Viral Loop Chronicles Part 1: Forget Everything You’ve Heard About Book Publishing

BY Adam Penenberg47 minutes ago

Part 1: Today’s Author, Yesterday’s Business

Forget everything you’ve heard about book publishing.

For instance, recently at a party to celebrate the publication of my latest book, a number of people asked, “Is your publisher sending you on a tour to promote your book?”

Dicl;dsCKWDfce9qdck. Sorry, I was laughing so hard recounting this story that I hit my head on my keyboard. More

New HP service undigitizes books: HP believes this whole print-to-digital book conversion push is very much a two-way street — sometimes, for some things, you really want a hard copy. And for a company with roots in printing and ambitions in services, the next play was a natural: How about we offer custom book printing services? And so we see making its formal debut from HP Labs an initiative that puts powerful publishing abilities into the hands of the masses.

The service is called BookPrep, and it enables any publisher “to digitize any existing book and turn it into a virtual asset that can be sold over the Internet and printed on demand — either as is, or personalized by the consumer. … BookPrep automatically aligns and flattens scanned texts of current and out-of-print-books, cleans and brightens the fold and corners of the pages for consistent coloration, and outputs a professional and print-ready PDF eMaster. … BookPrep makes it possible to give consumers access to every book ever published as a high quality replica of the original that they can even personalize.” The appeal here is in the long tail, all the fodder for those with passionate niche interests residing in the estimated 90 million books that are out of print, millions of them out of copyright. The latest addition to the books available for on-demand printing is a collection of 500,000 rare or out-of-print titles from the University of Michigan Library. And while the cost of a custom run was once prohibitive, new technology will let HP price a 250-page book around $15.

Keeping promises is important to human relationships, including the one between an author and a reader. The title of your non-fiction book makes a promise: “Read this book, and get this result.” Sometimes it’s explicit: “Awaken the Giant Within–Wake up and take control of your life!” (Tony Robbins). Sometimes it’s implicit: ”Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association“; while you can’t really tell from the name, this widely accepted style manual has become a standard reference.

Sometimes the title is designed to make you curious: “A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity” is a Bill O’Reilly memoir. Here, the author’s name is what gets most people to pick up the book; the title doesn’t evoke any response other than, “Huh?”
A good approach is to have a provocative title, and a clarifying subtitle: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!” (Robert Kiyosaki)

The same consideration applies to chapter titles, and even to subchapter titles, if you use them.

If you keep the promise of your book’s title, your reader will judge the experience of reading the book to have been worthwhile–even if the book has other imperfections. If you don’t keep that promise, your prose may be scintillating and your anecdotes breathtaking, yet your book will leave the reader unsatisfied.

Think about your book’s title as a promise to your reader. Make it a good promise–and keep it.

What is it?

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. More

FastPencil.com is getting behind NanoWriMo in a big way. Watch the site for interesting stuff!

“Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

“I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there are ever to be one hundred.”

— Google co-founder Sergey Brin defends the company’s book-scanning intentions in an NYT op-ed piece. (Via SiliconValley.com)

For me, Clark’s tools are right up there with Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style.” Your writing will improve just by reading the list.

Here are some examples:

1. Begin sentences with subjects and verbs, letting subordinate elements branch to the right. Even a long, long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early.

To use this tool, imagine each sentence you write printed on an infinitely wide piece of paper. In English, a sentence stretches from left to right. Now imagine this: A reporter writes a lead sentence with subject and verb at the beginning, followed by other subordinate elements, creating what scholars call a “right-branching sentence.”

2. Use verbs in their strongest form, the simple present or past. Strong verbs create action, save words, and reveal the players.
President John F. Kennedy testified that his favorite book was “From Russia With Love,” the 1957 James Bond adventure by Ian Fleming. This choice revealed more about JFK than we knew at the time and created a cult of 007 that persists to this day.

The power in Fleming’s prose flows from the use of active verbs. In sentence after sentence, page after page, England’s favorite secret agent, or his beautiful companion, or his villainous adversary performs the action of the verb.

Bond climbed the few stairs and unlocked his door and locked and bolted it behind him. Moonlight filtered through the curtains. He walked across and turned on the pink-shaded lights on the dressing-table. He stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom and stood for a few minutes under the shower. … He cleaned his teeth and gargled with a sharp mouthwash to get rid of the taste of the day and turned off the bathroom light and went back into the bedroom.

Bond drew aside one curtain and opened wide the tall windows and stood, holding the curtains open and looking out across the great boomerang curve of water under the riding moon. The night breeze felt wonderfully cool on his naked body. He looked at his watch. It said two o’clock.

Bond gave a shuddering yawn. He let the curtains drop back into place. He bent to switch off the lights on the dressing-table. Suddenly he stiffened and his heart missed a beat.

There had been a nervous giggle from the shadows at the back of the room. A girl’s voice said, “Poor Mister Bond. You must be tired. Come to bed.”

17. The number of examples you use in a sentence or a story has meaning.

A self-conscious writer has no choice but to select a specific number of examples or elements in a sentence or paragraph. The writer chooses the number, and when it is greater than one, the order. (If you think the order of a list unimportant, try reciting the names of the Four Evangelists in an order other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.)

The Number One: Declare It
Let’s examine some texts with our X-ray reading glasses, looking down beneath the surface meaning to the grammatical machinery at work below.

That girl is smart.

In this simple sentence, the writer declares a single defining characteristic of the girl, her intelligence. The reader must focus on that. It is this effect of unity, single-mindedness, no-other-alternativeness, that characterizes the language of one.

Jesus wept.

Call me.

Call me Ishmael.

Go to hell.

Here’s Johnny. …

The Number Two: Compare It
We know that girl is smart, but what happens when we learn:

That girl is smart and sweet.

The writer has altered our perspective on the world. The choice for the reader is not between smart and sweet. Instead, the writer forces us to hold these two characteristics in our mind at the same time. We have to balance them, weigh them against each other, compare and contrast them….

and much, much more.

Go here for the whole list, podcasts, the book. Thanks to Roy Peter Clark and Poynter for sharing this treasure-trove.

You know how football coaches talk about “the basics”? This is the most powerful and succinct diagram and explanation of “the basics” for marketing that I have ever seen, and in keeping with Perry’s policy of simply giving away good stuff to build relationships, there is no sales pitch here. Well worth checking out. Go here.