How to sign an e-book

The book signing at Realm Makers was a great event. Over a dozen authors, all fabulous. I even bought a print edition of the Avenir Eclectia anthology, although I almost never buy print books anymore, because six of its contributing authors were there.

But among the remaining authors, I either had their books in print back home (Jeff Gerke, Kathy Tyers) or I had their books in the Kindle app on my iPad (Robynn Tolbert, Rebecca P. Minor, and a bunch of others). So how do you get an e-book signed?

I had heard there was “an app for that.” There are a couple, actually, but they both require the author to have signed up beforehand: Authorgraph and Autography.

Many iPad apps allow you to write or draw with a stylus. Unfortunately, the Kindle app is not one of them. Here’s my workaround:

1. Open the book in the Kindle app and take a screen shot of the cover.
2. Copy the photo and paste it into an app that allows for drawing.
3. Use the stylus to write on or under the photo.

Jeff Gerke signing a picture of his book on my iPad. Photo by Morgan Busse.

(I have to confess, Samsung has us totally beat here. The Galaxy tablet’s built-in photo editor lets you draw on your screenshots.)

I used Notability, because that’s what I already had installed. Since then, I found Adobe Ideas, so that’s what I’ll use in the future. Notability worked pretty well, although it was sometimes fidgety when people wrote over the photo.

That worked for the e-books, but what about the print books I chose to leave at home instead of hauling them to St. Louis and back? Jeff came up with the solution for that one: “Take a picture of the cover, and I can sign that.”

So I turned to my friend Jeni, who had a stack of Jeff’s books from the conference bookstore, and borrowed her copy of Plot versus Character. I don’t think Jeff will mind my telling you that he was a little geeked out about signing a book on an iPad. I was totally geeked out myself.

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