The Author-izer

Archive for the ‘In the News’ Category

On October 12, 2008, Paula B from The Writing Show published an episode about Print-on-Demand Technologies hosted by Ricardo from Amigo Audio (known to me from his insightful contributions to the For Immediate Release podcast). Ricardo talked about buying your own printing press in order to start a bookstore that could provide thousands of titles without needing acres of shelf space.

The printing press, in this case, would be one of two devices, either of them smaller than the HP Indigo printers used by many POD houses and the new MagCloud services. The first is Instabook Maker, which when assembled is 7 feet long, 3 feet high, and 2.5 feet deep.

The second is the Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books. The new 2.0 version is 3.8 feet wide, 2.7 feet deep, and 4.5 feet high.

Either of these could fit in a good-sized office or a modest-sized storefront. (Ricardo even talks about the possibility of installing such a press in a van and creating a new, improved bookmobile.)

When listening to Ricardo’s recording, I had a hard time imagining myself, or most of the authors I work with, wanting to start a bookstore. Devices like this do have the potential to give independent bookstores—a dying breed—an edge they haven’t had before and an opportunity to make a wider range of books available to their customers, including titles that have now gone out of print. But most non-fiction authors don’t aspire to running a bookstore or even a printing press. Come to that, I don’t know any novelists or poets who do, either. In fact, most independent publishers have someone else do their printing.

Then there’s the caveat that even if the quality of the paper, printing, and binding do in fact stack up to those of commercially published books, producing a professional-looking book requires good design and good editing in addition to the correct technology.

And if you want to be able to reprint books from other authors and publishers, there has to be some kind of arrangement about rights and royalties, which could get complicated.

But then I got my October Michigan Today, and what should be in it but an article about an Espresso Book Machine recently installed in the Ugli? (Excuse me, the Shapiro Undergraduate Library. But when I was in gradual school at U-M in the early 1990s, we all thought “Ugli” was only too appropriate.) U-M was one of the first libraries to get involved in digitizing books as part of the controversial Google Book Search project, so it’s not surprising they should be quick to adopt other new technologies.

The Espresso Book Machine makes perfect sense as an investment for a research library. Academic books tend to have small print runs and to go out of print quickly, but those out-of-print books remain important for scholars. U-M is a research university famed for its library collections. They even have a papyrology collection; I worked there one summer. (Yeah, I know, you thought U-M was all about football. I was in Ann Arbor for 5 years and never went to a single game.) And libraries only need a few copies of any given title, but they need to restock them due to wear and tear.

So when I read the article and watched the video, I thought “Now that is really cool.”

Do I want to open a bookstore? No. And I don’t think either Instabook or Espresso is likely to be a good investment for anyone who wants to print large runs of single books. Nor is owning such a device enough to make you a publisher (assuming you can afford one, and the prices are such that you’d better be independently wealthy, a large enterprise, or have VC backing). But the potential really is tremendous, if the intellectual property issues can be worked out.

Most of Jeff Bezos’ session at this year’s Book Expo America amounted to an extended sales pitch for the Kindle and Amazon’s plans to get every book in or out of print digitized into Kindle format. This was actually pretty interesting, even though it wasn’t the reason I was listening to the podcast. It did make me see the appeal of the Kindle, though Bezos did not address the real problem facing any such device: you can’t “rip” your existing library of books onto your Kindle the way you can rip your CD collection onto your iPod. That makes replacing your print books with Kindle books prohibitively expensive—at least for compulsive readers like me, who can sell five grocery bags full of books to the local used-book store and still have overflowing shelves. Scanning printed books is a clumsy, time-consuming process that simply isn’t feasible for consumers today, and that’s a serious obstacle to widespread uptake of the Kindle.

But I digress. The reason I wanted to hear the presentation by, and interview with, Jeff Bezos was that I wanted to know more about Amazon’s recent move to insist that all their POD authors use BookSurge for fulfillment. Amazon owns BookSurge, so the move looked not merely self-serving but downright monopolistic to competing POD houses.

I have nothing against BookSurge. One of my clients has been using them since before Amazon bought the company, and while they aren’t perfect, they produce quality books for a fairly low set-up fee. Or, at least, it was low by comparison with AuthorHouse (then First Books) and its competitors at the time. And in 2003, at least, BookSurge was able to offer services that AuthorHouse couldn’t, namely including a color insert section for some critical illustrations.

Since then, companies like Lulu have drastically undercut BookSurge, and the differences in what an author has to pay are one reason for authors to object to Amazon’s decision. There are plenty of others, all with varying degrees of validity. And Amazon’s argument that printing all POD books at BookSurge made distribution easier seemed weak.

Yet it wasn’t at all difficult for Bezos to make a clear argument in favor of the move in his discussion with Chris Anderson at BEA. (Skip to 42:27 in the recording if you want to bypass the Kindle eulogy.)

If you’re going to pioneer something, you are going to create some controversy from time to time, and you have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to be sure feel good about what you’re doing, and if you don’t, you can go back and course-correct. But if you’re simple-minded about the customer experience, that usually keeps you on the right side of that line… Even small things that we have done that people expect and later find helpful, have initially caused controversy…

Modern Print-on-Demand printers can print and bind a complete book in two hours. In our own fulfillment centers, we have millions of traditionally-printed books. They’re on shelves and in pallets in cartons, ready to be shipped out to customers. Latency for shipping these books is very short, and transportation cost is critically important to us. If somebody orders two books—and most orders are for more than two units—it basically costs us twice as much to transport two books if we have to send them in two separate boxes as it does if we can marry them together. [We have] things like Amazon Prime, where we make two-day shipping free, and things like Super Saver Shipping, where we make shipping free if you order $25, and that $25 [minimum] often gets people to order two items…

Very few books in a demand sense are POD books. Most books are traditional books that we sell. You probably ordered a traditional book and a Print-on-Demand book if you ordered a Print-on Demand book. So we want to marry those things in one box. We can save a lot of money by doing that, we can get the product to customers faster, we can pass on the savings to customers in the form of lower prices, and that’s a great customer experience. But it does require that the book be printed, if it’s a POD book, in our fulfillment center. That’s going to make some people unhappy…

System-wide, it does not make sense to print a POD book anywhere but in our fulfillment center…If you print it somewhere else, to get it in a single box, you gotta cross-ship that book to us, which is a delay, and we’re going to ship it to you tomorrow instead of today. That’s a bad customer experience.

So yes, it’s definitely to Amazon’s benefit to have all POD authors use BookSurge. The specifics of BookLocker’s class action suit against Amazon make it clear that Amazon has some less-than-altruistic motives. No one seems to be clear yet on what additional costs (if any) will be passed on to authors who use POD houses that agree to Amazon’s terms and use BookSurge for printing any books sold through Amazon. It’s possible that customers of Lightning Source or Lulu or Xlibris might have to pay an “Amazon surcharge” of some kind. But I doubt it will be as high as the set-up fee paid by BookSurge customers, because the files Amazon gets from these companies will already be set up and ready to be printed.

Given the way people shop at Amazon, printing books at Amazon’s fulfillment house really is to the customer’s benefit. Despite probable additional charges, it may well prove to benefit the authors of POD books. It might even benefit the other POD houses, because it saves them shipping costs and wear and tear on their equipment. It’s certainly better for anyone than if Amazon refused to carry POD books because the shipping costs are too high.

BookLocker, Lulu, and Lightning Source will continue to make the bulk of their money from the additional services they offer to their authors. It’s worth remembering that traditional publishers don’t have that added source of income, and all bookstores—not just Amazon—have required them to accept lousy terms since the 1930s.

This is the kind of thing that gives ghostwriters a bad name: Merck wrote the studies for Vioxx and persuaded (or bribed) prominent doctors to sign them.

Perhaps if someone outside Merck had actually conducted and written the studies, the drug wouldn’t have been released unless it was safe, and Merck would have been spared its eventual recall.

There are times when it really does matter whether the person whose name is on a document is the one who wrote it. And there are times when the identity of the ghostwriter matters more than the identity of the author. If obscure doctors had conducted the Vioxx study and more prominent doctors had signed it, this would not have been much different from the common scientific practice of having the graduate students do all the work and the professor get top billing on the publication. It’s the fact that it was Merck’s employees who wrote the studies that invalidates the results.

It’s here at last: fEmpowerment: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl, by Sandy Shepard (a.k.a. Solitaire). And me, but mostly her. We started working on this book in 2005 and built it up out of posts on her Double Oh! Productions blog. You can order it from the Be a Bond Girl website or the usual sources (like Amazon).

Why Bond Girls?

Because Sandy takes them as a model for a life with more passion, enjoyment, fun, and fulfillment than many of us have right now. You don’t have to be a fan of the James Bond films to get something out of this book. I was a little skeptical about it, myself, but in the course of editing it, I learned a lot of things that have helped with my relationships. (No pole dancing classes for me, though.) Sandy takes a fun, practical, and very specific approach to getting rid of anything that doesn’t work for you and putting some adventure back in your life.

Who Should Buy This Book?

Women, especially if you

1. Have become so powerful and successful in your career that you find yourself isolated on a lonely mountaintop
2. Don’t really know what you want or like because you’ve been too busy trying to fit in
3. Want to have more fun at work, at home, with friends, and with your “James.”

Men, especially if

1. Your spouse or girlfriend fits into any category above
2. You aspire to live the James Bond lifestyle yourself.

And remember: no one is ever too old to be a Bond Grrl.

Disclosure

Naturally, since I helped write this book, I’m biased in favor of it. But I don’t make any money from sales of the book; I haven’t even set up an Amazon affiliate link in this post.

Self-publishing guru Dan Poynter, author of Writing Nonfiction and The Self-Publishing Manual, makes his YouTube debut in a ten-minute video taken at one of his seminars. The video is not as enlightening as his books, but it does serve to introduce Dan as a person. I’ve never attended a live seminar, but I’ve heard Dan in teleseminars and I’ve read his books, and I definitely recommend them for anyone considering writing and publishing a book. He’s also been very helpful when I’ve contacted him with questions, even though he’s on the road almost all the time. That may be why his podcast never took off, though the first two episodes are worth hearing.

It appears that WordPress doesn’t want me to embed the video here, but you can watch the video at YouTube.

Hat tip to the Small Press Blog.

Rachel Metz’s August 24th Wired News interview with Steve Wozniak starts with his new book, IWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.

I haven’t read the book, but was particularly interested in what Woz had to say about working with co-author Gina Smith. The process he described sounded very familiar: he recorded a series of anecdotes which she then combined into a chronological narrative, and the manuscript went back and forth from there, including a session where they read the entire thing aloud to make sure all of it was really in Wozniak’s voice.

You can play or download the file below. The book occupies approximately the first ten minutes. It’s a nice demonstration that ghostwriting for celebrities works the same way as ghostwriting for anyone else—though it pays better.

Remember the RainToday survey about business books I linked to a few months ago? The results are out, and you can read the summary and order The Business Impact Of Writing A Book on RainToday’s website. I haven’t read the full report, so I can’t tell you whether the 71-page download is worth $149.

As for the results: 34% of those surveyed said that becoming an author had a very strong influence on their ability to get business, with another 22% saying their books had a strong influence on lead generation. Only 5% said that becoming an author had no influence.

The more copies of the book an author sold, the stronger the influence reported, which is only logical. Things really start happening when you sell 10,000 copies.

Another interesting point is the difference in number of books sold between authors who did and did not use agents and publicists. Agented authors and those with publicists sold roughly twice as many copies of their first book as those who marketed the book on their own. That statistic should be a nice boost to the business of agents and publicists.

I noticed that many of the authors surveyed are now endorsing the report—and that most of them are business book authors of whom I’ve heard. Of course, there wouldn’t be much point putting the endorsements or names of the unsuccessful authors on the site.

RainToday.com is looking for business book authors to participate in a study on “The Effects of Publishing Business Books on Professional Services Practices.”

If you’ve already published a business book, head on over to the RainToday.com survey and share your experience. Participants are automatically entered to win a copy of RainToday.com’s $445 special report How Clients Buy: The Benchmark Report On Professional Services Marketing And Selling From The Client Perspective.

If you’re still considering publishing a book, you might want to wait for the final report, which promises to answer questions about how much authors invest in their books, whether the sales of your book affect its usefulness to your practice, large vs. small publishing houses, and how much difference PR and book marketing firms make.

Or you might just want to conduct some research of your own by asking the business book authors you already know.

As I mentioned in my FileSlinger™ Favorites Blog a short while ago, one of my favorite podcasts is Heidi Miller’s “Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter.” Heidi has been asking listeners to send in their “two-second teaser” introductions (that’s the really, really, really short version of your “elevator speech”), so I submitted mine: “I turn [fill in the blank] into authors.” Heidi liked it and put a post up on her Talk it Up blog about it.

I’m absolutely thrilled that she did this, of course. Even better, she included the same information (including her battle with my name— “Goetsch” actually rhymes with “sketch,” but I should have warned her about that) in yesterday’s podcast. I hadn’t even listened to it myself yet when someone who had heard it phoned to ask me about my services.

Heidi endeared herself to me immediately (as if she weren’t already one of my favorite podcasters) not only by approving my “2-second teaser” but by liking the names “Author-izer” and “Collabowriter.” (I’m rather fond of them myself; for one thing, it took me days to come up with them.) She refers to an article by Branding Diva Karen Post on inventing words for your brand. I hadn’t heard of Karen before this, but I’ve just subscribed to her newsletter.

One interesting point Heidi brings up is that people think they know what ghostwriting is all about, so if you’re a ghostwriter, you might be best off not coming right out and saying so in your 2-second teaser. I’m asking readers: do you agree? What do you think ghostwriting is about?

Also, feel free to submit your own 2-second teaser on Heidi’s blog. You, too, could get mentioned on the air and have prospects phone you out of the blue.