Publetariat

Pre-Editing (Or, My Thoughts On Hiring Freelance Developmental Editors Pre-Submission)

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This post, from Editorial Ass, originally appeared on Editorial Ass on 6/29/09.

I got this note the other day: 

Hi there,

I am a first time writer and I just finished my first novel. In your opinion, should I try and get an editor before I query an agent? I haven’t been able to find any advice on that and I read your blog all the time so I figured I would ask. If you have time to respond, please let me know whenever you can!

XXX

Dearest XXX, thank you for asking. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time. I’m afraid I have a TON of thoughts about it.

Let me start with an anecdote.

About six months ago, I got to meet an editor hero of mine, who is a big important head of an imprint at a big important company. We got to chatting, and she asked me about some of my favorite projects.

Being my humble modest self (ahem), I started bragging about all my most splendid projects (all of them, naturally). I took some special time on a book I was particularly proud of–one you’ve heard a bit about here–which I’d acquired after every other house in basically the entire world had passed. I’d seen potential there, and after working carefully with the author on editorial back-and-forth and thoughtful development, we published to mind-blowing awesome reviews. In my prideful, sinning mind, this was an ultimate victory, because I felt like I could see my own personal hand in the book’s success in a special way.

My esteemed interlocutor, however, did not *realize* I was bragging! Instead, she said something that shook me from buttons to boots: "Oh wow, you guys edit over there? That’s nice–I always used to enjoy editing. We don’t have time, so we can only really buy books that are pretty much ready for production."

I was, as I said, pretty shaken. My very smart, wise, and experienced new friend had opened my eyes to an industry trend I’d kinda been ignoring–houses are increasingly not insentivizing their editors to EDIT. Instead, they are supposed to focus on ACQUIRING. I love editing, and realizing that it may not be a crucial or celebrated skill for an acquisition editor to have made me wonder what the future holds for me.

Enough about me and my ego. How does this tie into YOUR life as a writer?
I am not saying the system doesn’t suck. I’m just trying to address this very specific question of whether or not you should hire a freelance editor.

Basically, you want your submission to be as clean as possible, at every stage.

"Clean" means both in terms of copy issues (grammar, punctuation, sentence structure) and in terms of content–your structure, composition, ideas, and for fiction plot, characters, and pacing should all be tight as a drum–it’s not enough to want to sell your manuscript anymore. You have to imagine that, in a worst case scenario, you might get published without another hand tinkering with anything you’ve written. (Hopefully this won’t be the case–but you should treat your manuscript as if it is.)

Don’t let yourself cut any corners at any stage. You should be as clean as possible before submitting to agents, because while some agents are fantastic editors, some of the best agents are very poor editors (different although frequently overlapping skill sets–but don’t count on an agent to edit your manuscript). You should also talk seriously to your agent about how clean the manuscript is before the agent submits to editors.

Some pros and cons (all mixed together) of hiring a freelance editor to work on cleaning up your project:

*The expense–they charge a ton. We’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on the person and what kind of editing your book requires. And I know a lot of us aren’t exactly rolling in it. You have to figure out on your own the risk/reward scenario fiscally–it’s important to remember that working with an outside editor doesn’t mean that your project will sell.

Read the rest of the post on Editorial Ass.

CJ Allan and Matt the Cat, new members

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Hello Fellow Writers, 

I’m CJ Allan.  I just joined you over the weekend, having been invited by April to come take a look. 

I was introduced to April by Ed Patterson’s book, “Are You Still Submitting Your Work To A Traditional Publisher?”. 

(I wrote an Amazon review of Ed’s book, with the header:”Should be required reading for any who want to self-publish at Amazon”.) 

I’m from Dallas, Texas, and am currently traveling around Texas and Oklahoma. 

As I told April, I’ve always made my living as a writer… of articles, user manuals, and business publications, but do not yet call myself an “author”. 

I came close a few times in the past, but each time I sat down to discuss a contract with a conventional publisher (“you don’t need a lawyer, you can use ours”… did anyone else ever hear that?)… I would, on reading the fine print, back out. 

“I’d be making minimum wage”, I’d say.

 “But I’m the one taking the risk”, they’d say.

[SIGH]

 Do you suppose they wonder why Indie Publishing has taken off the way it has?

Since retiring from the business world, I’ve been traveling in my motorhome, writing travel-related articles.

My signature line carries the likeness of Matt the Cat, who rides shotgun with me.  He will be the spokesman in some photo-articles I am planning for the Kindle.

 Looking forward to learning from you all,

CJ

Evolution Of An E-book Author To Publisher

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This post, from Rob Walker, originally appeared on the ACME AUTHORS LINK blog on 7/9/09.

Sure every author wishes to be discovered by Random House or another of the biggies of NYC but since my first publication in 1979 the pinnacle of publication has gotten thinner, higher, spikier, snarkier, and harder and harder to manage.

In fact, since the early eighties, getting a novel published has only become more difficult to the point of its being like making the NBA or NASA or winning an Oscar™ or the Lottery. It has gotten further and further out of reach and every author is nowadays faced with brick walls, even a well published author—and often he or she is finding it harder than the new kid on the block.

As a result, over the past several years, I – like so many others who must write – have turned to smaller press venues. First with Echelon Press with PSI Blue a number of years ago. More recently, I have signed with Five Star for DEAD ON coming out this month. Between these two publications, I published three books with HarperCollins, my Inspector Alastair Ransom series. So I have a unique view on what it is like to be publishing with large and small presses. Recently, too, I have submitted a book, Cuba Blue, to yet another small press.

I don’t have to enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of going large or going small, but I do feel a lot more Zen with the smaller presses; with them it is far more about the work and far less about the sales figures, although everyone wants to see good, healthy sales. I have published titles with Dorchester, Zebra, St. Martins, Pinnacle, Berkley, and a few imprints no longer in business along with my early YA publisher Oak Tree Publications, as well as HarperCollins, and family, friends, fans who read me can simply not fathom why I am not far, far more successful in this business, and why my work has not landed on the major bestseller lists.

Aggravation fills my days and nights if I give it much thought and that negative energy can swamp you, so I try to remain positive and have damned the torpedoes and have always written the book that I wanted to write, the one I was most passionate about, and I have never written a book with the direct intent of becoming rich and filthily wealthy but I have hoped to have an income, to have some return on the huge effort or time and energy one puts in but it has not always worked out so.

I do know that I have had the worst representation in the business, and that due to the bottom-line mentality that ties the hands of editors at major houses, editors who love to work with me but can’t, that I am in a sense black-balled. Not overtly so but one look at my last sales numbers and that is all it takes to have an agent or editor run screaming from me. And as this is how the business truly operates, I have turned to other means of getting the work in print, so I thank God for small presses and publishers that have come into being since the early eighties.

Then comes a pale rider called the eBook. I was fascinated with the idea way back when Stephen King experimented with it and found it rather a failure so far as he was concerned, but I kept the faith and have always kept my eye on the evolution of eBooks and the hardware from the hefty Palm Pilot of the early days to the slim, light, lovely state of the art Kindle now set at $299. Keeping close tabs on the Kindle, reading about it in every article I could find, I kept close watch for its success and I predicted it would go large—which it has!

I put up free pdf files on my website and I offered free chapters and whole books on my site, and on chat groups I offered simply to send downloads. I got my toes wet doing this sort of thing. Information kept coming in that the big publishers were experimenting now as well and sure enough HarperCollins asked for an addendum to my contract to place the Ransom Series on Kindle and that was a major spark. After seeing these on kindle at the Kindle Store, I was hooked, and about then Joe Konrath informed me that he had placed a number of books up for Kindle readers and that he was controlling it all from his computer—and making money! A rare thing for most writers! I mean we are expected to give back an honorarium to anyone who allows us to speak about our writing right? We’re expected to give it away, right?
 

Read the rest of the post on ACME AUTHORS LINK.

A Short Story In The Palm of Your Hand

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This article, from Michael Miner, originally appeared on the Chicago Reader site on 7/9/09.

Punk Planet’s Dan Sinker believes you really do want to read on your phone.

I don’t know that print is dying, but if it is I want it properly mourned. So I’m partial to the sentiments of Dan Sinker, a print person moving on but paying his respects to the medium he leaves behind. Sinker goes so far as to concede print virtues he hopes his new paperless publishing experiment will replicate.

Sinker, a former layout artist at the Reader, created the celebrated zine Punk Planet and ran it for 13 years. It went under two years ago not because Sinker’s imagination had run off to chase the next thing but because of a cash-flow crisis triggered by its distributor. But now Sinker is off to the next thing. He calls it CellStories.

The idea is easily understood by you and me; the technology behind it may not be, but that’s Sinker’s problem and he thinks he’s just about worked it out. He promises that in a month or so, when CellStories is up and running, a fresh story will await us every workday at cellstories.net, accessible only by our iPhones, iPods, and other mobile devices. At the moment he’s working on banking enough pieces to be confident that when he gets going he can keep that promise. As he starts up, his primary sources for stories are Brooklyn’s Akashic Books, which has a Punk Planet imprint, and Chicago’s 2nd Story reading series. And he’s counting on what he calls “13 years of good will with writers” he published at Punk Planet to keep ’em coming. “Eventually,” he says, “there will be an open call for submissions, probably on a quarterly basis. But I expect that the longer-term partnerships and relationships will be the source of the brunt of the material.”

Submissions can be sent to stories@cellstories.net. Contributing authors will be compensated by being showcased: with CellStories as with so much paperless publishing, the paper prohibition extends to money.

The stories Sinker plans to post, mostly fiction, will run about 2,000 words, give or take. The service will be free—but if the idea flies and he expands it so that readers can download and save stories they like and root through archives for old ones, he’ll charge a small subscription fee, something like 99 cents a month.

“I love short stories,” says Sinker. “I love magazine-length articles. That stuff doesn’t have a home right now. Talk to any publisher and ask how his short-story collections sell and they sell poorly. Magazines have less and less place for long narrative pieces. They like lists.”

If Sinker’s idea sounds to you like some sort of very limited take on the Kindle—you supply the screen, he supplies the literature—you’re misreading his intent. “The book is still a wonderful thing,” he continues, and by book he means that old-fashioned thing with binding and pages that bend at the corners. “I still definitely believe in books.” The Kindle, though, he considers a passing fancy. “It’s the laser disc of the late 2000s,” he says. “It’s an interim device. It’s too expensive for anyone to buy who isn’t a technology lover or hasn’t a lot of money burning in their pockets. It’s the answer to a problem I don’t think very many people have. And it’s so temporary—the day and age of a one-function device. ‘This is my thing to read. This is my thing to make phone calls. This is my thing to play games on.’ We’re well past that point and good riddance to it. It was never a time that was going to last because everything is converging.”

Just as the word processor became a personal computer with a million uses, so the cell phone is becoming a mobile device, or as Sinker likes to call it, “a sophisticated communication device that can get you on the Internet, can get you to your friends, can get you to where you are on the map, can get you all kinds of things.” When it comes to dreaming up new uses, Japan, South Korea, and western Europe are years ahead of us, he says. In Japan and Korea, he points out, the mobile device has started to replace the credit card.

But Sinker thinks people like their mobile devices for reasons that aren’t limited to the neat things they do. There’s the simple physical congeniality of one. “It’s tactile in a way a laptop isn’t,” he says. “A laptop is something you’re sitting away from. A mobile phone you cradle. There’s something wonderful about that.”

And because it is so congenial, he believes the public will enjoy reading stories on it—“things that might take 15 minutes or 20 minutes. Your eyes aren’t going to burn out. You’re not going to get uncomfortable. You can sit there with a beer in one hand, or a cup of coffee in one hand, and read this thing.”

Read the rest of the article on the Chicago Reader.

The Advance v. Royalties Conversation Continues

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This post, from NYT bestselling author John Green, originally appeared on his Sparks Fly Up site on 7/7/09.

Okay, quick background: Last week I wrote a post arguing against outrageously high book advances and in favor of better royalties for authors. I followed this up with a post arguing that the widely held belief that big advances cause big marketing budgets does not really hold up to scrutiny. (Big advances and big marketing budgets are obviously often correlated, but that does not imply any kind of causal relationship.)

Then I promised a mathy post explaining to publishers why this model makes more sense for them, after which I decided that my numbers were perhaps not as lock-solid as I previously believed them to be, so I decided not to publish that post.

For the record:

1. One thing that keeps getting overlooked here is that many big publishers would currently be OUT OF BUSINESS if they were not owned by gigantic media companies that can absorb the losses of their idiotic up-front gambling. It’s not like I’m fretting about some on-the-horizon crisis in publishing; the crisis is here. The model is not working, and it isn’t changing, which historically bodes poorly. (I’m looking at you, record companies.)

2. That said, my radical proposal was wrong enough to be relatively easy to dismiss. But if you lower advances and increase royalty escalations dramatically (at least according to my calculations which might be wrong because I am bad at math), over the last five years EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHER IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EFFING WORLD would either be more profitable or lose less money except maybe Hachette.* So I just want to make it clear that I am not backing away from that fundamental belief.

3. The comments to these posts have been fascinating and wonderful and I am deeply grateful to all of you for them.

4. I wanted to pull one comment out and respond to it in pieces, because it raises a lot of important questions and also brings forth the obvious but as-yet-unstated fact that I am writing from a particular POV. So okay, from commenter writeon:

"If (like most authors) the only money you’d be making from a book is the advance (since most books don’t earn out their advance or stay on shelves long enough to make royalties) why on earth would an author want to turn down money?"

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing against advances. My beef is not with $30,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back. My beef is with $500,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back.

The reason to take less money upfront and get more in royalties is pretty simple, I think: Your publisher is owned by a company that wants to make money. So long as you make money, you make sense. If you don’t make money, you don’t make sense.**

"Authors don’t have a crystal ball where they can see into the future and say, "Well, in three years I’ll come up with this Book X which will make me money, so, for right now I can sell Book Y and Z for pennies."

Again, I’m not proposing you sell any book for pennies; I’m proposing that you sell a book for a reasonable five-figure advance and the kind of escalating royalty that allows you to share fairly in the profits from the book, if there are any.

"Most authors don’t know if they’ll get the chance to publish another book. They can’t count on publishers doing anymore than putting their book in a catalogue as their ‘marketing.’ You want THAT author to turn down money?"

Probably not, because that author probably hasn’t been offered a huge advance. But I think that author is mistaken if s/he thinks that an antagonistic relationship with publisher will help get the book to its audience.

Read the rest of the post on Sparks Fly Up.

* Twilight.

** But to expand on that a bit: You have to begin with the (reasonable) assumption that your publisher wants to make money and would not have acquired your book if they did not feel that it could be profitable. It may be that they think it can only be profitable if they don’t pay to hand out galleys at ALA, which is disappointing and annoying and etc., but it’s irrational to assume from the outset that your publisher wishes to lose money on your book.

Eight Social Media Tips From Artist Natasha Wescoat

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This post, from Magdalena Georgieva, originally appeared on the HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog on 7/8/09.

Making a living as an artist is hard. Somewhere between establishing a market and promoting your art, you have to stay inspired.

Artist Natasha Wescoat has done just fine online with all three. She uses blogging and social media to promote and sell her creative work online. "If I can do it, anyone can," she said in a telephone interview yesterday about her social media usage. Here are eight tips that emerged from our conversation:

Natasha1) Experiment, experiment, experiment Natasha got started with experimentation. In 2005, she began video blogging and saw that people responded to her content. Afterward, she got interested in MySpace and Facebook. With almost 5,000 followers, she has now become an avid Twitter user.

Experimentation helps you keep up with changing industry landscapes. As Ben Rowe commented on Natasha’s Mashable post, "Twitter mightn’t be the silver bullet for all artists. A blog, Flickr or Etsy page might not be either. But the artists who are out there trying these new tools are already miles ahead of the artists who aren’t."

2) Set time for social media Make sure you are not overusing the social networking sites. "I try to set a time everyday to check all my different networks," said Natasha. Twice a day, after waking up and before going to bed, she checks her Twitter replies. That helps her avoid habitually overusing the tool.

3) Patience is a virtue If you are just getting started with social media, be patient. "It takes a lot of patience and research," Natasha said. You won’t see instant results because developing relationships takes time. Natasha suggested that social media rookies focus on "building their networks and relationships because that will be their most powerful tool."

4) Train Your Brain Train your brain to regularly read other people’s blogs and tweets. They provide good examples of the interaction that you are looking for. When she first started using Twitter, Natasha found herself at a loss. "I didn’t have any idea what to say. But I read other people’s discussions, trained my mind and got started on new ideas," she said.
 

Read the rest of the post, including tips #5-8, on the HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog. (photo credit: Natasha Wescoat)

From The Offer To The Bookstore

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This post, from mainstream-published author Shannon Hale, originally appeared on her Squeetus website.

Before going through the process myself, I was pretty clueless about the route a book takes to get to the shelf. Here are the major phases of traditional book publishing, based on my own experience.

Offer—When an acquiring editor finds a book she’d like to buy, either from an agent or the slush pile, she then calls agent or author to make an offer (huzzah!). The offer details how much money the publisher will pay the author as an advance on royalties (for a first book, generally $2000 – $10,000), the percentage of royalties the author will get (for a children’s author, generally 10 percent on hardcover, 6 percent on paperback), and the rights the publisher wants to buy (i.e. North American rights, World English, or World. Bloomsbury bought World rights from me, meaning if any of my books are sold for translation, Bloomsbury gets 50 percent of those royalties).

The Counter Offer—Often a counter offer is made, wherein the author/agent negotiates a slightly higher advance, percentage, or asks to retain more rights. This can be brief or haggling might go on for weeks. The actual signing of the contract can delay for months, but once the offer has been accepted, business goes forward.

Editing—For me, this phase lasts six to nine months. See Working with an Editor for more details. After several revisions under my editor’s supervision, we decide the book is ready to go. Such a good feeling! Sometime during the process, my editor is also shopping for cover art, running different artists by me, deciding on a feel and design. Bloomsbury is good at consulting with me, but ultimately the decision is theirs. They send me initial sketches of the cover art for input and accuracy. Eventually, I get a jacket proof in the mail and I go over the front, back, spine, and flap text. That’s always very exciting and makes the book feel more real.

Copy Editing—Now the publisher sends your manuscript to the copy editor (inhouse or outsourced). My editor will send me a xerox of the ms with copy edited notes and I often have just a weekend to go over it. I usually find a couple of errors she missed (though those copy editors are incredibly thorough and very good) and find some changes she made that I don’t want made. I also find adverbs I wrote but now hate and other minor changes. When I go over these corrections with my editor on the phone, our call can last three hours. It’s quite an intensive process, but the ms is so much cleaner for it.

Read the rest of the post, including Typesetting & Proofing, ARCs, Printing, The Release, and Now What? on Shannon Hale’s Squeetus website.

Ten Marketing Questions Authors Are Asking

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This post, from literary agent Chip MacGregor, originally appeared on his blog on 6/24/09. While Mr. MacGregor isn’t a supporter of self-publishing, his advice here is equally useful to mainstream and self-published authors.

I’ve received a bunch of marketing questions from authors over the past few months. Let me take a stab at a random sample…

Jennifer wrote to ask, "What is the most important thing I need to know about marketing my book?"

To me, the most important thing for you to grasp as an author is that you are responsible for marketing your book. Not the publicist. Not the marketing manager. Not even the publishing house. YOU. Think of it this way: Who has the most at stake with this book, you or the publisher? (You do.) Who is more passionate about it, you or the publisher? (You are.) Who knows the message best, you or the publisher? (You.) I think an author should work with his or her publisher’s marketing department as much as possible. Make yourself available. Say "yes" to everything they ask. Express appreciation every time they do something that helps market your book. But then go do everything as though it all depended on you, because it does. Whatever the publicist does for you is gravy. YOU are responsible for marketing your own book. Don’t leave it to some young college grad who has 17 other projects to market. 

Clatrice asked this: "If I publish my book with a smaller publisher, will they set up radio and TV interviews for me? And can I expect them to set me up with newspaper interviews or book reviews?"

Here’s my suggestion: When you first begin talking with the marketing department at your publisher, tell them how excited you are to work with them, explain that you’ll do everything they ask of you, then ask this question: "Can you tell me what you’ll be doing to market my book? I’ll be working hard at marketing, and I don’t want to duplicate efforts." Just try to get some sort of explanation about what they’ll do — even if it’s minimal. Some will focus on media, others will send out review copies. Once you find out what they plan to do, you can begin to fill in the gaps with your own efforts. And don’t have huge expectations of your publisher — a smaller house may not have the resources to do a lot of marketing. The fact is, they are expecting the author to help them sell about half the copies of the book that will be sold. Half. No kidding.  

[And this is the perfect time to share my favorite marketing story. Years ago, when I was releasing one of my own books, I asked a very brainless marketing manager what she was planning to do on my book. "First, we’re going to give it a great cover and title." I was VERY pleased about that, since I’ve noticed books without titles and covers don’t sell. "Second, we’re going to stick it in our catalog." This is something that only goes to bookstore owners, so that doesn’t make a big difference when it comes to convincing readers to buy my title. "And third, we’re going to give it to our crack sales team." I’m not making this up — those were her three points. My response: "So… you’re not really doing anything?" Which was fine, since I just wanted to know. Again, if you can find out what they’re doing, you’ll better know how to manage your own marketing plan.]

Dave asked, "Since it seems like anyone can get a book published today through self-publishers, how do I make sure my book gets the needed exposure?"

I’m one of those who thinks that most self-published books don’t really count as being "published," Dave. Most people who self-pub lose money because they don’t know how to market and sell their own book. So if you want to really sell some copies, whether you are self-pubbed or published through a regular royalty-paying publisher, you’ve got to understand basic marketing principles. I suggest authors purchase some basic marketing books (such as a textbook from Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, or Frances Brassington and Stephen Pettitt), in order to give them a conceptual framework for what marketing is. Maybe take a class at the local community college, or look for online marketing training. Then you can invest in some of the "how to market your book" titles available at Barnes & Noble. But the most important thing is to put together a planned strategy, so that you aren’t just trying to think up stuff on the fly as your book releases.

The key principle for anybody doing marketing of their own book is simple: Figure out where your potential readers are going, then go get in front of them. If you’re doing a book on lowering cholesterol, research to find out what websites people with high cholesterol are visiting, what blogs they’re reading, what magazines and e-zines they’re checking out, what the most popular sites for information sharing are. That’s the first step. The second is to get yourself involved with those venues. 

On a related note, Greg wrote these words: "You have frequently told authors to find out where the potential readers are, then go get in front of them. How can an author find the target audience for his book?"

Research, man. This will take time, but start checking out key words and topics. Find other books and sites that cover similar material and check them out. Start doing reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor. Get involved with Digg and Flickr. Create del.icio.us bookmarks. Join Facebook and Twitter. Begin researching your topic and you’ll soon discover interesting sites, as well as being steered toward other places people go. This takes time — there’s no hurry-up formula for getting this information. The key is to have multiple venues for finding new friends, and see it as "participation," not just "promotion." 

Read the rest of the post on Chip MacGregor’s blog.

What's A Book Blog Tour?

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This post, from Yen Cheong, originally appeared on her The Book Publicity Blog on 6/11/09.

An interesting discussion emerged on Colleen Mondor’s blog Chasing Ray a couple days ago about the blog book tour and in particular who schedules them and how they are set up.  I caught the tail end of the discussion on Twitter.

Blog tours aren’t new — this New York Times article from a couple years back explores one author’s blog tour experience – and sites like Blog Book Tours or this post at The Dabbling Mum contain some excellent information about what exactly a blog tour is.  But beyond that, I thought it might be useful to look at how blog tours are set up and how they differ from online publicity in general.

First, the basics: for those of you who attended the book blogger panel at BEA, you will have heard the blog tour explained as an author going from blog to blog (rather than from store to store as they would on a traditional book tour) which is a great, quick way to explain it.   Depending on the author and the blog, coverage may consist of any of the following: book review, Q&A (either posted or live) or book giveaway and then I’m sure some bloggers have gotten creative and come up with other ideas.  Blog tours, like traditional bookstore tours, will feature a designated number of “stops” — often 10 to 20 blogs — and can roll out over the course of a week or a month (or whatever other length of time that has been decided upon).

Here’s some more information about blog tours.

How do blog tours get set up?

Blog tours are typically set up either by the publicist of a book or by blog tour companies / coordinators.  Since it takes time (and expertise) to schedule blog tours, publishing companies sometimes feel it is worthwhile to pay a third party — an online marketing company, a freelance publicist, a blog tour company, etc. — to set these up.  (We’ve been doing this for years with the broadcast industry — we hire companies to set up a series of radio or TV interviews, also known as radio or TV “tours.”)

Although typically book publicists ask authors not to contact the media directly, different rules apply to (some) blogs.  For example, Natasha from Maw Books Blog, mentions that authors sometimes contact her directly to schedule a “stop” on a blog tour.   (Other bloggers may prefer to work directly with publishing houses — many bloggers will have information about how to contact them on their sites.)  Sometimes, a group of bloggers may come together on their own and contact the author (or publishing house) to schedule the tour.

Regardless of who sets up the blog tour, the end result is the same.

What’s the benefit of a blog tour?

As with radio and TV tours, blog tours enable a book and author to generate buzz for a book without having to travel.

How is the blog tour different from online publicity?

A blog tour is simply one type of online publicity.  One difference between a blog tour and online publicity in general is timing.  Blog tours start and end on designated dates, the goal being to generate a certain amount of publicity within a certain amount of time.  A general online publicity push, on the other hand, could start months (or weeks) before the publication of a book and could end months (or weeks) after.

Also, while the goal of online outreach is to generate any coverage of a book — from a mention to a full-fledged review or interview — blog tour “stops” will typically skew on the more robust end of coverage, e.g., a post rather than a one-line mention.

Are bloggers paid to participate in the blog tour?

No — paying anyone to cover any books would be unethical.  (Paying for ads is a perfectly ethical practice, of course, but with PR, coverage — good or bad — should come free).   To clarify — since this can get confusing – with blog tours (or with radio or TV tours), publishing houses aren’t paying bloggers (or radio or TV hosts) to cover a book; we’re paying someone to schedule the tour: finding blogs that would be appropriate for the book, arranging dates for the reviews / interviews, reporting back to us about who is running what when, etc.  It’s like we’re paying a party planner to put together a party and the guest list (but we don’t pay guests to actually attend the party).

Read the rest of the post on The Book Publicity Blog.

Advances And Royalties: The Business End Of Writing

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This post, from mainstream-published author Susan Beth Pfeffer, originally appeared on her blog on 6/23/09.

I was wandering around the Yahoo listings for the dead and the gone, when I found its official Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paperback publication information. Publication is indeed Jan. 18, 2010, but what I didn’t know was that its price is anticipated to be $7.99. That’s a dollar more than the paperback of Life As We Knew It, which means that every paperback d&g sells will earn me 6 cents more than a LAWKI paperback.

I figured I’d be safe sharing this information with you, since you’d be unlikely to hit me up for a 6 cent loan.

It occurred to me after I decided to make the 6 cent announcement that there are people who read this blog who may not know how writers get paid (not enough and certainly not often enough, but that’s a whole other entry). So for those of you who are interested, here are the basics of how it works, using LAWKI as the example.

When I wrote LAWKI, I gave my agent the manuscript to sell. That’s called writing a book on spec (short for speculation). Neither my agent nor I knew if any publisher would be interested in buying it (when I wrote the dead and the gone, and This World We Live In, I got a contract before writing the books). My agent gets 15% of every penny I earn from these books, so it’s in her best interest to sell them.

Harcourt agreed to buy LAWKI, and offered me a $20,000 advance. For that money, they were given the right to publish the book in hardcover and paperback, and to make some additional money by selling some of the subsidiary rights, which they did, selling to both the Junior Library Guild and Scholastic some reprint rights (HMH gets half that money; I get the other half, after my agent gets her 15%).

An advance is called an advance because it’s an advance on future royalties. Once the publisher gives you the advance, they can’t get the money back, no matter how hard they beg. So I got the $20,000 minus 15% (that’s $17,000; I can multiply anything by 15%), gave Internal Revenue its share, and kept the rest to pay rent and gas and electricity and groceries, etc. Since the book was already written, Harcourt pretty much paid me the whole amount at once; with d&g and TW, I got half on signing the contract and the other half after Harcourt decided the manuscript was ready for publication (I’m currently waiting for the second half of the advance for TW).

I get a 10% royalty on the LAWKI hardcover. That means I get 10% of what the list price ($17) of the book is: $1.70 for every book sold, after I earned back the original $20,000. Because of the sale to the Junior Library Guild, I knew that meant as soon as the hardcover sold 10,000 copies, I would start earning royalties. That happened almost immediately, so I’ve been earning royalties on LAWKI since shortly after its publication. I have no idea why they’re called royalties, since most writers earn less than the average medieval peasant.

Royalties get paid twice a year. The publisher keeps track of how many copies of the book are sold, multiplies the total by the percentage the writer gets (10% for hardcovers, 6% for paperbacks), sends the total amount to the agent, who takes her 15% and sends the rest to the writer, who’s been going crazy waiting for the check to arrive. It used to be I never knew how much money (if any) to expect, but nowadays I can ask what the sales numbers are, so I have a far better sense of how big (or small) the check will be. This definitely cuts down on the stress.

Read the rest of the post on Susan Beth Pfeffer’s blog.

Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Publishers Can Do to Flourish In A Community-Centric Web World

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This post, from Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his Idealog site, and represents a talk he presented at BookExpo America on 5/28/09.

Michael Friedman and I were having lunch and he said to me, “You know Mike, the word is “evolve”.” And that’s the word. So in fact it’s not going to be about how you flourish, it’s going to be about how you evolve. How publishers who create products can evolve into a world that’s going to be about community.

There are a few fundamental premises that really ground this speech that we want to start with, and the first one is Things Will Change, and I don’t think we’re going to have a lot of disagreement about that. So, we can move on to the fact that It Is necessary to have a view of the future to anticipate change. Think, for example, that people in the future are going to look up publishers on the web, and search those publishers for the books they want. Well then you would do things differently to what I’m going to suggest to you, because I don’t really think that’s what the future is. But you have to have a view of the future in order to know what to do in the present.

Another premise that I believe is true is that the market is going to shift in some ways, from now on, between the time you acquire a book and the time you publish it. Every book that is being published now was acquired before anybody had heard of Twitter. And every book that is being published now depends on something that is in Twitter. So that’s going to be normal. And because that’s normal, you’re going to be constantly trying new things. You’re not going to have any choice but to try new things! Because Twitter is a new thing, and things become new, and you don’t have the chance to sit on the sideline and watch how it works and analyze it.

You have to be opportunistic, you have to see what opportunities are out there and you have to try new things all the time, and you have to do that within some sort of framework, within some sort of understanding of the future because we know that there are so many new things going on. We can barely remember them all from the last two weeks, let alone try them all. So if you don’t have some sort of an idea of where you’re going, and where the world is going, it gets very very hard to distinguish between the opportunities.

A Lot Happens in 20 Years

Now, before I describe what I think will be the world of content and publishing in 20 years, I want to make the point that a lot happens in 20 years, because I’m going to describe a world that is pretty different from the one that we’re in, and that would raise a lot of skepticism. Think about this:

In 1968, there were about three broadcast networks that had about 95% market-share. There was nothing else to do with your TV, and there weren’t a lot of things to do other than watch TV. So, half the country or 60% of the country, could watch The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. By 1988, half the homes in America had cable, and half the homes in America had VCRs. There were five broadcast networks, not three. And there were 40, 50 , 60, 70 channels on the cable. And the broadcast networks knew that that day they had, 20 years before, was never coming back.

I picked 1980 for the record companies because that was just before a huge boom. As a matter of fact it was before two huge booms, because the Walkman 2 was invented in 1980. So between 1980 and 1983, the record companies got to sell me all the records I bought until that time, as cassettes. And then in 1983 or 84, they invented the CD, and they got to sell me all the records they sold me as cassettes again as CDs. And that made the record companies a lot of money. And things looked great for them. And the future was booming. And we know where the record companies were by 2000. 2000 was before the invention of the iPod, but not before the invention of Napster.

Newspapers. Well 1989 was a peak year for newspaper ad revenue. It went down a bit after that, but you know what saved them? In the mid-1990s, classified advertising saved them. But you know what classified advertising is now? Craigs list. It’s not on the newspapers anymore. You know where newspapers are now. They’re threatened. So in 1989 they had a peak year, and in 2009, they’re facing extinction. That happened in 20 years.

Mass-market paperbacks. Now this is something where you have to be as old as I am to remember when book publishers made a lot of money selling mass market paperback rights, and the fact that that was the jackpot. You published that title in hardcover, and then you could sell the mass market rights for a lot of money. I’ve picked 1975 as a starting year there, because the record sale for mass market paperback didn’t occur until 1979. That was Princess Daisy. Remember Princess Daisy? Pretty forgettable book. 3.1 Million dollar sale from Crown to Bantam. That number has never been topped. By 1999, mass market paper backs were where they are now, which is that they are category books. 95% of mass market paperbacks fall into a fiction category. So in 20 years, it went from a business that meant, that mass market books were bookseller, to a business where it doesn’t anymore.

Online Access in 20 years. Well, in 1989, the World Wide Web was in the process of being invented. But you could go online. To Prodigy. Through a dial-up. And now, 20 years later, you carry the internet in your pocket. So, that’s changed a lot in 20 years!

Books. Well, 1989 was before two great booms, sort of like the music business in 1980. Because in 1989 the owners of Borders, and the owners of Barnes & Noble were headed down to Wall St. to get a lot of money, to open up superstores. And all those superstores stocked a lot of backlist. So in the early 90s, publishers were printing a lot of backlist to put into all those superstores. And then Amazon came along. And that, as a matter of fact, got the backlist for the guys who didn’t have enough sales clout to get into the Barnes & Noble and Borders. Their backlist is sold on Amazon. So everybody was moving up. But you know what? The last 10 years, unit sales on books are flat. And bookstore shelf space is now sinking, where it was really expanding. We have gone from a business that was expanding, to a business that is contracting in 20 years.

Read the rest of the post, view the PowerPoint presentation, and watch videos of the BEA talk, on Idealog.

10,000 Ideas And Resources For Writers

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This post, from Kathryn Vercillo, originally appeared on her Real Words From A Real Writer blog on 3/13/08. While the post was originally aimed at freelance writers, most of the resources on this fantastic list will be useful for any writer.  

Every once in a while I come across an article or blog post listing the "Top 100" of something for writers or bloggers. Every time that happens, I’m a little bit impressed. After all, it is common to see "Top 10" lists but it takes a lot more effort to compile a list that includes 100 things. However, it makes more sense to be thinking in terms of hundreds and not tens when it comes to freelance writing.

With thousands of new blogs launching every single day, there is a lot of material online for people to be reading. There’s certainly far more than ten authority sources on any particular topic. So, in an effort to be ambitious as well as to provide others with information about the best writing tips and sites out there, here is my Top 100 collection of “Top 100″ lists that others have put together. That means that you’ve got 10,000 tips/articles/ideas to read here. There are lists about books, lists about blog tools and lists about everything in between. That should keep you busy during your downtime!

  1. Writers Digest 101 Best Websites For Authors (updated to 2009 edition)
  2. The Top 100 Freelancer Blogs @ Bootstrapper
  3. 101 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog @ Vandelay
  4. Top 100 Blogs @ Make Money Online
  5. Top 100 Articles on Writing @ Writing Information
  6. 100 Tools Freelancers Can’t Live Without @ Bootstrapper
  7. 100 Writing Tips @ How to Write for the Web
  8. 100 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Blog @ InternetBabel
  9. Make Money Online: 100+ Tools and Resources @ Mashable
  10. 101 Ways to Create A Powerful Web Presence @ Hello, My Name is Blog
  11. 100s of Resources for Finding Blog Content @ Lorelle on WordPress
  12. 101 Reasons Freelancers Do It Better @ HR World
  13. Top 100 Novels Of All Time @ Time Magazine
  14. 101 Ways to Monetize Your Blog without Irritating your Readers @ Inside CRM
  15. 114 Ways to Build Links @ SubHub
  16. 100 Niche Job Boards for Web Workers @ Bootstrapper
  17. Top 100 Essay Sites for Students
  18. 100 Ways to be Better Entrepreneur @ Entrepreneur.com
  19. Top 100 Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Blogs @ Virtual Hosting
  20. 100 Web Apps for Freelancers @ Codswallop
  21. 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies @ SearchEngineWatch
  22. Over 100 Best Firefox Extensions @ LifeHack (many of which are great for improving writing productivity)
  23. 120+ RSS Resources @ Mashable
  24. Top 100,000 Search Keywords @ Aleksika (useful in SEO, when adding keywords to your posts) 
  25. 101 Great Posting Ideas To Make Your Blog Sizzle @ I Help You Blog

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Read the rest of the post, with links for resources #26-100, on Real Words From A Real Writer. While we’ve verified the links provided in this excerpt (and updated them as necessary) , due to the age of the post we can’t guarantee that when you click through to view the full article, all the remaining links in the post will still be valid. 

5 Steps for Successful Social Media Damage Control

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This post, from Sharlyn Lauby, originally appeared on Mashable on 7/9/09. While it’s primarily aimed at companies, much of the advice here is just as useful to an individual, or group blog, that’s run into some social media trouble.

I spent many years of my career in the hospitality business and the first rule of thumb when dealing with customers was, “if a guest had a positive experience, they’ll tell 3 people and if they had a negative experience, they’ll tell 10.” That same idea holds true in the new media world, except the numbers have grown exponentially. Instead of it being 3 people – it’s 3,000, or instead of 10 – it’s perhaps 100,000. The numbers aren’t meant to scare you. But what should you do when something goes wrong?

Our goal, of course, hasn’t changed – work to increase the number of positive comments written about your company, product, or service and take care of those who have negative experiences. But, how do you make that happen in the social media world? What steps to you take to keep negative social media damage to a minimum?

Minimize the damage

Before we even talk about how to fix what goes wrong, let’s talk about the positives. One of the best ways to minimize social media damage is to proactively create an environment that encourages positive feedback. There are two main things you should do to keep the accolades coming.

1. Foster a positive culture. There are plenty of studies showing that if your employees are happy, they will deliver good service to customers. Not only does this minimize potential damage, but it leverages your brand in a very positive way. Keeping your employees engaged and letting them know how they fit into the corporate culture goes a long way.

Case in point: I recently returned from a conference in New Orleans where Harvard Professor John Kotter showed us an old video of a Roto Rooter employee who had pimped out his van to make his job easier. It had everything from pull down maps (obviously this dated prior to the Garmin) to a makeshift toilet. The point is, this employee created all of these conveniences for himself so he could spend more time servicing customers. How many of your employees are doing that?

2. Train employees on the proper use of social media tools. Your employees represent your organization, and if they have a solid, credible personal brand, it will carry over to the company’s image.

It’s not enough to allow employees to have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Organizations need to show employees the proper way to use them. For example, Zappos employees are not only encouraged to have Twitter accounts, but they receive training during company orientation on how to use the application. Again, if your employees use social media well, it will benefit both those employees and the organization.

Keep in mind, however, that someday the other shoe might drop. Many companies have fallen prey to negative press, so don’t put your head in the sand. It’s not about “if” something will happen; it’s about “when.” In this transparent, authentic and real-time world, expect a hiccup to occur. But be prepared.

In the end, the issue is less about the mistake that was made, but the reaction that came after. So, here are some tips to follow if you find yourself in a damage control mode.

1. Monitor social media sites 24/7

Daniel Ruby, director of marketing at advertising network Chitika, recently had an issue where McAfee flagged one of their ads, thus making their entire network have issues with aggressive McAfee antivirus alerts. Ruby credits Twitter for alerting them to the issue. “We actually found out from one of our publishers who was telling a reader via Twitter, as well as the comments box on his site, that our ads were…giving McAfee users a red flag,” he said.

From there, Chitika could respond to concerned users (also via Twitter), and keep users up-to-date on the steps they were taking to fix the problem.

 

chitika tweet image

 

 

2. Respond quickly with a consistent message

No matter how proactive you are, customers will start to question your organization when they see problems. And, whenever there is an information void, those customers will tend to fill in the gaps with their own thoughts on what the cause may be. That’s why it is important to respond to issues quickly, even if the message is just, “we’re looking into it.”

Ruby elaborated that he “reached out to the publisher via his comments box, letting him know what happened and what Chitika was doing to resolve it.” He also kept him updated via Twitter (apologizing as profusely as one can in 140 characters).

Communication is key here. Make sure each employee knows the same message all the way down the chain of command. And, when that message changes, don’t forget to communicate those changes. This serves two purposes; (1) it gives the public a sense that you have your arms around the issue; and (2) it gives your employees a sense of unity – working together to solve a common problem.

Read the rest of the post, including steps #3-5, on Mashable.

17 Reasons Manuscripts Are Rejected

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This post, from Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen, originally appeared on her Quips and Tips For Successful Writers blog on 10/24/08. Even if you intend to self-publish, this list of traps to avoid will still have some applicable wisdom for your work-in-progress.

These 17 reasons book manuscripts are rejected are from a panel of editors, literary agents, and publishers at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in British Columbia, Canada. I’ve also pulled out some great writing tips and quips about the book publishing business from this discussion…

But first, a quip from an agent about getting published:

“You don’t have to have an agent to get published,” says literary agent Janet Reid, of Fine Print Literary Management. That may be true, Agent Reid, but representation sure greases the literary wheels! I’m with Special Agent Jon Sternfeld of Irene Goodman, and he’s knocked on doors of houses that I can’t even see…

Julie Scheina (Little, Brown editor) and Haile Ephron (writer and book reviewer at the Boston Globe) joined Reid for a 90 minute session about sending queries, editing manuscripts, and publishing books. For more info on literary agents, click on the Guide to Literary Agents by the editors of Writer’s Digest (and read my 12 Steps to Finding a Literary Agent). And, read on for 17 reasons book manuscripts are rejected… 

 

17 Reasons Book Manuscripts are Rejected

1. “The writer uses the phrase ‘fiction novel’,” says agent Janet Reid. Misusing the English language is why she – and many editors, publishers, and agents – stop reading and reject manuscripts.

2. The manuscript doesn’t seem organic or authentic. “If you’re trying to follow a trend, you’ll lose your voice,” says Scheina. “If I feel like this is something I’ve already read, I’ll put it down.” Read How to Write Authentically From Anne Lamott.

3. The manuscript is too complicated. “If there are too many characters and I have to make a list to keep them straight, then I’ll put the book down,” says Ephron. Your manuscript will be rejected if it doesn’t flow or transition easily.

4. The book is boring. “If your opening paragraph is someone driving and sleeping, I’ll put it down,” says Reid. “Most writers need time to warm up – but I don’t want to read that. Make sure your story starts in the first sentence.” Read Grabbing Your Read by the Throat for tips on writing introductions!

5. The writer offers no reason to care about the character. “Why do I care?” asks Scheina. “Each character has to be unique and special, or I’ll want to close the book.” The first day of school, moving, or packing your boxes aren’t gripping leads. “Prologues are really boring most of the time,” says Scheina.

6. The writer slips into a sliding point of view. “You get one point of view character per scene,” says Ephron. “Every scene should be narrated by one character in that scene.” Don’t shift the point of view. Stay with one specific character’s perspective throughout the scene.

7. The writer includes too many stock characters. Beautiful blonde bombshells, evil billionaires, and hookers with a heart of gold are all stock characters – and agent Reid is tired of them! Limp descriptions are also boring. “I want complex, nuanced characters,” she says.

8. The writer offers didactic messages. “Don’t send me fiction books that give moral messages, because neither kids nor adults will [read] them,” says Scheina. “If you have a message, it shouldn’t be on the first page or in the first chapter.” She also says readers don’t want to be preached to; morals and messages should occur to the reader after they put the book down.

Read the rest of the post, containing reasons #9-17, on Quips and Tips For Successful Writers.

Ebooks and Text-To-Speech Technology: A Legal Perspective

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This article, from Charles A. Gaglia And Thomas R. DeSimone of The Legal Intelligencer, originally appeared on Law.com’s Legal Technology blog on 6/30/09.

Amazon’s recent foray into the electronic book business can be described in no other way than as a resounding success. In a short period of time, Amazon’s Kindle has done for the electronic book what Apple’s iPod did for electronic music: that is, make it easily accessible, downloadable and, most importantly, cool. However, Amazon’s attempts to find new ways to exploit this medium and enhance the reading experience have met with their fair share of controversy.

The Kindle 2 recently hit the market, and it included a new feature that had the publishing industry up in arms and threatening suit. Ths feature is commonly referred to as "text to speech," but according to representatives for the publishing industry and the Authors Guild, it may represent the beginning of the end for the burgeoning audio book market, in addition to constituting a blatant violation of existing copyright law. From a copyright point of view, does text-to-speech technology require a license? And should publishers be legitimately concerned about the demise of the audio book?

What exactly is an e-book? Quite simply, it is nothing more than an electronic version of a traditional paper copy of a book. An e-book is usually in some type of computer readable format (such as DOC, PDF, etc.) and can be read on any type of electronic device capable of displaying that particular file type. E-books have been around for quite some time but have had a limited appeal because of the fact that many people prefer the portability and ease of use of traditional printed media, as opposed to being tethered to a computer screen. Keenly aware of these shortcomings, several manufacturers attempted to develop dedicated hardware devices that would emulate the traditional book-reading experience while at the same time providing many advantages only possible with e-book technology, such as storage of hundreds or thousands of books on a single device and instant access to titles via downloading.

Sony was an early entrant into the field with its LIBRIe device, which never really found an audience. Sony tried again more recently with its PRS-500, which experienced moderate success, but has been largely overshadowed by the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle device. Unlike Sony’s PRS-500 reader, the Kindle does not need to be coupled to a computer in order to download titles. It uses Amazon’s wireless Whispernet (provided by Sprint) in order to download any available title from Amazon’s e-book library, wirelessly, on demand. However, the most controversial feature of the Kindle was introduced to the public when Amazon released the second-generation device, known as the Kindle 2. This device incorporated text-to-speech technology, which, at the press of a button, allows the Kindle to read the e-book.

Much like the e-book, text-to-speech technology is not something entirely new. In fact, the first computer-based text-to-speech system was completed in 1968. Text-to-speech software enables a computer to convert text characters into audible, intelligible words by virtue of the computer’s internal synthesizer. If one wants to get an idea of what typical text to speech carried out by a computer sounds like, it may be instructive to listen to any interview given by world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who communicates with the aid of a computer because of severe paralysis brought on by the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The technology continues to improve, and many who have heard the Kindle 2 in action have remarked on the quality and clarity of the Kindle 2’s electronic "voice." However, text-to-speech technology continues to be hampered by the software’s inability to convey emotion and to handle heteronyms, which are words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently (e.g., "bow" as the front of a ship versus "bow," which is used to fire arrows). Considering these significant shortcomings, should the publishing industry be legitimately concerned that text to speech may replace audio books created by professional voice actors? The answer to this question is important, as it relates directly to whether text-to-speech technology is a permitted use of computer-stored text under U.S. copyright law.

As a result of protests made by the publishing industry and the Authors Guild that Amazon had not negotiated for the text-to-speech rights, Amazon elected to disable the feature at any publisher’s request, effectively forestalling any threatened litigation for the time being. In a press release announcing the compromise, Amazon steadfastly maintained its original stance that its text-to-speech feature was in fact a permitted use of computer text under their current license. In an opinion piece published in the Feb. 25 issue of The New York Times , Roy Blount Jr., president of the Author’s Guild, stressed the importance and value of protecting audio rights and the continued success of the audio book market. His argument was primarily economic in nature, stressing that authors be adequately compensated for their creative works and any derivative rights that may flow from them. But the letter is noticeably devoid of any legal support for the contention that text-to-speech technology is violative of U.S. copyright law. Blount concludes by noting that while parents need not fear any legal repercussions for reading bedtime stories aloud to their children, performing the same act with the Kindle’s text-to-speech function is another matter. He fails, however, to explain the distinction.

Under the 1976 Copyright Act, copyright protection may extend to any work of authorship. Among the works that are subject to protection are literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, graphic, audiovisual and architectural works as well as sound recordings. In order to be eligible for copyright protection, the work must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." With respect to e-books, the underlying text itself is clearly subject to protection, in that the e-book text is fixed as an electronic file on the Kindle’s internal memory. (This assumes, of course, that the underlying e-book is still subject to copyright protection, and that the work has not passed into the public domain.)

However, the situation is not so simple when one considers that when a Kindle user activates the text-to-speech feature, there is no fixation of anything into a tangible medium. In fact, after the software completes the process of converting text into audible sound waves, and those waves have reverberated throughout the listener’s immediate vicinity, there is nothing tangible that remains. With respect to audio books, there is fixation, in that the sound waves of the author or professional reader’s voice are affixed to a compact disc, or more recently in the form of an electronic MPEG file affixed to the hard drive of a user’s iPod. But nothing similar exists with respect to text to speech.

Read the rest of the article on Law.com’s Legal Technology blog.