Archives for September 2009

Publishing is for Professionals

September 26, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

As regular readers know, I’m working my way through a very interesting book called The Black Swan, which was recommended to me in the comments. Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’s a treatise on the commonsensical idea that it’s not life’s little ups and downs that are the real threat, but rather the bottomless pits that no one anticipates that pose the greater risk.

When I say that the author is smart I’m not condoning the author’s colossal ego, or his tendency to cloak bullying in humor and pranks. But he really is smart: and particularly so in that outside-the-box kind of way that you need to be to make any kind of difference these days. Which is obviously why Random House, a major publisher, decided to publish Taleb’s book, and why the New York Times made the book a bestseller. [ Read more ]

Piracy is Piracy

September 25, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

There’s a note going around today that 90% of MacMillan’s frontlist (their new books for this year) has been pirated. Predictably, this somewhat less-than-surprising factoid is being exploited by a number of interested parties, including the anti-DRM nuts who are always eager to remind us that DRM doesn’t work.

Well, we know DRM doesn’t work, and probably won’t ever work. But that doesn’t mean the idea behind DRM is wrong.

I also don’t like it when two sides in an argument promote extreme views that intentionally distort reality, then demand that I declare an allegiance. Since the internet first took hold of public consciousness the very question of content piracy and what piracy means has been distorted by two notable and related running battles featuring factions that I don’t respect. [ Read more ]

Squidoo and the Identity-Theft Threat

September 24, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

Speaking of trying to make a buck off of other people’s property, this is pretty impressive:

Rather than convincing companies to set up their own public profile pages for their brands to aggregate and manage online conversations, Squidoo is creating hundreds of unofficial ones (e.g. for Guinness) in the hopes that companies will come to them and cough up $400 per month for the right to develop the page on their terms. Once a company pays up and gains control over the relevant Squidoo lens, the left hand column will ‘belong’ to them.

Obviously Squidoo is smart enough not to use Guinness logos or other branding on the page, but what’s the real intent here? Rather than wait around for some user to put up a Guinness page, Squidoo is priming the pump in the hope that a discussion will get going that Guinness will then feel compelled to take ownership of. It’s a wonderful example of extortion by social-networking proxy, and I can see why somebody thought it was a good idea. [ Read more ]

Self-Publishing Linkfest

September 24, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve run across a blur of information about self-publishing in the past 24 hours or so, all of it deserving attention.

From the New York Times, a nice piece on Pondering the Format of E-books before you self-publish.

The proliferation of formats has come about, in part, because most companies entering the e-book market have created a proprietary version.

This rugged individualism started falling out of favor several years ago, and today many companies have adopted the ePub format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, an industry consortium. Sony announced in August that it was switching to ePub as well.

Repeat after me: proprietary is bad. Independent authors do not want a third party to own the means of distribution in any way. If Sony or Amazon wants to sell hardware (e-readers), more power to them. But I’m not interesting in anyone who’s selling hardware that requires me to use (pay for) their software. I understand why people can own fonts, but I’m not down with someone owning the alphabet.
Five Good Reasons to Self-Publish Your Book. The subtitle here is: Because No Publisher Will Take You No Matter How Good Your Writing Is.
Finally, e-Fiction Book Club chimes in with Why You Should Self-Publish…, including more links on the subject.

When you self-publish, as I have said before, your book comes with no guarantee of quality or even readability. Readers have to take a punt on your work, and unless you have a great word-of-mouth campaign going on, you’ve got very little chance of being noticed and selling significant copies. Not that I’m disparaging all self-published authors; I’m just pointing out the facts. You are shoulder to shoulder with some of the worst examples of writing ever produced, and you will be lumped accordingly.

Sad but true.

An interesting side-effect of reading all these posts is that I’m getting a renewed appreciation for the skills of the craftspeople who work inside the staggering publishing industry. Clearly there is a lot of really useful institutional knowledge and business experience there that is applicable to all of the decisions individual authors are now making for themselves, and I have respect for that experience.

— Mark Barrett

Transmedia, Level 26, 90-9-1 and Transparency

September 24, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

One of the hallmarks of storytelling over the past few thousand years is that the majority of people who are drawn to stories are not interested in creating stories on their own. They don’t even want to confront the means of delivery, or to understand how stories are imagined, created or produced. What they want is an imaginative, emotional narrative experience that is transparent to all of these mechanisms and processes. They want to consume in the same way that you or I might prefer to consume a meal without having to gather ingredients, cook, season, serve, or do much of anything except taste and chew.

I mention these points to re-frame the context surrounding transmedia storytelling and a recent example of that exploratory narrative form: Level 26, which you can see here, and read more about here and here. [ Read more ]

BNET: Exploit Your Customers or You’re a Wimp

September 23, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

In a previous post I mentioned running across BNET.com, which is a division of CBS Interactive. Yesterday I went back to the site to see if it held any riches, and promptly stepped in this:

The elephant in the room at Advertising Week sessions in New York beginning today is the ongoing reluctance of companies to mine user preferences and other data many consumers are willing to share in exchange for more relevant products and services.

Wow.

I mean, I thought one of the reasons consumers were willing to share data is because they’ve been told that it won’t be used against them. (I mean over and above the fact that you have to share data in order to use many services or sites — which means it’s really a fee.) [ Read more ]

Best Job Title Ever

September 23, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Sign me up!

(Although the job title certainly fits, I don’t believe all the wild talk that this is a bold move on the part of the New England Patriots.)

— Mark Barrett

Google As Benevolent Dictator

September 23, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

It’s taken me a while to figure out the Google Books Case, and I’m still not sure I could accurately and fairly describe the motivations of all parties involved. In the end I’m not even confident there’s a good guy to point to, given that all parties seem eager to claim and exploit rights to other people’s property.

(Is it just me, or is it time to beat back some of these absurd online euphemisms? Currently a complete stranger who’s lying to you about who they are qualifies as a friend, and the idea of stealing other people’s property is redefined as sharing. “Because I am such a good person, I want to share these stolen — uh….I mean, orphaned — jewels with you. In fact, have a whole bag. And some MP3’s.”)

Yesterday, Google and the Justice League of Authors decided to avoid a ritualized gutting in the courts over a proposed mutually-beneficial settlement aimed squarely at exploiting other people’s legal rights. (When I say I’m still not sure I can ‘accurately and fairly describe the motivations of all parties involved,’ this is what I’m talking about.) At the strategic level this is nothing more than legal repositioning. Google and the Author’s Guild are almost certainly still intent on putting a deal together that passes the smell test without actually mitigating their mutual and individual legal objectives. [ Read more ]

Link Hopping, Rants and Andrew Sullivan

September 22, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

One of the nice things about the web is that you never know what you’ll run across when you start poking around with a search engine. While doing a search for POD (print-on-demand) resources I ran across a rant on the Daily Dish site that contained this quote:

[Publishing] is an industry where agents only get work from editors, and editors only get work from agents. Where the writers are taken out of the process entirely in order to “protect” them.

I have to say, on those occasions when I actually tried to penetrate the book world that’s very much the feeling that I came away with. It really didn’t matter how good your writing was or how much of yourself you put into it — it only mattered if you would sell. And that would be fine if that’s the way they played it, but it’s not. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Mick Rooney

September 22, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Mick Rooney is the proprietor. The full title of his blogsite is POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing. I ran across it while chasing down links related to the previous post, and it certainly seems to be up-to-date on the titular subject matter.

And no, I’m not pointing to him because of the awesome ditch mention.

— Mark Barrett