Self-Publishing Review  is the brainchild of Los Angeles novelist Harry Baum.  It’s been around for awhile, but it’s just recently gotten a significant overhaul.  While anyone can visit and browse, writers should consider “joining” the community to gain full access to the site.  Members can post to the blog, though posts are held for approval before they appear online.  They can also participate in group discussions.   These features open up the site to lots of different inputs and points of view.

A major feature of the site are detailed reviews of self-published books.  Most are traditional reviews of a book’s literary qualities.  More helpful to authors aiming at self-publication are more recent reviews of the design of individual self-published books, written by book designer Joel Friedlander.  Joel is very specific in his observations, pointing out exactly what he likes and what he thinks could have been improved.  By reading these reviews, potential self-publishers can pick up a lot of tips about how to approach book and cover design.  I find these reviews fascinating.  Joel also maintains an exceptionally useful blog at The Book Designer.  When you visit his blog, consider downloading the free booklet about prepping one’s files for uploading to Lightning Source — and subscribe to his free newsletter.  He has a Facebook Fan Page too.

Speaking of design, Self-Publishing Review identifies on its Resources page a useful book cover design tool.  I’ve never come across it before.

• Book Cover Pro — a program dedicated to turning out reasonably good covers.  I’ll be trying it out myself.

Following through a series of links, I eventually found another website with a number of tools that may be of interest to self-publishers:  Self-Pub Net.

AND ANOTHER SELF-PUBLISHING REVIEW

Actually, there’s yet another website with similar title, but it’s located as a blog at Blogspot:  The Self-Publishing Review.  This blog is maintained by Jane Smith out of the United Kingdom.  She has been active as a writer, researcher and editor for 20 years.  This blog does serious reviews of self-published books.  If you’ve got a book out already, look into this blog for a potential review.

Jane also maintains How Publishing Really Works, which gets more into the nuts and bolts of publishing.  This site is open to guest bloggers.

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JUST A WEEK AGO, I blogged about online collaboration by writers, specifically pointing to a new, free online resource TypeWith.Me. Well, now online collaboration takes a HUGE STEP forward. Google has just bought DocVerse, the company that developed a Microsoft Office plug-in that allows users in different locations to work simultaneously on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Now writers will be able to collaborate using familiar tools.

DocVerse was developed over the past three years by two former Microsoft employees.  On 5 March 2010, the company was bought by Google, which puts real muscle behind the product.  Here’s what the developers wrote on the DocVerse Blog:

“We fundamentally believe that Google is one of the best positioned companies to truly disrupt the world of productivity software.  We’re looking forward to the opportunity to scale our vision at Google.  Our first step will be to combine DocVerse with Google Apps to create a bridge between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.  I look forward to sharing more about our plans in the near future.”

The plug-in is now unavailable to users, as the development team works at integration into the Google family.  I’ll keep track of this software enhancement and pass on word once it’s again available.  In the meantime, take a brief tour of this plug-in.  It’s powerful.  I’m eager to get hold of it myself.

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I’ve been writing a lot about e-books lately.  it’s certainly the buzz topic of the season.  But I wonder:  just how many of you readers of this blog actually read e-books?  I’m betting many have yet to take the plunge.  Well, now’s your time to give it a try:  it’s READ AN E-BOOK WEEK!

This special annual event revolves around the Read An E-Book Week website.  The event is entering its seventh year already, but I’m guessing that it will gain more attention this year than ever, due to all the hullabaloo about the new e-book readers coming on market. The event was dreamed up by self-published writer Rita Toews.  She was recently interviewed about the origin, history and objectives of E-Book Week by Mark Coker of Huffington Post.

THE E-BOOK UNIVERSE

I cannot think of a better, more thorough way to get acquainted with the world of the e-book than to visit the E-Book Week Store this week.  There you will find a list of links that covers the e-book universe:

• 14 E-Book Vendors
• 16 E-Book Publishers
• 21 Authors, including Cory Doctorow
• 9 websites
• plus 16 other relevant links

Taking some time exploring these lists is like a college education about the state of e-books today.

WHAT TO READ

If you are overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of e-book titles available for download, then I have some suggestions about what to read this week, knowing your interest in building your writing career and readership.  I found these titles by browsing around the E-Book Week Store.

Smoky Trudeau’s Write Well Workshop – Episode 9 – Revisions — published just on March 4, Trudeau offers this title as a free download via the Smashwords e-book store.  The link takes you to a special catalog page of Smashword books available for free or at discount for E-Book Week.  This page illustrates how the Smashwords catalog looks and operates.  Click on the Write Well Workshop title to visit the download page.  When you get there, note especially the wide range of e-book formats available for download.  This is the genius of Smashwords:  authors can upload their manuscript [following certain directions], and a special Smashwords engine will churn out all of these versions automatically.  In case this book doesn’t ring your bell, you can look through the other 356  catalog pages of books offered free or at discount for this week.  While you are at the site, you may wish to read the site’s guide How To Publish on Smashwords.  Then you’ll know how to get your book online for next year’s Read An E-Book Week.  Note that many of the books in the Smashwords catalog have links to print versions.

Burning the Midnight Oil:  How We Survive As Writing Parents — a collection of 35 interviews and essays by various successful writers, offered for free this week only by author Dawn Colclasure.  To find the download link, scroll down to the bottom of the page.  If you poke around Dawn’s website, you’ll uncover a second free e-book on the same subject, a collection of Dawn’s own essays from 2006:  Survival Strategies for Writing Parents.

How to Create an E-book in 10 Steps — offered as a free download by business consultant Sharon Cohen.  To get it, you will need to sign up for her free email newsletter.  In case you don’t know, this is a favorite tactic by bloggers and marketers to build a mailing list — give away a product in return for an email address.  Increasingly, writers are finding a way to employ this tactic to build their own readership base, something you may wish to try at some point.  While at this website, consider signing up for Sharon’s free webinar about E-Book Marketing.  I’ve signed in to quite a number of webinars and always walk away with valuable information.  And, yes, it’s yet another new marketing tactic that some writers are beginning to use.  Try it out and see how it works.

HOW TO READ

You don’t already have an e-reader?  No problem.  There are quite a number of free e-reader applications — for your computer or for your cellphone.

One good place to find download links to popular readers is at Kobo Books.  This is one of the major online bookstores in the world, and it’s getting into e-books in a big way.  On the site’s front page, you’ll find invitations to learn more about e-readers, including specific Kobo applications for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm Pre.  You will be given precise directions about how to proceed.  And at the same time, you’ll see how a major player is getting into e-books.  Kobo’s books are in ePub format.

Adobe Digital Editions is a new, free desktop application that reads PDF and ePub formatted e-books.  The program also integrates with the Sony Reader.  During the installation process, you will be invited to register.  I recommend that you do so, as it opens the way for the software to keep track of your e-books and to read them on up to six different devices.  This digital reader, incidentally, supercedes the Adobe Reader, which almost all of us have encountered and probably have used.  Also be sure, while at the installation page, to check out the Sample Adobe Digital Library [there's a link also at the bottom of the page].  This will take you to a lot more, beautifully designed e-books., not the home-grown e-books we usually encounter.  Just a bit ago, for example, I downloaded the sample first chapter of The Geography of Bliss, a delightful reading experience in this beautiful reader.  One hint:  the page turn buttons are almost invisible, tucked away at the bottom right of the screen.

If you have one of the new Android cell phones, you will want to buy the Aldiko Reader [$1.99].  Even if you don’t have such a phone, you may wish to check this application page to see just how nice it looks.  Hmmm, maybe one can read a book on a smartphone after all.

Currently, the most popular reader for smartphone is Stanza.  There’s even a version for the desktop, which I’ve been using myself for some time.  You may recall that I wrote about this app not too long ago. This application is still in development, and its features are not yet completely set.

I’m very surprised NOT to see the Kindle and Amazon as participants in E-Book Week.  Nor is Apple there either.  Or Blio.  So even though E-Book Week’s website carries lots of information, it is by no means complete.  The e-book universe is expanding at the speed of light — especially this year.  So stay tuned for more developments.

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For a glimpse of what iPad-maximized books will look like, Penguin UK previewed last Tuesday some of its upcoming releases tailored for the iPad. The interactivity is remarkable and will, I suspect, become the hallmark of iPad e-books.

Engadget makes the comment that these are “non-books.” Certainly, they are something quite different from the traditional book. This type of iPad book goes well beyond what most writers will require. However, the Vampire Community angle presented by Penguin for one of its upcoming novels does raise questions and opportunities for novelists.

I do not yet understand just how these iPad books are created. Looks a lot like Blio working in the background to me, but I cannot confirm that.

For more information, I recommend you take a look at brief video of Penguin CEO John Markinson explaining his views of this new iPad Book experience.  He’s offers some provocative thoughts. He suggests that iPad Books provide a great opportunity for publishers.

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I covered this software back in January.  Hey, guys, keep these tips coming.

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For you novelists out there, here’s a great chance to help create the software of your own dreams.  Pass on your ideas.  And if you haven’t already done so, download the current version 1.70 for a test run.

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You can also see — and join! — our very own demonstration of the application.  What you are reading right here is my personal first draft.  But at our demonstration document, you can collaborate on this post yourself.  If people do add in some valuable content, I’ll post it back here as our first collaborative post.  This may be an effective way to gather together the collective wisdom of this blog’s readership.

The application is easy to use.  There is no need to officially register with the site, but you do need to insert a name in the box at the top right to help track your contributions to the document.  The list of names visible at the demo site are people who are currently live on the document draft.  Collaborators can also enter into live chat in the area provided.

Please collaborate with us, while seeing also how the application works.  Just click this link, which will be active for a limited time.  The document at this link hopefully will turn into a collaborative post for this blog about the utility of online collaboration, plus recommendations of other collaboration applications, if any of my readers care to chip in.  Please offer your additions and observations to my original post.  This is actually an experiment among us to see just how the application works.

For those who visit, I pose two questions.  Please enter your own thoughts into the document.  After you’ve written something, feel free to click the “Saved revisions” button.  If this little experiment is successful, I’ll post our collaborative post back here into my blog for the whole world to see.

QUESTION ONE:  CAN YOU THINK OF ANY USES  FOR THIS APPLICATION FOR WRITERS?

QUESTION TWO:  DO YOU KNOW OF OTHER  COLLABORATION APPLICATIONS THAT YOU LIKE BETTER?

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As I read my online magazine, I also remembered the observation from the current cover story of Fortune Magazine, “The Future of Reading,” about the interactions of the author’s daughter with her new issues of the print magazine Vogue, with her many sticky-note flags on pages to follow up:

…she was trying to annotate each issue [the author wrote], sorting the material by outfits, accessories, footwear, and other categories for later reference.  I noticed that the more issues she tagged, the more frustrated she became.  This was a lot of work.  So why was she doing it?

“Don’t you get it?” my wife observed.  “She’s trying to turn the magazine into a computer.”

That comment, which I read five days ago while flying across the Pacific, hit me like thunder and lightning.  I can’t get it out of my mind, for I think it strikes precisely at the essence of the revolution that’s now in full throttle.  But, mind you, the obverse is equally true as well:

We are trying to turn our computers [and other electronic devices] into magazines.

We writers are caught right in the middle.  We’ve got the content, but just how do we package it in a form that future readers will embrace and enjoy?

FROM BOOK TO E-BOOK:  AESTHETICS, DESIGN AND THE DIGITAL

Strong reinforcement for my current train of thought arrived in my email inbox this morning:  the “last-call” announcement of the Think Future Panel Two seminar scheduled for next Tuesday, March 2, at Random House in New York.  The topic:  From Book to E-Book: Aesthetics, Design and the Digital, presented by Publisher’s Weekly.  The seminar features a graphic designer and three publishing executives dealing with digital media. Details are available at the Think Future webpage.

As writers, especially those of us who will chart our own route to publication, we need to think about e-book design.  After all, the design will become the package through which we offer up our thoughts and fantasies to our readership.  And much of what passes as e-books today is unattractive and a nuisance to read.

Within the past two weeks, I’ve bought several e-books dealing with various aspects of harnessing the computer and the internet as a writer and a blogger.  They are “home-grown” e-books, lacking flashy design or aesthetics.  The reading experience is, frankly, not very pleasant.  The pages are oriented vertically, not particularly handy on a horizontal computer screen.  They are basically simple word processor files converted to PDF format.  To read them, my computer calls up Adobe Reader.  The pages sadly do not fit the screen very well:

• I can either see the full page with type too small to read comfortably,
• or I can boost the page size so that the type is readable  Then, to move from page to page in the e-books I’m currently reading, I’m required to SCROLL DOWN, which before long gets tedious.

The new e-book readers fortunately are addressing these problems, with vertical page orientation, adjustable font sizes and easy flipping from page to page.  Meanwhile, online magazines are currently opting for double-page spreads across a horizontal screen.  To make things even more interesting, new publications will be called upon to instantly redesign themselves as readers turn their e-book devices from vertical to horizontal and back.  Readers, I predict, will quickly get accustomed to these e-reader and tablet formats and their design.

Hidden behind these new marvels is a challenge I’ve not yet seen addressed.  What will the effects on reader expectations be on web design as we currently know it?  Will web design adjust easily to e-readers and tablets?  Or will the ease of reading on the Kindle and iPad force a change in website and blog design?  Equally important, will readers become more focused on short-form writing, such as serialized novels, novellas, short stories, in-depth essays, tightly focused booklets.

BLOGGING FOR THE TABLET

I began thinking about these questions this past week as I wondered how Becoming A Writer – Seriously will translate to the iPad.  Maybe I’m raising false fears, but I do think bloggers may need to search out new “themes” that are designed specifically with tablets in mind.  At the moment, I do not know of any such designs.

I know that in this post I’ve been “thinking out loud.”  I am not offering answers, I’m raising questions.

What do YOU think?  Will e-readers and tablets, just by their physical design and inner workings, begin to influence what we write?  And how we write?  And how we present our work through graphic design?  Share your thoughts.

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HERE’S SOME BREAKING NEWS for writer’s considering self-publishing – proof that we are indeed in an exciting era for writers.  For overall perspective, check out the Fortune article cited below — it’s the best overview I’ve read in a long time.  It has been amazing to me to follow the speed of developments over the past two months.

WRITER’S DIGEST SELF-PUBLISHING AWARDS

Hitting the newsstands this Tuesday, 23 February, is the March-April issue of Writer’s Digest, which will announce this year’s awards for the best self-published books of the year.  This is a must-read and must-study issue for any writer considering self-publishing.

Already online is an interview with Grand Award winner Daryl Pinksen, author of Marlowe’s Ghost, by WD editor Zachary Petit.  It’s an excellent and detailed case study of one writer’s experience with self-publishing.  Particularly clear is the seriousness with which Pinksen approached his project, from setting his goals, undergoing extensive revision and editing, spending hours writing the book cover blurb.

Pinksen chose iUniverse as his POD publisher.  I’ve been intrigued to see just how well iUniverse titles have done in the WD self-publishing awards in recent years.  A visit to the iUniverse website is worthwhile.  Notice that the company is wired into the social media, Twitter and Facebook.  But it also has its own “TV channel,” featuring its authors — and it displays creative book trailers.  iUniverse also offers a free Get Published guide.  I picked one up a couple years ago at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference and found it an informative read.

When you read this issue of Writer’s Digest, I suggest that you take the extra time to really study the books cited.  Take a note of who published the book:  was it published by a known publisher, or did the author create one’s own “publishing company”?  Visit the author’s homepage to learn what a serious self-published author does by way of promotion.

VOOK RECEIVES $2.5 MILLION NEW FUNDING, PLANS TO OPEN UP TO WRITERS

The online Christian Science Monitor reports that Vook, the company that promises to wed text and video, has recently acquired $2.5 million in development funding.  When I first blogged about Vook a few weeks ago, I was unable to uncover any facilities for writers to prep their work for this multi-media format.  Apparently, with this fresh funding, the company plans to roll out a number of easy-to-use publishing tools.  Read more at the Monitor.

KINDLE FOR THE BLACKBERRY

A couple of days ago, Amazon released a free beta version of its new Kindle for Blackberry application, providing more fuel to the books-on-smartphone debate.  I also read yesterday a forecast that by 2013 there will be more cellphones in the hands of consumers than computers.  If you haven’t already read my two-part post last week about Joe Nassise’s release of his next book targeting a smartphone readership, then perhaps you will want to take a look.

FORTUNE MAGAZINE:  THE FUTURE OF READING

The current issue of Fortune certainly caught my eye in the Los Angeles airport last Tuesday.  Huge type announced its cover story:  The Future of Reading.  With a 14-hour flight ahead of me, I bought it, of course.  I started reading it right after take-off.  And I found myself mulling over the article’s implications for the rest of the flight.  It’s a very thought-provoking and extraordinarily insightful piece.

Author Josh Quittner is very well qualified to write on this topic.  He’s been central in the developing of forthcoming online editions of the magazines in the Time Inc. stable.  And he has a clear vision of what’s ahead.  I will probably return to this article for a future post exploring my thoughts and reactions after reading it.  In the meantime, read it yourself if you have any interest in the future unfolding for us writers.

BLIO:  NO NEWS

After its very public presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, Blio has been very silent.  This company promises to release a free e-book reader that marries text and multi-media.  It apparently will be directly competing with Vook and the DNL Reader.  I desperately want to know more about this project and its release date, as I have some projects in the wings that will turn to one of these three platforms.  I anticipate that Blio will become a major player in the future of publishing.

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SOME YEARS BACK, I needed a simple, straight-forward outliner program.  I finally found one that matched my needs – and I paid $100 for it.  TODAY — Sunday, 21 February — Bits du Jour offers a brand new, one-month-old outliner program at half price, for a whopping $9.95.  It’s called UV Outliner.

This program is very basic, but it does have some nice features.  And for old-fashioned writers like me, who grew up learning outlining skills in high school, it’s very handy and familiar.

The software developer says this about the software:

I tried almost every outliner for Windows. Unfortunately, they all look like they were developed 10 years ago with same Windows 98 style.  Personally, I think one of the best outliners ever is OmniOutliner.  Unfortunately, there is no version for Windows.

Being a developer, I decided to create my own outliner with focus on usability.

Outliners — and there are quite a number on the market — can be much more powerful than this one.  In fact, there’s a website forum devoted exclusively to discussing outlining programs:  Outliner Software.  OV Outliner is a :single-pane” outliner, similar to the Mac’s OmniOutliner, which many think is the best outlining program on any computer platform.  Most are “double-pane,” or even “triple-pane” programs.  For an explanation about the differences among these types of outliners, check out my post Better Than A Shoebox, one of the very first posts to this blog.  In fact, if you enter “outliner” in the search box above, you’ll uncover a number of posts relevant to the subject.

If you catch this post in time, check out the Bits du Jour website for today’s discount.  You can download and try out the program first, but you have to purchase the program before the end of the day to avail of the discount.

For more about various outliners, including OmniOutliner for the Mac [pictured above], check the links below.

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