A while back I tried to create Kindle versions of the two of my four novels, Pennterra and The Bird Shaman, that exist as electronic files. At the time, and this may still be true for all I know, Amazon couldn't convert PDF files into their own format, and I made a royal botch of trying to convert PDF to Word and then to Kindle, and quickly gave up.

Then martyhalpern told me that Small Beer Press had launched an e-book line of its own. The line featured mostly Small Beer titles but they seemed somewhat interested in acquiring others. So I emailed Gavin Grant with a query, and he said sure, send them over.

The catch, if you want to consider it one, is that there was as yet no contract for out-of-house titles, and I had recently decided that I needed to be more businesslike about my writing. Gavin said we could do a contract or not, just as I preferred, and I replied that I would prefer to sign one.

That was back in May. Weeks went by. I nagged a couple of times, but the contract never got written or sent. Finally I concluded two things: 1) deciding to be more businesslike is all very well, but the people one does business with also have to be businesslike or nothing happens; and 2) insisting on a contract in this case, with so little money at stake (e-books are very cheap), and in view of the fact that I trust Gavin to do what he says he'll do, was hard to justify in practical terms. And the Weightless list is thoroughly distinguished.

So I caved. The two titles went up on the site a week ago. In his blog for July 20, 2010, Gavin writes:

Weightless is Featherproof!

Over on our Weightless ebook store (the best place for indie press ebooks!) we just added half a dozen titles from one of our fave Chicago publishers, Featherproof Books, plus two o/p titles from sf writer Judith Moffett—who was in the right place at the right time when we needed to try adding a few more titles from other people. Weightless is taking off nicely and we should have more addition announcements and so on over there most Tuesdays.

Check it out: http://weightlessbooks.com