This week has been extremely busy, working on promoting the first App through as many mediums as possible. We've had a mention in the April Edition of Martial Arts Illustrated, as well as in 'The Author's Showbox', here:
http://paperdragonink.com/?p=3229.
I've heard that University College Falmouth are going to run a press release, but intend waiting until the App is actually out there before doing so. Then, the night before last, I heard from Dan, who's based in New York, that we've had funding approved for the next three Apps, which as you can imagine is brilliant. But, as they say, all good things comes to those who wait. For even once we've actually done all the work and these new Apps are up for sale (which will be many months, yet) we first have to first claw back the money paid out in advance to fund it before we get anything ourselves; so it's very unlikely we'll see anything from these endeavours until at least the end of the year - and I hope to be well enough by then to go back to work, this time as a full time writer.
Following my change of mode back to short stories, to fulfil my Orbiter Obligations, and the birth of 'The Man Who Wasn't There', I had an idea for a second short story - and I love the concept.
Sometimes these ideas appear in dreams, other times you can see something and a story will just pop into your mind. Well, with this one, I was writing down the things that influence me, or inspire my writing. I was in the process of talking about people in the past, and how little different they were then to ourselves now; so how different will the people of our time be to those in the future? Quite simply, they won't. The only things that will change is what's around us, tools and inventions, new diseases and variations of disasters, tyrants and crime.
It was while in this melodramatic mood that the idea for this new story struck me, and I remained beavering away until silly o'clock this morning; and it's still not finished. But there's a deep and savage delight when you have a great story between your teeth and you continue to worry away at it until you end up with a satisfactory product. That's the whole thing about writing, it comes from the heart. It's like giving birth to a child. It need nurturing until it reaches maturity, and when you can watch with pride as it makes it's way out into the world.
I was also pleased to hear that the film reviews I've done for MAI have been taken on board. My feature on Buakaw Por Pruamuk, a world class Thai Kickboxer, on his part in the film 'Yamada' has already been published in April's Edition of MAI - and is already sold out, despite it being only the 17th Of March! My interview with Thomas DuPont, Nicolas Cage's stunt double in the film 'Justice', has been accepted for the May issue - as has a feature of Grand Master Mike McGavin - and I have a great many more lined up.
This Wednesday 21st March is the day that the final marks for the MA are due in. Whether we will hear then or have to wait a while I have no idea, but like many of my fellow students I think I'm going to have disturbed nights thinking about it. But, on the bright side, there is always my writing to crack on with, if sleep eludes me.
Saturday, 17 March 2012
The Pro's And Con's Of Writing For Free
New writers often write for free to build a name for themselves, but while it’s nice to have a long list of publications behind you to impress agents and publishers, how does this affect the people trying to make a living from their writing? I spoke to Dan Witters about this in the 4th of our 5 part series.
Dan, how do you think this affects current writers, as editors may become reluctant to pay if new writers are writing for free?
That’s true up to a point. There’s nothing on the published material to show that a writer has provided this work for free, so you can certainly build a profile with it. I just think that you should set yourself a limit and not do more than a few. Otherwise it will become a habit that editors will take advantage of. There is a definite advantage for new writers to do this but not excessively. Editors do tend to believe that there’s an endless stream of new writers out there who will write a large part of their content for free, rather than just the occasional article. These editors can just select what they need from this constant stream of work and use this as a replacement for their paid writers.
There’s obviously a conflict of interest between the writer who hopes to get paid for an article and one who does it for nothing, so that they can raise their profile. These interests are diametrically opposed.
Some markets, such as martial arts magazines, have become non-paying. Is this something you’ve noticed?
No I haven’t but there’s definitely a risk of this happening. You’ve given the example of martial arts magazines and presumably there was a time when that was paid work. But here, there was such an influx from enthusiastic amateurs that this has now moved into an area where it’s very difficult to get paid at all. As you mentioned, this has a knock-on effect later when writers who have been working for free find that they’ve shot themselves in the foot. Why would an editor pay you when previously you had been working for free?
So, what can you do? Writing here in the UK isn’t a unionised profession, whereas in the US you see writers striking from time to time to put pressure on television studios. There’s some headway made occasionally, but even there you often see writers breaking rank and conducting work when no one’s aware of it. It’s very hard to see how unpublished new writers can take action; whereas published writers with a track record of working for television, can take some joint action. There’s very little contact between new writers, and there’s a vast group of them out there trying to get work. It’s almost impossible to see any concerted action that can be taken by writers against editors who take advantage of free writing.
I also think that the situation can vary depending on what type of writing you’re involved in. For instance, say you’re writing a short story. You can supply this for free, on the basis that there’s a footnote at the end of the story saying that it’s taken from a collection and then telling the reader where to find the rest of it. Consequently, if you’re writing for a magazine, then you have the chance to do some genuinely targeted advertising. Saying, not simply this is my name, but also that this is part of a short story collection, and if you like this one then go to my website. Likewise a writer of travel or lifestyle articles can have a note at the end of their work saying that he is a UK based travel writer and this is where my website is. This way, writers take a direct benefit of having the free work published. If you are going to provide work for nothing you have to ask yourself how you can get a tangible benefit from doing so.
Look at the chap who goes around saying that he’s just had an article published and he’s now building a CV. This guy needs to think about how he can focus his work. What you are trying to do is deal with two types of people, the first of which is the buying public. In this case you need to show the audience how to locate the other work that you’ve done. The second type are editors of other magazines who might like your work and want to know how to contact you, with the intention of getting work from you themselves. I can’t see a magazine having any strong legitimate objection to having a writer’s contact details included at the end of an article or story. I think if you’re going to give free work to a magazine it’s reasonable to insist that, as you’re not being paid, you’d like this information included.
Then there’s the question of review. Most magazines publish letters that state how much readers have enjoyed the articles. So it’s quite common for there to be a follow on here from the article itself.
You asked me if I’ve personally seen many traditionally paying markets become non-paying. Well, take magazines that deal with online games as an example. These have a lot of teenagers and younger readers whose contributions are more commentary and review than anything else, based on their reaction to the games they’ve been playing. Therefore they aren’t doing this to make a living but actually reacting to the subject matter and this is exactly what happened to the martial arts market. People liked these areas so much that they flooded the magazines.
These days we’re trying to support app development, whereas the publisher is concentrating only on the printed word. A lot of publishers are trying to get a price for the app, which isn’t a lot below what they get for their printed work. There’s enormous pressure from the public to get anything digital for free, which obviously drives down the price that editors will pay. So, what we’re seeing here is becoming a trend. This is a different industry from e-book conversion. What we now have is a magazine that can be downloaded free, because the publishers can get their revenue from the advertising contained within the app.
Other apps are often given out free because the publisher makes their money from the weekly, or monthly, add-on. The purchaser isn’t making these distinctions, or even asking themselves how the publisher’s making their money. People don’t understand that certain downloads are free because of the advertising, whereas other apps don’t have advertising and so can’t be free.
You were also talking about keyboard slaves: writers who produce work for free and make their money from direct sales from their own sites. I think you’ve hit on a real threat there. Magazine publishers who move into the world of apps are under pressure to provide free, or very low priced, downloads and they will automatically try and get their content for nothing to compensate for this. Consequently, the consideration for acquiring your article suddenly becomes an intangible thing. The publishers might say, that this will give you exposure and thus build your profile. This way the currency that moves between editors of magazines, publishers and writers ceases to be a tangible currency like money but becomes a currency such as profile.
Do you think this will cause the standard of writing to drop?
If you have a trend towards unpaid writing the standard of writing is going to drop. If you want an analogy for that, think of the conflict between newspaper journalists and bloggers. Journalists have an enormous resolve to investigate issues properly, whereas bloggers tend to just do online research and then offer their opinion. They might not be concerned about fairness or accuracy, simply because they aren’t going to be sued or even held to account by a press association. So, as the public tend to turn to blogs to get their information this can create a problem. Journalism isn’t particularly viable now, and if independent bloggers are going to replace journalists the quality of the reporting we get declines considerably. There are major blogs like the Huffington Post who often have the same standards as newspapers, but many other blogs don’t. It’s the same with magazine articles. Unpaid writers certainly have their moments of quality, but generally the new and unpaid writer will provide a lower standard than paid-for writing from established writers. I think there’s a danger of an assumed quality of the market dropping off.
Dan, how do you think this affects current writers, as editors may become reluctant to pay if new writers are writing for free?
That’s true up to a point. There’s nothing on the published material to show that a writer has provided this work for free, so you can certainly build a profile with it. I just think that you should set yourself a limit and not do more than a few. Otherwise it will become a habit that editors will take advantage of. There is a definite advantage for new writers to do this but not excessively. Editors do tend to believe that there’s an endless stream of new writers out there who will write a large part of their content for free, rather than just the occasional article. These editors can just select what they need from this constant stream of work and use this as a replacement for their paid writers.
There’s obviously a conflict of interest between the writer who hopes to get paid for an article and one who does it for nothing, so that they can raise their profile. These interests are diametrically opposed.
Some markets, such as martial arts magazines, have become non-paying. Is this something you’ve noticed?
No I haven’t but there’s definitely a risk of this happening. You’ve given the example of martial arts magazines and presumably there was a time when that was paid work. But here, there was such an influx from enthusiastic amateurs that this has now moved into an area where it’s very difficult to get paid at all. As you mentioned, this has a knock-on effect later when writers who have been working for free find that they’ve shot themselves in the foot. Why would an editor pay you when previously you had been working for free?
So, what can you do? Writing here in the UK isn’t a unionised profession, whereas in the US you see writers striking from time to time to put pressure on television studios. There’s some headway made occasionally, but even there you often see writers breaking rank and conducting work when no one’s aware of it. It’s very hard to see how unpublished new writers can take action; whereas published writers with a track record of working for television, can take some joint action. There’s very little contact between new writers, and there’s a vast group of them out there trying to get work. It’s almost impossible to see any concerted action that can be taken by writers against editors who take advantage of free writing.
I also think that the situation can vary depending on what type of writing you’re involved in. For instance, say you’re writing a short story. You can supply this for free, on the basis that there’s a footnote at the end of the story saying that it’s taken from a collection and then telling the reader where to find the rest of it. Consequently, if you’re writing for a magazine, then you have the chance to do some genuinely targeted advertising. Saying, not simply this is my name, but also that this is part of a short story collection, and if you like this one then go to my website. Likewise a writer of travel or lifestyle articles can have a note at the end of their work saying that he is a UK based travel writer and this is where my website is. This way, writers take a direct benefit of having the free work published. If you are going to provide work for nothing you have to ask yourself how you can get a tangible benefit from doing so.
Look at the chap who goes around saying that he’s just had an article published and he’s now building a CV. This guy needs to think about how he can focus his work. What you are trying to do is deal with two types of people, the first of which is the buying public. In this case you need to show the audience how to locate the other work that you’ve done. The second type are editors of other magazines who might like your work and want to know how to contact you, with the intention of getting work from you themselves. I can’t see a magazine having any strong legitimate objection to having a writer’s contact details included at the end of an article or story. I think if you’re going to give free work to a magazine it’s reasonable to insist that, as you’re not being paid, you’d like this information included.
Then there’s the question of review. Most magazines publish letters that state how much readers have enjoyed the articles. So it’s quite common for there to be a follow on here from the article itself.
You asked me if I’ve personally seen many traditionally paying markets become non-paying. Well, take magazines that deal with online games as an example. These have a lot of teenagers and younger readers whose contributions are more commentary and review than anything else, based on their reaction to the games they’ve been playing. Therefore they aren’t doing this to make a living but actually reacting to the subject matter and this is exactly what happened to the martial arts market. People liked these areas so much that they flooded the magazines.
These days we’re trying to support app development, whereas the publisher is concentrating only on the printed word. A lot of publishers are trying to get a price for the app, which isn’t a lot below what they get for their printed work. There’s enormous pressure from the public to get anything digital for free, which obviously drives down the price that editors will pay. So, what we’re seeing here is becoming a trend. This is a different industry from e-book conversion. What we now have is a magazine that can be downloaded free, because the publishers can get their revenue from the advertising contained within the app.
Other apps are often given out free because the publisher makes their money from the weekly, or monthly, add-on. The purchaser isn’t making these distinctions, or even asking themselves how the publisher’s making their money. People don’t understand that certain downloads are free because of the advertising, whereas other apps don’t have advertising and so can’t be free.
You were also talking about keyboard slaves: writers who produce work for free and make their money from direct sales from their own sites. I think you’ve hit on a real threat there. Magazine publishers who move into the world of apps are under pressure to provide free, or very low priced, downloads and they will automatically try and get their content for nothing to compensate for this. Consequently, the consideration for acquiring your article suddenly becomes an intangible thing. The publishers might say, that this will give you exposure and thus build your profile. This way the currency that moves between editors of magazines, publishers and writers ceases to be a tangible currency like money but becomes a currency such as profile.
Do you think this will cause the standard of writing to drop?
If you have a trend towards unpaid writing the standard of writing is going to drop. If you want an analogy for that, think of the conflict between newspaper journalists and bloggers. Journalists have an enormous resolve to investigate issues properly, whereas bloggers tend to just do online research and then offer their opinion. They might not be concerned about fairness or accuracy, simply because they aren’t going to be sued or even held to account by a press association. So, as the public tend to turn to blogs to get their information this can create a problem. Journalism isn’t particularly viable now, and if independent bloggers are going to replace journalists the quality of the reporting we get declines considerably. There are major blogs like the Huffington Post who often have the same standards as newspapers, but many other blogs don’t. It’s the same with magazine articles. Unpaid writers certainly have their moments of quality, but generally the new and unpaid writer will provide a lower standard than paid-for writing from established writers. I think there’s a danger of an assumed quality of the market dropping off.
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
This Week
This week I've continued concentrating on 'A Cull Of Lions', the follow on to my novel 'The Roar Of Lions', and also my YA novel. It's interesting writing two novels at the same time, because when you hit a wall with one you can turn to the other, and before you know it ideas start flowing again in the former. I was adverse to this at first, then I had a flashback to an online chat I had with Kevin J Anderson, an amazing author who wrote one book of his 'Saga Of Seven Suns' (Saga Of Seven Suns) each year, along with another of the continuing 'Dune' series with Brian Herbert, who's furthering his father Frank's work. Then, when I thought about it, I realised that I'd been writing several things at once for many years - so why should novels be different? In fact, it works extremely well, and it's something I would recommend.
I've also written several film reviews for Martial Arts Illustrated and had an interview booked yesterday morning with Thomas DuPont, stunt double for Nicolas Cage in his film 'Justice' - which is being released on DVD later this month. Alas, as sometimes occurs, this went awry at the last moment and the phone interview didn't take place - I'm hoping though that this can be done by other means, but we will have to see.
I've also written a short story, 'The Man Who Wasn't There'. This has an interesting twist on the old concept of invisibility. I've submitted the story to a magazine, who are interested in inventions and ideas, and now it's back to the old waiting game. This is the first short I've written in a long while, as I've been determined to build my experience in other areas, such as novel writing.
In a little over two weeks I will hear whether I've passed the MA and I'm now considering what to do next, whether to concentrate solely on my current projects or to improve myself further. Decisions, decisions. But whatever happens I'm finally doing the thing I really love, writing.
I've also written several film reviews for Martial Arts Illustrated and had an interview booked yesterday morning with Thomas DuPont, stunt double for Nicolas Cage in his film 'Justice' - which is being released on DVD later this month. Alas, as sometimes occurs, this went awry at the last moment and the phone interview didn't take place - I'm hoping though that this can be done by other means, but we will have to see.
I've also written a short story, 'The Man Who Wasn't There'. This has an interesting twist on the old concept of invisibility. I've submitted the story to a magazine, who are interested in inventions and ideas, and now it's back to the old waiting game. This is the first short I've written in a long while, as I've been determined to build my experience in other areas, such as novel writing.
In a little over two weeks I will hear whether I've passed the MA and I'm now considering what to do next, whether to concentrate solely on my current projects or to improve myself further. Decisions, decisions. But whatever happens I'm finally doing the thing I really love, writing.
Publishing One-Stop-Shop
Have you finished a manuscript? Edited it? Just want to get it out there without fussing around with agents and publishers? Nothing could be easier. I talked to Dan Witters of editorial service Dancing Tree Productions about publishing with Firsty Authors, from uploading your manuscript to making sure the world knows your book exists.
Dan, tell us about Firsty's Author’s Package.
The idea started with an approach to Firsty Group to see whether they could come up with something that would benefit unpublished authors; giving them the chance to get their work published, initially digitally, and also to give them some sort of platform from which to negotiate with print publishers. Firsty had a look at what unpublished authors ideally need and came up with their Author Package.
First you upload your e-book onto a WordPress website, which they create for you. It’s very easy to use and maintain. The first e-book is free and there’s a very competitive charge for subsequent books. You simply upload your work and it’s automatically available for sale on your new website, which has a plug-in to Firsty’s e-commerce site which allows you to take credit card and PayPal payments. This is a huge thing for most people, as the ability to take payments online is a very difficult thing to arrange. Even established businesses struggle getting permission from banks to do this and yet it’s included as part of the package.
Within about a week or so the book will be uploaded onto both Amazon and the Apple iBooks store. Again, if you try and do this yourself you’ll find it very difficult, particularly because Apple tend to give precedence to people uploading large volumes. So, unless you’re uploading a large quantity of books at once you’ll go through quite a slow process. My feeling is that e-books sales are increasing, particularly in America, and I think that it’s going to be increasingly important for all authors to get their work out in e-book form. Publishers seem very slow to understand this.
With this package not only have you got all the above, but also a series of guidance to locating various people and services. This includes cover art, photographic illustrations and editing services. Every writer, whether published or not, needs to be edited.
Firsty has made a list of everything that an unpublished author would need and has provided that at the cheapest price possible. At the moment this is £495. For this you get the full package including website, your first e-book created and uploaded plus the e-commerce facility. You’ll have gone from having a book, which no one wants, to having a website with your book for sale on it; in addition to Amazon, the iBook store and various other stores. This is an extraordinary jump for someone to make in a matter of days.
Do you think that this is the way ahead for publishing?
Absolutely; you see all traditional publishers get hundreds of books sent to them which they send out to readers for assessment and they have to rely on these readers. The fact is that there are some great authors out there who just keep getting rejection slips and over the years these authors simply vanish.
Publishers are turning away people they shouldn’t, as due to the structure of the publishing system it’s very hard to get their full attention. If someone joins Firsty’s website they’ll receive suggestions on how to expand their sales through various marketing techniques. You get three-monthly sales reports, from which you can determine not only how many you’ve sold, but also where you sold them through. You can also check daily the sales that have been made on your website, or on Firsty’s e-book store Firsty Fish. Publishers work on the premise that you’ll sell a lot more in print (although I think that this is about to become a flawed assumption) so they’ll be quite impressed if you can show them you’ve sold this many books electronically over a three month period. Particularly if you can say I’m also selling in the States and Canada etc. By putting the sales sheet in front of them you’re no longer saying ‘do you or don’t you like my book’, you’re saying ‘people love my book and they’ve demonstrated this by paying £5.00 or £8.00 for it’.
Bookshops take about 50% from sales of printed copies. Then there are costs such as printing, distribution and so forth, plus the publisher takes around 15% of the sale price which doesn’t leave much for author. With the Firsty system the person who handles the sale will take between 20% and 30% of the price, which means that 70% or more goes to the person who actually wrote the book. In the traditional market a writer will get anything from 50p to £1.00 per book that sells, whereas if you put an e-book up at £5.00 on your site you’ll actually get close to £4.00 per copy. Consequently a single e-book sale might be worth more in monetary terms than a number of print sales and I think that this is going to become increasingly attractive to authors.
It wouldn’t surprise me if authors soon put their print books through a traditional publisher but reserve their e-books rights and handle this side of it themselves, through their own websites and a system like Firsty’s. This way they’ll be getting the vast majority of the income generated from these sales.
Once you’ve got a digital site and your book is up there you might need an App developed, as either a promotional thing or a follow on to the book itself. Firsty
Won’t the E-book market become swamped, and if so how can we make our book stand out?
That’s definitely going to happen, because what you have is a bottleneck as far as how many books are out there. In the print market this is controlled by the publishing companies, who get literally thousands of books referred to them. So which do they chose and why? We’re now looking at a situation where, for the cost of a couple of hundred pounds, authors can get their books out there. This leaves us in the situation where suddenly there are thousands of e-books available and it will be increasingly difficult to bring yours to the attention of a traditional publisher.
Firsty has done quite a lot of marketing research. They might say, for example, sit down and make a list of all your friends. Go through your email addresses, Facebook or other social media and say to everyone, ‘look I’ve written a book and it’s available on Amazon’. If the book’s priced right most people will buy it, particularly if it’s priced at £1.00 or £1.99. It won’t be hard to ask your friends to download it and see what they think.
From there on it’s just a case of looking at your book’s content and thinking about marketing opportunities. I’ve just edited a memoir for a man who worked in the merchant navy and who’s a member of a merchant navy association that has over 70,000 members. I’ve shown him how to draw it to the attention of those members through websites, newsletters and meetings. This gives him a potential market of at least 70,000 people who’ve probably had similar life experiences and might be interested in his book. These are the sorts of tactics that Firsty’s developing to provide a package to authors, to make a bigger noise than the e-book that’s for sale next to you.
How does someone go about setting a target price for their book?
You have to balance two things: whether you need the income today or whether you’re trying to build your profile while you have a daytime job. If you’re in the situation where writing is something you’re doing as a supplementary income, or you’re building it for your future, then you’ll probably be able to price your book at the £1.00 to £1.99 range, because there’s a big book buying public out there who will happily spend up to £2.00 for your book and not be too concerned about it. If you need to live on the income then you’ve got to consider whether you can increase your price to £4.99. If you have a potential sales market of several thousand then this could become a significant income. However, if it’s a specialist subject then perhaps you can go up to £8.99. I’m very sceptical about the ability of e-books to go past the £9.00 barrier. I think if you do that people will struggle to see the justification because they’ll know that with hard copy there are margins that have to be made by the publisher and bookshops and that that pushes the price up.
There’s a very low tolerance in the e-book market. Once you go past the £9.00 mark people will know that you’re getting £6.00 or £7.00 per copy, which you’d only be getting for a £30 plus book in the shops. So, you have to decide where the book fits into your lifestyle. If you’re looking to get your name established and prove you can sell, then my advice is to stay down at the £1.99 level. If you need the income from it then I’d say price it around £4.99. Only if you believe that you have something exceptional should you go up to £8.99, but there’s little justification to go beyond that.
Can you see student textbooks moving heavily towards this market?
I think that this is a huge market. At the moment it’s controlled by hard copy publishers, but I feel that soon there’ll be a move by writers who produce good textbooks to approach schools and say, ‘Everyone has to be particularly conscious of costs at the moment, particularly students, so here’s a digital textbook I’ve written on this subject. It’s available at my site for £1.00, as opposed to the £20.00 for a university textbook’. This market’s wide open for such material and there’s going to be fierce competition from e-books here over the next few years.
How long would it take an author to get his e-book up onto the major selling sites?
If you approached Firsty on a Monday, and signed up with their Author Package, you’d probably have your website operational and be selling books on your site and Firsty’s by the end of the week or at worst the following week. It would be available for sale on Amazon and the iBook store soon after that.
What about the writers who want their sales to go through the websites they currently hold?
Very few people have an e-commerce resource that allows them to take payment on their sites. With Firsty’s Author Package you not only get that, but you also get digital rights management and protection against digital piracy. Your own website can be made compatible with Firsty’s, which is specifically designed with WordPress so that it can be bolted on to an existing website. So, if someone asks if we can adjust their own site, so that it works in the same manner, then the answer is yes we can.
You touched briefly on promotion, saying that Firsty will be rotating the books. Would you say that most of the promotion will be down to the author themselves?
It’s a joint thing because Firsty has an interest in selling the book. They’ll get their percentage through sales from their website. If sales go through Amazon then Amazon will take the percentage there. But it’s in Firsty’s interest to see these sales turning over, so they’ll be looking at books on an individual basis to see if there is anything that they can do to promote them.
They’ll also be maintaining their website, so that when it opens each day different books are given prominence alongside well known authors. Firsty will also be looking at ways to direct traffic to their site. So when people are putting effort into their own marketing Firsty will be doing the same, also making suggestions on how sales can be increased. It’ll be comforting to know there’s a large corporate entity behind you.
I understand that you’re offering an editorial service.
Yes, I have an editing company called Dancing Tree Productions. A lot of people who have written for the first time don’t appreciate how everyone, from published authors onwards, needs to be edited. We get too involved in our own writing and tend to miss flaws that a good editor will catch.
What Dancing Tree Productions will do is read your book in its entirety and give you a close line-by-line sample editing of the first thirty pages or so. We’ll then give some general comments on the strengths, weaknesses and areas you might develop. This will give you a pretty clear idea of the extent you need editing. Most people are horrified when they see these thirty pages, the syntax, grammar and spelling mistakes or little idiosyncrasies. We charge a nominal fee for the preliminary look at the book and if someone wants us to edit it completely then we’ll quote for that. We provide a reasonably full service and will work with the author towards getting introductions to publishers, giving recommendations from ourselves. So people can come to us for a preliminary or thorough assessment, or even a complete hand holding where we work with the writer from the inception of the idea to negotiation with a publisher.
How can people contact you?
Through our website http://www.dancingtreeproductions.co.uk/. We’ve got some excellent editors and have three editing services under the one Dancing Tree umbrella. For an example of the website you get with Firsty take a look at Nun The Wiser. Further details are available at Firsty Authors.
Dan Witters runs editorial service Dancing Tree Productions and you can email him directly at: danw@dancingtreeproductions.co.uk
Reproduced with the kind consent of www.profwritingacademy.com
Dan, tell us about Firsty's Author’s Package.
The idea started with an approach to Firsty Group to see whether they could come up with something that would benefit unpublished authors; giving them the chance to get their work published, initially digitally, and also to give them some sort of platform from which to negotiate with print publishers. Firsty had a look at what unpublished authors ideally need and came up with their Author Package.
First you upload your e-book onto a WordPress website, which they create for you. It’s very easy to use and maintain. The first e-book is free and there’s a very competitive charge for subsequent books. You simply upload your work and it’s automatically available for sale on your new website, which has a plug-in to Firsty’s e-commerce site which allows you to take credit card and PayPal payments. This is a huge thing for most people, as the ability to take payments online is a very difficult thing to arrange. Even established businesses struggle getting permission from banks to do this and yet it’s included as part of the package.
Within about a week or so the book will be uploaded onto both Amazon and the Apple iBooks store. Again, if you try and do this yourself you’ll find it very difficult, particularly because Apple tend to give precedence to people uploading large volumes. So, unless you’re uploading a large quantity of books at once you’ll go through quite a slow process. My feeling is that e-books sales are increasing, particularly in America, and I think that it’s going to be increasingly important for all authors to get their work out in e-book form. Publishers seem very slow to understand this.
With this package not only have you got all the above, but also a series of guidance to locating various people and services. This includes cover art, photographic illustrations and editing services. Every writer, whether published or not, needs to be edited.
Firsty has made a list of everything that an unpublished author would need and has provided that at the cheapest price possible. At the moment this is £495. For this you get the full package including website, your first e-book created and uploaded plus the e-commerce facility. You’ll have gone from having a book, which no one wants, to having a website with your book for sale on it; in addition to Amazon, the iBook store and various other stores. This is an extraordinary jump for someone to make in a matter of days.
Do you think that this is the way ahead for publishing?
Absolutely; you see all traditional publishers get hundreds of books sent to them which they send out to readers for assessment and they have to rely on these readers. The fact is that there are some great authors out there who just keep getting rejection slips and over the years these authors simply vanish.
Publishers are turning away people they shouldn’t, as due to the structure of the publishing system it’s very hard to get their full attention. If someone joins Firsty’s website they’ll receive suggestions on how to expand their sales through various marketing techniques. You get three-monthly sales reports, from which you can determine not only how many you’ve sold, but also where you sold them through. You can also check daily the sales that have been made on your website, or on Firsty’s e-book store Firsty Fish. Publishers work on the premise that you’ll sell a lot more in print (although I think that this is about to become a flawed assumption) so they’ll be quite impressed if you can show them you’ve sold this many books electronically over a three month period. Particularly if you can say I’m also selling in the States and Canada etc. By putting the sales sheet in front of them you’re no longer saying ‘do you or don’t you like my book’, you’re saying ‘people love my book and they’ve demonstrated this by paying £5.00 or £8.00 for it’.
Bookshops take about 50% from sales of printed copies. Then there are costs such as printing, distribution and so forth, plus the publisher takes around 15% of the sale price which doesn’t leave much for author. With the Firsty system the person who handles the sale will take between 20% and 30% of the price, which means that 70% or more goes to the person who actually wrote the book. In the traditional market a writer will get anything from 50p to £1.00 per book that sells, whereas if you put an e-book up at £5.00 on your site you’ll actually get close to £4.00 per copy. Consequently a single e-book sale might be worth more in monetary terms than a number of print sales and I think that this is going to become increasingly attractive to authors.
It wouldn’t surprise me if authors soon put their print books through a traditional publisher but reserve their e-books rights and handle this side of it themselves, through their own websites and a system like Firsty’s. This way they’ll be getting the vast majority of the income generated from these sales.
Once you’ve got a digital site and your book is up there you might need an App developed, as either a promotional thing or a follow on to the book itself. Firsty
Won’t the E-book market become swamped, and if so how can we make our book stand out?
That’s definitely going to happen, because what you have is a bottleneck as far as how many books are out there. In the print market this is controlled by the publishing companies, who get literally thousands of books referred to them. So which do they chose and why? We’re now looking at a situation where, for the cost of a couple of hundred pounds, authors can get their books out there. This leaves us in the situation where suddenly there are thousands of e-books available and it will be increasingly difficult to bring yours to the attention of a traditional publisher.
Firsty has done quite a lot of marketing research. They might say, for example, sit down and make a list of all your friends. Go through your email addresses, Facebook or other social media and say to everyone, ‘look I’ve written a book and it’s available on Amazon’. If the book’s priced right most people will buy it, particularly if it’s priced at £1.00 or £1.99. It won’t be hard to ask your friends to download it and see what they think.
From there on it’s just a case of looking at your book’s content and thinking about marketing opportunities. I’ve just edited a memoir for a man who worked in the merchant navy and who’s a member of a merchant navy association that has over 70,000 members. I’ve shown him how to draw it to the attention of those members through websites, newsletters and meetings. This gives him a potential market of at least 70,000 people who’ve probably had similar life experiences and might be interested in his book. These are the sorts of tactics that Firsty’s developing to provide a package to authors, to make a bigger noise than the e-book that’s for sale next to you.
How does someone go about setting a target price for their book?
You have to balance two things: whether you need the income today or whether you’re trying to build your profile while you have a daytime job. If you’re in the situation where writing is something you’re doing as a supplementary income, or you’re building it for your future, then you’ll probably be able to price your book at the £1.00 to £1.99 range, because there’s a big book buying public out there who will happily spend up to £2.00 for your book and not be too concerned about it. If you need to live on the income then you’ve got to consider whether you can increase your price to £4.99. If you have a potential sales market of several thousand then this could become a significant income. However, if it’s a specialist subject then perhaps you can go up to £8.99. I’m very sceptical about the ability of e-books to go past the £9.00 barrier. I think if you do that people will struggle to see the justification because they’ll know that with hard copy there are margins that have to be made by the publisher and bookshops and that that pushes the price up.
There’s a very low tolerance in the e-book market. Once you go past the £9.00 mark people will know that you’re getting £6.00 or £7.00 per copy, which you’d only be getting for a £30 plus book in the shops. So, you have to decide where the book fits into your lifestyle. If you’re looking to get your name established and prove you can sell, then my advice is to stay down at the £1.99 level. If you need the income from it then I’d say price it around £4.99. Only if you believe that you have something exceptional should you go up to £8.99, but there’s little justification to go beyond that.
Can you see student textbooks moving heavily towards this market?
I think that this is a huge market. At the moment it’s controlled by hard copy publishers, but I feel that soon there’ll be a move by writers who produce good textbooks to approach schools and say, ‘Everyone has to be particularly conscious of costs at the moment, particularly students, so here’s a digital textbook I’ve written on this subject. It’s available at my site for £1.00, as opposed to the £20.00 for a university textbook’. This market’s wide open for such material and there’s going to be fierce competition from e-books here over the next few years.
How long would it take an author to get his e-book up onto the major selling sites?
If you approached Firsty on a Monday, and signed up with their Author Package, you’d probably have your website operational and be selling books on your site and Firsty’s by the end of the week or at worst the following week. It would be available for sale on Amazon and the iBook store soon after that.
What about the writers who want their sales to go through the websites they currently hold?
Very few people have an e-commerce resource that allows them to take payment on their sites. With Firsty’s Author Package you not only get that, but you also get digital rights management and protection against digital piracy. Your own website can be made compatible with Firsty’s, which is specifically designed with WordPress so that it can be bolted on to an existing website. So, if someone asks if we can adjust their own site, so that it works in the same manner, then the answer is yes we can.
You touched briefly on promotion, saying that Firsty will be rotating the books. Would you say that most of the promotion will be down to the author themselves?
It’s a joint thing because Firsty has an interest in selling the book. They’ll get their percentage through sales from their website. If sales go through Amazon then Amazon will take the percentage there. But it’s in Firsty’s interest to see these sales turning over, so they’ll be looking at books on an individual basis to see if there is anything that they can do to promote them.
They’ll also be maintaining their website, so that when it opens each day different books are given prominence alongside well known authors. Firsty will also be looking at ways to direct traffic to their site. So when people are putting effort into their own marketing Firsty will be doing the same, also making suggestions on how sales can be increased. It’ll be comforting to know there’s a large corporate entity behind you.
I understand that you’re offering an editorial service.
Yes, I have an editing company called Dancing Tree Productions. A lot of people who have written for the first time don’t appreciate how everyone, from published authors onwards, needs to be edited. We get too involved in our own writing and tend to miss flaws that a good editor will catch.
What Dancing Tree Productions will do is read your book in its entirety and give you a close line-by-line sample editing of the first thirty pages or so. We’ll then give some general comments on the strengths, weaknesses and areas you might develop. This will give you a pretty clear idea of the extent you need editing. Most people are horrified when they see these thirty pages, the syntax, grammar and spelling mistakes or little idiosyncrasies. We charge a nominal fee for the preliminary look at the book and if someone wants us to edit it completely then we’ll quote for that. We provide a reasonably full service and will work with the author towards getting introductions to publishers, giving recommendations from ourselves. So people can come to us for a preliminary or thorough assessment, or even a complete hand holding where we work with the writer from the inception of the idea to negotiation with a publisher.
How can people contact you?
Through our website http://www.dancingtreeproductions.co.uk/. We’ve got some excellent editors and have three editing services under the one Dancing Tree umbrella. For an example of the website you get with Firsty take a look at Nun The Wiser. Further details are available at Firsty Authors.
Dan Witters runs editorial service Dancing Tree Productions and you can email him directly at: danw@dancingtreeproductions.co.uk
Reproduced with the kind consent of www.profwritingacademy.com
Sunday, 4 March 2012
New Writers And The EBook
What do digital formats offer new writers? It's easier to get published, no? I quiz Dan Witters from Kiwa Media, who makes e-books and apps for major publishers and indie authors alike, in this second of five interviews.
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I write short stories, Dan, so what can the e-book format do for me?
E-books are extremely cheap - most people producing e-book conversions are doing it for about £100, which is well within the reach of new authors and freelance writers who might be concentrating on short story collections. But the people uploading the e-books to sales sites - and I don’t just mean the big ones like Amazon or Google - are reluctant to take work that hasn’t already been published in print format.
Traditionally both publisher and writer would have hoped to see a financial return from published material after publication costs. Then came e-books and the cost of publishing suddenly vanished. Unlike in traditional publishing, there are no print costs with e-books. No publishing, storage or insurance costs. Transport costs don’t exist and there’s no returns cost either, so the expense associated in actually producing an e-book is minimal. Logically, therefore, you would have thought this would make it much easier for new writers to get published.
This isn’t the case then?
Well, you can get your book completed in e-book format easily, but the question is who will host the sale? The costs incurred by the e-books sales sites are considerable, bearing in mind the level of expertise and technical knowledge required to set up, administer them and take online credit card payments. So while it originally looked like the e-book was going to sidestep the traditional publishers' cost-based objections to taking on new writers, the hosting sites have now become their digital equivalents, saying, “No, I don’t want that unknown book that doesn’t have tested sales figures”. Many e-book hosting sites now stick to churning out e-books from traditional print publishers because they know they will make money. And so we’ve come full circle.
OK, so its up to me to make people aware of my digital book then. How do I do that?
That’s a good question; it’s the biggest single problem in this area. Traditionally you could simply walk into a Waterstone’s, or any other good bookshop, and have the opportunity to see and buy a good selection of quality books. But how do you do that with an e-book or app? We recently released an excellent app from one of the world’s biggest publishers. The voice-over is done by an extremely well known actor. You’d think that these components, combined with a historically bestselling title, would ensure a good take off , but the app hasn’t sold even moderately well. Why? Because of the issue you just raised - how do you let people know it’s out there? E-book publicity is a huge issue.
On the other hand, I’m currently working with a group of people from a TV show that has a very high profile and therefore is attractive to newspapers. That’s what’s needed to get this kind of product selling. Because of the TV show, newspapers are always happy to run an editorial on the product. It’s what they are increasingly looking for.
When newspapers cover the e-book or app, sales boom, but as publicity dies off the hits on the website die off too, as does the advertising drawn to it. Therefore any newspaper with a pay wall is receptive to any ideas that will increase hits on their websites. If you have an app featuring a well known celebrity, whose TV show is in vogue, it’s extremely easy to get coverage on newspaper websites and thus it sells well. These days high quality high content apps are much harder to sell than less sophisticated content based around a celeb.
So marketing is crucial, not to mention extremely difficult. In this new industry we’re all working on ways to get better viewing of our apps and constantly thinking up tricks to get people’s attention. Such ways of working are largely outside the reach of a new author. Even if you did get your e-book up on someone’s site, how does this site direct people’s attention to your product? We’re still in the very early days and simply haven’t found anything that will get a new writer to the attention of the buying public.
So it's up to me as the new writer to think in new ways, too?
Yes, because we all have to contend with the sheer volume of stuff up there. When apps move, as they most certainly will, to the Android and probably Windows MS platforms - not to mention the new generation of touch-screen computers - the amount of e-books and apps available is going to be more incredible still.
We all have to think about how we draw people’s attention to sites that host books. Google does this very well, as does Amazon. They rotate books across their home page and that gets people looking at them time and again. Those are well established print books, though; we’ve been trying hard to get such sites to set up areas to promote new art and writing from new authors. I’m suggesting to these people that they see it as an obligation to take on new writers, because the next Harry Potter is out there somewhere. It’s important that new authors somehow get to the public’s attention.
Reproduced with the kind permission of www.profwritingacademy.com
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Writing For The IPad
Will the iPad change the way we read – and who makes a living from writing? In this first of five interviews I spoke to Dan Witters, Kiwa Media's UK Manager, to find out.
Kiwa Media are an award winning media company based in New Zealand, developing iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad Apps, digital content for books, film, TV and the mobile music industry. The company has seen rapid growth since Apple launched the iPad, opening offices in America principally to service the Latin American market, and another in Bristol to deal with the UK market before moving on to the rest of Europe. Things are looking very good indeed for them. But are the opportunities as good for us writers?
What’s so good about the iPad?
Let’s start by finding out more about the iPad. What makes it different from other E readers? Dan explains:
“The Kindle is essentially an E Reader, which takes a novel and puts it out in a format that isn’t greatly different from reading a hard copy, although it’s more user friendly, particularly when you have three or four hundred pages of text. Apple has allowed the reader a whole range of functions that you wouldn’t normally use. For instance, it’s ideal for illustrated children’s books, allowing children to interact with the book.
A current children’s book often just gives the reader text, though there might be things that pop up from the page, so the experience is little more than just reading the words. Books are read to children by parents or friends, and once children are learning to read, they often just skim a traditional book rather than really coming to grips with it.
The iPad has allowed us to introduce a whole range of activities to children’s books. For instance our QBook application can clear the illustrations of colour and then the children can paint with their fingers, recreating the illustrations. Then children can record themselves reading the book or perhaps their parents can record themselves reading it to them. This means that the child can have the experience of their parents reading them a book at any time they wish. Our wide range of applications can make the whole experience of reading a book so much more enjoyable. For instance we have multiple language functions. We have just mastered Japanese, have Cantonese and Mandarin versions and are working on other major languages like Hindi and Arabic. With this experience the major European languages are relatively straightforward for us.
The advantage we have over other people who are converting children’s books to applications like the iTunes store is that at the moment they are doing literal translations. This means that you get the words and the pictures on the page, and the ability to turn these pages, but not much more. Because of Kiwa’s background in sound production, audio work and synchronisation with text – for 18 years we’ve worked on music videos and dubbing for television over - we’ve been able to introduce that extra level of function, which means that at the moment we have the lead in the market worldwide."
Is it too big?
While the iPad is an attractive piece of equipment with a stunning array of applications it is quite large – compared with a paperback that fits in a pocket. Does Dan think this will change?
“I use two analogies. At the moment it is quite clear that the iPad is cumbersome and that the itouch, which is hand held and about telephone size, too small to fully enjoy what’s available in the application, so two things have to happen. At the moment the iPad is dominating the market but everyone is now looking at this market. So while the Kindle has been concentrating on text, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it move out of black and white into something like the iPad fairly quickly. All the phone companies, particularly Nokia, are moving as fast as they can to get their own versions out on the market. Google have their Android system and won’t be far behind. I would expect that next year, when you come to download an application for children’s books using iPad, Kindle etc, I think you could see five or six different platforms that you could use to download it to, and with that will come a drop in price.
At the moment the iPads cost about USD $500, which is out of the range of most people to put in front of their children. But as the price comes down to say $100 it becomes more feasible. The development of quick transport such as the car hasn’t made the bike obsolete and we still enjoy riding bikes for the sheer pleasure. So I believe we will continue reading physical books for an awfully long time.
The other analogy is the mobile phone. When these first came out they were huge devices. People thought they would be confined to businesses and never saw the day that ten-year olds would be running around with them as a standard accessory. But this happened fairly quickly, and the time frame where we move to hand held reading devices could be 2 to 3 years. Then it could be quite normal for a five- or six-year old to have a small hand-held device that their books are downloaded onto, in addition to written papers. I think that in future years if you are taking children on holiday you’ll prefer a small hand held device with all their reading downloaded on it rather than a heavy bag full of books."
How does Dan read?Does Dan read on electronic devices himself, or does he prefer a book?
“I have three children and personally I like to hold a book in my hand. My 14-year-old is spread between digital and the current norm. He still likes to get a hard copy and curl up in a chair to read. At the other end of the family, my five-year old thinks everything should be delivered digitally and once he has the iPad in his hand you have to prise it away from him. I think it’s an age thing. There is a generation coming through now aged between five and ten, whose predominant way of getting entertainment, including children’s books, will be via this media. As they grow older, we will be pushed to one side. People like me have been reading hard copy for far too long to give up now. Whereas up and coming generations will use digital as their prime means of entertainment."
More than children?
Kiwa focus on children’s books at this moment, but are they looking to move into other forms and genres in the future?
“At the moment children’s books are perfect for us. But we have had approaches from several educational organisations who see possibilities in what we offer. One of them deals with children coming to the UK who speak little or no English and who then go into the school system and find it difficult to catch up. This group see a great opportunity in having something like a simple children’s story which we could produce in their native language for children to engage with as part of their education. This allows them to grapple with a language within the confines of a children’s book where they understand and enjoy the story in their own language. There is this little function that can allow them to go back and forth between their native language and English, or whatever language that they are learning. So we are seeing quite a lot of opportunities in that area alone."
London Book Fair
Kiwa had a stand showcasing their products and approach at the 2010 London Book Fair. Was the publishing world interested?
“LBF was tremendously successful for us. We were interested primarily in seeing what our competitors are working on. It confirmed that there are some extremely talented companies out there making applications for studios in America and they are extremely good. We looked at one for Alice In Wonderland, which was very high quality. But none of them were doing audio. So while they could make the Queen Of Hearts move her tarts around the page, and there was a lot of movement visually, the story itself just sat in pixels on the page. In comparison, our texts come alive. You can run your finger over the text, reading at your own speed or even record it in your own voice. You can tap an individual word, have it spelt out or repeated if you wish. To be honest our peers were simply intrigued.
These peers went away quickly, having seen how we did our audio, and we of course went away with an interest in their visual tricks. So it was good to see what was out there and that there isn’t anyone ahead of us in any way. We don’t seem to have an equal in the audio and translation sides.
We found it helpful to talk to publishers with an iPad in front of us, so that they got a visual impression. It’s so hard to contact people by phone or email and to convey to them just how extraordinary this form of media is. It simply has to be done face-to-face and the London Book Fair was a wonderful opportunity to do that. What actually came out of the fair far exceeded our expectations."
Threat or opportunity?Do some publishers see Kiwa’s product as a threat? And if they are not on board at the moment will they have to be in the near future or face missing out on a huge potential market?
“Publishers have been aware of the digital world for some time and simply hoped it would go away and leave them alone. I don’t believe that many have actively prepared for it. The Apple Pad is the big game changer. It just can’t be ignored now, with its good quality reproduction of books. We’ve found that some large publishers have finally realised that they simply have to engage with the market - and quickly. Those that we are dealing with will be trying very quickly to get books up digitally. Others are pausing and standing on the sideline to see how it works. The last three months has seen enormous change in the activity of publishers moving towards this idea. They realise that they have ignored it as long as they could but have no option now. These guys simply have to get their stuff into digital format and move quickly."
I asked if Kiwa have any success in getting publishers on board at LBF? Dan smiled :
“We’re under a confidentiality agreement, but have signed a deal with two household publishing names. We already work with Penguin. On the strength of those sort of associations we feel we’ll get a lot of independent publishers prepared to try perhaps one, two or more books and see how it goes. This is a new market - even Apple have only been in it for a short while - and none of us knows what sales to expect. A book may have sold hundreds of thousands in paper form, but it’s anyone’s guess how it will perform digitally. We are learning as we go.”
What does an E book cost?So how much does an average electronic version of a book cost the reader – is it more, or less, expensive than a paperback?
“With children’s books we find that the average price of the application is around 4 or 5 US Dollars, as opposed to 9 or 10 Dollars if you bought it from a bookstore. The digital application is 40 or 50 percent of the price hard copies fetch in the book store. There is a huge saving because you only ever make one copy, which is constantly downloaded. With the printed version one has to keep reprinting it and there’s delivery to stores and so forth. Plus stores return unsold books. Digital should be cheaper and I think digital prices will drop even further.”
The owner of a hard copy can resell it. Does Dan foresee a medium to facilitate this electronically?
“I hate the thought of bookshops going out of existence. We have recently lost Borders here in Bristol and the rest of the UK. The market does seem to be getting increasingly difficult for booksellers. Whether they will be able to achieve success digitally I don’t know. There are complicated security and rights issues that have to be worked through. Then there’s the question of whether people like Amazon would consider it in their best interest to get rid of the bookstall in the high street. It won’t happen overnight, but the availability of digital books must to some extent go on robbing from the bookstore on the high street. Just think how CDs and DVDs available to be downloaded on the internet affected businesses. This could easily have the same effect.”
How do they sell their products?Many companies producing software have online links to the companies who make the hardware and get a percentage from linked sales. Is this the case with Apple?
“We put applications up on the Apple iTunes store and customers purchase from there. We are working to having our own electronic store and being able to sell ourselves, but at the moment, like everyone else, we are in the shadow of Apple. We’re essentially a facilitator. We say to a publisher, or someone who writes books, that we will take their book and load it up to the Apple store and no doubt in time Amazon will have their own store for these applications and we might well supply books to that. We aren’t tied to anyone and would like to have our own means of doing this but at the moment it’s a one-way trip to the Apple store.”
Opportunities for writersOne of Kiwa’s prime products is the Milly Molly series of books. Who writes them and how are they doing?
“These books have done particularly well. They are written by Gill Pittar, a New Zealand author, and it all started with a doll she made. She went on to write a series of books about her. I noticed a stand at London Bookfair devoted totally to Milly Molly. She had been franchised to a UK operator who thought the market sufficient to justify a stand at the LBF. They seemed to be busy and generating a lot of interest.
The author comes from a town that’s small even by New Zealand standards. For her to have written a book that has travelled all over the world is amazing, given that in the past she would have been lucky to even get it across New Zealand, let alone Australia or elsewhere. But in an electronic generation, the figures rise daily. There are now 750 million people worldwide with a touch device that can download these applications, and so someone in a small town at the end of the world writing children’s books now has a theoretical market of 750 million people. This is the type of change the digital world brings to writers."
Can we approach you direct?So as a writer, could I bring an idea to you if I couldn’t get a deal with a publisher? And what would the cost be?
“Yes , any writer could do that. For instance, we can look at getting a children’s book into digital format and up onto the iTunes store and on sale for prices starting at around one thousand pounds. Now, if you were looking at publishing a book and printing several thousand copies which you then have to try to around bookstores you would be looking at a far higher starting figure. So if we have an author with all their drawings done and ready to go to a printer then yes, we can take that material, convert it digitally, add sound and audio text and all the additional features we have available and get it up on the digital world at prices starting around a thousand pounds. This is an easy, low-cost entry, and I do think we will start to see authors saying ‘Well, do I simply sidestep the publishers?’ While we are not dealing with many authors directly at the moment, I believe that in the near future we will be.”
What about publicity?That’s great, but how are E books publicised? Traditionally, this is handled via the bookstores and publishers. Would Kiwa be able to publicise a book, or is this all left to the writers themselves?
“This is a real concern for publishers. We don’t take on the responsibility of publicity. We put books up in the digital world and writers have to find ways to advertise their books themselves. The traditional way to get the buying public to know about a book is for the author to go on a book tour and sign copies, with in-store publicity, posters, stands, and book reviews in newspapers and monthly periodicals. Unfortunately a lot of those things don’t have an equivalent in the digital world. If we do lose the bookstores how indeed are we going to publicise the books? No-one has an answer to that one yet.”
Just books?And what about writing in other forms – particularly for magazines – will that work on E readers?
“We were approached by a publisher of a good-quality magazine to see whether we could make it work. The answer is that it’s a question of capacity. Just how much you can download quickly, what storage capacity is your app taking up on a small device and where do you have so much content that you cease to be an app and become more of an EBook? We are looking at ways of increasing the current capacity. One consideration is that they won’t need audio content. When you take that out it allows us to have much larger quantities of material. So yes, I do see that happening. It’s already occurring in the newspaper world. You can buy any English newspaper on a street corner but also go online and read the same newspaper for free. The Times are now charging for access, but yes I can see magazines following that path. Quite quickly as well."
Reproduced with the kind permission of www.profwritingacademy.com
Sunday, 12 February 2012
With my first novel 'A Pride Of Lions' completed I'm now working on the next novel in the series, 'The Cull Of Lions' and I'm really getting into it. This follows on directly from my protagonist Jenny William's and her teammates escape from a dying planet back into the battlefield, where a stunned mankind has discovered that their ancient enemy is still out there, and to Eden - the mysterious world deep within the regiments new home Loreen. I'm also working on a Young Adult novel, simply because the story wouldn't wait - it's screaming to be written and so I've put pen to paper.
Just completed are reviews of Jackie Chan's 100th film, '1911' which is about the Chinese Revolution, and 'The Front Line', a tale of the Korean War. The latter is an excellent film, much along the lines of 'The Pacific' and 'Band Of Brothers'. Although I'm not a great fan of subtitles this movie is well worth watching. I've also done a book review for Kim Bok Man's 'Taekwondo, Defence Against Weapons'. This is a rewrite of his famous 'Practical Taekwondo', a must-have-book for any serious martial artist.
With the temperature still plummeting well below freezing it's nice to be tucked up indoors with the heating on, tapping away at my laptop. It's a case of keeping your head down, ignoring the cold outside and pitching in; there's so much to write and so many tales to tell.
Just completed are reviews of Jackie Chan's 100th film, '1911' which is about the Chinese Revolution, and 'The Front Line', a tale of the Korean War. The latter is an excellent film, much along the lines of 'The Pacific' and 'Band Of Brothers'. Although I'm not a great fan of subtitles this movie is well worth watching. I've also done a book review for Kim Bok Man's 'Taekwondo, Defence Against Weapons'. This is a rewrite of his famous 'Practical Taekwondo', a must-have-book for any serious martial artist.
With the temperature still plummeting well below freezing it's nice to be tucked up indoors with the heating on, tapping away at my laptop. It's a case of keeping your head down, ignoring the cold outside and pitching in; there's so much to write and so many tales to tell.
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