Hello Publishing Friends! SFU has a workshop coming up Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers.

July 23 – 24 | Thursday – Friday | 9 – 5 pm
Fee $275 CDN (all course materials provided)
Details on the Course
Registration info.

Digital Publishing: Connecting Publishers to New Media Consumers
Formats. Futures. Channels.

While most publishers are beginning the process of digitizing their back lists, digital technology has gained a toe hold in helping publishers market their front lists as well. No longer are titles digitized and pushed through select channels to have the process stop there. Content can be moved, indexed and combined with other publishers or books.

This two-day workshop, presented in conjunction with the Association of Book Publishers of BC, will consider success stories such as Japan’s $220 million in sales with Manga. We will also learn from some of the less successful initiatives.

And we will consider channels of distribution and the markets that are not being fully explored and developed, such as India where a significant majority of those attending universities speak English and whose market is primarily digital. Publishers need to have a defined digital strategy, much like their business mandates and business plans.

This workshop will provide answers and prompt questions to get the information you need to create your own digital roadmap. If you are not doing something, you may find you will soon be playing catch up. By the end of the two days you will understand the phrases and definitions and identify what kinds of formats best suit your needs. Some key points you will learn:

• Determine which formats can best deliver your content
• Determine business objectives for an initial foray into digital publishing
• Determine your requirements from third party service providers
• Understand XML
• Discuss the pros and cons of DRM
• Hear what the future of publishing may look like

This is an excellent workshop for new publishers, smaller publishers, or larger more established publishers who are past the thinking stage and want to begin to implement a digital strategy for their companies.

Remember when we blogged the opera?

Ling Chan of the Vancouver Opera and Capulet Communications have been doing a couple of sessions for business groups on blogger outreach and twitter. Vancouver Opera’s success and Capulet’s expertise are written up in the Victoria Times Colonist, and the story went out on the Canwest wires and has been picked up by the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal.

Hooray for Vancouver Opera, and congratulations to Capulet for being such superstars.

http://www.timescolonist.com/News/Social+networking+boosts+bottom+line/1734727/story.html

http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/search/article/719627

The opera’s blog is used to make it more accessible to people, educate them, increase awareness and make connections, Chan said. Other organizations have approached the opera about its social networking methods, which only started in spring of 2008.

Warmest regards,

BookCamp Vancouver 2009 Unconference : Exploring New Ideas in Books, Publishing and the Future of Reading.

Join Us on October 16 at SFU Harbourcentre for a day-long exploration of books, book-like technologies, and the future of the publishing industry.

We want to bring together the technologists and the book publishers, marketers, writers, librarians, media, and anyone else interested in reading, writing, publishing and gadget geekery.

Become a Fan on Facebook

Follow Updates on Twitter

Registration details to come.

Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business? is a great article by Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs in TIME on Monday, Jun. 22, 2009.

As I’ve said before, Amazon isn’t just a bookstore.

Quote: As numerous publishing journalists and bloggers have pointed out, Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it’s hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there’s Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.

BookCampTO was this weekend and it stimulated my brain.

Mitch Joel, who I admire greatly, was in attendance and we had a couple of excellent thought exchanges, one of which is playing out on his blog.

Here’s a fleshed out version of my comment “Gratis vs. Libre.”

The thing of value that publishers and authors have is the content of their books. Setting the value of that content at zero is not the way to go. (Although there are interesting examples of free PDFs that lead to great value for the publisher and author. See the D&M case study on The Tar Sands (PDF). –Thank you Alison for sharing!)

Giving the content away for free (in whatever format the book takes) is like my fellow apartment dwellers who toss books into the “free” box in the laundry room. Those books are gratis. They are one step above being thrown away. The value exchange between giver and taker is “meh”.

Freeing the content, as in libre, is what publishers and authors are after. It’s the quest to give–as in a gift–that allows the value exchange of the content to remain in tact.

Why did the D&M campaign meet its goals with the free PDF? Partly because it’s still early days for free PDFs. D&M captured our attention by giving away the entire book because there are few people doing that as a marketing strategy. There is value in the rarity.

More important though is that there was a strategy to this campaign. They set measurable goals in advance. And they didn’t set the only goal as increasing sales because they recognize that there’s not a direct correlation between a single marketing campaign (with multiple facets) to sales. But most important of all, they treated the PDF as a gift.

It was available for a limited time. And it was available, in particular, to journalists and bloggers as a file that they could gift to others. It was libre–free to travel, free to be shared.

And, quite cleverly, there are still reasons for us to talk about Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk because the publisher has created this case study to share as a gift to other publishers and authors who are debating the merits of posting a free PDF. Thank you again for sharing!

Book publishing is an industry in a cribbage game–and it’s not about avoiding getting skunked by your fellow publishers, it’s about avoiding getting skunked by every other industry vying for consumer attention. You are playing as an industry, not as individual players.

BookCampTO is one example of how we can work together and I really hope to bring that conversation to the west coast. Thank you for the Toronto hospitality.

I’ll be posting my BookCampTO notes at http://www.breakthespine.com/. If you’re interested in attending the Vancouver debrief session sign up for email alerts at Break the Spine, email me, DM me on twitter–chose your means.

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Biblioasis and SeenReading have launched the Kill a Critic: A Revenge-Lit contest, to celebrate the Launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead.

The first entries are up at www.revengelit.blogspot.com and the deadline (pardon the pun) is June 12.

How to Entry
Write 250 words or so on the Death of a Critic (Literary or Art), and what they did to get there.
Send entries to revengelit@gmail.com
Visit RevengeLit.Blogspot.com for details

Background
Everybody Hates a Critic. Some people hate them more than others.

Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead kicks, err, off with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head, and literary revenge plays an increasingly important role as the novel unfolds. The literary world, and especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful, and occasionally murderous, place. Character assassinations abound, books are regularly murdered in the (shrinking) book pages across our fair land, while others are smothered with damningly faint praise. More than a few knives, even if thankfully metaphorical, have been buried hilt deep in authorial backs.

Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage and only have a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your evident talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.

To celebrate the launch of Terry Griggs’s Thought You Were Dead, Biblioasis and Seen Reading are teaming up to help you unleash the murder we know is in your heart with our Revenge-Lit contest. Pen a flash fiction of 250 words or so (though, in truth, no one is likely to count them) on the (fictional) literary critic whose body once filled the chalk outline and what he did to get there and send it by June 12th to revengelit@gmail.com

The best of the entries will be published as they are received at RevengeLit.blogspot.com. The winning entry will:

1) Receive a one hundred dollar cash prize

2) Be published in a forthcoming issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries

3) A Biblioasis press catalogue of in-print trade titles (approx. 40 books, retail value approx. $1000.00)

Entries to be judged by Dan Wells, Julie Wilson and Terry Griggs.

Carnal Flower by Dominique Ropion is part of Frederic Malle’s Editions de Parfums. Dominique spent 2 years perfecting the formula for this perfume, which reportedly has the highest concentration of tuberose on the market.

So what? The “what” is that tuberose is a really heavy, dark, sexy floral essence. Tuberose flowers are white and light looking but they pack a powerful punch. Dominique’s perfume is not light but it’s not heavy either.

The first notes on my skin were citrus and green but as the hour wore on, the scent evolved to be a dull heady floral (and I mean that in a nice way). Most floral perfumes become really powdery on me but this one smelled a bit smoky and camphorous. It’s a bit like smelling the wrapper of a stick of Juicy Fruit next to a bouquet of tuberose.

As my mother used to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

I tell people that they should offer email subscription options as well as RSS because many people still prefer to receive email. That said, I had set up a Feedburner account, then crashed my website, then fixed it (thank you Hop Studios), then noticed the wrong “Sign Up for Email Alerts” was being used.

Alas … I’m back up on Feedburner, thank you for your patience.

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