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Posts Tagged ‘EBook’

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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.

 

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The Importance of Being Indie

Monday, May 24th, 2010

“Writers need to stop defining themselves by their publisher, or lack thereof. “Indie” is becoming a meaningless affectation.”

@glecharles, 1:00 PM May 19th

I really, really wanted to agree with this when I read it. It resonates with how I feel about my book and what I’m doing – that I’m competing with all books, and not just the independently produced ones. I’d never send my book for review by a publication dealing only with indie books; I’m putting Make a Move up for the Pepsi Challenge against every book out there, and I’m competing on story, character, dialogue and ideas, knowing that my editing and printed product are comparable with anything the mainstream can offer, and won’t let me down. The quality of my book is more important to me than any label I could attach to it, or myself.

And in a perfect world, that would be enough.

Thing is, if you don’t label yourself, someone else will. And that label is “vanity publisher”. It happened to a writer friend of mine last week; she was enquiring about whether attending a seminar on book marketing, targeted at publishers and held by a respected outfit in Manchester, would be of benefit to her. The reply she received told her that there would be little of interest to a vanity publisher. Nice.

This stereotype – the vanity publisher – was weak ten years ago, outdated five years ago, and is now just tired. Even its irony value as an inaccurate, mindless cliché sustained by a supposedly creative industry has faded. It’s time it ended.

I read Zoe Winter’s blog post over at IndieReader.com about how the term “indie author” is starting to catch on, and how indies with the skills and drive to produce a quality product need to stand up and define what it means to be an indie. I agree with her assertion of what it means – or what it should mean to be an indie author – and I’m committed to playing my part on all counts, but I’m skeptical about one thing, and that’s how far we, as indies, can push the title. I “officially” adopted the title of indie author when I changed my About page recently, but I didn’t do it because I needed to feel like part of a movement, or I was looking for validation, or I was yielding to peer pressure; I did it for the reason anyone running a business should do anything: because the customers asked.

I run Google Analytics on this site, and I monitor what people are searching for when they find me. Know what my most frequent search term is? “indie novel”. I don’t know specifically what these browsers want when they search for indie novels, but I hope they want the same thing I did when I used to search the “contemporary” section of a bookshop: something new, inspiring, raw, alternative, edgy – exactly the kind of books that are struggling to get book deals as publishing pounds are redirected to easier sells. So these readers are searching for something, and they’re finding me, and they’re sticking around to explore the site and download my sample episode (okay, I admit it, I have a data fetish).

So there is an indie movement in books, but it’s the readers who are driving it, not the writers. We have no control over where it goes, other than to do our utmost to give the readers print books and eBooks of the quality they deserve. And as for the title of “indie author”, its your choice whether to adopt it, but given the energy, enthusiasm and acceptance of the indies I’ve met since I published Make a Move and started this blog, it’s one I’m proud to accept.

 

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Posted in Blogging, Opinion, Publishing | 2 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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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:

  • $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.
  • 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…

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The Road to eQuilibrium

Friday, January 8th, 2010

eBooks are an interesting concept for me, as they potentially solve a problem I have: the only way to ship books to international markets (such as the US) economically, is in bulk, and I’m not dealing in bulk, so those markets are closed to me. I’ve been looking into eBook platforms as a way into those markets, but the eBook market is barely more than nascent. If anything, it’s childlike. Any effort I put into ePublishing will yield a fraction of the return I could get by marketing my printed book in the UK. There might be a time when the market is mature enough to allow a self-publishing writer to receive a good return on their efforts, but it’s a long way off. I can see a point where eBooks and printed books will coexist, satisfying the needs of a varied readership, but I don’t think it’s as imminent as some others appear to.

The Hurdles

Before the eBook market becomes a serious contender, I can see a series of hurdles holding back mass acceptance:

  • FreeBooks. The race to the bottom has seen most books by independent or minor authors on sale for jack – $0. Trading financial remuneration for exposure, these authors/publishers have driven the market into the ground, to the point where the content has been so devalued, even if people do start charging again, it’s going to take a long time before customers are prepared to pay.
  • Loss-leading. At the other end of the scale, blockbuster titles are selling at heavily discounted prices; for example, at time of writing, the Twilight novels are selling on the Kindle store for just north of $5. This means that even if customers are prepared to pay more than nothing for a book, you’re very soon going to hit a ceiling beyond which you can’t charge. There’s no market in that gap.
  • Format Wars. A slew of new eBook readers arrived at the CES show this week, and with them comes an increasing number of conflicting eBook formats and DRM systems. I don’t know exactly how many formats, as I don’t care, which is my point. Customers don’t want to be restricted in what they can and can’t do with their content, and don’t want to be stuck with hundreds of pounds-worth of eBooks that only work on a dying platform. There has to be consolidation, and it has to happen quickly, otherwise the market will be dead before it’s started (look at what happened to HD DVD: people waited and waited to see which format would become the standard, to the point where they gave up waiting, and now the winner also the loser).
  • Publisher Acceptance. The book publishing industry is chasing its tail trying to work out how to survive in the digital real, and they’re not, in my opinion, playing it smart. When Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, they became the gatekeepers to a way around the music piracy problem; the record companies needed Apple, and as a result they got reamed on the deal. The book industry doesn’t have a problem – at least, not to the same extent – yet they seem to be elevating Amazon to a position of power. It’s not like book pirates are scanning books in their bedrooms and uploading the pdfs to torrent sites. So why are the publishing companies letting Amazon lead them in this dance? They need to work out a deal in which everyone, and not just the technology manufacturers, benefits and books, and good writing, don’t become the innocent casualties. Then they could focus on how to market and manage this new product. Of course, if the publishers realised that by joining together for a common good, they could kill off eBooks within a month by refusing to move to a digital platform. But that would be naughty.

I’m not anti-eBooks. Not really. I think eBook textbooks for students are an amazing concept, and newspapers/magazines could flourish in the digital space. And I do know a few people who read a lot and don’t want to own the paper books, and they could be a good niche market for eBook publishers. Whatever happens, I just want it to be over. All of this wrestling to establish the market, it only really harms consumers, and it seems that, as always, the media companies are fine with that.

But this is books, not pop music, and not Hollywood movies. There’s always been a certain legitimacy associated with the book industry – an element of class. How about we keep that traditional image intact, and just get this done as quickly, and as painlessly as possible?

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Shorter Stories

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Stories have to be the length they have to be. Some ideas are so pure, they suit the short story form perfectly – just a high concept, in-and-out narrative that is stronger for taking up less space. Other ideas have reach, grandeur, longevity, and when coupled with a couple more like-minded concepts, form the backbone of a novel-length tale. You can always tell when a writer has tried to stretch a short story into a novel, or has an idea crammed into a short that really needs more room to breathe and evolve. Ideas are born with a genetic word count, and have an inherent resistance to modification.

For the sake of discussion, let’s ignore novellas. They’re a marketing ploy to sell long short stories and short novels.

When I was outlining Make a Move, the ideas I felt drawn to write about weren’t “novel” ideas. They didn’t have the substance to carry a full-length book. Thing is, they weren’t “short-story” ideas either, as they relied on character background to work. I’d been messing with the idea of writing a book formatted as a sit-com (a British sit-com with 6 episodes, rather than the 22-25-episode US variety) for a while, but couldn’t see the point without a good story to justify it, and it was just sat in my back head waiting for a reason to use it. I think I’d just finished rewatching Spaced on DVD and was craving more. So there I was, with a collection of serial, but short, story ideas and an idea for a multi-part framework…

I think most people see the decision to write Make a Move in 6 parts as a gimmick, and I admit it was for a while. I referred to it as a lit-com, but that kind of marketing speak makes me feel dirty, and not in a good way, so I stopped. Once I started to write, though, I realised I’d hit on something that was going to inspire me in new and scary ways. I knew it was working for me when, despite not aiming at a word count, all of the episodes were dropping at 17-18,000 words. Episode 6 ran to 20,000 in the first draft, but I had to rewrite it extensively to make it not suck; the unsucky version is 18,000 words. That was the story (stories) dictating what length it wanted to be.

There was a side-effect to this structure that I became aware of early on, and I exploited it in every way. All of the writing books/websites tell you that characters have to have a reason to exist. They have to advance the plot, and must have detailed, convincing motivations in order to come alive. Fair enough. But what about all of those characters that are just cool, or fun, or scary, or sexy? Should they not exist just because they have no lofty goals? I have lots of characters like that; they turn up, do their thing, and then leave. Many writers would condemn that as frivolous, but my readers don’t, as they know that, due to the episodic nature of the book, there’s more coming, and my core characters will guide them along the way. I read somewhere (I forget where) that in writing a book, a writer establishes a contract with the reader, and they have to satisfy the terms of that contract or the reader will feel cheated. Make a Move comes with a contract too, but it’s not a pro forma deal; I changed the terms. I think my readers know that by the end of page one.

So the point of this post? A call to those writers wrestling with ideas that just won’t fit into the current accepted templates. The concept of the novel is in flux right now – some might say it’s in jeopardy – and it’s the perfect time to experiment. If eBooks get a foothold (a real foothold, not the toe poke the evangelists are currently creaming over) all manufacturing limitations will be removed, and there’ll be a market, and a platform, for stories of all length. I love short books – 100-150 pages – but they don’t cost half as much to print and bind as a 300-page novel, so they’re bad value, and I need to really like an idea before I’ll buy. Maybe it’s time for those diminutive ideas and marginalised characters to emerge. Make a Move and the (cringe) lit-com is just one idea (actually, it’s 15 ideas, but let’s not talk about that headache in this context) and it came to me before the Kindle was first hinted at; now, all boundaries are flexible, and all bets are off.

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Don’t Read Me

Friday, December 11th, 2009

So it’s illegal to import and sell eBooks from foreign territories, despite the publishers delaying eBook sales for months after the hardcover release? Is it illegal to buy a copy of a printed book in the UK, take it to the US and sell it? Possibly, but I can’t be bothered to check. And I bet the publishers/distributers can’t be bothered to care either, as the bulk of printed books prohibits excessive abuse, so it’s a self-limiting problem. US distributers/retailers lose a few sales – a few points of a percent – no problem. Enter the age of ubiquity, and now they have a problem. So they slap some DRM on it, restrict customer rights to the point of rendering the product an expensive novelty for the techno fetishists, and kill a market before its first Christmas. Interesting.

Or, not. The problem with the eBook revolution, is that not one person in any of the corporations currently fighting for market position has had what this emerging technology requires: an original fucking idea. This is the same restrictive crap the movie studios/distributers have been forcing down our throats since films went mainstream – artificially creating demand by delaying releases to get two bites at the cherry. Well look how that turned out; now they have to release simultaneously worldwide just to secure some box office take before everyone gets sick of being treated like children and just downloads the film from the torrents out of spite.

And here are the same companies owned by the same media groups pulling the same crap with the same consumers. Except you can’t do it with books, because books are perfect, and people love them. People didn’t love VHS, and they don’t love DVD. It appears they’re even less fond of Blu-Ray, and as for downloads… no deal. You try to strongarm people into how they consume books, they will walk away. There are enough books in print right now for everyone on the planet to read in their lifetime, without running out of great stories. People can wait for the publishers/distributers/tech companies/big-ass retailers to dry up their pissing contest and maybe concoct an original idea between them, instead of trying to find new ways to overcharge us for the same shit twice. You want my money? Add value. As of now, DRM stands for Don’t Read Me.

And, yes, it’s been a bad day. Sorry about the language…

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5 Things a Self-publishing Author Doesn’t Need

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

It seems there are a lot of things to spend money on in getting a printed book to market. Kind of like optional extras on your new car. If you’re going to make any money on a self-published book, you have to keep your unit cost as low as possible, so avoiding any unnecessary expenses is vital. Whenever you are considering whether to pay for something, look at the increase to your unit cost price and compare it with the chance it will increase sales. If you can’t see a guaranteed return on investment, don’t buy it. Here are 5 things I decided didn’t offer enough return:

  1. ISBN Numbers. Most independent booksellers don’t need a barcode to sell your book, and you certainly don’t to sell direct. So who uses a barcode? Amazon, Waterstones and supermarkets. If you can make a deal to supply to those retailers and stop your cost price being higher than theirs, you’re printing in such quantities that the £107 for ten ISBNs is negligible. In other words, if you need an ISBN, you can afford one; if you can’t afford one, you don’t need one. Apparently you need an ISBN to sell an eBook through Amazon Kindle or the other ePublishing services; yeah, eBooks are great…
  2. Author Photo. Before the internet, the author photo (and About the Author section) created brand identity and enhanced the connection with the reader. Now we have the internet. The only thing you need to print on the back cover/flap of your book is the address of your website. If you’ve decided you want an author photo, don’t pay a professional to take one. So many people have digital SLR cameras and photo editing software now that you must know someone who can take that photo for you. Professional photographers turn up and take perfectly framed and exposed photos on demand; you have the time to experiment until you get the shot you want. I’ll post soon with some tips on how to get better portrait shots with a variety of levels of photographic gear.
  3. Website. I’m lucky – I have a good friend who runs a web/graphic design company (Lemonaise) and is happy to help me out with my site, but even if you’re on your own, pre-built blogging platforms and services like WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and so on are more than enough for establishing your web presence. Add a Twitter account and not only will you be expanding your reach, you’ll have access to thousands of people who’ve set up their own sites and offer links to help and advice. You don’t need to pay for a website (although you may choose to if you’re after something unique).
  4. Distribution. If you’re going to make enough money to give up your job, you need access to retailers. But if you have the tens of thousands of pounds it would cost to supply Amazon et al at the cost prices they’ll demand, and you can supply those books on sale or return terms, with no guarantee of sales, you probably don’t need to work anyway. So let’s discount distribution at that level as beyond out reach. Print on Demand (POD) companies such as Lulu allow you to sell to foreign territories, as the books are printed in the country to which they’re shipped when ordered. Access to the US market for a UK author is tempting (it’s not something I’ve completely discounted) but the profit per book is so low compared to printing the books yourself, I’m not sure it’s worth it. If you could establish sufficient reputation in a foreign market to sell a few thousand books, I’m not sure the time spent couldn’t have been spent pushing your book in your home market, at ten times the profit (I’m generalising on the numbers, but I’m not far off). “Local Author” is a brand that can sell books, and you should work hard to maximise the returns on that brand.
  5. Middlemen. We all need more middlemen, right? I don’t know too much about publishing services as I stop reading early whenever they’re mentioned. Forget vanity publishing, misleading branding or outright cons, there just isn’t enough profit on a small print run to leave room for anyone else to take a cut. You, the printer, your retailers; that’s the guestlist, and there isn’t room for crashers.

There are way more than 5 things you don’t need when you’re printing a book (swine flu is one I can advise against based on experience) but these are the main money-sinks I considered and discounted when planning my print run, and upon which I feel able to offer some insight. So what other ways can you suggest to keep that unit cost price as low as possible?

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