The Author-izer

Elizabeth Marshall, host of Author Teleseminars, asked me to let my readers know about her upcoming workshop for aspiring authors.

Book Breakthrough NYC │ Ideas + Relationships + Strategy
Date: Thursday, Jul 29 to Saturday, Jul 31
Location: Doubletree Metropolitan Hotel (New York City)

http://www.BookBreakthrough.com

At the event, we’ll have a select group of top NYC publishing experts along with NY Times bestselling author, Michael Port, so it’s a great opportunity for aspiring authors and messengers who are committed to getting their book and message out to the world.

If you follow that link, you get one of those long-copy sales letters I so dislike, but if you read all the way to the bottom, you’ll find the important part:

Our Book Breakthrough NYC event is ideal for:

• Coaches, consultants and service professionals who feel “called” to deliver a message to a much wider audience
• Entrepreneurs and business experts who want become a recognized expert in their field or industry
• Leaders and executives who know that a book is an essential next step for their career
• Speakers, teachers and helping professionals who want to expand their influence and impact thousands of lives
• Both aspiring and already published authors who want a fresh perspective on how to expand their reach, publish a new idea and build their “platform” (don’t worry, we’ll explain if this concept is new to you)

In addition, this workshop is INVALUBLE if you:

• Have a self-published book or partially written manuscript and need help on how to build an audience and following to attract a literary agent, publisher or plan to successfully publish your book on your own
• Want feedback and help on how to come up with your BIG IDEA

BUT, so that we’re clear on what to expect, the Book Breakthrough NYC is NOT for:

Fiction authors who just want to learn about crafting and pitching (however, this event IS great for helping you learn how to build your “tribe” and an audience for your work)

Authors who are looking for a specific “book launch plan” or a formula for how to reach bestseller status (but we WILL discuss the essential marketing elements that lead up a successful launch and help sustain book sales)

Any aspiring author or messenger who’s not open or willing to receive feedback and direction about your idea and your publishing plans.

I have no affiliation with the event, so if you hand over your $697 ($1297 after today, July 16th), I don’t get a cut of it. And no, I don’t know what Elizabeth means by “messengers,” except that it’s not people on bicycles delivering packages.

Here’s what I’ve tagged for July 6th through July 14th:

• The Online Matchmaker for Publishers & Great Writing ǀ Pubmission –
• Unagented Writer? Editor Drowning in Slush? Pubmission.com Promises to Help –
• Seth’s Blog: Publishing books to make money… –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for June 25th through July 3rd:

• The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases | Adam Sherk –
• If You Ignore Customers’ Questions, You’ll Kill the Sale – by Jeff Sexton –
• Five Things You Need To Know About Ghostwriting « Justin P Lambert – Writer –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for May 11th through June 14th:

• Apple opens the door for authors to self-publish – Internet Retailer –
• Bowker’s Andy Weissberg on ISBNs and the Future of the Book — The Book Designer –
• Jessica Kaye: The Making (and Selling) of a Good Audiobook — The Book Designer –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for May 2nd through May 7th:

• Ghostwriters are more than a phantom presence – Herald Scotland | Arts & Ents | Book Features –
• Bulletin: New Book Technology « Ask the Agent –
• Leanpub — Publish Early, Publish Often –

I’m taking part in a panel on writers and editors with websites for the Bay Area Editors’ Forum tomorrow evening at 6 PM. To quote from the panelist guidelines I received,

The point of this friendly, peer discussion is for you to candidly share whatever you can about your experience related to having your own website, for the benefit of those who are considering launching their own…or those who may be in the middle of it themselves, including:

• why you decided to establish your own site
• what preparation was required
• what initial and ongoing costs to expect
• how much time/effort it takes to manage your site
• what you manage yourself and what you hire out
• what benefits you have realized since you’ve had a site
• how you may be promoting your site
• if you have decided to integrate social media
• what you wish you’d known before you started
• pitfalls to avoid and lessons learned

If You’re Going

Thursday, April 29, 2010
6:00-8:30 PM

4th Floor
Mechanics Institute
57 Post Street
San Francisco

BART: Montgomery St
Parking: Sutter-Stockton Garage

Free Admission

Here’s what I’ve tagged for April 19th through April 27th:

• The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books : The New Yorker –
• Scribd Partners with Blurb and Others to Offer Print on Demand – 2010-04-14 13:31:26 | Publishers Weekly –
• In His Private Books, Signs of Mark Twain as Critic – NYTimes.com –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for April 16th through April 17th:

• The art of the ghostwriter | Books | guardian.co.uk –
• HBS Cases: iPads, Kindles, and the Close of a Chapter in Book Publishing — HBS Working Knowledge –
• Inside Pfizer’s Ghostwriting Shop: Friendly Drug Studies for Just $1,000 | BNET Pharma Blog | BNET –

Len Edgerly interviewed Seth Godin on February 24th for The Reading Edge podcast. (It took me forever to get that pun, for some reason). Though Godin was there ostensibly to talk about his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Amazon affiliate link), the podcast bills itself as “Conversations about the eBook Revolution,” and this proved to be one, taking place as it did right after the great Macmillan-Amazon pricing dispute. (In case you missed that, Macmillan wanted to sell its new Kindle books for $14.99 instead of $9.99. Amazon took all the “buy” buttons off Macmillan’s books in the Kindle store, but then caved in, largely because of Apple’s intention to sell books in its iBook store for the iPad at $14.99.)

Starting about 7 minutes into the episode, Godin explains that instead of creating books for their readers, publishers have gone looking for readers for their books. Publishers are obsessed with moving paper (with what David Mathison called “packaging” in his talk at the 2010 BAIPA conference) around rather than getting attention. What they need is a platform that lets them know who is reading what. When it comes to e-books, they’ve ceded carriage to Amazon, and now to Apple. And because the iBook app doesn’t come pre-installed on the iPad,

That means that carriage is going to be an issue from the first day, because before you can even read a book on the iPad, you’re going to have to go download an app for it. Which is opening a huge door for any publisher with guts, who could, if I were doing it, join up with five other publishers and jointly issue your own app. Because if you issue your own app, then you don’t have to cut Apple in, the way you do in the current system, but most important, the data, the privilege, the ability to find out who needs what and how to get it to them, belongs to the publishers, not to the middleman.

My immediate thought was that it would never happen. Not because the Big Six would never cooperate in such a venture (though they might not). Not even because traditional publishers believe they’re in the business of producing and distributing physical objects rather than words, as Godin claims in the interview.

No, because Apple wouldn’t permit the competition. Back when the iPod Touch and the iPhone first came out, the mobile version of iTunes installed on them didn’t support podcasts. But when someone created a podcatching application, Apple wouldn’t allow it in the App Store because it competed with iTunes. Or would compete with iTunes, once iTunes supported podcasting on the iPhone and iPod touch.

And this was for something that didn’t actually make Apple any money.

So it’s pretty hard for me to believe that they’d allow serious competition for their iBook store.

For a moment, looking at the iPad app store, I thought I might be wrong. After all, there’s not only a Kindle app (the better to keep people from buying a competitor’s device) but a few other e-book applications, at least one of those focuses on free public-domain books. And let’s not forget the comic books and magazines. There are plenty of individual books (and Vooks) for sale as apps, but we had those already on the iPhone, and Apple gets its cut of each of those.

If you have contrary information and can refute me, please do, but I can’t imagine that Apple is letting Amazon sell books through its Kindle app, or Marvel Comics through it’s iPad app, without taking a cut. (It would certainly account for per issue prices that have Marvel’s reviewers complaining). The percentage they take of individual book apps is fair enough, at least by comparison with what an author can expect to get in royalties from a traditional publishing deal, but if anyone else is going to make money off an iPad app, Apple will, too. It beggars belief that they would do it any other way.

Because you can’t get an app into  the App Store without Apple’s permission (and, rumor has it, without designing the thing on Apple-approved tools), there’s no way book publishers could create a platform for recommending, selling, and reading books without cutting Apple in on the profits. Hence Apple would inevitably have a say in the pricing of any Mystery Novel or Science Fiction bookstore app that the publishers got together to produce, and it’s pretty unlikely that they’d stand for anything that seriously undercut the prices in their own iBook store. And that could act as quite a deterrent, not just to the big publishers, who might not be flexible enough to try such a thing anyway, but to smaller publishers, who might.

It could still be worth it for publishers to create their own system, for the sake of that data about who’s reading what. Amazon’s recommendation engine, its ability to say “People who bought this also bought that” is a great tool. So are its reviews, even if not all of them are genuine. There might be something extra that a publisher-created e-book app could offer to readers, and to the publishers, that would make it a worthwhile investment. But it’s not going to be freedom from Apple’s influence, not on Apple’s device.

Apple is the ultimate closed system. If you want to play with their toys, you play by their rules. If book publishers really want an e-book distribution system that they control, they’re going to have to produce their own e-book reader, and it’s going to have to provide a better experience than the Kindle and the iPad put together.

I’m not holding my breath.

Here’s what I’ve tagged for April 14th through April 15th:

• The Cost of eBooks | Claudia Suzanne –
• Penny C. Sansevieri: Why (Some) Authors Fail –
• Scribd Launches Print-on-Demand Options – mediabistro.com: GalleyCat –