1. Internationalization is Fascinating: the E-Book Case (Jiminy Panoz / Medium)
2. No, Machines Can’t Read Better than Humans (James Vincent / The Verge)
3. How To Brief A Cover Designer (David Gaughran / Kobo Writing Life)
4. Is Japan’s Rakuten the Second Biggest Player in the Western E-Book and Audiobook Markets? (Mark Williams / TNPS)
5. Seven Awful DRM Moments from the Year (and Two Bright Spots!): 2017 in Review (Cory Doctorow / EFF)

Nate is the founder of The Digital Reader. He also builds and repairs websites, and help authors turn website visitors into readers.

The post E-Books and Self-Publishing Roundup: January 23, 2018 appeared first on MediaShift.

The post Here Are the Journalism Books You Won’t Find On Your Syllabus appeared first on MediaShift.

1. The 7 Differences Between Professionals and Amateurs (Jeff Goins / The Mission)
2. Google Books Is Not Alexandria Redux (Chris Meadows / Teleread)
3. Ingram Content Group Delivers E-Books to Windows Store (Ingram / Infotoday)
4. Slow Writers: Are They Doomed to Failure in the Digital Age? (Anne R. Allen / Anne R. Allen)
5. Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria (James Somers / The Atlantic)

Nate is the founder of The Digital Reader. He also builds and repairs websites, and helps authors and small businesses solve tech problems

The post E-Books & Self-Publishing Roundup: April 25, 2017 appeared first on MediaShift.

Whenever I leave a room, I flicker the lights on and off twice. If any object isn’t exactly where it belongs — a dish, the remote, the clock by my bed — then I need to fix it before I can move on to the next thing, let alone leave the house.

I know I have some level of OCD. But at this point, I’m not looking to treat it. That’s because I’ve learned to harness it professionally. Without it, I wouldn’t have written a book during a week-long vacation. I self-published it upon return, made six figure profits within months, and turned down an offer from a major traditional publisher — until eventually selling them the reprint rights.

While most people don’t share my obsessions and compulsions, anyone can learn from the steps I took to write and publish in little time.

Organize what you know

Good writers write what they know. But many don’t keep that knowledge organized. I do, because I don’t have a choice.

My career focuses on sales and technology. As I learn things, I store them in compartments in my brain, filing them into specific folders where they belong.

Most people won’t do this mentally, but anyone can do it literally. Within your area of expertise, keep your knowledge organized somewhere, such as document folders in the cloud. As these build up, you’ll have the raw materials for a book. (This applies primarily to non-fiction, but can also help fiction writers store information necessary for the details they’re writing about — historical epics, industries, etc.)

Make distractions impossible

A lot of people who want to write books get too busy with other tasks. I gave myself no choice.

My writing process began on a flight from Sydney to Singapore. I was sitting in a bulkhead coach seat, and had no wi-fi.

I hate flying. But when I work, I get into a mental zone in which the task before me has to get done. So I forget I’m on a plane.

I spent all eight hours of that flight writing the outline. Each folder became a chapter. Within the notes for each chapter, I put bullet points and ideas. By the time we landed, I had a 15-page outline.

Seek solitude (ideally in a far-away time zone)

I had found an island near Bali, Gili Trawangan, with a cheap resort to stay at. My goal wasn’t just to be alone, it was to be in a far away time zone.

I’m the founder and CEO of a company in San Francisco. Given the time difference, when I woke up each morning at the resort I had a full inbox. I’d spend a maximum of two hours banging out responses. By the time I finished, everyone in the United States was asleep. There was no back-and-forth, no immediate follow-up. I had the rest of the day to write.

Organize what your interviewees know

But the book wasn’t entirely a brain dump from me. I also wanted to quote experts. Often, people gather quotes from interview subjects through free-flowing conversations. But I had specific topics for them to weigh in on, and knew this wasn’t the most efficient method.

So I created a Google Form with five questions. I emailed it to them, asking them to fill it out within a pretty tight time frame. They wanted to be quoted in the book, and they obliged (or indulged) me.

Google Forms automatically pulls together multiple respondents’ answers to questions into a single document. So now, I had quotes to use in all the right places. On day five, I reached the end of my book, having written more than 21,000 words. On day six, I went back through and added another 6,000 words.

I had planned on doing it as an e-book, released one chapter at a time. But when I saw how much material I had, I knew it was enough to sell in print.

Know, and be established in, your market

Specialized how-to business books of about 30,000 words can do quite well. This is particularly true when you sell a book about selling — to people who sell. I knew this about my market.

Just as importantly, I had established myself as a known quantity within my niche: where sales and technology meet. Through my work at Sales Hacker and the big conferences I was running, I had built up the right connections who would help spread the word. And I had a substantial e-mail list that would make initial marketing a breeze.

In my professional community, Amazon is generally the first place people turn to for books. So I hired an editor to format it and made it available on Amazon, as e-book and print-on-demand.

Soon after, I received an offer from a traditional publisher. But I saw no reason to give another company the vast majority of the money. Later, after months of steady sales, I had moved on to other projects. I agreed to sell the reprint rights to Wiley. They worked with me to expand the book a bit (it’s now at 35,000 words), and made it available in brick-and-mortar stores as well.

To this day, I get messages from people who see it all over the world, from the Hong Kong airport to the flagship Barnes & Noble in Manhattan.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that OCD comes in many forms, and many people suffer from it far worse. And it does take a toll on my personal life. But at this time, I’m focused mostly on work, and have found that I can make my mind work for me.

Max Altschuler is the founder and CEO of Sales Hacker, the leading community for the next generation of sales professionals.  He’s the author of Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High Velocity Sales Machine.

The post Thanks to My OCD, I Wrote a Self-Published Best-Seller appeared first on MediaShift.

Most writers find they need to query a number of agents before they find the right one for them. At Agent Hunter, the comprehensive online database of UK literary agents, we’ve found a number of nifty tools to help keep you organized and prepared for your search.

1. Agent Query

Similar to our site at Agent Hunter, this website holds details of literary agents based in the U.S. The site also has some useful tips for writers starting out, and a forum to connect with others.

2. Streak

This was designed as a CRM tool for sales teams, but is a godsend to writers who use gmail. A free add-on, this tool enables you to track your submissions within gmail itself, adding chase dates to each email, and even letting you know when your email is being read.

3. Trello

S3 you’ve found twenty agents you think might like your book – which ones do you email first? Trello is a useful to-do list app that works like a virtual corkboard. Add your agent notes to one column and move them to the next as you research them, write your cover letter, pitch and review your contract!

4. Dropbox

Let’s face it – submitting to all these agencies is going to take a lot of time. By saving your submissions to a cloud-based app such as Dropbox however, you can work on them using any device on the move, so you can capitalise on your commute time. Even better, your file will update across all your devices too, so you can avoid duplicates.

5. Scrivener

Scrivener is widely regarded as the king of writing apps, helping you work on your submission in style. Add notes, divide into folders and make use of the hundreds of fancy functions available in the program.

Photo by Negative Space via Unsplash’s Creative Commons license

6. CamCard

Let’s say you get chatting to a literary agent. After presenting your perfected elevator pitch, the agent gives you their card and asks you to send your manuscript to them. Now imagine how you’d feel if you lost that card… Fortunately, CamCard is a great app for storing card details digitally on the move, using your smart phone camera to capture data. Phew!

7. Hemingway

An editing tool, Hemingway will helpfully point out any problems with clunky sentences or poor grammar in your cover letter. Just paste in your text and watch Hemingway highlight the sentences that need work. A useful start, although it doesn’t offer the level of detail that a real editor can offer.

8. Pocket

Spotted an interview with an agent that could come in use later? Pocket saves the sites you find most interesting, enabling you to visit them later without clogging up your bookmark bar.

9. Online writing courses

Photo by Andrew_Writer and used here with Creative Commons license.

Agents are attracted to writers who have invested in their craft, especially those who’ve taken time to learn what makes a good book. There are thousands of online courses for writers happening right now, such as this one from The Writers’ Workshop.

Sarah Juckes works with Agent Hunter, the comprehensive online database of UK literary agents. For more information on submitting to literary agents read this useful guide from The Writers’ Workshop.

Correction: This article’s headline has been corrected.

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Greater circulation represents, not only sales to self-published authors, but also introductions to new audiences. For libraries and their patrons, e-books represent a new frontier where readers can access books outside of the physical confines of the library itself, which gives librarians much-needed ‘virtual’ territory to expand their shelves and the content they offer. Authors have long desired access to public libraries in order to get their books in the catalog, but now I’m going to tell you why, as a self-published author, you should not only want in with paid content, but how to get there.

First off, you want to get your self-published book and/or e-book into libraries for one vital reason: it presents a funnel for new readers to discover you. If you’re a writer who has a book that is already permanently free, think of the library as the ultimate funnel. That’s why you should be interested in libraries; now let’s go over why you shouldn’t give away the farm for the cow in doing so.

Libraries are huge community institutions which receive public and private funds in order to continue to facilitate local community access to books. Some libraries have budgets from $50,000 – $500,000 a year for their collections developments. E-books grew from 1.2 percent of that budget in 2009 to nearly 10 percent overall in 2015. Because libraries have extensive budgets geared towards buying books, your goal should always to get a piece of that budget pie.

Don’t worry if they’ll want your material, because as long as you’re presenting quality work, they will. It’s a win-win for a library’s collection’s development, as you have something that traditional publishers do not: the ability to make your catalog an affordable purchase for their collection. While Macmillan charges $60 per an e-book limited to 52 circulations before it has to be re-purchased – for example the hugely popular Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. My publisher partner, OverDrive, lists my book Blades Of Magic for just $4.99. As such, I have found quite a receptive librarian audience looking for reasonable prices and quality material. Therefore due to the ability to reach the librarian audience myself and the knowledge that there is indeed a budget for such purchases, I would never however allow another outfit to sell my titles to libraries without receiving a direct cut of royalty sales myself. If someone is getting paid for the library sales, the author should be a primary beneficiary.

So how do you get your books into libraries and get paid to do it?

Graphic courtesy of Terah Edun.

First, make sure that if you want your books physically on library shelves, that you have it printed by a distribution that feeds in Ingram or Baker & Taylor. Ingram, in particular has an easy way to access their services – through a program called IngramSpark. They provide a global distribution service for paperback and hardcover copies which bookstores and libraries can order from. Right now, through November 30, 2016, they have an offer going called INDIEFRINGE16, which allows you to set-up your first title in their distribution system with fees waived. Normally that’s a $49 fee per book.

Second, in order to make your e-books available on most virtual shelves, you need access to OverDrive – the largest e-book platform for library vendor sales globally. Libraries that buy direct from publishers for any format are few and far between, so you need access to this. There are many ways to get on OverDrive that ensure the writer is paid for their content, including Smashwords, UnTreed Reads, eBooksAreForever, agency-based, and direct. I’ve gone through the last two and now all of my titles are published through an exclusive OverDrive publisher partner contract.

Third, let’s go over pricing. Librarians have long asked for long-term access to e-books at fair prices. They don’t want to pay $60 per an e-book title that will eventually disappear from their catalogs if the title isn’t renewed. So price accordingly. That’s how I got into library catalogs in more than half the United States. Be reasonable about what you’re promoting to libraries. They want to work with you but they are also trying to serve a community of thousands with books that are both desirable and appropriate for their patrons.

Now what about getting physical copies onto their shelves?

There are ways to accomplish this as well. It’s more difficult than e-book integration but with some effort I know that my hardcover titles are in 55 library systems across the United States. Why is the system itself important? Because each state has multiple systems of libraries. Sometimes they’re regional, sometimes they’re organized on the county-level, and others serve entire cities. But within each system are dozens of individual libraries. Being in more than four dozen regional systems has therefore made it possible for me to be in hundreds of individual libraries.

Photo by Terah Edun of the Mid-Continent Public Library System.

For example, The Mid-Continent Public Library System in Missouri is one such system that carries my books. They alone carry six copies of Sworn To Raise’s hardcover in circulation. The PINES Regional Catalog in Georgia is another such system with my books, this time they have 10 copies circulating for patrons and readers. Just as in print, my e-book presence has grown to extend to more than half the states in the United States – in large part due to OverDrive. I’m in library e-book catalogs as far north as Maine and as far south as Arizona. All of this is obtainable. As a self-published author I had to market my butt off and work hard with smart outreach to get my books in all the libraries that they connected with.

Photo by Terah Edun of the North Carolina Digital Public Library.

In order to market to librarians you need to learn what it is they’re looking for and how to get into touch with them. Librarians are looking to purchase materials in all available formats according to their patron preferences. As an author you need to know what those preferences are4 as well as some of my favorite marketing solutions for outreach:

• 74.2 percent of library e-book collections consist of fiction titles. Of those fiction titles, nearly 70 percent are Adult.
• Spanish is king in non-English language titles with over 90 percent of foreign language acquisition books.
• If you’re a young adult or children’s author, librarians love active participation and bigger collections are your friend.
• 70 percent of librarians say they have no plans to acquire self-published titles, but as quality materials have grown that number has diminished.
• Outreach is a crucial step – find out what you can do with your local library and through national organizations like Romance Writers of America, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, or Young Adult Library Services Association.

It is my goal, and always has been, to expand the reach of my series, like Courtlight, and give readers as many access points as possible. Now that librarians have the ability – the drive, even – to work with publishers from all sectors to enhance their collections for the public readership, I have found that the library is the perfect venue to gain new readers and an even more dedicated readership for future titles.

Terah Edun is a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling high fantasy author who can be found at terahedun.com and on Twitter @tedunwrites.

The post Why Self-Published Authors Need Libraries and Vice Versa appeared first on MediaShift.

The book industry, like many areas of the media business, straddles two worlds. On one side is the 21st-century digital maelstrom, a place where software, platforms, devices and networks are upending the way authors and publishers do their work, and how readers buy and read books. On the other side is the traditional book industry, which revolves around the centuries-old concept of printing words on paper.

Casual observers might suppose that the traditional concept of a “book” is about to expire, as people switch to phones, tablets, and audiobooks. I have news for them: It’s not going to happen anytime soon. Printed books have shown a surprising amount of resiliency and flexibility (case in point: adult coloring books) and still sell very well. For my own publishing business, printed books account for 80 percent of sales (up from 70 percent three years ago).

As a consumer, I prefer traditional printed books over e-book editions. They are easy to use, don’t require batteries, and are sufficiently portable to bring on the subway or take to the beach. Like many readers, I do not want printed books to go away—in fact, I will continue to buy printed books as long as the titles are interesting and the prices are reasonable.

That said, as someone who is engaged in the business of producing and selling books, I so much prefer to be working on the edge of the digital maelstrom. It’s fraught with unpredictable change, but at the same time it’s an exciting, dynamic, and hopeful place to be working. At the same time, prospects for widespread improvements in the way publishers do business are not possible while the traditional book industry is hobbled by old ways of thinking and a few dominant players who are highly resistant to change. Take the Bowker ISBN monopoly, which makes millions off the backs of enthusiastic yet naive authors and new publishers in the United States. Then there are the big-name publishers that regularly leave books hanging in editorial limbo for years before finally releasing them. The practice of publishers launching books with little or no marketing support is a longstanding problem that has gotten worse as publishers attempt to cut costs.

Drawbacks to relying on editorial instinct

A huge impediment to the publishing industry is the bureaucratic mindset that prevents many organizations from embracing innovation. There are many opportunities available to organizations that are willing to embrace change. Yet innovation is regarded as a threat, as evidenced by the many outmoded and inefficient models in the book industry.

Consider the various processes associated with selecting and preparing books for publication. The traditional industry relies on skilled editors who serve as gatekeepers. They field calls from agents, go through the slush piles, edit the works, and shepherd the manuscripts through the publishing process. Alan Rinzler, who has been an editor for more than 50 years, described the process to NPR:

“Editors fall in love with books. They see something in it that resonates for them personally and they become passionate about it. They really have no idea whether or not the book will sell. It’s strictly an intuition, an instinct.”

Editors’ instincts sometimes yield massively successful books. A new author who stays on the best-seller lists for 20 weeks did not get there by accident. Someone at a publishing house saw potential in his or her manuscript, and an editor—or team of editors—worked with the author to finesse the text and bring it to the marketplace. Their editorial intuition is correct, and the book is a success.

Most of the time, however, books fail to make back the massive investments in time, money, and other resources. According to the same NPR article, 80-90 percent of books don’t sell. That does not mean the books are bad. But it does indicate that most titles fail to resonate with readers. It further points to a huge hole in publishers’ understanding of the marketplace … and a huge opportunity to close the gap.

In the past two decades, innovative companies from giants such as Amazon to startups such as Jellybooks have developed new data sources and new ways of measuring reader interest. Amazon is very skilled at identifying and promoting promising titles, but doesn’t share much of its data with publishers. However, publishers do have access to new types of data and services that can help gauge reader interest. For instance, Jellybooks’ technology measures how many pages readers read in a given book. If incorporated into the publishing workflow, such data could help identify titles and trends that have a much better chance of succeeding. Nevertheless, the traditional book industry still prefers to do things the old-fashioned way—by trusting gut instincts. It’s incredibly inefficient, as demonstrated by the poor success rate for new books and the ongoing struggles of the industry.

Using Lean Media in the book industry

Is there a middle ground? Over the past few years, I have been developing the Lean Media framework as a way for all kinds of media companies to change the way they develop and release books, film, magazines, music, websites, videogames, and other information and entertainment works. By reducing waste and understanding audiences, creative teams can be more focused on making great media. Conceptually, it looks like this:

Practically speaking, Lean Media entails streamlining operations and connecting with readers before the launch. Publishers can start by identifying delays, redundancies, and unnecessary processes, and working to reduce or eliminate them so the creative team (authors, editors, designers, etc.) can concentrate on developing books, instead of dealing with excessive meetings and months-long approvals. Publishers also have to be willing to show manuscripts or other draft materials (character sketches, outlines, cover designs, etc.) to beta readers and focus groups, and gathering both qualitative and quantitative reactions.

One example of Lean Media in action comes from Red Chair Press. The Massachusetts-based company recently launched Scary Tales Retold, a series of horror-themed fairy tales aimed at young readers aged 6-9. Publisher Keith Garton came up with the idea, and worked with an author and illustrator to create a half-dozen titles, including Cinderella and the Vampire Prince, Goldilocks and the Three Ghosts, and Jack and the Bloody Beanstalk. As part of the development process, Garton showed manuscripts to two groups—kids and parents—to gauge their reactions. It was crucial to validate the idea among both audiences prior to publication, as the books were intended to tread a fine line between being funny and scary. The kids liked the concept, and giggled at some of the more outrageous scenarios (for instance, Cinderella as a vampire, Jack getting squashed by the giant, etc.). Red Press also received feedback from parents, who are sensitive to books that are too scary for young kids. One piece of parental feedback that Red Press incorporated was the books should be limited to a certain age range that should be clearly stated on the cover.

Regardless of the feedback received, the Lean Media framework recognizes that the creative team is ultimately responsible for deciding how to move the project forward. In other words, authors and editors are still calling the shots—but they are doing so with a better understanding of readers. For publishers, it offers a new way to develop manuscripts and create books that audiences love.

It’s time for more publishers to consider how better data, new technology, lean thinking, and other innovations can be brought into their businesses. Embracing change is not easy, but when it comes to making media, clinging to the past is not an option.

Ian Lamont is the founder of i30 Media Corp. and serves on the board of the Independent Book Publishing Association. He writes about Lean Media at leanmedia.org. Follow him on Twitter at @ilamont.

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We live in an era in which we expect information to be provided to us at the click of a button. Paul Otlet, a Belgian librarian and father of the Universal Decimal Classification, was motivated by the notion that the world’s information materials could one day be non-rivalrous through technological innovation. Otlet’s vision of technology generating access is being realized today, as many libraries and archives are in the process of digitizing their collections on massive scales.

Click the image for the full series.Base image via Shutterstock; photo illustration by Kerry Conboy.

Digital collections may grant broader and non-rivalrous access, but there are many consequences to the process that should be considered before creating the digital Library of Alexandria; one of which is maintaining individual privacy.

What happens when the analog becomes digital? Archives collect primary source materials of enduring value to society, like personal papers and organizational records. These records become accessible to anybody who visits the archives and requests access to the collections. Before the internet, accessing these collections required a researcher to travel to the archives, request materials from the collection, examine the papers within the physical confines of the archive, make copies or transcribe information from the documents, and then synthesize the findings at home.

Digitizing analog collections disrupts the flow of information, allowing for broad and non-rivalrous access, and user capacity to store, copy, transmit, publish, and publicize potentially private information gleaned from the archives.

Where the Right to Privacy Comes From

The right to privacy is compelling and finds support in constitutional guarantees. The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech allows for people to be secure in their personal thoughts and beliefs. The Fourth Amendment protects the right of individuals “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” It is an ethical expression of the physical properties of privacy. But the constitution’s language leaves room for legal and theoretical interpretations, which has led to many different articulations of privacy as it applies to the individual.

Perhaps the most famous description of privacy comes from Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in their influential article “The Right to Privacy” written in 1890. They conclude “that the protection afforded to thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, expressed through the medium of writing or of the arts, so far as it consists in preventing publication, is merely an instance of the enforcement of the more general right of the individual to be let alone,” thus extending intellectual property law to respect the right of an individual to control information from being published. While it may not be articulated in the law as such, it is articulated in our own assumptions of personal welfare, justice, and above all self-determination.

The New Ethics of the Online Researcher

The examples used by Warren and Brandeis illustrate some of the issues of privacy negotiated by contemporary archives. “Suppose a letter has been addressed to [an individual] without his solicitation. He opens it, and reads. Surely, he has not made any contract; he has not accepted any trust. He cannot, by opening and reading the letter, have come under any obligation save what the law declares; and, however expressed, that obligation is simply to observe the legal right of the sender, whatever it may be, and whether it be called his right or property in the contents of the letter, or his right to privacy.”

The individual in this scenario might very well be a researcher accessing a collection of correspondence in the archives. Upon entering the archives, most researchers present a form of identification and follow rules pursuant to a registration form, creating contractual obligations (or at the very least, social expectations) between the archives, the researcher, and the individuals represented in the correspondence. Though these third parties likely had no idea that they would have their letters read by anyone other than their intended recipient, the rules of the archives have created a system of protections that puts liability and pressure on the researcher to act in accordance with legal rules and social norms, respectively.

Warren and Brandeis could not have anticipated how technology would change how information flows. Today, the researcher doesn’t have to enter the archive at all. Nor does he have to present identification or sign a registration form.

CC0 Public Domain photo.

Privacy in the Archives

In terms of assigning value to personal privacy, humans can be overwhelmingly myopic. We want (and have a right to access) information concerning others, but are hesitant to allow information about ourselves be viewed by the general public. We become upset when our most intimate secrets are shared – but why?

The very nature of generating meaningful relationships and building our own identities requires a degree of intimacy, and most social individuals have at some point shared secrets with others. If privacy is a right to appropriate flow of personal information as Helen Nissenbaum, Professor and Director of the Information Law Institute at New York University, suggests, does the digitization of personal letters constitute a privacy violation?

Different actors have different privacy concerns within the context of the archives. The donor of a collection enjoys full intellectual control over the collection, ideally having legally created or owned all of the collection’s contents. In this scenario, the donor can easily transfer all rights to the repository through an agreement. More often than not, donors are not the sole creator or owner of the materials they donate. Many collections are wholly comprised of letters sent to the donor by family members or friends. When this happens, archivists try to leverage the donor’s knowledge of the collection’s contents to identify areas of risk. Of course, this approach only works if the donor does have deep knowledge of the materials, which they often do not given the breadth of many collections.

The other actors with legitimate privacy concerns are the third parties depicted knowingly (or unknowingly) in collections. “[T]he privacy of so-called third parties who may be represented in a collection can be the most worrisome and difficult to address,” writes Sara Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts at the Huntington Library. “[They] had no voice in deciding the fate of the papers, and are unlikely to have been consulted about any potential sensitivity in the collection.”

Consulting all of the third parties in a collection would be an onerous process for archivists, however. It would require careful scrutiny of the collection’s contents, finding up-to-date contact information for all third parties, and finally being able to actually contact them – a difficult and labor-intensive task if the collection is large. Most personal collections do have some degree of third party representation, however.

CC0 Public Domain photo.

If any actor can be blamed for disrupting the appropriate flow of information in this process, it is the researcher who disseminates personal information that causes harm to the donor or third parties. This problem is exacerbated when you considered the limited liability and anonymity remote researchers enjoy when they access digital collections.

Access to Everything, Access to Nothing

Archives have long provided physical structure to historical collections, and archivists have long provided order to the collections inside. Though they do operate under the same guiding principles as their physical counterparts, digital archives and digital collections are not (and cannot) be the definitive solution for access – though they are motivated by the notion of democratic access to information and creating sites of all human knowledge akin to the Library of Alexandria.

These projects not only ignore the persistent problem of privacy for the individuals represented in the collections, they add to the existing problem of the information glut. While we may have access to more than ever before, we often feel as if we have access to nothing. Somewhere among all the digitized materials is the information that we need; the information that answers our questions. Digital collections reproduce curated selections from already accessed collections, rather than bringing less visible collections into view. In this way, digital collections represent human expression that has already been “discovered” and is consequently already accessible, suggests Lauren Gottlieb-Miller, Assistant Librarian at the Menil Collection and I in a forthcoming paper.

We must reconsider the concept of “access” as “visibility” and ask ourselves whether digital collections should be viewed as yet another valuable keeper of our cultural property among a bouquet of many, with the same omissions and failures of its physical counterparts; or if making all knowledge “visible” is a worthy goal.

Update: This post has been updated to add credit to the author and collaborator Lauren Gottlieb-Miller for their forthcoming paper.

Ellen LeClere is a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies. Her research interests include digital collections and barriers to accessing and using archives collections, such as copyright and imposed restrictions on private or sensitive materials. You can reach her at eleclere@wisc.edu.

The post As Libraries and Archives Digitize, Implications for Maintaining Individual Privacy appeared first on MediaShift.

With the growing popularity of self-publishing, there is one recurring question I get from almost every aspiring author: “How much should I budget?” This is a really hard question to answer because the term “self-publishing” encompasses a wide range of very different possibilities.

For example, let’s say you’ve written a first draft of your novel and just uploaded it to Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. Technically, you’re “self-publishing.” And your only monetary cost is the formatting to get the required .mobi file, which can be done for free via several online tools.

Now, if you want to have a chance of selling that book, you need to replicate at least some of the steps of traditional publishing and ensure a certain level of quality and professionalism. This means having your book properly edited, typeset and proofread, and hiring a designer to create an eye-catching cover. Depending on your genre and your writing ability, these can cost more or less.

It’s impossible to say, “Self-publishing your book with cost you $X.” However, it is possible to find average costs for the different steps that go into producing a book: editing, design and typesetting. And this is what the data and infographic below focus on.

Methodology

Before unveiling and analyzing the data, let’s explain where it comes from and how it was collected. First, it comes from quotes exchanged on the Reedsy marketplace. The particularity of Reedsy is that we curate our list of professional editors, designer and typesetters. The 400 professionals currently displayed on the marketplace have been hand-picked out of over 10,000 applicants. Most have extensive traditional publishing experience and all have worked on best-selling books. Their quotes obviously reflect their level of professionalism, an important point to keep in mind when reading the data below.

The average prices and ballpark ranges displayed in the infographic have been calculated using raw, unmodified data from over 2,000 quotes exchanged on the Reedsy platform. Not all of these quotes have been accepted, obviously.

Editing quotes have been broken down by type of editing (editorial assessment, developmental editing, copy-editing, proofreading) and by word count. We then applied a linear regression on the thousands of data points to determine a “price per word count” for these different services.

For cover design, we considered both quotes for a simple ebook cover (front only) and for a paperback cover (front, spine and back). The way most of our book cover designers work is that they charge a mark-up to do the paperback cover, but some do both for the same price. We therefore didn’t make the distinction in this infographic.

For interior design, all quotes have been considered, from simple ebook formatting on a straightforward novel, to the complex design and typesetting of cookbooks and coffee table books. This explains the strong variation in pricing.

The Costs of Editing, Cover Design and Typesetting

Originally posted on the Reedsy blog

Key learning points

Developmental editing vs Editorial assessment

As you can see, an editorial assessment is, on average, half as expensive as a developmental edit on the manuscript. And I think this is really important to keep in mind for authors. But before I go in more detail, here’s how we define both on Reedsy:

• “An editorial assessment evaluates big-picture issues like characterization, plot, structure and style by way of a separate document — like a professional, super-in-depth book report.” More about it here.
• For a developmental edit, the editor is working in your document with you, so in addition to the big-picture items addressed, he or she can also point out line-level issues. More about it here.

In a nutshell, the main difference is that, in a developmental edit, the editor is doing (or suggesting) the big-picture changes directly in your manuscript, paragraph by paragraph, instead of compiling an “edit letter.” This is much more time-consuming, and therefore more expensive.

Now, a lot of authors ask me: Why should I seek an editorial assessment first? Part of the answer is in the numbers above: It can actually save you money. If you get an edit letter, and redraft your manuscript based on your editor’s comments, you will weed out most of the big picture issues in your writing. This is not to say you won’t need a proper developmental edit afterwards, but because your manuscript will be in such better shape, that subsequent edit will be much less expensive.

Bundling copy-editing and proofreading

One of the things that can be surprising in the numbers is that copy-editing and proofreading, bundled together, are only slightly more expensive than copy-editing alone. The reason for this is actually pretty simple: if the same person does the copy-editing and the proofreading, they’re probably going to try to do everything in one pass. The editor will read through your manuscript and pick up every inconsistency in style, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  They will mark their changes and then proofread only those.

In other words, hiring the same editor to both copy-edit and proofread your manuscript can save you a lot of money, but it also defeats the very purpose of proofreading. Proofreading is supposed to be a final check of your manuscript, by a different pair of trained eyes, to pick up any mistakes that might have slipped through — or been introduced in the previous rounds of editing.

You are free to decide whether you want to pay for that last check or not, but know that if you do, you should hire someone else for it.

The different types of cover design

$700 might seem high to some authors as an average price for book cover design, so I’ll try to explain why it’s not. The quotes actually went from $200 to $2,000. The strong variation means that only a few quotes on the higher end can strongly impact the average price. This is why we’ve also added a breakdown by ballpark range —which is what you should really be looking at.

Now, why would some designers charge $200 and others $2,000? First, because the market is quite non-transparent (until now). Then, because there are several ways to create a cover. Custom, hand-drawn illustrations or digital paintings will obviously be much more expensive than stock photo manipulation. Even with stock photography, some is royalty-free, while some requires the designer to purchase the rights to use it. Then comes the question of how many different photos you want combined, and how hard it is to combine them.

The process can be quite different as well. Usually, designers start by realizing a few different cover concepts so you can pick a “direction” for them to go into. You pick the concept you like most and they then do several rounds of iterations on it, based on your comments. The more concepts and the more rounds of iterations, the more expensive it will be.

Bringing transparency to the market

The reasons for Reedsy releasing this data are two-fold: first, to help aspiring authors understand what it costs to “replicate” the traditional publishing process; and second, to bring some transparency to the author services market.

The democratization of self-publishing is, after all, a relatively new thing. There aren’t any rules or standards out there for editors, designers and typesetters when it comes to pricing their services to authors. The industry standards —for working with publishers— sometimes apply, but not always. Most editors and designers out there simply charge what they believe is fair, and what works for them. With this, we’re hoping to give them a sense of the market.

Related Reading

The Real Costs of Self-Publishing a Book, by Miral Sattar

Four Places to Order a Short-Run Printing of Your Book, by Carla King

Ricardo Fayet is one of the founders of Reedsy, an online marketplace connecting authors with top editors, designers, ghostwriters and publicists. An avid reader and technology enthusiast, he likes to imagine how startups will build the future of publishing.

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Tween librarian Chelsea Woods-Turner sat around a group of 10-14 year old girls in the public library’s Story Time Room and facilitated a discussion regarding what to write in the “What We Do” section of their self-published magazine On The ‘Zine.

Woods-Turner, a patient and encouraging woman who is regarded as New Brunswick’s version of Matilda’s Ms. Honey, listened to all the suggestions and helped craft a response.

Click the image for the full series.Base image via Shutterstock; photo illustration by Kerry Conboy.

“Our goal is to make new things for people to read since many authors inspire us,” the What We Do section states. “We do that by: brainstorming, working together, and gathering different topics that our city would find interesting. We love to share ideas about our neighborhood!”

On the ‘Zine is a program created by New Brunswick Free Public Library tween librarian (providing services for readers ages 10-14) Chelsea Woods-Turner and teen librarian (providing services for readers ages 14-19) Rosy Wagner. The program, which started January 2016, was made possible by a Curiosity Creates grant from the Association for Library Service to Children.

Woods-Turner and Wagner contacted New Brunswick Today, the hyper-local, bilingual, independent newspaper, and invited NBToday (and me, the community engagement director) to be an On The ‘Zine community partner.

“We reached out to NBToday because they are a local publication, so Rosy and I figured [they] had good experience with interacting with stories in the community,” Woods-Turner said. “We also thought they could provide insight into how to get stories from around town … and we like that they are a bilingual publication.”

As the community partner representative, I attended all of the On The ‘Zine planning meetings, encouraged tween writers and photographers to express themselves on the page and provided insight into what working at a newspaper is like. Working with the student writers soon became my favorite program to contribute to, and one that I feel will have a lasting impact.

From the New Brunswick Free Public Library’s Facebook page.

A Place for Self-expression

Contributors met bimonthly at the public library, and Woods-Turner also worked with local charter school students to collect submissions. The first finished issue had photo essays, movie reviews, autobiographies, a word search and more.

The advice column, a personal favorite of mine, addressed the issue of being friends with your friend’s boyfriend. The columnist suggested that “Friend not Foe” should “take the mature route” and ask her friend if she wanted to talk somewhere quiet and resolve the issue by reassuring the person that friends come first.

On The ‘Zine took a very kid-focused approach regarding the theme and direction. By giving the tween contributors direction and decision-making power, we created an empowering space for students to speak their minds in a flexible creative space.

“Kids [in New Brunswick] have a lot of venues for formal expression, such as formulaic writing in school, but few opportunities to engage in a creative outlet,” said Woods-Turner. Our hope is that the On The ‘Zine program provides the space for self-expression that tweens deserve.

The idea of empowering tweens to create commentary about their own neighborhood was central to the project, as well as my primary motive for getting the newspaper involved. New Brunswick can sometimes be a rough place — many of the public library users live below the poverty line, have family members who are involved with gangs, or have to work more than one job to make ends meet. Providing an outlet for tweens to express their feelings and thoughts about their neighborhood encourages residents to talk with one another about issues they are facing while encouraging them to discuss solutions.

A New News Demographic

The cover of the most recent edition of On the ‘Zine, a partnership between New Brunswick today and the New Brunswick Free Public Library.

As a newspaper, we try to represent all residents of New Brunswick by not only reporting on the news, but also by promoting community improvement initiatives and programs. Being able to work directly with residents and talk to them about what they thought about their neighborhood helped NBToday clarify what residents really cared about.

This program also brought a new demographic of readers to our newspaper — On The ‘Zine participants frequently discussed stories that they read on NBToday with me and would ask for updates or tell me what they heard. The only group of people who are more gossipy than teenage girls are reporters, and I definitely enjoyed the local city news we all passed around.

After the first issue came out, Woods-Turner and I discussed how we would improve the program as well as how to keep it sustainable. Our largest problem was recruitment and consistent attendance. New Brunswick is a very walkable city, but during the winter, when it gets darker earlier, many parents didn’t want their tweens to walk home by themselves. To solve this problem, the public library will be doing additional parent outreach to neighborhood parents to encourage them to provide transportation for their tweens, as well as asking parents to encourage their children to attend meetings regularly.

We will also try to diversify the gender divide in the zine by adding a male role model. Hopefully, I will be able to bring another reporter from the newspaper to the meetings for the second issue who can be a positive example for tween boys. Having a male role model who is comfortable with written self-expression and who encourages the male participants to also express themselves through writing and art could really diversify the On The ‘Zine content. We would love to have the magazine represent as many tween voices as possible by including tweens from different neighborhoods, genders, ethnicities and age groups.

The first issue of On The ‘Zine really resonated with the participants in a positive way, and I hope NBToday can continue to be a part of this process.

“The girls had a very strong reaction to experiencing ownership of their work,” Woods-Turner said. “Seeing their byline made them feel empowered and important.”

In the future, Woods-Turner expressed interest in partnering with NBToday for future issues of the zine, and possibly widening the program to include magazines by and for other age groups.

Sarah Beth Kaye works as NBToday’s Community Engagement Director. She is interested in promoting community news and programs, as well as meeting the residents of Hub City.

The Libraries + Media series is sponsored by the School of Information at San José State University. Your source for master’s degrees and professional certificates to propel your career in the information professions.

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