Friday, December 7, 2018

Moonlight Mesa Announces New E-Book Releases

In a surprise move, Moonlight Mesa Associates publisher Becky Coffield announced  that two of the company's nonfiction titles will be released as e-books very soon.

Some Gave All, J.R. Sanders' nonfiction account of Old West Lawmen Who Died With Their Boots On, will likely be in e-book format in January. "Converting this book without losing its design is a challenge," Coffield said. "We positively do not want to lose the artwork and photos in the book. We've managed to get the file below 50MG, so it should work with Kindle, but the file is much too large for Smashwords, unfortunately."

Although Kindle claims the bulk of e-book sales, Smashwords is a distributor to ALL E-BOOKS - every brand imaginable.

"We've been thinking of doing this for quite some time. Thinking is the easy part; doing is the challenge."

Coffield's big push is to have the e-book available in January. "This is just a wonderful book," Coffield said. "But eliminating photos and such hurts. We eliminated photos in Casey Tibbs - Born to Ride because no e-book publisher could handle the size of the files back then. Hopefully they can do better now."

The other title Coffield is moving to electronic format is also undergoing a title change. The Old
Folks in the Boat will be available also in January, under a new ISBN and title: Rowing for Health. The original title will be kept as part of the subtitle.

"We made a mistake choosing the title for the book," Coffield admits. "We spent months - no, two years - throwing titles around. Seriously. I don't know how that happened as much time as we spent talking about titles."

Coffield feels that the book should be doing better than it is. "We didn't expect a barn-burner with a niche book, and we've sold copies every month, but I truly think the book should be selling better. We talked about just re-issuing it under a new title and a new ISBN, but the thought of having to change the cover and headers and the uploads, it just exhausted me. That's still a possibility, but I'd prefer not to go there - at least at this time," the publisher said.

The e-book title will be Rowing for Health. The subtitle will be Inspiration from The Old Folks in the Boat. Like Sanders' book, the number of photos in the electronic version of Rowing for Health could present a stumbling block.

Moonlight Mesa's 2018 top-selling nonfiction, A Beginner's Guide to Owning a Mule,  is not destined for e-book conversion - at least at this time. The publisher will, however, release an e-book for Saving Our Oceans at the same time as the trade-paperback. "I expect better e-book sales with that title," Coffield said. "I can't tell you why. I just do." Coffield plans to donate the money from sales to orca and ocean groups.



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