Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

Why You Need To Fail

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This article, from Peter Bregman, originally appeared on The Harvard Business Publishing site on 7/6/09. While it was originally written with business executives in mind, the information presented here is equally helpful to authors who are struggling with setbacks—who are, after all, businesspeople too.

"Peter, I’d like you to stay for a minute after class." Calvin teaches my favorite body conditioning class at the gym.

"What’d I do?" I asked him.

"It’s what you didn’t do."

"What didn’t I do?"

"Fail."

"You kept me after class for not failing?"

"This," he began to mimic my casual weight lifting style, using weights that were obviously too light, "is not going to get you anywhere. A muscle only grows if you work it till it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail."

Calvin’s onto something.

Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward — not just a step, but a leap — failure is always on the list. For some it was the loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.

Yet most of us spend a tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure.

According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, we have a mindset problem. Dweck has done a tremendous amount of research to understand what makes someone give up in the face of adversity versus strive to overcome it.

It turns out the answer is deceptively simple. It’s all in your head.

If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.

Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.
 

Read the rest of the article on The Harvard Business Publishing site.

Publishers’ Bad Habits, Now Glutting the iPhone

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This post, from Ryan Chapman, originally appeared on his Chapman/Chapman blog on 11/3/09, and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Publishers are hungry for as much data as they can get on how the written word is consumed online and on mobile devices. (Or they better be.) Unfortunately, honey traps abound which lead to specious logic and flawed conclusions. Take the latest stats from the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store. In October there were more new book apps than gaming apps, the previous top category. Gizmodo succinctly phrased this as “iPhone Ebooks: The New Fart Apps.”

O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica, possibly my favorite media statistician on the web, breaks this down even further, noting the quantity of book apps does nothing more than glut the app store. Games continue to outsell and outrank books on almost every metric. (See Lorica’s chart.)

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: you can click on the chart below to go to Lorica’s post (in a new window), which has a larger version of the chart.]

O'Reilly Radar

And let’s not forget that several of the top paid children’s book apps, like Duck Duck Moose’s “Itsy Bitsy Spider“, are listed in the games category. And why not? For picture books with light animation, the distinction between “book” and “game” disappears.

What we’re really seeing is a recreation of the industry’s bad habits in the App Store.

I subscribe to the belief that the print book industry is suffering from publishing too many books. The average reader is easily overwhelmed, and so relies on their friends and trusted sources to discern what’s worth reading. This would work if everyone’s friends weren’t increasingly interested in other, more exciting media, and if the notion of a trusted source remained static. We all know a front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review doesn’t mean what it used to. The most common reason cited by friends why they don’t read as many books as they used to? It’s impossible to know what’s good. Every week another 25 “amazing literary debuts” and “spellbinding journeys of the heart” and “adventures into the mysterious underworld of sexy vampires.”

…So before I go off on a rant, I’ll just say this: we’ve done the same thing to the app store that we’ve done to the book market. I counted over 600 book apps a few weeks ago. iTunes isn’t built for browsing or highlighting apps specific to your taste. If you’re not in the top ten in your category, you’re sunk. If you’re a publicist with a debut author, this should sound familiar.

Which is where marketing comes in, right? It’s not enough to create the app, you have to tell people about it. You have to put in the work and find that audience.

Well, yes and no. Of course marketing and publicity are important — you don’t think T-Pain and Smule made $3 million purely on word-of-mouth, do you? But publishers need to rethink the book apps the same way they need to rethink the print market. Don’t just wrap your ebook in a reader template and shove it off to customers. They’re used to playing games, watching video, checking the weather, and using Shazam, Skype, and Evernote on this device. It’s on us, the publishers, to rise to that new consumer expectation. (Nick Cave’s Death of Bunny Munro app is a step in the right direction, though 894MBs is a bit cumbersome.)

Grisham Spills The Beans…

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I just got up after watching a short segment of the Today Show.  Usually there’s not much of interest for me anymore on NBC mornings, but this morning, Matt Lauer, interviewing John Grisham about his newest book, a collection of short stories, turned from the standard book tour interview to a hard question.  It dealt with a recent Court case involving writers who are fed up with the retail sales tactics of  a few giants and box stores.  In John Girsham’s case, his hard cover new book, with a list price of $24.00 is being sold at Walmart and Amazon, among others, for …$9.95.

Matt Lauer wanted to know what Grisham thought of the case, which uses the language "predatory sales tactics".  Grisham admitted that it wouldn’t affect him much in the short term, but when he considered the long-term effects, the interview got interesting.  Mr. Grisham, openly pronounced that for new or future writers, this practice will make it very hard to impossible for them to be published.  There is nothing made when a book that costs the publisher a certain amount to produce is sold for way less than what its cost.  To paraphrase, he indiacted that in his opinion, this kind of tactic will shake the industry to it’s knees, eventually. Even when the sales quantities are considerable, the margin has disappeared.  The margin is what fuels publishing’s ability to test new authors work.  It gives them the room to provide publishing homes for new voices, and without it, there will be little attention given to emerging writers. 

It turns out, according to Mr. Grisham’s comments, that the business of selling books has a great deal more impact on whether your book will be published than many of us believed. 

Massive discount tactics have already destroyed the once-great American Department Store Retail culture.  There are no more merchants out there at all, just perpetual motion operations that desperately must keep the goods moving or perish — similar to the old notion of how sharks swim forward all the time to stay alive.  It’s about time that a respected author turn some of his attention to some of the ills that are in the process of destroying publishing as we know it.  He also spoke of the pending collapse of many publishers and established book sellers who wil be unable to compete with the box stores and online merchants.  This is already happening in spades.

He closed, by saying, that his book, "is worth $24." 

Readers should be willing to pay someone for their creative work, and if it means paying the author directly, that day may well come.  That bodes well for Indie Authors who can produce a high-quality product at a reasonable price…and can hang in a bit longer, until the dust settles.

 

Roland Denning And, Quite Possibly, The Best Non-Book-Trailer Ever

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You may not have heard of Roland Denning yet, but his hilarious non-book-trailers (On Meeting An Agent, Parts 1-8) are rapidly becoming the stuff of retweet and link-sharing legend. I first learned of the video clips via a tweet from Debbie Ridpath Ohi. Debbie is the artist behind the Will Write For Chocolate and Inkygirl comics. If you use Twitter, I highly recommend following Debbie because she tweets boatloads of great links for writers and publishers. Now, getting back to Roland…

After viewing the clips, I knew I wanted to interview Roland. Not only are his videos entirely relatable for any writer who’s ever queried on a manuscript, they’re very, very funny. The films are book trailers in the sense that they were created in order to promote Roland’s book, The Beach Beneath The Pavement, and there is a brief mention of the book at the end of each film, but the films themselves don’t have anything to do with the content of the book.

Watch On Meeting An Agent yourself (broken up into parts 1-5 and 6-8 in the YouTube videos below), then read my interview with Roland afterward to learn more about the films and their creator.

Why did you decide to create the clips?
I started playing around with the software, then they just seemed to emerge into a series. Then I realised it could be a promotional tool for my book as well as an entertainment.

Did you hire someone to do the animations, or did you create them yourself?
I did it all myself. I am, as it happens, a professional filmmaker. But these were made with some incredibly easy free on-line software (xtranormal.com) which means I could make each one in about 3 to 4 hours from conception to going on line, except the final episode which integrates live action and took a couple of days. (Bugger, I shouldn’t have told you that. You’ll all be doing it now). The problem with the software, brilliant though it is, is that it is very limited. The animations all come out looking very similar. I think I’ve been lucky in that, as far as I know, I’m the first to use it in this context.

How true-to-life are the clips? Did you try to more or less repeat conversations you had with real people verbatim, or did you take some artistic license?
It’s fiction. I made it up! Perhaps it was a mistake to give the robot the same name as me. No, really, the phrases came from real life (‘I didn’t love your book enough’ etc) and real conversations, but I’m not really bitter. The agent I met was extremely nice. I was just a little disappointed. But ‘disappointed’ isn’t funny. ‘Violently bitter’ is. It does reflect some of things I’ve gone through, like you think your book is definitely finished, an agent has a few ‘issues’ with it, you find yourself re-writing the whole damned thing, then you tell yourself that’s what you were going to do anyway.

Don’t you think that’s one of the inevitable factors of being an author, oscillating between total self-belief and self-loathing? Or is that just me?
 
Did you release the clips primarily in order to drive more book sales, to attract mainstream publisher attention, or for some other reason?
Primarily I made them because I enjoyed them. After spending so long writing the book, they came as a light relief. It was only after I started making them I saw the marketing potential.

How did you go about raising awareness of the clips?
I just sent them to a few literary blogs, and sites such as yours and they began to take off.

Have you seen an increase in book sales since releasing the clips?
Too early to say. They’ve only been out a couple of weeks and it takes longer than that for the sales figures to get back to Lulu (who did the POD).

In the clips, there’s some joking about the avalanche of self-published books, and an implication that many of them are of poor quality. What led you to finally choose the indie path, given that you seem to have a somewhat skeptical view of self-publishing?
Well Lulu publishes 1000 new titles A DAY. Clearly, they are not all masterpieces. But the point I was really making was – how the hell can you get noticed when literally thousands of authors are clamouring for attention at the same time? The POD revolution is great, all the mechanisms of the web to promote stuff are great EXCEPT it’s getting exponentially harder for each book to get attention, let alone a sale. I think it’s easy to think that when your name is known around a few writers sites, when you get mentioned on literary blogs, the world knows all about you. But sometimes the internet can be a very small place – or, rather, you can be stuck up a tiny little cul-de-sac and not realise it.

To answer the second part of your question, I’m still sending my chapters out to agents (a revised version, without the problematic second chapter!) as well promoting my self-published version.

Roland Denning was born and lives in North London. He studied philosophy at university but has got over it now.
Most of his life has been spent working on the fringes of the film and television industries and in the arts.
The Beach Beneath The Pavement is his first novel.

Learning to Wait…

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This is a general, rambling comment covering some of the more touchy-feely components of setting up a marketing plan.  I prefer a more organic approach rather than the nice, crisp document with all the numbers in a row.  They have their place, but if you have an interest in developing your ability to perceive your market better, read on…

“Millions Sold!” Remember the little tag line that used to be seen between the Golden Arches under every McDonalds Hamburger Sign? Just knowing that …millions…of people had purchased and eaten these “bombes du gut” really made your mouth just water, didn’t it? It also made established two implications. First, that the burger was good. Second, that if you didn’t scarf one up, you were cutting yourself off from…millions of people. Millions.

I receive the Daily Email from Publisher’s Weekly. As an Indie Author, I find it about 50-50 with subjects of direct interest and entertainment. Today, (I’m getting a head-start by actually beginning on Friday for tomorrow’s article.) the banner ad running across the top of the email was for “NY Times Bestselling Series” Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead! Then, just below – and I realize the PW is a TRADE publication for those that sell books – ran the slogan, “Over 2 Million Books Sold!” 

Not to disregard the money to be made in the Vampire Genre, by booksellers hungry for every sale, but it really did remind me of McDonalds’ advertising. Brings P.T.Barnum to mind. I won’t be scarfing up any Vampire bestsellers right now, and I don’t care if I’m ostracized from millions of sold readers. I don’t write Vampire. After Stoker – good, tasty stuff – I won’t be reading Vampire either, no offense intended to Anne Rice, who launched this amazing fountain of gold, then exited holding a huge bag of cash.

 

So, if you write and enjoy Vampire Genre, my column may not give you any new marketing ideas.  You’ve been lucky enough to hit upon a trend.  Being light on your feet and enjoy lucky timing is a rare and can be a profitable blend of skills, but it might not be something you can learn.  It may not be sanguine enough, or sexy enough, or….you get the idea. Still, the idea of Millions Sold…Millions! Just the thought makes my mouth water for the griddle-fried goodness!

 

Most of us who write fiction in niche genres, creating prose with a unique voice know or rather, should know we won’t be selling millions. It’s not a bad thing, after all – it’s just such a distant prospect that we tend to dismiss the possibility. Along with appearing on Oprah every other month.  We have more realistic ideas — the ones we can actually help create, if we can be patient.

 

The Zen of Waiting…

 

It can be tough, waiting for recognition and the resulting book sales, but while we do wait, we should not be waiting idly. Waiting is an activity, after all. I remember when I was in College, investigating whole new worlds of thinking I found Zen Buddhism particularly interesting. One of the major pathways that Zen can use to lead you to enlightenment is to learn how to wait. It was also covered in great detail in Herman Hesse’s book Siddhartha, which in the day, was to my generation what Vampire Academy and it’s like, must be to the current crop.

 

There is an important lesson to training yourself to be occupied with the activity of waiting. Waiting allows you to quiet all the background noise and actually observe what is happening around you. If done with deliberate non-focus – deliberate non-attachment, it can lead to all kinds of new awareness. It works in meditation. It works in business. It works in the creative process.

 

While waiting, we can learn techniques which will sharpen our ability to sense opportunity. Now, I’ve let a lot of opportunities slip away, over the years – I’m not a master in any way. Yet. As an Indie Author, not everything remotely literary/publishing-oriented will relate to my personal path towards my goals. Some things will. Those are the ones I don’t want to miss. I know I’ll miss plenty – I just want to pare down the numbers to improve my chances.

 

Mientras Descansas Hace Adobes

 

This is an old, New Mexican “dicho” or saying, handed down through the years. It was meant to be a final comment made by a husband, to his wife as he left the family home for a day of work. It’s supposed to be a kind of joke. Sometimes, we’ve seen it inscribed on a tile or embroidered on a sampler, then hundg up near the door. Translated, it means “While you’re resting, make adobes!” Adobes being the 40 pound mud and straw bricks that are left to bake in the sun. Not exactly the kind of job done while “resting”, but the saying applies equally well to Indie Authors. While you’re resting….

 

One of the first things you need is a set of goals. Not one. Several. These should be visualized as a series of steps that lead to different places you want to reach. For example, good (insert number here) bookstore sales may be a goal that takes several different paths to reach. Another, better (insert cogent qualifier here) recognition, also may be achieved through different steps and tools. Let’s assume here, that you don’t have several hundred dollars burning a hole in your pocket to spend on a retained publicist. I can’t afford that expense, so it’s been up to me to find ways of getting the word out while I’m waiting. That, and making sure that what the word conveys, is what the reader wants to hear.

 

The first step…

 

Making sure you understand what your readers want to read is step one. In the same way we tried to visualize and quantify our readers and booksellers (if we seek to sell to book stores) when designing our book cover, we need to hold those ideas close when we wait to see what is working out there. Think: My Book’s Niche. How are our readers and potential customers (booksellers, who are also readers) different from those who won’t even consider reading our books. Try to answer those questions by observing – at a relaxed pace – what the media is dishing, what the niche-forums are spouting, what “people” (insert appropriate adjective that relates to your readers here) are talking about. What are their concerns? Why are they reading at all, assuming they are.

 

I have a group of bookmarks in a special folder on my browser named “Book Marketing” in it I put links to forums, book seller sites, publishers sites, other writers sites and anything else whose subject works towards the subjects or settings in my book that may attract potential readers. I visit these every couple of days – sometimes I post a comment, sometimes not, but I try to get a general idea of what’s cooking.

 

I pay special attention to anything which uses keywords also found in my books. If a forum offers a keyword search, I’ll use that, along with my trusty list of ten keywords that pertain to my work and I’ll limit the time frame to the last two or so days. If I find a lot of activity, I might go back into the threads, but I try not to get too ensnared. I actually do try to remain somewhat disconnected, so my own inner demons don’t trip me. Forums that specifically deal with subjects that create dissenting opinion may be entertaining, but the egos fly fast and furious, and the useable lessons may not be as easy to parse through. But, if you have a competitive nature, and like to see the fur fly, this may produce useable results for you, depending on what you write, and who your reader is.

 

I also like to visit libraries, and ask librarians what’s being checked out in similar genres of fiction. Have they noticed any sudden shifts? Do these shifts always follow the marketing pushes from publishers? Try to notice readers, while you’re in a library or bookstore. Are they quietly reading, or are they casting around for contact or experience? Do they look at posters or other marketing materials, or do they seem to be on a mission, heading directly to what they want, and then, leave just as fast, book in hand?

 

Bookstores also now provide coffee bars and cafe environments which can be very useful in catching interesting comments – even if just to see what’s being read. If you’re not shy, you might even engage readers – and find out many things you can use to train your ability to understand YOUR reader better. Most people, unless engaged in conversation, will react positively if you ask their opinion about something. That’s what Marketing Research Firms count on, and so should you. It makes the “subject” feel important. You may get more information than you need, but it may be useful later on – you never know.

 

Ask ’em Questions…

 

It’s a good idea to keep any interview conversations spontaneous and light-weight and on-target, so that it will be a simple matter to decide when your part of it is over, and you can move on – unless the entanglement is appealing to you. I am a better observer usually than I am an “interviewer”, but you may be better at conversation. Use what you are good at, and improve those areas that need improving, by doing. You should learn to observe and retain information until you are able to spot your reader by sight alone — probably not possible, but you get the idea.

 

Everyone has lots of characteristics that betray their inner selves – for example, if you write about driving on the Nascar circuit, your reader may indeed by wearing a specific team hat, or T-Shirt. I’m not sure specifically what your reader would do to betray their interest if you write Vampire Novels, but there would be signs. These signs are often referred to in Poker-playing circles as “tells”. Few players can eliminate all of them, thereby being “unreadable”. Outside of Poker, most folks like their “tells” displayed proudly. Good for them – good for you.

 

As you learn to wait effectively, you’ll begin to amass a great deal of data and understanding. The better you know your prospective reader – customer – the easier it will be to make the sale. As a producer of goods (Indie Author)you have the additional opportunity of massaging your product to appeal directly to any or all of the “tells” your customers display. Specific, salient selling points that will satisfy their needs in a good read. Now, unless you’re producing hamburgers, of course, you’ll still want to retain your own voice, and your own story ideas, but inserting an occasional piece of juicy fruit or candy into a cake never made the cake less tasty.

 

The Recipe…

 

Begin to think of the “ingredients” that your readers will be hoping to discover in your writing. List them. Train yourself to learn to see them in other contexts, in other writer’s work, in discussions. If you can do this, then you can gently guide your story’s appeal without making it seem false, or over-reaching. The chances are, you already have quite a few of them in your work, as it’s come from your imagination – full of the things that appeal to, or are frightening to, or are of interest to….you.

 

Enjoy the scenery.

 

You’ll learn to wait in different places. You’ll learn to wait while engaged in all kinds of other work. Multi-tasking is possible, if you don’t try to do too much at once –even for men. Now, in case you think I’m suggesting you become a spy – that’s not what we’re doing here. You’re an interacting human being, not a recording device. Besides, words are your favorite medium. Your interactions, past and present with other humans gives an honest voice to your writing. If you were doing market research for a particular tool, for example, you’d clearly want to know what users liked and disliked about the tools they use as well as the tool you have designed or are trying to sell. Sometimes you ask, other times, you listen. It’s a simple matter of quantifying the results to help refine the tool to be positioned properly for the market.

 

Writing is an interactive, yet singular activity. So is reading. Writers read. Readers ….well, some readers, write. You have a lot in common with your readers, mostly those things are the key to making your writing rewarding, both to you and to your readers. Rewarding writing is appealing to booksellers, even eBook sellers. If all the ingredients are in the mix, and the product satisfies the market, then all you need to do next, is let ’em know. No small task, but made easier by you’re having learned that waiting isn’t down-time. The ongoing task of selling your book, unless you have a publisher willing to do it for you (pretty small chances out there for that kind of commitment these days) will become easier the more you practice it. Like Zen. Learning to sit and …be.

 

Now go out and grab a nice, juicy cheeseburger. You’ve earned it! Oh, and make some adobes.

Next Week: We learn to narrow down the number of targets while waiting for success to improve our aim and our scoring.

 

 

Al Katkowsky: The Book As App

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Earlier this week I went to see a talk given by author Al Katkowsky at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. If you’re wondering why an author would be speaking at the Apple Store, it’s because Al has published his book, Question of the Day, in both print and iPhone application (a.k.a. “app”) editions, and the app edition has been hugely popular. It seems that in addition to self-publishing in print, ebook and podcast/audiobook formats, indie authors now have yet another publication opportunity at their disposal.

Question of the Day began life as a simple, workplace pastime. Al would pose a question to co-workers, providing fodder for discussion. Eventually someone suggested Al turn his questions into a book, and he did, classifying them on a scale of “Light” to “Heavy” based on how serious or easygoing each question is. Once the manuscript was finished, he spent about a year querying on it. He received a lot of encouragement but no offers, and started thinking about alternative routes to reaching a readership.

Al was a fan of Urban Outfitters, which stocks books in addition to clothing, home furnishings, electronics and miscellany. He approached an UO buyer, who was very enthusiastic about Question of the Day and expressed interest in carrying it. Al knew that the timeframe from contract to release for a traditionally-published book is a year or longer, and he worried that UO’s interest might wane if he couldn’t get the book to them right away. So he self-published 1,000 copies through Cafepress (correction – Al only ordered a few samples through Cafepress) and returned to the UO buyer, who sent the idea of carrying QotD in UO stores up the chain of command. Unfortunately, the answer was ultimately “no”.

Disappointed but far from defeated, Al arranged for distribution through Baker & Taylor, and booked a launch event in a Borders store. Following the launch, Al partnered with a speed dating event, in which the content of his book was used for easy icebreakers between the speed daters. Next, he gave a talk to an 8th grade Social Studies class whose teacher had been using the book for class writing prompts.

Al was a bit at loose ends and unsure what more he could do to build a bigger audience for the book. Then a friend suggested he consider releasing the book as an iPhone app, since the iPhone was hot and only getting hotter, and app sales were growing exponentially.

After making some inquiries among Apple- and tech-savvy friends, Al commissioned a developer to turn QotD into an app. Where you’d page through the book, in the app you can look up questions based on how “light” or “heavy” they are, and also get a little help from ‘prompters’: brief suggestions to get your mind working. When Al added videos of sample responses to the app in May of this year, interest in the app increased dramatically. Since then, the app has had 500,000 hits and 80,000 downloads, and has been in the top 25 of all book apps ever since. Al has continued to promote the book and app via speaking engagements in Apple stores, at conferences, and elsewhere.  

Al suggests that authors who intend to release their books as apps think outside the box of a typical ebook, which is just static text on a screen. Adding multimedia capabilities, such as sound and video, will make a book app much more appealing. Any interactive functionality you can add that makes sense in the context of your book is worth considering. For example, the next edition of QotD will add the capability to answer and share questions, and the edition following that one will add social networking functionality, enabling users to “see” when someone else is using the app and, if the other party is interested, discuss the questions and their answers with one another. However, Al warns against relying too heavily on hyperlinks as a means of introducing interactivity to your app, since once you’ve escorted a reader out of your app via an internet link there’s no guarantee he’ll come back.

Al thinks a combination text/audiobook with bookmarking capabilities would be a popular type of book app. Users could read the text onscreen, then turn on a voice to pick up reading where they left off when they need to get in the car, or any other time reading the text onscreen isn’t practical.

Since apps can be updated at any time, and iPhone users love getting updates that add new value or functionality to apps they’ve already purchased or downloaded, Al strongly encourages authors to release a large chunk of their books for free, one chapter at a time. “Hook ‘em in,” he says, “then charge them to finish reading the book.” In an app you can display a message to the user asking him to please pay a fee to continue reading, and the user can do so immediately right on his iPhone or iPod Touch. Alternatively, you can release an updated version of the app that includes the final chapters and can only be downloaded for a fee. If your content is good and you’ve provided enough of it, conversion rates from the free app to the paid app should be high.

Hiring a developer to create your app can be costly, and will definitely require some research and an interview process. There are some new companies popping up to offer simple, affordable app creation services as an alternative; I’m starting to investigate these and plan to report my findings in the future. But you may be wondering why it’s worthwhile to release your book as an app in the first place, given that considerable time, effort and money can be required.

The first reason is that you’ve created a podcast version of your book, and would like to sell it as an audiobook through iTunes. Currently, the iTunes store has an exclusive deal with Audible whereby only audiobooks released by Audible can be sold in the “Audiobooks” department of the iTunes store. Any other audiobook must be released as a podcast, and audiobooks are lost among all the other podcasts offered on iTunes. However, there’s no exclusive deal governing the “Books” department of the app store. Your audiobook app can coexist and be listed right alongside NYT bestsellers.

The second reason is to enlarge your book’s exposure. The books of authors who publish through Smashwords are already available to iPhone/iPod Touch users who use the Stanza reader app, the books of authors who publish through Shortcovers can be read by users who have the Shortcovers app, and the books of authors who publish in Kindle editions can be read by users who have the Kindle reader app. However, those authors’ books aren’t listed right on the iTunes site, or in the app store. Users have to find the books by browsing the virtual shelves inside each respective reader app, and each virtual store has thousands of titles to choose from. Your book won’t be discovered by any users who don’t have the appropriate reader app installed. If you publish your book as an app, however, users don’t need to have any special reader app to find or read your book, your app isn’t hidden inside another app. You still have the same promotion and marketing challenge as any other author, but you’ve removed a barrier to discovery.

The third reason is to make your book into something more than static content. If your book could benefit from embedded video or audio clips, embedded game experiences, or social networking connectivity (like Al’s book), publishing in ebook or audiobook format alone will not realize your book’s full potential. Imagine a novel about a fortuneteller that’s presented with various interactive divination games (e.g., tarot card readings, crystal ball, the I Ching, etc.) embedded in the app. Consider a fantasy adventure novel with an interactive map of the story world included. Imagine a cookbook with step-by-step instructional videos embedded, or a foreign language phrasebook with audio clips that demonstrate proper pronunciation. In books with invented languages or obscure technical terminology, the author can put a pop-up glossary at the user’s fingertips. In a young adult novel where the hero must solve a series of puzzles or riddles to prevail, the author can present the same puzzles and riddles for the user to try his hand right alongside the hero. The possibilities are endless.

One more reason to consider releasing your book as an app is the fact that any author or publisher of content sold by Apple can book speaking engagements in Apple stores all over the world. According to Al, most Apple stores are built with a presentation area somewhere in the store, and store managers have been put on notice that they should be offering speaker events to store clientele at every opportunity. You will be welcome to demonstrate and talk about your app because your talk will essentially serve as an advertisement to buy more stuff from Apple. While Apple will not allow you to put out a press release to publicize your Apple store speaking engagements—they are all about image and brand control—, you can publicize them on your website, via Facebook, Twitter, and any other means you’d ordinarily use to publicize a speaking engagement.

There is one caveat of which authors should be aware before releasing their books as apps: trade publishers don’t tend to view apps as books, even if the app began life as a manuscript. Once it’s an interactive app, it’s possible publishers no longer recognize it as something they can release in print, ebook or audiobook formats. If you have a manuscript or self-published book, ebook or podcast audiobook which you hope to sell to a mainstream publisher, it’s probably unwise to release it as an interactive app in the current publishing climate, but hopefully, that will change in due time. Al has found that despite the great success of his QotD app, he’s not seeing a lot of interest from publishers or literary agents because it no longer looks like a book to them, and they don’t quite know what to do with it. Al is confident that in time, publishers will come to see apps as a publishing opportunity.

For now, if you’re an entrepreneurial-minded indie author who intends to stay indie, apps can be yet another valuable avenue for building readership and selling books.

Learn more about QotD at http://www.questionofthedaybook.com. 
 

Viral Loop Chronicles Part 1: Forget Everything You've Heard About Book Publishing

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This article, from Adam Penenberg, originally appeared on Fast Company on 10/22/09.

Forget everything you’ve heard about book publishing.

For instance, recently at a party to celebrate the publication of my latest book, a number of people asked, "Is your publisher sending you on a tour to promote your book?"

Dicl;dsCKWDfce9qdck. Sorry, I was laughing so hard recounting this story that I hit my head on my keyboard.

These friends/colleagues/acquaintances/random people I met were inquiring about Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. It tells the stories of the fastest growing companies in history–Skype, Hotmail, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and many more, all of which grew virally. By amassing such huge numbers of users without spending a dime on marketing, they were able to create multimillion and in some cases billion-dollar businesses practically overnight. They did it by creating a product that its users spread for them. In other words, to use it, they had to spread it. Never before in human history has it been possible to create this much wealth, this fast, and starting with so little. I’d like to think Viral Loop is partially inspirational. If they can create billion-dollar companies from scratch, why can’t you? (Read an excerpt here and here.)

Most people have a vision of publishing that ceased to exist years ago: writers of yore traipsing bookstore to bookstore across America to offer readings and scrawl inscriptions to the handful of strangers who bothered to show up. It sounds so quaint. Alas, today’s publishers have little patience for such low-yield marketing efforts. Building a writer’s career isn’t part of the equation. It’s all about the bottom line. If legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, who patiently guided some of our nation’s greatest writers (Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe) were alive today, he’d probably be working in public relations.

Publishers don’t pump serious marketing money into a book unless they know it’s a hit, even after coughing up a six-figure advance. They don’t commit to ad budgets in contract negotiations and are loath to spend a dime on authors’ Web sites, travel, or any other expenses. That’s because so few of the books they publish actually "earn out," that is, sell enough copies so that the author’s advance is covered by his or her sales. A book that sells enough copies to justify an author’s advance is about as common as a kind or thoughtful anonymous comment on Gawker.

Read the rest of the article, and continue to follow the series, on Fast Company.

Theme As Technique

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Today we continue Mark Barrett’s series on theme, which originally appeared on his Ditchwalk site and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. You can read the first entry in the series, ‘Axing Theme’, here, and the second installment, Thinking Theme For Fun and Profit, here. 

On Monday I introduced you to Thomas McCormack and his devastating critique of the way theme is taught. On Tuesday I talked about how emphasizing theme and ‘important’ literary works actually discourages some (if not many) students from reading and learning. A helpful reader provided more ammunition in the comments.

The consistent theme in these arguments is that theme should not be deployed as an analytical tool. Readers, students and teachers have more insightful measures by which to judge literature and writing — a sampling of which awaits you in the conclusion of Mr. McCormack’s document. Too, at the highest levels of academia criticism is always in flux, meaning determinations of theme are not simply potentially speculative but inherently transitory.

In short, using theme to reveal meaning in a story is like using divining rods to discover water underground. Many people swear by it, but it has no basis in fact. Theme as a creative technique, however, can be a powerful means of organizing and expressing ideas. By understanding theme in this context we not only learn how to use it appropriately, but also gain insight into why theme is poorly taught, and how theme can be so easily turned to nefarious purposes. (A subject I’ll tackle tomorrow.)  

Now, suppose you and I are going to build a house, a car, or almost anything you can think of. In our collaboration we will have functional requirements to discover (it must not blow up, it must turn on when you press a button), we will have usability requirements (it must not be confusing, it should provide positive feedback when operated), and we will have aesthetic requirements (it should be cool, sexy, retro, whatever.) Unfortunately, completing these design tasks only reveals two new obstacles. First, there are a lot of requirements to organize. Second, there is no inherent consistency to the requirements.

For example, if we’re making an outdoor grill we could satisfy our aesthetic requirements by putting different stickers or paints on the same functional model. Or we could make different functional models with varying capacity and burners, yet present all models with a common paint scheme. Or we could emphasize usability and give everyone a Model-T grill: basic and black. We might even decide which choices to make based on a set of priorities, but that would only kick the can down the road. How do we know what our priorities should be?

The answer, as you might imagine, is to employ theme as an editorial tool to help determine which requirements to keep or emphasize, and which to omit or diminish in importance. But even here we need to be careful, because all themes are not equal. Proportionality in theme is also critical to our ability to integrate theme in any instance.

For example, it would be tricky to make an outdoor grill based on a theme such as ‘war is hell.’ I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but the end result would probably be so obvious as to make it no longer a war-is-hell grill but a statement in which the theme detached from the object. Yes, the grill might function as a grill, and particularly so as a conversation piece (hold that thought for tomorrow), but the theme would exist apart from the grill’s functionality. Meaning we could just junk the grill and go with the message, or vice versa.

(Note that this is exactly what happens when a student proposes a theme that seems preachy relative to the story being analyzed. The student goes too far in trying to find deeper meaning and ends up under hot lights, accused of moralizing. When an author writes a preachy story the same dynamic is at work. In such instances theme — meaning a message the writer is trying to communicate — separates from the story. The end result is that story dies at the hand of theme. And yes, you should consider that a cautionary tale.)

Scaling our thematic grill goals back, then, we could probably embrace themes like ‘the future,’ ‘masculinity,’ or even ‘heat’ in a way that allowed us to harmonize the elements of our grill without beating cooks over the head with a message. (It’s not that we’re trying to hide our theme per se, just that we don’t want it to separate from the object.)

In picking the theme for our grill we could simply make one up, but we are not obligated to conjure out of thin air. For more focused inspiration we could look to the intent of our object (cooking), or to knowledge about people who might want to experience or use that object. Because we are making a grill, and because we intend to sell it, we might distill marketing data about grill sales into a generic customer profile: male, mid-forties, overweight, meat-eating, stubble-faced, beer-can-crushing, etc. This profile, in turn, might suggest a variety of possible themes that could be used to harmonize our grill requirements.

If we chose ‘masculinity,’ for example, that one word and its attendant (real or imagined) traits would become both a filter and editorial point of focus. Each part on the grill could be shaped and machined to look burly. We could also comb through our usability and functionality requirements and make thematic choices there: eliminate a few conveniences to make the grill seem more rugged (and save on manufacturing costs); engineer the grill’s functionality to require more muscle (firm detents on the burner knobs, a heavy lid).

Ideally, at the end of the design and manufacturing process, our theme would be indistinguishable from the final product even though it informed every aspect of that product. We would not want someone looking at our grill to see our theme standing apart because that would mean we failed to integrate and harmonize our requirements. (In that case, again, we could have saved ourselves the trouble and simply put up a sign.)

Yet this is exactly what students are asked to do with stories. It should also be clear from this example that the easier it is for a student to identify a theme, the more likely it is that integration of theme into story was bungled. Ideally, integration of theme in a fictional work should be indistinguishable from the work itself, yet students are routinely told that they should be able to make such distinctions.

(It is possible for thematic obviousness to be a marketing goal in itself. A line of light-weight Cute Tools in various shades of pink would be a fairly obvious appeal to cultural norms of femininity. It is also possible for thematic obviousness to be an artistic goal, as demonstrated in the works of Andy Warhol. It is not, however, possible for thematic obviousness to be a storytelling goal because storytelling requires suspension of disbelief, where thematic obviousness destroys suspension of disbelief. Again: bad storytelling makes theme apparent while good storytelling makes it organic to the whole — yet students are routinely told that being able to identify a theme is central to being able to appreciate the best literature.)

Earlier I suggested one of the things we might do, short of harmonizing our imaginary products thematically, would be to paint them all the same. Readers steeped in marketing may have noticed that this projected our grill-making operation into the realm of branding. Not surprisingly, it’s possible to inject theme into branding, just as we used it to help organize the product requirements for our grill.

In fact, it could be argued that branding in its purest form equals theme at its most abstract. If our product line is widely varied — say, appealing to beer-can-crushing goons as well as more genteel shoppers — specific themes may actually thwart our objective (sales). Acting as both a filter and editorial tool, theme in the guise of branding can be used to unify elements of our business and products such as color, type style and logo design, which will in turn inform all resulting advertising in all media.

In instances where a product line is more focused, theme as branding can be extended to the look and feel of objects, and I think Apple is a good example of this. I can’t tell you what the theme of Apple’s products is — it may or may not have been articulated in-house — but when I see an Apple product I see it as thematically connected to other Apple products, which reinforces Apple’s branding. Even Apple’s preference for look and feel over usability is thematic: control systems that are unintuitive for novices ultimately provide a deeper sense of community and mastery as users becomes more familiar with them.

In these examples we can also see that theme as a technique owes nothing to sophisticated language, deeper meaning or valuation. Theme is quite happy to operate apart from concerns about worth, merit, the human condition or anything else we might want to saddle it with. This doesn’t mean we can’t employ theme in these ways, just that these are not inherent aspects of theme as a technique.

Which brings us back to storytelling and literature. As I said in my first post on theme, I gave up chasing art for something more useful to me as a writer: craft. By extension, viewing stories as machines that are made up of parts and subsystems which function to create specific intended effects means there’s little difference between our grill-making venture and any story I chose to write.

In the same way that theme can be used to edit and filter the requirements and components of our grill, we can employ theme in storytelling. But note: this does not alter theme in the least. Theme is not suddenly more important or powerful in fiction than it is when used in grill-making or branding. Theme is theme. It is a tool of creation and it is used in the same way in all instances: to filter and edit and harmonize.

For example, let’s say our grill business falters. You go back to what you were doing, I slink off to a shabby one-room hovel situated beside a polluted waterway. Night after cockroach-infested night goes by until the last lightbulb fails. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep for fear of being eaten. I am in agony.

Fortune smiles on me, however, when a typewriter and 500 sheets of 20-pound paper fall out of a passing truck. Seized by a desire I cannot name I set to work, determined to tell my story. Maybe it’s fiction, maybe it’s non-fiction, maybe it’s the stuff that guy and Oprah had to apologize for. It doesn’t matter. All I know is it’s ultimately going to be about one thing: pain.

That’s how complicated (not) theme is as a storytelling technique. Every word, every scene, every aspect of what happened in my document can be filtered and edited by one over-arching thematic point of reference — yet this says nothing about the subject matter or the facts or the events I might choose to portray.

(The previously-mentioned requirement of thematic proportionality doesn’t just apply to grills. If you are determined to write a story based around the theme that war is hell, you pretty much know going in that you’re going to have to show a lot of war and a lot of hell. War-is-hell short stories, to say nothing of war-is-hell flash fiction, usually end up about as convincing as a war-is-hell grill. Then again, if you’re going to include a lot of war and a lot of hell, to what extent does adopting war-is-hell as a theme impact the final product? The answer is that it doesn’t because you’re simply replicating the subject matter. Writing a war-is-hell story with a war-is-hell theme is as helpful as designing a grill with a grill theme. The first conclusion you should draw here is that theme should vary in some way from the object it relates to. The second conclusion you should draw is that asking a student to elicit the theme of a war-is-hell story is pointless.)

To continue the example, imagine that what I write gets published, pipelined into schools, force-fed to students, then analyzed by students and teachers alike. What are the odds that any of those down-steam analysts are going to figure out my theme, particularly if it varies from the subject matter? And to what extent is what I wrote even reducible to the original theme? Is my story, loaded with characters and events, really only pain? If so, why did I put all that other stuff in there? Why didn’t I just write PAIN on a single piece of paper? Or make PAIN posters and put them up all over town? More importantly, why didn’t I skip writing the story altogether and deal with my pain?

The question is: If pain is my theme, is pain the meaning of my story?

The answer is: No.

Pain as theme is simply one tool I use to shape the end product, just as character selection, setting, dialogue and every other aspect of storytelling should conspire to create a whole. The blindingly obvious proof of this is that I can neglect theme entirely as an author and still complete my project. I don’t even need pain as a theme in order to write about pain.

If you haven’t read Thomas McCormack’s essay, I urge you to do so. You’ll see clearly how theme as an analytical tool foisted on students is entirely misplaced, while theme as an editorial tool used by authors makes sense.

In the same way that a compass can tell you where you’re going, but not where I have been, theme seems only genuinely useful to the person employing it.

Mark Barrett has been a professional freelance writer and storyteller for over twenty years, and also works in the interactive entertainment industry.

Thinking Theme for Fun and Profit

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Today we continue Mark Barrett’s series on theme, which originally appeared on his Ditchwalk site and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. You can read the first entry in the series, ‘Axing Theme’, here.

Yesterday I posted an important excerpt from Thomas McCormack’s book, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist. In the excerpt, Mr. McCormack dismantled the way theme is commonly taught in schools and colleges, and I urged readers to forward his essay to others so that we might collectively stop this abuse.

Today I’m going to explain why this is not simply a goofy idea but actually important. By which I of course mean that it involves making money.

If you remember my post referencing the 90-9-1 Principle, you’ll recall that 90% of the people interested in anything are passive about their interest. They want to watch movies, not make them. They want to watch cooking shows, not cook anything. They want to read books, not write them.

In the publishing business, this 90% is variously known as The Audience or Our Customers. Yes, writers read other writers’ books, and editors read books other than the one’s they’re editing. But when it comes to the people who buy and read books and generally provide the medium with a return on investment, that’s the 90% who are not interested in writing books or even in analyzing books. They just want to read.

So it stands to reason that booksellers and book writers would want as many such readers as they can get, and they would want those readers predisposed to enjoy the process of reading, as opposed to, say, hating it. Which is why the way theme is often taught to students is a serious question, and one that deserves addressing.  

In fact, it seems to me there is no better time to look at every aspect of the publishing industry than right now, while it’s collapsing under its own weight. (As an aside, when was the last time that an established entertainment medium went through a rebirth akin to what’s happening in publishing? The music business is certainly being transformed by the internet in similar ways — and faster — but revolutions in the music biz are common: wire recordings to vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3 to whatever. In publishing you have the printing press…27 million years of human history in which nothing changes [give or take]…then the internet.)

I understand that everyone is in a hurry to discover the next big bandwagon, but there are some serious structural problems with the book business. One of them is the fact that of all the entertainment mediums in existence, no audience gets hassled more than people who read books. And all that hassling — at all levels — drives people who might otherwise enjoy books to look for alternatives like fast food, heroin, overthrowing the government and watching television.

The whole thing starts in grade school. Not in individual homes (unless your parents are snobs), but in the educational system that kids encounter across the entire country. Some teachers, administrators and librarians believe that children should read specific material so they will be properly educated. Others believe that children should be encouraged to follow their passions, because promoting and preserving a life-long interest in learning and knowledge is critical to the long-term health and welfare of that student.

These battles rage up to and through high school, and there are valid points on both sides. You can’t have everyone reading comic books and nobody reading about global events and history: that leads to stupidity. But you also can’t force everyone to read Shakespeare and Chaucer and allow no one to read popular fiction because that leads to hating school and hating reading. (My own personal belief is that anyone who does anything to discourage a student from reading anything should be shot.)

Somewhere in late junior high or high school, a new wrinkle is added to this tug of war between being educated and being interested. At some point a teacher assigns a book report which is not only about what happens in a book, or about who wrote the book and when, or even about how that book fits into the history of books. At some point someone asks what a given book means.

And this is where the real trouble begins. Because moments earlier each student was thinking, “Well, I enjoyed this book,” or, “Gosh, this book is super stupid,” and all of those reactions were honest if perhaps also youthful and maybe even uninformed. But now something different is in play. First, there’s the possibility that there is a right answer, meaning the student can be wrong. Second, this new meaning may have nothing to do with emotion and existence, “It made me feel cold,” and everything with thinking and abstraction: “It made me wonder about global warming.” Third, the reader’s subjective experience and all that went with it is now being superseded by objective meaning as a point of educational focus.

As Thomas McCormack notes: the student is now being asked to perform an autopsy, rather than being asked to understand a living being:

The remaining counts in the indictment—that the professors’ “theme” hunt misleads the student about, indeed positively shields him from, a good book’s best reward—is something that would be corroborated by many adults looking back on their school days. Picture the student, told that he must derive an abstract generality that “accounts for” and “explains” all the major details of a story. He figuratively dons his white clinician’s smock and knuckles down to his grim task. He lays the tale out on a slab and begins his joyless dissections—not in search of its beauty of feature, grace of movement, charm of voice, vitality of nature, but in search of its ‘idea’; in search not of its feeling but of its ‘statement’; not of what it does, but of what it ‘says’.

When he has finished his examination, he then must write up his report, a tricky business requiring that all the x’s, y’s, and z’s be encompassed in the algebraic formula. In the end it no more conveys the meaning of what’s on the slab than the coroner’s report that starts, “A well-nourished Caucasian female of one hundred eighteen pounds, aged between twenty-five and thirty . . . ”

Again, if the 90-9-1 Principle is even remotely accurate, then 90% of the people who are being subjected to this kind of teaching have no interest in going on to become English majors or professors or authors. If they enjoy reading at all, they enjoy it as a reader. Yet during much of their ride on the educational conveyor belt these readers are being bombarded with the idea that there’s more to writing that what you get out of it — particularly if what you get out of it is enjoyment. Writing is IMPORTANT and MEANINGFUL and other big words that don’t get hung on movies and music and TV and video games until you’re in college and decide you want to do that to yourself.

Worse, writing has the fewest (meaning none) bells-and-whistles of any medium. It’s got nothing going for it other than content, while at the same time the one thing the educational system seems determined to do is make sure that content is not fun. Imagine how much less enjoyment kids would have playing video games if they had to anatomize the theme of a game in an MLA-certified five-page paper. This is the minefield the publishing audience must navigate until they grow into adults with free time and disposable income, at which point a certain percentage of them decide to blow that time and money on anything and everything other than books.

And yet….even as we admit that books are inherently boring as objects, we also know that you get things from books that you can’t get anywhere else. Catch-22 comes to mind — and particularly so given how impossible it would be to turn it into anything else even if you set your mind to it. The depth, complexity, breadth, richness and power of a good novel or biography destroys everything in its path.

Amazingly, the necessary skill to access a book is taught to most children before they are taught anything else, yet somehow swaths of kids ultimately decide that reading for entertainment isn’t for them. I wonder why that happens?

The movie business faces none of this. Television, unarguably the greatest brain-destroying invention since the cudgel, gets little notice in school, even as legions of marketing weasels plot daily how to inject corporate brand loyalties into the minds of three-year-olds. Music is subjected to none of this: in fact it’s a relief to students who have to study music precisely because no one makes them think it to death. Interactive entertainment doesn’t even exist on the curriculum radar: it’s all fun.

My point here is that our audience — the 90% who are simply interested in reading books — is inevitably smaller than it should be because of this intellectual gauntlet. If this were any old time I wouldn’t dare to dream of changing the status quo. But this isn’t any old time: it’s a pivotal time because the status quo is already changing. Today we have an opportunity to go beyond transformation for its own sake to making changes we should have made a long time ago. Because of the way the internet is impacting publishing, we have an opportunity to revisit the entire evolutionary process by which itty-bitty babies become book-reading kids become book-buying adults become book-buying parents.

If readers are always important then they’re even more important when the publishing industry is hurting. Every reader is one more customer that we can satisfy or disappoint. Richard Nash gets it. It’s all about the readers, and I don’t mean the damn devices.

Yes, what I’m talking about would be a revolution. But the internet is a revolution. Teachers are inevitably going to have to adapt to new technology and writing that uses that technology, so we should be trying to help them and their students avoid fumbling live grenades like theme if they haven’t been trained in demolitions. No child should go to school and learn that reading sucks. Chemistry can suck. Or biology. Or gym class for all I care. But not reading.

That’s why I’m asking you to think about theme and the damage that it’s doing to our readers. I mean, our customers.

Mark Barrett has been a professional freelance writer and storyteller for over twenty years, and also works in the interactive entertainment industry.

Twitter Tips From My Tweeps

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This post, from Alice Pope, originally appeared on her Alice’s CWIM Blog on 10/19/09.

Last week I was working on an article on Twitter for the SCBWI Bulletin and asked my Twitter followers to answer this question:
 

@alicepope: I’m writing an article on Twitter (aimed at writers and illustrators). What’s your best Twitter tip (in 140 characters or less, of course)?

In a matter of minutes my question had been retweeted several times and I’d gotten more than a dozen tips (from writers, editors, and other publishing professionals) which you’ll find below. This served as a great demonstration of how one’s Twitter community can be useful. I suggest you follow each of the wise tweeps who replied to me—and follow their advice as well.
 

  • @HeatherMcCorkle: Twitter tip: Never write anything you don’t want to read on the front page of the newspaper. Could hurt your career later!
     
  • @aliciapadron: tweet how you like to be tweeted
     
  • @GirlsSentAway: Follow 80/20 rule: 80% professional tweets, 20% to show your personality. Interact.
     
  • @EyeOnFlux: Avoid TMI (overly personal information). This begs the question: what DO most people use their Twitter accounts for? Professional? Personal? Should the two mix?
     
  • @glecharles: Be relevant, always add value and remember, it’s SOCIAL media, not just an alternative RSS feed.
     
  • @loniedwards: Tip: Download an add-on like tweetdeck to help sort. Especially during kidlit chats!
     
  • @KateMessner: Just aim to be a friendly, helpful human being online. It’s much better self-promotion than shouting about your book.
     
  • @Lynne_Griffin: I found this helpful “RT @EliseBlackwell @thefictiondesk “Be yourself, not your book.”
     
  • @RuthSpiro: My tip: Connect w/folks OUTSIDE the writing/publishing world; they don’t encounter authors daily, and think you’re really cool!
     
  • @wendy_mc: If you want your funny stuff to be retweeted, shorter tweets are better (leave room for your name)
     
  • @BrianKlems: Be honest in what you post, be it personal or promotional. If you wouldn’t read it, don’t post it.
     

Read the rest of the post, which features many more Twitter tips, on Alice’s CWIM Blog.

Ransom Stephens on The God Patent and the Future of Publishing

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This post, from Henry Baum, originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 7/28/09.

Ransom Stephens has written one of the best assessments of the future of publishing that you’re likely to read (found via Pod People).  Called Booking the Future, it needs to be read – more than once.  Here we talk about the ideas put forth in the article and the success of his digitally-published novel, The God Patent, which basically proves the thesis of his essay: the future of publishing is going to look very different than it does today. 

It will have many elements of self-publishing writ large.  As he says, “Though the role of publishing has not changed – connect readers to writers – the revolution will not be led by an established publisher.” The writers who are shunned by some in the lit business are actually the innovators.  Publishing is about to go very digital.

Self-Publishing Review: Your book, The God Patent, has 7200 reads and growing. How did that happen? What’s it take to become a Scribd phenomenon? Did you promote the book a lot or did it just sort of happen?

Ransom Stephens: It kinda blows me away, I’m not sure how it happened.

The whole problem is signal to noise – having your signal emerge from the noise. When I got word that “The iTunes for books” was about to open, it seemed like an opportunity to get above the noise. I didn’t know when it would happen and I didn’t know who would do it. I got everything ready and waited. Then that first day came, May 18, and I jumped on.

I’ve promoted the book pretty much the same way I would a book in print. I’ve handed out 1000 bookmarks at bookstores and literary events and set them in obvious spots where people use computers. I didn’t catch the irony of handing out bookmarks for an ebook until I was introduced at a reading and the MC said that my bookmarks must require understanding of quantum physics to make them work with the scribd e-ink.

I think the bookmarks were a waste of money. The trick with an e-book is to get links in front of people. I used email. By the end of the month, I’ll have sent email to everyone who I’ve ever sent email to or received email from (sans spammers), about 2000 people. A lot of my friends have forwarded my emails to their friends and, I think this is really the key: there are a few people who flat out LOVE my book and they are the best salespeople. They quote it on Facebook, put links all over and stuff. That’s gratifying. And it was weird when my neighbor asked me detailed questions about The God Patent. It’s set in the town where I live, and she had a lot of questions about what was modeled after what and that sort of thing.

As a public speaker, I’ve been able to “capitalize on the bad economy” by giving speeches to mainstream audiences, sometimes even for free (since there is so little work out there right now), based on topics and themes in The God Patent. For example, the woman physicist in the book, Emmy Nutter, is based on the Emmy Noether, the Einstein contemporary who I think made the greatest contribution to mathematical physics of anyone. Ever. I have a speech titled “The Fabric of Reality” that focuses on her work that I’ve given to Rotary Clubs, some new-age groups, a science café, and have pumped up The God Patent at each one.

Ultimately though, I don’t see how anything I’ve done can account for the success The God Patent has experienced at Scribd.

SPR: Do you think posting work online changes how writers approach the work. Did you write your book thinking about how the book would work on screen with the glare of a monitor, and not on paper? If not, would you approach your next book differently keeping the Scribd audience in mind?

 

Read the rest of the post on Self-Publishing Review.

Publishing Is A Community Service

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This is a cross-posting from Guy LeCharles Gonzalez‘ Loudpoet site.

Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a tecnology is entirely netural… Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing happening in publishing these days, both by those struggling to find solutions to the challenges the industry faces, and by various Joker-pundits who apparently “just want to see the world burn.” Demagogues and idealogues love the spotlight, and attention-seeking media outlets happily provide them a stage to stoke faux controversies over what’s not being done, or is being done wrong, yelling loudly about the inevitable end of publishing as we know it!

Personally, I’m pretty confident that the end is not near; in fact, I’m very optimistic that new generations of readers will continue to be served by ambitious authors, passionate publishers, and brazen booksellers for many years to come. The individual players and channels may will change, of course, but that’s neither new nor a bad thing.

Change is good, inevitable, and in publishing, very necessary.

For all the talk of publishing’s supposedly imminent demise, there are far too many passionate people working in and around the industry, at every level, to let that happen. And whether they realize it or not, it doesn’t matter if they’re working for one of the major publishers or an independent press, in senior management or as an editor, author or bookseller — there’s a wide and fertile common ground we all share and it’s best represented by the community we all serve: the readers.

Ultimately, it’s readers’ changing habits that are driving the fundamental changes in the publishing industry – everything from the types of books they’re reading to the formats they prefer reading them in – and as a result, it’s the current business model of most publishers that’s under stress, not the community service of publishing itself.

I’m in Frankfurt this week for Tools of Change and the Book Fair, and I’m particularly excited about the opportunity to see Cory Doctorow, Richard Nash, Dominique Raccah, and the Pecha Kucha presentations at the former; and to get a glimpse of the global publishing community, including this year’s guest of honor, China, at the latter. I’m also here on behalf of Digital Book World, meeting some of our Advisory Board and sponsors, and getting feedback on the exciting program we’ve put together for the event in January.

Among the hot publishing topics of the moment, the eBook debate is perhaps the most torrid, and a particularly annoying one when it’s treated like a zero-sum game — Print vs. eBooks in a Battle to the Death! Death!! DEATH!!! It’s also fraught with larger implications for both publishers and authors alike that too many pundits willfully overlook (while pushing their own self-serving agendas), like DRM, international rights, and unequal access to information and technology.

Publishers are also facing the difficult question of justifying their role in the supply chain when the Internet has cracked the playing field wide open, making verticality a more viable model than it’s ever been, and enabling savvy authors and small presses to outmaneuver their larger, more established competitors.

On the flight over I caught up on some reading, a one-two punch of the July/August issue of the Harvard Business Review, and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman’s must-read classic could easily have been written in 2009 about the current Internet era; many of his critiques of television apply doubly today, especially with regards to social media, and there are many interesting parallels to be made in the current “battle” of print vs. eBooks.

HBR’s “Managing in the New World” special issue offered a thorough and insightful look at what’s changed and what needs to change for businesses to survive in 2010 and beyond, noting that, “An organization that depends solely on its senior managers to deal with the challenges risks failure.”

Coupled with that statement, perhaps the most relevant article in the issue is Henry Mitzenberg’s “Rebuilding Companies as Communities“, which argues that in order to succeed in the future, companies have to become places “where people are committed to one another and their enterprise.”

Leadership at the center. A robust community requires a form of leadership quite different from the models that have it driving transformation from the top. Community leaders see themselves as being in the center, reaching out rather than down. They facilitate change, recognizing that much of it must be driven by others.

This week, I’ll be giving a lot of thought to what I can do to help move the industry forward in a community-centric direction, and I already have a few intriguing ideas that will unfold over the coming months.

What are some of the things you’re doing from your vantage point to serve the publishing industry’s community of readers?

My Online Booksbyfay Bookstore

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I’m proud to announce that I now have my very own Online Bookstore with a paypal account. Putting together a website is not fast or easy. Not every website I checked out would let me sell products. The website I have on tripod wouldn’t come up for those who tried to find me. Most of the time, I had trouble getting into the site. So recently I explored other websites, thinking that I would have to have one for personal and another for business. The website I found will allow me to do both in one place. So far I am able to gain access to the site. If readers of this blog can’t gain entry let me know.

 

 

The bookstore comes up on the first page with paypal buttons under each book and a description along side the book picture. Other pages contain my bio and favorite links, my accomplishments, an event calendar and hit counter, a blog and Book event pictures which will change from time to time. Do I have this website perfect? No, it needs work and picture will change from time to time. I thrilled that I now have my book inventory available to purchase.

At the very top, I made sure to include that I am a member of MyEntre.net’s Iowa Entrepreneuers and Small Business Owners Group. For me, that lends proof to the fact that I am who I say I am. A small, honest business owner. Besides, I’m proud to say I’m a member.

Hopefully, my site shows buyers a self published author that writes the kind of books she reads – wholesome, heartwarming, humorous, entertaining, suspenseful, exciting and hard to put down until the end. I stated that not one of my books will be rated X or graphically violent. Any member of the family can read them if the books are to their liking. In September, a middle school girl ask her mother to buy my Amish book – A Promise Is A Promise – for her. After talking to me, the girl’s mother bought the book. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear when the girl was done reading the book, the mother read it, too.

　

　

　

　

 

Http://www.booksbyfaybookstore.weebly.com

The Smoking Cannonball

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This post, from the 3G1B collective (Dennis Haritou, Jason Rice, Jonathan Evison and Jason Chambers), originally appeared on Three Guys One Book on 10/19/09.

3G1B has an ongoing conversation, the subject of which: "what the hell is going to happen to publishing in the future?" disturbs us all. This week we have invited Craig Nova to tell us what he thinks. Craig is the award winning author of 12 novels. His new novel, The Informer, will be released in January 2010.

CN: the first thing that comes to mind when I consider writers and the state of publishing is one of those science fiction movies from the fifties, you know, where some light is seen in the sky and then something like a smoking bowling ball lands someplace and then a couple of geeks get out of a pickup truck. They find a stick and poke the smoking bowling ball and say, "Welcome to California." Then a cobra shaped thing comes out and wastes the shit out of them with a death ray.

So, I think we are in the smoking bowling ball stage. Something has landed and we don’t know what it is. The best we can do is scratch our head and poke it with a stick.

By this I mean, we haven’t come to terms with the digital age, and the impact that this is going to have on publishing. And while it would be easy to say that we are only talking about Kindle, and books in digitized form, it is far, far more ominous than that. Ask an ex-independent book store owner about the impact of online shopping, which seemed pretty innocent in the beginning.

For instance, what about pricing and royalties? For some reason, a Kindle book is being priced at $9.99. Now, for writers there is a big difference between a ten percent royalty on a book of $25 and one at this price. Just as this might mean the end, altogether, of book stores. The economics seem to be driving it that way (after all, you can avoid cutting down a lot of trees, although I guess you still have to make plastic, but only once). So, that’s the simple part.

But it’s not that simple, if a writer’s chance of making a living, already precarious, is reduced even more. The downward pressure on a writer’s livelihood is a serious matter and I think writers are scared.

Where it gets complicated, and where writers and I would imagine publishers feel doubly uncomfortable is that if you don’t need books, that is physical items on a shelf, maybe you don’t need publishers. If the technology is there to make a book suitable for Kindle, and anyone can set up a website to sell it, and if there were some other web based method of letting people know about books (say this very website), where does the publisher fit?

Where, by the way, does an editor fit?

Is this the way it’s going to go?

And beyond that, will it be like the newspaper business, where more and more they are giving away content. Will writers have to do that, too, that is give away large pieces of a book to try to get people to read the last half. And if that is the case, what impact will that have on the way books are written?

Please understand: I am not saying I think this is the way things are going to go, but that this is the way one thinks when poking at that smoking bowling ball and seeing that sleek, metallic cobra head come out with that little hot spot there in front that begins to glow a little more intensely….

That’s one thing.

Another is seemingly more mundane, but in fact, more realistic. That is, what is happening to the American novel or novels altogether.

Read the rest of the post on Three Guys One Book.

Publish A Book With Your Literary Tweets

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This post, from Polish author Nick Name, originally appeared on his Password Incorrect site on 10/15/09, and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Have you ever thought of making an e-book with your literary tweets? If you still have doubts, consider this: you can easily do it yourself, you can do it without any cost, and you can use the book as a promotional tool.

A free cover for your Twitter bookHere are some tips based on my personal experience. Just make sure you’ve got a large coffee ready – and make your book happen!

How to collect content?

Twitter search is currently showing results from 9 recent days. Nobody will find your fantastic tweet if it’s 10 days old. 10 days means  “gone”.

It might be difficult even for you to collect your own Twitter stream. And here is a rescue: Tweetbook. It’s a wonderful web service, where you can make a pdf or xml file with your tweets (up to 3200). Having all of them in one editable document will make it really easy to select the golden ones – those you want in your book.

Tip: if you want to have a constant access to your tweets, you can subscribe to your Twitter profile’s feed. From now on all the updates will be collected in your RSS reader.

Where to publish?

There are a few really wonderful sites where authors can self-publish in addition to Smashwords or Manybooks. Feedbooks is my favourite one. Here is why:

:. creating a book is extremely easy. Just copy and paste a piece of text into blog-like fields. A very useful feature is the ability to structure a book on different levels: parts, chapters, sections. If you do so, the table of contents is clickable afterwards, which makes it easy to navigate through the book. This is a unique feature, I didn’t find it anywhere else

:. Feedbooks fully supports mobile reading. Major formats are ePub and mobi, which make a book friendly for reading on cellphones and eReaders. Having in mind that Twitter is being consumed mostly from the mobile web, it’s good to be there

:. apart from public domain books, there is a quickly growing section of original self-published books. Recently a new book list has started, 140 characters, with Twitter-based fiction. Just make sure you include “Twitter” as a tag for your book, and you’ll surely find yourself on the list.

What about a cover?

For many authors the book cover seems to be a killing problem. They can’t design it themselves, they don’t know any designer who would do it for free, and they’re afraid to ask. Well, there are at least three ways to deal with that:

:. every site for self-publishers shows a default cover. At Feedbooks there is additionally a title and author’s name shown on a cover, which is a really nice feature

:. you can choose from a collection of free covers I’ve prepared for self-published Twitter authors like myself

:. as soon as you have a selection of tweets made, you can use the brilliant Wordle word cloud generator to make a cover design for you. Read here how to do that.

How to benefit from a book?

As soon as your book is published, you can use it for promotional activities:

:. in addition to your current literary tweets, you can send a link to your book from time to time

:. show a book on your blog; you’re a published author, let everybody know it

:. share your book on other platforms, let it appear in as many places as possible. It’s a finished and lasting work, link to it from your profile on Posterous, Bebo, LiveJournal, even if you don’t use them frequently

:. if you want to try reaching a book agent or a publisher, having a published book is an asset. Sending an e-mail with a book attached (f.e. in pdf format) makes it more probable to draw attention

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: there’s a variance of opinion on this, but in the U.S. at least, most agents don’t want to receive unsolicited attachments of full manuscripts. However, you can always use your Twitter book to help build your readership and expand your author platform by sharing the book—or just excerpts from it—on your author website or blog]

:. your book is at the same time an easily accessible archive of your best tweets. Send them again, from time to time, there might be people who haven’t yet discovered how good you are. 

Note: if you’ve found this post useful, I would be grateful if you could just download my Twitter-fiction book, share it with your friends and leave a comment.