Tag: Publishing

Bookmarked https://blog.ayjay.org/behind-the-scenes/ (blog.ayjay.org)

Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything.

Source: behind the scenes – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

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Alan Jacobs reflects upon the legacy of Lauren Lepow and the invisible labor associated with the roll of the copy editor. Austin Kleon recently reflected on paying ‘attention to the credits’:

If you want to be a better student of any art form, you have to pay attention to the credits! If you love an album, read the liner notes, notice the personnel involved in the recording, and seek out more of their work. (Reading the liner notes is increasingly impossible, as people do so much listening via streaming. Personally, I rely a lot on AllMusic.com or Discogs.) If you like the way a movie looks, watch the credits or check IMDB to find out more about the cinematographer. (Again, increasingly harder — Netflix skips credits by default these days, so you have to scramble for the remote at the end of a movie.) If you like the way a book is designed, check the acknowledgements or copyright page for the designer, the imprint, and the other personnel involved. This is one of the easiest ways to find more of what you like and discover what you don’t know you like yet.

Source: Collective creativity by Austin Kleon

After recently spending time with Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, I was left wondering who edited such a book and what other books they may have edited? I was also left thinking about editing a book like Anti-Oedipus?

Liked Pluralistic: MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier (16 Aug 2024) by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that’s stable over long timescales, chances are you’re looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that’s the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that’s saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/

Bookmarked https://blog.ayjay.org/advancing/ (blog.ayjay.org)
Alan Jacobs extends upon Elle Griffin’s discussion around the hard-truths associated with publishing and getting an advance:

Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:

  • $25,000 at contract signing;
  • $25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
  • $25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
  • $25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on. 

Advancing by Alan Jacobs

The more I read books about the music industry or interviews with artists, I feel like being a rock star or an author is not always as glamorous as it is sometimes portrayed as?

Liked Indiekit (getindiekit.com)

The IndieWeb is a community of personal websites, connected by simple standards. These follow the principles of publishing content at your own domain name and owning your data.

Indiekit uses these standards to help you publish content to your own website and then share it on popular social networks.

Paul Robert Lloyd’s Indiekit looks like another interesting blogging platform. It offers a different approach to the IndieWeb that does not depend on WordPress.
Bookmarked The 9 Biggest Myths About Nonfiction Trade Publishing, Debunked by Summer Brennan (A Writer's Notebook)

What really happens when you “get a book deal,” publish your first book, and go on tour to promote it? It may not be what you’ve always imagined!

Summer Brennan debunks nine myths associated with publishing:

  • Book deals do not mean a bunch of money.
  • Most authors never see another cent beyond the advance.
  • Often book launches are the responsibility of the author.
  • In 99.9999% of times authors are not paid for readings.
  • Book tours are funded by authors.
  • Often authors have little control over the cover, title, and subtitle of their books.
  • Books maybe copy edited, but are often not given extensive structural edits.
  • Authors often only earn $1.50 a book.
  • Usually authors have no control over the publication of excerpts.

This is very thought provoking and eye-opening.

ᔥ “Austin Kleon” in Stolen plants always grow – Austin Kleon ()

Bookmarked sheet-posting (sheet-posting.me)

Turn a Google Sheets spreadsheet into a blog page and RSS feed

Tyler Robertson has created an app with Glitch to use a Google Sheet to generate a blog with an associated feed. This includes options in regards to SEO and CSS. See an example I put together here.

I really like the potential of this as a tool for students to spin up a site for a project or even a collaborative space to share. I am also intrigued in the prospect to work with the data collected using Google Sheets.

Bookmarked Self-publishing – Cory Doctorow – Medium by Cory Doctorow (Medium)

Unless you feel you can figure out how to market your book, unless you want to devote as much energy to that marketing plan as you did to its authorship and production, unless you are prepared to sustain your marketing effort through constant iteration and refinement, you probably shouldn’t self-publish.

Cory Doctorow reflects upon the monopolisation of the book publishing industry and the perils associated with self-publishing. He shares some of the lessons that he has learnt along the way:

I’ve evolved a checklist for would-be self-publishers that makes success more than a matter of pure luck.

  1. Observe the publishing fortunes of books whose audiences you imagine to be similar to your book’s audience;
  2. From these observations, formulate a falsifiable hypothesis about how you will reach a similar audience;
  3. Based on this hypothesis, formulate a plan to get your book to that audience;
  4. Execute your plan, and measure its progress by comparing your book’s performance to your hypothesized performance;
  5. As new data comes in about where your hypothesis was mistaken, revise your hypothesis and make a new plan, and execute that;
  6. Go to step 4. and repeat.

This won’t guarantee that you succeed, but without something like this, you will almost certainly fail.

I am intrigued to how this differs in Australia or if it is the same all over the world.

Doctorow also shared a reading of the piece on his podcast:

Replied to Pluralistic: 03 Jul 2020 by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

It’s not a “license,” it’s a sale. You bought it, you own it. It’s a book. Books are older than copyright, than publishing, than paper, than commerce.

Cory, the only other published that I have come across that works as openly as Craphound is Verso Books. The book that you buy is yours and actually is imprinted with your name.
Bookmarked Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms (n+1)

No one wakes up in the morning hoping to be as vapid as possible. But eventually you internalize the squeeze. Everyone down the chain adjusts their individual decisions to the whim of the retailer, or to their best guess at the whim of the retailer. If it’s Barnes & Noble, you may hear that a cover doesn’t work, that the store won’t carry the title unless you change it. If it’s Amazon, you may not hear anything at all. You go back and adjust your list of wildly optimistic comparative titles — it’s The Big Short, but . . . for meteorology!

The editors at N+One discuss the current process associated with publishing in the 2010’s and the place of Amazon within all of this.
Bookmarked Media Accounting 101: Appholes and Contracts by Craig Mod (Roden Explorers Archive)

Choose active media, set yourself up to succeed by building systems to cultivate positive habits, but most importantly: Take a second to think about the contracts you’ve entered into as you go about your day. Are those contracts you’re happy with? Did you realize you had entered into them?

Craig Mod shares some notes from a lecture he shared at Yale to 70 or so publishing CEOs, marketing, editorial, and PR folks on the topic of contracts:

It’s an essay about “contracts” — and I don’t mean the formal things we sign upon joining a company or getting a divorce, but the more implicit contracts we enter into with a piece of media, software, or an application. Contracts can become proxies for thinking about “media accounting:” What we gain or lose by engaging with different media and mediums. Consider this missive a little bit of Media Accounting 101.

It is about the agreements we make that we may not always be aware that we are making. This is another interesting examination about being informed.

Central to this discussion is attention and in particular James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.

Replied to Using the Design Thinking Process to Write a Book (A.J. JULIANI)

Yet, there was something I wanted to do with this book that made it different. During the navigation ideas phase, I wondered what it would be like to give the book away for FREE to teachers and leaders all over. Now, folks would still have to pay for shipping, but with printing costs as low as they are, I wondered how this was possible.

I had a number of really bad experiences of sending books out to teachers free. The organization and fulfillment of this process were tough for all involved.

Thanks for sharing the process AJ.

I’ve always wondered about self-publishing, but always from a digital perspective, using Gumroad or some other platform. I had never thought of physically publishing something and giving it away. I obviously need to explore this in more detail.

Syndicated at Read Write Collect