Publetariat

Do I Care About Mobile Readers? [A Checklist]

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This post, from Piotr Kowalczyk ( @namenick on Twitter) originally appeared on his Password Incorrect site on 1/10/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Year 2010 has already been called “The Year of the Mobile”. Internet activity is shifting from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to mobile phones. This is an inevitable trend. People play music on mobile phones, update their social networks, watch movies and even play games. What about reading? It seems to be one of the easiest things. It’s not.

One side of the story is that people complain about general reading comfort – and this is a common excuse to stay with paper. The other side of the story is a fact, that a majority of Internet content is still not mobile friendly.

Here’s a quick checklist of things which can be done to make mobile readers’ life much easier.

Do I publish my books in formats optimized for mobile reading?

If you plan to publish a next book, a free teaser of a book or any new piece of writing, think not only of Scribd, BookBuzzr or Lulu. Think also of sites which convert your book to formats tailored for mobile viewing, like ePub or mobi. The most popular services, besides Amazon’s Kindle Store, are Smashwords, Feedbooks, Wattpad and Kobo.

Do I use a mobile friendly blogging platform?

Most of what 2.0 authors write is not actually books, but everything else intended to draw attention to those books. A blog is still a major place to share thoughts and tease about a book (first chapters, excerpts, etc). If you’re on WordPress.com, you are 100% mobile friendly. When a reader is visiting your blog from a cellphone, a mobile theme is automatically loaded instead of a regular one.

Do I use mobilizing plugins for my self-hosted blog? 

 If you run a self-hosted blog, you can use a proper plugin. This is especially important, when a blog is rich with many advanced plugins. They make it slow to load and probably the content will not display correctly as well. A list of blog mobilizing plugins can be found here.

Do I use blog mobilizing services?

If not a plugin, you can use one of convenient blog mobilizing services, like Mofuse or Mippin. You may also consider mobilizing part of your blog (such as one category) – and this tool seems to be the best option. Just paste the RSS feed in and in a couple of easy steps you’ll have it running. The list of services is also available in the above mentioned article.

Does my feed shows full articles?

More and more people are switching to reading RSS feeds on their mobile phones. If you set up an option to show only an excerpt of your post, the reader is forced to move to your page in order to read the rest. If your blog is not mobilized, consider it a lost view (or even a last view). A much better option would be to show a full length post in a feed.

Do I tweet mobile links?

Even if you haven’t done any of the above, you can still make your content mobile friendly. This is especially important if you spend a considerable part of your time in mobile communities like Twitter, Brightkite and alike. You can always use Google Mobilizer – just paste a link and in one click you’ll have your page optimized for mobile viewing.

Now, if your content is already mobilized, there is one more thing you could do. [As] non-mobilized blogs [are still common], the general attitude [toward reading blogs on mobile devices] is “do not open this link”. So ask yourself…

Do I inform readers that my blog is mobilized?

You can easily do that. Use text or widgets delivered by blog mobilizing services. Hopefully one day it won’t be needed any longer.

 

Also see this article, which provides instructions for how to make your blog available for sale to Kindle owners.

Stuck: Is the DIY Scaring Them Off?

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"So you are in Ingram’s?," they ask, as if it’s some kind of legitimizing checkpoint in order to go any further. Because if the book wasn’t listed, like there’s no possible way in a million years they would even take this conversation any further.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump.]

There is no veritable "indie" brotherhood from which an author can establish a relationship with indie bookstores. I can’t breeze in and ask them to carry my book, just because they’re independent and I’m independent. Ok, good enough, they have to read it first. Fine. Makes enough sense. But how can I afford to send out potentially hundreds of promo copies? Why can’t my synopsis be good enough? Is it because I’m the author walking into the bookstore and that is too accessible?

Is the D.I.Y scaring them off?  All this time I’ve been poo-pooing those statements by certain twitter detractors that author accessibility is always a good thing, especially for no-names like me. Is it possible though, that bookstore owners are uncomfortable with the author walking in with a copy of the book and asking them to carry it?  So, is the D.I.Y. scaring them off? They want a little more professionalism, anonymity?

I had these beautiful, glossy 4×6 postcards with the cover on one side and the synopsis/backflap copy and ISBN info on the back. How much money am I going to piss away by doing a mass mailing to selected indie bookstores throughout the country?

But what is their risk in carrying something no one’s ever heard of? Is it shelf space? I can understand that. They have to make a buck, and the real estate in these small spaces carries a premium for titles that will sell with a profitable margin.

But 29 Jobs and a Million Lies is slim. It’s got a nice cover, really, it does. What’s the risk? Just take a chance on me. I’ll promote the book the best I can, and I’ll do a reading at one of your events, even on a regular basis.

I need to bring my following, you say? I have a following if I don’t have an opportunity to sell my book locally? Ahh, that independent Catch-22. The onus is on me to cultivate that following, even if it’s friends who I’ll have to drag to these readings and events. Friends do not always equal Fans, though they can overlap.

I’ve learned that the Twitter "following" numbers do not equate to sales, or even real "fans." So how do I cultivate a local following who will trail me to these events and boost up attendance at coffee-house readings? Really–how? Because I can’t get the Ocean County Library or the Middletown Library to return my calls inquiring about carrying the book and doing a reading.

I’m willing to do it all. I’m a little stuck now.

On the positive side, the local arts paper has agreed to do a profile (I’ll be whoring that right here soon) on me so I guess I can use that to get in the door at a few of these joints.

Right? That’ll un-stuck me?

(Oh my god, my first post without a "fuck".)

Thanks, as always, for reading.

This is a cross-posting from Jenn Topper‘s Don’t Publish Me! blog.

How To Lose Friends And Tick Off People On Facebook

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This article, from Scott Stratten, originally appeared on UnMarketing on 1/20/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. While it is addressed to social media consultants, the advice here is equally useful to authors, publishers, and anyone else who hopes to avoid missteps in using social media.

An open letter to all my friends in the social media consultant/guru game,

Please stop.

You’re steering people the wrong way.

You sell yourself as social media consultants, the ones that can show you the way and then fark it up.

I beg of you to stop.

Go back to teaching Internet marketing from the old days, I could at least ignore you then. I talk to you at conferences, share the stage but I can’t listen to you up there any longer spewing “tips” that hurt people and their relationships.

Here is what I and many, if not most of the world, request of you to stop immediately when teaching “Facebook Strategy”:

Photo by the awesome Racheal McCaig

1. Stop telling people to invite everyone in their contact list to every event, even if it’s local. If you invite me to your 1 hour workshop at the library in New Mexico, and I live in Toronto, it hurts my view of you and questions your geography skills

2. Stop teaching people to create fake events. You know what I’m talking about… it’s the “month long event” that you say people should create, and then they “message” all the “no’s and maybe’s” and “not yet responded” to continue to pump out their message. It makes me feel all unfriendy. (yes, that’s unfriendy)

3. You know that trick of tagging people in articles/pics/videos that they don’t appear in so they come and read it? Stop it. Getting me to think I’m mentioned somewhere just to find out I’m not and you’re just being a selfish bumhole, does not bode well for our future “friend” status on the book of faces.

4. Inviting me to a “loss weight” teleseminar event, where it lists people you’ve invited is like being on a roll call at fat camp. Really? Do I look fat in these jogging pants? I know a lot of people are overweight, but inviting someone to an event to lose that weight, especially when I’m perfectly happy living my life of denial, does not strengthen our relationship.

And while we’re here, can you start teaching your clients:

1. Inviting me to assassinate someone in the temple in Mafia Wars may give off the wrong vibe for your brand… I don’t know about you, but I like to be a sniper in the privacy of my own Xbox, not regular updates on my wall of whose neck I’ve cracked

2. Hundreds of Farmville updates on your wall doesn’t make me think you’ll focus on my needs if I become your client. Especially if you’re positioned as a “busy” person, and your status update says “I have no time!!!” And yet we can read how you just nursed a sickly cat on your farm in FarmVille, well, um, it’s just awkward.

3. Blingee generic mass-sent greeting animated cards make people go nuts. Before turning off and blocking the app, I had 43 posted on my wall. In 4 hours. Nothing says “I thought of you personally” like a mass sent lame greeting self-serving wall post. “Hey Scott, if you don’t like the app, you can just turn it off” Well, I didn’t ask you, but if you insist, that’s like me having to tell people to stop kicking me in the nuts. It should be opt-in, not opt-out.

If you’re going to be in the position of an expert, act like one.

Teach people that really, truly want to know how to do things in social media properly. Show them how to:

1. Connect with people on an authentic, not automated level.

2. Show them that with time and effort, you can meet the greatest people in the world on sites like Twitter, if they only would only invest their time, care and knowledge first.

3. That “success” is subjective, not a number of friends/followers. If by success you mean some of the most incredible relationships you’ve ever had, that once trust is established can also lead to a fruitful business, you can have it within social media.

4. Tell them to treat others like they would like to be treated. That sending repeat invites weekly to your event on Facebook would really really suck if they had 20 people doing it to them every week, and that promoting others is sometimes better than promoting yourself.

5. And warn them, that us, the self-appointed guards of social media are very protective, very persistent and aren’t goin anywhere.

There you have it my fellow social media teachers. I’m sure we’ll get along fine with just these small but meaningful changes.

Love you.

Sincerely,

The entire Internet

(As a special treat, I also made this into a song for you. With apologies to Heart)

UPDATE – Thanks to the awesome @SnipeyHead here is a post on how to get rid of most of this annoying schtuff by using FaceBook Lite. 

Scott Stratten is the President of Un-Marketing.com. He is an expert in Viral, Social, and Authentic Marketing which he calls Un-Marketing. It’s all about positioning yourself as a trusted expert in front of target market, so when they have the need, they choose you, That’s UN-Marketing.

Over 45,000 people follow his daily rantings on Twitter and was voted one of the top influencers on the site with over 20 million users . His recent Tweet-a-thon raised over $16,000 for child hunger, in less than 12 hours. His book “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” is due to hit the shelves in the Fall of 2010 from Wiley & Sons.

His clients’ viral marketing videos have been viewed over 60 million times and has generated massive profits and lists. One of the movies was chosen by the Chicago Bears as their biggest motivator towards their Super Bowl run a few years ago, while another made their client over $5 million in 7 days. He recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Mashable.com, USA Today, CNN.com and Fast Company. That plus $5 gets him a coffee anywhere in the world.

Since he still has to pay for his own coffee, he earns his keep by speaking and consulting around the world on how businesses can engage better (or at all!) with their current and potential customer base using social media, viral marketing and just plain old engaging conversation. His team of Un-Jedi’s are responsible for such online hits as “The Dash Movie”, “The Time Movie” as well as the tongue-in-cheek “I’m Breaking Up With The Leafs” (although Scott wants you to know he really is no longer a Leafs fan).

Dear Publisher

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This post, from Dan Holloway, originally appeared on his The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes blog on 1/20/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. In it, Dan pokes a little fun at boilerplate query responses while revealing some salient truths about authorship and today’s chilly trade publishing climate.

Thank you for sending me your contract for consideration. I am sure you will appreciate that talented authors receive many unsolicited contracts. Nonetheless, I am aware that a publisher like yourself relies upon discovering new talent in order to keep its lists fresh and win new readers, so I hope that you will not be too disappointed that in this case I am declining your kind offer. I wish you all the best in seeking exciting new talent elsewhere.

I understand that it is frustrating to receive a form rejection from an author, without any elaboration on specific areas to work on in your contract. I hope that the following general points may help you in your future submissions.

1. An author relies for their living upon a day job. They write, edit, and network in the evenings, at weekends, and in lunch hours and teabreaks. A publisher’s advance, the largest incentive for an author to sign a contract, is not sufficient for them to give up their day job with any security.

2. Many talented, exciting authors write work that will not appeal to large readerships. Publishers need to sell large amounts of books. The result of this tension is that many of these authors will fail to recoup publishers’ outlay within their first two books, and it will not be viable for publishers to keep them on board.

3. Without a publisher, a writer is under no such pressure, and will not be junked if their initial books "fail".

4. Should a writer achieve initial success wit ha publisher, they will be expected to produce similar works, and not explore or develop their talent.

5. Without a publisher there is no pressure to change, for a writer, the way they write in order to fit market needs.

6. Without a publisher there is the freedom to experiment, change genre at will, try, fail, try again, fail again, and devlop one’s talent, voice, and potential to the full.

7. With a publisher a writer must concede control over cover design, the way their work is presented to the world.

8. The long cycle of the publishing industry means that the time from pen to audience inevitably freezes some of the initial energy and excitement of the creative process, leading to a less real and invigorating feedback process between writer and audience, and a less meaningful feedback loop.

9. With a publisher, a new writer loses editorial control. Not just total control of final cut, but control of which editor to use in the first place. An editor must have two qualities – the ability to be utterly ruthless; and absolute sympathy with an author’s aims. An author needs to be free to select their own, trusted, editor.

10. Pricing – whilst unsigned, the author is free to set the price for all his books – and other merchandise. This includes setting the price at free should the author wish to do that with, for example, her ebooks. It also means the freedom to create and price special and limited editions of the work.

In conclusion, I am afraid that authors must consider not just their short-term but their long-term future. And whilst I am sure that your kind offer, were I to accept it, would put me in a financially more advantageous position one year from now, and possibly three years from now, compared to that if I reject it; I am afraid that the models I have run show that in five, ten, and twenty years – that is, over the course of my career – there is no financial advantage, and in many models financial disadvantage, in my accepting.

I wish you every success in your future publishing career.


Dan Holloway is an author and the founder of the Year Zero Writer’s Collective. Learn more about the upcoming Year Zero live reading tour here.

Writing Styles

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Last night I found myself taking several tweets to explain why I write like I do. That told me I had stumbled onto a good blog topic, so here goes. First, let me say that whatever your style, if it works for you, it’s right for you. My purpose is simply to explain what I do.

There are generally two types of writers:

  • Seat of their Pants Writers
  • Outliners

Seat of their Pants Writers

These are the people who follow their muse. They believe that were they to do any kind of pre-writing organizing, they might stultify their creativity. They are also folks who must then do a lot of rewriting to get it right. For me, that’s a lot of work. Being the lazy person I am, I don’t find it very attractive for my purposes.

Outliners

These are those who like to work with a logical framework right out of the starting gate. I am generally an outliner, as you can probably tell from my past articles which start out with a list of bullets and then expand those into points I want to make, such as I’m doing here. It is definitely possible to organize your thoughts and then use the muse to fill out what you’re trying to say so both approaches get served. That would be me.

Why I do what I do

During my twenty-five years time in and with the military, I wrote a lot of messages, a lot of intelligence reports, and as a tester and evaluator of new military systems and concepts, a lot of highly technical plans and reports which were of the scope of doctoral dissertations. This type of bureaucratic writing demands a high degree of organization and its readers may have to make decisions that affect many lives or millions of dollars. (What you are now is what you were when.) On the other hand, it is possible to adjust writing styles. When I began writing nonfiction how-to books, I knew I had to communicate with a much broader, more informal audience. The highest compliment I have ever received about that transition came from a fan in the 1990s: “Reading one of Bob Spear’s books is like sitting down with him in my living room in front of my fireplace and having a conversation.” I always keep that in mind when I write fiction. I’m not interested in or have pretensions for writing the great American literary novel. Instead, I want to tell a story that captivates and entertains. I was a music/business major, not a literature/English major.

The Importance of Storytelling to Me

My first six years of my life were spent on a self-sufficient Quaker farm in North Central Indiana. I had no playmates, brothers, or sisters living within miles. My grandmother would tell me oral stories of our family; my mother would read to me; and I would spend hours in front of our old Motorola radio listening to classic radio theater (this was the late 40s and early 50s, so no TV yet for us). Storytelling became so important to me as a form of entertainment, that I began telling stories out loud to myself. I would always be the hero ,and I would free form my way through never-ending stories (…and then…and then…and then). I told my first story to an adult at the age of four when I tried to outdo a tall tale told by our hired hand. My grandma was listening inside at the window and just about fell over she was laughing so hard. The hired hand just stood there speechless with his mouth wide open as I told him about being chased by wild Indiana, swimming to England and back, and riding to Indiana and home.

Remembering those years led me to become a professional storyteller in 1997. I quickly became a performance resource on the juried Kansas Arts Commission Touring Roster. I found myself performing at schools and communities all over the state. This is why the story is everything to me when I write fiction.

A Recent Example of My Process

It is time to write my 5th mystery, but I needed to write it more as a thriller. This is my approach. First, I take a look a look at my character database, my ‘Bible,’ and determine how my characters need to grow or change in both good and bad ways. I also give a thought to any new characters which are needed. So, I guess you could say the interaction of my characters among themselves and with outside events, natural or man-made, is the basis for my stories. After I play with the characters a little, I begin laying out plot points in some kind of logical time line that allows for those characters to continue to develop. Each plot point is written in a format of one to several sentences. These serve as memory ticklers as I write. Each plot point becomes a chapter. For this latest book, I’ve come up with a structure initially built upon 45 chapters. I lay out my chapter heads and include my plot points just under them so I can glance up to them to make sure I’m not forgetting any key elements.

Now, I allow my muse to kick in again (the first times were when I developed my characters and my plot points). I begin writing, now filling in settings, thoughts, motivations, dialogs, etc. This approach eliminates the need for extensive rewrites. It becomes much easier to quit and return to my writing without losing my thoughts as to what I’m doing where. That’s really important because I write in my bookstore, an environment where my work gets interrupted often by customers or my wife needing help.

In other words, I have developed a process that works for me. It might not work well for you at all, but it may give you an idea or two to try. Until my next post, happy writing!

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends Blog.

How I Actually Increased Sales

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This post, from Ruth Ann Nordin, is excerpted from a post which appeared on her blog on 1/21/10, and is reprinted here with her permission.

I keep trying to think of ways to help authors boost their sales so if they want to either make more money at writing or attract the attention of an agent/publisher, they can have a better chance at it. Now, I don’t know if this will boost sales or recognition or not, but I’ll share what has happened to me over the past year and you may take the information to do what you will with it.

As I compiled a list of my expenses and royalties (which still are lacking compared to what I spend), I noticed that Kindle sales brought in $118. I thought that was for the year, but then I realized it was for the month of December. So far this month, I have made $174. Those are what I get after Amazon take their cut. I’m starting to see monthly payments instead of the three times a year I averaged for the past two years. I made about $174 over the course of one year in 2008. I never thought I could make that much in one month from Kindle sales. I only charge $0.99 per book. (Note, my paperbacks are still low. I made a total of $120 for the year on those, which was my average anyway.)

Okay. So I know other authors blow my totals away. But I thought since I am seeing a pretty good increase in sales, I would pass along what I did this past year. Like I said, I don’t know if the same method will work for you, but it’s all I can think of to offer in an effort to help others out there.

1. In January, I started posting three of my best books for free on my website and asked a blogger who posts free ebooks if they would be willing to post my books on there. She did.

2. Finally, I saw some actual traffic coming to my site. Before this, I got about 30 to 40 visitors a month. Now, I was actually getting into the hundreds. This was pretty exciting…and scary (because suddenly, I realized people were looking my way and I didn’t want to goof it up).

3. Around March or Spring, I had someone who has a free ebook site email me about posting my stuff on there. I said yes and decided to post more of my books for free. I noticed an increase of sales in some of my paperbacks and ebooks, but nothing substantial.

4. I signed up for Author 2.0 at The Creative Penn to learn about book promotion, making book trailers, podcasting, and other topics I thought might prove useful to increase my exposure as an author. I also started listening to podcasts geared toward publishing and marketing.

5. Over the summer, I decided to go fully into self-publishing and posted everything up for free. I got on two more free ebook sites from those who contacted me.

6. I started publishing my books on Kindle. I started the price around $3. Saw no real sales, heard that Kindles $2 and under sell best, so I changed the price for all of my Kindles to $0.99.

7. I started getting regular emails from readers and even if they had something I didn’t want to hear, I thanked them for contacting me and kindly explained why I do what I do. (I’d say 95% is positive email, though the couple that weren’t were very nice people and very respectful, so it never got nasty. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea.)

8. I started book trailers. This didn’t seem to impact sales, though they were a lot of fun.

9. I started the 500 words a day WordPress blog which is steadily attracting more attention.

10. Got my first $12 royalty payment for Kindle sales.

11. I got 5,000 hits on a website in October. I nearly fainted. This was probably because I just posted new ebooks on my site.

12. October was my first $35 payment for Kindle sales. I also got $35 from CreateSpace for about three months worth of paperback sales.

13. November, I got 13,000 hits on my website. How? I do not know. I also brought in another $35 from Kindle sales.

14. December, I sold 12 paperbacks (the most I’ve ever sold in a month–probably due to Christmas). Kindle sales went through the roof. I earned $118 worth in royalties. Again, I do not know why. I did nothing different than what I was doing before. I’m guessing word of mouth is starting to do its magic.

15. January, I started a podcast to begin uploading my first audiobook. (I have no idea if or how this will improve sales or visibility as an author.) I have made $174 so far this month on Kindle. I have only sold 4 paperbacks. I have received roughly 6,000 hits on my website.

So we’ll see how things (hopefully) progress this year.

But take whatever you can from the list if you wish and see if something will help boost your sales too. I mention the numbers to show the trend of cause and effect. I really hope that this method can work for someone else. I never thought it would for me. To me, this is beyond my wildest dreams. For someone else, this may be pathetic.

Visit Ruth Ann Nordin’s blog here, and learn more about Ruth and her books here.

Top 10 Book Promotion Strategies for 2010 Revealed by Survey

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A recent survey of authors and publishers by a national book marketing firm reveals that they are anxious to leverage the benefits of social media marketing as they promote their books in the coming months.

According to Dana Lynn Smith of The Savvy Book Marketer, nearly all – 94 percent of the respondents – said they plan to promote their books with social networking and other social media this year.

"Online book promotion through social media is clearly a popular strategy," says Smith, a book marketing consultant. "But, it’s important that authors and publishers learn to use these new book promotion tools effectively."

According to Smith’s late 2009 survey, here are the top 10 book promotion methods that authors and publishers plan to use this year:

1.  Social networking and social media: 94 percent

2.  Blogging: 84 percent

3.  Seeking book reviews: 75 percent

4.  Seeking testimonials and endorsements: 73 percent

5.  Press releases: 68 percent

6.  Ezines or email marketing: 62 percent

7.  Radio and television talk shows: 62 percent

8.  Speaking or teleseminars: 60 percent

9.  Article marketing: 57 percent

10. Book signings: 56 percent

"Despite the emphasis on online book promotion in 2010, more traditional activities like book reviews and radio interviews are still important," notes Smith. "An effective book promotion plan should use a variety of online and offline tactics for the widest reach."

Of the 136 people responding to the book promotion strategies survey, 42 percent are independently or self-published authors, 25 percent are authors published by a traditional publishing house, 12 percent are aspiring authors, and 21 are publishers or others in the industry.

Smith, who develops marketing plans for nonfiction books, is the author of The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Successful Social Marketing and several other book promotion guides.

For book promotion tips, visit The Savvy Book Marketer blog at www.TheSavvyBookMarketer.com. Subscribers to Smith’s complimentary newsletter, The Savvy Book Marketer, get a copy of the Top Book Marketing Tips e-book when they register for the newsletter at www.BookMarketingNewsletter.com. For more book marketing tips, follow Smith on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BookMarketer .

How To Sign An Ebook

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This post, from Ami Greko, originally appeared on The New Sleekness on 1/18/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

Like the oft-lamented “smell of books,” I’ve found that there there are some concepts that people consistently get hung up on when discussing ebooks. I used to try to puzzle out answers to these, but in this new, Zen-like approach I’m experimenting with in 2010, I’ve decided to try to actually evaluate the meanings behind the questions. Get your Desktop Rock Garden ready: we’re going behind the scenes on three of them this week.

Question 1: “How will people get their ebooks signed?”

As far as I can tell, the logic behind this question seems to go like this: authors have always signed books, and readers have always come to events to get their books signed, therefore not being able to do that = huge problem.

Here’s the logic I’d love to see people using: instead of wondering how we can adapt an older model to suit new technology, maybe we should think about what getting a book signed represents to a consumer, and see if there’s a way an ereader could make it better.

I’m not big on signed books, so it’s possible I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that they tap into a few different things: the impulse to memorialize an event, the collecting jones, and also the desire to have a unique experience directly with the author. Why else stand in line for an hour with your name spelled out on a post-it note waiting for Salman Rushdie to scrawl his signature and your name in Shalimar the Clown? (←An actual unfulfilling personal experience I’d prefer to not relive.)

We can make this a different encounter. It’s a paradigm shift. Instead of forcing people to wait in line hoping to get some small face time with an author, maybe everyone who attends the reading gets a recording of the event immediately following. Maybe the author is excited enough about being sent on tour that he writes an additional story with the book’s characters, available exclusively to those who show up at his appearances. Maybe a risk-taker even releases the first chapter of her upcoming work-in-progress and an email address where comments can be sent.

The suggestions above aren’t meant to be definitive, and more importantly, they aren’t meant to be changes that need to happen overnight. I mean for them to be examples of the ways in which we can reconsider the signing experience wholesale, instead of merely adapting old practices.

What ways would you be excited to see the signing experience change?

 

Part II in this series, Kindles For All!, can be read on The New Sleekness.

Ami Greko is the director of business development for AdaptiveBlue, working primarily with their add-on Glue. She has previously worked as a publicist at Viking Penguin and FSG, marketing director at Folio Literary Management, and digital marketing manager at Macmillan.

How To Kill A Writing Career

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This post, from Jason Sanford, originally appeared on his site on 1/10/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

This afternoon while slaving away on the novel which will rocket me to the heights of literary superstardom — maybe even to the level of Paris Hilton superstardom — insight struck. I realized I was working way too hard at this writing gig. Instead of trying to succeed through hard work, talent, and dedication, there was a much better way to reach my fictional goals.

I simply needed to thin the writing herd.

Think about it. There are thousands of fiction writers and wanna-be authors in the world. As we all know, when one species overpopulates an ecosystem all creatures are at risk of starvation until the population stabilizes. So why not knock off the competition? This way the survivors — and their fiction — will naturally float to the top of an empty literary world.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions on how to destroy a writing career. Simply retitle these suggestions as positive advice — such as "What every successful writer knows!" — and send them to both budding writers and established pros. Budding writers won’t realize the success you refer to is your own until AFTER their buds have been nipped, a la Barney Fife, while established pros are so cocky they won’t recognize what’s happening until they’re knocking on heaven’s remainder bin.

So do your part, and dump a little weed killer in the garden of literary delights by passing this "advice" to other fiction writers.

How to kill a writing career
Remember: Before sending this to a writer, retitle it in a positive way, such as "10 sure-fire ways to publishing success" or "What publishing insiders don’t want you to know."

  1. Heed the immortal writing advice of Allen Ginsberg: ”First thought, best thought." Revisions and rewriting should be left to those without the talent to be writers in the first place.
     
  2. Proper spelling and grammar are traps to keep authors down. Dare to reach greatness by following your own linguistic path.
     
  3. Only writers lacking vision worship coherent plots. So every time you sit down to write, mutter this simple chant: "James Joyce’s Ulysses is a great novel. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a great novel."
     
  4. Write only what is popular and trendy. After all, if drunk and horny vampire biker chicks are the hot thing this year, imagine how much hotter they’ll be when your book comes out three years from now.
     
  5. Embrace adjectives. If one adjective is descriptive, why not five or six in a row?
     
  6. Waste the readers’ time. After all, if readers want to drink from the fountain of your literary greatness, it’s up to them to pucker up and suck.
     
  7. Write only when the muse moves you. Only bad writers force themselves to write every day. You answer only to your muse. And don’t forget — the muse loves to drink! Lots and lots of drink!
     
  8. Guidelines are for writers afraid to push the boundaries. Not only defy every guideline you encounter, when submitting tell the editors you don’t accept their limited ideas on what fiction they should publish. Be sure to also address submissions to "Dear Editor" to show these little people their proper place in the literary supernova that is you.
     
  9. Continually act neurotic, paranoid, angry, annoyed, psychotic, or better yet, all of those at once. And remember, you can’t be a great writer unless you are addicted to something obscure and weird. (Like wow man, that dried gnat excrement is nature’s only truly righteous high!")
     
  10. Flame wars are your friend. If you don’t post a nasty repartee somewhere on the web at least once a day, how will you succeed as a writer? And be sure to engage in flame wars with other writers, editors, and literary agents. Nothing says you’ve arrived on the literary scene like a flame war!

 

 

 

Jason Sanford co-founded the literary journal storySouth, through which he runs the annual Million Writers Award for best online fiction. He won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll for one of his stories, and has also been published in Year’s Best SF 14, Interzone, Analog, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, The Mississippi Review, Diagram, Pindeldyboz, and other places. He’s published critical essays and book reviews in places like The New York Review of Science Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Fix Short Fiction Review.

Publication of Written In BLOOD is Pushed Back

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Even with the holiday season I had to move it back owing to the scope and size of the book and its plotline. I am working as hard as I can to finish it, but it does entail some serious research and organization, and I am also creating illustrations for the new video to accompany it. We hope to have the print book published and released by the end of February, with a simultaneous release of the digital ebooks in a variety of formats. In the meantime, some of the other books planned for the season have also been rescheduled. Antellus will announce their debuts as soon as they are ready to be released. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The 2nd edition of PRINCIPLES OF SELF-PUBLISHING, including new material on digital publishing, is the next book and to follow Written In BlOOD, and may be ready to release sometime in the spring.

Different Types of Merchant Accounts

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After cash, credit cards are the most widely accepted means of payment in the world. No matter what business you are running, or what product you are selling. Chances are that you will require a credit card processing system. From American Express to Visa, the brand may vary, and since there is no such thing as an individual payment gateway for each individual company. Every company may have a payment system that is unique to them, but the payment gateway is what is the essential link. But before we go into the technicalities, lets get some of the basics out of the way. Especially some of the terms just used.

Any credit card transaction on the planet acts in a predefined manner, first the customer will offer his credit card details, the credit card details are then processed through a payment gateway, and finally the credit card payment is received in a merchant account. The way in which the credit card payment is accepted is different, you could be using the credit on a EPOS (electronic point of sale terminal), or you could have a successful online store that is accepting payments. The important thing to remember is that the mode in which you are accepting the payment is not as important as having a payment gateway and a good merchant account.

Okay so the next thing to discuss here is what is a payment gateway? well a payment gateway is usually a third party system that processes the credit card transaction it could be the server an EPOS dials out to, an e-commerce system, however the term payment gateway usually refers to the latter, and once the checks are done the funds are then transferred into a merchant account. The essential component is the merchant account, the merchant account is offered by companies and based on the volume of transaction and certain other criteria; the charges and upkeep is different. No merchant account is free as the company is offering you services. Merchant accounts in general are of various categories and depending on the type of business you are running, different monthly charges, and percentage charges are applicable.

Important merchant account types

a) Regular merchant accounts – Although in business there is no such thing as a typical business, however a majority of businesses are usually treated as regular merchant accounts, they have low maintenance fees and lower rates than other merchant accounts.

b) High risk merchant accounts – This category is usually reserved for high risk credit card processing accounts, for example accounts that handle a large volume of transaction that may or may not offer a 100% authorisation rate. An example will be an outbound call centre, that attempts hundreds of credit card transactions to verify the credibility of the credit cards. There are also additional complications like currency conversion involved. Hence the term high risk merchant account.

c) Specialized merchant accounts – There are some businesses that require specialized credit card processing, or might require a specialized merchant account that caters to requirements such as offshore processing, etc. Such merchant accounts are usually referred to as specialized merchant accounts.

Congratulations: You Get To Be The Bigger Person Now

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If you’re working your author platform effectively, you’re very active online. You’re doing any or all of the following: posting to your blog, possibly posting to others’ blogs, tweeting, posting updates on Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn, participating in online discussion groups and comment threads, posting or commenting on YouTube book trailers, and maybe even podcasting. Your goal is to open a dialogue with readers and your peers, and the better your author platform, the more feedback and discussion you will generate. Much of the feedback and discussion will be enjoyable and thought-provoking, a kind of online ‘salon’. The rest of it, not so much.

An awful lot of people will have strongly held opinions with which you disagree, or which are ill-informed, or which are obviously being shared only for the sake of getting a rise out of you or casting aspersions on you or your work. But however much you may want to angrily tear into this latter group anytime they darken your virtual doorstep, however tempting it may be to respond with a biting and clever remark, you must never do it. Answering the uncouth and trollish in kind requires you to become uncouth and trollish, which can quickly escalate beyond your control and undermine all the goodwill you’ve built up to date with your community of readers and peers, and quickly turn off any newcomers to your tribe.
 
As an author, you’ll find there are two primary arenas in which you may feel it’s necessary to rain invective down upon a perceived adversary: following a bad review, or following an ill-informed or insulting post to, or about, you. First, let’s look at what happens when authors respond to negative reviews…negatively.
 
Consider this case of commercially- and critically-successful novelist Alice Hoffman, who was so outraged by a negative review (some have called it merely lukewarm) from author Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe that Hoffman ended up flaming Silman all over Twitter. Hoffman eventually went so far as to provide Silman’s phone number to her fans and request that they call Silman to defend Hoffman. It wasn’t long before the mainstream press was all over this, and not much longer before an embarrassed Hoffman began making public apologies.
Then there’s author Alain de Botton, who responded to a negative review on Caleb Crain’s blog with a number of posts that eventually escalated to the point where Botton was saying things like, “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” There’s a terrific post about the incident on Ed Rants in which de Botton responds to questions about the incident and provides an essay as part of his response as well.
 
Next, take a gander at the controversy more recently sparked by author Candace Sams on Amazon. When reader-reviewer LB Taylor posted a one-star review of Sam’s novel Electra Galaxy’s Mr Interstellar Feller, Sams responded with a series of angry responses, initially under an alias but eventually under her own name as well. When the dust had settled and the press and blogs were finished with her Sams went back and deleted all of her posts in the Amazon thread, but it was too late by then because plenty of sites and blogs (such as Babbling About Books) had already copied and re-published the worst and most disturbing of them online.
 
Prior to the Sams dustup, perhaps the best-known author outburst came from Anne Rice in 2004, also on Amazon, in response to multiple negative reviews of her novel, Blood Canticle. In a 1200-word diatribe, among other things, Rice responded to reader-critics by saying, “Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander…You have used the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies." Her entire response is reprinted on the encyclopedia dramatica site, where the term “rice out” is defined as, “To make a spectacle of oneself in response to literary criticism by insisting that one’s creative work is superior in all aspects.”
 
Now, compare these authorial meltdowns to the actions of Carla Cassidy, who posted a wry and clever rebuttal to a negative review on the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books site. SBTB’s review featured a sarcastic, snarky list of 26 reasons why Cassidy’s novel Pregnesia is the best book in the history of pregnant amnesiac romance books. Cassidy responded with her own list of 10 reasons why she loves the SBTB review, as detailed on the Saturday Writers site. According to Saturday Writers, “Carla responded with grace and humor that exactly matched the tone of the review. I don’t think I could respond so well to a negative review. I’m in awe of her.”
If you can’t craft a humorous and/or graceful response to a negative review—and the many examples of non-humorous, non-graceful responses from seasoned authors given in this post are proof enough that you can’t trust your own judgment on this—, then it’s best just to keep your mouth (and keyboard) shut entirely on such matters. As Neil Gaiman has said on his blog, “some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning.”
 
As for coping with stuff and nonsense from respondents to articles or blog posts you’ve written, or from people who are more or less just out to make you look bad, you should simply ignore such commentary when it’s clearly labeled as opinion but it may sometimes be necessary to correct inaccurate factual information posted about you or your work. If you choose to do so you must tread with the utmost care, lest a new idiom for author freak-outs turns up in common usage with your name attached to it. I don’t think I’ve yet seen a more shining example of calm, professional, classy damage control than that of Harlequin Digital Director Malle Valik in response to the firestorm of controversy that followed Harlequin’s announcement of its partnership with Author Solutions, Inc.
 
First, Malle responded personally to the many charges leveled against the partnership on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (scroll down through the comments thread to Malle’s first comment, posted on 11/18/09 at 6:48am). Next, she graciously answered some specific questions about the deal on Dear Author, then came back to respond to some very pointed and angry remarks in the comments thread following that interview. In the face of a plethora of insults and accusations, Malle kept her cool, kept a positive attitude, and remained professional. She kept the discussion on-point, and never allowed herself to stoop to the mud-slinging tone employed by many of the attackers.
 
Malle Valik is to be commended for her exemplary performance in this matter, and to be emulated by every one of us anytime we find ourselves in the unenviable shoes she was wearing last November. To do so, you must first acknowledge that as a writer, you are in the free speech business. It is your duty (and should be your honor) to defend the right of anyone to voice any opinion on any subject, however much you may disagree with that opinion or even find it offensive. While I freely acknowledge that very often, the people who put you in a mind to take the low road are not honestly attempting to engage you in a fair debate, it will do you no good to respond to them in kind. Correct factual errors if you must, but only if you’re certain you’re capable of Valikian conduct in the matter. Take action on libelous statements about you or your work if you feel they have the potential to do significant damage to your earnings or reputation, but do so in private, offline. Otherwise, your safest bet is to ignore the noise; it’s not truly worthy of your attention, anyway.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author blog.

With Kindle Royalties About To Be Set At 70%, Is It Time To Revisit Bestselling Novelist Anne Rice's Post: "Should Major Authors Think About Making Kindle (If Possible) Their Primary Publisher?"

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Many Kindle owners may care very little about issues such as author and publisher royalties, digital rights management, the finer points of Kindle book pricing, or whether Kindle authors need traditional publishers like a fish needs a bicycle. But some of these issues ultimately will have a powerful effect on the selection of books that are available to us as Kindle owners.

 
As of yesterday, the prospect of Apple unleashing a popular tablet device and negotiating great deals that would lure authors and publishers away from the Kindle was looking like the first real threat to the growing dominance of the Kindle in the field of ebook reading devices and content. 
 
Today, not so much.
 
Any fears that authors and publishers were about to begin jumping ship in droves from Amazon’s Kindle catalog were vaporized this morning when the company announced a suite of dramatic changes in its relationship with authors and publishers. The headlines will be all about the fact that Amazon is promising to begin, on June 30, paying a 70 per cent royalty on qualifying Kindle books, but there is much more to ponder in the requirements that Amazon will use to qualify authors and publishers for that 70 per cent royalty, and in the overall impact that these moves will have on the book business. Amazon never seems to be short on arrows in its quiver, and in this case its tactical moves are bound to have a chilling effect on Apple’s apparent efforts to lure authors and publishers away from the Kindle platform.
 
"Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books," said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle Content, in today’s news release. "We’re excited that the new 70 percent royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform will help us pay authors higher royalties when readers choose their books."
 
Indeed. There’s plenty for authors, publishers, and literary agents to chew on here:
  • Amazon is prepared to compensate authors and publishers more generously than they will be compensated anywhere else.
     
  • For authors who deal directly with Amazon rather than through the mediation of a publisher, royalty compensation could be astonishingly high.
     
  • Despite all the buzz about "Kindle Killers," the Kindle Store is the only real game in town if it is true, as some have claimed, that the Kindle Store currently accounts for over 90% of all ebook sales.
     
  • Even at the current 35 percent Kindle royalty, popular authors like Anne Rice are already thinking about making Kindle "their primary publisher." At 70 per cent, there may be no stopping them.
Back on December 13, Rice went on an Amazon customer forum and asked:

What do you think? If regular publishing is having a very hard time marketing and distributing books effectively, should major authors think about making Kindle (if possible) their primary publisher? Kindle would then be the one to introduce and advertise the book, and Kindle could license limited hard cover editions for those addicted to the "real book." Would this be good for authors? Would it be good for readers? Would Kindle do it?

Of course, it’s not like Amazon’s sole purpose here is to do better by authors. Like nearly every major occurrence in the economic marketplace, today’s announcement is driven a complex web of market forces, of which the key factors here are Amazon’s desire 
  • to maintain the dominance of the Kindle catalog, 
     
  • to outflank Apple in that potential ebook newcomer’s effort to negotiate with book publishers, 
     
  • to organize Kindle Store pricing into a logical $2.99 to $9.99 range (at least 20 percent below competing hardcopy prices but higher than the zero-to-99 cent range that has been growing in the Kindle Store and threatening the overall Kindle pricing structure),
     
  • to strengthen participation by authors and publishers in the Kindle text-to-speech feature and other coming Kindle features, and
     
  • to persuade publishers to play nice with the Kindle ecosystem, in part by making them aware how easily they could end up losing authors who might opt for the direct relationship whose possibility Rice raised in her aforementioned post.
Nobody but Amazon and the publishers really knows what deals, percentages, and subsidies may have informed Amazon’s previous dealings with corporate publishers of Kindle content over the past 26 months, but one thing that seems likely today is that, with the royalties and qualifying requirements noted in this 70 percent royalty option, Amazon may be pushing more and more of its corporate publishing partners in the direction of the Digital Text Platform that has been seen heretofore as a publishing platform for smaller indie publishers and self-published authors. After all, for example, participation in the text-to-speech program has never been optional for DTP publishers, so the inclusion of it as a qualifying requirement for the new royalty program suggests that publishers who have accessed the Kindle via corporate publishing channels in the past may be pushed now directly into the DTP. And, like the major music labels that participate in Amazon’s "self publisher" print-on-demand subsidiary, CreateSpace, in order to market their previously out-of-print backlist music titles, the smartest of the major book publishing houses are going to go where the best terms are. 
 
If they lag behind, they run the risk of arriving there only to find that some of their authors are already there.

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily blog.

Shipping Warning! The USPS Strikes Again!

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Like many small businesses including indie authors and publishers, we rely upon the USPS’ online shipping services to print labels for our shipments. I’ve been especially pleased with using Priority Mail to send books out when time is important.  Well, no longer.

On Friday, I printed three mailing labels Priority Mail, for mailing after the long weekend.  The Post Office was closed on Monday, so I shipped them out Tuesday, from our POst Office counter. All three were returned to me today, labelled Return to Sender: Bad Meter Date.  When I explained to my regular clerk that they were closed Monday, he said it didn’t matter, they could no longer pass through a package with a printed label except on the actual date shown on the label.

What The ????

I called Washington DC — an amazing excercise in  futility.  It seems that despite my packages being run through for years, no matter the date on the label, the Postmaster General, John Potter has determined — within the last coiup0le of weeks was the date I got, that they will no longer accept packages for Priority Mail shipping unless the label is printed the actual day the item is presented.  He is concerned about the Post Office’s reputation.

What The ????

It seems that some people unfairly ask for refunds of postage when the label date indicates an earlier shipping date than the actual shipping date. My mention of the fact the office was closed Monday did no good, nor my mention of the fact that each package is scanned into the system and the scan date is the date that the package is entered into the system, not the printed label date. No matter, my pre-paid postage is dead.

So. If I understad this properly, the USPS Postmaster General John Potter has, in the interest of maintaining the repuytation of the POstral Service, determined that without so much as an online warning, they willo make shipping for their regular business customers, as inconvenient as possible, thereby improving their glowing reputation.  Sounds just like Washington DC, doesn’t it?

The USPS has put a loty of money — taxpayer money I might add — over the past few years into marketing their services for business shippers.  They stressed the convenience of what they offer in all their TV advertising.  Yet, this decision.

To put my own troub les into perspective, my local Postmaster told me to watch where he went, as he slid to the back, behind their counter.  He called out — "we’ve got a lot of regular busi8ness shippers now," and motioned towards a huge laundry dolly. Wheeled canvas, about four feet on a side and filled two feet above the top with Postal Priority Packages. 

"These are from one shipper," he explained,"They were all returned because he printed the lables on Friday, and presented them after the Holiday on Tuesday.  I’m sure he’s not going to be happy."

I’m sure.  So remember, if you can’t take the time to go to the post office to deliver your package today, don’t print the label, or it will come bouncing back.  Even if it’s a PO Holiday. Call them, instead, for a pick-up.  This will help their bottom line about as much as the PR nightmare this new ruling will create among the business customers the Postal Service has been working to attract for so long.

Oh, by the way, if you think this is a hare-brained new regulation — you can always write John Potter:

US Postmaster General

US Postal Service

475 Lenfant Plaza SW

Washington, DC 20260

Alien Languages: How Foreign Would They Really Be?

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This post, from Juliette Wade, originally appeared on her TalkToYoUniverse blog on 1/10/10.

This post was requested by CWJ, my friend from the forum over at Analog – thanks so much for the question, CWJ! It also strikes me that this may be a timely topic for people who are considering the Na’vi language that was used in Avatar.

CWJ asked: 

Juliette, I’d like to hear more about (constructing) non-human languages. In particular, if Chomsky’s idea of universal innate grammars is correct, does that mean there are only certain avenues down which humans can go, which might be different from aliens? That is, maybe there are some concepts or constructs that would be difficult for humans to truly conceptualize. Or the other way around. In short, I am interested in the possibility that communication may be very difficult.

This is a complex question, so I’ll take it a bit at a time.

First, the Chomsky question. Chomsky proposed the idea that there was some basic sense of grammar universal to all humans, that was passed on as an instinct.

Now, human languages are very diverse. The most thorough article I’ve seen on this topic was recently published in the Economist, and you can check it out here.

In fact, it’s hard to say how much of human language is innate and how much is learned. Humans are oriented towards language from birth or even earlier; this is well known, as newborn infants prefer to listen to language sounds over non-language sounds, and their mother’s native language over other languages (studies measured strength of sucking response!). They also go through a number of language development stages, like early babbling, even if they don’t have any auditory language input (say, with non-hearing babies). Non-hearing babies are also known to babble with their fingers. People have also looked at pidgin languages, which tend to take on grammatical structure – and very similar grammar structure – when they’re passed on to the second generation, and used this as evidence for a more extensive innate language faculty.
 


Read the rest of the post on Juliette Wade‘s TalkToYoUniverse blog.