In this book Morris Rosenthal offers a distinctive and contrarian point of view on author marketing that is a must read for any author who wants to build a "platform" and market his books more effectively. Rosenthal subverts the conventional wisdom that "interactive" and social networking are the best tools and makes a convincing data-based argument that providing rich substantive content is the way to go. As a publisher I recommend this book to all my authors and it has spurred a rethink of how I do my corporate website.
Quiz your attorney on the rules and laugh uproariously when he describes his procedures for avoiding conflicts.
The Kaplan guide to Constitutional Law is also available free. If you are at all politically inclined, this would be a good acquisition so that you are conversant with the state of the law on hot button topics.
In this long and brilliant work Maitland summarized and analyzed much of the greatest thought on ‘liberty’ in the two hundred years before his own work, including the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, Mill and others.
The Kindle versions of legal classics often leave something to be desired, and the Internet Archive version are too often OCR’d scans from Google. I find Project Gutenberg is the most reiiable source. For example, Blackstone’s Commentaries in the .mobi with images version.
Wondering how Kindle counts “locations”? I always thought that a location was a paragraph, i.e. an HTML <p>. Wrongo!The answer is 128 bytes, or approximately 23 words with no formatting—html markup counts). So to get a rough count of how many words are in a book, multiply the number of locations by twenty (i.e. double and add a zero).
Lawrence Block is a great writer and, in his autobiography, Step by Step, he says that this is one of his favorite books and that he wrote it in a burst of energy in two weeks straight. Unfortunately, only the latter makes sense. This just isn't a very good book.
It is severely handicapped by a completely absurd line of silly mystic mumbo-jumbo that propels its characters on their "walk." They are boring because there is no conflict. They join the walk, they experience a miracle cure, they all get along. The other half of the book is from the point of view of a prolific serial killer. He is not boring, but he sure is super creepy, so much so that it's hard to enjoy the book.
The Kindle formatting is fine, no issues.
Skip this one unless you are a New Age loon, a serial killer, or a Block completist.
Good. I was just thinking about how much I dislike living in large cities. They just seem to go on and on and on with more of the same everywhere you look. Ann Arbor is a highly networked city.
Zachary Neal found that although America’s largest cities once had the most sophisticated economies, today that honor goes to cities with many connections to other places, regardless of their size. The study was published online Aug. 30 in the research journal City and Community.
Excellent and very thorough meta-analysis of Kindle 3 reviews at Amazon by Switch11 at Kindle Review. Who knew: people hate the Korean font (image here). Most ominous finding was that there are a lot of reports that Kindle 3 freezes more often than its predecessors.
The much-anticipated (and embargo-busting) YA fantasy Mockingjay is out on Kindle for a reasonable $8.02.
Did you know about Mangle, the Kindle program for manga? It seems to do a pretty good job with manga on the Kindle 3.
Nielsen BookScan, which provides hard numbers about print book sales, is working on an offering to track e-book sales. If you publish e-books in any format, they need your help. Reach out to your retail partners and encourage them to participate in Nielsen’s new offering. Better data helps everyone.
Important post with royalty math at Mike Shatzkin’s Idealog. You must take a look at his tables. The problem with his analysis is that the market is exerting inexorable downward price pressure on e-books. If you consider solely those royalty plans in his table where e-books are priced at $10 or under, authors can expect to be making between $0.80 and $2.80 per copy. The only hope that authors have for seeing hardback-like per unit royalties in the future is if the market will support as many ebook sales at $12.99 as it currently supports hardback sales at $25. That is iffy, IMHO.
Nielsen BookScan, which provides hard numbers about print book sales, is working on an offering to track e-book sales. If you publish e-books in any format, they need your help. Reach out to your retail partners and encourage them to participate in Nielsen’s new offering. Better data helps everyone.
Occasional mention: consider joining the 1600-member mailing list, POD_PUBLISHERS@GROUPS.YAHOO.COM, which is focused on the business and marketing aspects of just-in-time publishing. I am a co-moderator.
I just received my first iBooks sales report from LSI’s CoreSource distribution program, covering the month of July. A title that sells about 50 copies a month on Kindle sold 1 copy in July. This is consistent with what others are reporting.
Tragically, there are no grocery stores within a 15-mile radius of Ann Arbor where one can buy a six-pack of Toasted Almond bars.
Brilliantly, I just struck a deal with the owner of a local party store that he will buy me a box from his distributor. I can pick them up Friday. Toasted Almond Bar diet here I come!
Hat tip to Scoop Deck’s Phil Ewing for this gem. LOL.
It must get really tiresome being a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. Your human operators are always making you take off, fly your stupid old waypoints, look at boring objects through your Forward-Looking Infrared sensors, and then go back to base or the ship. Sometimes you want to just… break free, y’know? Well, after more than 1,000 hours in the air for the Navy’s various test models, one Fire Scout finally did:
Shades of Fahrenheit 451. But really, what is the harm in burning a pile of books? It would be different if they were e-books and he was putting DRM on them.
If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?
this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.
The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?
The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead. Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.
All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial.
An unusually interesting discussion of the interaction of linguistics, culture, and religion.
“AMUCK” NOW appears in English dictionaries to mean going out of control, usually expressed as “run amuck.”
The Encarta Word English dictionary cites its roundabout origins: “Directly or via Portugese am(o)luco ‘homicidally violent Malay’ from Malay amuk ‘fighting frenziedly’.”
I am going to use “amok,” which comes closer to its pronunciation in Malay. It is also “amok” that now appears in UP’s Diksiyonaryong Filipino, acknowledging that the term has entered local usage, as in tabloids occasionally reporting someone as “nag-amok,” usually in a hostage-taking incident, as in the recent terrible tragedy at the Luneta.
The literary agent Andrew Wyle has cancelled his exclusive deal with Amazon for classic backlist books. That was quick. Chris Walters at Kindlerama has a good insight that the minimalist covers suggest he was bluffing along.
Kindle holds the promise of beinggreat for readers who want to read everything by a given author (completists). Unfortunately, as I have alluded to before, there are still a lot of holes in the Kindle collection; but when the Kindle has “gap-fillers”, it’s a beautiful thing. Two of my favorite Kindle purchases ever are Keller in Dallas, an otherwise unavailable novella about Lawrence Block’s stamp-collecting hit man, and The Complete McAuslan, by George Mcdonald Fraser, author of the Flashman series. The McAuslan is in print, but it would be, to be frank, a pretty questionable purchase as a paperback dust collector without any collectible value. As a Kindle, for some reason, it’s a must.
Nimble Book of the Day:
Packed and Loaded: never-before-published interviews with James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity ($7.17).
Feature requests:bookmarking for periodicals. I wish Kindle would treat blogs and periodicals just like books. A severe problem throughout all Kindle interfaces is the lack of feature/function consistency from one device to another. Why doesn’t Kindle for PC have all the same features as Kindle 2.5? Why does Kindle treat PDF annotation differently from book annotation?
Vital information for people converting documents that contain images:the image standards have changed. The old guidance was 450 x 550, 67 dpi. The new guidance is 600 x 800 pixels or larger, 300 dpi, JPEG with quality factor > 40, and color whenever possible. Everyone (especially Kindle owners) needs to remember that Kindle is a cross-platform standard that delivers documents to many different types of devices.
“Power draw is said to be minimal, even less than eInk in some cases, no backlight is required, glare is virtually non existent, color reproduction is possible, as is 30 frame per second video.”
Kindle 3 shipping dates:
From a thread on the Amazon support board: Orders placed before 8 p.m. Pacific Time on August 1st will still ship by the August 27th release date. Orders placed before 10 p.m. Pacific Time on August 5th will ship on or before September 4th. Orders placed before 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 8th. Orders placed after 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 12th. ‘
Nimble Book of the Day:
The Handbook of 5GW [Fifth-Generation Warfare] edited by Dan H. Abbott – a brilliant collection of essays about the future of warfare, ranging from counterinsurgency to cyberwar.
Vastly overpriced Kindle books coming out soon:
September 2: A Journey: My Political Life, by Tony Blair. Knopf. Print Length: 640 p. Kindle edition $19.25. Text-to-Speech: Disabled. I’ll always regard Tony Blair as a true friend of the United States of America for standing in the well of the Congress when George W. Bush addressed Congress on September 20, 2001. That said, $19.25 is ridiculous for a politician’s memoir.
One ray of hope, though: my pre-order of George Bush’s DECISION POINTS at $19.75 was swiftly marked down by Amazon from $19.75 to $9.99. Maybe the Blair book will be, too.
Must-read for authors, 
