Is It Apple Forcing Down Apple’s Hardware Prices, or Amazon?

by

“Apple’s Lower Prices Are All Part of the Plan,” ran the headline for an interesting piece yesterday by Nick Wingfield of the New York Times.

Really?

Wingfield believes that Apple, “once known as the tech industry’s high-price leader,” is carrying out a major strategy change to the point where it is now competing with, and often beating, its rivals on hardware prices.

 

I’ll have to admit that despite some interesting anecdotal pricing comparisons made by Wingfield, I’m not feeling him. Yes, Apple has certainly shown some signs that it is pulling back some on its hardware prices, and those prices could soon collapse by 30% or more due to forces entirely outside Apple’s control. We’ll get to that, but it is unlikely that such a collapse would reflect Apple’s strategy.

To conclude that Apple has a real commitment to competitive pricing in its corporate DNA, we’d have to see a lot more evidence of significantly  lower prices on mainstream hardware items like the iPad, the iPod Touch, and the various workhorse Macs (as opposed to boutique products like the MacBook Air or carrier-subsidized products like the iPhone.)

It could happen. But to suggest that Apple management will be in the driver’s seat applying the gas on such a strategic transformation is to ignore a number of powerful forces that leave Apple few options.

For starters, let’s look at the tablet market, which it is entirely fair
to say was created through the innovative brilliance of Apple and its
late leader Steve Jobs. The brilliant success of the iPad — both in its elegance and in its acquisition rate by the public — made fierce competition inevitable. So while iPad sales continue to grow dramatically quarter over quarter, iPad’s overall tablet market share fell from 95.5% a year ago to 66.6% in the third quarter of 2011, FierceWireless reported Friday. Nothing truly stunning there; it’s a pattern one could expect to see in any new market as it begins to mature.

A little more of a jaw-dropper is that the market share for the various Android tablets on the market — including devices from HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Acer and Dell — grew from 2.3% to 26.9% in the same period.

Now, in the fourth quarter of 2011, the Android market share is likely to grow even more dramatically with the launch of the Kindle Fire tablet, priced at $199 and capable, Amazon clearly believes, of doing everything an iPad can do except for the things that only a few people really care about.

If the Kindle Fire hits the hardware sweet spot once people have it in their hands, it could quickly become the single most coveted holiday gift for smart grownups this year at that $199 price, and that price and popularity would constitute a very powerful if traditional pressure on the $499-to-$829 iPad price structure.

But there is another set of pressures forming just now that could totally pull the rug out from under iPad prices. As we reported last week in our post Interested in Trading Up for a New Kindle Touch or Kindle Fire Tablet? Pull Your Clunker In to Amazon’s Super Lot, Amazon is now investing website real estate and an aggressive marketing campaign to create its own secondary marketplace for virtually all tablets and ebook readers. If Amazon can succeed at enticing thousands of the customers whom it shares with Apple to trade in their iPads and iPod Touches for the 30% to 40% offers now on the Amazon website, those trade-in units could stake Amazon or its “Warehouse Deals” subsidiary to an off-price inventory that might, in time, create an entirely new form of downward pricing pressure on Apple.

What’s really going on here? Obviously, an important part of Amazon’s motivation is to give its customers as much incentive as possible to buy its latest-model Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire units, and regardless of what you paid originally for an iPad it’s a compelling proposition to be able to trade it in now for a brand new Kindle Fire and actually have money left over.

But there could be another mission for Amazon, one that could well influence the economics, the retail pricing, and perhaps even the share price for a competitor such as Apple over the next few years. It’s easy at this point to think that Amazon’s new two-way hardware market will be dwarfed in scale by Apple’s front-door production and retail power.

But Amazon knows better than anybody the effects that its Amazon
Marketplace secondary market for new and used books had on competing
booksellers and publishers over the past decade. Some in the publishing
industry believe that Amazon’s customer-friendly innovations actually
destroyed billions of dollars in corporate wealth, even if it also
fueled tens of thousands of small and often home-based businesses.

“Some companies,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, “do everything they can to raise prices for their customers. Other companies do everything they can to lower prices for their customers.”

It is clear that Amazon has always been the latter kind of company, and equally clear that Bezos feels that Apple has been the former kind of company both generally and in its activities with the Big Six publishers to create the “agency model” to fix ebook prices at higher levels than Amazon wanted to charge.

If Apple now seems to be in a state of transition from the former kind of company to the latter kind of company, it remains to be seen whether the transition is “all part of Apple’s plan” or, at least in some significant part, the result of an impressive array of economic pressures that Amazon’s innovations are bringing to bear on Apple.

Note: it happens every 90 days or so, and this afternoon Amazon will report its quarterly earnings after the close of the markets, with the usual conference call scheduled at 5 pm Eastern. Apple reported its earnings last week and apparently disappointed investors. Amazon may well do the same in the short term, but the company’s commitment to low margins could well be leading it to a promised land in which it could gain as much as 50% of the U.S. trade book market by 2013.

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily, where you can find real-time listings of free and quality 99-cent Kindle books in Amazon’s Kindle store, as well as book reviews, news and commentary about the Kindle and ebooks in general.

And Pretty Words All in a Row: Tightening Your Narrative Focus

by

This post, by Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 10/19/11.

First drafts are typically messy. We let our creativity guide us and the story goes where the story goes. It’s not uncommon for a first (or even second) draft to be a bit all over the place. Eventually we’ll get to a point where it’s time to tighten, not only the prose, but the narrative as well.

It’s time to look at your narrative focus.

Narrative focus is the theme or idea that ties a sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, and book together. It’s what keeps the story flowing because everything is lining up like lovely little story roads. It helps keep the pace moving as events and details are building upon one another and making the reader feel like the story is going somewhere.

Like so many things in writing, narrative focus affects the macro and micro levels of your story.

Sentences
Have you ever read a run-on sentence? Odds are it lost its focus. It’s trying to do too many things at once and you’re not really sure what the point of the sentence is. Or you’ll find a sentence that’s trying to cram something in that doesn’t really go with the rest of it.

Bob ran for the car, jumping over the barrel of firecrackers he still couldn’t light, trying to ignore Sally screaming that she’d never leave the keys in the ignition and he was looking in the wrong place.

Um, what?

Do you have any idea what this sentence is trying to say? What’s important here? Going for the car, lighting the barrel of firecrackers, or the keys in the ignition.

Try keeping the focus of each topic together.

Bob ran for the car, ignoring Sally’s screams that she’d never leave the keys in the ignition. He jumped over the barrel of firecrackers he still couldn’t light.

Better, but there’s still trouble here, because what do firecrackers have to do with going for keys? This kind of narrative wobble is common when you’re trying to slip in details and aren’t sure how they fit. This can lead to unfocused paragraphs.

Paragraphs

Remember English class? One topic per paragraph? That still holds true in writing.

 

Read the rest of the post on Janice Hardy‘s The Other Side of the Story blog.

Top 8 Tactics to Power Your Online Book Launch

by

Okay, you’ve finished your book, filled out all your book metadata, and gone through the publishing process. Soon, your book will become available for sale online. For many authors, this is a critical time in the lives of their books.

Why? When your book is new, it’s the natural time to do a book launch. In fact, it’s possible to re-launch a book any time there’s a reason to do so, but the vast majority of book launches are, appropriately enough, at the time of initial publication.

 

The idea of a book launch is to turn the publication of the book into an event. Events, by their nature, draw more attention from the public. Your event is one-time-only, happening live, and the more ways you can attract attention during the launch period, the more eyeballs you will attract to your book (and your other books, if you have related books in print already).

Let’s look at the elements that can go into a book launch. You won’t be doing all these things, so don’t immediately become overwhelmed. Think of this more as a menu of options you can choose from.

8 Ways to Make Your Book Launch Take Off

First, decide whether you want to run all of your activities on a single day, over the course of a week, or extending to a longer time period. Any of these options is workable, and I encourage you to spread them out if your time is already at a premium. Remember that you’re in charge, so you get to decide the exact parameters of your book launch. Here are some things you might include in your book launch:

  1. Media Kit – This is essential. It’s the established way for you to get your information to book reviewers, media contacts and other bloggers. I won’t go through the whole media kit here, but it should include your book launch media release (see below for more information), photo of your book cover, photo of the author, marketing information, sample interviews, and a concise cover letter.

    2.  

  2. Guest Posts – One of the best ways to bring your message to new groups of readers is by offering to write guest articles for other bloggers. This can be done as part of a blog tour or on its own. In any case, by introducing yourself and your subject to new networks of readers, your book will get more of a boost at its launch.

    3.  

  3. Book Trailer – Short videos that act like movie trailers for your book have become more and more popular in the last couple of years. Some books seem to lend themselves to this treatment more than others, and some of the most effective I’ve seen are for fiction, like thrillers and romances.

    4.  

  4. Media Contacts – One way to help your book get off to a good start is to get the attention of the media. This might be through an interview with the local newspaper or radio station about your book, or it might be articles you submit to magazines or online periodicals in your niche. Developing a list of media contacts who are interested or who have reported in the past about your topic will be very useful for this effort.

    5.  

  5. Book Reviewers – Planning your review campaign well in advance will allow both print and online reviewers plenty of time to prepare a review about your book. Although we can’t dictate the schedule on which these reviews are released, let reviewers know when the launch will be happening and other events scheduled for the time period of the launch.

    6.  

  6. Contests & Giveaways – One of the techniques that’s been used to good effect by lots of authors is to give away a set number of books during the launch period. These may be offered by lottery, for leaving comments on your blog, for posting Tweets about the book launch, or any other way you can dream up to attract people’s interest. Free anything is still a powerful pull for lots of people, and getting your book into as many people’s hands as possible is the aim of your launch, so get creative here.

    7.  

  7. Blog Tour – A blog tour organizes the guest posts, giveaways and blogger networking into a formal schedule during your launch period. Setting up guest appearances on blogs, which allows the bloggers to introduce you to their readers, is a terrific way to grow your own reader community and enhance your relationship with lots of bloggers in your niche. You can promote your tour schedule on your own blog and through social media to create some excitement for all the events you’ve planned.

    8.  

  8. Media Release – Although your media release is an integral part of the Media Kit I mentioned at the beginning, it’s really a key piece of your book launch as well. Why? A well-written and targeted media release will bring together all the best reasons people should be interested in your book, your subject, you and your book launch. And if your book legitimately addresses more than one audience, take your basic media release and re-write the headline and first paragraph to highlight the connection to other groups.

Taken together, putting together a book launch can be a lot of work. But there are a lot of tangible and intangible benefits you get from going through all this trouble. And while our basic aim is to sell books, if you’re in this for the long haul, you’ll recognize that these benefits will repay your efforts in many ways. For instance, by going through the launch, you can:

  • Create better relations with other bloggers in your field
  • Better understand your readers and why they respond to you
  • Explore aspects of your subject that might be of interest to different groups of readers
  • Learn which approaches work best in driving traffic, and interest, about your book.

Running a book launch can be a demanding, exhausting and exciting adventure. You’ll learn a lot, and you’ll be able to use that learning for your next book. So give it a try.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

WIG&TSSIP: Point-of-View Methods

by

This post, by Mark Barrett, originally appeared on his Ditchwalk site on 10/13/11.

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

So much has been written across all mediums about point of view in storytelling that the aggregate should be classified as a type of pollution. And all the more so because such conversations almost always reference a system of categorization rather than the act of creation. To paraphrase Hills: while it’s always useful to have something to say to an academic, getting lost in critical blather is pointless.

 

To begin, any story you tell will have at least one point of view. It doesn’t matter which medium you’re working in or what your objective is. You can try to entirely scrub point of view from a story as an exercise and it will still be there. Why? Because anybody who experiences your story knows that it didn’t come from their own head, which means it came from somebody else’s head, which means it has a point of view.

Point of view is inherent in storytelling. The question, then, is how you most effectively control and make use of this always-on, omnipresent aspect of fiction. Fortunately, just as audiences are open and willing to suspend disbelief in order to participate emotionally in the fiction you create, they are generally open and willing to adopt whatever point of view you want to use. If a particular point of view makes your work better or more convincing, that’s not only the point of view you should use but the point of view your audience will want you to use.  

Following up on the previous section, Hills connects the abstract notion of choice with the concrete question of point of view:

The choice of the point of view to be used in a story may be pre-made, more or less unconsciously, by the author, as being basic to his whole conception of it. Otherwise, though, choices about point of view will undoubtedly be the most important decisions about technique that he has to make.

 

Read the rest of the post on Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

7 Social Networking Mistakes to Avoid

by

Everyone says you must social network as part of your author platform.

Publishers, agents, self-publishing marketing people, other authors. It now seems part of the non-negotiable author platform for indie authors and those wanting a traditional deal.

But there’s more to social networking than just marketing.

I started blogging, tweeting and Facebooking over two and a half years ago and consider it a life-changing experience. I have made some fantastic online friends, connected with peers in the industry, gained an online platform that now reaches thousands of people and my novel, Pentecost, is still in the Amazon bestseller rankings after six months, based on a launch fueled by social media. Twitter in particular is an important part of my social life as well as my work and I am a passionate evangelist for the platform.

It doesn’t matter what social network you want to jump into, there are principles that apply to all and some basic mistakes that you can avoid which will make it a much more effective place for you to be.

Here are the top 7 mistakes authors and writers make in social networking.

(1) Not being useful/interesting/entertaining.

If you want to stand out in a crowded market online you have to offer something to people. Remember the phrase ‘what’s in it for me?’ Everyone wants to know things that will help them, or interest them or make them laugh. If you’re not offering that, then you won’t get attention. If you don’t have attention, it won’t lead to interest in you or action in terms of buying your book. So focus on being one of these things as the main pillar of your social networking. For example, I tweet useful links to blog posts on writing, publishing and marketing @thecreativepenn .

(2) Not understanding generosity and social karma.

There is an understanding online that we are not competitors, that this isn’t a zero sum game, that the pie just gets bigger. In fact, those of us in the same niche post on each others blogs, share posts that aren’t our own and promote other people’s products, even if they overlap with ours. The blogging and social media world is all about being generous with links, with information, with help. It makes the community a very positive place to be and we all benefit. It’s important to do this for it’s own sake but it also generates social karma, as in you will receive back in the measure you give. I don’t mean this in any spiritual manner, just that ‘what goes around, comes around’ as in any community.

(3) Not being personal enough.

Yes, you have to be useful but you also have to be a real person. Don’t just tweet information all the time. Intersperse some updates about your life, your writing, maybe your pets or interests, some photos. People connect with people, not info-streams. Use pictures and also link to multi-media that you create or participate in. Remember that people buy from those they know, like and trust so you have to earn that. I also recommend using a picture of your face throughout your networking. It’s much more personal to connect with someone specific rather than an avatar or random picture. Using the same picture all over the web is a good idea and will help people recognize you across the networks.

(4) Being too personal or too marketing focused.

Of course, personal does need balance. You can’t just have personal updates as no one is interested in that. Also, do not just tweet about your new book. The fastest way to get blocked by people is if you are just interested in selling your stuff. There’s a time for that but it’s AFTER you’ve built up some social karma and goodwill with the online audience. Also, if you want to get retweeted, or Liked so your post is shared across other people’s networks, it needs to resonate. That generally means it should have a good headline. I frequently rewrite headlines from blogs in order to get more Retweets. Basic copywriting skills will serve you well here. I recommend Copyblogger as the best place to learn about this and much more on internet marketing.

(5) Expecting short term gain.

Social networking is basically hand-selling to people around the world. You have to connect with people over a longer period of time, before you try to sell them your book. Many authors dive into social networking just before their book launch and then try to sell immediately, or try desperately to grow their following at the last minute. But it doesn’t work like that. You need to work on it consistently, putting in the effort to create relationships over time. This is a long game. Luckily, authors are used to long term projects!

(6) Not being consistent with niche and timing.

People tend to clump together around their interests online, so people will follow your twitter stream for several reasons. They like what’s in your profile (writer/author/loves books!) or they like your tweets/updates, or both. It follows that you need to be consistent with the topics you share because those people will be turned off if you start in a completely new direction. So I tweet about writing, publishing and book marketing @thecreativepenn. I can be tangential e.g. creativity, books I’m reading, things that relate but I won’t be sharing on things really outside the niche e.g. weight loss/ TV programs etc. If you stick to your niche, you will develop a nice, tight community who share your interests. Consistency is also important in terms of timing. If you don’t tweet/update/post for months, people won’t follow you. Simple as that.

(7) Not being global enough with tweet timing and book availability.

Online social networking opens up the world to your books. That is truly exciting…but only if you take advantage of the opportunity.  I’m based in London but 70% of my traffic comes from the US and 15% of my podcast audience is in China, and there are many others represented in my twitter stream and blog traffic stats. The only way to reach people everywhere on social media is to use a scheduler for your tweets. I use Su.pr but you can also use SocialOomph or Hootsuite. Scheduling in multiple time zones means you can appear in streams at different times of day. It’s what I used to specifically try to network with Americans (and it works! Hello American friends!) However, you should also remember that there is only a point in connecting internationally if your book is also available everywhere i.e. on Amazon.com and also in ebook format.

So, those are the top mistakes I see people making on the social networks. If you have any more lessons to share, please add them in the comments below.

 Do you need some more in-depth help with social networking?

Many people want to be successful at social networking but they are afraid of wasting time and not being effective, as well as the concerns of privacy and just not knowing where to start. So I have launched a multi-media mini-course that will help with this.

It has a 59 page ebook, plus audios and 4 behind the scenes videos on all the major social networks. I share all my top tips and strategies for building your social network and using your time most effectively. I help you through the process saving you time and effort in jump-starting your social networking platform.

It’s just US$39.99. Click here to learn more about it .

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn. Images: iStockphoto.

E-Book Cards Will Change The Way You Sell E-Books: Transform A Digital Book Into A Physical Product

by

Publetariat welcomes author Cheri Lasota. In this guest post, Cheri introduces the idea of using physical gift cards as a means of ebook distribution through brick-and-mortar and other offline outlets.

Have you heard of e-book cards? If you haven’t already, I think you will soon. They are a new book marketing technique making headway and headlines around the country now. 

I heard about them from author Dean Wesley Smith. The idea stems from this simple question: how do authors and publishers sell a digital product in a physical store? 

So many of us are releasing e-book only versions of our fiction. In such cases, how do we sign our books at events? How can we hand-sell our books at conferences, speaking tours, or to the neighbor next door? How do we start to educate the paperback public that e-books are both the wave of the future and the here and now? E-book cards can accomplish all this.

These plastic cards are the same size as your credit card or the gift cards you might buy at the store. Why that size and shape? 

·      You can fit them into your wallet or purse.

·      You can slip them into larger sleeves or envelopes that can display even more content about the book.

·      You can put them in a display holder that has a slot for business cards.

·      You can sign them at events because the plastic makes them durable.

·      You can mail them in a standard envelope for promotional packages because they are so small and compact. 

And just think about how little space they would take up on the bookstore shelf, as opposed to a 600- to 800-page paperback?

SpireHouse Books released my novel on Sept. 13, 2011 and we have wholeheartedly embraced e-book cards in our marketing campaigns since then. 

Thus far, we sold many of the cards at my book launch, I’ve sold some by hand, several stores are displaying and selling them, many have bought them as gifts for their friends, and I have used them as giveaways at events and elsewhere.

In the future, we plan to mail them out to book reviewers,continue to use them for giveaways and to sell at events, give them as gifts for holidays and birthdays…the possibilities are endless.

You can tailor your e-book cards for your own needs. For my cards, my publisher put the book cover on side 1 and included two important notes on it:  “E-book Card Edition” and “Read On Any Device.” On the accompanying display, we mention that the e-book card edition is cheaper than anywhere else the book is sold, which gives bookstore owners a clear incentive to stock them and gives readers a great reason to buy in-store as opposed to buying online. Our e-book card edition also contains exclusive content.

On side 2, we included a “tagline” as well as a short synopsis of the storyline; clear, concise instructions on how and where to download the book; an ISBN/barcode; and a unique scratch off promotional code,which the buyer plugs into my publisher’s website.  

We see this as an incredible opportunity for bookstores as well as authors and small publishers. Spread the word to other authors. Talk about this with your local bookstore managers. Think outside the box and you may find that these cards give you access to readers you never thought you could reach. 

Have questions? Just comment on this post.

 

[Publetariat Editor’s note: more of the how-to nuts and bolts, and costs, of getting ebook cards produced are covered in this linked post from Dean Wesley Smith, which was referenced by Cheri near the beginning of this post.]

_______________

SpireHouse Books just launched Cheri Lasota’s first novel, Artemis Rising, this fall. The book is a YA historical fantasy based on mythology and set in the exotic Azores Islands. Currently, Cheri is writing and researching her second novel, a YA set on the Oregon Coast. Over the course of her sixteen-year career, she has edited fiction, nonfiction,screenplays, and short stories for publication. Cheri also has twenty-four years of experience writing poetry and fiction. Learn more about Artemis Rising at http://www.cherilasota.com or buy it at http://bit.ly/ArtemisRisingNovel.

 

Guest Post – Piracy and Free Content with Foz Meadows

by

This guest post, by Foz Meadows, originally appeared on Alan Baxter’s The Word on 10/11/11.

Today I’ve got a guest post from author Foz Meadows. A discussion elsewhere led to this very lucid and, to my mind, accurate post on the nature of piracy in the digital age and the pros and cons of authors offering free content. It applies equally to all forms of digital media. I agree wholeheartedly with Foz on this and hope it makes some interesting reading for you guys.

Piracy and Free Content
by Foz Meadows

solace and grief front cover Guest post Piracy and free content with Foz MeadowsNeil Gaiman tried the free giveaway experiment a little while back – the readers of his blog voted which novel of his they most wanted to recommend to friends (it ended up being American Gods), and then he made it freely downloadable for a month, after and during which time his publishers monitored his sales to see what happened. Similar to Cory Doctorow’s experience, sales of ALL his books (and not just American Gods) went way, way up, which I think Gaiman compared to something of a library/lending effect, i.e.: most people discover new authors because someone, be it a friend or a library, loans them a copy of the book, thereby encouraging them to buy that author’s works in the future but without the initial risk of paying money for a product they might not like.

What I took away from the whole endeavour (apart from the fact that, when it comes to any experimental sort of book sale process, it is very helpful to already be a megastar) is that it seems to work best for writers who already have a published back-catalog. Putting up one book for free, for a limited time, draws attention to all your works together; and if people like the free product, then they’re more inclined to pay for your other stuff, because you are now one of Their Authors. Which could work as a promotion for a second book if done right, I think – but the call is yours.

Regarding people who download, I do think there’s something to the argument that the majority (or at least, a significant proportion) of DLs don’t actually constitute a lost sale, per se, so much as a parallel form of consumption. Allowing for the 10% of assholes who will always rather steal than pay even when they can afford it, I know there have been myriad reported instances where people who already own physical copies of books have sought out illegal digital versions because of region control issues in the legal versions, such as someone from Australia not being able to buy an ebook version of a novel they already own because it’s only published in America.

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Let's Talk About The Author's Journey

by

My first book, Southern Cross, falls under Historical Fiction. It is a spy/murder/mystery that takes place in 1938 and 1939. The journey from writer to self-published author has been long and interesting for me, but not without its potholes. I am beginning to see that promoting my book is going to be more difficult than writing it. Southern Cross is listed on Amazon in England, Germany, and France. So far one copy was sold in England. Nice, but how did they find me and how do I reach other potential readers? I have a webpage, listed on page one of a Google search. I just started a FaceBook page. So far I have been able to do it all myself and would like to keep it that way. What methods have worked best for you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialogue: Common Mistakes Part 1

by

This post, by Karen Baney, originally appeared on her site on 9/23/11.

In this series on dialogue, I’ll cover several common mistakes that writers make in dialogue.  For a more thorough study on dialogue, I suggest picking up a copy of Gloria Kempton’s Write Great Fiction – Dialogue.

Today’s Topic:  Overuse of Character Names

This is best illustrated in the following example:

“Why are you here, Kyle?” Niki asked.

“Well, Niki, I’m here because Marcy asked me to come to dinner with her and her boyfriend,” Kyle replied.

“That’s not what I meant, Kyle.  What are you doing here, in Arizona?  Out of the Air Force?”

“Why is it so important to you, Niki?”

“Why are you avoiding the question, Kyle?”

“Look, Niki, I’m just not ready to discuss it yet.”

Did you notice the extreme overuse of the character names (Kyle & Niki)?  Is it clicking yet?  If not, try reading it out loud.

 

Read the rest of the post on Karen Baney‘s site, and also see parts two, three and four of her series on dialogue.

Will Book Publishers Be Able To Maintain Primacy As Ebook Publishers?

by

This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on The Idea Logical Company site on 10/9/11.

Being on the road in London and on my way to Frankfurt, where we have two Publishers Launch Conferences coming up on Monday and Tuesday, I don’t have time for what my British friends would call a “proper” blogpost, with a bit of research (I admit I never do much) and some links. But I’ve been thinking about something over the past month which I ran by a marketing VP at a major house last week. It looks like one of the really big questions facing the major houses in the next couple of years, so it seemed worth airing in the run-up to publishing’s largest global gathering.

Here’s an assumption that is not documentable; it is my own speculation. I think we’re going to see a US market that is 80% digital for narrative text reading in the pretty near future: could be as soon as two years from now but almost certainly within five. We have talked about the cycle that leads to that on this blog before: more digital reading leads to a decline in print purchasing which further thins out the number of bookstores and drives more people to online book purchasing which further fuels digital reading. Repeat. Etcetera.

We’re already at the point where new narrative text units sold are well north of 25% digital (percent of publishers’ revenue is lower than that, of course) and we are still in a period that has lasted about five years (soon to end) where the penetration of digital has doubled or more annually. (I italicized that to emphasize that what I’m talking about doubling is the percentage of sales that are digital, not the absolute number of digital sales. Several people misinterpeted that when I made to it previously.)

Of course, penetration will slow down before it reaches 100%. I’d imagine we get to 80% in 2 to 5 years, then then to 90% in another couple of years, with the last 10% stretching out a long time. How long did it take after the invention of the car before the last person rode their horse to town?

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

Use Statistics Counters in Managing Your Author Website

by

In managing your author website and your publishing business, it’s important to understand visitor trends for your site. Here are just a few of the things you can learn by studying website statistics:

• Number of visitors each day/week/month
• Number of page views each day/week/month
• How much your traffic is increasing over time
• How are people getting to your site
• What specific search terms people are using to find your site through search engines
• What Web page people were on before they landed on your page
• How long people stay on the site
• How many pages they visit
• Which pages are the most popular
• What countries or regions your visitors come from

You may want to use more than one statistics counter to get a full picture of your website traffic patterns.  Here are a few options:

1. Statistics from your blog or website host

Check to see what kind of statistics you’re already getting from your blog or website host, and consider what other data you may be able to get from external sources.

2. Google Analytics

Google offers a free statistics counter at www.google.com/analytics. You’ll need to log in with your Google user name and password to set up your analytics account.

One nice feature of Google Analytics is a chart of where your website traffic comes from. Here’s what mine looks like:

GoogleAnalytics
 
Search engine traffic comes from web searches (primarily on Google), Direct Traffic refers to people who came directly to the site, Referring Sites means that someone clicked a link from another website to get to my site, and Other includes things like traffic generated by RSS feeds.

3. Other statistics counters

There are a number of other statistics counting services available, both free and paid. I use Google Analytics along with the free service at www.StatCounter.com. The StatCounter interface isn’t as pretty as Google Analytics, but I find it easier to use for quick traffic checks, and I’m able to exclude my IP address from the counter so that my visits to my own websites don’t get counted.

Savvy Tip: To find out your computer or network’s IP address, go to www.WhatisMyIPAddress.com.

Good to Know

If you’re using an external statistics counter, they will provide you with a snippet of code to place on your own website. On a blog you can place the code in a widget or sidebar item. In most cases, you will want to select an "invisible" counter so that the code is not visible to visitors.

Don’t be surprised to find that you’re getting different numbers from different statistics counters. They don’t all use exactly the same data capture methods, but the overall trends should be similar.

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Literary Agency Sells 520 Books In One Deal, Raising Questions

by

Editor’s Note: while most Publetarians are indie authors and small imprint owners, this article is still worth a very close look from all of us. It touches on the indie authors’ and small imprints’ new competitors, companies which are a hybrid of literary agency and publisher. Plenty of indies have a mainstream-published backlist, and those indies need to be particularly wary of the kinds of business practices revealed in this article.

This article, by David Gaughran, originally appeared on his Let’s Get Digital site on 10/19/11.

Last week, Curtis Brown (UK) signed a deal for 520 of their authors’ backlist titles to be published by Pan Macmillan’s new imprint Macmillan Bello.

120 titles will be released between November and the end of the year, with 400 more coming in 2012, and the books will be available in both digital and POD formats.

 

Regular readers might remember that, in May, Curtis Brown were considering a move into publishing after fellow-agent Ed Victor launched his own imprint Bedford Square Books.

At the time, Jonathan Lloyd, the managing director of Curtis Brown, was quoted by The Bookseller as saying, “Where Ed Victor leads, others follow – and we are right behind him, but with a rather larger list.”

However, Mr. Lloyd may not have expected what happened next. Ed Victor’s move created a firestorm, with angry reaction from publishers, authors, and even other agents – including calls for his expulsion from the UK’s representative body, the Author’s Association of Agents (scroll down to comments for quote)

In addition, later that month, one of the first UK agents to move into publishing – Sonia Land – was dramatically cut out of a publishing deal by one of her own authors – Tom Sharpe – who made a backlist deal directly with his publisher.

It seems that Curtis Brown decided to rethink their move into publishing.

Instead, they have announced a deal to sell 520 books en masse to a new imprint owned by Pan Macmillan created especially to house these books. Naturally, with a deal of this size and nature, questions are being asked. Here is what Passive Guy (a lawyer) had to say:

 

Read the rest of the article on David Gaughran‘s Let’s Get Digital site.

9 Tools For Character Development

by

This post, by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, originally appeared on his site on 10/13/11.

Character Development is core to good storytelling. After all, characters are whom readers connect to and if they are stagnant and unchanging, the story can fail to hold reader’s interest. Growth of characters creates drama and propels the story. So what tools can you use to develop characters well? Here’s [nine] suggestions:

 

1) Treat Your Characters As Individuals–People are unique, no two the same, and so should it be with your characters. So each characters should respond differently to a situation as any other character. In particular, fight scenes, for example, can often be a place where characters blend into one, as they all react the same. Instead try treating such common scenes as opportunities to reveal character through uniqueness. How would one character fight differently than another? Work this in and your story will be richer, your characters stronger. There are many other common scene types where you can similarly emphasize the uniqueness. Look for them.

2) Vary The Vocabulary–People use words differently, so your characters should as well. One of the best ways to distinguish and develop characters is through dialogue. Educated people use more sophisticated words, while less educated structure sentences  differently. Think of this as you develop each character’s voice and use it to set them apart, create conflict and develop them throughout your story. Vocabulary, in fact, is far more effective than attempting to create accents. Phonetically, accents already pose problems and can even devolve into silly or, far worse, confusing dialogue styles which detract from the story.

3) Scene Point Of View–Another way to develop character is by choosing the protagonist whose point of view will tell particular scenes. I tend to consider who has the most at stake in a particular scene and make the scene happen in that POV but there are varied theories. Whatever your method, your characters can be developed well through use of POV. For example, I had a scene where a couple are fighting. At the same time, an old enemy is stalking them, intent to do them harm. I told the scene from the enemy’s POV, even though he never interacts with the couple because it allowed me to further both the romantic storyline and the antagonist’s storyline in one scene through his internal monologue as he witnesses their discussion. Three character arcs and two plotlines were thus furthered in one short scene.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 6 more tools for character development, on Bryan Thomas Schmidt‘s site.

25 Things You Should Know About Writing Horror

by

This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 10/11/11; note that it contains strong language.

I grew up on horror fiction. Used to eat it up with a spoon. These days, not so much, but only I suspect because the horror releases just aren’t coming as fast and furious as they once did.

But really, the novels I have coming out so far are all, in their own way, horror novels. DOUBLE DEAD takes place in a zombie-fucked America with its protagonist being a genuinely monstrous vampire. BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD feature a girl who can touch you and see how and when you’re going to die and then presents her with very few ways to do anything about it. Both are occasionally grisly and each puts to task a certain existential fear that horror does particularly well, asking who the hell are we, exactly?

And so it feels like a good time — with Halloween approaching, with DOUBLE DEAD in November and me writing MOCKINGBIRD at present — to visit the subject of writing horror.

None of this is meant to be hard and firm in terms of providing answers and advice. These are the things I think about writing horror. Good or bad. Right or wrong.

Peruse it. Add your own thoughts to the horror heap. And as always, enjoy.

 

1. At The Heart Of Every Tale, A Squirming Knot Of Worms

Every story is, in its tiny way, a horror story. Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether or not one is capable of overcoming those things. It’s not all about severed heads or blood-glutton vampires. It’s an existential thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every story this dark heart beats. You feel horror when John McClane sees he’s got to cross over a floor of broken glass in his bare feet. We feel the fear of Harry and Sally, a fear that they’re going to ruin what they have by getting too close or by not getting too close, a fear that’s multiplied by knowing you’re growing older and have nobody to love you. In the Snooki book, we experience revulsion as we see Snooki bed countless bodybuilders and gym-sluts, her alien syphilis fast degrading their bodies until soon she can use their marrowless bones as straws with which to slurp up her latest Windex-colored drink. *insert Hannibal Lecter noise here*

 

2. Sing The Ululating Goat Song

Horror is best when it’s about tragedy in its truest and most theatrical form: tragedy is born through character flaws, through bad choices, through grave missteps. When the girl in the horror movie goes to investigate the creepy noise rather than turn and flee like a motherfucker, that’s a micro-moment of tragedy. We know that’s a bad goddamn decision and yet she does it. It is her downfall — possibly literally, as the slasher tosses her down an elevator shaft where she’s then impaled on a bunch of fixed spear-points or something. Sidenote: the original translation of tragedy is “goat song.” So, whenever you’re writing horror, just say, “I’M WRITING ANOTHER GOAT SONG, MOTHER.” And the person will be like, “I’m not your mother. It’s me, Steve.” And you just bleat and scream.

 

3. Horror’s Been In Our Heart For A Long Time

From Beowulf to Nathaniel Hawthorne, from Greek myth to Horace Walpole, horror’s been around for a long, long time. Everything’s all crushed bodies and extracted tongues and doom and devils and demi-gods. This is our literary legacy: the flower-bed of our fiction is seeded with these kernels of horror and watered with gallons of blood and a sprinkling of tears. Horror is part of our narrative make-up.

4. Look To Ghost Stories And Urban Legends

You want to see the simplest heart of horror, you could do worse than by dissecting ghost stories and urban legends: two types of tale we tell even as young deviants and miscreants. They contain many of the elements that make horror what it is: subversion, admonition, fear of the unknown.

 

5. We’re All Afraid Of The Dark

We fear the unknown because we fear the dark. We fear the dark because we’re biologically programmed to do so: at some point we gain the awareness that outside the light of our fire lurks — well, who fucking knows? Sabretooth tigers. Serial killers. The Octomom. Horror often operates best when it plays off this core notion that the unknown is a far freakier quantity than the known. The more we know the less frightening it becomes. Lovecraft is like a really advanced version of this. Our sanity is the firelight, and beyond it lurks not sabretooth tigers but a whole giant squirming seething pantheon of madness whose very existence is too much for mortal man’s mind to parse.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 20 more things to know about writing horror, on Chuck Wendig‘s terribleminds.

Uneasy Spirits and Halloween: Using Fact in Support of Fiction

by

“The feast of All Saints, which was ushered in Friday evening by the old-fashioned games of ‘All Hallows’ E’en, was yesterday celebrated in the Catholic and Episcopal Churches.” San Francisco Chronicle, 1879

 “It’s barmbrack cake. Beatrice has baked a ring in it, and tradition has it that the girl who gets the slice with the ring will marry within the year.” Annie Fuller, Uneasy Spirits.

The first quote above is from a real person, who was reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle about real events. The second quote is by Annie Fuller, a fictional person and my protagonist, from my newly published historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, which is set in 1879 San Francisco. As we approach Halloween, 2011, I thought it would be fitting to discuss how I used factual data from the past to provide historical context for a work of fiction.

 

As I was plotting Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I knew that I wanted the story to start only a few months after the first book ended, which was the last week of August, 1879. I also knew the basic plot was going to revolve around Annie Fuller trying to expose the shenanigans of a trance medium who claimed to commune with the spirits of the dead. So, placing the action of Uneasy Spirits around October 31 and the celebration of Halloween seemed a fairly obvious choice.

I got a calendar for October 1879 (one of the wonders of the internet is being able to find this sort of thing so easily), made a list of the main scenes I had outlined for the book, and then decided to make Halloween (which was a Friday that year) the day when several of the semi-climatic scenes in the story occurred. I then literally counted back from October 31, and determined that the opening scenes of the book should happen about 3 weeks from this date. In the final version of the book, the first chapter opens on October 11.

But then I was faced with a real problem. Despite being a professional historian and having written a dissertation that focused primarily on women who worked in San Francisco in 1880, I had no clue how people in 1879 San Francisco would have celebrated Halloween. Did they trick or treat? Wear costumes? Have Jack o Lanterns? I had some vague idea that young boys in small towns went around tipping over outhouses on this night in “earlier days,” but beyond that, I didn’t even know if anyone would actually celebrate this night at all, much less how, in a larger city like San Francisco.

A little research was in order. The first clue came with the mention in the San Francisco Chronicle of “old-fashioned games of All Hallows’ E’en.” I now knew to look for what someone in 1879 would consider “old fashioned games,” which led me to several internet sites that reported on Halloween, including an article in Harpers Magazine for 1886. In addition there were a good number of contemporary articles detailing the history of this holiday.

All these articles agreed that, while Halloween’s roots can be traced back to a number of ancient cultures and religious beliefs, in the 19th century it was the Celtic peoples, particularly the Irish, who had the strongest influence on the development of Halloween as a night of celebration. It was the Irish who seemed responsible for turning October 31 into a night of fun and games, and Irish immigrants brought their traditions with them to America, profoundly influencing how this country celebrated this holiday.

I couldn’t have been more pleased with this information because the Irish were an enormously important ethnic group in San Francisco in 1879. They not only made up a substantial percentage of the working class of the city, they also were represented among some of the economic and political leaders of San Francisco (men like James Flood and William O’Brian, the Silver Kings, and Frank McCoppin, a former mayor.)

Not coincidentally, two of the most important people in Annie Fuller’s life are her cook, Beatrice O’Rourke, and her maid-of-all-work, Kathleen Hennessey, both Irish. Once I knew about the prominence of parties as the way to celebrate Halloween in the late 19th century, it was easy to decide that Annie Fuller would host a party at the boarding house she owned, with Beatrice and Kathleen inviting their friends and family. A perfect setting for one of the main climatic scenes of the book.

And what fun that party was to write. There were indeed jack-o’lanterns at that time (in Ireland the tradition was to use turnips!), and I was able to work a pumpkin into the plot in what I thought was an unusual way. In addition, there were games like “snap the apple,” dancing, and special foods, like the barmbrack cake, which was one of several elements of Halloween activities that revolved around trying to foretell the romantic futures of participants.

I now had a way to provide a new and different setting in which my characters could interact. The detail I had gleaned from my research would make my portrayal of the past more authentic. And finally I was able to leaven what could have been a series of very “heavy” scenes with a light, humorous scene, which is one of my goals as a writer. And I learned something, which was much fun for me as I hope it is for the reader.

Oh, and click here to find a recipe for that barmbrack cake, in case you want to make it for Halloween! 

Sources:

Lynne Olver, Halloween and Day of the Dead Food Traditions, 2005   http://www.foodtimeline.org/halloween.html

Bridget Haggerty, An Irish Halloween Part 1 and 2
 http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/acalend/Halloween1.html

William Sharp, “Halloween: A Threefold Chronicle,” Harper’s Magazine, Vol 73, 1886
http://bit.ly/newKG3

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.