Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

Tag archive: new technology

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Better Not Trash My Sony E-reader Yet

While I’ve metaphorically trashed the Sony E-reader a couple of times when comparing it to the Kindle, a whole new world just opened up for the little device: Google has launched their new Google ebookstore, and they’re selling books in the e-pub format for Sony and Nook.

But the best news is that they’re making literally millions of public domain books available for free.  Want to catch up on your Sherlock Holmes–maybe Dickens for Christmas?  It’s going to all be there.

Better yet, Google executives have stated that while they don’t want to start a price war for the copyrighted works they sell, they do want them to be among the most competitive.

I predict a fall in the price of e-books with Amazon leading the way.

This will be fun!

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Conflicted About The New Publishers Taking Their Cut

Amazon and Sony have crossed the line from e-book stores to publishers, although they’re using a very old method to recruit want-to-be-authors:  self-publishers, also known as vanity presses.

There are still bent self-publishers out there, promising fame and fortune if you pay them to publish your novel.  But there are also new smart and professional self-publishers.  Amazon fronts CreateSpace.  The Reader Store has made two deals, one with  Author Solutions and the other with Smashwords.

Traditional publishers have been accused of being gatekeepers, of publishing only authors they know and not truly considering new talent, but the new e-book stores like Amazon and Sony are minding a different gate.  They’ll publish anyone and let the market sort them out, but they want their cut.

To e-publish with Amazon, you’ll get a 70% royalty.  This may be great compared to the 15% you’d be happy to get from a traditional publisher, but Amazon doesn’t have to hire editors, printing presses, trucks or pay for promotion.  What they’re charging 30% royalty for is simply the right to be on Amazon.

Sony’s deal is pretty much the same for their Reader store.  If you want to e-publish with them they’ll send you to Smashwords, who will put your novel into a number of formats, including the e-pub that you need for the Sony Reader store.

Now I could use Calibre open source software to put my novel into e-pub format and offer it for sale through my website for fans who own Sony e-readers, but the traffic on my website isn’t anything compared to the Reader Store.

So that’s why I would eat the 30%.  It’s not unlike the traditional publishers paying for prominent placement in brick and mortar stores.  Not that a self-published author will get front page placement on Amazon, but they’ll have the feel of legitimacy when they send friends to search Amazon or the Reader store for their novels.

And Amazon and Sony will be happy to take their cut of your friends’ money.

I guess that’s okay.  They’re not promising to make you famous.  Yet I’ve got that oligopoly feeling I get when I look at traditional publishers–that claustrophobic feeling that makes me want to shout unfair!  Who made you the gatekeepers?

Of course they’d probably reply that the internet is a big place and I can go anywhere I want, and try to sell my novel anyway I want.  Which is true.  It would just be much easier with Amazon and Sony.

So I’m conflicted.

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Fogel Defends Hard and Soft Cover Books

Guest Post by Melanie Fogel

Not everyone who reads books keeps them. Those of us who do line our walls with books do so because we love books. We like looking at them; we like holding them. Some of us even enjoy dusting them.

I’ll assume somewhere in the world there are people who like to “show off how smart they are by what’s on their bookshelf,” but that’s not me, nor the people I know. And on behalf of all book lovers, I take exception to your dismissing us like that.

Book lovers are a subclass of readers. I suppose there are book lovers who don’t read, but I’ve yet to meet one. They may not love books for the same reasons I and the people I know do.

There’s something wonderful about sitting in a room surrounded by books. It’s like sitting in a room surrounded by friends and family: no matter where you cast your eye, you see someone with whom you have an emotional bond. And unlike family, you can chuck the ones who made you angry or sad. So there’s only good memories in a room full of books.

Books aren’t just containers for ideas, they’re artifacts to appreciate in their own right: their colours, their textures, their smells. As packages, they beat heart-shaped chocolate boxes hands down. More than that, reading—at least in the age of paper books—is a tactile experience, and just touching a book can recall memories. Opening one is even better.

Unlike electronic books, paper books can hold more than ideas. Signatures, for example. Or bookplates, which are somehow more intriguing when you’ve acquired the book second hand, and you wonder why anyone who took the trouble to paste in a bookplate would later give the book up. Then there’s the miscellany of what else you use for a bookmark: postcards, photographs, shopping receipts, dollar bills. Or bookmarks themselves—be they embossed leather gifts from friends, souvenirs of a book launch, a giveaway from a bookstore no longer in business. All memories at least as rich as photographs, that spring at you unexpectedly when you open a book.

A room lined with books is a room filled with potential that you can “see.”

I have no doubt that today there are children who will become adult readers who’ve never read a paper book. They won’t know what they’re missing, which is probably a good thing for them. But I have to wonder what they’ll fill their rooms with, and if it’ll be anything near as satisfying as a room full of books.

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Is My Sony E-Reader Doomed?

If I truly knew the answer to that I’d be a rich stock investor and not a writer with a day job, but this article makes me wonder if sometime in the next couple of years there might be a great opportunity to short Sony stock.

For those of you who have a life and don’t have time for the article: the salient prediction is that Amazon and the Kindle will move from 50% e-book market share to 90% market share.

This is because Amazon wisely treated Kindle as a platform rather than a device.  You can download Kindle for free to everything from your Blackberry to your PC and then buy your e-books from Amazon.

Remember all those predictions about i-pad being a Kindle killer?  Most people now use the Kindle app to read books on their i-pads, which means they’re buying e-books from Amazon instead of the i-bookstore.

I still use my Sony E-Reader, but I remember beta VCRs and I wonder if one day one of my kids will find a dusty Reader sitting on a shelf and say, “Hey Dad, what’s this thing?”

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What I Wrote for The Crime Writers of Canada

E-readers: A Fad or the Future?

Way back in 1994, a CBC television producer told a researcher I was dating that the internet was just a fad like CB radios.  If she wanted to build a web page for the show, she’d have to do it on her own time.  Oops.

The producer can be forgiven this assessment of the internet because he was confusing a device, a radio, with a new and highly versatile medium of expression.  C.B. radios had only one purpose, and no one could use them for advertising.  He was also probably thinking about that eight-track tape player gathering dust in his basement.

E-books are the new must-have gadget, and they are everywhere.  Last week the new color version of Barnes and Noble’s Nook reader launched.  They’ve sold over a million of the old (so last year) black and white version, and they expect to sell a million of the color Nook over the next year.  Combine that just with Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony e-reader and you’ve got a lot of consumers looking for content for their new toys.  Let’s not even get into the tablets like the i-pad.  Avid readers can also get apps for their smart phones that’ll allow them to purchase e-books, so every Blackberry, Apple i-phone or any phone with Google’s Android operating system is a potential e-reader.

But I’m sure some authors and publishers are still thinking about all those eight-track tape players or their Beta VCRs.

They should think again.  E-readers are evolving platforms for expression.  Cookbooks will be able to insert how-to videos, and advertisers can find nooks (pun intended) and crannies to sneak in their less than subtle messages.  People can find new ways to make money.

More importantly, like the internet, e-book readers are going to enable content providers and facilitators to appear from unexpected places.  Who’d ever heard of Google, E-bay, Wikipedia, Facebook or even Craigslist in 1994?

E-readers are going to allow small publishers to distribute electronic downloads on an equal footing with big publishers.  No trucks required.  No expensive warehouses.  There will be price wars, content wars and jostling for attention.

I don’t predict the imminent death of the hardcover or paperback because some people still like to show how smart they are by what’s on their bookshelf.  But like the newspapers, big publishers are going to have to get used to slumping sales of paper books–sales that never recover to the glory days of the twentieth century and fade with the boomers.

Yet e-readers may be good for writers.  There’s opportunity for creativity, a new and (for now) more egalitarian platform from which to sell your words.  It’s exciting.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s the future.  You heard it here first.

By the way, I married the researcher.

Mike’s Note:

The Crime Writers of Canada asked me for an article on e-books for their newsletter.  The article I wrote above turned out to be very similar to one they’d published last month.  Who knew?  I’m not the first person to see this coming.

I slashed off a different article for the newsletter, but above is what those Crime Writers would have read if they hadn’t aleady read it somewhere else.

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You Don’t Need A Kindle To Buy E-books

Amazon’s Kindle e-readers may cost you some bucks, but the Kindle reader software is free to download onto your computer.  So you can start reading e-books without buying the Kindle, dipping your toe into the e-reading water at no cost.

I  had trouble finding the link for the free download, but it’s here.  I got there through Kindle, e-books, Kindle Support.  The great thing is you can get it for your Mac, PC, Blackberry, i-phone or any smart phone with Google’s Android operating system.

Besides the obvious advantage that you can immediately purchase and read my short stories Railroaded or Burning Moose, it also means you can buy any book you want to read  on your computer or mobile device.

But free stuff is why I prefer the Kindle over the Sony e-reader.  Amazon has put up a bunch of content for your reading pleasure that won’t cost you a dime.  Never got around to reading the original Sherlock Holmes short stories?  Now you can.

Worried about losing your book if your computer crashes?  No problem.  Once you buy it, the book goes onto your bookshelf in your Amazon account so that you can recover it for free.

So download that free Kindle software.  Save some trees.  Buy my short stories.  Make me rich!  Actually, at 99 cents per story, it’s more like contributing to a cup of coffee.  But thanks!

H/t to Kim for pointing out that I’d never explained how to buy my stuff.  I’m going to make a new menu item for this tip.

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Millions of Nooks Means More E-books

The game is changing so fast.

Barnes and Noble came out with their colour (that’s color for Americans) version of the Nook last week, and it’ll sell for $10 less than last year’s nook.  I’m betting graphic novel  and children’s book authors are going to be happy.

Now this isn’t a tablet like the ipad.  It’s a dedicated e-reader even though it has some extra bling like very fast web browsing.

What’s really amazing is that Barnes and Noble have already sold a million of the old version of the Nook and expect to sell a million of this version.

By New Year’s there are going to be literally millions of people with e-readers looking for content.  What an opportunity!

The downside is I haven’t found a way to sell through B&N yet, but I’m looking.  As traditional book retailers get more and more like Amazon, I’m willing to bet they open their distribution up too.

Must edit faster.  Must write faster.

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Record Sales Numbers

I’ve been carrying out an internet experiment over the last month.  I put two short stories up for sale on Amazon for Kindle downloads and waited to see how many random purchases might occur.  The results were pretty much what you’d expect: none.

Oh, the Amazon sales report says that I’ve sold two copies of each, but that’s just me testing out two different platforms to see how the formatting carries through.  Somehow that has netted me $1.40 US hard cash in royalties.  Yippee!  That only cost me $4.00 to acquire.

Since I’ve never sold anything before I guess I can call this a record for sales of my shorts, at least the electronic version.  I have no idea what Storyteller Magazine’s sales figures were like back when these stories were first published.

The lesson I take from this is that the internet is very crowded, and if you’re just standing back in a corner waiting to be discovered–well, you’d have a better chance of being noticed in a football stadium at the Super Bowl with two minutes left in a tie game and a field goal in the offing.

So now to part two of the plan: e-pub the rest of the Sioux Rock Falls short stories, add some new ones that have never been published and package it into an anthology.  Then I’ll put that up for sale and the true test begins: marketing.

Now I wouldn’t risk an anthology if we were talking about traditional publishing.  An author once warned me that the big book chains have programs that check the sales of your previous book before ordering your most recent.  So if you only sold five per store at the chain last time, they’ll only order five per store this time, and unless they get repeated requests they won’t reorder.  Bummer.  An author can’t break out unless, like Yann Martel, you win the Mann Booker prize for your second novel.

The problem with anthologies is they don’t sell well–see my previous post about short stories for my theory as to why–so by putting out an anthology you risk killing the sales of your NEXT book.

But e-publishing gets around that.  No sales record at the big chains to worry about.

So let’s see if I can set a new sales record!

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Am I a Closet Luddite?

I think of myself as a tech using guy, but with technology changing so fast we’re always tested.  I hope I will never catch myself using expressions like “new-fangled.”  I’m determined to march through middle age without saying, “Back in my day we didn’t need…”  Refer to latest gadget here.

So I was surprised by my gut reaction to this link sent to me by The Fogel. She describes it as a toy for reviewing my novel, and her point is that there are some words I use with monotonous frequency.

This toy is designed to search your text, find those overused words and put them up in fun graphic displays.  The more you use a word, the bigger its size.

But Hemingway, Fitzgerald,  and all the greats didn’t have this toy.  I can’t imagine Margaret Atwood needing it.

Then I remembered my creative writing teacher at University of Toronto.  He told us that he prefers to write with an IBM typewriter, the way Hemmingway did back in the thirties.  I had to repress a derisive snort.  Hemingway used a typewriter because it was the word processor of his day.  I’m sure he had contemporaries who preferred to write long hand, and I bet they had all kinds of excuses like: the pen flows with my thoughts; the typewriter is too jarring and loud.

Hemmingway was using the modern tech gadget of his day. Writing a play with a quill won’t make me William Shakespeare.

So I will put my novel through this toy, because I want to use all the tools at my disposal to make it effortless for the readers.

But I admit I’m worried about the word brown.