Invitation To The Madhouse ~ Report On Self-Publishing

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Alert: Stay turned to this channel for a special broadcast, Monday, 28 Feb.
Irina Avtsin will tell us all about the power of the word, “No!”.
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{This post is almost a rant and purposefully written in a voice I rarely use…}

A madhouse is where insane persons are confined or a place exhibiting stereotypical characteristics of such a place.

This, to me, right now, is what self-publishing is.

Let me define my terms a bit more precisely:

“Sanity” has roots indicating “healthy condition” or “soundness of mind”. If I temporarily constrict my argument to the term “publishing”, most people who are trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in this arena of human experience would, I feel, tend to agree that publishing is not in a healthy condition or showing soundness of mind.

Many of those same people would go further and claim that self-publishing is the medicine needed for the sick field of publishing.

Well…

I’ve been involved in self-publishing for about six years now and the last year has seen me working overtime to come to terms with how to best take advantage of the opportunities that self-publishing seems to offer.

I don’t have space in this post to detail the ills of the traditional publishing route but anyone interested can easily find much to ponder.

So, try to accept one point on a conditional basis: self-publishing can bring a book to market faster and supply the author with higher royalties than traditional publishing, as long as the author is not already on the bestseller lists or in the stable of a publishing house being preened to take the book-world by storm when the right marketing moment arrives.

If the above statement is true, one would think that an author would find it easier to self-publish…

My experience has been that the word “easy” needs to be carefully defined with ample attention being paid to whether said author has what it takes to build their own following and work intensely at experimenting till they find the particular combination of tasks that can assure them a sufficient platform of eager individuals waiting to render them aid on publishing day.

If you are comfortable with building relationships, if you can be honestly altruistic in those relationships, if you can multiply the number of those relationships, if you have the time to attend to them with care and diligence, if you have the money to pay for or can trade for the expertise of editors, artists, and publicity specialists, then, maybe you would say self-publishing is easier than going the traditional route.

The reason I’ve been willing to persevere in the madhouse of self-publishing isn’t because I can easily fulfill all the ifs in the last paragraph.

I will continue to do all I can to successfully self-publish my work-in-progress because I lack the patience to search for an agent who would accept the unusual book I had to write and must publish, because I don’t have a few years to wait while such an agent finds a publisher who thinks my book can sell and negotiates a contract, because I refuse to be paid a royalty that can have itself disappear in paybacks to the publisher if the book doesn’t sell, and because finding an editor I don’t have to pay and supplying cover artwork are something I was able to personally handle.

So, from my perspective, the crumbling house of traditional publishing and the raucous adolescent scene of self-publishing are both “madhouses” but I’m a writer and I have a book I’ve written and I want people to read it and I had to make a choice…

I chose self-publishing.

I’ve written about this topic before in this blog and using the handy Top Tags Cloud in the side panel will lead you to those other musings…

What are your thoughts, theories, experiences, and rants or raves about traditional publishing and self-publishing?
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A Self-Publisher's Guide To Metadata For Books

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This article, by Carla King, originally appeared on PBS.org‘s MediaShift on 10/12/10.

Metadata used to be a wallflower, hiding out at the library with the Dewey Decimal system. Now it’s at every party, flitting about gathering and sorting books on mobile devices, e-readers, and websites. Metadata is a core component of digital information and news; so good book metadata is good book marketing. It’s an essential tool for all self-publishers.

For those unaware, metadata is data about data, words about words. In the semantically driven matrix of search, all words have a value, and "key" words have more value still. These keywords must be strategically selected and then placed where they can do the most good. Creating metadata tags for your work is a marketing challenge that requires both editing skill and narrative common sense.

"As our digital landscape explodes — as web search becomes not just one way but THE way readers find what’s next on their reading lists — metadata only becomes more important," wrote Laura Dawson of Authorweb.

It might sound daunting, but if you know who your audience is, and you can fill out a form, you can create metadata for your book. Here’s what you need to know about providing metadata for your book record on the Bowker system and for all your web activities.

Identify Your Keywords

First, we must spill into search engine optimization (SEO) territory. The typical self-published author doesn’t need to hire an SEO expert. But I spoke with expert Mark Petrakis who helped me create these steps to identifying a solid keyword list:

  1. Imagine the words and short phrases your readers might enter into a search engine to find you and your book. Begin to eliminate the less important and more generic words and phrases from your list. Try to keep the number of repeated keywords to a maximum of three. The final list should be no more than 10 to 20 words with a 900 character maximum. This constitutes your "keywords" metadata and can be used for your book metadata, for creating tags on blog posts, and in your social media activities. Most major search engines (like Google) no longer factor in the keyword metatags at all in search results, so this just makes having effective TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags all the more important. (Similarly, your file names should be descriptive.)


Read the rest of the article on PBS.org‘s MediaShift.

Web Seminar Debates How Self-Publishing Will Lose Its Stigma

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This post, by Lynn Andriani, originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 2/23/11.

Thanks to the well-publicized success of authors like J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and Seth Godin, the stigma surrounding self-publishing is fading fast. Still, it’s far from gone, and a web seminar sponsored by PW and Digital Book World yesterday titled The Evolution of Self-Publishing covered the reasons for self-publishing’s stigma, how and why it’s losing that stigma, and what the industry and individual authors need to do in order to help self-publishing move even further into the mainstream.

But first, about those aforementioned bestsellers? Panelist and author Jason Pinter expressed his frustration at always hearing the same few names repeated as examples of how lucrative self-publishing can be. “What annoys me is that the same names are always used: Godin, Konrath, Hocking, The Shack,” he said. “There’s a sense of people latching on to a couple of individuals who’ve found success and then those people get a lot of publicity. Then it’s, ‘They can do it; I can!’ There is a bit of a fallacy there; it’s not always the case.”

Though there are, of course, many reasons most self-published books don’t sell well. One of the main reasons mentioned by the panelists? Marketing. “It’s one of the hardest things to do,” Pinter said. “Authors really need to look at what their goals are and how they’re going to realistically achieve them.” Carolyn Pittis, svp, global author services at HarperCollins, agreed: “Marketing is the issue of our time. Book marketing is the biggest challenge that anyone in the book business is facing today, purely because there’s so much noise and so much content getting created and so many potential distractions.” Marketing often determines a book’s commercial success—or failure, said Phil Sexton, publisher and community leader at Writer’s Digest. “It’s about what the intent of the author is. How much they’re going to back [their book], whether or not they’re going to try and sell it.”


Read the rest of the post on Publishers Weekly.

The Imminent Collapse Of The Publishing Bubble

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This post, by Candice Adams, originally appeared on the examiner.com site on 1/7/11.

Booms and bubbles are considered economic inevitabilities—when the getting is good, people will keep buying and selling until the last dollar to be made is had. Recent times have witnessed the burst of the tech and housing bubble. Most bubbles generally don’t survive longer than a decade due to a continued escalation in the destructive behavior that eventually dooms the industry. But what if a bubble lasted longer? Could the traditional publishing model be seeing the end of a 40-year bubble?

Bubbles occur for several psychological reasons, but the one that pertains most closely to the traditional publishing model is “The Greater Fool Theory.” This theory, although not scientifically proven but empirically observed, relies on the market’s overvaluation of a product leading to an inflation in price. The price continues to rise as long as a seller can find a greater fool than himself to sell it to. When the price finally plummets, the bubble bursts.

Moreso than books being overpriced, the traditional publishing model has been propped up by several illogical modus operandi that could eventually lead to the collapse of this house of cards.

1. Dog eat dog: Over the past 40 years, the publishing industry has gone from small publishers working with authors to instead being dominated by the “Big Six” corporate publishing houses (Random House, Macmillian, Simon & Schuster, Pearson/Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette). Corporate publishing eventually led to the rise of the literary agent and the retail behemoths Barnes & Noble and Borders. Corporate publishers continued to acquire smaller presses that couldn’t compete with the large advances that corporations could offer. Larger advances led to more complicated deals, which needed to be brokered by an agent who preferred to work with corporate publishers who offered larger advances. With more books in their catalogues and backlists, the small independent bookstore could no long house, nor move, that quantity of inventory, and they were soon largely put out of business by the corporate mega-bookstores. However, in order for corporate publishers to continue to see profit in a very mature industry (and every corporation has to see profit), the Big Six began acquiring and producing fewer titles and attempting to sell more of the books they produce (i.e., publishing high concept book that could be optioned for their film rights, celebrity tell-alls, etc.) So while there is more book-selling space, fewer books are actually sold.

Read the rest of the post on examiner.com.

Borders Closing: An Author's Perspective

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This post, by Steve Yates, originally appeared on his Fiction and History blog on 2/17/11.

Springfield, Missouri Borders on bankrupt chain’s closure list

There is a tumult in my heart about the Wednesday (2.16.2011) announcement that Borders will be closing 200 stores, including the location in Springfield, Missouri, the store in which Moon City Press first launched my novel Morkan’s Quarry.

The characters in my novel, the Morkans, owners of a limestone quarry in Civil War-era Springfield, would likely take a cold-hearted line on all this. Michael Morkan could easily see why a Borders at that Glenstone location would be one of 200 stores losing $2 million each day for the retailer. 25,000+ square feet of books right across the street from a Barnes & Noble store of equal square footage, that’s 50,000 square feet and surely lots of duplication. In those 50,000 sq. ft., think how many shelves HAVE to carry specific books that frequently sell—Harry Potter, The Twilight Series, the Da Vinci Code, and the like.

But walk-in, foot traffic markets have limits, capacities to absorb and demand any given product. In the heyday of giant retailers, back when Montgomery Ward still existed, and book buyers had few choices and no internet, such side-by-side offerings might have been sustainable. But this Starbucks-gone-wild passion for expassion came on after Montgomery Ward and lots of other retailers had already died and left fossils and empty shells.

The minute Morkan learned the space at Borders was leased, and the staff had to be paid an established minimum wage, and there would be no hope of free county prison labor… he would opt that every book in the place, every ISBN or SKU in retail parlance, be one that tears out of there faster than an opium and alcohol-saturated tonic (see energy drink) from a traveling medicine show.

There’s one source of the tumult: it is very hard to be unique and become a costumer’s favorite local bookstore when you have to carry what a corporate supervisor in Michigan chooses, items that can be sold to everybody. Giant scale, which can seem to the untrained eye a wowing advantage, becomes a deathtrap. And carrying all those hotcake items as your mainstay becomes unsustainable when your customer has already picked up The Chronicles of Narnia at Kroger or Sam’s or Wal-Mart at an humungous discount.

Read the rest of the post on Steve Yates‘ Fiction and History blog.

How To: Deal With Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand

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This article, by Maria Ogneva, originally appeared on Mashable on 2/21/11. Maria Ogneva is the Head of Community at Yammer, where she is in charge of social media and community programs, and internal education and engagement. You can follow her on Twitter, her blog, and via Yammer’s Twitter account and company blog.

Brands try to inspire excitement among their communities so that their fans and supporters will do the selling for them. That’s called advocacy, and it’s much more powerful than self-promotion. There are of course many ways to cultivate that fan base and get your advocates motivated

On the flip side, however, are “badvocates” –- the folks who spread negative comments about you with their networks. For example, Kevin Smith’s experience with Southwest Airlines.

It’s important for any business learn how to handle this badvocacy. To do so, you must first understand its causes.

Causes of Badvocacy
 

In most cases, badvocacy is a result of negative experiences with your brand. These can come from:

  • Inconsistency across channels and touchpoints. With social media, you can touch the customer at any point in the purchase cycle: Pre-purchase, during, and post-purchase. Each of those interactions has to add value and be consistent with the rest of the experience.

    Let’s take support as an example. When you provide multi-channel support, you need to be careful about creating a consistent experience across all channels. Twitter support tends to lead other channels in its ability to provide individual solutions to customers. Other channels tend to lag behind. How many times have you called a support line only to have them route you to another 800 number because information you are looking for is in a different database? An inconsistent user experience can breed bad experiences. 

  • Inconsistency with expectations. Several times, I’ve gotten excited about a product based on the advertised promise, only to discover that that expectation was wrong. This type of disconnect certainly breeds negative feelings because time, effort and possibly money were wasted. 
  • A negative relationship with people who represent the company. Social media can humanize your brand, if used correctly. It’s important, however, that everyone adheres to the highest codes of conduct and is on the same page about company’s policies, news, product and feature releases, etc. A negative interaction with any person, whether in social or traditional channels, will mar the user’s view of the brand. 

Chronic Complainers

Read the rest of the article, which offers specific strategies for dealing with and preventing "Badvocacy" on Mashable.

Context First, Revisited

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This post, by Brian O’Leary, originally appeared on the Magellan Media Consulting Partners site on 2/21/11.

(This post provides the content for a presentation I recently gave as part of O’Reilly Media’s “Tools of Change in Publishing” conference.  It builds on a talk I initially gave last October at the Internet Archive’s “Books in Browsers” conference.  A screencast that includes the presentation visuals has been posted on Vimeo.  It runs about 23 minutes).

For the last couple of years I’ve been writing about a set of publishing topics – piracy, disruptive innovation, print on demand, workflow and content strategy, among others – that I started to think were connected by a common theme.

I first called that theme “a unified field theory of publishing”, more than a mouthful, but I think “context first” is a better and more helpful description.  In that spirit, my talk today addresses the damage done by what I call the “container model of publishing”.

My idea in a nutshell is this: book, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information.  Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit.

Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones.  In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone.  We compete on context.

I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated.  To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content.

We need to think about containers as an option, not the starting point.  Further, we must start to open up access, making it possible for readers to discover and consume our content within and across digital realms.

Without a shift in mindset, we are vulnerable to a range of current and future disruptive entrants.  Containers limit how we think about our audiences.  In stripping context, they also limit how audiences find our content.

Here, scale is not our friend.  It may well be the enemy.  As Clay Christensen first outlined in 1997, disruptive technologies don’t look or feel like what we typically value.  Often enough, they are cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient than their traditional analogues.


Read the rest of the post on the Magellan Media Consulting Partners site.

Book Package Deals

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I often get advertisement pieces from printers calling themselves publishers. One feature common to these offerings is the use of package deals, most of which are named with exotic titles such as the “Gold Program” or the “Star Package.” These special deals provide varying deals based around pre-press services, printing of a certain number of books, and even marketing offers. Here are a few things you should be aware of:

Each package is optimized for the max number of pages or words offered by the package deal. That means the best per page price you will ever get from them for that package is for the max number of pages they offer. Any number less than that means the per page price just keeps going up and up. For example, If the max pages allowable by a certain program is 300 pages and you have produced 250 pages, you will be getting those 250 pages at the 300 pages price.

Oft times the company will offer glowing expectations for royalties described as being in the thousands of dollars. In fact, the company is shooting for the friends and family market, some of whom have the gall to ask you for a list of everyone in your family and your friends who might be interested in purchasing your book. That book will often be way overpriced for the booksellers’ market, meaning bookstores won’t have an interest in carrying your books for the general public. Friends and family, however, may well pay the inflated price to see their loved one’s book. Once the list of contacts you provided are contacted  for sales of your book, the company moves on to the next author, even if they say they’ll market your title for years to come.

This is why experienced folks in the book business warn about the sharks and barracudas out there. Consider yourself warned.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear’s Book Trends.

How It Feels to Have Your Book Out There

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Warning: Honest post!

I feel I owe it to you guys to get a bit personal about my feelings now [that my novel] Pentecost is out in the world. I’ve blogged the whole first novel  journey so far so I thought I should post this while I am still mired in launch week! I will be doing a breakdown of how the marketing went in the next few weeks.

In the video, you will learn:

  • How Pentecost made #17 in religious fiction on the US Kindle Store, #96 on UK Thriller Fiction in paperback and #9 in Christian fiction UK. i.e. I made Amazon bestseller lists! It’s great to have the book out there and selling and it’s all happening! I’ve done loads of guest posts so my name is out there. Crazy times! [Update 13 Feb: Pentecost made #4 in Religion & Spirituality -> Fiction and #5 in Kindle -> Religious Fiction and #67 in Genre Fiction as well as #2 in Movers & Shakers]
     
  • BUT I’m also tired and emotional about it all. I did work very hard on the launch and I guess I’m burnt out and the adrenalin high is wearing off.
     
  • Writers have some issues with self-esteem of course, but there is a fear of judgment and criticism. We all worry about this. I have written genre fiction, not literary fiction after all! We just have to carry on writing. It’s to be expected.
  • I feel weird about the fact people are reading my thoughts across space and time. Parts of me are in the book (not the violent parts!) You can hear which parts are autobiographical in this interview with Tom Evans.

  • The cycle of creativity. There are peaks and troughs and I’m down at the moment. I know it will return again as I have ideas for the next few books but right now, I need to rest and not pressure myself too much.
  • On the pressure of needing to get the next book out there! Pentecost is a short book, a fast-paced read and people are finishing it and wanting the next one which I haven’t started writing yet! But writing is a long term experience and I’m aiming to continue writing over time.
     
  • I hope these honest thoughts help you!

 

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

The Power Of Strong Characterisation – Dexter Morgan

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I’ve been mainlining Dexter recently. Let me state from the outset that it’s the TV series I’m currently loving and I haven’t yet read any of the original books by Jeff Lindsay. I’d certainly like to and will eventually, but right now I want to talk about the TV series. I started wondering what made the show so compelling and how we can get so invested in a serial killer. The performances are superb and the writing is brilliant, so that makes for great television, but what is it about Dexter Morgan that is so enthralling? The reason, I think, is that Dexter is such an incredibly well developed character and so utterly believeable. I won’t put any spoilers in this post talking about particulars of the show, but I do want to talk about why Dexter is such a good character.

To start with, let’s establish the facts – Dexter Morgan is a largely emotionless, mentally broken serial killer. He has a code that he lives by very strictly and only kills other killers. Here’s the first thing that lets us associate with him so deeply. We all want to see killers that escape justice pay for their crimes. Dexter makes that happen. But he kills them in a hideously ritualistic way because he has to kill. He has what he calls his “dark passenger” that fills him with an insatiable urge to kill and he regularly, though only briefly, satisfies that urge by killing bad guys, thereby having a certain justification for his heinous acts. But he enjoys it, and he enjoys cutting up the bodies into component parts afterwards before disposing of them. How can we associate with that part of him?

Dexter lives more than a double life. He works for Miami Metro Homicide, which gives him access to all the things he needs to find his victims. He has a lover (slight SPOILER – later he has a family), which he needs to protect from his true self. He has a sister that he cares for, and again has to protect from his true self. Make no mistake – the real Dexter is the broken, ritualistic serial killer. The job, the family, the sister, the social life – these are all contrived masks that he holds together to protect his true nature. Therefore he lies to and manipulates these people all the time.

So sure, Dexter kills bad guys, but he’s a horrific person that lies and cheats and manipulates. And kills. So why is he so compelling? Why do we associate so much with him? When you watch the show, you’re desperately hoping he won’t get caught. We want him to carry on. Why?

I think it’s a many faceted thing. Firstly, the writing is superb, with Dexter developing as a character all the time. Through the course of his life he learns more about what made him the way he is, which gives him personal insight and we get that insight too. As his relationships grow with the people around him, so too does his personal character. He learns that he does care about his wife, her children, his sister and his colleagues. He grows as a person even while he remains a slave to his dark passenger. This all helps to invest us in him as a character.

dexter kill The power of strong characterisation Dexter MorganBut more than that, I think the reason we really enjoy the show is because we can empathise with Dexter. We hate what he does, but we can see ourselves in it. We can see the potential for us to do similar if our own morals and emotional responses were dampened. Part of us can’t stand it, but most of us wants him to get away with it. We all have a dark passenger to some degree. For the vast majority of us that passenger is small and quiet and rarely does more than irritate us from time to time before sinking down again. But that tiny part revels in Dexter’s ability to let his demon out completely and give in to those dark, nasty desires that reside in everyone.

On top of that, it’s an adrenaline rush to ride with Dex. We constantly fear that he’ll get caught and while his emotional responses are so dampened that his own stress and panic levels are way more controlled than ours, we still get that vicarious buzz at watching him ride the risks the way he does. We like Dexter for the same reason we like rollercoasters and scary movies.

Dexter makes mistakes and feels guilt when he does, even though he doesn’t necessarily recognise guilt for what it is. But he is flawed even within his own code and abilities. He has incredible rushes with his successes, amazing highs when he satiates that dark passenger ever so briefly. And we rise and rush and fall along with him.

Dexter does terrible things but there’s enough redemption in the character for us to root for him. It’s an incredible achievement in storytelling and character development that we care for such an anti-hero. Especially as that character only gets more and more compelling.

So we can learn from this that great characterisation comes from a well-rounded, well developed character, with a shared and satisfying genesis. One that continues to grow and develop while still maintaining the core of what makes them who they are. One that makes mistakes and learns from them. One that has an internal consistency in their actions while still being affected by the world around them and responding to it. This kind of intelligent character building can even make us root for a ritualistic serial killer without making us feel like sickos for doing so.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with my assessment? Are you as fascinated by the character of Dexter Morgan as I am? Leave a comment and mention some other examples of great characterisation if you have any in mind.

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

A Virtual World, A Writer’s Mind, And Serious Business That’s Always Fun!

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I just got back from Book Island in Second Life.

Yep, a virtual world I visit for play and work. I wrote about virtual worlds in a previous post. Here’s a bit of what I said:

“All virtual worlds have virtues that make them valuable whether we’re talking about your mind, a book you read or wrote, or a computer-created world.”

Yes, I called our minds and books “virtual worlds”. Check out that post for more about what I’ve done as a writer in Second Life.

This post is for talking about what I’m doing as a promoter (of my writing) in that virtual world.

Just like a book’s virtuality can become quite real to us, walking around in a computer virtuality can make you wonder why this “real”, consensual, physical reality puts so many demands on we weak humans 🙂

My latest book will be coming out in May and I’m doing all the necessary promotional tasks I can squeeze into my day–writing this blog, visiting the blogs on my Blogroll and commenting there, planning a BlogTour for the book launch, making final revisions, preparing for online reviews of the book, using Twitter and Facebook, etc…

Most of those activities are me relating to other people and that’s what I consider Promotion to be–Relationships.

Would you rather be bombarded with TV or online ads for books, movies, or your favorite things, or would you like to have a friend recommend one to you?

Relationships have always been the most effective form of promotion, in spite of the mega-budgets of the marketing firms. Sure, you may have seen a movie that got mega-hyped and liked it but, imho, most of what’s sold through the traditional channels of promotion is either quite useless or actually harmful.

So, I take a break from the sometimes sweet, often harsh, conditions of Real reality and move my relationship-forming brand of promotion into Second Life.

I’m the events manager on Book Island, I help host the weekly Open Mic on Sundays, I take part in the Wednesday Writer’s Chat Support Group, I’m organizing the new Happy Hours at the Writer’s Block Cafe, and I read chapters from my forthcoming book on Thursdays.

Apart from the live reading of book chapters, most of the “work” is hanging out with people and forming relationships. I’m not running around shouting out my agenda. I talk with folks from all over the world. I bond with them. They often wonder what I do in Real Life. I tell them about my book…

What I do in real life takes many hours of every day. I make time for virtual relationship-building, carve it out of my diurnal allocation, find it often more satisfying then this war-torn, global crisis-ridden, greedy and dangerous “real” world…

Like yesterday: I sat with five people from various parts of the United States, one man from Finland, and two others from the UK. Some were writers, some artists, and one was a pole dancer. We all had a great time. We shared information, experiences, laughter, and good will…

I think it’s time to wrap this post up. I’ll do it with some questions from that previous post:

Have you ever wondered if your mind is truly registering our physical world with fidelity?

How lost can you get in a good book?

Has a book you’ve read ever made you want to abandon our consensual reality?

Have you ever visited a virtual world?
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Open Letter to JK Rowling

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This letter, by Chris Meadows, originally appeared on Teleread on 1/23/10.

This letter is also being sent by snailmail to J.K. Rowling’s agents, the Christopher Little Literary Agency.

Dear Ms. Rowling:

For several years, you have adamantly refused to make e-book editions of your Harry Potter series available, citing concerns over promoting piracy. In May, The Bookseller reported that you were considering releasing the Harry Potter novels in e-book form. However, it is now October, and we have heard no further word as to when or if these e-books will be coming out.

I am writing to ask that you release these official e-books, as soon as you possibly can.

To begin with, your prior reluctance to license Harry Potter e-books has not resulted in any reduction in piracy of these books. Indeed, each time a new book in the series was published, a fully scanned e-book edition of it was on BitTorrent within hours.

Indeed, at the moment, if I enter “‘Harry Potter’ e-book torrent” into Google, it returns 690,000 results, in a variety of e-book reader formats. I have little doubt that by now that if I were to download one of these at random, I would find it had been proofed and polished sufficiently to compare favorably to professional quality. One of these in particular claims to be “reference quality”, with “exact layout and page sizes” and “every word on every line”.

 

Try as you might, you will never eradicate these illegitimate e-books from the Internet. What you should be thinking about doing is supplementing them with authorized versions that would earn you some money, and divert at least some of these e-books’ popularity to legitimate ends.

Read the rest of the letter on Teleread, and also see New Harry Potter piracy reported: Time for J.K. to allow legal Potter e-books, an earlier article on the same site.

For Ebooks, An ISBN Dilemma

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This article, podcast and transcript, by Chris Kenneally, originally appeared on the Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond the Book site on 2/14/11 and are provided here with that site’s permission.

Not so long ago, a book was an unmistakable object. Then someone came along and started digitizing content, and very soon, books were something else, something much more than ink on dead trees. That transformation, indeed the redefinition of books, matters enormously to readers and publishers, as well as retailers and librarians. Without a way to identify “books” as they are published, information and creativity could be orphaned.

To discuss this challenge, CCC’s Chris Kenneally recently spoke with publishing consultant Michael Cairns who had just completed a report for the Book Industry Study Group examining practices in the identification of e-books in all their vast variety. The research turned up several surprising findings, as well as revealed a tension between US publishers and their counterparts around the world.

“We’re in this transition between the sale of a physical book to one that’s a digital book, and in that transition, some aspects of the ISBN number are not being upheld as they were in the physical world,” notes Cairns, who is a highly-regarded blogger at PersonaNonData. “And when there’s a breakdown, that starts to increase the likelihood that the supply chain does not operate as efficiently as perhaps it should or could. And so that’s a real issue.”

 For E-Books an ISBN Dilemma [21:36m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

4 Steps To A Less Frustrating DIY Book

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I finally ordered my proof copy of Simply Prayer, formerly Prayerfully Yours. While I’m happy with the file I uploaded to CreateSpace, I’m left wondering if I was my own worst enemy in getting the entire project done to begin with.

I had originally planned on having the book out before the season of Advent, but missed that deadline by a good two months. I reset my deadline to have it ready for Lent 2011 and I’ve just made it. Why all the deadline problems? I tried to cut too many corners. Instead of going the normal route of writing, editing, designing and fixing the details of the design I tried to write and design simultaneously.

Bad idea. Very bad idea.

What I had hoped would shorten the amount of time from the planning stage to the finished product bred headaches and nightmares too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say I won’t be trying that again. And so I want to leave you all with a bit of advice. Follow these four steps and you’ll reduce the irritations and frustrations of the DIY Independent Author.

  1. Write until the story is completely told, or for non-fiction until you begin repeating yourself. Don’t worry about page count and design elements like fonts, pictures or pulled quotes.


  2. Edit your manuscript completely before you even begin to think about what it should look like on the page. Once the design process begins it’ll make it more difficult to add new material, move passages around or delete entire sections.


  3. Design your book with an eye toward more than one media. Ebooks are growing in popularity and soon will become the majority when it comes to purchases, but that doesn’t mean no one will want a well-designed print edition. Yours may become a collector’s edition. If you’re not already proficient in designing print and/or ebooks, then either hire someone to do it for you or find some really good resources like The Book Designer or Elizabeth Castro’s book EPUB Straight to the Point.


  4. Fix the little details of your design, like making sure chapters begin on the right of a print book and new sections/chapters are new pages in ebooks.

What short-cuts have you tried that didn’t end up as you had planned?

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

Fun With Fonts: Identifont

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If you like typefaces, if you like to play around with your fonts while other kids are off doing piano lessons, if you keep noticing the typefaces on the restaurant menu, you need to know about Identifont.

Identifont is the coolest font site on the web. You might not expect that when you first go there, because it has none of the luscious typography of sites like I Love Typography, Typographica or Typophile. But it’s got something no other typopgraphy site has.

Identifont - Find Out The Name Of That Font!

Identifont, the brainchild of David Johnson-Davies was built around Artificial Intelligence (AI) software developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and launched in 2000. The site says it is the largest independent directory of typefaces on the internet. You can see by the updates that new type foundries are being added all the time.

Here’s what you’ll find at Identifont:

  1. Fonts by appearance—This is the heart and soul of Identifont. Through a series of simple, illustrated questions, the AI behind Identifont will help you figure out exactly what typeface is used on that book cover you really like. It takes an average of 15 questions to come to a conclusion, but I’ve found Identifont to be right most of the time I’ve used it. There’s really nothing else like it. Here’s a typical screen from the identifier, where I’m up to question #4:
    Identifont

    Click to enlarge

  2. Fonts by name—Maybe you remember that the font you want has “park” in it, but that’s all you remember. No problem, because Identifont will call up every font it has that gives even a partial match. This is a lifesaver also.

     

  3. Fonts by similarity—Another terrific utility. Perhaps you want something like the stylish Park Avenue, but not quite. This is a task that could take time to visit font websites and look through pages of samples. Not with Identifont. In a few seconds I had located this lovely Tiamaria, a typeface I had never heard of. Perfect.
    Identifont

    Click to enlarge

  4. Picture fonts—This will amaze you. Try entering anything here, like “dog” or “beach” and see what Identifont comes up with. It has such an enormous database of fonts it’s hard to stump it. Here’s one of the 18 fonts I got with a search on “balloon”:
    Identifont

    Click to enlarge

  5. Designers—Want info on a typeface designer, including links to all their fonts? Just enter a full or partial name, and you have it.

     

  6. Publishers—A huge collection of type foundries, with links to all their typefaces on Identifont.

There’s also a small collection of free type fonts, with links to download locations, and listings of the most popular fonts on the site in the past week. In addition, there are links to two associated websites:

  • Fontifier where you can turn your handwriting into a font
  • Fontscape, an independent directory of typefaces organized into unusual and useful categories.

If you like fonts, set a timer before you surf over to Identifont, because it’s easy to spend way too much time running searches through their database and marvelling at the sheer variety of the fonts it will return.

Identifont, a great tool and a heck of a lot of fun for type lovers. Try it.

 

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