I recently attended a roundtable discussion about the state of publishing for university presses (it should be noted that this does not include Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press, as these two adhere to a different model).  Listening to one of the press representatives talk, I was a bit disturbed by the anti-library rhetoric that seemed to be the subtext for his whole presentation.

The presentation was a look at the history of publishing from the 1970s to the present, while paying particular attention to what influenced the output of university presses.

Starting in 1975, the shortage of tenure jobs created what many academics would recognize as the current “publish or perish” environment. Serials (we are talking about journals) also started to take over the buying budget for librarians, especially science serials. The result is that university presses were pumping out more individual titles per year to compensate for libraries buying less and to meet the departmental demands that all new hires and tenure track faculty have published works to prove that they are adding to their field.

Here are some of the main points I took away:

• Contrary to popular belief, the number of individual titles published each year by university presses has grown each year.
• Many libraries spend most of their budget on serials and not on book titles.
• Since libraries are buying less, print runs for individual titles have been cut in half. Where a publisher could count on selling at least 1K copies for each book, now many titles only sell about 200.
• It is clear, from what I heard, that publishers only view tenured professors and libraries as their market and some are now price gouging the libraries that do buy titles ($100+ for a new hardcover monograph). My thoughts: while they admit that the price difference between a hard cover and a paperback is negligible, they prefer hard cover because they can charge premium prices. No one will buy a $300 paperback on medieval history, but put it out in hard cover and they seem to think it is more acceptable and the library does not have to bind it.
• Many university libraries are now faced with storage issues and must get rid of books before they can add to the collection—digital books helps solve this issue.
• Librarians want to own their license and many academics want to do away with copyright—this does not please many publishers.
• Some publishers are worried because some librarians are calling their corporate model, which is at odds with scholarship, into question and they worry that libraries will become the distributors of content.
• One publisher said that they felt bullied by libraries to embrace digital and that libraries were bullies because they helped create the flood of individual titles and were now causing a rush to the digital.
• University publishers, or the ones I listened to, are not interested in embracing a new model and seem to resent digital.

The announcement that Penguin Books is getting into the self-publishing genre fiction game was inevitable. Under the guise of a talent search, a la American Idol, Penguin and other publishing entities, including many startups soon to overload the field, the promise of so-called “literary” fame and fortune will be the lure and the goal of the sponsors, as always, will be profits.

In general terms, here is the way it will work: Authors with hopes and dreams of becoming known genre writing brands will post their work in the various genres and sub-genres in the fields of romance, detective, fantasy, science fiction, vampires, zombies and on and on into numerous subcategories within subcategories.

According to newspaper reports, in addition to complete works, individual chapters and short stories, the authors can also post ideas, outlines and whatever else their creative writing urges dictate. Readers will interact, provide comments, suggestions and conversation, critique characters, plots and other aspects of particular interest in whatever genre fits their fancy.

One of the obvious hurdles to this potpourri will be the copyright challenges and the risk of what one can best describe as “stolen ideas,” a vague definition that will raise hackles on those who believe their ideas spring from original inspiration. In my long career as a novelist I have discovered that many people who believe in their imaginative uniqueness will quickly learn that numerous minds in many lands have concocted similar ideas, plots, and characters that tend to be mirror images of each other. Intellectual property lawyers will have a field day.

What the publishers and website sponsors hope is that there might be one or two breakout books that they might scoop up for commercial exploitation, while mining money through fees and advertising based upon what the sponsor hopes will be a vast audience of readers and wannabe genre fiction writers.

This critique in no way is meant to denigrate the individual writers who will step up and accept the challenge. I believe strongly in the creative impulse that motivates authors who write creative fiction, even those who work with the tight restraints of the genre palette.

Indeed, getting their work out to be read and commented on by others will garner many personal psychic rewards, especially if some readers register approval of their work. Unfortunately, they will have to bear the brunt of a compendium of negative comments, a kind of multiple rejection process that will be difficult for those who cannot face negativity with a well-armored constitution. Internet comments are rife with such postings, especially if they are anonymous.

There is no question that wannabe professional genre writers will flock to the Penguin site and others in operation or about to be. Many will have been badly bruised by an endless search for agents and traditional publishers. Most will believe that their work deserves a broad audience and will yearn for the time when they can quit their day job and earn enough money to support themselves with their writing.

Such fantasies equate with dreams of winning the lottery. Rising above the chatter of millions of books available on the Net will be the author’s challenge, whether they are aspiring or established. Unlike the brief performance segments on American Idol or the song business in general, reading or listening to a book takes considerable time and mental concentration. Reading is not a casual enterprise.

Consider this then a cautionary tale of what writers who post on Penguin and other burgeoning sites will have to face. The odds of finding a traditional publisher or agent in this uncertain environment will be beyond formidable. Even if one were lucky enough to acquire them through this process, the cash advance is likely to run from small to none. Nevertheless, expect to hear success stories, promotional ploys designed to keep the pump primed for the sponsors and continue to attract more and more postings. Caveat Emptor!

On the other hand, such postings will provide psychic joy to aspiring authors in the genre field. They will be able to point with pride to the fact that their book has been published. People might comment on the text, a good sign that some have read the material which is the object of the exercise. That alone could be well worth the effort for some.

In general, the creation of such material is a remarkable achievement for anyone. It is extremely difficult to write a long-form genre novel, an awesome challenge to the imagination and one’s self-discipline. There is a lot to say for such an achievement.

As for expectations of achieving popularity, fame, fortune, praise or discovery, authors should temper their hopes with realism.

On the plus side, remember, someone always wins the lottery.

Warren Adler is the author of 32 novels and short story collections. The War of the Rose, adapted from his novel is an international classic. Other films include Random Hearts with Harrison Ford, and The Sunset Gang. His newest collection of short stories, New York Echoes 2, will be available soon.

Here’s the problem: Technology gets in the way of reading ebooks. MOBI wins simply because it happens to be the format Amazon used to make it painless for people to get books. (And if you think Barnes & Noble’s nook is going to become the EPUB equivalent of Kindle, you’re kidding yourself.)

Continuing.

I released my third book yesterday: Magdalene. In it are beautiful illustrations my fabulous artist Adam Figueira did for me.

Unfortunately, for EPUB readers built on the Adobe Digital Editions developer kit, those illustrations won’t scale. But they do in Overdrive, Kobo, and iBooks. Imagine that. So I had to manipulate the images down to the smallest size that was still barely readable, because most people read EPUB on ADE-based readers. (I use Bluefire in iPad.)

MOBI, on the other hand, that ancient and limited/limiting format, scales the images and while they’re still small on the Kindle, you can read them and they do zoom a tad. You can argue that it’s a reading software problem, and not a format problem (why blame EPUB? you wail), but it’s really irrelevant.

In this equation, the person who bought the book is the only person who matters.

No format does what it really needs to do to replicate the convenience of the print reading experience. All you have to do to read a print book is know how to read.

This format bullshit isn’t like having mismatching books on a book shelf. This is like having print books you can only read if you have a GE 75-watt bulb in your 60-watt lamp that has to plug into a European outlet. In the United States.

Amazon Debuts Kindle for $114, Packed With Visa, Olay, Buick Ads, Sponsored Screensavers

I was rather sanguine about it for a bit, wondering what was so special about $25 that you’d put up with ads, but figuring if it was just a screensaver, well, okay. I don’t look at my Kindle screensaver now and a couple of the pictures are really pretty. Otherwise, I didn’t really think on it too much. There are ads everywhere and I ignore them. I initially compared it to a magazine, even though it’s not analogous; a book is an immersive experience. A magazine is not.

But after some discussion on Twitter, it was pointed out to me that it wouldn’t take long before there were intratextual ads at points in the narrative with mentions of name brands. Now, when I write, I’m a brand-name dropper. I can’t get my head around people who say “tissue” instead of “Kleenex,” although I’ve been told this happens on the East Coast. So I would be annoyed if, after my Midwestern characters said “Kleenex,” you turn the page and there’s an ad for Kleenex.

Then I got to thinking other things. Bear with me while I do some stream-of-consciousness what-iffing.

Cheap ad-laden ebooks and premium non-ad ebooks

Publishers required by Amazon/etailer to create code for Amazon’s ease of insertion of ads

Publishers pay to keep ad insertions out

Publishers beat Amazon to the punch and solicit their own ads to subsidize the book

Publishers get hit with an Amazon vig for already having ads in the book

Publishers have reason to keep harping on print as the Kindle killer* and jack around with digital production for another five years

But then…

Someone creates apps for blocking the ads

Devices upgraded to disable the apps

[insert app update versus hardware update war here]

I could probably keep spinning out the what-ifs, but follow the money, then read back the history of every open-source web initiative that ever got around someone who wanted to force something on a consumer.

Notice: Implicit in my list is the assumption that ads in ebooks will happen, and there will come a point when they will not be avoidable without paying for the privilege in one way or another.

And watch ad-less file sharing soar to new and breathless heights.

*Richard Curtis declared print books “the Kindle killer” at the 2011 Writer’s Digest Conference. With a straight face.

In another few weeks, I will be moving to another apartment in the same building in Manhattan where I have spent the past few years. While moving in itself is a traumatic event as everyone knows, my principal problem is books.

I have a huge collection of books. In the three or four major moves in my lifetime I have culled, boxed, given away and donated thousands of books. During each nesting experience, however, I have acquired yet more books and have repeated the culling process each time. I could never pass a bookstore without buying one or more books.

The fact is that I am probably a bibliophile in my soul. I love books. Reading books takes up much of my time, when I am not writing books. For years I have collected sets of leather bound books by favorite authors. It is a valuable collection. I have leather bound books by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hardy, O’Henry, Balzac, Henry James, Turgenev, Twain, de Maupassant, and on and on. To list them all would make this essay endless.

I also have duplicate copies of my own books in every language in which they have been translated and published. They amount to hundreds of copies. I will never part with them. They are as much a part of me as my DNA.

I love reading novels, older novels and contemporary novels. My tastes are eclectic. I have many non-fiction books as well, on politics, history and religion with particular emphasis on American history, which is yet another passion.

Now here is the kicker.

I am a pioneer in electronic publishing. All of my books have been reversed from major publishers and digitized since the late nineties. I have for years been touting the inevitable switch from print to digital. It was a no-brainer bound to happen. And it has reached the tipping point.

I made the first pitch for digital books on handheld reading devices at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show for the SONY reader when it was introduced in 2007. I bought one of the first Kindles and for kicks have been collecting other reading devices like the iPad and the Nook.

For years I have been addressing groups on the joys of reading content on screens. At first my reception had been hostile. I have listened to the same complaints ad infinitum. They all have the same ring. I love the tactile feel of a book. I love the smell of ink and paper. I love to hold them. Books are my friends. I like to see them on my shelves. A curse on screen-read books.

My response is always the same. I feel your pain. I cite other examples of lost items, both corporeal and emotional: The clip-clop sound of a horse’s hooves on city streets, the beauty of horse-drawn vehicles, the smell and sounds of sizzling logs in fireplaces, the fading art of writing letters, the lost joys of childhood, the reassuring scratches made by pen points dipped in inkwells, my mother’s cooking, the reassuring house calls of the family doctor, the old New York Herald Tribune, penny candy, knickers, saddle shoes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. It didn’t bring tears to the eyes of my audience and did not soften the blows to my advocacy of digital books.

I would explain to those early listeners and those I speak to today that there is a lot to say for the psychic joys of a physical book, but, in the end, there is one hard truth that is inescapable. The heart of a book is its content. Content trumps all. When all is said and done reading is a one on one communication system, an author’s presentation of his or her insights, stories, opinions, a distillation of his or her thoughts, instructive, inspirational, original, and, in its own way, a miracle of transference through words. I suppose one can find numerous other definitions, both literary and instructive. Content and its dissemination is the beating heart of civilization. Enough said. I’m sure the point is made.

In one tiny device, Kindle, Nook, iPad et al, I can fit the content of every book on my shelves and can, if I chose, soon be able to download at my whim the content of my choice among most books ever published since the discovery that content can be portable.

That said, it does not diminish my love of physical books as objects of admiration and devotion.

But here I am culling once again. I find I am being more ruthless than ever with less second thoughts or pangs of conscience on what to keep and what to discard. I no longer really want to shelve paperbacks and am making my culling judgments on the basis of my emotional attachments, my love of the content presented by those authors who have truly moved me, whose content has given me hours of pleasure and made a difference in my understanding of the human condition.

I will keep those books in my new apartment as a monument to my love of books and my favorite authors as well as a symbol of enduring friendship.

Oh yes, one more thought. While I can enjoy the sight of seeing many of my “friends” tucked comfortably on my bookshelves, I can now carry these “friends” everywhere I go and in both a physical and symbolic sense hold them close to my heart.

But last night I discovered one more reason they shouldn’t be considered ebooks: metadata. EVERYBODY sucks at putting the metadata into a PDF. Period. Big publishers, small publishers (even me), self-publishers. EVERYBODY does reasonably well at putting the metadata into files they know will be read on a device. PDFs…not so much.

You suck. I suck. We suck.

How do I know this? I know this because I was loading all my PDFs into my iPad last night and using iBooks to read them. My library looks like this:

Stop sucking

We need to stop sucking if we’re going to put PDFs on sale like they’re bona fide ebooks.

(Note: The entries with the parentheses are ones that defaulted to my file naming system.)

Somewhere along last week, I realized that I sucked. I assumed no one else sucked as badly as I do. So I determined to make sure that Magdalene‘s metadata didn’t suck. It doesn’t. Behold:

Suck no more.

Now, getting this isn’t difficult, but here you go, step by step:

Stop sucking.

Let me tell you right now: Selling a PDF with a Paypal button, after which you have to email the file is not a good solution. You probably know that. If you’ve done it, you know what a hassle it is. For your customer, it defeats the purpose of an ebook, which is instant gratification. You’re tired of monitoring your email; your customers are irritated with you if you don’t pony up the file in about 2 minutes. I bought an ebook that way once. That was all it took.

Mike Cane pointed me to this: Massive Sqwertz for Indie Comics, which outlines a delivery system that is essentially manual (the part where you constantly manipulate your email filters). There are some good ideas there that I’ve had on my to-do list for some time, such as the SMS and QR code enabling, but at the moment, because I am on a shoestring budget, those tools compete with more high-priority customer needs (in my opinion).

Your goal, Renegade Writer, is to automate your delivery system without spending more than about $0.

I’ve said before that I’m not a visionary: I’m an implementer and streamliner of good ideas. The best one I’ve seen yet was Samhain’s My Bookstore and More (which is apparently on hiatus). It had everything:

1. Drop-down menu

2. Automated delivery

3. Perpetual bookshelf with unlimited downloads

4. Ability to redownload different formats (i.e., if you bought a title, you bought all formats)

5. Live files you can open immediately from your wifi device

That’s what I wanted. I contacted the people who built their site and about swallowed my tongue at the price. I’m a nanopress. I can’t afford that. Neither can an individual author. ZenCart and its ilk (free) are, I think, capable of doing this, but I really haven’t had time to delve into it for the exactly four titles B10 and Peculiar Pages have, which will expand to at least six by the end of the year.

My need to have a comprehensive perpetual bookshelf (defined as re-downloadability of different live-file formats) warred with my need to allow the customer to own all the formats. I couldn’t find a free shopping cart that would do that. (For one good discussion of shopping carts, go to Crystal Williams’s blog, Big Bright Bulb.)

So I had to choose between giving a customer ALL the formats and giving the customer a single live-file format (which would then necessitate me emailing the others).

It’s not a perfect solution, but I can’t afford a perpetual bookshelf. However, it sure beats any type of manual delivery system that depends on you, Renegade Writer, sitting guard over your email.

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December 31, 1969 7:00 pm via sReplyRetweetFavorite

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Perhaps the addition of SMS-enabled and/or QR code-enabled purchasing (if I can integrate it with my current shopping cart) will change my mind to favor the live file.

1. Domain name (~$15/year)

2. Webhosting (~$60/year)

3. WordPress installation ($0)

4. WP eCommerce shopping cart ($0)

5. Not having to tend my email 24/7 and having pissed-off customers (priceless)

Amazon’s at fault here, in my opinion, in allowing one to do it at all because it really doesn’t work well. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, but most people don’t know they shouldn’t or don’t know why they shouldn’t.

Well, why shouldn’t you, if they let you? Listen up.

This is your Kindle book from a nicely formatted PRC:

This is your Kindle book from a lovely, meticulously formatted PDF:

Any questions?

So come see me at the Writer’s Digest conference, on the Do-It-Yourself Publishing panel, which is chock-full of super-awesome self-publishing types who are also going to hell.

When: January 22, 2011, 11:45 a.m.
Where: Sheraton Hotel & Towers, NYC

(Conference runs January 21 through 23.)

And who cares if I go to hell? I hear it has snowed…

*cross-posted on my alter ego’s blog.

Thus, MS Word 2000 is my starting point for everything, from manuscript to digitization to print design.

A note: If I’m doing a manuscript-to-print job, my workflow process is digital first, then print design. It’s far more efficient.

My gimmick (for lack of a better term) is that I do all this by hand. That’s what a lot of people like to know, that I’m not just feeding their stuff into a program and giving them whatever comes out.

So here are the tools I use:

1. MS Word 2000
2. EditPlus 3
3. ActiveWords
4. MobiPocket Creator
5. Sigil

Note the absence of Adobe. I do use Adobe products, but not until print and/or graphics enter the picture, in which case:

1. Photoshop
2. Illustrator
3. Acrobat

There have been some changes to my system and there will be more as better tools come along, if they do.

I used to use Atlantis Word Processor to create an EPUB file, but I haven’t done that since I found Sigil. I do still love Atlantis, but the feature I bought it for is really inadequate for files people pay me to create. (Or it could just be that I’m too much of a control freak to not tinker with whatever’s under the hood.)

I am always streamlining my process, writing macros, building templates. Yes, I do it by hand, but there’s a lot of stuff I only need to do by hand ONCE. To that end, I’m learning AutoHotKey. Right now, I use ActiveWords for some macro functions, but I’m not sure that’s the best tool I could be using.

Now. How and why I use them is fodder for a manual…