UPDATED: Recalculating by Jennifer Weiner: from idea to ebook in less than a week

[image error]I know that as an author I'm not supposed to be excited about the possibilities of e-publishing, but I can't help it, I really am. So I was intrigued to hear about Jennifer Weiner's latest project: a short story (approximately 10,000 words) called Recalculating.

Jennifer had the idea for the story last Tuesday. And it was published – on iBooks, Amazon and B&N today. Yes, today. From idea to publication in less than a week. (Read Jennifer's blog post about it here.)

Now Jennifer is a professional with nine published books behind her and years of experience as a newspaper journalist. She wrote the story quickly, her agent, editor and copyeditor all read it and gave her feedback and it has a professionally designed cover – this is very much not the same as an unpublished author e-publishing their NaNoWriMo book on 1 December – but it's still a pretty exciting idea, don't you think?

Even though I don't like ghost/horror stories (because I am a massive wuss), I was intrigued enough to download Recalculating and I really enjoyed it. It was involving enough that until Joe responded to a question Dora the Explorer asked on TV, I'd forgotten he was there (I am an excellent mother…) and it absolutely didn't read like a rush job (and I only spotted one mistake – "Blue-ray" instead of "Blu-ray").

So what do you think? Is this an interesting prospect for authors or the beginning of the end? Or, you know, just a story…

UPDATED: Following a heated debate in the comments in which I was accused of being "pointlessly snide" about self-publishers, I just wanted to clarify my position. I didn't intend to be snide or negative about self-publishing at all. The point I (thought I) was making with the example of NaNo novels published on 1 December, is that, for the majority of authors, publishing anything so soon after writing it isn't a good idea. I used NaNo as an example a) because it starts tomorrow and b) because apparently agents and publishers are actually sent unedited NaNo novels at the beginning of December (which obviously is also a very bad idea!).

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