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Sean's Writing Blog
And that's a wrap! (Microsoft Office for the Older and Wiser is finished)
26 August 2010
Phew! It's been a busy few months, but I'm pleased to say that I've finished work on my new Microsoft Office book, a sister title to my social networking book published by Wiley. I've just finished checking the last of the page proofs today and it's looking fantastic.The book covers both Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Office 2007, and there aren't that many differences between them. It takes a project-led approach, so that readers are taught what they need to know in the context of something useful. The book goes from the early steps of introducing the ribbon interface (particularly useful for those who haven't upgraded since Office 2003), and covers advanced layout in Microsoft Word, creating spreadsheets with formulae in Excel, creating a photo album slide show in PowerPoint, and making a recipe scrapbook in OneNote. There's also a bonus chapter on using Windows Live Mail together with Hotmail to send email messages including your Office files.
Each chapter concludes with ideas for other projects that can be created using the skills taught in that chapter. I hope this will help readers to see how they can use the skills in the nine detailed projects to do almost anything they will want to using Microsoft Office on their PC.
I've had a lot of fun writing this book. Some bits were challenging to explain (I took a few drafts to explain why styles matter in Word), but generally it flowed easily. I've tried to make the screenshots fun and colourful as well, and I'll be uploading my example files from the book to this website so that readers can experiment with them and use them as the starting point for their own projects.
There were a few sections that were cut for reasons of space as well, which I'll upload to this site if they make sense lifted out of context.
For more information, visit the homepage for the book Microsoft Office for the Older and Wiser. The book will be published mid-October (just in time for Christmas!) and is available for pre-order at Amazon now. Amazon guarantees that you will pay the lowest price it offers between when you order and the publication date, so you might be able to save a few pounds by ordering now (even if you're buying it as a gift for someone else). You won't be charged until the book is posted to you.
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Do we need warning labels for journalism?
14 August 2010
Tom Scott has come up with a brilliant idea: labels that can be stuck on to newspaper articles to warn readers that the contents might be bad for them. We have warning labels on just about everything else, so why not on newspapers, he reasons?
He's created a sheet of stickers you can print out that covers the most common problems with news media today, including PR surveys masquerading as news, unverified tip-offs reported as facts, unverified plagiarism from other publications, and the publication of almost unedited press releases. My favourite one is 'Warning: Journalist does not understand the subject they're writing about'.
I've written about bad journalism in the past, including the Daily Mail and the Sun's publication of unverified claims of a ghost sighting, and the Daily Telegraph's poor research on a medical story. It would be wonderful to see people sticking warnings on stories such as these.
Tom Scott says that he's been putting the labels onto free newspapers on the underground, but it would be an interesting exercise to take a paid-for daily newspaper, and see how many articles do not deserve any of the labels. For a lot of the dailies, I'm guessing few stories will escape unscathed. That's one reason why newspapers will struggle to charge for online content: they're not doing their job well enough for people to be willing to pay.
All of the labels concern the reporting and not the material selection, so I did suggest that one missing label might be: "This is trivia. It doesn't matter. Read a book." Tom Scott replied that "one person's trivia is another person's vital information", which is true enough and puts my suggestion outside the scope of his project. Even so, I think poor story selection is also an important constraint on newspaper quality today. If there were fewer Paris Hilton stories, there would be more space for real news, and more need to generate real news too.
You can download the labels at Tom's website.
Labels: journalism
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Ebooks are outselling hardbacks at Amazon
05 August 2010
Amazon's latest financial results show that it is selling more ebooks for its Kindle reader than it is hardbacks. Specifically, Amazon says it sold 43% more Kindle books than hardbacks over the last quarter, and 80% more in the last month. Ebooks sales in the first half of 2010 were triple those in the same period last year.
The ebook and hardback figures aren't necessarily directly comparable. Firstly, hardbacks tend to be much more expensive than ebooks. They're premium products marketed to those who are willing to pay a bit more for a luxury copy of a book by a favourite author. The stat released by Amazon refers to quantity sold and doesn't make reference to total ebook and hardback revenue, but ebooks tend to be cheaper. Secondly, hardbacks are limited run products while ebooks will stay in the catalogue permanently. The catalogue from which Amazon can sell ebooks is likely to be much wider than the catalogue of currently available hardbacks.
That said, the figures do show how the industry is changing. They prove there is an appetite for ebooks, and that Amazon has had great success in exploiting it with its Kindle device. It will be interesting to see whether this momentum can be sustained, or whether it is driven by the novelty value and people re-buying much loved titles in a new format.
For authors, it represents a great opportunity. Amazon has a programme that enables authors to self publish their work for Kindle. As I said in my article about how to self-publish with Lulu, distribution is not the same as promotion, so you'll still need to do some legwork creating demand. But these latest stats suggest the market might be large enough to justify your time targeting it.
Update: When I blogged about ebook buying behaviour around the Kindle launch in 2007, I said that I suspected ebook sales would be existing customers buying in a new format. I wonder whether the hardback sales are down because the Kindle sales are up? Amazon doesn't report any trend details for hardback sales.
Labels: Amazon, ebooks, Kindle
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Can you tweet your way to a bestseller?
30 June 2010
Justin Halpern has shown that it is possible to tweet your way to a bestseller. He created the Twitter feed www.twitter.com/shitmydadsays to share the wit and wisdom of his 74-year old father.
Twitter seems to be the ideal medium for expressing his Dad's knack of getting right to the heart of a subject. His latest advice is: "Don’t focus on the one guy who hates you. You don’t go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit."
Since the feed was established last August, Halpern has attracted 1,441,919 followers who subscribe to his tweets. That's a pretty impressive audience, and it's helped to make Halpern's book inspired by the Twitter feed into a bestseller. There is now talk of William Shatner starring in a TV show inspired by the Twitter feed.
There are two key lessons from this experience for writers everywhere. The first is that if you build a large audience for your work, it's a lot easier to get a book deal. This same advice is what has been driving bands to build up their live and online following for years: if you can show there is an audience for your work, others will be willing to invest in it.
The second lesson is that Twitter can be a valuable tool for refining characters. Halpern's feed is based on a real person, but there's no reason why you couldn't create a Twitter feed for fictional characters in your book and use the brevity of the medium to refine the characters' ideas and sayings so that they really shine. If people take an interest in what your characters have to say, they will be more willing to read about them in books. Of course, this does mean you need to have something compelling for your characters to say outside the context of dialogue, which is a whole new creative challenge.
If you want to get started with Twitter, don't forget to follow me! There's a chapter on how to use Twitter in my book 'Social Networking for the Older and Wiser'.
Labels: social networking, writing
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How to make ebook apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch
23 June 2010
I've just published an article about how you can make ebook apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It's based on interviews with about 20 industry insiders, including bestselling app creators, authors and publishers. A much shorter version of the feature appeared in the June 2010 issue of Writers' Forum magazine, but I've extended it online with lots of content there wasn't room for in the magazine.
It was an interesting time to be writing the article, because I think it captured a moment in time when it was easy for authors to build apps. It's already become much more difficult, even in the few months since I wrote the story. Firstly, the companies that enabled people to make apps based on RSS feeds have massively increased prices. The entry price used to be $25 and now it's many hundreds of dollars. That probably reflects the demand they've seen from big brands, and might not be a price that the market can sustain in the longer term, at least not without some consolidation in the companies offering those services. For now, with prices that high, you might as well commission a bespoke design (which the article also covers). Secondly, Apple has responded to the number of apps being created by setting much higher standards for approval.
For this project, I did try to create an iPhone app using RSS feeds, but it was unfortunately rejected by Apple for reasons unknown. It might have been a victim of a crackdown on the service I was using, or they might have visited on a day when I hadn't updated the blog for a week or two. With Apple, who knows? The process of making and submitting the app was easy from a technical point of view, but every support query took a week to get a response, and the admin was hard to navigate.
The new iPhone OS and the iPad support the iBook store, so this might create new opportunities for authors to get their content into Apple's handhelds, if they're happy to publish static ebooks. It will be interesting to see what kinds of content Apple decides to approve and reject, and how this changes over time. I suspect that once the catalogue of books is looking reasonably healthy, we'll see a lot of self-published content get deleted and new rules come into play.
To read some success stories from authors who have created apps and find out how you can create your own, see my article. (If you make audiobooks, check out my tutorial on how to get your music into iTunes and Amazon MP3 too. The same concepts apply for audiobooks).
Labels: apps, ebooks, iPad, iPhone, iPod, publishing, writing
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A question about copyright permissions
10 June 2010
Michael MacMahon, author of a guide to personal debt called 'Back To The Black: how to become debt-free and stay that way', emailed me with a question about copyright.
He says: "The last job [in writing my book] is inserting external resources, especially case studies. Most of the latter I have clipped from newspapers (or the online world) over the last couple of years. I have about 25 of them and the majority are short(maybe 150-200 words on average). For these short ones I really don't want to get into writing to loads of different newspapers / websites and waiting for permissions. (plus in some cases I don't even have a record of who published the story originally)."
He asks: "In these circs do you think I might be vulnerable to legal challenge if I insert these shorter case studies in full and without permission?"
Absolutely. That's a clear copyright infringement. Even if you can get away with it, authors should ask whether they really want to be getting away with copyright infringement at all, given their income depends on copyright.
Permissions are a massive hassle, but they're unavoidable. Getting someone to sign a permissions form is a small price to pay for all the work they've done on your behalf (finding interviewees, interviewing them, writing up the case studies, etc).
Book contracts will often make the author responsible for ensuring all the content in the book is copyright-cleared, although I was fortunate to have fantastic support from my publisher for my social networking book. The terms of the contract usually make the author financially liable for any infringement suit that follows, so it's important to get this right.
A few things to look out for:
- Make sure you're getting permission from the copyright holder. That's not necessarily the publication, and is almost never the interviewee.
- Take care with layered permissions. For example, if you want to quote from a story in The Times which includes research from Gartner, there might be two copyright interests in that text. If you want to use a photo of a Coke can, you might need permission from the fizzy drinks manufacturer for its branding, and from the photographer for the shot.
- It often takes companies a long time to respond to permissions requests, so don't leave them to the end. Get started on them as soon as you know what you'll need.
- Be organised. If you've got a lot of permissions in your project, then use Excel or something similar to track the status of each one. Make sure you find out what credit the copyright owner requires.
- Even short phrases can be protected by copyright if they are distinctive. Take particular care with song lyrics and poetry.
In this case, the best approach is probably to use fictional case studies, which Michael suggested might be a solution in his email.
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Short story competition provides an opportunity for new writers
20 May 2010
Waterstones is running a short story competition in partnership with publishers Pan Macmillan and writing training organisation The Arvon Foundation.
What's caught my eye about this particular competition is the prize: the winner gets to "do lunch" with Will Atkins, editorial director at Pan Macmillan, and author James McCreet. The idea is that they will offer advice on how you can advance your writing career, but if you've got a killer story to pitch, I'd definitely take a copy of the manuscript with you. The winner also gets a creative writing course and their story published in the Waterstones magazine and on the Waterstones website for a couple of weeks. Three runners-up will get concise feedback on their submission, their story published online and £50 of books for their trouble.
Pan Macmillan has differentiated itself by trying to remain open to new and unagented writing talent. While most major publishers will only look at submissions from agents, Pan Macmillan has a New Writing scheme and promises to look at everything sent in. Michael Barnard's book Transparent Imprint tells the story of how the New Writing imprint came about. The transparency refers both to how approachable the scheme is and to the lack of secrecy surrounding the contract terms, which are published online.
As usual with writing competitions, you need to watch the terms and conditions. The Waterstones promotion is open to anyone who hasn't had fiction conventionally published in book format before. Self-publishers and magazine contributors remain eligible. The story must be original not have been submitted previously elsewhere.
The catch, as usual, is the copyright clause. In return for the opportunity to enter the competition, you give Waterstones the right to do pretty much whatever it wants with your story, even if you don't win. You're giving them a licence, rather than transferring the copyright, so you can still use the story how you like too. The worst that's likely to happen is that Waterstones might publish a fat book of the best stories and not pay any of the writers, or they might make a few quid selling your story on when you become famous. But perhaps that's fair enough if they're giving you a shot at your first steps on that ladder. If you have a story that has strategic significance for other projects, though, I'd consider submitting something else instead.
Find out more about the Perfectly Formed Short Story Competition.
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Find and understand new readers with Facebook's Like button social plug-in and Insights analytics
29 April 2010
One way writers can get an audience is by publishing online, but the challenge for many writers is that people rarely go searching for the kinds of things they write. How often have you sat down and typed keywords into Google and trawled through pages of results to try to find a new novelist to read? Never.
People discover a lot of the content they view online virally through sites like Facebook and Twitter now. Facebook has launched new features which enable any website to put a 'Like' button there. That means that when people do discover your website, they can click the Like button and it will be added to their Facebook profile, where their friends can see it. Facebook says that the story is also shared with their friends, but I haven't been able to confirm that works. If it does, it is a powerful way to ignite word of mouth.
You can get started by just pasting a short snippet of code into your blog template. There is documentation for all the Facebook site plug-ins here. There is a Facebook Like button generator here that you can use to create customised code for your site.
The default version leaves a large gap underneath the text (presumably for photos of people who liked it), so here's a simple customised version I've created which doesn't:
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://www.EXAMPLE.COM" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="false" style="border:1px solid black; padding:4px;width:500px; height:24px;background:#ffffff; overflow:hidden;"></iframe>
You can copy and paste this into your own website. You need to change the website address from EXAMPLE.COM to your own website. To get rid of the border replace '1px solid black' with 'none' (without quotes). You can try changing the other parameters, but if you want to do that, I suggest you just use Facebook's Like button generator unless you understand HTML.
This is what it looks like:
Feel free to try that out and tell your friends how much you like my website ;-).
The data can be a powerful tool for writers. You can incorporate an activity feed for your site into it, so you can direct readers to the stories that the Facebook community is buzzing about now. You can also provide Facebook recommendations, which will direct readers towards those pages their friends liked most and then direct them towards the content most popular with all Facebook members. Both of these features are as easy to incorporate as the Like button.
You can use Facebook Insights to get 'detailed analytics about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your application'. It includes a graph showing how often the site has been shared, and a breakdown of who is sharing it by gender, age group and country. That kind of information is hard to obtain using conventional analytics, so there is potential to learn a lot more about your online audience by integrating your website with Facebook. The registration is simple and the stats are easy to understand. (I've written an in-depth primer on web analytics if you're interested in learning more about that).
To familiarise myself with the tools, I've added them to Wild Mood Swings for now and will look at how they might work well on this site once I've seen how people use (or don't use) the plug-in on Wild Mood Swings.
If you're interested in learning more about Facebook from the member's point of view, see my book 'Social Networking for the Older and Wiser', which dedicates a chapter to the site.
Labels: blogs, Facebook, webdesign, writing
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London Book Fair: Guinness Book of Records launches iPad app
22 April 2010
The user experience is great. You drag two fingers across the screen to move to different sections. The animation is much more sophisticated than a simple page turn: the different elements of the design scroll into view at different speeds with objects closer to the horizon moving more slowly (parallax scrolling, to use the technical term). This creates a nice feeling of depth in the user interface. The menu options are well labelled, so there's no confusion about where to tap. The screen feels roughly A4 sized and the resolution is good, so the illustration can include striking photographs.
The device itself feels lightweight and comfortable, although I'm not sure how I would hold it if I really wanted to have a book-like experience with it. A laptop is hinged so the screen can be propped up at the right angle, and a paperback book feels easier to hold in one hand at the right angle. I only had a few minutes to play with it, though. And it's worth saying that the print book of the Guinness Book of Records is too big to hold comfortably for too long anyway. It's not the kind of book you'd take on the tube.
For the launch, the Guinness stand was attended by record holders including the world's tallest married couple and new record breaker Ben Lee who played Flight of the Bumblebee on the violin, showing the skill that helped him shave a second off the world record earlier this month. For many people, though, the real star of the show was the iPad. I wonder whether Guinness will be able to repeat its print sales record in this new digital format?
Labels: ebooks, iPad, publishing
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London Book Fair: Writing for teenagers
Barry Cunningham, founder of Chickenhouse publishers which is now part of Scholastic, had some good advice for writers: he said it was important that teenage fiction was told from the teenage experience, and wasn't viewed from an adult experience. He cautioned against writing adult books in disguise ("in animal suits"). There's a difference between books for teenagers and books that have teenagers in them. "It's an important definition," he said. "If we get it wrong, we might as well say all books are for everybody."
The lines are becoming increasingly blurred at a time when Cunningham says booksellers have moved teenage books from the children's section into the adult section, and we've seen so many crossover books which are read by both teenagers and adults (starting with Harry Potter, but also including the Golden Compass among others).
Sophia Bennett, author of the Chickenhouse novel Threads, said that she wrote her book for herself as an 11 year old, but had her own daughters (aged 11 and 13) in mind too. She believes her title is more for 14 year olds, but gets most fan mail from 10-12 year olds who are reading ahead of their age group. She said she has been inspired as much by movies and the internet as literature, and writes short, snappy chapters for "people with attention spans as short as mine".
There was some discussion about the degree to which the authors self-censor their work. Rachel Ward, author of Numbers which was shortlisted for the Waterstones prize in 2009, said that she didn't censor and her book includes bad language, sex, and drugs. The first draft had over 100 F--- words, but during the editing process she took advice on what would be acceptable to teachers, parents and librarians. The swearing was taken down to about 20 occurences, but she says reviewers still say it's in every paragraph. "In real life, the characters would use bad language," she said. Although she described the book as a "neutered version", she also said she was "very comfortable with anything that will get [her] published". For the sequel, she was more self-conscious about who would read the book, and after receiving emails from readers realised that many of them were 12 and not 14. The bad language is still there, but not as strong.
Bennett said that she created a problem for herself in the way her series was structured. In each book, the characters age by two years but the readers are not growing up so quickly. She tried using words like "Drat!" but it seemed too artificial. She found that it took two paragraphs to replace expressions like that without using swearwords, but she said that afterwards she couldn't tell where the edit was, and it felt like she was cheating when she was relying on bursts of dialogue. She also said that booksellers she's spoken to were particularly concerned about sex in teenage books because they want to be able to recommend them to younger girls.
One key idea to emerge in the session was the importance of following your own muse. Bennett warned that if you think about it too much and try to study the market, you'll be two years behind everyone else because that's where the market is today. "Write from the heart," she said.
Labels: publishing, writing
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The hidden challenge of ebooks: customer service
15 April 2010
Ebooks represent an opportunity for publishers to sell direct to customers, and to bypass the traditional sales channels. There are many reasons they might want to do this: it enables them to build a direct relationship with readers so they can better understand their needs, and it enables the publisher to make a bigger margin on the sale. It creates a massive challenge, though, which is often underestimated: customer service.
I've mentioned the Retro Gamer app a few times on this blog recently. It's an iPhone/iPod app that enables you to read issues of the magazine, which covers computer games from the 80s (or 'retro games'). I used to write games for the Amstrad CPC, so I like to dip into this magazine and the app version is cheaper and more portable than the print mag. The app features a catalogue of all the available issues, and you can use an in-app payment to buy one you want, which then downloads.
When I bought the latest issue, it failed to download correctly. Towards the back of the mag, there are about 10-15 pages that say 'downloading' on them, but which never download. There's no option to reset the download in the app, so the only solution is to file a support enquiry.
This is where the process breaks down: the print magazine has outsourced the whole operation to PixelMags, the company that makes the app. PixelMags says it responds to enquiries by the end of the next business day. But it doesn't: I've sent two enquiries (last Friday and Monday) and had no response to either of them.
As publishers move from print to digital, they need to reorientate their business around customers. Print books rarely have support issues. It's possible a book might be misprinted or wrongly bound, but I can't remember ever returning a book. In that event, the retailer, which has extensive customer service experience, would manage the replacement. In the print world, publishers can basically be creative manufacturers, shipping out crates of books and not worrying too much about end customer service. (They do have retailers as customers, but their needs are very different to readers').
Standardised formats and ebook channels (such as Apple's iBook store and the Kindle store) will help publishers revert to retail-led customer service. But when publishers want to be more innovative and sell iPhone apps or PDFs from their website, they have to make sure they can cope when things go wrong. The content delivery can be automated, but the customer satisfaction cannot. The promise of ebooks is immediate delivery, so customers expect prompt and helpful service.
Because this is an emerging technology, the publisher has more at stake than the reader does. In my case, I'm writing off a £3 purchase of an app, but the publisher is losing annual sales from me of about £30, because I'm unlikely to purchase again.
(Download a free chapter from The Customer Service Pocketbook).
UPDATE: I filed a support request with Apple, and Apple has promptly issued a refund and said it will investigate the issue. So in this case, the retailer was still able to offer an excellent service as support provider of last resort, even though it couldn't fix the downloading issue. As a result, I can continue to have faith in buying apps, although I probably won't buy any more issues from the magazine app.
Labels: apps, customer service, ebooks, iPhone, iPod, publishing
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Countdown to the London Book Fair
11 April 2010
The London Book Fair takes place 19-21 April, with a programme of paid seminars starting next weekend on subjects including digital transformation, how to get published and writing for screen. Throughout the week, there is a comprehensive programme of events, including frequent sessions on assessing your manuscript, self publishing and book promotion. On Monday there is a session on the Google Books Settlement, which could be of particular interest to authors. These events are included in the entry price.
The authors of the day will be Hilary Mantel (Monday), Andre Brink (Tuesday) and Eoin Colfer (Wednesday). They will take part in Q&A sessions, seminars and book signings.
This year there will be an area dedicated to comic books and graphic novels for the first time. The fair's website says they have "finally emerged as a serious part of the publishing industry", but we're still a long way behind France where graphic novels are a part of the mainstream culture. They do present an interesting opportunity to expand the market, particularly to younger people, at a time when book retailers have been struggling.
The Digital Zone and theatre will be back again this year. Last year, there were a lot of people selling technology to package ebooks. It will be interesting to see how much that has changed in the intervening year, in particular whether there are any companies developing apps for the iPhone or iPad. The sponsor for this zone is the Sony Reader, and there are no obvious Apple-related companies in the exhibitor guide. There is a comprehensive programme of talks dedicated to ebook publishing, covering technical, business and legal issues.
The market focus this year is on South Africa, and there is an impressive number of exhibitors (about fifty) in this area. If you're looking to break into the South African market, there is bound to be helpful advice there.
Outside the themed areas, the exhibition can be a bit hard to navigate. To help find your way around the exhibition floor, there is an interactive guide creator on the London Book Fair website. You tick the boxes for the product classes you're interested in, and it will generate a map and exhibitor listing showing only the companies you'll be interested in. If you have fairly narrow interests, this can be a valuable planning tool.
Tickets are cheaper if you register in advance, and you'll be able to get into the show more quickly on the day too. Members of the Society of Authors have a special discount. Details are in the latest issue of The Author.
Labels: books, ebooks, publishing, writing
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The cost of creating ebooks
09 April 2010
There's an interesting discussion taking place on the forum for Retro Gamer magazine at the moment. As I said in my recent post about how ebooks are changing writing, Retro Gamer has created an iPhone/iPod app for buying and reading the magazine.
Retro Gamer has many fans who are committed, or perhaps should be (as the old joke goes). They collect every issue of the mag, and now there's an iPhone app, those with iPhones will collect that too. What's interesting, though, is that several people are saying that subscribers to the print mag should get the digital version for free or for a reduction.
Editor Darran Jones said: "Why should you be given it for free? After all you don't see people saying. I've already got Die Hard on DVD, why should I have to buy the Blu-Ray version? I'm sure that some sort of deal will eventually come along that will give subscribers a better discount over those who are buying it fresh, but it doesn't normally make good business sense to give away something for nothing. After all, you're not being forced to buy it, it's just there as an option."
Reader Opa-Opa (not his/her real name) said: "The thing with your DVD/Bluray argument is that you would be paying for the media and packaging, which will cost the production company a certain amount of money to get produced and shipped etc but with the digital version of any magazine (not just RG, I'm not having a pop at you guys) the magazine is already made, it's already put together and it costs next to nothing to make all the time the paper version is being made. Do you get paid twice because you are now making two different magazines, one paper and one digital.. Because we have to pay twice if we want a digital copy..?"
There seems to be a perception that there are no costs in creating ebooks, which is not true. Even when the print version has been created, it takes time to generate the digital version, upload it to the app system and to test it. There are often significant setup costs too. I contacted PixelMags (who created the Retro Gamer app) to ask about their pricing a month ago for an article I was writing but I haven't heard back. Typical prices for creating a corporate app might be £20,000, although it's possible to do it much more cheaply and to do it on a revenue share basis. If it did cost £20,000, then it would take over 9,500 sales at £3 per copy to break even on that cost. (Apple takes 30%, and Imagine Publishing can probably amortise some of this cost across all its titles).
What about the other costs? Well, let's estimate that it takes about a day of somebody's time to look after each issue (including generating, uploading, and customer service) and that the cost of that (including office rental, furniture, employer taxes etc) is about £500. In that case, Retro Gamer needs to sell over 235 copies to break even on the cost of any one issue.
It's easy to question the figures. We could say that the cost of the staff time is half that, or equally argue that it takes twice as long. But it does demonstrate that however you slice it, digital content isn't free.
I have no idea how many copies they are selling. But Retro Gamer is a highly specialist magazine which had a print circulation of 5,000-7,000 last time I heard a rumour about it a couple of years ago. There are lots of people with iPhones and iPods, but how many of them are in the target market? It's clear that Retro Gamer has taken something of a gamble here, and won't make any profit until a significant proportion of its potential buyers have bought an issue. Only then does it start to make the profit which rewards its risk.
(It is possible it's doing it all on a revenue share basis and that PixelMags is absorbing the setup costs. But in that event, the costs are still in the system, and it's still not viable to give the content away for free).
Labels: ebooks, publishing
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Cameras have clocks too
02 April 2010
If you're out and about taking photos this long weekend, don't forget to change the time on your camera. Last weekend, the clocks went forward, and some devices will have recognised this automatically. The internal clock on your camera probably hasn't updated itself, though.
It's worth keeping an eye on the camera time when you travel abroad too: I have lots of photos taken in America which have a UK timestamp on them. When the PC downloads these pictures, it divides them into folders by day. But midnight in the UK falls in the early evening in the US, so a single photo shoot in one location can end up split across different folders on my PC. That makes it harder to find pictures later on.
I recommend that writers learn to take good photographs. It helps to sell stories if you have some images to go with them, and it is in itself a rewarding creative pursuit. It's also a useful research tool. If you want your pics to be published, though, don't let the camera stamp the time and date in the picture itself. It's in the file metadata, so you don't need it to be on the visible part of the image. You can get some fantastic professional-quality results with affordable digital cameras today, but a picture with a timestamp in the corner will always look like a cheap holiday snap.
* With thanks to my friend Mark for suggesting the idea for this blog post
Labels: photography, writing
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Using templates to make book writing easier
31 March 2010
I've just started work on a new book (more news on that later), and one technique I've used which saves a lot of time is to create a basic template that I can use for each chapter.
In this book, as in many practical non-fiction books, there are highly formatted sections (introduction, summary etc) that are the same in each chapter. Each of these sections needs to be formatted using the right styles in the publisher's Word template.
So I've created an empty chapter. It has placeholder copy for the chapter title and all the headings and styles that occur in the same place in every chapter. It doesn't cover the body of the chapter and all its subheadings - it just covers the regular features that are always there in the same place.
This has two advantages: firstly, it saves time. I don't have to worry about formatting the chapter title ten times because I've already done it. Although that in itself doesn't take long, the template I've created uses nine different styles and has fifteeen different content elements that require formatting, so the time does add up. All these bits are guaranteed to be in every chapter, so it's work I have to do anyway. I've just chosen to do it once, rather than doing it 10 times.
The second advantage is that it means I can get up and running with a new chapter straight away. I don't have to mess around with styles because that's already done - I can just start writing. Given that one of the challenges is to create momentum on a new chapter, having these templates makes the whole project run much more smoothly.
Labels: books, Microsoft Office, writing
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