DRM, Greed, and a Deal With the Devil

Three days ago, Tor Books announced they were going to release their entire list of ebooks free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) come July, 2012. As Tor is a subsidiary label of Macmillan Books this certainly carries weight in the publishing industry in general. It is also an indication that Macmillan is probably using this as a test before releasing their entire portfolio free of DRM.

I feel it is only fair to point out that Baen Books, another major publisher of science fiction, has always published their ebook offerings DRM-free. They’ve been doing so for years, even before ebook readers became big!

Digital Rights Management is simply a method of keeping people from copying and using a computer file on another computer. This file could be a game, movie, music, or an ebook. Obviously, my focus here is on DRM and ebooks.

The argument for DRM is easy to understand and makes a valid point. Making a copy of a book requires an extraordinary amount of effort and time. One can either tear the book apart, feed the pages into a scanner and assemble those scans into a file that can be printed, or sit down and start typing. An ebook is a computer file and copying it requires less brain power than farting. Counterfeiting books and selling them overseas is already enough of a problem. I once saw a clearly counterfeited book. I almost bought it for no other reason than it made a good example of a counterfeit. It had a decent cover on it, but all the pages were essentially printed from an old copier. The pages had been stapled together and the cover was glued over it. A quick thumbing through the book showed that some of the pages were out of order. For an ebook, all you need is one file and you could sell perfect copies of that file in perpetuity.

Authors live or die by the number of copies of their books that sell. Authors aren’t paid by the hour or month or year. They are paid by a piece rate—by how many copies of their book sell. Any free copies floating around each represent a no sale.

If you consider things in that light, DRM seems like a good idea.

There are many more arguments against DRM which easily override the above.

One issue that stands out in my mind was driven by pure greed: Lock in.

Publishers were convinced that the moment they started selling ebooks, people would simply copy the files and spread them to all their friends for free, costing them sales. Without stopping to take a look at what was going on in the music industry, they all but demanded that Amazon.com apply DRM to any ebooks they sold.

Amazon.com was all too happy to comply.

What the publishing companies didn’t realize was they had just done the equivalent of signing a contract with the Devil. They handed lock in to Amazon.com on a silver platter, and with it the soul of their business.

To be fair, Amazon.com, Apple, and Barnes & Noble all left DRM to be the choice of the publisher, having a checkbox that had to be selected before pushing up the ebook. The publishing industry left to its naiveté, clicked the box. Only now are the publishers waking up to their mistake.

When you buy a book, in your mind you own that book.

The media companies have been trying very hard to change that notion of the average consumer. They want people to think of it as you only paid to license use of that book, not own it. Ever notice in the warning on any DVD movie, they say you are “licensed” to show that movie in the privacy of your own home? One of the provisions in both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD specifications allowed the possibility that people would have to pay everytime they wanted to play the movie. This is one of the reasons why some Blu-Ray players have to be connected to the internet in order to play a movie.

A book (or DVD, or ePub file, etc.) is a container for the media within. When you buy that book, you own the container. You don’t own the story contained within. That means you can read it whenever you want, loan it to friends or put it on a table and sell it. You are selling the container. But, you don’t have permission to take the contents of that container and do something else with it, such as make a movie. In my mind, a data file is a container that holds the media within it. (Just to be clear, if you sell a book, then you no longer have possession of that book. Technically speaking, if you sell the computer file, you should delete it from your computer so you no longer have possession of it.)

Once you buy an ebook file, you should be able to read it on whatever device you own. Be it iPad, Kindle, Nook, cellphone, or computer, it should be your choice. Business people figured they could make more money if they forced consumers to buy a different file for each device.

Consumers aren’t that stupid. But it appeared that the publishing industry was.

Through the combination of DRM and proprietary file formats, the ebook reader manufacturers were trying to get customers locked into each their own platforms. The Kindle had a head start over all the others, and had gathered a lion’s share of the market. Then Amazon.com began to flex its muscle and force publishers into ebook pricing dictated by Amazon.com. Macmillan in particular tried to resist these demands, and Amazon.com delisted their titles from the listings, making them unavailable for purchase. This was the first proof publishers had that they had created a monster with Amazon.com. It’s been war ever since over the pricing of ebooks.

If DRM is no longer on a given ebook title, it becomes a trivial matter for a consumer to take an ebook in one file format and convert it to another that can be read by anything. This takes control away from Amazon.com and puts it back into the hands of the consumers. It does heighten the risk that the publishers will lose sales to people sharing files, but Apple’s iTunes has already shown that removing DRM from media has not dampened sales in the slightest. If anything, sales accelerated!

Baen Books (linked above) has long championed DRM-free books. They also offer a library of free books you can download in many of the different file formats for various ebook readers. Some of the titles offered are fairly recent as opposed to being out-of-print. If you enjoy science fiction, I strongly recommend you follow that link and peruse. While I have certainly pulled down a number of their free books, I have purchased more. There is a message to be carried to the publishing world!

I admit, I gave it long thought over whether or not to use DRM for the  impending release of my book, Nobody. While intellectually I rejected the use of DRM for many reasons, that nagging emotional fear over people being able to just take my book without any compensation to me still gnawed at me. Yet the evidence in the markets is clearly to the contrary! My own behavior of purchasing more books than taking those freely offered. Apple’s iTunes Music Store clearly shows people will still purchase music, rather than take pirated versions. I’ve come across anecdotes from other authors where people sent them money via PayPal to cover copies of their books that those readers had pulled down for free.

If there is one thing that holds true it is that the vast majority of people want to be honest! The evidence is showing that clearly. For that, I can allow my intellect to override and ignore the fear and just go with what I believe. My books will be DRM free.

The publishing industry should take pause and consider their greed. Writers have been handed a shiny new tool in ebooks that allows them to more easily than ever to self-publish. Keep squeezing writers hard enough on terms, they could slip away.

For the distributors who are putting the squeeze on the publishers, the same warning applies. Currently, many of the big publishers are behind the curve as far as marketing their products on the internet. That’s why Amazon.com has done so fantastically well. They took advantage of a great weakness that the publishing industry was ignoring. It really is not all that difficult to create an online store to sell your products. The publishers just haven’t figured that out yet.

Amazon.com’s only real advantage is that they conglomerate all the selections into one easy place. Any given publisher would only sell their particular lines.

The only way a deal with the Devil can keep you trapped is if the Devil can keep you from realizing you can just walk away from the deal.

The truth will set you DRM-free!

The Business of Writing: The Pendulum is Still Swinging

Following up on my earlier post, the Department of Justice has filed suit against Apple and two publishers, Penguin and Macmillan. Three other publishers—Simon & Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins—settled with the DoJ out of court.

Apple has chosen to fight the suit before a jury. Pundits who are far better experts at this than I say Apple has a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning this suit. My knee jerk, amateur opinion questions that assumption. We’ll stay tuned to see where that mess goes.

While everyone is wagging their fingers at Apple and the publishers for allegedly price fixing to raise ebook prices, there is another issue going on at the other side of the market: Amazon.com’s predatory discount pricing.

The idea behind predatory pricing is to sell products at a loss so smaller competitors cannot afford to match your prices. Eventually, the competitors are forced out of business because consumers will go for the cheaper prices. Once all the competitors are gone, then consumers have no other choice than to shop at your store. At that point, the you can then raise prices to whatever you want and reap in much greater profits than if you just used competitive pricing.

How on earth can a business survive long enough to pull this off? Simple, by declaring the losses as business losses, they can write those losses off their taxes. Through these write-offs, a business can actually make a profit by pocketing the tax deductions, even as they claim a loss for the year. It appears that big discount you got was actually subsidized by you paying more taxes because some multi-billion-dollar mega corporation doesn’t. Because all that tax money wasn’t available for road maintenance or public services, in the long run, you pay more for the book than its original price.

Worse, when there are no more competitors you can go to affordably, they raise the prices on you.

Science fiction author Charles Stross has an excellent post that explains Amazon.com’s predatory approach to the book market.

What does this all mean for the consumer?

In the short-term, it means that prices on ebooks will drop. Not by much, but they will go lower for a bit. That will be greatly advantageous to Amazon.com, because they have enough cash to continue their program of predatory pricing to squeeze out the competition.

The downside is in the long term. With no competition, Amazon.com could become the one-stop place to buy books. That means, the only place you can buy a book would be online via Amazon.com. At that point, prices on books can be raised significantly, because there would be no competition to set lower prices.

It also would mean for ebooks, the Kindle could be the only game in town. If you are an independent author, wanting to self-publish your story as an ebook, Amazon could force you to accept their dictated terms.

Amazon would have both a monopoly and a monopsony in the book market. (Don’t know what “monopsony” means? Go to the link I supplied above where Charles Stross explains it very well.) They would control both the supply and the distribution of stories. This would be very bad for you the consumer.

But this business model comes with a significant weakness. The weakness is, the Kindle cannot use the ePub file format.

The ePub format provides an opportunity for a small competitor to do to Amazon.com what Amazon.com is appears to be doing to the publishing industry. ePub files can be read by any device that supports it: iOS devices, Android devices, desktop computers, ebook readers other than the Kindle. The problem for Amazon.com is if they open the Kindle to the ePub format, then consumers would be able to buy ebooks from any distributor and not just Amazon.com. Amazon.com would lose the customer lock-in to the Kindle; an unacceptable condition for Amazon.com at this time.

What we are seeing here is the forced evolution of the publishing industry. While the traditional publishers have stumbled badly, they still have done a better job at adapting to the new paradigm brought about by advances in technology than the music industry. As Amazon.com’s 650-pound gorilla battles it out with the 350 pounds of chimps, monkeys and lemurs of its competitors, I find it interesting that they all seem to be ignoring the 14,000-pound elephant that has entered the room: R.K. Rowling’s Pottermore Shop.

Both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble redirect purchasers for Rowling’s ebooks to Rowling’s own ebook store. The purchases are not made through the third parties. Consumers buy directly from her store. The distributors are kowtowing to Rowling because to do otherwise could result in them losing distribution of Harry Potter-related products. Rowling has essentially told and demonstrated to the world that she does not need distributors or publishers. As an author, she’s decided to go it entirely alone selling her ebooks.

This 14,000-pound elephant is what the publishing and book distribution industries should be fearing. The fact that authors can go directly to the consumer and forego both publishers and distributors.

That doesn’t mean that every established and aspiring writer is going to rush off and publish themselves. In all honesty, it takes some technical knowhow to create an ebook. It takes even more technical knowledge and skill to create an ebook that takes advantage of special features found in Apple’s iBook format or Kindle’s KF8 format. And then there is the issue of creating a web site and online store for people to purchase your ebooks. 

I’m lucky enough to actually have these skills. Many writers don’t.

It also takes time to set these things up. It means setting aside writing for a period of time to work out all these things. Not writing means not earning your wages because you aren’t creating product.

In my opinion, the DoJ suit against Apple, Penguin and Macmillan won’t force them away from the Agency Model where the publishers dictate the retail price and Apple takes a cut from that price. However, it will have the “no lower prices” clause removed from those agreements, which will free up Amazon.com to once again offer ebooks at a loss. In turn, the DoJ will probably turn its attention to Amazon.com and its current market practices of predatory pricing and the potential of creating a monopoly or monopsony.

I would like to see the removal of the pricing policy. Part of that clause dictates that I cannot sell a special edition of my ebook on my own web site at a different price. (Or at least, that was my take on the wording.) I want my ebook, Nobody, to sell for $4.99. I would like to create a special edition which would include detailed maps, histories and maybe even the raw notes I wrote in creating the story, and sell that version for $7.99. (Keep in mind, it will take me quite a while to set up the special edition, so don’t wait for it.)

The pendulum is still swinging. We’ll just have to see where the publishing market goes.

A Simple Matter of Time

I’ve commented before that my most creative time for writing is in the evening. Usually between five o’clock and eleven o’clock. That’s when I’m at my most intense focus. It appears to me there is a certain calm that settles over the world at that time. The sun sets. The air itself seems to relax.

More importantly, I am less likely to be interrupted by people or phone calls during this time. Heck, my telephones are programmed to stop accepting calls after a certain time. Then, they simply shunt any calls directly to voicemail.

Times when I know I will not be interrupted are the times I am most productive.

Mornings I usually use for reading the news, correspondence, or other mental activities. Then I’ll take care of any running around. With all that out of the way, there is nothing to distract from the work at hand.

As anyone can tell you, life is never really that neat and convenient.

April was a complete blowout as far as writing was concerned. I had far too many things on my schedule—and all of them at the wrong times. Everything came up. There was one weekend where six different groups scheduled events on the same day. Two of which were mandatory!

The worst thing I can do to myself is schedule something for the evening.

I noticed long ago that I disliked working the evening shift. As a teenager—that age where one pretty much can only get jobs that happen during evenings—I disliked working evenings. As young and inexperienced as I was as a teenager, I thought my disinclination for working evenings was odd. It didn’t quite strike me as normal. By the time I reached my twenties, that dislike had grown into a hatred. When I had an evening shift ahead of me, I felt like I spent the entire day getting ready for work.

Oddly, I loved working the graveyard shift. Sure, it sucked socially because I turned into a pumpkin whenever the sun went down; I would fall asleep whenever my butt touched a horizontal surface. Still, I loved the graveyard shift. When that shift ended I and stepped out into the glorious morning sunshine, I had the entire day in front of me!

That feeling was and is the crucial clue to why I hate working evenings. The other clue, though not as clear, was my feeling that I had to waste the entire day getting ready to go to work when I had an evening shift in front of me.

It wasn’t until I decided to throw myself full-time into writing that I realized just why I didn’t like evening activities. Or rather, why an evening activity would completely throw off my productivity.

When I start on a project or task, I don’t like to stop. It takes me about 40 minutes to get into flow state; once I’m there, I will stay completely focused on what is before me until I am too tired to continue. The slightest interruption is enough to keep me out of this high state of productivity. Even the threat of interruption has the same effect.

And if I have something scheduled ahead of me, that is the ultimate interruption. 

This is why the evening shift always left me feeling like I was spending the whole day getting ready for work. It was because I couldn’t allow myself to drop into flow state and work on a project until I started falling asleep. I couldn’t get myself to get started on a project knowing that I would have to stop right after I felt I had gotten into the zone working on it. The opposite was getting out of the graveyard shift. I truly did have the entire day in front of me to sit down and work on some given project, without having to artificially stop.

This April has been one of those months where everything seemed to pile up. Too many activities requiring too much of my attention, something had to give, and that something was my writing schedule.

I am not a multitasker.

I do best when focusing on one thing at a time. My full concentration can be brought to bear on a particular problem without hindrance. But, it takes a certain amount of time to become fully focused on what is before me. If I am dividing my attention on two different things, then each time I switch my focus there is a delay of time until my concentration is at full steam. To me, that is a waste of time.

The process of mentally switching gears from Project-A to Project-B consumes so much time, that trying to do things at once results in it taking twice as long to complete both projects than if I merely set one aside for when I finished the other.

Life is not so convenient.

I keep to a certain work schedule. Monday–Thursday are reserved for writing. Friday is my official day off. Saturday and Sunday are optional days for me, either for taking time off or working on some other project.

Why take Fridays off? Because over the years, that was the evening when most of my friends wanted to blow off steam after the workweek and go out for either dinner or drink. Saturday evenings were a close second, but those activities were usually more structured activities such as going to a show or a special scheduled event. Long ago when I worked very odd hours and schedules, I missed out on a lot because I had to work when my friends wanted to play. When I was able to get into a career path that allowed me normal work schedules, I declared weekends to be sacred.

But life does not follow a schedule. Things come up. Some evenings are more convenient than others for some activities and projects. My cat—an animal that is purported to be supposedly aloof—has an urgent need to be snuggled or draped over my arms while I’m trying to type.

April proved to be one of those months. In the midst of all this, I was forced to set aside writing for the month. Not a good thing for the various deadlines hanging over me!

Time management is a must and it only works with good self-discipline. There will be times, however, when a rigid schedule and iron self-discipline must be thrown out the window. Flexibility is important, too.

Structure your time. Remember the good ’ole days before you became a writer when you worked 9–5, M–F? That’s structured time. During that time, you knew you had to focus on work in the work environment and that is exactly what you did. By structuring your time, you set the foundation for your self-discipline to ensure you use this time to write or at least work at related functions to writing. You can say, “This is the time I work.” It also gives you the necessary explanation to tell people not to interrupt you during your work time and thereby avoiding the interruptions that could cause you to lose your train of thought.

The absolute last thing you want your family or friends thinking is, “Oh, Bill is a writer. He’s not doing anything, I’ll call him to [insert favor or errand to be asked].” I suggest turning off your telephone if this happens a lot. You can always check voicemail when you pause to take a break.

Figure out the times when you are most productive. Set up your daily schedule based on this. Turn off your telephone/cellphone. (Telephones are my nemesis.) If this time of creativity changes over time, then adjust your schedule to match.

Once you have your work schedule figured out, determine which days you will have off. I suggest you schedule your off days to coincide with off days of friends and family. What good is having a day off if you cannot enjoy it with those closest to you? Even the most introverted of individuals needs to socialize with friends and family. Stick to your off days religiously.

You do not do your best work if you are constantly driving yourself.  Even God, according to the Bible, needed a day off. God created Heaven and said it was good. He create Earth, the trees and animals and said it was all good. Then he created Man and said, “Whoa! I seriously need a day off!” Then, after a day off, he was able to think of a lot of improvements and created Woman. Clearly, taking time off is important to the creative process and the quality of your work.

If God needed a day off, so do you. Do it.

By carefully and strictly structuring your time, you will find that you can be a lot more flexible with your time. Knowing when to work and when not to work allows you know when to put other activities on your calendar. It will also make adjusting your schedule a lot easier. Getting yourself in the habit of working certain hours and resting during others will also help you avoid the issue of burn out from writing too much.

Carefully managing your time will not always prevent blowouts to your calendar like I had this month. But it will make it easier to adjust and return to a regular working schedule when such things happen.

The Business of Writing: The Pendulum Swings

A settlement is brewing over an investigation by the Department of Justice into a practice by Apple and five publishers to control and inflate the prices on ebooks. Essentially the deal they created was the publishers would set the prices on ebooks, and Apple would require them not to sell ebooks at other publishers for less. This meant if another sales outlet decided to sell a title for less than as sold at Apple, then the publisher would have to cease sales with that distributor.

The result of this pact formed between Apple and Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan,  and HarperCollins was it allowed the publishers to set higher prices on ebooks and force Amazon to either accept the higher price or lose out on selling their books. This resulted in many ebooks selling for almost as much as the hardcover editions, easily more than the paperback versions. I’ve commented before that I felt there was no justification for an ebook costing more than a physical book—hardcover or paperback—as there were almost no production costs associated with an ebook once the file was completed and ready for readers to purchase.

Never mind that Amazon and Barnes & Noble also make similar demands for price matching. It’s probably a result of the above-mentioned agreement.

The agreement set two years ago between Apple and the publishers is what is called an agency model. This essentially allowed Apple to control the pricing agreements between publishers and Amazon, even though Apple had nothing to do with whatever contract was between the publishers and Amazon. This way the publishers had an excuse to force Amazon to charge higher prices for ebooks. This leveled the playing field for Apple’s then new iPad and iBookstore service, with the intent of breaking Amazon’s control over the market.

In simple terms, they created a corporate trust in order to fix prices. Good for big business and the 1% that benefit from sucking the money out of the economy unfairly; very bad for consumers and society in general.

So what is going on here? Are ebooks really all that big a deal?

In some ways, yes. An ebook is the perfect product. Once you’ve thrown a small pittance of money at that whiney and sniveling thing over there (the author), an ebook has almost no production costs! You could sell millions of copies with a 99.99% profit margin. That’s literally printing money, without the cost of paper, ink, or even running the presses.

But that isn’t it.

Apple made $100 billion in revenue last year. Only $50 million of that was in ebook sales. Ebooks accounted for .05% of Apple’s bottom line! A bump in their revenue stream roughly equal to a steamroller running over a marshmallow.

Clearly, there is something far more valuable that these companies are after. It is far more valuable than an ebook.

That something is control of the market.

It isn’t just Apple. It’s the publishers. It’s Amazon. It’s Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Toshiba, Philips, and NuvoMedia—just to name a few. NuvoMedia? That was the company that created the Rocket eBook Reader. One of the first ebook readers. NuvoMedia no longer exists. More about that later…

DVD, CD, RTF, TXT, DOC, PNG, MKV, JPEG, GIF, MP3, AAC, EPUB. These should all sound familiar to you,because they are all technology standards that we use. Movies, music, images, and text are all encoded into the above formats for our consumption. In order to use these, you need a device or program that can decode them. Some of these standards are open, so anyone and any company can use them. Some of these are proprietary, which means that any one that wants to make a product that can use proprietary standards must pay for that privilege.

If you create the standard, then the world must beat a path to your door. For every movie, song, book or picture that uses your standard, you get paid a small fee. Bill Gates became one of the wealthiest people in history by licensing his operating system. Every time someone bought a computer running a Microsoft product, a fee was paid to Microsoft. Any time a company wanted to create a program that used a format owned by Microsoft, a fee had to be paid for licensing for permission to use that format.

It’s called “Lock-in”. If you create the standard, everyone has to buy from you in order to use the product. If a competitor creates a product that uses your standard, they still have to pay you to use it. If your competitor creates a product that might be superior to yours, then you can play the “patent violation” card to force the competitor out of the market or at least delay their entry. Whatever happens, you will always get a piece of the action.

The best money-making condition any company or person can have in a monopoly. But, because monopolies usually result in abuse of consumers and corruption, monopolies are illegal. Still, businessmen tend to throw ethics aside and strive for monopolies.

Lock-in is essentially as close to a legal monopoly that the law will permit.

This is why we read so many news reports about one company suing another company. These lawsuits generally serve one of two purposes, either to force another company to pay up for licensing/patent violations, or to have the proprietary standard overruled so they can get into the market with impunity.

The most famous battle over standards and formats was that of VHS vs. Betamax. VHS eventually won and Betamax disappeared. People who paid the higher price for Betamax got burned when VHS took over. There were other struggles between one technology vs. another, but the VHS vs. Betamax is one that most people are familiar with.

Vinyl records fell to the CD in the mid-80’s. VHS fell to the DVD in the 90’s. CDs were fatally wounded by the MP3 players. USB replaced the serial port. HDMI replaced RCA-jacks, but is now already being touted as going out of use just a few years after the public adopted it.

The “standard” format changes were coming too fast. People were starting to stand on the sidelines and waiting to see which would be the prevailing standard before they threw their hard-earned money into either camp.

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD suffered greatly from this. Rather than throw good money after bad, people waited until industry finally decided to go with one or the other. Despite this, Blu-Ray is still struggling to catch on. Media companies trying to force consumers to pay a premium for it isn’t helping.

This has everything to do with ebooks.

Ebooks came out over twenty years ago! The first commercially successful ebook reader was the NuvoMedia (later, Gemstar) Rocket Ebook Reader. I came across it for the first time and was really excited by it. But I noticed a fatal flaw in their approach, and it was one that also caused a number of other ebook reader companies to fail.

The flaw was a proprietary file format. All books had to be in the format used by the Rocket, and only NuvoMedia (Gemstar) was the supplier of these books. The books were also expensive, even compared to print books. I didn’t want to invest in one until I knew that they were going to be around for a long time. What would become of my expensive library should my reader be damaged?

The Rocket disappeared from the market. Anyone who had invested their hard-earned cash were screwed.

A few other companies tried to jump in, but they had the same approach of trying to lock in customers to a proprietary format and having only one source for their books. They all failed, too.

Enter Amazon.com, Inc. in 2007, when they brought to the world the Kindle ebook reader.

Amazon did stick with the idea of getting people locked in to their platform by going with a proprietary file format. But, they had a few advantages over previous wannabes in the ebook reader market. For one thing, they were already well established and well known. More importantly, instead of a limited offering of titles, Amazon hit the market running with a large selection of authors, titles, and genres. The battle was won when Amazon.com began offering the ebooks at reasonable prices.

People jumped on the ebook wagon in droves!

And the publishers panicked!

Amazon was already the 800-pound gorilla in the room when the Kindle hit the markets.

As I said above, proprietary standards lock people into a single platform and limit their choices of where they can make their purchases. But open standards give consumers the choice of where they want to purchase something and the flexibility to enjoy their purchases where and how they want.

The the publishers got together and created a free and open format for ebooks, based on HTML, the markup coding that makes the World Wide Web work.

This format is called ePub (for electronic publication).

An ePub file can be read on practically anything. It can be read by a web browser on a computer, by a program, on a smart phone, even on a regular cellphone! Of, course, also on any ebook reader that supports it.

Because it is an open standard, ePub files can be created by anyone without having to pay licensing. Consumers can buy their ePub ebooks from anyone and read those ebooks using any device that can render an ePub file. If worse comes to worse, you can rename your ebook from Story.epub to Story.zip, unzip the file and read the text from the HTML files embedded within.

ePub reintroduced competition into the ebook market. Amazon could no longer completely control the sales of ebooks. It also opened the door for other ebook reader manufacturers to enter the market, no longer needing to worry about paying Amazon.com for licensing of their file format in order to make devices that could read those files.

Barnes & Noble introduced their Nook and Apple introduced their iPad, both of which could load and read ePub files. Then the above named coalition got together to try and game the markets to artificially inflate ebook prices.

Amazon.com had been selling ebook titles at a loss, using low prices to lure readers into adopting ebook readers over paper books. It was working. Kindle sales took off.

Publishers were upset that Amazon.com was selling ebooks at such a discount, because they didn’t want consumers thinking ebooks were cheaper. (Keep in mind, ebooks represent 99% profit margin for publishers, so the word “gouging” comes to mind.) Then Apple came about with the agency model contract, and the coalition got on board.

Amazon was forced to go away from a wholesale model—where the retailer sets the final price—and accept the terms the publishers demanded. As a result, prices on ebooks went up a few dollars.

When the Department of Justice has settled things with this group caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Amazon.com will be able to return to selling the ebooks as wholesale. This means prices will drop, and consumers will get much better deals on books. To stay competitive, other distributors will have to drop their prices. Consumers win!

Will Amazon.com start selling ePub-file ebooks? Probably not. Amazon.com’s goal is to get consumers to buy products through them, not go elsewhere for those products. The more people buy from Amazon.com, the more leverage Amazon.com has in negotiating the wholesale price from suppliers on items that they sell.

That’s what concerns me.

To be a professional writer, I need to make enough money to survive. I need to be able to pay my bills, put food on the table, buy clothing I need, etc. To do that, I need to be able to sell enough copies of a book so I make enough money to make a living. I have a tough fight in front of me, trying to get enough people interested in buying my book so I sell enough copies.

My goal is to sell 10,000 copies of my first book.

Go ahead and do the math. If you are feeling lazy, here is the reality:

Each copy of my book sells at $4.99, meaning I will have $49,900 in gross sales.

The distributors take 70%, leaving me with $34,940 that goes into my pocket. That is a pretty nice number for an annual income!

But wait! There’s more!

That $35K doesn’t actually land in my pocket. I have to pay both federal and state taxes, 35% and 5.25% respectively. That whittles down my useable income to a little over $20,000.

Twenty grand ain’t all that much for an annual income. However, it is something! At least I’ll be able to keep the lights on and reduce my debt load. There will be enough left over to keep paying the monthly bills while I hunker down and work on book number two, Dragontalker. It does mean my lifestyle [of having no life] will have to continue status quo.

With distributors losing their little money-making game, they are going to look elsewhere for where they can keep their profit margin. Let’s face it, how often do we hear of CEOs laying off thousands of workers and then getting paid a bonus that would have kept three times as many of those workers on the job? You know they are going to look for the easiest place to cut their costs.

And the easiest place is to cut the royalty they pay the author. That 70% could be cut to 40%. That would be pretty devastating on my bottom line. Or, they could simply state they won’t sell my ebook at the suggested retail price I set and choose a much lower number. Or, they could raise the price on my ebook, which would cause readers to forgo reading taking a chance on a new author which could cost me sales and keep me from reaching my sales limit.

I’m not sure what action the distributors are going to take after the DoJ makes its judgement. I recognize that I need to be ready with my contingency plan: sell my book on my web site directly and forget going with the big distributors. Same thing that J.K. Rowling just did last week.

On the plus-side, all the money I make through gross sales on my web site is mine to keep. Plus, the costs incurred with doing direct sales are deductible as business costs. The downside being I have to deal with the nitty-gritty of managing a retail operation.

One problem with selling via my own website is people not trusting my intentions with their credit cards. That could cost me sales. People trust Amazon.com, Apple and Barnes & Noble with their purchases.

There is the loss of free promotion. Not going through those three will mean that my title doesn’t appear in the monthly “What’s New?” emails they send out. If a new title has strong sales numbers, the retailers begin promoting it aggressively. More sales means more money in their pocket. A hot seller actually becomes more popular when people perceive that other people think it is good. Promotion from the retailer is a good message to a buyer that this is a good product. Rergardless of whether that is a fact or not.

I will also miss out in another area: perception of legitimacy. Selling through Amazon.com, Apple, or Barnes & Noble lends a certain illusion of legitimacy to my book and to me as an author. It tells people that an intermediary agent thought my book was worthy enough to sell. People too easily overlook that those businesses are merely retail organizations, distributors. They are not publishers. Distributors and retailers don't vet the ebooks they sell. Anyone looking through the volumes of 99¢ crap being sold will realize that the distributors don’t really care about how legitimate one author is from the next. Don’t get me wrong! There are some real gems among the 99¢ ebooks. Some are so good that I think the authors were selling themselves way too short by setting such a low price on their books. There are many others that were such awful drivel that I couldn’t get past the first page or two. Thank God you can download samples before buying ebooks!

Will people be willing to purchase my book through my web site, rather than through a retailer? It does mean I have to step up and be more aggressive in promoting my books. I need to encourage people who know me to share links about my book on social networks, as well as people who become fans of my writing.

The pendulum is swinging. But in whose favor will it swing? Consumers are certainly going to benefit from lower prices. But how will the new and independent authors fare in this change to the market? If distributors decide to put the squeeze on the authors/publishers in order to avoid eroding their profit margin, will authors/publishers turn to self-retailing? That could cause greater long-term damage to the distributors than having to adjust retail prices to the consumer in the short term.

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Whatever fallout comes from this, I’ll just have to make sure I look at my options and prepare.

Going It Alone

Ebooks just got a major boost!

J.K. Rowling just pushed the Harry Potter series into digital publication!

It isn’t that Rowling is making her books available as ebooks that is so important. What is so important about this is the fact she is only selling the ebooks through her own web site, the Pottermore Shop. The books are not available from Amazon, Apple iBookstore, or Barnes & Noble.

Up until now, it has been publishers that have taken the hit as more and more writers choose to self-publish via ebooks. Now the distributors are in danger. It isn’t like no one has been selling their own ebooks before. But that Rowling is the first top-name author to do it exclusively through her own channel, going directly to the reader with absolutely no middleman.

There are huge financial advantages to this move.

When you sell your ebook through a publisher, you might be lucky to get 5% of the sales. At 5% royalty, that means when you buy a book for $15, the writer gets 75¢; before taxes. Royalty checks show up about every six months. According to some writers I know, that’s if you are lucky. Usually, they have to call the publishers and remind them that royalty checks are overdue by a few months.

Sell through one of the big three ebook distributors, you can get between 65%–70% of the sales. That’s a hell of an improvement, but they hold the royalties for 60 days before transferring the funds into your account. That’s not so bad, and they are quite prompt in paying. Just don’t go spending money that you don’t have in your pocket.

Sell directly to the reader, and you get to hold onto 100% of the money they spend on your book! And, that money is available to you usually within a few business days, if not immediately.

Of course, there is a catch to doing it all yourself. The catch is, you have to do all of the persnickety financial setups in order to make things work.

You will have to set up commercial bank accounts. One for banking, the other for clearing credit card charges sent to your business. Banks charge for these accounts on a monthly basis. How much, depends on your bank. Do not ever directly use your commercial checking account for credit card receipts. If there is a charge back on a credit card, the cash disappears immediately and it can take months to get that money back, if at all. (Learned that one the very hard way!)

Second, you need to register your accounts with the credit card companies. Visa, Master Card, Discover, American Express, etc. In addition to taking a small percentage of each sale, there is a monthly charge for those, too.

Yes, you get nickel-and-dimed all the way when receiving credit cards directly.

Then there is the software you will need on your web site to receive credit card orders. The cheapest, quality software will run you about $10 per month. Many high-end internet service providers (ISP) can supply you with good and secure shopping cart software that will handle your transactions for you, once you have all your bank accounts ready.

You might be thinking you could write your own software or get free software to receive the credit card numbers and then enter them yourself. Well, if it takes you five minutes to enter a credit card transaction on a credit card clearing device. It works if you only get a few orders each day. But if you have one hundred orders, it is going to take you over eight hours to enter in all those transactions.

Then you have to take sales taxes into consideration. Laws vary from state to state in the US, so I am not going to touch too deeply on this. Just remember that it is your responsibility to collect those taxes and pay the states that ask for them.

If you have large sales numbers and your wares are flying off the shelves, then it makes a lot of sense to take on the chaos of directly accepting credit card orders. The 20% you gain in revenue can be a significant amount of money with large sales figures.

However, if you are selling less than a couple hundred copies of your book per month, the fixed costs associated with accepting credit cards directly might actually be greater than the 20% you could gain doing it yourself. So, in that event, it might be wise to go through the ebook distributors and let them handle the headache and accounting of those sales.

Rowling will obviously have significant sales of the Harry Potter series as ebooks. If she sells just two million sets of her series at $57 each, that is a gross sales of $114 million. Taking on the sales herself instead of going through a distributor will gain her over $22 million in net profit. I am being extremely conservative with two million as an estimate. The Harry Potter series sold over 450 million sets. With seven books each, that’s over three billion books! You can bet that out of over 450 million people, there will easily be more than two million who will be willing to part with $57 for the ebooks—this month alone!

For comparison, I’ll be happy if I can sell 10,000 copies of my ebook in a year. (Launch day is getting closer!)

Another thing Rowling did was state that she wanted to sell her ebooks in a way that meant her readers would not be forced to be locked in to any single platform for a reading device. That means the ePub file format. Anyone with a Nook, iOS or Android OS device can read the ebook on whatever they want. (For Kindle owners, hampered by Amazon’s closed format, she offers her books as MOBI files as well. The day Amazon accepts the ePub format into their system will be the day I go out and buy a Kindle Touch.)

This is a huge boost for the open format.

Rowling has fired the first warning shot across the bow of the publishing industry, showing how easy it is for a major author to step out and do it themselves.

What this means for everyone who is or wants to be a published author is that the publishing and distribution industry is going to need to come up with new ways to convince authors to go with them rather than eking out on their own. It won’t be sudden, it will take years. But even the “Big Six” will have to adapt if the market continues to change, or die like the dinosaurs.

Where there are companies that don’t want to change, there will be the opportunity for dissatisfied employees of the publishers to break away and start their own company. Smaller, hungrier companies may be more willing to accept smaller profit margins than the behemoths of the industry, and be more capable of adjusting to new market paradigms should they appear.

The opportunities for new authors may actually grow over the coming years. Publishing houses, in the hope of reeling in the next Rowling, Steele, or King, may start offering better deals for new writers. Offering better financial incentives than what has been the tradition.

And it isn’t just writers that can benefit from this.

For one thing, how about accountants? Take a look at the numbers listed above. Then consider this:

Q: What do you call a writer who can count over ten?

A: Barefoot!

I bet there is a market out there for accounting services for self-publishing writers.

If a writer gets 70% at best from the distributors and you can help them improve that take to 90% by managing their accounting if they sell directly, there could be a decent business niche out there. Of course, there are a lot of terrible writers out there, so you may want to set some standards before you take someone on. Or, set a base of a minimum fee for services. This would filter out unprofitable clientele.

Already, there are people who are starting their own services for independent writers. Editing, ghostwriting, typographical services—they’re all out there and starting small businesses, breaking away from the corporate bullshit that goes with managers who don’t understand the product their companies produce. 

I’m a good story teller and a decent writer. But I need other people to catch my mistakes. Often, I see the story and not the mechanics and I have a difficult time noticing mistakes. This is actually very common among writers. I’m lucky that I have friends and relatives who are actually very talented at catching my mistakes and suggesting the corrections.

For this reason, there will always be a need for these professional services. There will always be a need for the work a publishing house can do. What will change, are the terms and interaction between these businesses and authors. This change will certainly not happen overnight, and some businesses may fail due to unwillingness to accept giving authors better terms. In truth, it does mean serious downsizing. Letting employees go means some of those employees could form their own companies and easily replace yours.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Adversity is the mother of opportunity.

Friends Not Forgotten

My family moved when I was eleven-years-old.

That’s a critical age. You are right in the middle of your social development. Where all those social connections you’ve created and skills you’ve developed for the past six years are about to bear fruit as you and your peers enter puberty. When the general society of the classroom would filter down into smaller, more closely knit groups of friends.

Only, that didn’t happen.

The last day of school, I stepped off the school bus and into the car. We pulled out of the driveway even before the bus had stopped at the next stop down the hill.

Socially speaking, I was back to zero at the most crucial point of my social development.

I always wondered what happened to my various friends and classmates. As it happened, a few years later, I had the opportunity to do just that and meet up with some of my old friends.

And I was in for one of the biggest shocks of my adolescent life!

We were back in the old neighborhood visiting family friends. I decided I wanted to walk down the road and stop in to surprise one of my friends, Billy. The last time I saw Billy was from the car window as we pulled out of the old driveway, watching him in the distance jump off the school bus and run into his house.

Back then, I would have just run through all the backyards to get to Billy’s house. Not anymore. No longer a local resident, I had to walk around yards and stay on the street. It gave me the opportunity to study the expansions the new family had committed to my old house. Aside from that, the neighborhood looked pretty much the same since I had left.

I got to Billy’s house and with a grin on my face, rang the doorbell. I could just imagine his surprise when he saw how tall I had gotten! A lot had changed over the years.

And I was about to find out just how much things had changed.

The doorbell rung, the smug grin on my face, I was ready.

Only I wasn’t.

The door opened, and it was not Billy.

The door opened and it was not either of his sisters, or his mother, father or any other member of his family.

The door opened and the person standing there was his girlfriend.

She stood there in a red, one-piece bathing suit.

A red one-piece bathing suit filled to perfection with an very feminine body, with all the curves and bumps in the right places. At the top of this teen-aged fantasy brought to life—virtually unchanged since the last time I saw her, long before puberty struck gold—was the head and face of my former classmate, Suzanne.

The shock of seeing someone who I knew as a little girl transformed into a young woman in an instant before my very eyes was more than my adolescent brain could handle. The sudden surging flood of hormones and trying to connect the face of the little girl I once knew with that body in that bathing suit overwhelmed my central nervous system.

My cerebrum overloaded and exploded.

My upper faculties went completely offline. I have no recollection of our conversation, other than it was very brief. I might have blurted out her name in surprise. I don’t know if she even remembered who I was. The ability to logically arrange consonants and vowels fled my mind, but apparently I mouthed out enough monosyllabic grunts and hoots to initiate some sort of communication. I hope my tongue wasn’t hanging out.

I finally came to my senses when I was half way up the hill on my return trip; I think my mouth was still hanging open. I really don’t remember much from moment she opened the door until I reached that point walking back.

They say the first impression is a lasting impression. I propose that the corollary to this is the last impression is a permanent impression. Of one thing I am certain: I came across as a complete moron. 

Despite that disastrous first time reunion, I actually enjoy running into people I haven’t seen for years. It’s always entertaining and sometimes humbling. Then there are some reunions that will never happen. Those lost to disease, violence or poor choices.
In one case, when I learned of his sudden end, it struck a particular chord in me.

There was always a competitive edge to our friendship. A sense of one-upmanship that we always engaged in when we got together. I didn’t learn of his death until many years after the fact. He apparently died just as he was getting started out on his own. Years of preparation and work getting ready for the future, and he was cut down even before he stepped over the starting line. All that effort he put into preparing for his adult life was wasted in an instant.

For me, that death meant no closure. No running into each other decades later to settle the score. It was like watching a movie where the credits roll before the story reaches its conclusion, or a joke where the punchline is never told.
It’s a tough competition where the winner is determined by who crosses the finish line last.

The competition now will have to be won by reaching new goals that I’ve set for myself. At which point, I can find a promontory with a great view, hoist a glass of aqua vitae skyward and say, “Friend, I did it. Better luck next time around!”
Then there are reunions of another kind to consider. Those where people never actually met before. We think this is a new phenomenon, where people meet over the internet and agree to get together in real life. But it has been going on for centuries, as long as humans have had extended communications through writing.

In the early 1970’s as the Vietnam War began to grind to a halt, people started becoming aware of the plight of the soldiers, and in particular those who were being held as prisoners of war. To heighten awareness of the plight of these soldiers and to show support for them, groups began selling bracelets printed with the names of POWs.

It became all the rage among young girls and teenagers. A number of the girls even in my class had some of these bracelets. I even remember seeing a few men wearing them.

My sister got one. To her, the bracelet was not something she got to be part of the trend or as a fashion statement. It meant a certain responsibility to her. She wore the bracelet until it broke. She then carefully wrapped it up and placed it in a keepsake box. She never forgot about him. Always in the back of her mind, she wondered what his fate had been.

Fast forward forty years.

She recently pulled out this keepsake box. A friend had commented about attending the funeral for a soldier whose name was on her memorial bracelet. That got my sister thinking about the man whose name was on her bracelet, put away so long ago. He had never been forgotten. The bracelet was merely set aside where it sat quietly while life moved on.

In years gone by, she might have looked at the name on the bracelet and wondered about the man it represented. To find his fate might have taken many phone calls and letters to various groups and organizations. Weeks and weeks of delays and slow communication. But today, we have the internet.

It didn’t take her long to locate his name and his story. He was a Lt. Commander in the Navy, and his plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile in 1967.

In my sister’s investigating, she came across a phone number. After giving it a great deal of thought, she decided a few days ago to make the phone call. The phone rang and the man who answered was the Lt. Cmdr. himself.

He spent six years imprisoned before being released in 1973. He came home. He eventually met a woman at a POW Memorial event, they fell in love and married.

The full story is far greater than just the above summary. And it is still unfolding at this moment. I feel it is better to leave the telling of the story to my sister at a future period. It is her experience and she can tell it so much better than I.

I will continue to look forward to those moments of coincidence when I happen to be in the right place at the right time and I get to run into someone I once knew.

Daytime Astronomy

Here’s something interesting you can do during the day: look for Venus in the sky. It is visible in the middle of the day in the bright, clear blue sky. Yes, even while the sun is still in the sky. For the next few weeks, it will be visible in daylight.

Finding it is the tricky part.

Venus in the day lit sky on Tuesday, March 13, 2012.

First of all, it is silly to look for it if you don’t have any idea where to look. There are astronomy programs for both iOS and Android that allow you to point your phone at the sky, and the program will show you what is in that direction. Look around the sky for Venus using this program, and it will show you roughly where to look with your own eyes.

Second, stand near a tall tree or building. If you stare into a featureless blue sky, your eyes have nothing to focus on and your eye muscles will relax. When relaxed, the average human eye focuses at just under a meter. Naturally, this means that anything beyond this point will be out of focus. As Venus appears to be a point of light in the sky, if it isn’t in focus, you aren’t going to see it. If you stand near something tall, the top of the object will give your eyes something to reference for focusing at a distance.

Another good reason for using a tall object is it gives you a point of reference to explain where it is in the sky. Invariably, people are going to note that you are standing there staring at something and will want to know what you are seeing.

Venus looks just like a star in the bright blue sky. When you spot it, you will be amazed at just how bright it is! You will then wonder how you could ever have missed it. (See my second point above about focus.)

Another trick for finding Venus is to look for the moon when it comes around again and is in the sky close to the planet. The moon is a little easier to spot and you can use it as a visual reference to find Venus. It helps to look at the moon the evening before to figure out where it is relative to Venus. Keep in mind that the moon moves more than you think in does, and by the next day it will have moved from where it was relative to Venus the previous evening.

If you really want to raise the bar, take a look at this picture. Move the cursor over the bottom-left and top right-corners if you can’t figure it out. I took this picture back in November, 2004. I'm trying to repeat that image, but the weather hasn't exactly been cooperating with me the past few days. I also think that Jupiter is further away this time, and so isn't quite as bright as it was back then.

Looking at Venus in the daytime gives me an idea of what people might have seen when SN-1006 appeared in the sky, which was much brighter than Venus can ever become. It was the brightest supernova recorded in human history. People could see their shadows by it. Not too many years after that, SN-1054 exploded, creating the Crab Nebula.

Enjoy!

Marketing: Watching the Numbers.

Yes, I am getting very close to finishing my book, Nobody, Aggadeh Chronicles Book One.  The final chapters have been outlined and end of the story is in sight. That being said, there is actually one more phantom chapter that was created that didn’t make the original cut when I decided to rewrite Nobody. I figured I would set it aside until the end, and now I have a better idea how to rework it back into the story.

One task that must eventually be completed is writing the blurb of the story. That short summary that is usually printed on the back cover, inside the lining, or on the web site that is supposed to intrigue the reader enough to want to buy the book and read it. There are actually two that must be written. One is usually a single line that works like a catchphrase. The other is the summary as described above.

That first task is actually a small part of the second task that must be addressed, second in importance only to actually writing the book. That task is: selling the book!

That means getting the word out when my book is available. I can’t just rely on uploading the ebook and then sitting back and wait for the sales to roll in. I have to get out and actually tell people that it is out. That means hitting Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and a few other forums and message boards that I haunt. But, it must go much further than that.

I know at least three or four dozen copies of my book will be sold almost immediately. Those sales will be from friends and family that have known I’ve been writing this book and have been waiting patiently for me to finish it. While it will be exciting to actually watch that initial sales count roll in, I have to temper myself with the fact that those are technically “courtesy purchases”. 

Second to that, I know that almost 90 people have downloaded the sample chapters of my book. Again, about half of those are from friends and family. It is the other half that is more intriguing. Those are people who I may have met in passing or noted a post from a social site and were interested enough to take a look. Or, they may be friends of friends who were guided to my site. It is a most important number, because it represents the general public, people who I don’t know personally or don’t meet with on a regular basis!

The question is, who and where are these people?

If you stand on one street corner to sell your wares, after a couple of weeks, everyone who passes by on a regular basis has either already bought your product or isn’t interested in buying your product. You aren’t going to sell anymore. Eventually, you have to move to another corner. The same applies to social networking sites. I can post about my book all I want, but ultimately the message is going to the same people over and over again. Over time, that means almost 200 people that would be very annoyed and bored with me.

Sales is the process of selling the product. Marketing is the process of identifying who and where to sell the product. Are you going to sell more things standing by the train station at rush hour or at the entrance to a sewage treatment plant at midnight? Making that determination is marketing.

Marketing is all about demographics.

Is your book a hardcore sci-fi cyberporn extravaganza that exceeds the limits of human savagery and sexuality? Chances are, it might be a tough sell at the local church reading group. How about a coming of age story for a young girl that has lots of unicorns, glitter, bows and rescuing a handsome young prince in distress? Maybe setting up a table at the biker bar isn’t a good idea. (But, hey! You never know….) Determining who might like to read your story is all marketing; identifying demographic groups that would be interested in your story.

I spent one evening going through my list of friends on Facebook. I chose thirty who I knew were avid readers or I knew who were very well connected on Facebook. Then I visited each of their profiles and got the count of friends they each had. The final tally came in at just over fourteen thousand! Yes, connected to those thirty friends were fourteen thousand people.

If you think I was sitting at my computer staring at that number with my jaw dropped open in disbelief, you would be correct. I even went through the list a second time to make sure I didn’t punch in a wrong number somewhere. But the number was correct.

Hopefully what this means is if I announce the release of my book on Facebook and each of those 30 friends click “Like” when they see the announcement, then all of their friends will also see that announcement. This means the announcement of my book will be exposed to over 14,000 people through one degree of separation. Fourteen thousand people who might think, “Hey! My friend actually knows this author! Maybe I should take a look at his book.”

That little bit of market research told me that Facebook is probably the very first place I want to run to the moment I make my book available for purchase. Since doing that bit of research, the number of people I am connected to has more than quintupled (increased by over 500%). So, that number of 1° connections may actually be much higher now.

But that sales push will only work for a short while. I am basically relying on word-of-mouth to sell my book, and I can’t expect that my friends are going to go out and constantly beat the bandwidth of the internet for me. I also need to hit other social groups with the announcement. The announcement must also be repeated on a regular basis for a while, to keep reminding people that my book has been released.

This blog serves just such a purpose. It is both a promotional (sales) and a data-collection (marketing). It is a place where potential fans can come to and get a look into my mind, and at the same time, I can collect counts of how many people come to my blog and read it.

For example, I cannot see data that tells me that Fred Mertz of 123 Main Street, Anytown, USA visited my blog. But I can see that twenty-three people visited my blog at some point after I posted an entry, and fifteen of those people connected by following the link from Facebook and four followed the link from Twitter. It’s the remaining five that are a mystery. How did they come to my blog?

Marketing is driven by numbers.

When I post on Facebook that I have a new blog entry, how many people respond to that? What about the time? Do more people show up if I post in the afternoon or in the evening? Those numbers are a little more difficult to come by. And timing an announcement could make a huge difference in how many people actually see the announcement.

I’m publishing my books as ebooks first. Which platform is the most popular? Amazon’s Kindle? Apple’s iPad? Barnes & Nobles Nook? Or some other platform? That’s why I put the survey up on the right. That could determine where I launch my book first.  (So far, the Nook is winning.)

What day would be a good day to announce my book? A lot of newspapers print upcoming weekend events on Thursday, because that is when most people start thinking about what they want to do on Friday or Saturday. That would certainly be the evening to announce a “meet the author” event! But when do people sit down and decide they want to buy a book or start going through Amazon or B&N to find a good book to read? If everyone sat down Wednesday evening around 9 PM to peruse for a new book, then maybe I should make my announcement Wednesday evening at 8 PM.

These are things you need to ferret out in order to improve the salability of your book.

I just activated Google Analytics on my web pages to glean more detailed information about visits to my web pages. It definitely will NOT tell me that Fred Mertz just visited my blog. But, it will tell me that someone visited my site around 9 PM and they stayed on my site for about thirty minutes, which tells me that the visitor hung around and read a few things. Up until this point, all I could tell was that someone merely visited a given page. I can’t tell how long they hung around or if they downloaded something. Hopefully using Google Analytics, I’ll be able to glean this information.

What this will all tell me is how effective I am being in getting the word out. If doing one thing results in a lot of visits, then that effort is a good one to continue. If doing another results in no visits, then clearly that effort is a waste of time. The more effectively I can get people to look at my book, the more likely I am to generate sales of my book.

My goal is to sell at least 10,000 copies of my book. If I can do that, then I’ve got a future! The only way that is going to happen is if I properly market my book to people who are most likely to buy it and enjoy it. If those people like it enough to recommend it to friends, then my book will be a success. So the more people I can the book to that will promote my book to their friends, the more likely I will reach that goal.

Then there are other activities that must be done should sales of my book surge ahead.

For one thing, book signings. This, in my opinion, is vital for selling a book. People who might not look twice at your book are more likely to take a chance on it if they meet you as the author in person. It really is a thrill to meet the person who wrote a book you truly loved. It's even better when that author turns out to be an incredibly nice person. The corollary is, it really sucks when that person is a jerk. And I have seen the look of utter devastation on a fan's face when they waited for so long to get an autograph or even just meet their admired celebrity, only to have that celebrity whisked away to another event at the last moment.

Now, didn’t I just say above that you can’t autograph a computer file? Seeing as I am publishing as an ebook first, I figured I would print up copies of the cover on high-grade card stock and autograph those for anyone who purchased the ebook and wants an autograph from the author. Eventually I will get around to printing physical books, but for now, I just can't afford it.

I’ve already been approached by friends that belong to reading groups asking if I would be interested in me being a guest. Most people I have met that attend reading groups prefer to read from paper books than from ebooks. This is a quickly changing demographic, but currently within this population, paper books are still holding the lead.

When someone gets the chance to meet the author of a book, they do want some physical reminder of that occasion. So it behooves me to come up with something that can be done.

Printing actual books is expensive! How soon I move forward with this will depend on a number of things. Certainly the number of ebooks I sell! Without money, I can’t afford to print up actual books. Demand for print copies comes next. If there isn’t much demand for print versions of my books, then it doesn’t make sense to spend several thousand dollars to print them up if they aren’t going to sell. (Interestingly, dipping back into demographics, about half the people I know are interested in buying both the ebook and hardcopy versions of my book.)

I am considering turning to Kickstarter to raise money for doing a physical printing of my book sooner than later. I do recognize that it is important to try and go to print as soon as possible. If the ebook is proving successful in sales, then it would be wise to invest in a print run. Kickstarter allows people to offer a donation in return for a token of thanks. It has been very successful for a number of authors and other projects.

People want that keepsake from meeting an author. While I think the cover card is a good idea for those who have ebooks and are satisfied with that, there will be many more who prefer to have a book for their collection. I have a few autographed books I have received over the years, and I treasure that tactile memento as a shared presence between myself and the author I met. At some point or another, I hope my path crosses with Spider Robinson so I can get my copy of Variable Star autographed. (Though, I suspect that will happen after his Orphan Stars is released.)

So, I’ll be watching the numbers to see what is happening and hopefully be able to guide my decisions in the most advantageous way. I’ve had a general plan in place for some time now, but the moment to put all that in motion is fast approaching.

Readin' & Writin' & Judgin' a Book by Its Cover

How does one become a writer? What does it take to be a writer? Why does one become a writer? That last one is easy to answer. Have a story and the desire to tell it. That also answers the second question. Have a story and the desire to tell it. The first one also has an easy answer. You sit down and start writing the story you have and desire to tell.

While those simple answers certainly are true, they don’t tell all of it. Especially in regards to that first question. In my opinion, there is something far more fundamental that is needed to serve as the foundation before one can look to writing.

That fundamental is that one must first be a reader.

If you don’t like to read, then the chances are pretty good that the thought of writing a book will never occur to you. There is something that goes even deeper than that. The phrase, “Monkey see; monkey do,” applies very strongly here. Humans—heck most mammals and a notable number of non-mammals—learn by observing others. If you read a lot, then your brain is going to be conditioned how to write by the example of how other writers have written. If I complete writing a chapter and then sit down and read a book for a while, when I return to my own writing and reread it, I catch my mistakes fairly easily. If you do not read, then you are not going to be exposed to the structures and flow of writing. Without those examples as stimulus, you are probably not going to write very well.

When I was a young boy, I was not much of a reader. The desire and motivation was just not there for me. I just could not get myself interested in reading a book. In kindergarten, I was excited about learning to read. In first grade, that excitement disappeared as I realized that reading was boring and by second grade, it was starting to get annoying and I was starting to not like reading. It was boring!

The third grade at the age of seven was a critical year for me. I knew my reading skills weren’t as good as other kids my class and it bothered me a lot. Enough so, that I began to try and figure out why I wasn’t getting into books. I used to love reading when I started learning to read. There were books that I absolutely loved pulling out! I remember when I got my first library card, I was so excited! So what was the difference?

What happened that caused me to lose interest in reading?

It was when they handed out our third grade reading books that the answer to that question began to reveal itself to me. I did not like those books at all and reading went to the bottom of my list. That only heightened my concern.

High Plains Elementary was an unusual environment. It wasn’t until my family moved and I found myself in a completely different school system that I appreciated the difference. At High Plains, the children’s culture determined your social ranking not by your size, strength or speed, but by your academic standing. That was probably brought about by the fact that the school system was a very progressive one.

For example, they started teaching the students French in the third grade. I was abysmal at it! For the next three years (third, fourth and fifth grades), French was my worst course. I could not at all wrap my brain around that language! It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I just could not understand it. The last thing I ever tried to say in French was, “I have a dog.” (“J’ai un chien”) What came out of my mouth instead was, “Je suis un chien.” (“I am a dog.”) That’s not something that you say in the fourth grade. The entire class burst out laughing and I felt utterly humiliated! I completely gave up on learning French at that point, and forever more would just sit and either sulk or daydream whenever French class would begin.

The reason for my failure at French was because at no time did anyone explain that the word order in French was different from English. As a result of this, I could never make sense of the sentences. I could never picture the meaning of what was said.

It would be many years before I would be able to understand the concept of what was going on with me. But I was beginning to understand that I was different as a child.

The foundation of my problem with learning French was the same as my issue with reading.

I realized that the reason I didn’t like the new reader books for the third grade was because they had almost no pictures in them. In first grade, we used pictures books—kiddy books—when learning the read. In second grade, the text was smaller and there were fewer images. By the third grade, they were weaning us off the picture books and going for more textual narratives.

My favorite books were several of the Dr. Seuss books, such as Green Eggs & Ham, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and a number of other books of which I can remember the pictures and the stories, but not the titles. I absorbed the stories through the images. I would study the images and lose myself in the images. But not the words themselves.

The third grade readers had almost no pictures in them. It certainly didn’t help that the subject matter of the stories were boring as hell. I had no interest in drawing myself into those stories. Without a picture, I couldn’t generate the image in my mind needed to see the story I was reading.

The issue being, I think in images.

My favorite books were picture books, “kiddy books”. Not exactly something a seven-year-old boy wants revealed before his peers.

On one particular day in November, soon after that realization, my class was marched down to the school library for library studies. It was not one of my favorite activities. Dewey Decimal system, pick out a book. It was all boring. But at this particular moment, I was keenly aware that some of my classmates were picking out books that were several grades above my current reading level.

Not wanting to be embarrassed, I turned my back to the book section I might have chosen and walked away. I decided it was time I look for something else to read.

A little more than forty years later, I can say absolutely that day was the most pivotal moment in my life. The choice I made that day set the course my life would follow. A choice made by a seven-year-old.

I don’t know why I actually looked at the books in particular. I think I recognized the covers on the Hardy Boys series, a favorite of my older brother. I wasn’t interested in mystery series, so I glanced down at the other books that had similar covers. The books were by the same company that published the Hardy Boys series: Stratemeyer Syndicate.

The books that caught my attention were the Tom Swift, Jr. series of books. A teenage scientist and his adventures with the things he built. Not exactly the most sophisticated reading, those books. They were written to formulated plots and set structures. But for a seven-year-old boy who wanted to read, they were perfect.

The book I pulled off of the shelf was particularly important. I flipped through the pages and noted there were no pictures in it. Oh! Wait! There were actually two or three drawings in it. Just enough to give my mind an image to build on while reading. But the cover was what really caught my eye. At the time, one of my favorite TV shows was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and my favorite cartoon was Marine Boy. Like these two TV shows, the book featured something that was the absolute epitome of coolness to a seven-year-old boy.

The book was Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter. 

The cover featured a flying submarine!

What was so vitally important for me at that time was something that I would not quite realize until I was a few years older. The Tom Swift, Jr. books featured covers that showed a particular scene in the story contained within. It was vital because that image portrayed on the cover was the seed from which I was able to create the imagery of the story in my mind. It was a skill that I had not yet developed and it was a skill I needed to become a reader.

I sat down and began to read an “adult” book for the first time in my life. A story about a flying submarine.

And for the first time in my life, I began to enjoy reading.

It would be a few more books before I began to really visualize what I was reading. When I opened a book and began to read, I would no longer see the words on the page, I would instead see the imagery of the story like a movie played out in my mind. The passage of time would go unnoticed until I had to put the book down for one reason or another.

I began to read voraciously!

It wasn’t long before the drawings in the books that I originally relied on began to get in the way of my reading. Eventually, I graduated to more sophisticated reading.

It was my fourth grade teacher, Lark McGuire, who introduced me to the activity that would eventually become my career: writing.

The exercise was simple. She would write a sentence on the chalk board and our assignment was to take that sentence as the beginning of a story.

A fire lit in my soul like the flames of the sun! I couldn’t contain the incredible euphoria I felt! Where most of my classmates wrote one or two paragraphs, I was on page two and going onto page three.

The whole class enjoyed the exercise. So much so, that during one rained-out recess, Ms. McGuire asked us what we wanted to do for a game, and we begged her to write a sentence on the board so we could write.

I remember her asking, “Don’t you want to do anything else?,” and trying to talk us into playing a game or something. She had the biggest grin on her face when she turned and started writing something on the board. The more often we did those exercises, the longer and more fantastical the stories I wrote. A number of the kids in my class—friends and not-friends alike—wanted to see just what was going to come out of my imagination next.

I still have some of those stories, saved by my mother. And I can say with all certainty that they are pretty much as bad as the Marine Boy episodes linked above.

I loved to write. I yearned to write! Creative writing became my favorite exercise, because it gave me the excuse to write. But as time went by, creative writing gave way to more practical education. It wouldn’t be until my junior year in high school when we would have a creative writing class, and then only for about two or three weeks as part of English.

Because of the need for more “important” educational matters, it never occurred to me to just sit down and write for myself. It wouldn’t be until college when I would be sitting in a boring lecture, that I would begin to write stories again. Beyond that, the need to work in order to make enough money to survive would become my primary focus, and I kept putting off the thought of writing a book for some other point when I wasn’t so pressed.

Writing and reading go hand in hand. Each one reinforces the other. The more I read, the more I want to write. When I am having trouble writing something, I sit down and pull out a favorite book to read for a while. After that, I usually find it much easier to get started writing.

When I write, it really is the reverse of reading for me. As I read, I see the story played out like a movie before me. When I am writing, I am trying to write and describe the scenes that are passing before my mind. The more I write, the more I see the visualization of what I am writing.

I wonder what might have become of me had I not picked out that book that day? Which direction would my life have gone? Would I have ever found the joy of reading at a later age or would I have given up on it completely? I have no way to answer those questions.

I do find it interesting that the course of my life was determined by a frustrated and embarrassed seven-year-old boy over forty years ago. That my eventual career would be determined by a fourth-grade writing exercise a year later.

And that you really can judge some books by their covers….