E-books and LDS Lit

How will e-books change the face of LDS literature?

Since its inception, there have been only a handful of LDSpublishers, and they’re general run on shoestring budgets because the readership of LDS fiction is so small. Because of this, the books themselves are expensive, and the quality of cover design, page set-up, and so on is sub-par, compared with books produced by publishers with national reach.

Also, self-published books have never garnered the respect that traditionally published books have held because there’s no filter for self-published books. There are no editors to sift through the heaps of manuscripts and pick the very best.

But now we have e-books and Kindles, and I have a feeling that LDS literature is going to be blessed--as we would say at church--by these developments. Distribution can be much wider, and cover and page set-up quality will not be as important. There will be lots of mediocre e-books out there, to be sure, but some will rise to the top, and we’ll get to hear some new voices and maybe even some new styles and themes.

It’s an exciting time to be writing and reading in Mormondom.