Month: September 2009

How To Lose Fans and Alienate Visitors

by

Hi, Joe or Jane Author. My name is…well, it doesn’t really matter what my name is, all that matters is I’ve just signed up for your newsletter, or started visiting your site or blog, or registered for membership on your site, or started following you on Twitter, or friended you on Facebook or MySpace or FriendFeed or Goodreads or LibraryThing or something similar. This should be the start of a wonderful relationship, in which you share useful and amusing information with me and I sing your praises to everyone I know, buy your books, register for your webinars and show up to your speaking engagements. So far, so good.

Now here’s how to f**k it up.

Bombard me with emails. When I signed up for your newsletter, Helpful Tips or the like, unless you specified otherwise at the time I signed up, I’m expecting to hear from you no more frequently than once a week. And in all honesty, if your messages take longer than about five minutes to read, I won’t. Between my job, my family commitments, my social commitments, my own reading and writing, and the fall TV schedule ramping up again, I don’t have time to wade through your too-frequent or too-lengthy missives.

Bait and switch me. It might surprise you to learn that when I signed up for your newsletter or Helpful Tips I was expecting to receive…wait for it…news or Helpful Tips, NOT advertising messages. It’s fine to have a one- or two-line sales pitch at the end of your email, or to send out the occasional message about your upcoming book or speaking engagement, but the rest of your content better be worth my time and attention. Look at it this way: would you read a magazine that had nothing but full-page ads in it? If your favorite TV show suddenly started consisting of 80% ads and 20% show, would you keep watching it?

Son of bait and switch me. If you’ve promoted your free webinar, ebook, members-only site, newsletter or whatever else you’ve got as Twenty Surefire Strategies to accomplish some goal, and I sign up, I’m expecting to receive…you guessed it: Twenty Surefire Strategies. When you give me a series of sales pitches for twenty fee-based products or services from you and your affiliates instead, I tend to conclude you’re a lying liar.

Return of the son of bait and switch me. Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari and other reader community sites are places where people share their reactions to books they’ve read and engage in discussions about all things book-related, generally from a reader’s perspective. If the only books on your virtual shelf are those you’ve written yourself, or if you’ve got a variety of books on display but reserve your gushiest reviews for your own work, it’s obvious you’re using the site as a marketing outlet. Way to give new authors everywhere a bad name.

Bait and switch me, the revenge. It’s great that you’re branching out into new areas, or already operating in multiple areas, but don’t assume I want to branch out with you. I signed up for your Sci Fi Wonks site because I enjoy science fiction in general, and yours in particular. Imagine my surprise (and annoyance) when I also started receiving emails from your Gory Horrors site. And your Renaissance Romance N’ Ribaldry site. And your [insert religious affiliation here] Inspiration Of The Day site. And your eBay store. Bonus question: how angry do you think I was to find there were no “unsubscribe” links in any of the unwanted emails?

Bait and switch me, the final chapter. I understand I may need to provide my email address when posting a comment on your blog or site, because it protects you from spammers and hackers. And of course, if I’ve used the Contact form to send you a remark or question off-site, you need my email address to respond to me. But neither of these actions gives you the right to add me to your mailing list. Even if you’ve added some verbiage to your site pages to indicate that’s what you’ll do anytime someone enters his or her email address anywhere on your site, since that’s not how upstanding and honest most sites operate, if you want to avoid any appearance of bait-and-switchery you need to have a separate page just for mailing list signups.

Bait and switch me, the remake. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and other social networking sites are intended for…seriously, do I have to say it? Social networking. Not marketing or sales pitches. If most (or worse, all!) of your tweets, status updates or blog entries are only there to promote yourself or your work, you’re wasting my time. Just like I said about signing up for your newsletter or Helpful Tips, I wasn’t expecting to get a steady stream of advertising.

Are you beginning to sense a common thread? When I’m getting a lot of quality content from you, I don’t mind getting a modicum of advertising and promotion too. Sometimes I’m truly glad to hear about your new book, service or product, especially if I’m getting a special discount, premium edition or access to material or events not made available to the general public. But the moment the balance between content and advertising tips in the direction of advertising, I’m out. The moment I start thinking you’ve abused my trust, I’m out AND spreading the word. So please, don’t make me tweet angry.

 

April L. Hamilton is the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat. This is a cross-posting from her Indie Author blog.

Written In BLOOD Postponed

by

Written In BLOOD, the 8th book in the SF/vampire series Children of The Dragon by Theresa M. Moore, has had its publication date postponed to sometime in Spring 2010. Citing family issues and other technical delays, the author is taking a hiatus to clear the little grey cells and deal with the health of relatives. "It’s something like writer’s block, but there are too many things in the way which have more priority," the author said. "Once I get the niggling little problems sorted and stored properly I’ll resume the work." Other works in the hopper have been rescheduled according to timeliness and will be finished without further announcements. The imposition of a deadline sometimes interferes with the free flow of ideas.

Imagination Meets Life

by

Good Morning,

Today I realize how totally out of shape I must be. The only parts of me that don’t ache are my fingers. That’s what walking for hours on rough ground and rocks did for me yesterday, but I wouldn’t have traded the beautiful day or experiences for anything.

We spent yesterday at the Old Thrasher’s Reunion in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa and throughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend going if you like to go back in time to see how hard it was for farmers before all the modern equipment. It’s on through Monday. Hay making, corn shelling and wood cutting demonstrations abound. Two trains, trolley cars and tractor pulled carts haul people. On the hour, three lawmen have a shoot out with bank robbers or train robbers. Saloon girls put on a show. Two schools are in session through the day. We were invited to join a spelling bee, but I declined. I told the woman I didn’t spell a word without spell check on my computer.

For me, the adventure was like research from studying people to taking pictures of antiques that I might use in a story. The highlight for me was a young woman I watched weaving a rug in a log cabin in the settlers village. I talked to her about helping my mother weave rugs on Mom’s three looms. One of those looms was of 1900 vintage and steel. Took four men to get the loom into Mom’s house and that was in pieces.

Next we talked quilting and I told her I had been to Kalona in April to see the Amish quilt show. The woman mentioned she was in Home Health Care in Kalona and had a client that was Amish – Mennonite. She had visited on a day there was a quilting bee in session which thrilled her. What thrilled me about the story was how close my imagination came to real life in my latest book – A Promise Is A Promise ISBN 0982459505 . This is the story of a Home Health Nurse working in Amish country. I had every intention of telling the woman about my book but we were interrupted so I moved on. So much to see and so little time.

Of course, we had to sample as much food as we could consume and not much of it met the food pyramid. Funnel cakes about two inches high that filled a paper plate, homemade ice cream (close to a pint in that cup), a hamburger, popcorn in a sack larger than a microwave sack and a quart of homemade ice tea. By the time we got home, we weren’t hungry.

We stopped in the theater and walked through all the memorabilia from early stage productions complete with letters on the wall from some famous actors. Suddenly, we were joined by a greeter. She wanted to tell us the story of her family’s stage career in the twenties to forties. She was one of 8 siblings who performed with their parents in juggling and acrobat and actors hired by her father did plays. They lived in hotels and later a grayhound bus and performed out of tents as well as theaters. The scrapbook, she complied of their travels, had been put together from Internet research and newspaper archives. Proudly, she showed us her family history. Finally, she said humbly she hoped we didn’t mind her butting in on our tour. I told her I was delighted. Without her, I would have walked on by that scrapbook and showcase full of memorabilia. It was a thrill to meet her. I hope she continues to suddenly appear for others that come in to look around. The event program says the theater is air conditioned. That might persuade people to venture in just to cool off. Boy, are they in for a treat.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

God, Living Is Enormous

by

This essay, from Benjamin Anastas, originally appeared in the Sept/Oct/Nov 2009 issue of bookforum.com, as well as in the print edition of the same issue of Bookforum magazine.

It’s typical of God’s vanity that, after creating the heavens and the earth and all that goes with them, he had to go ahead and claim the word for his son’s business. “In the beginning was the Word,” the opening lines of the Gospel of John instruct, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Ever since, the power to capitalize the w has been the prize that nearly every writer would kill for—or die trying.

If the poem is a salvo at the skies and the play a pincer movement, then the novel is a full-blown putsch. It creates its own firmament between two covers, divides light from darkness, fills the waters with odd life-forms, and chokes the earth with abundance. The novelist’s word is almost the Word. One problem: What about the God who invented it? He must be killed, captured, or paid off handsomely and sent into exile. He must be dealt with.

The first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals, edited by her son, David Rieff, and published last year under the title Reborn, begins with an entry dated November 23, 1947—Sontag was fourteen—listing the precocious Californian’s core beliefs. At the very top, marked “(a),” is “That there is no personal God or life after death.” Before Sontag has ever published a word, she has written God’s death sentence.

This small matter settled, she follows up with her second belief: “The most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty.” Sontag is free to think her own way into understanding. Like the apostle Paul, she has learned to “put away childish things.” She has turned to literature for guidance. The rest of Reborn—if not the rest of Sontag’s life—is a testament to this. Sontag exhorts herself to read Stephen Spender’s translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, immerses herself in the work of the principled French libertine André Gide, judges Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain to be “a book for all of one’s life.” She compiles laundry lists of novels, plays, stories, and books of poetry that she aspires to read like a mystic seeking out new and ever more demanding spiritual disciplines. In 1949, when Sontag joined some friends for an audience with Mann at his home in Pacific Palisades, her journal entry describes the encounter this way: “E, F and I interrogated God this evening at six.”

Reborn, just as much as it provides a glimpse into a cultural celebrity’s fiercely guarded private life (and we don’t have many left that hold such fascination), gives us a record of how Sontag gained the visionary powers that every fiction writer covets. She approaches the novel with a certainty so fervent that it is clearly on par with religious belief—not even Gide, or Mann, would question the affinity. Sontag acknowledges this fact in one remarkable line from Reborn that could be adopted as the novelist’s credo: “God, living is enormous!”

God, living is enormous. As a pure sentence, it is almost perfect. There is no end to its reverberations or bottom to its mystery. There is murder in the “God” but also reverence; fiction may be “the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity,” as James Wood writes in The Broken Estate, but what novelist can dream of competing on the playing field of the printed page with a Maker whose every word arrives as truth, whose every idea is fact, and whose pride of authorship extends to all creation? Despite the long odds, one of the novel’s chief concerns from its beginning has been to try and steal a little thunder from the Divine— or at least his home office on earth, the church—through satire, mockery, and, at times, outright sacrilege. The trope had already been well established by medieval literature (see The Canterbury Tales); Cervantes, then Fielding, continued the ritual undressing. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that Victor Hugo would stop the action of Les Misérables for a polemic against the institution of the convent, although his broadside makes a crucial distinction: “We are for religion, against the religions.”

This stance, with its haughty backhand to the church for its hypocrisy and all-purpose endorsement of religious mystery—no matter what form it takes—kept the belief necessary for the novel’s survival alive, while preserving a place for the novel as a kind of opposition party to scripture. Perhaps no novelist’s work has embodied this paradox more than Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s—and he managed it by virtue of an imagination so all-encompassing that it might have been a gift from God himself. He even offered his readers a prophetic taste of modernism in a speech the Grand Inquisitor gives to the returned Jesus in The Brothers Karamazov:

How many among those chosen ones, the strong ones who might have become chosen ones, have finally grown tired of waiting for you, and have brought and will yet bring the powers of their spirit and the ardor of their hearts to another field, and will end by raising their free banner against you!

Read the rest of the essay on bookforum.com.

Freemium For Writers Is Two Debates

by

This post, from Dan Holloway, originally appeared as a guest post on Guy LeCharles Gonzales‘ Loud Poet site on 9/3/09.

The battle isn’t getting people to pay; it’s getting people to read. If they do read, they might not pay. If they don’t read, they’ll never pay.

Writers who use the “freemium” model face two distinct challenges, and the harder one isn’t always the one you think.

What a delightful piece of coincidence that I should be asked to write this blog the day before I headed off to the Reading Festival. My wife and I were going for the headline set by the most important band of the 1990s,  Radiohead (sorry, Kurt), who propelled the issue of providing content for free into the public consciousness (sorry, Trent) when they released their album In Rainbows on a set-your-own-price basis; 60% of people chose, in the event, to pay nothing.

A delightful coincidence, but not actually that significant. Radiohead are still the most important band in the world; Trent Reznor is one of the most important figures in [re]shaping the music industry; Stephen King is about the most long-term successful writer on the planet. And Chris Anderson is, well, Chris Anderson. But these are the names that come up again and again in the freemium debate – “look how great they are; see what they did!” on the one hand; “it wasn’t a success, it was a disaster; and the free wasn’t properly free!” on the other.

I want to make two points. First, the exploits of established megastars have nothing to do with the relevance of the freemium debate to new writers. Second, they actually skew the debate rather dangerously, because they focus attention on the wrong challenge, not the one that’s most important to new writers.

New writers who want to make a living (or to supplement their living) through their writing need readers who will pay for their work. They always have done and always will. What the freemium model does is claim new writers can get readers by providing content for free, and that enough of those readers will buy their content in alternative formats, or with added extras, to provide them with an income.

For the average newbie writer (or musician*), what matters most is getting any audience at all. So I want to come back to the first point, but I want start by exposing a couple of bits of faulty logic in typical objections to the second point.

 

*NOTE: I really don’t want to go into the shambles the UK government has made with proposed anti-file-sharing legislation, but I’ll say for the record that as a content producer struggling for an audience, I don’t want any boundaries put up between me and my audience. It’s something authors don’t talk about much, but I’ve yet to meet a musician who disagrees.

Read the rest of the post on Loud Poet, and also check out Dan Holloway’s Year Zero Writers Collective.

Awkward. Again.

by

Recently submitted short essay dealing with getting older — younger folks need read it if only to find out what to expect….

The awkward years. Again.
by Richard Sutton 8/30/2009
All Right Reserved
Remember how uncomfortable you felt most of the time when you were between, say 12 and 18?  Someone once called these the awkward years, and I readily agree. I remember. I’ve watched it happen as our daughter grew through the transition of her teen years, and I’m beginning to notice it with my older grandson. Making the transition from childhood into adulthood is awkward.

On the plus side, eventually it’s over, and you leave it behind you.

Or do you?

Read More…

My book site ….. also, my commercial site. Welcome!

by

My own book site, filled with the usual suspects: recent press, biographical notes, notes on writing, is up and running (a little creaky right now) for any with an interest.

http://www.rlsuttonbooks.com

Our commercial site, which attempts to actually pay our bills, running aince 1995, is…

http://www.kivatrading.com

 

 

 

Free Web Savvy For The Book Industry

by

Social media expert Mark Blevis is offering a series of free webcasts aimed at helping authors and publishing professionals get up to speed with using social media. From his site:

After three years of working with publishers, editors, publicists, authors and illustrators, and following my experience at BookCamp Toronto this past June, I decided it was time to offer the book industry the support it needs and the training it doesn’t have the budget for.

I’m teaming up with Greg Pincus to deliver a series of FREE webcasts that will give book publishers, publicists, authors, illustrators and enthusiasts social media savvy for outreach and promotion.  The series is titled How social media can help you sell books: Guidance for the book publishing industry and its stakeholders and each installment will seek to answer the question: How does this help me sell books?

Don’t miss the first four free sessions.

SEP 10 – Finding the Conversation: Who’s talking about you and what they are saying

Understanding search and alerts to monitor the digital conversation.  This session will focus on effective use of Google with references to Technorati, Twitter and IceRocket. (REGISTER)

SEP 17 – Twitter: More than “What are you doing?”

Why use Twitter, how to engage and craft your message, using hash tags and a few Twitter stories. (REGISTER)

SEP 24 – Bloggers/Podcasters are People, Too: Engaging with the social media community

Recommendations for meeting, relating to and collaborating with the social media community. (REGISTER)

OCT 01 – Remarkable Use of the Internet to Promote Books and the People Behind Them

Storytelling and interesting examples of effective book promotion in the digital age. (REGISTER)

 

Web Hosters Ordered To Pay $32M For Contributing To Copyright and Trademark Infringement

by

In an article from Jaikumar Vijayan, which appeared on Computerworld on 9/1/09, it’s reported that a California jury determined web site hosting companies can be held liable for the illegal copyright and trademark infringement activities of their clients when the hosting companies were made aware of such infringement and still failed to take any action.

Content created by authors and released by publishers may be protected by trademark (e.g., trademarked processes or techniques, terminology, character names/likenesses, book series names, etc.) as well as copyright, so this case sets a legal precedent upon which authors and publishers can rely in fighting online piracy of their works. 

See also: Internet Defamation, Author Platform And You.

9 Things To Do To Make Sure Your Next Blog Post Is Read By More Than Your Mom

by

This post, from Darren Rowse, originally appeared on ProBlogger on 9/3/09.

Two days back I explored the myth that all you need to do is write great content on a blog for it to get readers and introduced the idea of ’seeding’ content rather than ‘forcing’ it upon readers.

Today I want to take the ’seeding’ idea a step further and give a few examples of ways that you can do it – and in the process hopefully grow your readership beyond your immediate family (not that there’s anything wrong with Mom reading your blog).

I should say that while this post contains 9 ways to promote a blog post – that I rarely use all of them at once. Keep in mind that the idea of ’seeding’ is not about forcing things but rather it is about getting things going and then letting something organic happen. You might need to put a little more effort into things somewhere along the way to keep momentum going (like ‘watering the garden’ helps a seed to grow) but the idea isn’t for force things.

So without further ado – let me share a few of the techniques that I use to ’seed’ content:

1. Tweet it

I find that one of the most effective ways to get a link to a new blog post ‘out there’ is simply to tweet it. Tweeting a link is quick and easy to do – and if you do it well it can be quite effective at both driving direct traffic to a blog post but also in starting other little viral events on other sites.

The effectiveness of this does depend a little on the size of your follower group – but other factors you can have a little more control over include:

  • timing your tweets to be during peak times when lots of people are on Twitter.
  • doing a followup tweet to your original one (I only do this on important posts and usually try to change the wording so as not to annoy people too much)
  • the wording of your tweet (give people a reason to click it)
  • making your tweet ‘ReTweetable’ by not making it too long (I keep these seeding tweets to under 120 characters to leave room for people to retweet them).

I find that when something does well on Twitter (and not every post will) that it can often trigger a secondary event on a site like Delicious. This in turn can trigger blogs to link to my posts or other social bookmarking sites to pick up links.

2. Facebook Status Updates (and other social media)

This is of course similar to Tweeting a link. I’ve not had as much success with Facebook as a promotional tool for my blogs but know of a few bloggers in different niches who find it to be more effective. Whether it sends loads of traffic or not it can be helpful in an overall strategy.

Similarly I sometimes also use other social media sites like LinkedIn’s status update if I feel that the content I’m promoting is better suited to other audiences. Again – it depends partly upon the size of your network on these sites but even a small but relevant network on these sites can trigger other bloggers to link up or secondary organic submissions on other social sites by those in your network. You never know what impact sharing a link in these sites can have until you do it.

3. Pitch it to another Blogger

Is the post you’re promoting relevant to the audience of another blog?

This is a question I’m always asking myself as I’m writing blog posts. As I write I jot down the names of other bloggers that have an audience that might find what I’m writing helpful. This means that when it comes time to promote the blog post I have a ready made list of people to shoot out an email to to let them know about my post.

I don’t send these emails out often, nor do I send them out to the same group of bloggers repeatedly – but if I genuinely think my post is of high quality and that the blogger will find it relevant I will.

Check out these suggestions on how to pitch other bloggers for some more tips on how to do this effectively.

Read the rest of the post, which features six more options to spread the word about your blog posts, on ProBlogger.

Patience! Patience!

by

Last night, as my family gathered around a backyard firepit — our September ritual — I found myself sipping on a glass of something red, and engaging in a boisterous discussion over the future of healthcare here in the USA.  The combination, I believe, was responsible for my failure to keep my passions checked.  We all finally agreed to disagree, and no feelings were irreparably hurt, but  I woke up this morning with a fuzzy headache, and the realization that I had not been a patient man the night before.

For many novelists, that’s an all-too-common condition.  I’m no different — when I recall the hours, no…weeks, no … years of work that I’ve put into my writing, trying to be patient while waiting for publication, waiting for a review, or waiting for some better sales seems to elude me, sometimes. 

It seems, writers often become impatient with themselves. Sometimes we expect a solution to suggest itself quickly.  We feel the driving momentum leading to a critical point of a WIP, and then…..despite our ongoing focus……nothing. 

That hasn’t happened to me often — I don’t get "blocked" I just change the channel — but when it does, I feel like I’ve let myself down.  Then, every time, the inspiration arrives from some unexpected source, and I go on again, as if nothing had slowed me down. 

I need to remind myself, that writing is the vocation of patient people. Impatience in writing, or marketing, or speaking, never brings the satisfaction you had hoped, and often confuses the issue at hand — even turning good ideas into garbage.

So, as I sit here, waiting to hear from three different reviewers, I’ll remind my self of that fact. Patience, Man! Patience!

The Paper Decision

by

Paper is such an important part of any book, it’s incredible that many independent authors don’t really consider it as part of the design process, when preparing their book for press.

Most POD publishers use the sheet-fed offset printing process, as the run quantities are usually short.  This is actually a very good process for quality control, although the actual printing is slower than high speed web printing.  It uses a different kind of paper, that is finished in a different way than high-speed paper. 

Text papers, for inside pages, have a surface that is optimized for the printing of text, of course, but there may be different levels of finish available from your book’s printer.  Be sure to request printed samples on the stocks they offer. They may be able to make these available before the contract is signed, or not — it varies from press to press.

At the lower end, you’ll find basic newsprint, which you’ll remember as being the lightweight, easily smuded stock that the pulp novels you read in college were printed on.  It’s similar stock to what most newspapers are printed on, and is designed to be first, inexpensive – -as any product printed on it is not expected to be around very long.  It is not very resistant to tears, or abrasion, and would not be my first choice for a novel, non-fiction or reference book which would expect a lot of handling.

The next step up is basic text stock, often available in two or three shades besides white.  An off-white color is a good choice, especially for smaller than 12 point typography, as it minimizes eyestrain from the high contrast a pure-white sheet would create.  You can also consider the context of the book — for a novel, it’s setting, etc. and the age of the typical reader.  A whiter sheet, or a more creme colored sheet may add page appeal, depending upon the "style" of the prose, the subject matter, the setting — all the things that make your book special.  Look at other books you’ve enjoyed and see what kind of stock they’re printed on.

The finish of the paper itself will also affect the appearance of your book, and a good rule is that as the fine-ness of the type increases — with fine serifs, for example — the smoothness of the paper surface should also increase.  If there will be spot illustrations, unless they will be rendered in a rough manner, such as with block prints, or some scratchboard art, a smoother stock surface will also provide better detail, and what is called "ink hold out". 

Ink Hold Out, refers to the ability of the paper to keep printers ink on it’s surface with less and less bleeding as the hold out increases. Better hold out keeps illustrations and text proofing out, after printing, as close as possible to what you intended, including color fidelity, if you are utilizing spot or process color elements along with the text.  Poor hold out can result in print through, which is what happens when you can see the text on the backside showing through a page, and irregular color fidelity.  You don’t want that, if you can help it! 

As you make paper choices, you’ll also begin seeing your book differently than you did when you were writing it.  Now, you’re creating a product, where before, you had a manuscript.  The product will need a lot of polishing to get it just right, just as the manuscript did. At this point, you’ll be changing"hats".  I believe that seeing your book as a product will help you keep your priorities straight, when setting your retail price.  It will also help connect you with your readers — I mean, consumers.

As we move up the ladder of paper quality, the price also goes up exponentially.  Paper cost is one of the fastest rising components of publishing cost, and it is one that is showing no sign of retreating.  Better paper, useful in hard-bound books, will begin to show what is called "rag" content — actual cloth fibers in the mix with the pulp fibers that give a page more strength and make it less likely to yellow with age because of the acids left in the regular pulp paper from the manufacturing process.

At the top end of text stock, are "laid" finish stocks, with textural patterns in the paper itself, from the way the paper is made, that resemble the weave in cloth, for example, a "linen" finish.  They can be much heavier weight, and usually completely out of the range of price that could be considered for a retail book, although sometimes, specialty bound keepsake volumes use these papers in extremely short print runs of under 30 books.

Another level at the very top, are 100% rag contect papers, or archival stocks, used for mounting fine art  prints and fine photographic prints.  These stocks usually are certified for a life-span in excess of 100 years without yellowing or any acid damage to anything attached to them. They can be found in laid finishes, plate finishes, with varying degrees of roughness to the touch, and finally in high plate finishes, which are especially smooth and hard surfaced papers designed for fine-art level full color printing. 

There are also plate finished and coated text stocks, in lighter weights, that are designed for color reproduction.  Cast-coated sheets, like Chromecote (R) are designed for the absolute highest color fidelity and resolution.  They have a high, glossy finish, but coated text stocks are also available with matte and low-gloss coating. If you are producing a coffe-table, art folio, or a cookbook full of beautiful images, you will want to investigate these stocks.  Your POD printer may or may not have these available to you, and if you will be producing this kind of book, you will need to choose your printer wisely, in part according to the paper options they offer.

Color reproduction on lesser text sheets can be dicey.  You’ll need to request printed samples of pages with approximatelky the same coverage as the pages you will be providing  them, to see if the quality level is what you want.  Of course, the cost of such production is much higher than black ink on a medium grade text sheet, and you will see how much your choice of paper will affect your retail price.

MOst POD printers will offer only one cover stock choice, which is, more and more, a heavier text stock, plate finish, with a lamination — an actual plastic film heat set over your image.  They resist moisture, spills, and tearing pretty well, but one drawback is that unless shelved, they tend to curl. This is casued by the inside of the cover absorbing mopisture from the air and expanding slightly.  If you are going to purchase inventory in these type of books, keep them lying flat, in sealed boxes with a weighted cover over them to keep the covers flat.  If you are going to shelve them, they will need to be covered with a moisture barrier — a plastic sheet, for example, along the tops so that the covers won’t spring curled when removed from the shelf.  Most of the paperstocks used for trade paperback ccovers from POD printers are selected for good ink hold out and white color. They can reproduce well to 300dpi resolution and beyond.  You may want to take a few extra days with your final proof, to see how it reacts to humidity, etc., before giving the final approval. My novel, The Red Gate was proofed 3 times to check cover consistency.

All-in-all, your paper choice will play a very large role in the quality and presentation of your book — er, product.  Take some time, research the possibilities thoroughly. Get printed samples from potential POD printers if you can.  Get a feel for what one of their books feels like in the hand, adjust your design as necessary…then make it happen!

####

The author is a graphic designer, American Indian arts dealer… and an Indie Novelist.

His first book The Red Gate is available on Amazon

 

 

Finding Indie Opportunity On The Kindle

by

This article, from Bryan Gilmer, originally appeared on The Millions on 5/18/09.

Bryan Gilmer of Durham, N.C., teaches newswriting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and writes for institutional and corporate clients. Until 2003, he was a reporter at Florida’s largest newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times. He has just independently published a crime thriller novel, Felonious Jazz.

Last week, I created a Kindle version of my indie crime thriller novel, Felonious Jazz, using the tools at Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. It took about nine minutes, a “why-not” side project alongside my trade paperback, which I published using Amazon’s print-on-demand company, CreateSpace.

coverMy Kindle edition went live last Monday at $7.99, so I announced it on a couple of Kindle message boards online. By Wednesday, I’d sold one copy. One! Message board replies said, “If you want us to try a new author, give us a really low price. It’ll generate sales and reviews.” So I marked it down to $1.99 Thursday morning and posted the price change on the same boards. What happened next was remarkable:

As of 5 p.m. Friday – about 36 hours later – Felonious Jazz was the No. 1 selling hard-boiled mystery on the Amazon Kindle Store and the 17th best-selling title in Mysteries & Thrillers – the only title not by huge names like John Sandford, Michael Connelly, and Elmore Leonard in the top 25. Its overall Kindle sales rank was as high as 133rd out of all the 283,000+ fiction and non-fiction titles available in the Kindle Store.

I thought, now that I’m in the rankings, I shouldn’t have to be so cheap. I bumped the price to $4.99. Sales continued, but at a slower pace, (and Felonious Jazz has slipped in the rankings. I probably should have stuck with $1.99 longer). I also drew in some people who just buy cheap Kindle offerings who don’t normally read the genre, though they may have been less likely to enjoy it than fans of similar books.

But overall, what a no-budget way to gain visibility. A few big lessons here: Readers expect Kindle books to be much cheaper than dead-tree books (because they know it costs less to publish them and they can’t share them and worry they won’t have them forever). A cheap price is enough to buy your way up the rankings among national names with a zero-dollar PR campaign. Now that there’s a free Kindle app for iPhone, the potential audience for a Kindle title is not just the half million people who spent $359 for the device but many times that large. It’s surprisingly comfortable to read book text on the Kindle iPhone app. If you haven’t tried it yet, get the app and grab my free sample from Amazon, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s transformative to have a book you’re reading (or several) on your phone to pull out whenever you have to wait in line or for an appointment.

Read the rest of the article on The Millions.

Also note, Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton offers a free guide to publishing in Kindle format on her website in downloadable, pdf format. Also, Publetariat contributor Joshua Tallent is the founder of Ebook Architects, a company that offers consulting, formatting and conversion services for authors wishing to publish in various ebook formats .

How Lucky We Are That The Book Business Is Not Like The Movie Business!

by

This post, from literary agent Richard Curtis, originally appeared on the E-Reads Publishing In the 21st Century blog on 8/17/09.

Is the book business beginning to feel like the movie business? An article by the New York Times‘s Michael Cieply might reinforce the similarities.

Cieply reports that, unlike filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino who landed huge studio deals at the Sundance Film Festival, today’s aspiring young movie makers have got to finance everything, investing in themselves on the speculation that lightning will strike in the form of financing and distribution by a major studio. As more and more authors throw in the towel in despair of landing a book deal with a big publisher, they are publishing their own books and underwriting every step from editorial to publicity.

Are there other ways to compare Cieply’s description of the film industry with the current state of publishing? Let us count them, and to help you, I’ve taken the liberty of extracting some of Cieply’s descriptions and substituting language that might reinforce the idea that New York is a lot closer to L. A. than a five hour flight on the red-eye.
 

The glory days of independent film [first novels], when hot young directors [authors] like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio [publishing] executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance [Book Expo, Frankfurt] and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers [authors] playing the cool auteur [literary lion] in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker [major New York literary agent].

Here is the new way: filmmakers [authors] doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution [self-publication], marketing films [books] through social networking sites and Twitter blasts [social networking sites and Twitter blasts], putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges [maitre d’s] at luxury hotels [chic publishing watering spots] in film festival cities [New York] to get them to whisper into the right ears.

Read the rest of the post on the E-Reads Publishing In the 21st Century blog.

Finally! Some Press!

by

August 27th I finally was referred to as an author by someone besides my immediate family, in print! Stinky, smearing newsprint!  I suppose it should have felt like a graduation or something, but I was mostly happy with the article, and especially that it mentioned the two local places where the book could be found. 

The editor, whom I’ve known for some time, sent my release and material on to a staff writer, who worked at it for two weeks.  After one week’s delay, it was finally published in an Arts pull-out section of the local newspaper.

When my grandson saw it, he exclaimed "Hey! That’s Papa!" 

Anyone who’d be interested on the small-town Long Island take of my Indie-almost launch, should read the article on my book website homepage this month.  www.rlsuttonbooks.com/

Now, I’m goinbg to have to use that to try and obtain some print reviews.  There are a couplke of slick, local lifestyle magazines that occasionally do them for local writers, and both are distributed in shops and hotels in the Hamptons resort area.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed, and will let you know how it goes…..

Time to get out the Press Release Letterhead…..