Earlier today, the NY Times contemplated book-buying freezes at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and company-wide bonuses at Hachette--diagnosing the "split personality" that has spooked writers around the country.

In these strange times, one writer used Amazon Kindle to re-configure his career. A few months back, horror novelist Aaron Ross Powell uploaded his Mormon-influenced zombie story, The Hole, to Amazon Kindle. In a recent essay, he explained that step-by-step process for anybody interested in adding content to Amazon's Kindle.

His post joins today's news about the upcoming release of the Kindle 2. From uploading tips to formatting to pricing ideas, the essay is a good place for aspiring digital book authors and editors to look for ideas:

"I set the price at $3.49. Amazon knocked twenty percent off to $2.79. That put the book firmly in the impulse buy category. The novel has sold relatively steadily since publication, with a slight bump in October (people like to buy horror stories around Halloween, oddly enough)."