Read and eat—Kandy Shepherd

Reading and eating good food are two of my favorite past-times. Combine them and I’m in heaven. I’m not talking about nibbling on chocolate as I read (my guiltiest of guilty pleasures!) but of visiting a wonderful bookstore that has a really good café or restaurant—or vice-versa.

Browse books between courses at Berkelouw Book Barn

Recently I had the pleasure of visiting two Australian venues that combined food and books in a most appealing way. First was the Berkelouw Book Barn at Berrima, in the Southern Highlands of NSW.

Second was the Whileaway Bookshop & Café in the tropical far-north Queensland resort town of Port Douglas. (Last year I also visited some wonderful bookstore/cafes in California but, unfortunately, didn’t take down the names or take photos.)

Snack and choose books at Whileaway Bookshop & Cafe

I’m the first to put my hand up for the pleasure of e-book reading. The convenience and portability has me hooked. I love seeing a novel that interests me in an on-line book store, and reading it on my iPad or Kindle just a few minutes later. I like being able to transport lots of books on one device, too.

Lunch every bit as pleasurable as the books (Berkelouw Book Barn)

But there’s something about paper-and-ink books—I’m resisting the terms “real” or “old-fashioned”—that still has me hooked. I still love the experience of visiting a bricks-and-mortar bookstore and browsing the shelves. To be able to savor both that experience and a delicious lunch, is very appealing.

An old-fashioned book press

The Berkelouw Book Barn in the grounds of the Bendooley Estate is renowned for its fine offerings of new, secondhand and antiquarian books. But my last two visits there were prompted by lunch at the new Bendooley Bar and Grill. The barn is a huge, open space with cathedral ceilings, exposed timber beams and stone fireplaces. 

So simple, so delicious at the cafe at Berkelouw

The restaurant offers first-rate contemporary cuisine, stylishly presented. What fun to order lunch and browse the books between courses. Both times I’ve visited, I’ve gone away with a stack of new books and memories of an excellent meal.

Lots of popular fiction at Whileaway

I came across the delightful Whileaway Bookstore & Café on a short vacation—recommended for good coffee and food. Both cafe and bookstore were convivial, well-stocked, and with friendly service. Again I really enjoyed the experience of being able to browse books and enjoy good food.

If this is a way to keep independent bookstores flourishing, I’m all for it! What about you? What do you think of bookstore/cafes? Have you any recommendations? Do you worry you’ll spill coffee all over your new book? Do you prefer e-books to print books? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

Kandy Shepherd writes fun, feel-good fiction.

Her new contemporary womens fiction e-book, Reinventing Rose, is available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, and other e-book retailers.

Kandy’s romances include the Amazon bestseller The Castaway Bride, Something About Joe, and the award-winners Love is a Four-Legged Word and Home Is Where the Bark Is.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

So You Say You Want to Publish Your Own Book… by Jenny Gardiner

It's been nearing two years now since I decided to self-publish a novel. Back then it was in the early days of indie publishing, and I made the decision based on instinct, purely because I'd gotten a Kindle for my birthday that previous December and was so hooked on the convenience of it, the ability to acquire new books within a minute's time, the elimination of tons and tons of paper waste that was endemic with the publishing industry, etc. I just knew if I loved this cool, new (and then overpriced) gadget, then others would too. And I knew once the price came down on it lots of people would be on board. I'd decided the time was upon us when I heard that Apple would be launching this new product called an iPad soon. That was the magic bullet to bring the price down on e-readers so that people would buy them.

It was slow-going in the early days. That first year I hardly sold any books. Hardly anyone owned e-readers. Plus it was hard to determine the proper pricing--it made sense for an e-book to be cheaper than a book that is printed, but how much cheaper? Hard to know. And it seemed that those who owned Kindles were looking for free content. Maybe to save money after shelling out $350 for a Kindle? hehehe

Have I learned a lot in the past two years? Oh, if only you knew…

There was a time when I wanted to stay parked firmly in the camp of publishing with New York houses. That's the way it was supposed to be. But something happened along the way: times changed. New York houses changed (well, actually more like they failed to adapt, which led to their becoming much more irrelevant). It went from a reasonable proposition to an unrealistic one. More and more houses were putting all the demands on authors with little-to-no risk on their part. If a book didn't sell gangbusters, it was automatically because the author somehow failed. Which we all knew was baloney. But it was easiest to blame the most vulnerable in the trail: the writers. Advances became so small as to be almost insulting: once upon a time an advance would enable an author to write from book to book without quite starving to death. But advances were becoming so small that it was the equivalent of working a minimum wage job for about a week: clearly not enough to sustain someone. Authors were busily working their tails off, building a healthy mountain of debt and not ever seeing much money for their efforts (while readers falsely believed writers were living it up like the Kardashians!).

But then Amazon decided to offer authors what no one else had truly done: respect. In the form of a legitimate level of royalty payment. Enough to help pay for groceries! Imagine! Granted, it was part of their multi-pronged attack against the industry-slash-attempt-to-curry-favor-with-a-susceptible-population. But hey, I admit, I was completely vulnerable! Throw the possibility of actual wage-earning my way and I'll foam at the mouth! I have no pride!

But what I hadn't expected that I love about publishing myself is that I have control over my career again. No longer am I at the mercy of vagaries over which I have no control. No editors who leave in the middle of a book, leaving you essentially unrepresented for your book's publication and floundering in no-man's land. No houses who lose interest in the novel and neglect to promote it. No IOUs on royalties stuck in this mysterious accounting category known as "reserves", which means you'll never see a penny of it. Basically no one to blame but me if it doesn't do well. But now I have an artist's palette of options to try to fix that if it doesn't sell: change the cover. Change the descriptive jacket copy. Try various promotions both within Amazon and without. If the book doesn't sell, it's not dead in the water as it once was with a New York house. It just calls for some refining. Tweaking. This was a new concept: rather than sit passively by while my home was engulfed in weeds, with indie publishing I was able to take proactive measures to spruce up the curb appeal and ensure that people were interested. This is a great gift that Amazon has given authors. And one that benefits readers. For far too long authors were shut down with terrific books simply because they didn't fit within the narrowly prescripted terms of their genres and those of bricks-and-mortar stores: i.e. if it couldn't be easily categorized on a shelf, it wasn't going to find a home. But now if you write a book that transcends genre descriptions, one that might be part suspense, part women's fiction, and part sports narrative, well guess what? Somewhere on Amazon, you'll find your readership. Chick lit, once considered the graveyard for all eternity for writers, has returned with indie publishing: we knew the readers existed. It's just that publishing houses refused to take a chance to publish that type of novel after they'd killed the genre. It's a whole new world in publishing, and I'm so happy to be in the frontier of it, taking charge, owning my career again.

Over the past two years I've become a scholar of sorts, learning the ins and outs of independent publishing, trying to discern what works and what doesn't. There's a lot of trial and error, and there isn't always a simple answer. Plus it's true, rather than devote all of my time to writing, I'm having to divide it in order to focus also on trying to succeed in this New Publishing World Order. But hell, even if publishing through "legacy" New York publishers I was spending much of my time with marketing and publicity, sucking away time I'd otherwise spent creating worlds as a writer. At least now I'm doing it while earning an actual living, which is a good thing, if nothing else because it enables me to continue to be a writer. And that's a good thing.

So if you're interested in checking out my indie-published books, here they are!













and others I have with other publishing houses:





and coming very soon:




and please come visit me on twitter and Facebook here and here