E-book Revolution Podcast Ep9 - Digital First ‘Traditional’ Publishing With Jeffe Kennedy

  

Most aspiring authors today are quick to note that the traditional publishing gates are closed to them and that digital is the way of the future. For many authors it has boiled down to self-publishing being the only potential path they are aware of to get their work published. And though the old prejudices against self-publishing are slowly fading (not without a whole lot of bar fighting and knifing of authors with one star reviews) the stigma is still there - digital books/authors = self-published = lesser quality.

Yet, with e-books taking a greater share of the reading markets each year it was only inevitable that traditional publishers would start using digital strategies to solve one of their biggest problems – how they could publish authors they really loved, but had to pass up because they didn’t believe there was a strong enough local market for an author’s odd mix of genre. Enter digital first publishing imprints, all the benefits of a traditional publishing deal (yep, editing provided and no formatting, designing or technical know-how required) with less risk to the publisher and more royalties for the author. In this podcast I talk to digital first author Jeffe Kennedy, a ‘traditionally’ published author with Carina Press (imprint of Harlequin), who has only had her work published digitally. During the podcast we explore this alternate path for authors, who just want to write and be published without dealing with the self-publishing/vanity press rollercoaster.

Jeffe Kennedy is an award winning author with a writing career that spans decades. Starting originally as a highly successful essayist, Jeffe found her career drawn towards fantasy and romance. Finding her feet at digital first imprint, Carina, her fantasy BDSM romance, Petals and Thorns, has won several readers awards. Sapphire, the first book in Facets of Passion has placed first in multiple romance contests and the follow-up, Platinum, is climbing the charts. Her most recent works include three fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns, theFacets of Passion, and the post-apocalyptic vampire erotica of the Blood Currency. Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com or every Sunday at the popular Word Whores blog.  She is represented by Pam can Hylckama Vliea of Foreword Literary.

In this podcast we discuss:

• ‘Traditional’ deals in digital (Digital first publishers)
• How the romance community are at the forefront of the digital revolution
• Alternate paths to traditional and self-publishing (No, we’re not talking vanity press!)
• The benefits of submitting to digital first publishers rather than self-publishing
• How Jeffe ended up at a digital first press
• Benefits of online friendships with other authors
• How Jeffe signed with an agent after being published with a digital first press
• How the Harlequin ‘propaganda machine’ works
• Marketing a digitally published book
• What genres lend themselves better to digital first releases
• Appeals of digital erotica to readers
• Whether or not her readers follow her work from romance to ‘sexy’ novels
• How digital first publishers are more likely to give ‘different’ books a chance
• Fairer royalties for authors
• And the more diverse marketing opportunities for erotica writers.

Enjoy!

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I love hearing from my listeners! Please feel free to contact me or offer any feedback on topics you would like to see covered at: ebookrevolution (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Emily's non-fiction book E-Book Revolution: The Ultimate Guide to E-book success is now available at Kobo, Amazon and Bkclb (Australian e-book store).If you enjoy her tongue in cheek style you may also enjoy her comedy novel set in Facebook, The Grand Adventures of Madeline Cain: Photographer Extraordinaire also available from Kobo, Amazon and Bkclb.

The companion website for this podcast is http://ebookrevolution.podbean.com 

Building An Enhanced E-book

A huge thank you to Simon Groth who pulled together his If:Book essays on If:Book's Choose Your Own Poetry Adventure event in 2012 for this guest post.

The recent official launch for The City We Build, the amplified ebook made between if:book and the Queensland Poetry Festival, has highlighted some of the challenges faced by authors, publishers, and readers when designing digital books that take advantage of their capabilities.

In the original project, three local poets wrote a series of pieces based around specific locations within Brisbane’s home of everything loud and late, Fortitude Valley. Each of the three adventures opened at the Judith Wright Centre on Brunswick Street and, from there, readers had to choose the next location and walk there to read (or listen) to the next poem.

The poets – Chris Lynch, Carmen Leigh Keates, and Julie Beveridge – not only created beautiful, evocative, and sometimes hilarious poems, they also played with the notion of choice and prompted quite a bit of what looked like aimless wandering through the Valley streets.

To adapt this locative project for the small screen, we brought in photographer Cindy Keong to the project to capture the essence of the locations for each piece. We also brought the humble hyperlink to the book. Readers can either move sequentially through the book or brave the links to jump between each location minus the heat and legwork (unless you really want to, in which case we have maps).

Titled The City We Build, the book is available free from Apple’s iBookstore. Here are a few images we took while recording the poets’ performances.

Mics: Making an ebook with QPF

Editing audio: Making an ebook with QPF

Performance notes: Making an ebook with QPF

Gear: Making an ebook with QPF

Sliders: Making an ebook with QPF

Cables: Making an ebook with QPF

Regardless of how well designed or how beautiful its content, The City We Build is unlikely to ever reach some readers. This is because it has been designed for one digital platform alone.

Writers and publishers alike want their content accessible and available to as many readers as possible, but in the digital world this means taking into account a wide variety of devices. Some have high colour screens that can handle video and other content. Some have more simple ‘eink’ black and white screens that are simply not fast enough to handle anything other than page turns (and even those are too slow for some readers). Some devices are connected to the internet and handle much more than just reading; others are largely unaware of anything on the web other than their own bookstore. Some devices use highly response touch-sensitive surfaces, others opt for physical buttons.

Some devices are available in Australia, others are not.

It’s entirely appropriate there should be no one-size-fits-all reading device. But, for creators of content, this incredible diversity of devices presents a challenge of first principle.

What kind of book are we making here?

To suit as many readers as possible, books must be designed for the simplest of devices. To a large extent, this means text only. The simplest ereaders replicate the basic book experience as closely as possible. This means no colour, no video, no hyperlinking. Of course, for many books, this presents no problem at all.

The original poems from The City We Build were written for a Choose Your Own locative project. To read the poems, you had to stand there, on the corner of Brunswick and Ann, smartphone or tablet in hand. Your phone connected you to the poem via the web. You read or listened along, while juggling your phone, searching for references, and looking strange to passers by. That was part of the fun.

The purpose of The City We Build was to adapt the locative project into book form, without losing its sense of place or its multimedia origins. We wanted you to feel as though you were still wandering the Valley streets, maybe minus the heat and the legwork. This meant incorporating images and audio. Most of all, to replicate the reader’s choice of experience, jumping from poem to poem, we needed hyperlinks.

In Australia, right now, the platform that meets all those needs is Apple’s iPad.

So who has iPads anyway? There’s some debate over exactly what market share the iPad enjoys globally, but the most recent (and apparently dourest) estimates still hit more than 40%. In Australia, without competition from the Kindle Fire or the Nook, the share would almost certainly be higher. In real numbers, apparently 22.9 million of the things were sold in the last quarter alone (if you have specific figures for Australia, let me know). Man, that’s a lot of tablets. And, although Android tablets (most of the remaining 60%) make perfectly fine reading devices, the platform is yet to emphasise the kind of extra features needed for this project.

Although that’s the picture today, don’t forget this is likely to change at any time. Already we’re seeing some projects that could revolutionise the way digital art books are made in the near future, but for the moment (and with our resources), The City We Build is a project with but one destination.

It’s a trade off publishers and writers face all the time. Do you make a work suitable for a range of devices or do you exploit the features of a single device to make as rich an experience as possible? The direction you choose will depend on a myriad of factors, but the guiding principle should always be to serve the work itself first.

Simon Groth’s stories can go anywhere from tangled relationships and virtual writers to rock music and sleep disorders. His books include Concentrate, Here Today, and Off The Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press. As director of if:book Australia, Simon writes regularly on the future of the book and took the role of lead writer for the 24-Hour Book. On Twitter, he’s @simongroth and his website is simongroth.com.

Is Your Book Not Selling As Well As You Hoped?

First of all, apologies for making this a short written post today. My body, in short, hates me and I'm in my 6th day of beating off a cold with a combination of drugs (legal - I'm my pharmacist's best customer this week) and lemon & honey tea. My writing is still being done, but all other tasks have fallen to the wayside including the post I had originally intended for this week. Luckily I had a back-up plan thanks to the lovely Georgina Hannan!

I've had a lot of emails this year from authors telling me their book isn't selling as well as they'd hoped. They've followed all the conventional advice and they're just not sure what else they can do to boost the publicity machine. So, if your book isn't selling as many copies as you thought it would, then perhaps this consult between fledgling author, Georgina Hannan, and myself will give you some extra tools to add to your marketing plan.

In this short call we talk about optimising her blog and back of book blurb, finding reviewers for her book (and why she needs to get over her fear of sending Cursed to reviewers), and how to automate twitter to bring in more traffic for her website. The video demonstration for the consult kicks in at the 3-4 minute mark, and for a full break down of suggested steps see around the 40min mark of the consult.

A huge thank you to Georgie, who gave permission for her consulting call to be posted for promotion purposes.

This call should give you a great starting point, however, if you feel you need a marketing plan that is more specialised to your novel and personality, then I still have consulting spots available for this year, please feel free to email me at ebookrevolution (at) yahoo (dot) com. I love chatting to authors and brain-storming! Don't worry, if you would like your own consult I will never post your call online without your expressed permission. Promise!


Hope you get some awesome actionable tips from the video that help you restart your books momentum.

Stay well!! (Truly, it's better then converting the water content of your body into slime...)