Anatomy of an Online Launch Party

My publisher has set up an online launch party to celebrate the release of Howard Carter Saves the World. I've had a couple of people ask me what an "online launch party" was and what it is for.

It's a Facebook event, so it will take place on social media. Specifically, it is a page they set up that I can invite people to (consider yourselves invited) where I will spend a large part of the day on Tuesday  talking to readers, answering questions, sharing stories, posting more of my illustrations and silly artwork from the world of Howard Carter, sharing previously-recorded readings from the book, and generally having a digital hootenanny.

Fun fact: Because it was set up by my publisher, who live in the UK, it technically starts at midnight BST. I'm not sure if that means that the book drops on Amazon and elsewhere at that time (5:00 pm here in the Pacific Northwest, if I'm not mistaken).

I'll have some silly giveaways, additional writing, and a limited number of autographed postcards with one of the aforementioned silly illustrations on it that I will be sending out to a lucky few.

Howard Carter lives in a world that is rife with silliness and much of it leant itself to my penchant for illustration and faux ephemera, so there's quite a lot of it lying about waiting to deepen the world that is introduced in Howard Carter Saves the World.

All are welcome to stop by! You can find us here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1396956627287554/

More to come!

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You: Howard Carter Saves the World

BIG NEWS about BIG ROBOTS!

Well, books about big robots, anyway...

This week, I signed a contract with a small UK-based publisher called Crooked Cat Publishing to bring Howard Carter Saves the World to bookstores. The official announcement was made yesterday via social media.

I've been bouncing off the walls ever since.

As you may recall, Howard Carter is the novel that I wrote in public, posting chapter-by-woefully-unedited-chapter live and in front of a studio audience. (No laugh tracks allowed!) The results were somewhere between a coming of age story and a 1950's alien invasion serial. Most of all, it was an ode to all the fun and funny science fiction that I enjoyed as a much younger man and a reaction to how overwhelmingly dour and dark science fiction has become.

Which means that some of you read along as I wrote it, putting that first, imperfect, draft of Howard Carter's adventures up as they unfolded. You've been here for the free short story days and all the posts that have charted the path from idea to publication.  I'm inviting you to come with me on the next step of the journey as we prepare Howard for his debut at Amazon and other online booksellers.

This is the part where I tell you how I need your help.

Crooked Cat press operates on a model that has become popular with many small presses. Howard Carter will debut as an eBook under the Crooked Cat imprint, available from the publisher's site and everywhere that eBooks are sold. If the eBook sells well enough, it will get a print run, and we'll all be able to put a physical book of paper and ink on our shelves.

Which would be lovely, but the real goal is to put out a book that is good enough for you to read and fall in love with, one that you love enough to not only read but to recommend to your friends. I've worked in publishing at enough different levels to know one thing for certain: positive word of mouth is how success happens.

More later.

- Scott

Cover Story: The Mermaid Stair by Maggie Secara

I just realized today how long I've been procrastinating writing up the cover design for Maggie Secara's newest book, The Mermaid Stair, published in May by Crooked Cat in e-book and paperback.

This one was fun because I got to do some hand illustration, and who doesn't like to draw Mermaids?

Late last year, Maggie contacted me to see if I would be interested in doing another cover for her newest book in the Harper Errant series. The main thing she asked for that day was a line drawing of a famous mer-creature that appears in a Pictish stone carving in Scotland. This twin-tailed creature would be the Morven and would play heavily into the plot of the story.

The Morven sketch done, I turned my hand to the cover of the new novel. This time, we would go blue, naturally, and I wanted to get my hand in with a real pencil. I began to draw Mermaids of all sorts, mostly tiny doodles the size of my thumbnail (hence the term) and finally settled on an idea that would blend the digital and the handwork.

For the sake of blending the series covers together (I hate it when they change covers midway through a series and they no longer look good together on the shelf) I stuck with the same font treatment and the 2:1 arrangement of the color field.  The blue field naturally leant itself to this as a stylized sea.

My first pass was of the Morven drawing, this time treated as a block stamp as I'd done before with the Dragon Ring and green man of the previous covers.  This lacked the oomph we were looking for, so I went back to my sketchbook and biggie-sized my favorite of the mermaid sketches and began to play with it in Photoshop and Illustrator.

The goal, once again, was to get the woodblock effect even though I was now working with a more naturalistic drawing than in the past. To play with that effect, and inspired by several genuine old woodblocks I had found in a Dover book, I added erratic horizontal lines to imply sea and tide...

I was closer, but it looked a bit too busy and didn't - to my mind - echo the time-travel aspects of these stories. The first book featured a dragon that had been derived from a line drawing by a noted folklorist, Ari Berk, and the second utilized a 16th century embroidery pattern as the basis for the green man.

I turned to one of the images that had inspired the sea lines in the previous pass and with a bit of juggling of elements, discovered that it fit beautifully within the curl of the mermaid's tail. The whole image encapsulated the present/past nature of Maggie's hero and his friends and, I thought, did an excellent job of carrying the cover.

Thankfully, Maggie and her publisher agreed and we were settled. For a fuller discussion of my approach to cover design and the use of color and imagery in the digital bookselling world, visit this post:  Judged by its cover: And introduction to book design.

Click the image below to visit the author's blog and webpage to learn more about the writing of the series.

Death & Taxes: The IRS, Amazon, my dad's library, and Book Pricing

Book pricing is in the news again. The US Dept of Justice has filed antitrust lawsuits against the Big Six publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to fix prices on e-Books (which would be illegal). The complaint stems from something we've talked about a lot: Amazon's efforts to unilaterally define the value of e-Books at rock-bottom prices in order to sell more Kindles.

There's a lot of inside baseball here, and if you want to see it from the publisher's point of view, you can read the open letter from Macmillian president John Sargent over on Tor.com. Book pricing is a complex issue and I've been searching for a real-world analogy, something I can point to that will prove my thesis on the perils of training the world to expect literature to cost $.99 (or to be free).  Turns out I didn't need to look farther than the outstretched hand of the tax man.

Believe it or not, the United States Internal Revenue Service has a lot to say on the subject of book pricing. And what they have to say has had a profound effect on the perceived value of books in the marketplace.  It's one of the few places where the market for used books has lessons to teach us about the market for new ones.

Bear with me a moment as I put on my storytelling hat...

My dad and I have always been fond of the idea behind Henry Ward Beecher's marching orders: “A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. I library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.”

That's a lovely sentiment from Mr. Beecher but what happens to those books when you are gone?

I've been sorting the final stacks of boxes that were once my dad's library. He passed away three years ago and I'm still shifting through the boxes and looking for places to donate the ones I don't have room for. Every time I think I'm done, mom says "Have you looked in those boxes in the attic?"

For the most part, these are books I already own or simple aren't interested in. Those precious to me or the family or those in which I have a particular interest I've already sent to live on my own shelves back in Washington. The rest must find other homes, preferably homes that will continue to nurture the love of literacy that my dad spent his life kindling in me.

What does this have to do with book pricing?

Death and taxes being life's two constants, it seems inevitable that they would somehow collide in a way that impacts pretty much every other aspect of life -- including buying and selling books. Hopefully, everyone in the United States knows that donating an item to charity allows you to deduct that item's "Fair Market Value" from your taxes for that year as if you had made a monetary donation in that amount.

This is how the IRS defines fair market value:

Fair market value.   Fair market value (FMV) is the price that property would sell for on the open market. It is the price that would be agreed on between a willing buyer and a willing seller, with neither being required to act, and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts.

                                                         http://www.irs.gov/publications/p561/ar02.html#d0e139

Sounds simple enough, right? I mean, books have the market price printed on the cover. Publishers sell them for that price, so it seems simple enough, right?

Not so fast.

The chore of determining the fair market value of most items falls to the tax payer seeking the deduction and woe betide the person who gets it wrong. The penalties for over-estimating the value of donations are prohibitively steep. And I'm sad to say that no matter what the publisher prints on the cover, the FMV for books has little or nothing to do with what they cost at Barnes & Noble.

Donate your books to Goodwill, and you can expect to claim Goodwill's value for those books. They will usually sell them for somewhere between $1.00 and $3.00 each regardless of their rarity or condition. You can't claim more than they are worth on the open market, and no market is more open than Goodwill.

Fair enough. But what if I donate them to a library? Or my church? Or a prison literacy program?  Having done exactly that -- literally by the truckload and with the receipts to prove it -- I wondered what my family might claim as a deduction for those books.

The answer: From $1.00 to $3.00 for hardbacks. Because that's what those libraries, churches, and prisons could theoretically buy them for if they bought them from Goodwill or the Salvation Army.  It doesn't matter that for the most part, the libraries of the world wouldn't be caught dead buying books from those sellers, that's their "Fair" market value, defined by the free market.

In IRS Publication 561, the tax agency has defined the 'Fair Market Value' of most goods as the price two honest people can be expected to arrive at if one sells it to the other. For cars, it's the Kelly Blue Book value. But for books as the amount charged not by used bookstores in your area, but as the amount charged by Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

It's the Law of Unintended Consequences in full force.

Even if Half Price Books operates in your area, selling Stephen King hardbacks by the truckload at 1/2 their face value, the IRS wants you to declare their value as $3.00 per copy or explain why. And that explanation had better come in the form of a professional appraisal.

The cover price of the average new hardback novel is about $26.00. And to be fair to our friends at thre IRS, unless you are buying a signed first edition no one really expects that valuation to hold once you've taken the item home. It's like driving a car off the lot depreciates the car -- this is the way of things.

By charging too little for books for too long, these national thrift store chains have had a profound effect on the perceived value of used books. A perception that has taken the force and effect of law unless you care to pay for a professional appraisal.

I checked with my tax preparer, and it's not worth fighting them over it. Either pony up for a professional appraisal (which will also be affected by the degradation of market value) or take your medicine and collect your books for their content, not their value.

If you've ever discovered a rare gem in a thrift store and paid a song for it, you really have no right to complain.

Here's where we pick up the thread of the multi-faceted dispute between the publishers, Amazon, and the US government. The publishers have, for most of their existence, defined the retail price of their product. As they used to tell us at Borders, you can't very well threaten to go down the street to some other publisher and buy Stephen King's new book. If you want to sell King's books, you have to buy them from King's publisher at their asking price.  If you discount them, that's up to you.

Enter Amazon.com and the uncertainty of the brave new world of e-books. Amazon came out of the gate insisting that the fair market value for e-books (regardless of what they may cost to produce) is $9.99 or less.  They trained the market to expect e-books to be less than ten bucks, and to expect most of them to be a dollar or even free.  And in spite of voices raised in protest (including mine) the publishers mostly went along with it.  Even when they started to realize that they were eroding the fair market value of their product as surely as Goodwill has incidentally eroded the value of used books, Amazon was still the only game in town... until Steve Jobs reversed his previous assertion that books were dead and offered publishers a better deal: the "Agency Model".  It was a better deal that publishers were able to leverage into a (somewhat) better deal with Amazon.

All well and good.  But if they cooperated in any way, that's market collusion and it's illegal. Enter the US Attorney General and the current lawsuit against publishers for price-fixing.

What a mess.

The big publishers aren't going to come out well in this. The DOJ thinks they've got a good case, and they probably do.  But even if they defeat the suit by DOJ, (and there's a settlement already in the offing) they already can't afford the protracted battle.

Big Publishing may or may not be an outdated model. They might crumble under the weight of this thing, or they may consolidate further and get even bigger -- either way, there will always be publishers of some kind, whatever size they may be or whatever name might appear on their letterhead. Self-publishing is well and good, but there will always be writers who don't want or aren't able to do it themselves and there will always be people who will stand up and say "Give it to us and we'll be the middle-men for a cut of the take."  It won't look like it did in Salinger's day, but it already doesn't. Those days are gone.

Here's all I care about: the written word has to have a market value that allows writers to make a living writing it. If the agency model falls, if the seller-side model of pricing wins and booksellers set the price too low for the real professionals to stay in the market, we will all suffer for it. Even if it is more legal than what we've already got.

The bulwark of our literary canon is and always will be the professional writer devoted to holding up the literary mirror against all efforts to cover it. Without that professionalism and dedication to craft, we might get more books shoveled at us over the transom in the anarchic e-book free-for-all but we will get less and less of the real quality that already seems too rare.

This is the challenge of writers and publishers going forward: This is a tough thing to describe in a way that is interesting, sounds rational, is devoid of alarmist warnings but isn't laden with statistics, but it's paramount to our future literary legacy that we preserve the value of books.

If we don't, we will one day be gone and we will have left our heirs with a legacy that they can't even give away.

Cover Story: Designing 'The Dragon Ring'

What more can any man hope for than to sit and be creative among friends?

When it hits the digital shelves of your local online bookstore, it will be called The Dragon Ring but when I read the first draft of Maggie Secara's sweeping fantasy epic, it was still titled Sparrow's Dragon.

I was enchanted. I remember thinking: Boy, I'd love to do the cover for this...

So when Maggie told me her publisher was looking for a cover designer, as you can imagine, my hand shot up. Luckily, I've done some web design for Maggie in the past, so when I stepped forward, she welcomed me with open arms. We talked about. We talked some more. Then I received a sketch of a dragon from noted folklorist, artist, and author Ari Berk and Maggie said "Yes, something like that" and it was on.

How could anyone pass up the opportunity to put themselves in the middle of so much talent?

Cover design is more than typesetting and Photoshop manipulations; there's always an element of art direction and packaging.  The photos or artwork has to be gathered from the illustrators, the client has to feel that the images and typefaces chosen correctly reflect their desires, balanced, of course with legibility and style.

And somewhere in there, you have to create something that also fits your own aesthetics.

Photo from Wikipedia: Used under Creative Commons License

The description of the eponymous Dragon Ring is that it's viking in origin.  Appropriately, the sketch that Professor Berk sent me is loosely based on the intricate viking-era serpent carvings like those found in the Urnes Stave Church in Norway. (see photo)

I took Ari's sketch, fed it into Photoshop and started sending ideas to Maggie for comment. One of the hurdles for any project of this sort is the mental image the author holds of their ideal cover, their ideal heroine, or in this case, the ideal artifact at the center of their story. In this case, I was lucky enough to have full participation from an author who understood that cover design is not about illustrating the story, but about creating an accurate impression of the story inside. And not to get in the way of the reader opening the book to begin with.

Fifteen or so emails later, we had a couple of final ideas to send to the publisher for them to choose from.

This is a unique experience in many ways and one of those things that distinguish the "Indie" authors and small presses from the big guys. At larger publishers, the covers are very polished. The cover art is chosen mostly for marketing concerns and often drawn from stock sources rather than commissioned from artists who have read the book and discussed them with the authors.  The authors are given very little input on cover designs in the classic publishing model. I've heard stories of authors managing to get covers changed, but not very often and only with great hardship.

That's neither good nor bad. I certainly understand why it has evolved that way. I've talked to authors who would have to back a Brinks truck up to my studio to get me to take their call. People who cannot put away "This is pretty" and say "This will get people to open the book (or click on the thumbnail) and give my words a chance to capture their hearts."

Maggie gets that. Gets it in spades.

What else can I say about Maggie? We've been the 21st century equivalent of penpals for quite awhile now. She is part of my online writing group and one of the many great and surprisingly close friends I have met online but never in person. She's been a great friend and an excellent sounding board for ideas when I'm contemplating anything to do with history.


Dragon Ring has a lot of time travel in it, and seeing someone with genuine historical chops take on a story like that is always exciting. Maggie is the force behind Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge, a one-stop shop for all matters Elizabethan. Whenever my work wanders into the time of Shakespeare, as when I was writing the first draft of Mummer's Masque last year, Maggie's website is my first stop. (She has handily turned the website into a book, which you can buy in all the finest online establishments).


Look for The Dragon Ring from Crooked Cat Publishing, available March 16, 2012! 

Cover Design by Scott Perkins, Ari Berk, Illustrator.
Copyright 2012, Crooked {Cat} Publishing.

Ben Harper, an American living in England, is an organizational guru with a popular British TV program and a great family. It may not be the career his theatrical and musical training prepared him for, but it’s a good one, and he does have a definite knack for bringing order out of chaos. But for all his success, Ben remains unhappy, aching to find a channel for his pent-up creative talents. 

A chance meeting in the pub leads to an offer from some guy who claims to be Oberon king of Faerie. Oberon--if that's who he is--tells Ben that he can help him with the career crisis in return for a favor. All Ben needs to do is take a dragon arm ring back in time and deliver it to Alfred the Great so the medieval king can make peace with the Vikings and get down to forging modern England. If this doesn’t happen, Oberon says, the world Ben knows will cease to exist... 

The Dragon Ring is filled with music, adventure, faerie magic, and dry humor. It also has solid roots in history and folklore, and some indebtedness to the worlds of Brian Froud, Neil Gaiman, and Marie Brennan. 

Read a synopsis and sample chapters here on Maggie's blog.  

Judged By Its Cover: An Introduction to Book Design

Fact: 31% of book purchases are impulse purchases[1].

I haven't talked much recently about the business of publishing because I've been focusing on writing.  Recently, I put on my graphic designer hat to design the cover of an upcoming novel, and before I take it off, I wanted to talk about that a bit.

While I was researching the design, I trawled through the dusty remainder bins of the internet and what I found indicates a disconnect between the burgeoning independent book industry... and its cover.

I spent years working in bookstores, watching patrons peruse the shelves, picking up book after book and putting it back without so much as glancing at the jacket copy.  What were they looking at?  Title? Cover art? What was it about the books they put back that didn't appeal to them?

I posit that in many of those cases it was the cover. Something about the cover got in the way of them opening the book and reading the words.

I admit the possibility of bias, but I've watched it happen too often to discount it. Publishers agree with me.

In fact, in "ye olde days" (which was actually about six years ago) the best thing a publisher could do to get a book in a customer's hands was to make a deal with a bookstore to put it on a table, an endcap, or on the shelf with the cover facing out. This is called a "Co-op" and it's been the way of things for decades in both the book and music businesses. Heck, they do it in grocery stores too.

Why does it work? Because publishers know that a decent cover can get you to pick up a book. And if you pick it up, you're significantly more likely to form a bond with it, and ultimately buy it. [2]

Here in the future (cue beepy futuristic Star Trek noises) where we buy most of our books online, all book covers get the full-face treatment (which is awesome) but they're shown the size of your thumb print (which is not).

On the screen of the laptop I'm using to type this, Amazon displays thumbnails at about 100 pixels by 140 pixels, or approximately 1/3 inch wide by about a half inch tall.

That's about this big:

Consumers do indeed judge a book by its cover. Is it logical or fair? No. Does it happen? Constantly. Do I judge a book by its cover? No, but I do judge publishers by them. . . or rather I take it as a measure of their faith and how devoted they are to marketing the book.

As both a reader and as a designer, the cover art tells me how seriously the publisher takes the book. It tells me that they invested the time, energy, and money in getting a designer and a book packager in a room together to give the book a visual identity and that ineffable thing we used to call "shelf presence" but I suppose we should start calling "thumbnail presence"  that gets people to pick it up and give the words a chance to seal the deal.

At best, a book cover will make the buyer click on it (or pick it up) but really the best you can hope for in the thumbnail age is for it not to get in the way.

The fake cover shown above is frankly a bit pedestrian, but it works.  It's imperfect to say the least, but it's still perfectly adequate cover for a science fiction book about melty buildings. I cobbled it together from a picture my wife took of the Experience Music Project which, frankly, looks a bit like Tupperware that melted in the dishwasher.  (I felt bad doing this to a perfectly good photo. Behold the majesty of my lens flares!)

If nothing else, it proves that you don't have to be Saul Bass to make a workable book cover or poster. This isn't great, but it wouldn't hurt your book sales. Even with all the stops pulled, it still works as a cover.

Why?  Because it adheres to some basics of proportion and composition (more on that in a minute). It uses a clean font that has been optimized for contrast with its background. There is nothing about this image that would make you skip clicking on it.

Let's look at a different picture that gathers together many of the most frequent cover design errors that I see as I trawl through Amazon's lists:

This is illegible. I see it all the time and it doesn't work on any level. A loopy handwriting font is bad enough, but it's in a color that isn't a sufficient contrast to the underlying image -- even in white against a black background as with the author's name you can't read it.

Note that this one barely works at a larger image size or higher resolution.  Even blown-up, the red subtitle is gone.

Graphic designers are so touchy about handwriting fonts that it's nearly legendary. (Type "Comic Sans" into a search engine sometime.)  In fact, I'm just shy of saying that all handwriting fonts should be banned from book covers entirely.  Except that I've seen them work, but only in very select circumstances and in the hands of a trained professional.

Sometimes it's easy to see why one things works and the other doesn't. Even with all the silly Photoshoppery, When the Buildings Melt "works" not because it's brilliantly executed -- it isn't -- but on simplicity alone. Just being legibile will get you a long way. The curly font murders Swear Not by the Moon in its bed before we ever get to the contrast and composition problems.

This isn't my best work, but it is a bit better.  At least you can read it.

The tapes and off-kilter type is very much a trend right now and it does look funky and youthful (I'm imagining this is a YA book). The font could be even clearer but I don't want to spend a lot of time on an example piece.

Note that I de-emphasized the author on this version just to make a point. Despite what our egos tell us, the least important part of a cover is the author's name. If you're not James Patterson or Steven King, your name isn't the prime selling point. It's a choice that not many are willing to take.

These aren't even extreme examples. Go through the lists of e-books uploaded by hopeful authors at any book site you care to name. You'll see every one of these problems and more that I haven't thought of.

The aesthetics of design are the work of a college degree and several library's worth of books.  Which is to say that they cannot be adequately encapsulated in a single blog post. So why bring it up at all? Because it's the place where so many small publishers and self-publishers fall short.

Book selling used to be all about getting booksellers to lay your book flat on a table or turned face out on a shelf. Give the book prominence of placement and the chance for the cover to work its wiles and you're halfway to a sale.  These days, it's all about clickable thumbnails.

A very basic understanding of graphic design is mandatory in that marketplace, but independent authors and small publishers the world over fail to fully appreciate the power of a thumbnail. If you don't believe me, go through the lists at your favorite online bookstore and pay attention to how many thumbnails are completely indiscernible.

Scott's First Rule of Design: "Possessing a copy of Photoshop does not make you a graphic designer any more than owning a stove makes me a chef."

I may be a foodie, I may even be an excellent cook, but it takes years of training, tasting, and all around hard work to become a chef. The best I can hope for is to be an enthusiastic amateur. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean I should open a restaurant. Technique is the product of training, taste is the product of training combined with experience. You cannot claim the funny hat without liberal helpings of both.

What you're going to turn out will be amateur work. That's okay. Make it the best amateur work you can. Honestly, you're ahead of the pack if your cover just doesn't actually deter sales.

Here are some very basic rules and/or guidelines:

1. Don't use Microsoft Word or Paint: MS Word & Paint are not adequate to the task. Your image will bust into pixels as you re-size it and you will be sad. Happily, you don't need the full Adobe Creative Suite. Photoshop "Elements" contains all the tools you're likely to need and only costs about $80.00. This is a business you're engaged in. Invest in your business.
2. Pixelation is bad. Work large and shrink it, don't work small and try to blow it up. While you're working, constantly apraise your image at every size it's likely to be viewed at. At art school, we were taught to think of every image as a postage stamp.
   
   
3. Use clear, strong, fonts in colors that contrast with their background. Keep it simple. Ornate fonts are your enemy and have to be applied very carefully if at all. If I can't read your title, the odds of me reading your book are diminished.
4. Learn the "Rule of Thirds" and stick to it. The Rule of Thirds is a quick way to attaining a decent level of composition and after awhile it becomes second nature -- without meaning to, I adhered to it even in the Swear Not By the Moon cover I posted above. The Wikipedia article on this topic really is pretty good. Click the link. Even professional designers and photographers only break the rule of thirds on purpose.
5. You do not have to use a photo. I see so may photos on book covers that I feel like someone, somewhere thinks it's a rule. It's not. Also, as we've seen, photos can complicate the legibility of your text. If you do want to use a photo, use your own if you can. Take the picture in the best possible lighting and at the largest format your camera allows.  Do not use a flash. Most bad digital photos can be made better simply by turning off the flash.
   
   If you feel you need to use someone else's photo, you need to familiarize yourself with licensing a fair use.  CreativeCommons.org is an excellent resource.  I urge you to use a photo that is in the Public Domain (the Library of Congress or Wikimedia Commons are excellent sources) or a Creative Commons image that the photographer licensed for commercial use.  If you don't, the image owner has every right to sue you.
6. Fonts belong to their designers. The same rules of photo and image licensing apply to fonts. When you choose a font, you must be sure you have permission to use it commercially. There are a lot of free fonts available. Shop around.  (Once again, the Creative Commons folks can help you out there. See above.)
   
   
7. The Three C's" Contrast, Clarity, and Composition. These are the three concerns you must always keep in mind as you're choosing every element of your design. As in storytelling, the parts are in service to the whole, not the other way around. I don't care how much you love the photo of the kids playing in the mud puddle, if it doesn't work, chuck it.
8. Go to a book store or a website that sells books and LOOK at the covers. Take note of what makes you want to click to see more and what doesn't. Go thou and do likewise.

---

[1] Source: Bowker: Making Information Pay 2009 -- GALLAGHER, KELLY (Bowker)

[2] “Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping” by Paco Underhill

Book news you might have missed in the shadow of larger events...

In the wake of world events, it's easy to lose track of even the biggest doings in the bookworld. Compared to earthquakes, volcanos, civil wars, air raids, and nuclear meltdowns (not necessarily in that order, of course) it gets difficult to think about anything else right now.

via: wikipedia commons

Even though I no longer get ink on my hands most days, I still try to read the whole newspaper every day, even when the headlines are less than encouraging.  My dad taught me that it's important to stay abreast of even the stories that seem less important or ones that wilt in the shadows of larger events.  Because those are the stories that are more likely to affect you directly, even if it takes awhile.

Here are three book-related news stories you might have missed in the shadows of the larger stories unfolding worldwide...


Neither a borrower, nor a lender be...

Earlier this week, Amazon apparently backed away from e-book lending, revoking access for the third party Kindle application "Lendle" which allowed those who signed up to lend e-books to others who had signed up for the service as well.  Only those willing to lend could borrow and vice-versa.  According to Lendle's initial statement, the letter they received from Amazon cited concerns that their app would hurt Kindle sales.


A day later, Lendle was back up and issued a statement saying that Amazon's concerns were with a part of their app which synced their service with the user's Kindle library.  Lendle deactivated the 'Book Sync' app and they were back in business.  How or why Book Sync was of concern wasn't entirely clear in the initial statements from either party.

"Late today, we received an email from an Associates Account Specialist at Amazon informing us that their concern only relates to our Book Sync tool, which syncs a user’s Kindle books with their Lendle account. Amazon informed us that if we disabled this feature, our access to the API, as well as our Amazon Associates account, would be reinstated. We appreciate Amazon’s willingness to modify the position stated in the original access revocation email and work with us to get Lendle back on line. We have complied with the request to disable the Book Sync tool (which was a very useful, but non-essential, feature of Lendle)."

-Lendle's official statment regarding revocation & reinstatement
http://lendle.me/amazon-api-revocation/

Was this another Amazon cockup and a demonstration that they've finally learned how to correct course and move on before it becomes a thing?  The difference in reasons cited between one day and the next would seem to imply that it was.  Actually, I hope it was, because it would indicate that Amazon is learning from their past missteps.

The ability to lend and borrow e-books is a step in the right direction for e-book providers and publishers.  As Neil Gaiman stated in the video I posted a few days ago, new authors are found via recommendations from friends.  "This was awesome, you have to read this, here borrow mine..." is a phrase that launched a thousand literary careers and a phrase that should never die out if the publishing industry wishes to thrive. 

An unsettling development...
The most recent iteration of the Google Books Settlement was rejected by the judge who is overseeing the case.  The judge found that the settlement was too much in favor of Google and gave them too much power in the developing digital marketplace.

"...Citing copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners. Judge Chin acknowledged that “the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” but said that the proposed agreement was “not fair, adequate and reasonable.”

Read the full story in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/technology/23google.html

Born to be Kurzweil'd
Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil and Baker & Taylor (a literary distributor) perhaps inadvertantly dragged his landmark Blio project into the fray surrounding AT&T's announced plan to buy T-Mobile.  Blio, you might recall, is a free e-reader app designed to create a truly immersive and interactive e-books experience.  I may not be anti e-book, but most of what they can do has been pretty pedestrian thus far.  The Blio is the happy exception and its abundant possibilities for cross-platform use legitimately wows me.

How all this will be impacted by the AT&T acquisition of T Mobile is anyone's guess at this point...

"Bob Nelson, president of B&T’s digital group, said the deal allows T-Mobile to deliver “premium bonus applications to its customers. Blio brings e-books to life, in vivid color and with a variety of enhanced features, including audio read along, Web browsing from inside the book and its patented Read Logic technology.”

-via Publisher's Weekly
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/46578-blio-b-t-ink-bundling-pact-with-t-mobile.html

And that's the highlights from this end of the publishing pool -- things I think we would be well served to pay attention to, even in light of more pressing concerns in Libya and Japan.

My thoughts continue to be with my friends in Japan and all across the Pacific Rim.  In case you've been living in a cave and haven't yet heard, you can donate $10 to the Japanese Red Cross by texting REDCROSS to 90999.  The amount will be added to your cell phone bill.  You can donate more, of course, by contacting the Red Cross directly.

Click to find out more

The Buggywhip Defense League

I'm a big fan of buggy whips, and you just can't find anywhere to buy them anymore.  Sad, really.

In recent weeks I've been accused of being a Luddite, a snob, a hipster, and a Luddite hipster snob.  Just because I prefer printed books to the digital ones.  Or was it for whining too much about Daylight Saving Time?

Might have been both.

Earlier today, someone sent me a link which implies I'm a "Book Fetishist", which has implications I don't care to delve into here.  Though here's a hint to the guys who wrote that: you're not going to win a booklover's heart by handing them a gutted book unless it was used to smuggle another book into the former Soviet Union or something.

Preferably with the smuggled book still inside.

I do love books.  I love the sensory experience of them and feel that I retain more of the text reading paper rather than the screen, but contrary to what is apparently a popular belief, I'm not anti e-book. Being anti e-book would be like being anti paperback. In point of fact, I'm fully in favor of someone making this digital marginalia idea from the New York Times a reality with all due haste.

If they do that, I will be first in line for my ticket.  Please make it available for the Kobo.


I am blessed with a personal library that runs into the thousands of books, some of which I inherited, some of which were gifts and some of which I bought when I was a bookseller and could get them at a steep discount.  I grew up surrounded by them and cannot imagine a house that feels homey without them.  Not everyone has that luxury and not everyone has the space to store them properly even if they can acquire such a collection.  Electronic formats allow someone to acquire such a collection at a significantly lower cost in terms of both money and space.

I don't think that any booklover in his right mind would begrudge someone that joy over a simple matter of silicon & pixels versus paper & ink.

Just mind those user's agreements.  Read it before you click "I agree".  Know what you're signing away in terms of rights and privileges, because you're not getting them back.

The part of the digital domain that does bother me is the part that eliminates bookstores.  And mayhap that does make me a Luddite or one of the other things I've been called.  Nevertheless, I posit that the ecosystem that grew up in support of the written word is not the Cult of the Buggywhip as it is often portrayed.  It was the support system that gave rise to our literary culture. A support system which at present, no one has presented a replacement for it that seems to have the chops to go the distance.

I'm not actually talking about publishing.  Publishing will evolve and the publishers will evolve or not as their survival instincts dictate.  Publishing will find a way to survive, they always do.  I'm talking about bookstores.  Indies, Barnes & Noble, Borders, the lot of them.

Only recently has the Googlebooks launch made it possible to buy e-books from my local bookstore (and this time I am talking about the indie bookstores such as our beloved local independant Elliot Bay)
There's nothing wrong with reading books on an e-reader any more than there's anything wrong with listening to music on an MP-3 player, but I'm not a fan of leasing any of my media.  And while the comparison between music and books is tenuous at times, I mention music specifically because of the death of the independent music store that used to be a part of the culture of every city.

To throw that away in the name of convenience is a crying shame.  When you throw out the bathwater, don't be surprised if you look down and the baby's no longer there.

And if that makes me a Luddite, a hipster, or a snob, then so be it.

A Skeptic Crosses the e-Rubicon :: E-books & Digital Rights Meditations

The other day, my wife came home with our first e-reader, a Kobo, and all my careful research on the best and rightest of the electronic readers went out the window.  Why?  Price.  The Kobo was on sale for about $75.00 at the Borders liquidation in my town.  At a price point like that, how could any ardent reader resist?

Yes, my wife bought an e-reader at the Borders liquidation sale.  A sentence so laden with irony that you'd need a hacksaw to cut it.

Thankfully, the Kobo is e-Pub friendly and does a good job displaying .PDF's which were my main requirements.  I reckon that the amount of paper I save printing out reading and proof copies of my stories will offset the cost of this new widget twice as fast as the others I've looked at.


Being cross-platform friendly is nice.  The price was nice.  In fact, I suspect the Kobo people might look back on the Borders liquidation sales as a watershed moment for their device.  Already attractively priced well below other e-readers, I suspect that many people who were on the fence about the things might make the leap based upon price alone.

Food for thought at any rate.


Digital Rights Meditations...

The e-Pub format is a nice step in the direction of creating a digital library that is truly a movable feast, but not quite the whole way.  With some effort, you can carry your library from one device to another, but you still don't 'own' your books.  Honestly, I think we've given up entirely on the concept of ownership.  Of our music, of our computers, our phones and our video games.

Honestly, even though it brands me a luddite in most circles, I find it all a bit sad.  Sony is suing the hell out of a kid who figured out how to reactivate a function of the Playstation that was on there when he bought it, the option to install a different operating system.

If you think about it, prosecuting someone who wants to update or run "unapproved" software on a Playstation is a bit like Nissan prosecuting me for dropping a new engine in my Xterra.

Actually, it's exactly like that, except that Nissan didn't force me to agree to a ream of terms and conditions before they would allow me to start the engine the first time and then update and change the way the car works periodically without my permission.

I wonder how long we'll have to wait until that does happen?

I also wonder how much case law will be on the books already when it happens, which will tell us that while we're allowed to own the cars, we're only allowed a limited license to their engines and won't be allowed to sell them second-hand because that would rob Nissan or Toyota or GM of the sale of a new one.

Think about that for a moment.

Because no matter how the advertising copy of the electronic booksellers is written, you don't buy an e-book, you buy a license to access one.  A license that can and will be amended and revised or revoked as the licensor sees fit, as many American libraries discovered last week to their chagrin when Harper Collins changed their minds on how they were going to go forward on library loans of their e-books.

And as loud as the uproar might be, Harper Collins didn't do anything wrong.  They were acting well within their rights as licensor.

All of this relates to e-readers because I've never once picked up a new author without someone I trusted first handing me a copy of one of their books to read, which got me hooked.  So when I see publishers or other authors saying that a library or book loan is tantamount to piracy or theft, it makes me wonder if they're really paying attention to which writers are doing  well with young readers in the new publishing paradigm.  Not the older readers that keep the established mega-sellers like James Patterson aloft, but the future readers that will be buying books for decades to come... writers like Neil Gaiman.



I found out this morning that a company called Calibre has made finding and listing DRM-free e-books their business model for a new site.  It will be interesting to see if they succeed on that model.  Though, I sometimes wonder what the founders of Project Gutenberg think about the many e-book purveyors who are essentially re-packaging their content and making a note of how many free e-books they have available...

The Circuit Board Jungle :: E-Booked

E-reader Revolt: I'm Leaving Youth Culture Behind

Emma Silvers for Slate.com

...One recent story in the New York Times went so far as to claim that iPads and Kindles and Nooks are making the very act of reading better by -- of course -- making it social. As one user explained, "We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone." Hear that? There's a stigma about reading alone. (How does everyone else read before bed -- in pre-organized groups?) Regardless, it turns out that, for the last two decades, I've been Doing It Wrong. And funny enough, up until e-books came along, reading was one of the few things I felt confident I was doing exactly right.
Read more at Slate...

This article from slate was bandied about quite a bit on Facebook the other day.  Mostly, I think it draws attention because it's a voice rising from a generation that led us in lockstep into the digital world: cell phones, iPods, digital filesharing.  These so-called "Millenials" are the engine in that change, a generation that we are told has never worn a wristwatch or known a time when TV's weren't video game monitors or desks didn't have computers (or laps for that matter).  And this 'kid' (at 26, no one's a kid really) doesn't want e-Books.

Gasp.  The horror!
The statistical outlier gets the press, as always.

While it's at times funny and poignant and a lot of the points are well-argued, there's an underlying problem with it that most of the retweeting and facebooking and commentary have missed: the issue of ownership.  Therein lies the single greatest logical leap from Generation X (me) to Generation Y (Emma Silvers).

The single greatest problem we should all have (or so I arrogate) isn't that we can't read the spines to see that the burly biker next to us is reading Harry Potter, but that whether he's reading Grapes of Wrath or Artemis Fowl, it's not his.  He's just leasing it from Amazon or Apple.  We don't own our e-books or i-books, we lease them from the distributor and for the most part are only able to read them on that distributor's software preference.

Less like your local library and more like literary pay-per-view.

I think she was fishing around for it and couldn't find it.  Her generation feels that these things they paid for should be theirs -- they should be able to pass that great song or cool movie along to their friends.  "You've got to see/hear/read this!"  But to do so with digital downloads requires the breaking of laws.  And they do break that law.  In droves.

The central problem of most articles on e-books is that they avoid this topic like the plague.  When we ceded our right to own the music we listen to in solid-state, we gave up thinking about ownership.  It gets argued ad nauseum on the internet, but most people don't seriously think about it outside of the comments section of Wired magazine's latest article on the subject.  And just about all of those commenters have iPods.

The zeitgeist states that this format change could "save publishing".  If a format change is all it takes, then there's no conclusion to be reached other than there was something wrong with the prior format.  And as far as publishing was concerned, there is something wrong with print books: You could hand them to someone else or to a used bookstore and they could go on shelf-hopping forevermore without a dime making its way back to New York.

But this puts publishing in a terrible position where the fan advocacy that once pushed the great and the good to the top of the bestseller lists is shackled by the inability to press a well-thumbed paperback into the hands of a friend with the earnest insistence that YOU HAVE GOT TO READ THIS!.


I'm a writer and I want, oh yes, I want to make a living from my work.  So I am in no way, shape or form advocating that writers should give away their books for free.   Library bookloans, used bookstores, earnest friends, garage sales... those are lost sales.  Authors and publishers don't get a dime (at least in the United States) from that secondary and tertiary trade in books... but really, who cares?  There isn't a bestselling, successful author working today that wasn't helped by that trade - helped far more than they were hurt.

And to say there's something wrong with that is to say that I somehow gypped Nissan or Subaru when I sold my last couple of cars to some college kid I found on Craig's List.  A secondary market is part of doing business that only musicians, writers, and publishers in music and print seem to think they should be immune to.

Free

This morning my wife called me into the room to hear this story on NPR.  A press giving away their new books in return for a charity donation.  Publicity for their authors and their causes... an interesting idea.  Wonder if they'll still exist three years from now...

"The Kindle, the iPad and e-books are all part of a revolution that's shaking up the publishing business. The big question is how to ensure the book industry can remain profitable?  There's at least one publisher, however, that doesn't care about profits. For the past two years, the Concord Free Press, has been publishing books and giving them away for free..."

via National Public Radio

A library with empty shelves

NPR: Stanford Ushers In the Age of Bookless Libraries

Jan Swafford on eBooks in Slate

Bold Prediction:
Why e-books will never replace real books.

By Jan Swafford
Posted Tuesday, June 29, 2010, at 10:12 AM ETBecause we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things... [READ MORE @ SLATE.COM]

Apple, the Ebook and the consequences of free...

There has been a lot of skepticism about the big numbers that Apple claims to be putting up with their new iPad bookstore.  Apple claims that the publishers told them that they've already cornered 22% of the eBook market (which remember is still actually only about 2% of the overall market) and the even more attention-grabbing number of 5 million books "sold".

 

The reason "sold" is in quotes is the same reason it's always in quotes in these discussions, because like Amazon before them, Apple is being a bit fuzzy with their numbers.  As suspense author David Hewson asked via his Twitterfeed yesterday: "How many of those 5 million ebooks downloaded to iPads were free?"  

 

The degree to which ebooks are catching on and especially the perceived dominance of any particular vector for the things is always questionable because in truth, many of the ebooks downloaded to Kindles, iPads, Nooks, et al are free.  Either because of promotions or because the books are out of copyright and available free from places like Project Gutenberg, or even through the commercial channels.  Barnes & Noble, for instance, brags that they're offering over a million titles formatted for the iPad, over half of which are free.  It isn't clear whether those free downloads are being touted as 'sales' by Apple.

Apple isn't alone in this practice.  Barnes & Noble and Amazon too are vague on how exactly they report those 'sales'.  That's where the ebook sales numbers get tricky and one of the many reasons why it's so difficult to pin down just how many ebooks are bouncing around out there.  It is entirely possible that the total aggregate trade in ebooks both free and paid for accounts for a significantly larger portion of the booktrade.  It is just as possible -- more possible according to some -- that the percentage of the booktrade being taken over by eBooks is largely made up of these free downloads and accounts for very little in actual dollars.

 

Here's the rub: A cornerstone cash cows for the larger publishing companies and bookstores is selling editions of books that are out of copyright.  Publishers can rack up profit at little cost because there are no rights to be paid for the many editions of Dickens and Austen.  Even bookstores get in on the act, which is why so many American bookshelves have complete sets of the Classics of Western Literature with a Barnes & Noble or Borders logo on the spine.  For a long time, these books are essentially free for the publishing companies, all they have to do is print and bind them.  I can read all of them free, now via the internet or download them to an iPad or Kindle and not have to pay anyone a dime.  They won't impress anyone lined up on my bookshelves, but if the content is what I'm after rather than the perception of erudition for my house guests.

 

Just one more part of the whole puzzle as the publishing industry changes around us...

Technology @ The New York Times

Bits: Why Apple’s iBooks Numbers Are Meaningless

By By BRAD STONE

Published: June 7, 2010

Apple's advances in the e-book market are not as impressive as they sound, but could prove trouble for Amazon down the road.

State of the eBook

It's been a tumultuous month for the ebook and it's only the sixth of February.  The fracas between Amazon and Macmillan is settling while the Googlebooks lawsuits are heating back up with the Author's Guild finally getting out there and trying to explain why they settled in they first place.  (Essentially they were trying to not become the RIAA.) 

The ripples of this thing continue to spread and the book industry is just trying to surf the wave... but really, why do we care?

Warning: If you've an aversion to statistics, you might want to find another post to read.

They get 90% of the press and actually represent just one or two percent of the actual sales. e-Books are the Prius of the publishing industry.  Nevertheless, the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show was the debutante of more and yet more e-Book Readers.  The Plastic Logic Que, the HP Tablet and the Blio (among many others) were all rushed to the podium to get out there ahead of the much anticipated advent of the Apple iPad.

If you think about it, this was probably the first time since Gutenberg started printing his Bibles that book technologies were discussed on this scale.  Certainly no futurists of the 1950's would have predicted that a new way of delivering books to readers would trump coverage of the introduction of 3D Television!

So, are we really seeing publishing turn a new page in the long journey that began with Cuneiform stamped into terra cotta tablets?  Will electronic readers like the Kindle do to paper books what Gutenberg's press did to the medieval scriptorium or more recently what CD's did to LP's?

It's impossible to say without doing a little bit of math.  

In spite of the hype, adoption of e-Books has been slow.  In 2008, e-Books accounted for an estimated 0.46% of total book sales, up 68% from the previous year (APP statistics).  Exact 2009 statistics aren't available yet, but the publishers are generally agreeing that it's risen to 1% of total sales.  While that's impressive growth in an industry that only grew on the whole by about 2.5%.  The long and the short of it is that unless something groundbreaking happens and all hell breaks loose, at the current rate of growth, we're probably looking at about 2016 before they equal the current sales of audio books.

That's not a tsunami, that's just the tide coming in.  e-Books certainly aren't going away, but without some sort of unforeseen intervention in the market to drive more readers into the arms of the e-Readers, the physical book will be with us for some time to come.  So don't go tearing out those pretty bookshelves in your living room just yet.

I see three main challenges to the e-Reader market before it can truly come into its own...

• Standardization: At present, there is no standard format that can be effortlessly transported from one reader to the next.  Even ePub, which is quickly rising in favor, has problem jumping from one reader that uses it to another due to some of the DRM problems.
  
• DRM: More authors have been helped than have ever been harmed by the secondary market in used books.  Trading, loaning, and sharing literature is ingrained into literary culture and readers have been significantly less inclined to accept that they won't own their books and be able to give them to friends or resell them.  The Barnes & Noble "Nook's" loan feature is a step in the right direction, but not a solution.
  
• Pricing/Valuation: The Macmillan/Amazon battle is just the tip of the iceberg. The publishing industry is only this past week finally taking steps to preserve the valuation of books.  It's a simple fact that printing and distribution of a physical book only accounts for (at most) 20% of the cover price.  Establishing the idea that a standard price of $9.99 or less for e-Books in no way reflects the reality of production.  The inclination of people to view digital content as essentially free will take a long time to reverse.

As I've said before, we have to get away from the idea that what we see now is necessarily any indication of what will be reality in ten years.  I don't think you could have looked at the early output of Gutenberg's presses (Bibles, indulgences and religious tracts) and seen an accurate view of what would be happening once writers stopped playing with the new toy and really started to create.

I'm reading a book by literary agent Donald Maas called Writing the Breakout Novel (which I will be reviewing here in the next week or so as past of the Backlist Book Review series).  In the first chapters he gives a sort of a summary of the "State of the Industry circa 2000" (when he wrote the book).  It's interesting and I'd like to see it updated, but there is a lot there that we need to remember.  Maas has the reputation of being the agent's agent and much of what he's saying came to pass and much is still in the works.   He's especially skeptical of the predictions that were being bandied about back then of the impending ebook revolution and that "in five years print books will be finished".  It's 2010 and we're still waiting.

He is especially skeptical of the writer's fantasy that the electronic book will somehow make the publishers disappear or that such an event is even desirable.  I refer you back to  John Scalzi's play for why I think that operating without a publisher is not the panacea that many want you to believe it would be.    Check it out at Scalzi's blog "Whatever".

Verso Advertising recently compiled data gathered from 110 million internet users across 5,100 websites to compile a broad-spectrum look at the book market as it was in 2009.  There's a definite marketing slant to this information insomuch as the data is used to underline the need for publishers to advertise in order to sell books.  

The e-Book data is a mixed-bag, mostly anticipating several proposed e-Book strategies such as pricing adjustments above the $10 benchmark that Kindle used to adhere to (back in the old days) and whether they would pay a premium for a hard copy if it came 'bundled' with an electronic version.  Most interesting to me was that 29% of e-Reader afficionados admitted to downloading pirate e-Books with 8% unsure.  (Which in this case I think translates to "I don't really want to answer this question because I have enough of a conscience to feel guilty about it").  45.9% of males age 18-34 admitted to slapping the skull & crossbones sticker onto their e-Readers!

Overall, Verso concludes that a 10-12% market portion for e-Books is theoretically achievable in two years, but no promises as there is no visible tipping-point event on the horizon.  With echoes of presidential elections ringing in our ears, we are forced to conclude that the revolution still isn't here and once again the undecideds hold all the cards.

e-Books start on Slide 19