Ebooks.

Okay, so unless you’ve been in Bali for the past two months, inspired by that totally uninspiring movie with Julia Roberts that I resent having lost two hours of my life watching, the buzz is all about ebooks and Kindles and Sonys and iPads.  I, for one, have been tapping my fingers daily trying to make new files of my old out of print books so they might find a second life on Smashwords and Amazon.  Referring to the Bali thing again, China Rose ( www.amazon.com/CHINA-ROSE-ebook/dp/B003WQBINM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AZC9TZ4UC9CFC&s=digital-text&qid=1284582139&sr=1-1 )  is up already, as is  Swept Away ( http://www.amazon.com/Swept-Away-ebook/dp/B003XVZAB2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&m=AZC9TZ4UC9CFC&s=digital-text&qid=1284582355&sr=1-4 ) (and if anyone knows how to shorten those URLs, please do let me know), both at the bargain price of $2.99.  Yep, that was another shameless plug.  So while I’m on a roll, let me point out I have a new Ebook website too…www.MarshaCanhamEbooks.com  and I’m on Twitter and Facebook too.  I’m also on a nifty new Facebook page dedicated to other authors like myself who are breathing life back into out of print books…many of them award-winning writers who, like me, didn’t quite know what to do with those older books.  The page on Facebook is http://www.facebook.com/#!/BacklistEbooks, and soon all of us will be on an easy to find website as well.

So why am I repeating all of this?  For the two people who actually read this blog (*snort*) let’s just say I’m keeping my fingers limber on the puter keys.  If more than two are reading it, please do wave and let me know.  It’s like I always tell the grandkids…it’s okay if you talk to yourself, but it’s so much nicer when someone else answers *s*

The question I might pose here would be…how close do readers want the covers to actually represent what is in the books?  I ask because I’m dabbling with graphics and doing my own covers for the reissued ebooks (the publishers hold the rights to the artwork on the print copies, so we can’t use those).  I thought I did a splendid job, if I do say so myself, with China Rose.  Swept Away was a compilation of three different pictures and I had to strip out the color from all of them to make it uniform. Yes, yes, I know I didn’t get the shade of sunset right, but after a few hours of playing with it I settled on the same shading as a favorite blouse I have.

Re the question I asked above…In mere days I should be finished retyping and editing Bound by the Heart.  I’m torn between a simple cover with a beach and palm tree, perhaps…or something more piratical, since a good deal of it takes place on board a ship?   Or, because there actually are sites now that offer romance cover type artwork…a man and woman in period costumes, swanning in each others arms?

Don’t even suggest flowers, or I’ll have to repeat my Forty F**king Flower story…again.

The Wind and the Sea should be a no-brainer if I design a cover based on just the title, even, though there again, do I have a ship on the cover sailing blithely along on a blue ocean?  Or a ship in the midst of a battle?  Or a man and a woman clutching each other in fevered passion?

Questions, questions.   I could mock up several covers and make it a majority rules sort of thing.  Hmmm.

Opinions? Either of you? *g*