Archive for the ‘e-Books’ Category

IBM Selectric Typewriter

by Bill Ruesch

I nearly tripped over an IBM Selectric typewriter, once the King of all the offices,now leaning against a painted door, relegated  to a basement hallway’s supply closet, forever consigned to be a lowly doorstop.

My, how things have changed.  What was once considered swell was using the word my as an exclamation at the beginning of a sentence, or even using the word swell at all for that matter. I’m not really into archaic slang, it just seemed somehow appropriate to the topic.

Indexing somehow seems like a quaint idea, more fit for the 19th century than the present. After all aren’t there more and better solutions via the Internet and such? Tia Leschke contacted me to ask if an article on indexing would be of interest to Chicken Scratching readers. She sent the information below and we send to her our thanks.

Tia Leschke’s four very important things to consider when it comes to indexing

Tia Leschke -- Indexer

An Index? Why?

You’ve finally finished your book. It’s been edited and proofread and has a wonderful cover design. You’re looking forward to reading sales figures and doing signings. Wait a minute…if it’s a non-fiction book, it should have an index.

Wouldn’t a key word search on an e-book be better?

You wonder, “Why would my book need an index?” If it’s an e-book, you might believe that a simple keyword search function will be sufficient, and maybe it will be. Your readers might get frustrated trying to find the right keyword, though. Let’s say she wonders whether there’s information about vaccines in the infant health book she’s browsing, so she searches on vaccines and finds nothing. The author used the word inoculations. A good index would have a see reference to guide her from vaccines to inoculations. She might also be guided through see also references to information about vaccine safety, as well as the various diseases for which vaccines are available.

Searching for information shouldn’t overwhelm one with a zillion barely connected hits.

We’ve all run Google searches that gave us thousands of hits. Most of us don’t go beyond the first page. In an e-book, the search will stop on every instance of word usage. Let’s say there’s a reader looking for information about using Twitter for business. A general book on social media will refer to Twitter probably hundreds of times, but how many mentions will be relevant to their particular search? Moreover, how much time is wasted by  readers checking every single reference?

Indexing is one of the least respected sales tools.

One more reason for having an index is that it can help a purchaser decide whether to buy your book. If she glances through the table of contents and doesn’t see anything about her particular interest, she might put it back on the shelf without realizing that there’s actually quite a bit there. A glance at the index would show her that, if there’s an index to peruse.

A quick off-the-shelf reference is not so easy to lose.

Whether your readers are wondering whether certain information is actually in your book, or whether they remember something that they want to refer to again, an index is the map for finding that information.

For more information, you can reach Tia at http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/tia-leschke/14/923/a09 or http://tia-leschke.ca

by Bill Ruesch

In the details, that’s where.

We all have to start somewhere. All over the Internet, you can find advice for self-publishers. Why? Because self-publishing has become big business, really big business.

The problem is that they, the advisers that is, don’t want you to be too self-sufficient. Most of them have something to sell. The strategy is to give up a little bit of information, just enough to whet your appetite, but not enough to go it alone. You see, the big secret of self-publishing is that it is simultaneously much easier and more difficult than you can imagine.

“The devil is in the details,” is truer for self-publishers than for just about anybody.

Are you surprised? Did you think it would be easy? Maybe you believed that printing a book would be like going to the quick printer for lost dog fliers.

Actually it can be just about that simple if your audience is family and friends, but if you want to sell your book there are other considerations that go way beyond ink on paper. For example do you know about ISBN’s?

ISBN is like a social security number for books.

The ISBN

1. What is it? It stands for International Standard Book Number.
2. Why does my book need one? Over 750,000 books were published in the US last year alone. This numbering system provides a method to track, account, and organize them. Libraries, bookstores, and even the Library of Congress require the numbers.
3. What does an ISBN cost? It depends on how many you buy. A block of 10 from Bowker will run $275.00 plus $25.00 for each bar code you order. A single ISBN can  be purchased from other retailers for $125.00 each plus the $25.00 each for bar codes. Here’s a note of caution, if someone is attempting to sell you a number for more than $125.00, run the other way. There are sad stories out there of gullible people paying up to $1,000.00 for one.
4. Who is Bowker? Bowker has the exclusive US rights to assign ISBN’s.
   
5. Why would I need more than one ISBN? The code does more than identify the title of the book it also tells the library, bookstore, or others what the format is. For example, is the book hardcover? Is it a paperback, audio-book, eBook, or some other media? Can you imagine the returns coming back because they thought they were getting a hardcover book and received audio-books instead?
6. Can I publish my book without an ISBN? Of course you can. You probably won’t get any bookstore distribution, or be picked up by libraries, but it is your choice. Remember publishing is not just a synonym for printing. Publishing includes distribution and sales.
   

The following article was originally posted in The Huffington Post, March 8, 2010. I found it to be very enlightening and thought provoking. I asked the author, Nathan Branford for permission to reprint it on this blog and he very kindly consented. Nathan is a literary agent with Curtis Brown LTD.

One e-reader = how many bookshelves?

Don’t Believe the E-book Skeptics

Originally posted at the Huffington Post

Slate’s technology writer Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a very interesting article about some off-base predictions of yore about our digital future. He focuses on a whopper of a Newsweek column from 1995 (which is actually titled “The Internet? Bah!“) about how the Internet would be a passing fad because, among other things, online shopping can’t replicate the experience of a salesperson, an online database can’t replace a daily newspaper, and the Internet was so jumbled he couldn’t even find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

Whoops.

Rather than just hardy har har-ing at the article, Manjoo takes a different, and very insightful approach. He notes that the author of the article was hardly a Luddite – he was actually deep in the weeds of the early Internet. The problem with the article wasn’t that the author was dumb, the problem was that he was looking strictly at the Internet of 1995 and ignoring the potential for innovation and change.

Manjoo lays out four principles for more successful predictions about our digital future:

1. Good predictions are based on current trends
2. Don’t underestimate people’s capacity for change
3. New stuff sometimes come out of the blue
4. These days it’s best to err on the side of (technological) optimism

When people make predictions about our e-book future, I find myself mystified that some people are so dismissive of their inevitability. I see blog posts and comments around the Internet from people who look at the nascent e-book landscape and think, “Blech. Expensive grayscale Kindles in a white piece of plastic? No way e-books are going to catch on!” Some people admit that they’re going to be a part of our lives, but do so grudgingly and see them as yet another signpost that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

Here’s the thing they ignore: e-books are only going to get better.

Move over Nostradamus, here are some predictions about our digital book future:

1. The e-book reading experience is only going to improve.

Sure – not everyone loves the current grayscale Kindles and tiny iPhone reading experience, particularly for books that are illustrated or are beautifully designed. But better devices are coming and it’s going to open up a new era of book design of unlimited possibility.

I remember that my high school English teacher told us that when William Faulkner was writing THE SOUND AND THE FURY he wished he could have published the text in different colors to denote the different perspectives, but obviously that would have been prohibitively expensive for publishers at the time. Not anymore. With the iPad and other devices coming soon, E-books are going color.

Tomorrow’s writers are going to have almost limitless ability to include beautiful color photos and art and interactivity and creative design even in the mass-est of mass market books, the ones that are currently printed on cheap paper and sold on supermarket racks and where the idea of including anything colorful or design-y besides the cover is laughable.

Think of how much a fancy illustrated book costs now and then think about how cheaply that can be done digitally. E-books may be uglier than print books now, but they’re about to get more beautiful.

2. E-readers and e-books are only going to get cheaper.

Sure, right now e-readers are out of reach for much of the population. That’s going to change. Every new technology is out of reach until it gets cheaper. Digital toys that would once have sold for $100 are now given out in McDonald’s Happy Meals. Lower prices for iPad-like devices of the future are inevitable.

And while publishers are currently taking a stand against deeply discounted e-books, the $12.99-$14.99 price point that they are fighting for is still half the cost of a $25 hardcover.

It’s soon going to be possible to buy e-books cheaply on an affordable e-reader device, and they’re going to be more colorful and interactive than most of their print counterparts.

3. Finding the books you want to read will only get easier.

One of the most common fears about the coming era is that no one will be able to find the good books in a time when anyone can just upload their novel to Amazon. It’s the Fear of the Jumble, which was also expressed in that column at Newsweek, where the author complained that (in 1995) you couldn’t even find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar on the Internet. He didn’t realize that Google and Wikipedia would come along to give you that answer in mere seconds.

Already there are sites like Goodreads and Shelfari cropping up that allow people to swap reviews and recommendations about books. People increasingly find new books through blogs, forums, and heck, hearing from an author directly. It was never really possible before for authors to reach their audience directly – now it’s a piece of cake.

Humans are really, really good at organizing things. If we can organize the billions and billions of web pages out there so that we can find what we want within a few seconds I think we can manage a few million books.

4. People are ignoring the digital trend.

I was watching a Seinfeld rerun the other day and there was a funny moment when Elaine hated a movie she was watching so much she called the video store and threatened not to rewind it. I’m going to have to explain this joke to my kids. And then I’m going to tell them about this funny thing we used to have where used to get these things called DVDs in the mail rather than having them downloaded straight to the TV (or wall or inside our eyeballs or whatever we’re watching movies on in the future).

Everything that can be digitized is being digitized because it’s cheaper and easier to send pixels around the world than physical objects. First it was music, then newspapers, then movies. Books are next in line.

5. Habits change

Yes, yes. The smell of books, reading in the bathtub, writing in the margins, a bookshelf full of books, etc. etc.

People will still have that choice and there are some books that simply can’t be replicated digitally. But when faced with a better option, consumers shift extremely quickly. Right now the benefits of e-books are a little murky except for early adopters and those that can afford the devices. But that’s just right now. Pretty soon they’re going to be better (color! design! portable! interactivity! instantaneous!) and cheaper. Readers won’t pay a premium for an inferior print product out of habit and nostalgia in great numbers.

The e-book era is going to be one of incredible innovation and unlimited opportunity, and people who don’t see e-books dominating the future of the book world are ignoring the coming innovation and creativity and affordability. I refuse to believe the skeptics and pessimists. Books are about to get better.

Be sure to visit these related posts: You Can Never Trust An E-Book and How Can You Call an e-Book a Real Book?

Yesteryear's Posse

It may seem odd to use a word like posse in connection with self-publishing a book especially since in today’s parlance it has come to mean a group of sycophants following the latest glistening celebrity. He who has the most toadies wins. No, I’m thinking more in terms of the Old West when the Sheriff sent out a call for citizen help and good, qualified people gathered to track down and capture the bad guy. They formed a team–a team on a mission–a mission to save the town and protect the womenfolk.

There will be some that disagree with me, and they will have a point, but trying to be the Lone Ranger when self-publishing is a hard road, even still, with the  exception of ePublishing, at the very least a self-publisher will need a printer. How many authors, besides Benjamin Franklin, are able to write and print books? Your desktop printer doesn’t count.

The typical self-publishers book posse consists of these:

• Content Editor (checks for plot flow, and sense–also accuracy of detail)
• Grammatical Editor (looks for typos, grammatical errors, etc.)
• Permissions Editor (checks the author’s right to use quoted or other material)
• Technical Editor (generally for non-fiction works to make sure the technical details are correct)
• Proofreader (proofreading is a skill that requires extraordinary attention to detail. The more eyes on it, the better.)
• Layout artist (takes raw copy and shapes it by selecting fonts, watching for functionality and ease of reading, margins, headers, pagination, etc.)
• Graphic Designer (Primarily for cover design. The objective a great book with a great cover.)
• Production Coordinator/Manager (This person brings it all together. They are the deputy in your posse. They assist in gathering the posse, getting pricing, arranging for shipping, etc.)
• Printing Broker (Serves as the posse’s guide seeking printers who provide the best value. Brokers, unlike company employees, have no self-interest in the transaction, and should there be problems can intercede in your behalf.)
• Printer (A good printer is GOLD, but you need to be careful, especially in this economic climate. Printers are hungry and as a result are going after any work they can get. Just because a printer can do, a job doesn’t mean that they are the best choice.)

After the book has been produced, you’ll need these for your posse:

• Distributor (makes sure book orders are shipped on time and at minimal cost)
• Warehouse/Storage (Where will the books be housed?)
• Marketing (Book sales don’t happen by themselves. What plans do you have to market the book? Who will help? What will you do?)
• Public Relations (includes press releases, interviews, book reviews, etc.)
• Travel Assistant (someone to help you coordinate speaking trips)
• Information Technology ( the Internet is critical–good IT people are a necessity)

Many of these people can serve in multiple ways. You, as the author, will take on many of the roles, and some will be filled family members or close friends, but be careful in your choices. Just because you have a nephew who can draw pretty well, doesn’t mean he has the skill to layout your book or create a K.O. cover. Here is where it gets tricky–be honest with yourself, are you knowledgeable enough to judge? Some of the worst books out there, the kind traditional publishers despise, come from potentially good authors who didn’t have the sense to hire experts. To them the book is incredible, but to a trained eye, it may be a wreck. Pay for professional advice and follow it, even if it takes you out of your comfort zone.

In coming posts I intend to describe the jobs of each of the posse members in greater detail and provide tips on finding and selecting the best ones.

A book that doesn’t sell is  landfill. We don’t need more landfill–what we need are books that get into the hands of readers. Social networking has proven to be an excellent way to reach possible readers and buyers, and The Author Platform (TAP) has developed a step-by-step program for authors to learn the ropes. Just click here to go to TAP and check it out for yourself.

Last Saturday I presented a workshop at the Toastmasters District 15 fall convention. I called it Every Speaker Needs a Book. It is the truth; every speaker does need a book. If someone is going to stand before you in the capacity of “expert,” don’t you have the right to know that they are qualified?

We are living in a new age of publishing. We are seeing the rapid rise of the self-publisher. I liken it to the changes in the music business during the 1960’s. It started with Rock and Roll. This new music hit the music industry so quickly and so hard that the entrenched establishment couldn’t wrap their minds around it. Then came the Beatles, and the British Invasion. Every album the Beatles cut redefined the genre. Music experienced an era of creativity pushing up from the grassroots (no pun intended for the band called Grassroots). Every high school in the country had at least two or three starry eyed groups practicing in their parent’s basements or garages.

60's World Shakers

I try to imagine myself in the position of a record executive. Music is flooding in from everywhere. Groups with strange names, strange sounds, and strange behaviors are climbing the charts. What do I do? I can get on-board or try to wait out the insanity. The problem is that I don’t have any point of reference. There isn’t a definition of Rock and Roll. Almost anything goes. So, what do I do? I shrug and open the studios to just about everyone, hoping to find something the boomer kids will buy.

Today the floodgates are open in publishing. Why? Big changes in book print production have created this new era. In the past traditional publishers held all the strings. The cost for an author to go it alone was prohibitive to anyone but the rich. If someone decided to self-publish, their efforts were tagged  with the derogatory title of vanity publishing.

The rise of computer’s word processors and the development of digital printing have made it so reasonably priced that almost anyone could get in the game. Furthermore, there are e-books, and audio books. Finally, the Boomer Generation has grown up and there are millions, upon millions of people that think it would be groovy to write a book. As a boomer myself, I can tell you that our generation loved the spotlight. We marched, we rallied, we protested. We got our pictures in the paper when we did something completely egregious. Boomer was probably the right name because we were loud, intrusive, and obnoxious.

The boomers are the right people to lead the publishing revolution. We have never been satisfied with status quo. We are self-reliant, and don’t really trust the establishment. We know how to organize. The tribe of boomers is enormous and powerful.

If you get the idea that I am in favor of this revolution, you are right. I am in awe of what is transpiring. The Internet, Computers, Alternative Publishing methods, have breached the dam and I’m sure this is just the beginning.

Creating a book is only the first half of the job. It’s like the Yin, the Yang comes with promoting and marketing. TAP (The Author Platform) is a relatively easy program to follow to learn Internet marketing, selling through Amazon, and other methods. Click here for more information.

breathe in the ancient wisdom

I stirred up a lot of conversation with my blog post titled, “How Can You Call an eBook a Real Book?” Most of the chatter was on LinkedIn through the writing and publishing groups I belong to. I was very surprised to read comments from  self-confessed, dyed-in-the-wool printed book advocates who are becoming wobbly on the issue. Don’t throw in the towel yet.

eBooks have already seized our minds and our imaginations. The possibilities are incredible, all except one. Yesterday I tried to pull up a document on my computer. A dialogue box popped up that said the file had become corrupted. It suggested some ways to fix the file–none of them worked–so, I’m left with reconstructing the document. If I can.

What was here one moment is, whoosh, gone the next. I’m sure if I call my service tech at the Bomb Squad he could find it by going through the mysterious back doors. These are the places us mere mortals dare not tread. To go in there, even for a peek, could set up a chain reaction that might destroy the entire planet. It is not worth the risk. I have to weigh my options carefully, do I bring in the Bomb Squad and spend money I don’t have, or try to reconstruct the document, or let it go, like a loose kite floating endlessly and aimlessly through cyberspace?

Do you understand where I am going with this? Permanence is the question. Books whether written on stone tablets, sheepskin, papyrus, cotton paper, or wood pulp stock have passed the test of time. Doggone it–they last. They may not stay in tip-top condition, but they have longevity.

How long will your computer hold files intact until they start getting iffy, weeks, months, or years?  I expect to see eBooks purchased by the average buyer as having a comparable short shelf life. If the computer gremlins don’t get them, technology changes will. I have a book of poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson in my library which must be at least 125 years old. The paper is brittle, and the binding is weak, but I can pick it up and read it anytime I want. No dialogue box will appear in my hand saying sorry the file is corrupt. Many of my other books are older than 40 years, even the cheap paperbacks. In a world where the average computer is ancient in five years, the possibility of a file hanging around for even 20 years is ludicrous.

The bottom line is electronic books are risky. You will have to replace them regularly if you want to keep them viable, or just get used to losing much of your collection each and every year. Now you see it–now you don’t. Paper to the people!

Okay, I admit it; I am a printed book snob. I want my books printed on nice paper preferably with gilt edges and leather embossed hardbound covers, but that’s just me. When I buy a software upgrade I always pay extra for a disk. I have files full of paper backups from things I store on my computer. I just don’t trust electronics, I guess.

My wife, who is more technologically inclined than I am, insisted I buy a computer for my Print Brokering business some 18 years ago. So I went to my local Office Max, and spoke with their computer expert who looked to be all of fifteen years old. He advised that I buy the latest PC with the brand-spanking-new Windows Operating System. That sounded good, so I bought it and carted it home confident that my wife, who worked on computers at her office, would be able to teach me everything I needed to know. Wrong. She was working with DOS and knew nothing about Windows. I was on my own. It was like being on Survivor without a camera crew, producers, or other participants; I was all alone.

I read tutorials, hired teachers, bought “easy to use software” before I learned that it was easy to use for the programmers who created it, but not for me. Despite my reticence I slowly I started to gain ground on this beast of convenience.

But it wasn’t long before I discovered the meanings of my C Drive crashed, my hard disks collapsed, and the computer froze. The admonition to save often made sense after losing a day’s worth of work. Then I found out about gremlins. Somewhere in the bowels of the malicious computer machine exists an intelligent life form whose only purpose is to make sure that the actions you perform today, will not work tomorrow, even if you meticulously repeat them.

This is the long road around to saying that I like many of us in the 50+ generation; have difficulty accepting anything made of electronic blips as friendly. As soon as you rely on them they erase themselves, become unintelligible, or transform into gigantic city stomping lizards. Well, maybe I went too far with the lizard thing, but you know what I mean. Heaven forbid you slip and drop them on the floor. Whether you are reading through a Kindle, an iPhone, or some other device drop it and like magic you’ll discover whether your credit card is maxed. On the other hand I can drop my printed book, pick it up and go on with my life. My credit card is untouched.

Is it inevitable?

So the question remains, is an e-Book a real book?  Somebody out there thinks so; e-Books are racking up the biggest sales numbers in the entire book market averaging an astounding 55.7% annual growth since 2003.  Compare this with all the other types of books from Adult Hardbound and Paperback, Juvenile Hardbound and Paperback, Book Clubs, Higher Education, etc. which grew a mere 1.04% annually (excluding sales for the Harry Potter series) in the same time period.

Here’s the shocker, do you know who are buying Kindle Readers by the boatload? The 50+ crowd. My peers. e-Book sales grew 183% among seniors aged 65+ and 174% among seniors aged 55-65. And here I was counting on older folks to save printed books.

Must I raise the white flag and surrender? 1.04% annual growth against 55.7% growth in e-Book sales is persuasive. Imagine fighting a war where the odds were 55 to 1. Can anyone say General Custer? My punishment for doubt is to write on the board 500 times, “e-Books are real books, e-Books are real books, e-Books are real books…”

How do you market an e-Book? Use the Internet. How do you learn how to use the Internet to sell e-Books? You can do it the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is The Author Platform. And you can test it for no money down. How’s that for an offer?

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