Fear and loathing in publishing and self-publishing:
ruthless coverage of intellectual (and not so intellectual) property issues on the web. Books, ebooks, and such. The weblog of Stephen Fraser. The unofficial blog of Lulu.com.
Lulu.com storefront of the day for August 21, 2004: Shawn Pease
. . . . the history and geneology of the Pease family from it's first beginnings in America in 1634 to the present. There's lots of great history in the family, from Great Aunt Sarah in the Salem Witch trials to Great Uncle Valentine, the model charactor for Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. Most recently I've been exploring and publishing family letters from Wesley Pease (my Grandfather) and his military adventures from Mexico in 1916 through World War II.
Another great glean from OLDaily: a list of ghost sites--the last, ethereal traces of web sites that never made it. Some, like Book Tailor, look disconcertingly familiar.
Louis Dischler was a corporate inventor for more than two decades before quitting his position as Senior Scientist to pursue independent inventions, eventually earning more than fifty patents. Late one night he discovered an online forum for satiric inventions, and there he met a rather curious person, a woman who claimed to be a time traveler from the Twenty–fourth century. She called herself Pluterday, after the extra day of the week that rich people have, a day everyone has in the future. The Devine Hahoo tells her story.
William Mead
After two years of hard work with help from many
family members, the Meads of Mead Street Family Histories is finally
ready. This book features nice warm reproductions of family photos
taken throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Lulu storefront of the day for August 14, 2004:Nitsa
Nitsa: a photographer
"...But as much as I looked into photography as it was presented through its different forms I realized something was not working out for me. It didn't flow with the feel and natural drive I had. This drive which sent me out to the streets finding random scenes. I found no interest in the amount or the conditions of light. I didn't care about the shapes or colors, which came together to construct the picture. Obviously I was neither a photographer nor striving to become one...are you listening? hey! wake up!"
Handbook of Atheistic Apologetics, by
Francois Tremblay
A handbook for those interested in atheist apologetics and theistic
arguments. JAM-PACKED with information on : * the epistemology of the
god-debate * a refutation of all types of Christian apologetics
* a detailed refutation of more than 25 major theistic arguments *
strong-atheistic arguments (with a section on the Problem of Evil).
Including a discussion on Reason and faith, the three "silver bullets" that disprove most theological arguments, why Pascal's Wager is really an atheistic argument, why gods cannot exist, and more ! (216 pages)
West Virginia Medicinal Plants, Trees, & Shrubs, A Field Guide
Lulu storefront of the day for August 12, 2004:Bill Church
West Virginia Medicinal Plants, Trees, & Shrubs, A Field Guide, by Bill Church Describes 104 plants, with color photographs; with a space on the back of each page for notes, plus information on weights & measures, dosages, gathering and drying of herbs, type of preparations, herbal properties, plant terms, a list of symptoms and what herb to use for them, plant usage, location, when to harvest, parts to harvest, when to gather, and when it blooms by month.
Tenebris is, of course, the unofficial blog of Lulu.com, which is to say the blog of Stephen Fraser (me), the marketing arm of the organization. Marketing digit, really. I started Tenebris partly out of frustration that we had been unable to get it together to create an official company blog, partly as a way to keep track of storefronts that tickled me, and partly because I missed my old blog, Equilugubrium, which I more or less abandoned a couple of years ago. But it quickly became apparent to me that Lulu.com needed an unofficial blog that was not bound by the necessity of promoting an approved point of view. As of today, it also has an official blog. Let's hope it takes.
On another note, Lulu.com lost an important piece of its DNA today. We will miss him greatly.
Bond Hill: Origin and Transformation of a 19th Century Cincinnati Metro-Suburb
Lulu storefront of the day for August 11, 2004:Aharon Varady
Bond Hill: Origin and Transformation of a 19th Century Cincinnati Metro-Suburb This is the reconstructed history of Bond Hill, currently a neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, originally founded just after the Civil War as a railroad suburb on the urban fringe of the most densely populated city on the planet. How did teetotalers, cooperators, railroad moguls, real estate brokers, and radical socialists pool their energies to found a new society and build affordable housing for "men of moderate means"? How did church politics and other critical events shape the social and environmental transformation of a once rural community? This history provides a complete survey of the Bond Hill area, from the post-Colonial period through the Village of Bond Hill's annexation by the City of Cincinnati in 1903, up until the present day. This book was originally submitted as a thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Community Planning at the School of Planning, DAAP College, University of Cincinnati, in June 2004. Inexpensive, black and white edition.
Lulu storefront of the day for August 10, 2004:Cyrus F Nourani
Intelligent Multimedia Foundations and Applications. PREFACE Intelligent Multimedia Sciences is the study, invention, and
creative use of sciences and technologies for understanding and
expression of multimedia.
Lulu.com storefront of the day for Monday, August 9, 2004: Kanji Mneumonics
"Kanji mnemonics and memory aids for learning kanji, and the onyomi and kunyomi readings." An interesting project by law librarian R. L. Foreman. The cautionary note about shipping times on his storefront is out of date, by the way. Currently Lulu.com books are shipped three business days from the date of order.
The MASCULIST MEME by Alan Carr IMN
The reason for this book: “..amid the atmosphere of torment, disgust, and disillusionment that pervades sex relations, the chaos, uncertainty, and tragedy that hover over the… family, to understand the reasons..” Suppose it were a disease? This book uncovers the history of a "memetic" mind disease that has infected millions of people today. A disease that cannot be seen by microscope, cannot be stopped by scrubbing or disinfectant but which has a very real effect on the people around you. You may well have it yourself. Your partner may have it. Carefully designed as a form of vaccine and even an antidote, this work is more than just another book. Written by the Chairman of the International Men's Network using logic, historical fact and the reader’s own rationality with an easy reading but harsh style. It bypasses your defenses and places something inside your mind. The Masculist Meme. Illustrated.
I ran across a book called Schott's Miscellany while waiting to get my hair cut a couple of days ago. It's fashionable trivia, no more--in the vein of something Dave Eggers might publish--but the typesetting was impeccable. In fact, I wondered if Schott might not have crossed paths with my old employer in Oakland, California, Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services. No way to know. But in the age of desktop publishing there aren't many designers I run across now who know the first thing about typographic arts. I take that back--they know the first thing, but no more than that. Type on the screen is quite a different animal from type on the page. Apparently, Schott is branching out into food trivia.
(I am absolutely floored, by the way, to discover that Wilsted & Taylor is finally building a web site. I thought it would never happen. Must have been a tough decision, typographic luddites that they are, bless them.)
Lulu storefront of the day for August 6, 2004: Dave O'Meara
A Metaphysician in the Dark: Three Plays for One Actor
In GROUP THEORY, a week's worth of misdelivered mail leads an apartment dweller on a journey through the refracted symmetries of self, as he makes surprising connections with people he had brushed past everyday. In PARSIMONY, a man returns home after a car crash, drugged up and teetering on crutches, to find a that a strange new neighbor has moved into the back room behind his kitchen. And in TERATOLOGY, the distant arching dome of an old train station looms over four stranded travelers, four strangers trapped together for a long night. Or are there three? Or two? Or.... ? These verse monologues were all originally performed by the author.
From Bookslut, an interview with comic book author and publishing expert Larry Young. I am unfamiliar with Young's work, but he is also the author of a book on how to make money publishing comic books independently that should be of interest to other authors. I especially enjoyed the section of the interview on what he prefers to drink while working:
I like a good California Chardonnay for press releases; something about the pear/nut taste combination just makes for good promotional copy. Coronas with lime for Act Is, when the set-up and promise of adventure fuels the story but you still have two more Acts to get through; Act IIs get an expensive single malt Scotch, like an old Springbank Campletown or maybe a utilitarian portwood Glenmorangie, or a Highland Park or maybe even a decent Lagavulin if I want to taste the homeland. Act II is the dark part of the story, where shit happens and stakes get raised, and you need to be fortified for that sort of thing. Act III to the resolution I'll get a Red Stripe or a local Hefeweissen; there's a restaurant down the way from the AiT/Planet Lar World Headquarters that microbrews some good stuff and I may take a walk down the beach to stock up on the West End Wheat. Depending on what sort of writing I'm doing, I might go old-skool and hit the Jack Daniels and Sierra Nevada. The whole of "Hemogoblin" was written with Mr. Daniels shining the flashlight into the dark corners for me.
From the Christian Science Monitor, an update on lad lit, or "Guy novels that guys don't seem to read." The upshot is that no matter the subject, men are not the primary consumers for fiction. By the logic of my previous post on pragmatism in publishing, the practical author would do well to tailor his or her subject matter to a female audience.
So the main audience will have to be women, says Antoinette Kuritz, founder of the annual La Jolla Writers' Conference - women craving, if cringing at, "insight into men's psychic and romantic terrain. If you're expecting men to read lad lit, it will fail."
That said, I know many women who lap up the lad lit, so to speak. My own wife is a big fan of Tucker Max.
I haven't figured out who Morris Rosenthal is, exactly, or what he does for a living (presumably he provides design and marketing services to authors), but he has developed a very informative site for authors that I ran across courtesy of a press release he put out on PRWeb.
The most frequently overlooked component of a book marketing campaign is the determination of whether or not a market for that title exists. Researching the Amazon sales ranks of similar books goes a long way to clarifying the situation. It's occasionally possible to create a market for a new title where none existed before, since every new genre in publishing begins with such a breakthrough, but it doesn't happen every day. The safest marketing bet for any any veteran authors writing and publishing a book is to target their next title for the same market as their last success. Not a competing title, but a complimentary work, one that would appeal to both customers and resellers of the previous book.
Not that all authors have practical motivations, of course.
XLibris lays off workers; outsources customer service
XLibris, while continuing to grow, has apparently been going through some growing pains, as evidenced by a recent round of layoffs and outsourcing (registration required) reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Feldcamp, who founded the company in 1997, said about 75 people had been hired in the Philippines, where the company already had an office in the small city of Cebu. An additional 25 hires are expected this year.
Xlibris, which is owned partly by Random House Inc., publishes books for their authors online and in softcover. For example, a writer would pay at least $500 to have one softcover copy of her 300-page book published.
Customer service is an enormous piece of the cost of running a business tied to the premise of publishing as many titles as possible, which is why Lulu.com has worked so hard to try to provide technological solutions to every problem, to create what we refer to as a "no-touch" publishing process. Nevertheless, this aspect of our business continues to be the source of frustration to many authors seeking to use our service. They tend to want to talk to someone, which is understandable. They've written books, after all, and what are books but the manifestation of a desire to communicate with the outside world? But we want publishing to remain free. There will always be publishing services companies. Lulu.com is a technology company.
Alongside books and music, another form of valuable intellectual property that has been revolutionized by technology is film. Affordable, easy to use cameras and editing tools have placed filmmaking within the grasp of individuals operating on their own without the backing of studios. And, as with books, the Internet offers the most powerful distribution platform in history. Some of the first earth-shaking efforts to emerge from this trend have been documentaries like the recent hit, Outfoxed. There is a bit of a parallel here between fiction and nonfiction books in the "self-publishing" realm in that it is very difficult to make a fictional film that is engaging and artistic, but it is slightly easier to dig up and present information that is useful or interesting to audiences.
Along comes Lulu.com's equivalent in the field of DVDs, CustomFlix, which gives independent filmmakers a powerful on demand tool for distribution.
A journalist at Poynter has done an analysis of sites that show up in Google news and, I am gratified to see, has begun a discussion about the problems he found:
For some unofficial websites that I'm helping to launch at several eastern U.S. universities this autumn, I had to find feeds of unusual categories of news stories, the quirky types of stories that are popular on campus. My initial inclination was to use Google News. But when I analyzed its choices of news sources, I was surprised by the results. Although Google spiders more than 7,000 news sources, only about a dozen sources account for the vast majority of stories displayed on Google News day to day.
I hope that others pick up on and amplify this--I have always been baffled by all the sources that Google appears to leave out of its news feed.
For those of you who may have missed it, yet another witty piece of flash animation has emerged from the current political contest, although it's not as funny as the Bill Clinton-Dr. Suess cartoon that arose from the impeachment scandal (which I can't find at the moment on the web, unfortunately). This parody, which depicts a sing-off between George Bush and John Kerry, is based on the Woody Guthrie classic. Much to the surprise of anyone familiar with the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, the folk singer's estate has apparently sued the animators. Astonishing. The highlights of the video, in my opinion, come during the cameos of Howard Dean and Bill Clinton.
A guy whose chosen art form/revolutionary business idea appears to be doodles on business cards--not that I'm knocking it--has written a sort of manifesto/essay on 'how to be creative' on his web site gapingvoid.com. It's interesting and worth a read, although I think the author displays a predictably romanticized view of creative talent. But he also hits some truisms right on the head, including:
Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.
The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.
Lulu storefront of the day for August 3, 2004:Twilightners
This site is a bit heavy on the flash animation, but it's an interesting attempt to market a science fiction novel using a web site. The novel itself, of course, is available through Lulu.com.
Lulu storefront of the day for August 2, 2004: Heudnsk
The Abandoned Photo Museum Guide Book
by E.C. Adams
Full-color photography book based on The Abandoned Photo Museum website collection of abandoned snapshots.
