Magid: E-books getting easier to borrow

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” – Eliel Saarinen

You want to write a book. You need to, yearn to write a book.

OK–write a book. It’s done. You’re holding it in your hands, feeling a glow of pride and accomplishment. Not thinking about where the boxes will go will go when UPS delivers them in the next few days.

Now what?

What role does this book play in your business, in your life?

I suggest you consider those questions now, while the book is just a yearning in your heart. That way, when the boxes arrive, you’ll know how they are going to leave and give you back your garage or basement. Or living room.

Here are some possibilities:

• The book is your new professional brochure, your credentializer. It goes out with every resume, with every business proposal. You leave one in the hands of every prospect.
• Your book is part branding, part revenue source. You offer quantities of them at a discount to every meeting planner who engages you. You sell them by the box-full to existing and past clients. You sell them “back of room” at your speaking engagements. You offer a book as a bonus with the purchase of your more expensive products.
• You promote the book as a product. You get it on Amazon.com, into bookstores, and on its own sales page. You work out joint-venture deals for partners with big lists to offer it.

Those are just 3 of many ways the book can serve you. But if any of them are to happen, there are some things you should include in the book:

• Frequent references to your website, perhaps as a footer on every page. You want book buyers to join your list. Offer a gift to anyone who comes to the site and signs on.
• A cover that suits the audience and the purpose of the book.
• Appropriate testimonials on the back.
• At least one chapter that tells about your “secret sauce,” the approach that makes you different from and better than your competition.
• Case studies of the wonderful things you’ve done for clients.

In sum: I encourage you to view your book as an element in your business pursuits, not a goal unto itself. Sketch out the whole business, then fill in the details. That way you’ll know where the book fits, when it must be done, and what to do to reach that point.

Questions? Write to me: joel@joelorrcoaching.com

Here’s the deal: Insight Publishing will interview you and create an article based on that interview to be included in a book with big-name authors. Cost: $1716 for 300 copies; books will be priced at $19.95. See below the note I just got from JoAnna at insight. (And tell her you found it here, if you talk to her.)

Be part of our newest book project, Yes You Can! featuring leadership guru Dr. Warren Bennis and well-known motivator Jim Rohn. The book will focus on topics that are necessary to success & growth in your business and or personal life. The response has been phenomenal! There will be 15 chapters total in the book.

Currently I have 1 chapter left, please see some topic suggestions and project details below:
Management              Success
Etiquette                     Negotiation
Marketing                   Networking
Courage                      Leadership
Adversity                     Customer Service
Finances                      Life Balance
Transition                    Fitness/Wellness
Work Force Issues

Note: We are open to various/different topics as these are just suggestions above.

PROJECT DETAILS:
Ø  Interview based book, no heavy writing required (see sample chapters at www.insightpublishing.com)
Ø  Custom cover with your photo alongside Dr. Warren Bennis and Jim Rohn on your inventory of books
Ø  Professional editing done by our on staff editor
Ø  Book will be listed and ISBN # registered with Baker & Taylor, Bowker, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com
Ø  Newsletter will be emailed to 20,000 meeting planners listing the bio, photo and topics of each co-author
Ø  Custom press release provided to each author to promote book
Ø  21 Ways to Market your Book plan provided to each author
Ø  Cost is $1716 for your inventory of 300 books with your custom cover. Books will retail for $19.95 (Larger packages available)
Ø  You will own the copyright to your chapter and can use it for whatever purpose you wish in the future
Ø  E book Rights – Each participant will receive the E book upon on completion at no additional cost

I would love to hear from you so we can discuss ways you can use this program to further your career. Please contact me at 1.800.987.7771 ext 27. If this is not a good fit for you, please forward it to others you know who may benefit from the exposure of being in a book with leadership expert Dr. Warren Bennis and beloved motivational speaker Jim Rohn.

Sincerely,

JoAnna Ward
Project Coordinator
Insight Publishing
A division of The Innovators Group, Inc.
647 Wall Street
Sevierville, TN 37862
1.800.987.7771 ext. 27
865.429.4523 – fax
mail to: joanna@insightpublishing.com
http://www.insightpublishing.com

Phuket, Thailand 12/26/04

On a beautiful clear day in Phuket, the water started coming in, like the tide–and just didn’t stop. Not a big crashing wave; just water, rising, and not stopping. The in-and-out motion of the horrendous waves that destroyed so many and so much all over that part of world, the violent breakers–they were not in evidence at first.

That was December 26, 2004. I hope you will pardon the dramatic metaphor, but that is what I see happening to book publishing. Control is shifting inexorably out of the hands of the publisher into those of the author. It’s not a huge breaker, but it is a tidal wave. The economic shifts have only just begun. No traditional publisher will be left unchanged; many will not survive the shift.

You probably know what’s doing it: The Internet; print-on-demand machinery and services; “pay for production only when you sell a book” services like Lulu.com and  (Amazon’s entry); and the subtle but pervasive spread of the “information wants to be free” meme.

Marketing guru Seth Godin publishes first for free, in PDF, on the Web; then he offers print copies. Fiction writers like Cory Doctorow put their stories out for free.

The “back end”–going from PDF to printed book–has already been revolutionized by Lulu.com and its ilk. But the process of creating a book, with its cycles of collaboration, design, editing, revision, has still not changed much.

Now comes FastPencil, which I have dubbed a “book-writing portal.” The company is a Silicon Valley startup, funded in December, 2008, and already ahead of schedule in terms of revenues.

“We’re an end-to-end toolset for anyone who wants to write, publish, distribute a book, built on top of a social network,” says CTO and founder Michael “Mash” Ashley, who used to publish and sell surf maps to avid surfers. “I got the idea through an experience my mother had. She wanted to write and publish a children’s book, mainly to read to my daughter, and was totally frustrated by the obstacles to getting a book out. So I took the manuscript from her and got 100 copies published.”

“She was moved to tears. It was her dream, come true! But what I hadn’t foreseen was the reaction of all our relatives, gathered for Christmas that year. They ALL had a book in them that they wanted to publish! That’s what planted the idea in me for FastPencil,” said Ashley.

FastPencil is a collaborative portal. You set up writing projects, invite people to participate. It saves and manages successive versions. When you are ready, you examine the publishing alternatives FastPencil offers.

Here’s what the site says: “Through a process we call Guided Collaboration, you can bring in new acquaintances and old friends to help you turn your idea into a masterpiece. At any point in the process you can connect with like-minded people, share knowledge, chat, gather feedback from reviewers and editors, and collaborate with other authors, all without leaving FastPencil.”

When your masterpiece is complete, you can get it edited; get a cover designed; publish it electronically and in hard copy; get it to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble; all without leaving the site.

Use of the portal is free. They make money when you buy services from them, such as publishing.

Check it out. And friend me there. Surf the tsunami.

NewScientist: A STATISTICAL method that picks out the most significant words in a book could help scholars decode ancient texts like the Voynich manuscript – or even messages from aliens.

Humans find it easy to identify the words that capture the theme of a text – for example, that “whale” is a key word in Moby Dick – but this is a difficult task for computers. Now Marcelo Montemurro, a systems biologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues have developed a method to identify word importance based on a branch of mathematics called information theory. “It seems that what we call semantics or meaning has a signature at the level of the statistics of words,” says Montemurro.

Simply counting the frequency of words in a text is not enough, as connective words such as “for” and “the” confuse the picture. Important words tend to clump in paragraphs and chapters that deal with the topic they relate to, but this only provides a crude guide, says Montemurro.

For a more detailed analysis, the team calculated the “entropy” of each word, a measure of how evenly distributed it is, in both the original text and in a scrambled version in which the words appeared in a random stream. From the difference between the two entropies multiplied by the frequency of the word, the team generated that word’s “information value” in the text. More

My friend Jon Peddie writes:

My pal Joel Orr wrote a book titled, “How to read a book in 30 days.” So I bought a book on my Kindle to test his principle. The book had 435 pages. Actually it had more than that but the story itself was just 435 pages. I figured I could read five days a week on average. So figuring 4.3 weeks a month that would give me 21.5 days to read the book, which meant I had to read 20.23 pages a day.

More

Writer/teacher Holly Lisle has this excellent advice, which works for non-fiction as well as for her fiction-writing audience:

Only write the good stuff.

That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?  Clearly you don’t want
to write bad stuff.

But I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read a post or a
blog or heard a writer say, “I can hardly wait to get through
this chapter so I can write the one I’m excited about.”

Have you ever been there.  Found yourself dragging through a
scene you’ve told yourself just HAS to be in the story because
if it isn’t, the story won’t make sense… but you’re not having
any fun at all writing that scene.  The good stuff is up ahead
somewhere, and you’re writing toward it.

Here’s a little secret.  What you’re hating to write, your
readers will hate to read.  If it’s dull for you—who in
theory at least love your story because it belongs to you—
it’s going to be twice as dull for them.

Your readers can only love what you have loved first.

If you’re having a miserable time writing the scene, stop yourself.
Look at the scene.  Something is wrong with it.

Write this somewhere in front of where you write:

If I’m not having fun with this scene, neither will anyone
else.

Write with joy,
Holly

P.S.  If you’re really struggling with scenes, I can help you.
Here’s the link to the system I use to create scenes I WANT to
write and have fun writing:

http://hollylisle.net/courses/GreatScenes

Holly Lisle

Get your own copy of this newsletter here:
http://hollylisle.com/newsletter.php

How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers
http://HowToThinkSideways.com

MY SITES:
http://HollyLisle.com
http://Shop.HollyLisle.com
http://HowToThinkSideways.com
http://MoneyToWrite.com

MY ARTICLES:
http://www.isnare.com/?s=author&a=Holly+Lisle

The F*R*E*E Courses:
Professional Plot Outline Mini-Course
http://hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/plot-outline1.html

CONTACT INFORMATION:
QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, and GOOD NEWS: courses@hollylisle.com
PROBLEMS: support@hollylisle.com

HOLLY LISLE’S WRITING UPDATES is Copyright (C) by Holly Lisle.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

I’ve mentioned Copyblogger.com before; it’s full of worthwhile stuff. Here’s a little gem.

An elderly man stormed into his doctor’s office steaming mad.

“Doc, my new 22-year-old wife is expecting a baby. You performed my vasectomy 30 years ago, and I’m very upset right now.”

“Let me tell you a story,” the doctor calmly replied.

“A hunter once accidentally left the house with an umbrella instead of his rifle. Out of nowhere, a bear surprised him in the woods… so the hunter grabbed the umbrella, fired, and killed the bear.”

“Impossible, ” the old man said. “Someone else must have shot that bear.”

“You got it,” the doctor replied.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

My wife and I came back from a great hour-long walk in Shoreline Park in Mountain View, California, and saw the truck. It had hand-painted lettering on it: IdeaFarm.com. and a few other things.

There was a sunshield, the kind with reflective foil, unfurled behind the windshield. The whole get-up looked like the rolling home of a wandering prophet, or someone who thinks of themselves that way.

He was sitting behind the truck, in the shade of a raised panel, on an old aluminum-and-plastic-mesh beach chair. He looked weather-worn, late forties. The American-flag suspenders holding up his shorts were soiled almost black, but his clothes were cleaner.

His auburn hair and beard were reasonably groomed. His smile was warm.

So we stopped and greeted him. “What’s the IdeaFarm?” was the thrust of our inquiry.

The man–his name is Wo’O Ideafarm, having been changed in 1999 from whatever it was before, answered us happily and clearly. His answer was not totally satisfying, as you’ll learn if you visit IdeaFarm.com; it’s positive, humanistic, and optimistic, however.

I won’t go into his message here; you can get from the site about all I managed to get from him beside his truck. I want to make a point about his methods.

Wo’O was a distinguished student of economics–ABD, University of Chicago; many honors–when he realized that he needed to communicate his uplifting idea to all. He’s been driving around for years doing just that.

Currently, he has–and I hope he’ll forgive me if I’m misremembering some details–a six-week course of messages, delivered in five-message blocks, one each day of the work week. Stuff short enough to read, especially if you stop at the light on the corner of Castro and El Camino Real, where he’s perched in recent weeks. The one he showed us: “Be an immigrant, not a colonist.”

He sees himself as a seed-planter. Without going to the New Testament metaphor, you can see the point: Some will “get it,” and carry it forward.

This long preamble was to point out an important lesson: Short sentences, even slogans, can take root in people and change the way they think. Not sure how successful Wo’O has been, but there’s something powerful in the approach.

So what’s the takeaway for the aspiring writer? Simply this: Words are a way into people’s minds and hearts. Carefully chosen, they can have the impact you want them to have. You needn’t use a lot of them; a few, properly delivered, will do.

So what do you think about this? Write to me: joel@joeltrainsauthors.com.

There are many careers that involve writing, but none that offers as clear a path to good income as copywriting Six-figure annual incomes are not uncommon in this profession.

But note: It is a profession, not a job. You learn a set of skills, and are forever improving them. You (generally) must find your own work, keeping your own “pipeline” full. And many gigs are one-time affairs.

So learning copywriting is not only a matter of learning the special kinds of wordsmithing used in the profession. You must also learn where to find engagements, how to price your services, what your contracts should contain and exclude, and how to run an independent business.

The “copy” referred to is advertising copy, writing to support sales. Now, before you curl your lip and sneer, let me point out a few facts about ad copy:

• Many famous writers, including Mark Twain and Joseph Heller, wrote ad copy.
• Almost nothing is sold today without the use of ad copy.
• The Web has opened up vast new markets, all needing good copy.
• You can learn to write ad copy through relatively brief courses from organizations that have substantial track records.
• The best copy is respectful of readers, authentic, and honest.
• People commonly pay tens to hundreds of dollars for brief ads, and hundreds to thousands for longer copy. Copy writing masters often receive thousands of dollars plus a percentage of sales for their work.
• Many copywriters expand their business by promoting their own products or those of others, using their skills to benefit their own sales.

Happily, there’s a lot of excellent free information about learning to write good copy on the Web. Some of my favorites are Copywriting-101 and its CopyBlogger.com site; AWAIonline (Michael Masterson’s company site, with excellent articles by leading copywriters); and Michel Fortin’s blog. Through these, you’ll find many more links of interest.

Brian from CopyBlogger lists both his own course and a couple from competitors here. (Michael Masterson’s course, noted there, seems to be the most popular one around–and has the graduate testimonials to back it