Book View Cafe offers free fiction, other goodies: Ursula Le Guin, other luminaries among BVG writers
By Paul Biba
Thanks to Darcy Pattison for pointing us to the new Book View Cafe site (home page here):
Book View Cafe is a consortium of over twenty professional authors with extensive publishing credits in the print world. The Internet is giving us an opportunity to make our out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work available to you. Every day, new content available nowhere else will be served up on Book View Cafe: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, episodes of serialized novels, and maybe even a podcast now and then. The content will be archived and available after the posting date by visiting the author’s bookshelf.
Book View Cafe is a new approach to publishing made possible by the Internet. While most of the fiction on the site is free, authors will also be offering expanded work, additional content, print versions, or subscriptions for a fee. Our authors are all professionals with publishing credits in the print world. The Internet is giving us an opportunity to make their out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work to you. We love feedback on how we are doing.
Current authors are:
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Brenda Clough
Kate Daniel
Laura Anne Gilman
Christie Golden
Anne Harris
Sylvia Kelso
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
Sue Lange
Ursula K. Le Guin
Rebecca Lickiss
Vonda N. McIntyre
Nancy Jane Moore
Pati Nagle
Darcy Pattison
Irene Radford
Madeleine Robins
Amy Sterling
Jennifer Stevenson
Susan Wright
Sarah Zettel
I note that they say "out of print" works may be available. This is a huge mine of gems that are just the perfect source of material for ebooks. Publishing costs would be minimal. Why publishers haven’t tapped this is something I just don’t understand.
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:16 pm
The world of out-of-print books does constitute a significant opportunity for publishers and authors. This opportunity has been under-stressed partly because of complicated rights issues. Many old contracts call for rights to revert to the author after the book goes out of print. As the publisher no longer owns the rights, they simply can’t put out the book. As the author isn’t a publisher, these out-of-print books often languish–especially where the opportunity is small enough that it isn’t worth an agent’s while to track down a small publisher interested in out-of-print books.
At BooksForABuck.com, we do offer authors an opportunity to re-issue their out-of-print books, with attractive new covers, additional editing, and affordable prices. However, I’ve noticed that re-issued books tend to sell less well than new content.
Best of luck to BookView Cafe.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com