I am always up for a challenge, at least until I grow bored or frustrated, so today I tried to figure out a solution. What I finally came up with is a bit convoluted, but hopefully it lays the groundwork for others to figure out more elegant solutions in the future.

First, I just played around with sending pdf, html, and txt files to Amazon to let them convert it to see what happened. The results were not good. I did a search online for advice on conversions and saw someone mention using FinalDraft–something about how you can set up the style guide with that program and export a correctly formatted document that can then be used by the Kindle.

Well I’m not paying $$$ for FinalDraft obviously. Instead, I remembered an open-source and free-as-in-beer alternative, Celtx. I figured I’d try that. It’s available for Windows, Apple, and Linux platforms.

Next, I went to a website that has html versions of screenplays and downloaded a sample script. (Note that I didn’t try any pdf documents–someone else will have to try that, as I’ve exhausted my curiosity for this problem today.)

Finally, I relied on Calibre, another free software, that manages ebooks for a variety of devices. It also handles conversions.

Once I had all the raw materials–html version of screenplay, Celtx screenplay formatting software, and Calibre ebook software–I started experimenting.

My Solution

Summary for the technically inclined: Import in Celtx, export as html, replace CSS code in exported doc with this code (modify as per your tastes), import into Calibre, convert to MOBI, send to device.

1. In Celtx
   1. import html version of a screenplay
   2. export it as html

   Why? Because by doing this, you get Celtx to replace whatever formatting the original document used with a consistent set of CSS mark-up tags, which is important to have in order to get the Kindle to display the formatting properly.

2. Open the newly exported html file in a simple text editor, e.g. WordPad on Windows XP, or in a real HTML editing application (note that fancier editors like Microsoft Word may hide the html code from you, and really really simple editors like Notepad may do the same)
   1. delete ALL the current CSS style code — everything between <style type=”text/css”> and </style> — from the top of the document (make sure you don’t actually delete the “style” tags as well)
   2. paste this CSS code instead
   3. save the file
3. In Calibre
   1. Import this new html file (or drag and drop it into your list of documents and it will be copied over automatically
   2. Highlight the file in the Calibre list by clicking on it once
   3. Click the big “Convert E-books” button at top of screen
   4. Click “Page Setup” and change Destination profile to Kindle
   5. Hit Okay
   6. Wait for hourglass in the bottom right corner to stop spinning
   7. Right click the file name in the Calibre list
   8. Select “Send to device”

That’s it! It probably looks more complicated than it is, because I’m trying to include enough detail here for beginners to use these instructions.

I experimented with the CSS style code for a while until I got something that worked for me, but I noticed a couple of weird issues with it:

• The Kindle seems to ignore right-side margins
• Although I used percentages in the CSS style code, hoping it would scale appropriately when different text sizes are used, it doesn’t seem to work that way. The CSS I settled on looks good when the text display size on the Kindle is at one of the smallest two settings, but on the bigger settings the left-side margins start to get really obnoxious. It’s a puzzle to me.

And finally, here are two things I noticed that you should be aware of:

• The final version will only be as good as the original screenplay you export from Celtx. If the formatting isn’t correct there, clean it up there and make sure everything’s standardized before exporting it. Otherwise, the CSS markup tags won’t be used correctly throughout the document.
• You can change that CSS code to whatever you want. If you don’t like the margins I chose, simply play around with the CSS code before you import the file into Calibre for conversion. The primary three areas you’ll want to play with are marked p.character, p.parenthetical, and p.dialog. Also, I stripped out a lot of other CSS code to make this simpler; it’s possible you can customize the code to include far more elaborate mark-up rules, so long as you always reference the tags that Celtx uses.

(Photo: Vikki Heartbreak)

…by raising the average price by $2.51, Amazon’s margins could increase from 6 percent to 20 percent on the sale of an e-book. That, they say, is “comparable to its physical book business” since Amazon would only have to sell 1.7 e-books to match the profits from the sale of a hardback, instead of 7.

Here’s my feelings on the matter:

• $12.50 is still a great price for a new book that just came out and is only available in hardback otherwise.
• It’s a terrible price, however, for a book that’s also available in trade or mass market paperback.
• It’s an even worse price at that point in the publishing cycle when you consider the things you’re not getting, especially from a closed format like the one Amazon forces on publishers and customers:
  • no physical copy, including no jacket art;
  • no ability to loan or give away or resell;
  • and no ability to transfer the copy to a different device (the number of competing ebook readers are growing every year).

I can understand the difficulty in trying to sell two versions of the same product at widely different price points, and the fear that that will mess up consumers’ perceptions of the true value of a work. However, I think most consumers understand that when you pay $25 for a hardback, you’re getting a physical object that you own outright. By comparison, in some ways you’re only renting an ebook. After all, the current Amazon system takes away most of the abilities you have with a physical copy–see my list-within-a-list above for examples. Add some of those abilities back in and you increase the real value of the ebook as well as the perceived value, and consequently can price it higher.

I also think that any argument in favor of aligning ebook prices more closely with hardback falls apart as soon as the book is released in trade and mass market formats. The only reason to price an ebook at a high price point is because of the scarcity that’s supposed to happen when the book is first published. There’s a reason it comes out in hardback first, and if a publisher is going to mess with that scarcity by simultaneously releasing an ebook version, he can and probably should price the ebook higher than “normal.” (At that point in the publishing cycle, $12.50 is still quite a fair price for an ebook, in my opinion.) But as soon as trade and mass market versions come out, that ebook price had better fall to a point lower than those other physical versions, or else I’m going to instantly recognize that the publisher is trying to rip me off.

My point is that there really needs to be two different price platforms: one for new books that are otherwise only available in hardback, and a lower one for all other books that are also available in various paperback formats. If I saw this reflected more frequently on the Amazon Kindle bookstore, I’d be far more willing to accept, and even buy, $12.50 ebook editions of new works.

(A final hint/suggestion for publishers: a customer might even be willing to pay $15 or more for an ebook edition if it was only available otherwise in hardback and contained additional content that wasn’t available in the physical copy version, like author commentary, expanded footnotes, additional notes and material from the writing of the book, chapters that were edited out, character notes, etc.)

Here’s a cool new use for the Kindle: the distribution of movie and TV scripts. To promote the new Edie Falco series “Nurse Jackie”, Showtime has put the script for the pilot episode on the Kindle store as a free download. That’s right, free! I can see this becoming a niche reading category for fans of TV shows and movies, and a great way for studios to use the Kindle to distribute content in a new format that doesn’t compete with the main product they’re trying to sell.

You can grab a copy for your Kindle or iPhone/iPod Touch here.

He’s found modest success with the release, I’m assuming at least in part because he has 6,000 Twitter followers and is a known screenwriter with big-league movie credits to his name. But I’m sure it’s also because the story is entertaining and well-written. (I haven’t read it yet.)

As of Friday, “The Variant” was ranked No. 69 on Amazon’s list of most popular Kindle offerings, right behind “My Sister’s Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult.

“I’ve made about enough to buy four Kindles,” said Mr. August.

I love this idea of accomplished, professional writers self-publishing at will, on a personal schedule independent of the sales cycles of the book industry. The manuscript moves directly from the writer to the reader. While I’m sure it won’t always be the best way to distribute new works, I think it’s fascinating and exciting to see it happening now in isolated instances like this.

Download a sample of “The Variant” to your Kindle or iPhone on the official Amazon page.

There’s also a handy “manage your Kindle” link at the top of the page, so you can bookmark this URL and use it to quickly access your device’s email addresses, downloads, etc.

Oh well. Gripe gripe gripe. Launch the App Store on your iPhone/Touch and grab the Kindle app or update. They’re both free.

By the way, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and read ebooks, you should really download the free Kindle app even if you don’t own a Kindle, because the Amazon store has the cheapest ebooks you’ll find online. (Yes, they’re locked to your device via DRM, but unfortunately this is the case for all ebook stores.)

So why is there so much doom and gloom, instead of excitement, from so many in the industry? The problem is one of economics, yes, but I think the real problem is a lack of imagination. Too many professionals–publishers, agents, authors, technologists, journalists, economic types (but maybe not real economists)–see ebooks and epublishing as building off of the current publishing model. Instead, they should be thinking of epublishing as disruptive. To put it another way (and to borrow/misuse terms from biology), epublishing is not the next stage in a gradual evolutionary path for the industry; instead, it’s an example of punctuated evolution–that is, the industry has been in stasis for a long time, changing little, and now is beginning to undergo a dramatic mutation to a form that’s more suitable to the new market environment. Publishing in the future will look so different as to seem like a new species, I predict.

This framing of the topic begs a question: what will make it so dramatically different, then? How is epublishing really that different from physical publishing? If it’s truly disruptive, it had better possess some unique characteristics that have never before been seen in publishing.

That’s where I come in! As a hypothetical Future Published Author, I take a keen interest in trying to come up with new schemes to publish and sell books, so I think I can help provide some of that imaginative power for the FUD crowd that sees the future and only sees death.

Will any of these ideas come to pass? Possibly not, and almost certainly not in the exact forms I’ve described below, because who knows how many important details I’m overlooking. But these are just rough notes pulled from my head over a cup of coffee on Sunday afternoon as I sit in a Starbucks. I think it’s worth noting that almost everyone here has either a laptop open, or an iPhone next to them, or both. A few even have physical books or newspapers with them, as if to prove that physical print is not dead, but is also no longer triumphant.

A special note: many of these suggestions will be heresy to readers, authors, and publishers. I shrug at you, which is not the same as disagreeing. These ideas are based on the assumption that an author is in the content-creation business, not that the author is an artist who is producing art. This doesn’t mean writing can’t be art, of course, but since most writing-as-art is not necessarily profitable, and is especially not profit-driven, I’m not allowing it to influence my ideas below.

A second special note: many of these suggestions are intended to solve the problem of perceived value: how can an ebook cost the same as, or even more than, a physical book if the consumer doesn’t receive a physical object to own after purchase?

Some ideas about
the future of digital publishing

Manipulating authorship on demand

• Customized and personalized texts. When a customer buys an ebook, he can choose to personalize it in certain ways, including changing the name of the hero or the villain or of secondary characters. Simple search-and-replace customizations require no human interaction at all, leaving the author and his agents free to work on creating more meaningful value.
• Can there be more precise customization? For the premium cost of an ebook, a customer can submit a photograph and complete a short survey. A real person on the other end will evaluate this data and use it to complete a profile that can be digitally combined with a book, provided the book is prepared ahead of time with specific passages marked up in order to facilitate this more complex search-and-replace.
• Books can be published without final chapters. Imagine a mystery novel where the identity of the killer is withheld until a certain date, in order to get readers to speculate and even vote on what happened. The final chapter may be unwritten at the time of publishing, in fact, only to be finished after readers voice speculation or opinions.
• Books can be republished with new endings; authors can rewrite sections of a book and republish it as a new version, not to simply sell more books but to update locations, or refine what a character’s intentions are, or to simply take the ending in a novel new direction as a sort of postmodern approach to the novel and authorship.

Redefining what makes a “book”

• Short stories and novellas can be sold individually. (See Stephen King’s Ur for the Amazon Kindle Store.)
• Anthologies on-demand. Say you love horror fiction, especially horror fiction about zombies, and especially horror fiction about zombies and teenagers. A publishing house can offer you the opportunity to assemble on-the-fly a collection of stories in that specific sub-genre. The publisher makes recommendations of related material as well–zombies with college students, teens with undead-but-not-zombies. Publishers can work out content sharing arrangements with other publishers so that each publisher has access to a larger content library. Authors prepare stories in specific genres as requested by publishers, or simply write what they want and submit it to the publisher’s content library, and are paid an exclusivity license and royalties for each book-on-demand their stories appear in.
• Non-fiction books can be updated frequently, following the same model as software. That is, between editions there can be a dozen or more smaller updates: Edition 1.1, 1.2, 1.3; Edition 2.0, 2.1, etc. This is especially valuable for manuals and computer resources, as well as catalogues.
• Digests can be sold around specific topics. Following a model similar to Google News Alerts combined with the “Best [xx] Writing Of [xxxx]“, readers can subscribe to topic digests for recurring fees, or for a flat annual subscription, and receive 4-8 collections annually of all journalism, essays, short stories, studies, journal articles, etc. on a topic. These digests can be curated by experts in some cases, to add additional unique value.
• Fiction or essays about current or recent events can be produced quickly, formatted quickly, and pushed to digital stores within a week of the event. Topics like teen celebrities, sci-tech that’s in vogue because of a certain movie marketing push, essays based on last week’s D.C. scandal, can all become fodder for books or mini-books.
• Long-form articles from magazines and newspapers can be sold individually for smallish amounts–say, $1. As an example, several of Seymour Hersh’s pieces for The New Yorker on topics like Gauntanamo Bay and Iran could have been sold to interested readers who don’t wish to subscribe to The New Yorker itself.
• Reference works can be sold piecemeal–a book on book proposals, for example, can sell just the generic intro and the chapter on cookbook proposals.

Modifying the publisher/author/public relationship

• Publishing houses can offer repackaged publishing services to authors. Instead of an author relying solely on the publisher for all aspects of the process–approval, editing, marketing, printing, shipping, bookkeeping–authors and their agents can hire, or enter an agreement with, publishing houses to provide specific services. If you’e an established author, you bring your own favorite editor into the mix, or hire the editor from the publisher (editors can be free agents or in exclusive contracts with publishers based on their fame within the industry). You negotiate with the publisher to provide marketing or book assembly and preparation for all forms of printing.

  You arrange your own publishing deals through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, using on-demand publishing facilities. Or you create an LLC and find financing to pay for bulk publishing. A publisher can take on this risk for a royalty, or can provide a package of services and offer to finance it for either a royalty or repayment with interest.

  Some authors may choose to bypass physical printing altogether, and to also bypass in-house marketing for third-party marketing from ad or publicity agencies.

  The point: publishing houses may change so that they provide a service to authors and the public by being a mediator between the two–but they are no longer the gatekeepers. In fact, depending on the ability of the author to finance the process, they may no longer own the book at all. Existing publishers may refuse to transition away from owning content, but startup companies can provide these services (editors can leave existing publishers and form their own companies with marketers and agents, in fact) and replace publishing houses as mediators.

• A reader can commission a work from an author. No, it will not be cheap, but it can be affordable as a unique “life event” gift (e.g. anniversaries, births) if an author creates templates–an anniversary template, a birth template, a Christmas template–and then customizes them. This requires real writing, not simply search-and-replace as above, but it doesn’t require the same amount of labor as writing an original work from scratch–the story’s theme is already created, as is the basic length and most of the plot. The author uses his template and customizes it with information from the customer. The author can also farm out customization assignments to ghostwriters while retaining creative control over the finished work.
• An author’s readers can help determine the components of an author’s next work, and follow along with frequent updates from the author, as well as certain chapters shared for feedback. (Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail followed this model in many ways, although the finished work remained identical to other traditional published works.) In particular, this deep level of customer interaction guarantees a small but confirmed amount of presales, to help the author budget resources for the duration of writing the book.
• Authors can sell subscriptions to their output: everything *but* novels are pushed directly to subscribers, while novels are sold at a discount. This sort of subscription model can help support authors who aren’t prolific in the traditional sense of pushing out a novel every 14 months, but who still produce substantive writing in the form of letters, essays, articles, and unpublished shorts works.

Adding value over static physical versions

• New books can come with notes, email exchanges, and rough drafts; more work is required to format the material for the digital edition, but theoretically the book can add thousands of extra pages without increasing the distribution cost compared to physical printings. Authors can adapt character studies or removed chapters into stand-alone short stories or short-shorts and publish in an appendix. Special editions can include 3-5 short stories from other authors over related subjects–this can also introduce authors to new readers.
• Epilogues can be added months later, intentionally.
• Serial works can be sold as works in progress, either for a flat “novel” fee or in chunks, or on a subscription basis.

# # #

A lot of these ideas require a shift in the relationship between the audience and the producer(s), and I think that’s a very good thing. Currently, most audience feedback is collected indirectly from sales figures or market research; there’s almost no true dialogue taking place between the content creators and the consumers. One aspect of the future of publishing is that publishers will ask their customers to engage more directly with them and with authors, which I think will influence publishing in ways I haven’t imagined yet.

Another shift implied by the ideas above is the transformation to a sort of bespoke publishing industry, where mass customization is, if not the norm, then a significant percentage of the marketplace. In general, I think mass customization and bespoke products are the next stage in industrial manufacturing, using digital technology alongside industrial technology to return the value of human-to-human services to the market, but at a mass level.

The world beyond traditional
publishing houses

Maybe none of these ideas will come to pass, but I can already say with confidence that if I were to publish a new novel today, the only reason I would even consider going through a publisher is that they currently control access to printing, shipping, editorial, and marketing services.

If I would be willing to forego physical printing–or relegate that to an on-demand status to save time and money–and could hire my own editorial and marketing experts, there would be no reason to go through a publisher at all. I could retain all rights to my work, distribute it as I see fit, and partner with an agent or lawyer to work out licensing agreements should the need arise.

Without the imprimatur of a publisher my book would lack credibility, but with the cooperation of published authors who are respected in the marketplace, I could load up a book with blurbs and recommendations that would help signal to consumers that I’m a risk worth taking–and with discounts, freebies, and samples, I could lower the risk even more.

I am not describing a DIY amateur publishing world, but one in which authors work with other authors, with the assistance of expert agents, editors, and reviewers, to help sell books. The current employees of publishing houses would still be working in the industry, but perhaps not for the current publishing houses any more. And most important, authors and readers–the two crucial components of the industry–would have more freedom than ever before to produce and consume the written word.

(Robot drawing: clickclickclickclick)

Well, of course, the answer is a solid yes, because I truly believe this is the beginning of an evolution in publishing. Even though I grow tired of all the doom and gloom from old-school professionals, I’m grateful (and excited) to be witness to such a transformative event as this.

Amazon originally said they’d charge 10 cents per document some day. The reality, which went into effect on May 4th, is that they’re charging 15 cents per megabyte rounded up.

That means you’ll pay at minimum 15 cents for each conversion. If your doc is, say, 1.14 MB (or 1140 KB, if that’s how your computer displays it to you), then you’ll pay 30 cents, and so on.

There are two ways to avoid this:

1. Have Amazon email the converted file back to you instead of sending it on to your Kindle.
   When you registered your Kindle, you set up an email address along the lines of “name”@kindle.com (where “name” is your name, of course). Attachments sent to this address will incur the fee and be forwarded on to your Kindle.

   To avoid that, send attachments to “name”@free.kindle.com instead. The converted Kindle-formatted file will be emailed back to you instead of sent to the device, and you won’t be charged a thing.

2. Convert the document yourself using software on your computer
   The easiest and best way to do this is with the free software program Calibre, which will convert several different formats into the MOBI format, which your Kindle can read without problems. You can also try the desktop version of Stanza or Mobipocket eBook Creator (Windows only) if for some reason Calibre won’t meet your needs.

Either path will result in you having a Kindle-friendly document on your computer, which you’ll then need to transfer over to your Kindle via USB. No, it’s not quite as hassle-free as letting Amazon send it directly, but if you want to save the equivalent of a Kindle text messaging fee for each conversion, you’re gonna have to start transferring it yourself.

(Photo: LabyrinthX)

Why is this happening all at once? Because Amazon just launched Kindle Publishing for Blogs, which lets anyone with a blog sign up and list their content on the Amazon Kindle Store for free. (Until now, you had to be invited by Amazon to participate.)

A few things to note:

• the $1.99 subscription price is set by Amazon;
• blog owners get 30% of that fee, while the rest stays with Amazon;
• there are other, cheaper options if you read a lot of blogs or you’re on a tight budget.

Is Kindlerama up there on the Amazon Blog Store? You betcha! I fully do NOT recommend you subscribe to ANY blogs through Amazon, but in the event that anyone wants to subscribe that way, I’m not going to deny them.

If you’ve ever tried looking for cheap, high quality books on the Amazon Kindle store, you’ve probably run into the same frustrating limitations that I have–namely, that you can’t set a specific price floor or upper limit when you perform a search. There are so many titles on the Kindle Store that it’s not practical to manually browse, screen by screen, through the listings. To make matters worse, you can’t filter out self-published, amateur, and public domain (aka “can be found for free elsewhere”) titles that junk up the listings.

Well, guess what? You can sort by specific price ranges if you use Jungle-Search.com!

This third-party website will let you narrow down your search to a particular book category, then set a price range, and then sort the results by the standard Amazon sort options. You can even filter out low-rated books if you trust the Amazon community rating system enough (I don’t).

I used Jungle-Search this morning to find Stephen King’s Duma Key for $7.99. I only read Stephen King novels every once in a while, but I think he makes for good summer reading, and I was happy to find one of his more widely-acclaimed books at such a reasonable price. Even better, the text-to-speech isn’t disabled on it, unlike some other Stephen King titles, so I had no qualms about grabbing it for my Kindle.

If you know of any other good ways to find discounted books on the Amazon Kindle store, please add them to the comments below.