nisus.com

Technology enables disintermediation: any prosumer can now easily publish their own e-book and keep 70% of the sales if they do so directly thru the Apple iBookstore bypassing publishers such as Smashwords and Lulu.

See the Macworld story: http://www.macworld.com/article/151614/ ... ished.html

And this related story: A novel concept: Roll your own iBooks with ePub
here: http://www.macworld.com/article/150817/ ... 4437544:z0

So far, there are only a handful of apps for both authoring and publishing to the ePub format on the Mac platform: InDesign, Storyist, iStudio Publisher, and Sigil. Scrivener will also publish to the ePub format when version 2.0 is released. Of these, only Storyist, iStudio Publisher, and Scrivener are truly native Cocoa apps. But none of them are as feature-rich as Nisus Writer Pro.

Interestingly, in March of this year searches for 'Scrivener' exceeded searches for 'Nisus' and 'Mellel' for the first time, mirroring the recent explosion of searches for 'ePub.'

There are also a number of apps that can convert your text files from your favorite word processor (such as Nisus) into the ePub format: Calibre, eCub, Legend Maker, as well as some online conversion tools, but this is a two-step process and you may lose some formatting along the way.

Apple will no doubt add ePub output to the next desktop version of Pages, perhaps as soon as June 7, but it's safe to assume they will never offer output in competing ebook formats for the Kindle, etc. So one would still have to use at least two apps to reach all major ebook markets.

Here's hoping Nisus will add output to ePub and Mobi in the very near future for multi-format ebook creation!!

Cheers,
Jeff

I don’t want to dampen your ambitions. I want to remind you of the experience of two literary giants of the American literature, i.e. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen Crane. They self-published their first books, the earlier around 1850 and the latter around 1890. Both ended in a fiasco. Crane’s first very first novel, Maggie, was to become a classic masterpiece, but only when Crane went through the sudden success of The Red Badge of Courage, and all this thanks to the publishing towers. Crane walked grimly on his hands trying to sell his great novel to no avail, and you can imagine what it meant for a boy of twenty. Of course it was the Nineteenth century and there was no Internet multiplier around and you had to first have skills for literature and buckle down hard. We seem to take ’em all for granted now and that’s true. With the Internet you have a lot more ways. But so have millions of others.

I think a more realistic suggestion came from Jack London. London kept on selling manuscripts to publishers until he succeeded. He used his brother’s typewriter which only allowed uppercase letters only, so his manuscripts must have looked a lot like Ceasar’s.

Lastly, you can publish for yourself and don’t care about the royalties and give away your work for a pittance. In that case, you’ll only need a few bucks and a lot of un-pent-up happiness.

Greetings, Henry.

Why didn't you type your reply on a typewriter and mail it to a newspaper in hopes the newspaper publisher might print it one day?

I was just exemplifying. I quote from my knowledge. I said Crane, Hawthorne and London lived in the Nineteenth century, early twentieth, while I stick to my time. As to your reply, it is my opinion that tools belong to epochs rather than to people. I use the computer whereas Hawthorne supposedly used a fountain pen, and Jack London used his brother’s typewriter, but we all have similar success capability compared to our respective ages. Back then there were few writers, few publishers and few readers. To sum up, it’s not just a matter of writing tools. It’s a matter of readers too. Mostly of them.

I wish you the best. But be ready for the worst.


Greetings, Henry.