Monday, October 3, 2011

Ereading Experiences in Germany

Okay... so I went down the rabbit hole a bit. I found this article: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15423450,00.html  about reading portals in Germany. And now you will be so proud of me... I signed up for a profile on Lovelybooks.de! Yes, it is a little funny I'm sure as I was using Google Translate. No telling what some of my answers will come out in German when they translate them from English. Thank goodness some things about websites are universal, so I understood what they meant about uploading my image and this warning, or at least how Google Translate put it: "By 
uploading the photos you certify that you have no rights of third parties, in particular copyright and 
portrait right, injured."


This is my profile: http://www.lovelybooks.de/mitglied/elizabethannwest/

Click on Marcel Proust. I'm not 100% sure what the German means, but it's basically answer these random questions and we will put one up randomly on your public profile on the bottom right. :) Some of the questions I couldn't answer because the translation was too vague. I'm nervous about my answer to "What great misfortune on you?" I hope they meant something along the lines of "What is the saddest thing to happen to you?" I was a bit personal there, revealing that I once lost an early pregnancy while my husband was out to sea for the military. I wasn't sure how well Navy deployment would translate.

There is supposed to be somewhere I can get them to identify me as the writer of CANCELLED. I was most interested in joining LovelyBook.de because they offer a way for readers to ask questions of authors as soon as they have them with their ereader and highlight text. I thought, well snap, what a great way to help foster global communication? My book is a modern, contemporary American tale, I'm positive there are colloquialisms and customs in the book that I take for granted as known to my American readers, but any German readers would be confused. Like, they might wonder where on earth are the sex scenes since I have a tendency to fade to black. To give a perspective on how prude our society is in comparison? The Book of the Day on the left side was Mindfuck. Yep. Just out there, here it is. :)

I'm going to spend some more time on the site, it runs basically like a Goodreads, but I think some users do speak English. It's a great learning opportunity for me, and I'm ecstatic to have found it. Signing up is not for the faint of heart, there is a little bit of guessing, even with Google translating the page for me in Chrome. German embedded in images doesn't translate. But I learned some new German words, like Bucher is books, Alle is all, and Autor is Author. How cool is that?

***BREAKING NEWS: I'm featured on Nathan Lowell Presents today! It's a fun feature about the time I killed my mother's rubber tree plant in an attempt to become a superball mogul. Please show some love with a little traffic and comments. http://www.nathanlowell.com/presents/guest-post/mother-of-invention/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mother-of-invention :) ***




A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby. CANCELLED is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords WIP: PAST DUE A nurse, crippled by debt, takes a part-time job in medical investigation only to find the man she's dating is a fraud!  (status: outlining)

4 comments:

  1. That is cool! I'll have to check it out :)

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  2. It is pretty cool. I love the linking an author's contact info to the books. The way it work, from what I can translate, anyone can post a question. If the question asker tags the book in the question, and the author has already "claimed" that book, Lovelybooks.de sends a message to the author "You've got a reader question!" I love the idea.

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  3. A German lesson AND a new book site. Enjoy! :D

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  4. I love it! It's like Goodreads the International edition! :)

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