Wednesday, February 12, 2014

E-books--a grudging appreciation


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:




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