My Most Important Post: The Pieces Are Beginning To Fit

NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 09: Amazon.com founder an...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

During the two-plus years I’ve been blogging about productivity for writers, significant developments and changes affecting us writers have been cascading in a dizzying torrent.  In fact, there’s so much of it that many writers have more-or-less stopped following it all.  It’s just been too much, too disjointed — and too confusing.  Suddenly the pieces are beginning to fit.

This week I will write the most important posts I’ve ever uploaded to Becoming A Writer Seriously.  I will chart out, along with helpful links to what others are also writing, the new and exciting topography confronting us writers.  Finally, I think we can say, the revolution offered by the internet to writers has truly arrived, and now we can see our way forward.

Within the past month there has been a convergence of new announcements and written opinion across a wide spectrum of sources that are simultaneously arriving at the same conclusions that I have.  Fundamentally, there is emerging agreement that this is the year that the e-book finally makes its mark.  The recent highly-trumpeted unveiling of the new Kindle 2 has sparked a lot of this discussion.  More quietly has been the suddenly realization by many that e-books are also moving onto the iPhone in a big way.  And the most recent issue of Writers Digest focuses on self-publishing, a true sign that this route to publication is moving into the mainstream, no longer a scorned corner in the book publishing universe.

In other words, it is clear that the roadblocks to publication are crumbling, especially as more and more readers are turning to these new sources of books, articles, stories and such.  While writers will still long for the big book deal with one of the remaining major publishers, the other routes to publication are both more promising and more immediate.  And these new routes also open up new forms of writing — shorter, more interlinked, less rigidly sequential.

Later in the week, I will point to some new e-readers that are likely to appear in the next year or two.  I will also share what I’m learning about what’s happening in the iPhone world, a development that only came to my attention in the past few weeks.  And I’ll cap that off with my recent discovery of a new publication portal that may become a writer’s greatest resource of all, one with stunning implications for all of us.

But now let me point you to another blog post of immense significance:  Mike Elgan’s column in ComputerWorld — Here Comes the E-Book Revolution.  This, by the way, is REQUIRED READING!

Now that the Kindle 2 is shipping, other tech writers are also beginning to write their own first-hand evaluations.  They are universally good.

Yahoo Tech gives a definite thumbs up, liking the new Kindle even more than its predecessor.  The New York Times review does an excellent job of describing what’s new.  The only major criticism of the Kindle 2 I’ve uncovered, aside from simple personal tastes against electronic devices, is an outcry from the Author’s Guild about the Kindle 2’s ability to utilize text-to-speech technology that delivers content in spoken word, contending that writers and displaced voice talent should get extra payments from Amazon.

What are YOUR THOUGHTS?  Has the revolution really arrived?  How will it affect you as a writer?  Please share your comments.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Related Posts

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

    Comment by
    Jean Reidy
    2 Mar 2009

    Thanks, Tom. As I’m technology dangerous at best, I appreciate you keeping me abreast of all I need to be abreast of. I’ll be curious to see how readers feel about e-books on the iPhone. I just can’t imagine it being a comfortable format. But Apple hasn’t failed us yet. So I’ll withhold my opinion until I see it.

    Comment by
    Jean Reidy
    2 Mar 2009

    Thanks, Tom. As I’m technology dangerous at best, I appreciate you keeping me abreast of all I need to be abreast of. I’ll be curious to see how readers feel about e-books on the iPhone. I just can’t imagine it being a comfortable format. But Apple hasn’t failed us yet. So I’ll withhold my opinion until I see it.

  • Comment by
    Tom Colvin
    4 Mar 2009

    Now that the Kindle is becoming somewhat mainstream, attention is turning to ways of getting other documents into the Kindle format. Download.com has uncovered one tool that does that, with an article describing its use. Go to:

    http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-10187502-12.html?tag=mncol;posts

    This kind of conversion facility is part of the puzzle that’s coming together to overcome fragmentation in the e-Book world.

  • Comment by
    Tom Colvin
    4 Mar 2009

    I mentioned the Author’s Guild protest about Text-to-Speech. Within a couple of days, amazon announced that this feature would only be available on books where the PUBLISHER approves of the text-to-speech facility.

    That’s set off a minor firestorm of protest from the disabiled community. As someone with failing sight, I protest also. Author’s Guild is not making any friends right now.

Sorry, comments are closed.

Web Analytics