I would have loved to have jumped on board with Googles payment system in place of PayPal... but there was a slight problem... it was "US Only". It would seem that if I look at the dominant players in various fields, they are players that embrace the fact that the internet and more importantly, consumers, exist well beyond the US alone.
Soon as Google lets us buy/sell stuff using their PayPal-replacment across the bulk of the world, I'll be interested.
It would be a dumb move if that was the only financial pool authors could draw from - but it's not; it's only there for the lending/borrowing. Sales via the normal channels are still sales that you obtain money from directly - it's the best of both options. The KDP-Select "free" days are a nice addition, it gives you a chance to release a new book with minimal barriers of adoption - though the uptake rates are dropping significantly from the original "tens of thousands per day" when KDP-Select free was announced - however, it's still useful for a product launch.
We recently moved a couple of books to KDP-Select strictly for the free days and it has helped (easier than managing coupons!), though after 90 days we're putting our books back to normal KDP and then sharing the eBook editions out via LightningSource/INGRAM.
and that is....? Because their stuff "isn't good enough for trad publishing"?
These days trad vs independent aren't an if-else type question, now it's a fairly even handed option either way. Contrary to the big dream, most people getting trad contracts are not able to just kick back and watch the money flow in, instead it's a full on marketing drive that -you- have to organise and perform (while also writing more to comply with the contract), it's no free ride. For the most part, people being signed up by the Big-6 end up worse off than if they take the independent route, assuming they put in the same level of work.
Things have changed a lot in the last 2~3 years and major publishers are having to now fight harder to remain relevant among their back catalogues. There are several independent writers who have been picked up by trad-publishing, but that's only after they've succeeded as indies and are subsequently given some fairly nice contracts - unlike the ones you'll get if you start from the bottom. Conversely, there's a lot of writers who have now cancelled their publishing contracts and reacquired the rights to their work and are going independent. Trad publishers used to be the only practical way of getting your resources for making a good book (editing, proofing, artwork, marketing) but with the introduction of ebooks, print-on-demand and improved internet connectivity those old exclusivity barriers have come right down.
No matter which way you go - you have to gain your own readership. If you want that, you then take the time to do your covers well, you get your work edited, proofed, beta'd and marketed. For sure there's a lot of trashy work out there by people, but there's also a lot of professionally run independent publishing who go through all the same steps, the difference simply is that they're taking it on their own back.
Except the big gain of the KDP-Select, the free days as you say, are already starting to lose its impact. We see each other on KB (Hi, I'm MrPLD) and we can see it falling away in front of us. We pulled ~2000 freebies last week over 3 days, but when it originally came out people were getting 10,000+, now more and more people are only seeing 50~200 freebies.
Sooner or later, we're all going to have to go back to the traditional way of getting our readership, we're running out of "pricing as marketing" strategies, unless we want to start paying readers $1/book (and yes, it will happen, I'm fairly sure).
I'm off the auto-renewal after 90 days on KDP, the free days were a nice thing, but I do wonder in some ways if Amazon isn't trying to make the independents destroy their own kind with this strategy [cynical hat on].
My fault for not being sufficiently specific and adding in "If they so wanted to [migrate]" as opposed to "they should then migrate". I for one certainly am not migrating to anything else, hell and I started with Slackware 3.0:)
I've got dozens of anecdotal data points that say otherwise... just like everyone else.
The discussion is about the problem of diluted consistency rather than that of actual effectiveness of the opted path. We can discuss that for eons with pointless non-results.
New interfaces aren't as scary if people have others around them experienced in the same thing to fall back on, and that's the idea, instead of "Hey Fred, I've got a problem with KDE" - "Oh hell, I don't know that, I use Unity" etc... else WinCE phones would possibly be the dominant force in the smart-phone market, since everyone knows Windows.
While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options if they feel they want to. Funding a parallel-but-different version is just encouraging the confusion. If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.
If we want cohesive desktop/apps then this is a reasonable move to make.
(I'm no fan of Ubuntu Unity, but I still use Ubuntu + Fluxbox instead:) )
Because while we did our artwork first, the Lauren Kate one has been more widely publicised. Every month we get people messaging us asking "Why did you copy the Passion cover? Epic fail!".
The only common element between these two book covers is that the central stock art image of the girl.
People generally only make that mistake once or twice before they become a bit more clued up and invest in a backup option, even on OS's that provide undelete (Windows). Agreeably it doesn't save you when you create and then lose a file between the backup times.
It might be a nice option to have, so long as it doesn't inhibit/hinder the existing system. I think an entirely different filesystem would be a better option, something with inbuilt versioning/history.
Waiting to see the usual fanatical wars over filesystems... people calling for the death of the EXT3/4 system.
Personally the whole fanatical thing seems a bit silly - who'd have ever thought that people would lynch each other over having different options for different purposes/tasks, the very core of the whole idea of what we do and strive for. I'm fine with ext4, thanks:)
Similar here - had to quit for a while due to illness and found that my life wasn't any different without it. To be fair, I'm on 2 half-cups of moka-pot brewed coffee each day, so many it's just not enough to cause a massive upheaval when I stop drinking it.
For sure, yes, it's a SoC, but I'm still going to wait for a complete "on the shelf" system to make an appearance before holding my hopes too high. Leaked releases are about as useful as "New solar cell technology yields 50% more efficiency" announcements.
What is interesting is that they only mention the elevated power consumption in relation to video playback (720p) which is something that'd likely be handed off to a dedicated section of silicon, not something done in the general purpose CPU core. Hopefully we can get some more comprehensive data soon so we can all stop speculating.
The Atom's have always had a reasonable core power consumption... but the external chipsets that ruin the system power consumption figure. Will be curious to see what the total system consumption is going to be with these new one, maybe time to look towards a nice replacement for my Asus eeebox B202's for the desktop.
Fine time for me to run out of mod points... +1 to you... though also have to start adding in the "eBook/evil-Amazon" ones too now, as I've noticed a lot of eBook related stories lately.
The "Ask Slashdot" ones are the most annoying though.... may as well be "It hurts when I breathe, what should I oh wonderful master?"
Agreed. I think the shift has occurred because of increasing corporate interest in open source. BSD is seen as more corporate-friendly than GPL, when in fact it should be the other way around--BSD allows your competitors to reap the fruit of your labor without giving you anything in return.
It's pretty simple if you're the developer, if you don't want this happening, use GPL. If you don't mind or don't care, use BSD.
What I find amusing is when people start trying to coerce developers into choosing a licence when in reality it's simply none of their damned business. I'm sick of receiving emails from GPL-extremists telling me that I'm ruining my life or destroying the universe because I'm letting people copy-and-profit from my code. I opted for that licence choice for my own reasons, to hell with anyone who thinks they can make my choices for me on something as trivial as software.
All my open-source code is now BSD-revised licenced, and this is precisely the behaviour I see, large corps (even IBM and national banks) have submitted patches back to me simply because it's far easier for them to do so and not have to try and maintain their own parallel edition. A lot of the time it's just the "admin" person you're dealing with and it's likely they're perfectly happy to send patches back as they're often rather pro-"OpenSource" themselves.
As for corps taking my code, modifying it and making a profit, that's great - if I didn't accept things like that occurring then I'd not have released as BSD. People should choose their release licence for their own reasons, not because it's "what everyone else is doing".
They would stand to pick up a lot more sales of their hardware and subsequently their instore books if they did this, at least that's my theory. A lot of people avoid the Kindles because of the lack of ePub. I suppose Amazon fears people will buy their books from elsewhere and read them on the Kindle, but in reality Amazon does have a nice 1-click/buy/delivery system which is hard to walk away from, it's just so damned convenient (most of the time).
I fully sympathise... it made me cry to do it, literally (because of a huge argument I was having). It'd be nice if SW offered an ePub or HTML+CSS upload, since that's what they work from internally to feed the meatgrinder. Given that they're forcing people to use the SW Styling Guide, I don't see why they can't offer an equally strict HTML/CSS styling guide. The biggest pain I found is the disconnect between your submitted doc and the errors that often come out say from the ePub validation, you just have to thumb-suck and hope that you find the true cause of the glitch.
It's something we certainly discuss in great length between each other (independent writers), most frequently becoming rather heated. For some it works best to go to $2.99+, for others they find they lose their traction and retreat back to $0.99 or lower.
Personally I'm just glad we're sticking with the $2.99 vision because there's just no practical way to do it as even a small scale home job/business, not when you have to factor in artwork, editing, proofing and marketing. I suppose some people could make it work if they lived in the basement and had someone else pay their bills. As you probably know, Amazon will give you 35c/sale at 99c, even at 100/day I think you'd be still slowly sliding backwards and I don't know too many indies that sustain 100/day for more than a few months on each release (there are some exceptions of course, like Amanda Hocking).
As a general rule, PDFs cannot be reflowed (there is a new revision in the PDF standard that allows this now, but it's a bit of a crutch).
ePub/mobi/what-ever-other-ebook-format is more akin to HTML than Postscript/PDF, as such eBooks can then be read on all manner of devices without knowing in advance the limitations of the output media. So it's fine if you have a nice 9~10" tablet to read the PDFs on, and things like datasheets for electronics work well in this format, but if you try it on a 5~6" display device it becomes a case of either scrolling/panning to read or reading with a lot of detail lost.
Given that I'm the geek *cough* and my wife is the writer, I put her on LyX, it has its shortcomings but for novels they're not a problem and it's a nice bridge between mainstream wordprocessing and my world:) (our biggest complaint lies with the dictionaries and grammar... but then we do have editors that we contract). Anyhow, from within LyX we just do the HTML export and then import via Calibre with our own tweaked stylesheet to give us the mobi and epub. For print-publishing of course LyX/LaTeX does a bloomen nice job with very little work as we all know.
I do like the the Palitino font combined with the Memoir document class. Unfortunately of course, all that goes down the chute for the eBooks:(
I have a great deal of bitterness towards Smashwords and their singular MS-Word submission format, rather a stab in the eye considering their profit is built on OpenSource software - but that's something I've complained about long and hard to Mark's face with thus far very little gain.
No doubt other independent publishers reading these comments know still how annoying it can be when you think you've got everything finished and a few hours after you've released the book you get an email from a reader "Your formatting is totally broken on device XYZ":(
Slashdot Mirror
I would have loved to have jumped on board with Googles payment system in place of PayPal... but there was a slight problem... it was "US Only". It would seem that if I look at the dominant players in various fields, they are players that embrace the fact that the internet and more importantly, consumers, exist well beyond the US alone.
Soon as Google lets us buy/sell stuff using their PayPal-replacment across the bulk of the world, I'll be interested.
It would be a dumb move if that was the only financial pool authors could draw from - but it's not; it's only there for the lending/borrowing. Sales via the normal channels are still sales that you obtain money from directly - it's the best of both options. The KDP-Select "free" days are a nice addition, it gives you a chance to release a new book with minimal barriers of adoption - though the uptake rates are dropping significantly from the original "tens of thousands per day" when KDP-Select free was announced - however, it's still useful for a product launch.
We recently moved a couple of books to KDP-Select strictly for the free days and it has helped (easier than managing coupons!), though after 90 days we're putting our books back to normal KDP and then sharing the eBook editions out via LightningSource/INGRAM.
http://elitadaniels.com/ - Fantasy - Vampires - Zombies
and that is....? Because their stuff "isn't good enough for trad publishing"?
These days trad vs independent aren't an if-else type question, now it's a fairly even handed option either way. Contrary to the big dream, most people getting trad contracts are not able to just kick back and watch the money flow in, instead it's a full on marketing drive that -you- have to organise and perform (while also writing more to comply with the contract), it's no free ride. For the most part, people being signed up by the Big-6 end up worse off than if they take the independent route, assuming they put in the same level of work.
Things have changed a lot in the last 2~3 years and major publishers are having to now fight harder to remain relevant among their back catalogues. There are several independent writers who have been picked up by trad-publishing, but that's only after they've succeeded as indies and are subsequently given some fairly nice contracts - unlike the ones you'll get if you start from the bottom. Conversely, there's a lot of writers who have now cancelled their publishing contracts and reacquired the rights to their work and are going independent. Trad publishers used to be the only practical way of getting your resources for making a good book (editing, proofing, artwork, marketing) but with the introduction of ebooks, print-on-demand and improved internet connectivity those old exclusivity barriers have come right down.
No matter which way you go - you have to gain your own readership. If you want that, you then take the time to do your covers well, you get your work edited, proofed, beta'd and marketed. For sure there's a lot of trashy work out there by people, but there's also a lot of professionally run independent publishing who go through all the same steps, the difference simply is that they're taking it on their own back.
Except the big gain of the KDP-Select, the free days as you say, are already starting to lose its impact. We see each other on KB (Hi, I'm MrPLD) and we can see it falling away in front of us. We pulled ~2000 freebies last week over 3 days, but when it originally came out people were getting 10,000+, now more and more people are only seeing 50~200 freebies.
Sooner or later, we're all going to have to go back to the traditional way of getting our readership, we're running out of "pricing as marketing" strategies, unless we want to start paying readers $1/book (and yes, it will happen, I'm fairly sure).
I'm off the auto-renewal after 90 days on KDP, the free days were a nice thing, but I do wonder in some ways if Amazon isn't trying to make the independents destroy their own kind with this strategy [cynical hat on].
http://elitadaniels.com/
My fault for not being sufficiently specific and adding in "If they so wanted to [migrate]" as opposed to "they should then migrate". I for one certainly am not migrating to anything else, hell and I started with Slackware 3.0 :)
I've got dozens of anecdotal data points that say otherwise... just like everyone else.
The discussion is about the problem of diluted consistency rather than that of actual effectiveness of the opted path. We can discuss that for eons with pointless non-results.
New interfaces aren't as scary if people have others around them experienced in the same thing to fall back on, and that's the idea, instead of "Hey Fred, I've got a problem with KDE" - "Oh hell, I don't know that, I use Unity" etc... else WinCE phones would possibly be the dominant force in the smart-phone market, since everyone knows Windows.
Agreed.
While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options if they feel they want to. Funding a parallel-but-different version is just encouraging the confusion. If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.
If we want cohesive desktop/apps then this is a reasonable move to make.
(I'm no fan of Ubuntu Unity, but I still use Ubuntu + Fluxbox instead :) )
I'd be very curious to see what people thought about the similarities of these two images -
http://elitadaniels.com/images/zombie-cover.jpg
vs
http://www.criticnic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Passion-by-Lauren-Kate.jpg
Because while we did our artwork first, the Lauren Kate one has been more widely publicised. Every month we get people messaging us asking "Why did you copy the Passion cover? Epic fail!".
The only common element between these two book covers is that the central stock art image of the girl.
tsk.... notepad.exe ftw! ;)
( okay, I use vim )
People generally only make that mistake once or twice before they become a bit more clued up and invest in a backup option, even on OS's that provide undelete (Windows). Agreeably it doesn't save you when you create and then lose a file between the backup times.
It might be a nice option to have, so long as it doesn't inhibit/hinder the existing system. I think an entirely different filesystem would be a better option, something with inbuilt versioning/history.
Waiting to see the usual fanatical wars over filesystems... people calling for the death of the EXT3/4 system.
Personally the whole fanatical thing seems a bit silly - who'd have ever thought that people would lynch each other over having different options for different purposes/tasks, the very core of the whole idea of what we do and strive for. I'm fine with ext4, thanks :)
Similar here - had to quit for a while due to illness and found that my life wasn't any different without it. To be fair, I'm on 2 half-cups of moka-pot brewed coffee each day, so many it's just not enough to cause a massive upheaval when I stop drinking it.
For sure, yes, it's a SoC, but I'm still going to wait for a complete "on the shelf" system to make an appearance before holding my hopes too high. Leaked releases are about as useful as "New solar cell technology yields 50% more efficiency" announcements.
What is interesting is that they only mention the elevated power consumption in relation to video playback (720p) which is something that'd likely be handed off to a dedicated section of silicon, not something done in the general purpose CPU core. Hopefully we can get some more comprehensive data soon so we can all stop speculating.
The Atom's have always had a reasonable core power consumption... but the external chipsets that ruin the system power consumption figure. Will be curious to see what the total system consumption is going to be with these new one, maybe time to look towards a nice replacement for my Asus eeebox B202's for the desktop.
Fine time for me to run out of mod points... +1 to you... though also have to start adding in the "eBook/evil-Amazon" ones too now, as I've noticed a lot of eBook related stories lately.
The "Ask Slashdot" ones are the most annoying though.... may as well be "It hurts when I breathe, what should I oh wonderful master?"
Agreed. I think the shift has occurred because of increasing corporate interest in open source. BSD is seen as more corporate-friendly than GPL, when in fact it should be the other way around--BSD allows your competitors to reap the fruit of your labor without giving you anything in return.
It's pretty simple if you're the developer, if you don't want this happening, use GPL. If you don't mind or don't care, use BSD.
What I find amusing is when people start trying to coerce developers into choosing a licence when in reality it's simply none of their damned business. I'm sick of receiving emails from GPL-extremists telling me that I'm ruining my life or destroying the universe because I'm letting people copy-and-profit from my code. I opted for that licence choice for my own reasons, to hell with anyone who thinks they can make my choices for me on something as trivial as software.
All my open-source code is now BSD-revised licenced, and this is precisely the behaviour I see, large corps (even IBM and national banks) have submitted patches back to me simply because it's far easier for them to do so and not have to try and maintain their own parallel edition. A lot of the time it's just the "admin" person you're dealing with and it's likely they're perfectly happy to send patches back as they're often rather pro-"OpenSource" themselves.
As for corps taking my code, modifying it and making a profit, that's great - if I didn't accept things like that occurring then I'd not have released as BSD. People should choose their release licence for their own reasons, not because it's "what everyone else is doing".
They would stand to pick up a lot more sales of their hardware and subsequently their instore books if they did this, at least that's my theory. A lot of people avoid the Kindles because of the lack of ePub. I suppose Amazon fears people will buy their books from elsewhere and read them on the Kindle, but in reality Amazon does have a nice 1-click/buy/delivery system which is hard to walk away from, it's just so damned convenient (most of the time).
I fully sympathise... it made me cry to do it, literally (because of a huge argument I was having). It'd be nice if SW offered an ePub or HTML+CSS upload, since that's what they work from internally to feed the meatgrinder. Given that they're forcing people to use the SW Styling Guide, I don't see why they can't offer an equally strict HTML/CSS styling guide. The biggest pain I found is the disconnect between your submitted doc and the errors that often come out say from the ePub validation, you just have to thumb-suck and hope that you find the true cause of the glitch.
It's something we certainly discuss in great length between each other (independent writers), most frequently becoming rather heated. For some it works best to go to $2.99+, for others they find they lose their traction and retreat back to $0.99 or lower.
Personally I'm just glad we're sticking with the $2.99 vision because there's just no practical way to do it as even a small scale home job/business, not when you have to factor in artwork, editing, proofing and marketing. I suppose some people could make it work if they lived in the basement and had someone else pay their bills. As you probably know, Amazon will give you 35c/sale at 99c, even at 100/day I think you'd be still slowly sliding backwards and I don't know too many indies that sustain 100/day for more than a few months on each release (there are some exceptions of course, like Amanda Hocking).
I completely agree - that sort of thing just makes the brain pop.
Just don't dare tell people that you don't use MS-Word ... :D
As a general rule, PDFs cannot be reflowed (there is a new revision in the PDF standard that allows this now, but it's a bit of a crutch).
ePub/mobi/what-ever-other-ebook-format is more akin to HTML than Postscript/PDF, as such eBooks can then be read on all manner of devices without knowing in advance the limitations of the output media. So it's fine if you have a nice 9~10" tablet to read the PDFs on, and things like datasheets for electronics work well in this format, but if you try it on a 5~6" display device it becomes a case of either scrolling/panning to read or reading with a lot of detail lost.
Hey, many thanks for that :D We've been quiet lately because we're building up to our latest release "My Boyfriend is a Zombie"... YA romance... already having fun with an Apple-vs-Samsung wrangle over the cover artwork ( http://elitadaniels.com/images/zombie-cover.jpg vs http://www.criticnic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Passion-by-Lauren-Kate.jpg ) ... fun fun fun ...
Given that I'm the geek *cough* and my wife is the writer, I put her on LyX, it has its shortcomings but for novels they're not a problem and it's a nice bridge between mainstream wordprocessing and my world :) (our biggest complaint lies with the dictionaries and grammar... but then we do have editors that we contract). Anyhow, from within LyX we just do the HTML export and then import via Calibre with our own tweaked stylesheet to give us the mobi and epub. For print-publishing of course LyX/LaTeX does a bloomen nice job with very little work as we all know.
I do like the the Palitino font combined with the Memoir document class. Unfortunately of course, all that goes down the chute for the eBooks :(
I have a great deal of bitterness towards Smashwords and their singular MS-Word submission format, rather a stab in the eye considering their profit is built on OpenSource software - but that's something I've complained about long and hard to Mark's face with thus far very little gain.
No doubt other independent publishers reading these comments know still how annoying it can be when you think you've got everything finished and a few hours after you've released the book you get an email from a reader "Your formatting is totally broken on device XYZ" :(