Monthly Archives: September 2012

The impending release of the Apple iPad and the restructuring of the pricing system for e-books will change the game, and publishers, authors, and consumers will need to adjust in the new digital publishing world.

Impact of the iPad
When the iPad lands in the hands of consumers in the Spring of 2010, the publishing market will change overnight. By all accounts, the full-color iPad will be an upgrade over the black-and-white Amazon Kindle, its closest competitor, as well as the Sony eReader, and the Barnes and Noble Nook. Apple’s iPad, essentially a larger version of the iPod Touch, will retail for as low as $499, and its iBook application will place customers clicks away from a virtual bookstore. Additionally, Apple has already pushed for new e-book prices, a move welcomed by publishers who have complained about Amazon’s $9.99 e-book price for some time.

Publishers Come Aboard
There is no longer any question about the lasting appeal of digital publishing. Publishers who are not planning for dual programs in print and electronic publishing will be left behind by those that do. The new price deals with Apple, which will make e-books slightly more expensive to consumers and therefore slightly more profitable for publishers, should make the decision to jump into e-publishing a lot easier for publishers. And the benefits for publishers are very real. E-books eliminate expensive printing and warehousing costs, and supply problems (such as out of print books) simply do not exist.

The Changing Role of Authors
In the past, the path to success for authors was usually via a publishing house. However, authors that embrace digital publishing will largely be able to control their own path. Authors now have the option to turn to electronic self-publishing. And this isn’t a bad thing. Because the same cost-saving advantages of e-publishing exist for authors as they do for publishers, authors can write and self-publish electronically at low costs. Authors will be able to control their work and their profits to a degree that didn’t exist just a short time ago.

Where Does This Leave Consumers?
Ultimately, the big winner in the coming digital publishing world will be the consumer. True, the cost of an e-reader is fairly expensive at the moment, which creates a very real barrier between publishers and its customers. However, it is very likely that the prices of e-readers will begin to drop due to heavy competition. The $499 price for the iPad, which many thought would be considerably higher, is a good indication that prices should begin to drop in an effort to entice more buyers. Once customers have an e-reader, they’ll have immediate access to a full range of titles at low costs, even with the eventual price change from the current Kindle standard of $9.99.

What It All Means
In the end, the impact of digital publishing and how publishers respond to it will be guided by consumers. If people want to read e-books, they’ll cast their votes by spending their dollars. Publishers will be forced to respond to the demand if they want to stay in business.

Martin Alan enjoys writing on subjects such as literature, digital publishing, digital magazine, publishing software, sharing sites and self publishing. He also enjoys keeping up-to-date with the latest developments and innovations in technology and online marketing.

For more information on online publishing click here; http://www.yudu.com.

Author: Martin Alan
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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The world of “Big Publishing” is shrinking! For some, this is horrible news. I was recently talking to someone who had a book contract for her non-fiction book, and she was on cloud nine…rubbing shoulders with other authors and would-be authors at cocktail parties, etc. Then the economic slump hit and she got the bad news that the publisher was no longer going to publish her book.

What to do?

The book was essentially written, but it still needed editing, cover design, typesetting, printing and ultimately publishing and distribution. This seems like a great deal of work for anyone, but especially to a writer who has just “birthed” a book and now has to face all these questions.

Fortunately the loss of some of the big name publishing companies is paving the road for smaller presses, and a concept called Print on Demand (POD) Self-Publishing. There is still a little bit of a bias against self-publishing, but it is quickly diminishing.

People are finding that there are folks out there who want and need the information that they are providing. What was once called “vanity press” is now being viewed as “independent publishing” or “indie publishing”.

Caution: If you plan to just get a book published, you can do so, without an editor, without a graphics designer, and without setting up a publishing business. The question you should ask yourself, however, is whether or not this is the best way to represent yourself and your work.

Any future author wants a book that they can be proud of. This means you should look at your book as a piece of marketing material. You wouldn’t send out a brochure without having it proofread, edited, and professionally typeset, would you? Most of you will answer, “No,” because you understand how important it is to put your best foot forward. What if this is the only thing a potential client will ever see? You want it to be your best.

Let’s face it; everything we do is a business in some form or another. To put out a good book, you have to set aside some money for the production of the best work you can possibly publish. The people you hire are in business to provide editing and proofreading services, typesetting services, graphics design services, and printing services. All of them are in business to make money.

Beware the “free” or “low cost to you” printing and marketing offers. You really do get what you pay for. Most of those companies lure you in, making you believe that they are just like the “big guys”, but in truth, they’ll take your money, charge you a pretty high fee for a few copies of your book, and then leave you high and dry. You’ll discover that they never intended to prepare any type of marketing or distribution program for you. You may even discover to your horror that you have signed away your rights to publish your book anywhere else.

Self-Publishing is an excellent way to get your book published. Just make sure that you are smart about how you proceed. Working with a business that specializes in printing, editing, graphics design, publishing, and hopefully marketing, fulfillment, and storage in addition to merely publishing your book.

It’s not enough to get it published. It needs to get into the hands of your readers. Search out a full-service solution that is financially reasonable for you, but provides the benefit of printing and distributing your book without requiring that you store 20,000 copies in your garage.

Kathleen Birmingham is a ghostwriter of hundreds of articles, lesson plans, newsletters, and books. Currently she is creating a book coaching writing system to help business owners and other people get their ideas out of their heads and down on paper. For more insight into her philosophies on the business of writing, visit her at:

http://www.kbwrite.com

Copyright – Kathleen A. Birmingham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Author: Kathleen Birmingham
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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There have been many times where a new technological development have brought about predictions of the demise of an older technology. It was widely proclaimed that television would kill radio and the movies. Some also said that the emergence of online stores and commerce would kill traditional physical retailing. Along the same line of thought, many predicted the end of physically printed magazines and newspapers with the advent of digital publishing of these media. None of these predictions have as of yet come true, but the growing presence and benefits of digital magazines and newspapers is a fact.

Readers of newspapers and news oriented magazines have always wanted to know what’s going on in a current and accurate fashion. Of course they like to be entertained as well. Print media has done a good job with this, but it can’t compare to digitally published media that is distributed via the internet. With the prevalence of the internet, readers want to know what’s going on NOW, not yesterday or even many hours ago. Very importantly, many readers today don’t want to hear just from reporters or editors, but from other readers as well. This doesn’t mean just a reader opinion piece, but where the readers themselves become the source and contributors of the news.

Along this line of thought, readers today also want news and information media to be very reader relevant and interactive. They want to be able to “search” the publication for relevant information, not just rely on static tables of contents, indexes or summaries. Most of these reader demanded attributes require the media to be truly interactive on a real time basis. This can only be accomplished via digital publishing.

As for the entertainment factor, digital newspapers and magazines are far superior to the printed versions. On line media provides the ability to publish multimedia content, including audio, video, and interactive graphics and photos. Many readers get great entertainment value from the ability to actually publish their own news pieces and article “talk backs” (on line reader opinion pieces).

Even for magazines that are not necessarily a news publication, digital publishing provides many similar advantages and benefits. Imagine a travel magazine where the readers can actually experience destinations via video, audio and interactive content such as 3D maps. Any specialty magazine can utilize the same digital technology, such as fashion, hobby and activity magazines. Of course, the prior mentioned benefits regarding currency, reader interaction and relevancy all apply here as well.

Then there are the business and financial advantages to publishing magazines and newspapers digitally. There are no print run costs or physical distribution costs. It is definitely more “green” to digitally publish as you don’t use paper to print or fuel for delivery vehicles. There is a marketing advantage as well, as more and more readers are online more and more of the time. Your publication needs to be online to have effective visibility and accessibility. This is especially true with the rapidly growing use of hand held device that access the internet.

Therefore, while print media is not dead and may never be, for the above reasons, it is crucial that a newspaper or magazine publish digitally in order to be successful and grow.

Martin Alan enjoys writing on subjects such as literature, online publishing, the digital magazine, publishing software, sharing sites and self publishing. He also enjoys keeping up-to-date with the latest developments and innovations in technology and online marketing.

For more information on online publishing click here; http://www.yudu.com

Author: Martin Alan
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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These stages can be run in parallel and obviously the priority/cost of conversion between front and back list and individual titles should be considered.

Basic conversion of existing titles to digital

• Ensuring you have digital rights for all of the text, photos, illustrations, maps etc.
• Conversion of your PDF/InDesign/Quark print files to ePub,.mobi etc.
• Uploading and distribution of digital titles to the numerous online eCommerce websites.
• Marketing the digital versions of the book.

Content digitisation and workflows

• Conversion of your content to a simpler way of storing and accessing it such as an XML database.
• Changing your workflows so the content databases can be edited and products created directly from them.

Maximising the value of your content i.e. getting your content out to more people and in more formats.

• Re-packaging your content involving re-designing products to suite digital devices.
• Licensing and providing access to your content for other uses.
• Using your content in marketing to help create and keep communities interested in your products.
• Build or create links into online communities where your content can be marketed. As you gain access to online communities interested in particular subject areas this can then help influence your publishing program.

The Implementation of your Digital Product Strategy

There are various different stages that you should assess when looking at your digital strategy.

Research the general market and your market

The first thing you need to do is look at the following:

• Market – what’s out there already, how is it being sold, what price point, numbers etc etc
• Innovative ideas – these are often in different products, but look at what’s moving forward in your subject areas.
• Your market – assess what your target market is, how they buy/download, what technology they use etc.
• This will give a great overview of what areas to assess within the strategy development.

Mature your ideas

Firstly look at the ideas you have already for your titles. You, as the publishers of the books know the titles the best and often have a great grasp for what their readers will enjoy, and thus buy. Often it’s a lack of confidence to go forward with these ideas or not knowing how to complete the ideas is where the sticking point is. However if you’re creating your digital strategy in-house, actually getting something written down can really help you move forward and stop just talking about it.

What are your long term and short term aims?

You need to have a clear understanding of what you’d like to do, where you’d like to start and generally the speed / direction of where you’d like to go with digital products. Then you can start working out what they’re going to be and when you need to develop them.

Define a product strategy / Action Plan

Once key decisions have been made about the best way forward for your digital products, you should develop a strategy, this could include:

• A written document detailing a product strategy that you can move forward with within your timeframe / budget. This will overview the type of products (technologies – i.e. Kindle, ePub, apps etc), the content of potential products and distribution lines etc. This could be created in something as simple as excel for each of the titles and the product types you intend to create.
• A digital product schedule to help you understand the long term and short term priorities.
• Detailed product walkthroughs, technical documentation etc to enable you to send to our external development company for the different types of digital products you have decided to create.

Linking in with website / marketing

Once you have your digital product strategy in place don’t just leave it there, careful consideration needs to be made for distribution and marketing. Look at how to use your website and marketing activities to best promote your digital products.

We are entirely focused on delivering a range of digital services to publishing companies and authors. We’re great at creating effective social media campaigns, but we also like to think we’re pretty good at digital product development, web design and other online marketing activities too.

Discover what digital marketing topic we are currently talking about on our LJ Interactive blog.

Visit our website at www.ljinteractive.com to discover how LJ Interactive can help your publishing business

Author: Stuart Surman
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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Self publishing has become a beacon of hope for millions of aspiring authors. It is seen by many as the only way to write a novel the way it should be written. But is this view accurate? Many authors who have gone through the main stream publishing route see self publishing as beneath them and anyone who self publishes as less than authentic. I see this attitude as blatant snobbery. Lets face it, looking down the nose at people because they choose to self publish for whatever reason is the equivalent of playground taunting.

For some people the very fact that a publisher is not interested in your book means that you will never succeed. But let me ask you this – Would we have light bulbs today if Edison had given up on the incandescent light bulb? Would America be the country it is today if Columbus had decided to turn around and go home? Would air travel be possible today if the Wright Brothers and so many pioneers like them, listened to their detractors? No. Of course it wouldn’t.

Advancement often comes in the face of adversity. So many people succeed because they defy the odds, because they run in the face of criticism, because they believe in themselves.

The simple fact is that not everyone is born equal. There are many books in print that are to my taste, awful, both books produced by large publishing houses and through Indie publishing. There are many reasons why a book might not get published and it does not always have anything to do with the quality of the writing. Thousands of good stories get thrown out every year along with the bad.

The Writing Dream

Thousands of would be authors, dream of seeing their story in print. For the vast majority, that is all it will ever be, a dream. It will remain a vague inclination, something to talk about with friends over coffee or as an innocent pastime, a hobby to be done when the kids have gone to bed or at the weekends. They do not truly have the desire to see their work in print and they certainly don’t want to work at it.

For a few it becomes an obsession, a hopeless cause bereft of an ending that does not include despair. Lack of writing talent, drive or the ability to take criticism and rejection become stumbling blocks to success. They take the same tired manuscript and re write and twist plots and dialogue and send it to any agent whose address they can find. But they refuse to listen to criticism when it is offered. They don’t seem to learn anything from what they are doing. They don’t evolve, they simply are!

And finally you have the minority group of writers. These are the survivors, those hardy souls who have learned to pen a tight and punchy synopsis, they have a finished manuscript that is rich with passion, powerful metaphors and an A-bomb climax. The story is original, the characters fresh and they present with a professional attitude to their agent and publisher.

Two things happen.

• They get an agent and end up with a publishing contract
• They get an agent but the story is not a good fit or if it is non-fiction perhaps does not have enough mass appeal to make it worth the risk

And let us not forget that publishers are all about risk and profits. It’s hard enough to make a living these days without taking undue risk. But…and I think this is important – why should a writer with the talent and the scope, more importantly, with the desire to succeed – having failed to open the door, simply give up? What is wrong with taking his book and publishing it himself? Is this not another way to prove his worth and desire? Is this a reason to look down at his efforts?

For many of these talented authors, self publishing is a sensible means of developing a following and proving, once and for all, that they have the ability to make it in the industry. Self publishing is fast becoming the means by which aspiring authors seek to promote themselves. Authors like Cory Doctorow and Kit Berry have shown a unique and innovative talent for self promotion and are an example to all writers on how to make a success online and off.

Let Darwin Decide

I think we have a lot of thanks to offer all those self published authors who have gone before us. They have opened up a realm of opportunity for writers. It is not inconceivable that self publishing will become the first choice for many writers in the not so distant future. The advent of the Kindle and other electronic book readers has provided many aspiring writers with the means to sell their books online. As with any Darwinian process, some make it and some don’t. Just don’t knock them for trying.

For more information on self publishing check out our writing and publishing resources.

Author: Edward G Gordon
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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