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“21st-Century Publishing: Report from the Front Lines”–an inspiring evening!

Posted on by CJ Verburg

San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library may not be the first place you’d think to look

Authors Carol Verburg, Blythe Rainey-Cuyler, Carol Costello, & Renee Gibbons (Adele Fasick not shown); librarians Sharon Miller & Taryn Edwards

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

Posted on by CJ Verburg

[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

Posted on by CJ Verburg

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!

Posted on by CJ Verburg

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!

Its as you read my head! You appear to know so much concerning this, like you published the guide in it or something.

Proceed to keep up the superb operate. Looking for ahead to reading extra from you later on!

I believe this internet site is rattling instructive!

Look complicated to more introduced agreeable from you!

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.!”)

Posted on by CJ Verburg
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=twitter

Bad news from Kindle for indie publishers

Posted on by CJ Verburg

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

Posted on by CJ Verburg
from earth to heaven @ Scuola Grande dei Carmini, Venice

“…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)

What a great night!

Posted on by CJ Verburg
watching dress rehearsal

How can this possibly work? Why didn’t I choose some other career? Should I warn all these nice people walking in the door to go home? you wonder an hour before show time. Then the audience is seated, lights rise on the stage, and–mysteriously, magically–it’s wonderful! Laughs! Tears! Applause! Flowers! & you wish you could do it all over again.

Thanks to all who supported Centenary Stage Company’s reading of my play “Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians,” especially the actors, crew, and unsung staff who made it happen. This past week has been a marvelous adventure!

at Centenary Stage Co. in NJ

Posted on by CJ Verburg

The Garden State is at its most delightful this fourth week in April, lush with lilacs and dogwoods and thick green grass (and, at the moment, heavy rain.) We’ve just spent 2 days rehearsing my play “Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians.” This is Centenary Stage Company’s 20th anniversary season for their Women Playwrights Series, which I’m proud to be part of–especially since Program Director Catherine Rust is not only producing the reading of my script, but playing a lead role.

Catherine Rust, Quinn Warren, Will Rothfuss, Becky Engborg, Nick Wilder, Eric Rolland

As always, Day One of rehearsal was scary. (Who are these people, and what are they doing to my play?!?) Day Two brought ever-larger glimpses of brilliance from the cast, and hints of more revelations to come when we finally get onstage Wednesday night.  It also showed me that the fully staged reading I hoped for is way beyond the limited prep time available to WPS winners: my play follows hard on the heels of last week’s, will be followed in a few days by next week’s, and overlaps with not only the mainstage production (winner of last year’s Susan Glaspell Prize) but a student production and a special event for children.  Luckily we’re in the Centenary College’s fabulous new Lackland Center–a thespian’s dream!

Tomorrow I head for a NYC break, to catch up with old friends and other arts besides theater.  Then back for a final run-through and our 7:30 PM reading on Wed. PM.

at the Edward Gorey House

Posted on by CJ Verburg

The murmur of Gorey fans is filtering up the stairs: this is the first week of the EGH’s 2012 show, “The Envelope Art of Edward Gorey,” after last Sunday’s grand opening. (Everyone here was so busy, they didn’t realize the gala day was also the 12th anniversary of Edward’s death on 4/15/00.)  Ombledroom the vast white-and-black cat is as chunky and friendly as ever, and Yarmouth Port is sparkling with green grass and yellow forsythia.

The exhibit is extraordinary: dozens of envelopes and postcards dating back to the days when you could mail a letter for 5 cents, addressed by Edward Gorey to his mother and three of his closest friends, and lavishly hand-decorated with lumplike creatures, rainbow dragons, flying babies, mini-dramas starring a pair of black-and-white dogs in letter sweaters, or entire parlor scenes fit for PBS’s “Mystery” series.  Curator Rick Jones has managed to find a number of the items featured in these remarkable pictures, too: a display of blue glass bottles, a curtain tassel, even the head of a fly.  If you’re on Cape Cod between now and October, don’t miss this remarkable showcase of a genius having fun!