A quick comparison
Just a quick comparison when it comes to ebooks.
Today when I went to the various ebook stores (to check my numbers/book status with Private Lessons) this is what I found.
Amazon Front page (for Kindle ebooks): Water for Elephants, Hunger Games, James Patterson’s 10th Anniversary, Laura Hildebrand’s Unbroken, Sherryl Woods & Janet Evanovich. In otherwords all or primarily major house published works.
Barnes & Noble PubIt! front page (note I know PubIt! is B&N’s self/small press publishing page, but I didn’t see an equivalent on Amazon. Please correct me here if you know of one.):
Barry Eisler’s Paris is a Bitch
Synopsis bit:
Bill Lampkin doesn’t have much of a life. He’s in the hospital, abandoned by his father and decides to take a walk one night to escape the grim confines of his existence. During that nighttime stroll, he literally finds himself in another world.
And what a world it is! He is found by a group of very unusual people who take him in and teach him everything he needs to know. As he lives among them, he shares their lifestyle and even falls in love for the first time. What more could anyone ask?
Synopsis bit:
Denise, a single mom, has finally met the man of her dreams; one she can settle down with. As a bonus, he is the perfect partner to help her to raise her son, Amir. Bernard loves Denise with all of his heart, and other than his weekend drinking binges, he’s a pretty good man. The break up to make up scenario makes it all better and pacifies Denise every time…
Synopsis bit:
In a modern day spin on the famous story “Gigi” (originally told by Colette), Gabrielle LeGrande knew her grandmother was a famous courtesan in France, many decades ago. But Gabrielle never thought that legacy had anything to do with her or her destiny…until the day her grandmother tells her about the curse that goes live on her 18th birthday…a curse that has affected the women in her family – and the choices they must make – for hundreds of years…
Synopsis bit:
The zombie apocalypse has arrived, flooding the West Coast with the walking, ravenous dead. Follow the horrifying and hilarious collapse of civilization through the eyes of four alternating characters: Doctor Alejandra Karnydin—the scientist whose seemingly benign attempt to control weather patterns may have caused it; Doode—a pot-smoking, rock-and-roll slacker in Seattle; Inspector Ogilvie Teague—a foul-mouthed but romantic, three-hundred-pound Scottish cop stuck in Los Angeles; and Daniel—the slim, sensitive, poetic conjoined twin whose world is altered in ways he never could have imagined.
And over on Smashwords we have:
Set in the not-too-distant future, Finn, a battle-weary combat veteran, loses himself while travelling the southwest U.S. One night, in a small town at the edge of the Mojave Desert, he meets a group of travelling magicians, including a beautiful and mysterious young woman who teaches him magic and helps him recover his courage…
What if you could go back in time and change events to suit your own purposes? Paul Carroll invents a machine to do just that – at the expense of his family. Just when he’s ready to put it to use a mysterious man hires him to go back to the time of Jesus’ death in order to prevent Judas’ betrayal and thereby prevent the crucifixion…
he came from the street with a mission and a vision to conquer with his lyrics, and he did.
And for fun the extended description:
all the way from ghetto, martins reached the world with his lyrics, but life cut him shot.
English Teacher X follows up his debut book with this raw and vivid memoir of his first five years teaching English abroad. In 1995 a young backpacker answered a newspaper ad and inadvertently became English Teacher X, working between 1995 and 2000 in seven different cities in five different countries, encountering exploitative employers, degenerate colleagues, and eager “foreigner groupies.”
So what’s my point in all this? That there still isn’t a perfect, or even really good solution out there.