Self Publish Blooks

Bloggers are scoring rich paydays

2007-02-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

Reuters has a fairly interesting story about blogs turning into books. Apparently some bloggers get paid advances in amounts that usually only applies to traditional bestsellers, and that makes people scared about a burnout in this sub-niche. A fresh wave of blog-based books from waiter, emergency medical worker, taxi driver, quilters, wine connoisseur, and handful of titles with political themes are now in bookshelf.
“It’s like the dot-com boom all over again," some publishers say the craze could fizzle out.

Let those who can't publish, publish

2006-09-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

Blurb.com, a self-publishing startup, now invite 600 bloggers this week to try out its new service by creating a free bound copy of their blog. Those who participate will get a taste of how to convert their blog into books. In this service, Blurb offer extensive customization options, an e-commerce storefront, and forthcoming tagging and metadata add-ons.

The blog-to-book feature isn't cheap. An 8-by-10 full-color, hardcover book with custom dust jacket costs between $30 and $80.

Bad-girl blook

2006-09-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Any one read enough blogs will know one or two of those bad-girl diarists. Bad-girl diarists are using the web to reveal their sex lives to the online world. They write about sex, work, men, Valentine's Day, cooking, sex, men. Those writings, or sexblogs, often have therapeutical effect for both authors and some reader, and people will always have an interest in sexblogs because sex is something that affects all our lives. The biggest Bad-girl blook story in UK right now is authored by The Girl With a One-Track Mind.

Push-button printing ?

2006-08-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

Blogging is often called push-button publishing, it looks like within next few short years, we could see 'Push-button printing' become a hot trend. In a recent announcement that the print-on-demand Espresso machine is now being tested at the World Bank, which can print black-and-white text for a 300-page paperback with a four-color cover, and bind it together in 3 minutes.

If the test run goes well, as early as next year people would be able to order books (or blogs) online in just about any language. After pressing few buttons, faster than they can say "Grande Caramel Macchiato," peoplee will be able to be pick up the finished book/blook at a nearby bookstore, coffee shop, Kinko’s or Wal-Mart.

Mom and Daughter Self-publish with Blogbinders

2006-08-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

A reader from CA has told me that last year, She and her daughter published their first co-authored blook from BlogBinders.com, which is Francisco based company founded in 2003.

Below is their self-publishing experience -
BlogBinders.com internally uses CafePress.com, and you can see it at times. For example, you need to create two accounts, and you will get emails from both services. Also, the package arrives in CafePress.com wrapping. This makes it look as if BlogBinder is riding on the back of someone else’s service.
However, BlogBinders understands different blogging packages – LiveJournal, Blogger.com, TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress and others – and spares you the hassle of figuring out how to convert this into a book. CafePress only accept PDF files at that time. So instead of turning blog into a PDF yourself, you just simply tell BlogBinders which blogging software you use. In our case, I had been using TypePad, and my daughter was using Blogger from Google.
You will now be able to edit the book online and reformat some passages or delete blocks of text. You can then continue to choose font and cover styling. There aren’t many options at the moment, so we went for a rather traditional font. I insisted to go for the highest-quality printing – the price is still fair enough to pay. After you configured the settings, you can render a preview PDF which will be displayed right in the browser. All of these steps worked flawlessly for us.
And then, you send the book to print. After BlogBinders checks your configuration and approves your book, it will be shipped to you.
The table of contents works nicely and is separated into the different years and months for easy access now that actual Google-like search functionality will be lost. Our book has little over 150 pages, and covers a selected few articles from around one year of blogging between me and my daughter.
Not all things which work online work offline, naturally. My daughter was careful to select only bigger articles, and those with a simpler style. Tables, illustrations, any kind of advanced formatting, will be lost when BlogBinders converts your blog. Links will also be lost, of course, but you can keep the link text – it pays off if in the past you avoided “click here” non-semantics. Before we would ever consider selling it, we would need to edit it, too, which would consist of both proof-reading and making sure web-specifics translated well.

Overall, the experience is more labor intensive than we originally thought, but well worth it !

Self publish blooks - link for today

2006-08-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

1) are you using a blog to promote your book? - a discussion thread;
2) The Penguin Blog - the legendary publishing house marches into blogging;
3) whether you are interested or not in the self-publish blooks business, check out 19 pieces of advice for authors from Seth Godin. I think item #18, 19 is talking to us bloggers.

Proposing marriage with a self-published book

2006-08-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a create use of self-publishing: Cameron Kelly of North Carolina (US)proposed to his girlfriend Angie Kreimer via a 113-page self-published book he self-published at Lulu.com -- 50 Reasons Why You Should Marry Me and 51 Reasons Why I Should Marry You. The book includes 101 pages of text and 44 color photographs. "It's a sort of prose-poem, with pictures," Kelly said. According to a Lulu.com press release, some of the reasons he claimed he was marriage-worthy included:
- I clean the bathroom every week.

- I'm going to look like Sean Connery when I'm 65.

- You don't even have to change your initials!
Apparently the book was met with a one-word reply -- "yes".

Please drop me a line if you know someone using a blog to propose a marriage, I am sure there are quite few.

Blake Schwendiman's blook story

2006-08-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

You may have read stories like this many times in my blog: a successful blog leads to audiences, which leads to a book/blook deal and win more audiences, which then leads to financial success. This is now officially a trend.

Blake Schwendiman have already published 2 programming books before, and he's been moonlighting on a novel. He started blogging to market his book to an agent or publisher. He had a few leads, but it's not going anywhere. This week, after thought it through, he decided to put his book "The Agency Delta" on-line for free download. Since his blog have already won some audiences, this act was noticed by many people in the blogsphere quickly. In only 2 days, the book has been downloaded over 1,000 times already.

By putting his novel online for free and encouraging people to read it, email it, blog about it, distribute it on other blogs, etc. there is a hope that more people will eventually spend money buying other publications from Blake. Since it is so competitive in the traditional publishing world, Blake can't find any actual downside in this.

This is another nice blook story in the making. I hope this will eventually leads to a financial success for Blake Schwendiman.

A Churchillian challenge for bloggers

2006-07-15T04:20:00.000-07:00

Divergence of the self-publish business model

2006-07-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

Lulu is a one-stop do-it-yourself publishing shop. You upload your opus and pick a design template. Lulu then lets you sell your book through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Lulu itself. Your book only exists digitally until someone places places order. Then Lulu handles the printing, shipping, and order tracking. However, in none of this is Lulu unique. Since the late 1990s, two on-demand outfits - Xlibris, backed by the Random House, and iUniverse, backed by Barnes & Noble, have been doing something similar. And Amazon has its own program, BookSurge. The difference, is that Lulu utilizing advanced technology, focusing on serving huge number of small publishers; whereas other shops are basically vanity presses, focusing on their own bottom line. This difference reflect the divergence of the self-publish business model.
At BookSurge, iUniverse, and Xlibris, authors pay an up-front fee of $300 to $1,600, book prices are set by the services, and royalties range from 10% to 25%. At Lulu, by contrast, no money changes hands until a book is purchased; design and layout are free. Authors set the prices for the book. And the royalty rate is 80%, excluding Lulu's charge for production.
Lulu's self-publish business model seems to be working. According to an article in June 2006 issue of Business 2.0, last year Lulu rang up revenue of a couple of million every month. Since August, 2005, book sales have almost tripled, from 36,000 to 91,000 a month. 1000 books are added every week; the site now has 40,000 titles available and 160,000 accounts.
Apparently Lulu is trying exploit the long tail phenomena through technology. In traditional book publishing business, small, unknown authors/books are all too often a barely-tolerated distraction on the road to getting best authors/sellers. They can cost as much to serve as their richer counterparts but generate less revenue. But modern digital self-publish businesses could be efficient enough to serve small, unknown authors/books who generate no revenue at all. Even if only a tiny fraction of them become profitable, a small percentage of a very large number can still be a big number.
Who is the longest tail in the publishing world? It is our blogs, millions of millions of blogs created by amateur authors and journalists like us.

Long live the book

2006-06-14T06:36:00.000-07:00

The always provocative Jeff Jarvis declares that books is dead in his blog:
(book) they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there is only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can't afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers' whims. They aren't searchable. They aren't linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there's no space for them anymore. Print is where words go to die.

But of course books are not dead, for most people, in most of their times. Here are my senses:

1) books are convenient. They are cheap, portable, easy to read (comparing with monitor). You can do anything with them, you have total control over them.

2) books are secure. Books are authentic. Books can't infected by virus, spammer, etc. They can't be modified, deleted, copied without physical trace.

3) books are part of our culture. Human have been reading books for a long time. People love the physics and psychology of holding book and read. It is easy to change technology, but it is hard to change humans habits.

Electronic media (blogs, etc.) and print books are simply two different media forms for our knowledge and thoughts. Staff in the electronic media are raw, rich, volatile, somewhat un-organized; staff in print books are more consistent, coherent, being a crystalline form of our thought. Both have pros and cons, and in my opinion, they will co-exist for a long, long time.

The future of books

2006-06-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

By its very nature, blog is the media for niches - be personal view of the world, or be detailed full-coverage of a narrow products & services. Is this character makes blog a good candidate of published books? Apparently some people think so. Bob Young, CEO of Lulu.com ( a print-on-demand, self-publishing house) predicted that the future of books belongs to "niche-busters" -- books targeting a niche rather than mass market. He made this prediction after observing the life-expectancy of a bestselling novel has halved within the last decade.
The plummeting life-expectancy of a fiction bestseller, in my view, reflects the personalization trend of book reader’s tastes and interests. This is much like the general personalization trend of other products & services in the market place. For book publishing, as long as the cost of personalization continue to decline (electronic self-publishing) and selection/filtering technology (search engine) continue to improve, more and more of blogs will turn into books, and some will become niche-busters.

A Cinderella story of the self-publishing world

2006-05-23T19:28:00.000-07:00

The Times yesterday told a Cinderella story of the self-publishing world. It is about author Kathleen McGowan. She spent years researching and writing a novel, a thriller about a descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Last year, She self-published it, then went to the annual book convention on her own nickel (thousands of dollars in credit card debt) trying to draw attention to the novel. Day after day was spent slogging her way to any person willing to look at it. This year, the book was picked up by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster for a seven-figure advance, and she was feted by booksellers. "An experience that every writer dreams of", She said.

PostSecret is on bookshelf

2006-05-23T18:42:00.000-07:00

The blog loved by many - PostSecret - has been in the print since the beginning of the year. I didn't get to see it until today in the book store. PostSecret blog, launched in 1/1/2005, is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Any one submit information to PostSecret grants PostSecret right to publish them.

This book, titled as "PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives", is a collection of 300 those artsy postcards inscribed with messages describing the thoughts people wouldn't dare say out loud -- from suicide contemplations to forbidden crushes. The cards are among the thousands author Frank Warren receives each week from all over the world.

This blog has been hugely popular, being named by Time as one of 50 coolest Web sites in 2005. Recently, it won two 2006 Webby Awards and five Bloggies, including "Best American Blog" and "Blog of the Year". It has been one of the top 5 blogs on the Technorati for quite long time. This book has made Frank Warren from a typical suburban husband to a first-time author. Frank Warren plan to publish four more similar books. A short PostSecret documentary film has already shown locally.

The state of blook self-publishing

2006-05-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

Based on a presentation given in the recent Book Industry Study Group conference, the market growth for self-publishing books is in the double-digit range, which is a quite healthy number. Since bloggering/blook is a very recent culture phenomena, blooks probably only represent a small percentage of total numbers of books self-published. I am sure that percentage will increase rapidly in the next few years.

Already, Lulu.com, an online (vanity) self-publishing house, estimates that more than 20% of its 100 top sellers are based on web site and blog entries.

I think it is quite possible that within next few years, a blook equavalent of 'The Da Vinci Code', will be self-published somewhere by somebody. When that tipping point comes, blook self-publishing will become the main stream.

Blog to book - "Straight Up & Dirty"

2006-05-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

Musings on the struggles facing a young divorcee in Manhattan helped Stephanie Klein develop a reader base averaging 100,000 a month. She turned some of the blogs into a book that traces her adult life -- from moving in with what seemed like the perfect man, to divorce, to single life again.

Her blog is updated weekly with heavy commenting.

Blog to book - "All the President's Spin"

2006-05-05T04:14:00.001-07:00

Written by the founders and editors of the now-discontinued Spinsanity blog, All the President's Spin is a critique of what they say are the Bush Administration's use of half truths and questionable statistics to "spin" the media and the public.

Their blog has not been updated since 1/19/2005. (Otherwise, it will be much more interesting ...)

Blog to book - "Four and Twenty Blackbirds"

2006-05-05T04:14:00.000-07:00

Four and Twenty Blackbirds grew out of a modern-day ghost story, begun in 2002 on Priest's blog. The book spins the tale of Eden, an orphan who tries to uncover sinister secrets of her lineage to understand why she is being constantly watched by three ghostly figures. The book became the fiction winner of the Lulu Blooker Prize in 2006.
The blog is updated daily, funny and warm, not spooky at all.

Think your blog as “book” not “diary"

2006-05-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

Guy Kawasaki, a successfully business man, rose to stardom in the blogsphere in just few months of blogging. He posted his first blog entry on Dec. 30th, 2005, now his blog's technorati ranking is #46 (in terms of linking numbers). In my opinion, this is mainly because he has been known as permanent fixture of the IT industry since his days as an evangelist for Apple. But most people would also agree that he is an excellent blogger and marketer.
His recent post The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog , is a succinct but accurate collection of truisms about blogging and it's marketing. In particular his 1st advice :

"Think "book" not "diary". First, a bit of philosophy: my suggestion is that you think of your blog as a "product." A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it. If you want to evangelize your blog, then think "book" not "diary" and market the heck out of it".

Yes, think your blog as "book" not "diary", and write it as such. If in the future you want to publish or self-publish your blog, you have something already very handy.

LJBook.com help you self-publish blogs to ebooks

2006-05-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

LJBook.com is a web service making it easier for fellow bloggers to port their entries into book form. It is a free service, but donations make this service live longer. LJBook.com was originally built to allow fans of LiveJournal.com to export their entries into a printable PDF file. Now the service also works with the popular Movable Type, or other blogging software as long as an XML exporter is provided. LJBook.com also has its own, yet small community.

The direct output of LJBook.com is a printable PDF file (or ebook), which may be enough for many bloggers. If you want a real book, binded with perfect bound, then you need submit the PDF file to self-publishing vendors like lulu.com or CafePress.com.

44 blooks

2006-04-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

Many aspiring writers are starting out as bloggers, and publishers are taking note.

BlogRevolt.com, a blog covering the blogosphere, published the four parts series listing writers who got blook contracts. The series lists 44 blooks, a few of which have come out and most of which are in the works, please take a look if you are interested - Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4.

None of those blooks are self-published. May be I should compile a list of most popular self-published blooks.

Seven basic kinds of blogs

2006-04-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, offered a taxonomy of 7 (in bold, listed below) basic kinds of blogs. I added my comments (in Italic) to the list:
1) Personal diarists

Most bloggers fit into this. They share their daily activities, observations and thoughts with the world, profound or mundane. Many published blooks are from this type of blog.

2) Family networkers

Moms, coaches, boy scout Den leaders, etc. like to use this kind communication to keep family/team members up to date on what's happening.
3) Early responders:

Many technical gadget lovers belong to this group. They follow trends closely, to the edge, like to share their discoveries with the world. When time comes, many also are eyewitnesses to major news as it happens, such as Hurricane Katrina, London subway bombings and Asian tsunami. A lot of photos are typically used in those blogs.
4) Hunter-gatherers:

On-line niche community builders.

5) Agenda blogs:

For people with strong political and ideological standpoints. Several blooks were out of agenda blogs so far.

6) PR/corporate communications blogs:

More and more companies are doing this.

7) Newsroom blogs:

News columns providing quick, routine news reporting with brief insights. Many commercial products blogs and celebs gossip blogs can be classified as this group as well.

Another type of blog I think desearve its own class called "personal project blogs". Many blogger use them to ducument processes and results of personal projects (truth searching, information collections, story telling etc.). I saw quite few published blooks based personal project blogs.

And the winners are ...

2006-04-05T19:14:00.000-07:00

Julie Powell is the Overall Winner of The 2006 Blooker Awards !

According to judge Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing and Wired Mag fame) :
"Those who dismiss blogging as 'mere' confessional writing and complaining about one's day job fail to appreciate just how engrossing those genres can be when handled by a talented writer like Julie Powell. The story of how blogging and - writing in public - changed Powell's life is inspirational and memorable."

In other category, the Fiction Winner goes to "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" by Cherie Priest and the Comics Winner goes to "Totally Boned" by Zach Miller.

Top five reasons you should self-publish your blook

2006-04-04T05:41:00.000-07:00

1) after 2-3 years of hard work on your blog, you will likely become an expert in your domain, your knowledge deserve to be systematically organized and published, and shared by broader range of people who might not familiar with your blog;
2) you have a distinct advantage over traditional authors: you already have a dedicated following of readers; and your blog provides the perfect free forum for letting people know about you blook; in another word, there has been a market campaigning running for your blook since your blog existed;
3) nowadays, once get published, your blook will have a good chance being known from every corner of the world. People will find your blook through Amazon's book search engine, if not through Google; People read the book will likely bookmark it on the social bookmarking sites such as del.icies.us, so more people will know it;
4) traditional big publisher will not publish you blook. Your topic may be too narrow for them,
there may be many other better known authors in front of you;
5) through digital and print-on-demand technology, modern self-publishing is relatively easy, fast and inexpensive. Lulu has a place on its web site that provides a way for bloggers to instantly publish their own blook. Amazon and similar sites are finding ways to work with bloggers to make their blooks more accessible and profitable.
On one side, majority of people (one survey say it is about 60% - 70% of reader) still want to buy/see physical copies of books; on another side, people want free information whenever they can. It is hard to predict how financially successful your blook will be, but the downside is minimum. You do, however, will expand your influence through your blook.

The brief history of the book self-publishing

2006-04-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

Oddly enough, self-publishing (also called vanity publishing in the old days) is the genesis of today's publishing. Two and three hundred years ago, almost all books were produced using the author's, or his family's and friends', money. The bookseller took a cut and the author got the rest. This changed with the advent of modern publishing in the early part of 20th century, when royalty structure were established and the advance system was born. Bookselling and publishing became industrialized and profitable. Agents soon followed.

In the old vanity publishing world, the business model was in big favor of publishers - they charged an author for ALL (any thing you can think of) the costs of publishing a book and then sold that same book back to the author for additional charge. Since vanity book publisher didn't do sells for the book, many authors forced into buying thousands of copies of their own books which they were never able to sell.

The modern self-publishing houses, such as Xlibris and iUniverse, typically offer authors two things:

(1) Print-on-demand (POD). POD cut down on the printing costs because books are printed only when an order is placed;

(2) help with the books' edit, design and layout, book marketing and sells. (with a cost, of course)

According to the Publisher's Marking Association (PMA), during 2003-2004, self-publisher and other small publisher accounted for 78% of all the book titles published in the US.

When to self-publish your blog ?

2006-04-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

One big advantage of blogging is that you know when to publish it - the time when you receive high number of reader comments and web links.

Blogger Julie Powell down on her luck as a secretary in Queens, NY and decided to blog-u-ment her crazy scheme to cook more than 500 Julia Child recipes in one year. Her blogging struck a chord with readers and heavy commenting on her posts was not unusual - you often see 40 - 50 comments per post. Although there are only 201 sites linked to her blog (not a high number) based on the Technorati count as of today, the activity around her blog lead to some media coverage, and she soon found herself signing a book deal with Little, Brown and Company, and had her book published in Sept. 2005. Julie Powell's blog/book is also one of the finalists of 2006 Lulu Blooker Prize (see my previous entry).

The world's first literary blook award

2006-03-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks": books based on blogs or websites. Blooks are warded in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comics.

There are all kinds of prizes for books published by traditional publishers. Prizes are one way that people choose what to read. Self-published books aren’t eligible for most of the traditional prizes. Lulu is a printer and distributor of self-published books. I think they are wise to help to build a market for self-published books including prizes open to “blooks” whether printed by Lulu or not.

Entry to the 2006 Lulu Blooker Prize is now closed. This year's winner, selected by 3 judges independent of Lulu.com, will be announced April 3, 2006. I counted that among total 16 finalists, 7 of them are self-published. Below are those 7 :

Stone Cold Guilty - The People v. Scott Lee Peterson by Loretta Dillon
Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $16.50)
blog site: Observations of a Misfit - www.misfitting.com

Africa Fresh! New Voices from the First Continent - edited by Rod Amis
Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $15.00)
blog site: G21: The World's Magazine - www.g21.net

Ambidextrous: Collection 1 by Kevin Cornell
Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $11.99)
blog site: Bearskinrug - www.bearskinrug.co.uk
Comic Strip Volume 1: Scarybear and Friends by Jason Pultz
Publisher: self-published (paperback, $15.00)
blog site: - www.scarybear.org
Dinosaur Comics: Huge Eyes, Beaks, Intelligence, and Ambition by Ryan North
Publisher: self-published through CatPrint (paperback, $8.00)
blog site: Dinosaur Comics - http://www.qwantz.com/

The Dada Alphabet: An Absurdist's Illustrated Primer by Stephanie Freese, David Milloway

Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $15.00)
blog site: The Dada Detective - www.likelystories.com
Totally Boned: A Joe and Monkey Collection by Zach Miller
Publisher: self-published through Lulu (paperback, $14.95)
blog site: Joe and Monkey - www.joeandmonkey.com

Entry will soon open for the 2007 Blooker Prize. Anybody interested ?

Tom Evslin and his blook

2006-03-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

Today I bought the hardcover edition of novel hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble from Amazon. Eight months ago, I read the online version of first chapter of the book and enjoyed the experience. Hackoff.com is truly a blook(book published via the blog) written by Tom Evslin. For those of you who are not aware of Tom, here is a little background I found on him at A VC.
Tom was one of the first successful Macintosh software developers, sold his company to Microsoft, oversaw the development of the first versions of Back Office, Outlook and Exchange. He then went to AT&T where he got them into the Internet and invented flat rate pricing for dial-up internet access, and then finally to ITXC where he invented commercial grade VOIP. As can be seen, Tom is an innovator and he is continuing to innovate in his new career, writing books.

His book hackoff.com is different than any books you ever seen. Tom is making the blog part of an overall reading experience, an essential part of reading the book. Hackoff.com is a murder mystery set during the internet bubble. Murder mysteries such as this inevitably get people talking: Whodunnit? Publishing a book of this genre in blook format is a great idea because the links, comments and discussions will be an essential part of the reading experience. The blog format has also allowed Tom to leverage the power of the audience through an RSS feed and e-mail list that will deliver the newest chapters directly to your aggregator/reader or inbox as soon as they are published. However, the interactivity doesn't stop there. Tom has numerous blogrolls for people who link to the blook in their posts, maintain a constant link via services like Word of Blog, write reviews of Hackoff.com, and post about blooks in general. He has also set up a fake company website for Hackoff.com which will hold company press releases and other data to enhance the reading experience. All of this makes Hackoff.com a really unique reading experience. Try it.

10 journalism tips for bloggers

2006-03-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

Spencer Critchley writes 10 good tips for bloggers from journalist's point of view.

The best piece of advice I think is "whatever your subject, write about people, physical objects and actions", since "these are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity. Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and clichés".

Another advice I will take to my heart is "look for the heat in your subject", as "appeal is emotional, not intellectual". To write good blogs, one need to "look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide".

Here is another good advice: "identify interests". "Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may be lying".

Grandma's self-publishing story

2006-03-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

My next door neighbor, Priscilla Mitchell, retired in 1997 after working 19 years with autistic students in special education. One day in the summer of 1997, as she examined the beautifully detailed wild columbine flower in her garden, she marveled, "how do those little parts know which way to go? Surely Good has programmed the whole process! Children are impressed with computers, they ought to realize God had His computers a long time ago". She went in the living room, to her favorite quite place, and began to write down those inspirations. The first few lines rhymed, and so thus began her book about seeds.

After finishing the initial draft, My neighbor sent it out to friends, few published friends among them, for critiquing. When it was time to find a publisher, She quickly decided to go with WinPress Publishing, a leader in Christian self-publishing, since traditional Christian book publishers rarely take risks on unknown Christian authors. Priscilla told me later that her experience, as the first-time author, with Wine Press Publishing Company has been very positive; this was especially true with their marketing assistance and bookstore distribution services.

The most difficult part of self-publishing for Priscilla was to find and coordinate illustrators. There were total of 8 illustrators did works for the book. The books were printed in a factory at Hong Kong, Priscilla and her husband went there to see the process while touring Hong Kong.

Right before the Christmas of 1998, Priscilla self-published book, "Seeds: God's Awesome Computers" finally came into being. 2500 copies of book were published as the 1st edition. Another 3000 books published in 2003.

Blogging as a writing career

2006-03-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

We blogger write blogs on specific topics like azalea blog, the Porsche blog, whatever passions we have, and we have basically, over time, accumulated readership of maybe 1000 to 30,000 people just by doing something we love for the fun of it. Sooner or later, we will be able to make some money because the advertising people are starting to talk to us, thanks to Google and other companies.

We are authors of half pros, half amateurs. We are not quitting our day jobs yet, but we are paying our bills with the money we receive from this, and we are building little audiences.

Compare with fiction writers and journalists, blogging is the new new thing. Blogging, despite being closer to journalism in activity, is closer to fiction writing in financial reward - journalists are more likely to secure a steady job, fiction writer are not. As more money is invested in the blogosphere(as it is happening now), blogging will become a more acceptable career. There will be opportunities for good writers and a few will become seriously wealthy from a career in it. Not everyone is going to succeed, though. Blogging can be an incredibly stressful undertaking. When you've got everything riding on a mostly untested medium such as the blogosphere, the pressure affects your writing in tone, quality, and frequency.

In my opinion, if you taking blogging as a writing career seriously, it is un-avoidable for you to try publish (or self-publishing) books, beside publish electronically, and distribute it through traditional channels. The publishing industry is hugely flawed, but one of the things that it does is get books where readers will see them, in bookstores.

Let our blogs be literary permanence

2006-03-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

Along the same line, New York times mentioned Blurb today, reporting it's “Slurper” tool that can automatically downloads and reformats the contents of a blog into a book. The tool is expected to be available free later this month. The overall publishing price from Blurb appears to me a bit more expensive than Lulu; but it is not a big deal if only small number of books being published.

Malcolm Gladwell got a blog

2006-03-02T05:07:00.000-08:00

My favorite author, Malcolm Gladwell, now has a blog. Below he explained the relationship between book and blog:

In the past year I have often been asked why I don’t have a blog. My answer was always that I write so much, already, that I don’t have time to write anything else. But, as should be obvious, I’ve now changed my mind. I have come (belatedly) to the conclusion that a blog can be a very valuable supplement to my books and the writing I do for the New Yorker. What I think I’d like to do is to use this forum to elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written. If you look on my website, on the “Blink” page, you’ll see an expanded notes and bibliography, which mostly consists of copies of emails sent to me by readers. Well, I think I’d like to start posting reader comments for everything I write, and this is a perfect place for that. There are also times when I think I’ve made mistakes, or oversights, and I’d like to use this space to explain myself and set things right.

In my opinion, the reversal - from blog to book - could be also true.

Self-publish book, Adsense, and monetization of blog

2006-02-28T21:08:00.000-08:00

Some of us start up our blogs in our niche, slap on some AdSense ads in all the right hotspots, and secretly hope that the money rolling in. Then we wake up from your “passive income” dreaming and to the reality that it’s not money rolling in, it’s a few dribbles of coin.
The reality is, we will be lucky to cover our online expenses with AdSense, let alone make a decent living from it. You probably know Jeff Jarvis, the pioneer journalist in the blogsphere and owner of BuzzMachine blog. For the last quarter of 2005, his income from Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network combined was less then $168.64 . This number probably set the limit for most average bloggers like you and me.

Technically speaking, we are living on a thread and on the whims of advertisers and Google. Think about it: one slight change of direction from Google in regards to AdSense could cripple the whole professional blogging scene. What happens if click fraud gets out of hand and advertisers stop doing business with Google? What happens if the only way to make decent money from AdSense (ie: blogs on products) become so over-saturated that they dilute earnings for all? What happens if Google twist their search engine algorithm again, and all your hard SEO work goes backwards? It is my observation that most bloggers have dangerously placed their eggs in the one basket: AdSense.
So, how can a blogger, who’s picked a niche, made themselves somewhat of an expert in it, monetize their blog besides Adsense? One obvious way is to try several other types of advertisement programs; another way, which is being tried out only by very few, is to think blog as a book (to be published), as well as the marketing media for the book at the same time. Here is one beautiful example of doing this.

Self publish your blog as an Ad supported book for free

2006-02-23T20:23:00.000-08:00

If you are cheap and you don't want to spend a dime for book printing, you can try to turn your blog to an Ad supported book. Some times a small publisher is willing to give you a free ride to nicely print you book on high quality paper, but there are full page ads interspersed throughout your book. You get a small percentage of Ad revenue afterwards. This month, mega-publisher HarperCollins released a web-version of Ad supported book for the first time. The book is displayed in HTML rather than as a PDF, is flanked by clickable Yahoo! text ads.

How successful the Ad supported book will be? Hard to predict. It is obvious tha cost are quite high on the publisher side; but if your book is a gem, and printing cost being constrained, you may have a chance.

Three self published blooks from LuLu.com

2006-02-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

1) this blog book contains a thick collection of popular theme-based posts no longer available online. These include The Windy Times, Korean Food, Chongak and the Stray Cats and more. Alive with photos, reader comments and a variety of bonus material, this book is made for anyone remotely interested in a foreigner's life in Korea. It charges $14.99 for a book and $4.39 for a download. Not bad at all.

2) this is a personal blog, free of charge. I think this one is too cheap for anyone to get it.

3) a collection of the articles from the popular blog site, vitualis' Medical Rants along with the original source articles. The articles are mostly news items from a biomedical perspective, sometimes technological, at times ethical and on occasion "rage-against-the-system". Great for some light, and not-so-light reading about many new and interesting developments in biomedicine in Oct 2004 to June 2005. A full preview PDF version is available for download. This is the second edition and hardcopy version of this volume. $24.95 per book. Super.

Book (or Blook) deals for all

2006-02-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

Authors of my favorite blog Mister Snitch, are half-way through writing a book. They just started the marketing effort for it. (They realized, however, that pretty much all the posts in their blog require some adjustment to make them suitable for the blook.)

Another well-known blogger, Dawn Eden, also signed a contract last Oct. with W Publishing Group, a division of Thomas Nelson - the largest Christian publisher - to write a book.

It was even rumored that all but few good bloggers have signed book deals.

Congratulations, and book deals for all !

Blurb - a new self-publishing start-up

2006-02-15T21:30:00.000-08:00

Blurb, a new comer in the book self-publishing industry, made a news flash in the prestigious DEMO 2006 conference this month. It focus on turning people's blog or other web media into books. Blurb is currently in late stage BETA, with general availability planned for early March.

Blurb CEO and founder Eileen Gittins said "Already we can create our own iMovies, blogs, Podcasts, and playlists in no time. Why not books? At Blurb, we're bringing publishing in line with those dreams and expectations."

What makes Blurb unique will be their free flagship software, called 'BookSmart'. I may write a review on it later. Stay turned.

A thousand authors blogging on Amazon

2006-02-08T17:35:00.000-08:00

While some of us want to self-publish our blogs into books, many book authors have turned into blogger. By a recent count, there over 1,000 writers have joined Amazon Connect, the online retailer's initiative to begin hosting author blogs on its site. Amazon will show to users the blogs by writers whose works the users have purchased at Amazon, but visitors can also search for blogs alphabetically. Bloggers will include authors such as ex-wonkette Ana Marie Cox, James Patterson and Meg Wolitzer.

I think this is a marvelous way for an author wanting to promote books (existing or planned), answer critics, or write more details about a book than Amazon's usually posts.

Feminist Press turned Baghdad Burning blog into book

2006-02-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, Baghdad Burning blog was turned into Baghdad Burning book by Feminist Press.

In case you don't know, Baghdad Burning is riveting weblog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad. The author call herself Riverbend, but the real identity remained concealed for her own protection.

This blog recounts stories of life in an occupied city - of neighbors whose home are raided by U.S. troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons, and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. As the only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman's perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort. Due to its eye-witness perspective, the Baghdad Burning blog is recognized around the world as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media.

The book is available at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The British version was published by Marion Boyars Publishers .

Two well known book blog projects

2006-01-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

Some people start blogging long before they decided to make a book out of their blog, this kind of blog is called blog book, or blook. Other people start blogging with writing a book in mind. This kind of blog is called book blog. Currently, the two well known book blog projects in the blogsphere are (1) John Battell's 'The Search", and (2) Chris Anderson's "The long tail" .

John Battell started his blog in 2003, focusing on Google the company, and internet search in general. In Sept. 2005, he turned his blog into a book, which was rated as one of the best business book of the year by many.

John Battell acknowledged the comments and other feedback from his blog are organic part of his book. He put many of the book excerpts as his blog entries in the process.

Chris Anderson started put his thought on the 'Long Tail' phenomena into his blog in April 2005, and just finished the book's manuscript in Jan 2006. Chris thanked the comments and feedbacks from his blog, which made his project and the book possible.

Self-publishing defy world's worst disease

2005-12-16T21:06:00.000-08:00

Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbe magazine, blogged here explains why zero-sum thinking is "the sickest thinking and the source of human misery throughout the ages "; and due to ordinary people's daily optimism and creative actions, "history overwhelmingly refutes these ideas". He went on to say many creative minds operate out-side of the zero-sum game, for example, facing difficulties of publishing books the old way ,

"the most energetic, original and positive writing has been migrating to the Web and to blogs. No surprise here. Anybody who creates a blog is: (a) an entrepreneur and thus probably NOT a zero-sum thinker; (b) a producer first and a consumer second. These two attributes alone guarantee that the blogger probably has a more accurate view of the world, and how it really works, than does the zero-sum thinker toiling away at his Mainstream Media position."

Well said!

The difficulty of publishing an old-fashioned book

2005-12-02T00:15:00.000-08:00

According to Brian Hill & Dee Power, authors of "The making of a bestseller", there are about 490 new titles are now published every day in US. However, it is believed that less than 1 in 100 books that are submitted for publication actually end up in the print; some experts place it at 1 in 1,000 books.

This difficulty come from the financial bottom-line. It has been estimated that only 10% of books published ever end up selling enough copies to earn back the advance paid to the author.
There are 24 million people in the US describe themselves as creative writers, but less than 5% of these writers have ever published - the old way, that is.

Path to publication - the new way

2005-11-20T19:42:00.000-08:00

The new way to publication is self-publishing. This is generally a four-step processes:

(1) ask experts to critique your work before the publication; then have a book editing software -this could be as simple as Microsoft Word, or downloaded from the publisher;

(2) editing your book by mixing texts, blog entries, pictures or photos;

(3) select book print options -- binding (hardcover or softcover) , cover designs (hardcover book jacket) and book sizes (royal 10x8 or scenic 8x10);

(4) upload your materials to the publisher web site, and wait your book to be published.

After publication, you can sell them in the market to impress people as well as making profits. Sweet and simple when compare to the old way.

Chocolate & Zucchini blog signed a book deal with NYC publisher

2005-11-01T16:32:00.000-08:00

"Today seems like the perfect day to announce that I have just signed a book deal with a NYC publisher, that I have quit my day job and that I now live the happy life of a full-time writer, working on the book and a miscellany of other projects. Excited, thrilled, gleeful and proud is how I feel -- but most delightful of all, free. There is no price tag on that."

Above was from the entry of Chocolate & Zucchini blog, it looks like the author, Clotilde Dusouler, just signed a book deal.

Clotilde Dusouler is a computer engineer considering a career change to food journalism. She started the Chocolate & Zucchini blog 2 years ago. The blog is beautifully designed, thoughtfully written, and mouth watering. It is now reaches an audience of about 100,00 visitors a month.
Below are author's own words:
"Two years ago today, I hit "publish" on my very first post for Chocolate & Zucchini. I had been toying with the idea for a few weeks, debating with myself whether or not to start my own blog. Of course I didn't have the faintest notion what this would all lead to, what adventures, discoveries, encounters and life changes awaited me".

Bob Young left Red Hat, for self-publishing firm LuLu.com

2005-10-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

I am surprised to know that Red Hat Inc. co-founder and former CEO Bob Young, has resigned from the company he co-founded, and plan to concentrate on Lulu.com, an independent online self-publishing marketplace he started three years ago.

Like Bill Gates to Microsoft, Larry Ellison to Oracle, or Michael Dell to Dell, Bob Young is inseparable to Red Hat Inc, the pioneer in the Open Source software industry. Red Hat Inc is currently profitable and ranks first in enterprise Linux market share.

Young said that one of the reasons he's leaving the Red Hat board is because it was taking too much time away from the development of his new project.

Lulu is a new on-line self-publishing company, it allows authors to upload works free to the Internet in a variety of media formats, where its collaborative publishing engine instantaneously transforms them into published products that can be used for collaboration, or purchased as traditional bound books, CD-ROMs, or e-Books.

My take on this? On-line self-publishing is the next frontier of human knowledge advancement.

Path to publication - the old way

2005-10-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

The 1st step on the old path to publication begins with query letter. Nearly all the major publishing houses will not accept unsolicited submissions. So for a new author, acquiring a literary agent is mandatory. The agent sends a brief query letter and a proposal ( if the book is nonfiction), or the manuscript and a synopsis (if the book is a fiction), to the editor that the agent feels would be a good match.

The editor reviews the submissions and select those books projects they feel most excited about, that fits the house's list at the time, and will sell well. At the publishing house's editorial meetings, the editors present their selections. Questions and answers follow to determine if the book has a market, if it is well written, what the competition is, and what the potential "hook" for publicity might be. Finally, a decision is made about which books will receive an offer.

The agent and editor begin negotiations for the advance, royalties, and other issues of the contract. Advances for fiction can range from a few thousands dollars to seven figures for bestselling authors. The advance is paid to thr literary agent, who then deducts their commission and sends a check for the remainder to the author.

The book editor is a champion of book within a publishing house. As a group, they are the people who have the power to decide what we - as a nation - will or will not read.