Robert Niles: July 2011 archive
A journalist's guide to eBook publishing - part three
July 29, 2011
Previously:A journalist's guide to eBook publishing - part one
A journalist's guide to eBook publishing - part two
Now that you have an HTML file for your book, along with a cover image and all the images and other media that will appear within the book, it's time to compile that information into eBook format.
Formats, actually. You might need to convert your eBook into multiple formats, due to requirements from the various major eBook retailers. Start by zipping your .html file, cover image and embedded image files into a single .zip file. (On Mac, that's as easy as selecting the files, then Control-clicking them and selecting the "Compress" option.)
The two biggest online bookstores, Amazon and Barnes and Noble, will accept the .zip file as your eBook upload. However, I've had little success with this method producing a nice eBook with Amazon. There, I had to go ahead and used Amazon's preferred method of running my eBook through Mobipocket Creator first.
On Barnes and Noble, though, the .zip file uploaded fine. Even better, using the preview option Barnes and Noble offers you after uploading your file, Barnes and Noble gives you a link with which you can download the ePub file that Barnes and Noble generates using your .zip file.
If you get lucky, and you formatted your HTML well, you can use that ePub file to submit to Apple's iBookstore, as well as to other online eBook retailers. If not, you'll need to read through the error messages that Apple throws to you, then recompile your .html file into ePub format using Calibre.
Before uploading anything, however, you'll need to join the Big Three's direct publishing programs. Follow these links:
In each case, you'll need to create an account with each business. (A general Apple ID works with iTunes Connect.) Expect to wait up to a day or so for your application to each program to be approved, allowing you to then upload your eBooks. Once you're good to go, try uploading your .zip file.
One more note on Amazon: There's pricing quirk in Amazon's commission structure that might influence your decision how much you charge for your eBook. Amazon offers a 70% commission to publishers (minus a 15 cent delivery charge), but only on eBooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99. That means that if you planned to charge anything between $10 and $19.83, you'll actually make more money if you drop the eBook price to $9.99, since you'll get only a 35% commission on eBooks that cost $10 and more.
Since you want your book to appear on as many platforms as possible (and those platforms might not list you if you undercut their price on Amazon), that means you'll need to drop your list price on all platforms to that level, as well. More...
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A journalist's guide to eBook publishing - part two
July 26, 2011
Previously: A journalist's guide to eBook publishing - part oneThinking about your content is always the first step in publishing. But physically formatting your content will be the toughest step the first time you produce an eBook.
That's why many services exist that will do all that work for you, for a fee. I'm not going to analyze or recommend any of those services today. Instead, I'm providing the cheapstake's method to eBook publishing. These are the steps you can take to get your eBook published with the major eBook retailers, without having to pay anyone else a thing*.
*With one exception. And let's start there.
You'll need to buy an ISBN [International Standard Book Number] for your book. That means a trip, with credit card in hand, over to myidentifiers.com. Buying a single ISBN from the registry is outrageously expensive - $125 - but the price comes down significantly if you buy multiple ISBNs at once. Ten ISBNs will set you back $250, and 100 sell for $575. Go ahead and buy in bulk - once you get the hang of eBook publishing, it's easy enough that you'll want to keep publishing eBooks, and you will need a new ISBN for each.
Okay, there's a second exception to the no-spending-money rule, but only if you're ham-handed with graphic design. You'll need an attractive cover for your eBook, one that in a single image will effectively communicate to your potential customers what your book is about and convince them to buy (or at least sample) the book. If you're not confident in your ability to design such a cover, delegate or outsource this to someone who can. Don't screw up your cover, because that represents your first and best chance to convert interest into sales.
Your coverage image should be 2x3 width-to-height ratio, at 300 dpi resolution. Don't skimp on the resolution size. You want something that looks good to your readers when the open it for the first time in their eReader. Your customers' first thought when they prepare to read your book never should be: "Oh, no, I paid money for this?" Go look at every cover in your eBook and printed book collections and decide if you're up to this task.
With an ISBN and effective cover design in hand, you're ready to begin formatting your book's content. (We talked about creating and editing the book's content in the previous entry, in case you missed that.)
When I started editing my first eBook, I made the mistake of copying all my webpages I wanted to include in the book into NeoOffice, then stripping the HTML coding, so that I could copy-edit in NeoOffice. Only when I finished, and prepared to format the copy for my eBook, did I learn that eBooks basically just are... HTML.
(Insert Homer Simpson forehead slap here: "D'oh!")
The "source code" of your eBook document is nothing more than an HTML page, contained in an XML "wrapper." But there are a few tricks that can fool you. More...
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A journalist's guide to eBook publishing - part one
July 19, 2011
Starting today, I'll be bringing you a three-part series of instructions on how you can create your own eBook. Why an eBook? Because eBooks are one of the few online media where consumers have accepted widely a paid content revenue model, unlike on the Web itself. If you're looking to diversify your revenue sources - and, as a journalist entrepreneur, you should be - paid content through eBook sales should be part of your business model.Before I begin though, let's remember that just because people are paying to buy eBooks online provides no guarantee that anyone will pay to buy your eBook. You'll still need to find an information need and meet it with the content of your book, and support it with vigorous promotion to your target audience. Ebooks might have taken physical printing and distribution out of the publishing equation, but every other element of the publishing process remains. Overlook any of them, and you'll find yourself wasting the time and money you do invest in your eBook publishing effort.
So let's start in the same place that every book starts - with the concept. As a news publisher, you should have a wealth of content available to you from your existing work. But what of all that's now on your website would someone pay to read as an eBook?
That's the first question to ask yourself as you plan your eBook publishing strategy. My advice? Find the most beloved content on your site - the series, topic or writer that readers most often forward to others, copy and paste to other sites, and keep coming back to visit days, weeks and even years after it's disappeared from your site's front page.
In other words, find the type of stuff that people in past generations would have clipped out of the paper and saved for themselves. Think of the eBook as your collection of those clips, handily delivered to their eReader, smart phone, tablet or computer for a modest fee.
But merely assembling a collection of clips won't be enough to unlock the full commercial potential of your work. Remember, you're changing media here. Writing, editing and formatting that work best in a daily article or website post aren't the same as those which work best in a book. Be prepared to put your work through a tough re-edit for the eBook edition. More...
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Why I am rooting for News Corp. to fail
July 15, 2011
I'll fess up: I'm rooting for the phone hacking scandal to be the downfall of News Corp.I don't take lightly a desire to see a company fail, especially one that employs thousands of people who, in turn, support families and communities. But the list of News Corporation's sins against journalism, and society, is long, even if one overlooks the repugnant phone hacking. Instead of speaking truth to power, News Corp. tries bending truth to power.
Allow me again to state that I have no problem with political advocacy by news organizations or even by individual journalists, so long as that advocacy is the final point in a journey that begins with reporting and discovery of truth. I have a problem with political advocacy in journalism only when it represents the first step in the process, dictating the reporting and presentation of information to an audience.
That some News Corporation subsidiaries, especially Fox News, allow the political ideology of its leadership to direct its news gathering and presentation should not be disputed by any reasonable journalist at this stage. Fox News has subsumed the Republican Party power structure in the United States, to the point where GOP operative David Frum once said on ABC's Nightline: "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."
Don't mistake my opposition to Fox, and News Corp., as simple opposition to its political ideology. My argument is about power, and the danger of allowing a single entity assume too great a voice in our public discussion.
The abuse of power is an issue than can unite liberals and conservatives, and progressives and libertarians, within the journalism industry. I was inspired to write today by Howard Owens, who tweeted earlier this week: "There's an aspect of the News Corp. scandal not being discussed -- that bigness leads to things like this."
For those of you who don't know Howard, I don't think he would dispute my characterizing him as a strong libertarian, and someone with whom I disagree on a great many political issues. But I believe that he and I agree on this one: Size breeds power - and power corrupts.
I would extend that thought: Power in journalism corrupts the truth, too. More...
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The 'decline of online message boards' doesn't have to happen
July 13, 2011
Virginia Heffernan wrote this week on the New York Times website about Decline of the Online Message Board. Heffernan recalled several of the message boards that she frequented in the past, noting the precipitous decline in traffic on many in recent years.While I have no doubt that many discussion boards have suffered under competition from social media hubs such as Facebook and Twitter, those sites aren't killing off every board on the Internet. But board administrators will have to recognize their true purpose in publishing if they are to help their boards survive.
Why are some boards thriving while so many others whither over time? As with many other online efforts, the answer is found in its publishers' commitment to community - not simply to amassing a collection of readers, but creating a true community where participants inform and care for one another.
Discussion boards, by themselves, are simply a tool - as are blogs, wikis, emails, text messages and, yes, even news articles. While any of these tools can provide value to a publication, as other tools come along to compete with it, these tools' value to a publisher ultimately is measured by the value their content provides to readers and users.
Discussion boards proliferated online when they were easy to set up and provided the only way for large groups of people to communicate with one another. They're still easy to set up, but now readers have so many other places to gather and communicate, such as Facebook, Twitter and now, Google+ (which I finally did get on, by the way. Here's my link.)
Of course boards that can't offer their readers something more than that competition are going to suffer. While that's no big deal for cooperative boards, run by volunteers who never made any money from their sites and who are happy to shut down and let Facebook do all the work, this is a very big deal for publishers who grew to rely upon income from these boards.
If you're earning a living from publishing, you ought to be paying attention to what's happening to online discussion boards, and learning these lessons so that your publication doesn't suffer the same fate. More...
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News publishers shouldn't just 'set and forget' their websites' automated tasks
July 8, 2011
Do you know what your bots are doing?Many news websites have set up automated scripts and agents to handle a variety of tasks on their sites - from story migration to registration confirmations to page customization.
But how often do you check on your automated processes? Or do you take the Ron Popeil approach to Web publishing: "Set it and forget it"?
This week, when news of the Casey Anthony verdict broke, I just happened to be checking Yahoo! News' mobile site. Here's what I found:
First, a point to Yahoo! for not leading with the Anthony case, the latest media circus designed to channel public anger toward an insignificant person and away from anyone with actual power to abuse. But I take away that point and dock Yahoo! News an extra one for leading with a PRWeb press release instead.
That leads me to wonder if Yahoo! News has turned over its mobile site to an automated process that no human being is reviewing. Because I can't imagine that any competent news producer would choose to lead what should be a major news site with a press release. Nor can I understand why a major news site would completely ignore such a popular story, as regrettable as it might be. The Anthony story didn't show up on the Yahoo! News mobile site until it topped the "Most Popular" section about an hour later. Never did make "Top Stories" that I saw that afternoon.
Yahoo! News has been having other problems with its mobile site, too. I tweeted on June 25 that the site's footer still read "© 2010." A few days later, Yahoo! News debuted its new mobile design (with an updated copyright notice), and that's when the PRWeb and other inconsequential stories began invading the front page. More...
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Two new features from Google, neither of which are named 'Plus'
July 6, 2011
The big news from Google over the past week or so has been the launch of Google Plus… which I won't be writing about today, for reasons I'll mention at the end of this post. But I wanted to bring your attention to two other Google initiatives of interest to news publishers, which deserve not to be lost in the hype over Google Plus.First, Google's launched a new program to identify authors and attribute their webpages to them. The program uses authors' personal Google Profile pages as the focal point for listing and linking all their current work around the Web.
The program provides some additional visibility to participating authors' work in exchange for their linking more visibly to their Google Profile pages. (Here's mine, so you can see how this works from that end.)
It's a relatively easy four-step process to participate. But you'll need access to the content management system your publication runs.
First, you'll need to add a rel="author" attribute to the anchor tags around the bylines of your articles. That anchor tag should hyperlink your author profile page on the same Web domain.
Second, that author profile page will need to include a link back to your Google Profile. And the anchor tag linking the Google Profile should include a rel="me" attribute.
Third, in the links section of your Google Profile, you should include a link back to the author profile page on your website, checking the box that "this page is specifically about me."
Fourth, make sure that the "+1" tab on your Google Profile is set to public. If you want to make sure you did everything correctly, you can ask for Google to review your work by filling out this form.
What happens then?
Google will begin adding all of your bylined articles to the +1 tab of your Google Profile. It will also automatically assign a "+1" from you to those articles, so you don't have to manually hype your own stuff to the search engine anymore. Google also will add a thumbnail of your profile photo next to the links to each of your articles in its search engine results pages [SERPs].
What's the value of those steps? I don't know yet. It's too early for me to tell if those steps are driving more traffic from Google to the articles that I write. Or if the additional +1s are moving my articles up in the SERPs, relative to where they would have been without them.
But, having been in situations where people have tried to copy my work online and pass it off as their own, I'm encouraged that this system exists by which Google is associating my work with my profile as soon as it's published. It's also just fun me to make code change on my website and see an immediate change in the Google SERPs. I don't know if I'm moving up any spots, but I think having my picture there next to my work is kinda neat. More...
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Patch is the news industry's problem, not its solution
July 1, 2011
Jack Shafer's right: hyperlocal efforts are "a complete waste of time and resources" as he suggested this week in Slate.Shafer missed one crucial qualifier in his hypothesis, though. Hyperlocal's a waste of time and money for national corporations. What's happening in the news industry today is not the Internet destroying the news industry by spreading free content. It's the Internet destroying the national news chain by eliminating of the traditional economies of scale for the news industry.
Shafer bases his arguments on continued criticisms of AOL's Patch.com network. Hey, I teed off on Patch nearly a year ago, so I share the skepticism. But Shafer errs in not even mentioning locally-owned and operated hyperlocal news sites, much less contrasting them with the top-down, corporate-driven AOL/Patch model for hyperlocal coverage.
In Shafer's piece, the alternative to Patch are sites such as Facebook, social networks where residents in a community can get what Shafer calls "social news" about their "interests," as opposed to "hyperlocal news": "the starving-artists exhibition at the farmer's market, increasing parking-meter rates, the city budget, local real estate prices."
But there's an alternative to corporate news chains and corporate social networks: homegrown news communities run by local journalists. That's a model we're encouraging by training dozens of journalist/entrepreneurs in our annual KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camps. Freed from the burden of paying for a national management team and Wall Street expectations, local journalists can make hyperlocal pay in ways that big companies such as AOL simply can't. More...
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