kindle

On the pricing of ebooks

November 6, 2012 By Tim

I just had this experience. Someone recommended a book. Sounded interesting, might get, wondering about print or ebook format. Grabbed the Kindle sample to test it out, liked what I read. Kindle book price is £11.15. Process stops for further internal debate.

By the way, the book in question is Winning the Story Wars by Jonah Sachs. It looks good and relevant enough to my interests that I will end up getting it, and if I do I’ll post a review. That price is about the same as I can get the hardback for if I look at Amazon’s marketplace sellers. Regardless of comparisons, it’s too high as an absolute number.

You must price ebooks lower than the print version, by a margin that’s notable in the mind of the customer. Yes, they offer some benefits that print books don’t, but most consumers won’t be thinking about those.

Customers know they’re not getting a physical thing, and they know that the physical thing has production costs. So in their heads there’s a sort of natural justice that says the ebook costs you less so it should cost them less too.
You own a print book, and can lend, give or re-sell it. A lot of people also think it’s a preferable reading experience, though that’s eroding. Folks are gradually waking up to the fact that you only rent ebooks. You can’t share them freely, and if Amazon or whoever wants to take them away from you it can. (This is going to be an interesting field to watch in the next couple of years.) With print you’re paying for an object; with ebooks you’re paying for an experience.
Marketing of ebooks is all about speed and convenience. It’s about being able to find something that interests you, check out a bit more about it, click, payment happens behind the scenes, content appears instantly in your hand. Maybe there are people who are wealthy enough that the £10.00 barrier doesn’t trigger extra caution, but I think for most people it will. Don’t put barriers in the way of people saying yes.

Finally, of course this is all context-related. I personally sell PDF books priced at $10+ in the roleplaying game market. So maybe I’m just talking about where the expectations are set at Amazon and similar stores, and you need to think about the psychology of each sales channel’s users.

Word Fu

October 16, 2012 By Tim

I realised last night that I have something in common with my qigong teacher. Qigong is a Chinese system of movement to improve health. You can use a mental shorthand of “a bit like tai chi” if that helps (though of course there are reasons why it’s inaccurate, like tai chi being a martial art and qigong not).

My teacher has been doing martial arts since he was a kid. He’s said on a couple of occasions that he doesn’t know what it’s like to start an exercise-type thing for the first time in later life (mid to late thirties in my case): our journeys are different from his.

I’ve been doing things with words all my life. I’m used to getting them technically correct and marshalling them into newsletters, reports, books, etc. I fundamentally don’t, and can’t, understand what it’s like for someone who hasn’t developed those skills much. Of course, I can still help with what they’re trying to do, just as my teacher can, and enable them to get better results.

What sparked this line of thought? Bad books. I’ve seen a few interesting-looking novels on the Kindle store, grabbed the previews and found that the author has lots of great ideas but does not have the craft of writing. They use words inappropriately; there are typos, repetition, phrases that don’t ring true. Dialogue seems a particular difficulty. Instead of a smooth delivery that lets the writing fade into the background so you can get lost in the story, you’re stuck in a conflict between a continual jarring effect and the desire to find out what happens next. For me that tends to lead to abandoning the book, because of the mismatch between my standards and what the author has done.

That led me to think about how much this matters in the bigger picture. Are those “bad books” actually brave books or foolish books? The line between constructive and destructive criticism is a fine one.

Isn’t it a good thing that the internet has opened up new, low-friction ways for people to get their messages out there? Yes it is. One must also recognise that rather a lot of people don’t give a hoot about finely-honed writing, if Amazon reviews and indications around the net are to be believed. That’s probably because they don’t have a focus on writing skills themselves, so a lot of missteps pass them by without troubling them. They just want the stirring yarn. If lots of readers are happy, to what extent should we criticise a work for falling short of a formal standard? Maybe the internet, with all its easy, rapid communications, is pulling us away from standardised English toward a multitude of individual dialects – as I believe it was in centuries past. I suspect this will become a big topic of debate as the ebook phenomenon matures.

This is a point of learning and exploration for my own “teaching”. It’s the balance between making the best work possible and helping actual real people to do what they want and need. Much like my qigong teacher has to correct one thing at a time rather than trying to get the students to do what he can.

I think that if you’re going to do the thing that should involve a commitment to do it well. There has to be a first release, and if you go on to do more you’ll probably look back on it and see its flaws because your skills have developed. But there has to be a dividing line between “not ready for the limelight” and “good enough, let’s go”. Publishing is so easy now, but I don’t think that lets people off the hook of putting the work in (or getting the help) and developing the craft to make a genuinely good product. That’s not just a work ethic. It’s practical, helping you to get customers, satisfy them, and keep them coming back, rather than losing them as those ebooks lost me.

What do you think? What lines would you draw?

The Radio-Controlled Message Bottle

September 5, 2012 By Tim

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I was working on an ebook. I had to hold back on promotion while a formatting glitch was fixed, but now I’m happy to announce that The Radio-Controlled Message Bottle is available from major ebook stores!

This is the written-up version of my reflections over the last few years on writing to get a message across; how difficult that can be; and guidance on how to approach it and where not to go wrong. Some of it covers the same topics as blog posts here. People who have to write stuff for their work – pretty much everybody! – and would like to get better at it should find it particularly useful.

You can get it through Amazon Kindle store, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, and eBookPie, with more outlets to follow, recommended price $2.99. A print version is coming soon. There is a Google+ page for the book.

I’ve you’ve liked any of the stuff you’ve read here, this is an opportunity to get more of it on the reading device of your choice!

Back cover blurb from the print edition:

The information age seems to demand ever more writing in our work and personal lives: emails, letters, reports, essays, websites, blogs, tweets, brochures, tipsheets…

But for most of us, writing to communicate isn’t our main skill. Sometimes it can be like putting your message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea, hoping your audience will see it, understand it, value it and act on it.

In a quick read with a light and humorous style, this book helps you build up the skills and mindset for clear, effective communications that make you look like you know and care what you’re doing.

It covers guiding principles; writing style and process; writing persuasively; layout and design for documents and websites; and a selection of common grammar and word use mistakes to avoid.

Ebook mistakes to avoid

August 30, 2012 By Tim

I’ve been looking at quite a few ebooks on my Kindle recently. Some novels, some non-fiction; some by large publishers, some by small self-publishers. I’ve also made an ebook myself – more on that soon – which has given me a more informed perspective.

In terms of formatting, the larger publishers tend to be solid but sometimes slightly clunky. They’ve got staff who have come up with processes and templates that work. The stuff by small self-publishers is highly variable. The quality of writing is highly variable too, as they don’t have editing automatically built in to the process.

I’ve found that if I’m thinking of getting an ebook by an author I don’t already know and trust, the Kindle store (and iBooks) feature of downloading the first bit as a free sample is really valuable. Though that’s left me in limbo a few times, for instance with novels where I like the ideas they’re developing but the writing isn’t smooth enough – do I read the rest or would it be too annoying?

Here are some tips based on what I’ve seen recently.

Adventures in ebooks

August 13, 2012 By Tim

I’ve been a bit quiet because I’ve been channelling my head resources to creation of an ebook. I don’t mean in the sense of throwing a document out to PDF: I mean a reflowable text publication like you get on Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, etc.

That’s a new medium for me. Of course, being me, I wanted to turn the thing from Word to ebook myself rather than pay someone to do it. Partly to learn the process (which should then be relatively simple to repeat for other books) and partly to have control over the appearance of the finished product. Like any new technical process it’s involved a lot of trial and error – poke the box, puzzle, refine, repeat. My trusty Kindle has been my lab partner, uncomplainingly accepting one version after another. Getting it looking good on there is the first landmark; then checking on other platforms. The cheapo Android tablet has been handy too, letting me try several ebook reader apps.

If you don’t know, there are two main formats for ebook files. EPUB is the one almost everybody uses, but Amazon uses MOBI (and other dialects of it). They’re both basically a set of files like you’d use to make a web page, wrapped up in a zip file. Part of my process has been finding a software path that lets me produce good output without delving into the HTML (I could probably do it but I don’t want the hassle).

This is one of those things where simplicity makes it complicated. You don’t have a lot of control over formatting, certainly on the basic Kindle model. The device and the user define text size and font. All you can do is set a structure and relative things like paragraph spacing, heading size, indents, etc. If you’re used to print layout you have to forget a lot of it.

It’s also clear that you can’t rely on how it will be displayed. Different reader apps can render even a simple ebook in quite different ways. Even different models of Kindle apparently do so. Indents, paragraph spacing… Some reader software puts hyphenated word breaks in left-aligned text, which presses my buttons like I can’t tell you. (More so because the book has a section specifically about how bad these are!) You have no control over what device and software any reader will use. The simplicity is your buffer against that: artful throttling back to get something that works OK as widely as possible.

Experience of using styles has been crucial. Because I’m used to book layout (of the non-fancy but effective kind) I knew what I wanted and could go looking for ways to do it. I’d say that most people wouldn’t be able to produce an ebook that looks good without help. And indeed, the Kindle store shows plenty of examples of people who’ve squeaked by on enthusiasm alone. (Cover design is another aspect. Someone pointed me to the Kindle ebooks of the works of Catherine Cookson. The thumbnails are… to be learned from.)

Oh, you know that advice about writing for the web that says you should break your paragraphs up to keep them short? I found it goes double for ebooks. It doesn’t take much to turn a Kindle screen into a wall of text, making it harder for the reader to keep track of where they are and sapping their will to go on.

Anyway, my book is just about finished now. You can be sure I’ll plug it here when it’s available. It’s a short introduction to writing to communicate. The next adventure will be in marketing and sales levels.

Review: Kindle Keyboard

April 28, 2012 By Tim

This is a slightly edited version of a post I published elsewhere in October 2011.

Once in a while I’ll talk about gadgets here, and I recently acquired a Kindle, to take on a few days’ holiday rather than a brace of paperbacks.

Two days later Amazon announced the new Kindle models. Thanks guys. The model I got is being kept on, in the UK at least, as the ‘Kindle keyboard wifi’ (I didn’t pay the extra for 3G), alongside the new, cheaper, keyboardless model. I gather the screen’s the same in the new one, perhaps slightly improved, page turns are a bit faster but storage capacity and battery life are less. So if you want a similar experience for cheaper it might be worth a look.

The Kindle is probably the leading dedicated e-book reader at the moment. It’s Amazon’s best-selling product [now outstripped by the Kindle Fire colour tablet in the USA], and a key part of the company’s strategy, enabling book sales in e-book format, which has now outstripped sales of physical books.

So, what’s it like for convenience and readability?