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Tuesday, 6 October, 2009
- Rant 'o The Week
- School News
- Featured Courses
- Essay: E-books and Kindle readers
- Web Links
- Your News
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RANT 'O THE WEEK:
by WritersCollege.com Director Steve Morrill
After a
summer of stupefying humidity, we in Florida are finally moving into phony-fall. Real fall is a ways off yet but we had one teaser of a few days last week when the temperature dropped to a mere 75-80 and humidity to someplace less than swamp gas. I actually was able to open the front door and leave it open all day while I worked. (I have a fully screened front porch and my office looks out on that.)
Actually having the option to leave the front door open was a novelty too. I had not really closed it since mid-June. It was too swollen from the humidity to close. I just jammed it more-or-less into a position such that it looked closed if you didn't look too closely, and went to bed, or went shopping or went away for the weekend. Several times I tried sanding it by hand or with a pitiful little electric sander, to no avail. Finally, in mid-September, I got a handyman who came out and spent three and a half hours with sander and circular saw—taking the door off its hinges and working in the front yard on sawhorses he brought with him—and got the door to fit. For the first time in three months I could lock it.
In a few more weeks, with luck, real fall will arrive and with it the annual change of colors. What's that, you say? Florida has no colors, other than chlorophyll, the trees never drop their leaves? I refer, of course, to automobile license plates; in the winter we get all those pretty new colors driving (very, very slowly) around our highways and byways. We love 'em because they are almost our entire economy. Come to Florida! Spend your money! Keep my taxes low! Here's a margarita! On with the newsletter now:
SCHOOL
NEWS: We have several new courses to announce. Check them out in more detail at the Catalogs page:
Experimental Fiction Joining the Dialogue with Tantra Bensko: with Tantra Bensko. If you enjoy the idea of pushing beyond the boundaries of ordinary fiction, this course will allow you to play, and to forge new directions in literature which remain compelling for the reader. You will also consider how you fit into the history and ongoing presentation of experimental fiction, delve into new parts of your psyche, and start making connections with magazines.
Publish Your Writing Creative Writing that Creates Income!with Ned McIntosh: This course offers a series of progressive one-page Teaching Guides of the crafts of writing and submitting, leading up to the specific goals of submitting works for publication. The course should help determine whether the student has both the talent and drive necessary to become a published author.
FEATURED
COURSES: (Also see our homepage for daily featured courses)
Essays and Personal Stories: This is a class for any writer who is motivated to write short pieces based on his or her personal experiences, explorations, dreams, longings, emotions, thoughts, and/or ideas. These pieces can be targeted to magazines or complied into a book.
Flash Fiction: Flash fiction, when crafted with care, works within the boundaries of the genre and on the periphery of traditional storytelling. In the world of flash, a compelling story can be told in fewer than a hundred words!
Nonfiction Book Proposals: The best kept secret to marketing nonfiction books is that you don’t have to write the entire book. In this course, you will learn about all of the elements that need to be included in a book proposal and how to put them together for maximum effect on the agent and/or editor, setting you on the path to signing a contract with a publisher.
Shadow Writing: Are you curious about writer’s block (a myth), the dreams, longings, cravings, obsessions, and needs that distract you from your writing because of the strength of their grip? Do you suspect that there are depths that you can’t quite reach in your writing for fear of turning up something unpleasant? In this class, we will turn toward these things. Step on the accelerator and move into one of the darkest places you’ve ever been as a writer—your own unconscious.
Web Presence for Writers: Develop a basic knowledge of the internet, how it functions, how web sites are made, and the steps necessary to build your own web site. Learn how easy it is to have your web presence!
ESSAY: E-books and Kindle Readers
by WritersCollege.com Director Steve Morrill
What has held the e-book back for almost a decade is lack of agreement on a standardized reader. I've seen several hand-held readers proposed since the 1990s. Nothing came of those prototypes because nobody wanted to make the investment in production and marketing without some guaranteed buyer base. Remember the old truism that you can recognize the earliest pioneers because they're the people with arrows in their backs. So everyone held back, perhaps remembering the startups of home tape recorders (I can think of four different kinds of tape formats, three of which fell by the wayside after expensive investments) or how Sony's far superior Betamax was deep-sixed by cheaper VHS format video recording tape. Perhaps they were waiting for some industry leader to just step in and dictate the standard, much like people waited through a dozen different early home computer operating systems for IBM to finally make up its mind to get into that game.
And Kindle is a dictated standard. It comes out of the starting gate with a whoosh, thanks to being part of Amazon.com's immense stable of products. But the Kindle is still $600. Kindle is already trying to create a captive market, with offerings exclusive to its device only.
That strategy will work briefly, but the floodgates seem to be opening, driven to great extent by the fact that the problem of a standard device may be solving itself by becoming irrelevant. When a book can be sent to any display device, much as music and movies can be sent now, and as more and more people invest in cell phones/PDAs like Blackberry and iPhone, then publishers no longer need to produce a book reader just so their customers can read their books.
I predict three generations of Kindles: the first is now passing, replaced by today's second generation. In a year or two there will be a third generation of Kindle. One of those is destined for the Museum of Modern Art and there will be no fourth generation unless Amazon.com can make it competitive with a cell phone.
Mix in things like tablets you write on interactively and that replace home computers (and the MacBook Air is an early entry here, though not a tablet per se and Apple will be selling a tablet-based laptop by year's end) and I see people reading online news, online magazines, books, watching movies and TV or playing music, all on phones or on tablets the size of small legal pads.
Now to the media itself. E-books are only part of the huge revolution in publishing—and a logical outgrowth of the development of better ways of reading them. Some of us have been looking at POD (print on demand), for example, as the new wave in publishing. Yes, it is making it possible to anyone to publish a book, be that for good or ill. But it is also making it possible for popular authors, the rare few who can sell books, to bypass the archaic and uneconomical traditional publishing route. Why settle for 10-15 percent on a book cover price (if you're lucky enough to get cover price royalties) when you can get half and set your own price?
But we may have been shortsighted in assuming that POD was the wave of the future. In fact, why settle for half of the price when you can produce, for less effort, an e-book, and keep all of the price, or at least even more of it?
Let's briefly recap some of the major publishing costs for three kinds of publishing:
TRADITIONAL:
- Printing requires offset presses and huge investments
- Warehousing
- Distribution is by UPS, with huge monthly invoices
- Shelf space in bookstores is bought or wrestled for and limited in all dimensions including time
POD:
- Printing is one-by-one on photocopy machines
- Warehousing does not exist
- Distribution is by Post Office
- Shelf space in bookstores does not exist though there are some exceptions
E-BOOK:
- Printing does not exist or the customers print it themselves
- Warehousing does not exist
- Distribution is by electronic means at no significant cost
- Shelf space in bookstores does not exist
Other costs:—editing, layout, marketing—are too variable and may exist with all these formats, so we'll leave them out of the formula for the moment.
I'm experimenting with an e-book now. You can see it at:
http://www.vacationfunflorida.com
and we sell it at three price points, one for electronic transmission, one for printing it out ourselves and mailing it hardcopy, one for selling it as hardcopy face-to-face (we leave out the cost of postage). Sales are poor but we do sell a few. I think more marketing and especially more linked-to type marketing will help in the long run. I'm not discouraged.
One reason for not being discouraged is that it costs so little to produce an e-book, it costs nothing at all to store it, nothing to ship it and the person at the other end of the wire pays to print it (though we also can do that for a fee).
I thinking of producing e-book versions of abbreviated course materials for the five courses I teach here for WritersCollege.com. (Why not, the material, running to a hundred or more pages per course, already exists.) More exciting to me, probably just because it's so—pardon the pun—novel, I'm writing a fiction/fantasy novel and am thinking of creating a web site and ongoing e-chapter system for that. Readers would be able to keep up via a newsletter and can offer feedback as I write the book. Is there any money in this? I will find out, but does it really matter? I'll have a completed book at the end that I can sell in any of several ways. And any fan input would be nice and having a fan base is no bad thing when approaching a publisher.
E-books are certainly going to be a big part of the future of publishing. Whether they totally eclipse the offset printing press is not really the point. The point is that e-books are a relatively simple technology that can permit the author to reach the reader with fewer production steps and fewer people in the way—each of whom wants a financial cut.
Here's a comparison: Before 1850 or so, if you wanted a picture of a landscape on your wall, you hired a painter. If you wanted an image in your book or newspaper, you hired an artist. Later, anyone could do this with a digital camera. Now the latest iPhone built-in camera can take a 3-megapixel photo, which is of publishable quality. An e-book is to publishing what a camera-phone photograph is to the Mona Lisa. And, as with da Vinci's work, the ultimate test is not the frame or the paint—not the specific medium—but the content of the work.
WEB LINKS:
No webbies today. I'll try to have some for next week.
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