Tenebris

Time of the Faeries 2005 Calendar

Lulu storefront of the day for Saturday, October 30, 2004: "Time of the Faeries, " a 2005 calendar.

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween from the ghouls at Lulu:

The Travel Writing of Colin Todhunter

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, October 29, 2004: Colin Todhunter, author of India Express: Sub-Continental Encounters.

"The amazing story of one man's journey through the mass of contradictions that is India. As he journeys through India, Colin also journeys within himself, and the result is an incredibly complex work that gives new meaning to the term travel writing"
- Navin Sigamany, Zine5 (publisher)

On Giant Squid

I have added couple of new links to the blogs listed on the right, but one in particular tickled my fancy: weirdwriter. This blogger appears to share my fascination with giant squid, a topic that I don't get the opportunity to cover very often in this blog.

Another new link: Chekhov's Mistress

The Moose Is Loose

Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, October 28, 2004: Blaine Staat's Clash of the Figments:

The cold war is over, the Soviet Union has collapsed, and other than terrorism, SAR’s, global warming, weapons of mass destruction, street gangs, a volatile stock market, ethnic cleansing, and those 3 punk kids down at the food court that keep hassling everybody, the world has enjoyed a decade of peace.

But now a new peril has emerged that threatens to shake the safety of the planet to its very foundation. From behind the tattered remnants of the Iron Curtain, Zodar the Spy Moose, a long forgotten player of the fallen Marxist regime, is orchestrating his own final act, and in doing so will set into motion a chain of events so terrifying, you might well poop your shorts.

Only one man possesses the skill, cunning, and spare time to stop him, and on Dick Lassiter’s shoulders now weighs the fate of all nations. In an epic chase spanning at least two states and one foreign country, the fate of the world will be decided as man and moose clash in the ultimate showdown between good and not quite as good.

Queen of the Sky

Queen of the Sky, a blogger (blogette?) who posts stories and photos about her life as a free-wheeling, cocktail-swilling flight attendant (and I say that with only the greatest admiration for the position) has made the news by being suspended from her job for blogging. She may also have unwittingly entered the pantheon of internet heroes of free speech, joining Tucker Max, among others. Perhaps Queen of the Sky has an interest in publishing a book on Lulu?

New Bard Press

Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, October 27, 2004: New Bard Press, publisher of the play Beneath the Deep Blue Sky, "a strange and stirring geek fantasia written for the stage by award winning poet, playwright, and computer game designer, Rob Bartel." Looks terrific.

How to change your sex...

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, October 26, 2004: Lannie Rose, on How To Change Your Sex: A Lighthearted Look at the Hardest Thing You'll Ever Do. Don't worry--it's not in the DIY category.

Commercial Suicide

Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, October 25, 2004: Commercial Suicide, a compendium of bad-taste humour from the UK.

Medieval art on the web

As someone who has always had a strong attraction to medieval art, I was pleased to run across Gallica, a site hosted by the bibliothèque nationale of France. The galleries contain over 80,000 images (as well as text), including many stunning examples of illuminated manuscripts, among them Jean Mansel, Fleur des Histoires:

The Hyperliterature Exchange

PODs, Micropayments & Adverts: Lulu.com, BitPass and AdSense discussed by Edward Picot (from The Hyperliterature Exchange, Picot's e-book site). This article came out a while back and I don't recall ever linking to it on Tenebris, although I think it's quite good. I ran across it again today while surfing and, in retrospect, it is one of the rare articles that, whatever its other shortcomings may be, really gets it with regard to Lulu (before digressing into a discussion of BitPass):

With production and delivery costs eliminated, it becomes theoretically possible for creators to offer their work at a much lower cost; and consumers who would balk at paying a couple of dollars to see someone's self-published animated poems might be prepared to risk it for a few cents. The problem is how to get the few cents from the consumers.

The other standout article from the last year or so that showed an understanding of Lulu in the context of the bigger picture remains Stephanee Killen's essay (on her site Integrative Ink): Digital Rights: The Revolution of the Arts.

Operation Homecoming

If you haven't heard about it yet via NPR or any of the newspaper stories on the topic, Operation Homecoming is a writing project and series of workshops for soldiers returning from Iraq that seems to be intended as equal parts therapy, art, and history project. Yesterday Slate magazine gave us a leftist screed against the very idea of hearing from actual participants in the war, anticipating (I suppose) that what they write may not turn out to be consistent with what the author imagines is the "nonnegotiable human truth" of the war, which he seems to feel he would recognize if he read it.

Oh dear. The Washington Post on self publishing

A really bad, simplistic take on self publishing from Rachel F. Elson of the Washington Post (September 26, 2004): "How To Publish Your Own Book." Not sure how I missed this when it came out. This is a terrible column for a number of reasons, among them that the journalist completely ignores the Lulu option, (erroneously) insisting that, "Make no mistake: All this will be costly." Nevermind the paragraph devoted to marketing.

Backstory: Authors discussing their books

M.J. Rose has launched a new blog called Backstory, in which authors discuss (in blog posts, of course) the stories behind their books. Good idea. And, if you haven't seen it, be sure to check out M.J. Rose's book marketing blog, Buzz, Balls & Hype.

Chris Dauten

Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, October 21, 2004: Chris Dauten, author of horror, dark fantasy, historical fiction, and nonfiction.

Governor Tom Murphy VII

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, October 19, 2004: Tom Murphy VII, author of the Crap Art Manifesto, as well as the novel Name of Author by Title of Book . [The manifesto is, in my opinion, a neglected art form these days.] Enterprising fellow.

Epublishing gone wild: Romantica

I love this: a story about novelist Tina Engler, who founded an e-publishing company called Ellora's Cave for sexually explicit romance novels. See Romance novels go hard core: Writer/e-publisher steers a sexual revolution .

Sales for "The Empress' New Clothes" were slow at first. Readers were downloading the book once every other day for $3.95. One of Engler's first and most enthusiastic readers was a woman named Crissy Brashear from Cincinnati, who was not only a romance reader but a reviewer as well. Brashear loved "The Empress' New Clothes" and touted it on her many romance-reader Internet lists.

The key to the success of the titles, you'll notice, was cross-linking by an active reviewer. Advice to authors: use Amazon's listmania to your advantage!

MobyLives returns

The book blog of Dennis Johnson is back after a long hiatus: MobyLives returns.

Managing Innovation

It's more a business story than an intellectual property story, but BusinessWeek offers a provocative look at the paths to success being navigated by innovative companies like Amazon, eBay, and Starbucks. There are lessons here to be learned by companies like Lulu who are gambling on their ability to innovate to propel them past much larger competitors: see Building An Idea Factory

Having a great idea is not enough, argues the author. Not only must a successful company implement a new idea, it must also be able to observe the innovations of other companies, match them, and navigate the necessary failures until a successful idea takes off:

When Amazon.com managers noticed in 1999 that eBay Inc. (EBAY ) was taking off, for instance, they launched their own auction site to tap into the same group of sellers -- and the high-margin stream of commissions. But eBay's momentum was too great, and Amazon's auctions largely fizzled. Amazon also opened zShops, a gallery of independent merchants on its site, but that attempt to create a marketplace didn't catch fire either. In late 2000, an Amazonian came up with yet another idea: Let other sellers offer their wares on the same page as Amazon's own products. "Inviting third-party sellers onto our prime real estate -- that made some palms sweat," Bezos admits.

But the Seattle-based company plowed ahead, and this feature has turned into a hit. Now some 26% of unit sales on Amazon.com are by other sellers, who like how easy it is to list items. "The Amazon-selling platform is second to none," says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp. in Research Triangle Park, N.C., which helps large merchants sell on eBay and Amazon. The 60%-plus profit margin on the commissions and fees it charges other merchants has overcome any cannibalization. Bezos says people who buy used books buy more new books, too. All that has helped the company to log four straight profitable quarters.

Lulu's challenge is enormous, of course.

The ultimate in innovation, though, is not merely to come up with new products and services. It's to create entirely new markets where none existed before -- and better yet, to provide something that changes the way we live and work. Innovation was never just about new gizmos and gadgets. But in a service economy, innovations more than ever must transcend objects. Some of today's most successful companies, from Virgin Group Ltd. to eBay, create not only innovative products or services but also novel business models.

Definitely worth reading.

The Sinner and the Saint: remix

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, October 15: Iron Clown Studios (of Fayetteville, North Carolina) present The Sinner and the Saint Remix. Seems as if the marketing efforts among comic book creators are beginning to pay off.

Poynter frowns on self-publishing companies?

A Myrtle Beach newspaper (yes, they have newspapers in Myrtle Beach) published a fairly long, if crude, piece on "self-publishing" that is notable for two reasons (see PUBLISHING ON THEIR OWN):

1. The journalist, Jo Ann Mathews, omits Lulu from her list of the top on demand publishing companies, opting instead for the usual suspects, the rapidly-becoming-obsolete foursome of Xlibris, iUniverse, Trafford and AuthorHouse.

2. Dan Poynter, a guru in the self-publishing world, is quoted at the end of the piece disparaging the use of any of the companies listed above because "They charge too much per unit." Interesting angle. Important to note, however, that they also handle fulfillment, order tracking, etc.

If you are planning to handle fulfillment yourself and have the money to invest in your book up front, by all means go to a printer and make your own arrangements. If you are dealing with a title for which the market demand is unknown, then you had better proceed with caution.

Speaking for Lulu, there's not a cheaper per unit price for one-offs (single copies of a book manufactured one at a time) anywhere--not that I know of, at any rate. And there are other reasons to use one-at-a-time on-demand publishing as well. They include the ability to modify and update the text at any time without wasting the warehoused copies of your current print-run. Come on, Dan. Of course, he may have noted that in the piece of the interview that wasn't excerpted.

Sum 28 Studio, the graphic novels of John Jennings

Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, October 14, 2004: The Hole: Parts of a Hole, a graphic novel by John Jennings

Be sure to check out the preview.

They Publish: You Decide

You have got to love ReganBooks, a HarperCollins imprint profiled yesterday by the NYT in this article: "Political but Not Partisan: A Publisher Has It Both Ways."

They have made bestselling authors out of Jenna Jameson, Sean Hannity, and Joe Trippi, among others. This is what Tina Brown did when she was at her best as editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker--she managed to keep surprising people. Scandalous but brainy publishing.

Aha! Puzzles

Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, October 13, 2004: Amazing Aha! Puzzles, by Lloyd King
From the press release:

As you make your way through the various mind-warping challenges, you’ll encounter all sorts of fun situations and enchanting characters like Windlestraw the wizard, Cinderspeller the witch and Captain Swishbuckle, the swashbuckling adventurer. To negotiate them successfully, you really will need to call upon every last drop of your imagination and creativity and be willing to abandon your existing assumptions so that you are ready for all kinds of tricks, twists, lateral leaps and downright skullduggery too!

The puzzles, which are divided into four categories according to their approximate level of difficulty, range from ‘Easy Riders’, which are the simplest, to ‘Quantum Leapers’, which will prove a challenge to even the most experienced of puzzle solvers.

The Out of Body Travel Foundation

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, October 12, 2004: The Out of Body Travel Foundation, the books of Marilynn Hughes (be sure to check the Foundation's official site)

Getting Into Google Book Search

Search Engine Journal on Getting Into Google Book Search - Google Print. I plan to urge all Lulu publishers to submit their books to Google for this program--unfortunately the initial phase of the program requires paper copies to be mailed to Google, where they literally tear them apart and scan them. As odd as this seems, Google has said that at some point it will begin accepting PDFs, at which point Lulu could conceivably submit the books on behalf of the authors.

Blogging Web 2.0

Jeremy Hogan posted an account of his trip to the Web 2.0 Conference internally. Below are his links to blog accounts of the event:

Web 2.0 coverage in aggregate.
Jeff Jarvis' blog starting here.
Jeremy Zawodny's blog here, scroll for Oct 5-7 posts.
A master blog here. This one has MP3's of most of the talks. I highly recommend Brewster Kahle, Lessig, Doctorow, Gurley, Bezos, and sessions like “Music is a Platform”, “Media is a Platform” and “The Architecture of Participation.”

On an unrelated note, Lulu co-sponsored the Sally Ride Science Festival in Raleigh this past weekend. A report has been posted in the official Lulu blog.

Adventures in Applied Topology

Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, October 11, 2004: Dr. Robert Kiehn's Adventures in Applied Topology

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks

Lulu storefront of the day for Sunday, October 10, 2004: Minh Nguyen's Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks

Big ideas

Lulu's own Jeremy Hogan is on his way back from the big Web 2.0 conference(see BBC News: Visionaries outline web's future). I'm looking forward to his reports, which will hopefully wind up on the Lulu blog.

The conference was mentioned yesterday, by the way, in a WSJ story about the collision course of the internet giants, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and Google (subscription required). Essential reading.

Gryphonwood Press

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, October 8, 2004: Gryphonwood Press, a print and online magazine for fantasy short stories, flash fiction, poetry and artwork. They are using Lulu to product a print edition of their online magazine. Very nicely done.

Grey Tuesday through the eyes of academia

One of last year's notable skirmishes in the intellectual property wars took place around a series of recordings called the Grey Album by the DJ Danger Mouse. DownHillBattle.org, a copyright activism site, organized a pretty successful online action based on opposition to the existing copyright laws that kept Danger Mouse's work from being legally distributed. Now an online journal called First Monday has put together a comprehensive account of the whole event.

Stern breaks away

Howard Stern is leaving Viacom for satellite radio (WSJ story--subscription required). I expect we will see more and more of these powerful content producers striking out on their own, sans publisher. When Stephen King tried it, of course, he was ahead of his time.

On another note, Poynter online reports on the growing role of blogging in marketing books.

The Stereobook of Minimal Surfaces

Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, October 6, 2004: A book and two calendars by Matthias Weber

Wired: The Long Tail

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, offers an essay on the diffusion of content markets. It's a terrific article and it makes all kinds of points worth noting, some of which I've excerpted below. Much of the essay reinforces the fundamental business model of Lulu, but there are cautionary notes as well. Anderson uses the example of MP3.com, which allowed anyone to upload and sell their own music. MP3.com became an undifferentiated mass of unknown content with no path into it for consumers. Lulu as it is today could accurately be described the same way. The world continues to need bestsellers--books, songs, etc.--for complicated reasons, among them the need for cultural touchstones.

The truth is that whether or not you believe that an open, unmediated marketplace for content like Lulu can succeed, it is a fact that the market for content is diffusing. What kind of business model will succeed under these conditions?

Anderson on the origins of our current publishing system:

Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.
. . . .
This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

Anderson on the fallacy of the 80/20 rule (that no more than 20% of the content for sale will account for a profit):

We think that if something isn't a hit, it won't make money and so won't return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adibé, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.
. . . .
A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

How do we know this? That enormous laboratory of capitalism we call the Internet:

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.

And last but not least, a summary that could well be worth adopting as Lulu's new tagline:

As a result, almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer. This is the opposite of the way the entertainment industry now thinks.

Taking it off for Kerry

Once again, I'm digressing from topic of books and publishing, but the NYT today features a story on strip clubs' attempts to get out the vote by hosting special voter registration nights, along with various other efforts to register voters:

Other parts of the $15 billion adult entertainment industry have followed suit. Several adult film actors have made a DVD, for sale on the Internet, entitled "Porn for Kerry." In the film, which features porn stars, "Jorge Bush" canoodles in a hot tub with the king of an imaginary Middle Eastern oil state. The filmmakers say they will donate the proceeds to Senator John Kerry's campaign.

Good publicity or bad? You be the judge.

Thirty-nine years to go

This obviously has nothing to do with either books or publishing, but I feel compelled to note that according to The Death Clock, I am going to die on Monday, October 26, 2043.

Update on Amy Fisher juggernaut

The Amy Fisher stunt by Lulu competitor iUniverse (competitor in the short term, at any rate) continues to pay off and, as this NY Post story demonstrates, continues to provide good press for the idea of the author as publisher: L.I. LOLITA IN $WEET DEAL FOR HER NEW TELL-ALL PUB

This Ice, a mystery by R. P. Tucker

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, October 5, 2004: Thin Ice, by R.P. Tucker
Looks like good work for a first-time novelist. Be sure to check out the preview.

Household Cyclopedia

The Household Cyclopedia of General Information, 1881. This is my favorite variety of web project: gratuitous and odd, instructive and interesting.

And a rare books exhibition on the web from Monash University.

Hillary DePiano and The Love of Three Oranges

Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, October 4, 2004: Hillary DePiano
One of Lulu's most active and engaged members, DePiano's Lulu storefront offers a little something for everyone, but her personal author web site is also worth a visit. Her adaptation of The Love of Three Oranges is impressive.

Thar she blows...an interview with Dennis Johnson

One of my favorite book sites used to be Moby Lives, a now deceased blog (or a blog on hiatus, as the case may be). Bookslut recently published an interview with Dennis Johnson, the man who wrote the blog, who has apparently taken up publishing full time. His imprint is Melville House, which published the much publicized book Who Killed Daniel Pearl.

Painting Model Horses

Lulu storefront of the day for Sunday, October 3, 2004: Creating Pastel Champions—A Step-by-Step Guide to Painting Model Horses with Pastels, by Sarah Tregay

The clerihew

A random blog post elsewhere has me spending a portion of my Saturday morning thinking about doggerel, including the lowly clerihew. This is really the beauty of perusing blogs, no? You never know where they'll take you.

   Would you like to sin
   With Elinor Glyn
   On a tiger skin?
   Or would you prefer
   To err with her
   On some other fur?

Clerihew: "a humorous pseudo-biographical quatrain, rhymed as two couplets, with lines of uneven length more or less in the rhythm of prose. It is short and pithy, and often contains or implies a moral reflection of some kind. The name of the individual who is the subject of the quatrain usually supplies the first line."
--Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary (Frances Stillman)

My own contributions:

   In listening to John Kerry
   men tend to grow wary.
   Women, on the other hand,
   simply find him bland.
 
   George W. Bush
   has a mind made of mush.
   Despite this he's firm--
   Enough, it seems, for a second term.

Which reminds me: yesterday NPR offered a short piece introducing two post-presidential debate poems, one from each side of the political spectrum. If you're set up with Realplayer or Windows Streaming Media, you can listen to them here.

New writers on old writers

A clever new feature by Amazon.com to promote new writers: Writers Under the Influence. Includes James Frey on Tropic of Cancer.

I bring this up partly because Amazon.com does such a terrific job of enriching their marketplace with content that is of genuine interest--reviews, listmania, and the like. This is a strategy I am trying to move up the development queue at Lulu.

The Ballerina Who Bent

The Ballerina Who Bent. Ahhh, yes. Another niche topic and another celebrated, scandalous-but-literary book. I'm not going to excerpt this one--you'll have to read it yourself.

Lost Library of the Intermundia

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, October 1, 2004: Mythic Tome (or Lost Library of the Intermundia), by Harry Potter (a different Harry Potter)

While I haven't poked around much here, the images are captivating, no?