It’s up! I’ve uploaded my first ebook, “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns, 2002-2006” to Scribd.com. I’ll start the hard sell soon.
So far, with total sales at 0, I’m pretty happy with Scribd. I was expecting an hours-long rasslin’ match to get that thing uploaded, but it was pretty easy. The only thing that went wrong went wrong because of my own dumbness, deleting the document when I didn’t like something when I should have just uploaded a revised version.
That’s monkeying with the search right now. It’s run by Google, and right now Google’s seeing the original document, and when you click through you get “This document has been deleted.” Duh, me. I’m hoping next time Google crawls the site, the deleted version will be forgotten and only the second, correct version will show up.
The preview, which should show the “cover” — really just Page 1 of the PDF but it’s a photo with text on it and it’s supposed to look like a book cover — is showing up as a blank page, which isn’t great. Page 1 of the actual document looks right, though, so I’m hoping that the blank page on preview is another artifact of my dumb deletion and will sort itself out soon.
I’m pretty sure this is the most complex thing I’ve ever done on a computer without getting someone smarter than me — usually my only genius friend, Mignon Khargie — to hold my hand or do it for me.
You can read a preview, featuring the cover, the table of contents, an introduction and one column from each Olympics, here. And if you like what you see, spend the three bucks and read the whole thing.
I’m wondering if I should do more column collections, and I’m also wondering if ebooks organized around various subjects would be a good idea for Salon. Interviews with authors? Investigative pieces? The best of Heather Havrilesky? Let’s see if anyone’s interested in this one first.