Emdashery Blog

Sony Reader still winning customers--

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools has a write-up on the Sony Reader--Sony's electronic book device. The reader displays books that are in ebook format--specifically PDF, TXT and RTF formats.

The Sony Reader is a portable, unobtrusive paperback-sized handheld device for reading eBooks. I've carried it on several plane trips and car trips and have found it be quite convenient and functional. In fact, I generally have it with me all the time, so I'm never without a book (or 40). Having it has encouraged me to read the types of books I might not consider otherwise due to space constraints around my home or simply not wishing to carry around a physical book that could potentially get damaged during transport. The books I usually read tend to be technical or reference books, but I've particularly enjoyed reading some classics and contemporary fiction on the Reader.

An new electronic medium that creates new customers. That's often how it works. I'm still far too cheap to lay down the $350 purchase price. But I don't think this is a passing fad, so I know my time will come.

Read the full review here...

What will books look like in the future?--

A recent Shelf Awareness offers a summary of points made from the Making Information Pay seminary held by the Book Industry Study Group. As emerging technology continues to change the publishing industry, some people will bemoan that consumers aren't reading like they used to. In fact, consumers are not reading less, necessarily, but they are reading differently.

Although e-books are nowhere near achieving their potential, there are many other digital opportunities, mostly on the Web and cell phones and iPods, that continue to grow and evolve. Publishers who aren't ready for those and unforeseen opportunities--such as by not digitizing their books, for example--will lose out. As Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co., put it: "The day will come when you should have done it last week."

Consumers are reading more and more online and want pieces of information, not full texts. As a result, making chapters and other parts of traditional books available is more important. "Consumers don't want to read a whole finance book when they're only concerned with mortgages," Nicole Poindexter of Hachette Group said. "New media is radically changing content. In the past, readers just took content as it was presented." Now, she added, "consumers create content."

Poindexter pointed out, too, that the next generation of readers are digital natives and to an extent will bypass books. "We'll have no chance to control our content unless we take action now to digitize it and be proactive."

As digital natives increase their share of the consumer marketplace, I wonder what new content products will emerge to serve their needs. What will books of the future look like? And how will we need to write them?

Productivity--where art thou?

Marcus Goodyear is holding meme week at his blog, goodwordediting.com, and he tagged me with writing about productivity. Specifically, Marcus wants to know what my productivity secrets are, which is really quite amusing, because my productivity this week could be kindly assigned to a subterranean category.

But when I am successful at being productive, I have three secrets. The first thing I try to follow is to always love the work I'm doing. Marcus did I nice job laying out the argument for this. Unfortunately, most people's love/hate continuums run in the opposite direction of their starve/prosper continuums. In a world where eating and shelter are still an inconvenient requirement of life, love doesn't always fit the bill. So, after quickly abandoning hope of always loving what I do, I fall to my second secret, which is to have a deadline—or in other words—always work with someone with whom you have the potential to disappoint. Probably because I'm a pleaser, I abhor missing a deadline and can't really remember the last time I did.

In reality, I try to strike a balance between those two secrets as best I can. I love being a writer much more than any other job I’ve ever held, but not all writing projects inspire enjoyment. So, I pursue some projects that I love doing, but pay modestly, and intermix them with other work that is deadline heavy but not always fun. Sometimes work is just that—work. But to be honest, I can't think of anything I do that isn't a party compared to digging ditches or emptying septic tanks.

My final secret, which is really more of a reminder to myself, is that quality trumps quantity. I could produce more articles and books, but the quality of my work would take a hit. If you look at Mark’s blog, for example, he doesn’t post five times a day, but his content is some of the best out there. You want to visit his site because you know you’ll come away with new knowledge that will enhance your thoughts and abilities.

Returning to the meme of this blog, however, one of the most productivity-killing tasks a writer has to do is promote his or her book (you knew I'd get that in here somehow). Many authors simply take several months off from writing to do promotional activities (activities that are near the bottom of the "love" meter for most of us).

So how do authors promote their books and stay productive writers? Randy Ingermanson has written extensively on the idea of starting a blog related to an upcoming book. But I'm hearing of some writers who are considering writing their book material in blog entry form. Then, at some point when they have a critical mass of ideas and material (and maybe readers), they'll be ready with a rough draft in hand, or at least a detailed outline. Later, when they have a completed book, they'll be ready with a content-deep blog to promote their ideas. Many people have tried to retroactively turn their blog into a book, and the jury is still out on how successful that can be. But someone writing and producing a platform simultaneously…that sounds interesting.

Now, speaking of productivity…I need to find where mine went…

Simon Spurrier: giving away a book--

More on free book give-aways in hopes of inspiring future sales...

Headline Publishing Group is giving away a digital download of Simon Spurrier's new novel--Contract. It will be available online for six weeks--with each section available for a limited period. For those who like his work, a limited edition hardback will then be available to buy from the Web site.

Do you think the world is changing?--

Uh...yes would be the correct answer. This slideshow was picked as the world's best presentation by SlideShare. It demonstrates the fast-changing times we live in (times that writers need to be a part of).

How to build your brand (book) with young adults--

Myspace, piczo, friendster, orkut, bebo, facebook--we're all a twitter over the social networking options. QuickSprout lays out three ways to use them to build a brand: creating a profile, networking, and inviting stickiness. It's just one more way to network in your pajamas (at your computer where, you know, you actually might still be able to do some writing). The blog Mashable also adds some thoughts:

With all that’s going on with social networking these days, we’re seeing a lot of figures leverage the popularity of social networks to gain visibility for themselves. We’ve seen it a lot with musicians, films, and especially politicians, who recognize the potential of reaching out to the teen and young adult demographics that connect over social networks and are hoping to get the young vote for the 2008 Presidential elections.

Read both blogs here and here...

What to do during the long wait from acceptance to print--

The New York Times is writing again on the advantages of podcasting. I posted before on authors releasing their books straight to audio via podcasts. Now, authors are using podcasts to stay connected with "readers" while they wait for the book to come out.

When you are a budding author and you appear on television, it is sure to enhance book sales.

But what do you do if your book is not even written, never mind in stores?

For Mignon Fogarty, who is host of a popular podcast called Grammar Girl, the answer is to scramble to record a short audiobook in just a few days between the time the show tapes and is shown.

Waiting for her book to come out next year, Ms. Fogarty released an audiobook which climbed to the top of iTunes’ best-selling books list.

Ms. Fogarty’s feat comes at a time when Henry Holt and other presses are rethinking their audiobook divisions, which have negligible marketing budgets and typically ride on the coattails of the hardcovers. Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

Read the whole thing here...

Dean Koontz Gets Free Videos--

Recently, I posted about talk radio host Hugh Hewitt soliciting video trailers for his book, A Mormon in the White House. This past month, bestselling author Dean Koontz did the same thing. He offered $5,000 to the producer of the best 30-second video for his upcoming book, The Good Guy.

The response? He received 65 videos. And he only had to pay for one. Not bad.

You can see all the videos here...

And here's one of the submissions...

The look of books in the future--

Google's efforts to digitize every printed letter in the world--or something to that effect--has the Economist wondering what books will look like in the future.

IN SECRET locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google, the world's largest web-search company...

...a conservative estimate has Google digitising at least 10m books a year. The total number of titles in existence is estimated to be about 65m.

Google's is not the only project of its kind. The Internet Archive, for instance, is a non-profit organisation founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a San Francisco idealist who wants to re-create a modern Library of Alexandria containing all public-domain texts and videos. Amazon has been scanning books, as have Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google's biggest rivals in web-search, and individual libraries around the world. Eager not to be left out, publishers are also doing the same. But Google's effort, in scale and ambition, is off the charts.

Our curiosity about the future of books leads to many questions--and ultimately to one final question: the last one below:

As books go digital, new questions, both philosophical and commercial, arise. How, physically, will people read books in future? Will technology "unbind" books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?

Most of us wonder what books will look like. But technology will explode the variety of delivery. The better question might be: what will commercial reading look like in the future? We can only begin to fathom the answers...

Here's the complete article...

Misblurbing--"a completely acceptable practice..."--

"...if you're a promoter with no ethical values."

It seems the practice of misblurbing--distorting the meaning of a quote from a review or endorsement--is becoming more commonplace on book jackets.

This NY Times articles explains:

It happened to the Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman last October. Grossman says he was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier’s novel “Thirteen Moons” that included a one-word quotation — “Genius” — attributed to Time. Grossman was confused because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

It happened to me about 10 years ago. I had called David Sedaris’s memoir “Naked” a “tour-de-farce” in a review in Newsday. Shortly thereafter, the publisher ran an ad in which my 600-word review had been boiled down to one phrase: “tour de force.”

Read the whole thing here...