Author Gives Away Ebooks...

Recently received comments regarding self-promotion from Mike Dixon, author's of Curtin Express:

I'm at last having success in promoting myself as an author. I've not started to sell books. That crucial point has not yet been reached. However, people are downloading my free ebooks and they are doing so consistently.

I'm averaging over 40 downloads a day. I start by making the books available through the "free ebook sites" listed on my home page. After that, they seem to generate a following of their own.

I suspect that Facebook plays a part but not directly. Attempts to promote through my own page on Facebook have produced poor results. The same can be said for Twitter and all those other ways that the viral explosion people talk about. They will take you for a ride which can cost a lot in time and money before you realise they are talking nonsense.

My advice is "Get focused". Expose your books to people who are interested in books and forget about everything else.

My remarks apply to works of fiction. A different approach may be appropriate in other areas.

My books are currently available in PDF format.  I have started to convert them to epub via html and calibre (free on net). The steps are (i) use microsoftword to produce document - jpg images may be included. (ii) save for web (iii) convert with calibre - just three clicks on the mouse is all that it takes. Finally, don't forget to support the folks at calibre with a small payment.

The epub format allows your book to be viewed on a small hand-held device (eg iphone). I'll let you know what the outcome is. I suspect epub will greatly increase the number of downloads. There's only one way to find out.

Another Impressive Author Website...

Sue Gillou's book "The Mayan Priest" is currently climbing the Amazon charts and doing especially well on the Kindle platform. Here's a list of some of the promotional factors that have contributed to her success:

Audio Books for All

Apple Computers don't do many things for free (or even allow you to access free things), but the podcasts category on their itunes store is an honorable exception. Within the podcasts are a subset of audio books recorded by an organisation called Librivox. This non commercial project uses volunteer readers to voice classic books in the public domain. As you would expect, the quality of recordings is variable. Hundreds of books have been recorded, and all comers are welcome to contribute. Audio books are also downloadable directly from their website. Overall, a very worthwhile project.

Inklings

Wacom seem to have come up with an intuitive way of melding the hands-on beauty of drawing on paper with the world of digital design. Using a special pressure-sensitive pen, an artist/designer can draw directly and intuitively onto paper (with real ink) and all marks will be recorded by the pen for later uploading. Wacom's promotional text claims that Inkling "bridges the gap between traditional, freehand sketching and digital development". 

Web Designers rise up

Web designers vent in .net magazine about the inadequacies of industry standard web authoring tools, particularly those released by Adobe. They assert that the programs are mired in old technology, and do not reflect the contemporary web of css, html 5, resizeable sites and mobile devices. Their dream product would be able to accurately preview how design elements would display in a browser, and offer WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) control over design elements, plus access to code.

Festivals and Type

For this draft of a local Festivals program we needed to adhere to a certain corporate colour palette and also make reference to a corporate 'swirl' (see the base of the image). We took elements of the swirl and employed them throughout the A3 double-sided brochure, and set some type to follow the curving lines and thus add visual interest. The typeface used is the elegant HF&J Archer, mentioned before on this blog.

Archive of Everything

The interface is pretty ugly, but the ambition is grand and noble: "universal access to all knowledge". The Internet Archive describes itself as a 'library of the Internet". It stores/caches permanently billions of pages and millions of websites, plus audio and visual files. To do that, it needs serious storage capacity (we're talking petabytes). The Internet is such an evanescent, fizzing medium, continually addicted to the new and happy to forget the old almost instantly, that an organisation dedicated to preserving that tumult seems very valuable.

The Wayback Machine (a part of the site), for searching websites cached over the past decade or more, is exceptionally easy to use and functional. Likewise, the Open Library, featuring millions of digitised books, is incredibly interesting and well designed. Hopefully the programmers who put it together will work on making the entire site more accessible to lay users. 

 

A Muse yourself

Adobe has long striven to cater to code-phobic designers, via GoLive and later Macromedia acquisition Dreamweaver. Their latest offering (Muse) is the most intutive yet and aimed squarely at print designers with minimal web authoring skills. Muse looks and feels a touch like InDesign and offers similar object-oriented functionality. The program is currently in beta and is available as a free download until early next year.

Muse has its detractors in the web design community. Coders concur that the code it automatically produces is ugly and full of redundancy. They dislike the way Muse renders non-standard typefaces, the lack of dynamic page resizing, and argue that print designers should learn their web skills the way they did — via hard work and experimentation. 

Making email work for you

If you use email, you know how much spam rubbish and general clutter floods into your inbox. Some estimates place the amount of unwanted email traffic at 95% (fortunately most of it is filtered out before it afflicts you). Yet despite this white noise, email is still one of the most powerful marketing channels, social media notwithstanding. Most people still maintain an email address, and most still read their email. If you have clients and potential clients you'd like to reach, email is a very good place to start. But beside coming up with attractive, interesting content, you will want your email communications to look professional, and you will need to track the metrics of your various email campaigns. Vision6 and MailChimp offer users a low cost and easy-to-use entry to the world of email marketing. MailChimp in particular offers an absurdly generous free service to users generating less than 12,000 emails per month.  Plus they have a cute monkey avatar that dispenses cheerful backchat.

360 degree world

Google Street View gives users the chance to 'stand' on any of millions of streets and pan to see the scenery. But as every viewer knows, the average street is pretty prosaic, and the image quality is not fabulous anyway. Which brings us to 360cities. This immersive site has thousands of high resolution 360 degree images from all over the world — views of mountains, canyons, urban scenes, forest glades and massive crowds. The images are seamless, sharp and occupy your full screen with thousands of details that you can absorb at leisure. The interface is easy to navigate, piggybacking on Google maps (and also appearing as a layer in Google Earth), and once you get started, stopping is a problem. Check out some of their ultra high resolution images — the London Eye panorama is a jaw dropping 80 gigapixels.

Patterns and Colour

Fascination with combinations of repeating images/symbols and colour seems to span cultures and appear in every historical period. The Mayans, the Egyptians, the Persians and Victorian-era Britons were obsessed with pattern, whether applied to walls, monuments, clothes or jewellery. Those similarly afflicted in the 21st century can use programs like this. While they may not be designing a grand tomb, they could at least generate a nifty wallpaper for their mobile phone or PC...

 

Gmail now comes with Preview pane

After years of requests from frustrated users, Gmail labs finally offers a preview pane option -- meaning, gasp, a user can now do what they have always been able to do in desktop mail clients -- read the bloody email with clicking into it. With many desktop PC users using very large screens, they have real estate to burn and a preview pane feels like an efficiency improver -- every second counts!

Crowdsourcing: an Exchange

The Internet has brought many benefits for designers (enhanced communications with clients, easy transfer of files, access to vast image libraries and type retailers, etc) but it has also brought some challenges. One of these is the phenomenon of Crowdsourcing. Certain websites offer clients the chance to post a brief, and receive many potential designs before paying a pittance for the selected artwork. Needless to say, the vast majority of crowdsourced designs are deriviative, poorly thought out and represent the lowest common denominator of graphic design. The exchange here goes right to the heart of this vexed issue and does a great job of explaining why using a real designer is always a better option.