So, I have been hard at work. HARD at work, working on a project to make e-books out of all, or at least most of my blog posts. I initially wanted them to be completely, 100% free because they are already available for free here on the Cerebral Faith blog. Unfortunately, Kindle Direct Publishing won’t let me publish permanently free e-books. The good news is that (1) They will let me sell the books for ridiculously cheap prices depending on the file size. Between a minimum price of $0.99 and $2.99, and (2) There is a feature that will allow you to make it free temporarily for promotional purposes. (3) On top of it all, I’m going to enroll it into Kindle Unlimited so that, if you’re subscribed to this service, you will get the e-books for free anyway. That is the best that I can do. I tried to make my own unofficial EPUB documents to distribute like a pirate, but as the old saying goes “You get what you pay for”. Using free converter sites ended up changing my Google Doc/Open Office doc into an unreadable mess. And if it looked ok, I went back and forth between either not having a clickable Table Of Contents to not having hyperlinked footnotes. The technical difficulties seemed to have no end, and I refused to settle for a subpar product.
There are several reasons why I’m doing this;
(1) I cannot, no matter how hard I try, shake the feeling that blog reading has fallen out of vogue. I am not saying no one reads blogs anymore. I’m saying that blog readers, I strongly suspect, are a niche audience. I get the impression that TikTok, YouTube, and the podcast have totally overshadowed blogging as television once overshadowed the radio. [1]As referenced in a popular song. You know which one. That said, book reading has never gone out of style. Although we have gone from tablets to scrolls to books, to scrolling through books on our tablets! I really think that these articles would have a wider reader base if they were repackaged in the form of e-books. The articles would still be on the blog.
(2) For blog posts SERIES, like “The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels”, these are essentially books in their own rights anyway. With this one in particular, I frequently joked over the last couple of years that I accidentally wrote a book and published it on the blog. I called it a “Blog Book”. Each post in the series reads like a book chapter. Each post is meant to be read in order. So multi-part article series like this will be indistinguishable in their feel from an ordinary e-book.
(3) As this website accumulates more and more content, having all of my thoughts on a single subject compiled into a single file will be helpful for organization. Although I have done my best in the “Blog Categories” page, not everyone likes the layout. Especially if there is multiple layers of sub categories.
(4) In the event that this website is deleted, the writings will be preserved in these e-book files.
(5) This one just occurred to me as I was typing, but for purposes of studying, you can take advantage of the Kindle App’s annotating and note taking function. You can highlight things, make notes, etc.
(6) It will allow for an offline experience. As long as you have the Kindle file downloaded to your device, you’ll be able to read this book even when you don’t have access to the internet. Is the internet down? Are you on a long plane ride? You can still read my stuff!
(7) In referring some of my work to skeptics, especially if it’s a multi-part series, I won’t have to keep saying “Here, you should check out this blog series I did on this.” in which I proceed to post a ridiculous amount of links. I can say “You should check out this e-book I wrote on it. It’s f̶r̶e̶e̶ super cheap, and I go in depth.”
That I’m making anything at all might be surprising to some. For 6 months now, “A Hiatus, Spiritual Warfare, and A Future Podcast” has been my latest blog article. While I do plan on taking it easy until I can get myself into a better place emotionally and spiritually, I don’t think I’m going to be completely inactive either. I am considering blogging again casually, as I did when I first began. I’ll write a post whenever I feel like it, keep the Patreon site paused, and run the Facebook page. I haven’t decided yet. At the very least, I will be working on these e-books regularly. I hope to release at least one every month-ish. And again, I’m sorry I couldn’t make them free, but you’re still getting decent e-books for a cheap price. You can think of it as putting a dollar in a vending machine, but instead of getting a soda, you’re getting a book!
Now that I think about it though, GotQuestions.org categorized all of their articles into books. And William Lane Craig did the same thing with his Question Of The Week articles in his book “A Reasonable Response”, and they sold them for much more than I’m selling mine. So maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad?
Anyway, here is the first e-book in a long line of e-books I plan on producing; “The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels: A Cerebral Faith Blog Book” available now for $0.99!
References
| ↑1 | As referenced in a popular song. You know which one. |
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