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Self-Publishing, CreateSpace and Bing

February 19, 2013 By Mark 1 Comment

If you’re a self-publishing author, one of the important chores you can do to avoid having to actually write anything is to see how the two most popular search engines report back on you and your work. The dominant US search engine is of course Google, with about 66% of the search market, while Microsoft’s Bing makes up most of the remainder. (Bing powers not only the Bing.com site, which is 16% of US search, but also Yahoo.com’s search engine, which accounts for roughly 12 percent.)

If you’re not already obsessed with your personal and professional rankings on search engines and social networks, the good news is that you don’t have to become your own favorite celebrity in order to make sure people can find you. All you need is a basic understanding of how search engines work, and how people may try to find you using various words and phrases — like, say, your name or the title of something you wrote.

While it may seem as if all search engines see the internet the same way, that’s not actually the case. In order to return hits for any search you conduct, the search engine you’re using must have already visited the page you’re looking for in order to point you to it. This process of scouring the web for content is done automatically by what are called web crawlers, which follow links from one page to the next. In general web crawlers do a good job of indexing most of what’s available on the web, but depending on how often a search engine crawls a particular site there can be some lag between when a page is published (or updated) and when that page is indexed.

To get around this lag it’s possible to go to most search engines and submit pages and sites directly so search engines know where to find new content. Since this is a bit of a chore you can also use various aggregating services to submit new pages or sites to most of the popular search engines at once, albeit often for a fee. In my own experience it’s almost never necessary to submit URL’s to search engines yourself, and in no case would I pay to have this done. In a relatively short amount of time almost any new content will show up after the web crawlers make their next sweep.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: CreateSpace, Google

Storytelling and the Evolution of Mediums

February 14, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on several previous posts about mediums and how mediums affect storytelling, I recently ran across an article that illustrates my claim that stories exist apart from the mediums we use to communicate them. From PCMag:

Just like soap opera characters wake up from years-long comas or return from beyond the grave, two cancelled daytime dramas are getting revived.

Prospect Park today announced that All My Children and One Life To Live will in fact get a second chance as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN).

In a sense this development probably doesn’t even seem evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. And from the point of view of the end user it’s probably neither. You fire up whatever glowing screen you want to look at, you input a few commands, and voila: content. But consider what this means for television itself.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: internet, iPad, medium, television, TV

Kickstarter Caution

February 11, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

A reminder today that however intrigued you are by Kickstarter, it is by now almost certainly a festering cesspool of scams and con games designed to take your money and give you nothing in return. Consider this particularly clumsy example:

Asking for $500,000 in capital funding, the collaboration with Jam Entertainment (Anderson’s company) promised to deliver a challenger to EA’s popular NCAA Football video game franchise. Perks for investors included dinner with “co-owner” Jamal Anderson, a chance to play-test the game, or a signed helmet from former Ohio State greats Archie Griffin, Eddie George, or Jim Tressel. The promotional copy suggested the game would be different from EA’s offering, thanks to the participation of former college and pro football players, and would feature every college football team—including NAIA squads—and the highest-quality 3-D models ever seen.

That is, of course, if you believe the Kickstarter page, which asserts that the graphics actually come from the game. They don’t. In fact, the funding campaign was canceled earlier today, shortly after we spoke with Anderson. He told us he had nothing to do with the project and no connection to Dirty Bird Sports.

Kickstarter acts as a match-making service only. They guarantee next to nothing, and to whatever extent they police projects on the site they do so primarily to preserve their own reputation, not your bank account. If a scam or con game gets funded and ultimately bears no fruit for the people who ponied up money, Kickstarter still gets its cut. You get to feel like an idiot.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: fraud, Kickstarter

E-book Price Fixing Update

February 10, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two years after the heavy hitters in the publishing industry colluded with Apple in order to fix the price of e-books, most of the legal dust has finally settled. Today Macmillan threw in the towel on anti-trust charges brought by the U.S. Justice Department:

A small firm that is also known as Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC, Macmillan was the lone holdout among five publishers that the government sued in April 2012. Three publishers settled immediately and the fourth, Pearson Plc’s Penguin Group, settled in December.

The Justice Department will continue to litigate conspiracy allegations against Apple Inc, the department said in a statement. It accuses Apple of conspiring with the publishers to raise prices and fight the dominance of Amazon.com Inc.

More here and here.

The lone holdout, Apple, is probably betting that its haughty image and cultural cachet can keep it from becoming associated with yet another revolting act of corporate brutality. The Apple vs. Amazon battle is of course a deeply cynical dispute in itself, with both companies striving to dominate (meaning, monopolize) the distribution of digital content. In years to come it won’t be surprising if Amazon finds itself the target of anti-trust investigations on multiple fronts, including, ironically, attempting to monopolize both the sale and resale of digital content, thereby effectively allowing it to fix prices.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Macmillan

E-book Revolution Update

February 7, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

The writing is on the wall page display:

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting. After five years, e-books is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast—up approximately 70 percent last year,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. “In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent. We’re excited and very grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle and our ever expanding ecosystem and selection.”

Touting growth in percentages is always misleading when comparing new products to mature ones, but there’s no question that e-book sales are cannibalizing print sales as expected. Given that Amazon is positioning itself as the dominant e-tailer for all digital media it’s also not surprising that it would be facilitating this transition, and willing to take a short-term revenue hit in order to grow long-term market share.

For authors, the question is not whether e-books are good or bad. The question is how e-books can best be used to help you reach your intended audience. Economics will always play a part in that calculation, but given that it’s now possible to produce and widely distribute content with little or no up-front capital I think every writer should feel good about that.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: e-books

Personal Publishing, Micromarkets and Meaning

February 4, 2013 By Mark 1 Comment

Toward the end of last year, as a holiday gift, I put together a self-published book for my family. The manuscript was originally written by my grandmother (1910-2009) when she was in her eighties, and brings to life teenage trips she took to visit her eldest sister, who lived on a Wyoming homestead. To that original document were added photographs from the trips, a short page about the author, and a cover.

My grandmother originally intended her manuscript as a young-adult title. She submitted it to a few publishers, but after finding no interest she rewrote it as a more personal family memoir. In putting a book together based on that text I was conscious both of the work’s history and of her intent, but even more so of the responsibility of presenting her fairly and well. Fortunately, she did most of the heavy lifting with her own words.

What surprised me most about producing such a work was the impact the physical book had as an object when I finally held the first proof in my hands. The words had been around for decades, the pictures for decades more, but merging them into a book created something greater than the sum of its parts. And this feeling was shared by members of my family as well.

There is, obviously, something about a book as an object that confers a sense of importance about the contents. However that book came to be, and whatever the quality of the contents, at a bare minimum someone took the time and effort to assemble it — to create a new object from various pieces of source material. The result might be the functional equivalent of a scrapbook or personal journal, but the fact that it can be held and shelved alongside other tomes gives it a familiar, almost universal purpose and place that it would otherwise lack.

The question of an object’s worth — of a book’s worth — often devolves to critical and commercial assessment. At the same time, however, most people recognize that living a life dominated by (if not determined by) money and the artistic judgment of others leads to an inevitable corruption of self. If you can make a living pounding out words or creating images or raising and lowering hemlines that’s fine, but who are you when the crowds go away and you’re alone with your millions? (You may care about your money, but your money doesn’t care about you.)

To the great, brutish publishing industry this tiny little tome has no value of any kind. If traditional publishing cast even a glance my grandmother’s way it would do so only to sputter and spit about vanity publishing, as if I was trying to sneak past the industry’s desperate gatekeepers in order to make a buck or a name for myself without first coughing up whatever percentage they feel they deserve. But this simple book was not created to get around anyone or anything. It was created as an act of love, to honor someone who lived a full life and gave as much or more than she got.

I own a fair number of books, some of which I love for personal reasons and some of which I love because of the invaluable information they contain. My family is and always has been bookish. My grandmother probably read more books in a year than I read in a decade. But of all the books that have come through our collective lives, it would be hard to say that any of them are more meaningful to us now than this little self-published title that sprang from the hand of a woman who did so much for us all.

The fact that this book is a personal work aimed at a tiny micromarket says nothing about its inherent value and everything about how important self-publishing can be.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books

Mediums and Mastery

November 26, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

No matter how you find your way to storytelling, your own individual authorial journey begins with the stories you have been exposed to over the course of your life. This exposure inevitably affects and informs your initial efforts as you necessarily substitute mimicry for what will later become mastery. As you grow and develop as an author, and as your skills and interests broaden, you will leave these initial anchors and points of reference behind in order to explore new narrative territory. As you become more comfortable with different aspects of craft you may even probe the complex dynamics inherent in the interplay of art, craft and commerce. You may also decide to branch out and work in different storytelling mediums such as poetry, short fiction, long fiction, screenplays, stage plays and even interactive fiction.

At some point, if you keep pushing against your limitations, you will realize that stories exist apart from the specific mediums that allow us to document and relate fiction to others. We don’t need mediums to conceive of stories, we need mediums to express and communicate stories. This means that choosing the right medium is, in the end, simply another aspect of craft — albeit one that has unparalleled importance. As you grow in mastery you may even notice that many if not most of your earlier conceptions presumed a medium, and that in some cases that medium was not the best choice. (Not only can choosing the wrong medium dull the potential of a story, leading to a less-than-satisfying result, it can lead to still-born tales that never quite work no matter how many drafts or versions you write.)

Understanding the strengths and limitations of every medium you work in is critical. As I detailed in the previous post, what the world witnessed during the first three weeks of NFL football this year was the complete collapse of an entire medium into a narrative black hole. This self-inflicted debacle was both a chilling and comical lesson in the dangers of authorial hubris, and a cautionary tale for authors who believe they have absolute power.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Interactive Tagged With: Fiction, Interactive, literature, medium, NFL, story, theater

Mediums and the Power of Rules

November 8, 2012 By Mark 1 Comment

Like stories, sports are not simply constrained by rules, they are defined by them. What we enjoy and take from sports after the fact is, for the most part, a narrative almost indistinguishable from fictional ones we create or are entertained by, but because sports usually play out in real time the rules are inevitably more obvious to the audience. In recognition of the importance of rules, sports almost always feature officials who are charged with enforcing those rules, albeit as inconspicuously as possible. Without officials, most sports would descend into chaos in short order — as still happens from time time.

I’ve noted previously that even a simple rule change can have a big effect on the narrative of a sport. Three years ago the National Basketball Association decided to officially adopt a rule that had been in practical use for years. This new rule gave players with the ball the right to take two full steps without dribbling — which, given the stride-length of many NBA players, effectively allowed them to go from the perimeter to the basket without putting the ball on the floor. This, in turn, has had a commensurate positive effect on scoring, which the audience enjoys.

This year the NBA instituted a new rule about so-called flopping — the intentional faking of a foul so as to cause officials to charge the opposing player with an infraction that player did not in fact commit. The new rule is designed to punish players who routinely flop, a move necessitated by the fact that flopping has eroded the integrity of the game and the authority of NBA officials. (Even though there are three officials covering each NBA game the players know those officials can’t see everything. Fans and the media, however, often have clear evidence of a flop, particularly when an instant replay is shown. No sport can survive that kind of routine and objective breakdown at the officiating level, as waning public interest in Major League Baseball’s arbitrary and often incompetent officiating continues to demonstrate.)

In the past year I also commented on the fact that the NFL had to change a few existing rules that were eroding the appeal of its product. Specifically, the time-honored tradition of allowing defensive players to physically cripple offensive players had to be revised because of new evidence that all those “great hits” were leading to things like “brain damage” and “slow, agonizing, premature death” after players retired. While these rule changes were made in part to minimize the amount of money the league will inevitably have to to pay for crippling and killing its own employees, the changes were also necessary to protect the audience from feeling queasy about enjoying what had become undeniable if not unconscionable brutality. Even in this example, however, where outside information (medical data) intruded on the sport, all it took to solve the problem and support the medium were simple changes in the rules.

Now, contrast the above examples with what the NFL did at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season, because what the league did then affected the medium of sports itself, yet nobody at the time had any inkling of what that portended. Let me repeat that. Despite decades of experience working in or covering professional sports, all of the people who caused the problem, and all of the people in the media who commented on the problem, had no understanding of what was happening even as events unfolded week by week.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: medium, NBA, NFL, sports, stories, storytelling

Mediums and Authorial Control

October 28, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

The rules that define any medium at any particular point in time may vary in complexity, but they are still binding. If the medium you’re playing around in is space travel, you should probably pay strict attention to the rules we call the laws of physics. On the other hand if the medium you’re playing around in is abstract sculpture, you can pretty much do anything you want as long as it ends up being a physical object — or, if your intended audience is purely intellectual or academic, some non-physical or negative-space meta-commentary on physical objects. If you try to present an action painting as sculpture, however, you’re probably going to get confused looks, if not some serious push-back.

The tendency over time is for all mediums to become more plastic. Rules that were previously assumed to be inviolate are challenged by artists and craftspeople who chafe at those limitations, until ultimately all non-essential rules are pared away to reveal the bedrock foundation of the medium itself. Like sculpture, a painting is defined today simply as any application of paint to canvas, board or wall. It doesn’t matter whether a painting is abstract or representational: all that matters is that the materials being used are paint or some paint equivalent, but that clearly wasn’t always the case. This creative freedom for painters was hard-won over centuries, with each subsequent school balking at restrictions imposed by those who came before, until, ultimately, all rules of what defines a painting were abandoned in favor of unbridled creativity.

And yet, as with sculpture, rules still apply no matter how plastic a medium becomes. If what you call a painting is in fact a pumpkin sitting in a field then you’re objectively wrong. You can do anything you want with paint, you can paint anything you want, or paint on anything you want, but without paint (or its equivalent) you don’t have a painting.

Compared to painting, storytelling as a medium — even in the rarefied air of experimental literature — is and will always remain constrained by complex rules. Some of these rules are a result of the way human brains take in and process narrative information. Some are cultural rules that define the meaning of objects and people and places before they are redefined or repurposed by authors. Some are logical rules having to do with time and place and order, which can only be broken when some plausible new rule (time travel, say) replaces the assumed rules so the reader does not become lost. And there are of course rules defined by language.

When authors say of literature that there are no rules, what they mean is that you can write about anything in any manner you see fit, as long as it pays off in the way you intend. If you see a literary objective and you need to break a specific rule to reach that goal you’re allowed to do it. What you’re not allowed to do is put ten thousand words in a blender, hit puree, and call that a story, or literature, or even a dictionary mash-up. If you do that with paint people may actually pay you for the result if you spew it on a canvas or sell it in gallon cans, but nobody is going to pay you for pureed words.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: Fiction, medium, storytelling

Storytelling and the Power of Mediums

October 22, 2012 By Mark 2 Comments

I can’t tell you where my own impetus to author stories comes from. I know it’s there because I feel it, but I quit speculating about the cognitive roots long ago. Time ticks by and thoughts come to me, some of which I shape and express, but I don’t know where they originate, or even how they become coupled with sufficient desire and conviction that I choose to act on them. I’m glad this happens, but I don’t control it.

I do know that the idea of creating something from nothing has enormous appeal to me. I still remember being a very young boy and looking at a blank sheet of paper and a newly-sharpened number-two pencil and thinking to myself that what I was looking at was infinite possibility. With only those two things I could create something that would change the world or make people laugh or cry, and I’m still amazed by that.

But there’s another aspect to creation that can’t be overlooked, and that’s the issue of control. Very few people who menace a piece of paper with a pencil, or a canvas with a brush, or the world with a lens, do so with the intent of letting someone else control that process. Depending on the scale of the enterprise and the psychological make-up of the creator(s) the stakes may seem inconsequential or soul-destroying, but it’s axiomatic that in exchange for authority (if not also autonomy) each creator assumes responsibility for the final result. And that’s true even if chaos is your preferred method of creation.

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Interactive Tagged With: medium, story, storytelling

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