Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Publishing and Podcasting
In the publishing world, POD usually stands for Print on Demand, a technology which lets you print books in small quantities so you don’t have to store thousands of them in your garage and pay large up-front fees for more traditional self-publishing.
But POD has another meaning: Play on Demand. That means watching or listening to media when you want it. When you tape a television show to watch later, you’re creating POD media. Play on Demand is the prinicple behind TiVo. It’s what put the “pod” in “iPod” and “podcasting.”
Podcasting, the latest development in web radio, lets listeners subscribe to shows and automatically download the latest MP3 files to your computer so you can transfer them onto a portable media player and take them with you wherever you go. Podcasts have taken off like gangbusters in the past year. There are now more than 15,000 podcasts in the iTunes directory, with more than a million people listening to them.
What does all this have to do with publishing? More every day. There are podcasts for writers, podcasts by writers, podcast about writing and publishing, and podcasts which interview authors and/or review books. Even publishing houses are jumping on the podcasting bandwagon. So get yourself an MP3 player and some “podcatching” software and start listening to boost your career. Here are some recommendations to get you started.
Podcasts for Writers
These podcasts aim to guide writers in understanding the publishing world or becoming better at their craft, or both. Several follow an interview format, providing listeners with the inside story from publicists, reviewers, agents, editors, writers, and publishing houses. Others are monologues where successful authors share their tips for success. There’s a lot of really useful information in these podcasts about the business of writing, and the hosts and guests are interesting.
Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Offline, hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff of Blog Squad fame, is not strictly a publishing podcast, but has included many experts in the publishing industry. Sign up for the free live teleseminars at http://www.conversationswithexperts.com.
Publishing Basics Radio, sponsored by Selfpublishing.com, “Helping You Navigate the Self-Publishing Minefield” (available as MP3, QuickTime, Windows Media, and RealMedia)
The BookPitch Voice, hosted by BookPitch.com CEO Patricia Kelley
The Publishing Coach from Bill O’Hanlon (only four episodes, but all useful) provides tips on platform, finding a unique slant, and persisting until you get a publisher
The Secrets: the Podcast for Writers is the creation of science fiction author Michael A. Stackpole, but his suggestions on career-building for authors apply to any genre
The Writing Show, with host Paula B, “Where Writing is Always the Story”
Book Review Podcasts
These may be MP3 recordings of public radio book review shows, such as KCRW’s Bookworm or Australian National Radio’s Books and Writing, but some of them are web-only features, such as Bookbuffet.com, Authors Without Limits, Bill Thompson’s Eye on Books, and Pinky’s Paperhaus. These are the podcasts you’ll want to include in your Virtual Author Tour. (More about those in a future article.)
Bill Thompson’s Eye on Books
Podcasts by Writers
Some writers become podcasters in order to build up their readership in advance of publication, or to market their books after publication. Podcasting usually requires about an hour of preparation and an hour of editing for every hour of recording, so it’s not for every author. Used well, however, it’s an effective promotional tool, and less expensive than many options. Podcasting seems to be particularly effective for marketing fiction. Scott Sigler initially billed Earthcore as “the world’s first podcast-only novel.” The book is now available in paperback.
Dr Norman Norton’s “Death of the Author” podcast
Podcasts by Publishers
Major publishers like Holtzbrinck and Simon & Schuster are starting to produce their own podcasts to help them market books. These publisher podcasts provide audio excerpts from new books from the house’s different imprints and occasional interviews with authors and editors. If these two are successful, you can be sure other publishers will follow in their footsteps.
Holtzbrinck (6 podcasts: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Self-Help, Spotlight Title, and Special Events)
Simon & Schuster’s Simon Says podcast
Don’t let confusion about terminology and technology keep you away from this exciting new development in the publishing industry. Free software like iTunes, Odeo, and Juice (formerly iPodder) , which all work on both Mac and PC, will let you subscribe to these podcasts and download the MP3 files. You don’t need an expensive iPod, either: any MP3 player will work, or you can listen right on your computer. Your PDA is another possibility for playing audio files.
Get listening. Get recording. Get yourself out there.
Blog + Book = Opportunity
Blame blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine for adding “blook” to the proliferation of Internet-related neologisms.
So what the heck is a blook and why would you want to write one? A blook is one of two things: a blog (short for “Weblog”) created by serializing a book, or a book created from, or at least based on, a blog.
Jarvis coined the word “blook” in November of 2002 to describe the book of blog posts which Tony Pierce was preparing to self-publish. Pierce was sufficiently taken with the word to use it for the title, and is now the author of three blooks.
The Blooker Prize
It’s this kind of blook which has recently attracted media attention on account of Lulu.com’s 2006 “Blooker Prize.” Lulu produces and sells print-on-demand books and no doubt hopes to attract new business by means of this contest, which will award $1000 first prizes to winners in each of three categories: fiction, non-fiction, and comics or graphic novels. Entrants must submit three printed and bound blooks for the three judges (all well-known bloggers and authors). Non-Lulu blooks are welcome. (Tony Pierce published his two most recent blooks, which will not be competing, through CafePress.)
Blogs as Writing Tools
Time was, if you wanted to write a book you’d sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. (I wrote three never-published novels that way when I was an undergraduate.) Then word-processing came along, making it much easier to move and change the material in your book.
Many people think of blogs as “online diaries” or associate them primarily with political commentary, but blogs are really low-cost, easy-to-use content management systems. This is “content” as in “digital information.” If you’re a writer, your content will probably be in the form of text.
While blogs are not sophisticated word-processors, much less typesetting/layout programs like Quark or PageMaker, they allow authors to create, arrange, and publish all in the same place. The informal nature of blogging helps non-writers to get their ideas out there and create a first draft and let it evolve organically, then collect related materials together by means of the “category” function.
Getting from Blog to Book
Suppose you’re a blogger and you want to take your own shot at the Blooker Prize. Can you just export your blog into Word and send it off to a publisher? Well, no, it’s not quite as easy as that.
Blogs appear in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post first. Even if you sort your posts by category, the most recent will appear on the top of the page. If you want readers to start reading where you started writing, you’re going to have to reorganize the material before you send it off to the printer.
There are companies like Blurb.com working on creating software and services which will automatically import the contents of blogs and convert them into books. If you enroll in Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff’s self-paced, open enrollment Blog to Book course, you get to beta-test Blurb, which is not yet available to the public.
Or you can hire a company like The Friday Project, a British publishing house which specializes in turning blogs and websites into books.
Manual Blook Creation
If you want to design and format your own blook, you’ll need to spend some time cutting and pasting. How long this will take depends on the amount of material you have. As of this writing, my FileSlinger™ Backup Blog has some 136 posts, mostly fairly long (600-1200 words), for a total of about 65,000 words. It took me about two hours to copy and paste the contents from the blog pages into the Word template I’d adapted from Dan Poynter’s New Book Model example, and another couple of hours to tweak the formatting to something more appropriate for a 6″ x 9″ book. Because the blog is based on a weekly column, I’ll have at least 9 more entries of that length before I finish at the end of December, so I can expect the final blook to be about 75,000 words, a respectable length for a business book.
What Makes Blooks Distinctive?
If you want your blook to retain the look and feel of your blog, you’ll have to put some effort into page design, or hire a designer who can create an appropriate layout and choose fonts and visual elements. You might prefer a square or landscape format book to mimic the layout on a computer screen, rather than a standard 6″ x 9″ business book. You might even want to produce the whole thing in color, particularly if photos are an important part of your blog, though that could result in an expensive blook if it runs more than 100 pages.
It’s a good idea for blook authors to reread their material carefully in order to correct mistakes and remove redundancies, even if they choose not to make any substantive changes. You may also need to get permission before reprinting comments left by readers, unless you already have a statement on the blog to the effect that anyone posting a comment is granting such permission.
Blooks vs. Books
In discussing the Blooker Prize, journalists have pointed out with some reason that a book which exactly duplicates a blog rather than reworking the blog’s content into a tighter structure could prove tedious reading. But this depends enormously on the nature of the blog, the blogger, and the blogger’s material.
The informality and the chronological arrangement may be part of a blook’s attraction. Replacing chapters with journal entries has proven effective both for fiction and nonfiction works of various kinds, and a blook of short entries can be ideal for reading during coffee breaks—or as a bathroom book, for that matter. If the blogger writes well and has something interesting to say, blooks will be just as enjoyable to read as traditional books, and possibly more so.
When Is a Blog-Based Book Not a Blook?
If you’re using your blog primarily as a way to generate a first draft or collect raw material for your book, the final book which results from your blogging efforts will bear about as much resemblance to the blog as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does to the charcoal sketches Michelangelo made before painting it. You probably don’t want to produce a blook at all if you’re after, not the $1,000 Blooker Prize, but the bigger prize of a sale to a major publishing house and a substantial advance. Even the “A-list” bloggers who’ve been approached by publishers have created books which are more than just a compilation of blog posts.
Why Publish a Blook?
Though the $1000 Blooker Prize is more than many POD authors make from book sales, money isn’t necessarily the best reason for bloggers to create blooks. The real value of a blook is much the same as that of any business book: it’s what one of my clients calls “The thud factor.” A blook is a demonstration that your blog has added up to something substantive. It also gives you a chance to show people your blog when you’re away from computers. If you’re a professional blogger, a blook helps give your prospective clients an idea of what a blog can do for them. (Professional bloggers might want to create several full-color blooks.)
In other words, a blook is a blogger’s portfolio. And who knows? People might even want to buy it for its own sake.
Links and References:
Jeff Jarvis coins “Blook” in his BuzzMachine Blog
Tony Pierce’s History of Blooks (Busblog)
Blurb.com (currently operating in stealth mode; e-mail egittins@blurb.com for more information)
Dan Poynter&rquo;s Book Layout Template
Blog Hosting Services
Meet Your Deadlines with an E-zine
Not having set working hours is one of the advantages of being a writer. It’s also one of the disadvantages. When you don’t have to show up at work at 9 AM and show results at the end of the day, it’s far too easy to put off writing in favor of all the interruptions to which people who work at home are especially vulnerable. Before you know it, the day is over and you haven’t done any writing.
So what do you do if you find yourself flossing the cat instead of sitting down at the keyboard? The best way to be sure you get down to work and keep at it is to make yourself accountable to someone else.
The easiest appointments to break are the ones we make with ourselves. This may be particularly true for women, who are conditioned to take care of other people’s needs, but men seem to have just as much trouble sticking to things like diets and exercise programs on their own. One of the main reasons people sign up for exercise classes or sessions with personal trainers is to make themselves show up and do it. If the instructor has expertise to share, that’s just a bonus.
Getting a Writing Buddy
The first way to create accountability for your writing is to set up a one-on-one commitment by working with a writing coach or having a writing buddy you check in with. These check-ins need to be frequent (at least once a week) and regular (every week on the same day or every day at the same time). They don’t have to take up very much time, though: you can just tell the other person how much you’ve written, whether you’ve reached any milestones, and whether you’ve run into any stumbling blocks.
Just making a commitment and reporting on whether you’ve kept it helps you stay on track, even if the other person never reads what you’ve written and doesn’t know anything at all about your subject.
Writing Groups and Classes
Joining a writing group or taking a writing class works the same way. Having a homework assignment due every week can definitely make you get something written. Classes and writing groups are usually less expensive than professional one-on-one coaching, and they have the advantage of providing you with feedback on what you write. You do need to be sure when you join the group or class that you’ll get enough attention and enough motivation and accountability, and also that you’ll be able to work on your own material rather than writing on assigned topics.
Writing a Column
My number one favorite choice for developing writing discipline—and building up readership in advance of publication—is writing a weekly column or e-zine. Once you have subscribers, you have an obligation to them. They’re expecting you to write something every week, so you have to do it even if you don’t feel like it. If you don’t stick to your schedule, your professional reputation suffers and your readership drops off.
Having the commitment forces you to get ideas out of your head and onto the page. I’ve been thinking about writing this particular article for months, for instance, and now that I’ve committed myself to a weekly column for WomensRadio.com, I don’t have the excuse to put it off any longer.
You can either publish your own weekly column or write one for someone else. If you write for someone else, you’ll save on publishing costs and gain credibility. Writing for someone else’s publication gives you the added pressure of a commitment to an editor as well as the commitment to your readers.You might even get paid. Just make sure you retain the copyright on anything you produce, or you might have to go to court before you can publish your book.
Either way, you’ll find that what you’ve written adds up fast. You may also find that you start getting more ideas than will fit into a weekly newsletter, so you’ll start writing more often, and you’ll have enough material for a book before you know it.
Research by Writing
While you’re writing, you’ll also be doing market research. Your readers will give you feedback on what you write: what they like, what they don’t like, what they want to hear more about. Even if they don’t know anything about writing, their comments can be more useful than those of a writing instructor, because they’re the ones who will be buying the book when it comes out. After a few months of this, you’ll know enough about your book’s potential market to make a good pitch to an agent or publisher. By the time your book is finished, you’ll have a solid selling platform. Publishers care much less about how well you write than about how many copies you can sell, so they’ll appreciate these test-marketing efforts.
Get Them on Your List
Publishers like hearing that you have a mailing list you can market to. One advantage to publishing your own e-zine is that you control the subscriber list and know how many readers you have and who they are. While you can use columns you write for online or print publications to serialize and create advance interest in your book, you don’t usually have access to contact information for your readers. Providing it to you might even violate the publisher’s privacy policy, and in any event, there will be many readers that the publisher doesn’t have any details about.
Producing your own e-zine or newsletter allows you to collect contact information for your subscribers. Even if they never give you more than a first name and e-mail address, you’ll be able to reach them when you want them. Because they’ve opted in to your list, you can market to them without violating laws about spam (officially known as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail).
Don’t be shy about pitching your book to your newsletter subscribers. You already know they like your writing and are interested in your subject—why wouldn’t they buy your book? Owning the book is both more convenient and cheaper than printing out all your e-mail newsletters.
Using a List Service
Don’t make the mistake of trying to set up a large mailing list with just your regular e-mail software. You, your computer, or your ISP will end up overloaded, and you’ll probably wind up breaking the law unintentionally. You want people to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically, and you want to be able to personalize the messages with the recipients’ names and to avoid getting snared in junk mail filters. A professional newsletter service can take care of all those things and more, including offering readers a choice of plain text and HTML.
The service I use for my own e-zines costs $29/month for as many newsletters as I want, as often as I want, and up to 10,000 total subscribers. If I’m going away on vacation or business, I can write an article in advance and schedule the delivery date. They take care of the list maintenance, with automatic subscription and unsubscription, plus a customizable sign-up box for each list that I can put on my website. (See my alter-ego website, www.fileslinger.com, for an example of the sign-up box.)
I’ll be happy to recommend list services to anyone who wants to start a list—just e-mail me and ask. And if you have more suggestions for ways to make sure you produce a steady output, let me know!
The Author-izer Joins the Ranks of Shameless Self-Promoters
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.
Ten Things That Keep You from Writing Your Book
Want to write a book but can’t seem to settle down to it? Denise Wakeman lists some common reasons books don’t get written in her Next Level Biz Tips blog.
You can also sign up for the Blog to Book program which Denise is teaching with Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletters. The basic course costs $149 if you register by June 15; after that the price doubles.
Read From the Blog to the Book for some examples of authors who wrote their books by blogging.
And don’t be afraid of the technology—if you can type, you can blog.
