Tag: Tools of Change

video: Publishing Revolutions

I’ve just finished a new video, on some of the exciting changes taking place in the publishing world (I recommend you watch it in High Quality & full screen, if possible):

If you watch it a couple of times (once to absorb everything I’m saying, then again to absorb the production techniques) you’ll see that … at the beginning of working on this video, last Monday, I had never done any 3D animation and only a modicum of modeling (mostly in SL), and had never used Kinemac before.  (I bought the Macheist 3 bundle earlier this year, for access to that and BoinxTV, mostly.)  As I worked for about a week and a half on this video, I became more and more experienced with the software, more aware of what it was capable of, and more comfortable doing more advanced things with it.  So at the beginning, the big 3D text is pretty neat, but by the end I have an entire bookcase of individually hand-animated books leaping in and out of a box.

There’s things I’d like to change about it.  Not just improving the animation in the first half, either.

On Demand Books is now saying they’ll have two million titles available by years’ end, rather than one, for example.  Plus, I feel like I may have represented the kindle more strongly than the iPhone – while I believe the 41million iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation worldwide, each with hundreds of individual book apps and at least 4 different major eReader apps, each with robust eBook catalogs and (coming soon) in-app purchasing will do significantly better and reach wider and have more of an impact than the roughly half-million, all-US-based kindles.

I’m already working on the script for the next couple of videos.  More thoughts on what it means to have over 1400 new titles published every day.  More thoughts on print on demand.  Something about eBook pricing.

Productivity, Profitability

Still having trouble with staying focused. I feel like I’m not productive enough, almost daily. Things are getting done; the podcasts are all running on time, I’m doing two or more Art Walks/Fairs/Detours a month & I’ve painted a dozen new paintings since the first of the year. I’m even blogging semi-regularly, which you already know, reading this. But I could be doing more.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150.  Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now.  Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds.  Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands.  If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard.  Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once.  So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better.  Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet?  That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less.  Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.  Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability.  I need to produce more book sales.  That’s a hard one.  The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now.  Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks.  Gotta keep it up, though.  Gotta keep working on it.  Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now.  Gotta go.

Tim O’Reilly on Open Publishing

This is a great little video on why publishing should be open (variously: DRM-free, cost-free, copyright-free, using open standards) and how that doesn’t have to mean you can’t make it a business.  One of the best videos I’ve seen come out of Tools of Change so far, and well produced. Definitely worth your four minutes:


Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.

making eBooks

eBooks are still a bit of a headache for me. Smashwords helps.  Last year I had to manually convert my books into 8 different formats (each) by hand.  Actually, I just quit after I hit 8 formats.  There are a few other formats I couldn’t manage to get my books converted to for free.  Now, I’m thinking maybe I only have to re-create each book 3 times: I take the paperback (which gives me 1 PDF), convert it once to make a printable PDF, once for the kindle, and once more for Smashwords, which will then give me my book back in eight more formats.  (All DRM-free, of course!)

The PDFs are easy.  I already have to do the work in InDesign to create the paperback, and Adobe software loves to output nice PDFs.  Adobe recently announced that they’re updating their software soon to create epub files easily, which would be nice, but Smashwords seems to do a better job, right now.  Note to people not in publishing: epub is the future of eBooks.

Making a well-formatted document for the kindle is … well, I’m getting better at it. Luckily I’m not doing anything fancy with my books.  No charts, no pictures, no tables, no complex layouts… well, not in the books I’ve been putting in, so far.  My poetry can wait.  Because it’s going to be a headache, and probably won’t ever sell in volume sufficient to cover the value of the time I’ll have to spend to get it looking right on the kindle (and will never look good in most other eBook formats).  I’m just putting novels in. Still, I have to go through each book line by line manually marking it up.  Then, because the kindle has a limited range of fonts and doesn’t support extended characters, I have to go through basically character by character and -in some cases- not only change to characters without diacritical marks where I’d used them in the original text, but also rewrite entire sections where the use of specialized fonts and unsupported characters are actually integral to the text.

bleh.

Last year, before Smashwords, I would have had a similarly frustrating process to go through six more times, once for each of the other formats’ idiosyncratic proprietary requirements.  Now, by simply doing a quick find-and-replace of Amazon’s proprietary page break tags with a few line break tags, I can upload the well-formatted HTML file I created for the kindle version to Smashwords and -pretty much- get a good output within a few minutes.  It’s still lacking the extended characters and custom fonts of the original/paperback version, but most of the eBook formats don’t support that stuff, either.

I’m still developing a “workflow” for eBooks, probably go through and do the main markup in one pass, then save it out as two files & add the kindle markup to one (& remove special characters) and the Smashwords markup to the other.  I’m not really much for “workflows” but its something I’ve been thinking a bit about, lately.  At Tools of Change 2009, there were multiple, competing products in the exhibition hall & various presentations trying to help publishers manage their “workflows.”  At the upcoming ABPA conference (which I don’t plan on attending), one of the six sessions (the rest of which are trying to address the future of publishing via subjects like: alternative and online sales channels, online and social marketing, et cetera) is about creating and managing production workflows.  Apparently this is a problem area for publishers.  Apparently, solving the “workflow” problem is a very cutting edge, future-of-publishing sort of issue.

So I’m thinking about it.  Workflow.  Huh.  I’ve got some notes.  Maybe if I “plan” a “workflow” for my next book, it’ll go more smoothly?

What am I talking about?  The main hiccups in my last two books’ production were 1) Lightning Source not meeting their contractually stated production schedules and 2) volunteer, unpaid proofreaders taking unpredictable periods of time to get back to me.  One of these things I can’t effect, and the other I can only fix by spending money I can’t afford to spend.  Maybe I should add “wait an indefinite period for proofreaders” to my workflow.  Or maybe I’ll research reasonable time periods professional, freelance proofreaders take and how much they charge and negotiate expectations and/or my budget to find a reasonable solution.  Otherwise, my production of books works pretty smoothly.

I seem to have gone off topic.  Sorry, it’s late.  Maybe I’ll go to bed.  Ooh, but first I should link to my latest eBooks.  The eBook of Forget What You Can’t Remember is available in the Kindle Store for less than $8.99, at Smashwords for $3.99, and for those of you who can’t afford that price or don’t have a credit card, as a free eBook in a whole mess of formats.  The eBook of More Lost Memories, a companion collection of short stories, is available in the Kindle Store for less than $8.35, at Smashwords for $3.99, and if you can’t afford that price or don’t have a credit card you can email me for a free copy.  Enjoy:

I’ll be re-working all the eBooks I did last year soon, too, to get them on Smashwords.  I’m excited about Smashwords largely because of their partnership with Lexcycle – which is to say, because it makes my eBooks available for sale to iPhone users, in an iPhone-compatible format, and through an increasingly easy-to-use iPhone app-based storefront.  If you have an iPhone, download Stanza and take a look for yourself!

Not about Tools of Change

Last week I was in New York, NY for the first time in my life.  I won a free conference pass to O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference from Booksquare, managed to afford the airfare and hotel (Would you believe I flew to NYC, stayed for 3 nights within 1.0mi of the conference at Times Square, was fed the entire time, and flew home for under $550?), and had a great time.  I have tweeted a bit about it, from the conference, and I have many, many pages of hand-written notes I took over the two days of the conference I attended, but this post is not about Tools of Change.  I may (or may not – but probably will) blog extensively about it later.  There’s a good chance I’ll write a thousand words or more per page of notes, not to mention anecdotes about everything that happened between sessions and at night.  This is not one of those posts.

This post is about everything else.  This post is about how, in between the last two First Friday Art Walks (ie: basically in January), I painted 6 new paintings, recorded the audio for the podcast version of FWYCR (inlcuding 6 chapters ahead of where I needed to be), wrote 5 (mostly long) blog posts, did my taxes, et cetera, et cetera.  This post is about how, since the February First Friday Art Walk I haven’t painted anything new, have only written this blog post, and have only finished the single chapter of MEPod that was due today.  This post is about how I don’t know when my next book will be ready for publication, or what book it will be.  This post is about how I occasionally notice that I don’t have a “marketing strategy.” This post is about feeling insignificant, helpless.

After this month’s First Friday Art Walk in downtown Phoenix (I show among the vendors known as “Roosevelt Row” – the booths in the blocked off streets of Garfield between 4th & 6th, on 5th between Garfield & McKinley, and starting next month on 6th as well – I’m there every month, I pre-paid for all of 2009, and you can see/buy my art and/or books in person there for cash), I sold two paintings.  Did not sell them at the Art Walk, one because I don’t take credit cards on site, the other because there wasn’t a convenient ATM, but sold them after being seen there.  Gladly drove across town on Saturday to deliver one (after processing the payment through Google Checkout) and to a different part of town on Sunday to deliver the other.  I’m always glad to put my creations into the hands of people who appreciate them.  People who love them.  People who are excited to be able to see them again and again.  These kind of sales are awesome.

Very early Monday morning I left for NY. Thursday evening I returned to Phoenix.  Friday I did laundry and tried to recover from the conference & the trip.

Saturday I had another Art Walk / Art Fair, this time at Angel’s Serenity in North Phoenix/Scottsdale.  The Angel’s Serenity Art Fair is a Saturday, daytime event.  It had better turnout when the economy was in better shape (and when there was an open coffee shop involved – since gone out of business), but I still feel it’s worthwhile to show there.  It certainly doesn’t cost anything but my time and effort.  Sold a few books (You’ve seen the new books, right?), about half to returning customers.  That’s my favorite and most reassuring sort of customer, the ones who have bought my books before, read them, and want to buy the new books, too.  That’s the basis for my publishing model; to build an audience of people who will continue buying my books as I continue to write them.  Didn’t move any art at the Art Fair, but a past customer and I spent a lot of time discussing the 5 or 6 pieces he wants to buy – if only I catch him at the right time of the month.  I’ll follow up with him after the first of the month.

Writing it out, I know it hasn’t been a lot of time – especially since the conference was actually work.  Yet I feel unaccomplished, so far.  Dilligent, yes.  I recorded three more chapters of FWYCR yesterday, and worked on trying to figure out what to do about the final main character’s voice – it needs to be distinct, striking, but not distracting or confusing.  I edited, mixed, compressed & posted chapter 15 today, went to two banks and a book store, and am writing this blog post.  I’ve been working on some other ideas (more below) as well.  Still, I feel I haven’t done enough.  On the other hand, a big part of why I chose not to buy the big TV was so that I would be able to work longer without stress and worry – so that I would be able to go at my own pace without having to freak out about whether my art & writing were bringing in enough money on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis.  So I’m trying not to freak out.

I’m also looking at some new projects.  I’m considering designing a deck of cards – you can think of them like tarot cards or fortune telling cards, though I’m developing them largely from scratch.  I’m working out some planning and manufacturing ideas already, starting work on basic artwork & meanings.  Probably a set of 50 cards – thinking of maybe putting it out as a “deck” of moo business cards, actually, though I haven’t fully considered all the different custom card-deck printing options out there yet.  Feel free to suggest someone in the comments.  Then, in parallel with developing the deck, write a book explaining the cards, their meanings, and how to do a “reading” from them.  Publish the book & make the cards available – because I can, and it interests me to do so.  Not sure how to market such a thing, and certainly can’t bundle the cards with the book via Lightning Source, but it’s an idea.  If I decide to paint the images for the cards, that could mean up to 50 new Mini-Paintings – I’d want to do them at a size I could scan with the equipment I have, so probably 8×10″ or smaller canvas or canvas boards.  Or perhaps illustrations on paper, but then I’d have to mount/mat/frame them.  bleh.  But either way, that could be a gallery show I could shop around.  Hang the originals on the walls, sell the cards & books (& originals), and have me (someone) do readings for guests all night/nights.

I’m also increasingly thinking of trying to put together a music “album.”  Probably a “Christian music album,” at that.  I keep having to compose my own music for the podcasts (because I’m quite stubborn and independent) and thus to think about music, to design music, and to practice with its creation.  I’ve been vaguely thinking about creating music since middle or high school, but have rarely stuck with any physical instrument for more than a few weeks at a time & have never studied musical composition.  Having Garageband in front of me several hours a week, listening to music I’ve composed play behind my audiobooks, it’s been pushing me more and more toward writing songs & putting together an album.  That, I don’t have outlines or plans or marketing plans for (yet), unlike the cards/book thing above, but it’s rolling around in my head, closer and closer to the front all the time.

Which brings me around to what may be a lack of focus.  If I’m writing/composing/recording/producing an album of Christian music, am I focused on art?  On writing?  On publishing?  I’ve squeezed the designing of a deck of fortune cards (did you know the Old Testament  condemns divination?) into the art/publishing worlds with the hand-painting of the art & the writing/publishing of a companion book, but has my focus slipped?  What happened to the anthology of short stories I was working on last year?  When is UTFBF-RoaAP: Book Four going to be written?  Will I paint anything other than these cards any time soon?  What about my next podcast novel (due in April)?  What about marketing?

Marketing?  Fuck.  I knew I was forgetting something.  I still haven’t figured out how to do marketing.  Sigh.

In other news, since my books are increasingly apparent as some sort of idealized-communist propaganda, I’ve begun slogging my way through Atlas Shrugged.  The Fountainhead is next.  Then probably the Communist Manifesto, Wealth of Nations and Mein Kampf.  I’ve never read any of these, but time for reading is part of what I bought myself when I didn’t buy a 73″ HDTV.  Speaking of which, I’m going to go work on Atlas Shrugged right now.