Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

Why the Amazon–Hachette Deal Is Likely Good for Writers and Publishers

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This article by Vauhini Vara originally appeared on The New Yorker on 11/14/14.

The end of the months-long impasse between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing was a bit anticlimactic for those who had been watching the drama unfold. For months, the companies and their supporters had been accusing each other of bad behavior, warped motives, and plain dimwittedness. At one point, Amazon, apparently hoping to put pressure on the publisher, began delaying shipments of hard copies of Hachette-published books ordered through its site, to the ire of those books’ authors. In response, many writers signed an open letter from a group called Authors United, begging Amazon to back off; later, Authors United announced that it would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon’s delays, or other tactics, amounted to antitrust violations.

Journalists covered each of the escalations attentively, and the negative publicity hurt Amazon’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. The company posted disappointing earnings results in late October, including the slowest growth it had seen for North American media sales (which includes books, movies, and music) in more than five years. But then, on Thursday morning, the companies issued a joint press release announcing that they have agreed to make Hachette responsible for setting e-book prices, as Hachette is thought to have sought. It is believed that Amazon, which has typically favored keeping e-book prices low, had hoped to set those prices itself. Instead, with this agreement, Amazon will, according to David Naggar, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, offer “specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices.” The agreement will take effect in early 2015.

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 10/27/14.

Almost everything being said about publishing today is predicated on two facts that are dead wrong. The first is that publishers are somehow being hurt by ebook sales. The second is that independent bookstores are being crushed. The opposite is true in both cases, and without understanding this, most of what everyone says about publishing is complete bollocks.

Let’s take the health of publishers first. Below you will see that profit margins at the major publishers are either flat or improving. For three of the top publishers, margins have improved quite a bit:

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous infographics and much further analysis, on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Is the NYT Coverage of Amazon vs. Hachette Really Propaganda?

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing on 10/6/14.

By now you’ve seen the NYT Public Editor’s piece criticizing her own newspaper’s coverage of the Amazon/Hachette situation.

Note to David Streitfeld: see what Margaret Sullivan did? Being a competent reporter, she researched the situation and presented both sides of the story. That means quotes from authors representing both sides, and quotes from the very source (you) she was critical of.

She’s an excellent, smart, fair journalist, Mr. Streitfeld. Put your hat in your hand and go thank her. After you have, ask her for some pointers.

As well done as the piece was, Ms. Sullivan did write something that I didn’t agree with.

“A pro-Amazon author (Barry Eisler) charges that the paper is spewing propaganda…“propaganda” is a stretch…”

Is it really a stretch? Let’s dig a little deeper.

According to Wikipedia:

Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented.

Hyperlinked in that definition is “impartial” which leads to a wiki about journalistic objectivity:

Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities.

Also linked is “lying by omission”:

Also known as a continuing misrepresentation, a lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions.

And “loaded messages”:

In rhetoric, loaded language (also known as loaded terms or emotive language) is wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes.

Mr. Streitfeld says his stories have been driven by one value: “newsworthiness”. Back to Wikipedia:

Newsworthiness does not only depend on the topic, but also the presentation of the topic and the selection of information from that topic.

Is Streitfeld presenting his topics well? What information is he selecting about the topic? Does it err to the side of journalistic objectivity?

Let’s go back to May when the Amazon/Hachette story broke and Streitfeld wrote this piece. Looking at the definitions above, do these quotes from Streitfeld’s piece qualify as propaganda?

Streitfeld: Among Amazon’s tactics against Hachette, some of which it has been employing for months, are charging more for its books and suggesting that readers might enjoy instead a book from another author.

Joe sez: Amazon “charging more for its books” actually means Amazon is charging Hachette’s suggested retail price. Amazon suggesting that readers might enjoy a book from another author “instead” is unproven. Amazon advertises other authors’ books on every book page. This isn’t unique to Hachette. Amazon also offers used books for considerably less than the price of the new version, on the very same page. (buy Whiskey Sour for only $0.01!) But where has Amazon said “Buy this instead of this”? The word “instead” is loaded.

 

Click here to read the full, lengthy deconstruction of Streitfeld’s piece with Konrath’s commentary on A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing.

 

You Know What You Can Do With Your DRM

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 9/7/14.

Okay, folks. You heard it here first. I’M NEVER GOING TO BUY ANOTHER BOOK WITH DRM ON IT.

Yes, that’s me shouting. Do I hear you asking why?

I’m so glad you asked. But first, for those who don’t know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially, it’s an attempt by suppliers to ensure that only legitimate purchasers of electronic content (books, software, music etc) are actually able to make use of their products. Wikipedia’s description is as good as any other. Or you could read this one, which describes the restrictions imposed by DRM.

You might think DRM is relatively new. It’s not. The acronym might be, but the technique has been around from pretty much the time when personal computers exploded onto the scene in the early eighties. Products such as dBase III, word processors, spreadsheets and the like were protected with licences. Without the licence key, you couldn’t run them or do anything else with them. Other software companies came up with dongles – a hardware device fitted to the machine running the program. The idea was supposed to be that pirates couldn’t profit from the developers’ hard work.

Uh-huh.

Two things happened.

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s blog.

 

How I Made Record Sales in August

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This post by Elizabeth Barone originally appeared on her blog on 9/20/14.

I’ve been meaning to do this sort of write-up for a while, but I’m always hesitant because I don’t want it to seem like I’m bragging or whining. Here’s the thing, though: writing is my full-time job. Just like any other business, it’s important to track what is and isn’t working. I also strongly believe in sharing information; I don’t see other authors as competition. Being that I’ve been sort of coaching a couple of authors new to indie publishing, I think it’s even more important for me to share what I’m learning.

I’m going to share my actual sales numbers and income. I’m a little nervous about this, because I am far from making a full-time living off of my books. But I would like to track what I’ve been doing and swap some ideas with you.

Let’s get started.

 

August Releases
Becoming Natalie (Book #3, Becoming Natalie Series)

Becoming Natalie: The Complete Collection (Books #1-3 in the Becoming Natalie Series)

 

August Marketing
Uploaded Becoming Natalie to Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo for pre-order and added links to series sales page on my website.

Serialized Raising Dad on my blog, posting a new chapter every day.

Gave away the first five ESX books via my email newsletter.

Offered a signed limited edition ESX postcard to email subscribers.

Posted a gallery of photos from the real life setting of the Becoming Natalie series.

Posted a cover reveal for Becoming Natalie.

Made an effort to update my blog at least once a week with relevant pop culture or social topics.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes MANY more marketing bullet items, actual sales results and further analysis, on Elizabeth Barone’s blog.

 

Big Publisher Bashing Again With Fictional Facts

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Today we present two opposing viewpoints from industry professionals regarding the Amazon/Hachette dispute. This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 9/14/14, and was written in rebuttal to the Clay Shirky piece we are also sharing today (link to the full Shirky’s post included immediately below).

The estimable Clay Shirky has written a lengthy piece called “Amazon, Publishers, and Readers” on medium.com saying, essentially, that an Amazon-dominated world would be an improvement over the Big Five “cartel”-dominated world of publishing we have today. This is an apples to oranges comparison. The Big Five are not nearly as broad a cartel as Amazon — which reaches way beyond the consumer books they publish — is a monopsony. Amazon touches much more of the book business than the Big Five publishers do. To make his case, Shirky recounts some very questionable history and employs some selective interpretation to get from his own impression of the current Hachette-Amazon dispute (about which he says “Amazon’s tactics are awful, the worst possible in fact”) to a completely different conclusion.

My complaint with the facts and logic start at the top: with the two paragraphs Shirky uses to set up his argument and establishes the “holier-than” context for his position. He says:

Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.

Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to protect first editions; as long as ebook prices remained high, hardback sales could be protected. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.

Almost every sentence of this is subtly or blatantly wrong.

1. Publishers did not begin selling large numbers of books in digital format in 2007. Amazon started Kindle in late November 2007. Significant sales of ebooks didn’t start to occur until after Christmas and continued to grow rapidly thereafter.

2. Although an uninformed person would be led to infer from reading this that DRM was somehow created for Amazon, in fact DRM was routinely used for ebooks for their entire existence before Kindle. DRM on Kindle continued current practice; DRM was not created for Kindle or at Kindle’s behest.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

Amazon, Publishers and Readers

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Today we present two opposing viewpoints from industry professionals regarding the Amazon/Hachette dispute. This post by Clay Shirky originally appeared on Medium on 9/12/14.

In the current fight between Amazon and the publisher Hachette over the price of ebooks and print-on-demand rights, Amazon’s tactics are awful, the worst possible in fact: They are denying readers access to books, removing pre-order options and slowing delivery of titles published by Hachette. Amazon’s image as a business committed to connecting readers to books is shredded by this sort of hostage-taking. The obvious goal for readers in should be to punish anyone using us as leverage.

This skirmish will end, though, and when it does, we’ll be left with the larger questions of what the landscape of writing and reading will look like in the English-speaking world. On those questions, we should be backing Amazon, not because different principles are at stake, but because the same principle — Whose actions will benefit the reader? — leads to different conclusions. Many of the people rightly enraged at Amazon’s mistreatment of customers don’t understand how their complaint implicates the traditional model of publishing and selling as well.

Some of the strongest criticism of Amazon comes from authors most closely aligned with the prestigious parts of the old system, many of those complaints appearing as reviews of “The Everything Store”, Brad Stone’s recent book on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, wrote one such, “Citizen Bezos,” in The New York Review of Books:

At least two qualities distinguished Bezos from other pioneers of e-commerce and help to explain his subsequent success. The first was his gargantuan vision. He did not see himself merely chipping away at Barnes & Noble’s share of retail book sales; he saw himself developing one of the greatest retailers in history, on the scale of Sears Roebuck or Walmart. Secondly, Bezos focused relentlessly on customer service — low prices, ease of use on his website, boundless inventory, and reliable shipping. To this day, Amazon is remarkably successful at pleasing customers.

Coll does not intend any of this as a compliment.

He writes about book-making and selling as if there are only two possible modes: Either the current elites remain firmly in charge, or else Amazon will become a soul-crushing monopoly. The apres nous, le deluge!-ness of this should be enough to convince anyone that the publishers are bullshitting, but if your worry is market manipulation, the publishing cartel we have today has has already created decidedly non-hypothetical harms.

 

Click here to read the full post on Medium.

Click here to read Mike Shatzkin’s rebuttal to Shirky’s post, on The Shatzkin Files.

 

The Curious Case of Ellora’s Cave

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on Dear Author on 9/14/14. Note that this post contains strong language.

Long before there was the Kindle, long before self publishing, long before the emergence of Fifty Shades, a digital first publisher by the name of Ellora’s Cave began to deliver sexy reads that would transform the face of romance publishing. Ellora’s Cave was established in 2000 as an outlet for Tina Engler to publish books with heavy sexy content that were romantic in nature. Because there was no “ebook” in the late 1990s, Engler would create PDFs and email them to reader who sent her money via paypal. In 2000, EC was established and soon thereafter, it would become a powerhouse selling hundreds of thousands of ebooks a year in a world where ebooks did not exist for the most part.

Engler’s path was not dissimilar to that of JK Rowling. She went from welfare to millionaire in a short time.

Ellora’s Cave fed an unheretofore unexplored appetite of women for explicit scenes, bold women, and frank language. Prior to 2000, references to the penis would often be couched in terms such as “manroot” “stalk” and “pleasure rod”. The clitoris or vagina would be known in equally obscure terms. Now it’s not uncommon to see the use of “cock”, “cunt”, or “pussy” within many mainstream romances whether they be historical, contemporary or paranormal. Today the line between erotic romance and non erotic romance appears blurred, not just for readers but authors and publishers as well.

But in 2000, erotic romance was a new and somewhat scary thing for mainstream publishers. In fact, the recent acquisition or launch of digital publishing arms for mainstream publishers followed a similar trajectory to the old acquisition and launch of erotic romance lines. While it might seem ludicrous today, in the early to mid 2000s, agents had to identify which publishers would accept erotic romances and which would not. And it was a big deal when traditional publishers started accepting erotic romances regularly.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dear Author.

 

David Streitfeld is Dangerous and Disingenuous

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 9/15/14.

David Streitfeld of the New York Times has now cemented himself as the blabbering mouthpiece for the New York publishing cartel, and while he is making a fool of himself for those in the know, he is a dangerous man for the impression he makes on his unsuspecting readers.

(I should point out here that I’m a 7-day-a-week home delivery subscriber to the New York Times. I start every day by reading the physical paper. I love it. But they do make occasional hiring mistakes.)

A dishonest man with access to a pulpit is like a poisoner with access to a well. David Streitfeld is a dishonest man. He is a reporter with an agenda. A good case in point is this head-scratcher: Just one summer ago, David made reference to Orwell’s well-known disdain for cheap paperbacks to draw a comparison to Amazon’s fight for lower ebook prices. A year later, the same David Streitfeld claimed that Orwell was a fan of cheap paperbacks. What changed?

What changed is that Amazon used the same Orwellian quote in proper context, just as David did a year ago, but we all know that Amazon simply can’t be right about anything. And so enterprising Amazon-bashers reframed a partial quote from Orwell in an attempt to have the deceased man stand for the opposite of his opinion, in an exercise as disgusting as it was Orwellianly ironic.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Manuscript Formatting and the Nuclear Option

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This post by Melinda Clayton originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 5/6/14.

This past fall I published a self-publishing book. It looked great on my computer screen. The formatting was perfect; my spacing, indents, page breaks, etc., were all exactly where they needed to be, so I uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing feeling pretty confident my preview in their online previewer would be error-free.

Boy, was I wrong. My paragraph indents were completely off. Some were indented too far, some not enough, and some just plain missing.

I went back to my manuscript and clicked on the pilcrow (the little paragraph symbol on the tool bar that shows all the formatting in your manuscript). Everything looked fine. Telling myself it must have been an issue on KDP’s end, I uploaded again.

I clicked through the various preview screens. On some devices, the formatting was good. On others, it was clearly off. I couldn’t possibly upload a book that was going to have lousy formatting on half the devices that downloaded it.

I knew what needed to be done; I’d even written about it in the book. I needed to go nuclear.

My manuscript was written as a Word .doc, and Word is known for sometimes having hidden code that not even the pilcrow will show you. This is particularly true if you’ve copy/pasted a lot, saved in various places, or emailed the document back and forth.

 

Click here to read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

Introducing Kindle Kids’ Book Creator and KDP Kids

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From Amazon’s press release dated 9/3/14:

Authors can easily publish children’s books and reach millions of Kindle readers around the world

Kindle Kids’ Book Creator for illustrated children’s books available for download today

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sep. 3, 2014– (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon today announced KDP Kids, designed to help children’s book authors prepare, publish and promote both illustrated and chapter books in Kindle Stores worldwide. Children’s book authors can use Amazon’s new Kindle Kids’ Book Creator tool to easily create illustrated children’s books that take advantage of Kindle features like text pop-ups. Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in just a few simple steps, and use KDP’s category, age and grade range filters to help millions of Amazon customers choose the right books for their kids. Authors can earn royalties of up to 70%, while keeping their rights and maintaining control of their content. Authors can also choose to enroll their books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities like Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and access to marketing tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions. Get started today at kdp.amazon.com/kids.

“Authors want to focus on telling great stories and we want to help them do that. No one should have to be a computer programmer to create a beautiful, illustrated Kindle book for kids,” said Russ Grandinetti, Senior Vice President, Kindle. “Kindle Kids’ Book Creator makes it easy. In addition to helping authors craft their books, we’re helping customers find them with things like age and grade range filters.”

By creating a digital edition of their book, authors can reach a whole new audience of Kindle readers, who have already downloaded millions of children’s books this year.

Some authors got an early look at what KDP Kids offers, and here’s what they’re saying:

“The new Kindle Kids’ Book Creator is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” said children’s book author Niki Alling. “I was able to create fun popups with ease. I have plans to upgrade my existing children’s books with this new tool, and to use it with future books also. I highly recommend it to children’s book authors who want to add some extra fun to their eBooks.”

“As a self-published author, doing all the work myself and being no technical expert, I found this so easy to use,” said children’s book author and illustrator Michele Lynn Seigfried. “It will definitely save me time and money when I publish my future books.”

“Since I’ve published books for children of all ages, it’s a big plus that the Kindle Store helps parents find books by their kids’ age range,” said children’s science books author Seymour Simon. “KDP gave me all the tools and information I needed to get my books in front of the right audience.”

To learn more about publishing children’s books through KDP, or to download the Kindle Kids’ Book Creator, visit kdp.amazon.com/kids.

 

In Defense of Amazon

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This post by Neal Pollack originally appeared on Slate on 9/2/14.

I’m a writer, and my experience with this supposedly evil corporate behemoth has been fantastic.

Last August, Amazon flew about 80 writers on its Thomas & Mercer mystery and thriller imprint—including me—to Seattle for a conference. They put us up at the Westin downtown, a nice hotel by any standard, and spent the weekend feeding us well and serving us top-shelf booze at an increasingly fabulous series of parties. There were tourist outings, the usual conference mix of panels and workshops, and a non-stressful visit to the Amazon Death Star. Also, they gave us a free Kindle Paperwhite, a nice touch.

With a few exceptions, none of the writers at the conference were particularly famous; some had only published one or two books, all with Amazon. The Seattle trip wasn’t normal treatment for them, or for anyone. I’ve published books with independents and with big corporate imprints, and I’ve published books on my own. Each of these experiences was positive in its own way. But never before had I been treated quite like this. It felt like I’d entered a glorious new age. Amazon had given me a free sneak preview of what book culture would be like from now on.

As usual, I was naive.

 

Click here to read the full post on Slate.

 

What NOT To Do On CreateSpace

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This post by Laurie Boris originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 5/20/14.

When you’re getting ready to release a new title, it might seem handy to hop onto CreateSpace first to craft your print version and then hit the big magic button allowing them to format your e-book. Automation is more awesome than videos of tap-dancing kittens, right? Um, in this case, not so much. Allowing CreateSpace to make an e-book out of your print version is asking for trouble, and here’s why.

When you format an e-book directly from the word processing document you used to prepare your final manuscript, you have a good measure of control. Or as much control as you can have over a process in which the user can modify the appearance of the product and you’re trying to satisfy the quirks of a multitude of e-reading devices. If you choose to do your own formatting, and follow the guidelines supplied by your online retailer, you can prepare that document for upload to Amazon or a spin through Smashwords’ meatgrinder with tidy results and few if any formatting errors. (The Smashwords style guide is particularly user friendly, or see Melinda Clayton’s tutorial on how to use the “nuclear” option to zap weird coding errors out of your document.)

 

Click here to read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

More Thoughts on Wattpad

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her blog on 8/15/14.

I blogged in May that I was giving the publishing platform Wattpad a go.  I was somewhat worried about this decision at the time, wondering if my octogenarian protagonist and I would fit in among the youthful readers on the site.

From May to August, I went from several reads to steadily increasing reads.  Nothing I’d call spectacular.  But each day or couple of days I’d get a notification that I had someone else following (I think of them more as subscribers of) my story.  The number of reads (not readers, reads of each chapter) grew and with them grew more visibility.  That’s how it works at Wattpad.

Now, suddenly, I have over 18,000 reads.  I’ve done absolutely nothing to get these.  I’ve not been actively networking, not been joining groups.  I’ve been pretty darn introverted on the site except for my pleasant exchanges with readers who have commented on each chapter.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.