Content Collaboration

I’ve been thinking about content lately. 

Content is the new word for story. Container is the new word for form that the story comes in. It could be digital or print or images or audio or interactive game… 

A creative project I’m involved in is creating a found artifact which takes the form of a journal. This is to be part of a larger art project looking at different ways artists and writers collaborate together. I seem to be coming across content collaboration everywhere.

Porter Anderson reports on an opening keynote speaker at the recent Publishers Forum held in Berlin. Author Kathrin Passig gently told the publishers that they were using outmoded technology when they worked with authors. Had they ever heard of collaboration?

Joe Wikert has been thinking about content too. Specifically how he thinks publishers could improve the e-book sample and be better at converting samplers into buyers by working with authors.

Joanna Campbell Slan talks about serialising a novel on her website and what she has learned. Is this controlling your content or letting it go? I know of other authors who do this in other canny ways.  (If you can’t wait for the next installment you can go buy the whole book...)

The latest Author Earnings snapshot is out. You may have heard that e-book sales are declining. Author Earnings gurus Hugh and Data Guy have discovered that this is happening only to Trad publishers who raised their prices after negotiating new deals with Amazon. Check out the Author Earnings website for other interesting news from the 6th snapshot.

Joel Friedlander has an interesting guest post up. Short is the new black- your shrinking reader attention span. This is spinning your content in another way.

Mandy Hager recently had to give a lecture on Dystopian Fiction so she posted it on her blog. What does an author have to think about when constructing a dystopian world.

With the suspension of NZ Book Month... A group of writers have taken to Twitter to promote NZ Books. #NZBookMonthMay A lot of us are posting a NZ book a day so check in for your next great read.

Tinderbox 2015 has a website. We are getting ready to post delicious tidbits about the conference.

In the Craft Section,

Is your prologue destroying your subtext? K M Weiland

7 secrets of highly persistent writers

2 great posts from the Emotion Thesaurus team. Moving Beyond 

the Face to Show Emotion and Key elements to help you evolve as 

a writer.

Screenwriting tricks has a story elements checklist.

Tips for novelising true events.

Why you should put your book on Wattpad (this is a quick intro to Wattpad.)

In the Marketing Section,

Making a living from your writing – Joanna Penn (Bookmark)

7 email marketing secrets for Fiction Authors

Spine out - Design tips for your Book Spine.

Good Font choices for books (Bookmark)

Preparing your Author Business for Failure.

Kameron Hurley (popular sci fi author) has posted an in depth article on why Patreon is better than Kickstarter for writers. If you are interested in crowd funding this is a must read!

Helen Sedwick has crunched the numbers on the cost of Author copies 

Website of the Week

Last week I linked to Dave Gaughran talking about Author Solutions. Indie Publishing Magazine has a link to the class action depositions (testimony from the other side) and what I read had my eyebrows achieving liftoff. I am honestly amazed that Random Penguin would be associated with this outfit.

SFWA, who sponsor Author Beware, have a link to the list of DISREPUTABLE publishers out there.

To Finish,

Brian Pickings always has interesting long form articles. This week they look at Delacroix’s journal notes about the need for writing in solitude. If you had to go away to collaborate on content, how about going to a castle which is a dedicated library and hotel...

maureen

Pic from Flickr/ Creative Commons- Butch Delisay

How To Succeed after you have dusted...

Ok, I missed my usual blog day post...sorry...School holidays got in the way and also dusting.

Yes I am dusting...well orgy of cleaning anyway...this is in an attempt to finally make sense of the clutter on my desk so I can sit down at it and work this coming week. That’s the plan.

But as soon as I shifted some clutter I exposed more clutter and then there was the dust which not only could you write your name in but a short novel as well... get out the buckets etc and two days go by very quickly.

At least I’m feeling virtuous (dusty tho)

Two things have caught my eye recently. One was Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog.
Joe was commenting on the cover article of Fast Company magazine about Amazon head Jeff Bezos plans for the future of publishing.
Joe is a publisher with O’Reilly Media Inc so he has an interest in the changing face of publishing...The italics are quotes from the article in Fast Company.

Here is a snippit.

Jeff Bezos is trying to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs of Apple did to the music industry. With its iPod and iTunes Store, Apple carved out a largely virgin market so fast that it was able to wrest control of the digital-music distribution system and thus dictate what the record labels could do.

I've occasionally been concerned about this but I'm not sure there's much to fear after all. I'm seeing more and more e-storefronts popping up every week and even though the Kindle is pretty popular it hasn't been the runaway success the original iPod was. Even the iPhone itself is a worthy competitor to the Kindle. Ironically enough, I think it's when Amazon fully opens the Kindle platform that we'll have to worry the most about this. That will probably have to happen at some point, but Amazon doesn't seem to be in any hurry, so relax...for now.

Should that happen, book publishers would have more to fear than just being squeezed. Amazon could phase them out completely, treating them as the ultimate middlemen orphaned by a new technology.

Forget about Amazon. Any publisher that isn't already worried about this in general is asleep at the wheel. With all the great self-publishing services out there and the ever-growing importance of social media and author platform it's crucial for all publishers to determine the value they add to the ecosystem.

In some ways, book publishing operates like one of Joseph Stalin's five-year plans.

This statement made me laugh out loud. Literally. It's painful to admit but true that some publishers still try to lay out 3- and 5-year financial plans. This, in an industry where most have had a hard time coming close to their latest annual and even quarterly forecasts. Ugh.

Read the whole article...it’s interesting...thought provoking and will give you a heads up to the future....which with the speed of the digital revolution will be here next year....after all blogs are more than five years old...twitter has just had its third birthday...
Joe is optimistic and thinks there will be great benefits for authors... coming soon....

The other thing to catch my eye is a comment by Seth Godin on Social Media. Do you need twitter and face book etc? And before you think oh sure, yeah, I know what he will say....watch the one minute video...he doesn’t think they are all that useful but something else is...



As the great Jane says

"the strength of your relationships is essential to getting ahead, which means having a network of people who like you and/or trust you."

Go out there and enable each other...

maureen

pic is from http://www.mybigcareer.com/?p=22