The Design Process For A Book & More

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On the Soro Design Book Design Blog, Cecilia Sorochin offers a multi-part blog series.  In the series, Cecilia walks you through the professional designer’s process of designing not only the cover and interior layout of a book, but the design of a companion website as well.  You can learn a lot from her, and if you like, you can even hire her.

I find the design process really interesting, maybe more than the finished work.

Why? (just my point of view) Because during that collaborative process between designer & (ideally) author is where the visual personality of the book will be defined.

PART I: The Book Cover


We get the manuscript for the design of the book cover, layout & website for   A Worthy Legacy by author Tomi Akinyanmi.

A Worthy Legacy is a story about life and the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next. The author combines the last wise words of her beloved grandfather together, along with a few of her own thoughts to create a compelling story about real life.

Read the manuscript

From just a glance, the overall feel of the book should come out.

Then look for the voice: my starting point for every book is the belief that authors write books because they have something to say. By reading a manuscript, I need to find what it is that they had to say, who says it, how it is said, & from which point of view.

Sooner or later (usually very soon) some details are revealed, and often I find in those little details the key to the cover.

Reading A Worthy Legacy I learned that the author, originally from Nigeria now living in the U.S., tells many insights about the Yoruba Tribe, which totally fascinated me… & gave the book the ‘unique’ factor.
 

Go to the Soro Design Book Design Blog to: see what sorts of images the manuscript brought to the designer’s mind, view her early cover design ideas, learn which one the author ultimately chose, and read more of the series.

Audacity: Free Podcasting Software

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If you read Corey Dietz‘ piece, Podcasting For DumbDumbs, but felt you might like a little more control over the process of creating your podcasts than that provided by the services in the article, yet don’t have the resources to pour into a state-of-the-art home recording studio, take a look at Audacity. 

From the Audacity site:  

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

  • Record live audio.
  • Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
  • Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
  • Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
  • Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
  • And more! See the complete list of features.

The software is entirely free and very well-documented, with an FAQ, Users Manual (also available as a PDF or HTML download) and Tutorials.  

So if you’ve been thinking about dipping your toe into the podcasting pool to create audiobooks, audio blog entries or the like, you might want to give Audacity a try.  And if you do, be sure to report back in the Digital Publishing User Reviews forum, to share your experience with your fellow Publetarians.   

Why Solicit For Book Reviews?

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This article, by Michael R. Hicks, originally appeared on his site, KreelanWarrior.com.
 

The title of this article seems like a no-brainer: of course you want to get book reviews! But, at least based on my experience thus far, there are some interesting aspects to it, particularly for those of us who are engaged in that most subversive of activities: self-publishing!

 

Before we start off, let me caveat this by saying that when I talk about reviews and reviewers in this post, I’m limiting the scope to people who maintain web sites or blogs primarily devoted to reviewing books. I believe that periodicals such as newspapers and magazines would also fall into this scope, although I can’t say for certain since I haven’t – yet – submitted to them for reviews. Reader reviews, such as those posted on Amazon, are entirely different and very important, but for somewhat different reasons that we’ll get to in a bit.

 

So, let’s look at blogs and web sites that review books. These are often the most accessible sources of reviews, because many of the folks who run these sites find it a great source of free books, and will often accept self-published books (whereas more mainstream reviewers won’t). A lot of them clearly put a great deal of thought and consideration into their reviews, while others don’t.

 

But what can you honestly expect? What is one review or a dozen (or a hundred) from these sorts of sites going to do for you?

 

Let’s take In Her Name as an example. I submitted the book to a variety of reviewers, from SciFi.com to personal book review blogs – probably about a dozen in all in the initial round. I didn’t send out hundreds of copies to every possible reviewer because that would have been inordinately expensive, and I also wanted to evaluate how the reviews went, and what impact – if any – they might have on sales.

 

Small Following = Small Impact

 

Unless you can reach more mainstream review sites with large followings (think at least Google page rank 6 or higher), reviews will likely not have a significant (and in some cases, no) direct impact on sales.

 

This is largely a numbers game: you would have to get your book reviewed on dozens (or more) of smaller sites to equate to the exposure from a single more popular “mainstream” site (or periodical). But the trick here is not just effort, but financial: every review copy you send out has a cost, and if you can’t reach the more mainstream sites, the return on investment can be thin.

 

Remember: for every set of visitors to one of these sites, only a certain percentage are likely to be potentially interested in your book. And of those, some percentage will actively be in the market for a new book, and will take it upon themselves to check out your book in more detail. Finally, some number of those folks will actually buy it. So if you don’t have a lot of people checking out the review in the first place, you’re not going to have very many (or any) trickling out the bottom of the funnel to buy your book.

 

Four Stars or Better

 

Depending on the reviewer’s rating system – if they use one – chances are that if your book doesn’t garner at least a “four-star” rating (out of five), the review will probably have little or no direct impact on sales. A three is relatively neutral, and I suspect that the key for swinging readers toward your book would be in the reviewer’s synopsis, but I believe there would have to be something particularly appealing in it. Let’s face it: why would someone even bother to read a review of a book – let alone consider buying it – by an unknown author that only gets three stars? Three stars is “average” (no matter how you want to define it), and there are a million of those out there. People want to spend their money on “good” books. Three isn’t good; it’s fair.

 

Obviously, one- or two-star rankings aren’t going to help your sales! But let’s be honest: if your book has gotten more than one of these ratings (even the best book is bound to be subject to a fluke) from impartial reviewers who specialize in your genre, you really need to take another look at your work. They could be trying to tell you something.

 

Transient Exposure

 

The exposure your book gets on most review sites tends to be transient and very brief. Ironically, this is more problematic with sites that review a higher volume of books – the very sites that tend to be more popular.

 

What happens is this: the review of your book is initially posted on the front page of the site, right at the top. Let’s say they loved it and gave it five stars. You rejoice! You see an upswing in traffic to your web site, and – hopefully – some sales.

 

The next day, the review site has posted a review of a different book, bumping you down the page. By this time most of the folks who subscribe to the site’s RSS feed have had a chance to see your book’s review and have either checked it out or not (although this certainly can dribble on for a little while, as people catch up on their feeds). Meanwhile, the folks who visit the site directly have already seen your review and want to read the newest one. You notice web traffic plateauing, or even declining. Ditto with sales.

 

This continues until, at some point, the review for your book drops off the front page. After that, the game’s pretty much over: your book’s review has essentially wound up in the history books, and the only way that anybody’s going to find it is if they happen to be just browsing the reviews, or if they heard of your book and they searched for reviews about it.

 

So, depending on how popular the site is and how many reviews they post, you may have only a few days, at most, to reap any direct benefit from that review. And some sites post their reviews directly to an archive, as opposed to more of a blog format: in that case, it’s unlikely that your book will get much direct exposure at all!

 

It’s In The Quotes

 

Let’s make the assumption for a moment that my assessments above are correct. The picture looks pretty bleak, doesn’t it? If all that’s even close to being true, why should you bother sending your book out for review at all?

 

To me, the true value of reviews is in the quotable material. You know, those little blurbs like these that I received for In Her Name:

 

“Hicks blends fantasy, science fiction, and romance together to create a story that crosses genres, and will appeal to a wide range of readers…Hicks has created some of the most memorable, likable characters I have read about in a long time. Reza is the quintessential coming-of-age hero, starting as a young, scared boy, and ending up a strong, confident warrior. He is surrounded by strong, powerful women, who each have their own struggles…I highly recommend this novel to lovers of fantasy and science fiction, as well as anyone who enjoys an engrossing, fast-paced novel set in a new and fascinating world.” – BookLoons

 

“The author’s writing style is very engaging…which makes you keep turning page after page to find out what happens next, and in the process letting you live the book…Reza Gard is very interesting. Human by birth, alien by upbringing, Reza struggles to straddle two mutually incompatible societies: a scientific, more or less democratic and individualistic human one; and a fantasy-like society…which is communal, blood-bonded, hierarchic, and based on honor and place…In Her Name was an excellent book and I highly, highly recommend it.” – Fantasy Book Critic

[Publetariat Editor’s note: more reviews like these are available on Hicks’ KreelanWarrior site.]

 

Even if I didn’t get a single direct sale from any of the reviews, I’ve got some great ammunition to use for promoting the book through other means! You can use these with everything from press releases to queries for a radio interview, along with a fact sheet on your book, or as part of a complete press kit.

 

If you get good reviews at these sorts of sites, you can also try and get your foot in the door at the more mainstream reviewers where you might be able to score some real numbers. I can’t guarantee that, as I haven’t tried it myself (yet), but if I was an editor and somebody sent me a tightly written sheet on a book that had received some real praise from several impartial review sites, I’d be a lot more willing to at least consider looking at it.

 

Reader Reviews

 

Reviews from review sites and “professional” reviewers (e.g., from a local newspaper or magazine) will give you good marketing material that you can use in a variety of ways to help lead people to find out more about your book.

 

But I firmly believe that one of the most important factors nowadays to get people to actually buy your book is reader reviews. People interested in your book read those reviews when they drop in on its catalog page on Amazon or wherever, and in many cases the reviews make or break the sale. Let’s face it: if your book has positive reader reviews (at least three star equivalent), that tells others visiting the catalog page that it’s probably worth plunking down some cash.

 

On the other hand, if your book gets trashed (not to be undiplomatic here), the chances drop dramatically that future visitors will buy it.

 

Now, I’m going to make a personal observation here that hits on author integrity: I would recommend to any authors or would-be authors out there that you never, ever post reviews to your own book, or even ask relatives or friends to post positive reviews (in fact, I’d discourage them from doing so).

 

Why? For one simple reason: integrity. One of the major knocks against self-published authors is that some of them do silly things like creating several user accounts on Amazon so they can give their books a bunch of five-star reviews in the guise of fake “readers.” You need to let your work stand on its own with the people who count: the readers.

 

Now, I’ll also tell you that I don’t think it’s bad to ask readers if they’d consider writing a reader review, as long as they aren’t close friends or family (for example: folks who comment on your site or on a forum you frequent, or who send you emails about your book). There’s no potential conflict of interest there, and asking politely is certainly fair game (with the caveat that they are under absolutely no obligation to do so!).

 

Some other folks have asked me how you can get reader reviews in the first place. Again, part of it is a numbers game: the more people who read your book, the more likely it’ll be that someone will take the time to review it.

 

So that means you have to get your marketing and promotion plan in gear!

 

Please visit KreelanWarrior.com for many more posts on the subjects of self-publishing and Kindle formatting and conversion.

A Review of The Jade Owl . . . but more

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This is not the first review of my novel The Jade Owl, but this is the first one that has add commentary on Indie Publishing and POD. I thought it would be interesting to share it on Publetariat.

Edward C. Patterson
www.dancaster.com

 

"From Aricia’s Gay Book Blog

review by Aricia

http://ariciasgaybookblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/gay-mystery-and-ancient-chinese-magic.html

 I was asked a while ago, will I review POD books … and the answer to that is a resounding yes. I’ve said this several times before, and it’s true: some of the best fiction being published today is coming out in POD form, where it’s direct from the writer to the reader.

However, the first thing I need to do is make sure to qualify this statement! "Direct from writer to reader" does not mean the book hasn’t been edited, proofread, labored over, illustrated, layout-designed and so on. The best POD books have had every bit as much work as a book issued from a traditional publishing house. Sometimes more.

I applaud when a really talented writer has the courage to go it alone, because it’s going to mean work such as a non-writer can’t imagine. (Mel Keegan states the case better than me in this post: POD Publishing: why do it? And why not?")

So I’m delighted to be reviewing The Jade Owl by Edward C. Patterson, which is available from Amazon. com as a paperback, and also in Kindle. It’s also available from Smashwords in several formats. (I have the PDF for reading on my desktop because I haven’t yet saved enough of my pennies to get an ebook gadeget. Soon. Very soon.)

The story falls into the same category as the "urban fantasy" novels of writers like Charles de Lint (Yarrow, Greenmantle and so on) and Jan Siegel (the Prospero’s Children series). It takes place in the real world … but one of the foundation stones of the book is, paranormal artifacts do exist, and the powers are real. (The same foundation stone is holding up everything from Indiana Jones to the Mummy movies. It’s come to be a Hollywood staple.)

In this novel, the artifact is an ancient Chinese object, a six inch piece of Jade carved in the likeness of an owl — and it’s actually a key that opens a box known as the Joy of Finches. What’s in the box? That would be telling! But everybody wants the key.

The first thing that impressed me about Jade Owl was how knowledgeable about Chinese antiquities the writer is, and about China itself. Shanghai and Beijing are described with the same amount of detail and enthusiasm as San Francisco — and never having been to either China or the USA myself, I really appreciated the "local color." Many writers, when setting their plots in London, New York, what have you, seem to think that everyone’s been there and knows intimately every secret of the city. Not true. So, the first level where Jade Owl succeeds is in "selling me" San Francisco, which is the setting for the first long segment of the book.

Then it’s off to China, and in the second half of the novel the adventure really kicks in. The first half is more of an exploration of culture, personality, even history. There’s not too much "action" in this part of the story, but I liked having the story built up properly from the ground up, so that all readers are on the same page when the knock-down-drag-out adventure begins.

The characters are, for the most part, excellently drawn, with only one or two of the lesser players falling back on "stock characterization." Edward C. Patterson’s dialog is very believable, you can "hear" voices saying these lines. But it was the paranormal aspects of the story that hooked me … I love this stuff anyway, and the Jade Owl does it well. I know a little bit about things Chinese, since I grew up with a huge crush on Bruce Lee and read/watched everything I could get my hands on over the space of about ten years! Jade Owl is a real treat.

It’s a crying shame this book had to be self-published, and you have to ask yourself what the publishing world is coming to, when gifted writers everywhere are having to fly solo. Jade Owl is not just "competently" written — it’s only one thorough, ruthless edit away from being on a par with the top-notch writers who sell in the gajillions. (Trust me on this: I’ve been a pro "proofie" for decades and have seen the best and worst that professional writers can turn out … and some long-time professional writers I could name churn out unpunctuated drivel that has to be bashed into shape by line-editors who get paid about $10 an hour!) There was a time, maybe 20 years ago, when a publisher would take in a manuscript from an inspired and gifted writer, and would assign an editor to do the final work, then the book would be jacketed and sent out there with posters and hype galore. (Doesn’t happen now. A manuscript can be received that is absolutely gem-perfect, and it’ll still get turned around and sent back unread … sad to say, I’ve worked in the industry and seen what happens: it’d shock you).

But — I digress! The Jade Owl is an extremely good read. It gets off to a slightly shaky start, but the style settles right down after a few pages and is very readable. You’ll like the central characters of "Rowdy" Gray, Nick Battle and his partner, Simone. In fact, you ought to love Simone, who’s a drag queen from the Castro, indomitable, very human, very "real." There’s enough gay content to keep GLBTI readers reading — and more than enough action of other kinds (sensual, paranormal, cultural, comedic) to keep straight readers reading.

It’s also hellaciously good value for money, at $15.45 for the paperback, $3.19 in Kindle, and $3.99 from Smashwords … and this is a major novel, over 200,000 words. And here is one of the great things about getting a book direct from the writer: because there’s no publisher to accommodate, the price can afford to be much lower than you’d think.

Does the book have a downside? Well … maybe, but it depends who you are, and what your "ear" is like! The writing style can be a little erratic at times, but many readers would also call this one of the book’s charms. So there you are — as with so many facets of so many books — it’s actually your call. I found the PDF ebook easy to read, but halfway through I longed for a "proper" ebook reader to get away from the PC — not the author’s fault! When I get myself an iLiad, or Bebook or something similar, I shall be reading Jade Owl a second time in the comfort of a hammock chair at the bottom of the garden.

I should also note that there are two more books following on from The Jade Owl , the first one of which is available now, the second, on its way. I still have to get to the second, so can’t talk about it here.

Recommended on many levels. AG’s rating: 4 out of five stars — with a "gold star" added for incredibly good value for money."

 

Effective Book Cover Design

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If you’re not sure how to design an effective book cover, or just need a little inspiration, take a look at 30 Novels With Covers Designs So Good… How Could You Resist?, an article posted over at Flashlight Worthy Books.

As illustrated by the three examples shown below, some of the covers are quite simple, yet very provocative.  While you wouldn’t want to merely mimic any of the designs on display in the list, they provide excellent fodder for brainstorming your own, equally effective designs.

Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet

The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian & Flora DrewThe Last Jew by Yoram Kaniuk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Along those same lines, take a look at the cover designs for bestsellers in your book’s genre on Amazon.   Very often, you can discern a pattern of cover design style readers have come to expect for your type of book.

Hobby vs Career. Think you know the difference?

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There’s been a somewhat heated discussion going on at Romance Writers of America (aka RWA) over the last few months—which is nothing new and not all that surprising. After all, if you’re going to involve yourself with a large group of mostly female, inordinately verbal, excessively imaginative, and expressly passionate people, you ought to expect debate. And lots of it. 

This particular discussion revolves around the question of what makes someone a career writer as opposed to a hobbyist, and some of what’s been said by various members of the BoD has a lot of people feeling angry and trivialized.

At first glance, it might seem to be a fairly easy question to answer, but since RWA policy has always been weighted heavily in favor of large, traditional print publishers, nothing is as easy or simple as it seems.

To read more of my opinion on the subject follow this link: http://rhymeswithforeplay.blogspot.com/2009/02/tale-of-three-little-authors.html

 

Amazon DTP Publishing Tip: PDF Conversion to HTML

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This article, by Michael R. Hicks, originally appeared on his site, KreelanWarrior.com.

 

If you have a PDF that you want to convert to HTML to upload to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), Adobe has a free service to do just that!

Head over to the Adobe Online PDF Conversion Tools page. You have the option of e-mailing the PDF as an attachment, or uploading to the system from a web URL. Before you get started, you should probably read the FAQ page so you’ll have a better idea what to expect.

Adobe gives you two conversion options by email: one to make your PDF file into a plain text file, the other to convert it to HTML:

 

For our purposes here, converting the PDF for upload to Amazon DTP, you’ll want to use the HTML option.

 

For the URL conversion,  just type in the URL of the PDF, click the button for the format you want (HTML or text), and click Convert.

 

I tested both routes – email and URL – using the sample of In Her Name, with the following results:

 

  • The email conversions worked fine, but you need to make sure you send the emails in plaintext format (not rich text or HTML). Any files I sent that weren’t plaintext format got kicked back.
  • The URL conversion didn’t work for me and gave me an unspecified error, so you may or may not have better luck with that.

As for how the resulting HTML file looked, it was generally quite good. However, the big downside for anyone who has files with images is that no images were returned from the conversion process, only the text.

Also, don’t think that this (or any other PDF conversion) will result in clean copy: you’ll almost inevitably have to go in and tweak the HTML a bit to get it formatted the way you want. But that’s generally not too big a deal, and the conversion definitely gets you moving in the right direction!

Credit for this tip goes to [Amazon] DTP user booksdontchange.

 

Please visit KreelanWarrior.com for many more posts on the subjects of self-publishing and Kindle formatting and conversion.

Greek text on the Kindle

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The Amazon team recently released a firmware update (version 1.2) that allows some much-needed functionality in Kindle books. I was finally able to test the Greek functionality and figured out how to add Greek text to HTML files destined for the Kindle.

 

First, add the Greek characters into the file using Unicode character entities. For instance, the lowercase alpha is α or α. You could also add the actual character (copied from character map or another source) but I do not suggest doing that since it is usually a better coding practice to use the entity. Also, it just makes inserting and messing with the characters easier.

 

After the characters are inserted, the file needs to be saved with a Unicode encoding. I suggest using UTF-8, a very common encoding that will be sufficient for these purposes. Just open the HTML file in your default text editor or in Notepad, go to the Save As dialog box, set the encoding to UTF-8, and save the file with the same name or a new one. That HTML file can now be used in Mobipocket Creator to create a PRC file for testing, or be sent to the Kindle through the automated conversion system.

 

As always, I do not suggest you try uploading Microsoft Word or PDF files, with or without these characters in them. The Kindle format is HTML, and you are always better off formatting and tweaking in that code.

 

Overall, the Greek support is pretty good on the Kindle. The only characters which are not supported are the archaic koppa, sampi, digamma, and stigma in uppercase and lowercase. The Kindle does support all of the other Greek characters, including all of the pre-composed characters with diacritics… and I mean all of them. I was not able to find any that are not covered. I have included some screenshots below that will give you a sampling of what the Greek looks like on the device, including in the mono-spaced font.

 

Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
Image 5
Image 6
Image 7
Image 8
Image 9

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Please visit KindleFormatting.com for information and help with Kindle formatting and conversion.

Scotland?

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Halloo!

It’s nothing to do with writing — yet; I’m hoping for inspiration — but I’d like to ask if there are any other Scots here, and if so, if any of you are going to the Gathering of the Clans this summer.

Merry greet!

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I’m Ashleen O’Gaea (say that oh-gee-uh, as in "Oh, gee, uh … I don’t know how to say that!") and I’ve joined Publetariat because I’m on the verge of self-publishing, sort of.

I’ve published a few non-fiction books about Wicca, through traditional houses, but breaking into fiction is hard, and I’m impatient.  I’ve got a few novels I’d like to see out there, and the one I’m experimenting with first is called The Green Boy.  It’s about a Wiccan priestess who "chances" to meet a young man who’s grown up believing that her mother killed his mother by hexcraft.

Besides being a writer, I volunteer as a (writing) prison minister; I’m a dog-and-cat mommy, a camper, an amateur photographer … and I wish I could draw.

Merry hi!

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Merry hi!  My name’s Ashleen O’Gaea, and I’m new here!  And I’m on the verge of self-publishing a novel.

Before I go any farther: my first name’s easy to pronounce.  I’ll answer to Ashleen or Ashleen.  My last name is pronounce oh-gee-uh — as in oh, gee, uh … I don’t know how to pronounce that.

My about-to-be novel is called The Green Boy, and it’s the first in a series of novels about a Wiccan priestess, her family, and her coven.  I have published a few books traditionally, non-fiction books about the religion of Wicca.  You can check them out — and I hope you will — through my website, www.AshleenOGaea.com, or my other website, www.AdventureWicca.com

I also write a family column and various reviews for the Pagan ‘zine PanGaia.  And I am a dog-mommy and a cat-mommy, and a camper, and an amateur photographer . . . and I wish I could draw.

Podcasting For DumbDumbs

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This article, written by Corey Dietz, originally appeared on About.com. 

Let me first assure you I don’t think you’re a "DumbDumb". If you’re like me, you just want to get things done with the least amount of resistance. You want to get it done quickly, easily and done well.

Not long ago I wrote an article on how to put together a podcast. Although not terribly complicated and very straightforward, since it’s publication several services have popped up which eliminate the need for potential podcasters to learn any of the “nuts and bolts” I wrote about. (Of course if you’re curious, by all means have a look.)

Nobody needs to learn any of that stuff now that there are “point and click” services which provide what might be compared to the WYSIWYG metaphor: What You See Is What You Get. For busy people or those with little time to learn even the slightest code or new procedures, these are the easiest ways to get a podcast going. That’s why I want you to know who these services are in the event you want to create a podcast but are totally freaked out by terms like “RSS”, “file properties”, and anything that begins with “http://”

Gcast.com

Gcast from GarageBand.com is an easy to follow setup allows the user to quickly setup a Podcast with title, description, graphic, keywords, and more.

With Gcast, you can upload a finished Podcast in the form of an .mp3 or better yet, you can record your Podcast right over your phone – toll free.

Additionally, if you’re looking for “Podcast safe” music to include in your program without the worry of copyright-infringement, GarageBand.com is integrated so you can choose from that service.

You can create music playlists for your shows from Gcast’s Playlist Manager.

It allows you to change things up any way you wish.

That’s it. It’s amazingly straightforward and anyone can create their own Podcast for any reason.

ClickCaster.com

ClickCaster is a very simple and easy to use podcasting solution that gives anyone with an Internet connection, the ability to create, publish, listen and subscribe to an on-demand Podcast. The ClickCaster creation and management tools are available directly from the ClickCaster website.

End-users simply click, record and publish their podcast directly on the ClickCaster directory service.

 

Read the rest of the article at About.com.

Self-Publishing Standards, Part One

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This article, by Mick Rooney, originally appeared on The Self-Publishing Review on 2/12/09.  This piece, together with Part Two (link at the end), provides an excellent overview of self-publishing options and many specific comments about specific service providers.

 

The author who embarks on the journey into self-publishing takes on a great many tasks.  If they choose to fulfil all the tasks themselves, they have, in effect, taken on the running of a small business and everything that goes with it. 

They may decide to run their small publishing business by registering it a sole proprietor company, with the intention of publishing more than just one book.  They not only become authors of their book, but editor, designer and illustrator.  They will have to go about preparing their book as a digital file for the printers, using a program like Indesign, Quark, a cheap off-the-shelf book publishing program, or perhaps they will be proficient enough to use MS Word, resulting in a print ready PDF file.  Whatever method they use, a book will result, and the arduous task of promoting and marketing the book will follow.

 

Self-publishers using POD (print on demand) technology, like iUniverse, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, Infinity, Xulon, Mill City Press, Dogear, Raider, Lulu, Createspace, etc offer publishing services to authors unwilling to take on all that goes with self-publishing a book. An author may be motivated by other needs and wishes. They may simply want to see their book in print and available for family and friends, or they may see their books as the first step on the path into publishing. They may have already published through traditional publishing channels or instead given up after countless rejections. The facts remain that more than ever before authors are arriving at the road sign-posted ‘Self-Publishing – This way.’ So what barometers and measurements of standards of self-publishers does an author have to go on?

 

When we buy our car, we have an expectation that it will be value for money and run well. If we buy a pair of new shoes and the heel falls off in a few days; we take them back because, as a consumer, we have the right and we are protected under consumer laws. We expect the products we buy to do what they say on the tin or packaging. Self publishing, in spite of the contracts signed by authors, doesn’t quite work that way. When an author signs a publishing contract with a Self Publisher; is he buying a service or a book? Perhaps it is both. If a reader takes his James Patterson blockbuster back to Borders, WH Smith or sends it back to Amazon because page 218 is blank, they will replace it or give him his money back. In the traditional world of publishing, an author often has an agent to legally represent them. If things go wrong during or after the publication of a book, the author can use his agent or approach an Author’s Association or Guild. The publishers have their own representative associations.

 

This does not work the same way with self-publishers (who after all draw up their own contracts) and many self published authors. Often, both parties are isolated, and during a dispute have to legally go it alone without any norm or publishers charter. There are legal and consumer laws and copyright laws, but publishing goes far beyond these. National publishers associations frown on even the most reputable self-publishers. Some national author guilds and societies also treat self published authors as though they had done something wrong or deeply offensive to literature.

 

The world of self-publishing is easily open to the most unscrupulous scammers and fraudsters. It is an area rife with enthusiastic but naive authors and new ‘publishers’ with not a scintilla of editing, publishing or book marketing experience. Over the past two years, there have been far too many self-publishers set up by failed, disgruntled and disillusioned writers, who, with the best will and intentions in the world, have no idea how to run a bookshop, let alone a publishing business. Over the past two years—I can’t say I have found any more than about twenty who actually hit the mark—and that is looking at the USA, UK and Irish self-publishers.

 

So what is the mark all good self-publishers should be trying to work to and achieve? And more importantly, how can we help and go about bringing self-publishers up to that mark? Well, first let’s look at the ‘model’ of publishing and services offered by some publishers.

 

Read the rest of this article, and Part Two, at The Self-Publishing Review.

Citizen Journalists Will Bring The What, While Professionals Bring The Why

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This article, by Pat Thornton, originally appeared 2/8/09 on The Journalism Iconoclast blog.

   

Citizen journalism is a gift to journalism, professional journalists and people all over the world.

It’s an army of active citizens who want to report about the world around them — for free. They can cover far more ground than professional journalists and can provide coverage of events as they happen in real time — not afterwards. 

 

As a reporter you can’t be everywhere, but billions of people are everywhere.

 

That’s the power of citizen journalism.

 

Citizen journalism won’t replace in-depth reporting anytime soon — if ever. You probably won’t see citizens uncovering government corruption, but citizen journalism offers the ability to cover breaking news better than professional journalists ever could. Faster, better, uncensored and in real-time.

 

Wherever news breaks, there are always people around, but there aren’t always journalists around. Increasingly, these people are armed with mobile devices with Internet access that can post text, photos and videos from anywhere.

 

When you think about the power of citizen journalism, and how increasingly news stories will break first by everyday citizens instead of by professional journalists, one has to ask how much resources should news outlets dedicate to covering breaking news? Should professional journalists be belatedly duplicating the work of citizen journalists? Citizens can handle the what, while professional journalists can handle the why.

 

That’s the power of professional journalism.

 

Camera phones, smartphones, Web apps like Twitter and other technologies are helping make citizen journalism a reality. It’s just so easy today to report on the world around us, many people are asking, why not?

 

Why not snap a few photos with a cell phone and send them in to Twitpic? Why not send off 140-character bursts to Twitter and other micro-blogging services? Why not make a short blog post to WordPress or TypePad via their free mobile versions? Why not record real-time video and broadcast it to the world with Qik?

 

And this is just the beginning. A year from now more people will have more capable mobile devices, existing services like Twitter will be more robust with more users and many new Web apps will pop up. Imagine five years from now. 10 years from now?

 

I’m excited, and we are just in the nascent stages of citizen journalism. Combine citizen journalism with beat blogging, and I think we have a path forward that will allow news organizations to cover a lot more ground with a lot fewer resources. Better coverage with less. I like the sound of that.

 

Read the rest of the article at The Journalism Iconoclast.

Let Go Of Responsibility For Your Ideas

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This article, by Christopher R. Edgar, originally appeared on his Purpose Power Coaching site on 2/11/09.

 

One of the most liberating realizations I’ve had in my life is that I’m not responsible for my ideas.  In other words, I can do very little to make myself become creative, except for keeping my mind open to receiving insights, and writing them down as they come up.  In this post, I’ll talk about how I came to this perspective, and how it can give us more peace and productivity in our work.

 

This perspective dawned on me when I noticed my best ideas came to me while I was meditating.  After each meditation session—even short, ten-minute ones—I’d find myself frantically scurrying to the keyboard to type up the inspiration that struck.  This became so effective for me that I started a practice I call “staccato meditation,” where I meditate for five minutes for each half-hour of work.  Writing proceeds so fluidly, I’ve found, when I work that way.

 

When this became clear, I noticed my experience was at odds with the conventional wisdom on creativity.  Inspiration will arise, the common belief goes, if you keep your nose to the grindstone—the more time you spend in front of the computer, or wherever you do your work, the more likely you are to have a breakthrough idea.  But that wasn’t how it seemed to work for me—instead, my imagination operated best when I stopped writing, sat quietly and just breathed.

 

Another thing I started to notice was that creativity arises suddenly and without warning.  It’s not as if inspiration strikes at predictable times of day, or your left eyelid starts twitching madly to signal incoming ideas—you can never quite tell when they’re going to pop up.  In short, creativity didn’t seem like something I could predict or control—at most, it was something I could stay open to through meditation, as if I were planting a lightning rod and waiting for a bolt to strike it.

 

The Surprising Implications

 

When I had these realizations, I got to thinking.  If what I experienced is true for everyone—if we aren’t actually responsible for our ideas—why do we have a habit in our culture of putting famous creative people on a pedestal?

 

If I’m right about how creativity works, that means the well-known artists, writers, musicians and so on in our society didn’t really come up with the ideas that brought them fame—at best, they were just really good at transcribing and organizing the inspiration that struck them.  Some artists recognize this themselves—look, for example, at J.K. Rowling’s statement that Harry Potter “just strolled into my head fully formed.”  Our habit of treating these people like gods seems a bit silly from this perspective.

 

I also thought of how invested my ego can get in my creative projects.  For example, when I’m working on a book or article, I sometimes find myself imagining that I’m telling others “yes, that’s right, that’s my work,” and feeling special.  The downside is that, when my ego gets wrapped up in a project, I waste time obsessing over whether my ideas will look clever enough to my audience.  I’ll bet that, if you’re a writer, you can relate.

 

If it’s true that I’m not responsible for my ideas, I recognized, I don’t have to endure the suffering that comes with seeking ego gratification through my work.  It makes no sense for me to invest my ego in my projects, because the ideas at the core of my writing aren’t even “mine.”  In other words, if I’m not responsible for the ideas I put on the page, it’s misguided for me to take credit for them, or beat myself up if they don’t seem good enough.

 

A “Productivity Anti-Hack” If I Ever Saw One

 

The greatest gift that came with this realization was a new sense of freedom in my work.  When my ego became invested in a project, my work proceeded slowly and painfully.  After all, in that frame of mind, my self-worth was, in a sense, riding on how my work would be received—of course I second-guessed myself and suffered from “analysis paralysis.”

 

But when I acknowledged I wasn’t responsible for the ideas in my writing—all I was really doing was transcribing them and showing them to the world—I understood that my value as a human being had no relationship to what I wrote.  How could it, if the ideas weren’t even mine?  As it no longer seemed like my writing could “make or break me” as a person, there was no need to endlessly second-guess my work.  Words flowed most easily and naturally when I recognized my lack of responsibility for my creativity.

 

Read the rest of the article on Chris’s site.