Today I’m a guest over at Writer Unboxed, where I discuss how finding your unique writing voice is not so different from finding your marketing voice.

What Authors Seem to Forget About Marketing—Especially Those Who Dislike It

Here’s a brief snippet:

I think we can all agree that every author has a distinct writing voice or style, and that—over time—authors usually develop stronger and more confident voices.

What is acknowledged less often is how every author has (or should have) a distinct marketing voice and approach.

Sometimes, because we have less experience with marketing, or feel uncomfortable with the practice, we brace ourselves, even change ourselves, to engage in the activity.

This is good for nobody.

Click here to read the full post.

Rumors of Water:
Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Table of Contents

1. The Daunting
2. paidContent 2012: One busy day
3. Discoverability: DBW’s new confab
4. Libraries/Brantley: The Agency debate’s impact
5. Libraries/Raphael: A better Hachette job?
6. eReaders/Webb: A tablet loyalist
7. Craft/Friedman: Get out of the kitchen
8. Craft/Mayer: Making your books Audible
9. Craft/Bransford/Wendig/LaPolla: Dear DIY author
10. Last gas: A smarter, more sentient Google?

The Daunting

Saints preserve us, the Bezosian Beelzebub has struck again, this time spinning his stinking seductions, pants on fire, in the High Street, itself.

Publishing’s punditti and free-range bloggers have been on overdrive since Monday, of course, heaving their loudest lamentations back and forth across the Atlantic over the news that the UK bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain Waterstones has made a deal to sell Kindles.

Waterstones / Image: paidContent

In fact, let’s stop right there, get up, and run around the room for a good 45 to 60 seconds before continuing. Rejoin me here after you’ve taken your Indignation Lap.

OK, good, welcome back.

It’s bad enough for lots of folks to have thought Waterstones was getting cozy with Barnes and Noble about the Nook, only to find that Lucifer’s Own eReader is actually the conquering device.

But what’s worse, the company’s managing director, James Daunt, maybe he was Waterstoned at the time, did this deal with Amazon without calling up each of our commentators first for his or her permission.

Unthinkable cheek! We are beside ourselves. An arrangement to offer handguns for sale in the front windows of the bookseller’s more prominent locations may have gone down much more easily than this blast of blasphemy.

Why the Waterstones/Amazon deal could hurt Waterstones — paidContent http://t.co/n2yz997E

May 24, 2012 4:00 am via BufferReplyRetweetFavorite

@turndog_million

Turndog Millionaire

To be sure you catch the acrid air of sheer disgust here, I offer you a round of headlines. Sit well back from your screen, safety first.

Waterstones Let The Fox Into The Chicken Run. That one is Martyn Daniels at TheFutureBook, who, in fact, comes back for a second day, still fuming, with: Waterstones: Kissing Their Customers Goodbye.

Daunt dances with the devil. That’s our good colleague Philip Jones at TheFutureBook, referencing a phrase that has come to rather haunt Daunt — no extra charm for the rhyme.  Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December that Daunt was quoted as saying, “Amazon are a ruthless, money-making devil, the consumer’s enemy.”

(Yanks: The Brits refer to companies in the plural. So “Amazon are” to them is “Amazon is” to us. Daunt may have disparaged his future dance partner, but he didn’t mistake a foxtrot for a square dance, as it might seem to US sensibilities.)

Still waiting for indie booksellers to declare AMZN/Waterstones the devil's work and for the AAP and AG to sue someone, anyone.

May 21, 2012 10:42 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

Author Nick Harkaway went for the Huston-Eastwood treatment on his first pass, The Unexpected. Then he circled back again — and another thing, damn it — for Day Two, a bit more begrudging, maybe: Waterstones/Amazon: Clever, But Scary.

@thDigitalReader @DonLinn @mikecane Waterstones could be Pottermore, multiple devices, multiple formats, but sadly that is not the deal here

May 21, 2012 10:42 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@philipdsjones

Philip Jones

Even the dean of our commentators, Mike Shatzkin, couldn’t temper the surprise factor, getting out a fast turn headlined Shocking news from the UK: Waterstones selling the Kindle.

The fact that consumers would like to pay less for something does not, by itself, mean that the industry is 'ripe for disruption'

May 25, 2012 6:21 am via Twitterrific for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@BenedictEvans

Benedict Evans

So look, I’ve also selected for you the lilting tack taken by someone we don’t so frequently hear from in these tussles, a UK writer for CNET named Luke Westaway.

You have to love his headline: Waterstones to sell Amazon Kindle in possibly unwise move. May I ever-so-sweetly suggest that we all could take a gentle lesson from Friend Westaway about not overstating what we know in our headlines?

(Mike Cane, my good buddy, I’m talking to you, with your Waterstones Talks Big Then Surrenders To Amazon headline. And your first line: “Here’s a lesson for you, kids. Just STFU or this can be you!” I don’t know why, but the word “intemperate” just keeps coming to mind, crazy, huh?)

Here’s Westaway:

Waterstones primarily sells books made of mushy tree, so you’d think it would be less keen on the idea of inviting the all-consuming digital company into its brick-and-mortar shops. I’ve tried to puzzle out a way the move could help Waterstones, but this does feel rather like the three little pigs offering to pay for the wolf’s deep breathing classes.

Thank the Lord somebody in the Sceptered Isle still can do that with the language.

In fact, Westaway goes so far as to offer you the Waterstones video in which James the Reviled tries to say something for himself about his “curious move” (Westaway’s phrase). I’m embedding the tape — with its twinkly love-of-books music, sounds as if Jo Rowling is just around the next stacks — so you can enjoy it for yourself and at least let Daunt plead his case.

The point Westaway is making, however eloquently, is right. Crowning the Waterstone embrace of Amazon’s Kindle “family” is this thing of, as Harkaway puts it, “the goldfish offering to clean the cat’s teeth with his head.”

Remember Borders. Here is Laura Hazard Owen in her own second pass at the story, Why the Waterstones/Amazon deal could hurt Waterstones:

Waterstones’ outsourcing of its digital shopping experience to Amazon is reminiscent of the deal that the now-defunct U.S. bookstore chain Borders made with Amazon in 2001. By the time Borders ended that deal six years later, it had lost years of managing its own digital strategy and placed its customers right in Amazon’s hands. As a former Borders employee told Bloomberg last summer when Borders liquidated its remaining stores, Borders “ended up being a customer-harvesting vehicle for Amazon.”

That question of seemingly handing over the digital customer base of Waterstones to Seattle is, far and away, the most troubling.

Waterstones: Kissing Their Customers Goodbye | FutureBook http://t.co/2mXrOGAd

May 24, 2012 2:00 am via BufferReplyRetweetFavorite

@cathryanhoward

CatherineRyanHoward

Harkaway, in his second-day take on the matter, gets at it this way:

One major issue has begun to loom larger in my thinking …and that is the impact of Waterstones’ dedicated heavy readers converting to dedicated digital readers on Amazon’s platform. The sales those dedicated heavy readers drove will be lost to Waterstones.

But, as Shatzkin points out, in agreement with Owen, there are questions, too, of how the deal benefits Waterstones financially. He writes:

Michael Cader in Publishers Lunch reads the press releases the same way I do and we both get the message that the only ebooks Waterstones will share revenue on are those that are purchased over Waterstones’ in-store wifi network.

And Cader, in that article, Waterstones In “Far-Reaching” Alliance with Amazon to Sell Kindle, gets at something a lot of us noticed — word of the deal came right atop a feature in the Guardian. Here’s Cader:

Having walked into a puff piece over the weekend claiming Waterstones’ digital initiative would be “imminent” and quoting Daunt saying, “We’ll be different from Amazon, and we’ll be better” (while bizarrely implying that publishers are sinister masterminds behind “the semi-corrupt practice” of making books returnable), the Guardian repents today with a headline that reads, “Waterstones Kindle a deal for destruction with Amazon.”

That “deal for destruction” piece is a blog post at the Guardian, from Richard Lea, and freighted, like so many writes on the topic, with opinion. It’s worth noting Lea’s first line,  cunningly redolent with the industry! the industry! hysteria:

Monday morning and already it’s the end of the world.

Waterstones' digital dilemma is mostly fault of pre-Daunt management, but Daunt will forever be remembered for doing deal with Amazon

May 22, 2012 8:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@arhomberg

Andrew Rhomberg

The Guardian’s set piece is from Zoe Wood, the paper’s retail writer, steadier as she goes, in Waterstones deal with Amazon puts Kindle and ebooks instore. You can hardly ask for a more restrained line than this:

Amazon is a controversial player in the book industry with both publishers and retailers complaining that its aggressive pricing is undermining the success of the whole industry.

Wood does get the job done with an important point the more emotional writers tend to overlook, one that helps explain the tenor of the UK reaction to all this:

Last month the Guardian reported that Amazon.co.uk paid no corporation tax on the profits generated by last year’s UK sales of £3.3 billion – and is under investigation by the UK tax authorities.

Never a screamer, Eoin Purcell in Dublin does, at this writing, have two rounds of commentary out on the situation already, yes, but as usual he manages to work in some thoughtful perspective worth taking onboardl. In Thoughts On >> Waterstones & Amazon:

The value of inaction is often underestimated and right now when the ebook retail and distribution space is changing rapidly and requires such a huge investment, this move brings revenue, options but most crucially of all, time to just see what happens while rebuilding the core bookselling business.  Impressed by the cojones if nothing else!

Matt Gartland has created another of his "In Three Words" series, this one looking at the future of journalism. / At WinningEdits.com

As it turns out, a write that’s been favorably commented on by several folks comes from Tim Carmody at the Verge. It’s headlined Amazon’s Kindle deal with Waterstones deflates Nook’s global balloon – hysteria-free, you notice, plus it takes the story a step farther, to make us think, “Oh, yeah, what about Barnes and Noble and the Nook?”

Carmody takes the time to listen to a bit of Daunt-running-the-gauntlet, enough at least to catch and highlight for us this line:

“We had to give the customers what they wanted”

That hits somewhere near home in an industry trying to convince itself that the reader is our customer. So Carmody has gone about getting our attention with an unstated reminder of a newly promulgated principle. Then he reminds us that the Kindle is the reigning ereader at the home office:

Waterstones would effectively have to build the Nook e-reader brand up from scratch…Right now and for the immediate future, Amazon’s Kindle is the best viable candidate.

For its part, Carmody writes, Amazon needs a way to roll out the Kindle family of devices since only the basic Kindle is in widespread use yet in the UK. And Waterstones is a known, home-rule fixture.

Waterstones now becomes Amazon’s friendly British face. That’s well worth a small cut of e-books and e-readers sold inside Waterstones’ shops.

Best line in this story goes to Forrester analyst @smulpuru: "Amazon doesn't want to be anyone's bitch." http://t.co/AYRMFecU

May 23, 2012 5:26 am via YoruFukurouReplyRetweetFavorite

@tcarmody

Tim Carmody

And best in class? For an informative and well-crafted write, see the work of Tim Bradshaw and Andrea Felsted in London with Barney Jopson in New York for the Financial Times.

Their story has the bonus of an object lesson in how to write a clean headline: Waterstones strikes deal with Amazon. They quote Daunt:

“Our problem was that the part of the market being served by high-street bookshops is in decline and we have to do something about it…We are in the business of selling reading.”

Click to comment

Good morning, everyone. Did something happen with Waterstones and Amazon last night? If only my Twitter feed was mentioning this...

May 21, 2012 10:51 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Ginger Clark

paidContent 2012: One busy day

Respectfully, gratefully, I’d just like to recommend to the organizers of the annual paidContent event  from GigaOM – that they look at what they presented on Wednesday (expertly and with unending friendliness) as a series of nut-grafs on legs.

Know what a nut-graf is? Once upon a time, newsrooms called a paragraph a “graf.” And a “nut-graf” was that little bit of info that often is added just under or above a headline to flesh out what you’re going to get if you read a story.

RT @gregory: #pc2012 @sdkstl to News Corp's Jon Miller: Saving MySpace, "How'd that go?" http://t.co/7L1S1dPd

May 23, 2012 9:03 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@sdkstl

Staci D Kramer

Check out science correspondent Alok Jha’s piece in the Guardian, Text mining: what do publishers have against this hi-tech research tool? — that’s the headline. What follows it is this nut-graf:

Researchers push for end to publishers’ default ban on computer scanning of tens of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseases

What we saw Wednesday in the soothing garden-stage air conditioning of the Times Center in New York, was a full day of dancing nut-grafs. Smart ones. Personable ones. Expert ones. Intriguing ones, some of them.

If they’d just been able to spend more time with us, go for a bit of depth, fewer tapas, more main dishes.

• 

  paidContent's Jeff John Roberts, left, interviews author Richard Russo at paidContent 2012 / Image: paidContent

  One was infuriating: Amazon-detractor Richard Russo — who sells his books, of course, at Amazon — was onstage was there with the hapless Jeff John Roberts, a fine reporter who isn’t empowered, of course, by his journo stance to provide a countervailing voice to Russo’s biased tirade. Russo’s daughter Emily is an independent bookseller. For some time, Russo has been writing and shouting that she feels “directly impacted’ by Amazon. I’d rather hear from said daughter, myself.

When challenged mildly from the audience, Pere Russo retreated to proclamations of how Amazon is “wonderfully run,” etc., etc. You know, if you call that spade a spade, Richard, Jeff Bezos will deliver it to you with free two-day shipping.

Should you feel you need more on this one, Jeremy Greenfield of DBW has a piece here, in Best-Selling Author Richard Russo Has Harsh Words for Amazon at PaidContent Conference. Beware the dog.

Kudos to PaidContent and GigaOm Gang for pulling off a very interesting + informative conference. #PC2012.

May 23, 2012 7:35 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@KatMeyer

Kat Meyer

• 

  paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen interviews Pottermore's Charlie Redmayne at paidContent 2012. / Image: paidContent

  Another was the merciful antidote, the beautifully prepared Lucky Man of the Year, Charlie Redmayne of Pottermore, a man who can just say “Jo, Jo, Jo” all afternoon and make the rest of us feel impoverished, impoverished, impoverished.

This time, it was paidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen, who has done a grand job of covering the rise of More Potter, doing the interviewing.

No tough questions and no smash-surprise answers, but here was, in fact, that interesting question — this time captured by Greenfield in Can Other Publishers Do What Pottermore Did? Yes, Says Pottermore CEO. (I’ll spoil this one for you — yes, if you have control of Tolkien or Hunger Games, hinted Redmayne.) But this did get us to this intriguing thing of brand as the future of big success, Redmayne riffing along thusly:

Publishing companies now need to understand that the thing people like Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retailers really respect is a brand. If we’ve demonstrated anything (he and Jo), it’s the power of a brand.

If everyone in the world would gather and tell everyone in the world one by one that they're awesome, there'd be no need for show business.

May 21, 2012 7:18 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@Robburnett1

Rob Burnett

By my count, we heard from 29 movers and shakers from media, research, venture capital investment, network journalism, major magazine management, software development, you name it.

And these folks were hosted, moderated, introduced, and shepherded by the GigaOM and paidContent journalists expertly and gracefully … but without arc, without destination, without an arrival.

There was a good conversation between GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, among many quick but edifying moments in the day.

A theme of “At the Crossroads,” of course, does set one up to be run over. And with whole panels and Q&A sessions jumping up and running off after 15 or 20 minutes, it was hard not to feel that everyone had asked her or his cab to wait for them out on steaming West 41st Street.

Where now for Nook’s global ambition? Apps and Windows http://t.co/MP8uPzLu #pc2012

May 24, 2012 5:31 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@RobertAndrews

Robert Andrews

No speaker was a wipeout. Even Russo was doing his shtick well.

The event was a model of stop-watched efficiency. But somehow hearing from Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Letterman’s Worldwide Pants was little different than hearing from WordPress/Automattic and Expert Labs, from USA Today and Vox Media, from Union Square Ventures and Zite and the Boston Globe and Betaworks and News Corp and Small Demons, from Piano Media and the Financial Times.

There’s a quick wrap here from Staci Kramer, who carried a lot of the day’s hosting duties well. Tapes from the livestream can be found here — just hit the red “Watch Now” button.

And my congratulations to everyone on a bustling, if breathless trot-through. Like eight European capitals in four days. We knew it was 5:15p because there were Charlie and Laura.

best advice I heard at #pc2012 paid content event was - don't be corporate. don't act like a monopoly.

May 24, 2012 10:40 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@JoeConnollyWSJ

Joe Connolly

Here’s a useful round of Five key takeaways from paidContent 2012 put together by Robert Andrews, Owen and Roberts — if anything it illustrates both the newness of a few thoughts and the not-so-new of others, a good snapshot of how this valuable day went. Their five points:

• Data helps destroy containers, and that’s a good thing.
• Digital storytelling is a native art.
• Not all “media” are created equal.
• Publishers have to sell their brands directly to consumers.
• It’s time to toss CPM as a yardstick for online advertising success.
  

Click to comment

QOTD RT @Porter_Anderson: @Bankoff "If we don't take control as publishers of our technology destination, it will be done to us." #pc2012

May 23, 2012 10:35 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@cnaux

cedric naux

Discoverability: DBW’s new confab

The whole idea of the Discoverability and Marketing Conference is about teaching an industry that’s in the very early stages of a business transformation some of the basic elements of digital marketing.

Gary Lynch, community manager for Digital Book World, is talking about the interplay of the digital transformation in publishing and DBW’s decision to create its new Discoverability and Marketing 2012 for September 24-25 at New York’s Metropolitan Pavilion.

SEO to increase discoverability, content marketing, email marketing, social-media marketing — and that the combination of the two (discoverability and external marketing) should result in more sales.

Like many of us, Lynch is watching as the most forward leaning members of the publishing community press their grasp of the potentials.

The smart people in this industry recognize that things are changing very, very fast, and that they’re still responsible and accountable for hitting financial results. And if there’s a methodolgy out there that will enable them to do it more effectively, I think they’ll pay attention to it.

Of course, as was obvious at the paidContent 2012 this week, getting agreement on any given methodology or approach can be as hard as the discoverability, itself. As Lynch volunteers, unprompted:

The question is, do they recognize that deploying digital marketing tactics is the way to go? –So what we’re hoping for with this conference is that it will raise the level of awareness of discoverability in digital marketing.

With early-bird pricing now available on registrations ($695) and regular rates kicking in after June 15 ($795), the D&M conference — like other top-line industry events — isn’t priced with a recognition of authors’ new central position in publishing. Lynch says, however, that F+W Media is aware of this and interested in addressing it. And as for the currently planned conference:

Each of the sessions will be very tutorial. There’ll be five or six sessions a day, each about an hour. We’re taking people from outside the publishing industry who are experts in digital marketing, and they’ll be teaching the sessions.

Having started the day with, basically, “try this,” then, Lynch plans to stage industry figures who are, in fact, doing just that, have tried it — inside publishing — and are there to tell you how it’s going.

At the end of the day, we’ll have a panel of marketers within the book industry to talk about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, which tactics are working, which ones aren’t working.

Several speakers have been announced and you can see the lineup so far.

DBW's Discoverability and Marketing Conference in September is to be held at Manhattan's Metropolitan Pavilion. / Image: Metropolitan Pavilion

I’m glad that highlighted presenters include Jon Fine, director of author and publisher relations at Amazon. Whatever you think of Amazon, we need it in the room with us in our major gatherings. In fact, we need Amazon’s folks lined up for lunch, chatting over drinks, speaking on the panels, gladhanding in the hallways.

Lynch is clear on why it’s important for publishing people to include “our friends from Seattle.”

Because the customers are using Amazon. Whether you like or dislike Amazon’s business practices, what’s relevant is you need to be where your customers are.

More speakers, per Lynch’s planning, include Brett Sandusky of Macmillan New Ventures;  Mike Grehan, a VP at one of Lynch’s former workplaces, Incisive Media; Fauzia Burke of FSB Associates; Rick Joyce of Perseus; Colleen LIndsay of Penguin’s Book Country; Krista Nehar of Boot Camp Digital; Bethanne Patrick of Book Riot; Shane Norman, now of bMuse; and others.

What 50 SHADES success actually demonstrates is that women love the joy of text.

May 22, 2012 3:18 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@JustBethanne

Bethanne Patrick

There are no delusions in Lynch’s New York office about the trickiness of introducing a new conference on a developing brace of topics like this:

There’s always a risk when you launch a new event on a subject that’s still very much in the early stages of acceptance in the market. If you do it too soon and the market doesn’t think they need it, then the conference doesn’t work. If you wait too long, then competitors fill the void and your conference becomes a “me too.” My sense is that our timing is spot-on.

Click to comment

Cab driver: "You're a writer? You're exactly the person I need. I'm writing a book about my life. I've died 6 times. I have info from God."

May 23, 2012 1:02 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@EmilyMandel

Emily St. J. Mandel

Libraries/Brantley: The Agency debate’s impact

I have been following the lawsuits against trade publishers and Apple over agency pricing for the last several months…As is my wont, I’ve been trying to figure out what, if anything, this will mean for libraries and the demand for ebook lending services.

Of course, as Peter Brantley goes on to write in his Pricing and markets: agency and libraries for Publishers Weekly, with only one of the Big Six (Random House) making its frontlist available to libraries to lend, anyway, the question has a lot less urgency at the moment than it might.

Nevertheless, Brantley goes on to speculate that ebook prices, in general, should come down if Agency pricing is largely halted.

If the overall percentage of media time and dollars expended on books grows because it is cheaper for individuals to rationalize their purchase, then the overall demand for ebooks will swell across all distribution channels.

Publishers Lunch is making available to you a free ebook ahead of BEA with excerpts from more than 30 upcoming fall titles. Go to publun.ch/BEABuzz to get yours.

Such a trend, he writes, would include libraries and could be good for them:

If ebooks become a more attractive entertainment medium, and more people can enter the book market as a result, then those resorting to library borrowing will be either those most financially stressed and unable to enter the retail market at nearly any price, or they will be seeking something uniquely valuable from their local library.

But even as he and others convene nearly continually online, it seems, to predict this, that, and the other thing about the industry! the industry! in its long stagger into digital, Brantley, unlike some, is smart enough and gracious to note that all is conjecture:

Because digital media markets are rapidly evolving, it’s very difficult to examine hypothetical market impacts without pursuing a full-fledged research analysis…(but) arguably both consumers and libraries can benefit from an ebook market displaying lower average price points.

What do you think? Insomuch as anyone can foresee the lay of this land, has Brantley got it right?

Click to comment

Addicted to sparkling water. Want to venture beyond S. Pellegrino.Suggestions?

May 20, 2012 8:08 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@craigmod

Craig Mod

Wow — 3 Sodastream recommendations in 30 seconds ;)

May 20, 2012 8:11 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@craigmod

Craig Mod

Libraries/Raphael: A better Hachette job?

We were pleased to learn that starting this spring, Hachette is conducting a pilot with two ebook distributors for libraries, which will bring a selection of HBG’s recent bestselling ebooks to 7 million library patrons.

Hot pursuit on Brantley’s point that Five Bigs aren’t serving libraries: This is Molly Raphael, American Library Association chief, writing in the “E-Content” section of the association’s online magazine. In her post, Ebooks: Promising New Conversations, Raphael mentions a tantalizing test she says Hachette is making.

We had a very promising meeting at Hachette. As you may know, Hachette discontinued offering their new ebook titles to libraries as of April 2010, though Hachette continues to sell its backlist (i.e., titles with publication dates prior to April 2010). Going in to this meeting, we were hoping to establish a relationship with Hachette and to persuade them to give serious consideration to providing libraries with access to its newer titles.

And it sounds as if Raphael and her colleagues believe they may have reason for hope:

These pilot programs will help HBG learn more about library patrons’ interests, usage, and expectations, and help the publisher devise the best strategy to reach the widest audience of ebook readers in libraries.

“That’s all she wrote” on the subject, as the old saying goes.

Photo: paidContent

At paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen followed up quickly on Raphael’s piece with Hachette is offering new e-books to some libraries:

Hachette would not confirm which distributors or libraries it is working with — whether it is partnering with leading digital distributor OverDrive and/or with an OverDrive competitor like 3M Cloud Library or Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360.

She did, however, have a statement from Hachette that said, in part:

“These pilot programs will help us learn more about library patrons’ interests, usage, and expectations…We’ll have more to say once we have looked at the data from the pilots.”

Let’s hope this is a first sign of progress on the issue. Owen’s story includes this useful, quick wrap of where the other Bix Sixers are on library ebook lending. I’ve bulleted it for you:

• Random House is the only big-six publisher to offer unrestricted access to its titles, though it sharply increased the prices of e-books for libraries this spring.
• Penguin recently ended its relationship with OverDrive [the major distributor of books to libraries] and will no longer distribute e-books and digital audiobooks to libraries — at least until it finds a new partner.
• Macmillan and Simon & Schuster do not make e-books available to libraries.
• HarperCollins allows e-books to be checked out 26 times before the library has to buy a new copy.

Click to comment

I think the dog has finally forgiven me for giving him a bath.

May 18, 2012 5:34 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@KMWeiland

K.M. Weiland

eReaders/Webb: A tablet loyalist

First, I don’t want to be locked in to one retailer. On my iPad, I have apps that allow me to read books bought from anywhere I choose.

O’Reilly Media’s Radar operator Jenn Webb has no problem with technology. Far from it.

I can buy books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other smaller retailers, and they will all work on my iPad. True, this spreads my library around in a less-than-ideal organization, but the ability to buy books from anywhere is more important to me.

In Why I haven’t caught ereader fever, Webb chuffs, surely, anyone who’s held out so far from dedicated ereaders. These all are viable arguments.

I’m not so sure ebooks and ereaders will have a place down the road, making the value proposition of the investment that much less appealing.

And

I doubt my iPad will become obsolete any time soon. I look forward to the day books are URLs (or something similar) and we can read them anywhere on any device — and that day may not be too far off.

And

eReader shortcomings also are likely to present a rich content hindrance, even before a shift to a web/HTML5 format gets underway.

And

Most ereaders are somewhere around mass-market-paperback size, and the Nook Simple Touch and Simple Touch with GlowLight are nearly square. I prefer hardcover or trade paperback size — about the size and shape of my iPad.

One thing Webb doesn’t touch on, though, is the argument that a tablet’s multifunctional capacity means too many distractions for good reading. It would be interesting to hear her thoughts on that. And yours.

Click to comment

Maybe the emails could stop long enough for me to get up and get some water---oh, wait, no, they won't, sorry.

May 17, 2012 11:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Ginger Clark

Craft/Friedman: Get out of the kitchen

Earlier this month, #JaneFriedman, hashtag unto herself and host of the Ether, gave us an important write, Distinguishing Between Straight-Up Advice and Paradigm Shift.

What she was getting at there is that we’re now moving past a time in which authors and others in publishing can viably think of “writing over here” and “platforming over there.” There are too many creative members of our community still holding out, unable to achieve that paradigm shift in which they understand that their creative work and their author-platforming are elements of the same process.

Ultimately, I can’t change your mind about marketing/selling being inseparable from writing until you have your own experience or insight that validates what I’m saying.

Nevertheless — and understanding, as Friedman does, that your own level of development may make you feel a divide, still, in your work — I’m going to begin widening the concept of “craft” here on the Ether so that it can include any aspect of a publishing life and work, not just elements of writing.

Remind me to get into that big exposé on stand-up desks I’ve been meaning to do, will you?

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Infographic: The Fifty States of Grey. What does this say about us Americans? Courtesy @goodreads. #bookexpo http://t.co/WwPHCmyo

May 24, 2012 5:24 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BookExpoAmerica

BookExpo America

Craft/Mayer: Making your books Audible

I recommend finding a professional narrator from the talent pool Audible provides. For an audition you want to give a couple of pages, including a section that has dialogue to see how that is handled by the narrator.

Bob Mayer is writing there about auditioning narrators for audiobook editions of your books. In SOP for Authors Using Audible ACX, he goes over a lot of specific, actionable points from his own experience — some $35,000 worth of experience in having audio editions made, he tells us.

Audible’s ACX’s name refers to Audiobook Creation Exchange and bills itself as “the first marketplace where professional rights holders and producers connect to create audiobooks.”

If you are not someone who has listened to audiobooks, you need to understand that people who do listen value the voice as much as they value the content. So take your time and make sure you have top talent and be willing to pay for it.

I can vouch for that point, having listened to a lot of audiobooks. Not one for the cast-of-thousands funny-voices approach, I’m particularly fond of readings by Campbell Scott and Laurie Anderson because they’re able to read a text beautifully but without actor-ish embellishments. Others prefer flying dialects and giddy squeals and they’re welcome to it. But you need a fix on what you’re looking for when your work is read.

More good advice from Mayer:

Once you are happy with a narrator, try to use the same one for all the books in a series. Listeners expect to hear the same voice just as they expect the same writing from authors.

So. Friggin. Humid. Right. Now.

May 20, 2012 8:22 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@bsandusky

Brett Sandusky

And what should you expect to pay?

I generally posted for a payment window between $100-$200 an hour and ended up paying between $150-$200 per hour. Frankly, that’s about the lowest you can pay and expect quality work. I think $175 is a solid pay rate, but have ranged up and down from there…This means a 100,000 word book is going to cost you around $1,500 to $2,000 up front.

There’s an option of a 50-50 royalty split arrangement, too, Mayer writes. And you need a version of your book cover redesigned in square format, as a CD case might require.

Have your cover designer redo your eBook cover into a square. I recommend the cover be as close to the eBook and paperback cover as possible.

While it’s clear that creating audiobooks is no walk through the park, Mayer is highly complimentary of the Audible ACX program (“extremely efficient and easy to use”).

I like Mayer’s  column not only for all its straight-ahead advice but also because there’s no bragging or promotional slant. Not a hint of “buy my audiobook.” There’s a cover image to show you the squared effect, but no “call to action.” This is a busy self-publishing author heads-upping others about what he’s learned. Good job.

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@unbounders editorial meeting interrupted by @johnmitchinson getting a 'lamb alert'

May 17, 2012 11:00 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@unbounders

Unbound

Craft/Bransford/Wendig/LaPolla: Dear DIY author

All things being equal, people don’t want to work with a jerk.

In a post we’ve needed for quite a while, Nathan Bransford — former agent, now CNET operative and author — takes on the “rather substantial chip” on the shoulders of “some (some!) vocal self-published authors.”

Frustration is to publishing what carbon dioxide is to breathing: a poisonous but inevitable byproduct. (What many self-published authors don’t yet realize is that this is true of self-publishing too.)

Nathan Bransford's latest book was released in April.

Bransford, in On Self-Publishing and Having a Chip on One’s Shoulder, cuts the frustration-mongers some slack:

Yes, some people in traditional publishing are jerks and treat people accordingly. Yes, traditional publishing may well have overlooked your book. Yes, the query process is used as a torture device in some countries.

But he’s also — like many of the rest of us — fed up with screaming self-publishing blowhards.

He cites an author who’s is in agreement with him, and who got the ball rolling on this latest round of resistance to mouthy non-traditionalists: Bransford references Chuck Wendig’s post on the topic, Revisiting the Fevered Egos of Self-Publishing.

Here, Wendig describes the “maggot-chewed bad-apples” who are the subjects of his complaint:

They’re loud. They’re entitled. They’re oddly defensive (methinks thou dost protest too much). They often have books that look and read like they were written by a fourth grader on a high-test ADHD drug cocktail.

Bransford also refers to agent Sarah LaPolla, who, like him, has spotted and stepped up to approv of what Wendig is saying.

In Damn Yankees, and Other Ways Self-Publishing Holds Itself Back, LaPolla follows up on Wendig with a point I think is crucial in terms of not throwing the already-reeling reading public (emphasis hers in caps, mine underlined):

STOP CALLING YOURSELVES INDIE. You’re not that either. Using “indie” interchangeably with “self” only confuses people who want to self-publish and pisses off actual independent publishers. There is a clear difference between publishing with a small press (“indie”) and using a vendor (“self”). Misusing/stealing pre-existing terms doesn’t give you credibility; it makes you look unprofessional.

So we have a current agent, a former agent, and a very current author (who else curses as much like an adolescent as Wendig?), all in agreement, trying to get the self-publishing community to — oh, why not, let’s let Wendig lay it out for us:

Don’t be a cock-bag. A douche-nozzle. A righteous scum-topped cup of dickhead soup.

Chuck Wendig's next book, Mockingbird, is scheduled for an August 28 release.

Wendig has four points he wants to make to the “generic That Guy” who self-publishes. Each is blisteringly elaborated on at his own site. We’ll make do with the top lines:

• First, learn to write.
• Second, stop using your sales numbers as a bludgeon.
• Third, please be advised that the number of books you write is also not an indicator of anything — certainly not quality.
• Fourth, stop being mad at “gatekeepers.”

Bransford, meanwhile, gets together four points of his own, although he suggests you “eat my poop” fewer times than Wendig does:

• Your attitude could alienate people you might want to work with in the future.
• You’re turning off potential readers.
• Your attitude reinforces the idea that self-publishing equates authors who were rejected everywhere else.
• If you are self-publishing out of frustration with traditional publication you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

Remember- even if 99% of manuscripts are rejected, it's the 1% that both agent and publisher want you to be in when they open the jiffy bag.

May 18, 2012 9:44 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@jonnygeller

jonny geller

Put on your flood pants and check in at Writer Unboxed this weekend. It’s time we started really hashing out some of these issues, if for no other reason, so we don’t have to keep periodically revisiting them. It’s like band camp, the bus keeps pulling up with new tuba players who don’t know their valves from their bells.

And until we all convene Saturday beside the mudbath, mull over Bransford’s final (for now) word on the tender subject:

By and large, self-published authors are awesome, entrepreneurial, creative individuals. Some loud ones are not. It’s temping to join the loud crowd, but better in the long run to let your work speak for you rather than your frustrations.

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#wmfevents Ebook readers come out top in terms of what people are going to buy more of, according to Wiggin research

May 24, 2012 6:09 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@philipdsjones

Philip Jones

Last gas: A smarter, more sentient Google?

Since its beginning, Google has used brute force as its main strategy to organize the Internet’s knowledge, and not without reason…Your search queries can be answered so quickly because they are outsourced to immense data farms, which then draw upon enormous amounts of precompiled data, accumulated every second by millions of virtual Google “spiders” that crawl the Web.

This Google Knowledge Graph thing. You heard of it? Maybe not. Fortunately, Gary Marcus has just posted a piece on it in the New Yorker: The Web Gets Smarter.

In a decade or two, scientists and journalists may well look back at this moment as the dividing line between machines that dredged massive amounts of data—with no clue what that data meant—and machines that started to think, just a little bit, like people.

What was the need? Take, for example, the “Paris problem.”

Even in a Web search, Google’s bread and butter, brute force is defeated often, and annoyingly, by the problem of homonyms. The word “Boston,” for instance, can refer to a city in Massachusetts or to a band; “Paris” can refer to the city or to an exhibitionist socialite.

In a sort of new mind meld — a little bit of semanticism, a lot of empiricism — the server banks we know as Google are corral-ing up into a new kind of reef, a hybrid:

Now, Google is becoming something else, a rapprochement between nativism and empiricism, a machine that combines the great statistical power empiricists have always yearned for with an enormous built-in database of the structured categories of persons, places, and things, much as nativists might have liked. Google’s search engines still track all the trillions of occurrences of the word “Paris” and what it is associated with in user queries and documents, but now tries to relate those words not just to each other, but to categories, like people, places, and corporations.

And before you let this news do the library thing on you and leave you feeling a bit dumb beside the mighty roar of those computations in action, get hold of Marcus’ last line:

It’s refreshing to see that computer engineers still occasionally need to steal a page from the human mind.

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This such a @michaelwolffnyc passage: "Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something."

May 22, 2012 5:11 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jeffbercovici

Jeff Bercovici

@jeffbercovici: I wish Michael would be a little bit more vague :-)

May 22, 2012 5:11 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@mathewi

Mathew Ingram

Main image: iStockphoto / NKBimages

Rumors of Water:
Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Articles about the ineffectiveness of online advertising are a dime a dozen. (See this one and this other one, from just this past WEEK!)

I rarely advocate authors spend money on advertising, in part because it takes a specialized skill set to do it well. Plus you have to know how to reach your target market, and some authors don’t even know the definition of that term.

But if you think advertising might be helpful to you or your work, here’s an introduction on how to do it well.

1. Is your ad meant to build awareness or to make a sale? Most authors I know are interested in advertising to boost sales. If that’s the case, keep reading.
2. Does your ad have a call to action? You need one. A good example might be, “Download a free sample now,” or “Explore the TOC now.”
3. If your ad has multiple versions or multiple frames, make sure the call to action appears in every frame and version.
4. Provide as much info as possible about the pricing or promotional offer. Discount offers and discount codes attract attention.
5. Refer to deadlines or limits in quantity, if applicable. That will persuade people to take immediate action.
6. An effective ad is well-designed and balanced. If your ad is more than just a text-based ad (i.e., a display ad), you should probably hire a professional designer to ensure it’s easy to read and hangs together.
7. When people click on your ad, they should go to a landing page that matches the message in the ad, and offers more detail about the offer or product. Sometimes it is appropriate to link directly to an Amazon page. Just make sure that Amazon page has all the information it should (full book description, about the author, praise/blurbs, reviews, etc).

Other tips

1. If you have little or no experience copywriting, then gather as much feedback as possible from other authors and readers about the effectiveness of your message and call to action.
2. Your ad needs to be targeted to an audience that will be receptive to your message. The biggest site is not the best; rather, choose a site that has a devoted fan base that you know will be interested in the type of work you’ve produced.
3. Consider what other ads (or noise) you might be competing against on a particular site. The position of your ad also matters. If it’s buried at the bottom of the site, or in a sidebar with a ton of other stuff, it might not register with visitors. (This is particularly important if you’re paying a flat fee for the ad, rather than a rate based on how many clicks the ad gets.)
4. If you don’t know what CTR means, or you can’t define “conversion,” you’re probably not ready to start experimenting with online ads. Educate yourself fully (see resources below) before spending a dime.

Resources

• One-page crash course from Buzz Marketing
• HubSpot blog (search the site for “online ads” to find helpful articles)
• Copyblogger (excellent resource for learning copywriting)
• Google’s Tools for Online Success (they should know what works; more than 95% of their revenue comes from online advertising)
• Marketing Sherpa

If you’ve tried online advertising before, where did you decide to advertise and why? Was it successful? Will you advertise again?

Art vs Commerce by Tom Giebel / Flickr

Today’s guest post is from one of my UC students, Jarrod Welling-Cann. He is facing the issue—as we all do at some point—of how to making a living from his art. His thought process here is particularly relevant for any creative professional wondering about the role of marketing, sales, and promotion in the artistic life. His starting point is The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg, an excellent read for just about anyone who seeks to make a living doing what they love.

“I realized I was a people person and I needed to get educated in the game of life.”

—Michael Ellsberg

Whenever Ellsberg used the word “entrepreneur,” stereotypes in my head began to play out: money-driven, (slimy) success-hungry business [persons].

But when Ellsberg reflects on his early writing, and his attempt at entering literary bad-boyhood—with Rock Star Envy, along with his Black Masks, White Guilt thesis, and other rants on ecofeminism—I was reminded of my own temperament and inclinations. I’ve spent a lot of time reading critical theory in the realms of feminism, Marxism, media theory/communication, and environmental sustainability—and while I find all of these extremely important for philosophical direction, none of the them really help me put food in my fridge or pay my rent on time (directly).

All people are in themselves valuable, creative, complicated, coping with fears and desires in their struggle to survive—yet how can we all live well without domination or submission?

While I’m very passionate about analyzing structures of power, obedience, prejudice, and class, race, gendered and structural violence, I also want to know (as most people do) how I can stay alive and productive without being under the authority of others, without depending on the power of others for my own survival—and not just survive but actually be good to people.

This is where the dilemma occurs.

How can I become self-sufficient without either relying on obedience to authority without exploiting others and becoming an oppressive authority that delegates obedience (stress, guilt, anxiety) in a competitive labor-for-income / income-for-resources mode of survival?

I digress (a little). Perhaps a starving-artist ethos won’t bring sustainable benefit to those in need but neither will a slick-n-slimy mosquito-marketer’s ethos help. A starving artist denies the need to understand markets, and the slick-n-slimy mosquito-marketer denies people their humanity—their right to be vulnerable.

Can we meet somewhere in between? What I’m saying is that we all want this for ourselves, don’t we? We desire relative certainty of basic needs (monetary and material sustenance), optimum physical and mental health (with occasional visits to the psych ward), and a complex but (major) conflict-free or crux-free, reliable (and sustainable) interpersonal (and international) relationships (sprinkle some crocodile tears, long hugs, forlorn weekdays to taste).

Easier said than done.

In my experience as a performing artist and songwriter, I often struggle with the question of how to engage without violating trust, with the hope that being modest and genuine will motivate people to offer support. Shying away from even remotely appearing like a salesman is not uncommon in the musician’s world—you have an intimate product, you don’t want to be “pushy,” and you want to connect to the audience without having an empty or transactional relationship.

This summer we, The Sleeping Sea, are dropping our first full-length album, Sun Drips, and I’ve definitely been brainstorming ideas of how to creatively create awareness for the album without violating trust or being inconsistent with our message.

Plus other questions arise like:

• How much do we charge?
• Do we release it for free download?
• Can we make enough to keep making more?

In other words, I have to actually make decisions on how our music is valued by our audience, unfortunately, in terms of money—the least artistic value-system there is. Most artists I know, including myself, cringe at the idea of putting a price tag on their most intimate and subjective of creations (CDs, photographs, films, poems, etc). Putting a dollar sign on art has this subterranean psychological effect in that you feel limited, defined, boxed-in, sold-out, etc. (but you still want to pay rent, right?).

In Cincinnati we’re fortunate to have a small but dedicated group of local listeners, who restored our confidence after a 6-month recording hiatus by supporting us last week at our Friends with Friends compilation release, and in that I’ve started to realize that we don’t have to sell ourselves short just to maintain our audience’s trust. In fact, our audience will value the “product” we’re offering even more so when we show our confidence within it—but there has to be a mutual excitement about it and no secrets.

With the music industry at such a pivotal point, I have wild uncertainty about whether people will even buy music at all anymore, let alone something that isn’t a 99-cent download on bandcamp.

So, I’ve realized that I have to give my audience something for nothing, gain their trust through communication, build a relationship and build it for the relationship’s sake, not for the money, or the 15-minute fame, and in those moments of trust, I see that successful creation is indeed a participatory process—not an “I made this myself so you buy it” process—and this commitment to seeing audience-as-people-not-wallets can actually lead to better, critical communication down the line.

Back to Ellsberg

I found five big themes with this book that really stick to the proverbial ribs of life:

1. Nothing happens unless you take risks (question the “safe”).
2. Give (and give and give) without expectation or strings attached. Never treat people as means to an end! Ever!
3. No one can teach you what gives you inertia, or what gives you purpose in life, so find out what you love to do (or can’t not do) and start making your own Life-Study plan, your own self-syllabus, and act upon it.
4. Be a (really) good listener: Connect people to other people (find your social intelligence and brush off the dust).
5. (I’m adding this one via synthesis.) Just as the tongue is hardwired for sugar, fat, and salt, so is the brain hardwired for patterns. Some patterns are stories. People like stories. Tell meaningful stories.

Anyone brave enough to read The Education of Millionaires without lifting a brow or turning a deaf ear will be motivated to assess critically their own power to influence their purpose in life, and have some confidence to swim swiftly in the supposedly gelid waters of doubt; and hence reframe their own potential.

After last Friday’s post, 4 Ways to Immediately Improve Your Book Marketing Efforts, I received a few responses questioning the effectiveness of e-mail.

Or, in other words, isn’t e-mail dead? Who reads e-mail any more?

Regardless of what the biased Mark Zuckerberg says, e-mail is alive and well. (Here’s a bit of research that compares e-mail usage versus other types of messaging.)

Why do some authors, like Barry Eisler, decide to strike deals with Amazon? Partly due to their e-mail marketing power. Read his full explanation here. When I was publisher of Writer’s Digest, our direct marketing relied predominantly on e-mail. Each e-mail sent could be tied to a specific amount of revenue it brought in, and each campaign was only as good as the open rate and click rate.

So, in Friday’s post, when I advised authors to brainstorm a list of people to e-mail, note the stipulation I used: People you can count on to read your e-mails. 

That is a fabulous rule of thumb when deciding who to contact. If you don’t know if your e-mail will be read, that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t send, but consider yourself lucky if your message is acted upon.

But, you might say, won’t people see your calls to action via social media? Wouldn’t people who would read your e-mail also see your social media updates?

Maybe. Maybe not.

It may seem paradoxical, but the closer someone is to you, the more they may not respond to social media efforts because it’s not as personal, or it gets mixed in with a lot of other social media noise.

Gatekeepers especially may favor a more structured or formal approach when a favor is being asked. (Speaking for myself, I prefer being contacted directly via e-mail rather than via Facebook or Twitter. But I still respond across mediums—and ask people to e-mail me directly when needed!)

Here are a couple scenarios I experienced in the past month alone:

• A former colleague was seeking monetary support for a charity run. I vaguely remember seeing his posts, but it didn’t tie into what I normally see him posting about, so it never registered. When I received an e-mail from him, explaining what he was doing and why my support mattered, I immediately gave a donation.
• Jeanne Bowerman recently raised more than $15,000 via Kickstarter to support the production of a film she’s written. I’m sure I must’ve seen her posts about the film via Twitter, but I had never slowed down enough to understand what was going on. When I received an e-mail from her, with specifics on how I could help, I immediately did so.

Caveat: Everyone operates differently. Mileage may vary. Etc.

But if you have someone’s e-mail address, and you’ve corresponded before on a personal level, there’s an excellent chance you’ll get a [more] favorable response from a direct approach.

What has your experience been? If you’ve used personalized e-mails as a marketing tool, how successful were you?

This is me in 1999, posing with M, my boyfriend at the time. He visited me a few times in Cincinnati before we moved in together. On his first visit, I took him to the Mt. Adams neighborhood, with magnificent views of the city.

Note: Read the first installment in this series.

After I graduated college, I packed up my 1985 Ford Thunderbird with all my belongings and drove to Cincinnati to start my job with F+W Publications.

I didn’t know anyone in the city except my boss, Greg. He served as my only anchor for many months, so much so that when I needed someone to drive me to the airport on Christmas Day, he was the only person I could ask. (He agreed and was even cheerful about it.)

My first year in Cincinnati, I lived in a furnished studio apartment in the Hyde Park neighborhood, recommended to me as the safe part of town. To make up for that bad advice I was given, I now discourage newcomers from moving there if they have any adventure left in them at all. Hyde Park is where you live if you have a lot of money, like to run, and have decided against the suburbs.

During those early years, if anyone ever visited me, my procedure was the same: Show them Mt. Adams—a San Francisco-style neighborhood with views of the city—then do something on the river, e.g., go to Montgomery Inn or take a cruise on BB Riverboats.

Today, no one visits me, but when they do, I feel at a loss as to what to show them. It’s not that Cincinnati doesn’t have worthwhile things to see, but its riches are best discovered through daily living, not tourism. Yes, there’s an increasingly vibrant downtown, and we’ve got Fountain Square, but for me, the enjoyments come from being local. Perhaps I’m too well-traveled—and that undercuts my perception of Cincinnati’s wow-features—but unless you live here, you probably can’t appreciate the combination of (1) low cost of living (2) high-quality urban life and arts community and (3) dramatic absence of typical city annoyances (traffic, crowds, etc).

[Note: I might have to take back that entire paragraph. This past weekend saw the grand opening of Smale Riverfront Park. That, plus The Banks development, promise to dramatically reshape Cincinnati's downtown. See all my photos here.]

Smale Riverfront Park

It took 10 years of working in Cincinnati for me to truly live in it. I moved to Over the Rhine (OTR), which is believed to be the largest urban historic district in the United States. It contains the largest collection of Italianate architecture in the country, and is an example of an intact 19th-century urban neighborhood.

OTR is the first neighborhood I’ve ever lived in where I’m not constantly getting in my car to leave it. All my favorite places—and many necessities—are within walking distance.

Unfortunately, the large bulk of my time in Cincinnati was grudgingly spent in Clifton, due to a longterm relationship with (and later marriage to) a UC doctoral student. Clifton is a sprawling university neighborhood, and even though I work there now and don’t mind it, the only fond memories I have of living in Clifton are my long-distance runs outside of it.

My most symbolic Clifton moment was when, on a Halloween evening, my boyfriend, M, answered a knock at the door only to find an adult male with a tall boy in a paper bag and a miniature American flag in his hand. He asked if he could use our phone. (This was before cell phones were commonplace.)

M looked at me, and I shook my head vigorously (the man at the door couldn’t see me), but M was sweet, naive, and from another country. Ultimately this guy asked M to give him a ride to the gas station where he was “late for work.” It was about a 5-minute drive away. M agreed.

Fifteen minutes later, M hadn’t returned … which turned into thirty minutes, then one hour. I called my best friend to ask what she thought I should do. She came over immediately with her husband. By that time, 90 minutes had passed. My friend started to go through some logical steps: Let’s call the gas station, let’s call the district station …

Just as she was about to convince me to call the police, M pulled up. I ran to the driveway and was hugging him through the open car door window before he had even turned off the engine. He acted like nothing had happened—he was merely annoyed at being duped into playing chauffeur all over the west side of Cincinnati based on a convoluted story about a diabetic mother who desperately needed meds and groceries.

I think that story is still getting told around Clifton to naive university students. Almost daily, as a university employee, I receive e-mail alerts about the latest criminal activity in the neighborhood. (See memes below from UC students.) I always tell the suburbanites, who ask about safety in Over the Rhine, that I’ve experienced far more criminal activity in Clifton than I ever have in OTR.

I wish I had more time to spend in OTR and downtown Cincinnati, to watch the continuing transformation of the neighborhood that may eventually become a big tourist destination. I think that’s beginning to happen (see Lonely Planet and New York Times), plus downtown resident population is up 12%. In case you’re curious, the video below gives you a good feel for my neighborhood + downtown.

I wonder if the magic will still be here when I return, and how it will feel to become an outsider.

When I see bad book marketing out in the wild, I wish I could do something productive to help that author (or sometimes publisher!) see how they’re wasting their time.

What is bad book marketing? It’s whenever I receive:

• A tweet from a total stranger asking me to look at their book
• An e-mail from a total stranger asking me to look at their book
• A Facebook message from a total stranger asking me to look at their book

And so on—I think you get the idea.

Here are 4 ways to immediately improve your book marketing efforts. Perhaps you should save the link to this post, and offer it up via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail to anyone engaging in time-wasting activity as described above.

1. Use your website for hard selling. Do not lean on social media for hard selling. Social media typically works best for long-term awareness efforts, relationship building, audience development, and general networking. It is not terribly effective for repeatedly telling people, in your own voice, over and over again, “Buy my book.” All of the information about why people might like your book—along with the hard-hitting sales pitch—should be on your website. If you don’t have your own website where you control the content and presentation, it’s next to impossible to have a successful book marketing campaign.

2. Brainstorm a list of all the meaningful relationships you have—people who you can count on to read your e-mails. Divide the list into three groups: (a) people who would probably like to be alerted to your new work, e.g., old classmates or coworkers, (b) people who have significant reach or influence with your target readership, e.g., a blogger or established author, and (c) your existing and devoted fans who may be willing to spread the word about your new work to their friends and connections. For Group A, write a brief announcement and include a link to your website for all the book details. For Group B, write a brief, personalized note to each person about your book promotion efforts, and offer 1-3 concrete ways they could help you—e.g., tweet about the book on a specific day, excerpt the book on their blog/site, run a Q&A, etc. For Group C, write a brief, general note asking for support in any way they feel comfortable, and provide examples of what that support might look like. If there are any influencers in Group C, consider moving them to Group B and writing something more personalized. Note: So few authors do any of this. Taking the time to write personalized e-mails will dramatically increase support from your network. You shouldn’t try to market and promote your book on your own; it takes a village, as they say.

3. Brainstorm a list of all the gatekeepers to your readers with whom you do not have a relationship yet—specific individuals and specific websites/blogs. For example, if you write romance, then popular romance review blogs would act as a gatekeeper. Do those blogs accept guest posts? Can you contribute to their community in some way? If you want to grow your readership, you’ll have to work beyond your existing network. Find a way to help gatekeepers—rather than demanding something of them—and you’ll find the whole process more successful AND enjoyable.

4. Invest in professional design and presentation for all marketing and self-promotion materials. This includes your website, your author photos, your book cover (the No. 1 book marketing tool, whether print or digital), your business cards, your Twitter avatar, your Facebook cover photo, etc. If you appear professional, that’s half the battle. Amateur design hurts you tremendously in the long run—especially when it comes to gatekeepers and influencers. Sorry, but appearance matters, and a professional presentation shows that you take yourself and your work seriously.

What do you think are some other concrete ways to immediately improve book marketing efforts? Share in the comments.

Rumors of Water:
Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Table of Contents

1. The Dance Darkens
2. Quality/Craig: Self-publishing fails the teen guy test
3. Quality/Wikert: Near misses of another kind
4. Reading/Rechtsteiner, O’Leary: Larger contexts
5. Publishing/Weinman/Ogle: No fiction here
6. Pacing the crisis/Harkaway: Time is short
7. Confabs: paidContent 2012, straight ahead
8. Confabs: Publishers Launch Hollywood & BEA
9. Confabs: F+W revs it again
10. Craft/Anderson: Getting a handle on Twitter
11. Craft/Lebak: When agents say revise & resubmit
12. Craft/Mandel, Gardner: Noir and noise
13. Crowdfunding: ‘I sleep at my fans’ houses.’
14. Magazines: ‘Our own little content silos’
15. Last gas: Your ‘digital doppelganger’

The Dance Darkens

The class-action suit in question is the one brought by a number of US states, filed on the same day (April 11) as the Department of Justice’s own action against the companies. The number of states involved in the class has since ballooned from 16 to 31.

Jacqui Cheng, writing from the Ars Technica vantage point in Judge: Ample evidence that Apple “knowingly joined” e-book conspiracy, looks first, of course, for the tech-defendant’s position after Tuesday’s U.S. District Court opinion.

Cheng’s second-deck headline:

Apple hasn’t been found guilty yet, but the judge’s comments don’t bode well.

DOJ Lawsuit Update: Where Windowing Becomes Important http://t.co/F3XdGjLt by @jane_l #TOCCN #FollowReader

May 16, 2012 2:31 pm via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@toc

Tools of Change

Alison Frankel at Reuters Legal is even clearer in her headline: Ruling in ebooks class action is blow to defense in DoJ antitrust suit. Frankel writes:

The publishers were hoping that the class action didn’t meet the high pleading standard for antitrust complaints under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, but (US District Court Judge Denise) Cote found there were plenty of the specific, well-supported allegations of collusion that Twombly demands.

Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly headlined his story with as little emotion as possible: Court Rejects Motions to Dismiss Class Action Against Apple, Publishers. He maintained an admirable level of restraint throughout his write:

In her decision to let the civil suit move into the discovery phase, Judge Cote wrote that the suit “plausibly alleges that Apple and the Publisher Defendants took part in a conspiracy in restraint of trade, that an object of this conspiracy was to raise prices for eBooks, and that this restraint was unreasonable per se.”

Judge Cote had, as Milliot wrote, “rejected all of Apple and the publishers’ arguments to dismiss.”

ugly "truth" about how agency pricing came to be - it blows your mind; this is not clubishness, this IS collusion #in http://t.co/SfxnTYAO

May 16, 2012 7:07 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@arhomberg

Andrew Rhomberg

Judge comes down hard on publishers, Apple in e-book case, wrote paidContent’s Jeff John Roberts.

Cote’s opinion is at times remarkable for the emphatic language in which she decries the alleged conspiracy….(Her) opinion is at times remarkable for the emphatic language in which she decries the alleged conspiracy.

Roberts adds:

Three of the publishers (Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster) have already settled an antitrust lawsuit with the Department of Justice and agreed to change their pricing practices. The three publishers are also in negotiations with state governments under which they are likely to pay tens of millions in consumer restitution. In plain English, this means that people who bought an e-book in the last few years may receive a small settlement payment.

Why does Judge Denise Cote want to give the future of publishing to Amazon? http://t.co/ytJbIjhg via @drmabuse @SherylNantus

May 16, 2012 12:31 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@RavenRequiem13

PW Creighton

Robert’s paidContent colleague Laura Hazard Owen looked over the states’ amended complaint paperwork and found that portions that had been redacted in April (for unknown reasons) now has been left visible. Her write is headlined As 17 more states join class action against book publishers and Apple, new details revealed.

For example:

“The Club”: In September 2009 as the publishers considered “windowing,” or staggering the print and digital releases of a book, they “referenced themselves in one email as ‘the Club!’” This was in reference to windowing discussions and not to agency pricing discussions with Apple.

@Porter_Anderson Because they couldn't remember the word 'cartel' at the time?

May 14, 2012 4:31 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

Much of the “stupid DoJ!” crowd noise that had followed the original filing in April seemed missing this week. An email list or two had a few spirited exchanges, but without the feisty, devil-may-care, you-call-that-collusion? wit we’d seen for a month. Some called the newly revealed bits of the complaint in Owen’s story “damning.” Others took issue with the term.

More fuss, less debate, this time. #haha at best. No #hahaha’s to be heard. It got more serious this week.

And Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch wrapped some pretty painful sobriety in the  grace of clarity. In Judge Cote Rejects Motions to Dismiss Agency Class Action Suit; Shows Sympathy for the Plaintiffs, his reasoned, helpful assessment:

The initial read of Tuesday’s ruling can only give encouragement to the plaintiffs and pause to the defendants (and their defenders) at this stage, as Judge Cote confidently swats away all of the arguments made by the defendants in their dismissal motions.

Cader went even further, in order to assist book-biz observers parse legal implications:

Some people in the book industry wondered how a case could be built around mostly circumstantial evidence and inferences, but Judge Cote writes that since “unlawful conspiracies tend to form in secret, such proof will rarely consist of explicit agreements.”

Indeed, Cader explained, Cote has gone to some length on a lay person’s assumption that circumstantial evidence might be inadequate.

She (Judge Cote) cites case law that indicates “the antitrust plaintiff should present direct or circumstantial evidence that reasonably tends to prove that the [defendant] and others had a conscious commitment to a common scheme designed to achieve an unlawful objective.”

Thirty-one states are now suing Apple and publishers over ebook pricing http://t.co/BgFpy7LO

May 15, 2012 9:30 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@NiemanLab

Nieman Lab

The dance being celebrated in Montevideo in our lead Ether image above is a tango, “La cumparsita.” You’d know it if you heard it. The 95th anniversary of this work by Gerardo Matos Rodriguez — originally a carnival march — arrived on April 19. This photo was taken at an event held on the site of the song’s original performance, at a cafe, La Giralda.

The tango’s opening line, by Pascual Contursi, might evoke the spectacle of an unhealthy industry’s folks still trying to find their way forward.

As the coming one-day conference paidContent 2012 puts the challenge:

Today’s digital content space is about looking for innovation without displacing what works.

As Contursi’s lyric goes:

The masked parade
of endless miseries
promenades
around that sick being…

Click to comment

As 17 more states join e-book class action, prev. redacted details revealed--including Steve Jobs e-mail & B&N deets http://t.co/6ZzMAdRJ

May 14, 2012 4:12 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@laurahazardowen

Laura Hazard Owen

Quality/Craig: Self-publishing fails the teen guy test

After all, I thought, we’re talking about a 15 year old boy. It couldn’t bother him too much.

This is author Elizabeth S. Craig in a poised report on an acid test: Would her son, who loves dystopian fiction, have a problem with quality issues in a self-published ebook?

He came back downstairs later that evening. “I finished the book,” he said. Then he looked at me funny. “You know, the story was good and I liked the characters…but there were so many mistakes. It was totally distracting. I’ve never seen typos like that in a book.”

The post is headlined The Importance of Editing. And while Craig doesn’t belabor the point (as you know I’m going to), this perfectly positions one of the quietest and yet biggest dangers we face.

Think how much competition the entertainment complex is shoving at this young reader. Never in history has a traditional cultural pursuit like reading faced hot-and-cold-streaming everything, 24/7 glowing seduction by eye-popping effects and bright-shiny consoles, the sexiest sirens of creativity, populist appeal, connectivity, portability, affordability.

Because he’d never read a self-published book before.

That’s why, Craig reminds us, her son was so shocked at the unacceptable quality of the self-published book he’d just read.

Now, this particular guy is lucky. I have an idea his mom will keep him reading right past the bad experience of a self-published error-fest.

From Rick Liebling's presentation, "Social TV, Transmedia Storytelling and Beyond" at Mellennial Mega Mashup / Used by permission.

But what about other mothers’ sons and daughters?

How many times will kids get burned before they kiss reading goodbye and don’t look back? Are we expecting them to make all kinds of excuses for this sort of trashy production — as you hear some self-publishing authors do — and keep coming back for more? Why, when the culture of reading must square off against internationally played video games and electrifying films and DVR-ed television and all-music-on-demand do we expect them to soldier on, trying to read inferior substitutes for literature?

And from our last Ether, here’s good input from Victoria Strauss and Roz Morris to help a self-publisher find the editing that books must have. Must have. Must have.

As Elizabeth Craig puts it, with more patience than I have on this issue:

We put so much time into writing these stories….we owe it to ourselves (and our readers) to ensure our books are readable.

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How many self help authors does it take to change a light bulb? Change the light within first..

May 11, 2012 12:18 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@jonnygeller

jonny geller

Quality/Wikert: Near misses of another kind

Why doesn’t this book have a ton of links built in that point to related video clips and interviews? They’re all over YouTube and many other sites but they’re not curated in any manner.

Having read “Twin Peaks” co-creator Mark Frost’s Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America, Joe Wikert zeroes in on Another Missed Opportunity for Rich Content.

Publishing exec with O’Reilly Media that he is, Wikert knows exactly the point to get across, too:

I would have gladly paid more for a richer edition of this book with all those links curated by the author included.

As typically emblematic as it is of the peculiar fail-and-fail-again stage we’re navigating in the digital transition, it’s still hard not to shake your head along with Wikert when the simple approach of linking out is overlooked in such an obvious case as Game Six.

Publishers often complain about the prohibitive cost of creating apps out of books. Rather than going that far and spending a fortune, why not start with the inexpensive option of simply enhancing the ebook by curating everything related to it that already exists on the web?

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Is it wrong that I'm reading our new book, "Fitness for Geeks", while eating a Confetti Cake Blizzard from DQ? http://t.co/mGyzw6oo

May 15, 2012 8:28 pm via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@jwikert

Joe Wikert

Reading/Rechtsteiner, O’Leary: Larger contexts

Today, the battle is reading versus not-reading (because) a plethora of free and low-cost alternatives including TV, games, movies, videos, Twitter, Facebook are always at the ready.

That’s Chris Rechsteiner of BlueLoop Concepts writing Booksellers v. Libraries? Publishers v. Amazon? These are the wrong battles to fight at Digital Book World’s Expert Blogs.

He’s picking up on a frustration I understand well: intra-book-community battles seem ridiculous when reading, itself, is being eclipsed by the digital entertainment combine.

Publishers (both old and new) must step up and provide the platforms (and rights management frameworks) for innovation needed by booksellers (all types of booksellers) and authors to push reading forward. If they don’t, publishers will fall by the wayside as true innovation will be limited to a few (one?) large players investing on their own behalf (see Amazon, Barnes & Noble + Microsoft) while authors take their storytelling to completely new platforms that are altogether outside of the bookselling and library frameworks.

Rechtsteiner seems transfixed by some article he wrote four months ago, at which time he somehow thought publishing’s biggest problems were internal to the industry! the industry! And that being the case, it appears that he thinks the bright-shiny entertainment-deathstar enemies of reading have all sprung forth in the last four months.

I kept thinking that surely I was reading him wrongly. So I was relieved to find that Brian O’Leary understands it in much the same way I do. In a post headlined Not Helping, O’Leary writes:

Rechtsteiner claims that four months ago, “it mattered if libraries were or weren’t a direct threat to booksellers. Today, this question is irrelevant.”  Why is it irrelevant? Because Rechtsteiner just realized that “people not reading” is a bigger threat.

Precisely, and expressed with the sort of collegial restraint that enriches O’Leary’s work. After all, Rechtsteiner’s central message is hardly wrong:

Everyone in the ecosystem needs to step up to the plate and prepare to take back reading or an industry will be lost for everyone.

From Rick Liebling's presentation, "Social TV, Transmedia Storytelling and Beyond" at Mellennial Mega Mashup / Used by permission.

O’Leary, however, spots further inadequacies in Rechtsteiner’s position, based on his own widely read white paper, The opportunity in abundance. O’Leary writes:

Rechtsteiner mixes data (library patrons are more likely to buy eBooks) with hyperbole (they represent the biggest short-term threat to eBook sales through Amazon and others). His data (drawn from Bowker and Pew) is powerful, but misapplied: if the availability of free books was such a threat, why have publishers and libraries co-existed for so long?

Overall, while recognizing what I believe was Rechtsteiner’s good intent, I have to agree with O’Leary that this kind of material is “not helping.”

And you know who else’s voice your blog sommelier can pair with this for you? Read on, Ethernaut.

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I have a really busy fall ahead of me. Right now it feels like the calm before the biggest storm ever.

May 14, 2012 12:25 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Ginger Clark

PS: it is totally not calm here. I'm just saying, it's going to crazier this fall.

May 14, 2012 12:30 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Ginger Clark

Publishing/Weinman/Ogle: No fiction here

When digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about.

Sarah Weinman, in Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age, goes over the basic model of nonfiction production — the kind of project that takes years of research and writing, funded by grants and advances.

In the course of her thoughtful, challenging write, Weinman mentions historian and author Maureen Ogle, and her write on the topic, If Publishing is Dead, What Happens to Non-Fiction?

The self-publishing king- and queenpins are relentless in their mockery of those of us who cling to agents and publishing houses. According to them, we traditionalists are losers of the first order. We’re world-class fools for letting agents take our money, and dumbasses for letting editors and publishing companies call the shots on our behalf.

Echoing Weinman’s point, Ogle is aware of the parlous state her own career goes into in a scenario of collapsing publishers. And while we’ve heard more than enough invective from furious self-publishing hotheads who love to slam legacy publishing, this is one of the first times I’ve heard a strongly felt statement about the self-publishing camp from an author whose specializations have key needs for traditional support.

Ogle goes on:

The self-pubbers canNOT wait for the day when the entire traditional publishing complex falls into a huge hole in the ground…they don’t understand that for people like me, the “traditional” publishing industry is my only lifeline, my only means of support.

She’s right. The majority of irrationally exuberant self-publishers we hear from are in fiction.

So I ask them: What happens when the agents, editors, and publishing houses go away? Who will write non-fiction then?

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The News Insanity Index is depressingly high this weekend.

May 13, 2012 9:14 pm via Seesmic twhirlReplyRetweetFavorite

@sarahw

Sarah Weinman

Pacing the crisis/Harkaway: Time is short

There’s this tendency to talk about (the digital world) as if it’s an alien, separate space. And it’s not true. It’s just an overlay. The danger is that we end up thinking of the Internet as other, as a threat, or in terms of lawlessness, when it’s just another layer of the world we inhabit.

Author Nick Harkaway is at The Guardian with William Slidelsky in a too-short interview, Nick Harkaway: ‘The book industry has got to get online publishing right.’ 

Slidelsky asks Harkaway if the publishing industry has been slow to respond to the digital forces around it. Harkaway:

They’ve been a bit leaden. It’s not that they haven’t taken on board the shift that’s occurring, but some of the consequences haven’t sunk in. There’s a willingness to think: we’ll let everyone else figure out how the market should work, and then we’ll just supply books in the same way that we did to bookshops to electronic sellers like Amazon, Apple and Google.

The occasion is the arrival of Harkaway’s new book, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. You sense his gigantic if humane frustration, and not just with the publishing establishment that can’t seem to understand:

Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company.

What’s more (and I’d say perhaps just as damaging), Harkaway clarifies, is a reticence to handle tech in literature.

The mainstream of literary culture in the UK is very averse to writing about technology. There are sci-fi writers who are playing with interesting ideas but I haven’t yet seen much that represents social media in a way that’s both realistic and compelling.

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Oh fercrissakes. It's 5.05 am, I'm involuntarily awake, and the Olympics is sending me "your"/"you're" fails? http://t.co/ILRXvJ3O

May 17, 2012 12:11 am via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@Harkaway

Nick Harkaway

Confabs: paidContent 2012, straight ahead

As of this gassing of the Ether, just 46 tickets are left for Wednesday’s paidContent 2012 daylong program, “At the Crossroads.”

I’ll be tweet-storming for you, live, from the New York event, which has one of the most gratifyingly comprehensive rounds of topics I’ve seen in quite a while:

• Future of Publishing
• eBook
• Bundled Media
• Revenue Puzzle
• Content Discoverability
• Content Producers
• High Point of Creativity & Business
• Benefits of Paywall

With presenters ranging from Pottermore’s Charlie Redmayne and paidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen to NBC News’ Vivian Schiller and GigaOm’s Mathew Ingam, the day is a compact approach to the realities as we see them now. I like this line from the day’s setup:

If your responsibility is to make money from content, what should you do next? If the answer was easy, we’d all be on vacation. It’s not.

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I want to build a time machine, go back three years, and ask my past self why I bought so many cargo pants.

May 15, 2012 8:26 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Robburnett1

Rob Burnett

Not quite done on cargo pants. I never once filled two normal pockets in normal pants. What was the need for thigh pockets?

May 15, 2012 8:46 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Robburnett1

Rob Burnett

Confabs: Publishers Launch Hollywood & BEA

Last week, I mentioned the three Hollywood conferences that F+W Media is staging in October in Hollywood.

In tandem with those, Michael Cader and Mike Shatzkin will be staging a special edition of their one-day Publishers Launch programs on October 22: Hollywood Launch is themed “Film/TV-to-Book: How Digital Publishing Creates New Revenue and Marketing Opportunities for Hollywood.” Early registration is open.

In preparation, Shatzkin got his Left Coast side into gear this week, in fact, in Everybody in Hollywood Needs an eBook Strategy:

The first step for networks and channels and producers in Hollywood is to learn how to utilize their new revenue and marketing tool: ebooks.

Late night things that confuse me: mass market paperback originals for anything but romance, small press trade pbs that cost more than $20.

May 10, 2012 10:00 pm via Seesmic twhirlReplyRetweetFavorite

@sarahw

Sarah Weinman

In the piece, Shatzkin outlines the parallels in the digital experience, if you will, of filmmakers and publishers:

Things have changed in Hollywood too. Digital tools make it cheaper and easier to make a movie, just like it is now cheaper and easier to make a book. But, just like book publishers, producers of Hollywood content find the growth in competition mushrooming. The corollary to the fact that making movies can be cheaper is that promoting them is that much harder and, much more than decades ago, every revenue stream counts, even pretty small ones.

This digital thing just doesn’t fall on anybody very gracefully.

And speaking of that, in the nearer term. Shatzkin and Cader have a Publisher’s Launch show ahead at BEA on June 4: Launch BEA has a lineup of speakers that includes: Patricia Arancibia, Molly Barton, Javier Celaya, Hugh McGuire, Michael Tamblyn and more. I’ll be doing some live coverage at that one.

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I love twitter for talking about books, and bookish things, but the more I talk about it the less I read. #readingtwitterstopsreading

May 16, 2012 11:16 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jonnygeller

jonny geller

Confabs: F+W revs it again

Having barely sat down after announcing those three new Hollywood confabs in October, F+W Media is back on its feet this week to add Discoverability and Marketing 2012 to its confab portfolio — September 24 and 25 in New York. Early registration is open.

That one is under Digital Book World’s aegis and DBW’s new community leader, Gary Lynch, who writes in the announcement of the new conference:

Whether marketing books, digital books, or content of any kind, we need the tools to attract consumers through content marketing, email marketing, and social media.

Jon Fine, Kelly Gallagher, and Rick Joyce are among presenters announced for that one. We’ll have more ConfabWorld info soon.

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@Porter_Anderson somehow "PublishersDemon" didn't sound right and people might have mistaken for Amazon @nakedbook

May 16, 2012 5:25 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@Jellybooks

Jellybooks Ltd.

Craft/Anderson: Getting a handle on Twitter

Each time you visit France, all those French classes rush back into your mind, don’t they? You’re Rimbaud Jr. by the time you find your luggage at CDG, thanks to your immersion in the scene, the rhythms, the place.

The Eiffel Tower from the top of the Pompidou. / Porter Anderson

Speaking of Rachelle Gardner, I’m guesting at her site today on the topic of embracing social-media protocol.

In Get a Grip on Twitter Handles, I never say just how many writers I see failing to identify and promote their own handles (let alone others’) in their work. But it’s enough to make you wonder whether most platforming authors  understand how the amplification of “socmed” dynamics works.

A Twitter handle added to a standard byline. Sweet. @JamesScottBell at Kill Zone. (Click for larger view.)

I propose that writers get into a Berlitz frame of mind and stop leaving social-media currency sur la table.

Think in the language of Twitter. And come join me in our Twitter-ese conversation about it.

That’s a great way for a platforming author to approach Twitter — as a language. And nothing works like immersional baggage handling.

 

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I fail at Twitter today.

May 14, 2012 8:30 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@ColleenLindsay

Colleen Lindsay

Craft/Lebak: When agents say revise & resubmit

Think about it. Don’t just scream or slam doors, but really think about what it would take to effect the suggested changes. Talk it out with someone who’s familiar with your book. Think about how the changes would work with your own vision of the story.

Writing at the QueryTracker.net blog, Jane Lebak has a carefully observed overview of Revise/Resubmit Requests from agents. These can, of course, usher a writer into a special Limbo.

You haven’t been rejected, but you’re not being offered representation either.

Lebak is mercifully straightforward.

If the agent only tells you the first part (the problems) that is not a R/R. It’s a rejection with a reason attached. (You’re still free to revise, but the agent isn’t asking to see the result.)

Then she goes on to outline a way of working, painful to contemplate but clearly charting the high road to stronger material, should you decide you want to take onboard a request for revision and resubmission.

Take your time. Seriously, take as long as you need to, and then take longer. And then re-edit before you send it. Most agents would prefer you give the revision the full attention it requires than have you slap-dash some changes together.

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Everyone go buy this new piece by @nicomuhly starring @pianomorphosis in which me and my viola drone like gangbusters! http://t.co/sHuP4lML

May 14, 2012 4:23 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@nadiasirota

nadia sirota

It's a woman here who looks like she hunted, killed, skinned and is presently wearing big bird.

May 10, 2012 9:11 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@nicomuhly

Nico Muhly

Craft/Mandel, Gardner: Noir and noise

I took a train upstate to a literary conference sometime after my first novel came out. At a panel discussion in an underground conference room, an audience member asked a question: “What makes literary fiction literary?”

Emily St. John Mandel, whose new The Lola Quartet has just been published, gets at the confusion that dogs many writers in On “Noir” and Genre Pigeonholing at Beyond the Margins.Talking of her first novel, Last Night in Montreal, she writes:

When the book eventually appeared in print, I saw it categorized variously as literary fiction, general fiction, crime fiction, mystery, suspense, and—this last one bothers me immensely—women’s fiction.

And Mandel has to brace for the genre jig to hoof it through her work again on the new book. Feeling as literary as noir and as noir as literary, the not-so-new normal for her, she writes, may just be an unclassifiable world view very much her own.

Mandel is in sync with agent Rachelle Gardner, whose Is There Room for Originality? suggests that writers:

…don’t give up just because your work falls outside “expected” lines of genre or style. Be persistent. If your writing is good enough, you just may find that perfect editor to champion it.

For her part, Mandel clearly isn’t discouraged (she keeps publishing, after all). But her essay reflects the sort of dissatisfaction with traditional categorization that many in the self-publishing camp often discuss. Mandel:

What I mean to say is that noir feels like an appropriate response to the world we find ourselves in. I hope that doesn’t make me overly pessimistic.

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Guys, there is a Lambrusco bot. I am not kidding. Whoa. @kingvonelk

May 13, 2012 7:49 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bsandusky

Brett Sandusky

Crowdfunding: ‘I sleep at my fans’ houses.’

There is no marketing trick. There is human connection, and you can’t fake it. It takes time and effort and, most importantly: you have to actually LIKE it, otherwise you’ll be miserable.

That’s Amanda Palmer, performing artist and musician (Dresden Dolls, Evelyn Evelyn, and half of Mr. and Mrs. Neil Gaiman) in a first-person piece, despite its headline, for techdirt, How Amanda Palmer Built An Army Of Supporters: Connecting Each And Every Day, Person By Person.

We’re entering the era of the social artist. It’s getting increasingly harder to hide in a garret and lower your songs down in a bucket to the crowd waiting below, wrapped in a cloak of sexy mystery above. That was the 90s.

The success that prompts the piece is a Kickstarter campaign for $100,000 to do a studio album without a label. She had the money not in the 32 days planned, but in six hours. Here she is, and the all-caps moments are all-her:

I share my process. I ask for help SHAMELESSLY. I sleep at my fans houses. I eat with them. I read the books they write. I see their plays and dance performances, online and in real life. I back their own crowdfunding projects. I get rides home with them. I’m the kind of person they WANT to help, because they know me well enough, after years of connecting, to know WHO I ACTUALLY AM.

In a word? No. “@Slate: Do successful women turn men off? http://t.co/vAAnbZvF”

May 10, 2012 7:05 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@jeffwilser

Jeff Wilser

I think what’s interesting about this is how well it seems to work in the context of Palmer’s career and mode of working. Her art is based in alternative rock, cabaret, punk. (In Sean Francis’ note which follows her piece, you see “Team AFP,” for “Amanda Fucking Palmer.”)

Musicians are no longer traveling by limo with one-way glass protecting them from view. Now we’re all going on foot, door to door, in the open sunshine… with the internet as our magical, time-space defeating sidewalk.

This is the sort of project backing exercise we’d all love to see work for authors. Can authors approach their connections with readers as Palmer does hers?

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EVERY FRIKKIN DAY hundreds and hundreds of FREE Kindle books. It's a flood of shit!

May 13, 2012 3:14 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@mikecane

Mike Cane

Magazines: ‘Our own little content silos’

“My tech fantasy is that within the next couple years, smartphones and tablets will have external-facing screens” so readers can show others what they are reading. It’s a huge social signal. Right now we can’t do that. We’re all in our own little content silos.”

Josh Quittner / paidContent

There were several such memorable observations from Josh Quittner of Flipboard and Jesse Angelo of The Daily, in Laura Hazard Owen’s Flipboard’s Quittner: Magazines a “horrible,” “ugly” business at paidContent.

“The newsstand business is a horrible business. Magazines pay something like 50 percent of their costs of distribution to newsstands, and then if they sell 20 to 30 percent of their magazines, that’s considered a home run. Then they have to pay to kill — to destroy — the 30 to 40 percent of the magazines they don’t sell.”

As for paid content, Owen writes, “many Flipboard publishers are asking for paywall support, Quittner said.” She quotes him:

“People will pay for ‘essential’ — the WSJ, the NYT, and the Daily.” Flipboard hasn’t introduced a paywall option yet, but “we have to create systems that allow for the most engaged users to pay for that which they think is essential.”

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for everyone getting excited about Warren Buffett buying newspapers, he excels at squeezing value out of declining industries

May 17, 2012 8:58 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@mathewi

Mathew Ingram

Last gas: Your ‘digital doppelganger’

Over time, I stated to see, we’re really on the verge of having these pretty complete—I call it the data map—these digital doppelgangers of our everyday lives online.

Author and host of Canadian Broadcasting’s Spark, Nora Young says her position on the online-inclusive life has shifted. Since writing her book, The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us, Young says she now sees the “self-tracking” so many of us are doing as less Narcissistic than self-objectifying. Narcissus was stuck on his own beauty. If there’s anything to what Young is saying, we may be stuck on ourselves, period.

(I’m linking Young’s book title to Canadian Amazon, by the way, because the book isn’t listing as available at US Amazon, and there is no Kindle version, apparently. Which seems ironic for a book about virtual life, doesn’t it?)

Young continues:

When you talk to people, everybody seems to think, “Oh, I’m fine, I’m careful with my privacy.” But I don’t know. I think a lot of people are spewing out a lot of data and not really thinking about some of the implications of it or what it might be used for in the future.”

In this Six Pixels of Separation podcast interview with Mitch Joel — The Virtual Self, with Nora Young –  Young defines “self-tracking” as an effort to Storify your life. And she identifies the introduction of Facebook Timeline as “a watershed moment” when people suddenly could see how many “inanities about themselves” they’d been publishing. “And you really are publishing them.”

I think the slightly scary thing about it is that this has been happening in this piecemeal sort of way. There are all these pieces of the jigsaw that have gradually been coming together, like the rise of all these services, the rise of cheap data storage, the app revolution, and the fact that so many people have smartphones now…It’s kind of taken people by surprise.

From Rick Liebling's presentation, "Social TV, Transmedia Storytelling and Beyond" at Mellennial Mega Mashup / Used by permission.

To work as an on-air personality, Young has a strangely pronounced way of making everything she says a question. She sounds more like a Pasadena mall-shopper than a CBC host, frankly. But listen past the vocal inflections to what she’s saying.

My goal overall in writing the book – I’m a journalist, I don’t really have answers, I have questions – but I want people to start thinking about this stuff and talking about it.

I don’t think this is the tiresome digital-dualism hand-wringing of MIT’s Sherry “Alone Together” Turkle, who is mentioned, briefly, in this 46-minute podcast.

Instead, Young and Joel are onto something at once more interesting and, potentially, more serious: “self-tracking” means turning your day-to-day existence into a relentless scrapbook of Instagram shots, SMS messages, tweets, status updates, phone calls…memoir-in-real-time.

The social media, in particular, give us tools to view our own daily routines as reality shows. Life as the performance of self.

Young:

What can we use this information for? Can we use it in a way that’s good for personal insight and social insight? And can we do it while we protect our privacy?

Click to comment

Installed Flipboard for Android on a Kindle Fire.Unrelated: I think I just heard something made of Fraiche yogurt cry in the distance.

May 10, 2012 6:48 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@craigmod

Craig Mod

Main image: iStockphoto / lucop: Shot in Montevideo on April 19.

Rumors of Water:
Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

The turning point of my long-term publishing plans came when I realized I have very little in common with author Joanna Penn. Have you heard of her?

I started following Joanna on Twitter because she always shared great writing links, but I also began to follow her self-publishing story. She wrote a novel, released it as a 99-cent download, and reached 10,000 downloads after a few months.

Joanna blogged through the whole process and shared all of the details from editing to marketing. She worked really hard to pull it off, and as I added self-publishing to my own long-term publishing plans—plans that included books also published through large traditional publishers—I had no qualms about working hard.

For my self-publishing projects I marked up several drafts, lined up cover designers, sent out review copies, booked blog tours, and worked through spreadsheets listing everything else I had to do. The book received praise from experts, and my brother-in-law, a designer by trade, put together a sharp cover.

For all that fell into place, I dreaded opening those spreadsheets listing everything I had to do. You’d have thought I was being forced to slap a kitten each day.

I’ve always loved writing. Releasing my first commercially published book was a highlight of my life. Why did I hate self-publishing?

After processing my reaction to both self-publishing projects, I read Joanna Penn’s About Page one day. The light flickered on for me: Joanna had a business consulting background. She wasn’t just creative and dedicated to writing; she had the skills you need to run a successful business, which is a huge part of the self-publishing process.

Even the smallest publishing house provides more support than you’ll receive when self-publishing.

Self-publishing means that authors become small publishing companies. They aren’t just writing and editing. They need to manage a complex and draining process. There is layout, design, development editing, proofreading, retail planning, and marketing.

Doing all of these things well enough to sell more than fifty copies to my friends calls for a set of skills that many creative writers like myself simply don’t possess. Even if I had $5,000 on hand to hire designers, editors, and publicists, I’d turn myself into a publisher. Having published through large publishers, small publishers, and now independently, I’d much rather surrender a chunk of my royalties to an experienced publisher—heck, almost any publisher—so that I can pursue my creative calling.

Not sure about my take here? Read what Catherine Howard has to say:

We’ve seen time and time again that the self-publishers who enjoy consistent success are those who treat self-publishing like a business they’ve started up. They act like entrepreneurs, and make like their book is their first product—which it is.

I’m releasing my next book with a relatively small publisher that focuses on my niche, and the experience has been far better for me than self-publishing. They couldn’t pay out an advance, but I’m guaranteed a standard royalty. In return, they have edited the book, designed a cover, written marketing copy, developed a marketing plan, sought out endorsers, and reached out to retailers.

I could lament the non-existent advance, or I could focus on this: they’ve heavily invested in publishing my book after I paid them zip.

Best yet, I wrote the book and have been very involved in the design and marketing process, but they have managed the whole thing. Knowing that someone else is keeping the publishing process on track removes a tremendous burden from my mind and makes it far easier to develop creative marketing ideas.

I used to think of self-publishing as the only alternative to publishing with a large house. Now I’m committed to working with both large and small publishers. In addition, there are some strong subsidy publishers that provide excellent support to authors who have the means to pay for their services.

Now for my caveat: I haven’t ruled out self-publishing completely.

I’ll still create e-books that readers can download for free if they subscribe to my e-newsletter. E-books are also a great promotional tool. Even just selling a 10,000 word e-book on Amazon for 99 cents is a simple way to introduce readers to my work. It’s like I’m getting paid to advertise, but I have no illusions about building my career on these self-published books.

For example, each April 1, I release a prank e-book that my readers can download for 99 cents on Amazon (this year and last year). These e-books, which lovingly poke fun at the Christian subculture and my own quirks, are not a way to make money. They’re simply a way to introduce readers to my writing—even if I lose a few subscribers each year who miss the prank and think I’ve lost my mind.

Self-publishing is a great tool to keep in your publishing plans, but for creative writers such as myself, it is far more useful as a marketing tool. I don’t plan on writing another e-book until next April 1 because I don’t have the chops or desire to run my own small publishing company. When I hammer out 3,000 words in a morning, I hit a high that leaves me chattering about all of my ideas to my wife. When I run my own publishing company, she hears sobbing noises from my office.

I’m grateful that there’s a Joanna Penn in the world. I’ve learned a lot from her about publishing. The greatest lesson she taught me is that I’m not like her and that large and small publishing companies exist because there are authors like me who just want to write.

Mary-Jane reading

What are you working on next? is a question that always takes me by surprise (which is why it’s good advice for writers to have an answer prepared). Words gurgle in my throat. If I can’t change the subject, I mumble something about an essay or short story or blog post.

I want to say My Call to the Ring’s release date is not until September 2012.

It was November 2006 when Deirdre Gogarty handed me pages of true stories she’d written about Ireland, family, and her hard-fought battles to become a champion boxer. In an instant, I agreed to co-write her memoir. The chance of a lifetime had arrived. Like a pugilist who’d trained for an opportunity to fight, I’d been flexing my finger muscles for years. I immersed myself in our collaboration.

But there was a tradeoff—I lost volumes of family time.

Two months after I agreed to co-write Gogarty’s memoir, I sped to Women & Children’s hospital to welcome my granddaughter, Mary-Jane, into the world. She wailed and cooed. I rushed back to work.

And—pfffft!—she turned five.

Mary-Jane

Her brother, Milas, clocked nine.

My mother, eighty-five.

And I no longer recognize my hands when I type.

What next?

I’ve been sparring with guilt for missing many of my grandchildren’s milestones. But I’ve concluded it was worth it to hand down examples of sacrifice and perseverance—Deirdre’s and mine—to teach them to follow their calling in life.

Now I’m back to work on those essays and short stories and blog posts. But I’m also taking numerous, long walks with my dog on the family farm while pondering clichés about time.

The way it never stops.

Or turns back.

The way it flies.

And since it often gets lost,

I wonder where it hides.

Nip-Nip hiding