Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

The Rise of E-Books and a Shrinking Library Catalog

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This post by Kate Rosow Chrisman originally appeared on Consumer Eagle on 4/7/14.

E-reading is on the rise, according to a January report by the Pew Internet project. Fully 50 percent of adults own a tablet or e-reader, and two out of five public libraries lend e-readers. But while libraries own their e-readers, the same can’t be said of the digital books on their virtual shelves. As a result, library patrons face long wait times to borrow what are essentially collections of bits and bytes.

Most local libraries purchase licensing agreements to e-books through a distributor. The purchasing agreements typically stipulate a time frame or number of uses. For example, a book may only be loaned out 26 times or for one year before it disappears from the library’s catalog. Often, the prices for these books are unreasonably high, according to James LaRue, CEO of LaRue Associates and former director of the Douglas County Library outside of Denver, Colo.

For a new bestseller, “You can buy [the print edition] as a consumer for $12.99, you can buy it for $9.99 as an e-book, but [publishers] are charging libraries for $84 for that book and only one person can use it at a time,” said LaRue.

For consumers, the hidden relationship between library and publisher is having a direct impact on access to materials. Avid reader Hilary Kennedy uses her local Washington, D.C. library to borrow e-books. “The wait list [for e-books] is ridiculously frustrating, because often the queue is 142 people long. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s a virtual book and the technology is there to distribute it to everyone,” she said. Moreover, it’s “aggravating when the library doesn’t have the e-book at all,” she said.

 

Click here to read the full post on Consumer Eagle.

 

Tarnished Silver or Wyoming-Gate – Silver Publishing Owner Has Allegedly Fled The Country

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This post by AJ Llewellyn originally appeared on his site on 4/10/14.

It has been all over the Internet for approximately two years that Silver Publish, LLC, is a company in deep distress doing business in an unorthodox manner…its sole owner, Lodewyk Deysel, AKA gay romance author Leiland Dale, may have started with good intentions but quickly began not paying staff and authors, telling one lie after another.

And now, things have crashed completely.

I was the one who tracked down a former employee who told me that Lodewyk Deysel has fled. He went to South Africa on Monday. She took him to the airport. She had no idea this was going on. It was a fluke I tracked her down just now. She said he called her Saturday midnight. He told her he needed to leave town in a hurry. She sold his RV for him yesterday and had listed his TV on her Facebook wall – a TV that he bought out of authors’ earnings.

I begged her to take the listing down because she was aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice. She said the TV was already sold.

She was not concerned about the people he has defrauded. In fact she was very defensive. I was enraged to see her boating about the kindle fire “a friend” gave her and –

She even lied to me about the day he left. Look at her post, “chlling with my bestie at the airport”

I wonder which friend that might have been?

She aided and abetted a criminal. She sold his stuff on his Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/alisani.brazil?fref=ts

I called the police in her hometown of Harristown Township, Michigan, to report the crime. Dispatcher #31 would not help. He told me to call my local police. That I had to follow proper procedure.

“Pre owned Mitsubishi 60″ dlp TV in perfect condition!! $350. Only 1.5 year old!!!”

That TV and the RV are items that should have been sold for the authors.

He has moved out of his house and his stuff is gone. Goodbye royalties. He told her he has shut the company down.

As of this moment he is pretending to one staffer via cell phone that he is still in Michigan. She has now been informed otherwise.

He is GONE.

 

Click here to read the full, very lengthy post (and get the full history of Silver Publishing’s owner Lodewyk Deysel), on AJ Llewellyn’s site.

 

The Benefits of a Style Sheet

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This post by Jen Matera appeared as a reprint on ePublish A Book on 4/8/14.

Some authors write according to an outline, and others have a less-organized series of events they want to describe. There are authors who write their scenes sequentially, no matter how great or small, and those who write major scenes first and minor scenes last. I’ve even known one writer who wrote all her sex scenes first—she said they were the most fun—and then built the rest of the story around them.

But what most writers have in common is that they keep some kind of notes about their story, characters, plot, timeline, and whatnot. These notes, no matter how informal, are what editors use as a foundation for your story’s style sheet.

So… what’s a style sheet? It’s your editor’s notes about your novel—the place where every character’s name, physical description, relation to other characters is noted. But that’s not all. Not by a long shot. There are basically two types of information kept on a style sheet: content and format. Details that refer to your story line, your characters, your setting, your era, etc., are considered content information. Information regarding spelling, punctuation, and grammar is considered format. But the differentiation doesn’t really matter, as long as most of it is recorded somewhere.

Content:

• Character names—for every character named in the novel. Yes, even Sam the driver who was in one scene. We have no idea if he’ll show up again in book three, so he goes on the list.

• Physical description, including any descriptions—eye color, hair color, general build, and anything that’s noted as standing out. No author wants her lead’s eye color changing mid-story.

 

Click here to read the full post on ePublish a Book.

 

Tom Weldon: 'Some say publishing is in trouble. They are completely wrong'

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This post by Jennifer Rankin originally appeared on The Guardian UK / The Observer site on 4/5/14.

Ahead of the London Book Fair, the UK head of Penguin Random House insists his industry has coped with the digital revolution better than any other

The indie booksellers are shutting up shop, authors struggle to make a living, and more than 60% of 18-to-30-year-olds would rather watch a DVD than get their nose in a book. But as the publishing world gathers at the annual London Book Fair this week, one of the UK’s leading publishers thinks the notion of the book industry in crisis is just a cliched old story.

“Some commentators say the publishing industry is in enormous trouble today. They are completely wrong, and I don’t understand that view at all,” says Tom Weldon, UK chief executive of Penguin Random House, one of the biggest players in Britain’s book world.

As an up-and-coming publisher, he persuaded a teenage chef called Jamie Oliver to sign a book contract. He gets to edit Jeremy Paxman‘s prose and read the latest Ian McEwan manuscript. And since last July he has been at the helm of the UK division of the world’s biggest publishing house, after a mega-merger brought together Penguin, Random House and their 15,000 writers.

While a recent Booktrust survey showing that reading for pleasure is declining among young people might lead some execs to reach for the chablis, Weldon is convinced book publishers are doing better than other creative industries in adapting to a digital world.

“In the last four years, Penguin and Random House have had the best years in their financial history,” he says. “Book publishers have managed the digital transition better than any other media or entertainment industry. I don’t understand the cultural cringe around books.”

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian UK / The Observer.

 

LBF’s Digital Minds: The Golden Age or End of the Book?

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This post by Roger Tagholm and Edward Nawotka originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 4/8/14.

The Digital Minds conference in London took a philosophical bent, questioning is this “golden age for publishing or the end of the book?”

Copernicus, Ptolemy, Einstein, Wittgenstein and Willard Quine (don’t worry…he was a US philosopher and logician) were all name-checked in a presentation at yesterday’s Digital Minds that was as abstract as the speaker’s hair. Bill Thompson from the BBC Archives gave a philosophical masterclass on what we mean when we refer to a book and how the print and digital versions are very different animals, one passive, the other active.

“A [print] book sits there. It will contain the same words every time you open it. A book is outside the stream. Like a neutrino [sic: it was that sort of presentation], it rarely interacts with the world or interferes with the thoughts of even a single reader. This is its merit and its damnation…It is printed, dead, done with. Furniture.”

An ebook, he continued, is a file, “and because it’s just a file an ebook is never finished, an ebook is never cleanly separated from the rest of the flow of bits, an ebook is active, part of a wider ecosystem.”

Thompson thinks the industry needs to find a new paradigm because at the moment “publishers, agents and authors still act as if printed books are the center of the universe, and all other forms of publishing revolve around the printed, bound text.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Writers You Want to Punch in the Face(book)

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This post by Rebecca Makkai originally appeared on Ploughshares on 3/7/14.

This is the story of Todd Manly-Krauss, the world’s most irritating writer. He’s a good enough guy in real life (holds his liquor, fun at parties, writes a hell of a short story)—but give the guy a social media account, and the most mild-mannered of his writer friends will turn to blood lust.

Okay, so he’s not a real writer. Except that he is. At times I fear he’s me.

Because I do struggle for balance with social media. I’m supposed to use it to promote my work (it’s not just a Twitter account, it’s a platform, dammit), and if many of the highlights of my life are writing-related, I naturally want to share those. But then I think of how I might come off to someone who’s struggled for years to publish that first story. Or how I must seem when I’m the only writer (the only self-promoter, even) on someone’s feed. And I wonder if I’m someone’s own personal Todd Manly-Krauss.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Is Digital Technology Advancing or Limiting Freedom of the Press?

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This post by Rebecca MacKinnon originally appeared on Big Questions Online on 3/10/14.

The Internet is a powerful vehicle for expanding freedom of the press. Whether this vehicle is driven successfully in the right direction, however, is not inevitable. Even in the age of high-speed Internet and always-on mobile devices, the expansion and protection of press freedom requires specific political, economic, and regulatory conditions.

Invented 25 years ago by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web is the common interactive “language” upon which revolutionary applications and interactive platforms have been built: first personal website-hosting services in the 90s, then blogging software in the early 00s, followed by social media like Facebook and Twitter. The Web has democratized and decentralized the function of “press:” One no longer needs substantial economic resources in order to share information or perspectives that have at least a small audience, somewhere.

When I joined CNN in 1992, if a person living in Kenya or Tunisia or Cambodia wanted the world to pay attention her story, she had to capture the interest of journalists working for a major news outlets like CNN or the New York Times or Newsweek magazine, whose editors would then decide whether and how they wanted to tell it. By the time I left CNN in 2004, that same person could create her own blog without needing specialized technical training. She could report her story directly onto the World Wide Web where it could be shared globally without relying on powerful media gatekeepers.

During the 2013 protest movement in Turkey which started in Istanbul’s Gezi Park before expanding nationwide, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci documented how demonstrators relied on Twitter as their main news source. Turkish mainstream news outlets were kept too tightly under the thumb of Prime Minister Erdogan to report on a movement that was directly critical of his government’s policies. “I knew there was censorship on TV,” she quoted one demonstrator in a recent article for Matter, an online magazine of science and technology. “But it wasn’t until Twitter came along I realized how bad it was.”

Digitally networked technologies certainly make it harder for governments to perpetuate blatant lies for very long. That is not the same thing, however, as having a free press.

 

Click here to read the full post on Big Questions Online.

 

Oh Dear. This Is AWFUL.

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 5/3/14.

Like every other writer, I have a vault where I keep stories I’ve written that have never seen the light of day. Or maybe shouldn’t have seen the light of day. I recently blew the dust off a manuscript (koff koff), thinking this was one I could do something with. It was fan fiction and not half bad, as I recalled. Okay, way back when I wrote it I thought it was crash hot. Which is pretty good. I figured I could change a few names, tweak here and there, and maybe end up with a salable story. It would be fun.

So I opened up the doc and started to read.

And folks, it was AWFUL. Newbie writing 101 FAIL.

So… what was awful about it? Oh dear. Let me count the ways…

Look, when you’re critiquing, you’re suppose to find the good points first, so let’s get that out of the way. The plot was reasonable for what it was. Princess wants to avoid an arranged marriage so has a few adventures crossing the galaxy to a relo’s house, expecting to be safe. There, she meets a dishy alien admiral who was her dead husband’s CO. Sparks fly. He keeps her safe. The end. The spelling was spot on and the grammar obeyed the rules.

BUT

Point of view

What possessed me to think we needed her father’s POV? It’s easy enough to establish he’s a conniving prick from her POV. And why do we need the little cameos between daddy and the jilted suitor? We’ll find out the baddies are chasing her soon enough. (In her defence, the writer probably thought she needed to warn the reader that Mary wasn’t safe, and that it wasn’t daddy’s men chasing her, it was the other dude’s. To which this critiquer replies, ‘so what’?)

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

Earthsea Revisited and Visited Anew

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This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 4/1/14.

I mentioned a while back that I was embarking on a reread of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. It was, in fact, only a part reread. There are six Earthsea books, that Le Guin likes to refer to as either the Earthsea Cycle, or the two Earthsea trilogies. Until now I’d only read the first trilogy. (There are also two short stories in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, but I’m not including those. I’ve got that collection and will get around to it at some point.)

I came across the first trilogy – A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore – when I was 10 or 11 years old. I devoured them and absolutely adored them. They bent my tiny mind and I read them over and over again. I had no idea there were more books in the series (back then, there weren’t). The next trilogy – Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea and The Other Wind – came out much later. The first trilogy was published in 1968, 1971 and 1972. The second in 1990, 2001 and 2001, respectively. Having loved the first trilogy so much, it’s amazing it took me this long to get around to the second, but there you go. So I recently reread the first three and then went on to the “new” three.

Even though I’d read them so many times, it’s been a long time since I last read the original trilogy. I was desperately hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be a disappointment. Within a few pages, my fears were quashed and I was back in Earthsea and remembering just why I loved it so much.

 

Click here to read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

 

Facebook Fan Page Reach: No, It's Not All Over For Free Promo On Facebook

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This post by Publetariat Founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 4/3/14.

If you’ve been promoting your brand and books on Facebook via a Fan Page*, then stories like The Free-Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook (from Time Magazine’s site) may have you in a tizzy. Don’t be.

Those articles are either intimating, or stating outright, that this is some kind of plot on Facebook’s part to force Fan Page owners to either pay to “boost” their posts or pay for ads in order to maintain the same level of exposure, or “Reach”, as they’ve enjoyed in the past. I don’t doubt Facebook is very much interested in selling “boosts” and ads, but the truth is that you don’t have to invest in either of those things to increase your Fan page posts’ Facebook Reach.

*Note that this post only applies to Fan pages, not individual Facebook Profiles (aka “Timelines”). This is because there are no tools for measuring engagement or boosting posts on Profile/Timeline pages: those pages are supposed to be for private individuals to engage socially with their private networks, they’re not intended to be used for marketing purposes. So if you want to deal in Reach on Facebook, you need a Fan page.


How Do I Know This?

I manage a few FB fan pages for my day job and I’ve been observing the ‘Reach’ trends on both ‘boosted’ (promoted for a fee) posts and non-boosted posts. The ones with the greatest Reach are ALWAYS the ones with the most “engagement”: Likes, clicks, Shares, comments. This is regardless of whether or not a given post has been ‘boosted’, and in fact I frequently see non-boosted posts far exceed the reach of boosted posts.

It’s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg loop once the post is out there, because you have to get initial Likes, clicks, Shares and comments to improve the post’s visibility in your Fans’ newsfeeds. Higher visibility leads to more Likes, clicks, Shares and comments, and so on and so on.

FB is keeping the details of their Reach algorithm secret, but based on what I’ve observed it goes kind of like this:

You post something to your fan page. Facebook says, “Okay, we’ll show this post in the newsfeed of a very small test group of your Fans, and see if it gets any engagement. If it does, we’ll show it a larger group. If it gets more engagement from that new group, we’ll show it to an even larger group.” And so on, and so on. So Facebook isn’t just blowing smoke when their reps say the new algorithm is intended to ensure that only the most ‘engaging’ stuff gets pushed to users’ newsfeeds.


Context, and Specifics: How Many People Get To See A Post Immediately, and Ultimately?


Click here to read the full post on the Indie Author Blog.

 

Finding Your Author Voice

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This post by Susan Spann originally appeared on her blog on 4/2/14.

Today’s #PubLaw examines a mission-critical, but often overlooked, facet of author “marketing.”

I use quotes with “marketing” here because, for authors, many aspects of marketing have more to do with who you are than what you do. This makes knowing yourself, and your voice, critically important.

Authors are not products, or “brands,” though marketing your books involves aspects of each. Authors are people (like Soylent Green!) and being a person–instead of just a “brand”–is an advantage. It can also be an enormous pitfall, if you handle yourself improperly.

Knowing who you are – your author voice – can help you decide which marketing avenues are best for you and your books.

As an author, you need to find unique and effective ways to communicate, beyond the written page. The days when authors could “just write books” and expect someone else to do all of the publishing, marketing, distribution, & sales are over. The good news, however, is that marketing doesn’t have to be miserable – done properly, a lot of it can even be fun.

Effective “marketing” involves a multi-faceted approach–but authors, like diamonds, sparkle more when the facets are properly cut. Knowing your author voice will help you realize which marketing efforts to focus on, and which ones to avoid.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Susan Spann’s blog.

 

Europe Says No To Proprietary eBook Formats

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This post by Mike Cane originally appeared on his Mike Cane’s xBlog on 4/1/14.

L’Europe va mettre fin aux formats propriétaires pour les livres numériques

Europe will put an end to proprietary formats for digital books

While the European Parliament will be renewed in May, the European Commission, which will also be fully reconstructed by the end of the year, embarks on a surprising activism: she finally grabs the file interoperability digital books, with the aim of forcing retailers using proprietary formats to end these systems.

Amazon and Apple, the two market leaders, are directly targeted. Currently, a digital book bought on Amazon.fr can only be read on the Kindle, the e-tailer reading lamp, or one of its applications. Reading lamp which does not accept the open format ePub. It is the same with the iBook Store, Apple’s digital library, which does not allow the reading on the terminals of the Apple brand.

Assuming this isn’t an April Fool’s item, what will happen?

 

After Amazon and Apple fail with their bribes lobbying, I think:

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Mike Cane’s xBlog.

 

Not Drowning But Waving

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This post by Jonny Geller originally appeared on The Bookseller on 5/22/12, but its content is still surprisingly on-point.

I recently read a good début novel entitled The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (not my client, so relax, I’m not pitching). A ship has sunk and the survivors are packed in a lifeboat, vying for control. Without a clear idea that they will see land again, they are jostling for a good spot on the boat. You can see where I’m going with this.

It feels like a gust of wind has come along and shoved everyone in the publishing industry into one spot on the lifeboat. The storm has abated and the seas seem calm, but we are all sitting in the wrong place, next to people we didn’t think we would be, or should be, nudging against. We have to work out who we are now. The morning after the disaster, we have woken up on the lifeboat with new objectives:

» The publisher. Now seeking “a direct relationship with the consumer”—a euphemism for “they are going to sell books directly”.

» The bookseller. Now seeking “a localised, niche, customer-driven service”—a euphemism for “they are sick of the huge returns and so [are] now going to stock lots of titles but not many of each of them”.

» The agent. Now seeking to “create a 360˚ vision for his/her clients”—a euphemism for “they now do everything: publicise, edit, organise talks and even publish”.

» The author. Now seeking “a more equal partnership with all elements of the chain”—a euphemism for “they are sick of being treated like a disposable commodity”.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Bookseller.

 

How To Sell Your Book To Hollywood

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This interview of Walt Morton, conducted by JJ Marsh, originally appeared on Words With Jam on 3/31/14.

Walt Morton, Novelist & Screenwriter, shares tips with JJ Marsh

Tell us a bit about yourself, Walt. How did you get involved in the movie business?

In 1988, I had just moved across the country to Los Angeles. I knew nothing about Hollywood but I thought I could probably write and sell an original screenplay because many screenplays I paged through seemed dumb, wooden, or the work of a chimpanzee. How hard could it be? Over the next eight years I wrote seven screenplays. I even earned some money and had one script bought outright. I worked for a producer as a writer-for-hire like in the old Hollywood days.

Movies based on original screenplays have become rarer and rarer. To make this clear, an “original” screenplay is a screenplay that is not based on a novel or TV show or toy or comic book or anything else. It just starts as a writer’s idea for a movie.

Starting in the 1990s the average cost of making a Hollywood studio film skyrocketed with the associated costs of marketing and global distribution. Today, any big studio movie with star actors represents an investment by the studio of over $100 million dollars.

Scared studio executives almost never have the guts to make original material anymore, so seek ideas already vetted in the consumer marketplace. They’d rather bet on something already popular as a book, novel, TV show, comic, etc. This is not rocket science.

The realization almost nobody was buying original screenplays put me on the slow road to being a novelist. That, and a conversation I had with Michael Crichton, back in 1997. Crichton said:

 

Click here to read the full interview on Words With Jam.

 

Book Editors Really Do Edit Books. Really! They’ll Tell You So Themselves!

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This post by Chris Meadows originally appeared on Teleread on 3/30/14.

What does it say about what people think of you if you have to write a lengthy editorial insisting that, no, really, you actually do do your job?

That’s how a piece by book editor Barry Harbaugh in The New Yorker comes off. Entitled, “Yes, Book Editors Edit,” it insists that, despite Amazon claiming otherwise, book editors at major publishers actually do edit books. The fact that this piece had to be written in the first place possibly says more than does the entire piece itself.

Especially since there are just a few problems with it.

First of all, it’s hard to imagine where Mr. Harbaugh got the impression Amazon was claiming that editors don’t edit. The people who’ve been complaining about editors not editing have by and large been the authors of the works that were supposed to be coming in for editing—but weren’t. For example, look at some of the discussion from when the head of Kensington Publishing responded to writers’ complaints about their experience with the press. Many of those complaints involved the failure to receive any actual editing.

 

Click here to read the full post on Teleread.