David Kudler's Blog, page 19
January 16, 2014
New Stillpoint title: Laura English
We’re excited to announce the imminent publication of Laura English, Lynn Arias Bornstein’s new novel of glamor, love, and intrigue coming in print and ebook formats to Stillpoint Digital Press in February:
Driven by a Dream…
Chance brings producer/director Sir James Paxton to the Bournemouth Players, where the performance of an unknown actress fires his imagination and launches her on a dizzying journey from provincial theater to the post- war London sound stages of Briarwood Studios, the glitter of Hollywood— and beyond.
London. Acapulco. Cairo. Hollywood.
Enter the world of superstar Laura English and meet the people who populate her magic circle: unforgettable first love John Keith, whose secret life finally catches up with him. Adoring husband and best friend David Landau, who knows he will always take second place in Laura’s heart. And Robin, the child she cannot love.
Glamour. Heartbreak. Intrigue.
The world of
Laura English
December 16, 2013
The Mercenary Major Free on Amazon Today!
For today only, you can get Kate Moore’s Stillpoint Regency Romance The Mercenary Major for free on Amazon.com!
The Mercenary Major
A POSSIBLE HEIR
Escaping death in a stagecoach ambush which left him an orphan. Jack Amherly joined the ranks of the rowdy British army. But his eccentric aunt eventually tracks him down, and when the troops return to London, Aunt Letty makes it her mission to reintroduce her wayward nephew to the ton. . . and to find him a proper wife.
AN IMPOSSIBLE HEIRESS
Alas, the outrageously unconventional Jack is taken for a fortune-seeking impostor, a circumstance he finds rather amusing given his disdain for young heiresses. But that is before he encounters the tantalizing Victoria Carr. She’s determined to ascertain the truth of his identity and get on with the pleasures of the Season. Yet exposing the handsome rascal who distracts her quickly turns to a risky game of hearts-one that is never dull for either player.
For more on Kate Moore and her library of novels, visit her page on Stillpoint/Romance or her website at http://www.katemoore.com.
November 22, 2013
Used InDesign to export your ebook and now can’t upload it ’cause it’s “encrypted”? Here’s why.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had three separate friends come to me grumbling about not being able to upload their ebooks because the ebook site tells them the files are encrypted.
“Did you export the ePub file from InDesign?” I ask.
“Yeah,” they say. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything,” I answer….
This is a classic problem that folks run into with InDesign conversion — Adobe’s a font foundry as well as a software company, and so when you embed fonts while converting from ID, it automatically obfuscates them. Essentially, it encrypts them so that only a person with the license to use that font on that machine can open the ebook. So most ebook sites won’t allow you to upload a file with obfuscated fonts. (They just don’t tell you that. They say the file’s “encrypted.” That’s helpful!)
There are ways to turn obfuscation off in the ePub file after it’s been generated — but that’s not necessarily the best answer.
The thing to remember about embedded fonts is that unless you’ve created a fixed-format ebook, the users’ preferences will usually trump whatever typographic adjustments you’ve made. Base font size, typeface — all of those are settable by the reader. Some ereaders and ereader apps have a setting to “Use Publisher’s Fonts” — Kindle for iOS does, for example — but even then, if the user has set their typeface preference to Palatino, say, or Comic Sans (:shudder:), the whole book will display in that. At that point, the fonts are adding size your file for no reason. In the case of Amazon, that means that the publisher is paying a few pennies more “transport fee” for each download, and buyers have to wait another few milliseconds for the book to download, and all for nothing.
So except in special cases — basically decorative drop-caps or headers, or in fixed-format books — I’ve generally stopped embedding. I use CSS instead to suggest fonts, always ending with the option “serif,” “san-serif,” “monotype,” or “handwriting.” Here for example is the body text style for an ebook that I did recently:
Normal {
font-family: 'Adobe Caslon Pro',Caslon,'Adobe Garamond Pro',Garamond,Palatino,'Times New Roman',Times,Cochin, serif;
font-size: 12pt;
line-height: 1.2;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
text-align: justify;
text-indent: 2em;
}
That way the ereader will use the first option that I give it that it has available — unless the user has stated a different preference, in which case there’s nothing to be done.
You can turn off font embedding in the dialogue box when you export from InDesign. Go to the “advanced” tab. You’ll see a collection of check boxes labeled “CSS Options”:
Just uncheck the “Include Embeddable Fonts” box, and InDesign won’t add the fonts to the ebook file. (You can always add them later if you want.)
The other point to consider is that font licenses don’t usually allow distribution through ebooks — not even free fonts. So by sending the fonts out un-obfuscated, you’re breaking your license agreement and, essentially, pirating the fonts. See this guest post by type designer David Bergsland on Joel Friendlander’s excellent resource for self- and independent publishers, TheBookDesigner.com for more info.
November 15, 2013
Make your book its own best marketing platform!
Smidget is that tool!
Smidget — the social media widget for ebooks
Smidget — the social media widget for ebooks
(Try the buttons!)
Smidget™ is a social media widget designed specifically for use in ebooks. Just like the sharing button bars that are so familiar from websites, each of these buttons takes you to a sharing site — but not just to the site. The Amazon and Goodreads buttons will bring the reader directly to those sites’ review posting pages. The button on the bottom left will send the reader to your website (with your logo displayed). And the four familiar buttons on the bottom-right will send the reader to post on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest — with information about your book and a buy link preloaded!
Here, for example, is what happens when a reader hits the Pinterest button on one of our recent titles:
Pinterest — About Gods & Games
This widget makes it a breeze for your most motivated readers — the ones who have just finished your book — to share their experience, attracting more readers. Word of mouth is the best advertising there is; why not make it as easy as possible for your readers to share it? Go viral!
Stillpoint’s widget comes in two versions — one for Amazon’s Kindle ebooks and one for ePub ebooks to be uploaded to all other retailers. The text is completely editable, and will follow the style of your ebook.
We will send you both versions, including the code, all necessary image files, and instructions for adding the widget to your ebook for the low introductory price of $25.
Get your book out there — selling itself!
ORDER NOW
or email us at
smidget@stillpointdigital.com
October 14, 2013
Review: I Know (Je Sais) by Ito Naga — Observing through Science and Poetry
I Know (Je sais) by Ito Naga
We usually think of science and poetry as inhabiting very different parts of the human mind, of human culture. When an astrophysicist who spends his days exploring the frontiers of the unknown writes a book of poems called I Know (Je Sais), we might pay some attention. Currently in its seventh printing in France, I Know by Ito Naga has just been released in the United States, translated by poet Lynne Knight, and it repays that investment handsomely.
Ito Naga is the nom de plume of a prominent French astrophysicist living in Paris. Aphoristic and Zen-koan-like, I Know is a collection of four hundred and sixty-nine observations on life and the universe by a scientist whose eye for detail is keen and whose wit is ever-present: “I know that what’s called quick-witted is in fact slow-witted, a wit that takes the time to break things down….” The book is profound without being ponderous, instructive without being pedantic, and engaging even at its most serious: “I know that we are secretly delighted that certain things can’t be explained by science, that some mystery persists./I know that we don’t know why knuckles can crack.” The poems range from thought-provoking to disturbing to downright funny, giving the reader a sense of looking through a lens that combines science’s clarity with poetry’s depth.
While the poet himself is French, his wife is of Japanese descent, and he took the pen name to honor her heritage, and to honor a cherished Japanese friend. The Japanese sensibility seems consonant with the poet-scientist’s attempt to meld the aesthetic and the concrete. In an interview, Naga told translator Lynne Knight, “The Japanese go very far in understanding the senses and our relationship with nature. In contact with that culture, you find yourself paying more attention to subtle things. And this makes you happy.”
I Know was inspired by American artist Joe Brainard, who in 1970 published a book called I Remember, a list of seemingly random, personal memories illuminating the interior of the artist’s life. As Naga told Knight, “One day when I was walking in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Brainard’s [technique] and the question of ‘What do I know?’ came into contact together. Why? I don’t know.”
What drives a scientist to write poems? When Knight posed the question, Nago responded, “Both the physicist’s eye and the naked eye are about observing, aren’t they? And what you learn in one field of your life, you naturally apply to the other fields. The attention that you pay when looking at some scientific data, you inevitably apply it to your daily life. We sometimes say that someone can make you attentive to this or that. Something can make you attentive as well. Writing is an example of this.”
Naga is the author of three French poetry collections: NGC 224 (2013); Iro mo ka mo, la couleur et le parfum (2010), and the original edition of Je sais (2006). Lynne Knight, the American edition’s translator, is a poet-member of publishing collective Sixteen Rivers Press and has been the recipient of many significant awards and the author of four full-length collections of poems and three prize-winning chapbooks. Her chance meeting with Ito Naga at a poetry reading in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in July of 2010 ended with her bringing Je Sais to Sixteen Rivers Press, the not-for-profit collective press of which she is a member, and shepherding it along to publication.
I Know (Je sais) is available through Sixteen Rivers Press’s own website (sixteenrivers.org) or though most independent and online bookstores.
September 30, 2013
Six things you should be including in your ebook (and probably aren’t)
Last month I came up with a flash of inspiration: a way to use ebooks to market themselves. After trying it out on a number of my own ebooks, I wrote a post for Joel Friedlander’s wonderful resource for independent publishers, TheBookDesigner.com.
That post sparked a lot of interest and so I knew I wanted to share it here as well. (Since a number of folks have asked: yes, I will help you do this if you’d like. The directions here should be easy to follow — for someone comfortable getting in under the HTML hood of an ebook. Not everyone is, however, and so I can provide assistance. Just email me at editor@stillpointdigital.com
Quick: who—aside from you, your immediate family, and your dog—are the people most excited about your book, most ready to talk about it with their friends, and best equipped to talk about your book’s virtues? Anyone?
Well, there are lots of possible answers for each of those questions, but when it comes to identifying the whole bunch, I’d bet it’s a group that you haven’t thought much about: The people who have just finished the last page.
Think about it. If someone has actually finished your book, they’re committed to it. They’re interested in what you have had to say, and it’s fresh in their minds. They are your ideal advocates, your perfect evangelists for generating more excitement about your work and making sure that people hear about it. So what are you doing to harness that potential?
Most self-publishers don’t do much of anything. Maybe they put a bio at the back, and, possibly a link to their web page. Commercial publishers don’t do a whole lot more—they’ll put a list of similar titles the reader might be interested in, and, if they’re very twenty-first century, they’ll hyperlink those titles to the appropriate pages on their site.
Those are all really, really good ideas, and a great way to make the next sale. Is that enough? No, no, no.
What are you going to do to make sure that this title finds its audience? How are you going to harness that band of potential sales reps who’ve just finished your book and really want to talk with someone about it? I was thinking about this recently, and realized that the answer was pretty simple, when you remember that an ebook is simply a specialized web page. You do something like this:
To anyone who uses the web regularly—especially anyone who buys ebooks—those buttons are self-explanatory. Click us! they say. Click us and let everyone know what you think of this fascinating book you’ve just read!
You’ve seen a million little constellations of buttons like that on your browser. Why not put one where those motivated readers can use them at exactly the point where they’re most likely to do so?
To decode (if you haven’t been submerged in the culture of social media), each of those buttons leads to a review site. From top left to bottom right, they are buttons from the bookseller—in this case Amazon.com (you should change this to match each site you sell on), GoodReads.com (the preeminent review exchange site), my own website (more on that later), Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and Pinterest.com. (The missing link here—heh, “missing link”—is for Google . I’ll explain below why I haven’t included that button.) I now have a working Google button! See below!
Finding the buttons is easy—the sites themselves usually have link buttons that they want you to use, and you’re welcome to use the buttons from this post. Building the appropriate links is just a bit harder, but only a bit. In order to create the appropriate links for these buttons above, you must first do the following things, all of which you have to do anyway:
Create a dedicated web page for your book — on your own site, or on any other site that you like (if you are working through a publishing services company, they’ll create one for you).
Create a cover for your book.
Create a GoodReads page for your book (or, if your book has been published before, for this edition of your book).
Now to the business of building those links.
Your page: The first one that you need to think about is the one to your site—or whatever you are using as your dedicated page, since a number of the other links will be based on that. If you haven’t already loaded a copy of your logo/colophon into the ebook, do that, and then hyperlink it as follows:
yoursite.com/yourbookpage/?detail&buy“>[image error]images/logo.jpg” alt=”Logo” />
Now, obviously, the actual addresses will need to correspond to your page and the location of your image in your book’s structure. Okay so far? If you’ve been working on your ebook or know HTML at all, that should have been a piece of cake.
Okay. Load the rest of those images into your ebook.
GoodReads: Now, the easiest of the remaining links will be the one to your GoodReads page. The link will look something like this:
Amazon: Since the large majority of ebook sales—especially by self-published authors—happen through Amazon’s Kindle store, I’m going to show you how to link to that. However, you should absolutely change this button and the link code to match that of whatever site you’re selling on, since they don’t like you linking to other booksellers from within their ebooks!
All of the booksellers use the ISBN as a unique identifier for each individual edition—except for Amazon. Amazon uses their own identifier for ebooks—ASIN—which means, unfortunately, that we have to wait until after the book is published on the Kindle Store to create this link.
In either case, we’re going to use that number to create a link to the seller’s review page for your book. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to hit the button that says “Post your own review” or whatever. Because Amazon doesn’t assign an ASIN until the title is published, the easiest way to get this link is to go to your book’s page. Look up in the address bar; it will look something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Title-ebook/dp/B00ABCDEFG/
The two parts we care about are the title tag (Your-Title-ebook) and the ASIN (B00ABCDEFG). Now, you can’t link directly to the script launched by the “Be the first to review this book” link. However, you can link to the list of reviews. No reviews yet, you say? Pshaw. Here’s a typical Amazon review listing:
http://www.amazon.com/Death-in-a-Fair-Place-ebook/product-reviews/B00AXN84H0/
You’ll note that I’ve highlighted the title tag and ASIN. Replace those with your own so that it looks something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Title-ebook/product-reviews/B00ABCDEFG/
Now create that link in your ebooks:
There you go! When someone clicks on that, the first thing they’ll see is a button reading “Create your own review.” Just what we want.
Now it gets interesting—but if your dedicated web page already has social sharing set up, even this isn’t a big deal. If there are buttons already set up for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., just click on them, copy the URL out of the address bar, create the link, and you’re done.
If you don’t have sharing set up (and if you don’t, you should), it’s still doable. You just need to know one thing about how web addresses are called from inside other URLs: you can’t use any non-alphanumeric characters. So to include a colon (:), slash (/), ampersand (&), question mark (?), etc., we have to use (gulp) the HTML numeric code for that character.
Well, no big deal. I’ll give you a cheat sheet. So let’s start with your book’s dedicated web page. It probably looks something like this:
To use this inside of one of the social networking site’s URL’s, we’re going to need to change all of those non-letter characters to HTML codes. Here’s that cheat sheet I was talking about.
Change the colon (:) to :
Change all slashes (/) to /
Change all question marks (?) to ?
Change all ampersands (&) to &
Change all spaces ( ) to
When you make those substitutions, your URL will look like this:
http:/% 2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fyourbookpage/?deta...
Ugly, but browsers will read them just fine. To create those social links just replace the bit that matches our dummy address above with your own.
Facebook: For this link, we’re going to replace the web page URL, which goes after the “u=” attribute, and we’re also going to pre-enter some text (the author’s name and the book’s title, in this example) after the “t=” attribute. For that text, instead of using for spaces, use the plus symbol ( ).
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/share...http:%2F/www.yoursite.com%2Fyourbookpage/?deta...&t=Your Name - Your Title&display=popup
Twitter: This link is easy; just paste our doctored URL (or a shortened URL) after the “url=” attribute:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage%...
Pinterest: For this link, we’re going to use your web page’s actual, undoctored URL, and we’re again going to pre-enter some text—your name, the book’s title, and more text (the short description, for example) after the “description=” attribute.
This time, we’re using for spaces. We are also going to need a web address for your cover art (here called “cover.jpg”) which goes after the “media=” attribute.
http://pinterest.com/pin/create/butto...http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/...&media=http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/... by Author? The best book%20ever written blah blah
Google : (I was finally able to make this one work after the original post came out!) Just paste your doctored URL in to the following link after the “url=” attribute.
https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://www.yoursite.com/yourbookpage/...&gpsrc=frameless&partnerid=frameless
There you go! Now you’ve given your erstwhile evangelists the wherewithal to share their passion for your work with their friends, their colleagues, the world! Will every reader take advantage of that opportunity? No. But if even one in ten does, and even one in a hundred of that person’s friends buys your book, that’s a win. You’re harnessing the power of social networking.
September 27, 2013
Interview: Meeting Ito Naga — Poetry and Science
I Know (Je sais) by Ito Naga
If a stroll through Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens seems like poetry itself, in July of 2010 it led American poet Lynne Knight to actual poetry: a reading by a French poet sous l’arbre, under a tree, in the gardens. Cheyne éditeur, a small poetry publishing house, was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary with an open-air exhibition. That evening, Knight happened to attend a reading by French poet Ito Naga, who read from his collection of aphoristic poems Je sais (I Know).
Je sais is a quirky, literally wonder-full collection of 469 observations on life and the universe by an astrophysicist whose eye for detail is keen and whose sense of humor is refreshing. As Knight described it, “It’s profound without being ponderous, instructive without being pedantic, and engaging even at its most serious.”
What made the poet and his book even more interesting was the unusual path that he had taken to writing poetry: Ito Naga is the nom de plume of a French astrophysicist. He took his pseudonym in honor of his Japanese wife.
Afterward, Knight gave the scientist-poet a card from Sixteen Rivers Press, the Northern California poetry-publishing collective of which Knight is a member.
Two years later, Ito Naga’s initial English translation of Je sais arrived unexpectedly at Sixteen Rivers, with a letter saying that he would be pleased to have the press publish it. Knight laughs, “But we’re a collective that requires a three-year work commitment from our poets, and since Ito Naga lives in Paris, publishing his book seemed impossible.”
Although Ito Naga is fluent in English (having worked for NASA for three years), his translation needed some tweaking, so in a letter saying that the members of Sixteen Rivers were sorry that they couldn’t publish his book, Knight offered to work on the translation for the sheer pleasure it. She offered to help him find a publisher, too; the book had appeared in 2006 in France and had already been reprinted four times. (It is now in its seventh printing.) Knight was certain that it would have a similar appeal in the United States.
This fall, through Knight’s determined help, the work of the Sixteen Rivers collective, and generous assistance from the Howard S. Whitney and Yellow House foundations, Sixteen River Press is publishing I Know (Je sais), the English edition of Naga’s poems. The ebook of this collection will be made available by Stillpoint Digital Press.
Recently, Knight interviewed poet-scientist Ito Naga about his work:
Lynne Knight: Could you talk a little bit about how Je sais came into being?
Ito Naga: I had been looking for Georges Pérec’s Je me souviens for quite some time. I’d only heard of it and I thought it was an amazing idea. Many years ago, I asked the bookseller (whose name was Mr. Vie; isn’t that a nice name?) in my neighborhood about this book and he told me that the idea actually was from an American painter, Joe Brainard, who in 1970 had published a book called I Remember. This book had just been retranslated into French, and there was a lovely preface by the translator, Marie Chaix. “Brainard,” she said, “has found a key to open memory from which he extracts words corresponding to old images.” This so-called key of “I remember” lies in the fact that you directly access the “old image” without caring about introduction or other literary preparations. You sort of jump to the memories, and it’s a jubilant jump. I realized that Brainard’s idea was not only fun but also amazingly stimulating. […] And one day when I was walking in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Brainard’s key and the question of “What do I know?” came into contact together. Why? I don’t know.
LK: There’s such an exquisite delicacy and restraint at work in all three of your books. How much has your familiarity with the Japanese culture contributed to your work?
IN: I’m glad that you see such a delicacy in these books. As for the Japanese culture, I’m not sure that I’m as familiar with it as you say. One thing for sure is that, once you let this culture enter your mind, it gradually grows. I did not make up the story with the “shy” singing insects and the caring shopkeeper in Nara (No. 40 and No. 41 of I Know). These are delicate things you encounter in Japan. I think this Japanese delicacy partly lies in the fact that they do not make everything explicit. They care for what is present but not explicitly said; they care for the shade that gives shape to things and not only for full light that flattens everything. They’ll tell you a few things and you’ll have to manage by yourself to fill the gaps. “Someone who can’t read the air (kuki ga yomenai hito)” they say about someone who doesn’t get the feel of a situation. It’s a sort of training, and it’s almost a miracle that, in the end, you can be understood.
There is delicacy also in the fact that the Japanese are extremely good at observing. To describe a small garden, they may say “a garden that is small like a cat’s forehead (neko no hitai no yona niwa).” Listening to this, you not only understand that the garden is small; you develop a feeling for its smallness. Little is said, so you have to rely on different senses. It seems to me that senses are more solicited in the Japanese culture, be it for food, architecture, arts and crafts . . . The Japanese go very far in understanding the senses and our relationship with nature. In contact with that culture, you find yourself paying more attention to subtle things. And this makes you happy.
LK: I hesitate to ask this since choosing a pseudonym is implicitly a request for anonymity. But I’m wondering if you would comment on choosing Ito Naga as your pseudonym. If you type Ito Naga into Google Translate, by the way, it just offers “Ito Naga” as a translation—unless you then click on Japanese characters that Google proposes, in which case the translation is “thread length.”
IN: “Itonaga” is the name of the Japanese person I cherish. I’ve cut her name into two. Ito does mean “thread,” and I enjoy that idea. I think of Ariadne’s thread, which keeps you from losing your way in a maze. As for Naga, she says it means “eternity” rather than “length,” but is she trying to sway us? There are actually two ways of writing Naga in Japanese. The second way means “long length.” A bit closer to “eternity.”
LK: How much arranging did you do of the 469 statements? Did those statements that cluster together do so naturally, when you wrote them, or did you fit them together afterward? And did it just happen that there were 469 of them, or is there a reason that you stopped there?
IN: I initially wrote probably twice as many of these statements in notebooks. Just try and you’ll see that many of them come very easily. Then the whole question is which ones you select. If I write “I know that, at atmospheric pressure, water boils at 100°C,” although meaningful, it’s not very appealing to be included in the book. Or to put it in a different way: if you decide to include “I know that water boils at 100°C,” you give the book a very specific spin. So part of the game consisted in examining all the statements of my notebooks like tiny stones or shells according to their color and their atmosphere. Inserting them, or chains of them, here and there in the book, a bit like in a mosaic, sort of naturally led to the present arrangement.
LK: You spend much of your time as an astrophysicist seeing through a lens or seeing into the theoretical and abstract. How does your astrophysicist’s eye differ from your “naked” eye, as we say in English? Or does it seem not to differ at all?
IN: First, I should say that I’m working on in-situ measurements from spacecraft. So I do not see through a lens or, if so, it is not that of a telescope but a mental one. The physicist’s eye (or viewpoint?) is constrained by different conditions, the first ones being how, when or where can some event be observed. If this event cannot be somehow measured, the physicist’s eye looks away. Well, almost. Because of course in reality one keeps looking. Both the physicist’s eye and the “naked” eye are about observing, aren’t they? And what you learn in one field of your life, you naturally apply to the other fields. The attention that you pay when looking at some scientific data, you inevitably apply it to your daily life. We sometimes say that “someone” can make you attentive to this or that. “Something” can make you attentive as well. Writing is an example of this.
LK: Jean-Pierre Siméon [poet and editor, Cheyne éditeur] says that you show us the real for what it is: a universe infinitely expanding. In what ways has being an astrophysicist influenced your close observation of the reality before you? (Let’s posit that Nabokov was right, and “reality” is a word that makes sense only within quotation marks.)
IN: Your question makes me think of a day where I was dropping flower seeds. Have you noticed how tiny these seeds are? Well, at least the seeds I dropped were. I felt like I was not dropping anything but bits of code, marking the soil from place to place. One sometimes feels surprised all over again by real things and the processes inside them. There is a sort of exaltation in these moments where you reload something that has turned invisible to your eyes. We discovered all of this at the beginning of our lives and we forgot it.
LK: When you’re doing a reading, how do you choose which of the 469 statements to read? Are there some that you find “read” better aloud than others? Are there some you always read? If so, could you name a few of them?
IN: I always read the first one and the last one. The last one about Marco Polo because this story is just marvelous. It connects East and West; it sort of opens the horizon and makes you breathe. The first one because everyone notices coincidences: “I know that it’s tempting to see signs in coincidences.” I know that this statement is intriguing because everyone has a collection of coincidences of his own. I have mine. One day at a reading, a woman told me that she did not listen to me. She got stuck at this very first “I know” and started thinking of a recent coincidence. A not so pleasant one. Some of the “I know’s” that I read are recurrent such as the one about pigeons moving away from me in the street (No. 52) and the following one about the shark in the British zoo (No. 53) or the one about sitting at a table thinking about God (No. 269). To answer your question in a different way, the “I know’s” have different atmospheres. Some of them are more gloomy than others and I’d rather not read the gloomy ones.
LK: Did your sense of the book change in any way when you began translating it into English? Did any statements seem untranslatable? Are there particular statements that seem to you better in one language than in the other? (And of course we’d love some examples, if so.)
IN: This is an interesting question and I’m not sure that I have a clear answer. First, I must say that I am very happy that the book has been translated in English, which is a beautiful language. Translating is a matter of words and sounds, and also a matter of rhythm and viewpoint. Take Joe Brainard. After writing I Remember, he wrote a second book entitled I Remember More. Then a third one entitled More I Remember More. I enjoy the spin of these titles. They are simple, light and swift. I actually mention something about this in No. 100 and No.101 of I Know: how the position of words in English curiously makes them more evocative than in French, as in “atmospheric café.” I wonder whether it works the other way around for English-speaking people. With the translation of the book into English, I’ve also learned a couple of expressions that I don’t have a chance to meet in scientific papers, such as “Are you putting me on?” “Can I hit you up for one?” or “spread ourselves thin.” I miss a number of subtleties in English. I think there is irony here and there in the book, and I’m curious to know how it sounds in English. One example is No. 279: “I know that, when you listen to someone else, something that looks like thinking occurs. This is what makes you resemble a dead fish.” In other places, I can’t help being surprised by the proximity of French and English, for instance when it comes to “dotting the i’s” (No.184).
LK: There’s always discussion about an author’s intent. How would you characterize your own intent? And, as a related question, what do you hope people gain from reading I Know (Je sais)?
IN: One day, someone who hadn’t read the book asked me about the title. “Lucky man!” he said after I told him. When you read the book, it rapidly becomes apparent that there are different levels for understanding “knowledge” here. You may wonder here and there in the book: “What sort of knowledge is this?” The intent was not clearly formed in my mind when I started writing. It was rather a feeling that we are filled with streams of “I know’s” and that, as changing and fragile as they are, they stand at the very center of our lives. People have told me that they felt good after reading the book. If so, I’m happy that the book contributes to a sense of “bien-être” or well-being.
I Know (Je sais) is the twenty-ninth book to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press (sixteeenrivers.org), a poetry collective dedicated to providing an alternative publishing avenue for Bay Area poets. The press is named for the sixteen rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay.
Ito Naga is the nom de plume of a prominent French astrophysicist living in Paris. He is the author of three books, all published in France by Cheyne éditeur: NGC 224 (2013); Iro mo ka mo, la couleur et le parfum (2010), now in its third printing; and Je sais (2006), now in its seventh printing. He also contributes regularly to the Italian journal Sud.
September 17, 2013
From proof sheets to royalty reports: what a self-published book can earn
A client just asked what she could plan on making per copy of her book — she’s trying to put together a budget, which is always an excellent idea. Well, I talked earlier about the costs of preparing a book for publication, but hey! We know your book is going to sell, right? So what should we plan on in the revenue column?
I thought it might be helpful to share my response to her, to give you an idea of what a book might actually bring in (per copy — how many copies sell is entirely up to you).
The numbers I gave her are based on these assumptions:
The book is going to be self-published (so the author will the person going to Amazon’s KDP and Createspace subsidiaries, and to Ingram’s Lightning Source or IngramSpark)
The book in question is going to run approximately 350 pages (black ink on white paper), will have a trim size of 6″ x 9″, and will be “perfect” bound (the standard paperback binding)
Here’s my response:
For ebooks, you earn about 70% at most bookseller sites. Amazon (which sells something like 75%-80% of all of the ebooks in this country) pays 65%, minus a fee based on the size of the ebook file. Full-length ebooks typically cost between $3.99 and $9.99. So you’d earn between $3.00 and $7.00 for each copy sold. (If we go over $9.99, Amazon only pays a 35% royalty — very odd.)
For print books, the answer depends on whether the book is in the Createspace/Amazon zone or the Lightning Source/Ingram/Everyone Else zone.
Through Amazon/Createspace —
For Createspace, the equation is comparatively simple. We set a price — let’s say for the point of argument $14.99. The cost of production per copy of the book is deducted from that — somewhere around $5 per copy for your book (I’m assuming that your book will run something like 350 pages). If a copy of the paperback is sold on Amazon, they deduct a further share of 40% of sales price — around $6. Which would leave you with a net royalty of about $4.
So on sales through Amazon.com:
Sales price: $14.99
Amazon’s share: $6.00
Production cost: ~$5.00
Gross Royalty: $ 4.00 (approx.)
If the book were sold on Createspace’s own website (which is what I link to from mine), Amazon “only” skims 20% off the top, leaving you with closer to $7 per copy of royalty.
Sales price: $14.99
Amazon’s share: $3.00
Production cost: ~$5.00
Gross Royalty: $ 7.00 (approx.)
Ingram/Lightning Source
Going through Lightning Source, we get to control not only the list price, but the wholesale discount. Traditionally, bookstores get a 55% discount on orders, but we can set it anywhere from that down to 20%.
At Lightning Source, that same book (according to my calculations) would cost closer to $6.00 to print. If you decided to offer the standard 55% discount, that would leave you with a net royalty of about $1.75. (Now you see why books are so expensive!)
Sales price: $14.99
Wholesale discount (55%): $8.25
Production cost: ~$6.00
Gross Royalty: $ 1.75 (approx.)
We would have the ability to play with all of those numbers — Lightning Source’s discount rate and most importantly the list price — at any time. I can also control the page count in a number of ways, squeezing a bit more text in per page, which would lower the production cost, but make the book a bit less pleasant to read.
The other way to increase the (potential) royalty is to have the book offset printed, and distribute it ourselves. To be cost-effective, however, you’d need to print at least 500 copies of the book or more — and we’re still only looking at a savings of 25% to 50%, with additional costs (and headaches) for storage, fulfillment, and shipping. Plus there’s a large outlay of cash up front.
By the way, I only talked about Lightning Source here, not Ingram’s new self-publishing platform, IngramSpark, because I’m already on Lightning Source. If anyone’s had any dealings with IngramSpark, I’d love to hear about them!
More retro clipart at http://www.clipartof.com/
September 2, 2013
Tending the Spark
Ramiz Monsef
There’s the intoxicating flame of creating, of feeling inspiration hit you. And then there’s the equally heady, very different feeling of watching someone you’ve inspired — a child, a student — catch fire himself. Sometimes the two come together.
Before I turned full-time to publishing, I was — like my wife Maura — an actor and acting teacher. About sixteen years ago, we had the good fortune to teach a young man named Ramiz Monsef who took to what we were teaching as if he had been born to it. It was a little humbling to watch as he inhaled both the techniques we were offering to him and his classmates and the philosophy behind them and made them very much his own. Inspiration comes from the Latin meaning literally “breathe in.” That’s what Ramiz did.
That was half of his lifetime ago, but we’ve kept in touch with Ramiz, following as he continued his studies and launched a career, eventually becoming a resident actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
This summer Maura and I headed up to Ashland, home of the OSF, to watch The Unfortunates, the original musical that Ramiz had helped to conceive and write, which premiered at the festival.
The show is an ensemble tour de force — a thematically dense, theatrically stunning gumbo that runs the musical gamut from blues to rap to gospel to pop to hook-filled rock to Patsy Kline ballads. It’s staged brilliantly and performed flawlessly — not least by Ramiz.
After the show, we talked to him and his co-writers; he told them that we’d been his teachers. We told him we couldn’t have been prouder of him.
After going out to dinner with our former student and listening to him talk about all of that technique — and the philosophy behind it — that he had mastered, Maura and I went to the festival’s signature Globe-like Elizabethan Stage to watch a lovely production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As we were standing in the courtyard before the show I looked up and saw one of the shields that festoon the exterior of the theater. Each one listed the shows performed during one of the festival’s seventy-seven seasons.
The shield for 1973 listed As You Like It.
Standing there in the courtyard, staring up, I realized just when — and how — my own fire was kindled.
That year I was ten and a half, and my parents brought me to see an adult production of Shakespeare for the very first time. My memories of the show are vague and snapshot-like, but I remember very well how it made me feel. I was transfixed. I was lit up. I was bitten.
From then on, Shakespeare was my passion, my bliss: the language, the laughter burned in my blood, leading me to master’s degrees in English and Acting, to careers first in the theater and then in publishing. I had the joy of being directed, years later, at different theaters, by two of the leads in that 1973 As You Like It — Elizabeth Huddle (Rosalind) and Will Huddleston (Touchstone). I performed in dozens of productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and eventually I began directing teens in them.
One of whom was Ramiz Monsef. Whose work had so inspired me earlier that day.
That spark, that ember has been burning for thousands of years, jumping from one imagination to another. It was very funny for me, standing there in the sultry Ashland evening air, to find that it had traveled, this once, full circle.
August 29, 2013
New Guest Post: Best Ebook Marketing Tip EVER
I was working on this site recently when I had a bit of a revelation: the people who read a book all of the way to the end are precisely the people most motivated to review, FB-post, Tweet, Pin, etc. about it, thus sharing their experience with their friends, a group of people who may never have heard of your book, but who will take seriously a mention by your reader.
Better than any advertising you could pay for!
And web sites have been taking advantage of this truth for years — which has led to the ubiquitous bars of buttons that make it as easy as possible to share a web page (or product or…) with your nearest and dearest.
My revelation was that, since an ebook is merely a highly specialized web page, I should include a set of just those sorts of links at the end of each book: links to review the book on the bookseller’s site, on Goodreads, or on my own site, or to post something about the book to Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest.
Joel Friedlander posted my article on his wonderful resource for small and self-pubishers, The Book Designer, as Six Things You Should Be Including in Your Ebook (and Probably Aren’t)
