Turning Your Archives Into eBooks

For about fifteen years now, writing books has been an essential part of my life. But this summer I started to rethink what it really means to publish a book.

This year well-established authors like John Edgar Wideman began to do something radical: they started working directly with eBook sellers like Kindle and Lulu. I was reminded of the early days of blogging. Blogging presented a new way to publish an article. A writer could get an idea, create a piece of whatever length the idea demanded, and publish it with the press of a button. I started blogging myself, and have done so ever since. But I didn't give up writing those conventional articles; blogs simply opened up a niche that didn't exist before.

This year eBooks began opening yet another niche. I would never bother reading a 30,000 word blog post. An article of that length would be too long for a magazine, and too short for a traditional book editor. The numbers just don't make sense for either industry. But if you're an author with an ill-fitting piece of writing you think is good -- good enough that people might want to buy it -- you can just publish it yourself and put your hunch to the test. No warehouse required.

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Source: theatlantic.com