Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

Self-Publishing Basics: The Title Page

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In an earlier post about the parts of a book, I briefly discussed the title page:

Title page—Announces the title, subtitle, author and publisher of the book. Other information that may be found on the title page can include the publisher’s location, the year of publication, or descriptive text about the book. Illustrations are also common on title pages.

But title pages are more than a dry listing of facts. They are commonly the most decorative display page in a book, and are often used as the only location really suitable for expressions of design and graphics, since the rest of the book is devoted to transmitting the thoughts of the author.

Some consider the title page one of the least important parts of the frontmatter. This may be because the first printed books did not have title pages. Typically, the text would begin on the first page, and books were identified by their first words, rather than by a separate title.

Here are elements that are found on the title page:

  • Full title of the book
  • Subtitle, if any
  • Author’s name
  • Editor’s name, in the case of anthologies or compilations
  • Translator’s name, for works originally in a different language
  • Illustrator or photographer’s name, for illustrated books
  • Number of the edition, in the case of revised editions
  • Series notice, if part of a series
  • Name and location of publisher
  • Year of publication

 

Setting the tone for the book

Stay - by Moriah JovanBut title pages have often been the canvas on which authors and book designers have painted a picture of what is to come in the body of the work. Here’s a title page from Mariah Jovan’s Stay, designed by the author (click on the image to enlarge).

Here we see all the required elements of title, author, note that the work is part of a series, publisher name and location. In addition, the typography helps to tie the cover and the interior together. The designer has also given this page a subtle resonance with the cover by “ghosting” the image of the buildings in the background. This lends it a very atmospheric quality, like a fine perfume.

Following it is a different style of title page, from the Chicago Manual of Style. This is a lovely and modern typographic design that emphasizes the fact that the Manual is updated regularly (click on the image to enlarge).

Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Ed.

All the same elements are present, but used in a completely different way. The large number “15″ in the background is critical to regular users of the Chicago Manual, since the most recent version is usually preferred. This allows the book to be instantly identified as the 15th edition.

It’s Your Title Page—Make the Most of It

I’m going to collect some title pages from different eras and different design philosophies for a future post. But you can see already that, when it comes to title pages, you have a lot of leeway for creativity. If you use the same type fonts that are used for the title on the cover, and the text of the interior, you will help integrate the various parts of the book, making for a more harmonious reading experience.

But if you’ve got illustrations, artwork for your cover, or an idea of a bold typographic design, this is the place to use it.

Takeaway: As long as your title page conveys basic and necessary information, it can be an opportunity to set a visual tone for your book. Be creative.

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer site.

How to Sell More Books on Amazon by Increasing Your Book's Visibility

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A good way to sell more books on Amazon is to increase your book’s visibility in the Amazon.com search results.

Amazon customers typically search for books by author, title, or keyword. Like search engines, Amazon uses several criteria in deciding which products to display on the search results page and in what order to display them. Popularity (the number of books already sold on Amazon) and how well the book matches the keywords are major factors in determining the results of keyword searches.

The more books you sell on Amazon, the more books you will sell in the future, because your book will appear higher in the search results. In addition, many customers assume that the best-selling book must be the best one on the topic.

One way to increase your book’s popularity, and therefore its search results placement, is to direct all of your online book orders to Amazon.com rather than offering links to several online bookstores or selling directly to consumers.

It’s also important to make sure your book matches popular search terms entered by customers. If your book is not yet published, you can add important keywords to the book’s title and subtitle. Some publishers use long subtitles in order to pack in as many keywords as possible.

To capitalize on searches for keywords not contained in your title and subtitle, enter important keywords into Amazon’s Search Tag feature.  About halfway down your book’s page on Amazon, look for " Tags Customers Associate with This Product." You can add a check mark next to existing tags and add new tags by entering keywords in the little box below.
 
You can’t use keywords that already appear in Amazon’s search function, such as the book title or author name. Word order matters, so create different search tags with variations on your most important keywords. After you enter a keyword, you must to tell Amazon why you think the book should be indexed under that particular term.

Amazon staff members approve Search Tags, so make sure your tag and your explanation are relevant and don’t sound like a sales pitch. It’s best to use the keyword phrase within your explanation. You can personally submit up to ten search terms for you book. If you have additional search terms to enter, ask a colleague to enter some for you.

Another way to increase your popularity on Amazon.com is do a virtual book tour or an "Amazon best-seller campaign," designed to push up your Amazon sales rank by generating a large number of orders on a single day.

There are a number of other ways to sell more books on Amazon, including getting lots of good book reviews on Amazon, writing reviews of other related books, participating in the Look Inside program, enhancing your book description, participating in Amazon forums for your book’s topic, and creating Listmania lists and So You’d Like To guides.
 
For a more in-depth look at how to sell more books on Amazon, I recommend reading Aiming at Amazon, by Aaron Shepard.

Dana Lynn Smith is a book marketing coach and author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides. For more tips, follow @BookMarketer on Twitter, visit Dana’s blog at www.TheSavvyBookMarketer.com , and get a copy of the Top Book Marketing Tips ebook when you sign up for her free newsletter at www.BookMarketingNewsletter.com.

 

What You Steal

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The Premise
A month ago I engaged in an interesting conversation with Luke Bergeron on his blog, mispeled.net, about copyright law. My interest was prompted in large part by Luke’s incisive generational examination of the question of piracy.

Here’s how Luke initially framed the issue:

The real issue goes beyond digital piracy to copyright itself. Now, I don’t believe that digital file sharing, even of copyrighted materials, is theft. That’s probably a generational thing, but we’re gonna do our best to suss out as much meaning as possible. Keep in mind, this entry is a fluid conversation, so comment if you wanna participate.

So, theft seems to me like it is inherently defined by the taking of something from someone else, depriving them of it. Theft is a physical concept, based on a starvation economy, that there is a finite amount of resources to go around, and possessing resources means someone else will not possess them.

Last week I read a post on The Millions called Confessions of a Book Pirate. On the subject of piracy the confessor had this to say:

In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers.

Two days ago I read a post from Marian Schembari on Digital Book World, called
A Gen Y Reaction to Macmillan’s Piracy Plan. In her comprehensive rant, Marian had this to say about piracy:

I’m not condoning piracy (sort of), but if major publishers are only going to look at the “legal” side of things and spend precious time and money fighting the inevitable, they are going to crash and burn.

I’m poor, I understand technology, and I guarantee I can find any book online, for free, in 10 minutes or less. You can delete and sue all you want, but at the end of the day the internet is a wide and limitless place, meaning it’s a waste of time, money and energy to fight it.

In response to Marian’s post, Debbie Stier of HarperStudio/HarperCollins wrote a post on her company blog, congratulating Marian for stating her overall case regarding Macmillan, and for giving insight into the Gen Y perspective.

Here’s the bottom line for me — whether you agree or not with Marian Schembari’s views on piracy, she has given us a glimpse into the psyche of a Gen Y reader. I appreciate her honesty. I believe this is a gift. I think we should listen.

I agree with Debbie. We should listen. But then we should reply.  

The Response
To do any less is to treat Marian and Gen Y and Luke and anyone else who shares their views about piracy and content theft with condescension. We don’t pat seasoned peers on the head for showing us that they can put sentences together. We read those sentences, unpack them, take them apart — even hack them to bloody pieces — to see if they hold up.

Debbie’s right that it took courage for Marian to express her opinion, but the fact that Marian can express an opinion is not what’s important. It’s the resulting process of engagement — the conversation that takes place following the assertion of that opinion — that matters. And here I mean to single out not Gen Y but Gen X and the Baby Boom generation. Replacing wisdom and knowledge with the measuring of intelligence and facts may facilitate competition, but we lose something in that egocentric trade. While it’s true that some lessons have to be learned by each individual in each generation, it’s not true of all lessons. More importantly, it’s not true of the process of critical thinking itself, where critical thought can compound over time to produce generational benefits. (See also: penicillin; democracy.)

I also don’t think anyone should capitulate to generational opinion simply because a certain percentage of any generation has its fingers in its ears. If that was the right course of action we’d still have segregation in this country. It’s true that a certain percentage of every generation really does want to steal simply for the sake of stealing, but that doesn’t mean we should throw Marian and Luke or anyone else out with the Gen Y bathwater. What we should do is engage in a conversation so we can pass on the benefit of whatever meager wisdom we’ve accrued, while also testing our own assumptions. What’s happening with digital content is new in a very real way, which means we all need to talk this through.

I’ve stated my views on the question of piracy and content theft here and here. I’ve made the case that stealing is stealing: if it’s not yours, and it’s not being given away free, and you end up with it, then you stole it — and that’s true whether it’s a physical object, a digital file, or an idea.

But I also understand that it’s hard to make this case to Gen Y when massive corporations like Google are attempting to steal copyright authority from millions of authors covered by existing law. If Google can simply make a deal with another group (the Authors Guild) which obligates all authors under copyright to opt out of that deal, why can’t Marian make a deal with Luke to borrow his entire CD collection — and implicitly require the recording artists to opt out by imposing effective DRM? More to the point, is Google actually stealing anything when they scan a book and make it available online? Shouldn’t we actually applaud Sergey Brin for preserving the cultural history of Earth from fire and flood?

And speaking of the Amazon/Macmillan knife fight this past weekend, wasn’t Amazon actually stealing control of Macmillan’s products by selling those products at a price lower than Macmillan wanted? And even if they were, wasn’t that good for consumers? Didn’t it make books cheap?

The Conversation
My point here is that making Marian and Luke and Gen Y feel great about themselves because they can walk and chew gum at the same time congratulates them for meeting an absurdly low bar. These are serious people expression serious ideas and opinions. What they want is to be taken seriously, and to demonstrate the ability to think things through, and we should want that for them as well.

Look again at the conversation I had with Luke on his site. Look at the seriousness with which he engaged on the issues. That’s somebody who wants to know, and that’s someone who should be part of this conversation because in ten years Luke may be writing the books our grandchildren read. Or he may be setting public policy. Or leading a fight against a critical erosion of civil rights.

Why should Boomers and Gen Xer’s take the time to do this? Well, if you’re a consumer or consumer advocate, you can help Marian and Luke see that there are useful arguments against DRM that do not excuse theft or piracy as a cultural or generational right. Likewise, if you’re in publishing you can help Marian and Luke see that even though someone like Cory Doctorow is passionate about anti-DRM politics, his reasoning is a fraud*.

All of which would mean we could get on with the more important matter of finding a workable solution to the problems of piracy and DRM, as well as address the massive generational transition that is currently clouding both of those issues. I want Marian and Luke not simply to be assertive and confident, I want them to be smart and right and to prove to me that they’re right. I want them, in ten or twenty years, to be able to take apart the charlatans they run across, for their own benefit, for my benefit, and for their benefit of society. But they’re not going to be able to do that if we refuse to engage them on the merits of their ideas.

The Question
In the DRM debate the obvious point we need to engage on is the premise stated throughout the above quotes: that copying digital content is not stealing. If Gen Y is wrong, it needs to be proven through argument. If they’re right, the same requirement holds. It’s not enough to just say that theft is inevitable or that it can’t be stopped any more than it’s enough to say that it’s immoral and wrong. Both sides have to argue the case on the merits.

The reason this is important is precisely because these issues have never been dealt with before. Ownership questions regarding digital content and theft are so new as to be without precedent. While applicable laws have been added to the books, those laws, like all new laws, are an opening salvo in what will probably be a long-running legal debate. As with laws that used to exploit or abuse members of minority groups, new laws covering digital content may simply be an attempt by established forces to stop right from trumping wrong. Then again, they may actually protect individual rights and be good for society as a whole.

I think Marian and Luke are interested in being part of the answer to these questions. I don’t think they’re asking for a free pass. When they ask what is being stolen if someone takes possession of a copy of a digital file, they’re asking a serious question. And to their credit I think it’s exactly the right question to ask.

We all agree that stealing a can of beans from a grocery store is theft, for two reasons. First, there’s a can of bean missing from the store. Second, we have a can of beans in our hands that we didn’t pay for. On the other hand, when we copy a digital file the original file is still there, and we don’t actually have a new object in our possession. So what’s actually being stolen?

The problem here is that asking what is being stolen almost compels a response that describes a physical object. It’s the same problem you run into if you try to define right and wrong by asking if anyone got hurt. It implies physical injury or physical loss, yet I think we all agree that PTSD or emotional trauma can be as damaging as a broken arm. Just as someone can be hurt emotionally, economically and in ways other than through physical injury to the body, the theft of digital content may involve stealing things that are not physical objects.

To see why, let’s look at two situations in which, as with digital content, we see no physical object being appropriated. Maybe by looking at non-digital examples we can gain some insight into what a person is being deprived of if we avail ourselves of a copy of their digital content.

First, let’s say you live in an apartment complex. Across the hall your retrograde neighbor still has the local newspaper delivered each morning. You also know that he sleeps until noon. If you get up each morning and take his paper into your house, read it, then carefully reassemble it and put it back in front of his door, was anything stolen?

Second, let’s say you’re a huge RHCP fan. You know they’re playing at a nearby venue, but you don’t have the money for tickets. You gripe to a friend, who says he knows how to sneak in without having to pay. The concert takes place as scheduled, nothing is different except that you and your friend are there. Was anything stolen?

The answer in the first example is that you stole a service you didn’t pay for. The people who made the newspaper and delivered it were paid by your neighbor to make the contents of that paper available to him on a certain schedule. Even though you didn’t disrupt that deal, you profited yourself by not having to pay for delivery. In doing so you not only saved yourself money, you also denied the creators of the paper the right to control their content in a way that they determined, and that’s true even if you would not otherwise have paid to read the paper yourself.

In the second example you stole an experience. Everyone around you had to pay for that experience, but you got it free. You didn’t alter the experience by stealing it, and you didn’t leave with anything in your hand, but in the same way that you denied the newspaper creators the right to control their product, you denied the band the right to control the experience it created.

Are these examples convincing? Maybe, but maybe not. If the assumption is, as Luke first stated, that only objects can be stolen, then neither of these examples holds any weight precisely because they don’t involve the theft of objects. But I think there might be another way to show that they do involve theft.

As is usually the case when downloading digital content, in neither of these instances did you ask anyone for permission first. You had the social approval of your friend when you sneaked into the venue — which is analogous to the social approval provided by content pirates themselves — but you didn’t call the manager of the venue or the band’s manager and ask permission to sneak in, just as you didn’t call your neighbor or the newspaper and ask if it was okay to read the paper without paying for it.

The reason you didn’t do this is because you knew that they would mind, even if you yourself are convinced that you’re not doing anything wrong. Free newspapers and free concerts are announced as such: that’s how you know they’re free. Things that have prices attached to them, whether you agree with those prices or not, are not free. You can steal them — meaning you acquire them at no cost — but you can’t take them and not pay for them and then say you didn’t steal them any more than you can walk into a store filled with physical objects and declare them all free.

And you know this. And you know you know this. And I know you know this.

My Answer
Which means we’re not only having a conversation about theft, we’re also having a conversation about power. And that’s maybe the most important part of Marian’s post. It’s her declaration that Gen Y can’t be stopped, and she may well be right. At least, I don’t think anyone outside Gen Y can convince Gen Y not to strip the countryside bare.

What I am hopeful of is that Gen Y itself may recognize that there is a long-term cost to redefining content theft as legal, ethical, or even socially acceptable behavior. I’m also hopeful that it will ultimately be members of Gen Y who make this case to their peers. But none of that is going to happen (or happen soon) if we don’t engage the issue first. Today, right now, the obligation is on those people who believe that copying digital files without permission is theft to make that case. To that end the most important thing that can be said about piracy is that it is theft. There can be no equivocation on this point, because equivocation amounts to permission.

What Gen Y needs to be thinking about now, while they have all this power — and they do have an incredible amount of power — is that they are not simply exercising that power today. They are establishing a set of rules that everyone is going to have to live with in the future, and that includes their children. One day, maybe not too far down the road, Marian or Luke will have kids of her own, and those children may decide to create something (and it’s all going to be digital at that point). Maybe they’ll even try to start a small collective of artists and make a go of it in business, but that’s not going to be economically possible if the cultural norm says that copying digital content is not stealing.

Great generations aren’t great because they get away with whatever they can get away with. They’re great because they aspire to more than the minimum standard the law requires. To each member of Gen Y, and to anyone who is wrestling with the question of content piracy, I would simply say that you need to answer this question yourself, and to think about the long-term consequences of the answer you choose.

Don’t pass the buck and let someone else do your thinking for you. Luke isn’t doing that. Marian isn’t. Even the mysterious pirate confessor isn’t. Be your own compass. When civilizations do break down — as we’re seeing now in Haiti — ethics may become relative. But making ethics relative when there is no emergency simply reverses the equation, engineering a breakdown that would otherwise not have taken place.

If a crime is inflicted on you in the forest and no one can hear you scream, it’s still a crime. Even if nobody will ever know that you stole an MP3 or a e-book by downloading it from a website, it should matter that you know. And you should want it to matter, because the only people it really doesn’t matter to are sociopaths and psychopaths.

Doing the right thing takes more guts than flexing your generational biceps or kicking a corrupt corporation in the groin. It’s easy to take something for nothing, and Marian’s right that you can almost certainly get away with it. The odds are long that anything directly punitive will ever happen to you as a result of content theft.

The problem, however, is that you’re not just stealing content and you’re not just stealing from someone else. You’re also stealing from yourself.

This is a cross-posting from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk. Also see Luke Bergeron’s response to this post on his mispeled.net site.

*opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Publetariat or its other contributors.

Amazon v. Macmillan: Authors, Are You Backing The Right Horse?

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Herewith, I present an updated and amended cross-posting of my blog post on the Amazon v. Macmillan affair. Let me state up front, I do not agree with Amazon’s strongarm tactics, and it is not my intention to defend those actions in this post. Rather, I’m puzzled by authors’ nearly universal lack of criticism for Macmillan’s part in the matter. I can’t help wondering, if Amazon had quietly agreed to Macmillan’s requested terms, thereby depriving authors of an easy target and distraction, might they have reacted differently to Macmillan’s move?

This week, Amazon announced it will cave to Macmillan’s demand that it sell Macmillan Kindle books at up to $14.99 instead of the $9.99 pricetag that’s become standard for Kindle bestsellers. Per a report on Booksquare, Macmillan may have plans to price their Kindle books across a range, anywhere from $4.99-$14.99, and author royalties on those books may be based on an ‘agency model’ calculation which computes author royalty as a percentage of net, not a percentage of list price. See the linked Booksquare post for more information.

Macmillan authors are rejoicing, and I’m shaking my head. Would musicians cheer a decision on the part of their labels to raise the price of their music on iTunes by up to 43%? I think not. Yet despite the fact that their books may cost up to 43% more than other Kindle bestsellers, and their royalty on those sales won’t be even one cent higher, the Macmillan author “victory” dance continues apace on the interwebz. The Author’s Guild has come out on Macmillan’s side too, and I’m completely mystified by that stance since Macmillan’s change in terms with Amazon only stands to hurt authors and ebook readers alike.

The only reason I can think of for authors to be on the wrong side of this battle is that they don’t understand it. Let’s look at the facts.

1. Under pre-existing terms Amazon pays big publishers like Macmillan half the hardcover price on each Kindle book they sell: generally, that’s between $12-$17. This means Amazon is taking a loss on the sale of every such Kindle book, but the publisher is still getting its standard share, regardless.

2. Macmillan cut their standard author royalty on ebooks from 25% of the list price to 20% of the list price last October.

[UPDATE – THIS JUST IN, 2/4/10: According to E-Reads Macmillan is now saying that going forward, its standard ebook royalty in boilerplate contracts will be 25%, *not* the 20% it came out with last October.]

3. Amazon announced last week it will grant a royalty of 70% of the list price to U.S. authors and 75% to UK authors who sign Kindle book publication deals with Amazon directly. Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Stephen Covey are just a few of the authors who’ve already signed on. A data storage/transfer/processing fee of .15 per MB will be deducted from list price prior to the 70% royalty split’s calculation, but Amazon states that on average this fee only amounts to .06 per Kindle book sold.

4. The author’s royalty in either case is/was based on the list price of a given book, not the price at which the book is/was ultimately sold. This means Macmillan authors used to get the same royalty on every sale whether the customer paid $14.99 for it, or $9.99 due to Amazon discounts.

5. Last week Macmillan informed Amazon that if Amazon wanted to continue to sell Macmillan books in Kindle format, Amazon would have to raise [or lower] the prices on them to Macmillan’s stated prices.

Recent reports have said Macmillan essentially asked Amazon to match the ‘agency model’ deal it made with Apple’s iBook store, which dictates a 30/70 split (70% going to the publisher) and allows the publisher to set the price at which each ebook would be sold. If Amazon did not agree to these terms, Macmillan would allow Amazon to continue to sell Kindle editions of their books under existing terms, but wouldn’t allow Amazon to release the Kindle edition of a new book for sale until 7 months after its initial release in hardcover and several months following release in Apple’s iBook store. I have yet to hear or read any report as to whether these delays would also hold for books intially released in trade paperback or mass-market paperback editions.

6. Amazon didn’t agree to Macmillan’s terms, and childishly removed the Amazon ‘buy’ links for all Macmillan books from its site in response to Macmillan’s demand for new terms.

7. Macmillan authors stormed the internet, posting angry diatribes against Amazon and drumming up support among their fans and followers for Kindle and Amazon boycotts. Yes, that’s right: they took the side of the party who demanded that Amazon raise the price of their Kindle books, or delay their release by 7 months, or reduce the price of their ebooks below Amazon’s $9.99 standard and pay their royalties based on an agency (net profit) model instead of the percentage-of-list-price model they’ve had on their Kindle books to date.
 
It was Macmillan which set forces in motion that ultimately resulted in the removal of ‘buy’ links, not Amazon, and while Amazon’s actions in this seem excessive, I still see plenty of reasons for authors to be irked with Macmillan. If the report stating that Macmillan intended to withold Kindle editions of their books for a number of months after those books were released in the iBook store is true, is that a move that would’ve pleased the thousands of readers who own a Kindle, or who use the Kindle reader app on their computers or portable devices? Seems like a rather diabolical move to pressure ebook consumers to buy their ebooks from Apple (at higher prices) instead of Amazon, no? And isn’t it very likely that by the time Macmillan books were released in the Kindle store following this Macmillan-imposed delay, Kindle-reading consumers would have forgotten all about those titles and moved on to other, more readily-available ebooks?
 
I don’t own a Kindle, but release delays and pricing impact my book-buying decisions, too. I rarely buy hardcovers because they’re so expensive, and there’s many a book I intended to buy if/when it came out in softcover or e or audio, but either the book was never released in those formats or—salient in this case—by time it did, I’d forgotten all about it. This same phenomenon among ebook fans is well-documented, and ebook fans have always clamored to have their preferred format released at the same time as any print edition.
 
Also, recall that Macmillan may be planning to offer Kindle titles in a range from $4.99-$14.99. This isn’t good news for their authors either, since Kindle books priced higher than $9.99 will be a tough sell and those priced below $9.99 will net the author a lower royalty. None of Macmillan’s intended changes in its Kindle books deal with Amazon stand to benefit Macmillan authors or ebook readers. The intended changes only stand either scare off sales (in the case of Kindle books priced higher than $9.99 or those delayed by 7 months) or reduce author royalties (on Kindle books priced lower than $9.99).
 
So while I can understand Macmillan authors’ anger at Amazon for having their buy links removed, especially in the case of authors of books offered in print editions only (since they don’t even have a horse in this race), I still don’t understand why Macmillan authors haven’t been publicly objecting to Macmillan’s actions as well. Macmillan presented Amazon with an ultimatum in which either option hurts authors’ and ebook readers’ current situation.

8. Macmillan authors will not receive one penny more in royalties on their Kindle books if those books are priced up to 43% higher, because their royalties were always based on the list price for their books, not the price at which Amazon ultimately sold them, in the pre-existing arrangement.  Now their royalties will be based on 70% of the ebook retail price, and it’s a safe bet their books will be netting fewer sales if prices go up to $12.99-$14.99.

9. The upshot is a lose-lose-lose. Consumers lose reasonably-priced Macmillan Kindle books, and reasonably-priced Apple iBooks too, since according to this NY Times article:

With Apple, under a formula that tethers the maximum e-book price to the print price on the same book, publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction titles — higher than the common $9.99 price that Amazon had effectively set for new releases and best sellers. Apple will keep 30 percent of each sale, and publishers will take 70 percent.

So Macmillan earns the dubious distinction of being the first major publisher to make calculated moves to drive ebook prices higher across all platforms. Thanks to Macmillan’s "victory" over Amazon, Macmillan, authors and Amazon all stand to lose sales. Macmillan stands to lose market share. Authors stand to lose readership.

10. Prediction: emboldened by Macmillan’s so-called win, other major publishers will likely follow suit. More “lose” for everyone.

[UPDATE – THIS JUST IN 2/4/10: According to this report on the Wall Street Journal, Hachette is already attempting to renegotiate its Kindle book terms to match its deal with Apple, too. But why are publishers so anxious to get out from under the thumb of Jeff Bezos, only to wedge themselves beneath Steve Jobs’ opposable digit? I don’t know the answer, but what I do know is that in very short order, big trade publishers will get what they’ve wanted—and we ebook fans have feared—all along: a higher standard price point for mainstream ebooks. Still in Macmillan’s camp on this one?]

So tell me again: exactly why, and what, are we supposed to be celebrating here? I can already imagine the one objection I hear raised in discussions on this topic again and again: Macmillan is staving off devaluation of the ebook. There’s much hand-wringing over the notions that authors can’t possibly earn their due on low-priced ebooks, and that authors (like me) who sell their ebooks at prices significantly lower than the $9.99 Kindle store standard are somehow doing a great disservice to our fellow authors and trade publishing overall. This is so patently untrue, and such a pointless distraction from more important ebook issues, as to call to mind the Chewbacca Defense.

Under the pre-existing deal between Amazon and Macmillan, Macmillan authors earn a royalty of about $3.19 on their Kindle store standard-bestseller-priced books, whether those books are sold at $9.99 or $15.99. Under the new deal, which is the same in both Apple’s iBook store and the Kindle store, authors would earn a royalty of just $2.10 on an ebook priced at $14.99: 20% of 70% of the book’s $14.99 list price, and about $1 less in royalties per copy sold than what they have earned on their standard-priced Kindle books to date.

At a 70% royalty, I can earn $3.50 per copy sold of my self-published Kindle novels if I price them at just $4.99. The higher retail price does not add value for the author or the consumer, and at this point, it doesn’t even increase Macmillan’s profit since they’ve always gotten half the hardcover price on all their Kindle books from Amazon.

It’s quite clear that Macmillan’s take on each Kindle book sale under the new deal will be less than what they’ve received to date on those sales (since they used to get 1/2 the hardcover price and will now only get 70% of the ebook list price, which appears to have an upper limit of $14.99 for the foreseeable future), but I guess they decided they were willing to take that financial hit in exchange for the freedom to set their own ebook retail prices. Of course, Macmillan was under no legal obligation to include authors in their decision-making process, even though their decision stands to reduce their authors’ Kindle book royalties by up to 33%; I’m just saying it’s mind-boggling to me that Macmillan authors don’t seem to be the least bit peeved at this outcome. In fact, they don’t seem to have noticed it at all.

Publishers claim they need to wrest pricing control back from Amazon for the sake of what Amazon might do someday if it becomes too dominant in the ebook space. What if Amazon eventually decides to tell publishers it will no longer pay them half the hardcover price for their Kindle books, for example?

First of all, that’s a bridge to be crossed if, and when, someday arrives. Second, perhaps the correct answer in the event of that scenario is for publishers to lower their wholesale ebook prices. They claim it costs them just as much—or nearly so—to bring an ebook to market as it does to bring a hard copy, and they are therefore justified in their current pricing demands. But if it really takes a small platoon of publishing professionals and tens of thousands of dollars to bring a Kindle book to market, how is it possible that authors like me, JA Konrath, Piers Anthony, and countless others are doing it by ourselves, in our homes, from our consumer-grade computers, in a matter of hours?

“Your Kindle books lack the professional layout and design a publisher can bring to their Kindle books,” some of you are no doubt answering. This is true. But the thousands of readers who buy Kindle books from me, Konrath and the many other self-publishing Kindle book authors don’t seem to care all that much. I suspect that if you asked them, they would tell you they’d rather have a minimally-formatted Kindle book that costs $4.99 (or less) than an exquisitely-formatted Kindle book that costs $14.99.

As I’ve stated before, publishers arguing in favor of higher priced ebooks are ignoring the customer’s priorities in favor of their own, self-imposed priorities. This is because the ugly truth is this: the only parties being hurt by low-priced ebooks are big, mainstream publishers. Their overheads cannot be sustained by $4.99 ebooks, but that doesn’t mean their costs to bring ebooks to market should be forcibly subsidized by authors or consumers. To quote Konrath, “It would have really sucked to have been a buggy whip manufacturer when Henry Ford introduced the Model T. But technology changes things, and it isn’t always fair.”

In the end, all the arguments I’ve heard and read about the devaluation of the ebook are toothless. There seems to be this notion floating around that books must be expensive in order to inspire readers to value literature, but that’s ridiculous. If I’m earning more on my $4.99 Kindle books than a Macmillan author earns on a $15.99 Kindle book, both on a per-sale and volume basis, how is my book’s low pricetag hurting me, the author? And if low-priced ebooks bring more literature and ereaders within reach of more consumers, how are the books’ low prices hurting literature and literacy? If anything, low-priced ebooks stand to benefit authors and consumers alike, and advance the cause of literacy overall.

Hasn’t it been wonderful to find short fiction and poetry collections—species on the verge of extinction in trade publishing—coming back into their own in the Kindle store? It seems readers are only too happy to take a chance on these supposedly ‘fringe’ books if the price is reasonable. Midlist authors are earning new royalties and new readers by bringing their backlists back into print on the Kindle as well. Most importantly, in my view anyway, the current indie author movement wouldn’t be possible at all without Amazon’s equal treatment of indie and mainstream authors.

So authors, indie authors especially: if you’re backing Macmillan in this flap, why? Has Amazon’s overreaction distracted your attention from the long term ramifications of Macmillan’s move, and the likely damage to be done to you and your readership? To put it another way, see if you can answer this question: what part, if any, of Macmillan’s revised agreement with Amazon stands to benefit you?

 

April L. Hamilton is the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat. This is a cross-posting from her Indie Author Blog.

The Real Agenda of Apple’s Ebook Partners: Death to Ebooks

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This post, from Aaron Pressman, originally appeared on his Gravitational Pull site on 1/31/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

The head of one of the big book publishers, MacMillan CEO John Sargent Jr., is out with an “open” letter about his dispute with Amazon over the pricing and timing of electronic books. It’s telling that this “open” ebook letter wasn’t released publicly and isn’t directed towards readers, book lovers and customers. It was placed as an ad in a small publishing industry trade rag and the message is for publishing industry insiders. Sargent’s message, despite a bunch of misleading surrounding verbiage, is simple: let’s strangle the growth of ebooks.

If you want to understand where Sargent and other major book publishers are coming from, I strongly recommend watching this online footage from a conference New York University hosted last September. Here you can see Sargent and a couple of fellow old media dinosaurs whine and complain about the digital world, dismiss Facebook, Craig’s List and Twitter as irrelevant non-businesses that will never make money and generally explain their plans to charge everyone for everything at every opportunity.

The real critical portions come towards the very end, in part three, as Sargent grows more animated about his opposition to giving away ebooks for free, even for promotional purposes. Despite being in charge of one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world, he’s pretty pessimistic about the future of books. Challenged by Wired editor Chris Anderson to use digital distribution and new business models to attract new readers and expand the book market, Sargent is in full rejection mode:

“As the Internet grows, as all the other types of entertainment grow, it’s hard to imagine sitting here how we are going to convince everybody in this room to spend an extra six hours every week to consume another book. So in a way, if you look at the overall demand for books, it’s pretty hard to make that grow. We’ve tried. A whole bunch of people worked very hard to try and grow that. It’s pretty hard if you look at the demographics, how people read, to actually convince yourself that we have a growth business in books.”

In other words, what we have in books is a dying audience, a shrinking audience. And the way you extract the most revenue and profit from a shrinking audience isn’t with creative promotions and new ideas. It’s with ever higher prices. As Sargent says at a another point, in a barely veiled swipe at Amazon’s $9.99 ebook price:

“What we need is variable pricing. I think you guys would agree with this, variable pricing for content. You want a range of price points. You want to find a place — what you don’t want to do is give the consumer something for less than what they’re willing to pay for it in the rush to a new business model. Because once you get it out there it’s dangerous and hard to go back.”

Again, challenged to charge less because producing ebooks cost less, Sargent obfuscates, fixating on just one bit of savings, the printing costs of books (ignoring distribution, returns, overage, lost sales from out of print etc):

“Guys I can walk you through this. How much do you think a hardcover book costs us? A buck sixty. What are we saving? Not enough for the price point to drop from $22.50 down to $8.”

Amazon has been saying that its Kindle customers buy more total books – electronic and print – than they bought previously. It’s certainly been true in our household. I don’t have the figures at my finger tips, but I’d imagine that the whole creation and growth of Amazon.com has enlarged the book market, as well. But that’s not really happening in John Sargent’s world of mega-best sellers.

So keep in mind what Sargent was saying a few months ago when you read passages like this in his letter:

“In the ink-on-paper world we sell books to retailers far and wide on a business model that provides a level playing field, and allows all retailers the possibility of selling books profitably. Looking to the future and to a growing digital business, we need to establish the same sort of business model, one that encourages new devices and new stores. One that encourages healthy competition. One that is stable and rational. It also needs to insure that intellectual property can be widely available digitally at a price that is both fair to the consumer and allows those who create it and publish it to be fairly compensated.”

Leave aside for a moment the completely dishonest portrait Sargent paints of the old print book-selling world, and remember that he doesn’t believe the there will be any growth in book sales in the future. He’s not interested in a fair price for anybody — he’s interested in making sure that he never gives the consumer something for less than what they’re willing to pay for it.
He wants to extract the big bucks from the big sellers and move on.

The great danger to MacMillan is that it’s the authors of those big best-sellers who are becoming increasingly able to cut him out. If ebooks really take off, an author like Stephen King or Nora Roberts can sell a lot more of their books direct to their audience with no publisher at all. And that’s why Sargent’s real goal here is not to increase competition or create a level playing field. It’s to squeeze as much profit out of a dying industry as quickly as he can and hold off the digital future for as long as possible.

UPDATE: Henry Blodget also really gets it in his post today called “Hey, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Books, Screw You!” An excerpt:

Did Steve Jobs seduce you with that temporary “charge-whatever-you-want” speech?  Well, Steve has been known to seduce people from time to time.  Just imagine what will happen once Steve has put the Kindle out of business and Steve owns the ebook platform instead of Jeff Bezos.  That’s right: You’ll get held up even worse than Jeff’s holding you up today.  Just ask the music industry.  Careful what you wish for. So, bottom line, John, take your $15 ebooks and shove them.  We’re with Amazon on this one.

Good work.

About the author: Aaron Pressman is a professional journalist but wrote this on his personal blog. He lives in the Boston area with his wife, three kids and four Macintoshes. You can find links to more of his published articles here.

Publetariat Editor’s note: related to the subject of this post, also see: Apple Demands Removal of USB Sharing Feature in Stanza iPhone App from TechCrunch, and Peter Kafka’s on-the-fly transcript of Rupert Murdoch’s comments regarding Amazon, Apple and ebook pricing here, on All Things Digital‘s Media Memo.

Author Fail?

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This post, from James Melzer, originally appeared on his site on 2/1/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. In it, he offers an author platform perspective on the Amazon vs. Macmillan fracas.

I don’t pretend to know a lot about the publishing world. Hell, we’re probably on an even playing field here. The fact that I have a book coming out in March of 2011 doesn’t make me some publishing guru or know it all. I’m a guy who writes books, sells them, and then does his best to promote them however he can. I’ve never been to NYC to visit Simon and Schuster, and I have no idea what goes on in those tall, ivory towers people seem to think they can’t break into. I write books. That’s about it.

Some of you may have heard that on Friday the shit hit the fan between Amazon and Macmillan. Macmillan wants to raise the price of their ebooks and Amazon said no, so they stopped selling all Macmillan titles in protest. Something like that, anyway.

Upon observing this pissing contest between two giants, I noticed something funny about the authors involved. I follow some of them on twitter, read their blogs from time to time, and I wanted to see their reaction to the whole thing, so my spidey senses were heightened during this whole kerfuffle (which still isn’t over yet, BTW), and I watched and read.

Here’s what I saw: Pretty much all of the authors that I know of who are involved were tweeting and facebooking and blogging about Amazon pulling their titles. They posted links to other authors and newspapers and bloggers who were talking about it, and how it’s all wrong.

For the record, I agree. It is wrong.

Pretend for a second that you’re average joe reader. You hear about a book, think it sounds good and want to buy it. You go to Amazon this past weekend and find that you can’t. It’s not there. WTF? You’re inclined enough to go check out the author’s website and find all this mumbo jumbo about Amazon pulling titles and not selling the author’s book. What a pity. The author has posted this big, long rant on how Amazon is the devil and blah blah blah.

Yet he doesn’t tell you where you CAN buy the book online.

Now, you just don’t care and go on to find an author whose book is listed and that you can get delivered to your home in a few days. Done and done.

The author that posted that big, long rant about how Amazon is the devil and blah blah blah just lost a customer. A reader.

My point to this whole thing is that most of the authors involved in this Amazon vs. Macmillan thing were bitching and complaining and linking here and there, but they weren’t telling their readers, their FANS, where they COULD buy their books. Amazon is not the only place online to buy books, yanna. There’s Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Borders and if you’re Canadian like me, Indigo. Yes, people who are savvy enough know this and would have most likely gone over there to grab a title, but wouldn’t it be nice to hear it from the author who you’re giving your money to? No. Most of them just assumed that people knew.

A simple, “Hey, sorry you can’t buy my book on Amazon right now. Here’s where it can be found,” would have been nice.

Is that too much to ask of an author who wants his readers to find his books? More so, to attract new fans and readers? If someone who doesn’t know you or perhaps isn’t that web knowledgeable wants to buy your book but can’t find it on Amazon, then tell them where they can find it for goodness sake. The average joe reader doesn’t necessarily care about what Amazon or Macmillan are doing, they just want to read a damn book. Hopefully a good one. If they can’t find yours, they’ll go on to another author, and perhaps forget all about you.

Never to return again.

 

Two Roads Diverged: Understanding Traditional And Self-Publishing Differences

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This post, from Todd Rutherford, originally appeared on his Ask the Publishing Guru blog on 1/29/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

The publishing world has experienced change over the past several decades as all industries have, but the next 10 years will be a cocoon altering it into a different species altogether. Many major print publishing houses have either merged, or acquired smaller houses, and the net result is that there are fewer traditional channels for getting your book published. However, this only means that the nature of the challenge of getting a book published has changed. It does not mean that the challenge has become insurmountable.

The traditional publishing path of the past has been described similarly by many sources. Write a book, send query letter and/or book proposal to agents, get picked up by an agent, get sold by agent to a small-to-medium-size publisher, pray that your book takes off and garners attention from a big publisher who pays you a six-figure advance in return for the rights to your book.

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent with Curtis Brown discusses going from small presses to big publishers. I agree with many of his points on the difficulties of being recognized by a big publisher. His advice is very similar to my premise, if your book is really good, well edited, designed, printed, distributed, and promoted, it will succeed.

Today, the traditional publishing path is in upheaval and turmoil. The economic downturn has caused many small publishers to shut their doors or, at best, significantly decrease their new release budgets. The emergence of the Kindle, Nook, and other Ebook readers has stirred things up. Publishers of all sizes are more carefully scrutinizing new authors, primarily seeking to invest in less-risky authors with established platforms. Gone are the days of a publisher investing marketing dollars to help an author develop their platform.

The new traditional publishing path is emerging as more of a partnership between author and publisher with the responsibility for marketing and publicity resting on the shoulders of authors. If you bring a viable manuscript to the table with a sound marketing plan and/or platform, the publisher will invest in editing, design, printing, and distribution, the rest is up to you.

The exciting game-changer for the unknown author is the advent of affordable self-publishing options. Self-Publishing should not be confused with the deplorable practice of Vanity Publishing where an author is charged seriously inflated prices for editing, design, printing, and/or marketing services while giving up 80% or more of profit and/or rights to their material. True self-publishing is where the author handles editing, design, printing, distribution, and marketing for their book or hires professionals to assist with the process while experiencing control, speed to market, ownership of rights, and max profitability.

The self-publishing path has existed since the dawn of time. Dan Poynter lists 155 best-selling books that started out being self-published. In the past, the editing, design, and printing of a book could easily run $15,000 or more because of minimum print runs of 5000 being required. With the advent of print-on-demand merged with distribution channels the cost of the entry toll on the path of self-publishing has diminished significantly. And publishing a Kindle version of your book doesn’t require an investment of money whatsoever.

I’m not preaching against the traditional publishing model. I cut my teeth in traditional publishing. My family was in the traditional publishing business for nearly 25 years. I started at the bottom in the warehouse of a traditional publisher picking and packing orders. I eventually worked my way up to running a subsidiary of this same publisher. Throughout my career, I kept seeing countless numbers of authors turned down because we simply didn’t have the budget to add them to our production schedule. When I was asked to take over the helm at Yorkshire Publishing, I studied the self-publishing industry in great detail. I became passionate about being a part of an author-empowering movement to publish and promote quality books that otherwise may have been unrecognized without modern advances in the self-publishing industry.

The old-school mindset that says to avoid the stigma of self-publishing is quickly becoming a whisper in the wind. More unknown authors are starting out self-published for the first time in history. I believe self-publishing is the democratization of the publishing industry. Any unknown author now has a chance.

In my seminars and workshops, I tell authors to treat their book like a business. If you want a real chance, you must treat your book like a big publisher would. When naysayers point to the statistics that say self-published books average less than 200 units sold, I can rebut with a missing link in the formula and Poytner’s list. Remember, if your book is really good, well edited, designed, printed, distributed, and promoted, it will succeed, regardless of the road taken in the yellow wood of publishing.

Yorkshire Publishing offers ghostwriting, writing coaching, editing, design, printing, distribution and marketing services.

Promote Your Book on Facebook – Six Strategies for Success

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Many book authors set up a profile on Facebook, but they fail to take full advantage of this powerful networking tool. Below are six strategies for promoting books and authors on Facebook:

1. Take full advantage of the promotional opportunities on your Facebook Profile. For example, just below your photo is a small box where you can enter a concise description of what you do, including the title of your book and a link to your book sales page.

The About Me box (under Personal Information) is a good place to describe your book and your business. In the Contact Information section you can enter multiple website addresses. Post your book cover in your photo album or another application and display it in the left column of your profile.

Mention your book in your status updates, without being too promotional. For example, announce your book launch, mention reviews and awards the book has received, talk your own book promotion activities.
Remember, your Facebook profile must be registered in your real name. If you create a profile for your book or business, you risk having your account cancelled.

2. Facebook Pages are similar to personal profiles, but they are created for business use and they are an ideal place for promoting books. You can create a page for your book, your business, or even one of the characters in your novel. People join a page by becoming a fan.

You may want to offer an incentive to join (or at least visit) your page, such as a free download or a coupon for one of your products. Another way to attract fans is to set your page up as an information hub, offering links and resources. You can also send messages to your fan base, which will show up in their Facebook newsfeeds.

3. Groups are a great place for book authors to meet people who share their interests and find new friends, while subtly promoting books. Search for groups by entering keywords in the Search box at the top of the page and then clicking on the Groups tab. You can gain visibility on a group page by introducing yourself on the wall, participating in disucssions, and posting your book cover, photos or videos.

Forming your own group can also be beneficial. Be sure to encourage discussions and offer valuable information such as free downloads and links to resources. You can send direct message the entire group.

4. Hosting an event is another way of promoting books. Set up a Facebook Event and invite others to live or virtual events such as book signings, teleseminars book launches, speaking engagements or virtual book tours.  Joining other people’s events is a good way to get visibility because you can write on the event wall and post photos.

5. Facebook displays pay-per-click ads on most pages on the site, and ads can be targeted by age, gender, location, education level, relationship status, or keywords in people’s profiles. Consider advertising if you have a very specific target market that can be targeted by more than one of the above criteria. For example, if you have written an exercise book for women over 50, you can target that demographic on Facebook and you can even target the keyword "exercise" in people’s profiles.

6. The Facebook Marketplace is a classified advertising area where you can post a free listing promoting your books. It’s worth an experiment if the topic of your book is something that might be searched for on a classified site. For example, if you have a book about collecting costume jewelry, people searching for costume jewelry will see your listing. (Don’t forget to use this strategy on Craig’s List and eBay as well).

There are a number of ways of promoting books and authors on Facebook, but remember to be subtle when using profiles, pages, groups and events. If you are too promotional or make promoting books your main focus, you will turn people off.

Excerpted from Facebook Guide for Authors.

Copyright Page Samples You Can Copy and Paste Into Your Book

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One of the most common questions I get from new self-publishers is, “What do I put on the copyright page?” For some reason, the copyright page has the power to intimidate some people, with its small print and legalistic language, not to mention all those mysterious numbers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are a few necessary items on the copyright page, and others that publishers add for various reasons. I’ve treated the copyright page in some detail in other posts, so if you want background please check here: Self-Publishing Basics: The Copyright Page. In a guest post, Joanne Bolton supplied some useful information for books that are printed overseas, and you can find her post here: Copyright Page Requirements for Books Printed Overseas.

To see the place of the copyright page within the book as a whole, check out An Unabridged List of the Parts of a Book.

The only elements required on a copyright page are the copyright notice itself:

© 2009 Joel Friedlander

And some statement giving notice that the rights to reproduce the work are reserved to the copyright holder.

All Rights Reserved.

Next you’ll see two versions of the copyright page, one long page with a CIP data block and a short version. Feel free to copy and paste these into your book file. Just remember to put your own information in.
 

Sample of a Long Copyright Page with CIP Data Block

Here’s an example of a copyright page that has the necessary elements, then adds ordering information, web address, CIP Data block (I’ve put this in blue so you can identify what is included; replace this with your own or delete it if you’re not obtaining CIP), edition information, and printing numbers (the string at the bottom) and dates for future editions.

Copyright © 2010 by Bill Shakespeare

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Imaginary Press
1233 Pennsylvania Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94909
www.imaginarypress.com

Ordering Information:
Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above.
Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers. Please contact Big Distribution: Tel: (800) 800-8000; Fax: (800) 800-8001 or visit www.bigbooks.com.

Printed in the United States of America

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Shakespeare, William.
A title of a book : a subtitle of the same book / Bill Shakespeare ; with Ben Johnson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-9000000-0-0
1. The main category of the book —History —Other category. 2. Another subject category —From one perspective. 3. More categories —And their modifiers. I. Johnson, Ben. II. Title.
HF0000.A0 A00 2010
299.000 00–dc22 2010999999

First Edition

14 13 12 11 10 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A Short Copyright Page Example

Here’s a very short and to the point copyright page. It gives the necessary elements and not much more:

Copyright © 2010 by Wily E. Coyote
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2010

ISBN 0-9000000-0-0

Falling Anvil Publishing
123 Mesa Street
Scottsdale, AZ 00000

www.FallingAnvilBooks.com

This is the quick and easy way to get generic copyright page language into your book. Even with this short example, your copyright page will do the job it’s supposed to do, and give interested parties the means to contact you for publishing-related questions.

Next: Using disclaimers and giving credit on the copyright page. Let me know if you have questions about the copyright page. I’ll see if I can answer them.

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer blog.

Do I Care About Mobile Readers? [A Checklist]

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This post, from Piotr Kowalczyk ( @namenick on Twitter) originally appeared on his Password Incorrect site on 1/10/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Year 2010 has already been called “The Year of the Mobile”. Internet activity is shifting from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to mobile phones. This is an inevitable trend. People play music on mobile phones, update their social networks, watch movies and even play games. What about reading? It seems to be one of the easiest things. It’s not.

One side of the story is that people complain about general reading comfort – and this is a common excuse to stay with paper. The other side of the story is a fact, that a majority of Internet content is still not mobile friendly.

Here’s a quick checklist of things which can be done to make mobile readers’ life much easier.

Do I publish my books in formats optimized for mobile reading?

If you plan to publish a next book, a free teaser of a book or any new piece of writing, think not only of Scribd, BookBuzzr or Lulu. Think also of sites which convert your book to formats tailored for mobile viewing, like ePub or mobi. The most popular services, besides Amazon’s Kindle Store, are Smashwords, Feedbooks, Wattpad and Kobo.

Do I use a mobile friendly blogging platform?

Most of what 2.0 authors write is not actually books, but everything else intended to draw attention to those books. A blog is still a major place to share thoughts and tease about a book (first chapters, excerpts, etc). If you’re on WordPress.com, you are 100% mobile friendly. When a reader is visiting your blog from a cellphone, a mobile theme is automatically loaded instead of a regular one.

Do I use mobilizing plugins for my self-hosted blog? 

 If you run a self-hosted blog, you can use a proper plugin. This is especially important, when a blog is rich with many advanced plugins. They make it slow to load and probably the content will not display correctly as well. A list of blog mobilizing plugins can be found here.

Do I use blog mobilizing services?

If not a plugin, you can use one of convenient blog mobilizing services, like Mofuse or Mippin. You may also consider mobilizing part of your blog (such as one category) – and this tool seems to be the best option. Just paste the RSS feed in and in a couple of easy steps you’ll have it running. The list of services is also available in the above mentioned article.

Does my feed shows full articles?

More and more people are switching to reading RSS feeds on their mobile phones. If you set up an option to show only an excerpt of your post, the reader is forced to move to your page in order to read the rest. If your blog is not mobilized, consider it a lost view (or even a last view). A much better option would be to show a full length post in a feed.

Do I tweet mobile links?

Even if you haven’t done any of the above, you can still make your content mobile friendly. This is especially important if you spend a considerable part of your time in mobile communities like Twitter, Brightkite and alike. You can always use Google Mobilizer – just paste a link and in one click you’ll have your page optimized for mobile viewing.

Now, if your content is already mobilized, there is one more thing you could do. [As] non-mobilized blogs [are still common], the general attitude [toward reading blogs on mobile devices] is “do not open this link”. So ask yourself…

Do I inform readers that my blog is mobilized?

You can easily do that. Use text or widgets delivered by blog mobilizing services. Hopefully one day it won’t be needed any longer.

 

Also see this article, which provides instructions for how to make your blog available for sale to Kindle owners.

How To Lose Friends And Tick Off People On Facebook

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This article, from Scott Stratten, originally appeared on UnMarketing on 1/20/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. While it is addressed to social media consultants, the advice here is equally useful to authors, publishers, and anyone else who hopes to avoid missteps in using social media.

An open letter to all my friends in the social media consultant/guru game,

Please stop.

You’re steering people the wrong way.

You sell yourself as social media consultants, the ones that can show you the way and then fark it up.

I beg of you to stop.

Go back to teaching Internet marketing from the old days, I could at least ignore you then. I talk to you at conferences, share the stage but I can’t listen to you up there any longer spewing “tips” that hurt people and their relationships.

Here is what I and many, if not most of the world, request of you to stop immediately when teaching “Facebook Strategy”:

Photo by the awesome Racheal McCaig

1. Stop telling people to invite everyone in their contact list to every event, even if it’s local. If you invite me to your 1 hour workshop at the library in New Mexico, and I live in Toronto, it hurts my view of you and questions your geography skills

2. Stop teaching people to create fake events. You know what I’m talking about… it’s the “month long event” that you say people should create, and then they “message” all the “no’s and maybe’s” and “not yet responded” to continue to pump out their message. It makes me feel all unfriendy. (yes, that’s unfriendy)

3. You know that trick of tagging people in articles/pics/videos that they don’t appear in so they come and read it? Stop it. Getting me to think I’m mentioned somewhere just to find out I’m not and you’re just being a selfish bumhole, does not bode well for our future “friend” status on the book of faces.

4. Inviting me to a “loss weight” teleseminar event, where it lists people you’ve invited is like being on a roll call at fat camp. Really? Do I look fat in these jogging pants? I know a lot of people are overweight, but inviting someone to an event to lose that weight, especially when I’m perfectly happy living my life of denial, does not strengthen our relationship.

And while we’re here, can you start teaching your clients:

1. Inviting me to assassinate someone in the temple in Mafia Wars may give off the wrong vibe for your brand… I don’t know about you, but I like to be a sniper in the privacy of my own Xbox, not regular updates on my wall of whose neck I’ve cracked

2. Hundreds of Farmville updates on your wall doesn’t make me think you’ll focus on my needs if I become your client. Especially if you’re positioned as a “busy” person, and your status update says “I have no time!!!” And yet we can read how you just nursed a sickly cat on your farm in FarmVille, well, um, it’s just awkward.

3. Blingee generic mass-sent greeting animated cards make people go nuts. Before turning off and blocking the app, I had 43 posted on my wall. In 4 hours. Nothing says “I thought of you personally” like a mass sent lame greeting self-serving wall post. “Hey Scott, if you don’t like the app, you can just turn it off” Well, I didn’t ask you, but if you insist, that’s like me having to tell people to stop kicking me in the nuts. It should be opt-in, not opt-out.

If you’re going to be in the position of an expert, act like one.

Teach people that really, truly want to know how to do things in social media properly. Show them how to:

1. Connect with people on an authentic, not automated level.

2. Show them that with time and effort, you can meet the greatest people in the world on sites like Twitter, if they only would only invest their time, care and knowledge first.

3. That “success” is subjective, not a number of friends/followers. If by success you mean some of the most incredible relationships you’ve ever had, that once trust is established can also lead to a fruitful business, you can have it within social media.

4. Tell them to treat others like they would like to be treated. That sending repeat invites weekly to your event on Facebook would really really suck if they had 20 people doing it to them every week, and that promoting others is sometimes better than promoting yourself.

5. And warn them, that us, the self-appointed guards of social media are very protective, very persistent and aren’t goin anywhere.

There you have it my fellow social media teachers. I’m sure we’ll get along fine with just these small but meaningful changes.

Love you.

Sincerely,

The entire Internet

(As a special treat, I also made this into a song for you. With apologies to Heart)

UPDATE – Thanks to the awesome @SnipeyHead here is a post on how to get rid of most of this annoying schtuff by using FaceBook Lite. 

Scott Stratten is the President of Un-Marketing.com. He is an expert in Viral, Social, and Authentic Marketing which he calls Un-Marketing. It’s all about positioning yourself as a trusted expert in front of target market, so when they have the need, they choose you, That’s UN-Marketing.

Over 45,000 people follow his daily rantings on Twitter and was voted one of the top influencers on the site with over 20 million users . His recent Tweet-a-thon raised over $16,000 for child hunger, in less than 12 hours. His book “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” is due to hit the shelves in the Fall of 2010 from Wiley & Sons.

His clients’ viral marketing videos have been viewed over 60 million times and has generated massive profits and lists. One of the movies was chosen by the Chicago Bears as their biggest motivator towards their Super Bowl run a few years ago, while another made their client over $5 million in 7 days. He recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Mashable.com, USA Today, CNN.com and Fast Company. That plus $5 gets him a coffee anywhere in the world.

Since he still has to pay for his own coffee, he earns his keep by speaking and consulting around the world on how businesses can engage better (or at all!) with their current and potential customer base using social media, viral marketing and just plain old engaging conversation. His team of Un-Jedi’s are responsible for such online hits as “The Dash Movie”, “The Time Movie” as well as the tongue-in-cheek “I’m Breaking Up With The Leafs” (although Scott wants you to know he really is no longer a Leafs fan).

Dear Publisher

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This post, from Dan Holloway, originally appeared on his The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes blog on 1/20/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. In it, Dan pokes a little fun at boilerplate query responses while revealing some salient truths about authorship and today’s chilly trade publishing climate.

Thank you for sending me your contract for consideration. I am sure you will appreciate that talented authors receive many unsolicited contracts. Nonetheless, I am aware that a publisher like yourself relies upon discovering new talent in order to keep its lists fresh and win new readers, so I hope that you will not be too disappointed that in this case I am declining your kind offer. I wish you all the best in seeking exciting new talent elsewhere.

I understand that it is frustrating to receive a form rejection from an author, without any elaboration on specific areas to work on in your contract. I hope that the following general points may help you in your future submissions.

1. An author relies for their living upon a day job. They write, edit, and network in the evenings, at weekends, and in lunch hours and teabreaks. A publisher’s advance, the largest incentive for an author to sign a contract, is not sufficient for them to give up their day job with any security.

2. Many talented, exciting authors write work that will not appeal to large readerships. Publishers need to sell large amounts of books. The result of this tension is that many of these authors will fail to recoup publishers’ outlay within their first two books, and it will not be viable for publishers to keep them on board.

3. Without a publisher, a writer is under no such pressure, and will not be junked if their initial books "fail".

4. Should a writer achieve initial success wit ha publisher, they will be expected to produce similar works, and not explore or develop their talent.

5. Without a publisher there is no pressure to change, for a writer, the way they write in order to fit market needs.

6. Without a publisher there is the freedom to experiment, change genre at will, try, fail, try again, fail again, and devlop one’s talent, voice, and potential to the full.

7. With a publisher a writer must concede control over cover design, the way their work is presented to the world.

8. The long cycle of the publishing industry means that the time from pen to audience inevitably freezes some of the initial energy and excitement of the creative process, leading to a less real and invigorating feedback process between writer and audience, and a less meaningful feedback loop.

9. With a publisher, a new writer loses editorial control. Not just total control of final cut, but control of which editor to use in the first place. An editor must have two qualities – the ability to be utterly ruthless; and absolute sympathy with an author’s aims. An author needs to be free to select their own, trusted, editor.

10. Pricing – whilst unsigned, the author is free to set the price for all his books – and other merchandise. This includes setting the price at free should the author wish to do that with, for example, her ebooks. It also means the freedom to create and price special and limited editions of the work.

In conclusion, I am afraid that authors must consider not just their short-term but their long-term future. And whilst I am sure that your kind offer, were I to accept it, would put me in a financially more advantageous position one year from now, and possibly three years from now, compared to that if I reject it; I am afraid that the models I have run show that in five, ten, and twenty years – that is, over the course of my career – there is no financial advantage, and in many models financial disadvantage, in my accepting.

I wish you every success in your future publishing career.


Dan Holloway is an author and the founder of the Year Zero Writer’s Collective. Learn more about the upcoming Year Zero live reading tour here.

How I Actually Increased Sales

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This post, from Ruth Ann Nordin, is excerpted from a post which appeared on her blog on 1/21/10, and is reprinted here with her permission.

I keep trying to think of ways to help authors boost their sales so if they want to either make more money at writing or attract the attention of an agent/publisher, they can have a better chance at it. Now, I don’t know if this will boost sales or recognition or not, but I’ll share what has happened to me over the past year and you may take the information to do what you will with it.

As I compiled a list of my expenses and royalties (which still are lacking compared to what I spend), I noticed that Kindle sales brought in $118. I thought that was for the year, but then I realized it was for the month of December. So far this month, I have made $174. Those are what I get after Amazon take their cut. I’m starting to see monthly payments instead of the three times a year I averaged for the past two years. I made about $174 over the course of one year in 2008. I never thought I could make that much in one month from Kindle sales. I only charge $0.99 per book. (Note, my paperbacks are still low. I made a total of $120 for the year on those, which was my average anyway.)

Okay. So I know other authors blow my totals away. But I thought since I am seeing a pretty good increase in sales, I would pass along what I did this past year. Like I said, I don’t know if the same method will work for you, but it’s all I can think of to offer in an effort to help others out there.

1. In January, I started posting three of my best books for free on my website and asked a blogger who posts free ebooks if they would be willing to post my books on there. She did.

2. Finally, I saw some actual traffic coming to my site. Before this, I got about 30 to 40 visitors a month. Now, I was actually getting into the hundreds. This was pretty exciting…and scary (because suddenly, I realized people were looking my way and I didn’t want to goof it up).

3. Around March or Spring, I had someone who has a free ebook site email me about posting my stuff on there. I said yes and decided to post more of my books for free. I noticed an increase of sales in some of my paperbacks and ebooks, but nothing substantial.

4. I signed up for Author 2.0 at The Creative Penn to learn about book promotion, making book trailers, podcasting, and other topics I thought might prove useful to increase my exposure as an author. I also started listening to podcasts geared toward publishing and marketing.

5. Over the summer, I decided to go fully into self-publishing and posted everything up for free. I got on two more free ebook sites from those who contacted me.

6. I started publishing my books on Kindle. I started the price around $3. Saw no real sales, heard that Kindles $2 and under sell best, so I changed the price for all of my Kindles to $0.99.

7. I started getting regular emails from readers and even if they had something I didn’t want to hear, I thanked them for contacting me and kindly explained why I do what I do. (I’d say 95% is positive email, though the couple that weren’t were very nice people and very respectful, so it never got nasty. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea.)

8. I started book trailers. This didn’t seem to impact sales, though they were a lot of fun.

9. I started the 500 words a day WordPress blog which is steadily attracting more attention.

10. Got my first $12 royalty payment for Kindle sales.

11. I got 5,000 hits on a website in October. I nearly fainted. This was probably because I just posted new ebooks on my site.

12. October was my first $35 payment for Kindle sales. I also got $35 from CreateSpace for about three months worth of paperback sales.

13. November, I got 13,000 hits on my website. How? I do not know. I also brought in another $35 from Kindle sales.

14. December, I sold 12 paperbacks (the most I’ve ever sold in a month–probably due to Christmas). Kindle sales went through the roof. I earned $118 worth in royalties. Again, I do not know why. I did nothing different than what I was doing before. I’m guessing word of mouth is starting to do its magic.

15. January, I started a podcast to begin uploading my first audiobook. (I have no idea if or how this will improve sales or visibility as an author.) I have made $174 so far this month on Kindle. I have only sold 4 paperbacks. I have received roughly 6,000 hits on my website.

So we’ll see how things (hopefully) progress this year.

But take whatever you can from the list if you wish and see if something will help boost your sales too. I mention the numbers to show the trend of cause and effect. I really hope that this method can work for someone else. I never thought it would for me. To me, this is beyond my wildest dreams. For someone else, this may be pathetic.

Visit Ruth Ann Nordin’s blog here, and learn more about Ruth and her books here.

How To Sign An Ebook

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This post, from Ami Greko, originally appeared on The New Sleekness on 1/18/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

Like the oft-lamented “smell of books,” I’ve found that there there are some concepts that people consistently get hung up on when discussing ebooks. I used to try to puzzle out answers to these, but in this new, Zen-like approach I’m experimenting with in 2010, I’ve decided to try to actually evaluate the meanings behind the questions. Get your Desktop Rock Garden ready: we’re going behind the scenes on three of them this week.

Question 1: “How will people get their ebooks signed?”

As far as I can tell, the logic behind this question seems to go like this: authors have always signed books, and readers have always come to events to get their books signed, therefore not being able to do that = huge problem.

Here’s the logic I’d love to see people using: instead of wondering how we can adapt an older model to suit new technology, maybe we should think about what getting a book signed represents to a consumer, and see if there’s a way an ereader could make it better.

I’m not big on signed books, so it’s possible I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that they tap into a few different things: the impulse to memorialize an event, the collecting jones, and also the desire to have a unique experience directly with the author. Why else stand in line for an hour with your name spelled out on a post-it note waiting for Salman Rushdie to scrawl his signature and your name in Shalimar the Clown? (←An actual unfulfilling personal experience I’d prefer to not relive.)

We can make this a different encounter. It’s a paradigm shift. Instead of forcing people to wait in line hoping to get some small face time with an author, maybe everyone who attends the reading gets a recording of the event immediately following. Maybe the author is excited enough about being sent on tour that he writes an additional story with the book’s characters, available exclusively to those who show up at his appearances. Maybe a risk-taker even releases the first chapter of her upcoming work-in-progress and an email address where comments can be sent.

The suggestions above aren’t meant to be definitive, and more importantly, they aren’t meant to be changes that need to happen overnight. I mean for them to be examples of the ways in which we can reconsider the signing experience wholesale, instead of merely adapting old practices.

What ways would you be excited to see the signing experience change?

 

Part II in this series, Kindles For All!, can be read on The New Sleekness.

Ami Greko is the director of business development for AdaptiveBlue, working primarily with their add-on Glue. She has previously worked as a publicist at Viking Penguin and FSG, marketing director at Folio Literary Management, and digital marketing manager at Macmillan.

Publication of Written In BLOOD is Pushed Back

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Even with the holiday season I had to move it back owing to the scope and size of the book and its plotline. I am working as hard as I can to finish it, but it does entail some serious research and organization, and I am also creating illustrations for the new video to accompany it. We hope to have the print book published and released by the end of February, with a simultaneous release of the digital ebooks in a variety of formats. In the meantime, some of the other books planned for the season have also been rescheduled. Antellus will announce their debuts as soon as they are ready to be released. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The 2nd edition of PRINCIPLES OF SELF-PUBLISHING, including new material on digital publishing, is the next book and to follow Written In BlOOD, and may be ready to release sometime in the spring.