Archive for the ‘eBooks’ Category

Why I’m Cheating on Mark Coker

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Background

Smashwords – Mark Coker’s open-to-all eBook publishing and distribution portal – is, in my opinion, the biggest thing to happen to books and publishing in a long time. Create an account, upload a Word document of your manuscript, and your book is converted to all eBook formats and distributed to all of the major eBook retailers. Smashwords collect revenues from the retailers and pass the money onto you minus a 15% commission. They even give you a free ISBN.

How freaking awesome is that?

Yes, Smashwords is inundated with books of questionable merit (every day you’ll see new books with word counts optimistically in the “novella” range, with misspelled blurbs, priced for $9.95) , but Mark and his team have opened the market to ALL writers. Curation is just a view – a subset – of the book list, and any and all critics can step in to fulfil that function. I’m happy with the weaker books being out there, as I know there are some real gems – original, if uncommercial works – just waiting to be found. Smashwords, in my eyes, can do no wrong.

But…

Even though my book is being distributed to Sony, Kobo Books, Apple iBooks and was on Barnes and Noble before I opted out of that distribution option, it’s not on Amazon Kindle, and that’s the biggest retailer of eBooks by a long, long way, no matter who’s publishing their optimistic, massaged sales figures this week. If I’m going to achieve anything like notable sales, that’s where I need to be.

Mark explained the Amazon position from the start – that they wanted extended formatting options, which the Meatgrinder (Smashword’s automated conversion system) didn’t support – and I was fine with that as it was his priority to rectify the situation and get the books over to Amazon. But that was the message from when I uploaded Make a Move in April, and it’s now August. When the UK release of the Kindle was announced (the real release, not the mid-Atlantic hack that’s been in place until now) I knew I had to have my book on the Kindle store, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I downloaded the Kindle formatting guidelines, and conversion and testing tools, and I started converting my Word manuscript to HTML.

OCD

I was never happy with the automated book conversion Smashwords produced; the main problem was that my first-line non-indents were ignored, and I hate how it looks. Unfortunately, I followed the formatting guide to the letter, so I don’t know how I can fix that. I left it as it was, which is fine (the words are the important part) but it still bothers me. Now, with my Kindle Preview app which replicates how the text will display on the Kindle hardware, I can test and test and test, and fix anything that isn’t working. I’m a technical writer by trade, and a Virgo, so you can imagine how satisfying this is for me. Even though I’m hand-coding the HTML, the level of control I have is worth it.

An Uncomfortable Situation

So Smashwords aren’t shipping to Kindle, and now I am, so no harm, no foul. Except that Mark announced this week that they will be shipping to Amazon soon, and that the Meatgrinder upgrades are close to finished. So now I’m in the position of bypassing the distributor – a position with which I’m not 100% comfortable. It would be easy just to select the “opt-in to Amazon distribution” option on Smashwords and sit back, and I have been tempted, but I’ve tasted the level of formatting control Amazon’s DIY tools afford me, and I’m loathe to let it go. Not to mention the week of very late nights I’ve spent working on the conversion.

I guess it comes down to timing; I’m too far along now to quit. And I know I’m denying Smashwords their 15% commission on any Amazon sales, but time is money – my time is money – and after the effort I’ve put into this conversion, I think I deserve that 15%. I’m planning to have the book on the store in the next week or so – definitely before the August 27th UK Kindle release – so if you’re buying a Kindle, you’ll be able to see if my work was worth it.

Tags: Apple, Distribution, EBook, Kindle, Make a Move, Retailers, Smashwords
Posted in Publishing, eBooks | No Comments »

A Little Piece of History Repeating

Monday, May 31st, 2010

A sixteenth-century stately home is the last place I was expecting to be impressed by new technology, especially after I had my first play with an iPad at the Apple Store on Friday, and was thoroughly underwhelmed, so I hope you can forgive my inflated sense of irony after a weekend of contradictions.

Lyme Park, in Cheshire, is home to a book from the fifteenth century – the Lyme Caxton Missal – an instruction manual for clergymen. It was the first English book to be printed in two colours – a technique beyond English printers of the time, resulting in the printing being outsourced to Paris where the knowledge resided to achieve this feat of advance printing technology. The two colours (red and black) were used to convey the content of what the preacher should say (black) interspersed with instructions as to what he should do (red), which means that the technique had a useful purpose and wasn’t just for show.

The book’s available to view in the house’s library, but it’s under a lot of glass, so its entertainment value is limited. In order to allow people to fully explore the book, the National Trust have installed three computer screens in the library, which are effectively eBook readers. They’re not like any eBook reader currently being touted as the end of the printed word though – these things are cool. The displays are touchscreens – 17″-19″ at a guess – and the application is completely bespoke. The page-turning animation is as smooth as I’ve seen, and the functionality to zoom and navigate is both intuitive and useful. The core text is in Latin, and the option is available to pop-up a translation, or have an audio file play a reading back through attached headphones. All of the added functionality really served a purpose, and the experience was immersive; something more than just reading a book.

I chatted with the attendant in the room, and he commented that he appreciated the irony of reading a 500-year-old book on something so cutting edge, but it was something else he said that piqued my irony gland. He mentioned that the church at the time the book was printed feared the advent of mass-printing, as lower costs and increased availability would allow books into the hands of the peasant class, and subsequent education would make them less amenable to control. I’m not comparing that situation with the current watershed in the move from eBooks as a niche format to something gaining mass-market acceptance, but it does highlight the fact that the idea of restricting development of a technology, or availability of a resource, due to the needs/wants of a controlling elite isn’t a new one.

I’m not trying to get political, or suggest that the publishing houses aren’t acting in everyone’s best interests as they work to find a sustainable business model in the advent of widespread electronic distribution of books. I’m not even sure I have a point to make. My reason for writing is simply this: as I stood, surrounded by some of the oldest books in history, exploring a truly impressive piece of content-presentation software, I realised that the current impasse in the move to reasonably priced, non-release-windowed eBooks is just details. The content of those books – the art, inspiration and creativity – is going to find a way to reach its audience regardless of how hard the gatekeepers fight to hold it back. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, and it’s probably not going to happen soon, but it is eventually going to happen. And everything between now and then will just be history.

Tags: EBook, Publishers
Posted in Opinion, eBooks | No Comments »

Typesetting: DvP

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Now that I’ve uploaded Make a Move to Smashwords and it’s been accepted to the Premium Catalog(ue), I can share a couple of mistakes I made that, hopefully, will prevent you staying up until the early hours of the morning in order to fix them. Formatting text for digital distribution is completely different than for print, primarily because digital editions don’t really have any formating, and the little they do have is prone to being removed by the target eBook reader. I spent a LONG time making sure the first paragraph of each section and episode didn’t have a first-line indent, as I hate the way indentation looks at the top of a section, but the .mobi (Kindle) format hammered them right back in without asking. It also indented my section headers and left-aligned my copyright page content. Oh well – the message is more important than the medium.

But, two of the issues in the uploaded text were a result of my mistakes, and fixing them took a long time, so pay attention to the following points and save yourself some pain:

As I said above, formatting for eBooks is different than for print, so if you’re going to be producing both printed and digital copies of your books, take copies of the source files before you start to format either. I wasn’t planning to produce an eBook of Make a Move until I realised I was being a dumbass, so I had to create the digital text from the fully typeset, ready-for-print Word doc. This meant I had to remove/re-add paragraph breaks, and track down the three instances of manual hyphenation I’d added to override the automatic settings. The only way to find those manual hyphens was to Edit > Find, and given that each of my sections (around 180 of them) are formatted as 1-1, 1-2 and so on, it took A LONG TIME.
When you’re creating a text (Word) file for upload to Smashwords, the only way to be sure you’ve stripped out all non-normal styles is to either Edit > Select All and then Clear Formatting, or to past the whole text into a text editor (Windows Notepad, Apple TextEdit, etc.) and then paste it back into a Word document. This will remove ALL formatting, including any that you wanted to keep. Like italics. I forgot about the italics, which left me searching the print-formatted document for them, the trying to find them in a digital copy with no page numbers. There’s an hour of my life I won’t be getting back. So next time I’m preparing a digital copy of the source text, before I remove all formatting, I’m going to search for all italic text and add XXX or whatever in front of it. Then, once I’ve cleared the formatting I have something to search on in trying to find those instances. The same applies for underlines, bold, whatever – just use a different prefix for each type.

Yeah, they might seem like simple tips, and mistakes that could have been easily avoided, but hindsight is 20×20 and all that, so maybe you can benefit from mine.

Tags: EBook, Formatting, Hyphenation, Italics, Kindle
Posted in Typesetting, eBooks | No Comments »

I Smash Pads

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

I was disappointed when Apple released the iPad. Not because it sucks in any way, but because I was hoping for a new idea – something that hadn’t been done before. Functionally and physically, the iPad is just a large iPod Touch; there’s nothing new about it – it’s just more of something we could already buy. I wanted it to do something mind-blowing, something that would create or revolutionise a market. Like I said, I was disappointed.

One area I thought Apple might explore, given their history of placing pro-level creative tools into the hands of amateurs, is publishing. Maybe adding an iPublish app to the iLife suite that would allow you to upload magazine layouts or text from their Pages app to create online magazines or eBooks for sale from their online store. Maybe iPublish would let you take the podcast you could already create in Garageband and upload it to the iTunes Music Store. I’m just thinking out loud here, like I was back then, but that’s the kind of market shift I was hoping for. There’s still time for them to do this – the iLife suite is overdue for an update, and could be released soon after the iPad with a new twist to offer, but it’s not looking likely.

Then, two days ago, I realised that Apple had actually delivered that market shift; they signed a distribution deal with Smashwords. I know that Amazon have allowed writers to publish directly on the Kindle store for a while, but you need a US bank account to do it, which shuts out a lot of people. Apple have removed the last obstacles to any writer reaching their readers. By signing a deal with an independent distributor of independently published books, Apple have removed all need for publishers and agents. Notice that I said need, not want; there’s every chance the iBook store will devolve into the same morasse as the App Store, so there’s still a strong argument for the consistent “quality” that the traditional publishing machine can deliver, but as long as I can buy a title of the quality of Doom Resurrection in the App Store, there’s hope for its literary neighbour.

This isn’t “the death of traditional publishing”, but something big did just happen. Where we all go from here is anyone’s guess; I’m sure that Apple like to think they know, but they can’t predict what readers are going to choose any more than I can. And Smashwords aren’t predicting anything; they’re just enabling the rest of us.

Tags: Apple, EBook, Indie, iPad, Kindle, Publishers, Smashwords
Posted in Opinion, Software, eBooks | No Comments »

Making a Global Move

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

So, if I’m so disappointed in eBooks following my attempt to buy one, am I still considering publishing Make a Move in an electronic format?

Hell yes.

A Change of Perspective

You don’t have to be your target market to understand it; I get that now. I’m not selling to a group of people like me, who read books to relax and take a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to finish each title. eBook consumers – those driving the developing market – are voracious readers, and they consume books in varied forms. I don’t buy the pro-Kindle argument that you can take many, many books with you on holiday, as I only take one. Admittedly, it’ll be one big-ass book, but still just one. And my iPod. The people who would buy a Kindle probably take an extra bag, just for books.

Another reality I’m now starting to understand is that the US and UK markets for eBooks are completely different. As in, at time of writing, the US has one. I’m a tech writer when not masquerading as a real writer, and I work for a global software house with a lot of educated, technologically minded people. I know one person with an eBook reader, and I’m pretty sure that 90% of the contents are pirated. Add to that the fact that Sony’s reader is the only retailer-supported device available in the UK (the Kindle’s availability is more of a hack than a product launch) and that’s not a market I’m looking to enter. The US, however, is at the peak of the eBook wave. Until now, that 3000-mile-wide stretch of water separating UK writers from the US has been an insurmountable obstacle to the Stateside distribution of self-published books; it just isn’t cost effective. And now it may as well be gone.

What Price Freedom?

There is still a potential barrier in my way, though, and that’s cost. There may be a large market of readers consuming eBooks in the US, but as literate technology fans, they’re going to be intelligent enough to have the same issues with cost as I do, and that’s something I need to work out before I can find a market.

Do you know what the cost of developing Make a Move for electronic distribution is? Zero. I’ve already paid for everything in producing the printed version, so the eBook is free. Literally free. Yes, I have to reformat the text and proof it again for errors I may have introduced in doing so, but that’s just my time, not my money. I think that’s why I’m so hard on publishers who are defending their eBook prices by outlining the development cost of producing the text to the required standard of editing and proofreading. What? Are you going to slip the print books onto the shelves quietly and hope no one notices? And I know that eBook sales are going to eat into print sales to some extent, but how about allowing your business model to evolve with the market, rather than trying to cover phantom losses with padded margins up-front? Your protectionism is only hurting early adopters – the people you need on your side.

So I still need to set a price that I think is fair, and I’m not 100% decided yet. I need to put the research hours in, which is something I can do while I’m preparing the text files for upload.

But Will it Sell?

Who knows? I have been thinking about something that the poet Guy LeCharles Gonzalez first put in my head: the power of niche content. If you walk into the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of a larger Waterstones store, you’ll usually find a bookshelf of US imports. These are books by “cult” US writers who aren’t in print in the UK. Their books are generally more expensive due to the import overheads.

So let’s flip it around. How many books by UK writers are in print in the US? Most I guess, but still a lot that aren’t. If you liked a writer and their books were available in print, you’d probably buy the book, but if you can’t get those printed books, the eBook version, coupled with an eReader, is just as good. Ubiquity isn’t attractive, whereas niche can be, simply because it’s niche. I think a lot of American’s would love my book; it’s set in a part of Paris most writers ignore, is filled with British humour, has a European flavour, and is broken down into easy-to-digest sections that I think public-transport commuters will love.

I don’t think I’ll find a mass market in the US, but I may find a comfortable niche. And with no setup costs, there’s nothing stopping me trying.

Tags: Distribution, EBook, Kindle, Make a Move, Proofreading, Publishers
Posted in Publishing, eBooks | No Comments »

The Results of My eValuation

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

When Amazon released the Kindle application for the Mac last week, I downloaded and installed it, then went onto the store to see what was available. I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I found some bestsellers around the $10 mark (yes, I have to buy in dollars and stitch a commission when my credit card company performs the exchange) and a lot around the $0 mark. As in, a LOT of free eBooks. Guess which I bought?

Neither. I went to the Amazon UK store and ordered a couple of paperbacks instead. Seriously – I’m not just trying to make a point.

My thinking was this:

BULLET $10, with an exchange commission, is about £7 on my credit card bill. That’s almost the price of a new release paperback in Waterstones. On Amazon UK, I can get the same paperback for between £4 and £5 if I don’t mind waiting a couple of days for free delivery (and bear in mind that this is a book for my reading pile, not music or a movie; I can wait). If I don’t get the physical book to keep, I’m not prepared to pay more than half of the cover price for an eBook edition, so for an £8 print book, my eLimit is £4.

BULLET A price of $0 tells me that you don’t think your book is worth anything. I understand that writers want to build a fanbase and get “sales”, but a fanbase of people who “bought” your book for free is simply a list of people who downloaded your book. They didn’t pay for it, so there’s no compulsion to read it and extract value from it. And if you spent 2 years writing it, and don’t think it’s even worth one penny, why should they risk 10-12 hours of their time reading it when there are books to be read by authors who think their work is good enough to justify charging a fee in return for their time, writing skills and creativity? I know authors whose only goal is be as widely read as possible, and I admire that goal, but I’m not sure giving your work away for free is the way to do it. 1000 unread downloads doesn’t generate word-of-mouth. How about charging one dollar and giving the proceeds to charity (and making the charitable nature of the sale clear in the online store)? Now that would probably sell and be read.

I know that the eBook market is aimed more at customers using eReader devices, but I wanted to buy a book, and if I factor in the price of hardware, that first eBook purchase is going to cost over £200, with no guaranteed savings over the following years to cover that outlay. And I can get the same book on Amazon UK for £4…

So, my first foray into eBooks was a non-starter. I tried, honestly I did. I looked around and read some blurbs and compared some prices, but couldn’t find a price point I was happy with for a book that interested me. I was disappointed.

So how has this affected my opinion on whether to publish Make a Move as an eBook? Find out tomorrow…