My journey into the online publishing of ebooks has taken me into a number of bookselling domains, including Smashwords and Mobipocket. You may pick up this earlier thread here.
Most of the bookselling sites expect you to do the hard lifting. You’ve got to figure out their requirements, wrangle your manuscript into their format, upload and verify everything and then hope for the best (especially if you’re like me and don’t own a mobile device for testing).
One bookseller, Shortcovers.com, is a little different. This is the online bookstore for the large Canadian bookseller, Indigo Chapters, and their mantra is:
Shortcovers is not just for avid readers or technophiles. It’s for anyone who wants the convenience of accessing and reading their favorite books, content, anytime, anywhere, on the mobile device they already own.
Okay, not obviously so different from other booksellers, you think, BUT they have one cool advantage: they’re into selling short stuff (hence the name), like individual chapters, short stories, blogs, articles, poems, speeches, etc., as well as entire ebooks. I like this bite-sized approach to mobile reading.
logo for kobobooks
I was ticked and said so, ever so politely. To my amazement, a week or so later I received an apology and an offer I couldn’t refuse: Shortcovers generously agreed to cover the cost of the new conversions!
And they did, though it took weeks and weeks but eventually three of my works (two mysteries and one short story) went live. By this time, I had written a non-fiction primer on writing mysteries and decided to pony up the conversion fee (about $35 CDN) and have shortcovers handle this manuscript as well.
That was over a month ago and still no sign of Youdunit Whodunit! on shortcovers.com. I’ll follow up and I’m sure my little primer will soon appear.
In the interim, check out shortcovers. They’ve got a ton of great stuff available.
