On May 21st, 2009, Irene Watson and Victor R. Volkman interviewed Pete Masterson, veteran book designer, publisher, and owner of Aeonix Publishing Group. We had a wide-ranging discussion of all things vanity press, subsidy publishing, co-publishing, and employing a “self-publishing” company.  Key discussion points included: The pros and cons of traditional large or medium sized commercial trade publishers. The pros (very few) and cons (many many) of subsidy publishers (or “self-publishing companies” as they’re calling themselves these days). Discuss the pros and cons of a do it yourself self-publishing process — with or without help from a book coach, packager, etc.

Pete Masterson is the author of Book Design and Production: A Guide for Authors and Publishers. He founded Aeonix Publishing Group in 1997 after having owned a print shop, managed a book oriented typesetting service doing work for large and medium sized publishers, and after managing the publications and graphic production contractor at NASA Ames Research Center.He is a publishing consultant, book designer, and cover designer — he is accepting a limited number of new clients. During his career he pioneered POD production for price list publications at Southern Pacific Railroad, and was an early participant with desk top publishing in a print shop setting. He has supervised production of more than 1000 publications. Currently, he is focusing on sales of his book and in sharing his publishing knowledge with the independent publishing community

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On May 8, 2009 Victor R. Volkman and Tyler R. Tichelaar spoke with computer training and accounting expert Edna Washington of Washington Consultants, LLC.  We previously recorded Edna at the 2008 Motown Writer’s Conference but response was so great that we invited her on for a full 40 minutes of Q&A about business records, taxes, and structuring your company. Edna Washington is a workshop presenter and has over 15 years accounting and computer experience. We grilled her on a variety of common startup questions incuding: Do I want to be a proprietor or a corporation? How do I setup my business so it is properly recognized? How can I amortize a large book printing over several years? Do I need QuickBooks to manage by business? What are 1099s and when do I give or receive them? How can I draw money from the business? What is the “home office” expense and can I claim it? What types of deductions are commonly missed by authors?

Edna is the owner of Washington Consultants, LLC in Detroit, Michigan. She attended University of Missouri at St. Louis. Washington Consultants provides accounting and computer services to small businesses. They also offer computer skills training for youth and adults. Mrs. Washington also volunteers with youth organizations to help young people succeed in life. She believes in giving back to her community. She believes that our youth just need to be encouraged and shown that there is a world to be conquered

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1.       What is the Amazon Kindle? 

The Amazon Kindle ebook reader was released on November 21st, 2007, just a few days shy of Black Friday. The first production run was sold out in 5.5 hours after the announcement according to CEO Jeff Bezos. Shortly thereafter, it could be found on eBay for $100 over list price.

The first generation Kindle was ridiculed by computer the industry wags branding it with various epithets from ugly  to zany  to “a bit sad” . That hasn’t discouraged consumers, who have been wanting something like this for a decade or more: an eBook reader that made sense. They’ve been voting with their pocketbooks to the tune of 6% of Amazon total book revenues . The Kindle can deliver your blogs and newspapers to you without ever leaving the comfort of your own bed—not even your dog can do that for you.

Since its release at a hefty retail price of $399, they’ve since come down about 10% to $359 and this price held even through the introduction of the revamped “Amazon Kindle 2”.

2.       How many Kindles are out there? 

There are not publically released figures but analysts say based on similar electronic products, they would have had to have manufactured 50,000 units of Kindle version 1 to get that pricepoint.

3.       How many books are really available on the Kindle?

The Kindle launched with 90,000 titles and by all accounts has accelerated to a growth rate of 10,000 titles per month. As of June 2008, there were 130,000 titles online. The most recent report puts total book titles at 240,000. Now, to put that into perspective, the current output of the book industry is roughly that many titles per year and by contrast the Library of Congress receives 500,000 items per year and has 32 million books in its collection.

4.       Can self-publishers and small presses really compete on the Kindle platform?

Now I’m going to say something really controversial: the Kindle has leveled the playing field for self-published authors and small presses in a way that has not been since the introduction of the Internet itself. There is no fee for authors to get their books up on Kindle; once they are on Kindle they look just the “same” as all other books by any of hundreds of other publishers. Yes there are some apocryphal success stories of people selling 20,000 copies on Kindle, but the average Kindle title probably moves a hundred copies of itself per year. It’s a revenue stream that’s only going to grow. Also, consider that Kindle users can download a free preview of your book. That itself could result in a sale.

You can get onboard yourself as an author through their do-it-yourself site, or you can get an experienced team to optimize the reading experience for you, as is offered by Reader Views

5.       So I can just do my Kindle conversion today, right?

Not so fast… If you are not a self-published author and your book was published in the last five years, the odds are extremely high that you don’t own your own rights to produce an electronic book.  You need to read your contract very carefully to make sure you haven’t ceded those rights directly or indirectly.  For example, by an all-inclusive clause saying “all formats the publisher wishes to utilize”.  Like every other type of product, development costs time and therefore money.  Less time than putting out a book, but still someone has to be paid to do the work for the publisher.

6.       What kind of conversions issues are there for people doing the work?

It turns out that some input file formats are much better than others.  Sadly PDF is the worst of the lot. Unfortunately, most authors have gone past the Word file stage and have made corrections in the PDF stage of production so their Word documents are no longer the best representation of the text.  This is a problem I see over and over.  Word documents are actually relatively painless. PDFs however, generate a whole set of problems including UNICODE characters—a single one will prevent the whole conversion, poor paragraph determination algorithm—resulting in chopped up paragraphs, inability to handle “smart quotes”, often problems with headings misformatted and stray page numbers landing inside the body text. A PDF conversion can take between 2 and 8 hours, even with custom-written tools. And if you fail to do it right, Amazon will refund customers purchases and eve
n kick your title off the site.  I provide a lot of tips and tricks in my new book Authors Access: 30 Success Secrets for Authors and Publishers.

7.       What’s New with the Kindle 2 product “refresh”? 

The Kindle 2 rebuffs a lot of the criticisms leveled at the first-generation kindle.  It is definitely NOT klunky, weighing in at 10 ounces and 1/3^rd of an inch thick.  You can’t stuff it in a purse, but it can fit in any type of attaché case.  The first version already had a long battery life but Kindle 2 extends that to 4 days of reading on a single charge.  They can do that because it uses not LCD technology but “electronic ink” which stays put on a single powerup so that battery is pretty much only consumed during page flipping. Of course it still uses the Whispernet, a leased use of so-called 3G cellular networks which gives you access to content with no monthly fees.  It’s now a full fledged MP3 player but that’s not saying much given that you can buy a thumbdrive which is also an MP3 player for about 20 bucks.

8.       What is the big deal about the new text-to-speech feature that reads books to you?

I’ll read to you from an article in an issue this week from the Guardian (and I hope they don’t sue me for doing so).

The Authors Guild has objected to the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech feature and Amazon — which also sells audiobooks — is giving publishers the ability to stop it working.  Following objections from the Authors Guild in the US, Amazon has caved on the text-to-speech features of the new Kindle 2 ebook reader. It will now enable publishers and authors to disable the text-to-speech (TTS) function if they want.

There shouldn’t be anything controversial about TTS: it’s been available on personal computers since the 1970s. It’s important to people who have impaired or no vision, but little used by anyone else. However, the Authors Guild argues that the audio rights for a book are different from the reading rights, even if the audio is provided by a software robot.

In “The Kindle Swindle?” an editorial  in The New York Times, Roy Blount Jr, president of the Authors Guild, argues that “Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.” He says:

True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading “Harry Potter” or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.

9.       How much are Kindle books and how much do I make as the author or publisher?

Most of the books are available at $9.99 although there are always promotional items marked down further to as little as $2.99.  It still seems like a lot of money for me for a book that is locked up in a box.  Amazon rakes off 65% of the price so with a $9.99 book that means the publisher gets $3.50 and the author maybe some percentage of that, such as 50 cents or a dollar if they are very lucky.  Everybody knows that ebooks cost “nothing” to produce so everyone has their hand out to take the profits.  Ebookstores never take less than 50% of the list price for themselves.

10.   So Kindle 2 should take over the world right?

Not so fast… Kindle 2 is maybe a little bit late to the party and still has two strikes against it. First off, it rides against the notion of digital convergence.  This is not some pie-in-the-sky concept but a real trend where content, for example movies, can be shown on your computer, your phone, and your TV seamlessly.  Furthermore, new TVs are coming out with internet connections built-in for Netflix and Amazon video downloads. Kindle is a fully closed platform in that if you buy a “kindle book” from Amazon it will never never ever be readable on your laptop, your TV, or your phone.  That means you gotta lug it with you wherever you go.

Second point:  Kindle is going to be under a lot of pressure from the new generation Netbooks. These are tiny computers with a 9 or 10 inch screen that weigh 2 pounds and run Windows XP just like a full-size computer, have wireless internet, webcams, audio, a gigabyte of memory, everything you need.  And they cost less than the Kindle 2.  I just bought one for my wife on sale at Buy.com for under $300.  If you can surf the whole world wide web, do you really want an ebook reader?  This is where Amazon has shot themselves in the foot by not allowing online reading of kindle books.  Its anti-convergence, not pro-convergence.

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Hello and welcome to a special edition of Authors Access Live. This program was recorded in front of a live audience on November 9th 2008 at the 5th Annual Essence of Motown Literary Jam Weekend at the Southern Fires Restaurant in Detroit Michigan. This event was sponsored by the  the Motown Writers Network.  This talk features Ryan Johnson of the Guild of Blades Retail Group talking about POD Printing Books and Games. GOB is the only POD printer in the USA with walk-in service (as opposed to uploading your files to an impersonal web server) and features mixed (color and black-and-white pages) book printing as well as POD card deck printing, both of which are extremely rare in my experience.

The Guild of Blades Publishing Group is a Detroit area based adventure games and entertainment publishing company. Today the company is the publisher of a half dozen unique gaming brands and publishes and distributes more than 100 in print gaming SKUs. These games range from historical and fantasy board games, miniature games, role playing games and general strategy games. Its core brands include the Empires of History line of historical board games, Overlords: Fantast Battlescape Wargame line, Button Wars Tactical Spaceship Combat Game, Worlds of Heroes & Tyrants Fantasy Quest Board Game and Epic Adventure Role Playing Game and Heroes Forever Role Playing Game. The Guild of Blades is also the publisher of a growing catalog of electronic downloadable PDF games with brands such as Grunt 3rd Edition Fantasy Miniature Battles, Dark Realms Role Playing Universe, Risk Variants, G-spot Games’s adult humor products and e-product versions of select print games. More recent major expansion programs include the Guild’s launch of the Empires of History Online Gaming Network, a growing network of turn based multi-player online strategy computer games plus the Guild of Blades Fiction Group

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On Thursday, September 18th, 2008 Irene Watson and Victor R. Volkman spoke with Tyler Tichelaar, author, entrepreneur, and current president of the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Assocation. Tyler R. Tichelaar holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Western Michigan University, and Bachelor and Master’s Degrees from Northern Michigan University. He has lectured on writing and literature at Clemson University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of London as well as at several conferences across the country.  Tyler spoke to us about key aspects of author/publisher associations including:  how does an association get started, what are the differences between regional and national associations, what do people get out of being a member, how can a regional association leverage media and publicity opportunities, how to get involved, and how to host special events/conferences.

Tyler is a regular guest host of Authors Access Internet Radio and Associate Editor at Reader Views. He is the author of the regionally bestselling Marquette Trilogy, a family saga covering seven generations between 1849-1999 and centering on the pioneers who settled Upper Michigan. The trilogy consists of the novels: “Iron Pioneers,” “The Queen City,” and “Superior Heritage.” He also recently published his fourth novel, “Narrow Lives.”

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On June 19th, 2008 Irene Watson spoke with publisher, author, and editor Victor R. Volkman about the fundamental numbers of the publishing business including ISBN registration and usage, working with the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication program, and the Book Industry Standards Group’s BISAC coding system.  Specifically, we talked about the publishing lifecycle and how library cataloging and sales fits in with rest of the picture in pre-publication publicity. Additionally, we explained the nuts-and-bolts of ISBN registration, working with Books-In-Print, and how distributors and bookstores learn about new titles.

Victor Volkman is the President of Loving Healing Press Incorporated, a small publisher which has been dedicated to producing self-help, psychology, trauma recovery, and personal growth books since 2003. LHP has produced more than 60 titles covering such diverse areas as physical disabilities, medicine and alternative health, abuse recovery, mindfulness, and critical incident stress management. Their books are sold in the USA, Canada, and the UK via Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Bertrams Books, Quality Books, New Leaf Distributing, and other distributors. The overall mission statement is simply Redefining what is possible for healing mind and spirit. He is the author of six books on topics from psychology to computer programming and his next book will be called Power Publishing.

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On Thursday, July 27th, 2007 Irene Watson and Victor Volkman spoke with Jacqueline Marcell, best-selling author on eldercare, about how to get celebrity endorsements. She shares her secrets of how she obtained more than 50 prestigious endorsements including Hugh Downs, Regis Philbin, John Hopkins Memory Clinic, Duke University Center for Aging, Dr. Nancy Snyderman of NBC News, John D. Rockefeller IV, Leeza Gibbons, Ed Asner, Dr. Dean Edell, and others. Jacqueline says her missions are to: bring attention to the importance of long-term care planning; encourage funding for Alzheimer’s research and heighten early diagnosis awareness; enlighten healthcare professionals how they can better help the families they work with; provide solutions and hope to caregivers; expose elder abuse and exploitation.

Jacqueline Marcell was so compelled by a year of being the sole caregiver to her challenging elderly father and sweet but ailing mother (both with early Alzheimer’s not properly diagnosed for over a year), that once she figured everything out, medically and behaviorally, she gave up her stalled career as a television executive to become an advocate for eldercare awareness and reform. Determination to save others from a similar experience resulted in Jacqueline’s first best-selling book which written with a humorous twist on a serious subject. “Elder Rage, or Take My Father… Please! How to Survive Caring for Aging Parents.” It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; is required text at numerous universities for courses in geriatric assessment and management; and is being considered for a feature film.She is a big fan of www.BlurbsForYourBooks.com which is mentioned se veral times in the show but please use the above link because a lot of people have mistyped it.  Thanks

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On Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 8:00PM EDT we spoke with Stanley Greenfield, president of Dial-A-Book, an enterprise which distributes more than 115,000 book excerpts to online bookstores and public library catalogs. Stanley spoke to us about how a self-published author or small press can get their book excerpts online quickly and painlessly.  He also educated us in the basics of foreign rights sales, territories, how deals are done, and what to expect.

Dial-A-Book, which produces an innovative service called “Chapter One” that delivers browsable excerpts online retailers and library catalogs. Its database contains excerpts of 115,000 books prepared with the permission of more than 1,200 imprints/publishers.  Stanley will be speaking to us this evening on book promotion tactics, creating and managing foreign rights sales, magazine publishing, and his three decades in the publishing industry.

Chapter One distribution capabilities form the basis for the new PublishersPortal.com service which guarantees the distribution, if they handle the book, of first chapters of books of participating publishers at: Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Books-in-Print, Buy.com, EBSCO, Ingram, OCLC as well as hundreds of library on-line public access catalogs (OPACs).

Stanley R. Greenfield was senior vice-president of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company for many years. He acquired Information Access Company for Ziff-Davis and built the first on-line, X25, multi-magazine full text data bases. He served as president of its Franklin Square Subscription agency, the largest catalog subscription agency in the US.
 
At the Nicholas Publishing Company which he founded, he created and produced seven directories. Two received ALA “Outstanding Reference Book of the Year” designations. The National Directory of Addresses and Telephone Numbers (first edition, Bantam Books, 1975) sold more than one million copies of its annual editions.

During the late 70s, the Nicholas Publishing company was the sole representative of the People’s Republic of China for the acquisition of all scientific and technical bibliographic materials from the United States, including: serials, monographs, indexing and abstracting services, patents, U.S. government documents, judicial materials and commercial data bases. This function was performed with the knowledge and consent of the Departments of State and Commerce.
 
Mr. Greenfield served as president and publisher of Playbill, the Broadway theater magazine. He was founding publisher, The Corporate Board, The Journal of Corporate Governance. He holds a BA, in physics, from the Johns Hopkins University and an MBA, with distinction, from the Harvard Business School.
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During the run up to our initial broadcast date, we are releasing four different Sneak Previews which will introduce you to the Authors Access team of Irene and Victor.

These are ordinary MP3 files which you can download and listen in whatever ways that you usually do that.  Click on a link below to start listening.

• Sneak Preview #1
• Sneak Preview #2
• Sneak Preview #3
• Sneak Preview #4

NOTE: Each PODcast is about 5MB so allow up to 30 minutes if you have a slow dialup modem.

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