This is pretty cool news! CityLife, an imprint of Stephens Press, publishes every year in conjunction with the Las Vegas Valley Book Festival  a fiction title specifically representing the uniqueness that is Las Vegas. This year the book sports a collection of essays by local writers, some of them very notable in their own right. The theme for this year’s book was “Confronting Decay” and the result was Fade, Sag, Crumble: Ten Las Vegas Writers Confront Decay.

The Guardian’s Travel pages has chosen Fade as one of it’s top 10 books about Las Vegas. It’s sharing exaulted company with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Larry McMurtry, James Ellroy, Tom Wolfe, Dave Hickey, Charles Bock, and John O’Brien. That’s pretty exciting!

I didn’t have anything to do with the design or production of the print book. (I did convert it to ebook.) The cover was designed by Mary E. Hill, and text by Joe daCosta.

I am so proud that the efforts of these fine writers, and editor Scott Dickensheets, and well as publisher, Carolyn Hayes Uber, have been recognized across the pond.

Congratulations to all!

You can buy the book on all the usual book sites. Here’s a link to more info about Fade, Sag, Crumble

The Gutenberg Bible in NYPL (Kevin Eng)

I’m a worrier. I pick at thoughts and ideas until I find a chink, and then I niggle at it for days until I’ve loosened it up enough to get a fingernail under, and then I worry some more.

This thing has been worrying me for weeks. Really, ever since I started working on e-books. You know, converting paper and ink and cloth and glue to ones and zeros that magically morph into a narrative story when excited by electricity, and tickled by a particular operating system on your device of choice.

Why would something so cool, so hip in literary circles, be a concern?

What happens next year, or the year after, or maybe ten years from now—when the next insanely great thing makes epubs, and mobies, and more obscure formats obsolete? When the tablet or phone or e-ink reader has long since died and you can’t even get batteries for it anymore let alone boot it up?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hegarty_david/with/2255499619/

To all my feed subscribers … I profusely apologize for the spammy nature and frequency of the recent feed. As you can see if you click through to the website, I have now upgraded to a new design. As the site gets updated, if you’re subscribed you’re about to get a lot of emails. This is a by product of me adding material to my nifty new portfolio page. I can’t control it from here. You can unsubscribe from the feed and then please rejoin in a week or two if receiving these is a pain. But in the meantime, you can click over to the PORTFOLIO see it in action. Right now, I am just uploading old covers. Once I get caught up, I’ll try to keep the new stuff coming more or less regularly, so you don’t get big batches.

I’m excited about how this will eventually show off my design work. I welcome your feedback on the site changes, right here!

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I recently read, How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months by John Locke. Yes, I was one of the multitudes who clicked that “1-click” buy button. So, you’re asking, what is his secret sauce? How’d he do it? Could he do it again? The short answer to that last thing is yes. And he will, again, and again, and again.

His strategy boils down to just three obvious things. He writes for his niche market, and he uses Twitter/Blogs/and an Email list of his buyers to get the word out, and the third is price. That’s it. If you’re like a writer friend of mine who hasn’t sold a million ebooks yet, you’re thinking, “Well, that’s not new, it’s no different than what I, or thousands of other self-published authors are doing.”

So what’s really the secret? He’s writing for a niche. A niche he’s identified, learned what they want, and is delivering it, over and over and over as fast as possible.  Remind you of a super-successful business model? It should.