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When asking an author if her ebook has also been published as a "real" book will be like asking a musician if her album has been released in vinyl

I recently noticed an interesting Tweet that gets right to the heart of so many issues that authors are thinking about when we try to make decisions about publishing for the Kindle and other new technologies:

kaytee4ever: my gf thinks Kindle isn’t “realpublishing. Help! Know anyone who got a print deal after starting on Kindle?Any good arguments to tell her?

The Kindle is at the forefront of technological change that opens all kinds of new doors for authors, publishers, and anyone who likes to make reading an interactive experience. As with every medium, channel, or form of communication or commerce, there will be dreck (as there is plenty of dreck available from mainstream publishers).

But yes.

First, there have been people who got print deals after starting on Kindle, and here’s one of the most thoughtful and interesting analyses of the most recent big deal: A Kindle Success Story: How to Promote a Kindle Ebook

Second, you may not see it coming yet, but we are approaching a time when a confluence of sea changes in reading habits, consumer practices, and technology will mean that asking a Kindle book author if her book has also been published as a “real” book will be like asking a musician if her album has been released in vinyl. Serious authors from Joe Konrath to, well, me are already making a decent living from the Kindle editions of our books.

Third, all of this will work best when it works as it often works with indie music and indie movies, with readers lighting the way for other readers so that the feedback becomes the filter.

Fourth, just to take it back to the totally understandable vanity issues that are implicit in the original tweet, I hope you will enjoy the bit of dialogue included in my post The Romance of Submission, a chapter excerpted from my book Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex.

Update: In case you were wondering if the Boyd Morrison book described in the above-referenced post really existed, here’s proof:

Between Morrison, Amazon, and his new publisher, they have endeavored to wipe out all traces of the Kindle edition, but entering the ASIN from Amazon’s main page still gets you this search result that links to a 404-page ghost.

The Romance of Submission

An excerpt from

Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex:

How Authors and Publishers Are Using the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies to Unleash an Indie Movement of Readers and Writers

By Stephen Windwalker

Copyright 2008, 2009, Stephen Windwalker and Harvard Perspectives Press.

What is it to be a writer hard at the work of creating something wonderful, a work in progress that you will chisel away at and breathe life into and perfect until it is published and embraced by a welcoming audience of serious readers who buzz to one another and back to you that you have made something new, something of value, perhaps even something eternal?

In the middle of this faithful process, as you gird yourself against distractions and slave away at MacDowell or Yaddo or Starbucks, or in your garret, or on the Acela, or in your prison cell, there are blissfully intense moments when there is only you and the work. On these days the work is the best of companions.

Such moments may seem to validate Miss Dickinson’s pronouncement that “Publication is not the proper business of a poet,” so that you are inclined to apply it to your particular form of literary creation, whether it is your Dream Songs or your Ulysses, your biography of a racehorse, or your treatise on how to solve Sudoku.

But if you are budgeting time and funds so that you can afford enough daycare to allow you to finish your book, or trying to balance your writing with a day job, or to set enough aside to allow you to escape the day job, it may be difficult to fend off those thoughts of publication. If so, as the Belle of Amherst surely knew, these largely economic conditions may carry some strange elemental power – the power, perhaps, of the wolf at your door? – that puts you at risk of losing the very frame of mind that allows you to create something worthwhile in the first place.

I don’t wish to provoke hand-wringing, hair-tearing angst or to send ten thousand writers running for fee-based therapeutic relationships that they can ill afford. (Shrinks, in my experience, aren’t much good at solving underlying economic problems anyway). There are plenty of activities on the spectrum of creative endeavor where one need not be tied up in knots about one’s literary output and its ultimate place in the world. The conventionally established professional author, whose work reaps nice advances and then sells well enough to “earn out” those advances, is usually well enough inoculated against such dreary and careerist considerations that she needs only to balance her writing efforts with such concessions as she may choose to make to her publisher’s marketing demands or to the claims of celebrity. Such an author may be the fortunate inhabitant of a “zone” where one is so well guaranteed audience, promotion, distribution, and compensation that such considerations may be treated as trivial afterthoughts. And while some of the habitués of this zone may indeed be hacks who license their characters or record half a dozen formulaic page-turners each year with the next-generation iteration of the Dictaphone, there are others who have worked long and hard at good and durable work that extends our literary culture, fills our leisure hours with civilized delight, and illuminates the human experience.

No doubt there are many other writers of distinction who, keeping closer to Miss Dickinson’s dictum, work well and steadily with no regard whatsoever for the business of publication, whether they write only to be writing, for no audience at all, only for themselves, or only against some future time when they will brook their first considerations about what to do with what they have been writing. Perhaps they can work this way because they are the otherwise idle rich, or they combine a good day job with abundant energy and discipline in lives where distractions are scarce, or they are incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized, or they are prohibited for one reason or another from telling their story. But for the vast majority of us who would seek out a place for writing as part or all of the work of our daily lives, neither of these extremes is the reality.

Very few of us are driven by a serious desire to become millionaire authors, but we would like an honest chance to make a decent living writing good books and getting them into the hands of discerning readers. Yet it is in staking even such modest claims for our creative work that we risk subjecting ourselves to a writer’s purgatory.

Want to submit your manuscript through traditional publishing channels? Then those “blissfully intense hours when there is only you and the work” are about to be subjected, like a teenager’s love affair or even the bonds of best friends or blood brothers, to the intrusive, perverse, distorting pressures of societal judgment. You’ve been working privately, passionately, one-on-one with your manuscript, teasing and massaging it into the book you have lived to write, but now you must submit it and then wait passively to see if this relationship passes muster in the eyes of agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, and peers. You have quietly bestowed your passion on this companion, and now you must dress it up and take it to the prom. Even if you have always kept your own creative counsel, lived and worked by your own aesthetic, and been your own toughest editor and creative jury, now, by the simple act of inviting your companion into the glare of public scrutiny, as if assuming fairness in its consideration, you are turning the tables on yourself.

By accepting your role in this aptly named submission process, you are implicitly validating its legitimacy and encouraging its cliques of rather mean-spirited girls and boys. Later, as you open and file away their rejection slips, you will of course be formalizing and finalizing the concomitant process of obliterating your own confidence in your capacity to create, to evaluate, to rethink, and to revise what you are creating. As in most initially blissful high school romances, once they are subjected to the harsh judgments of the reigning popular crowd, someone is bound to get dumped.

It isn’t hard to imagine the famous final scene of break-up dialogue between a fickle novelist and his manuscript – what, your fiction doesn’t talk back to you? – as the pages are about to be consigned to the back of the file cabinet or the hard drive’s least trafficked subdirectory….

“Shit! I thought you loved me. All you wanted was to get published!”

“Well, sure. After I spent every day with you for two years, it would have been nice.”

“I never realized that was the only reason you were interested in me.”

“Oh, c’mon. Don’t guilt trip me. Can’t you accept that I have needs too?”

“If that’s all you were looking for, why didn’t you just pay for it?”

“Pay for it?”

“Sure. Why not? There are plenty of places where you could take your money and your so-called needs and get published without—”

“Without what?”

[Tears]

“Without paying any attention to what’s really inside me.”

“Maybe. I mean, I suppose. But I would never want it to get around that I was paying for it.”

“It’s hard to believe that you’re the same one who believed in me.”

“Oh, come on. Was I supposed to totally ignore the things that Lindsay and Winona and Heather were saying about you?”

“Hah! They call themselves agents and editors. They are nothing more than glorified slush-pile interns.”

“Well, everybody else listens to them. I’m never going to make it as a published author if I don’t listen to what they say. I know they will want to publish me if I can just go back to the drawing board and tighten up the story line a little.”

“Story line? What about my characters?”

“It was nice, baby. You know I will never forget you. Maybe if I can just get published we can get together sometime, in the future.”

Okay, this bit of fun has its limits, but hopefully it has helped to illuminate a worthwhile distinction: too often, it would be more apt to mangle Miss Dickinson’s phrases by noting that it is not publication, but submission, that is not the proper business of poets and other writers.

Is there a choice?

We have ceded to the major publishing houses and their gatekeepers the central roles in determining which written creative work will be widely disseminated in our culture, and in the process we subject ourselves as writers, and to a lesser but still significant degree as readers, to agonies of waiting, wishing and hoping, and quiet desperation. It was not gratuitously that publishers established this hegemony, with its concomitant power over our creative and intellectual lives. There was, especially in the half-century between 1920 and 1970, a golden age of American publishing. Many of the subsidiary “imprints” of today’s global media empires were, then, small, fairly informal shops where editors were motivated by their passion for literature, where an author celebrating the publication of his novel or not quite making it to his next royalty check or advance might well be found, of a morning, sleeping one off on the sofa in one of his editor’s homey book-lined offices. Almost everything about the book industry, from the ubiquitous independent bookshops to the number of books reviewed or excerpted in mass-circulation magazines like the Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s, to the abundance of serious “mid-list” titles kept in print by publishers, was well laid out for a mass culture of readers, and thus, in turn, for the care and feeding of enough quality writers to keep the culture in good books.

Lest I seem to be invoking some nostalgic “It’s Morning Again in America” sepia tone of a glorious past, I recommend Jason Epstein’s thoughtful and intelligent 2001 memoir of that era in the history of the publishing industry, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future. Of course there were market forces, personal ambitions, and intra- and inter-corporate competition at work in the publishing industry between 1920 and 1970, and barriers organized around class pedigree, racism, and sexism were every bit as prevalent in the publishing industry as they were in American society at large. But the fact remains that before the dramatic, power-concentrating frenzy of mergers and acquisitions that occurred in the last third of the century, the American publishing industry was generally keeping up its end of the bargain with the country’s creative culture and its audience of readers.

Writers submitted their work to agents and editors with some faith that it would get a reading, and thus would be given all the chance that any writer could expect. There was an ample array of potential entry markets, including college and literary magazines, the pulps, and even a surprising number of slick mass-market magazines that gave significant space to fiction each month and paid competitively for it. Mass periodicals from the Saturday Evening Post to Time, whatever their politics might be, were self-conscious of a responsibility to guide and broaden the culture, if perhaps not to deepen it, rather than merely to reflect its shortcomings.

In other words, there was a long period in American publishing when one could observe significant correspondence between the best work that was being written by our novelists and poets and biographers and the work that the “popular crowd” of publishing gatekeepers was admitting into its world of published books. During most of this time, our Anglo-American culture did much to promote its own better moments: Epstein notes that authors from James Joyce to James Baldwin used to grace the covers of Time magazine. Today, in a kind of weird apotheosis of the real and metaphorical linkages between high school clique culture and American literary culture, the bestselling author you are most likely to see on magazine covers at your favorite newsstand may well be Paris Hilton.

The reasons why Ms. Hilton is a bestselling author are perhaps more interesting than most of what one will find between the covers of her books. Publishing houses search out brand-name celebrities whose platforms guarantee bestseller status, because both the publishing houses and the retail bookstore chains desperately need high turnover bestsellers to generate the revenue necessary to justify their existence in a world of literary-industrial conglomerates that is, increasingly, all about the bottom line. Such name-brand authors may be genre fiction writers who have identified a certain formula for repetitive mass-market success and are willing to abide by their publishers’ pleas not to monkey with the formulas. But just as often these days the celebrity authors are cross-over stars: people who are cashing in on the notoriety they’ve gained on MTV, Court TV, American Idol, ESPN, Entertainment Tonight, People, their own television or radio shows, or, given its increasing “news” coverage of the icons who become known to us through these aforementioned portals of mass culture, the network news.

It shouldn’t shock us that readers buy a lot of these mass-produced cookie-cutter books. First, they are only one more confirming symptom of the national multi-media fixations that have already been proven for OJ, Wacko Jacko, Britney, Paris, Monica, and so forth. Second, sometimes there is interesting material in these books. Finally, although the range of more interesting alternatives to such books is definitely not narrowing, our public access to them is limited because neither the publishers, the chain bookstores, or the big-box stores whose deeply-discounted offerings of a few hundred bestsellers often drive independent booksellers out of business are willing to make a marketing or space-allocation commitment to books that do not stack up, from the get-go, as bestsellers. If you are looking for something to read on your flight, there are only so many titles available at the airport bookstand, and all of them are there because the corporate buyers or distributors are certain that they will be bestsellers and that “you” are most likely to buy a book by an author you’ve heard about already.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in a Spring 2008 piece on niche political marketing, drew a clear portrayal of the largely homogeneous culture that existed in America before anyone had ever heard of niche markets and long-tail economics:

“Fifty-five years ago, 80 percent of American television viewers, young and old, tuned in to see Milton Berle on Tuesday nights. Tens of millions, rich and poor, worked together at Elks Lodges and Rotary Clubs. Millions more, rural and urban, read general-interest magazines like Look and Life. In those days, the owner of the local bank lived in the same town as the grocery clerk, and their boys might play on the same basketball team. Only 7 percent of adult Americans had a college degree.”

Entering the book section of a Walmart, Super Stop ‘n’ Shop, or BJ’s has something in common with stepping into the 1950s in terms of the diversity of culture and selection. If you have written one of the top 500 novels of the year, but it never makes it into the top 300, it is unlikely that it will turn up on the bookshelves in those short-tail book departments.

None of this is great news for readers, but it can be especially depressing for serious writers, because the big cultural picture distills to a very simple message: the mainstream publishing industry, to the extent that it is embodied in the five global media empires that dominate the American book trade at this writing, is not interested in what you are writing, is not going to make meaningful judgments about your work based on the quality or distinctiveness of your content, and is instead much more interested in hooking up with someone who is already “popular,” even if it means hiring someone else (you, perhaps?) to do the ghost writing. The industry’s popular-crowd cliques, it turns out, are not fair, and they could care less about what you may think is special about your “companion” of the last couple of years.

(This book is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions).

Would you like to help with a blurb for my bestselling new book on the financial crisis?

Earlier this week I published the Kindle edition of a book on which I have been devoting a great deal of time and energy over the past few months, The Worried Citizen’s Little Survival Guide to the Greatest Financial Crisis of the Century: Understanding and Surviving the Domino Depression. Here’s a link to its Amazon page.

It’s not a book for the CNBC talking heads, and it may not even be a book for Paul Krugman or Ben Bernanke. It’s a book for people who’ve been working hard, feel like we’ve been thrown to the curb in this financial crisis, and and want simple answers to some very basic questions: How did we get here, how much worse is it going to get, and what can we do to protect ourselves, our families, and our future?

If you believe there’s a need for a book with this kind of commonsense approach to these worrying times, I would like to invite you to take a few moments to participate with me as I try to re-make the usual process of marketing a nonfiction book. Between now and the time when the paperback edition of my book is published late this month, I am inviting people who really know what is going on in this financial crisis — working people, labor and community organizers, seniors, teachers, librarians, people who run small businesses and nonprofits, young people trying to figure out how they are going to pay for their education or start a career, and others who have already lost a great deal through no fault of their own — to join with me in spreading the word about The Worried Citizen’s Little Survival Guide.

Okay, if Bernanke, Krugman, Jim Kramer, and Stephen King all want to send in blurbs, I might be able to use them. But I would really like to have a couple of lines from you, if you feel like sharing your comments publicly.

I’ve posted some sample chapters of the book, along with the Table of Contents, on Facebook just to make it easy for you to see what it’s all about.

If you would like to share a comment or “blurb” with me directly, you can enter a comment here or, better yet, email me at hppress@gmail.com.

If you include your name, any brief identifying info, and a snail-mail address and I include your comment in (or on the cover of) the paperback edition of the book (scheduled for July 31 release), I promise to send you a free signed copy of the paperback! (In response to a question from Donna, let me suggest that it would be helpful to have comments, blurbs, and reviews by Monday, July 15).

Such comments could become back cover blurbs, comments on the book’s web page, or readers’ comments in the front matter of the paperback edition. I would also welcome a brief review on Amazon or, if you have one, on your own blog. If you would like to write an Amazon review, short and sweet would be wonderful, and you will find a link right under the title information at the top of the book’s Amazon page: http://bit.ly/4BXrG

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this note, and — if I may be so optimistic as to presume — for your interest in helping me get the word out about a book that I believe can help to make a difference in the daily lives of many hardworking people.

Thanks for your interest in The Worried Citizen’s Little Survival Guide.To read or find out more about this book, email hppress@gmail.com

For more information, see the The Worried Citizen’s Survival Blog at http://worriedcitizens.blogspot.com/

Copyright © July 2009, Stephen Windwalker and Harvard Perspectives Press.

Off Topic: Pogue’s Productivity Secrets Revealed


David Pogue is a great guy. I’ve been reading his New York Times “Circuits” columns on technology for years, and despite the fact that he doesn’t know me from Adam, he responded the very same day back in late 2007 when — before my own Kindle arrived from Amazon — I emailed him a few questions about Kindle functionality on his review model.

The fact that he manages to be so forthcoming and helpful while also maintaining an incredible level of productivity — one that enables him to write five books a year, file two columns a week, churn out a daily blog, speak 40 times a year and film a video every Thursday — is something to which I can only aspire. (I only wrote three books last year, and I assiduously avoid video cameras no matter who is holding them!)

But in my interactions with hundreds of Kindle Nation members — we are over 3,300 strong now! — I notice that one thing that stands out about Kindlers is that we care deeply about productivity and guard our time carefully, even if only to protect our reading time. With that in mind, I want to recommend a terrific column that David wrote recently on some of the ways in which he uses technology — his beat, after all — to maximize his own productivity. I hope you enjoy it … if you have time to read it:

A thoughtful and well-considered post from Kindle Zen: PDF and the Kindle DX: Is Amazon Serious?


I’m not able to read every Kindle blog that comes along, but lately I have found that the relatively new Kindle Zen blog is calm, elegant, thoughtful, and informative. Its author, Steve Bain, recently wrote an interesting and well-reasoned post on the Kindle DX and the direction in which Amazon should proceed in addressing some serious problems with the new model’s PDF functionality.

I had observed some of these problems in my original review of the Kindle DX on June 11, so I was pleased and grateful that Steve granted his permission for me to share his piece in its entirety with the citizens of Kindle Nation here:

PDF and the Kindle DX: Is Amazon Serious?

I’ve been experimenting with the Kindle DX for several days and my overall impression is very positive, but I believe that the support for PDF documents is an embarrassment for Amazon. In this post, I will offer a critique for the PDF user interface in the Kindle DX.

First some background. PDF is an open but Adobe-specified digital document format that seeks to replicate the geometrical richness of a printed page. It is a complicated format that has evolved in nine succeeding releases over fifteen years, and full implementations of the specification are difficult to develop. There are apparently several classes of PDF rendering engines that are licensable from Adobe for embedded applications and some good third party options are also available.

PDF rendering in the Kindle DX is generally impressive. The PDF engine for the DX is apparently based on a mobile device offering from Adobe. This was a conservative choice by Amazon and was likely the least expensive option for PDF rendering that could be licensed from Adobe. However, this PDF implementation is actually a poor value for Kindle DX customers because it does not support linkage. Linkage from PDFs to external web documents might be of questionable value on the Kindle because of the clumsy web browser. However, linkage within PDF documents is an absolutely critical feature for efficient navigation, and it is hard to understand why Amazon would deliver PDF support without this key feature. Linkage enables an active Table of Contents that can greatly ease browsing in a long technical document. Linkage also enables practical access to cross-references within documents such as to footnotes, figures, and tables.

Since there is no support for linkage, how does one navigate? Well, the Kindle DX supports these methods for navigation in a PDF document:

  1. Next Page and Previous Page buttons
  2. Bookmarks
  3. Search
  4. Go to Beginning (of document)
  5. Go to Page

Bookmarks are not an efficient means for navigation, because they must first be set by the user. Further, the Kindle DX provides no way to name PDF bookmarks nor does it provide any context for PDF bookmarks. Rather, the user interface is simply a selectable list of the page numbers that have been bookmarked.

Search can be a useful navigation method, and especially when one is recently and deeply familiar with a document. However, search is no substitute for direct navigation because words are seldom unique within a large document.

This leaves “Go to Page” as the most broadly useful of the navigation methods that Amazon has provided for PDFs. From a document’s table of contents, you presumably estimate the page number for the start of a section of interest and then you do the following:

  • Press the Menu button
  • Manipulate the 5-way controller to highlight “Go to Page…” in the pop-up menu
  • Select this function by pressing the 5-way controller
  • Enter a page number using chorded keystrokes, Alt-1, Alt-5, Alt-3, etc.
  • Press enter to complete the navigation

This process could be simplified with a better UI design. First, “Go to Page…” could be the default option on the pop-up menu whenever a PDF document is displayed. Then, when a page number is being entered from the keyboard for navigation, the Kindle DX could interpret presses on the top row of keys as numbers so that there is no need for chorded entry on the cramped keypad. This would offer no disadvantage, because the page number entry field does not accept letters.

Clumsy navigation is not the only problem for PDF documents in the DX. The Kindle DX is missing a high-contrast option that would ease reading for PDF documents that were designed for color rendering. With such color PDF documents on the DX, text is displayed in shades of gray that can be difficult to read. Also missing from Amazon’s PDF implementation are support for highlighting, annotation, the dictionary, and text-to-speech. Why should any customer be satisfied that such features are missing for PDF documents?

There are literally millions of existing PDF documents that Kindle users might want to access, but a vast majority are formatted for letter-sized or A4-sized pages, and virtually all are formatted for page sizes larger than the Kindle DX display. This means that PDF pages are usually rendered in portrait mode on the DX at a size much smaller than the document developers originally intended. Even though the Kindle’s resolution is excellent, reading documents with tiny letters can become frustrating in a hurry. The solution on Kindle DX is to rotate the device into landscape mode, which usually results in roughly a 1.5X zoom and half as much page area displayed. This might be a reasonable compromise except for one major problem: It places the critical Next Page and Previous Page buttons at either the top or bottom of the display where they are inconvenient to access. I find it hard to understand why the DX doesn’t repurpose keyboard keys as alternate paging keys when the Kindle is in landscape mode.

When the DX is in landscape mode, the keyboard space bar could be enabled as an alternate Next Page button. This simple change would result no important collision with the text entry features, and would greatly enhance the usability of PDF documents in landscape mode for both right and left handed users. Another button on the bottom row of the keyboard, perhaps the Shift key, could be enabled as an alternate Previous Page button. This might result in a minor collision with existing uses, but one that is far less important than having convenient, hand-in-place access to the Previous Page function.

It is a major embarrassment for Amazon that the Kindle DX was released to customers with such a poor user interface for PDF documents. The current PDF document support should be viewed as an “experimental feature” at best, and the deficit leaves a hole in Amazon’s product line that could be a nice opportunity for competitors like Sony and Plastic Logic. The hope for Kindle DX customers is that Amazon will rapidly improve PDF usability through a major firmware update. Some improvements, like better menu organization and sane use of the keyboard, are pretty easy stuff. Others, like improved contrast options for color documents and support for intra-document linkage, might require a license for different software from Adobe, or perhaps the switch to a third party PDF rendering engine.

It has been rumored that release of the Kindle 2 was delayed past the Christmas season because Jeff Bezos was dissatisfied with early releases for the user interface firmware. One wonders who within Amazon approved of the PDF document features for the Kindle DX.