Tenebris

Just give him his privacy for godssake!

This is neither here nor there in terms of my usual topics, but a friend in the media just passed this along. In the please-just-let-me-suffer-alone department we get the following message from the web site of country music star Chris Cagle (also sent out to entertainment media under the subject line Media Bulletin: A special message from Chris Cagle... )

To All My Loyal Music Fans:    

"As many of you are aware, I had been anxiously awaiting the addition of a new baby to my life. The baby has been born and both mother and child are in good health. Since the birth, however, we have discovered that biologically, the child is not mine.    

As excited as I was about becoming a new father, my disappointment is equally as strong. So out of respect for all that are involved, please allow this situation to remain private and know that I will not be commenting further on this very personal matter. I'm thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation and understanding."

Bad blogger seeks to make good

I am a bad blogger. Not bad as in Bad Lieutenant, but bad nevertheless. Bad at keeping up. Bad at fulfilling my obligations to readers (both of you -- and by the way I owe you some cookies). Bad at any number of things. Also bad at running, which is neither here nor there. It has been a hot, hot summer, and I have become one slow blogger.

But in an attempt to kill, or at least wound, several birds with one stone, let me recap some recent developments in the world of independent publishing, which is the nominal topic of this-here blog.

Bob Young, CEO and founder of Lulu (and my boss) showed up on a PODcast called This Week in Tech (or TWIT) to talk a bit about his background with Red Hat and how he came to be the guy who is trying to revolutionize publishing. The podcast, which is Episode 18 of the program hosted by Leo Laporte, can be downloaded HERE. Not only is the show interesting, it is assembled by professional broadcasters who know exactly what they are doing. It came as a shock to me, but this podcast has generated more ripples than just about any media coverage Lulu has ever received. This program is apparently the number one podcast on iTunes, with an audience that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Impressive.

A nice, juicy story featuring Lulu appeared in the Sunday Times of London a few weeks ago, a notable placement that went unnoted here. The story, by Kira Cochrane, is called "Publish and Be Damned Self Reliant." [The reporter sadly neglects to mention the UK company Publish and Be Damned (PABD).] Lulu also showed up in a few non-wired newspaper stories this week, including the Columbus Dispatch and the Hamilton Spectator.

Yours truly was interviewed by the Self-Publisher News, a newsletter being published by Milton Stern, author of Harriet Lane, America's First Lady.

Lulu showed up in a story in the Bay Area Guardian, a weekly paper in San Francisco, in a story called "No Money Down." I don't think I've linked to this one yet. The premise is quite good, and often overlooked by other journalists: there are a small handful of web sites that allow individuals or small groups to start businesses without any capital. eBay, CafePress, and Lulu all fall into this category.

In the news world, the NYT ran a good story on Warren Adler titled "Steal This Book. Or At Least Download it Free." Adler is author of The War of the Roses and a number of other books and he is an advocate for self-publishing. His marketing technique, which is familiar to all of us working in the Internet realm, consists of giving away his content in serialized form on the web, and then selling a hard copy of the complete work to the folks who liked it. This try-before-you-buy strategy is fairer for the consumer even though it may work against the name-brand author hoping to sell a lot of copies of his or her latest title quickly. Had I been able to read one chapter at a time beforehand, I would never have shelled out thirty-something dollars for Don Delillo's Underworld a few years ago.

Xlibris has been busy spamming people again, and the sardonic POD-dy Mouth (bless her) has had a go at gutting the latest marketing dreck from that stubbornly unwise company. At least they seem to have retired the overworked Mercedes Bournias. One Tracey Rosengrave seems to have taken her place. Free marketing advice for novices: don't harvest email addresses; don't buy email lists.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine has penned another buzzworthy essay (in which Lulu makes a cameo appearance): "Who Owns Content?"

Novelist James R. Winter offers a somewhat vitriolic blog post on the topic of print-on-demand: "Why POD Sucks."  It serves to remind us once again, as if we needed reminding, that a few bad apples spoil (the perception of) the barrel. Not to take away from his general point, but he doesn't seem entirely up to date on the applications of POD or the current state of the technology. But it's easy see why novelists would hate print-on-demand.

Have I mentioned yet that Issue 3 of JPGMagazine is out? Its theme is Fabulous.

Lulu makes Time Magazine

Albeit in a very brief article, Lulu finally makes TIME Magazine this week in "A Market of One."

This marks a relatively rare Lulu appearance in the U.S. national  press (although there was the Wall Street Journal story a couple of years back and sites like Slashdot and News.com are, of course, national). The international press, on the other hand, continues to love the Lulu story--see today's updates to the previous post. 

Paul Theroux on Hunter S. Thompson

Why this should have appeared in the UK Guardian rather than the NYT Books section or some other native publication is beyond me, but nevertheless I was delighted to read one of my favorite writers on another of my favorite writers: "The Real McCoy: Paul Theroux recalls high times with Hunter S. Thompson, the writer and self-described outlaw who died last week" (thanks owed, as they often are, to Sanders the gleaner):

He was a living reminder that satire at its best is a savage business. He was unsparing, self-punishing, in the way he lived his life. His friends adored him. Such a brooding presence could not be the life of the party but he was always its soul.

Hunter Thompson dies

After discovering Hunter Thompson and new journalism as an idea at the age of seventeen, and spending the next eighteen years of my life incredulous that he was still alive, it's now hard to believe that he is dead. But Hunter Thompson  made his exit from the world yesterday, and the New York Times did an admirable job of pulling together an obituary on short notice. I suspect it was easy. The author didn't have to look up many details because he already knew them. No one I ever met who wanted to be a journalist wasn't inspired at some point by Thompson's ferocity and independence. He was at his best in 1970, when he wrote "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."

An optimist's view of the Internet

Seth Godin, author of the influential books Purple Cow and Unleashing the Ideavirus (among others), posted his list of ten reasons that the Internet is a phenomenon still in its infancy, which offers an optimistic vision for all of us who use the Internet, but also for those of us, like Lulu, creating a  business that exists entirely on the web. Godin is always very persuasive -- he is the force behind ChangeThis, the manifesto site I mentioned earlier in the week, and he is a master of the form (not to mention its close relation, the list of ten).

On that note, I am off to the Triangle Bloggers Conference to serve coffee and donuts and to meet the invisible tribe of Triangle people who blog together.

Craig on Craig's List

On the topic of blog together (or building communities on the Internet): Anyone who has spent any amount of time around me knows that I suffer from a sporadic obsession with Craig's List dating back to 1996, when I lived in Oakland. ChangeThis, a site dedicated to publishing manifestos (a literary form also close to my heart), offers this: "Why Craigslist Works, by Craig." Craig offers no new insights in this brief essay, just a restatement of his philosphy that the Internet is really about connecting people. I think my friend Mathew Gross, who used to blog for Howard Dean (and who should be making an appearance at the Triangle Bloggers Conference), would probably say the same thing.

Washington Post Trashes PublishAmerica

An intelligent journalist, Paula Span writing for the Washington Post, dissects the false promises of PublishAmerica, one of the larger POD publishers, in "Making Books: Self-publishing companies are in the business of selling dreams. But what if the dream becomes a nightmare?" (registration, sadly, required)

What I like very much about this article is that Span makes a pretty clear distinction between POD as a technology that allows books to be produced with great economy and subsidy publishing as a sometimes questionable business model . She also accurately notes that "The phrase 'traditional publisher' has no particular definition." All in all, it's a balanced piece of writing, albeit from someone looking at the industry through the eyes of a novice.

What I felt was missing from the piece was that it neglected the larger picture, which includes a publishing world unraveling beneath the relentless flood of new content and diffusing markets. Span also makes mistakes in assuming that editing and marketing are not services that can be obtained  discretely by authors on their own, and in assuming that brick and mortar stores are even a logical option for authors writing for niche markets. The Internet is, of course, the ideal distribution tool for products of any sort with niche markets, or for independent publishers with limited resources. The existing distribution and retail system for books is monstrously inefficient from the standpoint of delivering royalties to authors.

And, of course, the article neglects the emergence of Lulu on the scene over the last year and a half, with its transparency and vision. But you would expect me to be disappointed by that, no? Lulu continues to grow faster than iUniverse, xLibris, or anyone else, from all I can tell. What the journalist nails, however, is the fallacy of the promise implied,  even when not explicitly offered, by companies like PublishAmerica and its ilk--fame and fortune and immortality, not to mention editing.

Getting it wrong: The Minneapolis City Pages

In the mixed news category, the weekly paper in Minneapolis, The City Pages, ran a long story this week ("Publishers Sweepstakes"-- possibly a cover story) on an author using Lulu to publish his book.

That's great news for the author, one "Jaws" Newberg, author of Two Fisted Cab Driving Tales. The article itself, by Dylan Hicks, is dreadful. I know that the journalistic standard for weekly papers is, generally speaking,  low, but this is a particularly bad example. I should know; I provided a few examples of bad weekly newspaper journalism myself back in the day.        Not only did the journalist, who set out to outline the phenomenon of self-publishing, fail to make any attempt to contact Lulu (or even mention Lulu, really), he managed to confuse the issue rather badly.

Badly enough, in fact, that I felt compelled to write a response, which you are free to view, clarifying the difference between independent publishing, vanity presses, and print on demand technology.

Download Editor_Letter_City_Pages.jpg

Lulu reviewed on Newsforge

Lulu is making some headway with the geek press, anyway. Newsforge posted a nice review today, prompted by Lulu's launch of on-demand software publishing...A new venue for selling open source software, by Tina Gasperson.

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.

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.

Everybody wants to be a hero

Forbes.com offers an interesting story on City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer Internet game that is apparently spreading like wildfire. Even I have run across the game, albeit at a party by way of listening to three late-twenty-something males obsessively poring over the details their superhero characters.

This story caught my attention for two reasons: first, because its developer originally planned to self-publish the game and sell it to a larger publisher. It just so happens (you heard it here first) that Lulu is, shall we say, seriously looking into launching on demand software self publishing (icky phrase) as a content category. Stay tuned on that subject. The Forbes story also interested me because it mentions a company my good friend Catherine works for, Second Life, in the sidebar. Catherine told me that at one point Second Life hosted a virtual book signing by Cory Doctorow, which piqued my interest quite a bit. I lack any real understanding of how the game works, but it appears that the characters create quite a bit of content on their own and it crossed my mind that there might be someway they could publish and sell that content via Lulu.

The problem with Google news

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.

This Land Is Your Land

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.

JohnKerryIsADoucheBag

Hah! If you run a Google search for John Kerry, the 6th result (currently) gets you the URL of the year: JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway.com.

50 Coolest Web Sites?

Time Magazine has put together a list of what they consider to be the fifty coolest web sites. Lulu.com hasn't made the list. Yet.

Poor PR, I guess.

Dancing Saddam

Who says Iraqis aren't making the best of a bad situation? From Reuters, comes this encouraging news for the future of free markets in the Arab world: Hip-Swaying Dancing Doll Ridicules Saddam.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqis used to dance to his tune, but in Baghdad toy shops a chubby, gun-toting Saddam Hussein doll now wiggles his hips to the "Hippy Hippy Shake."

Toy stores around Baghdad are doing a quick trade in dancing Saddam dolls -- foot-high battery-powered puppets of the former president, kitted out in full insurgent regalia, who swing their hips to cheesy pop music at the flick of a switch.

Decked out with hand-grenades, daggers, a walkie-talkie, binoculars and an AK-47, Saddam dances to the "Hippy Hippy Shake" when turned on.

Clueless in Seattle

Interesting Robert X. Cringely column excoriating the Microsoft mentality in a roundabout way. I was especially amused by this:

People who are incompetent are also not competent to measure their own competency. Got that? In other words, people who are ignorant -- I mean really ignorant -- are less likely to see themselves that way and are more likely to fight for their mistaken beliefs. And the Internet has taken this effect to a whole new level because now we can have global discourse in which nobody involved knows what he is talking about.

Lulu in the News

Yahoo has picked up Lulu's most recent press release, as have a number of other news organizations: Tale of Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky Romance Republished as On-Demand Book by Lulu.com

Portland Communique Press has formally announced that it has republished its back issues using Lulu.com (see Storefront of the Day from June 20)

The Triangle Business Journal is working on a profile of Bob Young.

The Raleigh N&O wants to write about North Carolinian authors using Lulu.com.

CNet and a few other news organizations are busy following up on Matt Basham and his Cisco certification book, as covered in the St. Petersburg Times the other day.