Celebrating E-Books

Last week was Read an E-Book Week. This week is the annual EPICon, put on the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition. (I couldn’t make it there this year. Attending EPICon is hard for me because of the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which starts Wednesday of the following week—two cons so close together are exhausting and expensive.):

EPICon

It’s amazing how the world of e-publishing has changed since the publication of my first e-book, vampire novel DARK CHANGELING, in 1999 (which won an Eppie Award from EPIC in the first year the awards were established), and the first EPICon, in 2000. E-books have advanced from an exotic fringe technology few people outside the industry understood to something everybody has at least heard of, in large part thanks to Kindle and Nook. Authors now have a wide-open market for niche works and writings of awkwardly small or large word count. Their backlists never have to “go out of print.” Writers’ organizations are beginning to unbend and recognize that substituting high royalty rates and frequent payouts for advances and skimpy royalty rates is not evil but is a valid alternative business model that many authors prefer. I’m proud to have been an early adopter of e-publishing.

DARK CHANGELING stars Roger Darvell, a psychiatrist suffering from a dark thirst and a very strange midlife crisis. It can be found here on Amazon.com:

Dark Changeling

Recently I have even ventured into the deeper waters of Kindle self-publication with the electronic release of DAYMARES FROM THE CRYPT, a little chapbook of supernatural verse I self-published on paper many years ago:

Daymares from the Crypt

When I left my day job in December, my co-workers surprised me with a cake based on that book cover. How cool was that?!

Daymares Cake

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt