Ebooks And What Matters

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This essay, from Charles Tan, originally appeared on his Bibliophile Stalker site on 5/15/11.

Context is very important. Last week, I came across two seemingly-contradictory articles, at least if we only read the headlines and the first few paragraphs: E-Readers Fail At Education and iPad Study Released by Oklahoma State University. To sum up both articles: one showcases how ineffective eBook readers are, while the other praises the iPad.

Over the past few months, I’ve migrated from reading eBooks on a computer to an iPod Touch to a cheap eBook reader to an iPad. While my conclusions is based on personal experience, I think it gives me leeway to extrapolate on the subject.

The Reader Matters

Whenever there is a discussion, I think it’s important to nail down who the reader is. It’s not simply about the demographic, classified by age or profession or degree, but who they are as individuals. Are they open to reading on a computer screen? LCD or e-Paper? How tech-savvy are they? Any medical handicaps that may impede (or in some cases, benefit) from using an eBook reader? (I also want to point out how these questions are framed from the assumption that paper is the default and theoretically best method.)

That’s not to say these details are easy to consolidate and present in a report, especially as a statistic, but when it comes to individual choices of whether to use an eBook reader or not, I think these are essential questions which can’t be covered by a generic recommendation.

The Book Matters

I’ve been in a reading slump as of late but there have usually been two motivators for me when it comes to reading books on an electronic device–and this element isn’t stated often.

The first is how badly do I want to read this book? I’m a genre reader from the Philippines so book scarcity–whether it’s a supply problem (not available here) or a finances problem (it’s available but it’s not within my budget)–is a genuine problem. If eBooks can overcome those problems, my desire to read a particular book can possibly overcome any anti-eBook bias I might have. I don’t think this is constant rule, but just as we make exceptions to various standard responses, I think a book that’s compelling enough to the reader might make us "put up" with eBook readers, no matter how sub-optimal it might be.

Read the rest of the essay, which includes three more things that matter about ebooks, on Charles Tan‘s Bibliophile Stalker.

Because You’re Not Worth It (Or, Why Friends Don’t Ask Friends To Work For Free)

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This post, by Kian Kaul, originally appeared on his Stockholm site on 5/10/11.

I used to find this quote inspirational, but now it just seems puzzling…

“One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.”
– Stanley Kubrick

[Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

Not to pick an undebatable point with one of the greatest creative minds in recent history, but having produced a novel (yes, produced – more on that later) it’s fairly clear that all the author traditionally does is put the words together pretty.  Write the manuscript.  What usually follows in the process is turning it over to proofers and editors, lawyers who vet the prose for lawsuits-in-waiting, marketers whose job it is to judge to whom and how to hock the story, which in turn informs the graphic designers who mock up the jacket cover and possibly any accompanying advertising materials (if handled in-house), all overseen by the publisher whose vision greatly supersedes the person who slapped the words together pretty in the first place.  Not to mention the ENG crew who may be hired to shoot crisply-lit interviews with the author to be used in the press kit (produced by yet another company entirely) for media outlets who may want to cover the product (yes, product).

Before the switch is thrown on this assembly line, it’s debatable whether the manuscript is really a book or just a pile of papers.  Or perhaps it was best argued on an especially subtext-heavy episode of Seinfeld , “It’s a pizza as soon as you put your fists in the dough!” “No, it’s not a pizza until you take it out of the oven!”

But, all the above is pure fantasy if you’re an indie author (the recent rebrand of the dreaded “self-published”).  Unless you’re versed in some or all of these skills, or just wealthy (in that case, read no further, you’ve got life on a string!) you’re probably planning to pull in favors, find other skilled creatives who “need to build their portfolios” and enlist friends who will be brimming with enthusiasm to drop whatever they’re working on to help you.  But the truth is, you’re not worth it.

The math is pretty simple; if you’re not in the position to hire for pay, none of the following highly-coveted descriptive terms apply to you: wealthy, famous, influential, incredibly charismatic, double-jointed.  Because, let’s be brutally honest, if you were two or more of those things you wouldn’t be an “indie author”.

The term “indie” seems to be a more sanitized form of “punk” or “underground”, with the aesthetic implications of photocopied demo tape jackets and monochrome fliers, circa 1980-199something (pre-Photoshop, post-Guttenberg).  And that’s essentially what we’re doing, sticking up our own demo albums on the local giveaway shelves until either someone offers us money to do it on their terms or we make enough to pay ourselves a living wage and continue to produce (while screaming “fuck the man” and pretending that we haven’t become exactly that).
 

Read the rest of the post on Kian Kaul‘s Stockholm.

Rewind, restart…

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 I am a boutique publisher of two years standing who has learnt the hard way about what does and does not work. 

Now things are different. My business partner and I are starting over. We are taking a different position. Making baby steps this time without the giant leaps which we could not support. Concentrating on building our own readership with our work before we take on any others.

The Secret Ingredient To A Strong Author Platform

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This post, by Justine Musk, originally appeared on her Tribal Writer site on 12/9/10.

I have come to believe that an author platform is its own cool thing. It isn’t something you can just slap on top of your novel – a coat of promotion, a sprinkle of marketing – but a living, growing entity in its own right.

It needs to reach into many different places. You can’t just sit on your blog like a spider in its web and wait for the pretty flies to come. You need to find your readers across the different platforms – and you need to re-imagine and re-purpose your content to fit those platforms.

This requires work and time. An editor at a webinar advised her listeners to take half of your writing time and dedicate it to platform. Gone are the days when marketing your novel was something that happened after the fact. Now it has to be baked into the process.

Now it requires big meaning.

And by this I mean a big idea, a theme, an obsession, a vision, a mission statement, a full-fledged manifesto/a. Call it what you will. I like the phrase ‘big meaning’ because meaning is what we seek and make out of our lives, fleshed out through our creative work.

A sense of meaning is intrinsic to happiness. We need to love and work in meaningful ways. When we’re depressed, we say our lives have no meaning.

If an author platform is to be truly powerful, it has to mean something to you and to others.

Read the rest of the post on Justine Musk‘s Tribal Writer.

Online Retailer Amazon Accused Of Trying To ‘Wreck The Publishing Trade’

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This article originally appeared on the Daily Mail U.K.’s Mail Online site on 5/15/11.

Amazon has been accused of trying to ‘wreck’ the book trade by turning itself into one of the world’s leading publishers.

Critics claim the online retailer’s plans to produce its own titles will give it a stranglehold on the industry and drive traditional publishing houses and book shops out of business.

 

One literary agent who asked not to be named said: ‘It is a crazy and ridiculous idea which will end up wrecking the publishing industry.’
 

Amazon has already come under fire for ‘ruthlessly’ undercutting traditional retailers on the price of books.

It has launched four publishing businesses: Amazon Encore, specialising in first-time writers; Amazon Crossing, which sells English language translations of foreign books; Montlake Romance; and non-fiction range Domino.

The move is part of a campaign to further boost demand for the company’s Kindle electronic reader, which is the biggest- selling product of its kind in the world. The ebooks published by Amazon will be available only through this device.

The strategy is already proving a success and several of the 65 titles the firm has published have made it on to best-seller lists.

But critics say the strategy will further undermine demand for traditional print books and will put increased pressure on small and independent publishers which are struggling to survive.

Read the rest of the article on Mail Online.

Self-Publishing Resource Roundup

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Since Publetariat’s launch a bit over three years ago, the site has become a trusted resource and thriving community for indie authors and small imprints. For that, I thank each and every one of you. It’s also become a favorite haunt for writers who are considering going the self-pub route, but don’t feel quite ready to come out of the shadows and stake a claim to a readership independently. To them, I offer this roundup of particularly useful articles and resources for those just starting out.


Choosing A Self-Publishing Service Provider

Mick Rooney’s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing made its name on its analysis and reviews of various service providers, and continues to post service provider reviews and commentary about them on a regular basis.

Over on their Greene Ink blog, Stephen Wayne Greene and Meredith Greene offer the recent results of a survey they’ve taken among indie authors, asking which service provider the authors preferred and why.

Considering Lightning Source? See this case study over on the Foner Books blog.

Joel Friedlander explains what a subsidy publisher is, and why you shouldn’t work with one, on his The Book  Designer site.

This free, sample lesson I wrote for Publetariat Vault University will help you crunch the numbers when comparing service providers, and I’ve made these worksheets I designed for my book, The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can Use, available online as a free pdf download, too.


Getting Your Book Ready For Print—or Ebook—Publication

Editing – there are LOTS of articles and tips on editing right here on Publetariat. Whether you’re looking for DIY editing tips, guidance on when and how to work with a professional editor, or how to find and hire a freelance editor, you’re sure to find what you’re looking for.

Joel Friedlander offers a kind of crash course in self-publishing on his The Book Designer site, from Getting Ready to Publish, to Planning Your Book, Understanding Fonts & Typography, and Making Print Choices. 

Joel also offers this post on Ebooks &  Ebook Readers, and I’ve made my Indie Author Guide to Kindle Publishing and my Kindle Publishing Workshop (from the Writer’s Digest Business of Getting Published conference, 2010) available as free pdf downloads on this page of the Indie Author Guide companion website. 

Author Platform and Book Promotion

You’ll want to visit Dana Lynn Smith’s The Savvy Book Marketer site for lots of great articles on book and author promotion, with a particular focus on using new media and social media.

Also be sure to check out Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn, where you’ll find excellent how-tos on subjects like podcasting and making your own book trailer, as well as plenty of insight and firsthand accounts from Joanna herself regarding her own experiences as an author and speaker.

Once again, Publetariat has you covered with its own treasure trove of articles on author platform and book promotion.

Indie Audio

So you wanna learn how to turn your manuscript into an audiobook, and maybe release that audiobook in podcast form and make it available online for free? Podiobooks is the place to start. They’ve got a large and helpful community, a mentoring program, and excellent tutorials, all for free.

So you wanna release your indie book on audio and sell it? Audible has just announced its ACX.com service, which will allow you to do just that. Hey, if it’s good enough for authors like Neil Gaiman and MJ Rose, and Random House, it might just work for you, too.

Community, Support, and Motivation

The Association of Independent Authors is there for you, with resources, online discussion forums, and news from around the globe that affects indie authors.

If you just need a good old fashioned kick in the pants to get you motivated and excited about the possibilities of going indie, or need to feel like you’re not all alone out there in the indie wilderness, there’s hardly a better source than Zoe Winter’s Weblog. Whether she’s talking about her own struggles and successes, her writing, publishing and book launch approaches, or commenting on the state of publishing in general, Zoe tells it like it is and pulls no punches.

Mark Barrett’s Ditchwalk is another excellent stop, where you’ll find a mix of commentary and reportage on Mark’s own adventures in the world of indie authorship.

Finally, Publetariat’s got an extensive library of articles on the topics of motivation, writer’s block and the writing life.

 

Now get out there and do it!

 

A Plethora of (Terrible) New Alternatives To Going Indie

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The internet’s fairly bubbling over with news and commentary about sweeping changes in publishing, and most of it is not good for authors and aspiring authors.

On 5/4/11 on her The Business Rusch blog, Kristine Kathryn Rusch talked about the history of publishing contracts, and how recently she’s been seeing an increasing incidence of contracts with language that greatly benefits the publisher while greatly penalizing the author. She is particularly concerned about questionable terms being offered by the new agency-publisher hybrid companies springing up:

We used to recommend agents, but we slowly stopped doing that. Some of it was simple: we didn’t want to endorse any one we weren’t intimately familiar with.  But it became more complex than that. Some of our agenting friends had left the business. Others had moved to companies that had rather unseemly business practices, and still others had morphed their agenting business into something unrecognizable.

Rather than walk through the thicket of ethics, friendships, business partnerships, and individual monetary policy, we just stopped recommending any particular agent. Over time, we stopped recommending agents at all.

During that same period of time, we saw a lot of publishing contracts that were…dicey…at best.

In the same post Kristine offers a sort of history of publishing contracts, and it’s not a pretty story. In another post on 5/11/11, she discusses a disturbing new trend she’s seeing in recent contracts from publishers and agency-publisher hybrids: Draconian terms that make it virtually impossible for the author to ever earn a profit on his book.

Kristine also points us to a 5/10/11 post on Dean Westley Smith’s blog that takes a closer, and critical look at these new agency-publisher hybrids. He observes:

Because of sheer stupidity, writers once again are losing a major fight that they don’t even realize they are in…In today’s news there was an announcement of yet another agent setting up a publishing company “for their clients.” These agents, of which there are many around the world now, are settling on certain terms for their new publishing business. The terms from agency to agency are pretty much as stated in this new article today.

Three scary quotes from just today:

“…we are becoming partners with our writers.”

“…will recoup expenses first…”

“…then share net reciepts 50/50.”

In just the last few months many agencies have decided to go this way. Many others have been on this road for a time. One major agency has been doing this for over ten years now. In this new world this path is just about the only way agents can see to stay in business. Also, more head-shaking, a number of major bloggers have been pushing this for some strange reason as if it’s a good thing for writers.

Read the rest of the post to learn why this is most definitely NOT a good thing for writers.

Over on The Passive Voice, Passive Guy tries to help us poor authors out with an examination of the rights reversion clause that’s standard in publishing contracts, but can have far-reaching consequences of which authors should be aware. He warns:

A reversion of rights clause without a definite trigger is nothing but an invitation for an author to go begging to his publisher from time to time.

Then he goes on to share some recommended, more author-friendly language for such provisions.

The lessons to be learned here are many, but the bottom line seems to be this: if you’re considering going semi-indie by partnering with an agency or publisher that’s offering some kind of profit-sharing terms in exchange for handling your book’s production, distribution and/or promotion, watch your back and read the fine print. You may think going that route will save you a lot of time and headaches, but if it ultimately costs you the success of your book or overall career, you’d have been better off going it alone.   

 

Staying Focused As A Self-Published Writer

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This post, by David N. Alderman, originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 5/10/11.

“The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.” – Author Unknown

Being my own boss, I fall victim to many different things. It’s easy to procrastinate – to put things off that don’t need to be done right away. Sometimes, this causes me to put things off indefinitely. It’s never my intention to do that, it just…well…happens. I also tend to hyper focus on one thing and neglect the others. For example, I’ll get so focused on writing, that I’ll completely ignore my marketing efforts for that day, or vice versa.

I’m not a lazy person by nature. If anything, I am known as a workaholic and I tend to push my own limits sometimes when I try to get projects done in a timely manner. But lately I’ve just been under a spell, not really caring if anything gets done and just feeling fatigued and worn out for who knows what reasons. I think it may just be lack of structure that’s bringing all these things to my daily routine.

See, being a self-published, full-time writer is hard. I know some people think I’m living the dream by making my own hours and getting to do what I love – which is to write – full time. But there’s so much more to this profession than just writing. There’s marketing, there’s cover design, there’s marketing, there’s blogging, there’s marketing, there’s social networking, there’s…you get the point. Add in the fact that this can be a very lonely job, and you have the makings of a challenging career.

I’m sure many other writers, both who are doing this full time and who are doing it aside from a typical 9-5, experience some of these same issues I have been plagued with. And since this is my career, and not just my hobby, I’ve been forced to create a set of remedies to try and counteract some of these vices. I figured I’d share them with my fellow writers who are struggling to stay focused on their daily tasks, and hopefully help them accomplish their short term and long term goals.
 

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

Your Brand Is NOT A Community

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This post, by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, originally appeared on his loudpoet blog on 9/7/2010.

Back in January, Shiv Singh gave a great keynote presentation, Engaging Readers in the Digital Age, at the inaugural Digital Book World Conference that, in retrospect, set the tone for what was to come in 2010.

“Build consumer brands,” Singh exhorted, “because your current value chain is breaking.”

Since then, we’ve seen the introduction of the iPad, the Agency Model, and ugly public standoffs between Amazon and several publishers over ebook pricing; notable authors like J.A. Konrath and Seth Godin have made a fuss about eschewing “traditional” publishing channels; and uber-agent Andrew Wylie challenged Random House to a stare-down over ebook royalties, launching his own ill-fated ebook imprint, Odyssey Editions.

Underscoring all of these dust-ups is one recurring theme: publishers’ lack of a direct relationship with readers leaves them vulnerable to disruption and disintermediation.

While Singh and others, myself included, have noted the need for publishers to move from a business-to-business model to a business-to-consumer model, some arguments have mistaken “brand” for “community”, using them interchangeably.

Geoff Livingston, author of Now Is Gone – A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs, illuminated the difference by contrasting two well-known consumer brands: Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Madonna is an unmatched branding genius. She is able to transform and reinvent herself decade after decade and stay relevant. Her 2008 album Hard Candy was a #1 bestseller, the seventh of her 27 year career.

Yet Madonna is not a huge social media success. The branding doesn’t translate. Why? I think you need go no further than her community page, which reads: “Please note that posting Madonna unreleased material (including photos, audio and video) to your profile is not allowed. Doing so could result in the immediate termination of your membership with Icon.”

Madonna is in control, Madonna is messaging at you. And her image is complete, her content quality secure. And no one really wants to talk about her in conversational media forms, and given how she has controlled her community, is it any wonder?

–“From Branded Content Publishing to Networks (Madonna vs. Lady Gaga)”

Livingston contrasts Madonna’s approach to community vs. the artist most often compared to her, Lady Gaga, noting the latter “has transcended 20th century marketing to become the ultimate brand of the 21st century.” Her 15.3 million digital download sales in 2009 made her the best-selling artist, even beating Michael Jackson, whose death led to backlist sales skyrocketing.

“Gaga is dedicated to her fans,” notes Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message, “and clearly knows the elements of cultivating a community of evangelistic fans.”
 

Read the rest of the post on loudpoet.

How To Read A Book Contract: Paragraph 7 Giveth And Paragraph 22 Taketh Away

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This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice on 10/9/11.

I’m starting a series of blog posts that discuss how to read a book contract. To be completely accurate, the principles I’ll lay out are important for reading any contract, but generally I’ll use illustrations from publishers’ and agents’ contracts with authors.

Given the tenor of the times with publishers and agents, I’m going to place an emphasis on how a skilled lawyer can hide a gotcha in plain sight and how you might find that gotcha.

As a background for today’s discussion, you need to understand that the entire contract is important. Just because it’s first, Paragraph 1 is not necessarily more important than Paragraph 35. Paragraph 1 can give you a nice big lollipop and Paragraph 35 can take it away or rub enough mud on your lollipop that you would never want to lick it.

Good contract drafting style includes grouping like items together in an organized manner and most well-drafted contracts put the important provisions up front and use the later paragraphs for routine boilerplate. However, there is no law that requires an attorney to follow good drafting rules and those later paragraphs can be wonderful places to hide King Gotcha.

Someone reading the whole contract makes lots of notes and changes in the early paragraphs, but once they hit the part about what addresses will be used to send official notices to each party, they’re kind of sleepy and tend to see what they expect to see instead of what’s actually written on the page.

An excellent example of this occurred in a multi-million dollar contract between the company I worked for a few years ago and one of the largest internet companies in the world. Giant Company delivered a proposed contract about 50 pages in length, organized the way I expected, obligations and dollars set forth upfront. The proposed contract left about a half-dozen meaningful issues to negotiate.
 

Read the rest of the post, as well as Part 2 and the related post, Don’t Sign Dumb Contracts, on Passive Voice.

28 Out Of 100 Top Kindle E-Books Are Self-Published

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After a February excitement about Amanda Hocking earning millions of dollars from Kindle Store, I wanted to check how self-published authors are doing a couple of weeks later. From a Kindle Store list of top 100 e-books I’ve selected those which were published by the authors themselves.

It was not an easy task, as some of the titles were given a publisher label. I Googled the companies behind the names. If they were clearly associated with the author, for example published only that author’s books, I included them in the list.

The list is based on yesterday’s Kindle Store ranking (US localization). You can check it at Ebook Friendly (where I plan to post such lists frequently): Top Self-Published Books In Kindle Store – April 21st, 2011.

Interesting numbers:

– 28 out of 100 top e-books in Kindle Store are self-published; 11 are in top 50,

– all of those publications are priced $3.99 or less; that means 28% of top Kindle e-books cost less than $4,

– 18 of the titles are given the lowest possible price tag: $0.99,

– the shining star is John Locke with 8 titles (7 of them in top 50); Vegas Moon is the best self-published book – ranked #4,

– Amanda Hocking is sliding down; her best selling book, Ascend, is #64 (a result of signing a contract with a publisher?),

– authors to watch: Heather Killough-Walden, Julie Ortolon, J.R. Rain and Debbi Mack – with 2 or more titles in top 100.

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

Grandma publisher

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All right, I’ll admit it, I’m really a grandmother who is trying to publish some books for my son.  Long story short, he’s in prison for a crime he did not commit (really long story about a vindictive ex-wife who made false accusations in order to gain custody of their children).  In order to keep his sanity while going through the extremely long process of appeals, he has turned to writing, and along the way has discovered he has some talent and enjoys what he’s doing.  He’s written several books, but I’ve only gotten one ready for publication (check out the website at jcallenbooks.weebly.com).  I have to confess that I’m really out of my element when it comes to web design and promotion.  So far I’ve used my social network to get the word out, but that doesn’t seem to be working very well.  And with a grand total of nine books sold so far, there’s not really any money to spend for professional help.  Any practical suggestions?

Why I Sell My Novel For 99 Cents

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There’s a lot of talk about the 99 cent ebook at the moment, so I thought I would just throw in my own 99 cents worth. Pentecost is currently 99 cents on the US Kindle store, although it started out at $2.99. It’s rank as I write this is shown above.

Here are the reasons I am leaving it at 99 cents.These are all my own reasons and may not be applicable to you, so I am not saying everyone should do this, merely why I am.

Pentecost sales ranks

  • 99 cents is an impulse buy for anyone. My husband and I are Kindle converts and spend a lot of time reading. He isn’t an author and doesn’t keep up with the industry like I do so watching his behavior is fascinating. He buys a lot of 99 cent ebooks after downloading samples. He has tried a whole stack of indie authors based on 99 cent books and has told other people about them. It is a low risk buy and if someone enjoys the sample, they don’t even need to think about clicking when the price is under $1. I want those readers to try me as well.
  • Number of books sold is more important than income for me right now. I have a well paid day job so I am not writing for income just yet. I hope to in the future but right now, I want readers and fans. I want people signing up for Prophecy (which they do every day) and I want to build a large number of people who want to read more of my books. I am writing a series so I want to build fans now who I can sell to in the future. Hocking and others have made the first book in the series cheap (or some have made it free) and then upped the price on the subsequent books to $2.99. I may well follow suit with others in the series but for now, 99 cents is a great price for the first one.
  • The example of John Locke. Locke is rocking the Amazon charts with his 99 cent ebooks and this article is what convinced me to follow his example. He writes good thrillers with the brilliant Donovan Creed character. For 99 cents they are great value and you just buy all of them if you like what he writes. 6 books for the price of half a mainstream published book – fantastic! I’ve spent an afternoon in the hammock with Donovan Creed and it was very enjoyable! The quote below is from the interview with him.

  • JA Konrath and the impact of staying in the Amazon bestseller rank. Konrath writes the best blog for ebook authors, definitely subscribe and be inspired! He changes prices all the time and experiments with things but this got my attention “when I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies” (from the same Locke article). When I first launched Pentecost, I made the Amazon rankings in launch week based on my platform and my marketing activities but then I dropped out of the charts. Of course, I freaked out because I cannot sustain the effort it takes to maintain those rankings on my own. So after reading a lot of Konrath, I dropped my price to 99 cents and I haven’t left the charts since. I have been in Religious Fiction for 10 weeks now and have started ranking in Action/Adventure (which I believe in my true home!) I have definitely seen the evidence that lowering the price affected my ranking. Perhaps I should change the price back to $2.99 and see if it has an impact but for all the other reasons listed, I’m leaving it as is for now.
  • Fast-paced action-adventure thrillers won’t change your life. Pentecost will entertain you for a few hours but it won’t give you actionable tips for your business and won’t inspire you to give everything to charity or work for world peace. It is fiction and is there to take you out of your world for a time. I pay far more money for non-fiction books that will help me in a tangible manner than I will for fiction which I read once and then (often) forget. It’s not that I don’t value fiction writing, but the price you pay for entertainment has to be representative vs the price you pay for actionable content. I sell my e-courses for $39.99 and up to $297, and my workshops are also more expensive. I am definitely happy charging more when I believe you get more benefit, but with a thriller I am competing with free TV or a movie so want to price it attractively.

What do you think about the 99 cent ebook? What price do you sell for? Do you buy 99 cent ebooks?

 

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

Line Between Legacy Publishers and Self-Pubbers: Myth or Reality?

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This post, by Chris Hobson, originally appeared on his blog on 5/9/11.

I was thinking about something over the weekend. Maybe this is obvious to everyone, maybe it’s not, but the more I think about it, the happier I get. Here’s my thought: is there really such a difference between self-pubbers and legacy publishing houses? I know, I know. You’ll come back at me with, "Well obviously, Chris–people READ books published by Penguin because Penguin stands for Quality, whereas they think something printed by Chris Hobson Inc. is probably a cut just above preschool marble painting.

Granted.

But I know a couple of people who started publishing houses of their own. That’s right: they just up and said, "You know, I think I’ll start publishing people’s books." And they did. And they published good stuff by excellent authors. But how, may I ask, is this different than publishing your own book?

I know they didn’t publish their own books; that’s not what I’m saying. They published other people’s books. But it was them doing the publishing, not some faceless corporation with a decaying old man at the helm. And believe me, they didn’t have fleets of editors or artists at their beck and call: they had to arrange for all of those services on their own.

It’s weird: just because they called their enterprises "publishing houses" they gained instant credibility. One of the guys was able to consistently place ads in Publisher’s Weekly for his clients. Try doing that for your latest greatest self-pubbed novel. I don’t know for certain, but something tells me you’d get laughed off the phone. But what gets me is that these guys had to hustle for their clients, they had to track down cover artists, get layout work done, promote the books to industry magazines, beg book store managers to give them space on an end cap to display the books. If you looked close, their whole operations were held together with balsa wood and chewing gum.

I say again: how is this any different than someone self-pubbing their own books?
 

Read the rest of the post on Chris Hobson‘s blog.

Self-Publish — Understanding ISBN’s, SAN’s, LCCN’s Or PCN’s

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This post, by James  C. Tanner, originally appeared on his site on 1/17/11.

If you choose to self-publish your book, there are some custodial duties required before your book is ready to go to press.  These duties pertain to:

a.) the obtaining of an INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER ( ISBN );

b.) the obtaining of a STANDARD ADDRESS NUMBER ( SAN );

c.) the obtaining of a LIBRARY OF CONGRESS NUMBER ( LCCN or PCN ).

 

INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER ( ISBN )

The ISBN is often incorrectly referred to as “just a bar code” used for inventory control purposes.  It is a number and not a bar code.

Since the late 1960′s the ISBN has been in existence as a global identification system.  To help avoid errors in receiving orders, shipping,  etc. publishers and self-publishers have come to rely upon the ISBN number as each new edition of a book, and each particular style of publication (hard cover, soft cover, paperback, audio book, downloadable eBook, or CD) receives it’s own unique number.

ISBN numbers are obtained through the ISBN Agency which you can find at http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/index.asp .

You will be required to assign each of your new titles an ISBN suffix number (this will be explained on the ISBN site).  The important detail new users need to remember is that you will need to assign a different ISBN to each edition of your book.  If this is the first time your book is going to market, then a standard practice among writers and publishers is to start your ISBN off with a “0″ (zero).  Most people in the book industry, upon seeing a zero as the first digit in an ISBN will immediately realize this is a new publication and not a re-release, or a new-edition of an older version.

self publish,publish,write a book

 

The above is an example of an ISBN combined with a Bar Code as it appears on the back of a paperback novel from Louis L’Amour’s book, Lonely On The Mountain published by Bantam Books.

The bar code as we see above communicates several key bits of information.  The bar code:

a.) identifies the ISBN;

b.) identifies the publisher (or self-publisher);

c.) identifies the title;

d.) identifies the author;

e.) identifies the edition.

Read the rest of the post on James C. Tanner‘s site.