A new edition of Salon Futura is now available, including a podcast of a round-table on running a small publishing house. (Direct MP3 link, 57Mb | 57 minutes). Starts properly at 6:14.
There was a handy ePub edition for the first two issues of Salon Futura, but it seems to have vanished. Perhaps someone could volunteer to keep that valuable side of the magazine going?
Listening to it, I’d say they still haven’t tumbled to the way that you can pair print-on-demand print books with ebooks. They’re still working with the mindset of “printruns” and “boxes of unsold books in the loft”. Those days are over.
The epub versions of Salon Futura are all available at the Wizard’s Tower store: http://www.wizardstowerbooks.com/salonfutura.html.
As to PoD, it is something I bear in mind, but the process of preparing a book for electronic publication is very different from that for paper publication. In theory something like InDesign or Scrivener could export for either method, but you’d end up with either a really ugly book or an epub that would need tailoring for each hardware platform.
Hi Cheryl, thanks for the clarification. Perhaps a link to the ePub is needed in the footer of each article?
The way I do books is to to produce the print edition files, then rip the book back to text and start building a reflowable ebook by hand coding it. That way you get both editions looking as good as possible.
Borrowind: There’s a delicate balance to be stuck between reminding people what is available and not being seen as guilty of high pressure selling. I’m still exploring that boundary.
As for book production, that’s how I’d do it too, but it is an expensive process. An ebook I can do production on myself, but if I want a paper version of a book I have to hire a book designer, and that means expecting to sell enough copies to pay her. Then you start thinking about ordering enough copies to keep the unit cost down, and then you get stuck with printing bills and potentially a stack of unsold books.