ebookporn

*sigh* Amazon, I really mean you no ill will but you are really working hard to be a dick. ~ eP

writingbox:

Today I received an e-mail from Amazon about one of my short stories (the shortest one I have ever written). The email was as follows:

Hello,

During a quality assurance review of your KDP catalog we have found that the following book(s) are extremely short and may create a poor reading experience and do not meet our content quality expectations:

<Name of Short>

In the best interest of Kindle customers, we remove titles from sale that may create a poor customer experience. Content that is less than 2,500 words is often disappointing to our customers and does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.

We ask that you fix the above book(s), as well as all of your catalog’s affected books, with additional content that is both unique and related to your book. Once you have ensured your book(s) would create a good customer experience, re-submit them for publishing within 5 business days. If your books have not been corrected by that time, they will be removed from sale in the Kindle Store. If the updates require more time, please unpublish your books.

This is causing some lively debate online. What are your thoughts?

Context First: Moving inexorably toward a “pre-book world”

This is a very good piece from Brian O’Leary at Magellan Media Partners on how we need to rethink digital content and “publishing in containers” that segregate and isolate the content from the web. With convergence to a single screen everything is funneled through the web, a platform that “includes everything and excludes nothing”. Since the beginning of publishing the book, magazine, film and television supply-chain relied on the ability to exclude but to fully take advantage of digital distribution and discovery on the web we instead need the content to be open and accessible -precisely the opposite of what DRM and ePub is designed to do. Precisely what publishers are striving to prevent. Here O’Leary suggests how publishers should shift how to think of their content:

We need to migrate from thinking about products to instead planning for and offering services and solutions. To get there, four principles apply:

• Our content must become open, accessible and interoperable.  Adherence to standards will not be an option;
• Because we compete on context, we’ll need to focus more clearly on using it to promote discovery;
• Because we’re competing with providers that already use low- and no-cost tools, trying to beat them on the cost of content is a losing proposition.  We need to develop opportunities that encourage broader use of our content; and
• We will distinguish ourselves if we can provide readers with tools that draw upon context to help them manage abundance.

A very dense and thoughtful piece that should be read in it’s entirety. 

~ eP

FULL ARTICLE

Madefire and deviantART have struck a new partnership, giving deviantART creators new tools to create digital “Motion Books” through Madefire.

You can see the Madefire app in action in the video embedded above–a new way to make traditional comic books more interactive. Follow this link to read Motion Books on deviantART. Here’s more about the deal:

The deal consists of a creative partnership where the entire deviantART creator community is given unlimited access to Madefire’s revolutionary, browser-based publishing platform to create and distribute content while individually controlling the price point. Using deviantART’s Premium Content Platform, the content will reach an enormous worldwide audience while taking advantage of the Platform’s built-in payment and royalty systems fuelled by deviantART’s virtual currency. The content will also then be available on mobile through the Madefire App.

Last year, we interviewed the producer and director deviantART Network, finding out more about the community of artists, writers and creators.

A nice overview of a “stripped-down-nekkid method of conducting ecommerce”.

Jim Carrey is preparing to join the ranks of self-published authors with what he described as a “metaphysical” children’s book about a wave.

The actor told HitFix that the book would be called How Roland Rolls. And although a major Hollywood name like Carrey would find it easy to land a mainstream publisher, he said: “I’m going to self-publish, because that’s just the world right now and I think it’s cool”.

Last fall, Book Riot successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign to publish a book. But it was grueling and not very financially rewarding. Here’s what you need to keep in mind if you decide to publish via Kickstarter.

Libraries, regional Barnes & Noble, and Independent bookstores could mimic this idea.0 Pop up local author boutiques or self published genre stores built around short POD runs designed to stock events, fundraisers and author lectures and appearances and intended to sell out at the event create a stronger community merchandise mix and build local social and cultural traffic and connect store and library to local author community.

makingstorieswork:

It’s disheartening to see previously reasonably respectable publishers diving enthusiastically into the predatory vanity-press business. A deal like this essentially charges the author through the nose for nominal affiliation with a known publisher—but none of the actual or implied value that affiliation would normally bring.

A couple of weeks ago, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail ran “Why book buying stats might stifle the next great author”. Written by John Barber, the article claims that:

“The true dinosaurs of the new age are authors. Once happily enclosed in the “stables” of publishers willing to nurture and develop their talent, even if they never wrote a major bestseller, droves of so-called “mid-list” authors now find themselves roaming among the ever-present throng of wannabes flogging unpublished work in an indifferent market.”

Barber goes on to blame Canada, or at least providers of Canadian data:

“Many mid-list authors have fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated, widely available sales data, according to agents and publishers. Publishers can now assess every author’s lifelong sales thanks to such services as Nielsen Bookscan in the United States and BookNet Canada.”

Barber observes that “some now blame [data] for hollowing out literary culture.”