My Big Rant On Self-Publishing

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This piece, by Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest, originally appeared on her There Are No Rules blog on 2/27/09.

I can’t tell you how tired I am of hearing people bash self-publishing. The things I hear usually fall into two categories:
 

  • Most self-published books aren’t quality
  • Some self-publishing services are unethical

If you agree with one of the above statements, let me lay it out real clear for you: The landscape is changing, and if you haven’t noticed, you’re behind the times. This particular blog post addresses the quality issue, because the ethics issue is becoming less of a problem. The moment any self-pub service tries to pull a fast one or do something questionable, it’s trumpeted far and wide online. And often it’s the people who aren’t doing their research and due diligence that get taken advantage of. I’m not saying it’s right for this to happen, nor do I condone it, but all industries have bad eggs.

But moving on, consider:
 

  • Traditional publishers now rely on authors to do all the marketing and promotion. It used to be that writers could concentrate on writing and forget about that icky sales and marketing stuff. Well, welcome to the new world. Marketing is now expected from authors. And authors who survive will be the ones who find ways to authentically grow their platform and meaningfully reach their readership.
  • Communities will decide what books are worthwhile, and communities won’t have ego-filled judgments. Publishers will always be giving their authors one thing that is hard to come by: a measure of instant credibility. (That is: Someone thought this was good enough to take a financial risk on.) In good scenarios, there is also collaboration: to make a good book a great book. But soon, communities will have as much power as publishers to decide what books deserve attention. Plus you and I will be more likely to trust judgments coming from people we know and have something in common with, not necessarily The New York Times. It goes back to the whole end of cultural authority.

Read the rest of the article at the There Are No Rules blog.

Write Resources List – where to get help with craft

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Inkalicious Writer’s Cheat Sheets – from plotting to writing sex scenes, from editing to pitching, it’s all here

Lightning Bug – helping you write a story from beginning to THE END

Caro Clarke’s Writing Advice articles – character, dialog, pacing and more

Juiced On Writing – the writing process: tips, techniques & how-tos

Archetype Writing – writing essentials

Grammar Girl – for those times when you’re not sure whether to use "then" or "than", "who" versus "whom" and the like

Rick Walton – children’s writers’ brainstorming lists

Using English – dictionary of English idioms

Daily Writing Tips – list of frequently misused words

Writer’s Fun Zone – Reach for the stars.  Play like a child.  Write like a fiend.

The Writer’s Site – How to write/writing tips

Biographical Dictionary – this wiki offers thousands of free bios

Cliche Site – use them purposefully, or keep ’em out!

Internet Public Library – encyclopedia of basic plots

Get Into It – Help dealing with writer’s block

The Story Starter – random idea generator for short stories, novels, scripts, plays, poems, or just for fun

LitDrift – a new blog, resource, and community dedicated to the art & craft of fiction in the 21st century

Advertisements For Yourself: Can, and Should, Book Authors Become Brands?

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This piece, by Jill Prulick, originally appeared on The Big Money on 1/28/09.

People in the book business rarely agree on much, but no one disputes that the long-suffering industry is slogging through one of its worst periods ever. Editors are freezing their acquisition budgets; publishing houses are shrinking; booksellers are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands.

What does that mean? It depends. In the book world, where the word "brand" is either sacrosanct or dirty, there’s little consensus. Is there a difference between a best-selling author and a brand? What is the process by which an author becomes a brand—and is it a good thing?

The answers are as varied as weather in New England: A brand goes beyond one format into television or film; a brand is someone you would read regardless of the subject. For every theory ("All best-sellers are brands, but not all brands are best-sellers"), there’s a near converse ("You need to achieve best-seller status to launch a brand"). And some shun brands entirely. "Authors of best-selling books are not brands," insisted former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman.

There are even more contradictions. Traditional branding—a mix of ads, media appearances, and book tours-is dying. Marketing departments are being slashed. Authors are pushed to promote their own books, while reviews-and their accompanying ad space-are shrinking. Independent advertiser Verso, which recently launched targeted online advertising, now spends about $2,000 to $3,000 per book on marketing, a fraction of its budget a year ago. And yet publishers, agents, and editors all say that recognition, dependability, and longevity sell books.

No one questions that James Patterson, author of 45 New York Times best-sellers and subject of a case study in brand management at Harvard Business School, is a brand, thanks to an army of consultants. Patterson’s books, which have grossed more than $1 billion and have filled the author’s coffers to the tune of more than $100 million, are practically encoded with unifying, Patterson DNA—from the title to the packaging to the hook and hanging cliffhanger.

The clear lines end there. Five percent to 10 percent of publishers’ lists, the so-called blockbusters, are top-performing authors with built-in, expanding audiences—i.e., brands. Tom Clancy. Patricia Cornwell. Suze Orman. Mitch Albom. Or are they? "I don’t really look at him as a brand," said Albom’s agent, David Black, who recently negotiated the deal to release an Albom commencement speech on the Kindle to extend the author’s reach. "Whatever we can do to expand his audience we will do."

Brands are often the elephant in the room no one wants to confront. Some authors consider it unwise to be branded as, er, brands; it’s a signpost for low-brow, mass-market sensibility. And it’s also the case that the vast majority of fiction writers, even today’s best-sellers, did not begin their lives as brands. Many were unknowns whom publishers rejected. Believe it or not, there was a time when few had heard of John Grisham. He sold his first book from the back of a car and no one was interested. Then came The Firm. "I took John to bookstores, and, at every turn, clerks were putting his book into the hands of customers," said Ellen Archer, president of Hyperion Books. It became a hit and launched the author into a brand name.

In today’s fickle marketplace, the Internet—with blogs, videos, Twitter, and other promotional tools like Amazon’s Author Stores—is the modern-day equivalent to hand-selling. Thomas Friedman even posted a chapter of Hot, Flat and Crowded on LinkedIn and asked members to weigh in. (Disclosure: I was part of Friedman’s publishing team.) In a way, authors are empowered in this new model, provided they can leverage their networks into living, breathing communities who have a stake in—and benefit from—an author’s ballooning platform.

But it comes with a price. When authors are beholden to a brand, they ally themselves, almost like actors and athletes, with agendas and meanings that are well beyond their control. In their desire to fulfill the dictates of a brand, authors can compromise their integrity as writers, especially if they cubbyhole themselves.

The Chick Lit genre provides numerous examples. The Nanny Diaries, published in 2002, sold more than 1.5 million copies and was made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson. But the author’s 2004 follow-up, Citizen Girl, pitched as social satire—male bosses filled in for Park Avenue socialites—was a flop. The authors, who reportedly were unable to sell their idea to Random House, settled on Simon & Schuster’s Atria—and satisfied the beast that was the brand. Lauren Weisberger, "Bridget Jones," and Melissa Bank suffered similar trajectories—some worse than others—and their careers as writers have waned.

Read the rest of the article at The Big Money.

Book publishers, R.I.P.?

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This piece, by Novella Carpenter, was originally published on sfgate.com, the online arm of The San Francisco Chronicle, on 2/24/09.

In this bad economy, it’s tougher than ever to sell books

I had always thought that books were recession-proof…

…that most people facing a night at home due to budgetary constraints would gladly curl up with a mug of hot water, put on extra socks to keep the nip of their unheated apartment at bay, and read. While the rest of the world frittered away money on outings to movie theaters and bars, surely the frugal-minded (whose numbers are increasing) would choose to spend pennies on the hour soaking up the pages of a good novel?

 

That’s what I thought, but if you believe panicked grumblings about the book publishing industry, I must be totally wrong: Holiday book sales were abysmal, and most of the major publishing houses have announced job losses in recent months.

One publishing behemoth, HarperCollins, lost 75 percent of its operating income during the first six months of 2008. Over all, the publishing industry has struggled as bookstore sales — and the economy — have slowed drastically.

I feel terrible for those who have lost their jobs in publishing, and I fear for bookstores. But to be honest, the reason I’ve been watching the slow demise of book publishing with an ever-increasing sense of dread has to do with my own personal circumstances. You see, almost two years ago, in the flush of a strong economy, I booked a flight for New York and sold my first book to a major publisher. I remember looking at the publication date: June 2009, and thinking it was impossibly far away. Now, with June just around the corner and galleys of my book out to reviewers and book buyers, IÕm sure my book (my baby!) will suffer horribly.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been investigating the damaged state of publishing, seeking out advice from a wide spectrum of editors, authors and bookstore owners to gauge whether my fears of failure are substantiated. Their advice does not bode well.

"There’s a lurking fear here," said Kate, an editor at a mid-sized publishing house in New York who asked to remain anonymous. "Big accounts aren’t taking as many books. What we’re seeing is people don’t impulse buy books anymore. There’s less pleasure buying now."

Slower book sales mean less money for publishing houses, who then may be forced to downsize the company, laying off editors who acquire books and other positions that aren’t deemed crucial for day to day functionality. Kate, who has worked in book publishing for eight years now, has friends who work for Random House, one of the hardest hit houses. "They have been holding their breath," Kate said, "worrying about whether the axe will come down on them."

Kate went into publishing because she loves books, sharing ideas and working with eccentrically intelligent editors. The pay — she started at $28,000 — is notoriously lousy, especially after factoring in the high cost of living in New York City. But the economic crisis has made her "very glad to be employed," she said.

And yet, her anxiety is unmistakable: She knows that if her books don’t sell, her job security may be compromised. She is confident other cost-savings will be implemented before job cuts take place. Instead of hours-long lunch meetings at high-end restaurants, for example, editors, authors and agents now settle for coffee or in-office meetings. As for the future, Kate’s publishing company isn’t going to be acquiring any frivolous titles.

"None of us know when the market will recover," she said. "But right now, I’m very worried about my books — books that I believe in. They are going to be selling into a terrible climate."

I shyly mentioned my own (probably doomed) book, and asked her for advice.

"The best advice for today, and really in any financial climate, is to be fanatical and motivated to promote your book," she said. "Do as many events as possible. Become a shameless self-promoter."

Read the rest of the article at sfgate.com.

 

Kindle 2 Review, the Formatting Perspective

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This is a cross-post from my Kindle Formatting blog.

There have been a couple of really good Kindle 2 reviews in the last day or two, including Alexander Falk’s, which I found to be a good overview of the changes and adjustments in the K2. What I am going to bring you now is a review of the formatting and book display changes that come to us in the new device, some of which are great and some of which are just going to cause frustration. I’m going to list them in no particular order.

Line height: The line height on the K2 has been reduced, allowing more text to show up on the screen. This equates to about 4 more lines of text on the screen at font size 3.


click for full-size

Font clarity and size: The new 16-level grayscale screen, in addition to making images clearer, has made the Kindle font (Caelicia) show up a bit better on the screen. That actually makes the font a little bit lighter, from what I can tell, but it does not make it significantly less readable. It does appear as you compare the two screens that the font on the Kindle 2 is just a tiny bit smaller than the same size font on the Kindle 1. I have compared the font sizes in screen shots, and it does not appear to actually be smaller. However, there are a few places where a size difference definitely does stand out, most noticeably the size of the bullets in unordered lists.

Indentation: On the Kindle 1 the first-line indentation for paragraphs is .25 inches and the left indentation for blockquotes and lists is in .5 inch increments. That allows three full indentation levels and part of a fourth before the text is too scrunched up and the indentation just stops happening. On the Kindle 2 the blockquote and list indentation has been reduced to .25 inches, allowing five full indents and part of a sixth before stopping.

Em units are smaller: On the Kindle 1, em-units (a measurement that equals the height of the font at the current size) are about twice as large as they should be, but on Kindle 2 they have been reduced to the correct size. On both devices the em-unit size does change properly with the user’s font size adjustments.

Justification wrapping: The Kindle automatically fully justifies the text in books unless the creator explictly overwrides that setting. On the Kindle 2 there seems to be a bug that does not spread the text of a line out to the end if there is a certain amount of space already between the words. So, if a larger word wraps to a new line the text before it may not be flush with the right margin. This is apparently only a big issue at the larger font sizes, but it does show up periodically at the sizes 3 and below.

Broken Justification: This next one is a pretty important bug that I hope gets addressed soon. On the Kindle you can override the default first-line indentation on paragraphs by assigning a width="0" to the paragraph or by giving it a text-indent:0 CSS style. You can also use other numbers in those values to precisely manage the first-line indentation in the file.

The problem is that any time you use either of those commands the Kindle 2 will assign a left justification to the paragraph instead of retaining the default full justification. This bug poses a significant problem for formatting since no-indent paragraphs are used on a regular basis in books. For example, in many books the first paragraph under a heading is given a no-indent style. Unless the entire book is formatted in a left-aligned style, those paragraphs will stand out significantly.

It should also be noted that the option to turn on or off justification, which is available in the K1 with a hidden command in the font size menu, is not available in the K2, as far as I can tell.

Image Dimensions: The dimensions of the space available on the Kindle screen for book content (both text and images) has changed a bit with the new device. First, you should be aware that since the release of the Kindle 1 the typical answer on the DTP forums has been to make full-page images 450px by 550px. However, on the K1 the available screen area is actually 524px by 640px. Images smaller than that but larger than 261px by 319px will be upscaled to fill the screen area in width or height. This automatic adjustment can have a negative effect on the quality of the image, so it is best to size images at the actual dimensions of the available screen area.

On the K2, the available screen area is 520px by 622px. This is an odd size difference, but the best approach is to size images with the smaller K2 content area in mind.

HTML Tables: One of the biggest complaints about the K1 has been that it does not support tables. This complaint was made more pointed by the fact that tables are supported in Mobipocket, which is the foundational format of Kindle books. Well, the K2 displays tables, even handling them the same way Mobipocket does, by allowing the user to scroll the table horizontally when it is wider than the screen area.

Strikethrough: The K2 has a small change in the placement of the strikethrough line as seen in the image here.

 

Overall, the changes in the Kindle 2 seem to be aimed at making the text easier to read and easier on the eyes. The line height changes look good, and seem to handle superscripts and subscripts better. The justification issues will be annoying for formatting needs, but should be easy to fix with a firmware update. I really would love to see the Kindle 1 get table support, but unless or until that happens I will continue to use images. The 500,000 or so Kindle 1 users out there will appreciate that, I suspect.

Andrew Keen Could Learn A Thing Or Two From Us Monkeys

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In his book, The Cult of the Amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture, author Andrew Keen argues that Web 2.0 (content for media consumers created by media consumers) will soon spell the death of Western media culture as we know it. I don’t disagree with him, but unlike Mr. Keen, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Mr. Keen likens the worldwide community of bloggers and indie artists to "infinite monkeys…typing away". He says that where the web and media are concerned:

"…democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent…it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions."

"Moreover, the free, user-generated content spawned and extolled by the Web 2.0 revolution is decimating the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers, as professional critics, journalists, editors, musicians, moviemakers, and other purveyors of expert information are being replaced (‘disintermediated’, to use [an O’Reilly] term) by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun moviemakers, and attic recording artists. Meanwhile, the radically new business models based on user-generated material suck the economic value out of traditional media and cultural content."

Mr. Keen is apparently unaware of the possibility that the public at large doesn’t feel our culture, or access to it, requires “gatekeepers”. He also fails to acknowledge the reality that those “gatekeepers” have abused our collective trust with such regularity, we no longer recognize their status as arbiters of anything other than what stands to make their industries and corporate backers the maximum quantities of money in a minimum quantity of time. Whether we’re talking about big publishers with their ‘celebrity novels’, journalists with their ‘infotainment’, or TV executives with their so-called reality programming, the gatekeepers are now known to us primarily as experts in misdirection, hype and obfuscation.

It goes without saying that there are many honest, hardworking people in all branches of media who are doing their level best to deliver accurate, incisive content, but these are the minority voices in the cacophony of a vocal majority with less lofty goals.

Keen says, "The value once placed on a book by a great author is being challenged by the dream of a collective hyperlinked community of authors who endlessly annotate and revise it, forever conversing with each other in a never-ending loop of self-references."

And the problem here is…what? As an author of both fiction and nonfiction, I would be very happy to have an audience so engaged in what I’ve written that they’re moved to discuss it in groups. Isn’t that what literary study and criticism is all about? Keen seems to be suggesting that once a manuscript is bound between two covers, it should be laid to rest with no further analysis or study on the part of its readership. But isn’t it—and hasn’t it always been—the mission of great literature and nonfiction to spark thought, public discourse and debate?

Keen implies the author should always have the final word where his work is concerned, but I disagree. In my view, the author gets to open the discussion, but readers get to have the discussion. And that’s not a bad thing.

Keen goes on to talk about how free online content is stealing the very money out of the pockets of hardworking businesses and corporations. For example, Encyclopedia Brittanica has steadily lost marketshare to online compendia such as Wikipedia. But lest we feel little sympathy toward corporate behemoths like Brittanica that have been slow to get on the technology bus, or perhaps even feel some of those behemoths are about due for extinction, Keen trots out the story of the archetypal ‘little guy’:

"Then there’s Guy Kawasaki, author of one of the fifty most popular blogs on the internet…And how much did Kawasaki earn in ad revenue in 2006 off this hot media property? Just $3,350. If this is [Wired founder] Anderson’s long tail, it is a tail that offers no one a job. At best, it will provide the monkeys with peanuts and beer."

As it turns out, Guy Kawasaki is no ‘little guy’ at all. Keen neglects to mention the fact that Kawasaki has 10 bestselling nonfiction books in print. Hmmm…you don’t suppose Mr. Kawasaki’s blog has increased his book sales at all, do you?

The central failure of Mr. Keen’s book is his base assumption: that our culture needs gatekeepers and professional arbiters of quality in media, that people need to have their tastes, thoughts and opinions carefully formulated and shaped for them, that we lack the ability to make intelligent choices for ourselves. In addition to the snobbery inherent in his arguments, Keen’s scorn for the common man is evidenced by his repeated references to bloggers and indie artists as “monkeys”.

 
If Mr. Keen and his compatriots among the media elite knew anything about history, they’d know that every major step forward in human culture has been brought about by the dismantling of—wait for it—the then-powerful media elite.  From the French Revolution to the American Revolution, from Martin Luther pinning a note on a church door to Martin Luther King Jr. leading a march on Washington D.C., from the literature and art of The Age of Enlightenment to the Cinema Verite movement of the 1970’s, whenever the controlling forces in our culture overreach or come to scorn the very public they claim to serve, that public will rise up in an overthrow and the outcome will be cultural progress.

 
Mr. Keen, the cheese has moved. You are welcome to join the cheese in its new location or to seek out new cheese on your own, but it’s pointless to keep demanding that all the people you think are beneath you bring the cheese back to you, because they are all quite happy with the cheese in its current location and you haven’t done anything to earn their affection or respect. Your whining diatribe of a book may be very popular among your peers in the media elite however; you might be able to launch a cheese-finding expedition with them, were it not for the fact that they have no idea how the cheese got away either, and like you, are not terribly welcome in the monkey house.

Mur Lafferty and "New Media"

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This post, by Edmund Schubert, originally appeared on his Side-Show Freaks blog, and features a guest post from author Mur Lafferty.

A few weeks ago I posted an essay about achieving success in the publishing industry that included a link to an article posted on Time Magazine’s website. One of the people quoted in that Time article was a friend of mine named Mur Lafferty, a fiction and non-fiction author who has built her career on using new and open media.

She can be found on Suicide Girls as a regular columnist, on Tor.com as a blogger, or on her home page, murverse.com. Her first novel, Playing For Keeps, is available via print and free audio podcast (and was reviewed on IGMS by James Maxey). She graciously agreed to write more about the subject of new media, for which I am grateful. I’ll let her take it from here…

Edmund posted recently on this blog about podcasters getting publishing contracts. He then invited me to guest blog here, and I wanted to discuss this in more detail.

I am a podcaster who built an audience of over 40,000 via free giveaways of audio podcasts and PDF podcasts, so you can guess I’m rather gung-ho about new media. Podcasting my book led directly to it being picked up by a small press and released in print.

Yes, print publication, or "old media" is my ultimate goal. Giving work away for free is not a way to directly make money, obviously. But new media allowed me to connect to an audience, make them care about my work, and then ask them to help me with the marketing of the small press book. Many bought copies of the book for themselves and to give as gifts. I received one email from a woman who appreciated the free podcast so much that she promised to buy several copies for Christmas gifts.

I’m never clear on what number makes a small press book a success, but I earned out my advance and had a strong showing on Amazon for several weeks after the release, so I’m pretty pleased with the sales numbers of a book that never hit the bookshelves.

New media is not a fad or a gimmick. It’s not a pipe dream or a crazy idea. It’s a way to connect directly to an audience in a way that just a website will not do. Established authors with existing audiences can afford to look down on new media, but new authors with no audience would do well to consider audio or ebook releases of their work.

The relationship with the community is what it’s all about. What I’ve discovered from the listeners who hear my voice talking to them in intros and read me on blogs and Twitter, is that they want me to succeed. I’m not an author in an ivory tower to them, I’m a person trying to climb a pretty big mountain and can’t do it alone. (Yeah. Sometimes I mix metaphors.) When these people see my book, they don’t think, "Oh, a superhero novel by that author I heard of once." They think, "Mur’s book came out! Awesome!"

I had a man approach me at DragonCon last year. The conversation went something like this:
 

Read the rest of the post at the Side-Show Freaks blog.

Amazon Kindle 2 Review

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This post, by Alexander Falk, was originally published on his XML Aficionado blog on 2/24/09.

My Kindle 2 arrived from Amazon today!

It appears that I am lucky in this respect, because Amazon had originally announced the ship date as February 25th, and most people are still waiting for their unit to show up. But I had ordered mine literally within 10 minutes of the announcement – so I guess being an early adopter finally got awarded…

As I had promised a few weeks ago, I am providing a review of the new Kindle 2 as a follow-up to my popular original Kindle Review from November 2007. Just like with the previous review, this one is based on unpacking the Kindle 2 and working with the device for about 2-3 hours. I plan to add information about long-term issues such as battery-life in a future blog posting once I have accumulated several days of usage of the Kindle 2.

Unpacking the Kindle 2 is fun. Just like the Kindle 1 the packaging is well-designed and this  resembles a shipping box with a "tear here to open" strip on one side. The package contains the Kindle itself, a thin "Read me" brochure, and the charging cable. The screen of the device shows instructions to plug it in and then push the power switch on top of the unit – for those that hate even the shortest of manuals.

Once you turn the Kindle 2 on, you immediately get to read the User’s Guide on the screen, or you can skip ahead and press the Home button to get to your main library page.

Before I talk about the improvements in the software, let’s take a look at all the improvements in the hardware of the device compared to the Kindle 1:

  • The Kindle 2 looks much more polished or refined and gets rid of some of the edginess of the original unit. It feels more "solid" and less flimsy, which may also be due to the fact that it is about 10g heavier (468g with book cover for the Kindle 2 compared to 458g for the Kindle 1). 
  • The Kindle 2 now locks into place in the book cover / sleeve that you can order from Amazon. The original Kindle fell out of that cover far too often, so this is a great improvement.
  • Another annoying "feature" of the Kindle 1 is now a thing of the past, too: accidental clicks on the Next or Prev buttons. The buttons on the Kindle 2 are still on the very edge of the unit, but the buttons now have their pivot point on the outside edge and need to be clicked inward, which completely prevents accidental clicking. Very clever design change!
  • The new Kindle 2 gets rid of the shiny silvery and strange LCD sidebar that the old unit used to provide a selection cursor on the page or within a menu. Since the new display is much faster and more responsive, the selection feedback is now directly shown on the main screen.
  • The Kindle 2 has a better position for the power switch (top left of the unit) and gets rid of clumsy wireless on/off hardware switch on back of unit, too.
  • It comes with a better power adapter (mini USB plug on Kindle, charger cable can either use desktop USB plug or wall outlet), which is similar to what the iPhone charger from Apple does.
  • I’m lucky to be in a Spring 3G network coverage area, and so I found the unit to have much faster downloads using Amazon 3G Whispernet (only in areas where 3G EVDO service is available). This was especially noticeable when I downloaded all my previous purchases to the new device.
  • The new 16-grayscale display is great, especially for viewing web content, such as Wikipedia, newspapers, or blogs. It’s probably not the most important feature, but certainly nice to have and much easier on the eyes than the old display when rendering images.
  • I never really liked the hardware on/off switch in the back or the sleep mode on the old Kindle, but this is now all much more user friendly and consistent: wake-up from sleep mode is now done using power-button instead of "Alt-AA", and it is much more responsive; pushing the power button briefly puts Kindle in sleep mode (artwork screen saver is shown); and pushing the power button for 4-5 sec turns the Kindle off.

In addition to these hardware changes, the Kindle 2 also apparently offers some improved software that contains several usability enhancements. Some of those are more network features and I assume they will be available as an upgrade on the old units, too, but I haven’t heard any details about such an upgrade yet. Anyway, here are the software enhancements that I found notable:

Read the rest of the review at XML Aficionado.

O'Reilly Tools of Change (#TOC) Trip Report, Pt. 2

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Now that a couple of weeks have passed since the TOC conference, the main thing that has stuck with me is the fact that many—perhaps most—of the mainstream publishing staffers present at the Tools Of Change conference aren’t truly ready to change.

Even now, with mainstream publishing in crisis and Web 2.0 rapidly becoming a dated term, I met a surprising number of publishing industry professionals who are far more interested in discovering ways to further fortify their strongholds than they are in exploring the opportunities created by branching out into new media and fostering community among their customers.

At lunch one day, a gentleman at the table asserted it’s unreasonable for readers to expect ebooks to cost significantly less than their bound-paper counterparts.  Casting myself in the role of "ignorant consumer," I asked him to explain why ebooks shouldn’t cost less on the basis of savings in paper, printing, hard copy distribution and shipping costs alone.  He explained that those expenses don’t just go away, but are replaced with equal or even greater expenses introduced by the need to preserve "branding" in the ebook through the use of specialized layout, design and typography experts and technologies.

He took as his example the ‘Dummies’ series of books, which utilize proprietary fonts and graphics and are all laid out for print in a manner consistent with one another (i.e., sidebars with tips and gotchas, highlighted through the use of specific graphic icons).  He went on to explain the incredibly difficult and expensive process of trying to faithfully recreate the Dummies ‘experience’ in an ebook, particularly since there are so many different ebook file formats to deal with, each with its own limitations and technological specfications.

When I raised the possibility that it might not be necessary to perfectly reproduce every aspect of the paper book when releasing it in e form, because people who read ebooks don’t necessarily expect electronic books to look identical to their paper counterparts, he flatly disagreed.  Preserving the ‘look and feel’ of the paper book was critical, he felt, not only to meet customer expectations but to keep the sanctity of the ‘Dummies’ brand intact.

Like so many others I met at the conference, this gentleman has not yet altered his definition of the word "book".  Numerous speakers at TOC exhorted attendees to stop thinking of books as those paper things bound between two covers, and recognize that when people buy books, most of them are paying for the content—not the delivery system.  And with some notable exceptions (i.e., books containing physically interactive elements like letters to be pulled out of envelopes bound into the book, pop-ups, etc.) paper bound between covers is nothing more than one of many possible delivery systems for content. 

There was much agreement with this gentleman’s point of view at the table, however.  So when you see an ebook from a mainstream publisher that’s priced at or above the price of the paper version, it’s probably because the publisher is spending lots of money and effort to faithfully recreate the ‘look and feel’ of the paper book for you—something they’re very certain is critical to you, even though they’ve never actually asked your opinion on the matter.  In other words, they’re trying to force new media into an old media mold; they don’t get it.

Community-building is another area where there seems to be a great dearth of insight among mainstream publishing professionals where their customers are concerned.

Many of those to whom I spoke still view online communities they might build primarily as sales channels, failing to take into the account the fact that nobody enjoys a sales pitch, much less is willing to go out of their way to seek one out online. 

Others see market research as the main benefit of community-building: get a captive audience, get them to give you as much information about themselves as possible, and then data-mine to your heart’s content. They plan to keep large chunks of their site’s content and functionality locked up from the general public, forcing visitors to register for an account before spilling the goods.  When someone does elect to sign up, they’ll be presented with an exhaustive registration form in which nearly all fields must be filled out in order to submit the form.

All of this stuff can be boiled down to a single, pervasive problem I observed among most of the mainstream publishing industry pros I met at TOC: they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be an "ordinary" reader, and it’s been so long since they were ordinary readers, they can’t even imagine what it might be like to think like one once again. Their perspective is so mired in publisher-speak and publisher-think that it’s nearly impossible for them to come up with truly groundbreaking ideas, and when truly groundbreaking ideas are put before them, those ideas are either rejected out of hand or forced back into the box of their current ways of thinking and doing.

I’m not saying the situation is hopeless. The fact that so many big publishers sent their staffers to a conference about change is a good sign. Nevertheless, in the coming year we can probably expect to see quite a few ebook and community initiatives come barrelling out of big publishers’ gates, only to falter and fade away once the initial blitzkrieg of publicity is over.  Hopefully, lessons will be learned and improvements will be made, and the next generation of ebooks and publishers’ online communities will be more reader-centric.

Overcoming Writer's Block

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“You just can’t get there from here.”

How many times have you heard that direction-giving joke? But often that line describes a type of writer’s block. You’ve written up to a certain point. You know where you want to go up ahead. But what do you write in between? Personally, I have wasted hours, days, even weeks, trying to figure out what to write next, so I can get to that future scene I already have in my head.

But wait. Who says you have to write in a linear fashion? What if you write out of sequence? Aha! Now, you’ve given yourself permission to write the scene from your head and it flows wonderfully. Another Aha! Questions and solutions actually appear about how the character might have arrived here from there. You’re not stuck any more.

As a writing instructor once explained, to build a bridge, one first needs to erect a scaffold. It’s not a lot different in writing. You have several important scaffold scenes in your story or novel that have to take place (there will probably be more than one of each of these scenes in your book):

  1. The Introductory Scene where the reader meets your main character.  
     
  2. A Meeting Scene, where the main character meets another character (maybe the love interest or maybe his nemesis) This is another form of Introductory Scene.  
     
  3. A Conflict Scene where two characters battle it out, whether physically, verbally, or in a match of wits. Or where the character battles himself.  
     
  4. A Realization Scene—the moment the character realizes something about herself that is a turning point. Or realizes her “enemy” is really her friend.  
     
  5. A Resolution Scene, where a problem is resolved (not necessarily the main one, but a problem nonetheless).  
     
  6. A Final Scene, which may or may not be your actual ending. An interesting exercise is to write a scene in which your main character(s) are old and looking back at what happened, what he/she/they learned, how they’ve changed, what they would’ve done differently, etc. That can give you an insight to “fill in the blanks.”  
     

Another interesting exercise is to write a letter from your main character to yourself, as if this person has just learned you are writing a book about her, how she feels about that, any advice she might have for you, etc. This can be quite revealing. Sometimes you learn that you have a reluctant character, one who doesn’t want her story told. So you have to figure out how to win her over.

A recent article in The Writer magazine talked about writing out of order. The author made similar suggestions to the ones above, such as:

  1. Write a scene in which the main character enters a new place.
     
  2. Take a minor character you’ve introduced and write a scene where he/she appears later in the story.
     
  3. Choose a character other than the main character—someone you’d like to know more about, and write a monologue in which she explores or explains herself.
     
  4. Write a scene where your main character has a dream that advances the story.
     
  5. Make a list of at least five crucial scenes that you think will be important for the story/novel (see “scaffold scenes above.)
     

Any one or all of these scenes may or may not appear in your final draft, but they will help you keep writing and develop ideas.

Have fun, write on and defeat that Writer’s Block! (Now, I just have to take my own advice.) 

Social Pressure Can Solve The 'Copying' Problem Even Without Copyright

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This article, by Mike Masnick, originally appeared on techdirt on 2/23/09. 

from the reputation-is-a-scarce-good dept

Whenever we talk about a world without copyright, people chime in about how awful it would be because someone can just "take" someone else’s content and pretend it’s their own. However, that’s not nearly as easy as people make it out to be.

As we’ve pointed out before, in many such cases, it won’t take people long to figure out where the content really originated from, and the end result is that the "copyist" (especially if it’s blatant, and they do little to improve the content) has their reputation slammed. And, since your reputation is a scarce good (often one of the most important in any business model), there is strong social pressure to stop any such copying.

Two recent examples demonstrate this in a very clear manner.

First, MAKE Magazine noted that publishers Klutz/Scholastic were publishing a book on BristleBots, small robots made out of toothbrush heads, and failed to credit the folks who had originally created BristleBots, a group called Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, as an example of a simple, do-it-yourself, robot making system. It was a pretty blatant copy, from both the name to the design. And, while Klutz/Scholastic at first tried to claim that it was independently created, the similarities between the two made that difficult to believe. This resulted in a public outcry from many different sites, and Klutz/Scholastic finally agreed to back down and will credit the Evil Mad Scientists in all future releases. Notice that this didn’t involve any copyright claims or lawsuits — but pure public pressure, and the potential (serious) damage to Klutz/Scholatic’s brand and reputation. Already, the reputation is damaged, and the company will likely be much more careful in the future.

Meanwhile, angry jonny points us to another example. The community over at the excellent website Metafilter discovered that the author of the webcomic User Friendly has been blatantly copying punchlines to his comics from the Metafilter community.

 

Read the rest of the article at techdirt.  Publetariat editor’s note: since the piece was written, the creator of the User Friendly comic strip has taken down the strips at the center of the controversy.  Therefore, links to those strips in the second half of this article will not display the comics in question.

Where to Submit Your Book for Review

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Book reviews can be a powerful marketing tool for books of all types. Potential customers learn about books by reading reviews in newspapers, consumer magazines, professional journals, newsletters, ezines, book review websites, and other websites and blogs. In addition to bringing books to their attention, well-crafted reviews also help the reader determine if a book is a good fit for them.

Submitting books for review can be time consuming and the costs can add up quickly, but the selling power of reviews is well worth the effort. You can save time and money by planning in advance and being selective about where you send review copies.

When submitting review copies to publications, make sure your book’s subject matches the audience and the book meets the publication’s review guidelines. Some publications only review certain types of books and some only review prior to or within a certain time after publication. For example, The New York Times only reviews books available in retail bookstores.

Book reviews in newspapers are getting harder to come by, but many special interest magazines and newsletters do book reviews or mention books in articles related to the book’s topic. Publishing expert Dan Poynter sells lists off special interest publications in dozens of subject areas for a modest fee.

Bookstore buyers and librarians base many of their ordering decisions on reviews in the major book review journals. Eligibility and submission instructions vary by publication, so be sure to read the requirements carefully.

Online reviews can also be a great book marketing tool. Having lots of good reviews on Amazon.com can boost sales, especially for nonfiction books where customers are comparing several different books on a particular topic. There are numerous other websites that feature book reviews.

For a list of online book review sites, along with tips on getting reviews on Amazon.com and other websites, read Annette Fix’s article about online book reviews at the WOW! Women on Writing website. Yvonne Perry at Writers in the Sky has also compiled a list of people and organizations that do book reviews.

Use caution when sending review copies to individuals who request them. Some people have good intentions, but simply won’t find the time to write a review, while others offer to write reviews mainly as a way to get free books. If you don’t know much about the reviewer, it might be a good idea to politely inquire what other book reviews they have done and where they were published.

"I sent copies of my book to book bloggers who responded to my email that they indeed wanted to review the book, but who never reviewed it. I later realized that I wasn’t anyone to them, so my book got buried in the avalanche of books they receive," says Phyllis Zimbler Miller of MillerMosaic.com. "I found that bloggers on my virtual book tour and book reviewers whom I connected with through social media were much more committed to actually reviewing my book." For more tips from Phyllis, see this book review article.

Several services, including Kirkus Discoveries and Clarion, offer paid review services. The practice of paying for book reviews is controversial. Some people think that paid reviews are biased since they are done for a fee and that it’s a waste of money. Others maintain that paid reviews are just as fair as other reviews and that reviewers need to be compensated for their time.

Librarians and booksellers know which publications do paid reviews, so reviews from those sources won’t carry much weight with them. Paid reviews could generate good quotes for consumer marketing purposes, but there are so many places to get free book reviews that it’s generally not necessary to pay for reviews.
 
Wherever you choose to send your galleys and review copies, plan ahead and get them out as quickly as possible. And, whenever customers give you good feedback on your book, be sure to ask for permission to add their quote to your testimonial list and ask if they would be willing to post their comments on Amazon.com.

Book marketing coach Dana Lynn Smith is the author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides, a series of book marketing ebooks that are available at http://www.SavvyBookMarketer.com. For free book marketing tips, visit http://www.BookMarketingMaven.com.

Who Is Grady Harp? Amazon's Top Reviewers And The Fate Of The Literary Amateur.

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This article, by Garth Risk Hallberg, was originally posted at Slate on January 22, 2008, but is no less revelent to the world of Amazon reviews today.

Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. "Superb," wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. "Fascinating … addictive." Not to mention "profound." Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp’s style. Sure, he’d spelled my name wrong, but hadn’t he also judged me "a sensitive observer of human foibles"? Only when I noticed the "Top 10 Reviewer" tag did I wonder whether Grady Harp was more than just a satisfied customer.

After a brief e-mail exchange, my publicist confirmed that she’d solicited Grady Harp’s review.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon’s customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation … conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits," as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company’s leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of "Web 2.0"—an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon’s reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

On the surface, Grady Harp seems just the sort of enlightened consumer who might lead us out of Web 1.0’s darkness. A 66-year-old gallerist, retired surgeon, and poet, he has reviewed over 3,500 books, CDs, and movies for Amazon. In turn, he has attained a kind of celebrity: a No. 7 ranking; a prominent profile on the Web site; and, apparently, a following. In the week after his endorsement of my work appeared, more than 100 readers clicked on a button that said, "I found this review helpful." His stated mission is to remain "ever on the lookout for the new and promising geniuses of tomorrow." At present, Dr. Harp’s vigil runs to about 500,000 words—a critical corpus to rival Dr. Johnson’s—and his reviews are clearly the product of a single, effusive sensibility. Jose Saramago’s Blindness is "A Searing, Mesmerizing Journey" (five stars); The Queer Men’s Erotic Art Workshop’s Dirty Little Drawings, "A Surprisingly Rich Treasure Trove" (five stars).

Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users’ motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely.

A spokeswoman for the company would explain only that a reviewer’s standing is based on the number of votes labeling a review "helpful," rather than on the raw number of books reviewed by any one person. The Top Reviewers are those who give "the most trusted feedback," she told me, echoing the copy on the web site.

Read the rest of the article on Slate, here.

Publishing Industry – Change or be Damned?

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This article, by Mick Rooney, was originally posted on his POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing blog on 10/10/08.

 

Over the past month, there has been considerable debate about the current state and future of the publishing industry across the internet on writer’s forums and blogsites. Some of the discussion was sparked by Boris Kachka’s recent article in the New York Magazine.

A lot of the criticism of Kachka’s article seems to centre on his depressing analysis expressed from speaking with industry insiders about the current predicament in publishing across the globe. One of the key quotes he uses in his article is from statistician, Philip Roth;

“…there were at most 120,000 serious readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.”

Many avid readers will naturally disagree with the Roth quote, and, in fact, I also disagree, but with this caveat. There are perhaps more people reading now, than at any point in the history of mankind. It is time that the publishing industry started to more accurately look at ‘what’ is being read, and more to the point, ‘where’ and ‘how’ it is being read.

Let me digress for just a while before returning to Mr. Roth’s quote.

I think before we can access what state the publishing industry is in right now, we must first look at where it has been and the reasons why it has reached such a pivotal and directionless state. It is not surprising that the industry, like many, has pedalled along and mirrored the rises and falls in the standard of living and economic recessions.

Let us not forget that some of us still living can remember when competent literacy was not always the accepted given that it is now. Let us also not forget that the vast amount of information we take in on a day to day basis is through the written word. Whether that is reading the morning newspaper; the billboards and road signs on the way to work in the car or train; opening our work emails; reading countless memos, reports; studying the lunchtime menu in the cafeteria; browsing the evening newspapers; the recipe for our dinner in the evening; our favourite websites and blogsites; not to mention the countless text messages we receive every day on our mobiles; right to the very point when we fall into bed with the latest bedtime read; they all confront us as part of everyday life.

The fact is, day in, day out, we are reading to overload point. Much of it may be seen as a chore, and some of it may be seen as pleasure. True, pleasurable reading, whether it is Barbara Cartland or James Joyce, Raol Dahl or Stephen Hawkins, will always have the common denominator of shared experience and the identification of a writer to his true reader, and the reader to their favourite writer.

You cannot accurately define the relationship of author/reader in any theoretical form or publishing model. This is even beyond the best publisher’s entrepreneur or even the greatest and most entertaining of writers, because it is fluid, ethereal, and constantly affected by public trends and the personal moods of mankind.

This is not to say that the publishing industry cannot set itself up in a way that gives it the best chance of flourishing, rather than floundering aimlessly amid its printed words and marketing blurbs.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the industry inherently began to seriously change in the economic recession of the 1980’s. The book publishing world followed the mark of the newspaper empires of Murdock and Maxwell, where a handful of media companies controlled the entire national world newsprint output. Throughout the 1980’s, large commercial publishers consumed smaller commercial and independent publishers. We watched large publishers dance around like politicians, desperate to tell us all how different they were from each other, yet, all the while, the centre stage became evermore crowded and the publishing model they used became steadily narrower.

The following are the reasons why I believe the publishing industry has reached its current state of being.
 

Read the rest of the article at Mick Rooney’s POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing blog.

Why Can't A Woman Write The Great American Novel?

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This book review, by Laura Miller, was originally posted on Salon.com today.

Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper’s and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. This situation is lamentable, as everyone but a handful of embittered cranks seems to agree, but it’s not clear that anyone ever does anything about it. The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer alone, the distaff side is more than holding its own in terms of revenue. But when it comes to respect, are women writers getting short shrift?

The question is horribly fraught, and has been since the 1970s. Ten years ago, in a much-argued-about essay for Harper’s, the novelist and critic Francine Prose accused the literary establishment — dispensers of prestigious prizes and reviews — of continuing to read women’s fiction with "the usual prejudices and preconceptions," even if most of them have learned not to admit as much publicly. Two years before that, Jane Smiley, also writing in Harper’s, alleged that "Huckleberry Finn" is overvalued as a cultural monument while "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" is undervalued, largely because of the genders of the novels’ respective authors; the claim triggered a deluge of letters in protest. Alongside the idea that women writers have been unjustly neglected, there has blossomed the suspicion that some of them have recently become unduly celebrated — an aesthetic variation on the conservative shibboleth of affirmative action run amok.

Onto this mine-studded terrain and with impressive aplomb, strides Elaine Showalter, literary scholar and professor emerita at Princeton. Showalter has fought in the trenches of this particular war for over 30 years, beginning with her groundbreaking 1978 study, "A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing," and culminating in her monumental new book, "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx." Billed as "the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000," "A Jury of Her Peers" has to negotiate the treacherous battlefield between the still-widespread, if fustian insistence on reverence for Great Writers and the pixelated theorizing of poststructuralists hellbent on overturning the very notion of "greatness."

Showalter is certainly the woman for the job. One of the founders of feminist literary criticism, she has also written about television for People magazine and confessed her penchant for fashion in Vogue. Unquestionably erudite, she has always striven to communicate with nonacademic readers, and her prose is clear, cogent and frequently clever. She has insisted that themes central to women’s lives — marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations — constitute subject matter as "serious" and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing "culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction," and she doesn’t hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in "A Jury of Her Peers" as artistically limited, if historically interesting.

Read the rest of this article at Salon.