Publetariat

What's The Big Idea?

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This post by Nick Green originally appeared on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? on 10/3/14.

I shelved the blog post I was going to write, because something caught my eye and made it pop out in anger. You may or may not have noticed that last month was the deadline for The Big Idea Competition, an apparent bid to find the ‘next big thing’ (you’re not yawning already?).

This is the brainchild of Barry Cunningham, well-known as the editor who discovered Harry Potter, which was the biggest Big Thing in publishing history, and also Tunnels, which… wasn’t. The premise is simple. As in, simply infuriating.

‘Have you got an idea for a story that children will love?’ the website asked. ‘Then tell us in 500 words! Win the chance of seeing your idea transformed into a book, movie, TV or theatre production!’

There is so much wrong with this premise – in fact the whole concept is so breathtakingly cynical and disingenuous – that I hardly know where to begin. The supposed rationale, as explained in its publicity materials, sounds reasonable enough: there are lots of people out there who might have a great idea for a story, but who lack the skill / patience / masochism to actually sit down and write it. But don’t worry! the organisers assure us. We’ve got stacks of authors and playwrights and impresarios right here! You come up with a good idea, and we’ll do the rest. Simples.

 

Click here to read the full post on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?

 

You Know What You Can Do With Your DRM

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 9/7/14.

Okay, folks. You heard it here first. I’M NEVER GOING TO BUY ANOTHER BOOK WITH DRM ON IT.

Yes, that’s me shouting. Do I hear you asking why?

I’m so glad you asked. But first, for those who don’t know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially, it’s an attempt by suppliers to ensure that only legitimate purchasers of electronic content (books, software, music etc) are actually able to make use of their products. Wikipedia’s description is as good as any other. Or you could read this one, which describes the restrictions imposed by DRM.

You might think DRM is relatively new. It’s not. The acronym might be, but the technique has been around from pretty much the time when personal computers exploded onto the scene in the early eighties. Products such as dBase III, word processors, spreadsheets and the like were protected with licences. Without the licence key, you couldn’t run them or do anything else with them. Other software companies came up with dongles – a hardware device fitted to the machine running the program. The idea was supposed to be that pirates couldn’t profit from the developers’ hard work.

Uh-huh.

Two things happened.

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s blog.

 

Giving Readers What They Truly Crave

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This post by Joe Wikert originally appeared on his Digital Content Strategies on 8/11/14.

Publishers need to take a page out of the retailer playbook. You’ve undoubtedly noticed how good certain online retailers are at suggesting additional products related to the one you’re about to purchase.

Amazon is arguably the king here with their “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” recommendation sections. These elements typically appear just below the product image and above the product details. That’s prime real estate on the Amazon product page so you can bet these elements drive a lot of add-on sales.

You’re probably familiar with content recommendation links and widgets that have sprouted up all over the web the past few years. Taboola is a leader in this space and they specialize in offering links to related content from other publishers. For example, if you’re reading an article on USA Today’s website you’ll see a headline towards the bottom that says “Sponsor Content” followed by links to a handful of related articles from other sources.

I believe this is simply scratching the surface of content recommendation and we’ll see much more sophisticated cross-pollination in the coming months and years. I also believe many of these will be human-curated and implemented via a lightweight post-production model. An example will help illustrate.

 

Click here to read the full post on Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies.

 

Publisher Sues “Dear Author” Blog and its Owner, Jane Litte

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This post by Pete Morin originally appeared on his blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Well it’s no surprise, I suppose, that publishing has its share of loons, scammers and reprobates, but the increasingly bizarre case of Ellora’s Cave deserves its own chapter.

Last week, avid reader, book blogger, and lawyer Jane Litte published The Curious Case of Ellora’s Cave, in which she discussed the growing turbulence inside the publisher of erotic romance (the company and the person), where authors, editors and tax collectors remain unpaid as owner Tina Engler brags about “her Rodeo Drive shopping trips and her new property purchase in West Hollywood.” It’s a jaw dropping article, worth a trip over there to see.

Now news comes that, in response to Jane’s post, Ms. Engler and her company have sued Jane Litte personally for defamation. Of all the blogs in the book community that have reported on the Ellora’s Cave debacle, Engler sues the lawyer.

Well, it must have been her security detail that recommended this course of action. They’re on the case!

When Jane establishes a legal fund, I’ll be helping out.

UPDATE: The Complaint can be read here.

 

5 Ways Your Competition Can Help You Promote Your Books

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This post by Penny C. Sansevieri originally appeared on PR Toolkit on 9/24/14.

If you want to market successfully, you need to be smart. Why reinvent the wheel if there are more effective ways to promote yourself and your books? If you take the time to see what your competitors are doing, you’ll discover plenty of ideas and inspiration to keep you going – without resorting to only imitating what others do.

You’re simply being a smart marketer, and that means keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s happening. Understanding your market means being aware of who else is in the space. What books have they written? How do they price their books? How do they reach their audience? When you learn these things, you’ll have a better understanding of your market, and you’ll be in the perfect position to set yourself apart from your competitors.

This isn’t about copying anyone. Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery in this case. But you should know who else is in your market. You’ll gain so many insights from keeping tabs on your competitors. You’ll also learn some valuable marketing tips, and if you ever wonder how to get your message out more effectively you may find the answers from observing what your peers say and do to keep their fans engaged.

Here are some ways you can keep up with the competition:

 

1. Google search and alerts:

You start by looking for others in your market. You’ll find names and book titles, but you’ll also discover ways to touch base with your fans. No matter your topic, search for authors and books, but ignore the big names and titles. At their level, they can do just about anything and they’ll succeed – that’s one of the bonuses of their success, they are now their own brands (think Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Deepak Chopra). Look for the level below this supergroup because these are the authors who are working hard to break through.

 

Click here to read the full post on PR Toolkit.

 

Ten Reasons Why The Gatekeepers Of Self-Publishing Have Become… You

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This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 9/30/14.

One of the biggest driving forces behind authors who self-publish has been the declaration that writing has become stifled by “the gatekeepers of the publishing world.” Many writers now go straight to self-publishing. Be self-published? Sounds great! Let’s do it! We can all help each other, right? Right? Guys?

The online self-publishing clique has become incredibly judgemental of its own kind. These didacts are scaring the heck out of those wanting a nice gentle, creative, inclusive experience. Simply, self-published authors have become dictators of their own industry. Here’s why.

1. Online Herdism
Thou shalt not pay for any kind of professional promotion. Thou shalt not pay for book formatting. Thou shalt only use your peers with no knowledge of editing a book to – um, edit your book. If you pay for services, you are dumb. Yeah! Just look at the herd go off on paid book reviews without even understanding the different types of paid review or how to use them! Come on, people. Any book needs promotion. After all, you just spent years of your life writing the damn thing. Give it a life. Building a professional book and marketing it with assistance is nothing to be ashamed about, and this truly has to stop being a “thing.” Forum comments start with “I COMPETELY AGREE WITH YOU!!!!” Or “I HATE paid reviews!” or “NONSENSE!!!!” (I noticed it’s always capital letters, many punctuation marks and absolutes, just to be THE MOST AGREEING PERSON!!!!) I always look up the naysayers’ books on these forums, and 9/10 have sold no books whatsoever. But they are “being true to the spirit of indie publishing.” Pffff…

 

2. Everyone Is A Self-Publishing Expert – And Get It All Wrong

 

Click here to read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

 

Distinguishing Between Straight-Up Advice and Paradigm Shift

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This post by Jane Friedman originally appeared on her site on 5/11/12.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a column for Writer Unboxed, “Should You Focus on Your Writing or Platform?” In short, I said it’s a balancing act, but there are times when you should probably emphasize one over the other.

It generated more than 100 responses, many insightful and valuable, from working writers, established authors, editors, and agents. My colleague Christina Katz was one of the last to comment. Here’s part of what she said.

This post really makes me chuckle … I wonder how much time folks spent reading and chewing on and commenting on and spreading the word about a post ABOUT platform rather than actually spending any amount of time actually cultivating and working on their own platform?

I am a person who does not distinguish between writing, selling, specializing, self-promotion, and continuing ed, and also a person who sees all of these things as essential and necessary to my writing career success. …

For me, there is no separation. Writing is the center. (If you read The Writer’s Workout, you saw the diagram.) But it’s all critical. There’s nothing to debate.

Read her entire comment here.

I’m (mostly) in the same boat as Christina. I find it impossible and irrelevant to distinguish between writing activities and platform building activities. My approach is far too holistic.

So why did I write a post splitting them up?

Because most writers don’t and CAN’T see them as one activity. They’re still asking questions that show they need some concrete ideas on how to manage what they perceive (and what can be) a very real split in one’s life.

 

Click here to read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

How Copyright Law Protects Art From Criticism

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This post by Noah Berlatsky originally appeared on Pacific Standard on 9/29/14.

Aesthetics aren’t supposed to affect the law. You can’t dump a bucket of fishheads on Kevin Costner, even if he is a festering boil on the body of American cinema. You can’t hack Amazon and delete every copy of every Pearl Jam album, no matter how ludicrous the bellowing of Eddie Vedder may be. Ruth’s Journey, Donald McCaig’s authorized sequel to Gone With the Wind, which will be published later this month, may be wonderful or it may be horrible or it may just be blasé. But, no matter its quality, you’re not legally allowed to sell pirated copies of it.

The rationale here is easy enough to follow. The law is supposed to apply to everyone equally. Aesthetic judgments are contradictory and individual. Some benighted people may even like Kevin Costner or Eddie Vedder. Ruth’s Journey, told from the viewpoint of Gone With the Wind‘s Mammy, looks fairly tedious to me from reviews, but other folks may love it. That’s why, in a famous copyright decision dealing with banal advertising art, Oliver Wendell Holmes declared:

It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits.

Holmes’ admonition is often cited in intellectual property cases, and it’s widely seen as the correct legal position on copyright issues. Courts, everyone agrees, shouldn’t be ruling on whether Kevin Costner or Eddie Vedder or Ruth’s Journey are good art or bad art. Courts should enforce copyright regardless of how good or bad the copyrighted work may be.

 

Click here to read the full post on Pacific Standard.

 

Likeable, Relatable, and Real

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This post by Annie Cardi originally appeared on Ploughshares on 9/17/14.

When I was a junior in high school, we read The Great Gatsby in English class. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I knew the rest of my family hated it. (They’re Hemingway fans.) “Ugh, that Daisy,” my mom said. “Who cares?” Obviously a lot of readers care about Daisy and Gatsby, but many readers also place a priority on likeability.

On popular review sites, reviewers refer to everyone from Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley to Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester to the cast of A Visit from the Goon Squad as unlikeable. Part of this is a personal taste issue, but it also deals with what kind of people we want to surround ourselves with. A novel that’s over three-hundred pages long is a fair time commitment—it can be grating to spend that much time with a character you wouldn’t want to interact with on a daily basis. Likeability is about ease and comfort and a kind of emotional bond. Connected to that is the issue of relatability, which NPR host and producer Ira Glass brought up when he tweeted that Shakespeare’s plays and characters aren’t relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Writing: Word Counts in Fiction – How Long Is A Novel?

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This post by Debbie Young originally appeared on ALLi on 9/18/14.

Is it a novel? Is it a novella? Is it a novelette? It can be hard to decide what to call your book, but it’s important to get it right so that you don’t confuse or disappoint readers. This post offers guidelines suggested by experienced self-publishing author members of ALLi.

When promoting any work of fiction, it’s important to use the right terms of reference. This will create appropriate expectations in your readers and help guard against disgruntled reviews such as these:

“This turned out to be a short story, not a novel!” (left on a single short story)

“I hate short stories hence my one-star review.” (left on a novel-length collection of short stories)

“I only read non-fiction.” (left on a full-length novel with a cover and title that could have been misconstrued as a biography)

It’s particularly important to get it right when promoting ebooks because the purchaser cannot physically assess the length of the book by picking it up in his hands. Yes, most sites state an approximate page length, but few readers check that detail, which is usually tucked away in small print along with the ISBN and publisher’s name. (Why approximate? Because the actual page length of any ebook will vary in practice according to the settings of the ereader that it’s read on, depending on the text size the user has chosen.)

 

Common Fiction Classifications

 

Click here to read the full post on ALLi.

 

4 Completely Scientific Ways To Know If Your Content Is Compelling

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This post by Jennifer Miller originally appeared on Fast Company’s Co.Create on 9/23/14.

What makes for compelling art? Any creator who has given half a thought to paying the rent, or achieving immortality, has considered what makes art sell. We know that the notion of quality–the idea that “the best” art and marketing and media reaches the most people–is insufficient to explain what gives some creations mass appeal. So why do people–large number of people–find books, ads, movies and art works compelling? How can we know, ahead of time, what will pique our curiosity and sustain our interest? Jim Davies, an associate professor at Carleton University’s Institute of Cognitive Science and director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory wanted to find out. The result is a theory of compellingness, outlined in his book Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe.

Davies’s entry point into what makes art riveting, however, did not start with an analysis of best-seller lists or top-40 charts. He came to the question of compellingness through the one thing in human experience that has inspired passionate feelings (good and bad) in the majority of the world’s population: religion. “Unless a religion is compelling in some way, it’s not going to take off,” he says. “Religion has explanations, stories, rituals, and that all caters to our basic psychological proclivities.” Today, he says, we treat old religions, like the Greek myths, as though they are works of art. “Those were stories that people wholeheartedly believed. Even an atheist can look at stories from Bible and admit that they’re good stories.” So what makes religion, and its compelling counterpart, art, truly riveting? And what impact will that have on the way we create and consume culture?

 

Click here to read the full post on Co.Create.

 

You’ve Been Writing Sentences Wrong All Your Life! Find Out Why

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This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 9/21/14.

The sentence. It’s the building block of all books. Without it, we may have a poem, a song, a movie, a painting, an interpretative dance. But we sure as scuttlebutt don’t have a book. Most of us learn how to write (and diagram!) sentences in grade school. Out of the many potential pitfalls of writing a story, surely the simple sentence isn’t likely to be one of them. But what if I said you’ve been writing sentences wrong all your life?

And I’m not talking grammar here, folks. You can have a perfectly parsed, perfectly punctuated sentence that would have that grade school teacher of yours blushing for pride—and it can still be wrong as wrong for your novel. (I’m also not talking motivation-reaction units, or MRUs, which I’ve addressed elsewhere.)

Why We’re All Writing Sentences Wrong
So what’s with this pandemic of poor sentences? Why are even the best diagrammers amongst us at risk?

Basically, it all comes down to this: we totally take the sentence for granted. The very fact that we’ve all been writing more-or-less grammatically correct sentences for most of our lives means we don’t even think about what we’re doing. Subject? Check. Predicate? Check. Period at the end? Check. Done.

That may be good enough for your latest email to the bank. But it’s not good enough for an author.

 

Click here to read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors.

 

21 Social Media Conversation Starters

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This post by Kim Garst originally appeared on her site on 9/22/14.

Do you need a social media jump-start? Are your posts falling flat, or are you struggling to come up with new and interesting things to say?
Following are 21 social media conversation starters you can use to get your fans and followers to start talking!

1. Request feedback
Ask for feedback on your products, services or website. Example: “Are there any products you wish we would carry?”.

2. Be funny
Jokes, memes, funny stories and humorous videos all grab attention and encourage your followers to be part of the conversation.

3. Give the inside scoop
Your fans will appreciate being let in on a little-known fact or a behind-the-scenes story. Example: “Did you know that our CEO recently learned to ride a bike…at the age of 53!”.

4. Share a personal story
Showing your personal side is one of the best ways to get people to share their own personal experiences!

5. Cite an industry statistic
Sharing a relevant statistic shows you’re on top of the latest research in your niche; and these types of posts are great for getting shares and retweets.

 

Click here to read the full post on Kim Garst’s site.

 

How To Diversify Your Income Beyond Your Book

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This post by Kristen Eckstein originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 9/5/14.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a children’s book author, fiction writer, non-fiction how-to author, business person, or even a fine artist. The fact is, in this modern age of book publishing, you’re in business…

Period.

You’re in sales, you’re in the business of selling books, and hopefully you’re in the business of using your books as a gateway to make even more money with external products and services.

Any seasoned author will tell you that you won’t quickly get rich off book sales profits and royalties alone. The average traditionally-published non-fiction book royalty is a whopping 6% after print cost and the distributor’s discount.

That’s about 9 cents on a book that retails for $10. To make back the average advance of $500 for this type of book, you’d have to sell 5,556 copies. That’s over 5,500 copies before you’d see another penny from the publisher!

On the same indie-published book (that is, you own the distribution rights and publish under your own name, not through a self-publishing services company or vanity publisher), you’d make about $1.50 per copy.

To make $500 in book sales alone, you’d still need to sell over 300 copies.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Future of Ink.

 

How I Made Record Sales in August

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This post by Elizabeth Barone originally appeared on her blog on 9/20/14.

I’ve been meaning to do this sort of write-up for a while, but I’m always hesitant because I don’t want it to seem like I’m bragging or whining. Here’s the thing, though: writing is my full-time job. Just like any other business, it’s important to track what is and isn’t working. I also strongly believe in sharing information; I don’t see other authors as competition. Being that I’ve been sort of coaching a couple of authors new to indie publishing, I think it’s even more important for me to share what I’m learning.

I’m going to share my actual sales numbers and income. I’m a little nervous about this, because I am far from making a full-time living off of my books. But I would like to track what I’ve been doing and swap some ideas with you.

Let’s get started.

 

August Releases
Becoming Natalie (Book #3, Becoming Natalie Series)

Becoming Natalie: The Complete Collection (Books #1-3 in the Becoming Natalie Series)

 

August Marketing
Uploaded Becoming Natalie to Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo for pre-order and added links to series sales page on my website.

Serialized Raising Dad on my blog, posting a new chapter every day.

Gave away the first five ESX books via my email newsletter.

Offered a signed limited edition ESX postcard to email subscribers.

Posted a gallery of photos from the real life setting of the Becoming Natalie series.

Posted a cover reveal for Becoming Natalie.

Made an effort to update my blog at least once a week with relevant pop culture or social topics.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes MANY more marketing bullet items, actual sales results and further analysis, on Elizabeth Barone’s blog.