I am from Louisiana, and am historically a photographer. My work over the last 30 years had been relatively the same until the "Digital Revolution". I now find myself at the end of a fairly good career, and have been in the process of re-inventing myself. I am going to learn what goes on here and try and get to know some of you who frequent this forum.

I have long been a voracious book reader..reading as many as three books a week over the past 40 years. I am a strange reader in that I like to read mornings in the shower. I take long showers, as much as an hour and a half.., and yes, it does disfigure the books. But the books are mine to read, duly paid for and as such, I read them when I wake up and in the shower. I stand while reading. Why do I read in the shower? I have always liked long showers... and I have never been one who sleeps much at night. I only sleep 4-5 hours a night, and when you go to bed at midnight... wake up at 4:00 AM, it just seemed a great time to read. At night where it put me to sleep, in the morning I found it invigorating.

I used to collect books that I read, but if you saw them on my bookshelves, you certainly would wonder why I kept them. But, though a bit wavy, the books were totally readable, so I gave them away to people if they wanted good books to read.

What did I read? I like to read a myriad of subjects, and can honestly say that I have read as much non-fiction as fiction. In the last several years though, I have been leaning more often to non-fiction.

I am not really a book reviewer, and I probably would not be one now, though with the volume of books that I have read I am sure that I have plenty to offer in the way of talk about books and I might even find some books that I knew nothing about and might want to read.

So, from this beginning in your group, I say... glad to meet you and I hope that it will be beneficial to all of us, me included...

Jon B Barry

Welcome!! I'm relatively new here myself.

You say you're an author. What do you write about?

I have always written copy for brochures, instruction manuals, and things that really do not have much to do with books. I have been a photographer and over the years it has been a good career for me.

I might not even be right for this group because on reading further, the books that this group reads are printed books. I also believe that the way of printed books is going to go the same way for authors as film did for photographers,.. away. I wrote an e book...two different ways. I have been keeping up with what is going on in the industry because I found it interesting and the parallels are the same. Film is basically gone, and paper is following suit, both the victim of the digital revolution.

First I learned that coffee table books, unless you are very well known will never be printed other than through print on demand printers. The cost of those though are very high and there is less than zero left for the photographer. The same though seems to be the same for printed books. Unless you go to a print on demand publisher, for regular text books, it is very difficult to make a dime off of them.

As to getting a publisher..I went all through that. By the time that I get it all done, and several wanted to be my publisher, there was not much money left in it for me. A book that lists for 23.95 only nets me & .50 per book and an e book/epub for $9.95 nets me $6.75 per book. I also lose the movie rights to a book that is published..at least for my first book. I keep all rights this way.

But, I am finding out that no matter who does it, the only way to make money these days for a brand new author, is to do it with e books. The math says the story best of all.

OK. I'm a retired editor (of 35 years) of book length legal documents. I
I've dabbled in writing non-fiction legal satire, but haven't been published. I hate retirement (involuntary), but there's not much else I can do other than edit and no one wants to pay for actual editing anymore, or so it seems. The quality of writing, in my opinion, has drastically worsened since the computer and now the internet allow people to "publish" without going through all of the rigamarole.

I sincerely hope you're wrong abut the elimination of actual printed books. It's extremely difficult to read while in bed or on the beach or park, when your "book" is a personal computer or an e-reader device.

Personally, I am a book reader... paper books, but I sure do read a lot of everything else here on the computer. Hard to read an ipad or kindle in the shower, and saying that, I read more now on the computer during the day.

Publishing on the sites was not difficult, but it sure does have its ways. I found the thing most confusing, but for doing the next ones I cannot imagine having a difficult time.

The truth is, the kindle is easy to read in the sun, fishing or in the pool even. There is no glare at all. I used a friends for a week, and was fairly amazed by the whole thing. I think the ipad is a better device and I am sure at some point they will have non glare glass. It is a matter of when, not if.

ALL books will never be just electronic, but the numbers are getting bigger each year. The major difference to me is the cost of the book. It is cheaper to buy, and the author makes more. And, it is possible for books that would never be books otherwise to exist, plus some of those books are really good.

What you say is true, but I just prefer an actual printed book, so that I'm not tied to a device that, at a minimum, has to be charged every so often, and which, if it malfunctions, you stand a chance of losing the document. If I have a choice, I will always take a real book over an electronic one.

I hear you. I like books...always will. But I have to admit, I really like the new ebooks too. Incidentally, you can have a total hard drive failure...lose everything, in a fire, and along with it went all your paper books, but, wow, turns out that the ebook you bought can be recovered at no cost back from the bookseller you got it from.

They both have their place, but I sure do like the aspect of being able to read the book electronically.

Jon

Hi Jon,

Reading in the shower is something I'd never heard of before. Very interesting. I love long hot showers too but I can't fathom ruining my books by bringing them in the shower. I do read in the bathtub several times per week. The tub is my favorite place for reading.

I hear what you're saying about print books and I do agree that they will eventually be a thing of the past. But most books that come in print also come as an eBook. All of the books we've read over the years are probably available from the Nook or Kindle. I'm not sure why you don't think BookTalk.org is a good fit for you based on us reading print books. We read books, not print books or eBooks.

Welcome to the community. Please give us a chance!

Hi Chris,

I guess I have read in the shower now for close to 20 years. I had always taken long showers and somehow or other I wound up standing and reading while this was going on. After a while it just became something that I did. I cannot say that I will abandon that now. I still find reading in the shower a pleasure. One thing is certain though, I will never be reading an e book in the shower...or bath for that matter. It is one thing for a printed book to get wet..and another for a device to fall into the water.

As to fit, that is probably inaccurate. This might help you understand where I am. I only have so much time to promote my book, and that time has to be spent within the confines of where I can get it read. I was reading in your page under advertising that e books were unacceptable.

"Books must be BRAND NEW and in perfect condition or we will not advertise them. Advanced Reader Copies, Unedited Proofs, and Galley Proofs are not acceptable. PDF books and eBooks are not acceptable. We are offering ad space in exchange for print books that have monetary value. To understand the value of what we offer visit our ad page to see our rates.

Your book must be published and have an ISBN number and be available for sale on Amazon.com."

The above was in regard to donated books. I only have an e book... several formats of the same book, and it is for sale on Amazon, B&N, as well as Google, though I am fairly disappointed in the google version. So far, I have only had good reviews, and admittedly, a couple came from people who I have not met personally, but have had dealings with and they were kind enough to state that in their review. This is a slow process. I cannot imagine it being any different a process from that of printed books.

I can see no way to get a book to be know other than through either heavy advertising, adverse publicity, and giving the book away to get a word of mouth happening. I learned that just because one belongs to social sites such as facebook, or trade organizations such as what I belong to in photography, that if the subscribers to those kind of sites are not readers, then there is really not much chance that they will read your book. A person who is not a reader might read your book if they know you, but more often than not, they just say that they read your book, and say nice things that say nothing about the book.

There are flaws in the e book industry, the biggest of which is the many formats that they come in. The epub is basically great for reading on the kindle and other devices, but if you have photos in the book, then this becomes fairly unwieldy and less than optimum. Example the Kindle or mobi format. There is a limit as to the size of the photo, and a limit to the total size of the book... no more than 50 megs, which is a lot, but not enough for photography books.

So, naturally, any photographer is going to want a book in the pdf format because the text is fixed, the photos are sized to the degree that resolution is important, and they can be read on any computer at full screen size. I did mine first in the pdf format and that is the version on Google. But google will not let you download what you buy, and you have to read it through a "webarchive" format which is a derivative of the pdf, but you do not get to have it on your computer. You have to read it on line or you are out of luck. I might be wrong, but to talk to Google about this is a job unto itself.

So, I redid the book... in the mobi and epub formats. Wow, what a learning curve. I had to put links into the book to be able to show the photos which, to me, being a photographer, was important. This actually turned out to be fortunate for me, because it made me write a better book. All of a sudden the content of the book that was not about photos had to stand on its own. I had gotten tons of raves about the pdf photo book..but no one read it. It was great to have, and wow, it is one glorious looking book, but nobody would read any of it. They would look at the book and flip through the pages and send me back unreal statements..."Amazing, awesome, fantastic, wow," and the superlatives never stopped. But not one of them read the book... and that was a bit depressing. When I only provided the epub format, everything changed. They either did not read it at all, or they couldn't put it down. I was very heartened.

I got the book onto Amazon, and I could have used a publisher that I pay money to to get this done, but the amount of money you have to pay them for what they do was also a bit discouraging. I was good at doing things like that and so I did it myself. It took longer to get it up there, but it was not difficult and I had already heard that they really do not do any promotions. So I think I did this the right way.

Then, I learned about piggybacking. My book is about the me mostly, and the model I shot and traveled with. It was written in a period of my life where I was undergoing a great deal of change. The book is a tribute to the model I worked with, a person who I became very close with over the course of our journey, and I was very happy with the book. All of a sudden on Amazon, out of nowhere, a book showed up under my Amazon page that had an author by the name of Jon Barry, no B in the middle, and it had a photo cover that to a degree appeared to resemble the model with whom I worked. But wow, this book he wrote, was an e book of pulp fiction, of bondage and S&M and degraded women. I was very distraught over this. Then there was the next book and now there are five of them there, all degrading.

Naturally I contacted Amazon, and the customer service department was incredibly nice. They thought that this was wrong and they talked to the Kindle department. No one can talk to the Kindle department if they do not work for Amazon. Kindle told me that there was nothing they could do. It is more involved than this, just a simple version, but I am not going to be able to change this, so I had to write a disclaimer saying that I was not that person.

About this time, I knew that I needed another track. I have been looking to join book review clubs and yours is one of the ones that I have found. I did not want to just push my way onto here or onto anyone's site, but at the same time, I needed to do something and I am in the process now of making YouTube interview videos. I am really going to pursue this because I know my book is a good one. I guess if I had gotten any bad reviews I might be more distressed, but so far..the reviews have been good..and I got a lot of emails too saying that they loved the book..and I asked in return that they review the book, but this has not met with the same level of success. It is work to go to Amazon or B&N and make a review.

My problem is simple... my book is never going to be printed, at least not at this time frame. The publishers want all the money, and I have so much money and time into this now that it is simply not feasible. I would imagine that most authors have this problem..but even more so today. How many books have been written are totally wonderful books but nobody has ever read them because of a failure to get it printed? Wow... I bet that is a big number.

I want to give away as many of my books as I can find people willing to read it. I have already figured out a way to do it easily and at the same time protect me from having the book out there always available as a free book. I do not want it in the public domain.

Anyway, this was wordy, but I did not know how to write it any shorter. I like your site... am very impressed with it, and because I am an avid reader, I feel sure that I will frequent it often. If I find authors I like, I tend to read all that they write.

Thanks for writing to me. I appreciate it and any advice you have for me, I will surely consider.

Jon B Barry... incidentally, the other Jon Barry was not using that name for the same books elsewhere..but I guess he saw my promotion, and hence... the term piggybacked.

I've never heard of this term "piggybacking" before. Wow, that's an amazingly evil thing to do. Have you found who this person is yet? You should try to find the name and phone number of this person and then share with the world what he or she did to you. Amazing. I'm sorry to hear you went through such an ordeal. I really have never even heard of such an act.

Just google fiction4all. Most of the authors keep changing their names according to whoever is doing any publicity. It would be as if I just became John Grishan as a pseudonym. Grisham has the clout to shut me down if I did that..but to others..this is called piggybacking...they get mileage off of you.

So how would I go about supplying books that are not printed for review. I have yet to have a bad review, but it does not make me want to get the book into print..at least not at this time...is that something this site has interest in?

Jon Barry