Two years ago on the Two to BZ blog I used some photos I took on a beach in Florida and wrote a little fable, “The Heron and The Tortoise.”  Over the past few days, I have been adding photos to my little story, and just this morning I “secretly” published the first version of it as an eBook. For readers of this blog, since you’re the only ones who have the secret link, it’s available as a free download for the rest of this week:

It’s available in a variety of electronic formats, thanks to a relative new — and free — service called LeanPub. In many ways, creating one of these new eBooks reminds me of the early days of doing stuff for the web. There’s obscure markup to put in a text file, a lot of variation in how that markup is ultimately displayed depending on the program you use to read it, and very little control from the author’s perspective over the final layout of the pages.

We’ve come a long way – not – in 20 years of electronic “publishing”, IMHO. 😉

I mean, personally I would like to have more control over where things sit on a page, but that’s not that nature of an eBook.  Each eBook program has a different interface as well as a different way of breaking up the material into  pages, plus the reader of the book has control of the size of the fonts, etc. As a result, the designer just puts their material together, marks it up and then more or less hopes for the best.

This isn’t a big problem in some ways when you’re dealing with just a bunch of text, but obviously it’s a little bit different when you have more photos than text in your fable, and you’d like the photos to look reasonable within the text.

But on my long list of want-to-do projects are several ideas I have for creating some eBooks, most of which would have content that would be proportionally more text than photos.  LeanPub has some tools that I wanted to learn for making those eBooks, and it occurred to me I could learn LeanPub and give it a test drive by using this little fable I’d written in 2011.

Now, the LeanPub service is free to author the books. The way they make their money is by offering a place to sell your book as well. Their royalty structure is actually quite good for authors, so I’m interested in trying out that part of their service as well.

However, this is my very first eBook, and I’d like to get some feedback on it before I offer it for sale. So, for this week only, I have released it today in an “embargoed” form for free.  It’s “embargoed” which means it’s not listed as a “new release” yet on LeanPub, and not visible to the search engines. Someone needs to know the link in order to find the book.

So, until the end of this week, you can grab a copy for free* and see what you think. I’d really like to hear feedback, both good and bad. And, if you happen to notice a typo or two, let me know that, too, please.

BTW, if you try it on a device (e.g. Kindle, etc.) and it doesn’t seem to look right, let me know about that as well. I have an iPad, and a Kindle application, but no actual Kindle. And, as it turns out, the Kindle desktop app, the Kindle app for the iPad, and the actual Kindle device all display the books differently, even though they are all running a form of the same Kindle application.

I actually discovered a bug with LeanPub’s epub format yesterday. I reported it and it’s now fixed. I feel their pain as a company having to support so many different formats and eBook readers; I remember that kind of pain well from doing web development so many years ago. Shades of my days trying to test a web page in 4 or more different browsers – invariably, the page looked different, and was broken in at least one browser. Those were NOT the days…

But I digress. Next week, I’m going to take off the “embargo”, start charging for the book,  and then, well, who knows. NYTimes best seller list, here I come… 😉

In the meantime, hope you enjoy a tiny fable about a heron who followed his dream and wandered to the sea.

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*Note: when you click on the link to “Get your free ebook” it will take you to a page that allows you to pay any amount you want. This is part of the LeanPub interface, and not anything I added to trick you into paying anything for it this week; the idea is that customers on this site are always allowed to pay more than your asking price if they want to. If you just leave the $0 in the fields, you can really just pay nothing and download the book for free. You don’t have to sign up for an account or anything; you’ll just be asked to enter your email address.

The Heron and The Tortoise is available in the following formats – choose the one that’s right for what you have:

• Mobi (for Kindle)
• ePub (for iBooks, Marvin, Nook, and others)
• Pdf (for desktop computers, both Mac or Windows)