Today’s guest post about Google Books is by Judson Roberts, author of the Strongbow Saga. You can find him on Amazon.com, and his Web sites are StrongbowSaga.com and JudsonRoberts.com.

Jud says: I don’t actually hate all things Google. Google is still the Internet search engine I use more than any other, I love Google maps and Google Earth, and the free Google Navigation app on my Android phone is a wondrous thing, indeed.

But I am learning to hate Google Books. Let me explain.

I’m an author and, like many other authors, have been, over the course of the past year, republishing, as self-published books, some of my titles that my original publisher had taken out of print. So far, that’s been a mostly very pleasing project. The Amazon Kindle e-book versions are doing very well–much better than they ever did when published by HarperCollins, their original publisher–and the new print-on-demand print editions are selling steadily, too. They’re now for sale as Nook books at Barnes & Noble (and that has been a much less happy experience, but the problems with B&N I’ll leave to a separate rant). So I decided my next frontier would be Google’s relatively new e-book store.

I think I can honestly say that I have never–NEVER–dealt with a more user unfriendly operation. How can an organization that prides itself on creating intuitive, user friendly programs and applications have created such a monster?

An author cannot get to the Google e-book store, to place his books up for sale there, unless he first becomes a “partner” with Google Books. What does that mean? Well, I confess that I’m not totally sure. There are pages and pages and pages of legal mumbo-jumbo you have to wade through and agree to. I’m a lawyer, and usually actually read that kind of thing, but the Google Books disclaimers, agreements, etc., etc. left my head spinning. Hopefully I have not granted Google exclusive rights to the first born child for the next three generations of my family.

Then, you have to give Google Books a copy of the print version of your book. That’s the heart of their whole plan: Google is trying to create a vast digital library of every book in print, and many now out of print, and if you want to sell e-book editions through Google, you have to give them the right to add your book to their digital library (what rights do they have over it once it’s there? I don’t know, which is scary). One option is to mail them a print copy, so they can disassemble the book and scan it into their database, but the alternative they strongly encourage is that you save them any effort by just uploading a PDF version of the book.

Okay–I do want to place my e-books in the Google e-book store, so I did. Or at least I tried. But the Google Book Uploader would not work for me. After an hour or more of digging through multiple layers of “help” pages, I discovered why. Google requires you to rename any book files you submit according to their internal naming conventions. If you do not, their Uploader will not accept them.

Think about that for a minute. And to help you, let me explain how the similar process occurs with Amazon. You enter the relevant data such as title, author, price, etc., then click on the file(s) to be uploaded to give Amazon the actual text, cover image, etc. Since you’re uploading the file within the framework of all the other data about the book you’ve provided, there’s really no possibility that the book file(s) will somehow get lost. But with Google, after you enter the title, author, etc., you also have to correctly rename any book files you upload, or they will not go through. It perhaps would be only a minor irritation if Google simply told you that up front, but when you have to dig through layers of unhelpful “help” pages to discover that fact, it’s infuriating. Plus, the Uploader guidelines say check back regularly, and within a week they’ll let you know whether your upload was successful, or you have to try again. I’m still in Google Books limbo.

And then there’s the pricing issue. Google’s e-book store sells internationally, as does Amazon’s Kindle store. With Amazon, all an author has to do is set the U.S. price in dollars, and the price in other currencies, such as British pounds or Euros, will be automatically set to correspond. With Google, you have to “activate” each individual territory, and part of that process includes setting the price there. You can either accept Google’s default option, which will set the e-book price at 80% of the print edition’s price–a price I personally feel is too high for e-book editions in most cases–or you have to manually set the price in each given territory’s currency. Thank you so much, Google, for being so author-friendly and helpful.

Photo by iansand

Through the end of July (and possibly longer), I’m dropping the price on my full-length eBook collection of very short fiction, Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories, to 99 cents on Amazon for Kindle and Smashwords for all eReaders.

Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories throws normal people into strange circumstances in stories that can each be read in a few minutes. Cinderella tries to get a grip after her divorce; inventions go horribly wrong; robots rebel; a thinking teddy bear is trapped for decades in a toy box; love blossoms in a hotel corridor unmoored from time and space; dinosaurs invent the steam engine; girlfriends blink in and out of existence; and Very Bad Things happen that might be worth it in the end. Writers of the Future winner Luc Reid’s stories bridge science fiction, fantasy, humor, and the unclassifiable.

“It’s not easy to inject an entire world into one scene, but Reid does that time and time again. The characters, whether they live in one sentence or 20, are real people.”
– David Kopaska-Merkel in his review of Bam! on Dreams & Nightmares

“172 fantasy and science fiction, flash stories … each of them short enough to read in a few minutes, each of them rich, well crafted, meaningful.”
– Deborah Walker in her review of Bam! on Skull Salad Reviews

“thanks to this author’s unfettered imagination, quirky sense of humor, and great touch with twist endings, these short stories provide entertaining and often intriguing micro reading experiences. Highly recommended!”
– Amazon.com review

“Reid’s smart humor and eye for irony are sure to attract plenty of readers, and keep them perusing the collection at their leisure.  The wit he employs in the stories is perfect for setting up the most poignant of stories … because just as you begin to anticipate more humor, the weight of what is being said sort of sneaks up on you.  It makes for a great read.”
– Shelly Bryant, reviewing Bam! at SlothJockey.com

It’s come to my attention that some folks who own Kindles don’t know about one of my favorite Kindle features, text-to-speech (which I sometimes think of as “automatic audiobook,” even though actual audiobooks are usually superior). The voice, which has variable speeds and comes in male or female flavors (I recommend the default, male voice) is one of the best computer-simulated voices I’ve heard, despite a few pronunciation oddities. I use this feature all the time to listen to books I’m reading on my Kindle–stories for critique, articles I’ve pulled down from the Web, etc.–in my car by plugging into my car’s stereo system.

Text-to-speech was introduced with the Kindle 2, and these instructions are written using a Kindle 3. There might be differences in implementation on other models.

To start text-to-speech:

1. Open the document you want to read.
2. Hold down shift (up arrow) and press the sym key. After a second or two, the reader will start reading at the top of the current page. Sometimes it will miss the first syllable or two.
3. To pause/unpause, press the space bar.
4. To stop reading, hold down shift and press sym again.
5. Alternatively, you can stop reading by pressing Home.

Note that your Kindle will stay paused rather than stopped if you turn off the Kindle while it’s reading or paused. In this mode, you won’t be able to turn pages or search. You can always get out of it after you turn your Kindle back on by pressing Home or holding down shift and sym.

Reading aloud is disabled on some Kindle books: it’s up to the publisher (the author if self-published) to determine whether or not it’s enabled. There was a whole brouhaha about whether or not Amazon had the right to globally enable text-to-speech; see this article, for instance.

To change speech rate or voice selection, or to turn off text-to-speech by menu, press the font key (Aa) while reading or paused.

You can hook up headphones or external amplification using the 1/8″ audio port (standard headphone jack) on the bottom of the Kindle. There’s a volume control just to the left of it. I find I have to turn the volume up much more if I’m not plugged into external headphones or amplification.

Photo by albertizeme

As accounts grow of publishers both attempting to grab rights from authors without appropriate compensation and misreporting sales (for instance, see Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s series The Business Rusch, though I will say that I’ve had personal experience with both of these issues), I have to say I’m nervous about the possibility of working with a traditional publisher again. At the same time, while selfpubbing is certainly making a splash and is working very well for some authors and some projects, in other cases it doesn’t yet seem to me an adequate replacement for tradpub.

With that in mind, I’d like to share a daydream with you, a daydream of a kind of large-sacle publisher that could and should exist and thrive in the brave new world of publishing. My thinking is that such a publisher will have a different emphasis and approach than traditional publishers and will develop value and market share through 1) cultivating unusually good relationships with authors and 2) an unusually sophisticated understanding of new technologies for delivering and communicating about books.

I would love to see one or more of the current major publishing companies turn into what I describe here, or one or more small publishers grow big in this way– but so far, I’m not optimistic.

Here are the five things we’d need to see in an ideal post-eBoom publisher, other than (of course) excellent choices in what to publish (good filtering and quality control is always valuable). Some publishers are doing some of these things already: certainly there are good companies out there who are acting with integrity toward both authors and readers. As far as I know, though, no big publisher is ringing all these bells yet.

1. Doesn’t hog rights
It seems perfectly reasonable for publishers to buy specific electronic rights from authors for specific compensation. However, trying to get electronic rights thrown in with print rights for nothing, underpaying for electronic rights, trying to seize all electronic rights that may ever exist, trying to seize any rights in perpetuity, trying to seize any rights without compensation to the author, or sitting on rights like sequels and foreign sales without exercising them in a way that the author gets properly paid–all of these approaches strike me as reprehensible.

As an aside, I’ll say that I think any similar practices on the part of agents, as well as the practice of some agents (a minority, I hope and believe) trying to secure payment for the author’s future work or projects in which the agent has made no contribution, are also reprehensible. In fact, I’ll go further than that and predict that agents and publishers that persist in perpetrating these predatory practices (apparently the letter of the day is “P”) will fail and be crushed by the juggernaut of change in the publishing world. Sure, there will always be a greasy black residue of predatory agencies and publishing houses, just as there always has been, but it will not be a substantial or wealthy residue, and all it will get from most authors, readers, and honest industry professionals will be scorn.

2. Deals fairly and honestly with authors
This seems like it should be self-evident, but based on what has been going on in publishing lately (and to some extent, for a long time), clearly it needs to be spelled out. The ideal publisher will report sales accurately, transparently, and often; will promptly revert rights it is no longer using; will communicate well with authors; and won’t lie or withhold meaningful information in communications.

The reporting question deserves a side comment: currently the big publishers generally speaking report on sales a couple of times a year in a confusing, printed report that is often incorrect or misleading. There is no reason–and I say this as someone with two decades of professional experience in database development and computerized reporting–why the industry can’t over time move to a more Amazon-like model of live sales reporting, with reasonable allowance for returns and related qualifications. My impression is that the current, inadequate reporting system is kept not only to save the cost of converting to something more informative but because publishers often gain financial advantage by holding back and keeping control of data.

3. Provides both print and electronic editions
Nothing too surprising here: just publish in appropriate media. I don’t see anything wrong with publishing print-only and letting authors selfpub their own eBooks either, but I suspect that large companies that continue to do that will soon go out of business, as so much more income is available in the eBook world.

4. Improves the quality of the book
The ideal publisher will have an editorial hand in a book’s content, at the very least having a competent advocate in the company who really understands the work and its audience. At the other end of the spectrum, the company might do old-school editing of the book to help the writer improve it, but I don’t see this as essential in all cases. If more of the burden of ensuring our writing is good falls to us writers, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.

The book will also be well-designed, both in print and electronic versions. This includes designing for the right audience: for instance, a writer friend’s historical adventure series was packaged and sold with a young adult cover featuring a hunky model type, giving it a YA historical romance feel. This was a disservice to everyone involved and (I believe) seriously limited sales of the book to its natural readership, which would seem to be primarily adults and teen boys.

The electronic editions will be developed by people who know what they’re doing, and they’ll be carefully proofed before they’re uploaded. Some publishing houses’ idea of an eBook seems to be an automated file conversion that loses important characters and formatting and doesn’t take into account the difference between book and screen. Preparing eBooks for publication isn’t that hard; publishers should take the time to get it right.

5. Puts the majority of their efforts into helping the book find its natural audience
Why, in this day and age, would an author even need a publisher? After all, self-produced eBooks and print on demand editions can work as well for the reader as publishing houses’ offerings if done well.

I think there can be three answers to that question: preparation, design, and reaching readers. Of the those three, skilled professionals (editors, proofreaders, cover artists, book designers, and eBook formatters) can be hired to do the first two; only reaching readers is specialized to the strengths of a publishing house.

Publishing houses already have a leg up in reaching readers, especially insofar as booksellers and review venues will consider a book worth at least a little attention if it’s simply published by a big house. There’s an implication of quality control and investment in the book that makes it automatically non-trivial. But the ideal publishing house will need to go further: it will need to become a company whose primary concern, after acquiring quality writing, is to be masters of promotion and publicity for the purpose of reaching the exact right readers for a particular book. This doesn’t mean large-scale advertising and spamming the world; it means working with the author to create or enhance Internet presence, creating strategically impactful events for the author to participate in, being assiduous in getting books to appropriate review venues, and being masters of every important form of media, from magazine ads to store displays, Twitter to YouTube trailers, author Web sites to signing tours.

When I say that publishing houses need to be exceptional at this task, I don’t mean that they owe every author a huge promotional effort: I only mean that publishing houses should consider it their mission to help make the step from author to readers who want that author’s work, with as little wasted effort and mismatching as possible. That job is tremendously difficult, as complex and variable in its way as writing a good book (and as solidly based on certain key principles). It makes sense that someone should need to specialize in that work and earn a living doing so in a way that will benefit readers, writers, and publishers alike–while potentially keeping good literary agents in business and supplying Hollywood with a steady stream of new material into the bargain.

Will publishers go extinct?
Alternatively, it could be that authors or people they hire will take care of preparation, design and reaching readers. I’m sure there are marketing firms and individual professionals who have the mastery to properly market books without publishers being involved, though I think because publishers invest in a book rather than simply getting paid for promoting it, they’re better-positioned and more credible advocates.

Yet marketers will do in a pinch, which means the ideal publisher isn’t necessary for the ideal publishing experience. It would be more of a pain in the neck for authors to have to coordinate and pay proofreaders, cover artists, book designers, technical personal, marketers, and so on than it would to simply sell the book to a publisher, but DIY for writers can be a financially viable approach. If the ideal publisher doesn’t emerge, publishers as a whole may eventually dwindle to insignificance.

For all I know, the ideal major publishing house exists now–but I haven’t talked with any author who’s seen it, and I talk with a lot of authors. Maybe that’s because some of my suppositions here are wrong–though if so, I don’t see how, and would need you to point it out. You’ll also need to point out anything I missed: as far as I can tell, a large-scale publisher that offers quality books and does the five things above would be an unqualified win. Or maybe I’m right on target, and before long we’ll be entering into a brave new world of ideal publishers–or else no publishers at all.

I just read an interesting post by J. Daniel Sawyer that goes into some detail about clauses that are showing up in publishing contracts. I think he may be overstating the case a little bit when he talks about the kind of trouble a trap like he describes can cause, but I’m not a lawyer either, and for all I know, it may be worse.

The short version is this: be very, very careful (and if possible bring a lawyer) when signing any publishing contract that talks broadly about electronic rights or about future formats. I have a friend (who is an intellectual property lawyer) I’d like to ask about this, so here’s hoping for a substantive post on the issue coming up. In the mean time, I highly recommend reading J. Daniel’s post:
Principles of Contracts: Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (or should)

Photo by Profound Whatever

If you pay much attention to eBook success stories, you’ve probably heard of Amanda Hocking, who began self-publishing her young adult contemporary dark fantasy/romance novels for the Kindle about a year ago and has since made more than two million dollars from them. The burning questions this brings up are: Why her? What has she done right? and Can other writers somehow follow in her footsteps?

I’m only an interested observer, but I have a few thoughts I hope you may find useful based on digging up industry statistics, learning what Ms. Hocking has had to say about her own work, and reading the beginning of her Trylle Trilogy.

Feeding a need
The heart of the matter, if you ask me, is that Ms. Hocking is successfully providing something that a huge number of readers want. Her Trylle books feature a slightly misanthropic, beautiful teenage girl who discovers she is a troll changeling princess when she returns to the troll enclave where she was born. The premise has some obvious similarities to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books, which are about a disgruntled, beautiful teenage girl who discovers she has unusual status among a small, benign group of vampires. Both series feature a tension between the paranormal world and the normal world, multiple potential boyfriends, family conflicts, life-or-death obstacles to love, paranormal creatures who are more beautiful than ordinary humans, and dramatic, no-holds-barred romances that become literally more important than life to the main characters.

At the same time, Hocking doesn’t seem to have just traced Meyer’s books and filled in the outlines with her own ideas: the Trylle Trilogy seems very much the same kind of thing as Twilight, et al, without being a revamp. Hocking’s plots and premise have enough of her own invention to set them apart from Meyer’s work while still appealing strongly to the same kinds of readers. I think Hocking benefits enormously from Twilight’s audience being a large, book-hungry, self-aware group. Now that they’ve read Meyer’s books, they know what they want and are looking for more of it. Hocking appears to be deeply in tune with these readers and to intuitively want to deliver the right mix of danger, romance, strangeness, and angst. Anyway, that’s my theory.

Mistakes that don’t matter?
What’s very interesting to me, too, is what Hocking doesn’t do well. Her grammar is not great. She uses “alright”–a colloquialism that nearly any editor in New York would rapidly correct to “all right”–in narration, along with many other similarly dubious constructions. There are places in her books where a key word or phrase has accidentally been left out. She makes a huge number of small-scale writerly “infelicities,” and there are very often several grammatical and writerly issues on a single page.

In other words, she sorely needs a copy editor–or at least, that was my reaction when I saw her work. But apparently more than a million readers don’t necessarily agree, because poor copyediting has not gotten in the way of her tremendous success. What surprises me is that after she started bringing in all that money–and presumably started hearing about errors in the books–she wasn’t interested in engaging a copyeditor to spend a little time cleaning them up. With eBooks, cleaning up the current edition is simply a matter of doing the edits and uploading them. Admittedly, Hocking must have a lot going on at this point–for instance, a new, 2 million dollar, 4-book deal with St. Martin’s Press–but would this have been so hard?

Then again, a lot of major publishing houses put out eBooks plagued with formatting problems. I guess this is what happens in the Wild West phase of a new business environment.

But in a way I’m grateful she hasn’t done this cleanup work, because it demonstrates something very basic and very important about writing: it’s about delivering a story people care about, and if it does that, it can succeed regardless of trappings, presentation, or the opinions of pundits. It doesn’t matter what people who don’t buy her books think about them if she has a large enough audience of people who do buy her books, and it doesn’t matter much if the people who do buy her books notice errors if they still enjoy the story.

Books for teenage girls that aren’t for teenage girls
One more surprising thing about Hocking’s success is that it’s happening on the Kindle. The reason I say that this is surprising is that the official target market of her books seems to be teenaged girls, yet according to a recent Nielsen poll, only 12% of Kindle users are under the age of 18, and users are about equally balanced between males and females. Were the majority of those one million plus book sales to the 6% of Kindle readers who are female and under age 18? Probably not. Harry Potter and the Twilight series had huge adult audiences, and the people reading about teenage paranormal romance in this case seem to be mainly adults, and presumably mostly female. This begins to shed more light on both Hocking’s and Meyer’s success, because to the best of my knowledge, English-speaking, adult, female romance fans are the most prolific readers on the planet. It’s a damn nice audience if you have the kind of imagination that naturally taps into it.

So what can we other writers learn from Hocking if we want to see success in finding an eBook audience? Well, a few things come to mind: Find your natural demographic. Write a lot. Get your work out there. Work tirelessly. Make your story yours even if it taps into an existing readership. Worry more about connecting with a good story than about publishing method, presentation, or promotion.

For what it’s worth, the authors I know personally who have done fairly well with eBook novel sales are also people who seem to be following these kinds of approaches, except that in the cases I’ve seen they are much more polished in their presentation than is Hocking.

That’s about it for light I can shed on the subject at the moment, but there’s probably much more we can learn from Hocking, and links to posts that delve into that would be welcome in comments.