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Taking Stock: Ditchwalk at Six Months

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Six months ago I put up my first post on this blog. My goals at the time were pretty straightforward:

  • Re-establish an internet presence for myself as a writer. I had a professional web site for years that was devoted to my interactive work. I took it down when I stepped back from interactive in the middle of the 90’s. (Blog posts and documents from that site have been added to Ditchwalk, and can be located via the Archive and Docs tabs on the main nav.)
  • Investigate the (r)evolution taking place in publishing, how the self-publishing/online movement is impacting traditional publishing, and any opportunities this presents.
  • Get up to speed on the new wave of social networking tools. In a few short years, online forums and e-mail groups were out, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were in.
  • Get up to speed on new tech, including e-readers, online publishing sites, self-publishing service providers, and print-on-demand (POD) technology.
  • Get up to speed on issues facing writers and storytellers in this brave new world. (Google’s deal with the Authors Guild quickly caught my eye.)
  • Identify opinion leaders and stress-test their opinions.
  • Network with others who share any or all of these interests.

Six months later I feel good about what I’ve learned and accomplished. There’s more I want to do, and more I need to know, but today I feel as if I’m on the crest of the breaking publishing wave rather than paddling behind it.  [ Read more ]

Open-source .epub vs. Adobe .pdf

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Over the past few days I’ve been reading up on e-book file formats. I have a collection of short stories I want to publish, and I have a working understanding of the technology that readers will use to embrace that content, but until recently I haven’t worried too much about delivering content to that technology. (The main reason for my delay is simply the pace of change. Time spent trying to understand or master e-content technology six months ago would have put me at buggy-whip risk.)

As luck would have it, Mark Coker just released data about the file formats most in use on Smashwords, his e-publishing site. At the same time, Joel Friedlander pointed me to a useful video tutorial about formatting content using Adobe’s InDesign software, which seems to be the tool of choice for many people. From these two sources of information I was able to understand and easily navigate the first fork in the road on my own publishing journey.  [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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Call it the President’s Day long-weekend version. Speaking of which, a historical reminder: the single most important president in the history of the United States is George Washington. Standing apart from all of his other accomplishments, which were considerable, was his decision to relinquish power after two terms — a decision which created a tradition of orderly transfers of power which has sustained this country for over two hundred years. If you’re lucky, you’ve met one person in your lifetime who had that same combination of vision and selflessness.

(Bonus question: in the history of the United States, who was the single most important person? Answer below.)

  • Buzz off: Disabling Google Buzz

    Whatever you think of Google these days, it’s abundantly clear that they have fully transitioned from internet icon to corporate bully. Between their ongoing attempt to hijack the copyrights of millions of legally-protected works, to the opt-out, Big Brother, Microsoftesque we-know-what’s-best-for-you rollout of Buzz, Google has decided that it’s time to take the gloves off and go down swinging as just another morally-bankrupt company bent on leveraging its available cash. (Here Google plays the role of Godzilla, while you play a citizen of Tokyo.)

    Gone is any previous expression of sensitivity to the fact that Google has been collecting personally identifiable data on you for years, all with the promise that it would be treated with discretion. You’re now just an exploitable data point in a desperate advertising-driven bid to remain relevant in an internet world that is increasingly segregated on social networks. (Just as Microsoft didn’t see the internet coming, Google didn’t see the social-network threat.)

    More on turning off Google Buzz here. A slightly confused article about Google’s plans for global Buzz domination here.

    Update: Google makes privacy changes to Buzz based on “feedback”.

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Richard Nash and the Vision Thing

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I ran across an interview today with Richard Nash. If you meet any of the following criteria, you should read it:

  • You are a writer.
  • You are an editor.
  • You are a publisher.
  • You are a living organism.

As regular readers know, Richard is putting together a start-up called Cursor. I believe this venture is the right idea at the right time, and I hope Richard makes a go of it precisely because Cursor is not simply another publishing vanity. It is, rather, a proof-of-concept for a new, internet-age publishing model that emphasizes the reader-writer relationship.

That’s precisely why I’m here. Because I can write these words and you can read them without anybody else getting in the way or taking a cut or telling me I need to spice up my dialogue or throw in a torture scene or a vampire. And Richard Nash knows this:

The way I sort of think about this philosophically is that the reader pays a certain price for something. And everybody who takes a piece of that on route back to the author has to justify it. A lot of us have been failing to justify that big chunk of the reader’s money. It’s partly the reader’s money and partly the writer’s money. It’s the money the reader wants to give the writer for that experience. And typically, 10 to 15 percent of it actually makes it there.

The new reality is that writers do not need publishers in order to connect with readers. Publishers may be helpful in scaling up a writer’s readership, or in providing editing and publishing services, but they are no longer necessary intermediaries between writer and reader. And I know that’s true because this blog doesn’t have a publisher. Or rather, I’m the publisher.

This change is so great, so complete, that what everyone is looking for right now is a compass heading. Even if the destination is beyond the horizon, even if it’s going to be hell getting there, what everyone wants to know is that they’re at least on the right course. Maybe not the exact course, but headed in the right direction.

Richard Nash is headed in the right direction. You won’t agree with everything Richard says, but when you’re done reading the interview you’ll have a much better sense of where you are, and where you should be going.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: The Book Designer

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For the past six months or so I’ve been trying to learn everything I can about the publishing industry. A lot of that knowledge is political: it’s about business decisions that people are making in order to protect their interests, and how they’re leveraging others to achieve those goals.

There’s another kind of knowledge to the book business, however, and that’s the practical knowledge of how things are made. On the traditional side there’s book binding and printing; on the electronic cutting-edge there are document formats and presentation issues to confront. Because I know nothing about any of that, and because I need to know at least a minimal amount in order to make my work presentable in the literal sense, I’ve kept my eye out for useful sources of information.

Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer is one such site. Not only does Joel know a lot about how books are made, he makes that information available in language that anyone can understand. Straddling the transitional divide between print and online document preparation, Joel’s blog posts and site documents have already filled in a lot of blanks. And as I get ready to put together a collection of short stories for online publication and distribution, I find myself going to his site, and following his links, more and more.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Joe Konrath | JAKonrath.com

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When I first started trying to understand the tumult taking place in the publishing and self-publishing industries, one of the sites I ran across was a blog called A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Written by author Joe Konrath, the site provides useful commentary on the transitions taking place in publishing, and how writers may profit from these changes. In the past I referenced several of Joe’s posts here and here, but today I want to encourage you to take both a closer look at the Newbie blog and a broader look at the JAKonrath.com empire.

If your writing platform equals your celebrity (and it does), there’s still the nagging question of how you become celebrated. Various authors have reversed the process entirely, building up a persona first, then capitalizing on it by writing a book, but that’s not what most authors are going to do. For most authors the question is more mundane: how do I let the world know where I am?

Part of the answer today is undoubtedly technological. Whether you choose to have a blog or a web site or both or more, that’s going to be part of your solution. It’s certainly a big part of what Joe is doing — as one click here will demonstrate — and that’s another reason to keep track of both the site and the blog. Someone is actually doing the stuff you may decide that you want to do, and they’re giving you a chance to learn by their example.

If you’d prefer a more hands-on approach to marketing, Joe’s also been down that road:

I was the guy who sent out 7000 letters to libraries, who visited over 2000 bookstores, who blog toured over 100 sites in a single month, who gathered 10,000+ names for his newsletter, who talked about social networking before anyone knew what Facebook was.

I think all of this has had a positive effect on my career. I’ve made some money. I’m still selling books.

I’m not advocating that you do any or all of that — I certainly won’t be — but that’s not the point. The point is that Joe Konrath doesn’t seem to be kidding around as an independent author, and there aren’t a lot of people you can say that about.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

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It’s all well and good that people want to take advantage of the internet as a means of displaying their home-made arts and crafts, but as any veteran of any industry will tell you, there’s a big, big difference between being an amateur and meeting an industry’s standards of professionalism. For example, in the publishing industry professional authors and big-name publishing houses sift, vet, analyze, check, double-check, fact-check, double-fact-check and otherwise proof every single word on every single page. Editors scrutinize each line as to factual truth, house style, and grammatical validity, both as a service to readers and as a means of protecting the stature of the author’s and publisher’s names. To be sure, not everyone gets equal treatment, but as the price of a book goes up, you can bet more and more assets are thrown at the text to make sure it lives up to the names associated with it.

This is what it means to be professional, and it’s rightly why professionals look down on amateurs who think they know anything about publishing something important or good. For example, former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin recently published a memoir titled Going Rogue, for which HarperCollins paid her millions of dollars — which she in turn paid someone else a lot less money to actually write. Because publishing is a serious business, and because editors are serious people, and because the difference between amateur-hour and professionalism is always in the details, Going Rogue received the kind of professional, nitty-gritty scrutiny that your average amateur author (or fake author) could only dream of.

All of which, at first blush, would seem to make this gaffe surprising:

In her new book, “Going Rogue,” former vice presidential nominee attributes a quote to UCLA basketball coaching legend John Wooden.

The only problem is that he didn’t say it.

“Our land is everything to us…I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.”

It’s a nice quote, but it really doesn’t sound like something that Wooden would say. It was actually written by Native American activist John Wooden Legs in his essay “Back on the War Ponies.”

To the uninitiated it undoubtedly seems as if this kind of mistake undercuts the claim that professionals and amateurs are differentiated by the quality of their output. Unfortunately, this is the kind of uninformed opinion that defines amateurism.

It’s well known in the publishing industry that when a major publisher shells out millions of dollars in order to exploit the celebrity of a rapidly-burning cultural candle, it’s only doing so as a public service so it can steer some of the resulting revenue toward serious books by serious people. HarperCollins was really only patronizing Sarah Palin and her followers as a means of leveraging cash that could be used to fund the publication of cutting-edge literary fiction and nonfiction of cultural significance. What the amateur eye sees as hypocrisy, the professional understands as a savvy in-joke.

So remember: this kind of egregious, high-profile embarrassment does nothing to change the fact that you’re not worthy of professional status in the publishing industry. When you inevitably include a typo or a bad fact in something you ‘publish’ on the internet, you have defined yourself as a failure, a pretender, an amateur. And the publishing professionals will be the first ones to tell you so.

— Mark Barrett

Formatting Documents for e-Publishing

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I have a collection of short stories I would like to publish online. I’ve been working on cleaning them up for the past six months or so, and I’m now at the point where I need to confront a variety of technical questions. I know that a lot of people have already wrestled with these issues before me, so I’m asking for links/comments that will shorten my learning curve and prevent me from having to reinvent the wheel.

Questions:

  1. I write in Word, and that’s not going to change any time soon. My goal here is trying to develop a clean, clear work flow that makes the transition to any/all online publishing options as simple and painless as possible. (Including print-on-demand.) The first thing that (I think) I need to know is whether I should convert my original Word docs into another file format first (say, e-Pub, but that’s only an example), then change that internet-friendly file to meet the requirements of any particular publishing site/service, or whether I should only do so on a case-by case basis. What’s the right first step here?
  2. I need all the how-to links and advice I can get. I’m willing to read until my eyes bleed, but again, the goal is short-circuiting the learning curve. Who’s been down this road recently and written about it? Site-specific feedback is fine: I’d like to read about Smashwords author experiences, Amazon, etc.
  3. I know there are passionate views on both sides of the e-Pub file format issue. I’m not even sure what all the fuss is about, but I’m willing to learn. Who should I be reading? I like the idea of non-proprietary file formats. I know I’ll have to deal with Amazon’s proprietary format at some point, but I’m not eager to abet its dominance. Opinions? Links? Is this even worth wading into, or should I just stick with the practical issues related to getting my text ready?

Any and all feedback/links/comments appreciated.   [ Read more ]

A DRM Question Worth Asking

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Imposing technological solutions for Digital Rights Management (DRM) is, in theory, a viable way to stop the piracy of online content. In theory. In practice DRM presents a host of implementation problems and customer service headaches because legitimate content owners are punished or disadvantaged alongside thieves.

Because of the gap between current theory and practice, proponents and opponents of DRM attempt to dominate the DRM debate with apocalyptic rhetoric, political gamesmanship, and the kind of righteous indignation that is both an intellectual guilt trip and calculated lie at the same time. Neither side is really interested in what is practical or effective, or even in learning how pirated content is actually consumed by the end user.

The reason they are not interested is because they cannot sell the products they want to sell in a calm atmosphere. It takes fear of nuclear annihilation to sell both bomb shelters and bombs, so both sides in the DRM debate stoke the rhetorical fires and present their hard-line solutions as the truth, the light and the only way. All of which I’ve talked about here, here and here.

Still, it seems to me that there is one DRM question worth asking. Here’s how I referenced the issue in one of those previous posts:

Elsewhere in the clip, Mr. Doctorow makes a good point when he says that books will be copied and scanned regardless of the DRM that publishers employ. I agree. But that’s not necessarily saying something important. Scanned versions of books are almost inevitably going to be less clear than licensed e-books or even licensed digital copies. Yet even assuming someone cracks a DRM-protected book and makes it available for free, the book business has a kind of built-in protection against wanton piracy simply by nature of its content.

Music comes in small files. Movies are dumb — you just stare at them. Books, however, are big, and require active engagement over a long period of time in order to be consumed.

Maybe someone somewhere is downloading two hundred cracked e-books at a whack, then reading the first sentence of each in order to find a great read, but I think it’s unlikely. In fact, it’s unlikely that most pirated books are ever completely read, precisely because a book is relatively hard to digest. This means the ratio of thefts by end-users who intend to enjoy the content they steal to thefts by pirates who intend to profit from the content they steal may be lower in the book publishing industry than in any other medium. Which means the book publishing industry has more to gain by going after traffickers and less to gain by going after end-users than any other industry.

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Superbowl Sexism and Sports Narratives

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We watch sports for the same reason we watch movies. We like narratives. Movies (and books, and stage plays) are pre-designed: they are prepared for us, in order to induce the greatest amount of entertainment and emotional involvement. Sporting events play out in real time: the end result is not known in advance, and that creates its own kind of drama. You do not know what is going to happen when the curtain goes up on a game: you only hope that it will be great. (More on game and story here.)

Tonight’s game was a good game. It had a lot of narratives running through it, and in the end they played out as I would have liked as a storyteller. That’s not always the case, obviously, but that’s part of why we watch sports: it’s an act of faith. Sometimes we’re rewarded for believing, and sometimes our hearts are ripped out of our chests.

Going into the game the Colts’ quarterback, Peyton Manning, had ascended to god-like status on the wings of sporting pundits who know everything except how the game will actually turn out. And Manning played an excellent game. Unfortunately, everybody else on both teams played well, too, and as the game wore on Manning was not able to impose his will on the New Orleans Saints. When the Saints finally moved ahead late in the game, I said out loud that the only thing that would make the narrative complete would be if Manning threw an interception as he was trying to lead his team back for a tie — because the meta-narrative assumed that Manning would score the tying touchdown. When he did throw that interception, and it was returned for a touchdown, I could only shake my head. It’s not often, as a storyteller, that you get to see that kind of unscripted narrative play.

Apart from the game, however, I have to say that I was more than a little concerned with what can only be described as a parade of misogynistic, sexist commercials that played during the breaks. I know Superbowl commercials are supposed to be a big deal, and I know that advertising agencies pull out all the stops in an attempt to make their commercials talked about the next day. I fully expected, and got, a fair share of sex-driven commercials, but there also seemed to be a good deal of woman-bashing and wife-bashing aimed at what I can only presume to be a large demographic of stone-age male sitcom caricatures tuning into the game. Funny stuff if you’re a wife beater.

Then again, empowerment of women also seemed to be sadly lacking, and here of course I’m referring to Danica Patrick’s Go Daddy commercials. If you don’t know Danica Patrick, she’s a female race car driver of moderate talent, who, if she were male, you would never hear anything about as long as you lived. Because she is female, and TV-pretty, however, and more than willing to throw the cause of equality under the bus when there’s money to be made showing some skin, she’s decided to work her way up not by winning races, but by exploiting her physical appearance. Because it’s a TV world we live in, she’s of course having moderate success.

If I feel bad for anyone it’s the fans of the Indianapolis Colts. I don’t feel bad about this loss, but I feel bad for the way they were abused earlier in the year when the Colts’ ownership and coaches pulled the starting players off the field in the middle of a game, forfeiting a win. The Colts were undefeated at the time, the Colts’ fans had bought into the dream of an undefeated seasons, and yet the team’s ownership threw them overboard with as much concern as Danica Patrick gives to your daughters. The stated reason for throwing the game, it was said, was to limit the chance that someone on the team might get hurt, crippling the Colts’ chance of winning the Superbowl. Now that the team has lost the Superbowl, yet another narrative is complete because the Colts have not been rewarded for what they did — which, to my mind, was inexcusable.

Finally, a footnote. I won’t explain this fully, but somewhere tonight Brett Favre is laughing his ass off.

— Mark Barrett