Digital Publishing
Writing for the Web
There’s more to writing for the web than copying and pasting words into a content management system. While the inverted pyramid used in journalism is important, other writing customs are turned on their head
Remember everything you know about writing forget everything at the same time is the best advice I can give to freelancers hoping to break into the web content writing market.
Your sentences and paragraphs have to be short, your words have to be simple, your brain has to rewire itself.
Writing style
Pride yourself on a massive vocabulary? It doesn’t matter. Words like verbose are too difficult to use if you want the content to be accessible. (Accessibility and usability are two big words that you’ll get familiar with along the way.)
Think you’re really clever at word play? That doesn’t matter either.
Familiar with catchy headlines and sub heads/cross captions? They’re also gone. On the internet things have to make sense – straight away.
What Does the Kindle Owners' Lending Library Mean for Authors?
Kindle owners with Amazon Prime membership can now borrow thousands of eBooks for free with no return dates as part of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. The library includes more than 100 current and former New York Times bestsellers, an array of popular titles and categories, as well as fiction and non-fiction eBooks. Books can be borrowed and read on all Kindle E Ink devices and Kindle Fire, and users can 'check out' books as frequently as a book a month.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO says "Prime Members now have exclusive access to a huge library of books to read on any Kindle device at no additional cost and with no due dates."
So what does the Kindle Owners Lending Library mean for authors?
Read more: What Does the Kindle Owners' Lending Library Mean for Authors?
The New Value Web: The Impact of Digital Distribution
As digital distribution begins to be felt along the trade publishing value chain, what will emerge is not a NEW VALUE CHAIN as much as a NEW VALUE WEB, an environment that generates value in the industry, not in one way, but in many ways. What’s more, I believe that this state will persist because no particular method will emerge as the single ‘way’ of trade publishing (if that term even retains relevance), at least not for some time to come.
Everyone (at this stage) thinks that the book trade publishing value chain as we know it, is endangered. They’ve even created a word to describe it, disintermediation. And Everyone is right.
What I think they tend to ignore is the way in which the value chain is endangered. It’s not a simple change that we are experiencing, it’s far more dramatic and complex than that.
Until recently, the trade publishing value chain looked something like this:
Author > Agent > Publisher > Distributor/Wholesaler > Retailer > Reader
Some people fear that Amazon or Google or Apple will make a big move and the result will be something like this:
Author > Amazon/Google/Apple > Reader
Read more: The New Value Web: The Impact of Digital Distribution
No One Knows You're a Backlist Book: Eoin Purcell
There’s a wonderful New Yorker cartoon from a few years ago by Peter Steiner and it captures an essential truth about the anonymity of the internet, about privacy and much more. The catch line is: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Recently, I’ve got to feel that publishing is experiencing its own version of this cartoon and it is happening with backlist titles. On the internet, especially when you are an eBook, no-one knows you are a spine-out title in a regular bookshop. No one checks your inside page to see your publication date or worries about your condition. In fact, if you have a nice cover, a good blurb, a sensible amount of meta-data and a good price, you will be accepted along with the freshly published, the self-published and the badly published, just one more option in a vast sea of options.
An almost perfect example of this is the Len Deighton novel I bought on my Kindle for my recent trip to LA. I wanted something with a spy theme or a good thriller. If I’d been in a bookstore, Deighton wouldn’t have had a look in, firstly because he would be unlikely to have any shelf space, perhaps a spine out copy or two at best, and secondly because newer titles would have been calling out for my attention on tables with 3-for-2 offers.
Read more: No One Knows You're a Backlist Book: Eoin Purcell
eBook Pricing - The Big Debate by Adrian White
There is a hot debate about eBook pricing - Adrian White, author and bookseller, tells us exactly why he has chosen his pricepoint.
Pricing my ebook at $9.99? Am I crazy? Maybe so, but here's why:
I have three novels published as eBooks. Two have been published previously by Penguin Books but the third is published exclusively as an ebook. When I came to set the prices, I took the opportunity to try out the three different price points of €2.99, $4.99 and $9.99. I'm well aware of the power of $0.99 as an attention-grabbing price, particularly on Amazon, but it seems to me that a lot of that attention is on established writers such as Stephen Leather - writers making the most of an extensive backlist and an established readership to storm the Amazon sales chart. Or writers of serial genre novels, paranormal romance etc. And good luck to Stephen Leather and the others who manage to pull this off but, although my paperbacks have sold reasonably well in Ireland, I don't believe I possess the reach to do the same. Also, there's something in me that says this is my work and if I don't value it correctly then who will?
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