Archive for November, 2009
Indie authors, there is no better time to help each other!
This is a fantastic article written by April L. Hamilton, the founder of Publetariat, which I repost here in its entirety with her permission. It’s a great challenge for indie authors – to find, read, review and promote other indie authors’ books. I love this idea, as this is the core of 2.0 approach to publishing – to help each other, being at the same time the author, the publisher, the critique and the reader.
Let me add Feedbooks to a list of sites, where you can find fantastic books by independent authors. The tag to follow an action on Twitter is #indieaction. Join in, have fun and spread the word!
An Indie Call To Action
Most of us indie authors talk a good game about how there are plenty of quality indie books available, and how there are plenty of terrible mainstream books. We also like to complain about the lack of variety and originality in mainstream book offerings as compared to indie books. Such musings generally lead to the conclusion that if people would just give indie books the same chance they give to mainstream books, if they would just put indie books to the ‘fifteen minute’ or ‘first ten pages’ test, the frequency with which they’d find books they would want to keep reading would be on par with that for mainstream books, and indie authors and readers everywhere would rejoice. It’s time we stop all the hand-wringing and blind hope, and make this happen.
Yes, we have the power. Every indie author is also a reader, and every one of us has a circle of influence. So if you’re an indie author or small imprint owner, I issue the following challenge to you: »»»
Kindle, eClicto, Sony, Cool-er, Nook – który wybrać? [2]
Dzisiaj o formatach. Z punktu widzenia czytelnika, który najzwyczajniej w świecie chce dla siebie wybrać metodę czytania i pozyskiwania książek, to bardzo ważny temat – jeśli na serio bierze się pod uwagę stworzenie biblioteki e-książek. Wiem, że dla wielu ludzi możliwość umieszczenia w pamięci czytnika tysiąca książek jest czystą abstrakcją, ale przykład muzyki powinien pozwolić nam się szybciej oswoić z nieznośną niefizycznością e-książek i łatwiej zastąpić w naszych umysłach miejsce na półce miejscem na dysku.
Z formatami e-książek jest tak, że właśnie trwa walka między dwoma najważniejszymi z nich: ePub i mobi. Pod wieloma względami walka przypomina batalię między BlueRay i HD DVD – ścierają się interesy, sytuacja zmienia się z godziny na godzinę, a konsument jest coraz bardziej zdezorientowany, więc czeka na wynik. Wynik ten, przynajmniej dla mnie, już teraz jest przesądzony. »»»
E-book covers inspired by the design of mobile applications
I’m a mobile freak and here you have another prove of it. These are the brand new covers, I’ve designed with a help of my Twitter friends for two volumes of my short stories, which will be available in a couple of weeks through Smashwords/Barnes&Noble. In the meantime you can download a free edition here. I describe the stories as tech-absurd. The bot-behaving gadget-eating error-ready part of you will understand, what I mean.
The brief I issued to myself was simple: get an attention of geeks with a message: “technology is wonderful, but…” (oh, and check the bottom bar for options).
Google Wave and publishing – will it blend?
This is a great article about Google Wave. I repost it from Fiction Matters with a permission of its author – P. Bradley Robb.
Last week, the internet was rocked when Google handed out the first 100,000 invites to its new collaborative communication platform known as Wave. From the outside, the entire concept seemed a bit confusing, and the look from the inside wasn’t much better. But, after a week, many of us are starting to overlook the newness and instead focus on how to use Google Wave to make work more productive.
What is Google Wave?
That’s a difficult question. To understand what Wave is, minimal knowledge of several disparate technologies is required: email, instant messaging, collaboratively edited documents (wikis), and message boards. Add in a dash of other technologies – polling options, digital maps, games, chat rooms, and video – and you can quickly start to see why Google Wave is difficult to explain. The platform is essentially a wealth of potential, so much so that a starting point can be hard to find. »»»
#hashtagstory :: #iwish #iseeyou #inmyhood #beforethestorm
This was an example of my litexperimental project – telling stories with Twitter’s trendy hashtags. Read more about it here.
Dwie książki, które powinien przeczytać każdy pisarz 2.0
Jedną z cech pisarzy nowej generacji jest to, że dzielą się swoim doświadczeniem bez robienia na wstępie problemów, zwykle związanych z pytaniem: “a co ja z tego będę miał”. Nie zadaje sobie tego pytania Steve Weber i dlatego wydał dwa bardzo przydatne poradniki dla autorów, którzy chcą samodzielnie wydawać i promować swojej książki. Poniżej opisy wraz z odnośnikami. A odpowiedź na najważniejsze pytanie brzmi - tak, książki są za darmo. »»»
5 reasons why writers should mobilize their blogs
In this article I’ll try to describe how important is for a writer to mobilize a blook, blog or a site. In a next post I’ll give tips on how to easily do that.
Mobile Web is growing fast
According to a study by Morgan Stanley, there will be over 1 billion “heavy mobile data users” by 2013. It’s a major trend: people switch from desktop activity to mobile activity. On the other hand, mobile readers are disappointed when using mobile web. Non-mobilized pages are too slow to load on cellphones, they look ugly, and most importantly – they are unreadable.
Social sites dominate mobile web
A report by Openwave shows that four out of ten top mobile destinations are social networks. Why is that so important for a writer? Because probably for most of us social networks like Twitter, Facebooks and alikes are an effective way to communicate with readers. Ask yourself a question: how many of the readers of your blog and potential buyers of your book are opening your messages from a mobile device? In my case it’s a prevailing majority.
Links from mobile apps
And here comes the problem with links. If you tweet a link to your site, which is (still) not mobilized, it’s OK when a reader opens it from a computer. It can be disastrous when opened from, let’s say iPhone’s Tweetie. The reader will probably never try it again. You loose a chance to be read – and to be retweeted. »»»
Złote Niepomyśli
Nie będzie po myśli drukarzom. Niedługo w serwisie Feedbooks będzie można publikować książki o zmiennej treści – dzięki zastosowaniu odpowiedniego interfejsu API. Będzie to dotyczyć na przykład utworów literackich tworzonych w Google Wave. Każda zmiana w materiale wyjściowym to automatyczna aktualizacja w treści książki w Feedbooks.
Kiedyś, żeby zamienić tekst w książkę potrzebna była drukarnia. Teraz potrzebny jest interfejs.
[autor interfejsu niebojący się]
Week on Twitter 2009-11-15
My weekly tweets in chronological order. Join me for more: @namenick 
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Weekly links on e-books and self publishing 14.11.2009
I’m back with digest posts on e-book world and self-publishing topics. Instead of daily links from Delicious (too messing my blog), I’ll post every weekend my Google Reader shared items. Enjoy!
- Plugin by C. Murray Consulting
Recently updated Polish tech-absurdist and mobile fiction writer 3.0 beta. Addicted to ebooks and technology. Guest writer at 
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