Today’s award goes to Chris Rechtsteiner at Digital Book World (fb.me/Sba5iWpu)
“Let the doom and gloom reign down. The death of publishing, the death of books is upon us. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
What's New?
Hurray for SOBAY (which would be SOBA except it sounds like a noodle)
Science Online Bay Area sponsored a truly inspiring presentation at Swissnex Tuesday night 7/17 on the rapidly evolving e-book sphere, where diversity already borders on multiple personality disorder. Peter Brantley sketched the Net as the world’s largest public-works project and tech firms as the prime shapers of 21st-century literature. (Stop and think about that.) John Tayman of Byliner described his medium-length wedge into the literary world; Ron Martinez of Aerbook showed off his newly launched Aerbook Maker, whereby we can all create gorgeous multimedia works in the art form formerly known as books. Librarian-in-Black Sarah Houghton fumed about the middlemen barring libraries and their readers from borrowing e-books — a problem to which I suspect the epub offers a solution; we’ll see. Stay tuned for more news as it happens!
July only: 50% off Charisse Howard’s thrilling romance “Dark Horseman”
Hot news
for romance fans: Worldwide Summer/Winter sale! From now till July 31 you can download Charisse Howard’s “Dark Horseman” for 50% off on any e-reader. To jump into this fast-paced romance full of action and suspense, horses and Shakespeare, disguises and surprises in 1823 Virginia, go to Smashwords and enter the code SSW50.
“21st-Century Publishing: Report from the Front Lines”–an inspiring evening!
San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library may not be the first place you’d think to look
for what’s new in cutting-edge technology for writers & publishers, but Bay Areans are quickly learning what a great resource it is. On Monday evening, June 25, five indie publishers, a literary agent (April Eberhardt, not pictured), & MIL’s head librarian brought news bulletins & new books, just in time for beach-blanket reading! And if a beach blanket doesn’t loom large in your summer plans, how about those long waits in traffic? News flash: all of these new books can be read on your e-reader, tablet, or smartphone!
Wole Soyinka on life as an artist
[Interviewer] Ulli Beier: . . . You speak about the artist going on a kind of journey; a trip into another dimension from where he returns with a kind of boon … and inspiration … but maybe you better summarize it yourself.
Soyinka: I think what I was referring to was the mystery of creativity itself. Which is almost like a dare, a challenge of nature secrecies. One goes out almost in the same way in which Ogun cleared the jungle – because he had forged the metallic instrument. He is very much the explorer.
The artist is in many ways similar; each time, he discovers a proto world in gestation; it’s almost like discovering another world in the galaxy. The artist’s view of reality creates an entirely new world. Into that world he leads a raid; he rifles its resources and returns to normal existence. The tragic dimension of that is one of disintegration of the self in a world which is being reborn always, and from which the artists can only recover his being by an exercise of sheer will power. He disintegrates in the passage into that world. He loses himself and only the power of the will can bring him back. And when he returns from the experience, he is imbued with new wisdoms, new perspectives, a new way of looking at phenomena.
http://yoruba.org/Magazine/Summer97/File3.htm
Making a multiformat multimedia e-book
Each book I publish catapults me past what I needed to know & do for the last one! This is partly because I’m not fluent in Geek, the language of most advanced how-to guides, & partly because of big gaps in the overlap between publishing technology & software technology.
Edward Gorey On Stage will debut this month, fingers crossed, for Kindle, Nook, the iP*ds, & smartphones. It features color photos, B&W drawings, text of multiple sizes (captions were a challenge!), & live links. I’m using Apple’s Pages software because that lets me include all of the above & export the finished ms. as an e-pub, which even Kindle now promises they can handle (they refused until a few months ago).
Fallen by the wayside: Pages’ capacity to embed video clips does NOT export (I’ve had to use links instead), nor do its handy internal bookmarks (would have been great for image citations)–a problem because the auto-TOC won’t recognize figure captions.
The reason I’m posting this is a duh! moment yesterday. I knew that for my images to do the Alice-in-Wonderland size changes required by the enormous variety of e-readers, they’d have to be LARGE. So, OK; max pixels. The pictures looked fine on Mac or PC, but they shrank beyond teeny on my smartphone! Why? Duh! For image size to matter, the book itself had to be large! I’d created it in the same 5.5 x 8.5 page size I’ve used for most other books, which take both e-book & POD form. For EGOS, which is an e-book only, I knew I could get rid of margins, since it would have no fixed pages. The breakthrough was realizing I could use whatever page size worked best for the images. POD size was too small (postage stamps); 8.5 x 11 was too big (accidental cropping). With a calculator plus some trial & error, I picked 6.5 x 10 as the page size where most images fill my Android phone side-to-side, & also show up large & clear on both my computers.
Now if I could just find a way to get distributors to accept the book with a combined cover & title page, instead of requiring one of each, which in an e-book is a waste of space!
Spam, spam, wonderful spam!
Since I started blogging 2 months ago, the enormous volume of comments pouring in has moved me to tears. Of laughter? Despair? Hard to say. But what a world!–so full of typists struggling inarticulately to connect!
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So many people? robots? desperate to write something–anything–that will convince others to spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need! May you all win the lottery & buy each other’s unwanted goods.
Thought du jour from Harvard Business School (motto: “There’s no B.S. like our B.S.!”)
Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath studies innovation, corporate venturing, and entrepreneurship. Her latest book is Discovery-Driven Growth (2009):
My biggest concern with the commercial model for social media . . . is that I don’t see how they are going to deliver complete user experiences in exchange for payments or advertising. I’ve written for a long time about the need for companies to create a complete “consumption chain” in order for their products or services to be successful. A consumption chain is the total set of activities a customer goes through in order to get their needs met, or their jobs done. When a link in the chain is broken or unfulfilling (or offers more than the customer actually wants), the business model breaks down.
Social media have some of the links in the chain covered perfectly. But they don’t make payment easy, delivery is unspecified, and there is no particular social benefit to buying from one party or another. On Amazon, in contrast, you expect to be sold something (it isn’t an interruption in a social conversation); they cover every link right through to final disposition; and it is easier to do business with them than to cobble together a solution from many different players.
Contrast the two experiences. Say you hear about a cool new something or other — say a handbag — from a friend on Facebook, or through a Facebook ad. If you want to buy the handbag, you have to visit the vendor’s site. Then find the model you want. Then dig out your credit card and enter a ton of information about shipping and payment. Then (probably) pay more for shipping, etc. The experience takes a lot of effort, and it’s fragmented. Shoppers are very likely to drop out somewhere along the way. Let’s take the same experience on Amazon. An image pops up saying, “People like you bought this handbag.” You click on the handbag. There it is. You click on one-click — there is your payment and delivery information. And if you are a “prime” member, there’s no delivery charge. It is easy and effortless, all the way through the entire purchase and delivery process. Facebook and other companies similar to it are a long way away from having something like that to offer advertisers. And of course, if the advertising on Facebook is truly engaging and interesting, why would an advertiser pay them to feature it?
from http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcgrath/2012/05/did-somebody-say-bubble.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitterBad news from Kindle for indie publishers
Here’s my thumbnail summary of the news that’s been coming out this month about Amazon’s changes in its algorithms for calculating sales rank, which powerfully affect e-book visibility & sales.
First: Just before Xmas 2011, along with 3 new Kindles, Amazon introduced KDP Select (KDPS) for authors. If you commit your e-book to an exclusive 3-month contract with KDPS, it can still be purchased the same as ever, but now it also can be borrowed (for each loan, you get a cut of Amazon’s $600M promo pot), and you can promote it by making it FREE for up to 5 days during your 3-month contract.
FREE turned out to be a huge booster of visibility, & therefore sales. First: Amazon counted freebies as sales in calculating sales rank. The higher your book’s sales rank, the sooner readers see it when browsing. Second: Any time someone downloads your book plus someone else’s, your book appears on the other book’s website, in the “People who bought this also bought…” section.
The result? Indie/self-published books got to compete as equals with traditionally published books! From Dec. to March, a well-written, well-presented indie e-book could “break through” into huge success & profits.
What happened next? Here’s a summary from Ed Robertson (http://www.edwardwrobertson.com/2012/05/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-kindle.html)
Around March 19, Amazon changed the way they sell books. In a Kindleboards thread devoted to the subject, authors tracking the performance of books during and after a free promotion began reporting strange results. Prior to then, books that gave away several thousand copies during a promo would shoot to the top of the popularity lists some 36-48 hours later. It was like clockwork. Clockwork that paid you several hundred dollars.
Because the popularity lists are a big deal. These are the default book listings you’ll see when you’re browsing around by genre…. If you could ride a free promotion to the top of those lists, your book would be extremely visible to shoppers. Depending on genre and your book’s presentation, topping the pop lists could snag you dozens or hundreds of sales before other books overtook you. Sometimes that visibility was enough to launch a book into the stratosphere, where the stratosphere is also made of money….
Then, things changed…. Authors began reporting lower sales than expected as well as strange-looking lists. Chaos reigned!
Robertson did extensive tracking research, & found these changes in the new sales-rank lists:
- Ranks are determined by the last 30 days of sales, with no extra weight given to the most recent sales
- Free book downloads are discounted heavily–maybe as little as 10% the value of paid sales
- Borrows don’t count as sales
…What does this mean, then? Well, for starters, it’s probably the end of the 3-day bump. This was the term coined on Kindleboards for sales on Select titles that had recently been free. In the past, … if you went free and gave away 5000 books, … your book would be credited with 5000 sales, vaulting it to the top of the “most popular” lists. With your book in front of so many customers, you’d see a lot of [paid] sales, spiking late on Day 2 and carrying through Day 5 or so as your rank decayed and your book was pushed down the lists by new titles rolling off free.
I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore.
So, many indie authors are looking for a new approach. Smashwords? iTunes? Others are ignoring the change & figuring a little boost is better than none at all.
What’s your response?
writing in Italy with Henry James
“…Romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he feels, while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the wrong change.” (from the Preface to Portrait of a Lady)