6.11.2010

Newbie on Kindle

I've dipped my trembling toe into the ice-cold waters of e-books for the first time, making my backlist humor book available on Kindle.

"Trophy Husband: A Survival Guide to Working at Home" was published in hardcover by University of New Mexico Press in 2003, and disappeared shortly thereafter. (Kidding. It's still available. There's a whole warehouse full of them somewhere.)

The material in "Trophy Husband" came from my syndicated newspaper column, The Home Front. You can read most of those columns right here on this blog, but I reshaped the material slightly for the book, making it into a self-help guide that's no help whatsoever.

The book got great reviews and my favorite blurb of all time, from Virginia Swift: "If Erma Bombeck and Dave Barry had a love child, it would be Brewer."

Available now at a special introductory price of $2.99. I'd appreciate any feedback from Kindle users out there.

Next up will be my bank-heist caper, "Fool's Paradise." Then I'll start putting the Bubba Mabry books on Kindle as well.

O, brave new world . . .

2 comments:

Erin said...

I'm a person who LOVES books - the smell, the feel-- everything. My girlfriend offered to buy me a Kindle, but I declined - because it seemed, well...disloyal, somehow. So -- how do you like reading material on an electronic screen vs. pages you can turn?
P.S. - Loved Fools' Paradise -- it has made the rounds in my family. Thank you for an entertaining read.

Paul said...

I'm with Erin. With literary art, books are not mere information delivery systems, but a factor in the aesthetic experience. I not only prefer (paper) books when it comes to lit, I like the oldest edition I can find; one that bears the character of the time of the book's publication, or at least has the out-of-time character of the archaic. I'm now reading a 50s paper edition of Lolita (Nabokov), and with this book, I think I feel closer to the story than I would with an electronic device. Such devices, I think, will become simply the other that punctuates the special values of the book, just as the electric guitar did with the acoustic. There were no acoustic guitars, in the significant sense, before the electric. So, in a sense, we might now be entering the golden age of books.