Please read: Our ebook is PUBLISHED!!

Writing About Literature in the Digital Age is officially self-published. You can find all three versions the book (PDF, Mobi, and ePub) at Internet Archive's site for it here and at our Goodreads page for it (yes, you can download it there) here.

In addition, you are all now authors on Goodreads - congratulations! To edit your author page, go to the page for our book, click on the link with your name under authors, and click on the link that says "is this you?" and send goodreads an email asking for author status. You will have to be a member of goodreads to do this. I seriously recommend you do this and review our book on goodreads - it will only take a second, for real.

Also, for those who have kindles, please email Derrick (or check his upcoming blog post on how-to) to double check the process of downloading our ebook onto a kindle. I think there are also directions on how to access an ebook from Internet Archive on your kindle here.

Good job everyone!

Publishing a FREE ebook: Narrative of a very frustrating process

The Publishing Team ran into a few glitches today that would be important for you to know:

Problem: little known fact: As an independent publisher, you cannot publish to the Kindle store via Kindle Direct Publishing KDP (as has been our plan since we conceived of publishing our little ebook) and put it out there as "free" (ie. using a Creative Commons License). You must charge at least $0.99 unless you are a small publishing company, so that the big bad Amazon Kindle Co can charge a royalty on your product. (grin)

Solution: We shall instead publish our book (I believe in w/e format we want but this is still to be experimented with as soon as I receive a copy of our ebook) at the less-well-known Internet Archive under their text archive page. I tested this out today by publishing a PDF version of a homework assignment I recently did on Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. Derrick will write a post about how to access these published versions of our ebook on a Kindle or an iPad at his blog.

Problem: Several of the sites we considered distributing our ebook through require an ISBN number. Did you know that you can only get an ISBN number through one of 160 publishing companies and that it takes 15 days to process your request as well as having a service fee?

Solution: We're just not gonna publish at those sites. :P so there.

So in the end our plan is to publish to the Internet Archive and possibly Goodreads.

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(added 6/13 4:38 pm)

Answers to Dr. Burton's questions:

What did your team do?

First, I created a diigo list of research I and fellow classmates had done about publishing our ebook. This list, all about publishing ebooks, might be useful to future classes or individuals who are concerned with this process.

Then, I read through and summarized this research for the class on my blog.

Next, I read through information on publishing via KDP and ran into quite a few glitches which are narrated here and here. You can also read through my notes that help you understand my process at a googledoc I kept open as I read to use to present about publishing later for our class.

What tools did you use? 

Diigo, google docs, google search, blog search, and eventually I will use Internet Archive and Goodreads to publish our ebook.

How did this coordinate with the overall effort?

Kept the class informed via posts on my blog and kept in touch with the editing and design team in order to make sure formating was correct for what we were publishing and getting a copy of our book. 

What went well or could go better?

See my the beginning of this post narrating the frustrating process of trying to publish an ebook and share it for free. 

Places to Publish

We can publish to four different online publishers with our book in ePub format: 

1. Kindle Direct Publishing - best option in my opinion, most readers. There is a GREAT how-to guide here.
2. Barnes and Noble PubIt - We might actually have to have a "dumbed down format" like a Word, HTML, RTF, or TXT file, because this site's intention is to put it into ePub for you, but that would be easy with Calibre. Also I am not totally positive we can do it here because they take a 35% royalty so I'm not sure they'll take free ebooks
3. iTunes connect - this requires an application process and may take a long time so doesn't really work too well for our class. 
4. and Lulu which would get us into the iBookstore and Lulu's store which claims to have a large community of readers; I don't know how many of those readers will be our intended audience though.

Other options: 

Ashley Lewis also suggested we publish to Goodreads. I don't know what format Goodreads takes since they told her to contact them again "once the ebook is ready" before we could proceed, but it doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult a process. 

Ben had suggested we publish to Gutenberg but I don't think they'll take our book as it doesn't fit within their qualifications:

"Confirm the eBook has already been published by a bona-fide publisher (i.e., not self-published or unpublished). Project Gutenberg generally is not suitable for unpublished work. In cases where a work was published by a very small publisher or not widely distributed, Project Gutenberg might request copies of published literary reviews or similar documentation to demonstrate recognition of the work's literary value."  - Project Gutenberg publishing

 Publishing to Google books might also be a fairly easy option, but they will require both an ePub and a PDF version of the book. We would only have to follow steps 14 and 15 here after creating our book in both formats. This writer says it's a fairly simple process.

My suggestions: 

I think we should publish with Amazon Kindle, Goodreads, and Googlebooks. I believe this will reach the widest audience as a free ebook. Kindle will of course reach the most people, but those who don't use Amazon very frequently and want to read on their computers without an ereader will probably be able to just read it at googlebooks or if they're a big social reader, goodreads. Goodreads might take a little longer so we should have our book ready as soon as possible to complete the process.

Huck Finn Reading Group

That's right! On goodreads. It's private, but I've sent a request to join along with a message about my interest in joining and a link to my blog (forgot to copy the message so I could paste it here before I sent it via goodreads). Thought that'd be an awesome social discovery connection to make especially in relation to my thesis for my chapter of our ebook (see my previous post on my chapter).

GoodFlicks?

I am falling more and more in love with Goodreads social reading site. Is anyone familiar with a social movie site of the same veneer? I've found blogs, like this one, that recommend many different films of a particular genre. I wonder if there is a similar site where you can see what your friends are watching, review it, and even recommend films to others. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Photo attributed to Judy **| Flickr

Must Reads

Have you ever gotten an email forward with a list of 100 books you should read or posted on your blog a long list of books from the Western Cannon and checked off the ones you have read? It seems these lists are becoming even more ubiquitous as social reading sites crop up all over the place. Sam McGrath's post for today got me thinking more about what we should read.

I clicked over to wikipedia's article about the Western Cannon. I didn't know there were so many different versions of it and these lists are not short. It is somewhat overwhelming. Take a look at St. John's reading college reading list. It's pretty amazing. Sam asked if we think we should try to read everything. The problem is, the cannon itself is controversial: should it include more works by women and other minority groups? Should we abandon it altogether? Is the notion of universal truths as represented in these works of fiction a load of nonsense in itself?