DRM Does Not Stand for Don't Read Manuals: E-book Variations for the Raised By Wolves Series

My assistant and proofreader sometimes reads the chapters I send her for review on her phone… She has younger eyes than I have. She also has one of those nifty phones with the little wide screen you can swivel around. It’s still pretty damn small. I don’t expect most people to do that, but, as mentioned before, I want to provide that option for those of you so inclined.

I had a potential reader contact me last week. Her questions about possible e-book formats prompted me to go out and do the research I had been procrastinating about.

Let me first address my foundation issues with providing e-books. One, I don’t want to deal with money every day. I don’t mind dealing with checks or money orders to sell physical copies of my books to people who can’t order them easily through the normal distribution channels. Heck, I won’t even mind dealing with money to provide people with signed copies. If there’s a big demand for that sort of thing – my selling books directly – I will go ahead and set up a Paypal account. But I do not want the trouble or the expense of a merchant account in order to accept credit cards. A, I’m a very right-brained person. I’m smart, and I can fake left brain activity with the best of them, but it wears on me. B, merchant accounts are expensive when you’re small. I have to look at it in terms of the number of books I would have to sell using that method in order to break even with the monthly cost. If we get to those numbers, then I’ll consider it, maybe… They’re still a pain in the ass paperwork-wise, unless you pay extra money for online access… But I digress.

Two, I don’t want to deal with tech support issues. I spent over seven years fielding calls from people about tech things that didn’t work, or didn’t work as expected. (My all time fave – the early morning calls about the Internet being broken – no, really, all of it…) If I sell a paperback book to you directly, and you can’t open it, then I can call you a retard or direct you to the instructional book video on YouTube. If my version of the e-book format that’s supposed to work on your PDA doesn’t work... One of us will end up hating the other and I will have an ulcer.

Three, though there are many people willing to give their books away for free, I am not one of them. This is no longer a hobby. I will – at some point – probably post short stories, or maybe even the first book of a series (once the series is complete and years have passed since its release), or the occasional non-series novel to my site for people to peruse for free, but I really feel I can’t do that with an ongoing series. When a copyright holder does that – makes the intellectual property available for free – they reduce their ability to protect said work later in the event of a copyright infringement. Kind of along the lines of “If you cared enough about the cow not to want someone milking it, why the hell did you let it wander around town unescorted for two years?”

Sure, some authors rely on the idea that if the reader likes the book enough in the digital format, they will buy the hardcopy. I know how much some of the fans of my books read – more books than they realistically might be able to afford - and even if they have the best intentions of buying the book someday, I am sure a very big percentage of them will decide their dollars are better spent elsewhere – possibly rightfully so - when it comes time to buy a copy if they’ve already read it for free. And we’re going into a recession – it’s just going to get worse.

This milk and cow issue applies to distributing “unprotected” e-books as well. I have bought PDF versions of e-books directly from authors over the Internet. I could print them, copy them, mail them off to a hundred of my closest friends… I could have sold them myself (even print versions) – it would have been illegal, but if I didn’t advertise, the likelihood of getting caught is slim. Essentially, a basic PDF, and some of the other e-book formats, offer the publisher little or no protection unless properly set up with printing and copying limiters by an experienced DRM (digital resource manager).

SO… No financial challenges, no tech support hurdles, and no free milk. That leaves me with going through existing e-book distributors: two main options there.

My printer/wholesaler, the afore-mentioned Lightning Source, Inc., has a digital distribution arm set up with Ingram. Any e-book I list through them is part of the same account, payment rules, etc etc… as my paperback books. They fulfill orders from e-book retailers and – after the initial set up - I do nothing except accept the checks. They offer three e-book formats: Microsoft LIT, Palm reader PDB, and Adobe PDF. The trick is, I have to pay them a set up fee for each version, and assign an ISBN to it – AND, I have to convert my book into that format: they don’t do that. I can do PDFs, I own that software; but the Palm and MS formats are a bit more difficult. I had trouble locating the necessary conversion software – neither company seems to provide it for free if your end result is commercial resale. For example, the providers of the Palm conversion software wanted copy licenses for the e-books sold. So, for the near future – meaning the next year or so – I have decided to go with the PDF option for this distribution path. I will not be doing LIT or Palm versions.

The other big, readily-available player is Amazon via the Kindle or Mobipocket. I already have Brethren and Matelots set up for the Kindle – conversion software free, listing free, and THEY suggested the publishers use the existing main ISBN number for each book (a huge Bowker no-no) so that they can eventually link the databases so that the reviews for one version of a book show up for the other, etc… (we’ll see if that lasts…). But prior to the release of the proprietary Kindle, Amazon bought a French e-book DRM named Mobipocket to handle e-book listings for them via a universal e-book format – the same one the Kindle apparently uses… Mobipocket lists through other online e-book retailers, and has their own online store Ebookbase. Listing an e-book with Mobipocket costs me an ISBN, but the listing is free and so is the conversion software. And they handle the money, the fulfillment, etc. So they will be the other e-book format I will offer this year.

However, I can’t do all my books at once in three formats: paperback, PDF, and Mobipocket. With Treasure, that would be nine ISBNs for the Raised By Wolves series so far – and that’s only if Kindle doesn’t suddenly require one. I only purchased ten ISBNs to begin with… My next purchase will be for a block of 100, but I need to save up for that a bit. In the meantime, I have already assigned five of those ten – that includes the paperback edition of Treasure.

So… In May, I will release Treasure in all three versions; and then, probably in June - as I can afford the set up fees, etc - I will release Brethren and Matelots in the PDF format. Then I will have one ISBN left until reorder, and that’s reserved for Wolves (volume four) due to me wanting the ISBN publisher prefix to match for all four paperback editions.

So there you have it – your latest long-winded insight into the mind of a micro-publisher. I have provided my reasoning for my choices here. If people have other suggestions that fit within my parameters, please let me know.