Publetariat

Scrivener: 3 Reasons You Should Use It For Your Book

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I used Scrivener for my latest book, Prophecy. It’s been a truly life-changing experience after the dreadful cutting and pasting process in MS Word that plagued my last novel, Pentecost. I am now entirely converted and am also an evangelist for the product.

I used Scrivener happily without reading the Help (because I hate reading the Help) but then I found David Hewson’s ‘Writing a Novel with Scrivener‘ which I highly recommend. It will convert you and make your writing life a whole lot easier, I promise!

 

Here are 3 reasons you should be using Scrivener (which is on Mac and PC now so you have no excuse.) It’s just US$49 and you can use it for all your books, fiction and non-fiction as well as academic publications and loads more. No, I’m not an affiliate but I truly do believe in the product!

(1) You can write in scenes then drag and drop to re-order.

If this was the only feature of Scrivener, it would still be enough for me!

I write in sporadic scenes, not in a linear fashion so the final scene is often one of the first I write. I’m already plotting novel #3 and have maybe 5 scenes I could set down right now, but I wouldn’t have a clue where they go in the story yet.

So for the Prophecy work in progress I had all these scenes but it was only in the 2nd edit that I decided on the order they needed to go in. Scrivener makes it easy to drag and drop the scenes to re-order the scenes. There’s no cutting and pasting and no huge Word files to manipulate.

I also like the cork-board view of the scenes. If you use index cards, you’ll be at home here!

(2) Auto-create Kindle and ePub files.

This is a game-changer.

Compiling for .mobi

You can now create your own ebooks by compiling and exporting from Scrivener which is under $50, which once paid you can use over and over again. You obviously need to check your created files carefully but for plain text novels with little complications, this is a no-brainer.

I still recommend using professional formatters if you have complicated books or lots of images, but for basic books, you can just use Scrivener. This is also great for providing files to beta-readers and for reviewing your book in the way many will now consume it. You can also export to Doc and other formats including Latex if you want to format in more complicated ways.

The point behind Scrivener is that book length works can be complicated and easier to write in chunks, but when you want to submit them you need it in one document. Scrivener compiles them based on how you have structured your Parts/ Chapters/ Scenes and also by how you define the compile and export settings. There are preset defaults but you can also customize, and there are lots of helpful videos and a forum in case you have trouble.

I have just added a video to my Ebook Publishing mini-course that shows you how to do this if you’re interested in more detail.

(3) Project Binders can also hold notes, research, pictures and more so you have one place for the whole ecosystem of your book

There is one manuscript/draft folder within your Scrivener project and then there are other folders which aren’t compiled into the final document. You can use these for research or for character sketches, for pictures and other associated media as well as pasting scenes you don’t know what to do with (I do that a lot).

You can also split the screen while you are writing so you can reference the notes at the same time as writing text. I use a great deal of art history in my books so having the painting or image in the split screen is useful so I get the details right.

One memorable image is the Escher print of angels and demons (shown right) which is on the wall of a character’s study. It was great to be able to see it on the page as I wrote.

Using Scrivener for my own novel, Prophecy

My own process for Prophecy has been as follows:

* Write first draft scenes in Write Or Die or Pages app on the iPad which I use for writing in the library and out of the house. I have found this the most effective way to write fiction now since my home office is orientated towards podcasts, interviews, videos, product creation and the business of The Creative Penn. I need a different space for making stuff up.

* Paste the scenes into Scrivener and move them around as well as revise scene by scene within the program. It’s easier to revise on bite-size chunks like scenes.

* At the end of every day, compile and export a .doc file which I email to myself on Gmail so I always have a backup of my work. Gmail is online storage so you’ll always be able to find this again. I also back on an external hard-drive and monthly on Amazon S3 cloud storage (paranoid, me??)

* After the first draft is completed, I compile the full .doc and print it out. Read, scribble, self-edit, destroy, rework. Write some more scenes and fill in the blanks.

* Edit full 2nd draft on Scrivener and repeat print and self-edit, then repeat print and self-edit until satisfied

* When I’m finally happy with the draft, I distribute to my editor to review and provide feedback. Then I make changes and send to beta readers.

* Make changes on Scrivener and compile for the final time and output for Kindle and submission to Smashwords.

Once you have the master project saved, you can always go back and make any changes and recompile. It’s a brilliant system and I am definitely going to keep using Scrivener. I can’t imagine writing without it now and in 2012, I will also be revising my non-fiction work using it too.

Are you a Scrivener convert? Do you have any questions about it?

 

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Author Blogging 101: Blogging Platforms & Why I Love WordPress

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I had a book design website once. It was one of those “web 1.0″ websites that you put up because you know you need one, or at least everyone says you do.

It was built with a nifty Mac tool called Rapidweaver and for what it was, it was okay.

It took a lot of time to design and build the 6 or 8 pages and I struggled to get it working right. There were pages describing services and some samples of books I’d designed. The usual thing.

Looking at the little website, I realized there was one question I couldn’t answer:

Why would anyone ever come here twice?

Once you had read about the services and looked at the samples, there was nothing left to do. It was depressing. I couldn’t see how it was going to do me any good, although now I could point people to my company’s website.

Enter Blogging

I tried to use the tools that came with Rapidweaver to add a blog to the site, but it just wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to. And that turned out to be my good luck.

I started reading about blogging, and discovered WordPress.

Even though I had been reading blogs for a while, I had no idea there were different blogging platforms with their own strenths and weaknesses.

For instance, right now you can blog lots of different ways:

  • With WordPress.org software on your own domain
  • On the WordPress.com domain, where you can get a blog for free
  • On Google’s Blogger.com, another very popular platform
  • With Tumblr, where people who seem to like posting photos or other creative work blog
  • On TypePad, a platform hosting many top blogs
  • Or on Movable Type, another robust blogging platform used by big companies and small.

(Note that some of these services are completely free, some have a free trial that then turns into a subscription, and some rely on you setting up your own domain with an internet service provider [ISP]).

Everyone seemed to suggest WordPress software, and I soon understood why.

 

What’s Great About WordPress

Since WordPress is the only blogging platform I’ve used, this doesn’t imply anything about any of the others. But I was immediately struck by how easy it was to do things that once took me quite a while. You could easily:

  • Add an article (or post, in WordPress language), for instance. This took a fair amount of work on my static website. With the WordPress software, it was a matter of dumping the text in, filling in a few fields, and hitting “Publish.”
  • Add a page. In WordPress, you can add a page as easily as a post, and just as quickly.
  • Add stuff to the sidebar. WordPress also makes this very easy, with a whole bunch of pre-coded things like “Favorite Posts”-type lists. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty easy to add other things like badges and social media widgets, too.
  • Change the look. With thousands of different “themes” available free, you can change the whole look and design of your site in a moment. The ability to customize the software is built right in.

It turned out it was much easier to reproduce the pages from my old website—some of which are still somewhere on this blog—and have a hybrid site. WordPress, along with all the amazing add-ins from thousands of developers, make it possible.

Expanding in Many Directions

WordPress is open-source software, and encourages all kinds of software that extend the way you can use it in many directions.

  1. Themes allow you to change the look of the site, add hierarchy, organize content for use by lots of different kinds of WordPress installations. They can also include their own programming abilities, creating photo portfolios or complete e-commerce sites on top of the WordPress foundation.
  2. Plugins add functions like membership site credentials, e-commerce capabilities, spam protection, new classes of Pages you can create, and thousands of other things.

But for blogging, right out of the box, without much customization at all, WordPress is powerful software that’s

  • constantly being improved
  • is available free of charge,
  • is supported by a huge community of users and developers
  • can grow with you for years to come.

That’s why I love WordPress. It made the transition to real blogging fun and enjoyable and immediately understandable. And the software just keeps getting better.

Data

The Book Designer blog runs on the Thesis theme by Chris Pearson.
There are 12 widgets in the 2 sidebars and 19 plugins that do everything from filtering out 106,872 spam comments (as of today), to providing contact forms, doing search engine optimization, creating audio players and the floating social media share buttons sliding up and down the left margin.

 

 

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

Blog Comments: What To Do When They Just Don't Like You

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This post, by Alice Bradley, originally appeared on the Babble Voices blog on 2/3/12.

Having addressed reader reviews in the last post, I now move on, AS PROMISED, to blog comments. I am nothing if not trustworthy! You can let me hold your bag when you go to the ladies’ room! Or men’s room! Whichever!

Why do you have so many pens in your bag? And why do none of them work?

Now. Blog comments on your blog (that part is important*) are an entirely different animal from reader reviews, in that 1) they are meant for you, and therefore 2) it is appropriate, and often necessary, for you to respond to them. If you’ve enabled comments, it means you want feedback and discussion among your readers. You’re part of your community, so you should get in there as well.

You can’t control what your readers think, and this is both unfortunate and fortunate. Unfortunate in that sometimes a reader will dislike what you said or simply dislike you, and that can sting. Fortunate in that if you could control your reader’s thoughts we’d all be living in some creepy dystopia where you control everything, and you’d probably like that, LITTLE MS. CONTROL FREAK. God! What’s your blog? I’m going to go write an angry comment on it.

It’s pretty obvious what to do when your commenters love you or at least respect you and want you to respond to their comments: you respond, right? (Unless they’re demanding your home address and/or your blood type. You might want to demur in that case.) It’s all quite simple, until that day, the one where you finally get it: the unhappy commenter. The reader who thinks you suck. The person who knows you are an utter fraud and liar and kitten-kicker and calls you on it.

Congratulations!

Listen, if no one cared you wouldn’t have received a comment like this. Either the commenter is annoyed (but cares enough to share his or her annoyance) OR either people care about you and that really gets this commenter’s goat, so he/she had to lash out. Pretty much every blogger who’s read by more people than her immediate family will deal with criticism, in one form or another. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay. There, there.

Now that you’ve gone for a walk and maybe petted a cat for a while (if you like cats), ask yourself a few questions. Like so:

1. Does the reader have a valid point?

 

Read the rest of the post on Babble Voices.

Building Your Author Platform

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You’ve worked very hard to write your book and submitted it to appropriate agents only to be told they and the publishers aren’t interested because nobody knows who you are. That quickly becomes a dog chasing his tail or a catch-22 problem. How can you become a known and admired author if no one will publish you? The fix for this is to develop a platform or a fan base. The larger your followership becomes, the more books you will sell. The publishers want to use this as a marketing guarantee. It makes their marketing efforts easier and makes them more money sooner. So, how do you build a platform?

It’s not easy but it is doable. Here are some suggestions you may find helpful.

Facebook, UTube, & Twitter—Social networks are a free, excellent way to become known to people who count. Seek relationships with readers, other authors, book publishers, agents, reviewers, genera bloggers, and anyone interested in whatever you write about.

Book Signings—Don’t expect many sales at the signings. Instead, seek positive relationships with owners, managers, and staff who will hand sell your book long after you’re gone.

Interviews—This is a potential treasure chest. Radio interviews are the best because you do them from phone wherever you want to. I did so many radio interviews, that I was eventually offered my own show, which did for two and a half years. TV is more difficult because you must do it from or through a studio. Newspaper interviews can be done from anywhere that is mutually convenient; however, they are getting more difficult to get because of the weakening newspaper industry. Seek a good media booking agent to help you make all these connections. Make the interviewer look good.

Book Fairs—These are good ways to meet the reading public. Some are expensive, so pick and choose wisely.

Industry Trade Shows— These worked very well for me. I would book a couple of adjoining booth spaces, fill them with tables, put colorful table clothes on them, and set up collapsible wire racks. I would fill them with my books and other good books in my genre. I would give speeches and/or workshops and provide my mobile bookstore. I became very well-known for this customer base.

Regional Bookseller Trade Shows— Yes, the Book Expo America is better known, but it’s huge and very expensive. It is worth attending for the networking opportunities and education. If you really want to sell your books, however, go to the regional trade shows. To learn about these, go to http://www.bookweb.org/resources/regionals.html

Book Reviews— These are useful to let book buyers know about you and your book. Even the largest review services have begun charging for their reviews, so use them wisely Reviews make for a good source of marketing blurbs. Never send a book in the blind and expect to get a review—huge waste of money. Be sure to check the reviewer’s submission guidelines and adhere to them.

Book Award Contests— These can get expensive, so be judicious as to how many you register for.

Email Campaigns to Bookstores— Check with the American Booksellers Association for mailing lists at http://bookweb.org/indiebound/indiessentials and at http://bookweb.org/membership/products .

Speaking Engagements— As I mentioned before, this is a wonderful way to become known and respected.

Book Clubs— I went to a mini-trade show for military books, linked up with the editor from Doubleday’s Military Book Club, and sold 25,000+ copies each of two of my titles. They also used my printer and allowed me to participate in their printings of my books at greatly reduced prices because of the economy of scale.

These are some platform enhancing venues I have used to good effect in the past. If you find only one or two that work for you, you’re ahead of the game. Remember, you’re competing against 500,000+ new books a year. You have to work hard to get seen in a crowd like that.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

KDP Select Free Promotion — Discoverability Experiment: One Month Later and Feeling Fine!

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As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits back up to the top of the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. And, as I wrote in Part Two, not only did I achieve this goal, but I also had fantastic success in selling my books immediately after the free promotion was over. In addition, I was now selling a significant number of books in Kindle, UK, and I had started to have a large number of borrows of Maids of Misfortune, all unexpected but delightful consequences of enrolling a book in the KDP Select program.

While not everyone has had the same kind of success using KDP Select, a number of authors have reported large numbers of downloads, followed by better rankings, and increased sales. These suggest that my experience was not a fluke. See David Kazzie’s post “How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved my Book” as one example.

However, there also seem to have been a significant number of authors who have been disappointed with their results. Caroline McCray, one of the most successful KDP Select authors, has done a very thoughtful post on the pros and cons of the program, with a clear description of how factors like the percentage of your sales that are on Amazon and your rank on the best seller lists, can affect how useful using KDP Select might be for you. I can see that I fit her description of those authors who might benefit, since 96% of my income came from Amazon in 2010, and I was already on one of the best seller lists on Amazon and close enough to the top 100 in other lists to mean that an increase in sales would affect my rankings and make my book more visible.

Now that a month has passed, as promised, I am going to report on my numbers and what my strategy for the future is going to be.

My two-day free promotion of my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune was December 30-31, 2011. During those two days the book was downloaded 15, 576 times, and, the first week it went back on sale, the average sales of Maids of Misfortune and my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, combined, was 501 books a day (the price of each book is $2.99.) The second week in January the average number of books sold was 253 a day (and I had stopped thinking that I was going to be in the big leagues with Konrath and company.) The third week the average was 151 a day and the fourth week the average had dropped to 107 books a day. For the whole month, the average number of books sold was 236 a day. (A vast improvement from the 31 books a day for November or 35 books a day average for December that I had been selling.)

And, although my sales steadily dropped after the first week of January, by the end of the month I had, nevertheless, sold a total of 7,323 of books. Seventy-five percent of them were Maids of Misfortune; the rest were sales of Uneasy Spirits. (In December the newer book, Uneasy Spirits, made up 55% of my sales). In addition, 1272 people borrowed one of my books as part of the Amazon Prime Lending option.

I have to take a deep breath here. This month, my income was more than twice what I made in any given month in my entire career as a full professor of history (not being the Newt Gingrich kind of historian — smile.)

Apart from the sales and the money I made this month, which will go a long way to cover the income I lost by retiring to write full time, there is the fact that the free downloads exposed me to so many more readers, which should sustain my sales over the long haul for my subsequent books. I know that people say that those who download books for free may never read the books, but this month I have received 16 more reviews for Maids of Misfortune, 13 of them 5 star reviews, and they were clearly from people who had downloaded the book and read it immediately.

As I hoped, the increased sales in Maids of Misfortune resulted in increased sales for my sequel. Uneasy Spirits sold an average of 20 books a day in both November and December (the book came out in mid October), but the average for January was 48 a day.

So, what are my plans for the future? Since it appears that I am in the midst of a steady, albeit a gentle, slide downwards in sales, I will use at least some of my remaining KDP Select promotion days for Maids of Misfortune in February, if only to see if there will be a similar bump in sales. I confess I am assuming the increase in sales will be less, but it might at least arrest the downward slide.

In addition, I have entered Uneasy Spirits into KDP Select, and I will also do a free promotion of it. As a sequel, (although it can be read as a stand-alone) Uneasy Spirits will probably not do as well as Maids did. But if it only garners me more positive reviews, I will consider the promotion a success. After reading a discussion on the Kindle Boards where readers expressed frustration at downloading a book for free and discovering that they were going to have to buy the first book in the series, I decided that I would put both books up for free for one day and then possibly continue the free promotion for the sequel for a second day.

Who knows if I will have even a tenth of the success of my first promotion? But, whatever happens I will be happy if I gain more readers and more information about how promotions work. For me, half the fun of being an indie is being able to experiment. If something doesn’t work, I change strategies; if it does, I celebrate. And I get back to writing.

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.

Amazon, KDP Select, Monopolies and Asshattery

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Seems like everyone is weighing in on this debate and I can’t help having my say too. First and foremost, I’m all about seeing things from every side and not throwing out babies with bathwater. Seriously, who the f*** throws out babies!? So it’s fair to say that I still really like Amazon and all they’ve done. There’s no question that they’ve changed the face of publishing and bookselling and, for the most part, in very positive ways. Of course, brick and mortar booksellers will have a different view, but that’s life and progress.

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

Amazon single-handedly made ebooks the ubiquitous force they are today. Others helped it along, of course, but Amazon made it happen in the timeframe we’ve seen. They’ve opened up the playing field to let indie authors and small presses compete realistically with the Big Six. They’ve made books and other items readily available and affordable to millions of people who may have had trouble accessing those things before. I don’t like everything about the Kindle model – exclusive file format, etc., but it’s very good overall. Amazon are very good overall.

There’s no question that I would rather have Amazon around than not. Although, on a slight digression, when the hell are we getting an amazon.com.au? Seriously, Amazon, why do you hate Australia?

But there are changes happening at Amazon that I don’t like. I’ve never been able to ignore a bully and I don’t like monopolies. They’re bad for everyone except the person in control of said monopoly. And while Amazon are still doing many good things, they’re starting to do many questionable things as well.

The major problems are these:

– Setting up as a publisher, not just a retailer;
– Starting the KDP Select program;
– Cutting publishers out of control;
– Propogating the cheap and free model.

Why are these things bad? Let’s look at them one by one.

Setting up as a publisher:

This is not a bad thing per se – another opportunity for writers to get published is a good thing, right? Well, not if it restricts the writer’s ability to sell their work. Whenever Amazon set up a service, they make it exclusive to themselves. For example, their CreateSpace POD printing venture means stock is only available through Amazon.com – not even the other Amazon branches internationally. As a result of in-fighting, Barnes & Noble have said they won’t stock any Amazon published books. This is a direct result of B&N’s problems with previous Amazon exclusivity policies, and I can’t really blame them. But it means that writers being published by Amazon have a greatly restricted range of outlets for their work. And Amazon encourages that in order to gain monopoly share.

Starting the KDP Select program:

This is a program where authors can make their Kindle ebooks available free for 5 days out of every 90. The idea is that it will greatly enhance their profile, drag more readers to their work and they’ll see greater sales in the long tail. Amazon have a pool of cash and for every author with a free book, Amazon distributes a share of that pool based on how many free downloads that book saw. Sounds great, but it’s not. That distribution pool is already getting smaller, the vast majority of people involved will only ever see a tiny fraction of it and, worst of all, those books can only be included if they’re exclusive to Amazon. No iBooks, no Smashwords, no Nook, etc. That means that once again, Amazon are forcing exclusivity and using sweet, sweet cookies to lure authors into snubbing every other retailer. Then you find out that the cookie is made of mud and dog crap.

Cutting publishers out of control:

It’s getting harder and harder for publishers to manage their stock at Amazon. My novels are published by Gryphonwood Press. They recently commissioned new cover art for both books and tried to get Amazon to update the art. Nothing happened. No responses, no changes, nothing but huge frustrations. Eventually, after talking to my publisher, I went to my Amazon Author Central page and requested the changes myself. The update was made inside 24 hours. This is Amazon responding to authors, not publishers. That means they’re actively cutting publishers out, which actively encourages authors to do their own thing. That’s not an author’s job. It’s their publisher’s job. But this strikes me as an underhand way of getting authors to distrust their publishers or decide they can do without them and go the indie route, which is better for Amazon.

Propogating the cheap and free model:

So many novels are on Amazon for 99c. I’ve already talked about the free option on the KDP Select program. This is a big problem. For one, many readers are starting to undervalue work. They decide to wait until something is free or reduced to 99c before buying it and that’s bad for authors. This is our job – we’re trying to make a livng here and there’s a lot of work in writing a novel. It’s worth more than a single dollar. But Amazon don’t care. They’ve got something set up where anyone can upload an ebook, charge a buck for it and think they’re on the author gravy train. 99.9% of those people are unlikely to sell more than a handful of books. But that’s all right with Amazon. After all, if they make 75c for every book sold, they don’t need to sell millions of every book. They just need to sell a few copies of millions of books. Each author is making fuck all, but Amazon are raking it in. And those authors who stick exclusively with Amazon are told they’ll do even better, with no guarantee that that is actually the case.

You can see how all these things are set up to benefit Amazon, at the expense of everyone else – authors, publishers and readers. It’s better for all of those people if price points reflect the effort involved in making the work being sold; if product is available through a range of outlets for a range of devices to give readers a choice and therefore give authors a greater chance at more exposure and sales, leading to a stronger career. The only beneficiary of the models described above is Amazon.

Now I don’t mind Amazon doing well for itself, but not by monopolising an industry and not at the expense of authors and readers. That’s where I have to step in between the bully and bullied and say, “Wait a fucking minute, here, what do you think you’re doing?”

What can you do about it? Lots of things.

If you’re a writer or publisher:

Don’t make your work exclusively available in one place. It benefits everyone to have it available in as many places, for as many devices as you can.

Don’t price your work ridiculously low and devalue it. Equally, don’t price it stupidly high and drive all the readers to pirate sites instead.

Don’t saturate the work with DRM, inconveniencing readers who can’t read a book they paid for on seperate devices.

Stand up against monopolising policies wherever you can.

If you’re a reader:

Check various venues for the availability of the work you want and don’t always buy in one place.

Try to buy non-DRM versions in order to encourage greater openess in the future. DRM is not the way to fight piracy.

Don’t go for pirated work. If you respect the authors you’re reading, pay them for their work.

Don’t only read free books and those you can get for 99c. At the very least, you’re cutting yourself off from some really good stuff out there and only encouraging the lowest common denominator.

Chime in with a comment below if you have an opinion or an idea about this. Or if you completely disagree with me – I’d love to hear why.

 

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

Copyright, Piracy and the Arts

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Over on Slate, a debate on the topic of the merits of copyright, as well as the ethical and moral implications of digital piracy, has been raging between Slate Business & Economics Correspondent Matthew Yglesias and author and literary scholar Caleb Crain.

In the first post in the series, Why Should We Stop Online Piracy? (subtitled "A little copyright infringement is good for the economy and society"), Yglesias posits:

"…even when copyright infringement does lead to real loss of revenue to copyright owners, it’s not as if the money vanishes into a black hole. Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than forking over $7.99 to Amazon, and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling Stones’ loss is the pizzeria’s  gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. It’s at least not obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful."

Read the rest of the post here.

In his rebuttal, Crain replies (with tongue only slightly in cheek):

"That’s quite a line of argument, and I don’t think Yglesias has really taken it as far as it could go. So let me take it from him, as it were, and go further. If I were to visit the Slate cafeteria, sit in Yglesias’ chair, and eat his lunch, it’s not as if the money that I failed to spend on a lunch of my own would vanish into a black hole. No! The economy will not suffer! Yglesias, after all, will have paid for the lunch I ate, and the money that I didn’t spend would still be in my pocket or my checking account or whatever. So I could take that money and spend it on, say, the new Shins album. Now I can afford vinyl! Flourish, Keynesian multipliers, flourish!"

Read the full rebuttal here.

Yglesias comes back with a counterargument, in which he attempts to—believe it or not—draw a parallel between Jesus Christ and online pirates:

"Crain thinks he shouldn’t steal my sauce. I agree. He thinks he shouldn’t pass my recipe off as his own invention, and I agree. But suppose he duplicated the sauce and used it to feed the poor—is that so wrong? When Christ performs the miracle of the loaves and fishes do we condemn him for depriving fishmongers of hypothetical income? I say that the man who learns to conjure pasta sauce out of thin air will be one of humanity’s greatest benefactors, even if he drives the Olive Garden out of business."

Read Yglesias’ full counterargument here.

Not about to let it go, Crain returns with his own counterpoint essay:

"In my initial salvo, I pointed out that Yglesias had minimized the harm of copyright infringement with a rationale that could extenuate theft of any kind. Yglesias repeats the error in his reply. He describes copyright holders as monopolists who set high prices in order to maximize profits, thereby pricing some consumers out of the market…"

"But nearly all companies try to maximize profits when they set prices, and every price higher than zero excludes somebody. Suppose that Savor of the Savior tomato sauce sells for $4.99 a jar and I feel that eating it is only worth two bucks. Theft would help me get my hands on it. Would theft therefore be socially beneficial? Am I justified in stealing the goods of any company whose prices don’t suit my budget?"

Read Crain’s full counterpoint essay here.

 

Why Publishers Are About To Go Data Crazy

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This post, by Sachin Kamdar, originally appeared on the PBS Mediashift site on 1/17/12.

The following is a guest post from Sachin Kamdar, the CEO and co-founder of Parse.ly. Currently in stealth, Parse.ly provides a new set of performance metrics, specifically tailored to publishers’ needs. Here, Kamdar explores the new age of data and how publishers will be a part of it.

We spend too much time talking about how publishers are adapting to the rise of the web, and very few moments trying to understand the unique challenges their businesses face.

Many pundits have criticized the industry’s inability to adapt their business models to a new web-first world. But it’s not the publishers that aren’t adapting — it’s their toolbelts that haven’t evolved to meet most acute needs.

The printing press is a great example of a technology that was quickly and widely adopted, and believe it or not, evolved rather quickly over the course of the last century. I’d argue that publishers are better at adapting to change than we give them credit for.

For example, we rarely ever acknowledge that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters were into "big data" long before it became a buzzword.

And while the advances in media consumption technology for readers have been rapid, the publisher side of web technology hasn’t kept up with the pace. Publishers have been running a marathon in a pair of shoes that are four sizes too small.  

2012 will be the year that publishers get access to sophisticated, innovative technologies that are purpose-built for their needs, and this is precisely what’s going to change in the next year. Rather than publishers having to make due with the innovations in consumer technology, the ecosystem of technology vendors will realize the huge opportunity to address publishers’ needs. The result will be great news for a publishing industry that has been stunted by poor tools for too long.  

Here’s what it’s going to look like.

Social Isn’t Just For Distribution

For as long as most of us can remember, publishers have been using the likes of Twitter and Facebook to grow readership, improve content reach, and build community. As they’ve gotten more sophisticated, it has also become apparent that they need more insight into the cause and effect of social sharing. They need to move beyond just looking the part and making nice conversation.

The social web is great for distribution, but it’s also good for measuring the performance of content. 

Unfortunately, traditional measurement and analytics tools are designed for radically different business models — typically B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) companies that sell physical goods or services. The resulting metrics are tracking for leads, or sheer volume, or purchase cause and effect. But content is an entirely different game.

After years of "one size fits all" social media measurement platforms, 2012 will be the year that publishers are going to be served with a variety of completely new offerings that are purpose-built for content-centric businesses (instead of bending an all-purpose tool to their will).

Publishers need to know what exactly caused an article to go viral — was it timely content that created a new trend? The guest author and her accompanying network? A particularly influential commenter? A confluence of factors?

Publishers generally already know what happened in the past. But what about the future?

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Mediashift.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Writers

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This post, by Bamidele Onibalusi, originally appeared on his YoungPrePro site.

I’m in the process of writing an ebook I plan to be releasing soon and one topic I touched that I think a whole article should be dedicated to is SEO. Most writers are concerned with just one thing, writing, and the reality is that focusing on that alone can only take them so far.

Writing isn’t just about writing an article that mesmerizes people; it is also about getting as much people to read your writing. In most cases, there is no point in writing an article if no one will read it, especially online.

 

I have been learning the basics of search engine optimization, how content get ranked in the search engines, and as a result I’ve been able to make some changes to my site that has resulted in significant growth in search engine traffic; at the moment, an average of 800 people visit YoungPrePro from the search engines every day, so I believe I have a few insights that can help you take your blog to the next level.

Some of these tips helped launch my blog in the search rankings, and some of these tips helped increase my traffic by over 200% in only a few months, so make sure you utilize them on your blog for better results.

What is SEO?

Most writers are only familiar with the process of writing articles and getting it published, and very few people really know what SEO is.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, the process of optimizing your website in a way that is search engine friendly to publishing content that is search engine friendly and building quality offsite signals that helps the search engines know that your website deserves to be ranked well for a particular keyword.

In most cases, SEO isn’t just set-and-forget or something that you can do once and expect to be ranked well for every keywords. Of course, traffic to your articles will be consistent, but you have to keep optimizing for new keywords to get them ranked, and in some cases you have to keep optimizing even pages that are already ranking well for highly competitive keywords.

In a few words, SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence, optimizing your content to be search engine friendly and getting links, shares, votes and other signals to make it rank.

I know the process might be a little complicated right now, and that exactly is why I wrote this article. I’ll be giving you a basic breakdown into how SEO works, so that at the end of reading this post you can take necessary actions with your blog and begin to get results.

Why You Should Care about SEO

I keep hearing from people who hate marketing and who are not ready to learn the “jargons” of SEO. Most people write online, yet they believe that all they need to do is focus on what they’re good at, writing, and expect the results to come.

It just doesn’t work that way!

Traffic is the currency of the web, and no matter the quality of your content and your eloquence with words, you won’t survive online without traffic because not even an ant will read your content. And traffic, my friend, is what brings results; it is what brings sales, it is what leads to subscribers, it is what brings about clients and it is what leads to fame.

Search engines control a larger fraction of all the traffic online, and a great way to ensure you are getting as much traffic as you want is to learn how SEO works. Here are a few quick benefits of SEO.

  • It helps you get discovered; by publishers, by readers, by fans, by fellow writers, by clients and by the media. Getting your message heard is important, and search engines help make this possible with little efforts and possibly no charge on your part.
     
  • Targeted traffic; an added advantage to getting your content ranked well in the search engines is that you get targeted traffic. Most people only use the search engines when they want real solution to a problem, and this can be your leverage towards getting the results you want. Search engine visitors are people with real problems who desperately need a solution and are not just visitors from other sources like social media that just happen upon your website because the headline compelled them; these people weren’t interrupted by ads, nor were they forced to click over from a social media site due to the cleverness of your headline. They have a problem, they need a solution and they came to you just to get that through the search engines.
     
  • Results that can be tracked; While it’s easy to go for an advertising campaign you think might be effective, you can’t really be sure of what works until you track your results. Search engine traffic is easy to track and optimize for even better results.
     
  • Long term results; Unlike traffic from other sources, or online advertising campaigns, you only need to optimize a particular content once and reap the benefits for years to come. I haven’t done any conscious SEO for this blog for months now, and I’ve seen an almost 300% increase in search traffic.

Terms You Should Know

 

Read the rest of the post, which contains links to many more free online SEO and traffic-building resources, on Bamidele Onibalusi’s YoungPrePro.

Ebook Buyers: Can You Afford To Lose Them?

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I recently read a guest post by Chris Keys, author of The Fishing Trip – A Ghost Story and Reprisal!: The Eagle Rises!, about the difficulties of selling self-published books.  According to Chris, he’s only sold about a dozen books.  It seems typical of independent authors, but here’s the catch: I looked for Chris’ book The Fishing Trip – A Ghost Story on Amazon and found that he only had it in print.

 

What really bothers me about this is that he used CreateSpace to publish his book.  I would think putting out a Kindle edition as well as a print edition would have been a no brainer.  It’s really too bad Chris didn’t go with both because I was poised to purchase an eBook edition, provided the price was right, on the spot.  I wishlisted the book, but that doesn’t mean I’ll remember to go back and buy it later.

I’m left wondering how many indie author sales are lost because of this kind of shortsightedness.  Between earning higher profits on lower prices and the immediate delivery (aka immediate gratification) of eBooks, how can anyone afford not to publish in electronic format?  That’s especially true now that epublishing is free on major bookseller sites like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

I suppose many authors cringe at the idea of formatting their manuscript into eBook format. It’s not as difficult as you might think, though it does take some time. There are numerous articles on the web on how to do this, including “How to Format Ebooks” by Jamie Wilson and “How to Format an Ebook” by Smashwords’ Mark Coker. If you use Adobe InDesign, check out EPUB Straight to the Point by Elizabeth Castro. For basics on Kindle formatting browse Joshua Tallent’s Kindle Formatting web site.

If you still don’t want to try formatting your own book (or find you just can’t wrap your mind around it) then find someone who can. Indie Author April L. Hamilton of Publetariat warns us of taking the cheap route and simply converting a manuscript rather than having it formatted properly. It’s better to spend a little money on putting out a great book, than lose readers due to poor formatting.

Formatting is different from conversion in that formatting standardizes the manuscript and creates any companion files needed for the eBook while conversion is simply loading the work into a program and clicking a button. Conversion is easy. Formatting takes more time and effort.

Regardless of whether you choose to do it yourself or have someone else do it for you, if you want to get your book into the hands of more readers, don’t neglect the eBook format.

 

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

4 Simple Steps to Creating a Vanity URL for Your Amazon Author Central Page

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Amazon now allows authors to create a "vanity URL" or personalized web address that points to their Author Central page on Amazon.

Author Central is a great place to feature your bio, videos, and latest tweets and blog posts. It’s especially important for authors with more than one title for sale on Amazon, because it shows a summary of all of your books.

My vanity URL looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/author/danalynnsmith

Here are four simple steps to creating your own Amazon Author Central vanity URL:

1. Login to your Amazon Author Central account. If you don’t already have an Author Central account, you can create one at this same page:

https://authorcentral.amazon.com

2. Click on the Profile tab.

3. Click on the Add Link button at the top right of the page, next to Author Page URL.

4. Enter your preferred URL name and click Save. Most authors will probably use their author name in the URL, but give it some consideration first, because you can’t change it once it’s assigned.

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: don’t forget to update any links you may have pointing to your old Amazon author page URL, such as on your author website, blog, in your social media profiles, etc. etc. Creating a custom URL will break those links.]
 

AuthorCentralURL

Learn more about optimizing your presence on Amazon in my how-to guide, How to Sell More Books on Amazon.

 

 

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

Kindle Millionaires, Meet the Worst Book Signing in the History of the World

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This is a guest post from bestselling novelist Nick Earls.

Years ago, as a junior hospital doctor, I met Australia’s last surviving veteran of the Boer War. He was 108 at the time and could still share some fascinating details of the war he had fought in 1900, when he was 20. If I can live long enough, I can be that guy for the publishing industry of the late 20th century, and I can wax anecdotal about the things we did to sell books, back when they only came on paper. And the listener will be amazed and I will sound like someone who walked with dinosaurs.

I will by then be one of the last relics of book tours and stock signings and days of back-to-back regional radio interviews. If I can live to 108, I may be one of the last authors telling his/her Worst Book Signing in the History of the World story.

Let’s admit it – any author who has toured enough has one. We can’t let them go and can’t resist the masochistic urge to keep telling them – whether to fake self-deprecation or as a cautionary tale or because some wounds just won’t heal but we’re addicted to the talking cure.

You know what’s next: The True Story of the Worst Book Signing in the History of the World. It’s of course mine, and it’s offered here for the edification of all recent authors thriving from the comfort of their own homes with the help of KDP Select and all the other cunning means of selling books in 2012, while at the same time thinking, ‘It’s great to have sold a million on Amazon, but I wish I could go on a book tour.’

Yes, you know you’re missing expense accounts, room service and a lot of pre-recorded flattery from publicists needing to boost frequently flagging author morale, but you’re also missing having your own Worst Book Signing in the History of the World. Rest assured, it would not have been worse than mine.

The incident occurred in a regional Australian city, in a franchise store located in a shopping centre that the citizens were in the process of abandoning for a more glamorous new centre down the road. More than half the shops were empty. There was a card table waiting for me outside the bookstore, and for the next ten minutes I watched occasional clumps of people in the distance moving between discount stores in flannel shirts and Ugg boots.

Then the bookstore owner, with the whiff of failure already in his nostrils, came over to me and tried to sound upbeat as he said, ‘This’ll fix it.’ He tossed me a name tag, with my name recently written on it in blue marker pen in a spidery hand. Misspelt.

No one was coming within 50 yards of me. It was only going to work if the discount stores were selling truckloads of two-dollar binoculars. Which they weren’t.

Another ten minutes passed. By which I mean 600 seconds passed, each with the slow-motion drag of the last weeks of a too-long childhood summer vacation, but this time with the horrifying overlay of a feeling of abject failure.

Then the owner appeared with a PA system that looked like it had done its best work around the Big Band Era. He turned it on, and static seared the empty halls of the shopping centre. Way in the distance, a few heads turned. And then turned away again. Undaunted, he proceeded to read from a shiny faxed copy of the book’s media release, which my publicist and I had spent a lot of time writing and which I had, until that moment, thought was pretty funny.

By ‘read’ I mean misread, of course. It hadn’t faxed clearly, there were lots of awkward pauses and he pounded any punchline flatter than pizza dough. Fortunately, the distortion was so bad as it echoed through the empty labyrinth that not a word could be heard clearly, and it sounded more like an industrial accident in progress rather than a human reading something. Meanwhile, the rep from the publishing company stood next to me mouthing ‘I’m sorry’ over and over.

At the forty-minute mark, with not a single books sold, a girl ran over to my table. The rep smiled. The shop assistants smiled. The owner put his microphone down and beamed. The tide was turning. Our first sale beckoned.

And then the girl said she needed to write down a phone number and could she please borrow my pen? I said she could keep it, and called time.

The new ways of selling books may mean fewer scars like that landing on the souls of authors. The world will be just a little diminished as the anecdote supply dries up, but authors will be saner.

It’s expensive to tour an author, and usually more sensible not to. I want to ignore that and I still want to do it. I still love bookstores, still buy paper books at my favourites and hope to keep doing events in them indefinitely, but there’s a whole world of readers who will now only point and click and then read from a non-paper-based device. They’re rapidly shifting the cost/benefit analysis of a lot of author tours.

Selling e-books, it seems to me, is not so much about working out how we sell p-books and adapting that. It’d be extreme to say it would be as relevant to look at how we sell chickens or Toyotas, but maybe not completely out of line. Selling a physical object in a particular place is very different to selling a blast of digital signal.

This is a new paradigm, not a slow evolution. It’s frighteningly fast, giveaways abound because there are no unit costs, and millions of people have found new ways of browsing that we may not have properly pinned down yet.

An e-book needs to be findable and discoverable. It needs to have the right look and the right price. And perhaps it needs to be pitched into promotions that will see a lot of copies given away in the hope that talk and reviews and sales will follow.

In the end though, when I’m 108 and the young intern is re-siting my drip, I’ll be telling her/him that the most important thing has always been word of mouth, even if, by the early twenty-first century, the author needed a whole new bag of tricks to kick-start it.

We may be selling it in a new vessel, but a story is still a story and what will matter most is what happens when it’s read.

You can find Nick’s work on Kindle here, and on Nook here.

Publishers, Pay Better Attention. Authors, Don't Pay for Contests.

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This post, by Tominda Adkins, originally appeared on her The Elysium blog on 1/30/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

Here’s the story: I recently got an email heralding a book contest. Nothing to really shake up my Sunday, but I read on, because the contest is being put on by an organization which exists to support indie authors. The contest is exclusively for self-published books, and the judging panel consists of seasoned agents and publishers who are seeking "overlooked" talent to professionally represent. Maybe. If they love it. As in: no guarantees, even for the first place winner. Okay, it all sounds a little insulting, but I’m still listening. Like any other writer, I’d love for someone else to handle the publishing side of things. Maybe Vessel has a shot here. I then scroll down to the submission details, and my focus lands on the entry fee. Suddenly, my tempted interest turns into disgust and outrage. The fee is big. Triple digits, people.

[Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

Let me get this straight, panel. You are looking to find and assist (and ultimately benefit from) talent that has been overlooked. Overlooked by YOU, the agents and publishers. You want to take a second look now, now that we’ve all done the legwork ourselves, by pitting us against one another in a contest. And if I win, I might get represented, if you love it? And you want me to pay $150 to get my work in front of you?

Yeeeaah . . . NO.

Seriously. It’s like being spit in the face. I am quietly enjoying my Sunday morning here, drinking my earl grey, and you pop up and spit in my face.

Whose idea was this? Are you sure you’re talking to authors? People who are not exempt from the recession, who have bills to pay, who go to work and come home and postpone rest, sex, social interaction, and proper nourishment just to get some writing or marketing done? I’m willing to pay a modest fee (I consider that $30 or less) for any contest in which I have a fair chance at winning, be it a costume contest (my Halloween costumes fucking OWN) or a book contest. But these people, and frankly any people who charge struggling authors top dollar for something that offers no guaranteed benefit (publicists, self-publishing "gurus", conference speakers) are missing a grand point: indie authors don’t have that kind of money. The money they have is better spent elsewhere, and they know it. Well, some of them do. 

If you don’t know that, and you write, listen:

You DO NOT have to wait, pay, perform, or grovel to get someone in the industry to say your book is worth something. You get it in front of readers, period, and they decide.

If readers love it, congratulations. Do what you can to make yourself more visible, and more readers will find you. And if a publisher comes along and thinks you’re worth representing, that’s great, too. But for Christ’s sake, don’t pay a guy $150 to take a second look at what he missed the first time around!

Take that $150, and improve your book’s chances of being discovered and enjoyed by readers. Here are some things I’d put that $150 toward, off the top of my head:

– Professional editing, proofreading, cover design, or typesetting for my next book 

– A new title setup on Lightning Source

– A run of advance reading copies 

– A redesign of my website

– Prizes for contest winners 

– Ads on GoodReads, or on popular categorized sites through Project Wonderful

– Groceries 

– A massage 

– Booth or table space at a promotional event 

– More Sexodus Tour T-shirts

– A round of beers after the Vessel series lands a publishing contract or movie deal

And in case you were wondering just how serious I am about those Halloween costumes, here are my last three, plus a prize-winning Lady Gaga Dance-Off getup. Note: none of these cost over $30 to make. WIN.

 

Link (2010) and Edward Scissorhands (2011)

 

Secretary (2009) and my getup for "Show Me Your Teeth" (2010)

 

 

Maybe next year I’ll go as Thelma Harper . . . 

 

A Fiction Author Reviews iBooks Author App: Should You Try It?

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This post, by Cheri Lasota, originally appeared on her site on 1/26/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

There’s a great deal of buzz on the Internet about Apple’s iBooks Author App. Most authors and pub­lish­ers haven’t used it or refuse to use it, usu­ally cit­ing Apple’s EULA agree­ment. Controversial as it may be, the announce­ment of the Author app was exactly what I’ve been wait­ing for. You see, I’m obsessed with ebooks. More than that, I’m madly in love with enhanced (inter­ac­tive) ebooks. What fol­lows is a fic­tion author’s take on the EULA Agreement as well as a run­down of my expe­ri­ence using the app to re-​​release my first novel this past week. Curious about the app? Read on.

 

The usual way to code ebooks. *sigh*

When Spirehouse Books released my novel, Artemis Rising, last September 2011, I went all out design­ing that thing with spe­cialty cod­ing. I spent about four months learn­ing how to design, for­mat, and code dif­fer­ent ver­sions for iPad, Nook, and Kindle. The process was clunky, glitchy, and slow. I loved every minute of it (remem­ber, I’m obsessed?), but I found myself yearn­ing for a bet­ter way.

Until now, there wasn’t a bet­ter way. Authors often men­tion Smashwords as their go-​​to aggre­ga­tor for pub­li­ca­tion. But Smashwords’ cod­ing and design is plain and lacks the capa­bil­ity for enhance­ments. Because ebook read­ers are essen­tially still in their infancy, they are rid­dled issues that require non-​​standard cod­ing, workarounds, or sim­ply giv­ing up on desired design ele­ments because valid code won’t work.

 

Enter the iBooks Author App.

I snapped up an iPad and I already had a MacBook. I just spent a cou­ple of days learn­ing the Author app and cre­ated an iBooks 2 ver­sion of my novel, which I suc­cess­fully uploaded. I’ll get to the details in a moment, but my ini­tial reac­tion? FREAKIN’ AWESOME.

Here’s a run­down of the ele­ments I used most often in the process:

Video

It took me four months of research, test­ing, and fail­ure to real­ize I couldn’t man­u­ally code in my book trailer  (still have no idea why it wouldn’t work). How did I do it with the Author app? I dragged the .m4v  file from my desk­top into the Intro Media sec­tion of the app. Done. (And no coding.)

 Photos

Took me a cou­ple of weeks to learn how to cen­ter a damn pho­to­graph for iBooks. I kid you not. But once I learned how, it was easy! *dou­ble sigh* One of those fun glitches in the iPad cod­ing, you know. Anyhoo, as you can imag­ine, drag­ging and drop­ping pho­tos into the app is effort­less. What’s really cool is that as you move pho­tos around the page, smart rulers and arrows help you line them up to other ele­ments. Can’t tell you how help­ful this was, as I had spe­cial glyph GIFs and another large image of a map on all 28 of my chap­ter header pages. Whoa. Resizing is a cinch, but the app is not set up to allow you to edit the pho­tos them­selves much. I sus­pect they’ll expand that capa­bil­ity in a later update.

Fonts

iBooks fonts kick everybody’s butt. Seriously. iBooks sim­ply has more font selec­tion and more typo­graph­i­cal fea­tures to add to your design. No other device  even comes close in this regard. Took me a bit to test the app’s lim­its on font manip­u­la­tion, but in the end I just went with what pleased my eye. I really wanted to delete the chap­ter header text and insert my own graph­i­cal title for chap­ter head­ers, but alas, I couldn’t get it to work. I’ll keep test­ing, because I could hand­code it (took me sev­eral weeks to fig­ure out that spe­cialty cod­ing too) in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of my iPad epub file. I’ve not even attempted to try any cus­tom html cod­ing in the Author app. To be hon­est, I didn’t want to bother with cod­ing since most of what I needed was already avail­able in the app.

Inserting text

I’ve not played with every method or tried to import text from mul­ti­ple sources. I sim­ply copied the orig­i­nal text from my Word file (which was prop­erly for­mat­ted with clean styles, etc.) and dumped the whole man­u­script into the app. I hear from other sources on the Internet that there are eas­ier ways. But I was play­ing around with how I wanted to for­mat chap­ter header pages, so I wanted to try this method and take it slow. I then added in a chap­ter header page after decid­ing that that was prefer­able to using the “Preface” page for a novel. Which brings me to….

Chapter header pages

Everyone knows chap­ter pages are where most of your design ele­ments shine. And Apple does an amaz­ing job here, design­ing some beau­ti­ful ele­ments that take advan­tage of the hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal views of the iPad. A note on the views though: in gen­eral most ele­ments on the chap­ter pages must be designed twice: once for the ver­ti­cal view and once for the hor­i­zon­tal view. And just because your design looks purdy in one view…Well, much of my pre­view­ing and edit­ing work involved dou­ble check­ing both views to ensure that the read­ing expe­ri­ence was opti­mal all around. I spent a lot of time play­ing with the first chap­ter header page, because I knew that once I had that per­fect, I could then dupli­cate that page for all my chap­ters to save work time. That was fan­tas­tic. After the chap­ter header pages were set, I sim­ply added one page to each chap­ter and dumped my chap­ter text into it. Pages were added by the app to fit the text. Voila!

Glossary

Artemis Rising has a glos­sary of Portuguese and Latin words in the back mat­ter. In the old method, I used InDesign to hyper­link every word and then exported the book as an epub file (a very time-​​consuming process). The glos­sary fea­ture in the Author app is to-​​die-​​for easy to use. I high­lighted each word and added it to the glos­sary with the click of one but­ton. Later I went to the glos­sary sec­tion and pasted in each def­i­n­i­tion. That’s it. When the reader clicks on one of those spe­cial words, a lit­tle bub­ble pops up and gives them the def­i­n­i­tion right there. They don’t even have to nav­i­gate away from the page. Woot!

Preview

Previewing my design progress was ridicu­lously easy. I have iBooks open on my iPad. I plug the device into my MacBook. I hit the Preview but­ton in the Author app. I wait a bit. Presto! The new ver­sion pops in and I get to check out my updates.

TIP: Be sure to down­load the iBooks 2 app on your iPad before attempt­ing to Preview for the first time. Without it, you might run into issues. I did.

Elements I want to try next

I didn’t get a chance to use every fea­ture in this first go-​​around. But I have big plans. I want to build a photo gallery of my book trailer pro­duc­tion pho­tos (all taken by the bril­liant Beth Furumasu) as bonus back mat­ter. I want to cre­ate an inter­ac­tive map of my set­ting (I already have a map cre­ated in flash, but the folks at Apple are in a whiny fight with Adobe over Flash, so I can’t use it. Meh.) But I might be able to insert my own HTML5-​​coded map or use the inter­ac­tive wid­get within the app itself. Still explor­ing that. Doubt I can find a use for the 3D wid­get for my nov­els, but one never knows. =)

Should you use the Author app to design the iPad ver­sion of your book?

Would I rec­om­mend iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author App to indie authors and/​or small pub­lish­ers? A resound­ing YES, given a cou­ple of caveats:

  • You’ve obvi­ously got to have the hard­ware (an iPad and some type of Mac) and soft­ware (Lion OS X) needed. The app itself is free.
  • You’ve read the EULA and feel com­fort­able with what you are get­ting into.
  • You are inter­ested in doing an enhanced ebook–it’s great for fic­tion or nonfiction.

My ini­tial thoughts on the EULA Agreement controversy

The agree­ment itself is short-​​sighted and ambigu­ous. That goes with­out say­ing. But naysay­ers are for­get­ting one small detail that makes the cur­rent EULA’s stric­tures irrel­e­vant for now: the ebook files that the iBooks Author app cre­ates are far too com­plex for any other cur­rent e-​​reader device to dis­play prop­erly. In other words, you can’t read my Author-​​created novel on any other device than iPad, because devices like the Nook and Kindle aren’t sophis­ti­cated enough…yet.

I con­sider the Author app a beta. A test. A glimpse of the future. If Amazon is smart (please be smart!), they’ll hire a pro­gram­mer to cre­ate a sim­i­lar pro­gram and make it open to both PC and Mac users. And Barnes and Noble? They’d best get on it, too, or they’ll be the first of the Big Three to kick the bucket. I’m not even count­ing poor, dead Borders.

Apple’s most fool­ish move is to lock up their pow­er­ful pro­grams and apps from PC users. (Anybody else think it’s ASININE that we can’t read books we’ve bought through Apple on the Web? Silly. iCloud, where’s my damn book? *nar­rows eyes*) But in this case, that hoard­ing and elitest ten­dency is, as I said, irrel­e­vant. They are well aware that no other device can dis­play this con­tent. But that will some­day change, and once again, they’ll be left in Amazon’s dust. But that’s nei­ther here nor there.

My sec­ond thought on this: I can only sell an iBooks Author app ver­sion of my book through the iBook­store. I can sell my other ver­sions just how I always have. I have a spe­cially coded ver­sion for Nook and Kindle. I am curi­ous, though: can I sell two iPad ver­sions, per­haps giv­ing them both a sep­a­rate ISBN? One would be the Author app ver­sion and the other would be the “reg­u­lar” ver­sion. Hmm…anyone have an answer on that one?

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: for a differing, and more conservative, interpretation of the current iBooks EULA, see this post on the Passive Voice blog. The debate rages on among authors and indie publishers as to the correct interpretation of the EULA; as of this writing, Apple has remained mum.]

Next steps

We’ll all wait and see what hap­pens next in this yo-​​yo of an indus­try. The poten­tial of this app is phe­nom­e­nal, and no ambigu­ous EULA agree­ment will dimin­ish that. If you have a Mac run­ning Lion OS X, down­load the app and play around with it. Even if you don’t have an iPad. Try it out and see what could one of the great­est inno­va­tions ever in the short his­tory of ebooks.

I’ll say it again: FREAKIN’ AWESOME.

Want to see an iBooks 2 novel in action? You can down­load a sam­ple or buy Artemis Rising on your iPad. Here’s a link to the book.

Let me know what you think in the com­ments. And if you want to reprint this blog post, feel free. Just give me a credit.

 

Ooh! UPDATE: This is what might make us fall into fits of glee: an open plat­form ebook cre­ator! I just heard about this less than a minute ago.

One eBook Platform to Rule Them All

A com­pany known for long-​​form jour­nal­ism democ­ra­tizes tablet publishing.

http://​www​.tech​nol​o​gyre​view​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​m​i​m​s​s​b​i​t​s​/​2​7​5​1​9​/​?​p​1​=A3

Caveats: It’s not avail­able yet, still in pri­vate beta, and I have no idea what it might cost, if anything.

 

Is Amazon Select Really The Big, Bad Wolf?

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This post, by Andrew E. Kaufman, originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 1/27/12 and is reprinted in its entirety with that site’s permission.

I woke up Wednesday morning to a barrage of emails. It appeared an independent author’s sample anthology, to which I belong, was being taken down. The reason was that it violated the terms of Amazon’s new Select program (several of the authors are enrolled in it). The anthology offers excerpts from our books, and according to the exclusivity agreement, enrolled work cannot be distributed digitally elsewhere. This includes excerpts shown on websites (that’s right folks, if you’re a Select author and running excerpts from your book on a website or anywhere else, you may want to take them down).

Word of this sent the emails a flyin’.

Very quickly, the discussion turned hostile with lots of anger aimed at Amazon and its Select program, as well as the authors enrolled in it. Some complained that they were being punished because of the actions of a few. Others insinuated that Amazon is underhanded, manipulative, and self-serving. One person even went as far as calling them an “evil empire.” There was even talk of staging an indie author boycott of Amazon. For my part, I chose to stay out of it. I didn’t agree with much of what was being said and felt the facts were being skewed.

Now I realize I’m going to take some flack for this, but I’m having a hard time understanding all the anger directed at Amazon. I mean, let’s face it–we wouldn’t even be here having this discussion if it weren’t for them. There would be no indie movement, no platform to showcase our work, no audience to read our books. Many of us would still be on the outside looking in, trying to break through those iron-clad gates, the ones kept locked up for years by the mainstream publishing industry.

Amazon helped us find our audience much more than any traditional publisher ever did. They gave us a platform, then they gave us the tools necessary to make money at it, offering an unprecedented seventy percent royalty for our books, something previously unheard of with traditional publishers.

In short, they let us in and put the power where it belongs: with the readers.

As for  the Select program, I don’t understand the anger there, either. Amazon isn’t forcing anyone to enter exclusive deals; they’re offering them an opportunity. The program is completely voluntary. Those who wish to enroll are free to do so; those who don’t, can go on with business as usual, selling their books wherever and however they wish. For those who do choose to go that route, they’re being compensated with cash which Amazon has taken out of their own pocket.  Many authors would still jump at the chance for an exclusive deal with a publisher, and yet they’re balking at the idea of doing the same thing with Amazon.

Amazon isn’t evil; it’s a business just like any other. Lest we forget, they invented the e-reader. Everyone else jumped on board after that with their own versions. Is anyone faulting them for trying to cash in on the craze? Of course not—it’s business. So what’s so wrong with Amazon trying to stay competitive in a market they created? I say, nothing.

Are they forcing a monopoly?  I doubt it. Even if Barnes & Noble goes under, the Nook will likely live on under another name, and there is this other company called Apple, who, when I last checked, is getting ready to launch their own digital publishing platform. And I’d say they have the muscle to be a formidable competitor.