A couple of weeks ago, my day-job required me to fly to Chicago for a day to attend a meeting.  I’d been to Chicago on business a couple of times before, but on those trips I was visiting companies that were located outside of the city, so I never got a chance to see the downtown commercial center known as The Loop.   Like most Americans, I’m ignorant about the places in our country that I don’t actually live in, much less the rest of the world, so I was quite surprised to see an architectural treasure chest suddenly appear before me on the cab ride to the Hyatt on Wacker Drive, where my meeting was being held.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know a lot more about the architecture of Chicago.

After my meeting at the hotel had ended, I had a couple of hours free before I needed to get back to the airport for my flight home, so I took a little walk around the general vicinity.  Some of the buildings were quite captivating and I started feeling nostalgia for an era that I never actually lived in.  I imagined that it was the 1950′s and the hustle and bustle  around The Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower was comprised of men and women wearing hats.  I had arrived in the city by train.  I had my new Android-based smartphone with me, so I snapped a few pictures.   I had just gotten the phone the week before, so I fumbled a lot with it, trying to figure out how to work the camera function.  The results are rather mediocre and you can probably find much better pictures of these landmarks elsewhere on the internet, but at least I’ve documented my trip there.

On the ride to airport, in true Tom Friedman globe-trotting-blowhard fashion, I had a conversation with the cheerful and talkative cab driver.  He started the conversation, just casual small talk, by asking me what brought me to Chicago.  “A business strategy meeting I said.”  The fact that I had no luggage and had flown out just for the day for  “A business strategy meeting” in these difficult times is a dead giveaway that I’ve got a pretty good job.  Admittedly, I do.  He asked me what I did and I told him software.  We spoke for a bit as he asked me about what I thought “the next big thing” would be.

As we drove along Grant Park, I told him that although I had been to Chicago before, this was the first time I had actually gotten  to  see some of it and I thought it was quite beautiful.  I’m not naive enough to think that an entire city looks like the few blocks I walked around in the the commercial center and that like most places these days, the massive recession has hit hard.  I’m very aware of how fortunate I am.  My pretty good job has a lot to do with the sheer luck I happened to have in being where I was when the hammer fell two years ago.  There’s a lot of guys like me out of the work.

“But how are things going here really?”  I asked.

“Pretty bad,” he answered.  “I’m glad I got this job.  I lost my factory job a couple of years ago.  I’m doing this to make ends meet. I’m taking an exam next month to be a corrections officer.  Otherwise there’s no jobs.”

Interesting growth industry for a city like Chicago.

We passed by a massive old housing project.  It looked like it had been abandoned for years.  The windows and doors of all the buildings were boarded up, the grass had grown tall, and the entire complex was surrounded by a twenty foot high chain-link fence and no trespassing signs.

“What’s up with that?”

The cabbie shook his head. “They closed that down five years ago and were supposed to build mixed-income units.  Nothing’s happened since then.”

The final miles to the airport were filled with businesses – former grocery stores, coffee shops, dry-cleaners, gas stations, pizza shops, real estate agencies, car dealerships – that had all been shuttered.  The road to any city’s airport always seems to run through its metaphoric “Valley of Ashes,” but this one seemed deeper and wider than most.

At the airport, I paid the fare and tip, shook the cabbie’s hand, thanked him for the ride and wished him luck on his upcoming exam.  As I look now at those pictures I took, I still think of that mid-western industrial giant in the middle of the last century.  Those beautiful towers are the legacy an era when people worked in plants for a living wage, the unions protecting them were strong, the top tax rate was 91%, and CEO’s made forty times the lowest paid worker, not hundreds.

The forces that transformed that city into the despair of today are innumerable and complex, but the smart phone that I used to snap my pictures with tells one small part of the story.  It’s a miraculous piece of technology whose capabilities were the stuff of science fiction when those buildings first reached toward the sky.  It is also an artifact of that world-is-flat mentality that fellow cab-rider Friedman was hyperventilating just a few short years ago.   It was manufactured in a Chinese sweatshop operated by a company under a contract with a multi-national corporation.  Where is the headquarters of this multi-national corporation?

Chicago, Illinois.

© 2010 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

A coworker got his iPad this weekend, so I checked out what my eBooks look like on it.  I’m very impressed and eBooks may end up being the killer app for the iPad.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

It’s new, it’s green, it’s hot.

Sorry, that sounded a little too much like blowhard Tom Friedman.  Let me start over.

Last fall, when I was in San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, researching my next book, The World is Green, Sweaty, and Concave, I had a conversation with the cab driver who drove me to the airport about the International Monetary Fund’s Latin American policy and its impact on the  nanotechnology research incubators being established in the former rustbelt of the United States.  When he’s not driving his cab, Pepe is a student at the local university and heads an internet social-media startup…

Sorry, I did it again. One more time, I promise to be good.

EBooks, I was talking about eBooks and the coming revolution…

Last fall, I was talking to some acquaintances, ordinary writers with families and boring day jobs, not high-tech entrepreneurial cabbies from exotic countries, about the changes in publishing, and in particular POD publishing technology and eBooks.  For very little cost, it’s now possible for any writer to publish a book, in digital or print form, and sell it on the internet.  Whether or not it gets any attention at all and sells beyond the small circle of the writer’s friends is another question.  I’m still old-fashioned enough to be skeptical about self-publishing and aside from this blog, I’m still going at it the old fashioned way: trying to convince someone else to publish me.

But I was intrigued.  The biggest challenge to me was the fragmentation of the EBook market in technological terms.  There’s the Kindle, there’s the Sony Reader, the Fictionwise EReader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and now Apple’s iPad.  All of these devices are closed and proprietary to some degree or another, but more importantly, are tied to specific content distributers.  If you want your book to be available to the widest possible audience, you really need to be able to support all those formats as natively as possible and get connected in to those devices distribution channels.

As a lowest common denominator on the format question, you can use PDF, but PDF documents only work well on real PC’s and not on dedicated devices with smaller screens.  PDF files are composed of fixed pages that don’t display well on smaller screens.  Either the device shows the entire page making the text too small to read, or if you can zoom in, it makes for very awkward reading as you have to slide the enlarged page left and right and up and down as you are reading.  A cumbersome reading experience, especially if you are trying to enter into John Gardner’s fictive dream.  The device, like a real book, needs to dissolve out of our consciousness as we read.  In order to create the proper reading experience, the text needs to be reflowed dynamically for each device, something that PDF doesn’t do well at all.

There’s another practical matter to consider about PDF format as well.  Since it only works really well on a computer, it means that in order to read it you have to be sitting at a computer.  By necessity, I do a lot of reading at my computer these days.  My writing is published in ezines and I read a lot of them along with various blogs that I follow, but that’s hardly the way I done reading for most of my life.  The word sprawled comes to mind as in,  “Sprawled on the living room couch.”  Most of my reading is done horizontally unless it’s not possible, such as when I’m reading from my computer screen or incarcerated on an airplane.  I guess it’s possible to sprawl on an airplane, but it’s not very row-mate friendly.

And in bed.  I read in bed.  I have to confess that my aluminum unibody MacBook is the sexiest piece of hardware I’ve ever seen, but it’s too awkward to curl up next to it in bed.  Mrs. Bubbers would have a problem with that too.  So, the small book sized devices offer the most natural reading experience and cannot be ignored. The vendors of these products won’t let you with all those pictures of happy readers outside sprawled out under maple trees gazing at their devices.

While I was pondering these questions, I discovered Smashwords.com, which I discussed in yesterday’s post.  Smashwords solves several problems at once.  First, it provides the technology to transform your book into all the common formats used by the most popular devices.  Second, through their business relationships, they provide access to the supply chains that are supporting all the various devices.  Still, there’s the marketing challenge that you need to solve on your own, but at least the technical barriers are removed.

I stuck my little toe in the water and signed up with Smashwords as an author.  While I’m still working on a book-length collection of short stories to be published by someone other than myself, I wanted to see how the Smashwords process works.  I selected a memoir that I had written several years ago that had been published in the Oregon Literary Review and set to work formatting the Word document according to the Smashwords style guide.  It took a few attempts to create a document that would look good in all the published formats after the Smashwords meatgrinder  got through with it and also to get approved for their premium distribution program, but in the end, it was a lot simpler than I had expected.

Meta-memoir

The personal essay, or memoir, that I chose for my little experiment was a piece that I wrote several years ago.  It marked my return to serious writing after having quit in my late twenties.  The usual reasons: frustration at not getting published, building a career in software development, starting a family, etc. While in the middle of a thoroughly enjoyable (but harmless) middle-aged crisis, I decided I wanted to start trying to write again.  Unfortunately, I was at a loss as to where to start and the doubts about my talent had never gone away.  Fiction, making things up, was very daunting.  I contacted an old friend from my college days, also a writer, who is now an English professor and teaches, among other things, composition.  She suggested that instead trying to tackle a piece of fiction right away, I try to “get my swing” back by writing a personal essay.  She assigns personal essays to her freshman composition students as a way of helping them work through their fears of writing.  She also sent me a copy of one of her own personal essays that she gives to her students as a sample.  “Don’t worry about what it’s about, just as long as it means something to you,” she said.

When I read her essay, I immediately understand how I should approach my own.  Her first-person narrative was written using the iceberg approach.  Like an iceberg, the part that you see, the part that’s apparent, is only the tip and it’s supported by a huge part that’s hidden underwater.  For a memoir, the part that’s hidden, but still felt by the reader (if you do it right) is the emotional part.  It’s the part that resonates on an almost unconscious level with the reader.  It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do.  If you write too little, the reader literally has no idea what you’re talking about.  That’s what happens when young writers spend too much time in literature classes focusing on the subtleties in great writing.  Get too subtle, however, and you become obtuse.  On the other hand, if you write too much, you leave no emotional space for the reader to inhabit.

Maria’s essay was perfect, and in the years since we were students, she’s mastered the approach.

Since we were always a bit competitive,  when we don’t deny it, I decided to try the same method and see what I could do.  As a topic, I chose a writing workshop that I had taken in my last year at college.  It stood out for me because I remembered at the time how important to me it was and how nervous I was even applying to get accepted into it.  That was where I began.

A month later I, had completed it and it had been a journey.  I’m not one of those who tends to think of writing as a form of therapy.  If you need therapy, see a therapist.  Nonetheless, during the course of working on the essay, I rediscovered a person I had forgotten.  I’ve had no problem writing fiction since then.

For my trial run through Smashwords, I took another pass at the essay and polished a few things that suddenly, four years later, struck me as embarrassing and uploaded it as an eBook.  At about 9,500 words, it’s a pretty short book, so I priced it at $1.00.  It took several months, but the Barnes & Noble version finally showed up a few weeks ago.  I’m still waiting for Amazon.  This is all new for both Smashwords and the channels and they’re still working out the technical kinks.

As part of my participation in “Read an eBook Week,” the already low price of $1.00 has been reduced to free.  You can “purchase” it and download if from Smashwords here.

Unlike most of my fiction, a happy ending…

As a final note, after reading Maria’s essay, I wrote back to her and urged her to send it out for publication.  Neither of us knew that we were submitting to the same place, but much to our surprise, both of our essays were published in the same issue, so in the competition that we don’t really have, it was either a tie or we both won.  I prefer the latter.

“Shadow Ball,” by Maria Pollack, Oregon Literary Review, Vol. 1, No.2

See larger image The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $6.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 4, 1991.

See larger image On Becoming a Novelist (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $7.75 In Stock Used from: $3.24 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Living in Interesting Times

This week, March 7 through 13, is “Read an eBook Week.”  Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords.com, has an interview at Huffington Post with Rita Toews, who created the annual event in 2004, long before all the recent hoopla and turmoil in the publishing industry regarding pricing, devices, digital rights management (DRM), Google’s attempt to monopolize access to every book ever printed, Apple declaring war on Amazon, and Macmillan picking a fight with Amazon while bloodying the collective noses of its authors.  Add to that mix a reading public getting very used to “free” content on the internet and print on demand (POD) technology and things are getting very chaotic.  The publishing business as we have known for the past hundred years or so is rapidly changing, but it’s hard to know what it’s changing into.  Gutenberg knew he was changing the world but probably never imagined that his printing technologies would drive the Renaissance and create the modern world.

Maybe we’re on the verge of some new Renaissance, maybe we’re not.  Where things are going right now is completely unknown.  Unknown to the publishing houses, the major retailers, literary agents and the technology enablers.  All of the people who are supposed to understand their markets and their businesses are clueless.  Some are embracing change, others resisting it, all are jockeying for position and trying to corner markets no one can understand.  Some are heroes, some are villains,  some are both at the same time.

The publishing houses, aware of what happened to the music industry, have not resisted the digital revolution, and have been offering their books in digital formats for several years now.  eBooks still make up only a small percentage of their total sales, but each year the percentage increases significantly, fueled by improvements in eBook devices.  Growth is still hampered by one major factor: The lack of a single electronic format that works seamlessly across all devices.  If eBooks are going to displace print books, it’s going to be an uphill battle.  If you include the codex, the printed book at nearly two thousand years of age, is still the most perfect communications device ever invented.  All it takes to read a book is at least one eye and one hand.  No expensive electronic equipment, batteries, Wifi, or USP port required.

Unfortunately, this problem is not going away and it’s actually getting worse because the major players are hell-bent on monopolizing the distribution channels.  Amazon, to its credit, has created the most successful eBook reader to date, the butt-ugly Kindle, and has done more to popularize eBooks than anyone else, but they use the eBooks themselves as loss leaders in an apparent strategy to become the sole means of distribution, able to dictate prices to suppliers.  If that doesn’t sound so bad, go ask a former employee of Rubbermaid what they think of Wal-Mart.

To the rescue came Apple, with its announcement of the iPad, and its own eBook pricing model.  Instead of being a retailer, Apple will function as an “agent” of the publishers.  Publishers get to name their price, and Apple will take a 30% cut.  Macmillan immediately took advantage of this and demanded the same kind of deal from Amazon.  Initially Amazon refused and retaliated by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan and Macmillan imprint books on their site.  Eventually, Amazon had to give in.  Interestingly, it took over a week to restore all the buy buttons when it had only taken them a few hours to remove them.  I’m a computer guy, and quite frankly, that does not compute.

While this battle was going on, I visited various blogs and news sites where this was being discussed.  There was the Amazon-is-evil faction, there was the Steve Jobs-is-evil faction, and there was Micro$oft Sucks faction, even though Microsoft didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.  Then there were those blamed it all on those greedy publishers and authors (note that this is the first time in this article that the actual creators of “content,” authors, are mentioned).  While there are some authors who earn millions of dollars from their writing, the other 99.9% have to have day jobs.  Greed is not an option for them.  Unfortunately, our consumption driven society seems to regard “everyday low prices” as a right, no matter if denies everybody else the chance to make a living, or forces third-world sweatshop workers to live in poverty, or causes environmental devastation in Asia.

Obviously, eBooks should cost less than their print counterparts, but it still costs money to create them.  Aside from the author, there are editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, marketing managers, advertising copywriters, lawyers, and accountants all involved in producing them.  All of them are entitled to be paid for what they do.

I complain as much about the major publishing houses as any other unpublished author, but there are a few things that I’m willing to accept.  I wish that HarperCollins hadn’t inflicted Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten nonsense on us.  On the other hand, it was HarperCollins that took a chance on first time author Ryan Smithson’s important memoir, The Ghosts of War.  Trash finances art.  This has been true ever since the beginning of both trash and art.

Apple shouldn’t be given a free pass in this.  They are not a white knight.  It’s true that they are adopting a strategy that is the exact opposite of what they did with the iTunes store, where they dictated terms to the music industry.  Their goal, however, is no different than any of the other players in this game: to gain proprietary and monopolistic control over the book publishing business.  The danger of this is made apparent by an action Apple took recently in censoring iPhone applications.  Based on some complaints from a family-values group, Apple removed all adult-oriented applications from its iPhone App Store.  Along with all the strip-poker games and hottie-of-the-day viewers, applications provided by literary magazines, such as  Keyhole Magazine, were removed because the short stories had adult language and controversial themes.  What will Apple do when they open their bookstore and the family values crowd complains, as they always do, about Lolita, Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

A Smashing Idea

In the midst of all this chaos is internet startup Smashwords.com, Mark Coker’s eBook publishing company.  It’s not a publishing company in a traditional sense, but acts as a distribution company.  For no upfront cost, an author can upload his or her ebook where it is made available for purchase at a price set by the author.  Smashwords takes a set percentage of whatever the price is for each sale.  Additionally, an author may choose to make his or her book available for free or to allow the purchaser to name their own price.

In order to make the books available to the largest audience possible, Smashwords provides the books in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Barnes & Noble ereader, Sony ereader, and adobe PDF.  It takes a lot of technical wizardry to take a single Microsoft .doc file from an author and to publish to all those formats, and to have them look reasonably good.  A program, affectionately known as “The Meatgrinder,” does a pretty good job of it, provided the author has followed some strict formatting rules. Given the fragmented technical landscape that now exists with all the competing digital formats, the Meatgrinder, is the key technology.  As a software product development manager, I tip my cap to Mark Coker and company.  They looked at an emerging market and asked, “What’s the specific problem that needs to be solved, what can we do about it, and can it be a viable business?”   They’re still in start-up mode, but they seem to have put more thought into it than all those hare-brained companies that fueled the first internet bubble in the late 90’s.

Unlike any other business that offers its services to unpublished authors, Smashwords doesn’t try to scam writers.  Unpublished authors are a particularly vulnerable bunch.  Vanity presses, illegitimate agents, and other unseemly types prey on writer’s dreams and separate them from their money.  I wrote about this in a post last year.  Even POD publishers who ask for nothing up front, push all sorts of premium services that can end up costing an author thousands of dollars just to publish a book that will be bought only by the author’s family and long suffering friends.  Smashwords is completely up front about it.  “You aren’t going to make a lot of money,” they say, nor do they try to sell you premium marketing or editorial services or make any money outside of what they make from selling books to customers.  They don’t do any advertising for your book either, they’re honest about that too, and that’s what you get for no money down.  Marketing is your job.

The honesty in a field normally filled with scam artists is refreshing.

In addition to individual authors, there are also some small publishing companies that have signed up with Smashwords that have published multiple titles.  In that case, the companies are providing the sorts of things that traditional publishers do – editing, cover art, marketing – and are using Smashwords as a sales channel.

Smashwords has also made distribution deals with the other major retailers.  All Smashwords books that meet a set of formatting standards are shipped electronically to online retailers such as Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble.  More relationships are promised to be on the way.  This is a very shrewd strategy.  Let the war among those giants rage on, and in the meantime, do business with all of them.

This may be a glimpse of what the future of publishing will look like.

We are the world, in prose.

One of Smashwords most recent releases is short story collection, 100 Stories for Haiti, the brainchild of a group of editors and writers in Europe.  About six weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, word went across the internet that submissions for the book were welcome from all around the world.  Smashwords had signed on to handle the ebook distribution.  One hundred percent of the proceeds are going to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.  It’s an absolutely brilliant idea and it’s also nice to see that while the rest of the publishing industry is scheming how to corner this or that market, a grassroots movement can leverage technology in a new and creative way and actually do something altruistic.

I’ve bought my copy and it was well worth the money I donated.  It’s filled with exceptional writing.  Kudos to Smashwords and all the writers who contributed.

Books mentioned:

See larger image Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI (Hardcover) By (author) Ryan Smithson List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $9.23 In Stock Used from: $4.54 In Stock Release date April 21, 2009.

See larger image Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition (Paperback) By (author) Vladimir Nabokov List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $7.10 In Stock Used from: $2.50 In Stock Release date March 13, 1989.

See larger image Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback) By (author) James Joyce List Price: $13.50 USD New From: $9.92 In Stock Used from: $1.24 In Stock

See larger image The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback) By (author) J. D. Salinger List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $4.97 In Stock Used from: $2.73 In Stock

See larger image Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Mark Twain List Price: $6.95 USD New From: $3.08 In Stock Used from: $1.22 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

© 2010, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.