Many thanks to Edie for submitting this guest post!
Many thanks to Sarah for letting me do a guest blog, even though I still say she is crazy.
E-books are something I thought I would never try. As a second hand book seller for nearly eight years, I have a big love for the print book. But in 2003/4, I had a couple of Ellora’s Cave print books arrive within my business bulk lot. They looked different, and they were paranormal, so I thought what the heck, and I read through them.
They were very different from my norm, not brilliant but roused my curiosity about these new publishers I had been seeing around the traps, and they earned a nice penny for me on auction when I had finished them, so it was win, win.
So I actively started looking for them, and getting them in the door. In no time, thanks to the likes of Sherri L King’s Horde Wars, Lora Leigh and her ‘popcorn’ breeds books, anything Shiloh Walker I got my hands on, and Sarah McCarty’s raunchy emotional historicals, I soon became addicted.
Then when looking for more information on the books for my listings, I discovered that these authors had backlists and new stories not in print yet… But they were in ebooks! Wwwahhhhhh! I am a print book seller, I didn’t want no stinkin’ ebooks!
But there were two more Horde Wars books…
(The business wouldn’t be able to buy them, as there is no onsell…)
There were lots of Lora Leighs that I hadn’t seen before..
(I live on the computer as it is!)
Look at the Shiloh Walker backlist!! \o/
(But there is no onsell…)
Oh look Clint’s story just got released…
(Damn Sarah McCarty!)
It was so easy. I was used to waiting months for print books from the US with sea mail, but these were in my inbox in an instant, the same day it got released! (For me here at the bottom of the world with limited local releases, this was a big WIN!)
Surprisingly even a technophobe like me had no problems with the Adobe PDF, and with the auto scroll, I had hands free reading! (I could clean books while I was reading – so I was still working! *cough*)
E-books were/are appealing to me for many reasons. A lot of the e-publisher books are shorter than the norm, so I could justify taking an hour or two out of a work day to quickly read them. Also appealing was the fact (especially back in 2003/04) that the authors had completely different voices, and often total re-workings of genre tropes, than the authors getting published by NY had.
There was Shelly Laurenston at Triskelion (wince) with her whacky characters, extreme situations, completely off the wall humour. But the thing I love most about her work? Her heroines! They are insane! They have potty mouths, they are violent and can often kick the heroes butt when they want to. They are absolutely hilarious!
Then there is Lauren Dane, with her brilliant family dynamics with a bit of smart arsery thrown in on the side.
Bianca D’Arcs dragons…I love me her dragons
Anne Douglas with her fun paranormals – Hunting Dawn rocks my socks, and sexy emotional contemporaries.
Moira Rogers – the kick arse Red Rock Pass series… Bring on the lumberjack vampire!
Dana Marie Bell and her puma series that makes me howl. Her and Laurenston’s books are the only ones that make my brother threaten to ring the men in white coats if I do not stop laughing manically every couple of minutes. For example, in my favourite of her books, the heroine is a puma shifter marrying into a wolf pack, and she is a bit out of the loop. To bring her alpha and his pack into line, she uses a dog whistle/air horn to bring them to heel.
Theolyn Boese: again with the humour, but she has built a trippy fantasy world that sucks me every time… I just wish she would write faster!
Oh, and my latest find was thanks to Dear Author. I glommed The Evie Byrne Faustin Brothers trilogy, though can only recommend the second two as the first one is bleh.
And that, dear readers, is the end of my blatant hand sell…
I will admit that there have been a lot of misses, and that in some ways they are well below NY standards, but I think there is gold in them there hills! And for me one of the highlights of this journey has been discovering new voices with that special spark, and watching them grow book after book.
And now to the real reason I decided on this post, I need new authors to glom! Anyone got any recs for me?
{ 11 comments }
Thanks again Sarah for letting me have a ramble!
Apologies to your regular readers though, I haven’t written anything longer than a couple of lines for several years, and boy does it show!
No apologies required! Thank you so much for the post.
As for recs…have you read Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series? I’ve read the first three and thought they were great fun. I’ve wrapped up the fourth one for Christmas to stop me reading it in the meantime! I really enjoyed Lauren Dane’s Laid Bare, but perhaps you’ve read it already. Skin Game by Ava Gray is one you might enjoy. We’ve already discussed the new Shiloh Walker.
Have you found the edit button yet? It should be there…please let it be there!
LOL I think it is safe to say I have nearly all Dane and Walkers list – just ordered the new Walker, yay!
I am waiting to have all the KMM books in my hot little hands before starting them.
But will have to add Skin Game to the order.
Oh and I forgot to add another author to my list above, Mandy M Roth has been an auto-buy for me for ages, she has some interesting heroines, and really different storylines which rock my socks.
Didn’t see the edit button before, but will check now
No edit for Edie
Great post, Edie! You almost make me want to read more paranormals — especially the one with the puma, which sounds great. But here’s the problem I face: I’m virtually retired, and I still don’t seem to find the time to read all the books I want to read. So, until my TBR pile and my SBR pile have shrunk a bit more, I suspect all my H/H combos will be human and stay human. (But then I think about the dog whistle & air horn, and I waver…)
Magdalen, Steel Beauty, like the other Puma books is a novella, very quick to read! That is the only novel I have actually emailed quotes of to my e-book reading cohort, I think it took two to get her to buy the book and start reading with me, then emailing quotes back. LOL
Boy am I pushy. *blush*
I have to say, PDF is not my preferred format.
The thing is that for me, ebooks have been way more miss than hit for me, maybe 50% more than print.
Are there gems? Of course. My best pals are e-pubbed (Joely Sue Burkhart and Angelle Trieste/Nadia Lee).
On the whole, the best thing about e-pubbed ebooks is the lack of DRM.
I is a technophobe PDF was the first one I learned, and it was easy, so therefor the one i am comfy with.
My ratio with ebooks is actually lower on the miss scale, I know which pubs I have better chances with, and put a lot into exerpts and over the past couple of years have worked out little signs of what isn’t going to work for me.
Indeed the no DRM thing rocks muchly
What makes you think the other formats are more complicated?
I like that I can change the font, the size of the font, the color of the font, the color of the background, the line spacing, the justification and the margins of, say, eReader or Mobipocket.
I can have them two-up, just like a regular book — admittedly, you can have this too with PDF if you have a massive screen.
The few others I have tried, can’t remember which ones were more fiddly and I couldn’t find the auto scroll.
But I am the kind of idjit that once I have learnt something one way, it is hard for me to go outside and learn another way IYKWIM. A big failing, I know.
ah.
See. I’m not like that. I always think there’s a better way to do everything. Maximum utility/efficiency, depending on the day.
I read ebooks also because I think I read them faster than I read print books. This is more useful for some of the wonkier nonfiction, but is also useful when I want to find out why a crappy book is on the NYT list.
This last might not matter to most, but I can get through at least 10 romance novels in a weekend — I mean NY single-title length — if I read them on screen vs 6 in print.