Author-ized Articles

A couple of months ago I wrote about storing your data “in the cloud.” Now Hewlett-Packard wants publishers to store magazines in the cloud and make them available on demand. These days, a “publisher” is anyone who posts content online, so that means you.

Thanks to colleagues in the Northern California chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSANC), I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on MagCloud at HP Labs today. NSA member Ian Griffin used MagCloud to create the first issue of “Professionally Speaking” and send it to NSANC members.

MagCloud prints on heavy 80-lb matte stock rather than the flimsy paper used by most magazine publishers. I compared “Professionally Speaking” with the assorted business magazines piled up on my desk and with the Better Social Media Communication Results newsletter my colleague Lee Hopkins published on an offset press. The MagCloud product compared favorably to both, particularly for printing photos.

The text didn’t seem as crisp or black as that in the BetterComms newsletter, but that may be a function of the resolution of the PDF file uploaded to create “Professionally Speaking,” or perhaps the font color or style, because the body text in HP’s own MagCloud Publisher Guide is as clear and sharp a black as anyone could wish for. (You can download a free PDF version of that to help you set up your own MagCloud publication.)

Technology

Many POD book publishers use the same HP Indigo printers that produce MagCloud’s magazines. We looked at an Indigo 3000 in the Color Lab, but that’s already been superseded by newer, faster models that push the break-even point versus offset printing to 5,000 copies. (That means that unless you’re printing 5,000 or more copies, HP Indigo technology, and by extension MagCloud, is more cost-effective than offset printing.) Even the older model is impressive—more than seven feet tall, yet amazingly compact and tidy for industrial production. Ordinary inkjets, laser printers, and even offset presses use 4-color printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (abbreviated “K” for reasons I can’t remember). The Indigos use six colors, either the standard CCMMYK of photo printers like my Epson Stylus Photo 1280, or Pantone spot colors. They’ll print on practically anything, including plastic cards, and the samples we saw were beautiful. I don’t think I will add one to my “covet” list, though—the PG&E bill would go through the roof, and the fan noise would keep me up at night.

Serial Typography

Until now, the burgeoning print-on-demand industry has focused on publishing books. Magazines are actually better candidates for POD, which allows for timely production and reduces wastage. (Some 50% of magazines sent to newsstands are never sold and get pulped.)

The defining characteristic of magazines is recurrence. When you sign up as a MagCloud publisher, you’re asked to enter a title and subtitle for your magazine, and then create your first issue. During the private beta, you’ll need an invitation in order to get a publisher account, and they’ve already had more than a thousand requests, so you may have to wait a while before you can try it out.

Many other print publications also lend themselves to this multiple-issue format: newsletters, annual reports, membership directories, course materials, and the like. So do e-zines and blogs. You might not really want to start distributing your e-zine in print format to all your subscribers, but having a print version to hand around at networking meetings could be useful, and it’s possible that a few of your readers will actually want to order one.

If all you want is a short run of a short-format document, however, you may want to consider another POD service, because right now MagCloud offers you one trim size, one binding, and one text stock. (Cover and text stock are the same.) Other features, like templates to allow non-designers to lay out their own magazines, are still in an extremely rudimentary phase. And MagCloud is not (yet?) in the business of selling ISSNs. (That’s like an ISBN, but for magazines; I remember getting one for my electronic journal in 1994, and if you ever want your magazine sold in stores, you’ll need one.)

If they can find a way to import RSS feeds easily MagCloud will attract bloggers in droves. Right now Blurb’s “blog slurping” function only works with hosted blogs, which is no use to those of us who publish our blogs from our own servers. If Windows Live Writer can access and import from all my blogs, I don’t know why BookSmart can’t.

Pricing Structure

MagCloud’s own business model is to charge US$0.20 per full-color page. That’s one side of an 8.5 x 11 sheet, the same as one page in a word-processing program or one page as a copy shop would charge you. This represents a comfortable but not extravagant markup over HP’s costs. It’s less than you’d pay for color photocopies and probably less than it would cost you in ink to print the magazine yourself on an inkjet printer (assuming you have a duplex printer that handles tabloid format sheets, which most people don’t). Publishers add their own markup on top of this base price.

Magazine length is based on a unit of 4 pages, up to a total of 60 pages. (This is short by comparison with most commercial magazines, but much longer than most corporate newsletters.) A 60-page magazine would have a minimum cover price of US$12 plus shipping—steep compared with what you find on the newsstands. And that’s assuming the publisher doesn’t want to make any money on it.

There is no set-up fee for publishing a magazine if your PDF is ready to go.

Magazines 2.0

Because of the Indigo technology’s advantage in short-run printing, the MagCloud team is focusing its efforts on niche publishers like NSA or the Palo Alto flying club. One person at today’s presentation described MagCloud as “iTunes for magazines.” MagCloud has a lot in common with blogging, podcasting, and niche networks created with Ning. While print magazines already exist to serve a phenomenal variety of specific interests, those magazines also cease publication with alarming frequency as subscriber numbers and advertising revenue drop off and distribution costs increase.

A New Model for Print Advertising

Print advertising is the oldest form (apart from yelling at passers-by in the open market, anyway), and it has long-established conventions that simply aren’t appropriate for MagCloud’s niche publications, any more than they suit most podcasts or blogs. Advertisers buy print and broadcast ads based on something called CPM, which means “cost per thousand.” So for every thousand readers you have, you get X amount.

Naturally, if you only have 500 subscribers—or 50—CPM is a rotten model. Traditionally-published magazines give away free subscriptions to “industry professionals” (meaning anyone who signs up): it helps them keep their circulations numbers high. If you’ve ever had one of these free subscriptions and tried to cancel it, you know how difficult it is to stop magazine publishers from sending endless issues of dubious relevance.

MagCloud publishers who want to subsidize their printing costs with advertising (an established revenue model and one not yet much used in book publishing) can learn important lessons from online content creators. Highly targeted audiences are more valuable than sheer numbers. If the advertiser’s product matches the interests of a magazine’s readership closely enough, sales are guaranteed. For some groups (like the wine geeks who listen to Grape Radio), the revenue per order may be quite high and the return on investment in a niche publication very enticing.

This won’t work for all niches, and finding an advertiser to match the interest of your readership might be a challenge. But MagCloud has some ideas about that, too.

Community Vision

Many POD houses make more money by selling design and editing services than by printing and distributing books. Rather than selling design services directly and overtaxing its creative department, HP Labs wants MagCloud to become a community marketplace where content creators can hook up with (and rate) designers, and publishers seeking content can find writers to produce it. In this vision, subscribers could create their own magazines from individual articles in other MagCloud publications. An advertiser could post “I’m trying to reach Baby Boomers in the financial industry” and publishers could respond with their reader demographics and psychographics.

So far the crowdsourcing and social networking aspects of MagCloud are only at the “vision” stage, however. Users of the MagCloud site have two options: to sign up as subscribers, and to sign up as publishers. Eventually, one presumes, it will be possible to sign up as a designer, a content creator, or an advertiser.

Even in its pre-release state, MagCloud offers fascinating possibilities. Like all great ideas, magazine publishing on demand prompts the question “Why hasn’t someone done this before?”

Most of Jeff Bezos’ session at this year’s Book Expo America amounted to an extended sales pitch for the Kindle and Amazon’s plans to get every book in or out of print digitized into Kindle format. This was actually pretty interesting, even though it wasn’t the reason I was listening to the podcast. It did make me see the appeal of the Kindle, though Bezos did not address the real problem facing any such device: you can’t “rip” your existing library of books onto your Kindle the way you can rip your CD collection onto your iPod. That makes replacing your print books with Kindle books prohibitively expensive—at least for compulsive readers like me, who can sell five grocery bags full of books to the local used-book store and still have overflowing shelves. Scanning printed books is a clumsy, time-consuming process that simply isn’t feasible for consumers today, and that’s a serious obstacle to widespread uptake of the Kindle.

But I digress. The reason I wanted to hear the presentation by, and interview with, Jeff Bezos was that I wanted to know more about Amazon’s recent move to insist that all their POD authors use BookSurge for fulfillment. Amazon owns BookSurge, so the move looked not merely self-serving but downright monopolistic to competing POD houses.

I have nothing against BookSurge. One of my clients has been using them since before Amazon bought the company, and while they aren’t perfect, they produce quality books for a fairly low set-up fee. Or, at least, it was low by comparison with AuthorHouse (then First Books) and its competitors at the time. And in 2003, at least, BookSurge was able to offer services that AuthorHouse couldn’t, namely including a color insert section for some critical illustrations.

Since then, companies like Lulu have drastically undercut BookSurge, and the differences in what an author has to pay are one reason for authors to object to Amazon’s decision. There are plenty of others, all with varying degrees of validity. And Amazon’s argument that printing all POD books at BookSurge made distribution easier seemed weak.

Yet it wasn’t at all difficult for Bezos to make a clear argument in favor of the move in his discussion with Chris Anderson at BEA. (Skip to 42:27 in the recording if you want to bypass the Kindle eulogy.)

If you’re going to pioneer something, you are going to create some controversy from time to time, and you have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to be sure feel good about what you’re doing, and if you don’t, you can go back and course-correct. But if you’re simple-minded about the customer experience, that usually keeps you on the right side of that line. Even small things that we have done that people expect and later find helpful, have initially caused controversy…

Modern Print-on-Demand printers can print and bind a complete book in two hours. In our own fulfillment centers, we have millions of traditionally-printed books. They’re on shelves and in pallets in cartons, ready to be shipped out to customers. Latency for shipping these books is very short, and transportation cost is critically important to us. If somebody orders two books—and most orders are for more than two units—it basically costs us twice as much to transport two books if we have to send them in two separate boxes as it does if we can marry them together. [We have] things like Amazon Prime, where we make two-day shipping free, and things like Super Saver Shipping, where we make shipping free if you order $25, and that $25 [minimum] often gets people to order two items…

Very few books in a demand sense are POD books. Most books are traditional books that we sell. You probably ordered a traditional book and a Print-on-Demand book if you ordered a Print-on Demand book. So we want to marry those things in one box. We can save a lot of money by doing that, we can get the product to customers faster, we can pass on the savings to customers in the form of lower prices, and that’s a great customer experience. But it does require that the book be printed, if it’s a POD book, in our fulfillment center. That’s going to make some people unhappy…

System-wide, it does not make sense to print a POD book anywhere but in our fulfillment center…If you print it somewhere else, to get it in a single box, you gotta cross-ship that book to us, which is a delay, and we’re going to ship it to you tomorrow instead of today. That’s a bad customer experience.

So yes, it’s definitely to Amazon’s benefit to have all POD authors use BookSurge. The specifics of BookLocker’s class action suit against Amazon make it clear that Amazon has some less-than-altruistic motives. No one seems to be clear yet on what additional costs (if any) will be passed on to authors who use POD houses that agree to Amazon’s terms and use BookSurge for printing any books sold through Amazon. It’s possible that customers of Lightning Source or Lulu or Xlibris might have to pay an “Amazon surcharge” of some kind. But I doubt it will be as high as the set-up fee paid by BookSurge customers, because the files Amazon gets from these companies will already be set up and ready to be printed.

Given the way people shop at Amazon, printing books at Amazon’s fulfillment house really is to the customer’s benefit. Despite probable additional charges, it may well prove to benefit the authors of POD books. It might even benefit the other POD houses, because it saves them shipping costs and wear and tear on their equipment. It’s certainly better for anyone than if Amazon refused to carry POD books because the shipping costs are too high.

BookLocker, Lulu, and Lightning Source will continue to make the bulk of their money from the additional services they offer to their authors. It’s worth remembering that traditional publishers don’t have that added source of income, and all bookstores—not just Amazon—have required them to accept lousy terms since the 1930s.

George Smyth’s One Minute How-To podcast challenges us so-called experts to tell listeners how to do something in one minute. He picked the topic for this one, from a range of possible publishing-related tips. I had to use a written crib sheet to be sure I could cover all the important points in the allotted time. If you’ve had experience with self-publishing, feel free to add your own suggestions to this list.

1. Read Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual. Try to get the most recent edition.
2. Visit the SelfPublishing.com website. Read the FAQ. Listen to the Publishing Basics interviews.
3. Make sure you know the difference between self-publishing (which means printing the books yourself) and POD (Print on Demand), which has a higher per-book cost.
4. Get an ISBN if you plan to sell the book from anywhere but your own website or garage.
5. Hire a professional copy editor and typesetter/book designer.
6. Use BookSurge if you want to sell your POD book on Amazon (http://www.writersweekly.com/amazon.php).
7. Don’t self-publish if your aim is to get into the large bookstore chains. It can be done, but it’s very difficult.
8. Look for a local independent publishers association, and join it. In the Bay Area, for instance, we have the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association and Book Builders West.

Listen to the podcast here.

Ta ever so to Shel Holtz for tagging me on this. I have mixed feelings about blog memes anyway, and none of my blogs is really the kind that such a post is appropriate for, since despite encouraging comments, I’m really a columnist, not a blogger. But it’s an interesting sort of challenge to list 8 things about me that pass the test I have for anything that goes online: would I be willing for my mother and my clients to read it?

My mother is not actually online, but many of my family members are, and all of my clients. So what can I reveal that most people don’t know about me but that wouldn’t be likely to lose me a job or horrify my mother? I doubt any of them will be news to close friends and family members, but they might be to people who wandered over here from Shel’s blog or who know me primarily for my Reports from the Asylum on FIR.

1. I learned to ride a horse at the age of three, shortly after learning to read. You can blame my mother for my precocity in both areas. I’m still reading, but haven’t been on a horse for years, even for a trail ride. The skill stays with you, but the muscles don’t.
2. I played the Cheshire Cat in a youth theater production of Alice in Wonderland. In some scenes I was replaced by a large plywood grin.
3. When I was in high school, my ambition was to become a psychologist. Once I got to college, I discovered I didn’t have all that much aptitude/interest, and got sucked into the Classics Vortex instead.
4. I wrote my first never-published novel during my freshman year in college. (While not doing my psychology homework.) It was about Helen of Troy from her point of view.
5. There is actual video footage of me in the role of the drunken madam in a production of Plautus’ Cistellaria at the University of Michigan. (I was not originally cast in this role, but the actress had to go into emergency surgery on opening night, and I knew the script because I’d translated it.) And no, I am not going to post it on YouTube.
6. I own more than 30 hats, but don’t wear most of them because there isn’t room to keep them in my apartment. (And anyway, I don’t need wool hats as much in California as I did in England.)
7. My partner’s parents hated me at first sight. After almost 13 years, his mother is now reconciled to the fact that I’m not going away, but still appreciates me most from a distance.
8. I get migraines at least once a month. They have driven me on more than one occasion to pray for menopause, but as I’m only 40, this is somewhat in the nature of Augustine’s “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.”

I don’t believe I actually know 8 bloggers who haven’t already participated in this little adventure, but I’ll tag Tee Morris, Stefan Didak and Keith Ferrazzi. (Keith, wait ’til you can type, huh?)

The third quality you should look for in a prospective ghostwriter is the ability to mimic your writing style. Well known authors—particularly novelists—have distinctive writing styles, sometimes to the point that you can recognize their work even without seeing the name on the spine of the book. A ghostwriter has to be able to master many different styles of writing, to subsume his or her own “voice” into yours. It’s a bit like developing a good accent when learning a foreign language. A ghostwriter is not a “star” with a recognizable face, but more like the character actor you’ve seen in a dozen movies, never realizing all those parts were played by the same person.

Unless your prospective ghost already knows you well or you’ve worked together before, he probably won’t be able to write in your “voice” without hearing you talk and reading your writing. An experienced ghostwriter should be able to show you samples of work done in a range of different styles.

Note that in some cases the writer may need permission from clients to share this work, because either the work itself or the relationship with the client might be confidential. In such cases, be sure to ask for references who can attest to this ability.

If you’re interested in hiring someone who hasn’t worked as a ghost before, try asking her to rewrite a paragraph or two in the style of a famous writer: Shakespeare, or Stephen King, or Barbara Cartland, or anyone whose work is readily available and who has a distinctive style.

Continuing our series on how to find the best ghostwriter for your project, we move on to our second criterion for success, Active Listening.

The ability to listen to you—and more, to understand you—is important in any consultant you hire. A ghostwriter’s job is to “channel” your ideas. That means paying attention, taking notes, making recordings, and accurately reflecting back what you say. A good listener will ask pertinent questions about your project during the interview process.

Make sure to ask prospective ghosts to write something that demonstrates this ability. If you already have a rough draft and want a rewrite, ask the writers you’ve interviewed to rewrite a short section (250-500 words of a long document). If you want a series of newsletters, ask for a sample introductory issue (or article)—again, short enough not to give the impression you’re trying to get the work done for free. And always ask them to sum up the project itself—what you want them to do, who your audience is, and what you want to accomplish—in a few paragraphs.

If you don’t think “That’s exactly what I meant, but more so,” when you read their responses, you may need to keep looking. Don’t worry too much yet about how well the writer captures your “voice,” though: that’s something it takes time to perfect.

When you hire a ghostwriter to help you with a project, it’s your name and reputation on the line. If you’ve never worked with a ghost before, you might think the most important thing is to find a good writer.

But most people who stay in business as professional writers can write competently, grammatically—even brilliantly. Just as not all great performers make great teachers, it takes more than good English or publishing credits to create a successful ghost/author relationship. You may find yourself having to choose between several candidates with impeccable credentials and solid references. Here are ten criteria to help you choose the right ghost for you.

1. Compatibility

It may seem strange to put “compatibility” at the top of this list, but the relationship a ghostwriter has with a client—particularly when writing memoirs and autobiography—is an intimate one. Your ghost has to be able to get inside your head. That means spending a lot of time together. If you wouldn’t want to invite this person to dinner with your family, how do you think you’re going to make it through months of close collaboration?

It’s a good idea to meet with prospective ghostwriters in person before you make any hiring decisions. You can schedule the interview either after you look at writing samples and check references, or before. If you can’t meet in person, try to arrange a video chat. Services like Skype (www.skype.com) and Oovoo (www.oovoo.com) let you do this for free, as long as you have a webcam and a microphone.

Today is the last day to get a free copy of Marketing Sherpa’s 80-page report (regular price US$127) How to Get Your Business Book Published. If it’s still November 27, 2007 as you read this, go download your copy of the report right now and don’t wait to finish reading this post. If it’s too late and you want to know whether to pony up the $127, read on.

The report starts with an examination of what writing a business book is good for your career and covers everything from agents, publishers, contracts, and marketing to—yes—working with a ghostwriter. It concludes with four sample book proposals from successfully published books.

Examples like this are always worth having, because every author—even those who self-publish—should have a proposal. These are recent examples, so they give you a good idea of what you need to know and do to make your book succeed in today’s saturated publishing world. The report also provides contact information for business book agents (rarer and harder to find than agents for fiction) and publishers.

Marketing Sherpa’s recommendations and warnings are consistent with those in RainToday’s 2006 Business Book Publishing Reports (well worth reading, if you haven’t seen them yet). There’s plenty of fresh, original material here, though, and it’s presented in a very accessible way. Two of my favorite sections are those on agent turn-offs and myths about publishing.

And what does Marketing Sherpa think about hiring a ghostwriter? The best way to sum it up is probably “When it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid.” And naturally I’m in full accord with their conclusion:

As in most things, you get what you pay for when it comes to hiring ghost writers. Professional, experienced writers charge more than, say, a graduate student majoring in writing—spend the money to go with the professional. You’ll save time and money in the long run—the better the work, the less rewriting and editing you’ll do. Expect to spend at least $5,000 (it could be much more) for a 250-page book.

While it may seem that the ghost does all the work while you get all the credit, that’s not the case. You’ll need to work closely with the ghost writer from the beginning to be certain that everything you want to say will be included. You will probably want to at least provide the writer with an outline, and will certainly want to spend some time giving the writer background on the subject. Then, once the copy is written, you need to make sure everything is exactly the way you want. You must copyedit, fact-check, and revise—or have the ghost revise—until the book is perfect. Remember, it’s your name on the book.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

It’s here at last: fEmpowerment: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl, by Sandy Shepard (a.k.a. Solitaire). And me, but mostly her. We started working on this book in 2005 and built it up out of posts on her Double Oh! Productions blog. You can order it from the Be a Bond Girl website or the usual sources (like Amazon).

Why Bond Girls?

Because Sandy takes them as a model for a life with more passion, enjoyment, fun, and fulfillment than many of us have right now. You don’t have to be a fan of the James Bond films to get something out of this book. I was a little skeptical about it, myself, but in the course of editing it, I learned a lot of things that have helped with my relationships. (No pole dancing classes for me, though.) Sandy takes a fun, practical, and very specific approach to getting rid of anything that doesn’t work for you and putting some adventure back in your life.

Who Should Buy This Book?

Women, especially if you

1. Have become so powerful and successful in your career that you find yourself isolated on a lonely mountaintop
2. Don’t really know what you want or like because you’ve been too busy trying to fit in
3. Want to have more fun at work, at home, with friends, and with your “James.”

Men, especially if

1. Your spouse or girlfriend fits into any category above
2. You aspire to live the James Bond lifestyle yourself.

And remember: no one is ever too old to be a Bond Grrl.

Disclosure

Naturally, since I helped write this book, I’m biased in favor of it. But I don’t make any money from sales of the book; I haven’t even set up an Amazon affiliate link in this post.

The other day I posted some of my Podcast Asylum articles on EzineArticles.com. Within an hour of their approval, the Google alert I have set on my own name produced a link to a post entitled “Der Podcast Von Meiner Unzufriedenheit.” For those who don’t read German, that’s “The Podcast of My Discontent.”

More like the blog posting of my discontent, since it was my own article, “Podcasting without Podcasting,” translated into German and posted without the resource box linking back to my site—but with my copyright notice and name still on it. My German is rusty, and was never colloquial, so I couldn’t really tell whether there had been human hands involved in the translation process. It surely seemed like a human mind behind the title, and German is a very literal sort of language.

So I asked the Ur-Guru, whose German is better than mine. (Dutch is very similar to German, too, so that probably helps him get a better feel for the rhythm of the language.) He assured me that it was a computer translation and no human had been involved, and I shouldn’t bother posting a comment on the blog. (Which I had already done by that time.)

I’ve had material stolen and posted to splogs (spam blogs created to generate AdSense revenue) before, but usually it’s a couple of paragraphs combined with material scraped from other people’s blogs, combined into a mishmash that makes no sense at all but apparently contains some useful keywords.

This is the first time (to my knowledge) that my material was not merely appropriated but also translated into another language. Hence “Transcraping.”

It’s difficult to prevent that kind of thing from happening, and not usually worth the effort to try protecting one’s intellectual property, especially when I’ve made the article available for reprint free of charge. And anyone reading the German would figure out who the author was, regardless of the poster’s name. (Actually, any German speaker would probably have a fit laughing at the auto-translation.) And there probably aren’t many actual readers of splogs anyway—just bots committing click-fraud.

Then Donna Papacosta, my fellow podcasting “professor,” discovered that the article had been translated back out of German into English. Now we could fall about laughing at the way “you feel as though you really know them” became “you experience as though you really cognize them,” not to mention the way Heidi Miller became “Heidi Glenn Miller.” (An extra keyword, perhaps? A sex change Heidi didn’t tell me about?)

Mostly I laughed. But the thing is, my name is still on that article, and I work as a professional writer. As the Ur-Guru pointed out, “If someone were to take ‘Comments are male monarch in the human race of podcasting’ as your writing, it would not be good advertising for the Author-izer.”

No, it certainly wouldn’t, though I like to think my potential clients are sophisticated enough to be suspicious of English that unnatural. At least I haven’t (yet) experienced the problem some of my fellow writers have, that of someone stealing just your name and putting it on his or her own articles in order to borrow credibility.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no other Sallie Goetsch on the planet, which means that if you do a search on my name, what comes up is either me or someone (or thing) impersonating me. And at least the first thing that comes up on a Google search is my own website.

But if you read something strange-seeming with my name appended to it, check with me before you accept it as genuine.