Month: April 2011

As Kindle Authors Make Their Own Bestsellers, Are Traditional Publishers the Vanity Presses of 2011?

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Some interesting developments lately with Kindle Store bestsellers and bestselling authors….

First, congratulations to several Kindle Nation sponsors who have recently soared into the top 100 in the Kindle Store, and in some cases onto the USA Today bestseller list as well! Here’s where some of our past or current sponsors stand as I write this:

  • David Lender‘s Trojan Horse is #47 in the Kindle Store, up from #11,941 prior to its first sponsorship on February 19
  • Debbie Mack‘s Least Wanted is #55 and her Identity Crisis is #65 and #139 on the USA Today list (up from #3,374 and #1,048 before their first sponsorship January 18)
     
  • Victorine E. Lieske‘s Not What She Seems is #86 in the Kindle Store, up from #8,000+ before her first sponsorship in September, and was on the USA Today list ealier this month
     
  • And last but most definitely not least, colleague Abhi Sing of Kindle Review and his Seven Dragons team hold the #1 spot on the Kindle Store bestseller list with their magical and revolutionary Notepad app for the Kindle, which is currently featured as the Kindle App of the day here at Kindle Nation!

Meanwhile, we covered former CIA covert ops agent Barry Eisler‘s announcement the other day on Joe Konrath‘s blog that he has walked away from a half-million dollar St. Martin’s Press deal for his next two books in order to publish them directly via the Kindle and other platforms. “Direct publishing” is the new “self-publishing,” in case you hadn’t noticed, and it may be a more apt phrase since it is the platforms offered by new digital technologies such as the Kindle, rather than anything that we as authors have invented, that allow us to public and connect directly with readers.

Ruth Harris’ novel Decades, a future bestseller at 99 cents?

Eisler’s move has been widely hailed as a major development requiring — I’m sorry, there’s just not a pretty way to put this — very large cojones. And I agree, but courageous moves are seldom significant unless they blaze a trail for others. What may be most important about what Eisler has done is that there will soon be plenty more authors of distinction who follow a similar path to bring their previously published and newly published books directly to Kindle readers and other digital platforms, and it will be interesting to see how they go about the process of building fresh connections with readers, absent the usual intermediaries and gatekeepers.

One of these authors of distinction who comes naturally to mind is New York Times bestselling novelist Ruth Harris, whose Husbands and Lovers is today’s Kindle Nation Daily sponsor. Harris has sold millions of print copies of smart, stylish novels that have been translated into 19 languages and selected by the Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club, and she recently brought back Husbands and Lovers, Decades and Love and Money as direct-to-Kindle offerings. Husbands and Lovers jumped from #55,528 to #5,275o on the Kindle Store bestseller list during the past few hours, and the author is priming the pump by offering Decades at a promotional price of just 99 cents. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times plays it when Harris sells enough directly published ebooks to qualify for bestseller lists, as I believe she will. The Times has taken an utterly indefensible, know-nothing stance to keep its bestseller list free of self-published authors, but if the self-published author is a former New York Times bestselling author, will she still be barred entry?

But not everyone is moving away from traditional publishers toward direct publishing. Along comes the amazing Amanda Hocking today — according to this New York Times scoop — to sign a … are you sitting down? … deal for over $2 million with MacMillan’s St. Martin’s Press for her next series, whose working series title is “Watersong.” Hocking, 26, blogged very eloquently on Tuesday about some of the reasons — in addition to the two million obvious ones — she might be interested in a traditional publishing contract. And who can blame her?

But I have to wonder how her ebooks will do if MacMillan and St. Martin’s price them in the $11.99 to $14.99 range which publishers stupidly claim is the right price for newly released ebooks. Currently Hocking has 6 titles among the Kindle Store’s Top 100 bestsellers, but they are all priced between 99 cents and $2.99. Could agency model pricing ruin the Amanda Hocking franchise?

While this is the first ebook-to-traditional publishing contract narrative to ascend to the rarified air of  the $2 million advance, there have been a few other cases where authors signed nice contracts after doing very well previously with direct-to-Kindle ebooks. A couple of years ago Boyd Morrison made a big splash when he sold enough copies of his self-published novel The Ark to crack the Kindle Store bestseller list’s Top 100 and he parlayed it into a multiple-title contract with agency model publisher Simon and Schuster. The Ark was reissued for about three times its original Kindle Store price, although Morrison’s royalty rate is less than it would be if he had published it directly at the more reader-friendly $2.99 price. Not surprisingly, The Ark has created far less buzz the second time around.

Lately it keeps occurring to me that the big traditional corporate publishers are the vanity presses of 2011. Obviously, when an author is offered a deal such as Hocking’s, nobody will blame her for signing on the line. But Morrison’s example suggests there may be plenty of others who sign away their rights for far less than they are worth because of some romantic and outmoded sense of what it means, or used to mean, to land a book deal.

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

Announcement From The Editor

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Due to technical difficulties, no new content will be posted to the Publetariat site by staff this evening. New content posting will resume as per usual tomorrow evening at 6pm PST. Publetariat members can still use the Forum and post to their own blogs, and commenting on existing content is still possible at this time as well. Thanks for your patience and support.

Invitation To The Madhouse ~ Report On Self-Publishing

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This post, by Alexander M. Zoltai, originally appeared on his Notes From An Alien blog on 2/24/11.

{This post is almost a rant and purposefully written in a voice I rarely use…}

A madhouse is where insane persons are confined or a place exhibiting stereotypical characteristics of such a place.

This, to me, right now, is what self-publishing is.

Let me define my terms a bit more precisely:

“Sanity” has roots indicating “healthy condition” or “soundness of mind”. If I temporarily constrict my argument to the term “publishing”, most people who are trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in this arena of human experience would, I feel, tend to agree that publishing is not in a healthy condition or showing soundness of mind.

Many of those same people would go further and claim that self-publishing is the medicine needed for the sick field of publishing.

Well…

I’ve been involved in self-publishing for about six years now and the last year has seen me working overtime to come to terms with how to best take advantage of the opportunities that self-publishing seems to offer.

I don’t have space in this post to detail the ills of the traditional publishing route but anyone interested can easily find much to ponder.
 

Read the rest of the post on Alexander M. Zoltai‘s Notes From An Alien blog. 

Plenty of Good News for Indie Authors and Publishers in the the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey

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Why would an author or publisher be interested in the Winter 2011 Kindle Nation Citizen Survey?

Well, first, we all know that without other authors we would be nowhere, and one of the best things about other authors is that, with a very few, largely inexplicable exceptions, authors are voracious readers.

The deadline to participate [was] midnight Hawaii time Monday, January 31, 2011. There [were] 15 questions and most people tell me it [took] them about 10 minutes from beginning to end.

But equally important is that the survey results are shaping up to spell good news of dramatic significance for indie authors and publishers. Feel free to go ahead and click here to see the results now. Here are a few of the takeaways from the first 1,900 respondents:

Respondents continue to have strong positive feelings about bestselling authors (56% positive, 3% negative), but they don’t think much of the big agency model publishers (10% positive, 41% negative). Indeed, they have much more positive feelings, for instance, about:

  • Independent and emerging authors (52% positive, 1% negative)
  • Small independent publishers (35.5% positive, 4% negative)
  • Kindle Nation Daily (71% positive, 2% negative)

Influences such as electronic and print media reviews, bestseller lists, Oprah, or big bookstore displays in pointing readers to the books that they actually buy are in decline. Instead, respondents ranked the following, in order, as far more likely to influence them to buy books:

  • recommended or listed by Amazon.
  • recommended, listed, or excerpted on Kindle Nation.
  • reading a free excerpt, author interview, or other material on Kindle Nation or another source.
  • recommended by a friend, relative, or colleague.

Indie authors and indie publishers cannot survive without indie readers, and increasingly, readers are acting as if they are in charge when it comes to selecting the books they will read or acting as if they, the readers, are the final price-setting authorities:

  • 89% of respondents identified with the statement, “I frequently choose to delay purchasing an ebook that I want to read if I believe that the price is too high.”
  • 76% of respondents identified with the statement, “If publishers keep charging higher bestseller prices, I’ll buy more backlist or indie titles.”

Here, if you are interested, are links for our previous Kindle Nation Survey Results:

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s indieKindle.

Adopting a Device-Neutral Approach to Electronic Publishing: A Q&A With Springer's Timothy Griswold

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This article, by Janet Spavlik, originally appeared on Book Business on 4/14/11 and is reprinted here in its entirety with the site’s permission.

Digital publishing was, of course, top of mind for many of the attendees at last week’s Publishing Business Conference & Expo, as the event kicked off with a panel of book industry leaders in print-digital integration. Moderated by THA Consulting President Ted Hill , the session, entitled "The Cross-Platform Book Publisher: Reinvent Your Company," featured panelists Timothy Griswold , vice president, sales, trade and special licensing, Springer; Adam Lerner , president/publisher, Lerner Publishing Group; Deborah Forte , president, Scholastic Media; and Mike Rosiak , lead content architect, Wolters Kluwer Health—all of whom shared their experiences and insights into successfully bringing products to market in multiple formats.

Book Business Extra spoke with Griswold after the conference to expand on some of the themes discussed amongst the panel. Here, he advises book publishers on publishing electronically across multiple devices and discusses the next big opportunity Springer is exploring.

Book Business Extra: During the panel, you stressed Springer’s device-neutral approach in regard to publishing content electronically—the company publishes across as many devices as possible. How has Springer adapted to so many different devices and formats, and what advice would you give to other publishers that want to adopt a device-neutral approach?

Timothy Griswold: … There is a learning curve involved. You take a risk, and some of them are good and some of them may not be so good. … When you’re any publisher, whether small, medium or large, during the negotiation with [online retailers, such as] the Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Blio, etc., you need to really do that trial run-through at the beginning during the contract negotiation [before the contract is signed]. … What we found is that, in some cases, the content and the format [in which] we delivered the content … the actual appearance on the e-reader, the quality was not good. And so, because of that, with the contract already signed, there were conversion costs, and, in some cases, considerable conversion costs that had to be incurred.

There was a discussion back and forth as far as who was responsible for those conversion costs, so that’s probably the most important thing. … I learned that I need to have the people in production that I can rely on and who are knowledgeable regarding the different formats of e-files and delivery and what has to be done, and I need that knowledge while I’m out there negotiating with Blio or whoever it happens to be in order to deliver the content and make it that seamless transition.

Publetariat Editor’s Note: also see this Storify page, on which Heather Fletcher shares tweets from the conference, many of which include links to blog posts in which attendees have recapped various sessions and commented on them.

 

Library Ebooks & The Indie Author Conundrum, Part 1

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This post, by William Van Winkle, originally appeared on his Behind the Lines blog on 3/28/11.

"Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let’s love turbulence and use it for change."
–Ramsay Clark

In case I haven’t mentioned it in the last three or four minutes, I have a new book out, and like every independent, fledgling author, I’m trying to come up with different ways to find an audience — no small trick when your book is digital-only and digital still comprises less than 15% of the total book market.

I’m an avid library patron, and, as an audiobook nut, I’ve dabbled with OverDrive’s Library2Go service over the years. Library2Go (L2G) is my home state’s chosen conduit for making electronic media available to library patrons over the Internet. Most people to whom I mention the service have no idea that it even exists…perhaps for good reason. Historically, I’ve found L2G fairly underwhelming. I had trouble finding enough audiobooks that were in MP3 format, not DRM-constrained WMA, and the titles that interested me were few and far between. I went a year, perhaps two, without looking at the site 

And then something amazing happened. Library2Go hit puberty. We often forget that most librarians, like teachers, have the public’s welfare in their minds and hearts, and they work every day trying to help make the world better. I can only assume that it was librarians (and, behind them, a fleet of impatient patrons) responsible for not only a significant rise in the number of quality audiobooks available but also the recent appearance of ebooks.

The last time I touched OverDrive, I was listening to audiobooks on a 5G iPod. Today, all of my listening filters through a Motorola Droid. (For would-be audiobook listeners, I found my 2007/2008 BlackBerry and other "legacy" cell phones inferior to the iPod for this task. This is no longer the case. Media player apps have matured to the point that they’re at least as convenient for book enjoyment as traditional music devices.) OverDrive’s player app, called Media Console, is available for Windows, Mac, Android, BlackBerry, iPhone/iPad, and Windows Mobile.

Read the rest of the post on Behind the Lines, and also see Part 2.

Author Interview: Naderia by Julian Gallo

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 Author Interview – Julian Gallo’s Latest Novel, "Naderia"

written and conducted by Garry Crystal.  

The Debate Between Romance and Chick-Lit Wages On

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 I read this post on BigAl’s Books and Pals this morning about what exactly is the difference between Chick-lit and Romance? Most of the talk centered around the tried and true formulas we all know. 

Romance: Man and woman face some obstacles, steamy sex scenes (with no genitalia actually mentioned), happily ever after.

Chick-Lit: Narrator is a 20-30 something woman who suffers comedic hijinks to end up with a happy ending.

In the comment discussion, one commenter pointed out that Chick-lit and Romance are both under the umbrella of Women’s Fiction, but that Chick-lit gives an author more freedom with "happy ending." The main charcter could get the guy, the promotion, realize she’s better off without him, change careers altogether, etc.

I am hopeful that with more self-publishing, independent authors will step up and challenge the boundaries of these genres. So many genres are the result of formulaic, publishing guidelines produced to promote  a bottom line, not necessarily literary value. Need proof? How many chick-lit titles have you read are based in either London or New York and involve the publishing/advertising/public relations world in some way? Me? Too many to count. 

Where are the chilck-lit stories about women working in engineering? Or the romance stories about a passionate, frenzied tryst that ultimately fizzles out because most people can’t sustain that level of lust?

Much like other facades the traditional publishing world has hid behind (like the famous "It costs more to produce an ebook than a printed copy""), these genre formulas are going to be torn apart. They have lasted because authors were told "We did the research and this is the story arc the readers will read." Really? So why is self-published erotica suddenly leaping off the sales charts? The very same stories the publishers said the majority of readers won’t touch? 

I am working on my own attack of these genres with my first novel. I talk about this on my own blog. My "chick-lit/romance" is from a male POV, placed in the engineering world pandering for defense contracts, and doesn’t end sappily, happily ever after. And I don’t think readers of either genre will have a problem with this, because the love story is one that is modern, relatable, and realistic. The escape part is that my readers will be relieved this isn’t their life.

Please Don't Reply

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Good morning everyone. First, I would just like to say how thankful I am that Publetariat.com exists for those of us navigating the self-publishing world. I love the tag line: People who publish. Somewhere it seems like the people part of publishing got lost. No personalized rejection letters. Formulas instituted on genres based on sales, not the quality of the story. Obviously, these policies haven’t helped strengthen the community, but temporarily propped up the bottom line.

I have high hopes for the self-publishing/indie author movement. Last night, my husband and I sat at our kitchen table after the kids were in bed, both enjoying a beer. I explained what was going on in the publishing world. The traditional tasks performed by a publishing house–cover design, marketing, editing, typesetting–are being chopped up and provided by freelancers everywhere allowing authors to remain in control of their content and distribute freely to readers. He shrugged, popped open the top to another Dogfish Head and said "Sounds like open source to me." 

I now have the full support of my husband in my self-publishing goals. We’re big supporters of open source technology, and he sees self-publishing as a way to improve information dissemination, even if we’re talking about fiction novels. I think it’s a great metaphor.

My goals are:

  • Finish my first novel this summer, and publish a professional product this fall.
  • Promote Imperfect Timing and begin working this winter on my second novel about a nurse with too much personal debt that inhibits her ability to find romance (no, not in a cute Confessions of a Shopaholic way). 
  • Publish second novel in spring. Begin work on third novel, possibly a sequel to Imperfect Timing.

Having a publication date, even one self-determined, reinforces my desire to be a professional author. My writing experience mainly comes from four years of writing non-fiction copy for websites, online newsletters, and internet publications. Literature has always been something I’ve devoured, studied, or critqued. I used my minor coursework electives in college to take English Literature classes.

I never thought I would be a writer, much less an aspiring novelist. Then again, I didn’t plan on moving every two-five years to support a husband in the military and needing a career that allowed me to stay home with my two children. Writing can literally pack up and follow me from Norfolk, Va to San Diego, CA, then back to the east coast in Charelston, SC. Despite living in three different places in four years, and about to move again in less than six month, I am very happy where I’ve landed. I have a family full of love and an escape from the kid’s table to the grown-up conversations in the next room. 

Thank you for reading all the way to the end, and I’m very thankful to be joining the Publetariat.com community. And whatever you do, don’t reply. 🙂

Lulu vs. Createspace: One Indie Author's Perspective

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In 2010 I used Lulu to publish my first book, Fear Not! Discovering God’s Promises For Our Lives. Then, this year (2011), I decided to give CreateSpace a try when I published Simply Prayer. Although the two POD’s are similar, there are some differences I thought others might like to know about before choosing one or the other. Here’s the breakdown of the two.


Lulu

Cons:

  • Not very user-friendly. It took a lot of time to search through the FAQs and community answers to find out how to put Lulu’s free ISBN on my copyright page. By the time I was finished I had a major headache.
     
  • Difficult to add Lulu’s free ISBN to the copyright page. I first had to upload my .pdf to Lulu, then have them issue the ISBN (took only a minute or two), then add that to my copyright page and then re-upload the new .pdf.
     
  • Look Inside! not even an option. Let’s face it, even if you’re buying a book online you want to be able to see between the pages to get an idea if this book is right for you. I did find a work-around, but it’s not the same as having an Amazon Look Inside! right there with the buy button.



Pros:

  • It’s free. This was super important since I’m just starting out and have a very small budget.
     
  • You’re book will be listed on Amazon. It can take a couple weeks, but it does show up pretty quick. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered those supposed listings with other booksellers often show the book as “out of stock.” Not exactly helpful for distribution.
     
  • Great cover designer. I was able to design the front and back, then import them as .jpgs into a basic template. Lulu even added spine text, though they did warn me about the possibility of the text wrapping to one side or the other based on the small page count. This was very important to me as I’ve donated my books to church libraries that will be including them on bookshelves.



CreateSpace

Cons:

  • Cover designer difficult to use. I like designing my own covers (though I hope someday to employ someone much better), but I found designing a full cover (front, back and spine) very difficult. The CreateSpace instructions for creating a full cover were a little hard to figure out. Also, CreateSpace refused to add spine text, even though the page count for Simply Prayer was a little larger than my first book.
     
  • Questioned about picture quality. What I was asked to do was change every picture to “300 dpi” or risk poor print quality. While that might not seem like a big thing, for someone who understands the nature of printing houses it was an irritation because it’s not the dpi that matters. What’s important is the ppi (pixels per inch), which I knew were perfectly fine.
     
  • Look Inside! feature can take up to 8 weeks. Sure, waiting 8 weeks is better than not having the feature at all, but it does wear on one’s patience.

Pros:

  • It’s free.
  • Very user-friendly. With step-by-step instructions and simple buttons, I didn’t need to read any FAQs or search the community pages to figure out how to upload my book.
  • Easy to add CreateSpace’s free ISBN to copyright page. I was able to get the ISBN before uploading a .pdf, so adding it to my copyright page meant only creating one .pdf for the entire process.
  • Listing on Amazon. Of course, that’s where free distribution ends. If you have the budget, then getting the larger distribution package might be the way to go.



Those are the biggest pros and cons I found between Lulu and CreateSpace. Everything else was similar, as far as I could tell. For those of you who have used either or both, or even someone else, what are your experiences?

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road To Writing.

ThrillerCast 15: Fighting And Responding Badly To Reviews

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The latest ThrillerCast is up. In this episode, David Wood and I talk about fighting and writing fight scenes, in some thinly veiled… well, actually not veiled at all, pimping of my new ebook. We also talk about the recent author meltdown, where a self-published author responded really badly to a negative review of her work.

ThrillerCast PodcastI deliberately avoided blogging about it at the time, as there was enough internet beating up going on already. But Dave and I talk about it in this podcast and discuss how people should respond to reviews. Clue: it’s a very simple aswer.

Enjoy. And if you do enjoy it, please recommend us to your friends.

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

4 Solutions To The Book Discount System

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I’m finding in talking to new self-publishers that many people don’t quite get how the discounting works in different parts of the book distribution system. This is vital to understand because it affects whether your publishing company will make a profit or not, whether it will be a viable business enterprise. Besides, you want to know how much you make for each book you sell, don’t you? Sure, and why not. So let’s step through it together.

As a publisher, you are a retail product manufacturer. You are supplying a unique product to the market and it’s up to you to set the terms on which you’ll sell your product.

Depending on how your book is produced, you may have more or less flexibility in how you deal with the rest of the chain of distribution. Here are some scenarios:

     

  • You ignore it completely

    You do this by not selling your book wholesale. In other words, you, as the manufacturer, sell direct to the end user. For example, John T. Reed who I’ve written about before, only sells his line of books from his website. He has no need for a discount schedule because he is outside the chain of distribution. This method has some advantages, too. You capture 100% of the sales price, since you don’t have to share it within wholesalers, distributors, jobbers, or retailers. You also can capture the names of everyone who buys a book, which can build an asset that’s very valuable when it comes time to offer other books or services to the same market. The disadvantage is that you have to do all the work yourself, or pay for fulfillment through a fulfillment service. Also, some people may be reluctant to buy from a self-publisher’s website, trusting big companies like Amazon to protect them and offer services like bundled shipping or free shipping, returns, and other amenities. In addition, you will have to do all the marketing for your book, and any interruption you have in your website hosting will cause a financial loss from lost sales.

     

  • You use a print on demand supplier

    Most print on demand suppliers restrict the size of your discount, demand minimum discounts, or don’t allow you any say at all in discounts. Other suppliers, like Lightning Source, allow you to set your own discount within limits, but offer just that one discount to every retailer or jobber who buys your book from Ingram, whom Lightning Source supplies. So if you set your discount to 20%—the minimum allowed—bookstores won’t buy the book because they need a minimum 40% discount. But if you set your discount at 40% to appeal to the bookstores, and then end up selling most of your books on Amazon or BN.com, you will have given up 20% and gotten nothing in return. (If you need a review on how to trace the flow of money through the print on demand system, see this link: Understanding Print on Demand: Follow the Money.)

     

  • You print offset

    If your book has to be printed offset (and examples might include color books printed overseas, odd-sized books, and books that can’t be produced by print on demand methods) you will have to be your own distributor, unless you sign with a distributor (see the next option). That means that you’ll have to come up with a discount schedule that applies to retailers, maybe a separate one for libraries, and other terms for special sales or direct sales. In addition, some retailers will demand steep discounts, up to 55% off your retail price, and you’ll have to agree to take returns of unsold merchandise. In addition you’ll be responsible for shipping books to retailers, effectively reducing your profit margin even farther. And, as it should be clear by now, you will spend a lot more of your time handling all the details of wholesale selling, including paperwork, invoicing, tracking payments, packing and shipping books, and all the other minutia of doing your own fulfillment and distribution.

    book discount schedules

    Typical Discount Schedule – Click to enlarge

     

  • You sign with a distributor

    In this scenario your book is of wide enough interest and large enough potential or proven sales that you can get a distributor to take over supplying your book to retailers. Distributors will put your book in their catalog, their sales reps may help promote the book to booksellers, and they will deal with the bookstore bookkeeping, returns, shipping, warehousing and may even offer fulfillment services for single copy sales. The downside to having a distributor is what you have to give up: usually 65% or more of the cover price. Let’s say your book costs $10. You will receive $3.50 for each book sold after giving up 65%. If the book cost you $2.00 to produce, your gross profit is 15%. This is not significantly better than the royalty offered by most trade publishers, and it’s taking you a lot of work and risk to earn it. The only way this option makes sense to me is if you genuinely have a book that you think you can promote nationally, and for which you realistically can expect to have sales of 5,000 or more copies per year. Distribution also becomes a more viable option when you start to have more books in your line. If you have 5 books, you might find distribution an advantage, because if any one of them sells well it will help the others get a foot in the door.

When you plan your publishing project, think about the eventual buyers you plan to market to. Where do they buy their books? Knowing this can help you make smart decisions about how you approach dealing with retailers and, consequently, how you choose to discount your books.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

The Adman Cometh

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It’s no surprise…that ads have come to the Kindle. The good news — relatively speaking — is that you can save a few bucks by purchasing an ad-enabled machine:

Although the hardware is identical to the standard $139 Kindle, the new Kindle with “Special Offers” will feature advertisements and deals as its screen saver and on the bottom of its home screen. But for that added distraction, the company will take $25 off the price—dropping it to $114.

If ads on the Kindle are inevitable — and they are, as are ads on every imaginable surface and device — I think this is a smart way to introduce them. Rather than inject ads into every Kindle, thereby infuriating all those nice people who helped make the Kindle a success, Amazon is giving the customer a choice and motivating that choice with savings.

As a result of this innovation I assume the people who buy and sell things in the publishing world (agents, editors, publishers, advertisers) are having yet another breathless conversation about what this means, where it might lead, and whether or not ads might be injected directly into the content of books as a means of making lots of money. So far Amazon seems to be holding the line:

The screen saver and home screen bar are the only places customers will see ads and offers, according to Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle content. “We are not interested in doing anything that interrupts the reading experience,” he said.

If Amazon was facing more competition or in need of revenue I’m confident the reader’s experience would be the first thing on the auction block. Then again, it’s not like these things haven’t happened before, and some have actually failed. While advertisers would be happy to have ads on every page of a book — and would still complain bitterly about that limitation — consumers have shown that there is a limit to what they will tolerate.

On a related note, for a while now I’ve been seeing an odd announcement when I use my Gmail account: “Coming soon: Better ads in Gmail.” Now, I don’t know about you, but not only am I not interested in better ads in Gmail, I’m pretty sure Google’s idea of ‘better’ and my idea of ‘better’ are wildly divergent if not mutually exclusive.

So how is Google making my Gmail ads better? By mining my personal data, of course:

Google says that the system uses signals similar to those utilized by Priority Inbox, the automated system launched last August that attempts to highlight which of your incoming email is most important. These signals include things like who sent the message, whether or not you read it, and keywords that appear in the message.

(What I like most about this opt-out change is that Google has introduced the abstracted word ‘signals’ to replace the easily recognized term ‘personal information’.)

Why is Google improving its Terminator-like ability to target specific ads at specific keywords and the people who use them? Well, it might be because Google is facing increasing pressure on the search front:

Bing is expanding its reach as a search engine, according to new data from Experian Hitwise. In March, Bing powered nearly a third (30.01 percent) of U.S. searches.

The amount of Bing-powered searches has been steadily increasing. In February, they accounted for 28.48 percent of traffic, meaning the March figures are a 5 percent increase.

I don’t know anyone who clicks on Google ads. I don’t know anyone except SEO consultants who talks about AdSense anymore. If Google’s dominance in search erodes it’s going to have to make up that revenue somewhere, and since its main business is advertising it’s a given that Google is going to be bringing more ads to more surfaces and devices in the future. Like the Kindle.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Author Blogs – Use Categories To Organize Your Posts

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Many blog platforms have a default setting that places certain items (often called widgets) in the sidebar (the narrow column on the side). Two common default widgets are Archives and Categories. 

The Archives widget displays a list the months of the year, with the most recent month listed first. Usually there’s a number next to each month indicating how many blog posts were made that month. Clicking on the month brings up the blog posts made during that month. I recommend deleting the Archive widget from your blog. It doesn’t serve a useful purpose, it takes up valuable space in the sidebar, and if you don’t post very often, the small number of posts listed for each month looks bad.

Having a list of blog post Categories in the sidebar is much more useful to visitors, especially for nonfiction author blogs. If someone has an interest in a particular topic, they can quickly and easily find more articles on that topic using the Categories list.

Each time you publish a blog post, you have the option of assigning a category to that post. The Categories widget displays a list of the categories you have used. Clicking on a category name takes the blog visitor to a page containing the articles in that category.

You may have the option of presenting your categories in cloud format. The cloud displays the category names in a cluster, rather than an alphabetical list, and the names of the most frequently used categories are shown in larger type. The cloud may be harder to read if you have very many categories, but it is more eye-catching than a list.

Another option is include category names in a navigation menu across the top of your blog. This works best if you have a small number of categories. You can use the menu in addition to or instead of the Categories widget in the sidebar.

On my own blog, I deleted the Categories widget and created a custom widget called “Book Marketing Resources,” which you can see it in the lower right column of this page. Most of these category links go to a page listing all the blog posts in that category, but several of them go to special resource pages that also list additional resources related to the category. For a sample resource page, see the Library & Educational Sales page. 

Another way to use the categories feature is to link to a category page at the end of some of your blog posts.  For example:  See more articles about Blogs & Websites.

See this post to learn how to avoid common mistakes in using categories on author blogs.

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Arab Spring Update: Are Social Media Being Given Too Much Credit For Recent Changes In The Middle East?

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In this podcast and transcript, from the Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond the Book site, the CCC’s Chris Kenneally interviews Egyptian-born journalist Mona Eltahawy about recent events in the Middle East and the role social media have (or have not) played in those events. The podcast and transcript are provided here in their entirety with the CCC’s Beyond the Book site’s permission.

As popular uprisings have spread across the Middle East and North Africa, media pundits have credited Twitter and Facebook. But one Egyptian-born journalist based in New York says the acclaim for social media is misplaced, even though she admits to a Twitter addiction herself.

“It was a revolution of courage, rather than a revolution of Twitter or Facebook,” says Mona Eltahawy. “Social media connected real-life activists with online activists, and with ordinary Egyptians whose only exposure to politics came through Facebook and through tweets that they read. And through that connection, [Twitter] brought people out on the ground. But it was a tool. It was a weapon.”

An acclaimed freelance journalist, Mona Eltahawy is also a lecturer and researcher on the growing importance of social media in the Arab world. She spoke with CCC’s Chris Kenneally at the We Media NYC conference about her work and her insights on the Arab Spring.

 Arab Spring Update [12:15m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download