Contents Magazine. Though it began last month, I have recently been enjoying the first issue of Contents Magazine. If you work on the web and have an interest in well-crafted writing it’s worth checking out. The Business of Content is particularly good.
Tag: publishing
The infovegan
Information consumption also has a consumption chain, just like food does. Most news, for instance, comes from a set of facts on the ground, that get processed, and processed and processed again before it ends up on your television set boiled down into chunks for you to consume. But it also gets filled with additives— expert opinion, analysis, visualizations, you name it— before it gets to you. If this was food, a vegan would want none of it. They’d head straight to the data, to the source, to the facts, and try and get as much of that additive business out of their way.
Clay Johnson – Why Infovegan. via Daniel.
The extraordinary revolution of media choice
The idea that someone can program our consumption is becoming obsolete, and fast. The front page of the paper disappears in a digital world, where there is no front page–merely the page I got to by clicking on a link from a friend.
Seth Godin – The extraordinary revolution of media choice.
The Readable Future
So sad and so true:
No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.
Brent Simmons – The Readable Future.
Pub Rules. In a follow-up of sorts to the quote I posted yesterday Brent Simmons writes about what he would do if in charge of a publication. I think it will only be a matter of time before we see someone try this with a large-scale site. I bet that when they do they’ll supplant whatever the main source is for that community. The trick will be sticking to these principles as the site grows and not becoming a bloated mess of “business opportunities.”
Improve software by using it
Daniel recently moved his site to WordPress.com and had this to say in the comments of his announcement post:
I want WP.com to be good enough that I can sincerely recommend it to my friends and family, but in some cases WP.org has better features, flexibility, etc. There’s still work to be done; actually using our software is the best way to discover what needs to be done.
This is why every developer of a publishing tool must be a consistent and active user of the software. The best way to learn how to improve something is by using it regularly.
My site will be moving back over there hopefully next week. I just need to carve out an hour or two to customize a theme a bit and get all the content moved over properly.
The Future of the Book
If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?
The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.
Sam Harris – The Future of the Book.
The shape of our future book
The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don’t directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data.
Craig Mod – The shape of our future book.
WordCamp St. Louis: WordPress for Writers and More
Shawntelle Madison gave a talk at WordCamp St. Louis titled “WordPress for Writers, Publishers, and other Content Providers.” Shawntelle is an urban fantasy writer with a new book coming out. She also works with design firms in St. Louis and has been working with WordPress for over 5 years.
With her book coming out Shawntelle has seen both sides of the coin with what publishers require from author websites.
WP in the publishing community
It’s a lot more prevalent than you first think. Shawntelle polled 47 authors from various genres and 85% were using WordPress. The user-friendly Dashboard, ease of theme changes, and flexibility with widgets and plugins were favorites.
They also like it because it’s far easier than coding a site from scratch. When your job is writing content you don’t want to be spending all the time coding and designing your site.
Branding
Shawntelle said that “branding is very important for authors.” The design is what readers first see and it should really fit with the genre of your writing.
A great example is Scott Westerfeld who has a site which fits his steampunk style writing quite well.
What’s common
Authors expect a few key features for almost every site. They like having things like:
- Newsletter integration
- The ability to add a backlist of books
- Integration with social media
- Other basics like ad management, contact forms, and a well-designed blog
Most authors Shawntelle works with already have had some experience with WordPress. They don’t want a complex front-end layout and prefer to keep things simple.
Determining who is responsible for site maintenance is key to any project you work with an author on. Many won’t keep the site updated so figuring out who will be responsible for that going forward is crucial.
Shawntelle also mentioned some of her favorite and most useful plugins from projects with authors.
- Contact Form 7
- Secure Form Mailer
- Pick Giveaway Winner
- Quote This
- Advanced Spoiler
- WP Quick Deploy
- Sitemap Generator
Publishers
Out of the 6 big publishers 2 are running WordPress in their work.1 Random House and Hachette use WordPress to power parts of their imprint on the web.
For example, Random House uses WordPress to power their At Random site. There’s tons of reader guides, audio and video, as well as links to the books in the Random House catalog.
Data from the existing Random House catalog was used to power things like the New Releases slider and more on the site. They also link up to services like Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing.
- The big 6 are Macmillan, Random House, Penguin, Simon and Schuster, Hachette Books, and HarperCollins.
Marginalia on Post-Artifact Books and Publishing
Author’s note: A quote or a few sentences about a piece make up many of my posts here. This time I’m trying something new. Consider it an experiment in turning my blog into a type of digital marginalia. I’d love to hear what you think about it.
A rainy Sunday in Portland seemed like a good time to sit down and read Craig Mod’s essay Post-Artifact Books and Publishing. In a word it’s brilliance. Craig nails it. It’s such a thought-provoking piece that I wanted to make some notes. All quotes come from the essay unless otherwise noted.1
Natively digital
Take a set of encyclopedias and ask, “How do I make this digital?” You get a Microsoft Encarta CD. Take the philosophy of encyclopedia-making and ask, “How does digital change our engagement with this?” You get Wikipedia.
Great observation. Like much of the essay the driving point is that digital becomes powerful when it is not shoehorned into analog conceptions of artifacts. A book is a book (or a newspaper a newspaper) because that was what the technology used to best allow for. With new technology we will redefine our artifacts of information.
This quote also made me think of what we call “online learning” today. For the most part I think we’ve taken our idea of instruction in college and high school and placed that into online tools. What we’re missing is the form of instruction that stems from asking, “How does digital change what we can do with information, instruction, and learning?”
Publishing for all
We cannot know how much magnificent culture went unpublished by the white men in tweed jackets who ran publishing for the past century but just because they did publish some great books doesn’t mean they didn’t ignore a great many more … So we’re restoring the, we think, the natural balance of things the ecosystem of writing and reading.
That bit’s from Richard Nash of Red Lemonade. The more voices we have the better.
Reminds me of something Fred Wilson has written about multiple times: everyone deserves a printing press. He writes that:
If I look back at my core investment thesis over the past five years, it is this single idea, that everyone has a voice on the Internet, that is central to it.
The more pieces of information we can have publicly available in the world the better.
Shared experience
But — and here’s the real magic — it’s a shared telepathy. A telepathy from one to many, and in that, the many have experiential overlap. Printed matter binds this experience to pulp. With digital, there is the promise of networking that shared experience.
That’s a really cool point. It brings to mind the video IDEO produced on the future of the book. When a text can connect us to others in a shared experience that leads to really powerful possibilities.
This is similar to something Whitman tried to do with it’s Freshman year CORE class. The goal was to create a shared background of foundation texts that could serve as a common frame of reference for the 4 year experience. A problem in that, and in other experiential overlaps that are dependent upon printed texts, is that it requires a common place and time. Digital blows that wide open. Our networking allows us to share that telepathy in real-time or asynchronously from wherever we are.
- A note on this: writing up notes on something as complex as this essay has made me once again wish that emphasis was by default on the web. Since it’s not command + F is your friend to find these quotes.