I’ve covered Readability a couple of times already. In this post I’ll list ways in which writers can benefit from this great tool.

Earn money

Readability offers an honest and, in my opinion, a revolutionary model of compensating writers for writing interesting articles. Readers – if they want to use all features, including save for later and mobile interface – have to sign up and decide about a level of a monthly membership ($5 at least).

The transparent rule is that 70% of all membership fees are going directly to writers, simple as that. At FAQ page an example shows how it works:

Joe Subscriber pays $10.00 a month for the Readability service. Of the $10.00, $7.00 (70%) is allocated for publishers. If Joe reads 14 articles with Readability on 14 different domains in the month of February, each domain will receive $.50 ($7.00 divided by 14 pages) from Joe’s contribution pool.

I’ve opened two accounts at Readability (separate for readers and publishers) at the end of March. Payment chart looked like that:

That means that if a Readability user saves for later about ten articles a month and one of them is mine, I’ll earn as much money as from selling one $0.99 book at Kindle Store. Worth trying, especially that it’s probably your blog through which readers learn about your e-books.

Certainly, readers will save for later only original, interesting and valuable articles, and this is a great way to improve the level of online writing.

All what you have to do is to help readers notice that your blog belongs to Readability publishing ecosystem. The best way to do it is to install a button.

Show that you care

With a recent redesign of a blog I made many adjustments in order to reduce clutter. You may have several reasons not to do it – and that’s perfectly OK, as long as you have a Readability button installed.

The button placed within a post area gives your reader an option to choose between the modes: the original one or the clean one. For me, it’s not just another functionality, but a clear statement that an author of a blog really cares for the readers, no matter whether they’ll use the tool or not.

Correct your author profile

I wrote about it in a post on Kindle for the Web previews, but I think some authors may need such an advice. If your author profile is moving away from where you were at the time you published your first book, if your blog is now an expert blog which has nothing to do with mystery novels, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it to share first chapter of your new book.

What you can do is to share it via Readability mode. This is possible via a sharing box on the left. A special short link is given – http://rdd.me. Save it and use every time you want to say “this is an author of a mystery novel”. What you achieve is that a reader is brought to an interface which looks almost like a book – while still being a part of your expert blog.

Edit and proofread

You can use Readability also for posts which are not published yet, which creates an unexpected extra benefit. You can use a Readability mode to read your post before publishing it. Clean, distraction-free interface helps you focus on text. Spelling mistakes will be easier to spot and you may feel the need for further editing.

* * *

If you are interested in bringing traffic to your blog and draw attention to the sidebar where ads are located, you won’t probably need this tool. But if you really do want visitors of your blog to read your posts, you should give Readability a try.

Related posts

• 11.06.2011 -- Simple Tip to Embed All Readability Buttons on Your Blog
• 04.06.2011 -- Readability Adds Kindle Support – Great News for Readers and Writers
• 29.03.2011 -- Why It’s Good to Install Readability Button on Your Blog – and How to Do It
• 18.05.2011 -- Things to Consider When You Redesign a Blog
• 30.03.2011 -- 5 Instances You May Need Help from Readability

"4 Ways Writers Can Use Readability" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Readability provides all available codes at Free Publisher Tools page. Some bloggers would like to have both buttons in one panel. How to do it?

Now, here is a simple trick – instead of embedding two separate pieces of codes, one for Read Now/Later and another one for Send to Kindle, you can use just one code and have the Readability panel looking like at the top right of this post.

What to do?

1. Grab the code for Send to Kindle button and place it wherever you like in your blog.

2. In a first line of code find “data-show-read=”0″ (see picture below) and replace “0″ with “1″. Done.

Related posts

• 04.06.2011 -- Readability Adds Kindle Support – Great News for Readers and Writers
• 17.06.2011 -- 4 Ways Writers Can Use Readability
• 29.03.2011 -- Why It’s Good to Install Readability Button on Your Blog – and How to Do It
• 18.05.2011 -- Things to Consider When You Redesign a Blog
• 30.03.2011 -- 5 Instances You May Need Help from Readability

"Simple Tip to Embed All Readability Buttons on Your Blog" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Send to Kindle option is available also from a panel in a readability mode

A few days ago Readability added support for Kindle devices. This is another big addition to already the most powerful tool designed to reduce web clutter and help you focus on reading.

There are a couple of web-to-Kindle tools available already, naming only Instapaper, Delivereads or SendToReader, but I’m really glad my favorite distraction-removing service added it to a list of features.

Why is it useful and how to set it up? Read some tips below.

Useful for readers

Setting up Kindle-Readability sync is very easy.

First, go to your Amazon Kindle settings page and add to your approved e-mail list a new address: kindle@readability.com. Then go to your account at Readability and type in your Kindle’s e-mail address under a Kindle Settings tab.

In order to send content to Kindle you can use browser add-ons. You can also click on Readability’s Send to Kindle button if it’s embedded in a blog or site.

A really nice feature is a possibility to receive daily digests with all content you saved for later the day before. To enable it, go to your Kindle Settings and in point 3, “Receive daily reading list updates to your Kindle”, check Yes.

Kindle support is available for registered users of Readability. You can check the conditions and sign up here. A lowest monthly subscription is $5.

Useful for writers

I’ve scheduled for June 17 a special post about how writers can benefit from Readability (don’t hesitate to get blog’s free updates). Kindle is a great, long-expected way to let readers consume what you write.

If you are a book author and use a blog to direct readers to your books – give them a chance to send your content to Kindle, add a special button to your blog. You’ll give yourself a chance to appear on their ultimate reading device. One day it might be a blog post about your new book, next day it might be the book itself.

If you own a blog, open a publisher’s account and earn 70% from any contribution made by saving your article for later.

Related posts

• 11.06.2011 -- Simple Tip to Embed All Readability Buttons on Your Blog
• 17.06.2011 -- 4 Ways Writers Can Use Readability
• 29.03.2011 -- Why It’s Good to Install Readability Button on Your Blog – and How to Do It
• 18.05.2011 -- Things to Consider When You Redesign a Blog
• 30.03.2011 -- 5 Instances You May Need Help from Readability

"Readability Adds Kindle Support – Great News for Readers and Writers" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Hootsuite is the only Twitter app for iOS, which shows stats of the links you shared

Those who say that self-publishing is a vast world of bad quality writing, are right… still right. They do not take into account the fact that self-publishers learn and improve.

Self-published authors, those who think seriously about their writing, are highly motivated to find answers to their failures or successes, are willing to analyze and receive feedback. All that to write, publish and promote a better next book.

The beauty of the Internet is that they can find almost everything here. They have the same access to knowledge, resources and tools as big publishers.

Many of the tools were already mentioned in this series. Let’s say, the author is using Bite-Size Edits. He can observe, bite by bite, how his text is being edited and improved. Or after testing a couple of self-publishing platforms he decided to focus on two of them. Or he learns that the best way to communicate with readers is podcasting.

Internet is the biggest self-improving system on earth. Users are learning from each other – from comments, number of likes or favorites, number of retweets, you name it. Every such micro-fact can be, and usually is, analysed. And self-publishers have tools to make the analysis more accurate.

Let’s start from book statistics functionality. The biggest and most advanced platforms offer different ways and levels of analyzing how the book is doing. You can then match it with your online activity and locate the effort which gave best results.

One of the best analytics is provided by Feedbooks. It shows not only a number of downloads and favorites. What is tremendously useful is the split into different file formats, clients (apps, browsers) and countries. You can see how many of your readers are using mobile devices with Android operating system or how many of them are downloading your book directly to a computer. This can help you intensify your communication to the most promising group of readers.

Analytics dashboard at Feedbooks

If you promote your book heavily on social media, you can use tools to measure the effectiveness of your activity. The most common and advanced one is Bit.ly. It’s a URL shortening tool with an extended statistics functionality. You can check the influence of every link you share: the number of clicks, tweets, Facebook shares, likes and comments.

The basic way to use Bit.ly is to check the impact of the message associating the link. Send two tweets to your book page – each time with a different text. You’ll see which one is more convincing.

Another great tool to consider is Hootsuite. It’s a Twitter client with many powerful features. Among many options, you can compare traffic to your blog (Google Analytics) with your Twitter activity. Other Twitter based analytics tools are Klout, TweetReach, BackTweets and TweetStats.

Related posts

• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations
• 22.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How Technology Is Making You More Powerful [Introduction]

"Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Nowadays technology is able to analyze, think, judge, choose and response. What was a part of science fiction world now starts to leak into reality. It’s high time to realize that soon humans will not be the only beings to think independently.

That’s why another project I’ll be constantly developing is Tech Quotes. It’s fascinating to switch a perspective and see ourselves from a point of view of technology: robots, gadgets, scripts, computer parts or pieces of code. It would be a fantastic way to show that we humans are not the only ones to be right and own truth.

The project has two variants. All ideas will be shared on Twitter with a #techquotes hashtag from my main profile (@namenick) as well as @mobilefiction – that one is devoted to share fictional pieces only. Check also Password Incorrect Facebook page for updates.

Robot proverbs and other quotes

Let’s get used to the fact that we are developing our successors. What would they say about us? Read a couple of examples below.

Another idea is trickier.

Technologically processed thoughts on technology

I’ve processed my thoughts on a human-technology relation with a technology itself, using Ivona text-to-speech generator. The results are interesting. When listening to quotes you have a feeling that a human’s thought is interpreted by technology. You’ll find more details in this post. Listen to most interesting examples right now:

One sentence conclusion: the purpose of tech quotes is not to be loved by humans, but to warn humans.

Related posts

• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations
• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs

"Tech Quotes – What Would Technology Say About Humans" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Amazon's KDP dashboards lets you select countries for book distribution

On a surface it sounds obvious. Sure, if I publish a book at Amazon and Amazon delivers Kindle devices and content to more than 100 countries, that means I have a worldwide distribution.

It’s obvious for English speaking authors, but it opens lots of possibilities for non-English authors. If I write in Spanish or Italian, I can also publish at Amazon, Smashwords, Scribd, Wattpad or any other site – and my book is available for download by anyone who speaks Spanish or Italian, no matter which country he lives.

A lack of barriers typical for a traditional, local-level book distribution is what makes digital self-publishers tremendously powerful. We should keep in mind that an e-book travels extremely fast. The reader knows that he can read it in less than a minute after clicking “buy this book” button. How much time does it take to ship a print book from USA to India?

Digital content is creating new opportunities and you can be really surprised when you discover what is the biggest market for your book. Example: my book written in Polish is available at Feedbooks. Only 58% downloads come from Poland, and one of the top countries is… Algeria.

One angle of global thinking is selling books beyond geographical borders. But there is also another perspective. Once you publish a book, you’re distributed on a massive scale, being offered by huge online stores. Amazon is one example, but let’s focus on Smashwords for a while.

This excellent platform offers a functionality, which I call “auto-publishing”. The service signed contracts with Barnes&Noble, Sony eBookstore, Diesel, Kobo and iBookstore. You can publish a book once, at Smashwords, and it will be distributed by all those e-bookstores. Other multi-channel self-publishing platforms worth checking are Fast Pencil and Narcissus, with a latter one being a very good option for European authors.

Distribution Channel Manager at Smashwords

The major barrier of going truly global is not a location, though. It’s communication. How to talk about a book to somebody who doesn’t speak either your language or English?

I’d like to point out to one tool, which is going to have a growing importance in publishing. It’s Google Translate (and similar tools). Nowadays it’s being used mainly for working translations. The reason is obvious – poor, or almost ridiculous, quality.

There is a growing number of sites, however, where it’s used officially. One of the examples is Paulo Coelho’s blog. On one side the writer should not use such an unprofessional tool as a translation script, on the other side: it’s great that a worldwide known writer wants to share his thoughts with as many readers of his books as possible.

As I’m dynamically using Google Translate in one of my literary projects and I see a potential there. The tool is improving very, very fast. I can easily imagine that one day it will become natural to use such tools to translate books or that a translation functionality will be added to e-reading devices and applications.

Related posts

• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs
• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations
• 22.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How Technology Is Making You More Powerful [Introduction]

"Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

A presentation about innovators in self-publishing

Times when writers were the last people on earth to embrace technology are over. Internet with all the advanced tools and solutions is a chance to be at the forefront. Pioneering can draw unexpectedly huge attention, also from the potential readers of your book.

There are two kinds of innovation: driven by money and driven by idea. Self-publishers don’t have money, so they invent new ways to use what’s available and free – technology.

I’ve described several examples in this presentation, now I’d like to focus on one of them. In my opinion it’s a brilliant case of how writers can innovate to involve readers in their writing. It’s Google Wave.

When the new service from Google opened for users with invitations, writers were one of the first groups to populate the new ecosystem. They were starting literary waves to write mostly short stories, with a help of other members of their waves. Great writers who started what I call “wave fiction” were Adrian Graham, Tonya R. Moore and Brent Millis.

If you remember what Google Wave was about, just imagine the excitement when you were able to see the author writing a story in front of your eyes – or rewriting it after seeing a comment from another participant of a wave. All in real time!

Now, imagine that such tools are taking off every day. What you need to do is to find a way to creatively use them.

You’ve probably heard of Instagram, extremely popular photo sharing tool for iPhone. If you are writing a travel book, why don’t you share photos of destinations you’ll cover? Sounds like a good teaser. Or you can be more creative and instead of pictures you can share text, sentences or short paragraphs. It’s easy to do, you can use a note taking app, make a screenshot and add a vintage filter to give a cool look.

Microstories created on an iPhone

Other photo sharing sites to consider are Plixi, Yfrog and Twitpic. You can always use modern blogging platforms like Posterous or Tumblr to upload creative content. There is absolutely no limit in what you do and how you do it. Check for example microfiction stories I create completely on an iPhone and share via Posterous to 10 other sites.

If you prefer to innovate with audio tools, try AudioBoo. It’ a social platform where you can share voice recordings taking up to 3 minutes. You can record the clips on the go as AudioBoo offers free applications for iPhone and Android.

A very interesting site was launched recently by Electric Literature. It’s Broadcastr – a social media platform for audio stories. The uniqueness of a service is that the stories are location-based. It opens a whole new array of opportunities to tell more engaging, real, authentic and tangible stories.

Analysts predict that 2011 will be the year of group messaging, which allows to send instant text messages to a private group of your friends. Why don’t you try Beluga, GroupMe or Fast Society and find out if you could build a group of ambassadors of your new book?

Related posts

• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations
• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs
• 22.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How Technology Is Making You More Powerful [Introduction]

"Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Top rated authors at Protagonize

Digital environment is leading to an essential change of a relationship’s direction. In a traditional model the major flow was vertical, one way, from publisher to readers. Now the relationship becomes horizontal, two way, between the author and reader – at the level of the reader.

Before selecting the tools, you have to learn what’s best for you. Let me point you to a couple of excellent blogs where you can read useful information about how to build a successful reader relationship (and not only that): Marketing Tips for Authors, Quips and Tips for Successful Writers, Publetariat, BookBuzzr Blog and BookMarket.

As soon as you know how to engage the reader and make him reach for your book, you can start thinking about how the technology can help you meet the goal.

If you are writing a blog, you have plenty of tools at disposal. For example you can use free poll services (available also as plug-ins), like Polldaddy – for example to test the variants of the cover art of your new book. Other ideas for polls could be: title of a coming book, the genre, one sentence blurb, best time to launch the book, etc.

A timing and process of writing the new book is generally a great opportunity to involve its future readers. One of the most common methods is releasing a free chapter – but you can go further than that. Use free, online, collaborative writing/storytelling tools, not only to get feedback, but also to let readers write the book with you. It’s much more engaging than leaving comments under a blog post.

Collaborative writing services definitely worth checking are Protagonize (my favourite), StoryMash and Storybird. If you use Google Docs, be one of the first authors to benefit from a recent update in a commenting system, which makes this tool a powerful yet private collaborative writing space.

Whatever the level of online engagement, the fact is that it will never replace a personal relationship between the reader and author. Blog tours are effective, but not as effective as book tours in real life. Well, technology can help, at least partially, solve this problem. You can start podcasting or video podcasting. A great list of tools is available at Mashable. Or, to make it simpler, you can record a video with your computer camera, upload it to YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion and embed the clip on your blog post.

A great example of how to effectively use video podcasting is an excellent blog of Joanna Penn.

If you’re looking for a one-stop place with lots of useful tools, check BookBuzzr. The tools, opposite to other resources, are designed to be used specifically by book authors. One of the most powerful free tools is a BookBuzzr Book Widget – a great, engaging replacement of a static book cover display. Potential readers of your book can preview and search its content, share on social networks and instantly buy it – all in one place.

Book widget from BookBuzzr

Check the directory of all BookBuzzr tools here.

Related posts

• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs
• 22.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How Technology Is Making You More Powerful [Introduction]

"Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

The price of a book is what really matters to readers. It’s where self-published authors can compete with traditional publishers, as the examples of Amanda Hocking or J.A. Konrath show.

Many Kindle Store writers choose $0.99 price tag. They can afford it, as the cost of publishing an e-book is close to zero. E-bookstores equip the authors with the online tool – the dashboard – where they can publish a book in a few steps, and it usually takes a couple of minutes.

Book cover prepared in Wordle

I’ve been testing many e-book platforms and their publishing dashboards. My favorite ones are Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing), Smashwords, Feedbooks and Narcissus.

At a basic level the only thing you’ll need to prepare is a perfectly edited and formatted text of a book, in a proper file format (mostly required are doc, rtf, txt, html and epub). You don’t even need a cover of the book. Some platforms, like Feedbooks, display a default book cover with a title and author, if the cover file was not uploaded by the author.

Most authors do want book covers, though – and they are perfectly right. But if you can’t afford to hire a professional cover artist, you can always check what technology has to offer. One thing to remember: if you are not planning to print a book, the size of a cover doesn’t have to be high and it will have a screen resolution anyway. It’s where possibilities are.

First, you can download and use Gimp, a free and simple to use image editing program. But what if you’re not very much into design? There are still some solutions. You can, for example, use one of data visualization tools – they can do a design work for you. Some time ago I described how to use Wordle, a tag cloud generator, to prepare a book cover. A good thing about such a cover is that it’s at the same time a tag description of your book.

Another idea for a cover design – use photo applications on your smartphone. You can make a picture and apply one of cool filters, which will bring a tonality and feel you want. Applications I recommend for iPhone and iPod Touch are PictureShow, Camera+, PhotoStudio and Hipstamatic. PictureShow has also an option to insert a text, so you can in fact design a cover completely on your cellphone.

Book cover is one thing, but what about page layout? Self-publishing platforms offer a free conversion to popular e-book formats. For example every book at Smashwords can be read online (in html or java script) and downloaded in 8 different formats, including mobi (for Kindle), epub (other e-readers) and rtf.

And here comes the technology again. Formats like epub or mobi allow text to be adjusted by the user of a specific device or application. That means that if you read in a Kindle application on your Android tablet, every book will look the same – according to preferences you selected.

In other words: you don’t need a specific page layout design, unless you really want it.

Next thing, most important one – editing. The most popular way is to ask for help a fellow writer, but there are also very interesting tools, which can help you go through this process for free.

The most known and successful one is Bite-Size Edits. It’s a crowdsourcing platform where other writers can edit the text you submit, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. This service is both fun and useful and what’s even more important – it’s a smart way to connect writers and readers.

Edit box at Bite-Size Edits

Related posts

• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 03.10.2009 -- How to Turn Wordle Into an E-book Cover Generator
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations

"Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

This is a kick-off post of a series of articles devoted to describe free tools, which can self-publishers write, publish and promote better books.

If you decide to self-publish an e-book, you’ll become more powerful than you think. You can do it with a help of tools and services available online, to a large degree, for free. That means your computer can become your publishing house.

Certainly, technology will not write a book for you, or edit it, or design a great cover. Therefore I strongly advise you to ask for a professional help. My top recommendations are Bubble Cow for editing, The Book Designer for cover and layout design and The Creative Penn for book marketing.

I’ve defined 5 areas where technology creates opportunities for writers who want to publish e-books on their own. I will present them in the following articles, published every Friday at 15:00 GMT:

How you can reduce costs – 29.04 2011

How you can build better relations – 06.05.2011

How you can innovate – 13.05.2011

How you can sell globally – 20.05.2011

How you can learn and improve – 27.05.2011

It’s not possible to mention them all, but I hope you’ll discover one or two, which will be good enough to try. If you know anything worth mentioning, please share it in comments. Self-publishing is on the rise and the more we know now the better we will be tomorrow.

Let’s meet here in a week for a first set of tools.

The article was originally published in full length at BookBuzzr.

Related posts

• 27.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn and Improve
• 20.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Sell Globally
• 13.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Innovate
• 06.05.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Build Better Relations
• 29.04.2011 -- Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs

"Self-Publishing: How Technology Is Making You More Powerful [Introduction]" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.