Ebooks

New Age Of Publishing – Guest Post 8 – Shane Jiraiya Cummings

January 31, 2011

Here’s another in my series of guest posts discussing the changing face of publishing. In this one, dark fiction author Shane Jiraiya Cummings talks about his ‘grand experiment’. He’s decided to leap with both feet into the ebook self-publishing world and make the majority of his previously published work (and a couple of new things) available as ebooks, managing the whole process himself. He’s being openly transparent about the mechanics and results, so have a read here about where he’s gone so far and then follow along to see how it pans out.

The Grand Experiment

Shane Black1 2008 New Age Of Publishing Guest Post 8 Shane Jiraiya Cummings Filled with that euphoric sense of new year’s I-can-do-anything-ness, in January, I embarked on what I call the ‘Grand Experiment’ with ebooks (yes, not just an experiment but a GRAND experiment!) Sure, plenty of other authors are testing the ebook waters with a title or two, but I don’t believe this is enough to gain a foothold. Therefore, I released seven ebooks simultaneously into the wild on Amazon and Smashwords. With my novella Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves already available, I currently have eight ebooks online. I also have two more in production and another few on the drawing board.

With eight books, I’m hoping the splash will be big enough for me to drum up 1,000 sales over the course of this year, and if I’m lucky, I might even join those industrious authors like J. A. Konrath, Scott Nicholson, or Amanda Hocking at the top of the e-food chain. But before I entertain delusions of grandeur, I’m taking things one week at a time.

Phoenix Darkness Wolves New Age Of Publishing Guest Post 8 Shane Jiraiya Cummings Aside from my sales target, the other thing I’m hoping to prove is whether short story collections and novellas will sell as successfully as novels. In the bookstores, novels are king, but I’m not so sure the same rule applies in the e-world. Five of my Grand Experiment titles are collections (the ebook version of Shards, which has two new stories, and the four volumes of the Apocrypha Sequence). The other two – The Smoke Dragon and Requiem for the Burning God – are novellas (as is my other ebook, Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves, but this was published by Damnation Books, not self-published, so I have no control over its pricing).

My desire to prove that collections and novellas will sell well is not some wild stab in the dark. Others have already paved the way. Author Lee Goldberg on J. A. Konrath’s blog said this month:

“My most profitable title, in terms of hours worked and pages written, is Three Ways to Die, a collection of three previously published short stories. In print, it’s a mere fifty-six pages long, but it’s selling 24 copies-a-day on the Kindle, earning me about $1500-a-month. That means I could potentially earn $18,000 this year just from those three short stories alone. That is insane.”

$18,000 for three short stories? Yes, that is insane, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. And remember, that’s in just one year. I consider myself fortunate that I’ve been successful as a short story author. I’ve made more than a few ‘pro’ sales over the years, and by pro, I mean the SFWA and HWA rate of 5 cents/word. If you add up all my short story sales (and I’ve had more than 60 published so far – more than 120 sales when you count reprints), I estimate I’ve earned maybe $2000 from my short stories thus far. If you average that out, it’s $33 per story. So you can see why I’m enviously eyeing Lee Goldberg’s $18,000. Good luck to him, I say, but in the same breath, I say, if he can do it, why can’t I?

The early signs are looking good. The Smoke Dragon, which is free on Smashwords (but 99c on Amazon because of their pricing limitations), has rocketed up the ‘most downloaded’ fantasy chart at Smashwords, and in a week (and without much in the way of promotion), it has been downloaded 230 times and been given two great reviews (one five star, one four star). Plus, I’ve sold two copies on Amazon. The fascinating thing about The Smoke Dragon is that it was available as a free PDF on my website for more than 12 months. You know how many times it was downloaded from my site? Three.

Shards New Age Of Publishing Guest Post 8 Shane Jiraiya Cummings I’ve read articles about music downloads and iTunes that suggested people want convenience over free stuff. Pirating music is finicky, prone to viruses, and just plain inconvenient for the average punter. It can also make people feel guilty. However, the convenience and prevalence of programs like iTunes is such that most people don’t mind paying $1.69 for a song because it’s easy and guilt-free. The same theory applies to ebooks, which is why I wanted my books on Amazon (the market leader), not just Smashwords. It’s also why I’m not selling my titles from my website – it’s one more set of clicks that people used to the convenience of Amazon or Smashwords just don’t need.

If nothing else, I’ve already expanded my readership by embracing the e-revolution. In one week, 230+ people have read a story which, even though it was a Ditmar and Aurealis Award finalist, I couldn’t give away. Another 110 people have downloaded samples of my other ebooks, and of those, a dozen have purchased my titles. Right now, the numbers are small, but again, it’s the very first week, and except for some mates/colleagues mentioning my Grand Experiment online (for which I’m immensely grateful!), I haven’t yet properly promoted my ebooks.

I used to lament that I couldn’t get my work read beyond the Aussie small press diehards (bless them!). Well, now I’ve done it. I’m reaching new sets of eyes, and the exciting thing for me is that almost all of my ebooks are reprints. These are second, third, and even fourth bites of the cherry, but only a few hundred people at most have ever read my short stories, so it doesn’t matter that they were published in small press magazines and anthologies. Repackaged as ebooks, they’re ready for the wider world to enjoy.

I can’t see any downsides to embracing ebook self publishing so far, but the ultimate test for me will be when my novel is ready (which should be soon). I’m torn between approaching a progressive publisher (who publishes ebooks and print books) or going it alone and self-publishing. This is why the ebook revolution is such a heady time for authors. If we choose to take total control over our destinies, there is a reasonable chance we’ll fail, but if we succeed like someone such as Amanda Hocking – a previously unpublished author who sold 99,000 copies of her ebooks in December alone! – then the rewards will be worth it. For me, the next 12 months will decide my course one way or the other. Wish me luck!

If you’re curious to see how the Grand Experiment progresses, you can follow it here.

Amazon’s ebook sales eclipse paperbacks 115:100

By alan

January 28, 2011

Timely news given my New Age of Publishing series of guest blogs currently running. The figures are a bit messy as hardbacks aren’t included, but overall sales of paid Kindle books are outselling paperback books at a ratio of 115:100 through Amazon.com. The company says:

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books.
This is across Amazon.com’s entire US book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.

Given that this is a piece of US-centric news, it would be interesting to see how global figures affect the ratios. But regardless of vagaries in statistics, one thing is clear: Ebooks are mainstreaming faster than most predicted.

The Kindle ereader is the single biggest selling product on Amazon, though Kindle edition books are obviously available on a variety of devices. I read a lot of Kindle books on my iPhone, for example. Anyone still denying the ebook revolution is certainly kidding themselves.

New Age Of Publishing – Guest Post 7 – Benjamin Solah

By alan

January 28, 2011

My series of posts looking at the changing face of publishing continues. This time I’ve got a post from Benjamin Solah. Ben is an emerging writer from Melbourne. He’s also a poet and activist. He’s been dipping his toe into the murky waters of publishing’s new world and writes a bit here about his experiences. For anyone thinking about following Ben’s path, there’s some sage advice to be found in this one.

ben solah New Age Of Publishing Guest Post 7 Benjamin Solah eBooks have no doubt been a major talking point for writers and those in publishing and literary circles over the last year or so. But now, talk and speculation about digital publishing has moved toward action and I think we’re beginning to see more and more people adopt eReaders as a form of reading alongside print books, but not yet a primary form of reading. What methods people are adopting is varied and it would be impossible for anyone to predict what device or form is going to emerge as dominant, be it something like the Kindle, another eReader, iPads and tablets, smart phones or plain old PCs and laptops.

The era we’re in, I think, is one of speculation and one that is ripe for experimentation, for testing a variety of methods, devices and distribution. It would be mad for any publisher, writer or distributor to put their eggs in one basket. But even madder is some big names in the industry have been slow to put their eggs in any basket.

Enter the emerging writers and the small time writers. We’ve got a real chance to lead the way. And despite the term ‘evangelical’ having horrible connotations for me, I’ve become a bit of an eBook evangelist. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the chances emerging writers have to get in on the eBook market before the big guys do, but now part of me is assessing how much my little experiment is working and what is holding me back.

Using the emerging music scene that I have friends involved in, I was inspired to produce something like a demo tape or EP. I liked the idea of going to see a local band and if you liked them and wanted to support them, you’d buy their CD and/or t-shirt. It’s never like the polished albums you buy from JB Hi-Fi, but it doesn’t really matter. You hope by supporting them, it will contribute to them getting bigger.

Front Cover New Age Of Publishing Guest Post 7 Benjamin Solah I tried this with writing and eBooks. I got together some of the flash fiction I posted on my blog, my very first short stories and poems and some blog posts, and put them into a collection called Sanity Juxtaposed. It’s a kind of sample of my work and the early work is meant to be an example of where I’ve come from and how I’ve improved (dramatically) since then.

How’s the experiment gone? Not as well as I’d hoped. I’m kind of assessing it now but not regretting having tried. The eBook remains available in a variety of places to see who will bite, but I’m already looking at how to improve.

For one, I’ve changed the price. eBook pricing remains hotly contested. I originally set it at $5. I wanted it to mean something if someone shelled out their cash. Unfortunately, the nature of shelling over $5 in the online word seems a lot harder than pulling out a $5 note at a gig. I put it down to $2 a few months ago, but nothing much has changed.

One thing I am questioning is whether it was a good idea to put those first pieces of writing in there. I outlined the rationale for doing so in the introduction and hoped it wouldn’t mean those early works formed the basis of how people judged my writing, but with eBooks, most people download samples first before purchasing and I’m afraid those tales at the start probably served the basis for whether or not they bought the whole thing. I’d advise to put your best work forward and not devalue yourself.

Those are two things to consider if you’re experimenting with eBooks – the price and what content you include. But it would be interesting to hear what others think and to use it to adjust my experiment accordingly. I haven’t even mentioned marketing and how that affects sales. Playing around with covers, blurbs and promotion could mean a lot more than I’ve been able to look into yet.

And despite any mistakes we make, experiment, we must. Smashwords.com provides an ideal base in which to try things out and get yourself out there to a variety of formats and devices. I think it was even Alan that led me on this route, but others have followed such as Shane Jiraiya Cummings who has just launched his ‘grand experiment’ [Shane will be taking a guest blog here as well soon, talking about his experiences - Alan] with lots of titles on offer. He’s yet another example of someone taking the dive into this whole thing and it benefits all of us.

Those that venture into this jungle of digital publishing learn and teach the others around us by asking questions and sharing what does and doesn’t work. So if you’re one of these emerging writers looking into this with trepidation, know you’re not alone.

Benjamin Solah describes himself as a Marxist Horror Writer, writes fiction, performs poetry around Melbourne, and is an active blogger (http://benjaminsolah.com/blog) and socialist activist. He is currently working on a short story collection and his latest short story, ‘Somewhere to Pray,’ features in Chinese Whisperings: The Yang Book.

After The Rain ebook appeal for Queensland flood relief

By alan

January 16, 2011

I think pretty much everyone has heard about the shocking floods up in Queensland, even if you’re not an Australian. It really has been terrible and the people up there need our help. FableCroft Publishing has come up with a great idea. They’ve been putting together an anthology of short stories called After The Rain, which is due for release soon. Given the rather portentous title of the book, editor Tehani Wessely has made an advance ebook copy of the book available for anyone that donates to the flood relief appeal. It’s a brilliant idea and a brilliant cause. It’s also bound to be a brilliant book, given the sterling list of contributing authors.

All the details are here. Go and get yourself an ebook and do your bit to help those people struggling up north.

New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 4 – Chuck McKenzie, bookseller

By alan

December 31, 2010

My posts about the new age of publishing continue apace. This time I have a post that I think is awesome. Chuck McKenzie is a great guy and a personal friend. He’s also a writer but, more importantly in this context, he’s a bookseller. One of the traditional, old-school kind that sells actual paper books from a brick and mortar bookstore. His career depends on the continued success of the “old” publishing model, so you might find some of his views rather interesting. I agree with him on almost every point. Take it away, Chuck.

NB: the personal opinions expressed in the following post are not necessarily those of Dymocks Booksellers.

I manage a Dymocks store in Cheltenham, Victoria, and, as a traditional print bookseller, I’m often asked by customers walking in off the street whether we stock either e-readers or e-books. Most are only mildly surprised when I tell them that we currently don’t – ‘mildly’, because, after all, aren’t e-readers the natural enemy of the printed book? What tends to surprise these customers more is when I go on to tell them that at some point we certainly will be stocking e-readers, and that we’re currently in the process of seriously researching the pros and cons of what’s available on the market, and what products are likely to be released in the near future. The latter seems to be a source of surprise largely because most traditional booksellers still insist upon pretending that e-readers simply don’t exist, full stop.

To a certain extent, this reaction is understandable (if not particularly sensible): Change is scary. Change is also inevitable, and – especially where industry is involved – it’s vital to adapt to Change. Look at what happened within the music industry when downloads became available; the industry failed to move with the times sufficiently quickly, and suffered greatly as a result.

Likewise, e-reader technology is here to stay, regardless of how much the bookselling industry might wish it were otherwise; depending upon where you get your figures, anywhere from 10-20% of all purchases now made online are of books, with an increasing slice of that percentage being e-books. Why, then, does the bulk of the bookselling industry continue to ignore the issue?

There’s no simple answer to that. I suspect that the old attitude of ‘keep steady and everything will return to normal eventually’ has much to do with it; the Australian bookselling industry has just entered year three of an industry-wide recession, and traditional wisdom suggests that the drought has to break sometime soon. Problem is, the increasing popularity of e-readers – not the only factor affecting book sales at present, but certainly a growing one – is not an issue likely to evaporate once the current financial crisis ends. It is, again, a permanant change to the industry, and one that booksellers absolutely need to roll with in order to survive.

Which brings us back to the industry (and customer) perception that e-readers and printed books are natural enemies, and cannot be kept in shared enclosures.

To which I say: Bollocks.

It may surprise some to hear this, but I’m of the opinion that – certainly in the long term, and possibly even in the short-to-mid term – e-reader technology will be a boon to the bookselling industry, and not just to the e-book side of things, either.

Consider: while there are currently still issues regarding the availability and formatting of product for e-readers, eventually it will almost certainly be the case that any e-reader will be able to inexpensively access virtually any published work that has ever seen print, from ancient classics to the latest releases. Now, this may just sound like another way of stating that everyone will eventually download all of their book purchases, thus relegating traditional print publishing to the scrapheap of history, and certainly this is a concept that has seen a vast amount of discussion – both positive and negative – in recent times.

The one point that people almost always seem to ignore, however, when discussing the inevitability of the Universal Download, is that people like books.

Physical, printed books are something that virtually all readers – no matter how tech-savvy they are – seem to enjoy owning. Aside from the pure enjoyment of reading itself (which one can also get from reading off an e-reader, granted) there’s pleasure to be gained – for many readers – from the simple act of holding a book in one’s hand, the sensation of turning the pages; from displaying one’s treasured titles on a bookshelf for all to see, and being able to take a book down off the shelf to find that quote or passage that’s been eluding you. You can’t get an e-book signed by your favourite author, either (although I can see the possibility of alternatives: perhaps including a video function on a future e-reader that allows you to record a personalised message from John Scalzi or Peter V. Brett when you meet them).

So, if we take the line that printed books will endure in the face of burgeoning e-reader technology (if only due to the culture of nostalgia surrounding printed books), is it not still possible that sales of printed books will plummet as sales of e-books continue to soar?

I’m actually of the opinion that they won’t. Here’s my reasoning:

a) Yes, sales of e-books will continue to rise dramatically: no question about it. It’s even possible that people will eventually buy all their books in e-format (at least initially – I’ll explain in a moment). This increase is likely to be driven as much by the comparatively cheap pricing of e-books as by the (eventual) ease of access to and availability of product.

b) With the increase in sales of e-books is likely to come an increase in the number and quantity of titles sold. After all, with the $24.99 that you would traditionally have spent on the latest print-edition fantasy blockbuster, you can now purchase up to three (or more) e-books. [That's $24.99 Australian dollars and yes, book prices in Australia are mental - Alan] And I don’t believe that book-buyers in general will spend less on books just because the cost of books is reduced by electronic formatting, either: rather – as in the case of downloadable music – if buyers have been used to budgeting a certain amount to purchase a physical product, they will continue to spend roughly the same amount on an e-format, with the ‘bonus’ of enjoying more bang for their buck. So: that $24.99 will now be used to purchase that same fantasy blockbuster, in e-format, plus two or three other titles that the reader would not have purchased had they been available only as expensive print editions.

c) So the buyer ends up reading more books overall. Now admittedly, some of these may be books that the reader wanted to read anyway, but would have had to wait to purchase (in print) for budgetary reasons; or they may have borrowed the less immediately-enticing titles from a library to read. However, it’s also likely that the reader will occasionally – again, due to the comparatively low price of e-books – be enticed to take a chance on buying titles that they simply wouldn’t have bothered buying in print; titles that look kinda interesting, maybe a little outside of the usual comfort zone, or that so-and-so recommended; classics that you’ve always felt you should get around to reading, but can’t be bothered potentially wasting good fantasy blockbuster money upon; small-press publications and pulpy ‘summer reading’. And so on.

d) Finally, BECAUSE THE BOOK-BUYER REALLY LOVES BOOKS, it’s almost certain that they will purchase an additional, printed copy of that fantasy blockbuster. The e-book will accompany them on holiday, on the train, to work, etc – but the printed version will have pride-of-place on their bookshelf at home. And odds are that at least some of the additional e-books purchased with that $24.99 – including those that the reader would never have bothered to read, let alone purchase, in printed format – will also be so greatly enjoyed that the reader will invest in printed copies also.

e) All of which means, of course, that people will actually be spending more money on books than they currently do. What will have changed, however, is that all ‘guesswork’ will have been taken out of the process of purchasing expensive printed books, since the buyer already will know exactly which titles they definitely wish to own in print. And people in general are rarely unhappy to invest more money in something if they know they wll be 100% satisfied with the outcome.

Are there advantages to e-readers over printed books? Hell, yeah! As someone with major eyesight problems, I’m all for ‘books’ that allow you to increase the resolution or contrast of the text, or even backlight the screen in a darker environment. And taking twenty novels away with me on holiday will no longer be the packing-space nightmare it is today. But advantages of new technologies don’t always push older technologies to the wall: DVDs haven’t yet destroyed the movie industry; CDs are still the preferred ‘form’ of purchased music in a world that has embraced the iPod; and remember when the humble PC was going to put us all out of work?

E-book technology? Bring it on, I say!

Chuck McKenzie was born in 1970 and still spends much of his time there. As well as managing a Dymocks bookstore, Chuck is a sometimes author of speculative fiction, a reviewer for HorrorScope (the Australian Dark Fiction Blog), and obsessive managing editor of the NecroScope zombie fiction review site. Only one of these roles pays the bills.

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Pretty interesting ideas, huh? Agree, disagree or have a completely different opinion? Leave your comments below.

New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 3 – Mark Coker cross-post

By alan

December 29, 2010

In my continuing series of guest posts about the changing face of publishing, I couldn’t resist cross-posting this one. Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, was recently interviewed by Jeff Rivera at MediaBistro. He was asked for his ten book publishing predictions for 2011. Mark said I could pick up the first five from his blog and I’ll link at the end to the rest of the interview. Hopefully we’ll get something more from Mark later in January in this series, but he’s a busy man. In the meantime, enjoy this one.

2011 Predictions for Book Publishing

swcrysalball New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 3 – Mark Coker cross post It’s annual prognostication time when folks like me stick out their necks and try to predict the future. I invite you to join in the fun. Brush up your crystal ball and share your publishing predictions for 2011 in the comments field below.

Earlier today, Jeff Rivera over at MediaBistro interviewed me for my ten book publishing predictions for 2011.

I’ll list five below, and then I encourage you to click over to Mediabistro for the full ten in his interview, Publishing Predictions for 2011 from Smashwords.

If 2010 was the year ebooks went mainstream in the U.S., 2011 will be the year indie ebook authors go mainstream. We’ve already seen this start to happen with some tremendous indie ebook author breakouts in 2010. I wrote about Smashwords author Brian S. Pratt a few weeks ago.

So here are five predictions for 2011:

1. Ebook sales rise, unit consumption surprises – Ebooks sales will approach 20% of trade book revenues on a monthly basis by the end of 2011 in the US, yet the bigger surprise is that ebooks will account for one third or more of unit consumption. Why? Ebooks cost less and early ebook adopters read more.

2. Agents write the next chapter of the ebook revolution – Agents, serving the economic best interests of the best-selling authors, will bring new credibility to self publishing by encouraging authors to proactively bypass publishers and work directly with ebook distribution platforms. Agents will use these publishing platforms for negotiating leverage against large publishers. The conversation will go something like this: “You’re offering my author only 15-20% list on ebooks when I can get them 60-70% list working direct with an ebook distributor like Smashwords or a retailer like Amazon?”

3. More big authors reluctant to part with digital rights – Indie ebook publishing offers compelling advantages to the author. The economics are better (see #2) and the publishing cycle times are faster (an ebook manuscript can be uploaded today and achieve worldwide distribution in minutes or days, not years). Ebooks also offer greater publishing flexibility (shorts, full length, bundles, free books), and the opportunity to reach more readers with lower cost (yet still higher-profit) books. The advantages will entice more professional authors to self-publish some or all of their future catalog, and all of their reverted-rights catalog.

4. Self Publishing goes from option of last resort to option of first resort among unpublished authors – Most unpublished authors today still aspire to achieve the perceived credibility and blessing that comes with a professional book deal. Yet the cachet of traditional publishing is fading fast. Authors with finished manuscripts will grow impatient and resentful as they wait to be discovered by big publishers otherwise preoccupied with publishing celebrity drivel from Snooki, Justin Bieber and the Kardashians. Meanwhile, the break-out success of multiple indie author stars will grab headlines in 2011, forcing many unpublished authors off the sidelines. As unpublished authors bypass the slush pile, publishers lose first dibs on tomorrow’s future stars.

5. Ebook prices to fall – It’s all about supply and demand. Demand is surging, but supply will overwhelm demand. Average ebook prices will decline, despite attempts by Agency 5 publishers to hold the line. The drop will be fueled by the oversupply of books, abundance of low-cost or free non-book content, influx of ultra-price-sensitive readers who read free first, fierce competition for readership, and digitization of reverted-rights and out-of-print books. Indie authors, since they earn 60-70% retail price, can compete at price points big publishers can’t touch.

Read all ten of my predictions in the full interview over at Mediabistro, and please share your own predictions in the comments below.

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If that whet your appetite, please do go and read the rest. It makes for some thought provoking reading. There’ll be a few more of these posts throughout January and early February, so keep an eye open.

New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 2 – Moriah Jovan

By alan

December 28, 2010

In my ongoing end of year series of posts about the new face of publishing, I present a repost here of an article by Moriah Jovan. Following on from Angela Slatter’s post about her Smashwords journey, Moriah talks about the disappearance of the page as a concept. This post first appeared at B10 Mediaworx nearly two years ago. The revolution has been under way for some time.

A rose by any other name…

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the definition of a “book,” or more specifically, the proper formatting of an e-book, and the definition of a “page” and its importance in the New eWorld Order.

I’m here to tell you: Unless it’s on paper or in PDF, they ain’t no such thing as a page.

I’ll admit that it took me a while to get used to reading on my eBookWise. Between the whacked-out spacing and the left justification and the lack of paragraph indents, it looked…sloppy. Inferior. But I stuck with it and realized that each book is formatted differently; some are prettier and easier to read than others, but mostly not. I did, however, have problems even with the “prettiest” of the formatting. I was able to adjust my expectations of the presentation once I realized it was a function of the DEVICE and that the DEVICE was not a print book. The print book and the e-book simply have nothing in common except the words they contain: not headers, not footers, not design, not formatting, not…page numbers.

To use the “page” as common ground, each user must have the same edition of a paper book and/or the same edition of the PDF file, but that’s a fairly easy task to accomplish.

In any other format, however, it’s nearly impossible without each user having the same device, the same font settings (i.e., large or small), the same page view settings. Gentlemen, let’s synchronize our devices. Taking the probability of that into account, then, the concept of the “page” vanishes.

The latest argument I have seen for the need for strict pagination in e-books to approximate or duplicate that of a print book is for reference books and the uses of academia viz. for annotation and bibliography, tables of contents and indices, footnotes and end notes. What this demonstrates to me is ignorance or lack of vision or an inability to understand the vast differences in the format, and the capabilities and limitations of each.

ANNOTATION and BIBLIOGRAPHY

quadWhen your bishop or your preacher or your pastor or your minister or other Protestant-type ecclesiastical leader gets up and wants everybody to flip open their Bibles, does s/he say, “Please turn to page 1436 in your Bible”? No. He says, “Romans chapter 15.” (Cause that’s where mine is. In the King James Version. What if you prefer to use a different version? No problem! Romans chapter 15 is still where it’s supposed to be, which is between Romans 14 and Romans 16.)

hamlet 222x300 New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 2 – Moriah Jovan When your English lit professor or your director or your acting coach directs you to a certain passage in a Shakespearean play, does he say, “Please turn to Hamlet, page 783”? No. (Well, first of all, he’s OBVIOUSLY working from an anthology if it has 783 pages to begin with.) He says, “Please turn to Act 2, Scene 2, Line 35.” So what this means is I was smart and brought my little bitty Hamlet and everybody else was stupid and brought their big fat anthologies. And it makes no difference whatsoever.

The two print books, Bible and Shakespearean anthology, have page numbers. But they aren’t referred to or necessary for annotation or bibliography. In fact, the only thing they’re used for is within the book itself to create tables of contents and indices. So let’s talk about that.

TABLES OF CONTENTS, INDICES, and FOOT/END NOTES

There’s only one thing a table of contents and/or index is good for: To find your place in the book. Thing is, in a print book, that’s the only way you can find anything…maybe kinda sorta quickly.

In an e-book, the tables of contents and indices have completely different purposes. In fact, an index isn’t even necessary in an e-book, although I would argue that a table of contents is. However, their function and mechanism of use are entirely different from that of a print book.

1. It’s called a hyperlink.

Now, don’t be scared. I’m sure you’ve seen them before here and elsewhere on the interwebz. You put your cursor over it and click and boom…you’re somewhere else on the interwebz. Cool, huh?

You can do that in an ebook, too.

A list of hyperlinks in the beginning of the e-book serves the same function as the table of contents serves in a print book. A print book has page numbers after the chapter name. An e-book has a hyperlink you touch with your stylus and boom, you’re there, same as it works on the interwebz. No page numbers? No problem! Not necessary at all.

But hyperlinks are good within the text, too. If a word is hyperlinked, you touch it with your stylus and it takes you to further reading. They used to be called “footnotes” and “end notes.” Don’t need those anymore, either. Oh, they’re still footnotes and end notes, but they have no precise structure because it’s not necessary. The device will take you where you need to go.

2. It’s called the “find” function.

You can’t do this in a print book. There is no CTRL-F. There is no “Find.” You go to the table of contents and/or the index and if you’re lucky, that book had an excellent indexer. If you’re not, well, good luck to you then. I’m going out to get some Chinese while you look for that reference. Want anything?

Is there an e-reading device that doesn’t have a “find” function? If there is, smash it and get something else, ’cause there is no point to an e-reading device without a “find” function. Because why? Because there are no page numbers.

If the argument (with regard to reference material) is that e-reference books can’t be annotated or bibliographed or referenced, there’s a simple way around that. Organize the book in some other fashion, a la the Bible or Shakespeare. It’s been done. The system’s only been around for a few hundred years now. If it ain’t on paper, it ain’t got pages.

And if it’s inevitable, just lay back and enjoy it.

***

Further interesting reading from Moriah can be found here: Book Design with Microsoft Word: The Art of Moriah Jovan on The Book Designer blog.

New Age of Publishing – Guest Post 1 – Angela Slatter

By alan

December 23, 2010

Over the next few weeks I’m going to host a handful of guest posts from writers, publishers and booksellers talking about the new face of publishing. The world is changing and all aspects of writing and publishing are being affected by the increased digitisation of all aspects of the craft and business. I thought it would be interesting to hear from people about their thoughts and experiences along the way. First up, I’m pleased to present this guest post from author Angela Slatter. You’ll probably remember me gushing about her book Sourdough & Other Stories not so long ago. Here she talks about her experiences using Smashwords to put her published work out in ebook form. There’s a full bio at the end of the article. Take it away, Angela…

The Smashwords Experiment

The Start

When I first decided to upload a couple of my books to Smashwords I promised I would document the experiment. Time got away on me, so luckily Al Baxter asked me to do this guest blog specifically about my Smashwords experience. And so, here it goes.

sourdough1 New Age of Publishing Guest Post 1 Angela Slatter I have two short story collections out this year, Sourdough and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, UK) and The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications, Australia). I also have the collection of short stories I wrote for my MA a couple of years ago, Black-Winged Angels, most of which have been published in a variety of magazines, journals and anthologies, but the whole collection hasn’t been published all together.

My boss, Kate, is the Queen of All Things on the Bleeding Edge of Digital and she said, “Why don’t you put Sourdough up on Smashwords? Then, why don’t you put each individual story up, too? And you should have a big enough backlist of short stories by now that you can upload them all.”

And I thought, “Why not indeed?” Keep in mind that I am lazy and dislike change, so for me to take this step was quite big. Kate also made the point that, in general, hard copy books make their biggest sales mostly post-launch (any later award-generated sales can change the equation). With ebooks, things tend to be reversed: small sales at the beginning and then increasing as word gets out. Realistically, this is not a money-making venture for me, but it is a really useful experiment.

Reading Time is Essential

So the first thing you need to know about Smashwords is that you have to do a lot of reading before you start uploading anything. Read the Style Guide, the Marketing Guide and the extensive FAQs. It’s not annoying, nor is it a waste of time – you just need to be aware that in order to do things properly and save yourself time later, you need to make a time investment at the beginning of your Smashwords journey. If you don’t make the time to read all of the documentation, trust me, you will have a bad experience because preparing a document to become an ebook is very different to preparing one for traditional publishing methods – for instance, leaving more than 4 spaces between paragraphs will equal a blank page in an ebook. Your Smashwords doc is pretty plain compared to how you set up a doc for a printer. It’s not difficult to do, but if you’re taking a file that you’ve previously used as a print file, then it’s a labour of love to get it all correctly converted.

One thing that would be useful would be a checklist in the Style Guide for when you’re going to upload a second or third book – you’re likely to be familiar with the ins and outs, but a checklist would act as a handy tool rather than having to work your way through all the many steps of the Style Guide.

Assorted Stuffery

tgwnh small21 New Age of Publishing Guest Post 1 Angela Slatter You need to follow the guidelines for the copyright page. If you’ve got more than one book on Smashwords then make sure you put links in to that book – cross-promotion wins! You need to make sure you bookmark and hyperlink your chapters – it’s not hard but you need to pay attention while you’re doing it. Trust me, I’ve had to fix up the ToC links on Sourdough twice. You don’t need page numbers – they’re not really relevant if your book’s been bought for, say, an iPhone.

You’ll also need a cover – make sure your cover is (a) indistinguishable from a traditional cover (author name and title, nice image), and (b) the text is big enough to still be read when it’s thumbnail size. Hopefully you’ve got a friend or partner or someone you can pay or barter with for a cover design. I’m fortunate in that my best friend, Lisa L Hannett (who also did the cover for The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales), did the ebook cover for Sourdough and Other Stories, and my partner, David, did the ebook cover for Black-Winged Angels.

Depending on when you upload your file – and how many other people are uploading their files at the same time – you may find your book moves super-duper quickly through the meatgrinder (“You are # 70 in the queue”) or you may find it takes quite a while (“You are # 340 in the queue”). This can make your teeth grind. I’m currently still waiting after 3 hours for the newest version of Sourdough to upload (after fixing – I hope – that ToC issue).

Keep in mind that you need to ensure your book is as well-edited and proofread as a book produced by a major trade publisher. People are still buying a product and they want it to be worth the money they are spending on it. Invest in getting your work at least proofread before you upload it.

Marketing

Sourdough Slattersm1 187x300 New Age of Publishing Guest Post 1 Angela Slatter Just because you’ve uploaded your book/s to Smashwords doesn’t mean you’re going to sell any. Traditional publishers have whole marketing departments to get the word out about your book. You need to utilise handy things like social media to get your own marketing done. Smashwords has its own Marketing Guide, which is filled with common sense suggestions for mobilising things like Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter, MySpace, etc. to get the word out. Ask professional contacts if they’re willing to review, mention, promote, etc., your ebook (if they say “No”, be gracious). If you’re handy (or know someone who’s handy) make a book trailer to upload to the Tubes-of-You or your own website – did I mention you should have a website? To use to help promote your own work? We call it ‘author platform’ and you should create it and use it.

Publishers

Tartarus Press, who produced the Sourdough collection, only bought rights to publish 350 hard cover limited edition copies – I retain the electronic rights. Before I uploaded Sourdough, I contacted Ray at Tartarus and asked if they were okay with me doing an ebook version. He and Rosalie continued to be lovely and said, “Sure, why not?” They’ve been thinking about doing ebooks of some of their collections and were happy for me to report back on my experiences. Thus the learning circle continues.

Why don’t I have The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales up at Smashwords? Well, out of deference to my publisher. I have the electronic rights, I could upload it at any time and I know from the sheer number of queries I’m getting from readers in the US that I would have a ready-made audience for an ebook version of that collection. However, I know my publisher is wanting to sell the hard copies he’s gone to the trouble of printing. The print run for this book was larger than that of Sourdough and Other Stories, so I know there is more product to shift. As I said earlier, the ebook experiment realistically isn’t a money-making venture, so there’s no point insisting on an ebook version at this point and damaging my relationship with a very nice publisher. My strategy is to maybe in August next year release an ebook version of The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales.

Sales?

black winged angels sm1 187x300 New Age of Publishing Guest Post 1 Angela Slatter To date, I’ve made about eight sales – three of Black-Winged Angels and five of Sourdough and Other Stories. I kept the price on each book low in acknowledgement that (a) it’s been a hard financial year for a lot of folks who want to continue to buy books, and (b) most of the other books on Smashwords seem to be at the same costing. So, at $4.99 per book, I’m not gonna get rich quick.

The hard cover copies are artefacts, lovely books to read and keep and have on a shelf. The ebooks are – sure, ephemeral – but available in a variety of formats and portable. Basically, you’re covering two kinds of readers: those who like to read on screen and those who like to read and own an artefact that has a good heft in the hand and sits nicely on a shelf. More formats and a price range to those formats means you’re increasing the number of potential readers you can attract.

Sourdough and Other Stories can be purchased from Tartarus Press, or from Smashwords here. Black-Winged Angels can be purchased from Smashwords here. The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales can be purchased from Ticonderoga Publications.

Bio:
Angela Slatter is a Brisbane-based writer of speculative fiction. For some reason, she has a Masters (Research) in Creative Writing, which produced Black-Winged Angels, a short story collection of reloaded fairytales, and she is now studying (very slowly) for a PhD in Creative Writing. During her daylight hours, she works at a writers’ centre, and she has been known to occasionally teach creative writing.

Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again, Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales II, Twelfth Planet Press’ 2012, Dirk Flinthart’s Canterbury 2100, and in journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, ONSPEC and Doorways Magazine. Her work has had several Honourable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies #20 and #21; and three of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Fantasy Short Story category.

She is working on various short stories and three novels at the moment. Novel the First: an historical fantasy set in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Novel the Second: Finbar’s Mother, a mix of Irish and Norse mythology. Novel the Third is an urban fantasy following the further adventures of Verity Fassbinder, the heroine of Slatter’s story in Sprawl (Twelfth Planet Press), Brisneyland by Night. She is also working on ways to find more time to write and is trying to stop referring to herself in the third person because it’s just weird. She is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. 2010 saw the publication of two short story collections, Sourdough & Other Stories with Tartarus Press (UK) and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications). In 2012, she will have another collection of short stories, a collaboration with friend and writing-partner-in-crime, Lisa L Hannett: Midnight and Moonshine will be published by Ticonderoga Publications.

Visit Angela on the web at http://www.angelaslatter.com/

Advertising in ebooks – an inevitable outcome

By alan

December 15, 2010

I made a passing comment on Twitter yesterday that led to some heated discussion. My comment was this:

Ebooks will soon carry links, photos, video, etc. They will also, in order to really monetize the medium, contain ads.

Which I followed with this tweet:

Your ebook will start in 60 seconds, after these messages from our sponsors. #wontbelong

Man, that triggered some visceral reactions from a lot of people. Particualy the advertising part. I think multimedia ebooks are inevitable too, but they’re already showing up in some guises. It’s a matter of ereaders catching up that stands between the standard ebook as it is now and the future ebook full of other media.

But when it comes to advertising in ebooks, I think it’s something that people need to accept. There are many reasons, not least the desire to monetize the ebook and keep “cover” prices down. I’m a big fan of ebooks, but I believe they need to be a lot cheaper than print books. I know all about the general production, formatting and so on, but the same applies to print books. The simple fact is that a person doesn’t get a physical object and the price needs to reflect that. Also, with ebook retailers, the margins are much wider. I make a bigger royalty on a Kindle version of RealmShift, for example, than I do on a print version, even though the Kindle edition is $2.99 and the print edition $9.99. But it’s obviously in everyones interests for publishers to make a healthy profit as well as authors. The more money a publisher has, the more authors they can take on and the more books they can produce. The more authors and books a publisher has on board, the more choice and variety the reading public have. It’s a win for everyone. But how to make it happen?

Kindle ad Advertising in ebooks an inevitable outcome It’s a simple fact that we live in a capitalist society. If anything is going to work, someone needs to be making money. Ideally, everyone is making money except the people buying the product, and those people are happy with what they get for their outlay. In that environment, other than producing a quality product, a lot of profit comes from advertising. And is it really so bad to have ads in ebooks?

A lot of people on Twitter yesterday complained about ads interrupting the reading experience. I agree that if ads suddenly popped up when you turned a page, that would piss me off no end. But that’s not how it has to work. When you buy a DVD, you put it in and you get some ads and trailers before the film starts and maybe some afterwards as well. The movie experience itself is solid and uninterrupted. I see this as the way forward with ebooks. Hopefully consumer demand will force that to happen. If publishers start putting ads in the middle of books, customers should rightly voice their rage and refuse to buy from the publisher any more. But if you have to flick through a few pages of ads before the start of chapter one, it’s a slightly annoying but overall not very debilitating chore. Especially if the presence of those few pages of ads means the ebook is a reasonable price and the author and publisher are making money. Obviously, with the presence of ads, it’s the publisher that stands to make the most, but don’t forget my point above about publishers with good profit margins taking on more authors and giving readers more books.

I even see a time when an ebook might open with visual or video ads that you have to endure before the book itself starts that aren’t just the publisher promoting their other books, but third party advertisers buying space. Imagine an ebook of something by John Grisham, Dan Brown or J K Rowling. These are people that sell a lot of books. If their publisher sold advertising space in the opening pages of their books, that space could be sold at a premium. The publisher could stand to make a lot of money. Hopefully we’d see some of that money given back to authors in higher advances and royalties as well as being invested in future projects. I realise this is something of a utopian view and perhaps rather naive, but we can all dream. If the money is there, we can all lobby to see at least some of it spent right.

With most ereaders now utilising wifi and 3G technology, we could even see a situation where a different set of ads pop up every time you open a book. Ideally you’d only ever see ads at the start of the book, but if the advertising code used the wireless networks you might decide to reread a book a year later and see entirely new ads at the start. We’re already seeing video games where the billboards are updated with current advertising in-game. It’s no great stretch to see that happen with ebooks, thereby making that advertising space more profitable. Someone on Twitter (@NomentionofKev) even mentioned that the ereaders themselves might carry the ads, not the books. That risks a situation where every time you turn on the reader, you see an ad. For me, that’s going too far and I’d avoid that kind of reader. But it’s quite possible that we’ll see that situation before long.

Someone else (@Cacotopos) said that they have a demand list for ebooks – 1) no DRM 2) .ePub 3) no intertextual ads. And they noted that price wasn’t even on their list yet. I tend to agree with their list, but I would definitely add 4) Never more than $5 RRP.

Advertising annoys all of us, but it’s a necessary evil in a capitalist society. Sure, it would be great to have an ebook with no advertising, but isn’t it better to suffer a bit of advertising and have more choice of books, more new authors given a chance to get their work out to wide audiences and cheaper ebook purchase prices? I’m convinced that ads in ebooks are inevitable. It’s down to us to think about that and start voicing our opinions now so that we can hopefully help to shape the way that advertising is approached from the outset.

What are you thoughts on the matter?

Smashwords – get busy with the ebook

By alan

December 2, 2010

You all know by now what a massive fan of Smashwords I am. It’s the best site for ebook publishing, in my opinion, with distribution feeds to all the major stockists and outlets. I’ve been with Smashwords from nearly the beginning and watched them grow from strength to strength while they’ve done an awesome job of making my books available as multi-format ebook editions.

Loads of authors and publishers are turning to Smashwords to publish ebook editions of their published print work, self-publish their work or publish work by new and established authors alike.

Get on board. At the moment there’s a “Spread the Word about Smashwords” promotion going on, and I’m getting involved to help. Below is a slideshow all about them. Vive le revolution!

Introduction to Smashwords – Ebook Publishing and Distribution Made Easy

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