We’ve gone over the focus on the narrative and the forms stories come in, now let’s talk about sharing stories on Indie Aisle. One of the things that makes the internet so great is how we are able to communicate in a variety of ways and quickly share ideas with other people. Indie Aisle has been designed with this in mind, by offering two ways to connect with people:

Find and follow

Authors can keep their fans updated, and everyone can find and keep track of great indie authors on Indie Aisle. This is done by posting short updates and choosing to follow other people’s updates. Additionally, you can keep a personalized library of stories and let people get an idea of the kinds of stories you enjoy as well as see what other people are reading.

Share with the web

To take the experience even further, Indie Aisle integrates with the openness of the web by allowing you to share with other web services that you’re already familiar with by connecting them with Indie Aisle. Starting with Twitter and Facebook, in the future they’ll be many different services to pick from with different options for how to integrate each into your Indie Aisle profile.

The combination of the people you connect with, the stories you share, and how you customize your settings, makes your Indie Aisle profile unique to your personality. And how you interact with the tool allows you to connect with people from across the web and across the world!

Going along with the previous post on the kinds of stories you can expect to see on Indie Aisle, this time I’ll talk about how the tool will allow you to publish your story. While mainly focused on digital stories, Indie Aisle is designed to ultimately let you decide the form you want your story to be in:

• eBook – Upload your file and it is converted to a number of standard formats, set your own price for purchase through the website and earn 85% of all digital sales
• Physical Book – Use various service providers for print versions of your story
• Work in Progress – Post information on a story before you release it with options for fans to follow your updates on when it becomes available
• Series – Ability to add multiple eBooks or physical books under the same story

Additionally, stories will also be categorized based on content format:

• Primarily Text – Basic text formatting with or without accompanying illustrations
• Styled Layout – Mainly text but with specific formatting and illustrations
• Illustration-based – Full-page artwork with text being layed out around it
• Comics – Artwork with specific areas for text

With each format there will be tips for how to lay out your story for outputting it as an eBook. It will also allow Indie Aisle to figure out how your story can be distributed and promoted in other venues outside the site. I will talk more about how that will be done in a future post!

So what will Indie Aisle be all about and what will make it unique from other online marketplaces? Well, for a start, it will only have narratives. No textbooks or guides or anything not based on a sequence of events. Non fiction is fine, but should be in the form of a story.

The main reason for this is because one of the goals of Indie Aisle is to show the power of storytelling and how important it is to each of us. How personal a story can be, or how interactive and social. How a story impacts the way we see ourselves and the world.

And with the focus on the story itself, I hope to allow for exploring stories across all formats, from the written word, to illustration-based, to comics and beyond. Each format is its own artform, creating a different kind of experience for its audience.

This also allows for organizing stories in new ways based on specific interests and tastes, making it easier to find the kind of story you’re looking for, or to provide the right context for others to find your own story.

And that’s just the beginning. The core design for Indie Aisle is complete and as the under-the-hood development work takes place, I will go over other aspects of what Indie Aisle has to offer. Stay tuned!

I’ve covered eBook formats in a previous post, so I thought taking a look at eReaders would be a good follow up to that. Like the eBook format, readers for eBooks are also at their beginning stages so there are still certain kinks that need to be worked out to make them easier to use. Here are some things to keep in mind when considering one:

• eReaders usually come in two forms: as eInk devices (Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, etc) and as applications for your computer (Adobe Digital Editions, Calibre, etc), mobile device (Stanza, Kobo, Aldiko, etc), or iPad
• Because of the varying eBook formats you’re likely to download, look for an eReader that  allows for reading multiple formats
• As with digital music, DRM can be an issue for moving your eBooks from device/app to device/app, so when downloading eBooks make sure their DRM allows for this, or just try to avoid any eBooks with DRM all-together
• As people start using multiple devices for reading, a good universal solution is to go with a web-based app like Ibis Reader

And like with eBook formats, betting on the web is the way to go. One of the reasons the web browser was invented was for electronic reading and is now being built in to practically every device. And to not have to deal with moving files around, storing your files online seems to be the way things are heading and in a few years will become the norm. The ultimate goal being to just log in to an online eBook app of your choice and access your library of books from any device, anywhere, anytime.

• Writing Process – Write and revise, work with an editor for polish and get feedback from people you know
• Illustration – Work with a graphic designer for a good cover and/or a more stylized layout, and/or an illustrator for accompanying visuals
• Publishing – Work with someone to meet certain technical preparations required for printing and digital output
• Sales and Distribution – Work with brick and mortar book shops for print, and online marketplaces for eBooks
• Promotion – Work with someone knowledgeable of marketing, get reviewed by professional critics and get interviewed in various publications

Besides the writing part, it’s everything else that can make going with a traditional publisher still a viable choice. However, technology and the internet have given us tools that change the entire process. It’s paved the way for the independent self-published writer. But going the indie route isn’t necessarily about doing it all yourself. Even though you could, collaborating with other people can give you an edge to compete with books still published by big companies. In fact there are services available that offer different approaches to doing this.

But beyond all the tools, the one greatest asset, the internet, allows you to choose how you want to do things every step of the way. As companies try to reinvent the publishing model, ultimately it’ll be the writers that will be in control of the process. Because that’s the best part of being indie, doing things your own way!

Photo by JohnKit on Flickr

I went to this year’s Phoenix Comicon which was much bigger compared to last year’s and better organized. Besides having a great time talking about comics and stories, I noticed that for indie comic creators and book authors being part of the Con was a great way to promote themselves.

Even from all the panels I went to, the common advice successful comic creators and authors had for promotion was to go to various conventions and talk to people in person. From getting a booth to participating in panels, being active at various events is one of the best ways to interact with fans.

It’s all part of the community-building process. It’s the same reason using various tools like Blogs, Twitter and Facebook, works well. Simply put, to let people know about what you do, interact with them.

Here some other tips I kept hearing discussed during panels:

• To get your work talked about, put effort into getting reviews, even if it means tracking down bloggers who might be interested in your work and sending them review copies
• Making your work a series released on a shorter-term basis could be an easier investment with some quicker results versus spending years on the perfect novel
• Think of ways to create merchandise around your work since that’s what can sometimes make you more money than the story itself

Comicons and other conventions revolving around stories and the worlds they create are everywhere now and there’s more of them starting up than ever before. If you haven’t been to one, you’re missing out on some great fun!

• Adobe PDF – Most common for reading on your computer, originally designed for portable electronic documents, has some limitations when it comes to reading on eReaders or mobile devices
• MobiPocket – Originally designed specifically for mobile devices, most modern devices have switched away from it, the biggest current supporter is the Amazon Kindle device
• RTF (Rich Text Format) and TXT (Plain Text) – Have wide support but very limited formatting options
• ePub – Works virtually all eReading devices, except Amazon’s Kindle

The ePub format is the one to keep an eye on since it could well be the universal format used across all platforms. The reason it works so well is because it is essentially developed the same way as the webpage you’re reading right now. And since most mobile devices and even eReaders come with internet browsers, it makes it a no-brainer to support it.

Another big advantage is that ePub allows for multiple types of books. From primarily text-based to more stylized layouts, to even comic books. You can start with practically any word processing software, or with something like Adobe InDesign for more specific styling and layout, or Photoshop for your comics and either export it out directly to ePub or use one of the many tools available for doing so.

One caveat with ePub is that it does not use any DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. But if we’ve learned anything from the music industry and MP3s, no DRM is a good thing as it’s ultimately unnecessary.

Update: Thanks to Liza Daly who pointed out that there is in fact ability to add DRM to ePub files. I still feel that it is unnecessary, but the option is there.

People are reading comics now more than ever and as people get used to reading eBooks on different devices, comic books will certainly become a part of their reading. Comics have actually already gone digital even before eBooks gained ground through online comic strips. I’ve been reading them for years and the idea of a device like the iPad brings new potential to how comics can be enjoyed. It also means that there is now a new platform for indie comic creators to expand their audience.

A great article I came across recently at Digital Book World talks about how the iPad and eBooks medium can be used for comics even when  having to compete with a big publisher like Marvel or DC. I’ve highlighted a few good points that the author makes about how comics will be read digitally:

“A lot of people read comics digitally, but not enough on any single device to make digital distribution viable unless you’re able to make your content available on multiple platforms.”

“Breaking barriers and reinventing comics as a primarily digital art form is the only way to get beyond Marvel and DC’s stranglehold on the market.”

“Instead of multiple pages of panels read left-to-right, a comic can be a single page PDF one panel wide and hundreds of panels long scrolled down on your phone. It can be a slide show watched on a TV screen.  Stories can be told from three different character points of view that you can toggle back and forth from. None of this is easily or cost-effectively possible with novels or video. Only comics seem to have this level of flexibility.”

“Text can be converted to tagged XML metadata files, which in turn can then easily be converted to any number of eBook formats, from Mobi to ePub. Metadata can be tagged to maximize web search capabilities; digital files for typical books can built in such a way as to facilitate easy and efficient ‘chunking’ and repurposing.”

Be sure to read the two-part article titled “Digital Comics: Level the Playing Field” for more: Part I | Part II

The overall response seems to be very positive. Most reviewers have basically pointed out  that a device that allows you to read what we’ve been reading on computer screens for years in a more comfortable way is something people want. It’s true that to a certain extent the Kindle did this first, but it seems easier to make that transition to something else with a screen the way a lot of people have been doing with their mobile devices. Plus the iPad has the cool factor people are looking for in technology now.

All this talk around the iPad seems to have changed people’s perspective on reading as they now have a way of reading digitally as another form of leisure. Apple has indeed created a new line of technology products. Your computer is now for Email and maybe researching something, your phone is for communicating (Email, Twitter, etc), and your iPad or tablet device, is for reading news, articles and books. And more people grasping this concept is what will expand the audience for ebooks. Because now there is a device designed specifically for reading them.

Below are my notes from three panels that offered some good insights on publishing and promoting independently.

Publishing online

• A new approach to publishing should combine collaborative social media tools
• The web is about talking to people and giving them what they’re looking for, it should be a discussion with readers

Independent content creation

• There’s a low barrior to entry for expressing yourself through blogs or writing a book or even making music or videogames
• It’s still expensive to market content, even though there are sometimes exceptions to the rule with the viral aspect of certain content
• Content now requires thinking about building a community around it
• Make great content, gather a community, curate great content for community, repeat

Promoting yourself

• Fans help spread your work, live events help them gather and talk about it
• Go where your audience is by partnering with related organizations, guest blog/write to similar audiences
• Make sure to get links to your website on related websites
• Ask for reviews
• Make it easy to share content
• Start promoting early, even during development of project