Publetariat

Good Ideas vs. Bad Ideas

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This post, by author and screenwriter Marshall Thornton, originally appeared on his blog on 2/7/09.

 

I’ve come to believe that there are no such thing as bad ideas. Yes, Tom Green did make a movie called Freddy Got Fingered and that was a bad idea. But, Tom Green in himself is not necessarily a bad idea. Nor is a story of a young man who falsely accuses his father of sexually molesting his younger brother a bad idea. It’s only by putting them together that you come up with something that didn’t make a lot of sense.

 

And that’s the thing that writers have to remember. Your ideas need to belong together. You can’t just string a bunch of good ideas together and expect the whole thing to be great.

 

Each idea, each part of your story, has to have an organic and, hopefully, thematic connection to the rest. By organic I mean that the ideas have to arise out of your main character – they have to be things he or she would actually do. If your main character is an unrepentant liar, they can tell the truth – at the very end of your story. They can’t lie one minute and tell the truth the next. Even if it seems like a good idea on a scene by scene basis.

 

The same goes for theme. Your theme can’t be, say, the elusive nature of truth at one point and then abruptly shift over to the damage dishonesty does to relationships. Keeping your theme on track is particularly difficult in longer forms, like a novel. But when it comes to theme it is important to stick to one idea.

Read more of Marshall’s blog posts, and learn more about his work as an author and screenwriter, here.

Interview with Indie Author Norman Savage

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Just a few short months ago, Greenwich Village author Norman Savage was on the verge of earning a book deal with a large New York publisher for his memoir, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic.

Then in October, the market crashed, consumer spending seized, and the publishing industry was suddenly less willing to take risks on unproven authors.  The deal disappeared.

It’s a story we’ll likely see played out over and over again as talented authors learn they no longer have a home in the highest caste of authordom.

Norman Savage is an author who deserves to be published.  His storytelling is vivid, raw and unforgettable.  In Junk Sick, he chronicles a life of addiction, diabetes and hard living that at age 62 has left him with deteriorating health, the scars of quadruple bypass surgery and four amputated toes.

But Savage doesn’t want our sympathy.  No, he wants something else.

I’m proud to present an interview with Norman Savage, who last week published Junk Sick on Smashwords.   In our interview, Savage spoke openly about a life lived teetering on the edge of euphoria and oblivion.

Warning:  This interview contains mature language and subject matter not suitable for children.

[Mark Coker] – Describe your new book, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic.

[Norman Savage]   –  Junk Sick is my attempt to bring all that was fractured in my life–family, diabetes, drug addiction, alcoholism, women, jobs, madness, mayhem, ecstasy and suicide ramblings–into a coherent and readable whole.  It tries to explain how and why I married two different conditions–diabetes and addiction–into one unitary structure, me.   Both acts–the taking of insulin and the injecting of dope or the drinking of booze–implies intent and desperation, each of them uses a syringe to bridge one world into another and all the substances are short-acting.

[Mark Coker] – How long did it take you to write the book?

[Norman Savage]   –  About 20 years, though I’ve been writing most of my life.  I began publishing my poetry in little mags and presses in the 1960’s.  In fact, Susan Graham Mingus, the wife of the late bassist Charles Mingus, first published me and had Andy Warhol take the pictures for the spread.  The first draft of <span style="font-style: italic;">Junk Sick</span> was written circa 1985 and then from a kind of cowardice brokered by booze and dope it was shelved.  From time to time, I would re-engage and edit it, but not until Thanksgiving of 2007 did I really begin to edit and update it.

[Mark Coker] – When you first contacted me, you had just lost out on a potential book deal for Junk Sick with Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux.  What happened?

[Norman Savage]   –  In 2007, I was invited to the Thanksgiving dinner of an old friend who I’d met almost thirty years earlier at a bar where I worked.  I’d always declined previous invitations because I’m never really comfortable around most people I don’t know and am not much a fan of polite chatter.  I never really know what to say.  But I’d lived a solo life for a long time now at that point and thought I needed the company and a home-cooked meal.  Joanie was, and is, a terrific cook.

It also was a kind of challenge to myself to see if I still had the "chops" to engage the human race in social situations.  She, too, had become a bartender in a pretty famous saloon in the West Village and so I thought there’d be other barflies as well, which made it easier to rationalize.  As it turned out I met a woman that evening who had been an editor at Doubleday and was most interested in biography and memoir–she helped Brando pen his.  I told her that I, too, wrote, and had written a memoir.  I’m sure she was being polite by offering to read the first chapter of what I’d written and gave me her email address.

Within a week she contacted me and was very enthusiastic about what she’d read.  She wanted to read the entire work and thought that three agents who she knew would also be interested.  After reading the work she called with encouraging news.  She thought that Cynthia Cannell, a very prominent literary agent, once a VP at Janklow Nesbitt and now owner of her own boutique lit agency would be the person to best represent it.

Right after New Year, Cynthia called me.  She, too, thought the work terrific and wanted to meet.  After meeting, she suggested I edit three sections which she would send to senior editors she knew.  Sometime in March one of those editors at FS&amp;G called and said she’d be interested provided I was better able to "marry" the diabetes with addiction.  This to me was wonderful news.  It gave me an opportunity to go back into the work, update it, and use the cutting edge of "new" psychological advances in making sense of what I and every other addict and diabetic experiences on various levels.

I returned the newer version back to her late July, early August.  She read it and liked it.  She told Cynthia that she was giving it to another senior editor and should he like it as well she was moving it up to the marketing and sales division.

Then we didn’t hear.  And didn’t hear.  I felt in my bones there was something wrong.  That "something" began to become clearer as the economy began to unravel.  At the end of October she called Cynthia to tell her that FS&amp;G was not going to go ahead with new writers and unknown material.  A few weeks after that, Cynthia learned that she was let go after many years of service.  Cynthia suggested that I keep working on my new novel and then she’d revisit the "scene" with my work after the new year.  But that didn’t sit well with me.  I began to look for alternatives.

[Mark Coker] – What led you to Smashwords?

[Norman Savage]   –  Serendipity.  I was researching how to serialize my memoir and/or novels online when I came across a forum where some person spoke about your site as a publishing tool.  Curious, I took a look and liked what you had to say about it.  I didn’t decide to actually publish there until I fooled around–for a couple of days–with my own blog.  Deciding that a blog was not the right way for me to go in getting an entire serialized on it, I then contacted you.  I’ve never had much faith in the publishing industry, or industries in general.  Their existence is by and large for one purpose:  to make money.  How that’s done is usually dictated by what they think the marketplace is, or what they can manipulate the marketplace to be.  And that’s usually the lowest common denominator.

We’ve all heard stories of some of our finest artists never seeing the light of day–in their lifetime–because the powers that be didn’t believe that their audience was either ready or could appreciate the work of these people.  At one time, and not that long ago, if a senior editor at a publishing house thought well of your work they could (though it still could be a fight), get it published.  Some of the best publishers and editors could take risks, and they did.

Now, before a major publisher takes a chance on a "new" voice, they have to run it by the sales and marketing department and they try to see whether or not it will sell 25,000 copies or else they usually won’t take a chance on it.  They try to crunch numbers, but usually go by the past in making decisions:  what used to sell.  They can no more discern that than Hollywood can predict what movie we go to see.  Everyone plays it "safe."  It’s like never falling in love because you never want to get out of your own hip pocket.  And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

We know, of course, that most of the stuff that gets to us is dull, mind-numbing.  Whether it’s in print, on a canvass, film, or music hall.  It’s repetitive shit and, for the most part, having nothing whatsoever to do with our lives as we know them.  In order to get published you now have to go to and come out of "writing workshops"; actors and directors come out of "film schools" or "acting workshops"; painters out of "A Fine Arts" program, etc.  How many writers or actors or painters that are in the public eye today come out of the streets, madhouses, jails?  How many were vagabonds, hobos, trapeze artists, merchant seaman, janitors, dockworkers, street sweepers?  How many talk a living language?

Thoreau once told a young man who wanted to learn river navigation not to go to college, but to get his ass on a ship.  You learn by living.  Drink, have a few bad love affairs, drink again (or shoot some dope), get up at 5 a.m. and go to a job you hate, come home to woman you can’t stand being with, but can’t stand being away from, hit the keys like you’re in a heavyweight fight–because you are–and get up the next morning to do it all over again, and do it for many many years.  Go on welfare, food stamps, grab on a rope tossed over, think it’s going to save you only to find no one on the other end and just go until the living stops.  And it will, soon enough.

I know there is good stuff out there that’s being overlooked by the mainstream boys who will continue to publish safe shit:  diet, gardening, how to, celebrity, and formulaic fiction and non-fiction that fits their idea of what writing is.  It rattles their balls and their hearts when something different comes along.

However, there’s a problem that you face as well:  since this is intended to be the most democratic medium to get stuff up on, how does the reader evaluate all the stuff that floats in this ether world?  How much do we have to wade through to get a kernel of what we’re looking for?  We complain, bitch and moan about critics, but the good ones filter some of the shit and saves us god awful time.  Beside, some of the best fights are between critics; sometimes they’re better than the "art" itself.  Hard to draw the line.

[Mark Coker] – How important is it to you to reach an audience?

[Norman Savage]   –  All writers/artists want an audience.  We’re all "talking" to somebody, even if it’s to ourselves.  Even Emily Dickensen, not the most outgoing of gals, had this one guy who she was hot for.  Her poems were directed toward him.  In a way it’s only to prove that we’re not mad and all this breathing and pain was not a waste of time.

[Mark Coker] – What’s the connection between diabetes and addiction in Junk Sick?

[Norman Savage]   –  I wrote Junk Sick after completing a heroin detox and then, faced with no job prospects, but living with a generous woman who loved me and was paying the rent, decided not to let all that I knew about diabetes and addiction, up until that point, go to waste.  I knew that there was not a book that tackled the diabetes from an emotional perspective (there’s still very little of that today).  I did not want it to be a "how to" book or one that just gives a very clinical definition on how to cope with a chronic illness, psychopathology, or a new diet.

Diabetes implies deprivation, sacrifice.  I was diagnosed at age 11, and for a kid, coming into and going through puberty, that’s a high wire act without a net.  I wanted the book to represent the chaos of growing up in a crazed Jewish family in Coney Island, coming down with a disease that no one was equipped to handle or cope with intelligently and, left to my own devices, how I managed to assuage the feeling of being "damaged."  I thought that other people, diabetic or not, who try to cope with life’s madness, could gain some insight as to what governs them and maybe, in one way or another, get some insight into how they’re feeling and acting.

[Mark Coker] – In Junk Sick you write about how music, literature and art served as salves to calm your "crazy fascistic masochistic impulse of creation."  What do you mean by that?

[Norman Savage]   –  It’s scientifically and psychologically proven that when a person engages the arts–reading, writing, really listening to music or looking at a painting–our minds secrete a certain amount of endogenous opioids–the bodies natural morphine–to soothe the system.  It is not something we’re conscious of, but we do feel the effect.  Why, we must ask, do we engage with those things if we derive no pleasure from them?  We actively seek pleasure in our daily pursuit to avoid pain.  Artists are no different, except that in their art, when it’s going really well, those same hormones are triggered.  Every artist at one time or another got in "the flow" and usually that’s what they mean.  Eugene O’Neill, that quintessential alcoholic expressed it this way, "Writing is a vacation from life."

But this is where it starts to get fucked-up.  You can’t be "in the flow" all the time.  Shit, sometimes the gods are not good, the words don’t come, the paint has no color, the sentences make no sense, the kid is crying, the wife needs to talk, or fuck, the water is stopped up, the landlord is screaming for his rent, the car has a flat, your tooth just broke, your shoelace snapped…

You know that in order to do this shit you need "time" but you never have enough of that–there’s too much shit to do.  So what do you do?  You deny yourself pleasures.  You don’t do things that normal people do all the time:  movies, TV, sex, companionship, food, etc.  Now I’m not saying that you become a fucking monk, no, but that you try to give yourself enough time to try and let whatever art you have from whatever word gods sit on high to get through.  So the artist is a bit "fascistic."

"Masochism" is, in a way, the flip-side of that:  somewhere in your insanity you must enjoy whatever hell you’re putting yourself through.  There has to be some secondary gains.  You do have some kind of hidden agenda that you’re not aware of or copping to.  And, of course, you do remember those times when the work was going good, even though your life was in the shitter.  Those pockets of peace are worth a great deal of madness.

[Mark Coker] – Which authors or artists inspire you?

[Norman Savage]   –  All writers/artists are inspiring if they’re not bullshit artists because even the bad ones you learn from.  You know some of them are pretenders, phonies, fakes, frauds, but they give you some courage and anger to do it your way.  But the few who’ve been where you have get you through some hard days and nights and others, especially at the beginning of your writing allow you to be who you never thought you were allowed to be or are.  They opened up, dynamited, gone over and around, what was or wasn’t there before:  Hubert Selby, Jr, Jones/Baraka, Ginsberg, Eliot, Pound, Miller (Henry), Roth (Philip), Pynchon, Pound, Bukowski, Celine, Purdy, Hamsun, Morrison, Marquez, Crews and others, of course, many others.  And, then, you got around to what the painters and musicians were doing and saw color and rhythm and tried to marry that, too.  It’s style, man.  You create it; you swing to it.  It’s yours and yours alone.  It can’t be copied and it can’t be faked.  You just know it when you see it, hear it, or read it.

[Mark Coker] – What drives you to write?

[Norman Savage]   –  Mostly biology.  It’s not a big thing; it’s much like pissing–when your bladder gets full, you just have to empty it because if you don’t the whole goddamn system implodes.  Toni Morrison said in one of her great novels, "Sula,"  "if a writer doesn’t practice his craft, that craft will eventually turn against  him."  I don’t know if I got the quote exact, but it’s close enough.  It is very difficult for me not to think a certain way, in a certain style, to a certain music.  If I deny that–and I’ve tried to do it, sometimes for many years–I’ve usually wound up fucking myself.

I’m sure it’s a selfish thing, too, bound up in ego and all manner of forces, some of which I know and others I have no idea about.  I suppose, when it comes down to it, it’s about "fucking" as well.  I was always good with the women, but in the short term.  Writing has most of the time satisfied my libidinal urges:  striking hard at the keys, blasting letters onto a white sheet of paper, penetrating a canvas or the airwaves.  And now, as my body betrays me, writing has not, my mind has not.  The gods have certainly been gracious and have given me more than my right share.

[Mark Coker] – You write openly about your various addictions to a laundry list of legal and illegal drugs.  Do you regret or treasure these experiences?

[Norman Savage]   –  "Regret" and "treasure" are two words that are not easily addressed.  Each usually contains some of the other.  It’s like a woman saying she loves you and you are unable to respond, whether you love her or not.  It’s never that cut and dried.  I know that people would like "simple" answers, but for them there will only be hard days and nights.

I "regret" wasting a lot of time tethered to a habit, but then again, I regret wasting a lot of time going into another ridiculous job.  Alcohol and drugs opened up ways for me that were unsuspected, and they led me to other things that I wouldn’t have come across without altering my normal sense of reality.  They helped make sense out of things and provided different ways of seeing and experiencing, not necessarily all good.

But, as I’ve said earlier, there’s a lot to be said for "bad" experiences, too.  They are part of the whole, whatever the "whole" is or becomes.  They have also fucked-up and altered certain relationships, and given others pain, that never did them or myself any good.  But then, again, without them, I might have bitten the bullet before I had a chance to sort some of this out.

When I first started to experiment with drugs, I was lucky enough to be around some people, smarter than me, who used drugs as a tool and they taught me ways to work with various substances.  For me, though, they finally became a way for escape, escape from what was really best in myself and, after losing what control I had, I had no way of returning to my previous state.

But, to answer your question, I do treasure many experiences–from making connections with things when alone and thinking, to experiences with others in the most common situations–and regret the dishonesty, to myself and others, that bordered my own particular cowardice and what fueled it.

[Mark Coker] – How is it that you’re still alive after struggling with diabetes for 50 years and nearly continuous drug addiction for 45 of those years?

[Norman Savage]   –  Luck, brother.  Never underestimate it.  Yes, we work and plan and scheme and pray and think we’re on top of our game, but dumb providence makes the difference in a great many respects.  And fear, don’t forget down home gut-wrenching fear; that will get your attention.  My memoir makes clear just how helpful "luck" and "fear" were and are.

My genes, except for the "diabetic" one (if my disease wasn’t psychosomatically orchestrated), are apparently good.  Also, within my madness and mania, I never missed an insulin shot, ever.  The doctor, who became my friend, and took care of me for a long time, was a past president of The American Diabetic Association, wasn’t judgmental, and always was not only in my corner, but gave me other docs to sort out other ills.

Women were always far better to me than I was to them and kept me going long after I should have "stopped."  I’ve been clean for a couple of years now and stopped on my own.  I kicked junk three years ago by going into a looney bin and then coming out and getting on a public Buphenorphine program, then stopped going there after being clean for a year, and stopped drinking two years ago because I wanted to.

I do not like the word "recovered" or "recovering."  I used to go to a lot of AA meetings and never liked all the hand-holding, sharing and higher power kind of thing, but I did like, and needed, the social lubricant.  But I stopped going at a certain point.  What exactly am I recovering from?  Desire?  How the hell can you recover (and why would you want to?) from "desire?"

People drink or drug because there is an absence inside us, and we "desire" to fill that  absence.  We fill it with drink, drug, sex, others, TV, gambling, eating, working, or praying.  But that kind of desire remains, always.  Usually it’s the misguided desire for the other:  mother or father.  And that "other" is dressed in drag, disguised.  It’s finally false and utterly impossible to reproduce.  But we still search.

I believe, it’s only when you try to come to grips with that that you get on with it and go on.  There was a huge study done by NIAAA comparing what mode of "therapy" worked best for the drug addict/alcoholic.  They compared AA, therapy, and pharmacological interventions.  Each of them were dismally inefficient.  Most people who do stop using alcohol and/or drugs and who were really addicted (not those fakers who go on TV or to meetings wanting to meet people and get laid, published or "networked"), do so by "spontaneous remission."  They just decide one day that they’d had enough and quit.  Quietly.

[Mark Coker] – What’s your day job?  What are some of the other jobs you’ve held over your lifetime?

[Norman Savage]   –  I’d rather not mention my day job.  It’s legit and it’s hard, but it suits my purposes.  Aside from being a bartender from time to time and before I had four toes amputated, I was a non-profit whore.  Whoever wanted me,  I lifted my skirts for.  I taught, wrote grants, counseled kids and adults in alcohol and drug treatment settings, taught nurses and interns about diabetic management and skills (circa, 1984), drove taxi’, worked supermarkets, administered grants in major medical institutions, and worked with kids who had ADD & ADHD.

[Mark Coker] – When I asked you for ten things about you, you listed, "the impossibility of not lying."  Do truth and fiction blur to you?  Is your memoir truth, fiction, or both?

[Norman Savage]   –  Yes, "words" are a construct.  They’re made up.  It’s like trying to tell someone your dream.  Yes, you can almost, almost describe it, but you can never quite get the colors right, the texture right, you can never really say what you mean.  Some, of course, are much better at getting at the right word than others, but, brother, that takes a whole lot of work.  "Words," too, are straightjacketed;  they strain and crack under the weight of too many tongues.

I try to get it right, at least as "right" as I know it, but I’m sure if other interested parties were to describe the same experience they had with me they’d remember it, see it, and word it in other ways.  Truth and fiction indeed do blur.  My friend, Jack, calls it "friction."  Melville, too, in his great work, "Billy Budd," (or was it "Benito Cereno"?) says this about the rainbow:  how can you really tell where the blue ends and the orange begins, and then to red, to green, to yellow, to fuscia, to purple, to gold?  How do you really tease those things out?

My memoir is as close to "truth" as I know it for me.  I did not make-up or fabricate any of it; I didn’t have to.  Dizzy Dean, a once great baseball pitcher, once famously remarked:  "It ain’t bragging if I done it."  Other people would disagree with some or all of it.  That’s O.K.  Let them write one of their own with their own take on things.  What is always fiction is how I put the words together; one word, one sentence after the next.  In that respect, it’s entirely up to me.

[Mark Coker] – Have you been truthful in this interview?

[Norman Savage]   –  Yes.  Today.  But as this cat Zizek said, "I’d rather be inconsistent, than inconsequential."  If I learn of something that makes more sense to me, then I’d be a fool not to entertain that.

[Mark Coker] – What do you want written on your epitaph?

[Norman Savage]   –  There’s a writer who I’d admired long before I came to correspond with him briefly, Harry Crews.  There’s something he said that I’d like on my gravestone.  And, Mark, since I don’t know many people these days, maybe you’d be so kind?  Here’s what I’d like on the rock:  "I never wanted to be well-rounded, and I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work.  So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people.  The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."  I want to leave a stain, Mark, I want it to say that I was here and lived it through.

[Mark Coker] – Thanks Norman!

—

Where to buy Junk Sick:

Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic is available at Smashwords for $2.99 as a multi-format, DRM-free ebook.  Visit http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/715

To learn more about Norman Savage, visit his Smashwords author page.

This interview originally appeared at the Smashwords Blog.

Who am I?

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Greetings!

My name is Shannon Yarbrough and I live in St. Louis, Missouri.

I self-published my first book, The Other Side of What, in 2003 with Xlibris.

In 2006, I republished a much affordable version of that book with Lulu.

Last year, I published my second book, Stealing Wishes, also with Lulu.  It has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award this year.

I’ve also had several short stories published in various anthologies with traditional publishers.

I’m also the creator and lead reviewer of The Lulu Book Review.  We read and review books published through lulu.com.

Being a huge advocate and supporter of indie authors and the POD community, I recently published The POD Pocket Guide to Marketing and Selling Your Book on Amazon.  The title says it all.  It’s a quick look at the top ten ways to improve your sales on Amazon.com.

All of my work is also available on the Amazon Kindle.  And I’m currently at work on another novel and on getting my books up on Smashwords.

Best Wishes,

Shannon Yarbrough

www.shannonyarbrough.com

www.lulubookreview.com

Need an affordable book cover?

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Hello Indie Authors-

My name is Shannon Yarbrough and I am a published indie author.  I also help other authors who are in need of help with book covers.  I design professional full book covers (front, back, and spine) in JPG or PDF file formats for just $50 per cover.

 

Why am I so cheap, you might ask?  I’ll tell you…

 

Most POD companies will supply free (or cheap) cover art for you to choose from.  While it is okay to use these templates for your own personal use, I do not suggest using them if your book is going to be published for circulation. 

 

Why?  Simple. 

 

Other authors might also use the same template.  So, now you have several books on the market all with the same cover. You want your book to stand out and it should definitely be a representation of you as an individual.  That includes the book cover.

 

So, as an indie author and advocate of the print on demand community, I intentionally keep my services cheap and affordable because I want to help you create the best book possible.

 

Contact me for more information if you are in need of assistance. 

 

By the way, I’m in no way advertising or trying to solicite my services.  My minimal fee is really for time only.  There are other artists out there charging as much as $800 for designing a book cover for you.  In no way am I trying to be as profitable.  I’m trying to help authors make their book profitable instead.

 

Sincerely,

Shannon

www.shannonyarbrough.com

 

The Design Process For A Book & More

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On the Soro Design Book Design Blog, Cecilia Sorochin offers a multi-part blog series.  In the series, Cecilia walks you through the professional designer’s process of designing not only the cover and interior layout of a book, but the design of a companion website as well.  You can learn a lot from her, and if you like, you can even hire her.

I find the design process really interesting, maybe more than the finished work.

Why? (just my point of view) Because during that collaborative process between designer & (ideally) author is where the visual personality of the book will be defined.

PART I: The Book Cover


We get the manuscript for the design of the book cover, layout & website for   A Worthy Legacy by author Tomi Akinyanmi.

A Worthy Legacy is a story about life and the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next. The author combines the last wise words of her beloved grandfather together, along with a few of her own thoughts to create a compelling story about real life.

Read the manuscript

From just a glance, the overall feel of the book should come out.

Then look for the voice: my starting point for every book is the belief that authors write books because they have something to say. By reading a manuscript, I need to find what it is that they had to say, who says it, how it is said, & from which point of view.

Sooner or later (usually very soon) some details are revealed, and often I find in those little details the key to the cover.

Reading A Worthy Legacy I learned that the author, originally from Nigeria now living in the U.S., tells many insights about the Yoruba Tribe, which totally fascinated me… & gave the book the ‘unique’ factor.
 

Go to the Soro Design Book Design Blog to: see what sorts of images the manuscript brought to the designer’s mind, view her early cover design ideas, learn which one the author ultimately chose, and read more of the series.

Why Solicit For Book Reviews?

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This article, by Michael R. Hicks, originally appeared on his site, KreelanWarrior.com.
 

The title of this article seems like a no-brainer: of course you want to get book reviews! But, at least based on my experience thus far, there are some interesting aspects to it, particularly for those of us who are engaged in that most subversive of activities: self-publishing!

 

Before we start off, let me caveat this by saying that when I talk about reviews and reviewers in this post, I’m limiting the scope to people who maintain web sites or blogs primarily devoted to reviewing books. I believe that periodicals such as newspapers and magazines would also fall into this scope, although I can’t say for certain since I haven’t – yet – submitted to them for reviews. Reader reviews, such as those posted on Amazon, are entirely different and very important, but for somewhat different reasons that we’ll get to in a bit.

 

So, let’s look at blogs and web sites that review books. These are often the most accessible sources of reviews, because many of the folks who run these sites find it a great source of free books, and will often accept self-published books (whereas more mainstream reviewers won’t). A lot of them clearly put a great deal of thought and consideration into their reviews, while others don’t.

 

But what can you honestly expect? What is one review or a dozen (or a hundred) from these sorts of sites going to do for you?

 

Let’s take In Her Name as an example. I submitted the book to a variety of reviewers, from SciFi.com to personal book review blogs – probably about a dozen in all in the initial round. I didn’t send out hundreds of copies to every possible reviewer because that would have been inordinately expensive, and I also wanted to evaluate how the reviews went, and what impact – if any – they might have on sales.

 

Small Following = Small Impact

 

Unless you can reach more mainstream review sites with large followings (think at least Google page rank 6 or higher), reviews will likely not have a significant (and in some cases, no) direct impact on sales.

 

This is largely a numbers game: you would have to get your book reviewed on dozens (or more) of smaller sites to equate to the exposure from a single more popular “mainstream” site (or periodical). But the trick here is not just effort, but financial: every review copy you send out has a cost, and if you can’t reach the more mainstream sites, the return on investment can be thin.

 

Remember: for every set of visitors to one of these sites, only a certain percentage are likely to be potentially interested in your book. And of those, some percentage will actively be in the market for a new book, and will take it upon themselves to check out your book in more detail. Finally, some number of those folks will actually buy it. So if you don’t have a lot of people checking out the review in the first place, you’re not going to have very many (or any) trickling out the bottom of the funnel to buy your book.

 

Four Stars or Better

 

Depending on the reviewer’s rating system – if they use one – chances are that if your book doesn’t garner at least a “four-star” rating (out of five), the review will probably have little or no direct impact on sales. A three is relatively neutral, and I suspect that the key for swinging readers toward your book would be in the reviewer’s synopsis, but I believe there would have to be something particularly appealing in it. Let’s face it: why would someone even bother to read a review of a book – let alone consider buying it – by an unknown author that only gets three stars? Three stars is “average” (no matter how you want to define it), and there are a million of those out there. People want to spend their money on “good” books. Three isn’t good; it’s fair.

 

Obviously, one- or two-star rankings aren’t going to help your sales! But let’s be honest: if your book has gotten more than one of these ratings (even the best book is bound to be subject to a fluke) from impartial reviewers who specialize in your genre, you really need to take another look at your work. They could be trying to tell you something.

 

Transient Exposure

 

The exposure your book gets on most review sites tends to be transient and very brief. Ironically, this is more problematic with sites that review a higher volume of books – the very sites that tend to be more popular.

 

What happens is this: the review of your book is initially posted on the front page of the site, right at the top. Let’s say they loved it and gave it five stars. You rejoice! You see an upswing in traffic to your web site, and – hopefully – some sales.

 

The next day, the review site has posted a review of a different book, bumping you down the page. By this time most of the folks who subscribe to the site’s RSS feed have had a chance to see your book’s review and have either checked it out or not (although this certainly can dribble on for a little while, as people catch up on their feeds). Meanwhile, the folks who visit the site directly have already seen your review and want to read the newest one. You notice web traffic plateauing, or even declining. Ditto with sales.

 

This continues until, at some point, the review for your book drops off the front page. After that, the game’s pretty much over: your book’s review has essentially wound up in the history books, and the only way that anybody’s going to find it is if they happen to be just browsing the reviews, or if they heard of your book and they searched for reviews about it.

 

So, depending on how popular the site is and how many reviews they post, you may have only a few days, at most, to reap any direct benefit from that review. And some sites post their reviews directly to an archive, as opposed to more of a blog format: in that case, it’s unlikely that your book will get much direct exposure at all!

 

It’s In The Quotes

 

Let’s make the assumption for a moment that my assessments above are correct. The picture looks pretty bleak, doesn’t it? If all that’s even close to being true, why should you bother sending your book out for review at all?

 

To me, the true value of reviews is in the quotable material. You know, those little blurbs like these that I received for In Her Name:

 

“Hicks blends fantasy, science fiction, and romance together to create a story that crosses genres, and will appeal to a wide range of readers…Hicks has created some of the most memorable, likable characters I have read about in a long time. Reza is the quintessential coming-of-age hero, starting as a young, scared boy, and ending up a strong, confident warrior. He is surrounded by strong, powerful women, who each have their own struggles…I highly recommend this novel to lovers of fantasy and science fiction, as well as anyone who enjoys an engrossing, fast-paced novel set in a new and fascinating world.” – BookLoons

 

“The author’s writing style is very engaging…which makes you keep turning page after page to find out what happens next, and in the process letting you live the book…Reza Gard is very interesting. Human by birth, alien by upbringing, Reza struggles to straddle two mutually incompatible societies: a scientific, more or less democratic and individualistic human one; and a fantasy-like society…which is communal, blood-bonded, hierarchic, and based on honor and place…In Her Name was an excellent book and I highly, highly recommend it.” – Fantasy Book Critic

[Publetariat Editor’s note: more reviews like these are available on Hicks’ KreelanWarrior site.]

 

Even if I didn’t get a single direct sale from any of the reviews, I’ve got some great ammunition to use for promoting the book through other means! You can use these with everything from press releases to queries for a radio interview, along with a fact sheet on your book, or as part of a complete press kit.

 

If you get good reviews at these sorts of sites, you can also try and get your foot in the door at the more mainstream reviewers where you might be able to score some real numbers. I can’t guarantee that, as I haven’t tried it myself (yet), but if I was an editor and somebody sent me a tightly written sheet on a book that had received some real praise from several impartial review sites, I’d be a lot more willing to at least consider looking at it.

 

Reader Reviews

 

Reviews from review sites and “professional” reviewers (e.g., from a local newspaper or magazine) will give you good marketing material that you can use in a variety of ways to help lead people to find out more about your book.

 

But I firmly believe that one of the most important factors nowadays to get people to actually buy your book is reader reviews. People interested in your book read those reviews when they drop in on its catalog page on Amazon or wherever, and in many cases the reviews make or break the sale. Let’s face it: if your book has positive reader reviews (at least three star equivalent), that tells others visiting the catalog page that it’s probably worth plunking down some cash.

 

On the other hand, if your book gets trashed (not to be undiplomatic here), the chances drop dramatically that future visitors will buy it.

 

Now, I’m going to make a personal observation here that hits on author integrity: I would recommend to any authors or would-be authors out there that you never, ever post reviews to your own book, or even ask relatives or friends to post positive reviews (in fact, I’d discourage them from doing so).

 

Why? For one simple reason: integrity. One of the major knocks against self-published authors is that some of them do silly things like creating several user accounts on Amazon so they can give their books a bunch of five-star reviews in the guise of fake “readers.” You need to let your work stand on its own with the people who count: the readers.

 

Now, I’ll also tell you that I don’t think it’s bad to ask readers if they’d consider writing a reader review, as long as they aren’t close friends or family (for example: folks who comment on your site or on a forum you frequent, or who send you emails about your book). There’s no potential conflict of interest there, and asking politely is certainly fair game (with the caveat that they are under absolutely no obligation to do so!).

 

Some other folks have asked me how you can get reader reviews in the first place. Again, part of it is a numbers game: the more people who read your book, the more likely it’ll be that someone will take the time to review it.

 

So that means you have to get your marketing and promotion plan in gear!

 

Please visit KreelanWarrior.com for many more posts on the subjects of self-publishing and Kindle formatting and conversion.

A Review of The Jade Owl . . . but more

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This is not the first review of my novel The Jade Owl, but this is the first one that has add commentary on Indie Publishing and POD. I thought it would be interesting to share it on Publetariat.

Edward C. Patterson
www.dancaster.com

 

"From Aricia’s Gay Book Blog

review by Aricia

http://ariciasgaybookblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/gay-mystery-and-ancient-chinese-magic.html

 I was asked a while ago, will I review POD books … and the answer to that is a resounding yes. I’ve said this several times before, and it’s true: some of the best fiction being published today is coming out in POD form, where it’s direct from the writer to the reader.

However, the first thing I need to do is make sure to qualify this statement! "Direct from writer to reader" does not mean the book hasn’t been edited, proofread, labored over, illustrated, layout-designed and so on. The best POD books have had every bit as much work as a book issued from a traditional publishing house. Sometimes more.

I applaud when a really talented writer has the courage to go it alone, because it’s going to mean work such as a non-writer can’t imagine. (Mel Keegan states the case better than me in this post: POD Publishing: why do it? And why not?")

So I’m delighted to be reviewing The Jade Owl by Edward C. Patterson, which is available from Amazon. com as a paperback, and also in Kindle. It’s also available from Smashwords in several formats. (I have the PDF for reading on my desktop because I haven’t yet saved enough of my pennies to get an ebook gadeget. Soon. Very soon.)

The story falls into the same category as the "urban fantasy" novels of writers like Charles de Lint (Yarrow, Greenmantle and so on) and Jan Siegel (the Prospero’s Children series). It takes place in the real world … but one of the foundation stones of the book is, paranormal artifacts do exist, and the powers are real. (The same foundation stone is holding up everything from Indiana Jones to the Mummy movies. It’s come to be a Hollywood staple.)

In this novel, the artifact is an ancient Chinese object, a six inch piece of Jade carved in the likeness of an owl — and it’s actually a key that opens a box known as the Joy of Finches. What’s in the box? That would be telling! But everybody wants the key.

The first thing that impressed me about Jade Owl was how knowledgeable about Chinese antiquities the writer is, and about China itself. Shanghai and Beijing are described with the same amount of detail and enthusiasm as San Francisco — and never having been to either China or the USA myself, I really appreciated the "local color." Many writers, when setting their plots in London, New York, what have you, seem to think that everyone’s been there and knows intimately every secret of the city. Not true. So, the first level where Jade Owl succeeds is in "selling me" San Francisco, which is the setting for the first long segment of the book.

Then it’s off to China, and in the second half of the novel the adventure really kicks in. The first half is more of an exploration of culture, personality, even history. There’s not too much "action" in this part of the story, but I liked having the story built up properly from the ground up, so that all readers are on the same page when the knock-down-drag-out adventure begins.

The characters are, for the most part, excellently drawn, with only one or two of the lesser players falling back on "stock characterization." Edward C. Patterson’s dialog is very believable, you can "hear" voices saying these lines. But it was the paranormal aspects of the story that hooked me … I love this stuff anyway, and the Jade Owl does it well. I know a little bit about things Chinese, since I grew up with a huge crush on Bruce Lee and read/watched everything I could get my hands on over the space of about ten years! Jade Owl is a real treat.

It’s a crying shame this book had to be self-published, and you have to ask yourself what the publishing world is coming to, when gifted writers everywhere are having to fly solo. Jade Owl is not just "competently" written — it’s only one thorough, ruthless edit away from being on a par with the top-notch writers who sell in the gajillions. (Trust me on this: I’ve been a pro "proofie" for decades and have seen the best and worst that professional writers can turn out … and some long-time professional writers I could name churn out unpunctuated drivel that has to be bashed into shape by line-editors who get paid about $10 an hour!) There was a time, maybe 20 years ago, when a publisher would take in a manuscript from an inspired and gifted writer, and would assign an editor to do the final work, then the book would be jacketed and sent out there with posters and hype galore. (Doesn’t happen now. A manuscript can be received that is absolutely gem-perfect, and it’ll still get turned around and sent back unread … sad to say, I’ve worked in the industry and seen what happens: it’d shock you).

But — I digress! The Jade Owl is an extremely good read. It gets off to a slightly shaky start, but the style settles right down after a few pages and is very readable. You’ll like the central characters of "Rowdy" Gray, Nick Battle and his partner, Simone. In fact, you ought to love Simone, who’s a drag queen from the Castro, indomitable, very human, very "real." There’s enough gay content to keep GLBTI readers reading — and more than enough action of other kinds (sensual, paranormal, cultural, comedic) to keep straight readers reading.

It’s also hellaciously good value for money, at $15.45 for the paperback, $3.19 in Kindle, and $3.99 from Smashwords … and this is a major novel, over 200,000 words. And here is one of the great things about getting a book direct from the writer: because there’s no publisher to accommodate, the price can afford to be much lower than you’d think.

Does the book have a downside? Well … maybe, but it depends who you are, and what your "ear" is like! The writing style can be a little erratic at times, but many readers would also call this one of the book’s charms. So there you are — as with so many facets of so many books — it’s actually your call. I found the PDF ebook easy to read, but halfway through I longed for a "proper" ebook reader to get away from the PC — not the author’s fault! When I get myself an iLiad, or Bebook or something similar, I shall be reading Jade Owl a second time in the comfort of a hammock chair at the bottom of the garden.

I should also note that there are two more books following on from The Jade Owl , the first one of which is available now, the second, on its way. I still have to get to the second, so can’t talk about it here.

Recommended on many levels. AG’s rating: 4 out of five stars — with a "gold star" added for incredibly good value for money."

 

Effective Book Cover Design

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If you’re not sure how to design an effective book cover, or just need a little inspiration, take a look at 30 Novels With Covers Designs So Good… How Could You Resist?, an article posted over at Flashlight Worthy Books.

As illustrated by the three examples shown below, some of the covers are quite simple, yet very provocative.  While you wouldn’t want to merely mimic any of the designs on display in the list, they provide excellent fodder for brainstorming your own, equally effective designs.

Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet

The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian & Flora DrewThe Last Jew by Yoram Kaniuk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Along those same lines, take a look at the cover designs for bestsellers in your book’s genre on Amazon.   Very often, you can discern a pattern of cover design style readers have come to expect for your type of book.

Amazon DTP Publishing Tip: PDF Conversion to HTML

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This article, by Michael R. Hicks, originally appeared on his site, KreelanWarrior.com.

 

If you have a PDF that you want to convert to HTML to upload to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), Adobe has a free service to do just that!

Head over to the Adobe Online PDF Conversion Tools page. You have the option of e-mailing the PDF as an attachment, or uploading to the system from a web URL. Before you get started, you should probably read the FAQ page so you’ll have a better idea what to expect.

Adobe gives you two conversion options by email: one to make your PDF file into a plain text file, the other to convert it to HTML:

 

For our purposes here, converting the PDF for upload to Amazon DTP, you’ll want to use the HTML option.

 

For the URL conversion,  just type in the URL of the PDF, click the button for the format you want (HTML or text), and click Convert.

 

I tested both routes – email and URL – using the sample of In Her Name, with the following results:

 

  • The email conversions worked fine, but you need to make sure you send the emails in plaintext format (not rich text or HTML). Any files I sent that weren’t plaintext format got kicked back.
  • The URL conversion didn’t work for me and gave me an unspecified error, so you may or may not have better luck with that.

As for how the resulting HTML file looked, it was generally quite good. However, the big downside for anyone who has files with images is that no images were returned from the conversion process, only the text.

Also, don’t think that this (or any other PDF conversion) will result in clean copy: you’ll almost inevitably have to go in and tweak the HTML a bit to get it formatted the way you want. But that’s generally not too big a deal, and the conversion definitely gets you moving in the right direction!

Credit for this tip goes to [Amazon] DTP user booksdontchange.

 

Please visit KreelanWarrior.com for many more posts on the subjects of self-publishing and Kindle formatting and conversion.

Greek text on the Kindle

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The Amazon team recently released a firmware update (version 1.2) that allows some much-needed functionality in Kindle books. I was finally able to test the Greek functionality and figured out how to add Greek text to HTML files destined for the Kindle.

 

First, add the Greek characters into the file using Unicode character entities. For instance, the lowercase alpha is α or α. You could also add the actual character (copied from character map or another source) but I do not suggest doing that since it is usually a better coding practice to use the entity. Also, it just makes inserting and messing with the characters easier.

 

After the characters are inserted, the file needs to be saved with a Unicode encoding. I suggest using UTF-8, a very common encoding that will be sufficient for these purposes. Just open the HTML file in your default text editor or in Notepad, go to the Save As dialog box, set the encoding to UTF-8, and save the file with the same name or a new one. That HTML file can now be used in Mobipocket Creator to create a PRC file for testing, or be sent to the Kindle through the automated conversion system.

 

As always, I do not suggest you try uploading Microsoft Word or PDF files, with or without these characters in them. The Kindle format is HTML, and you are always better off formatting and tweaking in that code.

 

Overall, the Greek support is pretty good on the Kindle. The only characters which are not supported are the archaic koppa, sampi, digamma, and stigma in uppercase and lowercase. The Kindle does support all of the other Greek characters, including all of the pre-composed characters with diacritics… and I mean all of them. I was not able to find any that are not covered. I have included some screenshots below that will give you a sampling of what the Greek looks like on the device, including in the mono-spaced font.

 

Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
Image 5
Image 6
Image 7
Image 8
Image 9

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Please visit KindleFormatting.com for information and help with Kindle formatting and conversion.

Podcasting For DumbDumbs

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This article, written by Corey Dietz, originally appeared on About.com. 

Let me first assure you I don’t think you’re a "DumbDumb". If you’re like me, you just want to get things done with the least amount of resistance. You want to get it done quickly, easily and done well.

Not long ago I wrote an article on how to put together a podcast. Although not terribly complicated and very straightforward, since it’s publication several services have popped up which eliminate the need for potential podcasters to learn any of the “nuts and bolts” I wrote about. (Of course if you’re curious, by all means have a look.)

Nobody needs to learn any of that stuff now that there are “point and click” services which provide what might be compared to the WYSIWYG metaphor: What You See Is What You Get. For busy people or those with little time to learn even the slightest code or new procedures, these are the easiest ways to get a podcast going. That’s why I want you to know who these services are in the event you want to create a podcast but are totally freaked out by terms like “RSS”, “file properties”, and anything that begins with “http://”

Gcast.com

Gcast from GarageBand.com is an easy to follow setup allows the user to quickly setup a Podcast with title, description, graphic, keywords, and more.

With Gcast, you can upload a finished Podcast in the form of an .mp3 or better yet, you can record your Podcast right over your phone – toll free.

Additionally, if you’re looking for “Podcast safe” music to include in your program without the worry of copyright-infringement, GarageBand.com is integrated so you can choose from that service.

You can create music playlists for your shows from Gcast’s Playlist Manager.

It allows you to change things up any way you wish.

That’s it. It’s amazingly straightforward and anyone can create their own Podcast for any reason.

ClickCaster.com

ClickCaster is a very simple and easy to use podcasting solution that gives anyone with an Internet connection, the ability to create, publish, listen and subscribe to an on-demand Podcast. The ClickCaster creation and management tools are available directly from the ClickCaster website.

End-users simply click, record and publish their podcast directly on the ClickCaster directory service.

 

Read the rest of the article at About.com.

Self-Publishing Standards, Part One

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This article, by Mick Rooney, originally appeared on The Self-Publishing Review on 2/12/09.  This piece, together with Part Two (link at the end), provides an excellent overview of self-publishing options and many specific comments about specific service providers.

 

The author who embarks on the journey into self-publishing takes on a great many tasks.  If they choose to fulfil all the tasks themselves, they have, in effect, taken on the running of a small business and everything that goes with it. 

They may decide to run their small publishing business by registering it a sole proprietor company, with the intention of publishing more than just one book.  They not only become authors of their book, but editor, designer and illustrator.  They will have to go about preparing their book as a digital file for the printers, using a program like Indesign, Quark, a cheap off-the-shelf book publishing program, or perhaps they will be proficient enough to use MS Word, resulting in a print ready PDF file.  Whatever method they use, a book will result, and the arduous task of promoting and marketing the book will follow.

 

Self-publishers using POD (print on demand) technology, like iUniverse, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, Infinity, Xulon, Mill City Press, Dogear, Raider, Lulu, Createspace, etc offer publishing services to authors unwilling to take on all that goes with self-publishing a book. An author may be motivated by other needs and wishes. They may simply want to see their book in print and available for family and friends, or they may see their books as the first step on the path into publishing. They may have already published through traditional publishing channels or instead given up after countless rejections. The facts remain that more than ever before authors are arriving at the road sign-posted ‘Self-Publishing – This way.’ So what barometers and measurements of standards of self-publishers does an author have to go on?

 

When we buy our car, we have an expectation that it will be value for money and run well. If we buy a pair of new shoes and the heel falls off in a few days; we take them back because, as a consumer, we have the right and we are protected under consumer laws. We expect the products we buy to do what they say on the tin or packaging. Self publishing, in spite of the contracts signed by authors, doesn’t quite work that way. When an author signs a publishing contract with a Self Publisher; is he buying a service or a book? Perhaps it is both. If a reader takes his James Patterson blockbuster back to Borders, WH Smith or sends it back to Amazon because page 218 is blank, they will replace it or give him his money back. In the traditional world of publishing, an author often has an agent to legally represent them. If things go wrong during or after the publication of a book, the author can use his agent or approach an Author’s Association or Guild. The publishers have their own representative associations.

 

This does not work the same way with self-publishers (who after all draw up their own contracts) and many self published authors. Often, both parties are isolated, and during a dispute have to legally go it alone without any norm or publishers charter. There are legal and consumer laws and copyright laws, but publishing goes far beyond these. National publishers associations frown on even the most reputable self-publishers. Some national author guilds and societies also treat self published authors as though they had done something wrong or deeply offensive to literature.

 

The world of self-publishing is easily open to the most unscrupulous scammers and fraudsters. It is an area rife with enthusiastic but naive authors and new ‘publishers’ with not a scintilla of editing, publishing or book marketing experience. Over the past two years, there have been far too many self-publishers set up by failed, disgruntled and disillusioned writers, who, with the best will and intentions in the world, have no idea how to run a bookshop, let alone a publishing business. Over the past two years—I can’t say I have found any more than about twenty who actually hit the mark—and that is looking at the USA, UK and Irish self-publishers.

 

So what is the mark all good self-publishers should be trying to work to and achieve? And more importantly, how can we help and go about bringing self-publishers up to that mark? Well, first let’s look at the ‘model’ of publishing and services offered by some publishers.

 

Read the rest of this article, and Part Two, at The Self-Publishing Review.

Citizen Journalists Will Bring The What, While Professionals Bring The Why

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This article, by Pat Thornton, originally appeared 2/8/09 on The Journalism Iconoclast blog.

   

Citizen journalism is a gift to journalism, professional journalists and people all over the world.

It’s an army of active citizens who want to report about the world around them — for free. They can cover far more ground than professional journalists and can provide coverage of events as they happen in real time — not afterwards. 

 

As a reporter you can’t be everywhere, but billions of people are everywhere.

 

That’s the power of citizen journalism.

 

Citizen journalism won’t replace in-depth reporting anytime soon — if ever. You probably won’t see citizens uncovering government corruption, but citizen journalism offers the ability to cover breaking news better than professional journalists ever could. Faster, better, uncensored and in real-time.

 

Wherever news breaks, there are always people around, but there aren’t always journalists around. Increasingly, these people are armed with mobile devices with Internet access that can post text, photos and videos from anywhere.

 

When you think about the power of citizen journalism, and how increasingly news stories will break first by everyday citizens instead of by professional journalists, one has to ask how much resources should news outlets dedicate to covering breaking news? Should professional journalists be belatedly duplicating the work of citizen journalists? Citizens can handle the what, while professional journalists can handle the why.

 

That’s the power of professional journalism.

 

Camera phones, smartphones, Web apps like Twitter and other technologies are helping make citizen journalism a reality. It’s just so easy today to report on the world around us, many people are asking, why not?

 

Why not snap a few photos with a cell phone and send them in to Twitpic? Why not send off 140-character bursts to Twitter and other micro-blogging services? Why not make a short blog post to WordPress or TypePad via their free mobile versions? Why not record real-time video and broadcast it to the world with Qik?

 

And this is just the beginning. A year from now more people will have more capable mobile devices, existing services like Twitter will be more robust with more users and many new Web apps will pop up. Imagine five years from now. 10 years from now?

 

I’m excited, and we are just in the nascent stages of citizen journalism. Combine citizen journalism with beat blogging, and I think we have a path forward that will allow news organizations to cover a lot more ground with a lot fewer resources. Better coverage with less. I like the sound of that.

 

Read the rest of the article at The Journalism Iconoclast.

Notes from the TOC conference

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I just returned late Thursday night from the O’Reilly Media Tools of Change conference in New York City. This was my third year at the conference. The first year I attended as a reporter for VentureBeat, and then these past two times as a speaker. For the benefit of those of you who didn’t attend, I’ll share some of my personal highlights, in no particular order:

Twitter Forever Changes the Conference Experience – Thanks to Twitter, conferences will never be the same. For every session of the three day conference, hundreds of TOC attendees were Twittering real time quotes, analysis and conversation. I found myself monitoring the Twitterstream (check it out here) as I listened to the speakers, and it added another interesting (though distracting!) perspective on the conference.

Twitterers held nothing back. If the speaker started giving a sales pitch, or made questionable statements, the Twitterers were merciless. If the speaker said something interesting (or not), Twitterers would tweet it and then that would cause a cascade of retweets. For three days straight, TOC was in the top five most discussed subjects on Twitter. Thousands, if not millions, of people who weren’t at the conference were getting a taste of the not only what was happening but what people thought about what was happening. Many of the Twitterstream participants weren’t even at the conference.

One of the most profuse and entertaining Twitterers on the TOC Twitterstream – and he wasn’t at the conference – was Mike Cane (@mikecane for you Twitterers), a self-described "ebook militant" and writer who lives near Staten Island. Twitterers from around the world tweeted their friends at the conference and had them convey questions to the presenters. At one great panel on social media in publishing, moderated by Ron Hogan (@ronhogan for you Twitterers) of MediaBistro/GalleyCat, Ron actually introduced his panelists by their Twitter handles.

Is Twitter going to become a secondary form of identity? I think yes. I think it’ll also forever change the dynamic between conference presenters, attendees and wannabee attendees. At some points, the Twitter echo-chamber reached heretofore unknown limits of, well, echo-chamberness. During the Blogging and Social Media Workshop led by social media guru Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) who told attendees he considers Twitter the new phone, session attendee Chad Capellman (@chadrem) uploaded a YouTube video of Chris speaking. When Chad told Chris about it, Chris logged on to YouTube and the audience watched Chris watch a big screen projection of the Chris video taken minutes earlier, and then Chad or some other attendee joked they could take and upload a new video of this special moment as Chris watched a video of himself that we could all then watch.

Several times during his three hour workshop, Chris checked the Twitterstream to gauge audience impressions of his live performance. At one point after he walked on stage drinking from what looked like a beer bottle, Susan Danzinger (@susandanziger) of DailyLit tweeted she thought Chris was drinking a beer onstage, then yours truly (@markcoker) retweeted it because I was wondering the same, then Kat Meyer (@katmeyer) set the record straight, as did Chris when he saw the tweetstream on the big stage monitor. Twittering while watching Twitter while listening to and participating in a conference while the presenter talks about Twitter and is the subject of a Twitterstream while he himself Twitters makes for a very surreal experience.

Peter Brantley on Literature as a Driver for Services – Peter Brantley directs the Digital Library Federation, and he’s one of my favorite thinkers about the future of the books, and about the sacred place books occupy in culture. In a keynote address, Peter challenged the audience of publishers to consider how moving books from print to digital can change the nature of reading, and how the move to digital can open up new business opportunities for publishers. "What’s published will be less about the book and more about the people who read them," he said. He talked about how books will become networked and empower more participatory methods of reading.

Cory Doctorow Eviscerates DRM – In a keynote, author Cory Doctorow (@coreydoctorow) had the audience in rapt attention as he proceeded to disembowel Amazon and all those who would seek to perpetuate the short-sighted practice of DRM. He challenged publishers to step up to the plate and demand Amazon accept their ebook files DRM-free. If anyone knows where I can find a transcript of his talk, let me know so I can link to it here.

Chris Baty of Nanowrimo Says Authorship has Bright Future – One of my favorite presentations came from Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month, which just completed its tenth year of operation. Although Steve Jobs says people don’t read books anymore, Chris made clear that you can’t stop writers from writing, and for this reason alone books face a bright future because the process of writing helps writers appreciate books. "Novels are not written by novelists," he said, "novels are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels."

At least one Nanowrimo participant has landed on the New York Times Bestseller lists, and several have earned book deals. The international Nanowrimo challenge has grown from only 21 participants in its first year, 1998, to 119,000 participants in 2008. Chris spoke at length about how the success of Nanowrimo has been driven by the powerful community that develops between writers as they share the deeply emotional experience of "meeting the book inside them."

The Rise of Ebooks – Ebooks were a big theme of the conference. The first year of the conference in 2007, there were maybe one or two ebook-themed sessions. Last year there were maybe three or four. This year, ebooks reigned supreme with at least ten sessions squarely focused on ebooks and with most of the other sessions touching on related themes. I moderated the "Rise of Ebooks" session. I admit, I’m biased, because I think my panelists (Joe Wikert of O’Reilly Media; indie author advocate and Publetariat founder April Hamilton; David Rothman of Teleread; and Russ Wilcox of E-Ink) did a kick *ss job of surfacing and debating some of the most interesting trends facing ebooks today. We covered a lot of ground in just 45 minutes, including:

  1. What’s driving the rapid sales growth of ebooks? (Answers: better screen display technology; availability of more titles; Oprah; lower prices; e-reading becoming as, or more, pleasurable than print; DRM starting to slip away)
  2. How long until ebooks go mainstream? (Russ predicted 2-3 percent of American households will own a dedicated e-reading device in the next 18 months [this is huge, and even if he’s off by half, it’s still huge], and most of the panelists agreed the ebook market will be dramatically larger in the next couple years.
  3. Screen technologies, present and future (screens will get faster, cheaper, better color, different sizes)
  4. Print vs. ebook, complementary or competitive? (most concluded they’re complementary, though I don’t think we’ll know if they’re a net positive or net negative for a few years – I suspect the latter)
  5. Supply chain implications for ebook intermediaries (new supply chain models forming, may not look exactly like print model; publishers and authors likely to get closer to consumers)
  6. Rich media ebooks, integrating video, audio, sensory feedback such as vibrations (lots of interesting stuff happening; a worthwhile opportunity to leverage traditional "book" content to offer readers a more engaging experience)

Artist Nina Paley Argues, "Give Away the Content, Sell the Containers." – Artist Nina Paley closed out the conference with a thought provoking talk in which she argued that artists and writers should give their content away for free but sell the packages that add value to their content. For example, she argued, water is free from the tap or filter, yet people will pay for water in a bottle for the benefit of the packaging, the brand, and the perceived benefits of that bottle or brand. Customers will pay for free content that is packaged in such as way that it adds value to the consumption of the content.

She showed a trailer for her new animated feature film, "Sita Sings the Blues," which she plans to make available online for free. She plans to make money (and pay off the debts incurred to make the movie) by selling the film to theaters, and by allowing publishers to publish coffee table books of the movie and its art. She also plans to sell value-added packaged versions of the movie, such as the limited edition DVDs she sold at the conference (Corey Doctorow was the first buyer).

Amazon Announces the Kindle 2 – Amazon tried to steal some of the thunder of the conference by choosing to announce the Kindle 2 a few blocks away on the first day of the conference. Amazon, however, was conspicuously absent from the conference. While attendees generally praised the new device for it’s faster screen refreshes (enabled by new E-Ink technology) and improved user interface design, as mentioned above in Cory Doctorow’s keynote and repeated by other keynoters, presenters and conference-goers,

Amazon was ridiculed throughout the conference for its adherence to DRM on the Kindle. Download O’Reilly’s Free "Best of TOC" Ebook – There was a ton more of interesting opinions and news from the conference, and I couldn’t possibly capture it all here. O’Reilly put together a good ebook (it’s free) that captures the best of the show (its only big omission is it doesn’t mention the Rise of Ebooks panel!) you can download it as long as you don’t mind jumping through all the convoluted hoops necessary to register for, and "purchase" the free ebook. Check it out here: https://epoch.oreilly.com/shop/cart.orm?prod=9780596802110.EBOOK Watch TOC Videos – O’Reilly has created an online archieve of some of the videos from TOC 2009 and prior years you can access here.

Citizen Reviewer

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At the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, the buzzword of the event was community. In the hearts and minds of today’s reader, the opinions of fellow readers far outweigh those of professional critics, whose views can be seen as too ‘ivory tower’ or worse, too heavily influenced by the stature of the author or publisher. Increasingly, before buying, readers are turning to blogs and sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing to get a bead on what the community of readers thinks about a given book. This is a trend that works in favor of indie authors and small imprints by giving us an avenue to get on an even footing with our mainstream competition where reviews are concerned.

On his blog today, Seth Godin not only talks about the reach of influential bloggers but becomes one of those book-promoting bloggers himself on behalf of an author friend (and a tip of the cap is owed to Mr. Godin for the title of this article). You may not be a friend of any blogger quite so influential as Mr. Godin, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the trend. There are two approaches to consider.

The first is to bring the bloggers to you, the second is for you to go to them. Either way, you must provide free review copies and you must be willing to graciously accept the reviews, whether positive or negative. You must also agree with each reviewer on a likely timeframe for the review to appear, so you don’t end up having to repeatedly pester them for status updates.

To bring the bloggers to you, on your site or blog, simply offer to give away free copies of your book to book bloggers in exchange for reviews posted at those book-centric blogs. You can set a limit on the number of free copies available, or you can have a standing offer to all takers.

As bloggers write in to take you up on your offer, you will want to take a look at each blog to learn four things:

One, is the blog really primarily about books?

Two, are there numerous reviews already posted there about books similar to yours (i.e., fiction vs. nonfiction)?

Three, what is the quality of those reviews; does the reviewer give thoughtful and insightful remarks, or just seem to delight in the sport of shredding books and authors?

And four, how much traffic does the blog get?

The main advantage of this tack is that it’s easy to do. However, there are pitfalls. First, there’s the uncomfortable task of turning down bloggers whose blogs don’t meet the four criteria above, and potentially alienating those bloggers. There’s also the limitation imposed by your own site traffic: does your site get enough visitors to give your offer high visibility, and are many of those visitors likely to be reader-bloggers? If most of your site visitors are fellow writers, this approach isn’t likely to work.

To go with the second strategy, of reaching out to reader-bloggers yourself, begin by doing a Google search on "blog + reader" or "blog + books" You can also use the "more" drop-down menu on the main Google search page to limit your search results to blogs only, as shown below. Google Blog Search In that case, your searches can be limited to terms relevant to your type of book, such as "fiction", "historical fiction", "supernatural romance", etc. Go through your search results and check out any blogs that seem like a good match.

Use the four criteria listed previously to winnow the field, then contact the most promising bloggers via email with a review request.

The second approach is much more time- and labor-intensive than the first, since you have to do all your own legwork. On the plus side however, since you’re choosing the bloggers yourself, you can exercise quality control without any risk of angering potential reviewer-readers. Either way, once a review goes up you’ll want to read it and personally thank the reviewer (in a comment form under the review, if possible) for taking the time to post it – again, regardless of whether the review is positive or negative. You’re far more likely to win over readers by responding graciously to a negative review than you are by savaging the reviewer.

If the review is positive, promote it with an excerpt and a link on your own site(s) and blog(s). If it’s negative, while you can’t avoid all the views on the reviewer’s site or blog, it’s probably best not to add fuel to that fire with promotion on your own site(s) or blog(s).

April L. Hamilton is an indie author, blogger, Technorati blog critic and the founder of Publetariat.com. She is also the author of The IndieAuthor Guide.