Small and Independent Press Books discussion

K. W. Jeter is actually a fairly well-known writer, and he's published a number of books with mainstream presses. But for his current series, about a Korean-American orphan girl, Kim Oh (who's 17 when the series opens, and who becomes basically a hired gunslinger, though not without some ethics about who hires her or what she's hired to do) he's chosen to self-publish instead. I've read the first two books in the series, and , and gave both of them five stars; I'd recommend them highly to action-fiction fans. If anyone's interested, my reviews are here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

The only negative here, IMO, is that although there are so far seven books in the series, only the first one was ever published in paperback. Jeter also made the deliberate decision to only publish the rest in e-book format, effectively dismissing fans like myself who prefer to read in paper format and who don't buy e-books. No doubt, he thinks this is a smart business decision, cutting his overhead. I disagree; his rate of profit from print sales may not be as great, but some of those sales would represent profit he wouldn't otherwise make. Come on, Mr. Jeter --see the light! :-)

As an update, I want to note that most of the original self-published e-books (and the one paper book) are no longer being sold on Amazon. They've been superseded by new editions from Lincoln Square Books, which are available in both electronic and paper format, and which mostly each combine two of the original books into one volume. (I learned this only very recently; it's a boon to readers like myself who prefer paper format --the reason I hadn't pursued the series was that for a long time, it was only available electronically!)