Blog Love Omega Glee Even More Available Now!

Blog Love Omega Glee, my dystopian comedic novel, is now officially available for the Nook.  Unofficially, it's been available for the Nook for a couple of years now (a reader just had to download the .epub version of the novel to a computer and load it onto the Nook from there--the Nook actually was the ebook format I tested the coding of the novel on and how I read it myself), but this is the first time it's been officially listed on the Barnes & Noble website.  It has popped up because I finally managed to code the novel to the complete satisfaction of Smashwords, and they put it in their premium catalog, making the novel available at numerous ebook retailers.  So, the novel's probably available lots of places where people buy ebooks.  I don't know them all though since I seldom read ebooks myself (yes, that's ironic, but since the library's free and I don't need to plug in a paperback, I usually roll with print still--the ebooks I do read are ones like B.L.O.G., which are only available in that format or unavailable from the library and an ebook is the most affordable format).

The publishing journey for this novel has been an interesting one.  I first serialized it on this website, then I collected it as an ebook and published it on a pay what you want direct download model.  Since I noticed that many ebook readers (humans, not Kindles or whatnot) seemed most comfortable downloading books from Amazon and other ebook retailers to their ebook readers (Kindles and whatnot, not humans) rather than directly from an author via the Web, I adapted the coding to have the book published in those venues.  Despite the .epub coding being fine, this process was almost always a pain since it seems most retailers assume self-publishers are idiots.  Thus, they seem to set their systems up for people who upload Word files for conversion.  If you upload a full-fledged .epub (which is not hard; it's basically a fancy set of webpages), then one has to fiddle a bit with the coding so the text displays correctly in that retailer's format.

Frankly, from the sample I saw on BN.Com, B.L.O.G. could look better (the blank line spaces between paragraphs seem to have disappeared), but Smashwords did the conversion for BN and the rest of the known ebook retailer universe, so don't blame me (you can blame me for the Kindle version, since I did that, but from what I've seen, it looks right, as does the direct from Smashwords version I created).  If you're a Nook reader, you're probably still better off just downloading the pay what you want .epub and adding it to your Nook.  However, I'm happy that the novel is now even more available than ever.  Maybe someday it will even be available in print, but, with more and more bookstores closing each year, that's probably a pipe dream.