Am I the only one who thinks this is a very big deal? Textbooks and their publication are an industry in turmoil, and I believe this is an important direction. What do you think?

By MOTOKO RICH

Readers can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest
publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called
DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions
of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course
syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably,
rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years —
allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from
other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the
power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the
original authors or publisher.

“Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the
content right there and make whatever changes they want,” said Brian Napack,
president of Macmillan. “And we don’t even look at it.”

More: Click below
February 22, 2010
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html

John has made a career out of helping people market and promote books. His 1001 Ways to Market Your Books is an essential addition to any author’s library. He has an email newsletter, John Kremer’s Book-Marketing Tip of the Week, at his website; you should subscribe to it, if you are serious about promoting your book.

Here’s the table of contents of the current issue:

In this issue . . .
– Giving books to radio/TV hosts
– Tweets you don’t want to miss
– Using a Virtual Assistant to Help You Sell More Books
– Amazon.com #17 hit
– Turning lemons into lemonade: website feedback you can use
– Reporter Connection
– specialty retailers

While the exact numbers aren’t public, Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic book reader has been a huge success. And the way Amazon has things set up, it is silly for anyone who has a book not to convert it to the Kindle. Here are the steps:

1. Make sure that your manuscript is in a format acceptable to Amazon: HTML; PDF; plain text; MS Word (.doc); or Mobi (.mobi or .prc). Also, for marketing purposes, make sure you have links to your website within your book.
2. Head over to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform site. Fill out the paperwork. Follow the instructions to prepare your book for conversion.
3. You’ll need a cover image that’s at least 500 pixels on its longest side, TIFF or JPEG. And if you have any color images, convert them to simple grayscale before uploading; the Kindle can only display 4 shades of gray.
4. Your share of any sales is 35%. You set the price of your book. The vast majority of Kindle titles are around $10, but they range from free to $100+.

That’s it! Now, you might think that 35% isn’t much; after all, if you publish a book yourself, you get to keep the entire sale price. But consider: From your sale price, you must pay your production costs, your marketing costs, and any other costs. On Kindle, Amazon does it all for you. All you do is upload your book.

By all means, do good keyword research and make sure your book will be found by people looking for it.

Your Kindle income stream can become a nice addition to your information publishing empire.

Check out WeFeelFine. Especially the interactive version you’ll find on this site. The authors (Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar) wrote software to scan blogs for feelings and categorize them in different ways, then present them in different ways.

Each emotional event is a particle. The colored particles are shown in different displays. You can click on a particle and the sentence with the feeling will be displayed.

It elicits a kind of awe–even a feeling of overwhelm, for me, after a few minutes of browsing the surges of feelings.

What I love about it is that it is playful, beautiful, and profound–and that it represents a lovely evolution of the notion of “book.”

Please explore it and tell me what you think in comments here.

I’ve been watching startup FastPencil (Campbell, CA) grow from a “good idea” to a powerful, practical, writing, collaboration, and publishing environment. (I even wrote a self-referential book there, “FastPencil Your Non-Fiction Book in 30 Days!”) It’s an environment in which it is easy to create and collaborate on a manuscript, then move it seamlessly into publishing and promotion, while leaving your options open.

Check it out. It’s free.

If you do a Google search, you’ll notice that a button called “+Show options” pops up in the upper left:

If you click on it, a new sidebar pops out; it includes “Blogs”:

Click on “Blogs,” and you will see:

your search results in blogs. You can use this to find the most popular blogs in your subject area, and learn what people most care about right now. Powerful. Free.

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

This old piece of sales advice holds true for authors. Your readers want authentic feeling, and human beings have amazingly good crap detectors. If you find yourself writing without caring, just stop. Either find your genuine feelings about your topic, or find another topic.

I spent a lot of my life discounting the value and the meaning of emotions. My father’s frequent rebuke to my mother was, “You are not being logical; you’re just being emotional.” I should have gotten a clue about a certain lack of consistency when he shouted those words at the top of his lungs, sometimes while breaking furniture… but what stuck with me for a very long time were his words.

I’ve learned in recent years that, while it is still a good idea to not be led by my emotions, they have a lot of information to offer me. The more I understand my emotions as an important part of all that is me, the wholer I get.

I shoot for congruence, for integrity; for being the same inside and out. And I believe my readers can tell when I am not in harmony with what I am writing. My shorthand for describing that desired state is “caring.”

Care. And if you don’t or can’t, change something.

A new friend sent me his white paper about an astonishing, world-changing invention. The white paper is nicely done; the writing is great, and it’s full of good illustrations. The invention is truly significant.

But most people won’t read the white paper. Why? Because it’s a white paper, redounding in detail.

Even people in the field need a context, a reason to add to their daily reading burden, and they need it fast. They don’t get one from this white paper.

Eli Goldratt, a brilliant inventor in the field of manufacturing operations, faced a similar challenge when he was promoting his nine-dimensional-math-based software solution to factory scheduling problems. The people who really stood to gain from the software could not even understand that he was addressing their problem.

So with Jeff Cox, he wrote a novel: “The Goal.” (Recommended reading, even if you are not in manufacturing.) The book brought all of the abstruse issues down to earth, in the context of a page-turner of a novel.

If you have a complex, technical story to tell, and are having trouble getting people to listen, consider contextualizing it as a human story, with real emotions, a plot line–and a believable ending.

Dalia and I are in Israel. We just took a rare day off from work and went to see an exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The main exhibit was “Human Nature,” by Tzadok Ben David. It included “Blackfield” and some other large pieces.

The work’s impact is hard to describe. It consists of many small and large natural shapes–figures of people, animals, and plants and trees–ranging from a few inches to 15 feet in height. Most are cut out of flat metal–different types of steel and aluminum–with a plasma cutting torch. (The link above is actually to a slide show; click  on the small right arrow beneath it to “walk through” the exhibit.)

When you come into the exhibit room, and realize what you are looking it, it is stunning. Thousands of tiny cutouts of plants, like Audubon drawings in their precision, all black. As you walk around to the other side, first you see all the little cutouts in profile, so that they are nothing more than black sticks. Then when you reach the back, you are amazed to see a rainbow of color! All the backs of the cutouts are painted in bright colors.

What can a book writer learn from this exhibit? Here are some of my thoughts:

• The viewers are fascinated by a lot of realistic detail. So are readers of a non-fiction back. Share a lot of facts.
• The presentation is unusual; one does not know what to expect. Think of appropriate ways to surprise your reader, to bring them depth and color in striking ways.
• The shapes–both of the tiny plants, and the other sculptures–are taken from life: People; plants; trees. No abstract geometry. People are interested in real things, presented interestingly, from different angles.

Another, smaller, exhibit showed paintings by Aram Gershuni, a self-taught artist who paints with photographic realism–see some of his work on his website.

His paintings are fascinating. They are like large photographs–yet, not. He doesn’t sign them, but I get the feeling that even this brief exposure would enable me to recognize his work.

Some book-writing thoughts I had as I enjoyed his paintings:

• I felt his love for his subjects in all of his paintings. Does your love for your subject come across in your writing?
• His portraits of his family members might be considered unforgivingly realistic; there is no attempt to mask or soften blemishes or wrinkles. Yet they come across as having integrity, as having character, as having a life journey that would be interesting to know more about, even if it has difficult and painful passages. I want my writing to have those characteristics.
• As photographic as Gershuni’s style is, there is no doubt of its subjectivity. He chose the people and other subjects, and how to present them. These representations are Gershuni’s representations, and they make no claim to being anything else. Do I always write with conviction, with a willingness to give my honest opinion and stand behind it?

I could have gladly spent hours more there, but I needed to get back to work. And write this for you.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to comment.

I love Randy Ingermanson’s writing and teaching. Among many other accomplishments (“Writing Fiction for Dummies,” for one), he is the inventor of “the Snowflake Method” of fiction writing, which you can read about on his website. Even though I have never written any fiction (not on purpose, anyway), and have none in the works right now (as far as I know), I read Randy’s blog and other stuff regularly.

Writing is communicating, whether it’s stories or “reality.” And Randy not only does it well, he teaches it interestingly and entertainingly. With his permission, here is a piece from his latest ezine, which I recommend to you:

Organizing: Does Multitasking Make You Stupid?

Computers are faster and smarter and more efficient
than ever. They run at gigahertz speeds, using
gigabytes of memory, giving you giga power to get
things done.

Even so, once in a while, most machines seem to freeze
for several seconds, stuck in some mysterious inner
world that you know nothing about.

If they’re so fast and so smart, why should they ever
freeze like that?

There are several reasons, but one common reason is
that your computer is multitasking — it’s doing
several things at once, and it’s gotten its scheduling
out of whack. It’s forgotten to get back to you, at
least for a while.

Multitasking is usually a wonderful thing, especially
on modern machines with multiple brains. A
well-programmed computer with several CPUs can work
dramatically faster than a computer with only one, all
other things being equal.

The problem is that it’s tricky to take account of all
possibilities. Once in a while, your computer gets
itself tied in a knot and it zones out on you, even
with multiple brains. Multitasking occasionally makes
your computer stupid.

It’s dangerous to make a direct analogy between
computers and human brains, because they really aren’t
the same thing. But it does appear that multitasking
makes us stupid too.

Let’s be clear about one thing — the human brain is a
fantastic computing device, capable of doing enormously
complex calculations, especially in image-processing
and in intuitive situations where logic isn’t enough.
So when I use the word “stupid” here, I mean it in a
relative sense.

Multitasking makes us less sharp than we would be if we
were focusing on only one thing.

Most times, this doesn’t matter. Most people most days
can walk and chew gum at the same time, and talk on the
phone and consume oxygen and watch the ducks build
snowmen.

But notice one thing — of the five things I just
listed, all but talking on the phone are pretty
automatic and don’t require conscious thought. You can
walk without thinking about it. Ditto for chewing gum.
Ditto oxygen. Ditto the ducks — unless they really are
building snowmen. If that’s the case, as soon as your
consciousness takes note of the snowmen, the phone
discussion is going to shift direction radically.

And that’s the point. Once one of your tasks percolates
up to the conscious level, you lose the ability to
focus on any of the others.

If you Google the phrase, “Does multitasking make you
stupid,” you’ll find an amusing array of articles to
choose from. (It’s best to read these one at a time.)
Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

* When you’re trying to switch rapidly between several
tasks that take conscious thought, you lose efficiency.
A lot of efficiency — as much as 30% to 50%.

* Some studies show that when you’re focusing on a task
that takes a lot of concentration, an interruption that
breaks your focus can cost you about 20 minutes of lost
focus. This means that if you get interrupted more
often than every 20 minutes, you might NEVER actually
get into a deeply focused, productive state.

* Multitasking can actually lower your performance on
IQ tests — by about 10 points. Smoking a joint only
costs you 4 points. So if you have to choose between
multitasking and marijuana, the choice should be clear,
although your boss and your government probably see
things differently. Bosses and governments love
multitasking.

When people say that “multitasking makes you stupid,”
all of the above is what they mean.

So what’s a busy writer to do? You can’t shut off the
world, can you?

No, but you can shut off some parts of the world. If
you’re doing something that takes concentration (such
as writing fiction), you can take a few steps to make
yourself more productive for a well-defined period of
time while you focus:

* Unplug the phone or disable it or feed it to the dog.
Do what it takes.

* Close your e-mail program or at least disable it from
doing those useless automatic checks every five
minutes. The world is not going to end if you don’t get
e-mails instantly.

* Shut down all instant-messaging, texting, or anything
else that can interrupt you.

* Get a clock with a timer and set it for 50 minutes of
uninterrupted writing. Then write.

You can do a lot in 50 minutes of quality, productive,
uninterrupted, non-multitasking time. An awful lot.

Many writers find that they write more productively
when they’re listening to music. Some writers can’t
listen to vocal music but they thrive on instrumental
music. I’m the opposite — instrumental music bores me
into a potato-like state, but I can write 1000 words
per hour with the right kind of vocal music.

Oddly enough, certain European heavy metal groups work
best for me. I have no idea why, but it’s a fact that
just about any song by Nightwish or Hammerfall or
Dragonforce makes me more productive. I discovered them
on Pandora.com, a music streaming web site which is
smart enough to learn what kind of music you like and
bring you more of it.

If music gets you rolling, then find out what works
best and use that. Load up your favorite music on your
computer, or log into Pandora.com, or just turn on the
radio, and then pour out the words.

Writers often ask me what my secret is for being so
productive. If I have a secret, it’s this:

Singletasking makes you smart.

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, “the
Snowflake Guy,” publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing
E-zine, with more than 19,000 readers, every month. If
you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction,
AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND
have FUN doing it, visit
http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing
and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.