A Guide to Self-Publishing: Publishing eBooks

17 Mar ’12 By 23 Comments

This one is the big kahuna. The full monty. The one that got away…

…but not this time.

This time you snagged it, reeled it in, and grilled it for dinner.

This is the future of book publishing, and we are living in it. It has never been easier for a writer to reach millions of people globally than it is right now. Amazon continues to push its prices lower on Kindles and get them into as many hands as possible. And contrary to recent statements by union-type elites loyal to the author and consumer gouging practices of the Big 6, successful companies that verge on monopolizing any field do not raise prices but lower them. Consumers and creators benefit. As J.A. Konrath so unabashedly pointed out, it’s cartels and unions that are suffering, and are therefore throwing a hissy fit.

What’s the point?

The fact that you’re missing out on free money as I type this should be at least one motivating factor in getting you to start, finish, or prepare your manuscript for sale as an ebook. Yes, I write because I believe words change culture; I also write because I am compelled to be obedient to what I sense the Holy Spirit is calling me to, and to steward the talent he’s given me; as a blood-bought Christian, I will receive a reward (or lack thereof) in proportion to how I stewarded my gifts here on planet Earth. But I also write because it’s added income for my family, and as a husband and father I care a great deal about being faithful to them. You may not share my spiritual beliefs, but you probably share some of my economic ones.

Selling ebooks is probably the simplest, fastest, and most expansive return on my writing investment I’ve seen yet.

Granted, some authors will sell only a very little. Good books sell, and you should never fault consumers for poor sales performance. Other authors will sell gobs. The man I’ve mentioned above has hit $75,000-$100,000 USD/week multiple times in 2012. He’s fascinating to study, and to read. [Disclaimer to my younger readers: Konrath is brilliant, but at times he's very vulgar so please have a parent per-read a new post if you're unsure].

Me? I’m already making more per month than I ever have with my legacy publishers, and I expect my ebook sales to catch up with 6 months of combined print sales in less than 40 days.

As I’ll discuss tomorrow, I’m still experimenting with promotional tactics and trying to isolate what works and what doesn’t. Proper marketing is a fascinating and ever changing beast.

eBook Conversion

Probably the easiest part of self-publishing, and ironically the most cost-effective and lucrative, waits until the end of this whole process. That is unless you have no intention of providing print editions (which would go against the ideology of providing your books to as many people as possible across every available platform).

All the work you did to organize, edit and layout your manuscript, and to craft and refine a cover, now translates easily into creating an ebook. Essentially the conversion process takes the guts of your text and the front face of your cover and merges them together. If you’re skipping the print edition, then having a finished Word file and a front cover design are all you need.

As mentioned yesterday, I use Glendon & Tabatha Haddix of Streetlight Graphics for all my ebook conversions (and I plan to for a while to come). Here’s a little reasoning on why.

Knowing I’m a geek (nerds don’t make money; geeks do), I felt strongly I could attempt converting my own books. I read multiple tutorials on using MS Word and Adobe InDesign to convert manuscripts to ebooks. Given the amount of extraneous code that Word puts on the back end of a document, and the fact that I generally loathe even opening it (I prefer less clunky, more resource friendly and sleeker applications like TextEdit, Evernote and Scrivener) I decided to put most of my time into using InDesign.

I read tutorials, watched how-to guides, and even had some great dialogue with Adobe staff and one noted independent industry guru (all of whom were very helpful, by the way). But my final products never seemed to add up to something I felt represented my books, and I was sure they’d infuriate my readers. Knowing I had one chance to make my e-reading public happy, I needed a better option.

Kindle will help you convert a manuscript – at least to Kindle. When you create your free Kindle Direct Publishing account, they have options where you can have a KDP tech look at your PDF and give you a quote for converting it. Their base price says $69.00 USD. But my quote came back as $179.00 USD for each title of The White Lion Chronicles, as my PDFs had some “layering issues” they would not elaborate on. Ouch.

But having KDP convert for me was only a quarter of the problem. Since they only convert for Kindle – and holding to my “provide my books in as many formats as possible” mantra – I still had to find a way to convert for all the other formats, including Nook, Kobo, Adobe Digital Editions, Smashwords, Sony eReaders and Apple iBooks.

And people wonder where all my hair went.

By this point in the process I was tired and frustrated. I was emailing my fellow Spearhead authors looking for answers. One of their generous friends from a church in Seattle attempted to assist me; but even he, a former Amazon employee and conversion tech, was having trouble because things had changed since when he left a year ago. (Gulp).

That’s when Wayne Thomas Batson forwarded us all a link to Streetlight. At first none of us could believe their prices were legit. (Their cover prices as well as their package deals are amazing too!). So I wrote them to inquire.

Within a few hours I had a personal reply. What seemed too good to be true turned out to be better than too good. It was great. Not only would they format for Kindle for under $69.00 USD like KDP had quoted me, but they’d also convert to all the other formats I needed for under $69.00 USD per title!

I was beside myself.

Following the recommendation of friends I went and purchased a few randomly selected ebooks Streetlight had done, and the quality was above anything I could produce (and to date I’ve received zero negative feedback – a first for any reading format for me). Glendon & Tabatha are first class communicators and converters.

Distributing Online

Within one month I had The White Lion Chronicles ready to upload to all ebook distributing channels. Here’s what you’ll need to do the same.

1.) Open a free account with Kindle Direct Publishing. This will allow you to distribute your ebook to the largest seller in the world. And my own numbers prove it: more than 90% of my sales are on Kindle. You don’t need an ISBN; KDP has its own internal means of assigning yours books identification, though you can use your own ISBN if you have one.

2.) Open a free PubIt! account with Barnes & Noble which will allow you to distribute to the Nook. The Nook accounts for 2% of my sales to date. Like KDP, PubIt! doesn’t require an ISBN number and will track your ebook internally, but they’ll use your ISBN if you supply it.

3.) Open a free Smashwords account. Smashwords is great because it will allow you to reach all the other digital devices and formats out there, including Apple’s iBooks, and making your manuscript available as a viewable or printable PDF (I feel sorry for that printer!). Unlike KDP and PubIt!, Smashwords does require you to have an ISBN. It’s important to note that you can not use your physical book’s ISBN for your digital books. Your print book and you ebook are separate products (even though they have the same title), so they require different identification. Smashwords has their own batches of ISBNs that – like CreateSpace – list them as an associated entity with you, but does not infringe on your legal or moral rights or royalties. Until I feel like shelling out $1,000.00 USD for a block of 1,000 ISBNs from Bowker, this is the route I went. (Yes, you can buy less ISBNs from Bowker at a time, but the price is ridiculous).

One last note on Smashwords: in order for your book to be listed in something like Apple’s iBook Store, your book must meet their Premium status. Essentially, it needs to be a properly formatted, clean conversion that meets strict guidelines. Which Streetlight’s conversions do. It took almost 3 weeks (as your books wait in line), but eventually they were approved (something you see noted in your Smashwords dashboard).

Why not publish through Apple directly? You certainly can. But Apple tends to work faster with large representation companies (like Smashwords) that funnel huge quantities of titles and authors to them. Plus there’s no guarantee they’ll accept your application (they tend to be picky). There’s no real cost benefit either way, and it’s just one less account I have to monitor. I’m used to this already as my digital music is distributed through a San Francisco based company called IODA that supplies over 350 online retailers with my music, including Apple’s iTunes.

Streetlight provides a free step-by-step guide on how to upload your books and list them, and they alert you to any pitfalls in the process. It needs revising for 2012, but is a very simple and methodical overview of what to expect, and outlines just what you get when they convert your manuscript. (Astounding).

Pricing your ebooks can be a bit daunting. And the truth is you’ll never really know what works for you until you experiment. KDP has set the standard for the most part. At the time of my writing, they have two royalty brackets you can operate within: 30% for books set between $.99 and $2.98 USD, and 70% for books set at $2.99 USD and up. There are many articles and opinions on the best performing price points and why, but you risk getting so distracted you never end up setting a price point at all. All my books are set at $2.99 USD across all digital platforms at present; I may experiment later with dropping that further to $.99 USD.

There is a lot of discussion about the merits of selling ebooks for free in order to grow a fan base. While PubIt! and Smashwords allow this, Kindle does not, unless you’re a directly endorsed Amazon-published author (a whole other subject outside of this guide). KDP will only allow $.99 USD as their lowest price point. I’ll discuss the pros and cons of free in tomorrow’s subject of promotion.

The Future Is Calling

Publishing in the digital world is still in its infancy. But one thing is clear: it’s not going anywhere. Innovators will emerge, new companies will be birthed, and world literacy will grow – one of the best results I can think of.

I’ve heard it rumored that 10 is the magic number. Once an author has 10 titles to his or her name, their money-making abilities are firmly ensconced in the digital world. Call it an algorithm, a hunch, or a marketing ploy by Amazon to get more titles on their virtual shelves, the fact is that that premise will most likely mean little to you if you’re not writing.

So stop reading this and get back to writing. ch:

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A Guide to Self-Publishing: Publishing Print Books

16 Mar ’12 By 25 Comments

Publishing today is about making your book easily available to the widest possible audience. This means covering an expansive but ever narrowing range of formats and delivery systems. And while ebook sales are rising exponentially each quarter, having a print version is still needed.

At least for now.

The reality is there will be people who always love physical books. Like there are still people (like me) who like vinyl records. No one intends to get rich off them, but the manufacturer will at least make a few dollars and satisfy a small demographic. Meanwhile there’s kudos points for making a rudimentary collectors edition for those that want to place the work on display in their house.

Never before has it been so easy (for both author and consumer) and so cost-effective to turn your manuscript into print form.

Enter CreateSpace.com.

Essentially CreateSpace is a filing, ecommerce display, order fulfillment, printing, and delivery system.

The moment a consumer or retailer on any purchasing vehicle even remotely connected or affiliated with Amazon.com clicks “BUY” on your book, something magical happens.

The interior and exterior PDFs that you’ve painstakingly designed and uploaded to CreateSpace are called up into their printing presses in Charlotte, NC, and manufacture a specific book(s) to meet that order. Then that book is packaged and shipped, and collected monies are gathered and issued to you in check form at the end of every month.

It’s print-on-demand (POD) but with publisher-level quality, and without paying for huge runs and warehousing fees up front.

CreateSpace allows you as an author to buy your own books at cost and ship them anywhere you want. You can order 1 or 1,000 or 628. It doesn’t matter.

The best part is the book is permanently available and will never be blacklisted.

While you’re in the process of uploading your PDFs for a new title, you have a number of choices to make. Here’s a look at a title’s dashboard:

The first is what ISBN you’re going to use. You’re required to have one for each title, and there are a few options.

The easiest and the one I used is the free option: CreateSpace uses their ISBN numbers and gives you one. The pro is it’s free; the con is CreateSpace is listed as a cooperating entity under you as author/publisher should anyone dive into the details of the ISBN search results. This is only detrimental if a particular retailer doesn’t like CreateSpace. It doesn’t not affect your legal right to the book, its distribution, or its ownership.

You can opt to pay for a premium ISBN that’s registered to you.

And further still you can use your own if you’ve bought one (or a block) from Bowker. This is the most expensive but the most proprietary way.

Next you’ll need to decided where you want your books sold and for how much. This is listed under Sales Channels.

First up is selecting where people can buy them.

They give you a free CreateSpace page for each title. A book sold here will get the best royalty rate (almost 50%); the second highest is on Amazon (roughly 25%); the lowest is through secondary channels (retailers/wholesalers). You get to chose exactly where the books can be sold here. I recommend keeping all options selected for widest distribution and availability. Even at the lowest rate I make more per copy than my best legacy publisher rate.

Secondly, you’ll be promoted to set a sales price.

CreateSpace has a very convenient calculator that calculates the cost of manufacturing your book based on page count and materials, and then shows you the minimum prices you can charge without going in the red (and still make a profit yourself). For The White Lion Chronicles, the magic number where I was making positive income across all sales channels was at $16 USD. It was a little more than I wanted to charge, but allowed me to set competitive prices for books being sold to schools, institutions, and libraries.

Many people ask me about copyrighting their manuscripts. Legally, as soon as you’ve created a work, it’s yours, and by virtue of the fact that you made it, it’s therefore copyrighted. Proving that you made it (and own that copyright) is another story.

Some people feel very strongly about filing all their works of art with the IS Copyright Office in Washington, DC. But the reality is that if you’re printing (and therefore publishing) your own book through CreateSpace, and assigning an ISBN to it (listed with your name referenced to it), a court will see that alone as ample evidence that you’re the copyright holder. Putting “(c) date, your name” in the front matter of your book is just fine. And should you ever want to get the US Copyright Office in on validating it, fill out their form and send two copies of your book and a check for $35 USD to their office.

One operations note with editing details on a title listed with CreateSpace: while you’re extremely free to edit information – from the author bio to sales channels selections – any changes take a few days to go through and effectively remove the title from access temporarily. This may have even changed since I read about it last fall, but I’m too skittish to even try. Do your best to ensure that what you post the first time is the proper information; the same goes for Kindle Direct Publishing.

Turn around time for initial approval of your book is about 48-hours. Then you can order a proof (highly recommended); that will arrive in about 7 business days. Make sure you account for that time, and then review of that proof with any changes you need to make when considering a release date. I’d build a solid month into your timeline as it always takes longer than you think. Once you’ve reviewed the proof and made necessary changes, you can order a new proof (another 7 days!), or you can hit the magic “accept” button that essentially publishes the book. It’s a super cool feeling. And seeing your first book sales pop up on your sales reporting dashboard is pretty exciting.

Here’s what The White Lion Chronicles look like:

There are a few other POD style companies out there, but the authors I follow recommended CreateSpace, so I tend to follow. It’s been a fantastic experience so far, and I have hundreds of happy customers. My wife is happy too as the checks keep rolling in each month.

Tomorrow I’ll cover all-too-cool publishing of ebooks, by far the forefront of publishing in 2012 and beyond. ch:

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A Guide to Self-Publishing: Cover Design

15 Mar ’12 By 8 Comments

Looks don’t matter.

If that were true, God would have made sunsets various shades of brown, restricted us from any lofty vista viewing, and ensured woman were completely unattractive to the male species.

It’s a total lie. Looks do matter, have always mattered, and will continue to matter.

How your book appears – whether on a physical bookshelf or a digital one – could be the difference between selling and not selling it.

But when hasn’t that been the case? I think the only exception might be the Bible. Although some people really dig all-suede covers with gold embossed crosses.

The point is, your book cover needs to look good.

Here are a few important points to consider when thinking about the functions of your own cover:

1.) A cover needs to highlight the book’s title. It might seem like a given, but you’d be amazed at the amount of amateur book covers I see that make the title almost impossible to read. The designer got carried away with their favorite new typeface, and never once stood 15-feet away to try and read the title.

2.) The author’s name is probably the second most critical piece of information. Resist the urge to be ultra artsy here. People instinctively connect last names to reputations; don’t make them have to hunt for it.

3.) The general graphic and artistic elements that make up the visual concepts need to reflect a key “hook” of your story.

One tip here is to keep it simple. A lot of people feel they need to highlight every character’s face, or show the family’s prairie house, along with all their livestock, farm hands, and a bolt of lighting that started the fire that killed Uncle Ned, and the warrant the unjust Sheriff put out for innocent Jim Bob’s arrest, and maybe the waterfall where Jim Bob fell in love with sweet Martha May. And don’t forget the oil pump that made the family rich at the end.

Can we add some doves?

Um, no. Just no.

Pick one solid idea that provokes people and execute it well. Making any design too busy with colors, images or typefaces screams “lack of professionalism.”

Recognize that the cohesiveness and integrity of your design will build instant credibility with readers. Most people can’t articulate why they like something, but our modern eye has been conditioned to know good design when we see it.

Likewise, bad design can and absolutely will be detrimental to a story. I have books that sat on my shelf for years that I simply couldn’t bring myself to read because the covers were so atrocious. Turned out a few of the stories were quite good. Pity.

Make sure that you get good critical reviews from professionals or art teachers, or higher a cover designer to do it for you. After all the work you’ve put into your manuscript, the worst thing would be to brand it with a poor cover just because you think you can design, or you really wanted to use that painting you did 10-years ago that probably shouldn’t been seen in public.

If you have a good eye, iStockPhoto.com and ShutterStock.com have thousands of incredible images you can purchase with rights to duplicate. Combine the right image(s) with solid title and author typefaces, and you could be well on your way to crafting your own covers. While I’ve seen stuff done using text boxes in MS Word (the Lord knows I was a master text-boxer before I got better software), you really need something on the level of Photoshop or InDesign for true control and output integrity.

If you’re formatting for a print book, you will need to consider bleeds (like the interior), as well as how colors are going to print. One reason I love CreateSpace so much is that you can buy proofs to review before you finalize the files in their system. This is great for checking your interior and exterior designs.

Print books also demand a spine (as well as “back matter,” or what’s on the back of the book). While the spine may seem small and insignificant, pay attention to it. Both in stores and on peoples’ bookshelves, the spine will get the most long-term traffic of a book. Clear title and author texts need to be featured. CreateSpace can automatically assign and place a UPC bar code for you if you use their templates for layout. (Obtaining a template during your title upload phase with CreateSpace is exactly like obtaining a template for the interior design portion covered yesterday).

As for typefaces, any good designer will tell you that one typeface, maybe two, is what you should stick with. If you’re using a third typeface in a composition you better have a darn good reason. Beyond that your book will scream inferior and second rate (if not worse).

I would highly suggest employing the services of good graphic designers, if not for the entire cover at least for consultation. StreetlightsGraphics.com does amazing covers for dirt cheap with a fast turnaround. And The Miller Brothers and Jason Clement of New Life Media helped craft covers for the 2011 Editions of The White Lion Chronicles.

Here’s a look at some unseen cover concepts for Athera’s Dawn that I developed early on:

Eventually we decided on a Dairneag for the cover of Rise of the Dibor, a taken warrior for The Lion Vrie, and the statue-plaque of the White Lion’s face for Athera’s Dawn.

Here is the final cover, front, spine and back:

This cover printed the darkest of all three books, but the purple is still very striking.

Tomorrow we’ll start in on the technical, financial and legal processes of publishing through CreateSpace. ch:

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A Guide to Self-Publishing: Interior Design

14 Mar ’12 By 11 Comments

Growing up I never gave a second thought to how a book looked on the inside. Wasn’t the expression about judging a book related to its cover?

While the cover certainly plays a large roll on catching someone’s eye, which we’ll discuss tomorrow, people spend all their time with the book and its interior. So how the book looks, reads and “feels” should be of immense importance to you as a creator.

Granted, a large portion of your layout construction will be for your print edition; your ebook edition is much simpler. And rightly so: by virtue of a digital book’s nature, page numbers are automatically assigned because scaling text size by the user makes them obsolete. And since e-readers at present emphasize “text only and limited pictures,” there’s no place for elaborate layouts – they just don’t translate well.

At least not yet.

We are quickly approaching the time of fully-immersive and feature-rich ebooks. Novels that could have mini-movies attached to particular paragraphs, picture galleries, bonus downloads, and music are all on the horizon; some of it is available as we speak.

But for now we’ll stick with basic novel formatting.

It’s interesting to note that I spend 10-times the amount of time formatting my print books which account for a fraction of my sales, and almost no time formatting my ebooks which account for almost all of my sales. But for those that are willing to pay the extra money for the “novelty” of having a print edition, you need to spend the time making the physical book look sharp. Happy customers will be return customers. And as print books increasingly become collectors editions and not general market commodities, the look and feel of them will likewise become more important than ever before. If there was ever any doubt that printing will become an extremely limited format (though never fully extinct I believe), this morning’s headline of Encyclopedia Britannica’s end of their 200-year-long print editions should wake you up.

There are two primary ways – and subsequently, applications – to format your book’s interior design: Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. Yes, any text editor capable of generating a print-ready PDF can be used, but these are the two formats that are most widely available and supported.

Obviously Word is cheaper (probably already on your computer), has a small learning curve, and gives you limited control while still producing a solid finished product. InDesign is far more expensive but is a professional layout application giving you limitless control. If you’re not familiar with it, you’ll need to watch some tutorials, take a class, or ask your graphic design friends for help. But it produces the highest quality product.

While I use InDesign, I’ll demonstrate both for this tutorial.

My writing workflow starts in Scrivener, a fabulous text-editor-meets-epic-layout generator. It’s a writer’s best friend, and for Mac users you should just buy it today.

Once my book is complete, I assemble the chapters in Word and send to my editor with Track Changes enable as discussed yesterday. Once Sue has signed off on it, I dive into InDesign. If you’re staying in Word, your life just got a little easier as you’re very close to generating a finalized PDF from there.

The core decisions you need to make as an interior layout designer are:

1.) Deciding your book’s final dimensions and meeting the printer’s tolerances (or guidelines for how they accept print-ready files).

2.) What typeface and font size to use.

3.) The order of content (front matter, story, post-matter).

4.) Any branding or bells and whistles that set the book apart.

I’m going to recommend you use CreateSpace.com as your printer. Interestingly enough, they will also act as your order fulfillment processor (including returns), your ecommerce creator and manager, and your distributor. They will also help promote your titles in a foundational way. This all makes sense when you understand that CreateSpace is a subsidiary of Amazon. It’s in their best interest to make things as easy as possible for you; the more titles they can sell, the more money they make. And you make.

If you haven’t signed up for a CreateSpace account, do so now. It’s free, and it will make this tutorial much easier.

When you add a title (a book that you’re working and and want to get printed), you’ll be prompted to select a format size. Each has their own pros and cons, but one of the standard formats is 6×9″. This is what I use for my fiction works. Beefy, robust, striking and easy to hold, allowing for ample font size.

CreateSpace has free templates of all their formats as downloadable Word files. Here’s a sample you can download from me. They even have suggestions on step two, which is your content order. Again, they’re trying to help you get your books out there as it’s a mutually beneficial endeavor.

If you’re using a professional layout application like InDesign, they clearly tell you what bleeds you need to use. You can also add multiple layers of graphical content, specific page headers and footers, page numbering formats and positions, and virtually any other facet you want. This would also include my 4th point as listed above, which are branding emblems, icons and intricate details, codes, or riddles that you can lace throughout the manuscript. The possibilities are endless.

Here’s a screen shot of chapter 1 in Rise of the Dibor as seen in InDesign:

A huge note on bleeds for designers: CreateSpace suggests a 0.125″ bleed around outside edges. This is fairly standard in the print world. However, despite my multiple dialogues with them, it’s not a true 0.125″ bleed. With the grunge background on every page of The White Lion Chronicles, I was getting unprinted bars on the tops and bottoms of pages. While they refuse to change their values, you need to use a 0.250″ bleed, especially if you’re using images or backgrounds that go off the page.

Once your dimensions are set, you’re ready to start importing text and laying your books out.

For typefaces, I suggest experimenting. To the common eye, all typefaces are created equal. This is a gross error. Typefaces have a lot of power to communicate emotion and intensity (or lack thereof). Typefaces are picked deliberately and intentionally. Don’t make yours an accident. Here’s a great piece on the top 10 most beloved novel typefaces. I used Garamond for The White Lion Chronicles because it was contemporary enough that it wouldn’t be a distraction, but still had an old-world feel to it that fit with a fantasy theme. Too fancy and your reader will get annoyed without even knowing why; too plain and you might miss a great chance to add credibility to the essence of your story.

While you can lay your manuscript out any way you want – we’re self-publishing here – there are some standard rules of thumb that you should take into consideration. They’re proven, and the average reader is very used to them. Roughly, the most common order for interior layout is: book titles, author name, copyright page (including credits and the ISBN number), dedication, table of contents, forward (if any), main body, afterward, acknowledgements, author bio, advertising.

I’ve taken the liberty of showing you exactly what the first part of Rise of the Dibor looks like as a print ready PDF both as a Word.doc using CreateSpaces offset page setup (to account for left and right pages set in a glue binding), and as an InDesign file. While both are clean, print-ready versions of the same exact content, right away you’ll see a dramatic difference in InDesign’s ability to customize everything about the layout (which inherently demands a higher learning curve). Picking the right application will depend on your budget, time availability and capacity.

DOWNLOAD: Word – Rise of the Dibor FORMATTED 6 x 9 pgs1-2.pdf

DOWNLOAD: InDesign – Rise of the Dibor FORMATTED 6 x 9 pgs1-29.pdf

By the way, once everything is laid out – a process that usually takes me a few weeks – I send this PDF to my Proofies. It’s important that I make the manuscript as complete as I can possibly make it before it goes to them as I don’t want a lot happening to the book after their eyes have seen it. A lack of discipline here to follow a strict no-touch policy can lead to either a sloppy end product or an indefinite passing of PDFs to your Proofies; eventually they’ll get mad and stop reading. The point is, make sure you only send them something once.

From here you upload your PDF to CreateSpace into your respective project title. You still need to upload your finished cover design and fill out admin information, but you’re essentially halfway to seeing your first book in print.

The main reason I haven’t covered layout for ebooks is because formatting your Word or InDesign files for all the various e-formatting is merely repurposing your original files. We call it converting. And while there are whole mess of tutorials on how to format for ebooks, you won’t find it here. I spent the better part of a month researching it and finally decided I didn’t have the time or capacity. That’s when Wayne Thomas Batson found StreetlightGraphics.com and I fell in love with Gelndon and Tabatha Haddix. They were able to take my InDesign files and convert them to all the various e-formats that support Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony eReaders, iBooks, and PDFs. For less than $60/title (a fraction of the cost that Kindle Direct Publishing wanted for just Kindle conversion), I was able to publish to every format currently available. You want my advice? Don’t mess with it. Email Streetlight.

We’ll talk about the legalities and nuances of publishing through CreateSpace in two days, followed by publishing your digital books; tomorrow I’ll go over cover design. ch:

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The Irony of Originality

9 Mar ’12 By 8 Comments

20120309-065007.jpg

Yesterday a friend sent me this picture from a NJ bagel deli. (Apparently it’s a really good deli too).

The first irony is obviously how much it looks like me and my logo.

Bald.

White.

Styling shades.

The second irony is that a toasted everything bagel – with or without lox – is my favorite breakfast food. (Maybe tied with grits and cheese).

And the third irony is that the friend who sent it to me is none other than Mike Kim – my logo’s creator.

Oddly enough, I’m driving to pick Mike up from the airport today for our Momentum Leadership Advance at New Life.

What’s the lesson in all this?

“Christopher is paranoid with looking for ironies.”

That, yes, and:

9 “What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9

No creative thought, invention, or undertaking is truly original. It’s been done before. All of it.

Even if you’re truly the first person to think of something new, God thought of it first.

And he already has a better idea than the one you have. Heck, he has a better idea for every single thing we humans have ever created.

Your best idea is really only a copy. The fact that the Lord lets people get away with thinking they came up with something is proof of his ultimate humility – a fact that should serve to keep us humbled in all out efforts.

And I guess that’s the point.

God has always been more interested in co-creating with us, promoting our success, than he ever was with taking credit.

That’s because he’s a good father.

He prizes relationship above ownership.

I think I’ll go have a previously-invented bagel now. ch:

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The Bumblebee and Qualifications

6 Mar ’12 By 14 Comments

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Yesterday Luik accompanied me to Jefferson Community College in Watertown, NY where I addressed the Intro to Business class. Having him beside me was a great encouragement (and let us have a Daddy/Son date to CiCi’s afterward, followed by some indoor rock climbing at Black River Adventures).

During the final Q&A section of my “lecture” (how tedious sounding!), I addressed a question that lead into the subject of what makes us qualified to do what we’re doing.

Certainly, I want my doctor to have gone to school and be qualified to operate on me.

But often the people that accomplish the most in life are sometimes the least “qualified.”

In my address, I mentioned Igor Sikorsky – father of the modern day helicopter – and his famous if not endearing quote about doing what we should not be able to:

“According to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee can’t fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know anything about the laws of aerodynamics, so it goes ahead and flies anyway.”

Most of what I’m doing today I’m technically unqualified for. I’ve never been to college for music, art, pastoring, film, design, literature, creative writing, business development or franchising, let alone fathering or parenting. By all secular accounts, I shouldn’t even be allowed to operate a candy bar stand.

But I don’t know that I shouldn’t be able to do this stuff, so I just keep doing it anyway. (Thanks Igor).

This is certainly not a cop-out for getting an education; but an education should also never be a cop-out for hard work and diligence. (Nor is entering into a mammoth amount of ambiguous debt my recommendation either).

Qualification has far more to do with experience than it does with approval. Test results and certificates approve us, but only time and our capacity to embrace correction truly qualify us. ch:

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Marked

8 Feb ’12 By 2 Comments

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I’m somewhat obsessed with taking pictures of random stuff. Particularly markings, stickers, and signs. I might as well have my iPhone glued to my eye ball and wear a sign that says:

Caution: this person makes unexpected stops in front of obscure items.

From fire extinguisher housings to dog pooping areas to office lobbies, I enjoy seeing how designers mark things. Some are simple and elegant, others are clunky and awkward. But they all serve a purpose.

A new tidbit I picked up while here in Switzerland was the astonishing fact that the Swiss record everything on their maps. Every building has its own number, even down to a small car port. Maps are updated every two years just to show the specific placement of trees! It was something started by the military years ago so they could better develop strategies and execute maneuvers.

Excessive? Probably.

But it’s part of what makes them unique. (And explains why a Swiss watch truly does run so well). And as all cultures reflect elements of God’s character, makes me wonder how God has branded my life and kept track of me.

If you were to wear an insignia, what would it be, what would it designate about you, and what time period would it represent? ch:

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Inspiring Awe with Your Passions

26 Jan ’12 By 4 Comments

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Worshipping the Lord is a lifestyle.

Yes, music plays a key role, as does our response to it. Like it or not, the biggest book in the Bible is a compilation of song lyrics from an elite group of writers. Like a 4,000 year old version of ASCAP/CCLI.

But recognizing all the various ways we bring him glory is paramount in understanding the value of using our passions to bring him glory.

Glory is better defined as “things that summon awe” than the proverbial appearance of a mystic cloud of his presence (though there is Biblical precedent for the later).

Everything you see in this shot was constructed by extremely passionate people. To my knowledge, none of them are of a quality to perform a memorable singing solo, nor would they prefer the limelight to even attempt it.

But this stage set has inspired to many compliments – so much awe – that it’s assisted people in a very direct way of connecting with the beauty and majesty of God.

It’s awe-some.

Not awe-a-lot. That would be Jesus himself.

But our passions + “some awe” = a worship experience that points others to Jesus. That’s ultimately one of the greatest rolls you can play in life.

My heartfelt thanks to Megan Buckles for being Project Manager on this one; and to her husband Dave, as well as Zach, Trey, and Faith. Thank you for inspiring wonder in those who worship at New Life. ch:

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Self-Publishing Snapshot

25 Jan ’12 By 11 Comments

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I took a snapshot of this graphic by Alan Grundy while perusing Delta’s inflight magazine over the weekend. You know, during that time where they make you turn off all your electronic devices for take off and landing.

iPad off. Delta magazine open. Ironic that I was reading an ebook.

Let’s address a few of it’s points today.

Aside from the personal investment of time, MS Word, and Adobe InDesign, my hard costs have been paying for a good editor ($400 per title, á la Sue Kenney), and CreateSpace’s Premium service (as opposed to their regular free service, which nets better royalties) at around $39 per title. Granted, this is for physical copies (CreateSpace), not ebooks. Spearhead absorbed my cover design costs by my team, but that would have been another $400 roughly (had I not done it myself) and hired it out. But again, that’s for a full print cover, not the smaller single page needed for ebooks; average cost for a good design is now under $150. And finally a conversion service (unless you want to deal with the headaches of doing it yourself). I’m using streetlightgraphics.com (who also do covers) for under $80/title for a package of Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords formats.

So I’m well under half the cost of the statistical average.

From all my study I have to say the price points listed above are not only correct, but where a self-published author (of any breed) should list. Remember, ebooks are forever, and that’s a very long time to sell on a global market. We’re trading price point for sheer volume to a world that will soon have a billion e-readers in their hands (Amazon’s Kindle is about to hit India).

As for the number of authors hitting the NYTBS list? Let me just say, who cares! The industry model has changed. The selling power of a legacy published book is usually 6 months with its peak lasting for less than 2. Recently I spoke with a friend who had his book hit #1. It lasted for a few weeks. Then it was gone. How many royalty checks did it earn? Yes, a nice big one. And then what? Nothing. The publisher has kept the rights, and it’s overpriced as an ebook, selling only a few copies a month (of which he sees next to nothing).

Much like Dave Ramsey’s “status symbol of choice” being the paid off mortgage, authors are finding keeping their world-wide rights at 70% forever is the highest status symbol they can get. Already my CreateSpace sales of The White Lion Chronicles are earning an extra $75/week for my family; I’m expecting the ebook sales, due out next month, to exceed that.

When my most recent royalty check came in from my legacy publisher my dad happened to be with me. It was a $700 check. He was really happy for me. Then I told him what it would have been had I sold the same number of books through CreateSpace or Kindle Direct Publishing (numbers I’ve sold on your at my own merch table).

$6,500.

And the crazy part is, it wasn’t name recognition that sold those numbers with my publisher. It was me and my hard work (et all, Wayne). I should know. They had no budget for 4th quarter marketing and made me submit a list of what I was going to do. (Actually they only ever had $500 for first quarter marketing).

Time to feed my family, not a pig. Of course, I’m about to eat the pig anyways. ch:

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For My Lurkers

20 Jan ’12 By 10 Comments

My kids love a good story. They hunker down in our bed and get all sorts of excited.

They lurk in the covers.

And every day hundreds of you stop by this site and lurk. Waiting for a good story or an interesting takeaway.

You’ve made this a destination in your day. And I’m honored. I may not know you, or maybe we met once somewhere in the world, or maybe you’re from my home town. But no matter the case, I love that we get to do this each day together.

So for all those of you who read faithfully but never leave a comment, this post is just for you. My Lurkers. Thank you for reading. I may not know your names, but Google tells me when you’re here. ch:

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PIPA Love SOPA

19 Jan ’12 By 20 Comments

No, it’s not some new children’s book. Although a big lovable elephant named Pipa who follows his favorite bar of soap on a jungle adventure sure sounds cute. Or like a prison allegory turned horribly wrong.

Actually, a prison allegory would be tame compared to what PIPA | SOPA really is. (And if PIPA | SOPA have their way, the allegory would never get air time for poking fun at a government system).

Here’s why.

The Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are new government regulations designed to thwart online piracy. Sounds noble, right? Except that there are already numerous national and international laws on the books that accomplish this pretty well, successfully disbanding copyright infringing entities.

When you read the fine print, these two measures are actually allowing unprecedented government access into our most accessible vehicle for the freedom of speech: the internet.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the US Government breaks everything it touches. Heck, it can’t even turn a profit delivering mail!

My friend Christian Fahey pointed out an incredible statistic on his blog recently:

If you started a business the day Jesus was born and managed it so poorly that it lost $1,000,000.00 a day up until the present day, you would have just over 2 trillion dollars of loss (that’s 2,000,000,000,000). That is 1/7 of our national debt, which is today over 15 trillion dollars. (Thanks to Chuck Missler for the analogy.)

The bottom line is our government either outspends positive cash flow and puts public entities in debt, or it over regulates and puts private entities in debt (and out of business).

With such mismanagement, do you really trust our Congress to properly manage the internet?

Although since AL Gore did invent it, maybe they have a right to and don’t even need to vote.

Please watch this video by FightForTheFuture.org first, then consider writing your Congressional Representatives through their web form. While you’re at it, sign Google’s petition too.

If you have a differing viewpoint than mine, I’d love to read your comments. And if you share the same, or if you want to add to the dialog, you’re always welcome to comment (but you already knew that). ch:

______________

UPDATE 01.20.11: I just received this email from Tiffiniy Cheng, spokeswoman for FightForTheFuture.org, (as did you if you signed up with them) and thought it was worth posting. Great job everyone!

Hi everyone!

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now — SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today — the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game.  You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday.  See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.

The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled.  “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“’This is altogether a new effect,’ Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing ‘an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically’ in the last four decades, he added.”  

Tweet with us, shout on the internet with us, let’s celebrate: Round of applause to the 13 million people who stood up  - #PIPA and #SOPA are tabled 4 now. #13millionapplause

We’re indebted to everyone who helped in the beginning of this movement — you, and all the sites that went out on a limb to protest in November — Boing Boing and Mozilla Foundation (and thank you Tumblr, 4chan)! And the grassroots groups — Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, CDT, and many more.

We changed the game this fall, and we’re not gonna stop.

13 million strong,

Tiffiniy, Holmes, Joshua, Phil, CJ, Donny, Douglas, Nicholas, Dean, David S. and Moore… Fight for the Future!

P.S.  China’s internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

In the New Yorker:  ”Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know).
…
After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’”

 

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Tone Setting

11 Jan ’12 By 10 Comments

Setting the right tone at the beginning of any venture is imperative. It tells all those you’re working with exactly what they can expect, and what you expect as their boss or co-worker.

But doing so takes a lot of work. Experience gained through years, enduring one’s own set of scars, and lots of study are a few keys. But being able to articulate all that for the benefit of a diverse group is even more labor intensive. It’s one thing to be able to do something naturally, it’s another to explain why and how you did it.

However it’s much harder to define standards “as you go” than it is to initiate them right from the get-go. So while many prefer to just wing it because it demands less prep time, ultimately they’ll suffer the long term effects. Miss managed employees, poor work environments, emotionally disenfranchised team members, and suffering business or church models are just some of the ramifications.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. So take your time and accrue experiences of your own. It’s easier to set precedent now than make exceptions later.

Before you embark on any new venture ask yourself a few key questions:

• What are the qualities of the people I want to spend the majority of my day with?

• What are the values I want everyone to have in common?

• What kind of work ethic and environments will promote the greatest team collaboration among the most diverse group of people?

In discovering what you value the most, you’ll be able to better cultivate and communicate atmospheres where others feel comfortable with what’s in your head.

Day 1 for New Life Media employees yesterday was all about these defining company qualities. From our company profile and mission statement to our vision and core values, the executive team did a tremendous job at setting the tone properly. The result is team members who aren’t left wondering what unspoken expectations there are; they are comfortable and therefore free to be themselves. And therefore they perform better.

Of course playing with new iPads is fun too. But even that’s one of our core value: fun! It help alleviate stress in hectic environments (which our office is).

As the military is famous for teaching: BLUF – Bottom Line Up Front. It’s what successful organizational models are built on. You can qualify your statements all you want later, but just say what you need first so people know where you’re coming from. Trust me, your teams with thank you for it. ch:

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