An article in The Wall Street Journal tells about best selling business author Seth Godin who has decided to cut his ties to his commercial publisher and go electronic and/or print-on-demand. He says he’ll hire a professional editor and formatter, and sell his books directly to his hundreds of thousands of blog readers and book fans.
Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
Best Selling Business Author Dumps Publishing Business Model
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Old published books– Going digital…
Thursday, August 19th, 2010I am still splashing around in the web water, not always quite sure why I do what I do, but the one thing that has become clear to me is that whatever I write, web-based or hard copy, it has to be digital.
My latest book (just published: a short story collection called Out of the Mountains ) had electronic galleys that came to me by email. I was supposed to print them out and mark them, but some publishers I’m told are asking the authors to do mark-up electronically as well.
But here’s the point: I have at least three books from the early nineteen eighties when I was first publishing that are out of print from the original publishers and were never digital in the first place. A couple of them can be ordered now through the wonders of one-book-at-a-time technology (the hard copy was scanned in as .pdf files), but as I begin to prepare some of my books for e-readers, I wanted to get them scanned in as word processer files so I can make changes and digitalize for e-readers.
I’ve now done one with a pleasant-to-work-with company in Missouri called Golden Images, LLC. If you try them write to Stan Drew, who may be the whole show, but is in any case very responsive to email. The price is less that .50 a page, much less for .pdf files, but I think most of us with old books want the word processor files. Even with Stan’s good work, I am having to go through the book (Higher Ground) looking for anomalies (apostrophes that became Greek sigmas, etc.) but that’s fine because I wanted to see how the book felt anyhow– this was a book that I wanted at one point to make changes in, but couldn’t face retyping. So I’ll take my time and have fun.
More later about the differences in a typewritten book and a word processed book.
Hamilton Stone Editions’ New E-Books
Saturday, May 8th, 2010The cooperative literary press I work with, Hamilton Stone Editions, has begun putting up versions of our books as ebooks– even though most of the authors do not yet use the devices! Note I say “do not yet,” as I hope before the year is out to try it out. The problem is choosing which device, as the costs are high enough that it seems like a serious expense to me.
To prepare the books has been a hassle: we have to take digital versions of books (no surprise there) and strip out most of the formatting, because each ereader’s software does different weird things, and about the only things that translate are italics and capital letters.
If you get a chance, take a look at our first two books: Carole Rosenthal’s It Doesn’t Have to Be Me, and the final book of my Blair Morgan triology, Trespassers. You do not, by the way, have to have an ereader to read these: one version is a regular old .pdf that anyone with a late model computer can read, if you can stand prose on a computer screen. The advantage of the dedicated ereaders (for thos who don’t know) is that the actual reading experience is far more like book reading than staring at a tv screen.
I would be thrilled and delighted if you’d take a look at smashwords and tell me what you think!
The Beauty of Non-Specialization
Monday, April 12th, 2010I write occasionally about how I began life as a book maker: how I loved to cut little pages and staple them together, color the covers, invent trademarks, and even, if I didn’t lose interest, writing an actual story to fill the pages.
It would appear that I am ending the same way, as a full service book maker. Yes, I have a book coming out from a university press in a couple of months, published in the conventional way, and yes, my book on writing novels is about to be published by a smaller press, and yes, I intend to continue to get attention (and cash) from large commercial presses.
But this digital age is allowing me to have a wonderful time making books again. I am formatting some of our Hamilton Stone Editions books for e-readers; I keep web sites with information and reviews for Hamilton Stone and for myself. I am learning how to do a (hard copy) book cover using templates provided by printers, and how to make a book block that is readable and attractive.
One of the most wonderful things about childhood has always been that healthy human young are generalists: they dance and sing and throw balls and cook and run and pick flowers and pretend and make art and act and tell stories. Growing up is, from one angle, all about specializing. By the teen years, some of us are athletes, some are Brains, some are artsy, some are musical, some already making money.
So I feel that this digital world is enlarging my scope again.
Smashed!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010I’ve got a book uploaded to Smashwords.com! It cost me some time, but no cash. Take a look at Trespassers– and tell me what you think! We’re going to put up more books from Hamilton Stone if this seems worth the trouble.
Smashing a book
Saturday, March 27th, 2010I’m working on an experiment with a Hamilton Stone Editions version of one of my books. Using a site called Smashwords , I’m rather painstakingly turning a word processed manuscript (already published in hard copy) into a format that Smashwords will then run through some software called The Meatgrinder, and spew out the other end several versions readable by Kindle, the Nook, and more. Everything from EPUB to .pdf.
There is no charge upfront, and the service is not exclusive, as best I can read their information. The publisher/writer gets back a little if anyone buys/downloads a book. On the other hand, you don’t own the files in the specially formatted versions.
So the experiment is, does this work? Is it worth the labor (my favorite phrase: Is the Game Worth the Candle?), and will anyone conceivably buy the books?
If anyone has any experience with Smashwords, please let me know! Most of their books appear to be self-published single book deals, lots of science fiction and other genre, but more and more small publishers seem to be using it. This is, in my mind, a stop gap, something to do while things sort themselves out.
But I want our books available to read once I buy an e-reader!
My First Electronic Book…
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010I have a new book coming out in the summer from Ohio University Press , and they’ve already got a nice page set up for it, Out of the Mountains, with a link to this blog, and the opportunity to pre-order– and one of the versions to pre-order, along with a hard cover and a soft cover version, is an electronic file! It’s just a .pdf, at least so far, but that’s a start.
Reading More into the Future of Reading
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Riding the train into New York last evening to teach my NYU novel writing class, I was wishing for an e-reader, as I often do (I was already carrying my little Acer netbook so I could check email later). Then– as I even more often do, I drifted into a nap, so I don’t know if the desire for all the books in my library in my hand at every moment was just part of a pleasant dream or a real plan.
The irony of course is the hundreds of people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).
She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine . This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading: the instant hard copy books but also e-books (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!). I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books– I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books. Nice, don’t you think? Or at any rate, not bad.
Universities have been picking up on the possibility of instant books much faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010 New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet. See my article reviewing The Business of Books.
Poetry Books online: The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye
Saturday, February 20th, 2010Chalk Editions is doing poetry online– you download the books of poems that they publish, or read them online. They have an interesting statement of their reason for doing this here– they aren’t thrilled with the coming crash of physical books, but are determined to move forward. As an example of what they do, see Halvard Johnson’s latest collection of poems, The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye and Other Sonnets at Scribd.com– we’re considering at our cooperative press Hamilton Stone Editions how to get into the e-book market, so I’m going to look again at Scribd.com.
The abyss of Commercialism; the Firmament of Democratic Creativity
Monday, February 1st, 2010I wrote earlier about how when I was seven or eight I wrote stories, illustrated them, created covers, and manufactured the books with a borrowed stapler. I was aware that you were supposed to have a trademark, and mine was Black Horsey Books, a drawing of the top half of a rearing stallion. A female stallion. Other kids, less bookish and more athletic, pictured themselves as heroes of the basketball court and the world series and also as the fastest gun in the west. That’s one of the wonders of children and childhood: the moment at which you could be anything: professional home run hitter, movie star, gun-slinger and fighter for justice, illustrator, and author.
To some extent, the Web makes it possible for you to do this again. The big gap here is the difference between web structures/places that are professionally developed (you know those web pages: they are gorgeous; they have roll over links and video and music; they are expensive; nine times out of ten, the professional has to be called in to make even the smallest updates) and the ones like my web pages that still use tables to create a boxy, simple, page like structure. See http://www.meredithsuewillis.com and http://www.hamiltonstone.org. It isn’t so much that I am trying to recreate book pages, it’s that this is what I’ve been able to master. I like them, but I especially like that I can add to them, change them at will.
Or at least as long as the gods of cyberspace are favorably disposed.
I can tinker with (not write) html, the code underlying most web pages, I can do a little CSS through Dreamweaver, which means I can change the background colors and fonts easily.
I’m limited, but I’m having a good time.
There are, obviously, points on the continuum between homemade sites like mine and the big flashy professional ones. WordPress, which is here attached to my homemade site, is professionally structured, as is Blogger.com and certainly Facebook. You can get free or very cheap templates that someone else created and to which you can add your own text and pictures.
But what I really enjoy is being able to roll my own, as it were: just as I couldn’t have said when I was making my Black Horsey books if I liked best writing the stories or using the Grown Ups’ stapler, I get very caught up in all the parts of this. I probably spend too much time at it, trying to figure out what went wrong, why the font is too big or too small– it feels, in many ways, like a hobby.
In other ways, it feels like seizing control of the means of production. Which may be exactly where we are, on this ledge, looking down at the abyss of commercialism and time-wasting, and up at a firmament of democratic creativity.