Usually, I’m the curmudgeon who grumps about e-books, but
I’m coming around to the view that they do have their advantages—especially for
writers.
One example: Jim Conaway, a fine writer who excels in both
fiction and nonfiction, recently released most of his work online. He explains:
“E-books are satisfying for a writer because they open up a past thought
dead and, well, published. In fact, these stories were just waiting to be
re-discovered, also the inspiration, the places, the characters, even the paper
trails leading to their creation.”
Jim is a friend from my college days. After studying a year at Stanford
as a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow in the early 1960s, he took up journalism,
first, as a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, later as a freelance writer
based in Europe, and then as wine critic for The Washington Post. In recent years, he’s concentrated on long-form
journalism, writing for The National
Geographic, The New York Times,
Harpers, and Gourmet. In addition
to three novels, he’s published nine books of nonfiction and a memoir about
growing up in his hometown of Memphis in the 1950s.
My favorite of his nonfiction work is Vanishing
American: In Search of Our Elusive Landscape, essays he describes as being
about “lost culture and landscape.”
But perhaps Jim’s best-known book is Napa: The Story of an American Eden,
which stirred both controversy and admiration. It, and its sequel, The Far Side of Eden: Old Land, New Money,
and the Battle for Napa Valley, are required reading for anyone interested
in the real story of American viticulture. Jim’s latest foray into this country
is Nose, a satiric novel that
punctures the pretentiousness of Napa culture and celebrates the innovators who
make fine wine and also protect the environment.
Jim began a blog in 2012, musing on wine, winemakers, and a few other
things that catch his attention. Recognizing how powerful the Internet was in
reaching readers, he recentely decided to harness its power by releasing some
of his books, long out of print, online. Collectively, his books are an
impressive body of work, and the online versions invite new readers to dip into
his writing. Check out his blog and the site for his work:
In another example of the benefits of ebooks, my brother, Mike Cavender
just self-published, at age 68, his first novel through the CreateSpace
platform (a division of Amazon).
Although Mike also started out as a newspaper reporter, his career has
been less linearly literary. He’s embraced the natural world as a fly fishing
guide and as director of a land trust in the North Carolina mountains. But the
urge to tell stories burbled up, and he’s been working on short stories and
novels for a few years now.
Impatient to get his first novel out, after years of revising and
polishing and learning, he decided to skip the time-consuming, and possibly
fruitless, search for an agent. So, he self-published his novel, Revenge on the Fly, and has been working
hard to build his audience—which is small, but growing, mostly through
word-of-mouth and strong reviews on Amazon. He’s learned, to his chagrin, that
many independent bookstores won’t take the book, because of its association
with Amazon, indy bookstores’ natural enemy. A few—notably FlyLeaf Books in
Chapel Hill and Park Road Books in Charlotte—have liked the book and taken a
chance on it. But Mike’s main outlet is Amazon, where his sales are running
about 1:3 ebooks and print books. For more, check Mike’s Amazon listing and his
blog on politics and writing:
