Gibsons Elementary School teacher Audrey Owen keeps a low profile on the Coast. She teaches kids and edits manuscripts for adults, but on the world-wide web, Owen's presence is far reaching.
"If you were to ask at a writers' festival, no one would know who I am, but my website has been so successful that I have high visibility on the web," Owen said - so much so that, early last year, she was asked to give a seminar in the Caribbean on the topic of writing for the web.
Owen has written a how-to book that gives authors information and tips on editing their own work, Get Your Writing Fighting Fit. Although she has sold hundreds of copies around the world, you won't find it in a book store. Fighting Fit is available as an e-book only, a concept that speaks of whole new parameters for book publishing.
Here's how it works. You are a wannabee writer and you surf the web looking for help. You come across www.writershelper.com and discover Owen's world, articles and advice for the novice with a promo for her book, Fighting Fit. The book promises to help you with revising your manuscript, so you click on the button. Your order is received by a company called Clickbank that takes care of e-book distribution. They collect the money you offer, either through credit card or PayPal, and they send the book instantly via email. It's a portable document format (PDF) file that you can read on the screen using the program Adobe Acrobat Reader. (Don't be confused by special "e-book readers," Owen said. You don't need them.) You can also print out the PDF book at home so you can read it at your leisure or in the bathtub.
Fighting Fit is a trim 78 pages (with illustrations by Wendy Legendre) written in clear, uncomplicated language. It covers good writing principles: paring paragraphs, using active sentences and correcting frequent errors.
Owen started the business in 2003 by offering her website as a business card to promote her editing service. As she worked on her book, it became apparent that the website was its best outlet.
The e-book is low maintenance, yet can still be updated. Owen spends more time writing and less distributing because the business end is taken care of, and she receives a list of her e-customers which she can use to gather feedback or as a marketing tool for her next book on punctuation. Best of all, from an author's point of view, there is no inventory to carry, no boxes of books to be stored in the attic, as is the case with other self publishers.
"This method works best for non-fiction books," she advises, but she is considering exploring it for children's books as well. And she hasn't ruled out being published in hard copy in the future. Paul Blakey of Roberts Creek began his e-book career in the stone tools days of the medium. In 1998, he published a small e-book about selling a car wash business, Wash Your Way to $60,000. He laughs about it now and says that e-publishing was never a revenue source, by any means, but it did allow him to put interesting topics into writing.
"That's the value of an e-book," he points out. "You can always turn it into a paper book later."
The early days of e-books were fraught with problems, he recalls. The technology for payment and distribution did not exist.
"There wasn't the PDF platform, and when the book was sent, the fonts went weird or the pagination was haywire," he said.
Now, anyone with a computer even a few years old has access to e-books. Nonetheless, Blakey has returned to what he calls "paper books" for the time being. His most recent book was a memoir by dancer colleague Verity Purdy, Dancing on Air, published through his own Twin Eagles Company. He plans to continue with one or two books a year in the old-fashioned way.
