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pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos defaming
my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at
that damning passage:
[PULL-QUOTE]
> Download it for free from Corey’s site, read the first
> page
You see that? Hell, this guy is
working for me!
[ADDITIONAL
PULL QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I’m thinking of read-
ing of paying off
Entertainment Weekly
to say nice things about his
novel, “a surprisingly bad writer,” no less, whose writing is “stiff,
amateurish, and uninspired!” I wanna check that writer out. And
I can. In one click. And then I can make up my own mind.
You don’t get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego
and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all
the things that people are saying about your book is that it can
play right into your insecurities — “all these people will have it in
their minds not to bother with my book because they’ve read the
negative interweb reviews!” But the flipside of that is the ego: “If
only they’d give it a shot, they’d see how good it is.” And the more
scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot.
Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and
even if they spell your name wrong!).
5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace
their nature] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the
value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and
send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook’s
distinctive value propositions — that is, the more you restrict a
reader’s ability to copy, transport, or transform an ebook — the
more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper book. Ebooks
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