Avvie the Savvy

I am not one to brag, which is a sentence that always leads into precisely doing so, but really I am not – not publicly like this anyway.

I have received some excellent news that I have been shortlisted for the HarperCollins 2008 grad scheme. You can see my application online by following this link which is how I submitted it.

Anyway now that shameless piece of news is out of the way the point is that, in preparing for my interview I decided to turn my application into a book using Lulu. The idea is to show that I am still very much interested in ‘traditional’ methods of publishing albeit using new technology.

So I went through the whole process on Lulu, which is free, and created a book which I have ordered for myself at a cost of £6. Most of this cost is the P&P. When I searched for the book on Lulu (out of vanity I suppose) it came up with two options; one to purchase the book and the other to download a free copy in PDF. This made me wonder if that means I have also published an eBook. I would assume so but it doesn’t feel ee-ee enough, if that makes sense. It’s just a PDF.

Snowbooks are giving away an entire eBook on their website of Robert Finn’s new novel Underlife. I downloaded it and it too is a PDF. I read the first few pages and I thought about buying the book. I would never be able to read all of it sitting at my computer as I usually flit between tasks, but I thought the PDF made a good marketing tool because it got me to try an author I had never heard of (sorry Robert) and think about probably buying his book as I liked what I read.

This concludes me to ask, what is an eBook? The answer may seem obvious but there is a niggling doubt that PDF is the future. By all means use it to market a book but as a finished product I’m not so sure. Lulu also offer a create an eBook option so I will give that a go and see if I can download it to my mobile or somehing. Hey, I even might get it onto Amazon!

Ah yes, and before I forget on the left hand column is a link to Lulu market place which will allow to to either buy my application (I can’t even imagine my mum doing that) or download it.

Thank you ; )

Filed under: Publishing, career in publishing, digital publishing , career in publishing, digital publishing, eBooks, HarperCollins, Lulu, marketing, PDF, Snowbooks, Underlife