AV Club: Bookopolis

You cannot love books, and not love this:


This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Breakthrough at Amazon!

Well, here is one way to get yourself noticed...

Amazon and Penguin have announced that they will sponsor a second Breakthrough Novel Award.

From Publisher's Weekly:

Amazon and Penguin will sponsor a second annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The competition will launch on February 2, 2009. Between then and February 8, writers with an unpublished English-language novel manuscript can submit their work at www.amazon.com/abna. As they did last year, PW reviewers will participate in the review process. Last year’s competition awarded Bill Loehfelm with the grand prize, from a pool of 5,000 entrants. Putnam published Loehfelm’s novel, Fresh Kills, in August 2008.

The winner of the contest will be announced on May 22, 2009, and will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $25,000 advance.

So get your manyscript polished up and send it in!

Tiny Books of Mammoth Poetry

Crowvoice clued me in on this - Propaganda press and their mini-chap tiny books of poetry. This is awesome. Man I love indie publishing!

They have just released their latest issue, Ice Age by David S. Pointer. Frikkin 3 dollars and 50 cents, and that includes shipping!

And what is the Pocket Protector mini-chap series, you ask? Well, it is a series of teeny tiny poetry books, so small they can fit in any pocket, available for a super great price. Poets are chosen by invitation only, and a new book featuring a new poet comes out once a month.

Harpers True Definitions

Need to bone up on your literary terms? These may not help you impress your agent... but they make her laugh!

Harper's posts an exerpt from Chris Offutt's “The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms”

Faves:

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

short story: An essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer’s family.

novel-in-stories: A term invented solely to hoodwink the novel-reading public into inadvertently purchasing a collection of short fiction.

Use your history to market your book

AuthorsBookshop member (and author of 5(!) books,) Horace Mungin, just got a really nice write up in the Transport Workers Union newsletter. His book, Subway: After the Irish is an accounting of his years working on the New York City subway.

I think this is a great example of how you can leverage your own history, along with the topic of your book, to get great press for your book.  Mr. Mungin's history as a subway worker, his membership in the union and the topic of his book all seem to have made him a perfect candidate for attention from the union.  What makes this exposure even more exciting is that his book, about transit work, is going out to untold numbers of... transit workers!  You can't beat demographic targetting like that.

The cool think is, the article goes into some detail about Mr. Mungin's other great books, which are not transit related.   So his backgrown in the TWU could bring the attention of new readers to all of his books, not just the one that got him the attention in the first place.

You may not be a subway worker (ok, your probably not,) but you should always look at your own personal hsitory, as well as the topic of your book, to help you find unusual marketing opportunities.

Here's a chunk of the article, which you can read in full here (pdf):

Mungin says the book took only eight months of writing, but 20 years of taking notes as he searched for the right format to tell the story of his years on the subway. Although the book deals with what he views as an historical transition from a largely Irish American work force to an African American one, it also captures the daily lives of transit workers on and off the job.

I only wish the article included AuthorsBookshop.com as a place to buy the book.  Oh well, I will do it for them here:

Morning Jog: Money where my mouth is.

As I posted earlier, I spent last weekend at a music festival during Womens Week in Provincetown Mass.

Which means, I spent the weekend watching indie musicians watching each other, listening to each other, and buying each other's albums! In other words, supporting the hell out of each other.

It was inspiring and frustrating at the same time. Why aren't there more venues for indie authors to share their work with each other? Why don't we support each other like that?

I've been whining about it long enough. Starting in January, AuthorsBookshop is going to start hosting book circles for authors, and book readings in warm, comfy places.

Whos with me?

AV Club: Crafternoons!

This is an unusual but brilliant video pitch for a book. Much different from the usual Ken-Burnsy photo montages of book covers and pastoral landscapes that we see in so many book trailers. And yet, it's pretty funny. It will make you young.

Book Porn: Books

Books, originally uploaded by svenwerk.

Book Porn: Exciting pictures of books. If you have book porn, send it my way. If it's truly exciting I would love to post it!

Hebbo!

Clearly, this has little nothing to do with indie publishing, but it is so good I couldn't let it pass without sharing:


Say Hebbo! from Torvakian on Vimeo.

More, much more one the sacred faith of Tarvu here. It's so easy to join!

PW likes indie book at Frankfurt

Publishers Weekly calls a self-published book, "one of the interesting books" at the Frankfurt Book Festival.

PW says of the book,The Lost Epistle of Jesus,

Could Epistle be the next Lace Reader or, more likely, something along the lines of the Hachette-acquired and originally self-published Christian bestseller The Shack? Gottlieb certainly knows the appeal to publishers (and the media) of the self-published author; the platform, as he said, can be "a great way to start a writer."

It's nice to see a self-published book getting attention, and it's nice to hear that the likes of Robert Gottlieb "know the appeal to publishers (and the media) of the self-published author."

Back

I'm back from vacation and a two-day retreat for my day-job. Shwew. I'ts been a long, wonderful week. I thought I would be able to keep up with the blog while I was out but, alas, life was moving too fast.

But I am back, and looking forward to more IndieBookMan fun!

Pic is of Provincetown. I took it from about 2/3 of the way down the breakwater. Amazing place.

Sub vs. Self-Pub

Moira Allen and Writing World has a little article laying out the differences between subsidy publishing and self-publishing that is worth a read - even if you are already pretty solid in the difference.

Just one of her considerations:

2. Will I receive royalties or all sales proceeds? If the answer is "royalties," you're dealing with a subsidy house. Subsidy publishers pay authors a standard royalty of around 10-15% (which may be based on the retail price of the book or upon a discounted price). When you self-publish, you receive all sales proceeds (although this does not necessarily translate into profit).

Oh yeah,

I almost forgot... I'm probably supposed to mention that some French guy won some kind of prize for writing some kind of book or something.

I guess that's a big deal and stuff.

Morning Jog: On the Road

sahffi and I are on the road this weekend.  We are traveling up to Provincetown, Ma for the Women's Week Music Festival. 

So, it got me thinking that while I am in a part of the country I have never been... are there any AuthorsBookshop authors in the area. I took a quick look and there are. Actually, there are a few in MA, and one author directly across the water from Provincetown.

If I had been thinking about it, I would have sent out a few emails letting people know I would be in the area. Might have been cool to have met up.

And this lead me to think a little more about starting to try to connect people regionally. I want to start in Baltimore, but why not plan a day trip to another region to pull a few authors together at a local coffee shop for a meet-up... or even a reading.

I mean, why not?

Article:Two Ways to Market Yourself Without Spending a Dime

As highlighted in my 10 (alomost) Free Things article yesterday, you can submit your articles to online article databases. You can also publish articles in your own online publications. To demonstrate, here is an (arguably) helpful article with a couple simple things that you can do when marketing your book. Behold:

Two Ways to Market Yourself Without Spending a Dime
By: Jay Conners

Unfortunately not all of us have a budget to fit what we believe to be our marketing needs. No need to get down, here are a few very simple things you can do that have stood the test of time, and are proven to attract more business.

For starters, smile often if not always. I'm sure you are familiar with the phrase "smile it's contagious." Well it is.

Think about it, would you want to speak with, or do business with someone who frowned all the time. It just is not attractive and it turns people in the other direction.

Smiling says a lot about your personality and attracts people to you. It tells a potential customer that you are friendly, upbeat, and most of all it tells them that you enjoy what you do.

When someone approaches you about your products and services, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. By smiling, you will have easily accomplished this.

The second tip for marketing yourself and your products is having a good posture, or portraying an over all positive body language.

Again, body language will speak volumes to your customer.

Imagine approaching someone who looks as though they have just lost their best friend. Shoulders hunched over, no eye contact, no smile, with a whoa is me attitude.

Nobody wants to approach this kind of sales person. This type of body language sends a message to your potential customer that you are seriously lacking in confidence. Or, that you just flat out do not like your job, or the company you work for.

If a potential customer believes that you don't care for your current job or for the company that you are working for, than they will most likely believe that you will not care about them and their needs.

Customers want to approach upbeat, confident people. They want to know that they will be receiving the best possible products and services you have to offer that will match their needs. A presentable, positive, and confident image will portray these messages to your customer.

So smile, stand up straight, make eye contact, and shake hands with your customer.

Once again, these two tips have proven over time to attract and obtain customers. It is easy and it is free, so begin today, and good luck.

Author Bio
Jay Conners has more than fifteen years of experience in the banking and Mortgage Industry, He is the owner of www.jconners.com, a mortgage resource site.
Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com - Free Website Content

Morning Jog: Paths to publishing

Good morning! Im going to try to start hitting an early morning post each weekday. These will be my "morning jog." I prefer this to actually going actually outside and actually running. May it give you a reason to stop by here as you settle into work in the morning.

I met someone last night who knows someone who is apparently working on a website to help unpublished authors get published. That's not what I wanted to talk about this morning. But it did get me to thinking about all of the ways that authors seem to get themselves published these days. I wanted to list all of the
"paths to publishing" that I can think of. Please feel free to suggest any more.

Paths to publishing:

Traditional publishing via a major publishing house
Traditional publishing via a small publishing house
Traditional publishing via an indie publishing house
"True" self-publishing
Subsidy publishing
Vanity publishing
Saddle-stiched at Kinkos (what's a better name for this?)
eBook

Feel free to suggest more, or discuss these. Perhaps there are sub-categories that lie within some of these?