OUTER BANKS PUBLISHING GROUP

Classes for Authors

Publish and Sell Enterprises is now offering FREE and paid online courses for authors on self-publishing, book marketing and other topics relevant to writers and authors everywhere. Check out the listings at http://www.publishandsell.com/tutorials/

Is There a Dark Side to the iPad?

Steve Jobs has done it again. Wooed all of us with another Wow device with the introduction of the iPad last week, a new color ebook, email and web browser tablet that many critics say will go head to head with Amazon’s Kindle.

And Kudos to Jobs for bringing another technological marvel to the market, but there is a darker side to the iPad.
With the launch of the new iBooks app for the iPad, five of the largest book publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster had signed up to provide e-book content for the new tablet.

And one of the major reasons they jumped on board so quickly is because the iPad gives them the opportunity to sell their books between $12.99 and $14.99 whereas Amazon limited their highest priced titles to $9.99.

The dark side to all of this is greed. These publishers are going against the natural laws of the market by forcing a higher price for ebooks on an already well accepted market price of $9.99.

One of the major reasons for the attractiveness of the Kindle is the $9.99 price for mainstream book titles. For the price of one hardcover book, a Kindle owner can have three major titles. I know many Kindle owners who have filled up their Kindles to capacity because of this low price and I know of others who easily spent upwards of $300 plus on Kindle titles.

These publishers are following the same path as the music industry – attempting to raise prices beyond what the market has deemed the comfortable price point. And they are using the same lame excuses – the publishers claim the low ebook prices are hurting hardcover sales; the music industry claimed the low price of downloadable songs cut into their CD sales.

Both are false. Many young people do not read books today preferring to get their content on video games, the Internet, ebook readers or on mobile devices. The older generations buy fewer books because of the high price of hardcover titles and wait for the paperback versions.

The trend is clear – sales of ebooks and electronic content are exploding; sales of print books are decreasing. This is the reality of the market, but the book publishers refuse to accept this.

Instead, they see an opportunity with the iPad to further preserve and hopefully bolster their failing business model – to give the booksellers as many printed titles as they want on consignment and allow them to return what they don’t sell at no cost to the bookseller.

They believe the higher ebook price will cause people to buy the hardcover version. I don’t think so. I believe they will only decrease sales of both versions. The $9.99 and lower price point will prevail.

The iPad pricing model is also bad news for mid list and back list authors because with the higher ebook prices only the major titles by the bestselling authors will sell, again closing the door to many unknown authors with good content.

If Amazon raises the prices of their books to be in line with these publishers, it will turn the ebook business model into the failing print book model – where publishers depend on bestsellers to support their businesses and publish fewer and fewer unknown authors.

And Jobs – he supports the higher ebook price because Apple will make 30 percent of each book sale on the iPad. The following from The New York Times on 1/27 sums it up:

“Mr. Jobs credited Amazon with pioneering the category with the Kindle, but said ‘we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.’”

Remember that when you decide to purchase an iPad.

Win a Signed Copy of Dark End of the Spectrum

We are giving away a signed copy of our thriller/mystery, DARK END OF THE SPECTRUM just for subscribing to the OBXPG Publisher’s Club.

It’s free to enter and you can unsubscribe at any time. With your subscription, you will receive unadvertised discounts on our books and valuable information on authors and the publishing industry, agents and trends in writing.

And you may win a free signed by the author copy of Dark End of the Spectrum, the best selling suspense/mystery that readers cannot put down.

The drawing will be held Feb. 28.

Here is a short description.

When digital terrorists take over the US power grid and the cell phone network, they give the government an ultimatum – bomb the borders of Afghanistan with nuclear weapons to end Al-Quada or they will start downing commercial airliners. Only security expert Dan Riker can stop them, but they have his family. Will Dan save his family or will millions die?

“The family elements in the story – the real struggles with marriage, raising a family, making a living, and just trying to enjoy life – have broadened the book’s appeal to a wider audience, primarily women who are not into technology.”

Take Your Novel to the Next Level

ATTEND THE SAN FRANCISCO WRITE AND PITCH CONFERENCE

February 19 -21, 2010. All Genres
From the Algonkian Writer Conferences

What does the market really want? Reality check time. 50,000 or more in this country are struggling to write first novels, thousands of manuscripts flooding agent offices, but only a few hundred at most will ever be published by a major house. Why? … This unique writer conference was developed by the editors and authors at Algonkian Writer Conferences to provide you, the aspiring author, with not only network connections, but comprehensive, hands-on experience utilizing the craft skills, insider advice, and hard-to-swallow facts you must possess before you can even hope to get a first novel successfully published in this tougher-than-ever market–experience and info you will not receive at any other conference, and certainly, not from any Craft and Tips 101 writer magazine.

The W&PC is also the only writer conference to evaluate your novel or work-in-progress even before you arrive. As a participant, you will discover many days worth of eye-opening pre-conference work and study, our valuable MS analysis conducted by business pros (like Charles Salzberg on the left), our own time-tested Competitive Fiction Guide, as well as network pitch sessions, panels, lectures, Q&A, and interactions with some of the best list-building agents who will be present to provide connection and advice in proportion to your needs.

After this conference you will be able to:

• Display the craft, voice, and narrative verve that will put you on top even with the most discriminating editor or agent.
• Develop a reality check-list for all major structural and narrative issues that profoundly affect your novel.
• Reevaluate your novel premise, development, and all else in a manner the market demands and rewards.
• Demonstrate how to build your “platform”–publishers are now looking for solid credentials more than ever.
• Forever avoid the pitfalls of the query and pitch process.
• Use crucial must-knows to stop the rejection cycle, and write from the heart with newfound smarts.
• Do whatever is necessary to make an agent or editor feel confident in promoting your novel.

Getting published by a major house

In today’s environment, you will face more obstacles than ever. An aspiring author attempting to write the breakout novel must not only create a high concept novel premise that rings with “ca-ching” but must avoid all the common pitfalls in title, hook, early character development, prose craft, and ongoing narrative composition. Sound complicated? Well, it is. Welcome to reality! Writers unable to fulfill the many and picky demands of discriminating agents and editors will be rejected every time, and usually within seconds after reading the first page (or even the first line–no kidding).

Everyone is looking for reasons to reject

Why shouldn’t they? Hundreds of projects are right behind yours, all clamoring for publication, all written by ambitious yet soon-to-be-disillusioned writers who believe all they ever needed for success was Writer’s Digest and their local critique group to get it all straight.

After working with writers for many years, we know that isn’t true.

Writing is Similar to Computer Programming

Ok, if you think this idea is off the wall consider this: if a programmer leaves out a single character or adds an extra character, the program will not work as intended.

Writing in essence is the same. If you don’t craft your words, sentences and paragraphs properly, your intended message does not come across.

Programming is a lot easier than writing – it’s exact – XYZ code tells the computer to execute a specific function. The computer does not have an opinion about the code and the code does not have several meanings.

Writing, on the other hand, is more complex. Words have different meanings for different people. The structure of a sentence or paragraph may have one meaning for one person and different meaning for another.

But if the writing has the right flow, the right words and the right structure it is like great poetry. That’s why we hear statements like, “The writing works! The writing pulls you in! I just love the writing!” It is the stuff of the classics and more.

So what exactly is the right stuff – the stuff of classics, the magic of the writing? My take is that the writing communicates universal truths, truths that are common and important to all human beings. The universal appeal of these truths is so powerful that the writing lives on generation after generation, century after century.

More importantly, the writing drips with emotion. Words can stir our deepest hopes and dreams, our imaginations, our inspirations and they let us dance in the joy of the things we love.

It’s not easy getting words to do all those things, but as writers we always try. So if you can get the right “programming” for your words, you will write a classic that will live on and on.

Try doing that with a computer.

Attention Kindle Owners!

Now you can buy the page-turner, thriller, Dark End of the Spectrum, for $.99 until Feb. 10. Get your copy today at the Kindle Store.

Is Our Literary Legacy Threatened by Electronic Books?

We hear it all the time. The electronic book readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eReader are going to be the downfall of printed books. If you believe that you may have been one of the folks in Columbus’ day who believed the world was flat. Don’t worry. It won’t happen at least for a very long time.

The eReaders are just another distribution channel for books. If anything, eReaders are going to allow more people to access more content than ever before. We hear it from Kindle owners all the time that their Kindles are maxed out – they cannot fit anymore books on these devices.  Luckily for them Amazon allows users to store books online on their Kindle account. They just have to switch them out from the account to the Kindle. And people with mobile devices like phones and PDAs are only limited by the amount of memory in those devices.

Well, for all those people out there who don’t like change, book eReaders and other mobile reading devices like the iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry, Palm Pilot and the entire family of Windows Mobile software devices are here to stay. Whether you passively ignore these devices or actively denounce them, the eReader trend is coming at you like a steam roller and there is nothing you can do.  Go with the flow or be flattened.

A case in point is Amazon’s launch of the European version of the Kindle (See the story on Bloomberg.com). Before the launch, Europeans had to settle for the American Kindle version and could only download books after they downloaded them to their PCs. Now they can download books wirelessly directly to the Kindle in more than 100 countries all over Europe. Now Europeans like us Americans only have to think of a book and in less than 60 seconds they will have the entire book ready to read on their Kindles.

And according to  TIME online, “2009 is a breakout year for e-readers,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. “But we’re still in the early stages.”

More than 17 Kindle-competitors are already on the market or expected to hit the market by 2010, according to TIME. The major players include Apple and Microsoft, Asustek, a Taiwanese company, Samsung, LG, IREX, Interead and Fujitsu with a  full color e-ink display.

Sony's Family of electronic book readers - Courtesy of Sony

Cool technology. Disruptive technology. Revolutionary technology. The voices are clear.

So what does it all mean for our rich literary legacy? Will our literary future simply morph into something unrecognizable? Will it vanish completely? Maybe. Young people are writing novels on cell phones in Japan. Several authors have attempted to write and serialize novels on Twitter. Hundreds of books were first written on blogs and then turned into full length books in print.

Most young people don’t read books; older people read books. Females read more books than males. A whole new language has been created for texting that uses mostly acronyms and makes understanding shorthand a cake walk.

Again allay your fears.

Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired Magazine, reported in the September 2009 article, “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” that a college professor found just the opposite – that young people are much more prolific than their parents and grandparents.

“Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”

She’s right about technology “pushing our literacy in bold new directions” – everything written is shorter, faster, more efficient. Books are shorter; chapters are shorter to reflect everyone’s busier, faster lifestyle and the writing is concise and targeted written to get to the point quickly and efficiently.

Even Daniel Menaker, the former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker laments about the Internet in his article, “Radactor Agonisties” in the Barnes and Noble Review.

“(Speaking of shortness, the attention-distraction of the Internet and the intrusion of work into everyday life, by means of electronic devices, appear to me to have worked, maybe on a subliminal level, to reduce the length of the average trade hardcover book.)”

Does that mean we will never see great classics like Charles Dicken’s, A Christmas Carol or Great Expectations? On the contrary. Writers are the bellwethers of our time, and their writings will reflect our lifestyles, our cultures, and our pace of living. Besides, when was the last time a friend proclaimed, “I just finished, War and Peace, and now I can start David Copperfield.”

While books may be shorter, there will always be classics some already written, some to be written,  whether they are traveling at light speed as zeros and ones over the airwaves or inked permanently onto the printed page.

What We Look for in a Book

Image via Wikipedia

Whether you have written nonfiction or fiction, all books in essence are about a story.

In light of more than 400,000 titles published last year and the number increasing daily with the explosion of ebooks and self-publishing, your book has to be exceptional to get noticed and to ultimately be purchased.

Here are some basic elements that should be in every book:

1. Known as the lead or hook in newspapers, the first sentence or paragraph should effectively communicate something that will entice, interest or emotionally attach the reader to your book so he or she will want to read the rest of the book.
2. Every word, sentence, paragraph and section or chapter should relate in some way to the theme or story in a significant way. Background information on a character, a situation or concept should not be there just to fill pages. It should all relate in some way like the Ying and Yang – each complement each other, each are relevant to each other as parts that create the whole.
3. This may sound obvious, but your book should have a beginning, a middle and an end.  In essence, all questions, concerns or conflicts should be resolved by the end of the book. The reader should not be left with any questions whether your book is nonfiction or fiction unless intentional.

Content is king. No matter what you write about, if the content and the writing engages, inspires, entertains or educates with an emotional attraction, the world will open up to you.

Welcome to Outer Banks Publishing Group – Authors Wanted

Outer Banks Publishing Group is one of the first publishing houses to use the latest digital printing technologies, social networking, virtual marketing, and the Internet to publish, promote, and sell books in electronic formats as well as in print.

If you are serious about becoming a published author we invite you to submit a query for your book on the Author’s Query Page.

We are accepting most genres in nonfiction and fiction.

Outer Banks Publishing Group
183 Duck Road
Southern Shores, NC 27949
919 961-0198

Copyright 2009 Outer Banks Publishing Group