Publishing – Page 2

DIY Cover Design: GIMP vs. Inkscape

April 6, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

The first (and so far, only) two book covers I designed were done with GIMP. I got great help from Joleene Naylor on the first cover, and managed to flounder my way to solo completion with the second, but along the way I noticed some recurrent problems, particularly with regard to text, curves and anti-aliasing.

What I have learned over the past year or so is that all graphics software breaks down along two main lines: vector graphics and raster graphics. GIMP is commonly and accurately categorized as photo-editing software, but also belongs on the raster side of the graphics software divide. While photo-editing software can be incredibly powerful in its own right, because raster graphics are based on pixels, resizing raster graphics can also get you into serious trouble.

That’s not true for vector graphics, which are defined by mathematical relationships. Put together a snazzy logo in a vector program and you can scale that logo down to a business card or up to a billboard with no loss of detail. Yes, it is a miracle.

I have a few covers to design in the coming months — or years, at my current pace — and I plan on doing so, at least in part, using a vector graphics program called Inkscape. Like GIMP, Inkscape is open-source freeware and incredibly powerful. Also like GIMP, Inkscape is incredibly obtuse and difficult to learn, even if you’re otherwise comfortable with all things computer.

For example, suppose you want to combine two simple shapes as follows, using Inkscape:

After reading up on the program, following tutorials and learning about the power of nodes and paths, and playing with snazzy features like combine and union, to say nothing of delete segment, you might think the proper solution would be to overlap the two shapes, join them at nodes, then remove the line across the middle of the circle:

And you would be one hundred percent wrong. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Jane Friedman

April 2, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

First things first. Because nothing is ever easy in life, there are (at least) two Jane Friedman’s in the publishing world. One Jane is the CEO of Open Road. This post concerns the other Jane, who is the CEO of herself, and formidably so.

Back about five or six years ago, when the self-publishing craze blew up and all the hand-wringing inside publishing turned into shrieking and wailing in the streets, one of the people I ran across on the interweb was Jane Friedman, then at Writer’s Digest. While ably fulfilling her contractual duties Jane struck me as someone who didn’t just have a job, but genuinely enjoyed — and more importantly, was interested in — her line of work. When she later departed WD I was glad to see her hang out her own shingle and keep moving with the times, because I thought she had a lot to offer both new and veteran writers who were struggling to understand the rapidly shifting publiscape.

Flash forward half a decade and I just ran across the most recent iteration of Jane’s site, and I think you should stop by yourself. I don’t know Jane personally and I can’t vouch for her in any professional context, but one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that there’s a lot to be said for people who stick with their interests no matter what else might be happening. In a world — and particularly a disingenuous online universe — where everyone is always racing off to the next shiny object or embracing the latest transactional fad (or fraud), I think it’s worth paying attention to people who seem immune to such influences.

Jane’s blog is here, and if you’re interested in publishing, self-publishing, and how authors are transitioning between and navigating the two, you won’t be disappointed. Having been in a cave since 2010 I’m happy to have years of back posts to read through, and I’ve already found one or two that were genuinely informative.

Too, not only does Jane post regularly, but she maintains a presence on her site, which is also quite rare given the usual online advice about branding, social networking and becoming a micro-celebrity. For example, not only do I agree with just about everything she had to say in this recent post — yet another rarity, albeit largely because I’m a crank — but one of the few concerns I did have was mentioned in the comments, to which Jane herself replied. The only point I might add is to make your website mobile-responsive, as Jane’s site already is. Not only are most people using smartphones these days, meaning they’re looking at your content in a very small window, but in a few weeks Google is going to start factoring mobile-responsive web design into its page rankings.

(Don’t have a mobile-responsive site? Don’t panic. Anyone searching for your name or the title of one of your books will still have little or no trouble finding you on the first page of search hits. It’s just something to keep in mind when you’re putting up a site or doing a refresh.)

— Mark Barrett

Valuing Yourself and Your Work

March 30, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

On the heels of the previous post about money junkies it’s worth taking a moment to think about self-worth. The reason it’s an important topic is that if you’re not willing to set the floor on your own value, you can assume everyone else will set it at zero. In fact, only a few years ago there was a theory being floated that the smart play in the internet age was to give yourself away in every respect, including work you created.

Called the freemium pricing strategy, the idea — much like the overriding ethos of web development in general — was that eyeballs, marketing and branding are more important than anything else. Gather enough attention and you can cash in by monetizing your online celebrity. Now, if your product is celebrity that might be true, just as it’s probably true if you’re a money junkie and have lots of cash and employees to burn through. Likewise, if you have no compunction about abusing your own customer base, and in particular children and young adults, making free-to-play games can be profitable. Like street-savvy drug dealers, the makers of free-to-play games give their products away until users are hooked, then stick them with carefully engineered pricing strategies and deceptive promises that all but compel players to pony up real cash if they want to stay competitive.

Unfortunately, if you are an unknown, do not have a round of funding you can torch in order to attract your next round of funding, or you have a conscience, giving yourself and your work away will always yield exactly no money, which is problematic if you also like to eat and don’t want to live under a bridge. If you aspire to make a living doing something you love, or even doing something you hate, you’re going to have to give some consideration to your worth as a worker and as a human being. Depending on the state of the economy it’s entirely possible that the world will laugh in your face, particularly if the money junkies on Wall St. have blown the earning power of the average consumer to to smithereens and unemployment is through the roof, but still — at some point you have to draw a line in the sand.

Speaking of which, when you’re just starting out in your chosen field — or playing around until you figure out what you want to be when you grow up — it’s probably a good thing to be humble. Nobody likes a know-it-all or someone who is overly confident. If you’ve written a book and you’re sure it’s going to sell a million copies at $100 a piece — well, you get points for valuing yourself, but many more points off for being an idiot. By the same token, however, if you have zero confidence, even if only in your ability to bounce back from what will almost certainly be setbacks, you’re probably going to fail. [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

March 11, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

One problem with allowing people to publish their work without first taking the benevolent guiding hand of the publishing industry is that writers are left open to all sorts of potential exploitation. Just as it’s easy to take advantage of an elderly person who’s had a stroke and get them to sign all sorts of papers and statements and turn their lives over to virtual strangers, it’s easy to dupe young writers into making choices and deals that are not in their best interest.

That’s why I’m thrilled — thrilled — to see HarperCollins’ Jonathan Burnham taking such good care of Harper Lee and her recently discovered long-lost novel, Go Set A Watchman, which she apparently wrote prior to writing her rightly celebrated masterpiece, To Kill A Mockingbird. I get sick thinking how Lee might have been ill-served by a lesser white knight incapable of anticipating a jaded public’s dubious reaction and providing a preemptive and detailed forensic defense of such an important discovery:

“Everyone had believed it to been [sic] lost, including Harper Lee herself,” Burnham said. “You can see that it is written on a manual typewriter from the period. It has on the front of it the address where Harper Lee was living at the time in New York. But if you read the book, more importantly, only Harper Lee could have written this novel.”

Thank goodness! Because in the dark corners of the publishing world you can only imagine how easy it would have been for someone with fewer scruples to take an early draft of Mockingbird and pay a ghost writer to bash out a few new chapters on and old typewriter, using the resulting bastardized mishmash not only to exploit Harper Lee but rip off an adoring and trusting public. Fortunately, that has obviously not happened. [ Read more ]

Digital Natives Prefer Print

March 1, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Ran across an article in the WaPo that was interesting both for its contents and the fact that the paper is now owned by Jeff Bezos, emperor of Amazon:

Frank Schembari loves books — printed books. He loves how they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place.

Schembari is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American University, and paging through a thick history of Israel between classes, he is evidence of a peculiar irony of the Internet age: Digital natives prefer reading in print.

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, it’s definitely worth a read. Despite Silicon Valley prophecy, human beings are apparently not so easily led to the digital light.

— Mark Barrett

Amazon Outrage Redux Ad Nauseum

August 8, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Apparently more people are noticing that Amazon doesn’t care about authors or readers or anything other than making as much money as possible:

After months with Jeff Bezos’ fingers planted in their eyeballs, hundreds of pissed off writers are buying a full-page middle finger to Amazon. Their message is clear: please stop screwing us in order to promote world retail domination.

Sensing vulnerability, Google is attempting to ingratiate itself with authors and readers by teaming up with Barnes and Noble to provide a trivial service in a few public-relations-rich locations:

Starting on Thursday, book buyers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day deliveries from local Barnes & Noble stores through Google Shopping Express, Google’s fledgling online shopping and delivery service.

The big picture takeaway is of course that none of these companies care about you except to the extent that you can be co-opted or exploited in their wars with each other. Moral of the story: stop caring about technology, technology companies, or anything other than your work and your readers. And maybe your local independent bookstore if you’re lucky enough to have one. That’s where the love is.

Update: In counterattacking on the authorial front, Amazon manages to shoot itself in the foot, fall down a flight of stairs, bounce out the door, roll into the street in front of a steamroller, then to stagger to its feet only to be crushed by a highly rated piano that unfortunately did not quality for free shipping:

The freshest part of Amazon’s call to arms was the history lesson. It recounted how the book industry hated mass-market paperbacks when they were introduced in the 1930s, and said they would ruin the business when they really rejuvenated it. Unfortunately, to clinch its argument, it cited the wrong authority:

“The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.”

This perceived slur on the memory of one of the 20th century’s most revered truth-tellers might prove to be one of Amazon’s biggest public relations blunders since it deleted copies of “1984” from readers’ Kindles in 2009.

Amazon has apparently also decided to pick a fight with Disney, thereby opening up a war on two fronts in flagrant disregard for historical precedent.

— Mark Barrett

Making the Move to Mobile Web Design

July 16, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

After taking eight of the previous twelve months off from the haphazard blogging I do here on Ditchwalk, I knew when I picked up the mouse again that I needed to redesign the site to reflect a broader but also more personal focus. Less platform and profession, more craft and art. Less business and commerce, more being and seeing.

What I did not fully comprehend until I took up that task in February was that a sea change had taken place in computing over the previous two years, and that I would need to factor that change into the redesign of Ditchwalk. (I had noticed aspects of the change, but because I can be fairly slow on the uptake I didn’t perceive those dissonant experiences as part of a fundamental metamorphosis in computing.)

In retrospect, the loudest and most prominent signal came from Microsoft with it’s release of Windows 8. Unlike previous versions, Windows 8 came with a default desktop environment that emulated the screen of a mobile device, including touch-sensitive tabs perfect for use on tablet displays — then an exploding technology. As someone who has never owned a smartphone or tablet I reacted with a practiced and oblivious roll of the eyes because Microsoft is always trying to drive computing in directions that favor its various monopolies, often with disastrous results. What I did not realize was that the decision to try to kill off the desktop PC was not a sign of active corporate idiocy, it was a sign of reactive corporate idiocy.

During the two years following the release of Windows 8 Microsoft first denied it had made a mistake, then belatedly began trying to undo the damage it had done to its own brand by once again attempting to force everyone that used its products to adopt another self-serving interface metaphor. Watching this ritual inanity play out further convinced me that Microsoft’s initial decision was just another blind lurch by a company that cannot perceive its own meaning in the marketplace, but that was a mistake on my part. [ Read more ]

The Best Blog Post Ever

July 6, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

This is the best blog post ever. Now you know.

You now also know how keywords work. And don’t work.

— Mark Barrett

It’s Not About the Money

June 26, 2014 By Mark 2 Comments

Last week author Tony Horowitz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his tragicomic experience writing an e-book:

Last fall a new online publication called The Global Mail asked me to write about the Keystone XL pipeline, which may carry oil to the United States from the tar sands of Canada. The Global Mail promoted itself as a purveyor of independent long-form journalism, lavishly funded by a philanthropic entrepreneur in Australia. I was offered an initial fee of $15,000, plus $5,000 for expenses, to write at whatever length I felt the subject merited.

At the time I was researching a traditional print book, my seventh. But it was getting harder for me to feel optimistic about dead-tree publishing. Here was a chance to plant my flag in the online future and reach a younger and digitally savvy audience. The Global Mail would also be bankrolling the sort of long investigative journey I’d often taken as a reporter, before budgets and print space shrank.

Alas, things did not go well. If you’re eying the e-book boom Horowitz’s piece is a must-read because it comes from someone in the trenches, not someone selling you a shovel that you will eventually only use to dig your own grave. Based on the totality of his experience I don’t begrudge Horowitz his eventual retreat, but if you’re new to the writing game I think it’s important to understand what has and has not changed during the past few years of publishing upheaval.

Making money as a writer — to say nothing of making writing a career, even for a few years — has always been brutally hard. If you’re passionate and lucky and plucky and willing to do whatever it takes, and you meet the right people at the right time, and you have the chops, and you’re less trouble than you’re worth, you can, maybe, get a gig. If you do a decent job and meet your deadline you might get another gig, or even an actual job with regular hours and benefits and somebody else paying two thirds of your social security taxes. But it’s hard. Always.

While the e-book craze is in large part being driven by people who hope to profit from doing so, and it’s always nice to make a buck, the real value of e-books, and by extension, self-publishing, is the fact that you no longer have to ask someone for permission to write what you want to write. You may not make any money following your bliss, but when was that ever guaranteed? The best you could usually hope for was to write for hire, to get someone to pay you for services rendered, then use that income to cover the cost of personal projects. Even if you were a literary lion your high-dollar advance came with expectations and limits.

If you want to make money as a writer you’re looking at a hard life, but it was always thus. What’s changed — what the e-book revolution and self-publishing are really about — is that everyone now has access. So while you’re right to think about how much money you can squeeze out of the marketplace with your talent and guile, take a moment to ballpark the opportunity cost of the self-publishing and internet distribution options currently available. What would it take to replicate those opportunities if you had to pay for them yourself? A billion dollars? Ten billion? A trillion?

The e-book market will sort itself out in time, at which point it will become just another market you can sell your services to if you aspire to be a working writer. What you no longer have to do is wait for someone to say yes if you’re willing to bet on yourself, and I see that change as priceless.

— Mark Barrett