Diary of a Mad Gen Y er by Marcus Dino

I decided to publish my second novel Diary of a Mad Gen Yer as an E book. I had my manuscript published by my publisher, Summertime Productions am now in the process of getting my book onto major Ebook sites such as Smashwords. This is in contrast to my first book Fifi, Anything goes in the Double Os which was first published as a hardback by Iuniverse in 2003 and as paperback by Airleaf in 2005. Why did I use an E book publishing platform as opposed to publishing Diary as a printed book? There are several reasons:

The first reason is that e-publishing is more convenient than print publishing. Assuming you have a publisher who gives you the author, a lot of freedom, I can get an e-book published in a week after writing my manuscript as opposed to twelve months. I can make editing changes overnight as opposed to say waiting a month for my changes to come back from editor. It is much easier to market an e-book than a printed book. I can send review copies to reviewers by email as soon as my book is published. I can show my target audience and fans samples of my e-book on my website within days after I have finished writing my manuscript.

Expense is another major reason why I chose to e-publish my book. Face it print publishing a book can be a major expense. There are expenses to the publisher if you self publish, expenses to a professional editor, marketing expenses, etc….With e-publishing you pay a fraction the cost of print-publishing your book. Of course like an author or publisher you want to test the ‘sale ability’ of your book. What if sales are slow and there is little interest in your book? The potential losses are smaller with e-publishing than with printed-book publishing.

Your target audience, what’s more convenient, seeing a book advertised on the net where you can download it onto your PC or e-book reader in a matter or have to drive to several bookstores to see if they even have the book or place an order on the Net and wait several days plus pay shipping costs? E-books are just so user friendly and convenient for readers. E-books have potential if not now but perhaps in the near future more potential for a greater target audience than printed books do.

Editing, no matter how hard we and our editors fine comb our books, typos and grammatical errors still may appear after we have published our books. How exhilarating does it feel to finally see your printed book on a store shelf only to feel a big let down when you see a few glaring typos in the book. With e-publishing you can take care of those glaring typos in a matter of minutes as opposed to the time and expense to have your print books reprinted to take out the errors.

Is e-publishing perfect? Far from it, at this point only a small percentage of the reader population reads e-books. But that population is growing, especially with the younger generation such as the gen y audience, the people I try to target for Diary and Fifi, my first published book. Illustrations may be cruder and less refined than books that are printed, and of course as we all know, e-books may be subject to piracy, that is why writers need to copyright their books to the hilt. Finally the disadvantage of the convenience of getting an e-book published quickly could lead to poor writing and sloppy editing.

But at least in my opinion the benefits outweigh disadvantages and at least in the foreseeable future any books that I publish will initially be published as an e-book.

Marcus Dino has had an interesting professional career, first as an Aerospace engineer, next as a passionate math teacher teaching in urban Los Angeles which he currently still does, and finally, as a part time literary fiction author. It is Mr Dino’s being a die hard movie buff that led him to writing Diary of a Mad Gen Yer in addition to his first novel, Fifi, Anything goes in the Double Os, first published in 2003. Mr Dino is a graduate of Chapman University and he also has Masters Degrees in both Education and Electrical Engineering. Diary of a Mad Gen Yer and Fifi can be found at www.smashwords.com and www.summertimproductions.net. Mr Dino’s personal website which includes numerous blogs, short stories, and poems involving his central character Fifi Larouche, which helped inspire him to write his anthology, Diary, can be found at www.authorsden.com/marcusdino.