The Nimble Books Blog

Amazon.com–Print on Demand

Open letter to interested parties:

We wanted to make sure those who are interested have an opportunity to understand what we’re changing with print on demand and why we’re doing so.

One question that we’ve seen is a simple one. Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon’s own fulfillment centers, and if so why?

Yes.

Full bumpf available here

Amazon: you are a technology company. Do not make publishers reformat their entire backlist to conform to Booksurge specs. It is patently unreasonable to ask publishers to reformat thousands of books into Booksurge’s proprietary spec format. If you want to “own” POD, then man up and do the work. Or better yet, do a deal with LSI to put LSI machines in your fulfillment centers.

Amazon: what happened to your promise of  being “the world’s greatest bookstore?”. Are you seriously telling your own customers that if a POD book takes 24 hours to ship to you, it is too hard for you to acquire it for your customers?

Tags: What's New for Book-Lovers // Add Comment »

This is the latest in a series of periodic updates of the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook.

When I think about marketing books online, I often think of principal components analysis, which is a mathematical technique that is used to reduce the dimensionality of a data set. When you have a phenomenon that is described by a large number of factors, PCA is a tool for identifying the smaller number of variables that account for most of the variance. PCA is often surprisingly effective, sometimes reducing dimensionality from hundreds to single digits. The same concept works for marketing books online: although there are a great many variables, just a handful seem to explain most of the variation.

There are four major variables that you can influence before publication:

1. Get the positioning right. Are you providing a substantial benefit addressing specific interests of a well-defined audience that likes to buy books?
2. Maximize keyword discoverability. Discoverability = the intersection of strong keywords with few competing titles.
3. Maximize quality.
4. Take a strong point of view.

There are four major variables that you can influence after publication:

1. Get as many readers as possible to write “real name” reviews on Amazon. Anytime anyone says something nice to you about the book, ask them to repeat it in a review. Reviews appear to every prospective buyer at the point of sale and are free.
2. Update your email signature, your byline, your blog, and your webpage to point to the book’s Amazon.com detail page.
3. Sign up with Amazon Connect, Amazon’s marketing service for authors, and create an Amazon blog for your book. But only do one post to the blog, and update it as needed. Knock yourself out on that post, because it’s the only place on your book’s detail page where you can speak directly to the customer and where you can modify your message in near real time.
4. Send as many review copies as you can to prominent journalists and bloggers who are actually likely to review the book. When there is a good review, plug it in your blog entry (see item #3). I can also incorporate pull quotes in the “editorial reviews” section of the detail page, but I am limited to 20 (!) words, which usually requires severe, Rex Reed-like truncation.

That’s it! This relative handful of activities seems to explain most of the variation in the efficiency of online marketing for Nimble Books.

In a future post, I will list just a few of the dozens of demonstrably cost-ineffective marketing tools that have been devised to separate authors and publishers from their money.

Tags: About Nimble Books, Nimble Books Authors, What's New for Book-Lovers, Writing // Add Comment »

 If he does, it’s because he has (correctly) calcuated that this choice will give him maximum attention. If he chooses Michigan, he and Rodriguez will be on the cover of Sports Illustrated Sep. 1. If he chooses Ohio State, he will be a backup quarterback Sep. 1.

SportingNews.com - Your expert source for NCAA Football stats, scores, standings, and blogs from NCAA Football columnists

Roy Hall, Pryor’s quarterbacks coach, told the Plain Dealer in Cleveland that he believes Pryor will choose Ohio State.But Reitz told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “I think Michigan has closed the gap some the past few weeks. Their coaches believe they have a shot.”

Tags: Michigan Wolverines, Sports Phile // Add Comment »

Amazon.com: sdae102’s review of BB-67 MONTANA, U.S. Navy Battleship: Why S…

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding, March 10, 2008
By sdae102
A unique volume that depicts USS Montana as if the ship had been completed The photos of the model work are excellent. And the artwork of the ship by noted naval artist wayne scarpaci is outstanding.

It’s really heartening that this guy liked what I did.

I am a best-selling battleship author. Go figure!

Tags: About Nimble Books, Against A Dark Background, History Phile, What's New for Book-Lovers // Add Comment »

Condiment: Comment: The New Yorker

If McCain really wants to have it all—to refurbish his maverick image without having to flip-flop on the panderings that have tarnished it; to galvanize the attention of the press, the nation, and the world; to make a bold play for the center without seriously alienating “the base”—then he can avail himself of a highly interesting option: Condoleezza Rice.

Someone who is actually qualified to be President. I am getting tired of reading about governors who don’t have foreign policy experience. They have got to have some overseas seasoning before they are qualfiied to sit in the big chair.

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TheHill.com - It’s over

Suggestion for Obama:

The next time Hillary uses the recycled red phone ad, counter with one of your own. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, have a woman’s voice, with a flat Midwestern accent, answer it and say, “Hold on” into the receiver. Then she should shout, “Bill! It’s for you!”

Dick Morris is a chumbucket, but a smart one.

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wfzimmerman's review: "The blurb on the cover of the paperback edition that calls this "one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read" is not far off the mark."
Tor Books (2008), Edition: First Edition, Paperback, 384 pages

Tags: My LibraryThing, What's New for Book-Lovers // Add Comment »

Camera Spots Wolverine in Sierra Nevada - The Huffington Post

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A research project aimed at weasels has turned up a bigger prize: a picture of a wolverine, an elusive animal scientists feared may have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada long ago by human activity.

The discovery could affect land-use decisions if the wolverine is declared an endangered species, a step the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering, although the animals typically live at high elevations where there is limited development.

A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range.

Moriarty was trying to get pictures of martens, which are slender brown weasels, for a project she was doing with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station.

She said that when she saw the wolverine in the picture early last Sunday morning, it was a “complete shock. It was not something I would expect by any means.”

News of the picture surprised scientists, who thought wolverines, if they still inhabited the Sierra, would be found only in the southern part of the range, not in the Lake Tahoe area.

There had been sightings of wolverines by reputable people but no solid proof they were still in the Sierra, said Bill Zielinski, a research ecologist for the Forest Service who was working with Moriatry.

“The conventional wisdom was that they were pretty much gone from California,” said Zielinski. “There’s been a lot of other camera work and a variety of methods used to track rare carnivores. Those same methods, if wolverines had been around, would have detected them, we thought.”

Tags: Ann Arbor For Better Or Worse, Michigan Wolverines, Sports Phile // Add Comment »

Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69 | The Underwire from Wired.com

Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, according to Stephen Chenault, CEO of Troll Lord Games.

First off, I have to say that having the person who reports your death be the CEO of Troll Lord Games is pretty cool.

Next, I have to say that Gary Gygax had a profound impact on popular culture. I doubt if he ever made very many Top 100 lists, but he should have.

Finally, I have to say that from my perspective as a book publisher, Gary Gygax should be remembered not just as the guy who invented D&D, but as a brilliant author and book publisher.

His Dungeons and Dragons books sold like hotcakes and (appropriately) spawned dozens of new editions and spinoff titles. He did what every publisher dreams of.

Tip of the hat to Murdoc Online for spotting this story.

Tags: In Memoriam, Intergalactic Roll of Honor, What's New for Book-Lovers // Add Comment »

Patrick Swayze Diagnosed With Cancer, Five Weeks Left to

Patrick Swayze, best known for his role in Dirty Dancing, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he has just five weeks to live.

Swayze, 55, has been sick with the disease since he was diagnosed in late January with pancreatic cancer. The cancer has since spread to other organs and now the actor/dancer is dying.

For the past month, Swayze has been traveling to Stanford University’s prestigious cancer center in Palo Alto for radical chemotherapy, but his doctors are no longer optimistic that the treatments will be successful, according to the National Enquirer.

Swayze received three treatments of chemotherapy, causing the tumor to shrink, but less than his doctors had hoped for. He was then told that he should prepare for the end.

Way too many people have died recently. Patrick Swayze made some indelible contributions to people of my generation with DIRTY DANCING and GHOST.

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This is one of the better days in the history of Nimble Books. Today we have reached a final agreement with Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction author, futurist, and commentator David Brin, and we will be publishing his THROUGH STRANGER EYES, a collection of “Reviews, Introductions, Tributes & Iconoclastic Essays” in the U.S. and U.K. We will be working in partnership with Robert Stephenson of the fine SF publisher Altair Australia who be publishing a simultaneous edition for his markets. THROUGH STRANGER EYES will include essays on figures as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien, John Brunner, George Orwell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Charles Sheffield, Richard Feynman, and Ayn Rand.

More to come …

Tags: About Nimble Books, Forthcoming from Nimble Books, Intergalactic Roll of Honor, What's New for Book-Lovers // Add Comment »

Hillary’s Math Problem | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com

Hillary Clinton may be poised for a big night tonight, with wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. Clinton aides say this will be the beginning of her comeback against Barack Obama. There’s only one problem with this analysis: they can’t count.

I’m no good at math either, but with the help of Slate’s Delegate Calculator I’ve scoped out the rest of the primaries, and even if you assume huge Hillary wins from here on out, the numbers don’t look good for Clinton. In order to show how deep a hole she’s in, I’ve given her the benefit of the doubt every week for the rest of the primaries.

I love definitive articles like this one. Tip of the hat to Jonathan Alter.

Tags: Hillary, Obama, SHOULD BARACK OBAMA BE PRESIDENT?, U.S. & Local Politics // Add Comment »