Think

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

Researching Your Book

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This post, from BubbleCow, originally appeared on the BubbleCow blog on 5/8/09.

The key to effective research is to know what it is that you need to know!

The first step is to recognise that there are two types of research: general and specific.
General Research
This is all about gathering a wider knowledge of the subject of your novel or book.
  • Read general books: Start with outlines and histories of the period (topic) under study. Get a feel for the key events of the time. Read books at all levels. Children’s history books are often a good place to start since they will give you a nice overview. 
     
  • Read ‘real’ history books: The next stage is to read some serious history books. Find out who the key historians are in the area of your research and read a couple of their books. Good history books will have loads of references to the books that the historians used in their research. You can use these references to find more history books. 
     
  • Beware of the Internet: At this stage you are still probably gathering a deeper knowledge of the subject area. You may find that the Internet is not the most helpful tool at this stage. Wikipedia can be very useful to clarify details but use with caution. [Publetariat Editor’s note: this is because Wikipedia entries are created and edited by members of the general public, and are therefore not always 100% reliable]
      
  • Make notes: This is very important. As you read make notes of the key points and, most importantly, write down questions. 
     

Specific Research

 
Having gathered a general knowledge you will now be ready for specific research. This is all about answering the questions that will help with your writing. However, the key is to be specific.
 
Let’s say you are writing a scene set in London in 1867. You have a young couple walking down a street at night.
 
You could ask:
 
‘In Victorian Britain what did a London street look like at night?’
This would be fine but it is very hard to answer. Where would you begin? You would be very lucky to find a website or book that would give you the description you needed.
 
OK – let’s change the question to:
 
‘In 1867 what did a London street look like at night?’
 
This is a more specific question and therefore easier to research. You might do a google search on ‘London streets 1867’. This might pull up some useful information. An image search did produce this: 

See the image, and read the rest of the post, on the Bubble Cow blog.

#PublisherFail: The ONE Thing Big Pub Must Change In Order To Survive, Pt. 2

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(cont’d from Part 1)

Meanwhile, your industry is investing its time and money in practices, devices and technologies intended to keep control of, and broad accessibility to, your products out of the hands of your customers. You don’t release every book in print, audio and ebook formats. You release very few titles in audiobook form, yet fight against Text To Speech (TTS) technology even on books you have no intention of ever releasing in audiobook form. You don’t show strong support for cross-platform ebook standards, yet you fully support the proprietary file formats used on the Kindle and Sony Reader. Having learned nothing from PR debacles in the music and film industries, you are moving to criminalize your customers with stringent DRM.

You believe your products are special and your role as their producer grants you both rights and responsibilities over and above the mere needs of your customers. 

With respect to TTS and DRM, Big Pub hides behind a shield of ‘protecting the interests of the artist’, just as music and film producers have done in the past. But it didn’t take long for those producers to realize motivated pirates and hackers will always exist, and withholding purchase and use options from your entire customer base in order to discourage the criminal acts of a few is a bad business decision. They also realized customers are willing to pay for digital media, and in fact will buy digital media just as often as hard copy media, so long as it’s convenient, affordable, and meets their needs. Free from your curator complex, they’ve embraced digital media to the fullest extent and are reaping the benefits.

The software, videogame and film industries take cross-platform support for their customers a step further by providing simplified or downsampled versions of their products for use on mobile devices. No one playing Guitar Hero on a Nintendo DS expects the same gaming experience as playing the full-featured console game, no one using MS Office Mobile expects to find the same feature set as regular MS Office, and no one watching a movie on an iPod expects the same audience experience as seeing the film in a theater. Makers of these products understand that on a portable device the customer’s priority is—surprise!—portability. Content and functionality matter to customers too, but customers are willing to trade bells and whistles for convenience and cost savings.

When you start down the road to release a book in electronic, portable form, you begin with the assumption that you must preserve the “integrity of the page” and “integrity of print branding”. If you can’t exactly duplicate the frames and shading employed in sidebars, or get the tiny graphic of the geek with his finger in the air to display in the exact location and size as they appear in the print book, you don’t want to release an electronic version at all. Even when working with a minimally-formatted book like a novel, you strive to preserve original fonts, typesetting and layout details in the ebook version. You set up task forces, invest in development of new devices, software and technologies, and generally make things much harder and more expensive than they need to be.

You appear to be completely oblivious to the fact that one of the major draws of the ebook is the flexibility users have in controlling how the text is displayed. Most e-reading software and devices allow the user to change the font, font size, line spacing, orientation of the page, and sometimes even the font and page colors. All your efforts to preserve the “integrity of the page” are wasted.

Nevertheless, you pass the expense of these efforts on to the ebook buyer, and as a result your customers think you’re ripping them off on ebooks. You repeatedly defend your pricing on the grounds that your overhead in producing an ebook is comparable to producing a print book, but you leave out the part where you could provide a simplified version of the ebook at a much lower cost—a cost consumers would find much more reasonable and appealing. You ignore the customer’s priorities (portability, convenience and cost savings) in favor of your own, self-imposed priorities. Once again, it’s because you believe your products are special and you answer to a higher calling than serving your customer base.

Even your unsustainable policies concerning bookseller returns are the direct result of placing your flawed self-image and industry traditions above the needs of your customers. Chain bookstores are no longer the only game in town for bookselling and consumers already know the chains can’t compete with online vendors for selection or price, with ‘big box’ stores for convenience or price, nor with indie booksellers for service. None of your customers’ priorities are being served by chain booksellers (which is why they’re suffering a slow economic death), yet you continue to remain in voluntary bondage to the chains and even grant them preferential terms.

When chain record stores like Musicland and Tower Records began to falter, record labels didn’t engage in efforts to prop them up or prolong the inevitable. Instead, the labels followed their customers into new markets and new distribution models. If you didn’t feel beholden to the ‘old ways’ of bookselling, you would do the same.

If you want to take the high road and place artistic integrity and tradition above profit, that’s fine. Independent imprints do it all the time. The only problem is, preservation of artistic integrity and tradition often exists at cross-purposes to mass-market economic demands. You want all the big profits that come from serving the mass market, yet believe you are entitled to deny the wants of that market whenever you choose, with no impact on your bottom line. You feel justified in forcing your customers to subsidize the costs and suffer the inconveniences of your misguided efforts in curatorship.
 

Let libraries, museums, academics and critics decide which of your products are worthy of preservation, just as they do in art, film and music. Drop your curator complex, and suddenly all the ancillary challenges and crises that eat up most of your days and resources fall away. Of course you will always have the challenge of trying to forecast which products will be most popular to your customers, but so does every other business that produces consumer products.

Letting go of costly, needless business practices reduces your risk on each individual product, and enables you to open up new revenue streams that can help balance the overall profitability scales when an individual product fails. Focus on making your customers’ priorities your own, and the way forward becomes obvious.

And lest you think your industry can never fail completely, since people will always need sources of information, inspiration and entertainment…there’s an app for that. Lots of them, actually.
 

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April L. Hamilton is the author of The IndieAuthor Guide and the founder of Publetariat. Her latest book is From Concept to Community.

The Reality Of A Times Bestseller

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This article, by author Lynn Viehl, originally appeared on GenReality. In it, Lynn crunches the numbers on her novel, Twilight Fall, which debuted at #19 on The New York Times Bestseller List and went on to sell nearly 75,000 copies in its first 5 months of release. It will come as a shock to most aspiring authors that Lynn has netted $0 to date on the book. 

A few years ago I made a promise to my writer friends that if I ever had a novel hit the top twenty of the New York Times mass market bestseller list that I would share all the information I was given about the book so writers could really see what it takes to get there. Today I’m going to keep that promise and give you the stats on my sixth Darkyn novel, Twilight Fall.

We’ve all been told a lot of myths about what it takes to reach the top twenty list of the NYT BSL. What I was told: you have to have an initial print run of 100-150K, you have to go to all the writer and reader conferences to pimp the book, you can’t make it unless you go to certain bookstores during release week and have a mass signing or somehow arrange for a lot of copies to be sold there; the list is fixed, etc.

I’ve never had a 100K first print run. I don’t do book signings and I don’t order massive amounts of my own books from certain bookstores (I don’t even know which bookstores are the magic ones from whom the Times gets their sales data.) I do very little in the way of promotions for my books; for this one I gave away some ARCs, sent some author copies to readers and reviewers, and that was about it. I haven’t attended any conference since 2003. To my knowledge there was no marketing campaign for this book; I was never informed of what the publisher was going to do for it (as a high midlist author I probably don’t rate a marketing campaign yet.) I know they did some blog ads for the previous book in the series, but I never saw anything online about this particular book. No one offered to get me on the Times list, either, but then I was never told who to bribe, beg or otherwise convince to fix the list (I don’t think there is anyone who really does that, but you never know.)

Despite my lack of secret handshakes and massive first print runs, in July 2008 my novel Twilight Fall debuted on the Times mm list at #19. I’ll tell you exactly why it got there: my readers put it there. But it wasn’t until last week that I received the first royalty statement (Publishing is unbelievably slow in this department) so I just now put together all the actual figures on how well the book did.

To give you some background info, Twilight Fall had an initial print run of 88.5K, and an initial ship of 69K. Most readers, retailers and buyers that I keep in touch with e-mailed me to let me know that the book shipped late because of the July 4th holiday weekend. Another 4K was shipped out two to four weeks after the lay-down date, for a total of 73K, which means there were 15.5K held in reserve in the warehouse in July 2008.

Here is the first royalty statement for Twilight Fall, on which I’ve only blanked out Penguin Group’s address. Everything else is exactly as I’ve listed it. To give you a condensed version of what all those figures mean, for the sale period of July through November 30, 2008. my publisher reports sales of 64,925 books, for which my royalties were $40,484.00. I didn’t get credit for all those sales, as 21,140 book credits were held back as a reserve against possible future returns, for which they subtracted $13,512.69 (these are not lost sales; I’m simply not given credit for them until the publisher decides to release them, which takes anywhere from one to three years.)

My net earnings on this statement was $27,721.31, which was deducted from my advance*. My actual earnings from this statement was $0.

*Publetariat editor’s note: many aspiring authors don’t seem to know that when a publisher gives an author an advance, it’s a loan against future royalties earned on the book. The publisher witholds royalties from the author until the advance is repaid in full.

Read the rest of the article on the GenReality site.  Be sure to read the comments beneath the article as well; in them, several other multiply-published and bestselling authors weigh in with their own, similar experiences.

50 Benefits of Ebooks – Reviewed

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This is a cross-posting of a review which originally appeared on The Creative Penn website.

50 Benefits of Ebooks: A thinking person’s introduction to the digital reading revolution where ebooks are low-cost or free. This is definitely a must read for anyone who is remotely interested in where the publishing industry is heading.

 

50 Benefits of Ebooks - click to enlarge

 It is also great to read if you are a fan of ebooks, because you will learn more about them, where to find them and where the industry is heading. Equally, if you are not a fan of ebooks, you need to read it for your education! It is not a technical book – it is packed with literary references and is hugely readable.

Why is it so great?

Firstly, it is only $1 so immediately demonstrates its core argument – you can get the book in PDF or ePub format here. It is a fast, fun read for what some might consider a dry subject. I laughed out loud at points (whilst reading it on my iPhone on the train!)

It does indeed include 50 benefits of ebooks, each one well thought out with literary quotes peppering the text and examples. Did you know that Paulo Coelho published a hardback book in Russia which no one was buying? He “leaked” the ebook as a free download and suddenly the print book started selling. Cory Doctorow also does this, providing ebooks for free to boost print sales.

Some other examples:

· Ebooks keep literature alive – they cannot be burnt or destroyed.

· Ebooks are good for the environment. No dead trees, no pulping of leftover copies, no warehousing or distribution, no landfills full of old books.

· Ebooks defy time – they can be delivered instantly and you can read right now. This allows for faster, news related books to be published and available. No need to wait!

· Ebooks will revive reading and literature. It will no longer just be for the people who can afford a print book. Did you know that in Australia a trade paperback can cost $30 or more? That is hugely expensive for even someone on a good salary. Free or cheap ebooks mean people can read and devour the books they want without worrying about the money.

(I could go on, but you can get the whole book for $1!)

There are also sections on:

· How to read ebooks and where to find free ones

· What the various formats are (very useful!)

· DRM – what it means and why we don’t want it

· Publishing ebooks: 10 tremendous trends in 2009 “Print publishing has one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel”

· Ten Trends To Nourish a Revolution in Reading and Publishing

· Reflections on the importance of reading

Michael Pastore is extremely well read as demonstrated by the breadth of the quotes he includes. He is obviously a great reader, and he makes convincing arguments throughout. The book is also packed with resources and there is also a companion website here.

Ebooks liberate authorsFrom my perspective, ebooks liberate the author and the artist and allow far greater freedom of expression than traditional publishing. They also allow for “the long tail” of niche market books that large publishers would never touch. It levels the playing field and allows the individual author or indie publisher the ability to promote their book alongside the big names.

I do not need convincing of ebooks. I currently read them on my iPhone on Stanza and as PDFs on the phone and the laptop. I would buy a Kindle if they were available in Australia! I publish my own books as ebooks on Smashwords, Lulu and the Kindle. However, I also love print books and I still buy them too. I love to browse a bookshop in real life and on Amazon. I shipped over 1000 books from England to New Zealand and then on to Australia (I must love them!)

This book helped me feel that my experience is actually typical. Most people who read ebooks also read print books. We would like to consume them both ways. There are some books I even have in 3 formats – print, ebook and audio because I believe in the power of the message. However, some books I only want to read in ebook format now. I will not pay $30 for a fiction novel that I will read over a few hours in the hammock, but I will pay $1, or perhaps even $4.99. This book has also convinced me to change my pricing for my ebooks – post on that to come!

These are exciting times for authors and readers. This book just makes me grin and jump up and down with glee!

(so go buy it now and join me in gleefulness!)

Related posts from The Creative Penn:

The future of the book – it’s already here

author 2.0 – how to publish your book, sell and promote it with web 2.0 tools

Joanna Penn is an author, speaker and business consultant based in Australia.

The Authors Guild And Big Publishers Are Working Hard To Reduce Your Readership

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This column is sparked by an article on Teleread, in which The Center For Accessible Publishing argues in favor of the Author’s Guild and publishers who are trying to force Amazon to remove the default Text To Speech (TTS) capability on the Kindle 2. TTS is a technology that allows the print-disabled to hear their Kindle books read to them by the device. 

The AG and publishers argue that individual authors and publishers should have the right to decide on a case-by-case basis which books will have TTS enabled.  You might think that since indie authors aren’t beholden to big publishers and aren’t members of the AG this is a non-issue for us, but if the AG and publishers win this battle authors everywhere—indie and mainstream alike—will see their readership reduced. 

As an author with multiple Kindle books ‘in print’, I can tell you that I am not in favor of disabling TTS. As an avid listener of audiobooks, I can also tell you that not every book made available in print is also made available in audiobook form.

If publishers and the AG only wanted to get TTS disabled on books they are already planning to release in audiobook form that would be fine, but whether they realize it or not they’re working toward having TTS disabled on ALL ebook content, on ALL devices.

Which Is More Likely: Controlled TTS, Or No TTS?

Publishers’ and the AG’s claim that all they want is the right to disable TTS on a book-by-book basis is specious, because it’s a lot cheaper and easier for hardware and software developers to disable TTS entirely than it would be to invest the time and money in developing and administering a tracking mechanism to distinguish TTS-disabled books from TTS-enabled books. Simply disabling TTS altogether carries the added benefit of pre-empting any future legal battles over the issue as well. In this economy, I could hardly blame tech companies for taking the less costly route.

Does TTS Cannibalize Audiobook Sales, As They Claim?

The argument that TTS cannibalizes book sales is also specious, for two reasons.

First, who do they think would buy both an ebook edition and an audiobook edition of the same book? If you want to hear it (and it’s available) you buy the audiobook, if you want to read it you buy the print edition. In order to get the "free" TTS reading on a Kindle 2, print-disabled customers have to buy the Kindle book.

Secondly, as anyone who regularly listens to audiobooks knows, flat narration can ruin the listening experience. If you doubt it, check out some of the (many) reviews at Audible in which an audiobook was panned not for the content of the book, but the quality of the narration.

I have little doubt that given the choice, the print-disabled would much prefer to buy the professionally-produced audiobook that’s being performed by a professional actor. But if the book in question isn’t offered in audiobook format, TTS is a better alternative to refusing to sell them a ‘readable’ book at all, isn’t it?

Author and publisher objections based on TTS voice quality are ridiculous as well. If your book is offered in an audiobook edition, the print-impaired who want the book will buy that edition. And if your book isn’t offered in audiobook edition, it’s impossible for TTS to cannibalize your audiobook sales anyway. Nobody who opts to listen to a book via TTS expects a full audiobook experience, they know it’s a stopgap, but it’s better than nothing. None of my books have been released in audiobook format, and I’m glad TTS is there to make my work accessible to the print-impaired.

This Isn’t Really About TTS, It’s About DRM

All this brouhaha over audio rights is really just a curtain being drawn shut in front of what publishers and the AG are really driving at, and that’s Digital Rights Management (DRM). Their TTS demands are conveniently bundled up in a package that also includes DRM demands. As a group, they’re (needlessly) worried about the theft of digital copies, whether in audio or print form. It’s a pity the needs of the print-disabled are being sacrificed on the altar of bulletproof DRM, especially since bulletproof DRM will never exist so long as there’s one guy in the world with a lot of time, sharp hacking skills, and a desire to get free content.

Studies have shown that the illegal peer-to-peer music file sharing that was rampant a few years ago actually drove more sales of the legal files. Consumers are willing to pay for digital content, so long as it’s easy to do so and the digital content doesn’t place excessive demands or restrictions on them.

Authors, Not Publishers Or The AG, Will Be Left Holding The Bag

The AG and publishers don’t seem to realize it but they’re working very hard at cutting off their noses to spite ALL our faces—publishers, authors and readers alike—, the end result of which will surely be reduced sales and reader alienation. And despite the fact that the Guild and big publishers are driving these demands, when their demands are finally met, individual authors—indie and mainstream—will end up paying the price, and not just in terms of lost sales.

When consumers feel their rights to free use of content they’ve legitimately purchased are being denied, or severely limited, their attention naturally turns to the public face of that content: the author. When publishers and the Guild have succeeded in imposing Draconian DRM measures on digital books, they are not the ones who will end up looking greedy and insensitive to readers: authors will take that hit. The Reading Rights coalition addresses its ‘open letter’ of protest to authors, not publishers or the AG.

As an indie author, I strongly object to publishers and the AG taking a position that will almost certainly force developers to abandon TTS, because now they’re infringing on MY right as an free agent to make my work available to whomever I want in whatever form I want.

Part of my motivation for choosing the indie path was freeing myself from outside control over my work, but it seems that the gatekeepers of publishing are bound and determined to drag all authors everywhere down with them. With TTS disabled the potential audience for my books will instantly go down, and while I’d very much like to make audio versions available, I lack the time and skills to produce my own audiobooks or podcasts at present.

Way to go, AG and publishers. With mainstream publishing in crisis, I’d expect you to be focusing your energies on identifying ways to attract readers rather than piss them off. 

Check out the Reading Rights website to learn more about the TTS debate, to find out how you can join in the protest, and to sign a digital petition asking publishers and the AG to drop their fight against TTS. This Tuesday, April 7, Reading Rights will be picketing the Authors Guild office in New York from noon to 2pm. The group is also planning to protest at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA the weekend of April 25 – 26.

Most authors, indie authors in particular, aren’t well-informed about what the AG and publishers are up to in this battle, and haven’t thought about the negative impact on authors everywhere if publishers and the AG win. Please share this article far and wide, wherever authors are likely to see it: link to it, Digg it, tweet it, fave it, tag it…just get the word out however you can. Don’t let the AG and mainstream publishers—groups with which indies aren’t even affiliated—get away with claiming to speak on behalf of authors everywhere.

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April L. Hamilton is the author of The IndieAuthor Guide and the founder of Publetariat. Her latest book is From Concept to Community.

For Whom Do We Write?

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This piece, by Aidan Moher, originally appeared on his A Dribble of Ink blog on 3/23/09.

David B. Coe, author of the Winds of the Foreland series, wrote an interesting piece for SF Novelists about the motivations of a writer and who they truly write for.

So my question is this: For whom do we write? And before you answer that you write for yourself, and that you’d write even if you knew you could never sell anything, think long and hard about whether that’s really true. It’s my knee-jerk response; it’s certainly the answer I want to give and want to believe. The truth is a bit more complicated. I write for myself because thus far I’ve been able to make something of a living at it.

There are easier ways to make a buck (at least there were; they seem to be disappearing) and I would never deny that I have chosen this career path because I love it, and because I have to write to be happy. But again reality rears its ugly head: If I couldn’t sell books I’m not sure that I could afford to write them. Oh, I’d write in my spare time, but I used to be an academic; my wife still is. I have friends who are lawyers and doctors and business people. I’ve seen how hectic their lives are. Once they’re done with work and family, they don’t have a whole lot of spare time or energy for creating worlds and writing novels.

I write for me because I can afford to, because I’m fortunate enough to do for a living what I love to do anyway. But if I’m to be completely honest, I write for myself and also for a whole host of other people. I write for my agent, because she has to believe in my books to sell them. I write for my editor, because he has to contract the book before it can be published. I write for my readers, because their purchases of my current novel make the next contract possible.

I’m pretty sure that my fellow professionals would join me in admitting that they don’t — can’t — write solely for themselves. And what about those of you who aren’t professionals? I’m sure that you take great pride in your creative accomplishments — as you should — and that you write to satisfy your passion for storytelling. But don’t you also write because you want to see your stories in print? I’m an amateur photographer, and I’m also a musician. I do these things “for myself.” Still, I was thrilled when I was able to display my photography in a gallery. I used to perform music in bars and restaurants and to this day I occasionally fantasize about doing so again.

I am a writer, which should come as no surprise. I expect almost every other blogger out there would consider call themselves writers and I also expect that many of my readers would consider themselves writers (or artists of another medium). I think it’s also safe to say that the vast majority of us are at a point where we practice our craft solely for ourselves, with little professional or monetary gain. I know I do.

As a blogger, I do this for free. I make no money off of it, in fact, it costs me money (in hosting fees, domain, etc…). I suppose one could consider the amount of free novels I get as a sort of reward for the work done, but in the end, A Dribble of Ink, like the majority of non-professional blogs, is a labour of love. The reward for me is to have a place where I can articulate my passion for Speculative Fiction and help spread that passion to other like-minded people.

Of course, like most writers, I have ambitions. I dream of the day when my Work-in-Progress (a contemporary Fantasy called Through Bended Grass) is a full fledged novel, lining the shelves of bookstores and climbing the charts on Amazon. Still, I know that I am just a drop in an ocean of aspiring writers, and my novel, no matter how good, will be one among many when it hits the slush piles. Does this discourage me from devoting endless hours to finishing it? Not at all. There’s always that burning desire to get the story out on paper, a feeling any artist can attest to, and the fun, the challenge and the reward is in the writing of it.

Coe touches on this honeymoon period, when aspiring writers can write for the sake of the craft and the pride they take in it:

What’s my point? Simply this: Nearly all of us who love art begin with that passion to create. We start by saying that we’re going to do it for ourselves, for the sheer pleasure of creating and celebrating that accomplishment. And we mean it. But I would argue that all art is inherently a performance. Painting, taking pictures, singing, acting, dancing, and yes, even writing — especially writing — it’s all done for an audience. When a child creates something that she thinks is beautiful her first thought is to show it to someone else — Mom, Dad, a teacher, a friend, a complete stranger if no one else is around. And I don’t think that impulse ever really goes away. Nor should it. Because art is inherently interactive. Art is about creation and appreciation, passion harnessed and passion evoked.

What’s most interesting to me is how the paradigm of being a writer shifts once it becomes a profession and how it’s not always so peachy keen as us wannabes think it is. A little Twitter conversation between Matt Staggs (Twitter: @deepeight) and Jay Lake (Twitter: @jay_lake) got me thinking about this:

Staggs
‘Turns out I’m way too busy to run a D&D game. Part of going from fan to working pro, I guess. Sad in some ways.’

Lake
‘@deepeight Dude, writing has really interfered with my reading career’

Staggs
‘@jay_lake Yeah, kind of sucks, huh? There are some good things about just being a fan.’

As a hobbyist/wannabe novelist, I’m perfectly happy to write with no other reward than the writing itself. It’s liberating and keeps my mind from gathering cobwebs. But is this what I have to look forward to, if Through Bended Grass does make it to store shelves? To join those downtrodden professional writers chained to their typewriters, forced to ignore all the great things that led to my original love affair with Speculative Fiction in the first place?

By Coe’s own admission, artists begin with a passion and curiousity for a medium, about what would happen if they applied their own touch to it. As soon as one becomes a professional, though, other factors enter the picture that determine the course of the artist and a modicum of freedom is stolen.

Tobias Buckell has been struggling with this, and recently wrote an article about how he is shelving his current Xenowealth series and trying shifting his focus to a new novel called Arctic Rising, in an attempt to broaden his audience.

Read the rest of the post on the A Dribble of Ink blog.

read this b4 u publish :-)

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This article, by Max Leone, originally appeared on the Publisher’s Weekly site on 11/10/08.

A 13-year-old boy tells the industry what teens want.

I am of that population segment that is constantly derided as “not reading anymore,” and is therefore treated by publishing companies as a vast, mysterious demographic that’s seemingly impossible to please. Kind of like the way teenage boys think of girls.

The reason we read so little in our free time is partially because of the literary choices available to teenagers these days. The selection of teen literature is even more barren now that the two great dynasties, Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl, have released their final installments. Those two massive successes blended great characters, humor and action in a way that few other books manage. When they went for laughs, they were genuinely funny, and their dramatic scenes were still heart-poundingly tense, even after I’d read them dozens of times. 

And so, after weeks of brainstorming and careful consideration (three months of procrastinating and two hours of furious typing), I will now attempt to end this dark age of adolescent prose. I will start by stating the main problem with books aimed at teenage boys. Then I will give some examples of what teenage boys actually want to read.

The first problem with many books for teens is archaic language. Seriously. It is the kiss of death for teenage boy literature. Any book infested by it is destined to become an eternal object of derision around the cafeteria lunch table. It is a problem that applies not only to the “classics” (yes, I will use quotations whenever I use that word. Live with it.), but also modern teenage literature. “Methinks”? “Doth”? Really? So we are constantly ridiculed for “lol,” while these offenses go unnoticed? To all writers of books aimed at teenage boys, I beg you: please use only modern language, no matter what time period or universe your book takes place in.

Another giant, oily blemish on the face of teenage literature (that was entirely intentional) is whatever urge compels writers to clumsily smash morals about fairness or honor or other cornball crap onto otherwise fine stories. Do you not think we get enough of that in our parents’ and teachers’ constant attempts to shove the importance of justice and integrity down our throats? We get it. I assure you, it makes no difference in our behavior at all. And we will not become ax murderers because volume 120 of Otherworld: The Generica Chronicles didn’t smother us in morals that would make a Care Bear cringe.

And then there are the vampires and other supernatural creature that appear in many contemporary teen novels. Vampires, simply put, are awesome. However, today’s vampire stories are 100 pages of florid descriptions of romance and 100 pages of various people being emo. However much I mock the literature of yesteryear, it definitely had it right when it came to vampires. The vampire was always depicted as a menacing badass. That is the kind of book teenage boys want to read. Also good: books with videogame-style plots involving zombie attacks, alien attacks, robot attacks or any excuse to shoot something.

Finally, here is what I consider the cardinal rule of writing for young adults: Do Not Underestimate Your Audience. They actually know a lot about what’s going on in politics. They will get most of the jokes you expect them not to. They have a much higher tolerance for horror and action than most adults. Most of the books I read actually don’t fall under the “young adult” category. I can understand the humor in Jon Stewart’s or Stephen Colbert’s books as well as any adult.

Publishers can stop panicking and worrying that the teenage boy market is impossible to crack, that teenagers hardly ever read anymore, and that they have only a few years before books become obsolete and are replaced by holograms or information beamed straight into people’s minds. Okay, they probably do have to worry about that last one. But if they follow the simple rules I outlined above, they’ll be able to cash in on the four or five minutes each day that teenagers aren’t already spending on school, homework, videogames, eating, band practice and sports.

P.S. I have very good lawyers, so don’t bother trying to sue me if none of these suggestions work and your company goes out of business.

Author Information: Max Leone attends eighth grade in New Jersey.

The Future of Publishing, As Seen From The Future of Publishing

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This piece originally appeared on The Bookish Dilettante on 2/23/09.

Today – the Bookish Dilettante happily yields the floor to a new voice – Mr. Aaron Hierholzer. Aaron, a young gun in the publishing world, attended this year’s TOC conference, and has graciously offered up his observations. With no futher ado, Mr. Aaron Hierholzer…

Last November, former Collins publisher Steve Ross said, “It’d be absolutely terrifying to be starting out now, to be young and to not have the benefit of years, if not decades, of perspective . . . I would have seriously considered leaving book publishing." Days later, literary agent Esther Newburg said, “I would hate to be starting out in the [book] business.”

What’s a person with a passion for bringing books to readers to do when the old guard implies that running for the hills might be best? What’s one to do when you find out that neither MGMT, Diplo, nor a good chunk of your acquaintances even read books? What’s one to do when one could compile a lengthy volume of humorless “end of publishing” articles from the past four months, alone?

Attending "O’Reilly’s Tools of Change" conference isn’t a bad place to start. I got to go earlier this month, and the enthusiasm for the future of books both p- and e- was truly infectious, and helped dispel some of the gloominess I was feeling about Bookland.

Overall, TOC’s gloom-dispelling ability was directly proportional to its specificity: anyone who’s been paying attention knows that reading is increasingly a social act, that one can instantly access almost any fact on a mobile phone, and that Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century. These harped-upon broad strokes grew tiresome, and when news that HarperCollins terminated its Collins division spread through the conference on Tuesday, it seemed there were more pressing questions to address. Questions like, "where’s the money going to come from when most of the knowledge of mankind can be found for free via Google?" Questions like, "should I run for the hills after all?"

Thankfully, many presenters did get to the nitty-gritty and the applicable, talking about things like how we’re going to get readers to value (and therefore be willing to pay for) digital content. I wish the “Success Stories and Failures in Digital Publishing” panel could have lasted all day—the skipped slides by rushed presenters were heartbreaking. Hachette’s Stephanie van Duin, Macmillan’s Sara Lloyd, and Lexcycle’s Neelan Choksi all talked knowledgably about the pricing and profitability of digital content, and about the fearlessness it will take to find a workable solution.

In nerve-wracking times such as these, staying focused on why we publish books in the first place is a good alternative to worrying about the end times of reading. And the point that kept striking me over and over was simple: readers come first. Publishers have got to treat the reader, the end user, with utmost respect. That can take any number of forms—not publishing absolute dreck; not treating the purchaser like a potential thief by imposing draconian DRM; not making digital offerings confusing, and frustrating, and messy, and overly expensive.

Read the rest of the article on The Bookish Dilettante.

FiledByAuthor – An Easy, New, Free Web Presence Option For Authors

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Filedbyauthor is a new, free web service that promises to connect authors with readers and readers with books.

From the site’s About Us page:

 

FiledBy, Inc is a digital marketing company providing membership sites, web tools and community building solutions to content Creators – authors, writers, illustrators and photographers – and their fans. The Company, based in Nashville, TN, has launched its flagship site, filedbyauthor, the most comprehensive online marketing platform and directory of published author web pages on the Internet.

Filedbyauthor is now in Beta. Any author with a book published in the U.S. or Canada can join for free, claim their page, check for accuracy, provide corrections and enhance their pages.

Mike Shatzkin. co-founder of filedbyauthor, was not quick to jump on the author web presence bandwagon.  On February 22 of this year, he wrote about his gradual conversion:

 

When Joe Esposito first told me about blogs in about 2001 or so, there were very few. Michael Cader had PublishersLunch, but if Michael knew that it was an emailed blog, he didn’t tell me. And then blogs “happened”, as things do: gradually, then suddenly. And now I’m late to have one of my own. Really late.

I’ll admit that I fiddled with this a couple of times before. I started up at least twice, maybe it was three times. I decided I’d try it for a while, see if I could get into the pattern of writing regularly, and then reveal it to the world when I’d piled up a month or two of posts. But I never GOT to a month or two of posts. And because I was keeping what I was doing a secret, I had no traffic, no comments, and none of the rewards of interaction which provide the motivation to keep going. So I didn’t keep going…

But I’ve been getting some signs that “now’s the time.”

One follows from having been on Peter Brantley’s mailing list for a couple of years. Twenty, thirty times a week, Peter sends us a link to something he’s found about publishing and digital change and invites comment. The posts and comments have increasingly sparked a response from me that amounts to a blog post. Once in a while Peter would ask me to extend a comment as a post to one of his blogs, PubFrontier. Then last week David Rothman flattered me by turning another Brantley list comment into a post on his Teleread.

And then two weeks ago I started using Twitter. I was a bit slow to get it, but Tools of Change accelerated the process for me. The complementarity of Twitter and a blog seem pretty apparent.

On top of that, I’m involved with a large number of exciting new initiatives even in these troubling times. Filedbyauthor, a new venture I’m co-founder of being headed by my longtime friend and colleague, Peter Clifton, will be live with a web page for every author with an active ISBN in another month or so.

 

Here we are, a month or so later, and FiledByAuthor is live (in beta).  PersonaNonData shared the announcement on 3/25/09:

 

FiledBy, Inc. today announced the Beta launch of filedbyauthor. The site is the first large-scale author-centric promotional platform to provide every author that has been published in the U.S. or Canada a free, hosted, ecommerce enabled web page ready to be claimed and enhanced. With more than 1.8 million pre-assembled author web pages and over 7 million book titles, filedbyauthor is the most complete site for finding and engaging with authors and their work.

“All authors, regardless of publishing category are encouraged to visit the site, claim their page, make corrections, and enrich them in a variety of ways," says Founder, President & C.E.O. Peter Clifton.

Any published author or co-author can easily and immediately update their author page which is linked to individual work pages. In addition to the free level, FiledBy announced two new membership levels designed to make additional web marketing tools available at low cost. These additional levels include blog tools, additional linking and media postings, event listings, online press kits and banner customization.

And, any reader can join the filedbyauthor community and start connecting with authors. Readers can fill in their own pages, collect favorite authors and books, write reviews, rate works and authors, and comment through wall postings.

“We hope to level the web marketing playing field for all authors, eliminate some of the challenges authors face when designing their online presence, and help every author become more easily discoverable through a highly optimized site,” added Clifton.

 

If you have a book with an ISBN that was published in the U.S. or Canada, you can claim your filedbyauthor page now.

Understanding Writer's Block

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This article, by Christopher Edwards, originally appeared on the Stillpoint Coaching website.  It’s primarily aimed at people who write scientific and academic pieces for journal publication, but the ideas presented here about the roots of writer’s block are equally applicable to any author.

You’re stuck, damn it. You can’t even imagine starting to write your grant or article without a twinge of terror or resentment. Even if you can manage to drag yourself to the computer, the words just don’t flow. At one time or another, most everyone who needs to write suffers from writer’s block. It’s a devastatingly painful experience, and it can kill a career.

I have known research professors who left academia for industry to avoid writing, professors denied tenure because they could not publish, and Ph.D. candidates who bailed out of graduate school because they could not write their dissertations.

However, both the scholarly literature and my own client work convince me that most scientists with basic language competence can overcome writer’s block. This article will identify some major sources of writer’s block, particularly the most harmful attitudes toward writing, and will suggest a few solutions. In a follow-up article, I will describe some detailed strategies one can apply to break or avoid writer’s block. I will also suggest instances in which writing coaches or even psychotherapists can be helpful.

Anxiety and boredom are two major emotional sources of writer’s block. As with other productivity problems, overcoming writer’s block requires that scientists work within the zone of emotional arousal where they are neither bored nor overly anxious, setting realistic goals they can accomplish with concentrated effort. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a productivity specialist at the University of Chicago, defines this zone as the dimension where people experience pleasure, productivity, and flow in their work.  As with laboratory work, success with writing depends upon having enough challenge to stretch one’s abilities, but not so much that one lives in fear of failing.

If you struggle with the task of writing, take a close look at unrealistic, crippling attitudes you may hold. Psychologist A.C. Jones concludes that writer’s block occurs when grandiose but fluctuating expectations of success combine with a vaguely planned project. Perfectionism may be the greatest of all attitudinal blocks. I have seen scientists labor over every single word of the first draft, crawling toward the end of each paragraph by constantly switching between writing and correcting.

If you lower your expectations about earlier drafts and stop editing while you write, you can raise your productivity. Outline the main ideas and use the first draft to test what you will include in the submitted work. A writer invites paralysis by expecting anything close to a finished product in early drafts. With scientific writing, as with other writing, there is never a perfect text. To paraphrase poet Paul Valery, an article is never finished, only abandoned.

Writer’s block can be a reaction to boredom as much as perfectionistic fear. Boredom can occur when scientists view writing as merely a mechanical transmission of their truly creative work. If one feels this way, the challenge is to create enough novelty and interest to finish the writing task. As writer Dorothy Parker quipped: The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. 

Writing up research can be an interesting way of refining as well as communicating one’s science; if you can treat it as a challenge, it can sharpen your thinking. For example, I have watched scientists develop a better sense of the larger significance of their work through their writing, since composing and editing force one to confront what may be important for others, not simply oneself.

Task inflation can be another source of writer’s block. It occurs when one makes a project seem more daunting than it really is. Two types of task inflation can plague scientists when they write: overvaluing the importance of getting a current article published, and overestimating the role of one’s prose in the work’s acceptance for publication. No matter how important an article may be, it is only a limited communication of a portion of one’s lifetime scientific achievement.

Many excellent papers are published in Nature, Science, and Cell, only to be added to the list of hundreds of good scientific papers published each year. When one does publish in top journals, the writing is far less important than the science about which one writes. In reality, good journals accept even very poorly written scientific papers, if the science is novel and significant. One can conquer task inflation by learning to focus on the work one is reporting, instead of on imagined reactions to the paper.

When the above-mentioned attitudinal problems are combined with major misleading myths about writing, writing becomes a painful, frustrating bore of a chore. Three of the most debilitating myths, well described by Jerrold Mundis, are: writing should be fun and easy; one can only write when one is inspired or otherwise feeling enthusiastic about a manuscript, and writing requires some type of special genius. 

Scientists who write as a part of their jobs can learn something about the fun and easy myth from full-time writers. Many of the best professional writers dread writing. It is never easy. For many, the real pleasure of writing only comes with submission of the text – there is a sigh, a moment of relief from the tension of composing and revising that has been mounting for weeks, months, or years. Writing is lonely, hard work with few intermediate rewards. It can become more enjoyable over time, but only if one is willing to sit in front of the blank screen and plug away at a draft in the midst of fear or boredom.

Interestingly, the act of writing is rarely, on its own, the source of agony. Avoidance of the task, along with the cycles of fear and guilt that follow, is often the greatest cause of frustration.

Read the rest of the article at Stillpoint Coaching.

Publetariat Resource Lists

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Publetariat is in the process of adding resource lists to all applicable departments.  These lists of links to free resources will appear at the top of the list of articles within each department, so that when you click on ‘Design’, for example, the first item listed will be the Design Resources List. Resource lists are now posted in the Think and Write departments. 

The Think resources list features blogs and sites offering insightful opinion pieces on broad-ranging topics that all fall under the umbrella of self-publishing.  For example, in his blog, Mick Rooney offers reviews of self-publishing service providers, and PMI Books’ The Populist Publisher analyzes just about every issue you can think of related to self-publishing. 

The Write resources list highlights sites with helpful tools you can use when dealing with issues related to craft.  For example, Get Into It can help you work through writer’s block, the Internet Public Library offers a list of basic plot outlines, and Rick Walton maintains an extensive collection of brainstorming ideas and lists for authors of books, stories and poems for children (i.e., lists of common proverbs, first lines of kids’ songs, summaries of popular fairy tales, etc.) .

Additional resource lists are planned for the Design, Publish, Sell and Imprint departments, and will be announced when they’re ready. Check back from time to time because new links will be added periodically. 

Feel free to use the Contact Us form to recommend relevant links. Recommended links should primarily offer information, opinion, instruction or downloadable resources of interest to indie authors and small imprints. Links to sites that only offer goods or services for a fee will not be added. 

DRM on the Kindle – an update

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This is cross-posted at Teleread.org.

A few weeks back I posted on Teleread about Jew Bezos’ take on DRM on the Kindle. Bezos said that copyright holders can choose to include DRM in their Kindle books if they want it, but my contention was that anyone who uploads content to the Kindle through the Digital Text Platform (DTP) did not have this option. I made that assertion because there was no information on the DTP about how to add DRM to a book, and there is certainly no check-box on the upload interface that lets a user choose to DRM the content or not when Amazon prepares it for publication.

 

Well, it looks like the option is available after all — in a manner of speaking.

After some investigation I started to see that most of the books I downloaded that were published on the DTP did not have DRM. To figure this out, all you have to do is change the extension from .AZW to .PRC or .MOBI. Then the files will open in any Mobipocket Reader program or supported device if they are DRM-free.

 

So, I contacted Amazon to see what they would say about the issue officially. The response I received was enlightnening:

 

Using Amazon DTP, publishers have the ability to add or omit DRM from their submissions. If you use the DTP conversion, the default will be DRM-Free. You can, however submit a mobipocket file through DTP, which can have DRM when it was created. If this is the case, then DTP will honor the DRM.

 

That little bit of information is a game changer. I would venture to guess that the majority of individuals and companies using the DTP do not have any idea about DRM, and even fewer know how to effectively use Mobipocket Creator to make a decent eBook file.

 

I would encourage Amazon to make this option more prominent on the DTP and give users a front-and-center option for selecting DRM or not. A link to the Teleread DRM Primer would be a good addition, too.

 

Joshua Tallent is an eBook guru in Austin, Texas. He offers Kindle eBook formatting tips and tricks at his KindleFormatting.com website, as well as formatting assistance for authors and publishers.

Should You Create a Kindle Book? An Author's Guide

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March 8 -14 is Read an E-Book Week. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I thought I’d try to summarize what an author should know about Kindle, the e-reader from Amazon.

I’m going to assume that you’ve heard about the Kindle but you don’t really know too much about it. My aim with this post is to provide enough information for you to evaluate the market and figure out if it’s worth pursuing. So let’s get started. 

 

What Is the Kindle?

  • The Kindle is a dedicated e-book reading device, meaning it reads e-books, along with some newspapers and magazines, but not much else. Version 2 of the Kindle was released in February of this year.
  • It uses E ink technology for the display. E ink is very different from a computer screen or the screen on, say, an iPhone. It is not backlit and so the experience of reading on a Kindle is very much like that of reading off paper. There’s no eye strain and it can be comfortably used for long periods of reading.
  • The Kindle is relatively small and lightweight. It weighs just 10.2 ounces and has a 6″ screen on the diagonal. It’s very convenient for carrying, and many users appreciate its portability over heavy books.
  • The Kindle 2 can hold about 1,500 books at a time.
  • The device currently sells for $359 USD.

There are many video reviews online that will give you a more detailed look at the Kindle and its features. Here are a few good videos I have found:

Who Uses a Kindle?

  • Amazon will not release any sales data about the Kindle devices so no one really knows how many they have sold or who is buying them. Guesses from industry watchers range from 300,000 units sold to as high as 500,000.
  • Contrary to what you might intuitively guess — that the biggest users are kids of the ‘Net generation — anecdotal evidence points to users 40 years of age and up as the primary market. This older audience appreciates the resizable type, the light weight and portability, and the convenience of instant access to content. Typically, they also have more money and are able to afford the $359 ticket price.
  • Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Kindle on her show in October 2008, raising the device’s profile with the public in a big way. Demi Moore twitters about how much she loves her Kindle.
  • Right now, the Kindle is only available in the United States. There is some speculation that version 3 will be available in other countries, but Amazon has yet to confirm that this is true.

What About the Content?

  • There are about 245,000 book titles currently available in the Kindle format, including 102 of 111 current New York Times bestsellers.
  • Amazon reports that Kindle books have been selling briskly, now accounting for about 10% of sales for titles where both print and Kindle editions are available.
  • Kindle books are proprietary files. The files are wrapped in DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology, meaning they are encrypted. They can only be read on a Kindle or on the Kindle app for the iPhone. There is a great deal of debate and criticism in the publishing industry over Amazon’s choice to encrypt its files. Many publishers are pushing to standardize e-books around an open file format called ePub. (More on that in a later post.)
  • The typical price for a Kindle book is about $9.95. Amazon keeps a 65% commission on each sale. This is higher than the 55% commission they keep on print book sales.

What’s the Upshot?
While Amazon has taken its share of criticism over the Kindle for a variety of reasons — some of it well deserved — it can’t be denied that the device is helping bring e-books to the mainstream and creating new opportunities for book sales.

If you are an author with an existing print book, or one in production, publishing a companion Kindle version is pretty easy and inexpensive. For a small additional investment, you can make your book available to an audience that craves new content and wants it quickly. This audience is relatively small right now but will continue to grow over time. It’s almost certainly a good investment to make.

Jennifer Tribe is a principal at Highspot Inc. where she helps business owners publish their non-fiction books.

Affordable Advertising

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From the Publetariat Editor’s Desk: 

A major challenge facing indie authors, small imprints and freelance author services professionals is promotion. 

Advertising on heavily-trafficked sites is typically too expensive for indies and freelancers, but the more affordable ads on smaller sites may not get the traffic needed to make the investment worthwhile. 

This week, Publetariat is rolling out its paid advertising program.  Now, you can get your ad in front of the thousands of people who visit Publetariat each day for just US$32 – $75 per week when you book for a whole month, and US$50 – $100 per week when you book one week at a time. Even if you want to go crazy and book the most premium ad slot, right beneath the login block on the front page of the site, for a whole month, it’ll only set you back US$300. Ad space can be reserved weeks or even months in advance, to synchronize your ad’s timing with your book, site, product or service launch.

But that’s the pricing for just anyone off the street, we can do better for our friends.  Registered members are entitled to a 15% discount off regular rates. 

Since its launch on 2/11/09, Publetariat has quickly gone viral and already has an Alexa traffic rank in the top 3.66% of all websites worldwide.  But Alexa ranks are based on a 3 month average; since Publetariat has only been open to the public for 25 days, its adjusted rank is actually in the top 1.33%.  Publetariat is already averaging 5,000 hits per day, our RSS feed has received over 4,500 hits in the past 25 days, and average time spent on the site per visitor is 8 minutes.

To view Publetariat’s full ad rate card with booking information, click here.

Choosing Strength

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"The economy is down. You can be up.

Times are tough. You’re tougher.

The recession is depressing. You don’t have to be."

 

I received this in an email from  www.NancyDSolomon.com, a motivation coaching service, and thought it makes a good mantra. Here’s the other part :

"It’s our choice to be powerful or powerless. We need support and encouragement right now. We need to remember how strong we are, how capable we are, how invincible we are."

I’ve had a real struggle this week with depression. I’ve decided to quit watching the news. I don’t need to hear any more crap. I know I’m now going to have to work at my day job/career for as long as I breathe, that quite a lot of what I’ve saved as a small business owner has evaporated. Oh well. It wasn’t really there to begin with!

As an independent publisher, i want to put my new book out there. I wanted to get it out last fall – when the economy tanked, I felt I needed to wait.

Well, I don’t want to wait much longer. I’m determined to find a way, even if I have to go through Booksurge. As long as it gets out there!