{TOPIC} IN THE AGE OF OBAMA (or McCain).

Signed up so far:

• GLOBALISTAN IN THE AGE OF OBAMA (Pepe Escobar, Asia Times and Real News Network)
• THE STRUGGLE FOR MINDS AND WILLS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA (Matt Armstrong, Mountainrunner.us)
• THREATS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA by Michael Tanji of Threatwatch.org
• GLOBAL OPINION AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN THE AGE OF OBAMA by Dr. Nancy Snow of Syracuse University

CHRISTIAN CHALLENGES IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, PRIVACY POLICY IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF OBAMA, and so on … limited only by your ingenuity!

This is an open invitation for proposals. The specs for the thematic books are:

• 8000-40,000 words (32 - 120 pages)
• Some repurposed material ok
• Edited collections ok
• Any political viewpoint ok
• Illustrations OK, either B&W or color
• Deadline is Jan. 1, 2008 for publication on  Jan. 20, but the window will be open for later submissions with pub dates up to June 2009.
• All authors will participate concurrently in Jan. 20 “wall of bloggers” rollout.
• Nimble Books standard contract.

“Slides” is preferred. Idiomatically “Powerpoints” may be allowed, as in “Powerpoint Rangers.”

Re: Vugraph? Viewgraph?

Re: Vugraph? Viewgraph?

Subject: Re: Vugraph? Viewgraph?
From: Thom Randolph To: “Halter, Meg”
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 23:51:29 -0800

Meg:

If you mean the clear plastic sheets on which text and
images are printed, and which text and images are
projected onto a semi-reflective viewing screen by means
of light transmitted through the plastic sheet while the
sheet is positioned on a (usually) horizontal glass
or plastic panel….

The machine is properly referred to as an “overhead
projector”, and the sheets used to carry the text and
images are called “transparencies”. One is called a
“transparency”. The transparent plastic is available
in rolls for properly equipped projectors, or in sheets
with or without cardboard frames.

The term “viewgraph” is sometimes used to mean such a
transparency. I try to avoid using it, since when someone
goes out to purchase blank transparency film, they will
not find it under viewgraph. Dictionary.com does have
a definition for the word, from WordNet, but none of
the unabridged dictionaries I have include it.

I’ve also seen the sheets referred to as “viewgraphs”,
“Vue-graphs”, “Vu-graphs”, “overheads”, and “foils”.

I have always found the term viewgraph to be confusing,
especially when I’ve had to train non-English students.
Of course they’re supposed to “view” it, but there’s not
always a “graph” on it, strictly speaking. On the other
hand, many more people are likely understand what a
projector is, and can by extension understand what an
overhead projector is. Thus, the clear sheets used with
one are easily understood as “overhead projector transparency
sheets”, or just “transparencies” for short.

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Thom Randolph

and

Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format

XML? No, that wouldn’t work. As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for this scale. When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive proposition. Not to mention, writing code to work with the DOM tree can sometimes become unwieldy.

By sticking to a simple lists-and-records model that solves the majority of problems and resisting the desire to chase diminishing returns, we believe we have created something that is powerful without being bloated. And, yes, it is very fast – at least an order of magnitude faster than XML.

Technology going in a big circle? I remember when everything was going to XML forever — Office 2003, for example. Now it’s back to the future with a simpler, more stripped down technology …

1. What is a “nimble book”? – briefly, it is 32-120 pp, 8.5 x 10, color interior, 7,000 to 40,000 words with >= 10 full-page images.
2. The Nimble Books Standard Contract,
3. Books in Print & Forthcoming Books.
4. The Nimble Books Marketing Playbook v 3.0.

The business model is nimble, too: no inventory, no advances, no returns, better royalties. It’s the wave of the future because it fixes a lot of things that are broken with traditional publishing. HarperCollins recently started testing something similar.

Proposals for “Nimble” format books should be submitted via the form on that page.

Once you are writing a book for us, don’t forget to consult the Nimble Books Style Manual.

Questions?

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.

Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time.

So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all.

The name of Google Knol is a tip off that there is something basically broken in the concept — there is a damned good reason why there are no “knols” in the real world. Knowledge doesn’t come in units.

As a publisher, I wonder if there has been any thought given to how Google Knol and Google Book Search should play together. It doesn’t look like it at first glance. The sample author Knol page for Rachel Manber doesn’t even have a link to Rachel Manber on Google Book Search orGoogle Scholar. Why the heck not?

Hey Google, instead of having your engineers duplicate Wikipedia with daffy “knols”, why not involve some publishers? We know a little bit about promoting authors too… and we have this great way of binding “knols” together in paper and charging twenty or thirty bucks a package. It’s called a “book.”