Kindle Tips

Wow, this is catching on. I recently went to my agents’ lunch — a monthly gathering of six or eight of us, where we exchange gossip, share suggestions, and talk about kids & parents & real estate – and found four Kindle users among the six of us present that day. Of the remaining two, one was clearly weakening. (You know who you are, Miriam – get with it!) The sixth…well, I am a defender of the printed book myself. We must have spent 15 minutes of our lunch on the subject, and picked up a few tips from each other.

Like these:

Pagination: This is the big one among those of us who read manuscripts — there’s no easy way to convert the Kindle “location” to page number, beyond a rough approximation; page numbers in a Word document do not appear. How do you work with that? Here are some ideas we shared:

• Our friend Jane found a workaround: she adds an occasional page number to the text of the document, i.e. you write “PAGE 25″ at the beginning of p 25, and so on every twenty-five pages thereafter. Or every ten pages if you like… It’s a bit of work, but at least it gives you a rough idea when you need to share your notes with the author.
• Shana has another way we’ve mentioned earlier: she bookmarks the first page of each chapter, so you know later that the note you made is near the beginning of chapter five, for instance.
• Jane also described discussing a manuscript with the author over the phone. She looked at her Notes, and gave the author a keyword (or phrase) from the corresponding paragraph. The author did a search on her Word document, and off they went.
• Joy needed to read a potential client’s book over the weekend, before meeting with him on Monday. She was in the country; the book was in her office, but she was able to buy and download the Kindle edition in seconds. (David, check the next royalty statement!)

Maybe we’ll have a few more after next month’s lunch….