Thursday March 28th, 2024 5:57PM
5:31PM ( 26 minutes ago ) News Alert

Hall retiree 'indie-publishes' ebooks in pursuit of second career

By Staff
FLOWERY BRANCH - Flowery Branch retiree and writer Patrick McWhorter is vying for a new career. He has entered the indie publishing arena with the introduction of five multi-format ebooks, four of which are novels.

McWhorter is a former advertising account executive, recently retired from Gainesville advertising and public relations agency, Morton Vardeman & Carlson.

Given the rise in use of electronic readers - iPads, Nooks, Kindles, etc. - McWhorter decided his best opportunity for establishing a new career in the fiction market quickly and with a degree of impact was to opt for ebook publishing over traditional publishing.

He notes that an October, 2013 study by USA TODAY revealed that about 40 percent of adults in America - including 46 percent of those ages 18 to 39 - own an e-reader or a tablet. That figure is more than double the number of digital reader owners just two years before.

"I retired in 2011," said McWhorter, "and began planning to turn my hobby of writing fiction into what could be considered a second career. E-book publishing allows me to close the time gap - or maybe I should call it the gulf- between writing a 70,000-plus-word work of fiction and jumping over the daunting line of hurdles at the starting gate to traditional book publishing." With traditional publishing, a publisher controls editing, design, some of the promotion and most of the distribution, and the time from approval of a manuscript to first sales can be very long.

McWhorter's books have Christian themes. Four are works of fiction, entitled, Holy Joe; Reward of the Wicked;At First Sight and Where the Rivers Flow. A fifth focuses on the character of Christian faith, and is entitled, Faith is a Three-Legged Stool. The latter has also been published in print. McWhorter writes under the pen name, P. V. Mack because, as he says, "That's a much easier name to remember that Patrick McWhorter."

In July of 2013, Nielsen Research predicted that ebook sales, in terms of book volume, would overtake sales of printed books in 2014. Because ebooks typically cost less (in some cases, much less) than printed books, however, the gross sales revenues may still be larger for print. Both have suffered sales setbacks with the sluggish economy, but McWhorter reasons that economic pressure could work in favor of ebooks over the long term.

Will he focus entirely on ebooks? McWhorter says he is interested in pursuing print once his ebooks are established. "I think many people will continue to read printed books for a long time," he added.

For information on obtaining free samples of P. V. Mackebooks, go online to the Christian Fiction category in any of the major ebook retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Blio, Smashwords, Kobo and others.
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