PubWest BookLore: Social Media for Publishing Professionals

In mid-May, I'll be presenting with Melissa Taylor of Pinterest Savvy to talk about some ways publishers are using social media.

Hope you'll join us! If so, please RSVP to Kent at executivedirector@pubwest.org.

Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM
Denver Press Club
1330 Glenarm Place
Denver, CO 80204

My part will focus on content marketing, which is using book content to sell books.

I’m going to talk briefly about online promo effectiveness and then spend some time on how I used WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter to promote:

• The Feed Zone Cookbook
• Slaying the Badger
• Swim Speed Workouts
• Inside the Box 

This will include some gimmickry, SEO, meta-tagging, keywording, post timing, cross-posting, and poaching celebrity Twitter handles.

I’ll then compare the effectiveness of content marketing with traditional online advertising by using online metrics and book sales data.

A preview of Scott Jurek's upcoming book Eat & Run

For Scott Jurek, few things in life have come easily. And that’s why he’s the world’s best ultramarathoner. In his new book Eat & Run, Jurek reveals depth of character as he tells how sports offered a reprieve from a tough childhood spent as family caretaker in Minnesota’s backwoods. Running became his salvation, delivering him to the highest heights of a modernizing sport. Jurek’s journey shows him melding the best parts of those around him, grafting their toughness and attitudes about life, sports, and food onto his hardened athletic core.

The book’s race reports are its best feature as freelance writer Steve Friedman’s gritty, emotional writing style carries us along smoothly over the jagged terrain and rocky emotional struggles Jurek endures. Jurek puts us inside his head as he devours mammoth workouts in the mountains around Seattle and smashes course records at races like Western States and Badwater, often running brutal paces on torn ligaments and broken bones. Witnessing Jurek’s development as a person and philosopher-athlete transform his running performances into personal milestones more meaningful than any podium finish or new world record. Any runner will absorb Jurek’s subtle lessons about mental toughness and find invaluable his four-step process for handling crises.

Some readers might find the “Eat” parts of the book less fulfilling. While Jurek is clearly convinced that his vegan diet has carried him throughout his career, runners may find his workouts and racing more relatable than his clean-fuel diet. Jurek eats simply, yet the interjection of his somewhat involved recipes at the end of important chapters felt a little jarring.

Eat & Run is a fascinating and inspirational look at Scott Jurek, deepening the narrow portrait of him in Born to Run. Though many of us undoubtedly had an easier upbringing, Jurek’s inner fire and his transformation into the world’s best ultramarathoner are motivating reminders of why we run. Eat & Run will become a classic of ultrarunning lore. For runners and trailrunners, Jurek’s story is anthem.

Eat & Run will be available next week in bookstores and from its publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Learn more about Scott and his book at his brand-new website www.scottjurek.com.

Facebook Is Designing an iPad/Kindle Tablet Device

I'm speculating wildly here, but play along.


Push Pop Press makes interactive ebooks. Their ebooks are more app or self-contained website than ebook, really, but it seems that this sort of convergence of web and book is one possible direction for the written word and its various formats.

The About page for the site has announced that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press.

This can only mean that Facebook plans to join Apple, Amazon, Google, BarnesandNoble.com, Kobo, Sony, Motorola, and the rest of the technologized world in offering some device that lets you read ebooks!

If this seems like a leap, just think about what that device might look like: it would be a walled garden device designed to funnel all your Facebook-enable social network channels into one device. It would play Facebook video, have a built-in web browser (FaceFox?), and have a store where users could buy licensed music, movies, and ebooks through Facebook's App Store... or FTunes? Fbookstore?

Brand it how you will, Facebook's IPO will launch it into the socially enabled content retail business.

What We Feel When We Run: a Review of Haruki Murakami's Book

What was I thinking?

This morning I finished reading Haruki Murakami's book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. For a few years, it had seemed to me that the book was mentioned in the running media with the same reverence normally reserved for books like Lore of Running and Once a Runner. We're publishing our own running memoir this year, and having seen What I Talk About laying around the office, I thought I should read it. I expected it to be taut, maybe a bit mystical. I think I thought it would be for running what Tim Krabbe's The Rider is for cycling.

Just two chapters in, I was thinking about putting it down. At first, it felt like Murakami was rambling and spending too much time qualifying that this book was simply about what running was like for him. After 50 pages, I realized I was reacting to Murakami's complete lack of pretense. There is no artifice between writer and reader. Murakami writes plainly. When Murakami runs, you run. When he tires, you tire. It's not because Murakami's descriptions are lively. They aren't. He describes passing roadkill during a run from Athens to Marathon with as much pragmatism as those whose job it is to remove roadkill. The reader knows Murakami's experience as a runner because the reader is also a runner. The genius of What I Talk About is not the creation of an experience for the reader, but its evocation of experiences the reader has already had. There is no need for Murakami to describe the act of running because we fill it in for him. Instead, he describes the feelings his running brings out in him, and we feel them in our own way. This common experience of running becomes a conversation with Murakami. He says: here is how running makes me feel. Naturally, I thought about how running feels different to me. I thought about how running is the same for me a Murakami and how we are different in our running. Did Murakami plan on this being my reaction? Murakami made me realize that, though everyone runs by alternating the left and right feet, running is a different experience for each runner. The act of running evokes a unique response in each of us, and Murakami's book asks us to think about how running is for us.

Murakami's book is thought of by longtime runners as being particularly quotable, but I don't think this is particularly true. Parts of his book leave strong impressions, but the words themselves are not succinct. When searching for the book's title, Google auto-suggests adding the word "quotes" after it. Clicking on the top result brings you to a blog that quotes literature. The three What I Talk About quotes are over 3,500 words. Murakami writes in impressions. Yet he quotes someone early in the book, "In the act of shaving lies a philosophy." He explains that he feels any act repeated often comes to reflect the person repeating it. For Murakami, running and writing are deeply personal rituals, in part because he has run and written so much.

What I Talk About is really an improvised run. Murakami is an impulsive man, and he felt it time to write this book, so he did. I imagine him sitting at his sun-bathed desk in his open-air office in Hawaii and completing a sentence. He looks up and his eyes focus. Something has stirred in him and broken his stream of thoughts. There will be no more writing now. I think of him rising out of his chair, stepping tightly to his running shoes, which lie neatly next to the door, facing outward. He lifts off his shirt, stretching upward, breathing a deep breath and tingling in anticipation. He opens the door and, head down, begins his run. Murakami has no route in mind, no thoughts, just an urge to move. He must run until he is spent. As his body warms and his legs unspool, he is able to lift his eyes from their clouded writer's haze to see the ocean-side, the trees, the signposts easing past. He tells us what this feels like to him and we feel what it would feel like to us.

For Murakami, running is a moving experience, pardon the pun, and his experience has moved me. What I Talk About has made me think differently about running. I feel sad for those who run blankly or not enough to feel some hint of the depth Murakami draws from running. In the end What I Talk About is more than a description of what we feel when we run, more than a conversation among runners. Murakami describes how this act of running, repeated often, has come to reflect the person he is. He describes how running has challenged him to become better. In making me more aware of this process, Murakami and I will run together for a long time.

Check out Newton Running's "State of the Natural Running Movement" Panel Discussion

Newton Running invites you.

People who have been running for awhile and paying some attention to the sport are probably aware of the barefoot running movement. In a nutshell, barefoot runners believe that shoes mess with how our bodies evolved to run and cause injuries. The barefoot runner's manifesto, or at least its most successful foray into mainstream society, is Christopher McDougall's New York Times bestseller Born to Run (read my book review here).

Barefoot runners have always been a small minority of the running population, mostly because nobody wants to run without their shoes! And for good reason! It's kind of painful, it takes a long adjustment period, and everyone is terrified of broken glass, hypodermic needles, dog poop, and all the many gross things inhabiting our roads, running paths, and public parks.

So it turns out you can have your cake and eat it, too. Newton Running is leading the "natural running" movement, which seeks to teach people to run the barefoot way while keeping their feet firmly shod. The trick here is not to wear high heels. Take a look at your running shoes or, as Newton has done, saw them in half. Your shoe's heels are much higher than your shoe's toes. This angle forces your heel to strike the ground before your toes, which runs counter to many thousands of years of evolved human running form.

You see, humans have been running for tens of thousands of years. Some evolutionary biologists actually believe that the ability to run is the primary evolutionary advantage that spurred man to become homo sapiens, i.e. a big-brained tool user. Being hairless and sweaty, we're able to run far, far longer than any other animal on earth. (In fact, there is an annual organized race between horses and humans. Apparently, these particular humans and horses defy this particular hypothesis.) Humans can cool our bodies more effectively and avoid overheating. Other animals overheat quickly. There are those biologists who believe that ancient man simply ran down his prey, continually chasing until animals keeled over, half-cooked and nearly dead (a technique known as persistence hunting and covered in a story on This American Life and this BBC video). The ability to run long meant a boost to our meat supply, which supposedly allowed our brains to grow bigger and bigger.

Anyway... we've been running a very long time, but shoes weren't invited until just a few thousand years ago. (Man, that must have been a huge "Duh!" moment!). Those used to be simple moccasin-style foot coverings with little padding. Early 20th century running shoes were mostly canvas with laces. Since Nike's founding in in mid-20th century, running shoe companies have been adding more and more padding to shoes, raising the heel 10-12% above the toe, or even higher. Now when modern humans take off our high-heeled running shoes and go for a run, we start out banging our heels against the ground, because that's what we're used to. Soon, the brain is like, "Dang! Ouch! Watch it, bro!" and begins changing our foot strike so that the middle or the front of the foot hits the ground before the heel.

Newton Running's shoes feature a 0-3% grade from heel to toe. To me, this seems to be the company's biggest contribution to running shoes, and the major shoe manufacturers are all expected to announce similarly flat running shoes at the 2010 Running Event in Texas (I'll be there!).

So Newton is dedicated to teaching people how to run with barefoot form while they keep their shoes on (preferably Newtons, of course). Newton's panel next week will explore the state of this natural running movement. This fall, we're releasing a book by Newton's co-founder Danny Abshire that is all about natural running, so you'll find me among the audience of this panel event.

A quick note: I bought this pair of Newtons, partly out of curiosity, partly to help me understand the book, and partly because I want to get faster. My quick review is that they definitely help me heel strike less, though I found that no shoe is likely to fix technique alone. I'm excited to read our book so I can overhaul my running technique... again.

Anatomy of a Publicity Stunt

It was a friend in college who introduced me to the concept that luck comes with hard work. He'd just beaten me at some game, on what I felt was a lucky shot. I told him so and he replied, "You make your own luck."

I've found it's double-edged sword to work in publicity. Rarely can a publicist claim full responsibility for some good press, yet it's often that a publicist can claim at least some of it. This week, some hard work paid off in the form of a lucky break, but it was a fan boy blogger and the quick-thinking, fastest pro cyclist in the world who deserve most of the credit.

In the 24 hours after Mark Cavendish sprinted to victory in the first stage of the Tour of California last Sunday, a book I'm promoting got mentioned on ESPN.com (since updated), in the New York Times (since updated), the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (since updated), the Sacramento Bee, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and two cycling websites. This is a mother lode of publicity, more than many small publishers could hope for in a few years!

Last winter, we acquired Mark Cavendish's autobiography, Boy Racer, which  from the original UK publisher as a late addition to our fall 2010 list. We planned to publish the book in June, a comfortable month before the start of the Tour de France. In February, we made some print-on-demand ARCs (advance reader copies) of the book. Book publishers make ARCs to send to taste makers to ask for their endorsement and to magazines to line up publicity during the months it takes most magazines to plan out, develop, and publish their editorial content.

In March, I shipped out 20 ARCs to the big cycling print magazines and in April, I shipped 10 more to cycling websites and bloggers. I didn't ask for an embargo (because I think publicity embargoes are cheesy, especially in a small market like cycling), but I asked the magazines to consider book reviews and excerpts for their pre-Tour guides and mentioned to the websites that I was hoping for publicity after the Tour of California start.

Cav won the stage, which meant he was expected to take questions from the cycling media during a press conference soon after the race. Velonation described the scene like this:

"Following the race, Cavendish was relaxed and confident, and answered the myriad of questions with aplomb, but in an almost whisper. When asked about the Tour de Romandie victory salute debacle and whether he was thinking about that as he crossed the line, Cavendish was blunt and didn't pass up on an opportunity to give a healthy nod to his recently released book.

"I honestly don't think about my celebrations too much. You should read my book, Boy Racer. It's out in America now. I'll be doing some book signings during and after the Tour of California. It's a good book. In the book, I talk about how I switch off my emotions during the race. As soon as I cross the line, it all comes out. Most things are pretty impromptu, it's just all that emotion built up inside. When I cross the line first, sometimes I'm a quick thinker and come up with something, but for the most part, it's pretty impromptu."

At this point, a journalist in the crowd pulled out a copy and handed it to Cavendish. He dutifully held the book up and flashed a big grin." 

It looked like this.

That journalist was Richard Masoner, the blogger behind the Cyclelicious website, to whom I had sent a Boy Racer ARC just a few weeks before the race. He had taken his ARC with him to the Tour of California, hoping to get Cav to autograph it so that he could give the signed book away to a reader.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat described the events with more snark:

"Sprinters in cycling are like sprinters in track. They strut. They like to call attention to themselves. They are divas, showmen, who blossom like a peacock in front of a camera. When Cavendish stepped in front of the camera Sunday in the post-race press conference, he couldn't resist. From the podium he motioned to a man in the audience, presumably, and embarrassingly, a journalist. The journalist rose from his seat and brought to Cavendish a book.

It was Cavendish's recently published autobiography. That alone speaks volumes. Cavendish is only 24 years old. Some NFL wide receivers could get tips from this guy on self-promotion – which would soon become readily apparent.

The Brit then propped up the book, its cover facing the audience, pointed to it and said, “It's a good book.”

He smiled and he didn't stop smiling and he kept the book propped up for the couldn't-be-ignored photo op. Yes, maybe he had to squelch a defiant urge when he crossed the finish line but Cavendish couldn't be rung up for self-promotion."

It was Cav pimping his book after his win that caught the attention of the New York Times, ESPN, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and Velonation.

I learned about all this on Monday morning when I checked Google Reader and noticed the New York Times headline about Cav winning the stage. My jaw hit the floor when I saw how the book was mentioned, and then I raised my arms in victory!

It looked like this.

As any good publicist would, I printed the page to pdf and hit Google to search for more. I soon stumbled onto the ESPN and LA Times versions. (Quick aside: I noticed a lack of AdWords ads in the search results, so I took a few minutes to set up a campaign for Boy Racer.)

Another victory salute and then, having recovered my wits, I publicized the victory to some coworkers and our book trade distributor.

Finally, I noticed an email from Richard Masoner in my inbox. It said:

"Hi Dave,

I had Cavendish's book with me at his stage win in Sacramento Sunday afternoon. He saw it, grabbed it from me, and held it up at the press conference telling everybody they should read it.

The LA Times and NY Times both mentioned Boy Racer in Sunday's story on his win.

He also autographed the book for me. Is it okay if I give this pre-publication copy away in a contest?

Richard

http://www.cyclelicio.us/ is yummy!"

Yummy indeed! If I get the chance to meet Richard, I owe him a round of beers. Perhaps more than one round!

Of course, there are few less-than-perfect circumstances. First, the book isn't actually available yet nor is Cav actually scheduled to sign books during the remainder of the race. The book was bound and shipped to our distributor's warehouse a few days ago, which means it's sitting at a truck stop somewhere instead of selling like hotcakes; cycling fans who are now assuredly scrambling into bookstores are pawing through the shelves and walking away confused, frustrated, and disappointed. Publicity pushed demand, but the supply wasn't ready, and that means lost sales. I can only hope that Amazon and other online retailers just saw a bump in pre-orders.

Second, the cover on the ARC isn't the final one, and it's not as good as the final one. This is a pretty minor quibble considering only Cyclelicious posted the photo of Cav with his book.

Third, the book mentions have since been taken out of the ESPN and New York Times articles (which is why it's so important to print to pdf!). That afternoon, I emailed the book press release, cover image, and photo of Cav with book to all the reporters who mentioned the Cav-ARC incident to offer them a finished copy when they arrive next week. I hope this isn't what prompted ESPN and the Times to remove the mentions (both reporters were interested in receiving a copy). Should this happen again, maybe I'll wait a few days before thanking the reporter.


So if it's true that you make your own luck, then I'm happy to have placed an ARC in the right hands, even if it was those hands that put it in Cav's.

UPDATE: A coworker managed to catch Cav at the team bus today and got the final book into his hands!

It looked like this.

Photo of Cav with ARC used with written permission of Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious.
Photo of Dave with ARC and Cyclelicious website showing photo of Cav with ARC taken by Renee.
Photo of Cav with the final book used with permission of Ben Pryhoda.

Born to Run: Too Far a Leap

Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run is not about running, at least not what most of us consider to be running. Born to Run is a wide-ranging adventure story about elite, ultra-distance trail running, a cultish specialty of running that involves 50-mile races through wilderness terrain. 

Ultra running shares little common ground with the intended reader of Born to Run, the average American runner. Hard-core ultra runners seem like rock climbers; McDougall describes dirtball outdoors people who camp out near trail systems to run all day and party all night. By contrast, the average American runner is delighted to run a few hours a week on sidewalks, roads, and paths. To say that Born to Run is about running would be more than a small stretch.

In Born to Run, McDougall describes the events leading to a 50-mile trail race through Mexico's Copper Canyon. The race features a handful of native Mexican runners and elite American trail runners, and McDougall builds the race into a clash of cultures. The Tarahumara Mexicans are an indigenous society of agrarian hunter-gatherers that practices long-distance running for sport and survival. The Americans are mostly professional ultra runners who run impressive distances -- 50-mile and 100-mile races are typical.

But McDougall's book is written more like fiction than nonfiction. He has a mythology -- the Tarahumara are like a mythical people living in Shangri-La where all societal evils are neutralized through running. The Tarahumara have no cancer or metabolic disease. They have no violence or theft. They have no concept of sexism. The Tarahumara are the perfect society, McDougall says, because of running.

McDougall explains that the Tarahumara began running to escape eradication at the hands of Spanish colonialism. The people were driven into Mexico's Copper Canyon, a brutal environment lacking water, farmland, and so baked under the hot Mexican sun that colonists could not give pursuit. Realistically, the Tarahumara are a destitute people who live hand to mouth in a lawless, cartel-infested Mexican desert because they have no choice and few opportunities. McDougall provides the historical context, but his book conjures innumerable opportunities to characterize the Tarahumara as an ideal society when, in fact, they are an unfortunate lot.

For McDougall, the Tarahumara way of running has a magical quality; he characterizes it as "easy, smooth, fast" with little motion above the waist, but it's difficult to imagine. This video profiles the Tarahumara and Caballo Blanco, the hero of Born to Run who organizes an annual Copper Canyon race between Tarahumara and Americans. You can watch them run.

To me, these runners simply look like people who run a lot. The Tarahumara are not magical runners; they simply look that much better when compared to the average running American.

Chapter 25 of Born to Run lays blame for bad American running at the feet of Nike. Educated runners (and anyone who reads the New York Times fitness section) know the story: padding reduces the sensation of impact when our feet hit the ground. Reducing the feeling of shock makes it seem as if running is more comfortable, so it changes how we run. Untrained runners wearing shoes tend to land their feet heel first into the ground. Barefoot runners tend to land farther forward on the foot. Many biomechanists have shown that padded shoes distort our naturally evolved running form and actually may cause injuries rather than prevent them. (Stay tuned for a VeloPress book on how to run with shoes as if you were barefoot.)

McDougall takes the blame a step farther, saying that Nike's padded shoes have caused far more than millions of running injuries, they've also turned people off running, which has led to obesity, metabolic disease, and cancer. In short, Nike is the root of all Western ailments. The book pretty much says this.

In all of Born to Run, only chapter 25 seems grounded in reality, mostly because McDougall so heavily relies on what seem like second-hand interviews of authoritative sources like academics and scientists from interviews in the New York Times and on National Public Radio (specifically this 1997 This American Life episode about persistence hunting.). Still, I feel the comparison between normal running and the running in Born to Run too far of a leap. Trail running is very different from road running, requiring very different motions. Perhaps trail running's soft surfaces and its inherent variety of motions reduce its incidence of injury. After all, trail running must mimic the conditions under which we evolved to run much more closely than the hard surfaces and repetitive motions of road running. Unfortunately, I'm aware of no studies comparing injury incidence between trail and road running.

It's easy to overlook an important point here: none of the characters in Born to Run run without shoes. The traditional Tarahumara -- not all of them -- run with tire treads laced to their feet. Take a look at the video above and you'll see that their tire tread shoes are at least a half-inch thick. Even the character "Barefoot Ted" runs with Vibram Five Fingers, though the book seems vague about how often he actually wore them. Born to Run's entire mythology is based on the benefits of running -- specifically barefoot running -- and McDougall proclaims that America would be a better place to live if we all ran barefoot... yet just one person in the book runs barefoot and only some of the time.

Even McDougall runs shod -- in Nikes nonetheless. McDougall says he was inspired to write the book while seeking a cure for his own running injuries. Along the way, he comes to believe that running shoes injured him, but his own description of his rehabilitation at the hands of a running coach illustrates that McDougall was simply another bad American runner. His coach teaches him proper run technique and McDougall is cured. His comeback is evidence that Born to Run is a work of fiction: McDougall keeps his shoes on and is cured long before he runs with the Tarahumara.

This is the great joke of Born to Run: its entire premise is detached from reality. Born to Run is a make-believe book. McDougall tells us we should all run trail ultra marathons. The average American runner, for very practical and sensible reasons, should be skeptical. McDougall proclaims the benefits of barefoot running, yet no one in the book runs barefoot and back in Kansas, few competitive runners seem interested. McDougall's hero, Caballo Blanco, nearly gets into a fistfight with Barefoot Ted over what Blanco considers to be Ted's ceaseless and suicidal evangelism of barefoot running. 

Born to Run was an interesting and entertaining read, but the book requires suspension of disbelief from the first page to the end. Its writing style, which I've heard many compare to Outside magazine, is full of overstatement, jumped conclusions, and wondrous imagery. The day after I finished the book, I found myself Googling "Tarahumara" and "Caballo Blanco" during lunch at work.

I found this Running Times interview with Caballo Blanco. (The last question is telling.) I learned that, although the race has grown from 25 to 200 runners, the Tarahumara don't win Caballo Blanco's race anymore. I wonder how many Tarahumara compete for the corn and cash prizes for participants. You can read about Blanco's mission on his website.

Despite selling over 125,000 copies in its first year, Born to Run does not seem to have inspired many to take up barefoot running. Running.Competitor.com has been searching for barefooters for some time, without much luck. 

Born to Run accomplished two things. First, it introduced readers to the idea that running shoes might cause injuries. There is certainly some science to back this up, some of which is cited in Born to Run. Second, it has been raising awareness that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to run. For everyone in the running industry, this is good business. Both runners and readers should beware.

Should ebooks Be DRM Protected? HELL YES!

David Pogue of the New York Times asks, "Should eBooks Be Copy Protected?"

The answer is heck yeah!

Pogue comments that "the music companies are still in business." Um, okay, but their revenue has fallen by half and physical music retail has all but disappeared. At least musicians have a lucrative alternative -- people will pay to see them perform live. Who would pay a worthwhile sum to listen to an author read an entire book out loud?

Convenience and price trump quality. While the paper book presents information better, the ebook is cheaper and "good enough", with enough advantages in portability that it will eventually become the dominant form, just like the mp3.

Ebook readers will fall in price and paper will become the premium form of the book. People will only pay for paper if they need paper, e.g. a paper book on bike repair in the garage, a copy of a photo-heavy history book on the coffee table, a copy of a law book to help sketch out a contract on paper, or as a gift. 

The reason books haven't been Napsterized is that it's much more time consuming to scan a book than to rip a CD or DVD. Sure, you can build and operate your own book scanner for under $300, but few people will take the time. The problem is that, just like a CD, once the book is scanned or DRM-cracked once, it's potentially free forever, especially in tightly knit, niche communities.

As paper retail begins its inevitable slide, indies will disappear. Distributors will claw to claim what little shelf space is left at Barnes & Noble. The returns system will remain as long as Barnes & Noble stays in business. Publishers will distribute ebooks and POD paper books direct to consumer.

The trouble is timing. Should publishers shoot for first-mover advantage? Should we treat ebooks as seriously as abook sales warrant?

And pricing... Should we temporarily set extremely low prices to scare off the competition? Should we adopt the $10 price point and then make sure costs are aligned to support this new rate (until Amazon renegotiates)? Is there any profit left in producing quality print books if the market becomes dominated by ebooks?

The future of book publishing = DRM + fair pricing + easy access (i.e. a good online store with many titles). 

Relatedly, the NYTimes explores the economics of ebooks.

Your Two Minutes of Hate, Amazon Edition

Amazon deleted ebook editions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle users' accounts and their Kindle devices and then refunded their money.

Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices

Amazon was right to delete these books from Kindle accounts. (It seems that the irony is the story here!) But this point is really scary: "An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function."

Yet Amazon sold the ebooks anyway because it didn't know any better.

This lapse demonstrates my leading critique of Amazon--that Amazon has no way to vet any of its content and relies instead on unreliable sources. Any user can suggest changes to an Amazon product page. From a product perspective, Amazon is a dumb database (and from a sales perspective, a pretty smart one). Amazon is the Wikipedia of the retail world.

Clearly, Amazon's reliance on the goodwill of its users and vendors is flawed. It's fortunate, then, that Amazon can delete its mistakes. Who knew Bezos had the right and ability to push a button and delete books off a Kindle?

Oh wait--he doesn't have the right. According to the New York Times story cited above, the Kindle terms of service say explicitly that when a user buys an ebook from Amazon, they have bought the right to a permanent copy of the book.

So what if an unreliable vendor sells an illegal copy on Amazon? Apparently, Amazon is willing to incite the wrath of its Kindle customers to defend a copyright. Nervous, future ebook publishers everywhere are relaxing just a little.

The Long Tale: Should Publishers Buy into the Long Tail Theory?

In a mere 10 years, the Internet has shaken media industries to the core. Chris Anderson's long tail theory-that the rise of the searchable Web would unleash an enormous pent-up demand for obscure products-was so compelling that our industry sent his book onto the best-seller lists (wikipedia primer on the long tail theory). But a Harvard Business Review article, "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" by Anita Elberse, began partially debunking Chris Anderson's theory of the long tail last year, replacing it instead with a less optimistic worldview: The Internet is actually entrenching pop culture more deeply, and Anderson's uprising of niche-loving nerds is a myth.

Anderson's theory has inspired smaller publishers that lack blockbuster promotion budgets. The implications of his theory justified the existence of small-to-midsize publishers. If you publish niche content and make it easy to find, readers will come.

To test Anderson's theory, Elberse (an associate professor of business administration) investigated the music and movie markets, two industries that book publishing has watched closely in the post-Napster, BitTorrent era. Analyzing vast amounts of data made available by Rhapsody, Quickflix, and Nielsen VideoScan, she found the following:

• The long tail is composed of a rapidly growing number of products that rarely or never sell. The tail is longer and thinner, not longer and fatter.
• Best-sellers and blockbusters are more important than ever.
• Most consumers choose the most popular products and only occasionally choose obscure products.
• Those consumers who choose obscure products are the heaviest consumers of the category.

Pulling it all together, Elberse's findings appeal to our common sense: Casual readers read best-sellers; serious readers read best-sellers and less popular books. What's more, she reports that both casual and heavy consumers of a category rate obscure content as less enjoyable and popular content as more enjoyable.

The bottom line is that for each book lover who delights in the discovery of obscure, or classic, books, there are millions who have enjoyed best-sellers. It appears that we are social animals and there is no escaping the tyranny of the masses, even on the Internet. In fact, the Internet, contrary to Anderson's theory, is enabling the masses to reign with an ever heavier hand.

Yet some publishers have found ways to exploit both the best-seller and long tail models. At Nolo, located in Berkeley, California, the long tail begins with the printed book. Jackie Thompson, vice president of trade sales, explains that the book is then reformatted for a variety of uses, many of which fit nicely into the long tail.

"Once we have the information for, say, a business book," she says, "we take that same information and post some of it on Nolo.com for our free Nolopedia, which drives search engine optimization and web traffic. Then we submit the book to Amazon Search Inside and Google Print to drive more traffic to Nolo.com. We format the book as an e-book and an audio book and submit those versions for sale and for licensing. Sometimes we create software or online applications to sell online. We've even put a book together knowing it won't break even in the book trade, but that it will generate significantly more revenue in its various parsed formats on Nolo.com."

When asked the difference between investing in the long tail and in a great website, Thompson says, "For Nolo, investing in the long tail is investing in a great consumer website."

Mike Campbell, director of sales and marketing at Graphic Arts Center in Portland, Oregon, is receptive to Elberse's findings. "Books in the long tail are there for a reason," he says. "Instead of trying to sell books that consumers don't like, publishers need to sell more of what's selling well." His advice? "Build on the success of your hot sellers, and don't try to give equal treatment to long tail books or you'll just confuse your customers."

There has been some great irony to Elberse's findings. Chris Anderson has since posed another theory (Wired, July 2008). Mining massive amounts of data for correlations will replace the testing of hypotheses. Elberse did just that, disproving his long tail theory. Now that Anderson's book is safely off the best-seller lists, perhaps his own book sales will also prove him wrong.

Elberse's findings show us a world in which the best-seller is an increasingly important marketing tool. What does this mean for smaller publishers in 2009 and going forward?

For your general list:

• If you don't have one, invest in a low-cost website. There is no tail at all for publishers without web sales or sales through Amazon.
• Lead your niche. Indie publishers often can't compete at the blockbuster game. If you can't win at mass appeal, then be the best at what you do.
• Divert resources from books with limited appeal and focus on creating best-sellers.

For best-sellers:

• Promote best-selling books to the broadest possible market.
• Match the promotion to appeal: Books with mass appeal should get as much promotional support as possible (and vice versa).
• Lead with your best-sellers. Elberse cites the heavily discounted seventh Harry Potter book as an example.

For long-tail books:

• Spend as little as possible on products with little appeal or low sales. (POD, anyone?)
• Promote books with the narrowest appeal to only the heaviest users of that content.
• Make your long tail books more easily found by the heaviest consumer at the lowest cost possible. or example, line-list less popular books in your catalog, but keep them online.
• Leverage the popularity of your best-sellers by cross-promotion. Think like Amazon and use website cross-sells ("You might also be interested in . . .").
• Bundling best-sellers with less popular books ("Buy X, Get Y") can stimulate long tail sales. Revive old best-sellers in this way.

"Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" by Anita Elberse is available for free online viewing at the Harvard Business Review website. Chris Anderson responds to the article on his blog at longtail.com.

Dave Trendler is Marketing and Publicity Manager at VeloPress, an endurance sports and fitness publisher. To see Dave's previous EndSheet contributions, click here.

Why Amazon Is Beating Up Bookstores

The Seattle-based blog "Journey from Yuppie to Triathlete" offers a perfect example of how Amazon is beating bookstores:

"I was hoping to find Going Long by Joe Friel at Barnes and Noble but was disappointed...twice. I ended up purchasing it on Amazon along with The Triathlete's Training Bible also by Joe Friel."

Kindle 2.0 on the way, Amazon dropping rival e-book formats

Amazon has offered yet another indication that it wants to control how books are sold and read; the company announced that it will stop selling e-books in the Microsoft Reader and Adobe formats. Instead, Amazon will only sell e-books in its proprietary Kindle and Mobipocket formats. Fortunately, it seems that many devices are compatible with the Mobipocket format but not Mac and Linux devices.

A day later, the company announced a release date for its second version of the Kindle.

Endsheet Blog Review: Lifehacker.com

On July 25th, Google announced via its blog that the world’s most popular search engine has identified at least 1 trillion unique pages on the web.

That is a lot of websites. And with the explosion of free and easy-to-use web services, how’s a person to know which ones are most useful?

For this purpose, I turn to my favorite blog, Lifehacker.com. Run by a software programmer and a small team of contributing editors, Lifehacker is an award-winning blog devoted to online and offline productivity. Lifehacker reviews fascinatingly named web services—like Hulu, Remember the Milk, Jott, and Sandy—explaining their benefits and providing easy walkthroughs. Lifehacker’s clarity and ease of use has made it one of Technorati’s top-linked blogs on the web.

A sampling of stories on Lifehacker.com:

• Use Facebook as a Marketing Tool
• Repair Your Own Books
• Track web site stats with Google Analytics
• Zoomii Browses Amazon Books Shelf by Shelf
• Top 10 Computer Annoyances and How to Fix them
• Rent Books Netflix-Style with BookSwim
• Five Best Note-Taking Tools (yes, pencil and paper made the list!)
• VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2 Now Available

VM-what? Okay, so Lifehacker isn’t for everyone. It is for people who like finding clever ways to do things better, faster, or cheaper. It’s especially for those who get stoked about hacking their wireless router’s firmware with a Linux-based OS to boost their sign—oops! Sorry.

Lifehacker has made my life better, or at least more productive. The blog keeps me up to date on the newest and most useful web services, like Syncplicity, a simple way to my work files updated on my home computer—no emailing, DVD-Rs, thumb drives, or external hard drives required. Or like Jott, which will email me a text transcript of the voicemail I leave when I call from a cellphone. With 1 trillion pages to choose from and web services becoming increasingly powerful, Lifehacker’s insight is invaluable.

As a product of Web 2.0, Lifehacker is free and requires no registration. Just point your favorite browser to Lifehacker.com and enjoy a more productive life! Technophiles will appreciate Lifehacker's many RSS feed options: all stories or top stories, full text with ads or just ledes sans ads. Luddites, fear not. The wisdom of Lifehacker is also available in print. Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker, just published a book of life hacks called Upgrade Your Life (Wiley, 2008), available in bookstores and, naturally, online.

This article was originally published in the fall 2008 issue of The Endsheet, the newsletter of the Publishers Association of the West.

Google Phone May Morph Into Kindle-Killer

As Medialoper hints in its analysis of the recent Google Book Search agreement with publishers and authors, Google's Android mobile phone OS might become a Kindle-killer.

Android is more than a phone operating system, it's an OS for mobile devices. With Google soon to have exclusive access to its long tail of over 7 million scanned books, Google will have a strong incentive to monetize that content. The book search agreement includes several ways for Google to profit:

1. academia will pay for unlimited access to all the content in all of the scanned books
2. consumers can pay to see or print an entire book
3. once Google integrates the book search program more fully into its current web search program, Google will apply its usual search advertising model

Google won't create a Kindle-like device; the company has stated that it's into software and not hardware. For example, Google's approach to locking up the mobile search business has been to write software that runs mobile phones. Google is likely to apply this approach to ebooks. It will extend Android's capability to include presenting ebooks in a readable fashion. Since these mobile devices already have 3G broadband access baked in, Android phones will become small, backlit versions of the Kindle. Google, yet again, enables the creation of products that generate demand for its services.

Since Android phones will continue to add usefulness beyond mere mobile voice calls (including zero-charge access to the entire web and all its blogs and newspapers), who will want to pay $300 something to own a separate device that charges for some of that functionality? Only those who care about readability. The Kindle is remarkably readable. Still, what's to stop a mobile device manufacturer from creating a larger format, eye-friendly device that will compete more directly with the Kindle?

Amazon's 190K books won't compare to Google's 7 million and counting. Google may not yet have Amazon's access to best-sellers or Amazon's considerable leverage over print-focused publishers, yet publishers maintain their ability to choose which books to include in both Google's and Amazon's programs.

The Google Book Search agreement offers a way for publishers and authors to get paid to cooperate with Google. With this little sticking point resolved, have no doubt that Google will continue to tear down barriers to information, including Amazon's closed-loop Kindle program.

I got to play with a Kindle

I was sitting on the plane last weekend when the late 30-something woman to my left opened her purse, took out a Moleskine notebook, and opened it. I instantly pegged her as an English nerd. I didn't realize how right I'd be; it wasn't a Moleskine, it was a Kindle.

I blurted, "So howww do you like it!?".

"I love it!", she said. "Would you like to check it out?"

"Yes, yes I would."

She gave me the walkthrough, beginning with her list of books, one of which was some sex counseling thing -- little awkward.

After a minute of Kindle network connection troubles, she let me buy Friday's New York Times, which took seconds to download. All the while, she gave me Amazon's party line on battery life, usability, etc. I never thought to ask her if she worked for Amazon, though I did confess to working for a publisher.

I flipped through some pages, noting the reassuring heft of this machine. The screen clarity really is amazon, er, amazing. I found the refresh rate to be a little slow. The screen going black as it refreshes unsuspended my disbelief, and I can see this being a problem for the ebook reading experience. Perhaps one gets used to it as we're all used to flipping pages.

I held the Kindle with both hands, one on either side. I asked her if she accidentally flipped pages.

She admitted to such frequent unintentional page turns that she used the Kindle's "placemark" feature about every five pages just to avoid...something. I'm not sure what, though. Maybe you can fast-forward a Kindle? Either way, it sounds as if the page turn bars could use more than a little fine tuning.

The scroll bar, just right of the right thumb in this photo, needs work as well. The scroll bar is the main navigation device when the Kindle is not in a book. In other words, you choose what book to read, what chapter to open, what newspaper to purchase, etc. using the scroll bar, which you thumb up or down. To make a selection, you press down onto the scroll bar. Many times during my 15 minutes with this Kindle, I accidentally scrolled when I meant to select.

An exacerbating flaw is the slow processor speed. Pages "turn" with reasonable speed, but to do anything other than turn a page -- to navigate between books or to browse the Amazon Kindle store -- the page takes more time to load. So with every click of the scroll bar, I had to wait to see if I'd clicked or scrolled. If I'd accidentally scrolled-then-clicked, I had to navigate back to where I was and try again. The speed is definitely not as quick as, say, browsing the web on a computer. I found it a little tedious.

So hopefully Amazon will eliminate these flaws in the Kindle 2, which seems to be imminent.

John Muir Was Awesome

After chuckling through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, shivering through Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, meandering through Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, and thirsting for more of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, I've decided to build a library of great outdoor books. 

Most recently placed into the stacks is The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures, selected and introduced by Lee Stetson, illustrated by Fiona King, published by the Yosemite Association, ISBN: 0-939666-75-8. 

Lee Stetson is an actor who has dedicated his career to the study and reenactment of Muir's life. I imagine he has a bushy beard, and I imagine he's a strange fellow, in no small part due to the fact that he's likely spent many of his evenings in front of Yosemite campfires acting like a crazy Scot who talks to wildflowers. (To an Alaskan wildflower: "Ah! My blue-eyed darlin', little did I think to see you here. How did you stray away from Shasta?")

John Muir's insanity is what made him so effective. Muir was a fearless man, a man so honed into competence by his life experience that there was no situation in which he found himself powerless. Muir did not hesitate to commit insane acts because, for him, they were perfectly rational. A young man who wished to climb a mountain with Muir was told, "These foolish adventures are well enough for Mr. Muir, but you have a work to do, you have a family...and you have no right to risk your life on treacherous peaks and precipices.". Muir would argue, like Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, that the risk-taking lifestyle of the naturalist is far saner than that of "civilized society". 

Muir's tolerance of danger stemmed from his sense of capability, which he forged through years of challenges and misadventures beginning in childhood. Muir grew up in Scotland in an austere farming family. For excitement, the young Muir and his friends would turn to what they called "good scootchers"; games of brinksmanship that would make Johnny Knoxville grin. Muir writes of one scootcher that involved trying to nearly--but not quite--fall off the roof of a two-story farmhouse. When Muir's family moved from Scotland to Wisconsin as homesteaders, Muir's father asked the 19-year old to dig a 90-foot deep well with a shovel, pickax, hammer, and chisel. Muir spent an entire summer moving earth and chiseling through bedrock until he was nearly suffocated by carbon dioxide gas that filled the bottom of the well. Muir later taught himself to swim by rowing into the middle of a lake and jumping in. Danger was the young Muir's calling.

So when he decides to climb the sheer rock face behind Yosemite Falls, we're unsurprised that, upon reaching a pitch "dangerously smooth and steep", Muir "concludes not to venture further, but does nonetheless". When Muir becomes stranded in a blizzard atop Mt. Shasta (without a jacket), he lays flat on some geothermal vents, sometimes holding his breath to avoid billowing clouds of acidic vapors, until the skin on his back scalds and blisters and a set of barometric instruments freezes to his face. We're awed, but not surprised, when Muir hikes off the mountain alive, though badly frostbitten. 

The Wild Muir presents 22 riveting adventures in beautiful succession, building to the climax in which it offers two versions of Muir's cliffside rescue of a young pastor in Alaska; one from Muir himself and one from the pastor. The pastor slides down a gravelly slope and barely catches himself to prevent a 1,000 drop off a cliff and onto a glacier. He dislocates both arms. Muir recounts the rescue plainly, pulling the man off the cliff, the difficulty of re-setting the man's arms in their sockets, a long trek back to camp. The pastor's account is not so plain and it is from him we learn that Muir hoisted the man off the cliff by clenching his collar in his teeth. 

Unlike many of today's outdoor heroes, Muir reserved his glorious description for his surroundings instead of for himself. Muir is often credited as the father of Yosemite and the American National Park System, but Muir is underappreciated. Muir's towering ability and selfless love of nature was the spearhead that killed the old European view of nature as enemy, igniting a passion in the American West for nature as playground, as source of renewal.

A parting image of Muir the botanist from the young pastor: "With all his boyish enthusiasm, Muir was a most painstaking student; and any unsolved question lay upon his mind like a personal grievance until it was settled to his full understanding. One plant after another, with its sand-covered roots, went into his pockets, his handkerchief and the "full" of his shirt until he was bulbing and sprouting all over, and could carry no more... Then he began to requisition my receptacles. I stood it while he stuffed my pockets, but rebelled when he tried to poke the prickly, scratchy things inside my shirt. I had not yet attained that sublime indifference to physical comfort, that Nirvana of passivity, that Muir had found."