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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

Formatting TYOTE for CreateSpace POD

January 26, 2011 By Mark 5 Comments

This post documents the workflow I followed while formatting my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE), for printing with CreateSpace. If you’re venturing down the same print-on-demand (POD) road I hope my experience makes your project a little easier. I also fervently hope this post reminds me of all the useful things I learned the next time I have a manuscript to format. (Had I not kept notes, ninety-percent of what follows would already be lost.)

As posted previously, I finalized my cover redesign, uploaded the files to CreateSpace, and got the proof back in short order. To my utter amazement, all of the decisions I made turned out exactly as I hoped, and I was quite pleased with the result.

But I worked hard for that happiness. [ Read more ]

Why Print Publishing Will Never Die

August 23, 2010 By Mark 8 Comments

Turn on your TV on Saturday or Sunday during the day and you’ll discover that the great majority of shows are infomercials. That is, they are program-length commercials paid for by the companies presenting products and services in those shows.

In the evening you’ll see this is no longer the case. Instead of infomercials you’ll find actual programs — either original or syndicated — presented by the network or channel you happen to be watching. These shows are interrupted by short blocks of ads that have been sold to advertisers in the same way that the larger blocks of time earlier in the day were sold to infomercial creators.

The only difference between the day and evening hours is that at night the station believes it can entice an audience to watch its own programs — and by extension the ads that run during those programs, which in turn allows the network to charge for those ads based on the size of audience they capture. More audience at any given time equals more advertising revenue.

Running infomercials during the day is an open admission that a network or channel has thrown in the towel not simply on creating their own programming for that block of time, but even on the idea that they might present syndicated content (sitcom reruns, for example) as a means of attracting an audience. For that time slot on that particular day, taking money up-front from an infomercial provider produces more revenue than would trying to attract an audience by traditional means, And because the station is getting paid in advance it doesn’t care whether anyone watches or not. (Think about that.) [ Read more ]

Price, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

March 23, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series of posts on that subject, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Months ago, when I began idly wondering what my short story collection should sell for, I repeatedly found myself thinking in relative terms. In hindsight that approach seems to make sense given the rampant uncertainty in the e-book market , but it was more coincidence than prescience. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t know how much the industry didn’t know.

The comparison that popped up the most was what I took to calling hamburger pricing. Invariably this analogy would present itself while I was driving, because it’s impossible to travel anywhere in the United States for more than fourteen minutes without passing a hamburger stand. (I made that statistic up, but please feel free to quote me. The world can always use more urban myths.)

What I kept thinking at the time was that whatever my short story collection was worth, it had to at least be worth the average cost of an average hamburger at an average drive-up window. Without doing any research I pegged that number around $4, and in a lot of ways I felt like the idea made sense.

Which of course it doesn’t. [ Read more ]

Price Ranges

March 10, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. In this week’s blog posts I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

More than once in my life I’ve had someone tell me they would like to own ItemX. When I asked how much ItemX cost, however, the person replied with, “I don’t know.”

Now, it’s not very often in our commercially saturated lives that we encounter a product which is outside our pricing experience. And that’s particularly true if we know enough about the product to know we want it. Which is why, when this scenario unfolds before me, I invariably respond like this: “Is it a dollar? A million dollars? Ten dollars? A hundred dollars? Ten hundred millions dollars?” And on and on, until the person calmly replies that one of those numbers is close to the mark. [ Read more ]