Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

An Indie Call To Action

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Most of us indie authors talk a good game about how there are plenty of quality indie books available, and how there are plenty of terrible mainstream books. We also like to complain about the lack of variety and originality in mainstream book offerings as compared to indie books. Such musings generally lead to the conclusion that if people would just give indie books the same chance they give to mainstream books, if they would just put indie books to the ‘fifteen minute’ or ‘first ten pages’ test, the frequency with which they’d find books they would want to keep reading would be on par with that for mainstream books, and indie authors and readers everywhere would rejoice. It’s time we stop all the hand-wringing and blind hope, and make this happen.

Yes, we have the power. Every indie author is also a reader, and every one of us has a circle of influence. So if you’re an indie author or small imprint owner, I issue the following challenge to you:

1) Find an indie book you LOVE, from an author to whom you have no connection. The lack of a prior connection or relationship is important, since it will eliminate any possibility of a conflict of interest. Finding the right book will require you to put a few likely candidates to the fifteen minute/ten pages test, but if you’re not willing to do it, why should any prospective reader out there do it for your book?

2) Write positive reviews of your chosen book on every site where the book can be bought (e.g., Amazon, Smashwords, Scribd, Lulu store, Authors Bookshop, etc.; most allow you to enter reviews whether you bought a given book on their site or not) and on any reader community sites to which you belong (e.g., Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing).

3) If you’re on Twitter, tweet about the book and author, and include a link to a page where the book can be purchased. Use the hashtag #indieaction, to make it easy for everyone to find these indie action tweets (and some great indie books!).

4) Add the author’s site to your blogroll or links page on your own site.

5) If you were already planning to buy books as holiday gifts and your chosen book is available for sale, include it in your gift mix.

6) If you typically review books on your blog or website from time to time, review the book there as well. If you don’t typically post full reviews, just add a one- to two-liner about the book and author at the end of another blog post. Link back to this post if you feel you need to put your remarks into context.

7) Recommend the book personally to family, friends and coworkers.

8) Spread the word about this campaign to every indie author and indie supporter you know. Here’s a handy link you can share for this post –
http://bit.ly/19eRLb
 

This is not a shady scheme, and this is not a mutual back-scratching society. This is the many thousands of indie authors flexing their collective influence as readers for the benefit of the indie author movement overall.

Maybe you’ve never actively sought out indie books to read, and don’t know where to start. I’d suggest you begin by checking the top-selling, most-downloaded, and/or top-rated books at any of the sites listed below. Most of the bookseller sites listed allow authors to post a free excerpt (for your 15 minute/ten pages test); for other books, try looking up the author’s website to see if you can find an excerpt that way. Again, some time and effort will be involved here but you can gain a lot of insight into the typical book-buyer’s experience with indie books by going through this exercise.

Web Fiction Guide
LL Book Review
Small-Press Bookwatch
Scribd*
Smashwords*
Podiobooks (podcast audiobooks)
Authorsbookshop
Self-Publishing Review
The New Podler Review of Books
Top 100 Kindle Store Independent Authors
POD People

*These sites offer both indie and mainstream books, so you’ll need to check the publisher name to see if you’re dealing with an indie/small imprint book, or a mainstream release

I’m going to get the ball rolling by recommending an excellent indie book from an author who’s a complete stranger to me. The book is called The 6th Seal, and it was written by J.M. Emanuel. It’s an excellent, and truly scary, supernatural thriller set against an archetypal good vs. evil backdrop. If you enjoyed The Da Vinci Code but wished it had more depth, if you enjoy books by Straub and Stephen King, or any of the darker works of Neil Gaiman, if you like fictional explorations of Armageddon, mysteries, or stories built on biblical revelation, you really ought to give this book a try. You can read the first few pages of it using the Look Inside! Feature on Amazon.com, where it’s available in both print and Kindle editions.

In the coming week I’ll put my keyboard where my mouth is by tweeting and posting reviews of this book everywhere I can.

Now get out there and become part of the solution!

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton’s Indie Author Blog.

Literary Agents and the Changing World of Trade Publishing

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This post, from Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on the Idealog blog on 11/14/09, and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

I had a lunch conversation this week with three successful literary agents, who will remain anonymous for this post. They wanted to talk about the panel we’re having at Digital Book World called “The Changing Author-Agent Relationship: How Will It Affect the Business Model?”

That panel was born when I engaged an agent last summer with my observations about digital change and tried to recruit her to join a panel discussion about it. “Suppose you work with an author to develop her manuscript so your creative input becomes part of the work. Then you can’t sell it, or you get only a token offer for it, and the author wants to self-publish. Shouldn’t you, or any agent in that spot, be entitled to something in that case?”

The agent, sensing quickly that I was going to a model of “author pays agent for consulting help” said, “I can’t participate in a conversation like that. We have a canon of ethics in the AAR, and that might well run afoul of it.”

As it turns out, the canon of ethics of the AAR only explicitly prohibits agents from charging “reading fees” to prospective clients. Other charges are explictly permitted, such as for xeroxing and messengers. And others, such as consulting on self-publishing options, aren’t mentioned.

But, still, the question of whether the business model needs to change remains. The kind of book advances that agents have made a living on for years are diminishing in number. And now that self-publishing is legitimately part of the commercial continuum, authors have a right to expect that their career business manager, which an agent is, will employ it, or suggest that they do, when it makes sense. And agents will have a right to expect to be paid for that.

Of course, that’s not what these three successful working agents do. Their business assets are their personal knowledge of and relationships with acquiring editors; their ability to shape a writer’s concept and proposal into a commercial book; their knowledge of the ins and outs of book contracts and publishers’ accounting procedures. Exploring and keeping up with the various print and electronic self-publishing options: starting with Author Solutions and Smashwords, but including many others including our client Bookmasters, lulu.com, and many others, is a fulltime job in itself. (There’s a string started on Brantley’s list today by Joe Esposito who noticed announcements for four new self-publishing startups in his email in the past few days.) And searching out the authors with the money to self-publish, let alone to pay for advice on how to do it effectively, is also not what the successful agent in the current marketplace does.

I had spoken at a Writer’s Digest conference two months ago and told aspiring writers “get an agent” but also, “make sure the agent knows about the self-publishing options.” These very professional and desirable agents did not. But they agreed that when ten or thirty or fifty times a year a project they’d developed goes off for self-publishing, they’ll want to have a way to monetize that. We agreed that the likely solution will be an alliance with somebody who perhaps positioned themselves more as a “consultant” to aspiring authors. There is no shortage of such people.

The conversation turned to contract terms, particularly regarding ebooks. The agents asked me: “don’t the big trade publishers see that the strategy of paying authors half or less of what many ebook publishers will pay on digital book royalties isn’t sustainable? that we’ll end up splitting those deals?” I told them that I had raised this point with Big Six CEOs and they all said, “we won’t buy print-only; never happen.” The big publishers are counting on the authors’ (and agents’) desire for the advance to keep them locked into the current model. (Richard Curtis made this same point in a recent eReads post.) It is clear that the idea of splitting off ebooks from print contracts is one that these agents have been thinking about for a while. The relative attraction of the advance goes down as the level of ebook sales on which you’re taking half or less of what you could get goes up.

We also spent a little time discussing “verticals” and my theory that power is moving from “control of IP to control of eyeballs.” In the past week, I’ve had two conversations with Hay House executives (they’re on the Digital Book World program too) about their business. To somebody with a trade orientation, it’s pretty phenomenal. They run between 30 and 100 live events a year for their community. They have over 1 million email addresses that drive the sales of all their books. One of the agents said he had an author for whom he sold a book to one of the Big Six houses and they sold twelve thousand copies. He sold the next title to Hay House and they sold two hundred thousand. How long will the Big Six houses be able to compete for big-potential books in Hay House’s sweet spot (mind-body-spirit), advances or no advances?

One of the agents at lunch does a lot with juveniles. “Do I have to worry about this ebook thing much?” that agent asked. Soon you will, I said. After lunch I was working with my frequent collaborator Ted Hill on a proposal we’re making for another conference on digital tipping points. One we were talking about is “when does the publishing house have editors shift their focus from developing a print book with an author, with the ebook as afterthought, to developing the best possible digital product, with the print book coming out of it?” That gave me an answer for that agent: you better have somebody on your team now who can see the digital book possibilities in every idea before you peddle it. Now that you’ve made me think about it, I realize that if you’re not fully exploring the creative possibilities for digital products for every kids book you develop, you’re already missing the boat.

The Unmentionable Alternative

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This post, from Moriah Jovan, originally appeared on her website on 11/10/09, and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

I am constantly struck by the idea that writers “give up.” What does that mean, exactly? They stop writing? They stop submitting? Or they stop writing because they’re so disheartened by the submitting? My bet’s on that.

Keep on submitting and you will get published.

By “writer,” I mean good, unpublished novelists who don’t, for whatever reason, catch an agent and/or editor’s eye. I’m not talking about the people who don’t hang out on agent and editor blogs, learning every query trick in the book (some of which are flat wrong to some agents and golden to others). These are the writers who assume that the problem is with them, not with the odds.

Write a better book next time.

Oh, fuck that. It’s odds, folks, whether you want to believe it or not—and the odds get worse every week. And that write a better book bullshit? How do you know the one you just wrote is bad?

You don’t.

And then some of you will crack under the discouragement and say, “I write crap.” And you’ll stop submitting. You may even stop writing.

I did that.

I didn’t write crap, per se. I wrote slightly off-tick that didn’t hit the romance formula bullseye exactly right. Yeah, I said it. There’s a formula. I couldn’t hit it, and the misses were near enough that it was sickening.

willworkforfood243x301This is not an anti-traditional-publishing rant. This is about writers, about you and your work and how much faith you have in it.

Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make? And, by extension, why are you waiting for validation based on odds that aren’t in your favor? And why are you acting like a job applicant?

You’re not powerless.

But somehow the idea of taking control of your work and presenting it to the public/the readers/the (gasp) curators is “giving up.”

Because “money always flows to the author.” Fuck that, too.

Yeah, you’ll have to assume some risk. Deal with it.

It pains me to see good writers on agent blogs talking about “when I’m published someday,” because “it will happen if I submit enough and don’t give up” and “I just have to write a better book next time.”

Stop thinking that way and start believing in your product.

Stop thinking you have no power.

Stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur.

Go make your own damned job.

Update: To clarify, I’m using the term “curators” to describe the self-appointed task of the people who consume the work, like it, and recommend it to others, i.e., the readers/fans, the people who make being The Lone Artist all worth it. I’m not using the term as it has been tossed around the internet for the last year.

Crunching The Numbers: How It's Possible To Sell Every Copy Of Your Self-Published Book And Still Lose Money (And How To Avoid That Outcome)

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This is a sample lesson I’ve written for a new Publetariat offshoot: Vault University. Vault University provides monthly lessons in self-publishing in all formats (print, ebook, podcast), author platform and book promotion. Enrollment in the curriculum of their choice is free of charge for authors who have a published book listing in the Publetariat Vault, and is offered on a subscription basis to all others.

I recently met a self-published author who seemed at first glance to be doing everything right and whose book is on track to sell 10,000 copies. The only problem is, by the time all those books are in the hands of buyers this author will have lost over US$32,200 and will have no idea how it happened. I’ve changed identifying details of the author and book for purposes of this lesson, but the pitfalls to which this author fell victim are still very clear.

The author, we’ll call him Jim, had an idea for a novel and decided to self-publish. Jim’s job gives him lots of exposure to consumers from all over the world, so he set up an online shopping cart early on and began pre-selling before the novel was even finished. He figured a typical book in a store sells for about US$20, so that’s where he set his retail price. Jim did a lot of community outreach as well as personal outreach, and by the time he was finished writing the book he’d pre-sold 5,000 copies. At US$20 a pop, that’s US$100K! Even after subtracting the online payment processor’s service fee of 3% ($3,000), he still stands to net $97K. Sounds terrific, right? There was only one problem: he’d not yet paid anything to have the book produced, printed or shipped to buyers.

Jim settled on a subsidy publisher I’ll refer to as Publisher X. Jim decided he wanted a top-quality book, so he opted for a hardcover publishing package. Publisher X charges a minimum of US$1000 for project setup on a hardcover book, plus US$12-25 per author copy (depending on quantity ordered). Jim wanted to get the maximum discount and already had 5,000 copies pre-sold, so he ordered 10,000 copies of his book at the author price of $12 each. Jim opted to pay an additional US$1000 for Publisher X’s add-on editing and interior layout/design service, and paid US$8500 for professional photography and design services for production of a wraparound, full-color dust jacket for the books. Jim’s total expense up to this point is US$130,500.

You’re probably thinking (as I’m sure Jim is) that when Jim sells those additional 5,000 copies, he’ll earn another US$97K and have US$66,500 in profit. Not so fast: Jim still has to pay to have those hardcovers shipped to him, then he must turn around and pay for packaging materials and shipping expense on every copy sold to get his books to his buyers. If Jim didn’t charge his presale customers sales tax on their orders, he must pay that government tax out of his own pocket too, but let’s cut Jim a break and assume he did charge for sales tax.

Hardcover books are heavy. If we assume Jim will pay about fifty cents per book—which is a lowball estimate, but let’s just go with it—to have them shipped from the publisher to his home, that’s US$5,000.

In order to ship the books to his buyers, he must package them in padded envelopes and pay for postage on each copy, and many of those copies are going overseas. If we assume Jim gets a bulk deal on padded envelopes so that they cost him just ten cents each, that’s still US$1000. But that’s nothing, it’s the shipping expense that’s going to kill any chance his book had of being profitable. Even if Jim uses book rate mail for shipping instead of first-class, he’ll pay US$6 per copy on average to ship the books domestically, and US$15 per copy on average for international shipping. Let’s assume only 1/3 of his buyers are international (3,300 of 10,000). The shipping and packaging expenses still work out to US$49,500 for international shipping and US$40,200 for the remaining 6,700 domestic shipments.

You should now be able to see why Jim’s book cannot possibly turn a profit. If he’s paying the publisher US$12 per copy to buy each book, plus fifty cents per book to have them shipped to his home, plus ten cents per book for padded envelopes and US$6-$15 to ship each book to his buyers, you don’t even have to take the US$10,500 he paid Publisher X into account to see he’s either just breaking even, or losing money, on every copy sold.

Let’s review all of Jim’s income and expenses on this book project.

Item Income/Expense
10,000 books sold at US$20 each, minus 3% proc. fee +  $194,000
Fees paid to Publisher X for setup, + add-on services –     $10,500
10,000 copies of book @ $12 per copy –   $120,000
Shipping from Publisher X –       $5,000
Padded envelopes –       $1,000
Shipping to international buyers, 3300 copies @ $15 ea. –     $49,500
Shipping to domestic buyers, 7500 copies @ $6 ea –     $40,200
Total –     $32,200

Remember, this is assuming he sells all 10,000 copies of his book; he’ll be out much more than $32,200 if he sells less. Had Jim done some number crunching ahead of time, he could have made better choices, spent his money more wisely and turned a profit.

To determine what it will really cost you to self-publish, and how much you stand to earn on a book, you must calculate all of the following—ideally, before you publish:

1. Upfront costs

2. Author copy costs

3. Net “Royalty” per copy sold

4. Break-even point

 

Read the rest of this free, sample lesson on Vault University (no signup required to read this full lesson) to learn how to calculate each of these items, how to compare costs among author and print service providers, how to set a retail price for your book that’s appealing to buyers while still netting you a worthwhile royalty, and how to tell when a given self-published book project cannot possibly be profitable. This content © 2009 Vault University.

Veterans Day

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Today is Veteran’s day and I wish to thank all those who have served bravely to protect our freedom and to remember those who perished preserving our liberties.

Today I published an article for RedAdept on her Kindle Review Blog:

http://redadept.wordpress.com/

Thanks to all the Operation eBook Authors (232 strong) for supporting our troops.

"I believe that human courage must be matched by our very best efforts. As authors we may not be luminaries, but we all have a light to stand tall beside those who protect our right to be creative in ways not allowed universally. In that, we pay their courage forward with our creative thanks."

Edward C. Patterson

Mythbusting the ISBN

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This post, from Laura Dawson, originally appeared on the LJNDawson blog on 11/4/09.

It’s probably not healthy to keep thinking about this. It certainly makes me a lousy conversationalist. Because in all the ruminating and talking and (if you must know) mad nattering to myself (luckily, I spend LARGE portions of my day alone), I keep coming back to the ISBN.

Bear with me. (I have already investigated, and there is no rehab facility that deals in identifier addiction problems, so that’s out.)

Last month, the AAP’s Digital Initiatives Working Group and BISAC’s Identifiers Committee conducted a survey among members to determine what publishers’ views actually are on the ISBN. Publishers have been told what to think, repeatedly – and we know how much publishers like being told what to think – so we thought we’d turn the conversation around and ask them what they thought. The results are not yet finalized, and when they are I will talk about them.

But I worry. Because as we expand book distribution from merely a paper-with-occasional-ebook business to an all-kinds-of-paper-and-lots-of-different-ebooks-plus-vooks-plus-promotional-packages-plus-print-on-demand-plus-subscriptions-to-book-content-plus-downloadable-audio – well, you can see where this is going, and it’s messy.

And I have been in more than one meeting where I have heard these exact words (and I am not making this up), “If only we had some kind of system to deal with this, some way of identifying content…”

Hello????

So, first, some mythbusting.

ISBNs are expensive.

Actually, no they are not! The new My Identifiers site will offer new pricing in January. A single ISBN will cost an author or publisher $125. Ten ISBNs are $250, or $25 per ISBN. A hundred ISBNs are $575. This is cheap!

An ISBN is just a bar code for a book, and if my books are digital, I don’t need ISBNs.

Not so! In using an ISBN for a digital book (or any book), a publisher creates an automatic web page for that book, which is populated by the bibliographic data in Books in Print (and can be edited or added to by the publisher). Bowker hosts that web page, and the hosting price is included in the purchase of the ISBN. Publishers can choose which booksellers will sell their titles on that page – or direct traffic specifically to the publisher itself.
The price of the ISBNs also includes a widget for each title, to put on your own website or to share – you can choose to display as much or as little of each book as you want.

 

Read the rest of the post on the LJNDawson blog.

Remix My Lit: Literature That's Read and Write

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This is a cross-posting of a post that originally appeared on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn website on 9/23/09.

I went to the Remix My Lit masterclass at the Brisbane Writers Festival last week, and came away inspired! It was run by Amy Barker, author of Omega Park and the notes below come from her presentation and ideas.

RemixMyLit.com is a project that took original works by authors licensed under Creative Commons. Then a whole load of new authors remixed them creating new works, also shared under the Creative Commons license.

Some of the best works were published in an anthology, ‘Through the Clock’s Workings‘, that can be downloaded for free here, a Creative Commons work you can remix and share to your heart’s content.

“It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike licence. What that means is you can remix the stories, but only if you acknowledge the author, the remix is not for commercial use, and your new work is available for others to remix”. Remix My Lit.

What is remixing and why is it interesting?

Remixing is a term more commonly used in music, where artists remix each others work, or fans do the same (the project uses the example of Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails The Slip album).

But it has been used in literature, most commonly with Shakespeare – endlessly remixed into films, stories, plays and other works. Baz Lurhman’s Romeo and Juliet kept the language, but totally remixed the location, scenes and time to create a fantastic version.

Shakespeare and other older works are in the Public Domain, out of copyright and available for anyone to use for any purpose. You can get free digital copies of Public Domain books at Gutenberg.org.

Public domain classics include: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Ulysses by James Joyce, Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, most recently remixed as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith.

This is a ‘novel as mashup‘, certainly more recognisable that Bridget Jones Diary (albeit a better looking Mr Darcy!).

Whatever the literati think of these remixes, Seth Grahame Smith has made a lot more money than many, more original authors. He has 2 more books coming out, the next being “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”. There are also rumours of a movie!

So you can remix/reuse public domain works, certain Creative Commons works and, I presume, other work you have express permission to use.

So why is that interesting?

Remixing is great for writing prompts and jump-starting creativity!

If you need some inspiration for your writing, there is literally a world of ideas just waiting for your brain to create something new! That is pretty exciting.

In the workshop, we did this fun exercise where we took the hard copy of one of the stories, ‘Cherished’ by Emily Maguire. We then proceeded to do a ‘cut-up’ – literally!

We all cut words out of the story and re-pasted them into a remix, some taking the angle to preserve some of the original ideas, and others making something very new with the same words.

You can read the original story in the free eversion here. It is short narrative.

You can see all the remixes of the original stories here.

Here is my offering (and yes, I’ve been reading too much horror!)

‘Cherished’: The Scott Sigler Remix

Behind a smear of pinkish sunless skin

her gums are dried blood

Her ragged bathroom belly

flaunting retro-blue-frosted polished stumps

stiff to the touch

squat reflection on her steel-blue veins

the rest of her remains, a goth-inspired charcoal

disposable beloved,

Emily, Cherished girl.

****************************************************

The Remix My Lit logo is a derivative work of a CC Attribution 2.0 Flickr image ‘Street Art’ by Kim Laughton, aka ‘olivepixel.’

Ebook Drama Roundup

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There’s been a lot of hang-wringing, railing, theorizing and punditry about ebooks lately: pricing, devices, formats and DRM. Here’s a roundup of just a fraction of the buzz.

On October 23, Crain’s New York Business ran a piece entitled Analysts Warn Booksellers Of E-Peril. Sounds pretty melodramatic, but as it turns out, all the worrying and worst-case-scenario discussions can affect stock prices. The article ran within a few days of the launch of Barnes & Noble’s "Nook" dedicated ereader, and according to the article, "The shift from digital to physical books will ultimately hurt traditional bricks-and-mortar book sellers, analysts said Friday…" The article goes on:

The company could become a major player in the digital book business, but that actually may speed the downward trend in its revenue and profit, said Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter, who rates the company "underperform."

As the math currently works, each sale through a Nook is not just unprofitable but potentially replaces a higher-margin sale at stores," Mr. Balter wrote in a client note Friday. One obvious risk is that downloading books reduces the need to go into stores, he said.

Yet there’s a tiny ray of sunshine for B&N stock holders, in that the sale of Nook devices will temporarily increase B&N’s revenue picture. But that’s not necessarily a good thing for all the rest of us. On his Publishing 2020 blog today Joe Wikert wonders, Is the eReader Financial Model Upside Down?, saying:

I won’t buy a Kindle edition of a book that’s more than $9.99.  Why?  Besides the fact that I’m a cheapskate, I guess I’m still bitter about paying almost $300 for an original Kindle, so I expect to "make it up" with cheaper content.  I wonder how many others like me are out there.

I’d say quite a few.  Look at the Kindle book bestseller list.  Even though there are plenty of Kindle editions priced above $9.99 they rarely make the bestseller list. In fact, as I type these words 14 of the top 25 have a price of $0.00, one is $0.01 and the rest are at or below $9.99.  I only found three books in the top 100 priced above $9.99. Three."

Why can’t a device vendor go with more of a cell phone model, where the low price of the device is subsidized by the longer-term commitment to buying content?

According to Max Magee’s piece, Follow the Money: The ebook Pricing Wars, which ran on The Millions on May 28 of this year, Wikert is on target:

You’ve likely heard about Kindle owners who have balked at the idea of spending more than $9.99 for an ebook. With the Kindle going for $359, many Kindle owners have decided that their willingness to pony up the big bucks for the device was their side of an implicit bargain. In return, there is an expectation that ebooks will come at a discount to their physical counterparts, allowing Kindle owners to recoup their investment in the device over time. Any sign that this bargain is falling apart has been met with resistance by Kindle owners…

Okay, so publishers and consumers alike have a lot of financial concerns about ebooks. But what about the authors? J.A. Konrath has recently begun publishing some of his work for the Kindle himself, and on October 13 he posted a surprising comparison of Kindle Numbers: Traditional Publishing Vs. Self Publishing on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog. His conclusion?

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I’d be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I’m losing $15,762 per year.

Konrath is so pleased with his Kindle self-publishing results that’s he’s now beginning to dabble in iTunes ebook apps as well. Sounds pretty good if you’re an author, until you take a gander at Henry Baum’s piece, Ebooks are a Disaster, posted on Self-Publishing Review on November 4. Henry says:

I spent a long time designing the interior of my book – choosing fonts and font-sizes, etc. – only to have to delete all of that when creating the ebook. Given that people already chide ebooks for being a pale comparison to printed books, having an ebook be so different from the printed text is going to slow down converts to the platform.

The process of duplicating his interior formatting to the extent possible proved to be such a hassle that he eventually hired B10 Mediaworx to do the formatting for him, but even then it was no slide on ice. He adds:

We had a time of it, though, because the epub file wasn’t revealing the italics – which isn’t just a formatting problem, but an actual content problem. Italics can change the entire meaning. Turns out – after many emails sent back and forth – that the desktop version of Stanza does not work as well as the iPhone app, which actually does reveal italics in the epub file.  One example of the many possible ways that ebook formatting can go awry.

Unfortunately or fortunately for authors, depending on how you look at it, static text ebooks are just the tip of the digital book delivery iceberg. Last month I interviewed Al Katkowsky about the success of his iTunes book app, Question of the Day Book, and you’d have to be actively avoiding publishing news to avoid hearing about the Vook. Publetariat contributor Joanna Penn wrote about it on her The Creative Penn site on October 4th in a post called What is a Vook, and How Will It Change Publishing?

Publishers Simon& Schuster launched 4 ‘vooks’ last week, a combination of book and video to create a new medium for the reading/watching experience (video on What is a Vook here).

They are available in the Apple app store for the iPhone and are aimed at handheld devices, although are not compatible with the Kindle or Sony e-reader as they don’t do video. You can also buy them at Simon & Schuster’s website.

Following a video clip of Vooks in action, Penn notes:

  • There are opportunities for new sources of revenue for both publisher and author. The authors are getting ebook royalties (whatever that means!) but Jude Deveraux wrote her novella in 6 days and then worked with a film-maker. This is clearly not the 5 years Dan Brown took to write “The Lost Symbol”! These vooks may not replace the mainstream novel but they could represent a smaller, short story based product that could make authors money in between novels.
  • The ‘vooks’ have launched on Apple’s app store, and so the possibility of creating one as an indie author is there. This week I am interviewing Winged Chariot, who publish children’s books on the App store. I will be asking them how to create an app and will be posting more on this. I am determined to have my books as iPhone apps, but not for a huge price. I’ll let you know what I find out!

So authors, perhaps especially indie authors, have a brave new world of publishing opportunity at their feet, but it’s a world that demands that authors have either the techno-savvy to develop their own book "products", or the money to hire out for techno-savvy. Now if only we could get a handle on Digital Rights Management (DRM), that process whereby publishers and device providers collude to prevent consumers from sharing, moving, and generally doing whatever they want with their purchased ebooks.

The Nook ereader device introduces a new wrinkle in that discussion: ebook sharing. On October 25, Medialoper’s Kirk Biglione wondered, Is Book Sharing Really a Threat to Publishing? 

Although ill-named, the Nook is a worthy competitor to the Kindle, offering a number of features not found on the Amazon device, including LendMe, a feature that allows for controlled sharing of ebooks. While the sharing feature comes with a number of limitations, it would appear to be a small but important step towards making DRM-restricted content slightly more flexible for consumers. There’s just one problem — publishers want no part of the Nook’s LendMe feature.

Publishers Lunch reported last week (registration required) that many large publishing houses have indicated that they won’t participate in the LendMe program.

Later in the article, Biglione adds:

What Unnamed Publishing Executive seems to fear most is a sense of consumer entitlement. If consumers have the right to share ebooks now, they’ll expect to have that right until the end of time. Never mind the fact that consumers share print books all the time…If the history of digital media has taught us one thing it’s that media companies see the digital future as an opportunity to exert extreme control over how consumers use and interact with content.

It seems reasonable for publishers to want to protect their livelihood, but they may be barking up the entirely wrong tree if  a recent report out of Norway on the music-buying habits of filesharing pirates is to be believed. As reported by Ars Technica on April 20 of this year:

Researchers examined the music downloading habits of more than 1,900 Internet users over the age of 15, and found that illegal music connoisseurs are significantly more likely to purchase music than the average, non-P2P-loving user.

As a legalized version of file sharing, LendMe may have the potential to actually spur more ebook sales. And ebook sales are most definitely on the rise according to quarterly reports by the Inernational Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). On January 21st of this year on the Smashwords blog, Smashwords founder Mark Coker says of the quarterly report for period ending December 2008:

The IDPF today reported ebook sales were up 108% for the month of November, 2008 compared to the same period a year ago…

Dig beneath the surface, and the numbers are striking. Ebook sales are surging while the entire trade book industry suffers a decline…

For the five years between 2002 and 2007 (Click here for data, opens a PDF), overall trade book sales averaged an annual increase of 2.5% (lower than inflation, which means unit sales probably decreased), while ebooks for the same period turned in a 55.7% average annualized increase.

Granted, the robust sales growth for ebooks was off of a tiny base to begin with. But…fast forward to October of 2008, the date for which year-to-date sales are reported on the AAP web site , and you see overall trade book sales for the first 9 months of the year were down 3.4% while ebook sales were up about 58%. So the rate of ebook sales accelerated during the first 9 months of 2008 compared to the previous five years.

More interesting, for the month of October the AAP reported overall trade book sales suffered a 20% drop in the year over year monthly comparison, while ebook sales accelerated to 73% growth.

It seems that what we’ve got here is a mix of good news and bad news caught in a whirlwind of flux and guesswork. In the final analysis, I think there are only three things that can be said of ebooks with any certainty:

1) Digital books are here to stay

2) Publishers will not succeed in realizing the full potential of digital books until they can better comprehend the potential of the numerous media available to produce digital books, and consumers’ expectations of both the media and media providers

3) We have yet to see the best or final incarnation of the digital book; in the Vook and today’s ebook apps, we’re witnessing the infancy of a new type of book that is much more about dynamic content than it is about any specific delivery system (and we’re not just talking electronic files and gizmos – paper bound between two covers is a content delivery system, too)

Whether you’re a publisher, author or reader, you have a stake in the future of digital books and your opinion is no less valid than those of anyone quoted here. So, what do YOU think?

EBook Formats—Where are they Now and Where are they Going?

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For those of us who are more seasoned citizens, remember the battle between cassette tapes and 8-tracks? Remember the video format fights between VHS and Beta? Those seem very simple choices when considering what format choices we have today for ebooks. I certainly don’t claim to be the expert here, but hope those more knowledgeable will feel free to chime in with comments, which will expand our knowledge base. Please treat this as a forum.

According to my research there are quite a few methods to view ebooks, and, therefore, quite a few formats. What is a publisher to do? Stick to the most common format or publish his ebooks in several different formats? First, let’s take a look at some of the ebook devices, because they drive the formats. One term you should be aware of is DRM, or “digital rights management,” which refers to techniques that seek to prevent illegal copying or pirating of a digital work, like an ebook or music:

  • Computers (PC and/or Mac) which easily read the pdf format.
     
  • The Sony Reader primarily uses Sony’s proprietary Broadband eBooks (BBeB) format for documents with DRM but also supports RTF and non-DRM PDF.
     
  • The Amazon Kindle uses Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, which supports DRM.
     
  • Flip Book is an online connected technology that uses their proprietary format and plays on a computer (PC or Mac versions). It presents a 3-D appearance for those of us who like flipping pages and want something that looks like a book.
     
  • As the market expands, there will be more devices. For example, former HarperCollins President and CEO Jane Friedman has launched Open Road Integrated Media (ORIM) in partnership with film producer Jeffrey Sharp. They will use a proprietary format for their own devices. Barnes and Noble, not to be out done by Amazon, will be releasing a new device called the Plastic Logic e-reader. It will use the EPub format that has also been adopted by Sony. Yet Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore won’t be accessible by Sony Reader. Amazon Kindle users won’t be able to download books from Barnes & Noble’s e-book store. And so the Tower of Ebook Babel continues to grow toward Heaven.

What’s A Publisher To Do?

First, in my opinion, it’s not worthwhile to use DRM features, because it treats all customers as potential pirates. That doesn’t make for good PR, and it adds more complexity to your sales process, which is never a good idea because it gives the customer the opportunity to become frustrated and opt out before the sale is made. Pirating is a problem, but it isn’t that big of one. Besides, pirates will always develop work-arounds, which may render DRM useless.

If you would like a free resource that rates all the different ebook formatting software packages, click here to obtain the Ebook Developers Association free ebook software comparison guide. Personally, for the time being, I will stick to a simple pdf version.

I’m going to wait for device dominance, unless the ensuing battle goes on for too long, then I will consider going to multiple format editions. How will I do that? By relying on a formatting service. One such that I found is Smashwords. Click here to learn how they produce multiple DRM-free format versions and publish the ebooks for you for 15% of the retail price. I consider that a good deal, especially if it takes you out of the fulfillment loop.

Ever the pragmatist, I have offered my approach; however, I easily could have missed something. So, here’s the opportunity for the experts to weigh in and present alternatives. As I said, please treat this as a forum.

#fridayflash: Excerpt From Adelaide Einstein

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This week, I offer an excerpt from my novel, Adelaide Einstein. I think I’m going to have to keep alternating between original flash fic and excerpts from fiction and screenplays I’ve already written if I have any hope of keeping all my plates spinning!

 

There were a few minutes of silence, during which Adelaide recalled how excited and full of dreams she’d been when she arrived in this Golden Gate city all those years ago; meanwhile, Patty wondered why her mother had come all this way just to drop out of school and get married. She might as well have stayed in Earle like her younger sister. 

            “Mom,” she said, “why did you quit school and marry Daddy? Were you pregnant?”

            “Patricia!” Addie exclaimed, scandalized by the very idea. “Of course I wasn’t pregnant! I was a virgin until my wedding night!  I left school and got married because it was what I wanted.” She decided to make a slight correction. “It was what I…thought I wanted, at the time.”

           “I don’t get you at all, Mom. I mean, I know you’re smart and all, and you seem so happy that I’m going to college and I’m going to have a career. So if you think it’s great for smart women to have careers, why don’t you want one?”

           "Oh, Patty. It’s not that I never wanted a career. I think I got married too young to give it much thought. I hadn’t settled on a major in college yet, and the way I was raised, college was more a place for a young woman to meet her future husband than to get a degree. We used to say that so-and-so had been to college and got her M-R-S.”

           “M-R-S?”

            “Yes, missus.”

            Patty rolled her eyes. “That’s absolutely disgusting. Like that’s all we’re good for in life, to marry some guy.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I’m kind of pissed off at Grandma, now that I know she taught you that.”

            Having Patty feel protective of her gave Addie a warm feeling. She smiled. “Well, the important thing is that I’ve learned a lot, and I’m teaching you differently. And I’m not unhappy with the way things have turned out.”

            “Well, I guess as long as a woman is doing what she wants, even if it’s dropping out of college to get married, you could say she’s liberated. But you know, I think it’s really great that you’re going back to get your degree now.”

            “I’m not necessarily going to get my degree, Patty. I’m only taking one class, and not even for college credit. It’s just for fun, really.”

           “If I was going to take a class for fun, I don’t think it would be Concepts in Physics.”

            “Maybe you would if you knew the professor,” Addie said.

            “Why? Is he Brad Pitt-esque? Orlando Bloom-ish? Johnny Depp-like?”

            “No,” Addie laughed. “Nothing like that. He’s the cancer patient I met at the hospice, remember? I mean that he has a way of making Physics interesting and kind of fun.”

            “Don’t fall for it, Mom. It’s probably a trick, just like when my Algebra teacher started off the term by showing this cartoon, ‘Donald in Mathmagicland’. After the honeymoon period, it’s back to drills and quizzes.”

           “We had our first quiz already.”

           “On your first day? And you still think it’s fun?” Patty shook her head. “Sometimes I really wonder about you, Mom.”

            Adelaide was very pleased to hear it.

 

If you like this, you can read much more of it, from the beginning, for free on my site in pdf format. For you ebookish types, you can read most of it for free on Smashwords or Scribd.

Come With A Manuscript, Leave With The Knowledge And Confidence To Publish And Promote Effectively—And A Tan!

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The Stem-To-Stern Workshop Cruise will be taking place 10/10/10 – 10/17/10, and just $25 paid to AAA Travel holds your spot on the cruise roster until May 6, 2010. It’s a weeklong cruise vacation, and intensive writers’ workshop series, and private consulting sessions, all combined into a single, affordable trip for writers!

During the week of October 10, 2010, you can:

 

Learn  POD Publishing, Ebook Publishing, Podcasting For Authors, and Author Platform/Book Promotion from leading experts Kirk Biglione, April L. Hamilton, Seth Harwood, Kassia Krozser and Joshua Tallent in a setting where attendance is limited to 30.
 

Consult with the presenter of your choice about your specific book, project or questions in a 45-minute, one-on-one coaching session**.
**signups limited to 6 sessions per presenter; presenter choice granted on a first-come, first-served basis with top priority going to fully paid workshop registrants
 

Socialize with your fellow conference attendees and workshop presenters at 3 on-board social mixers. These get-togethers will be a great opportunity to get to know your fellow attendees and workshop presenters better, and talk to presenters about any questions or concerns that haven’t been addressed in workshop sessions.
 

Travel the Mexican Riveria, with stops in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas! All workshops are scheduled for at-sea days, so attendees will be free to go ashore and take advantage of any optional shore excursions offered by Carnival Cruises.
 

Enjoy unlimited meals, snacks and onboard activities (fitness center, games, pools, jacuzzi, water slide, mini golf, movies on the jumbotron at poolside in the evenings, much more) all included in the price of the cruise!
 

It’s a weeklong vacation with intensive workshops and private consulting, room and board and all onboard meals included, with pricing as low as $1169 for the cruise and workshop fee combined! You could easily pay that much for a weeklong cruise vacation alone, or workshops and private consulting alone, but if you attend the Stem-To-Stern Workshop Cruise, you’ll get both! 

Don’t miss this terrific opportunity to get twice the bang for your vacation and writer workshop buck. Click here to view full details on important dates, workshops, pricing options, presenters, a full cruise itinerary and details of how to get your deposit in to reserve a spot on the cruise.

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.)

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.