Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

Survivors?

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An unusual choice of words.

I’m listening to NPR (National Public Radio) this morning. They’re reporting on the Pope’s private meetings with sexual abuse “survivors.”

While I certainly don’t mean to take anything away from the situation — children and young people molested or sexually abused by Catholic priests they trusted — the term survivor seems a little extreme as a label for these now grown people. The first definition of survivor in the dictionary that’s part of Mac OS X is:

a person who survives, esp. a person remaining alive after an event in which others have died : the sole survivor of the massacre.

And that’s how I usually think of a survivor. Consider the phrases Hurricane Katrina survivor, cancer survivor, Titanic survivor. Surely you can come up with others.

But the dictionary goes on to offer the following alternative definition for survivor:

the remainder of a group of people or things : a survivor from last year’s team.

or

a person who copes well with difficulties in their life : she is a born survivor.

Indeed: either of these definitions would apply to these unfortunate people.

What do you think? Is the term survivor an appropriate label for these people? Can you come up with a better label? Perhaps one you heard or read in the media? As someone interested in words, I’m curious.

Thinking Outside the Book

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A print author’s revelations about electronic book publishing.

As the print publishing industry suffers the pain of ever-higher costs and competition from other media, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about electronic books or ebooks.

You’re probably familiar with the concept. An ebook is roughly defined as text and image content — like you’d find in a traditional printed book — that’s distributed as a computer-compatible file or series of files. So rather than read the book on paper, you’d read it onscreen.

KindleRecently, Sony and Amazon.com have been pushing their versions of existing titles as ebooks for their Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. This is the most basic idea of an ebook — take the text found in the original book and reformat it for use in an electronic device to make it portable. Project Gutenberg has been doing this for years, with a huge team of volunteers transcribing out-of-copyright works to plain text format readable by almost any electronic device. (I have a handful of classics on my Treo 700p so I’m never without something interesting to read.)

Pros and Cons of Ebooks

A properly prepared ebook has numerous benefits over a traditional print book:

  • Ebooks don’t require paper to produce, so they’re “greener” than paper books.
  • Because ebooks don’t require paper, they’re less expensive to produce and ship. (Note that I said less expensive, not cost-free.)
  • Ebooks are much more easily corrected for errors or changes in the content.
  • Ebooks can be extremely portable, depending on the type of device they are designed for.
  • Since ebooks are less expensive to produce, they should be less expensive for readers to buy.

Likewise, print books still have a few benefits over ebooks:

  • Print books are generally easier to read, “thumb through,” and refer to, especially for those of us who learned to read with just paper books.
  • Print books don’t require a computer (or reader) or the expertise that goes with using such a device.
  • Print books can be read almost anywhere.
  • Print books are properly formatted for their content and the reader can consult an entire page or two-page spread at once.

So while I think the time has come for ebooks to rise as a serious method for distributing information, I don’t see printed books going away any time soon.

Dawn of the Ebook Revolution?

Although the idea of ebooks has been around for quite a while — and there are several failed ebook readers out there to prove it — a number of technological developments have made ebooks more popular than ever:

  • The ever-increasing adoption of the Internet and World Wide Web as a tool for finding information.
  • The ever-increasing speed of Internet connections, making it possible to get more information — including information in more advanced media formats such as audio and video — more quickly.
  • The ever-decreasing size and cost of computers. Smaller, less expensive computers make computers more attractive as a device for reading ebooks.
  • The ever-increasing computer savviness of readers. Not long ago, the “average” computer user didn’t have the technical know-how to download, open, and navigate the pages of an ebook.
  • The development of electronic publishing platforms, both local (such as portable document format or PDF) or onscreen (such as Safari) and digital rights management (DRM) to protect copyrights.
  • The development of devices such as the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle — both of which are considered “successes” — as well as the improvements to those devices and new competing devices.

As more and more readers adopt ebooks as a medium for reading content, more and more content will be made available in ebook format. Imagine a snowball rolling down a snow-covered slope. The ebook snowball has just started its roll.

Print Publishers Jump On Board — Sometimes in Attack Mode

Not willing to miss out on their piece of the ebook pie — and perhaps glimpsing the demise of print publishing in the distant future — traditional print publishers have begun offering books directly to the public in a variety of ebook formats. They see their competition not only from other ebook publishers, but from the Internet itself.

Product ImageInterestingly, rather than concentrate on creating an electronically published product that will appeal to readers, some publishers have been concentrating on efforts to discredit their Internet-based competition. For example, one of my publishers cites the ideas set forth and expounded on in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture by Andrew Keen as a testament for why content published on the Internet should not be trusted or relied upon. Although I have not yet read the book — and frankly, after seeing what a jerk Keen seemed to be during interviews on various talk shows, I’m not anxious to read it — the book apparently claims that “Web 2.0” has put online publishing in everyone’s hands and too many people are trying to pass themselves off as “experts.” From the book jacket:

In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it. And while the folks quoted on the back cover of the book tend to agree with this view — as my publisher does — there are quite a few highly respected people who don’t. Author Kevin Keohane wrote “Unpopular opinion: everyone’s an expert on the Internet. Is that such a bad thing?” for Communication World earlier this year. In it, he argues that “Keen ignores the fact that for every recognized expert, there are a dozen other passionate experts who have just as much information and insight.” Other critics all over the Web point out the holes and problems of Keen’s arguments.

To my publisher, it becomes more important to get the work of its professional, highly trained, and well edited authors into the electronic publishing world to compete with the “amateurs” out there than to produce the ebooks that people actually want to buy and read. It doesn’t seem to take into consideration that many of its “expert” authors — including me — are completely self-taught, just like the “amateurs” also providing online content. Even the editors, in many cases, began their careers doing something other than editing books. What makes me an “expert” is the 70 books and hundreds of articles under my belt. But back in 1992, when I hopped on this publishing roller coaster, I was no more an expert than today’s bloggers writing how-to pieces on their Web sites.

So my publishers have jumped into the world of ebook publishing by republishing their printed books both as as PDFs and online-viewable documents. And, in doing so, they’ve made several major errors that are losing readers and sales.

What’s Wrong with Most Ebooks

There are several problems with the way my publishers are republishing my work, but to understand what the problems are, you need to have a good handle on how the work is being republished.

One of my publishers is currently republishing my work in two formats:

Safari, an online content distributor, reproduces each page of a printed book by reassembling smaller images to build the book’s page. Imagine this: take the page of a book and use a paper cutter to cut it into a dozen squares. Now take those squares and shuffle them up, and place them on a grid, in the proper order to rebuild the page. This is what Safari does electronically.

There are multiple problems with this approach:

  • You must have an active connection to the Internet to read a book.
  • If your connection is slow (512 Kbps or less), you have to wait while each piece of a page is loaded and placed to read the page.
  • If you have a monitor less than 20 or 24 inches, you probably will not see the length of an entire page onscreen. That means you need to scroll and you need to wait while the rest of the page is assembled.

This is obviously not the best way to read a book. In fact, I fail to see why anyone would read a book this way. I have a free subscription to Safari and still buy the books I want to read. All Safari does is help me choose the one that’s likely to be best for me.

There are other problems with Safari that authors don’t like, but since they’re related to sales and royalties, I’ll leave them for another article.

My publisher also republishes my books in DRM-protected PDF format. This also provides readers with a page-by-page view of the printed book. And it also introduces multiple problems:

  • As I write this, Adobe’s DRM doesn’t work with the latest version of Adobe Reader. It doesn’t work with Preview or any other PDF reader software either. So readers are forced to use a specific version of Adobe Reader software.
  • The DRM prevents book buyers from copying the book to another device. So if you bought the book from your desktop computer and started reading it there, you can pretty much forget about copying it to your laptop to read while away from your office.
  • Although you can scale the book’s page size to fit your screen, if you don’t have a big screen, the print size might be too small to see. That means a larger scale and vertical scrolling. You can’t see a whole page at once.

Oddly enough, neither of these formats take advantage of electronic publishing features that would enhance the books. Other than hyperlinking table of contents entries on Safari and enabling search features on the DRM-protected PDFs, the ebooks are identical to the printed books — right down to their black and white screenshots — but presented onscreen instead of on paper.

Do the Pirates Have the Right Idea?

For the past two or so years, I’ve been suffering the heartache of having the electronic versions of my books appear as unprotected PDFs or CHM files on pirate Web sites. The PDF version, when printed, reproduces the entire book, from the [ignored] copyright page to the last page of the index. You have no idea how violated that makes me feel, especially when my ebook royalties from these same titles are so dismally low.

Interestingly enough, the CHM version of a book, if available, is a better product than the original book. Sure, it’s not formatted the same way, but it contains all the content — including the screenshots — and has the added benefit of being searchable and containing hypertext links to other book content. Like the PDF version, it’s portable in that it can be copied to and read on any computer. This makes it possible for the reader to put the book on a laptop and take it on a trip, to read during a long plane ride or consult when working offsite and print books are not available.

Readers Revolt

Product ImageRecently, a reader e-mailed me with some comments about the ebook version of my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard book. Although she didn’t blame me, she was angry about the purchase and the product she received. She didn’t like the DRM limitations, especially since she doesn’t like to use Adobe Reader. And although she’d bought the ebook version to save money — there was a special deal going on at the time — she didn’t feel as if she’d saved enough money to make the purchase worthwhile. She concluded in her message that she’d never buy another ebook from that publisher again.

And that reminded me of something that most publishers seem to have forgotten these days: we’re creating a product for our customers. How can we expect to sell a product that our customers don’t want?

The Way an Ebook Should Be

These two developments — pirated book formats and ebook reader feedback — got me thinking seriously about the whole ebook situation. I realized several things:

  • Ebooks should be designed to be read onscreen. (Duh.) That means a landscape (wide) layout rather than a portrait (tall) layout. The entire page should fit on a screen so scrolling is not required. Type should be sized so it’s readable even when the page is viewed on a relatively low resolution screen (for example, 800×600 pixels).
  • Ebook formats should take advantage of all commonly-used technology available. That means including color images (which are often too costly for printed books), hyperlinked references, and possibly even multimedia content such as sound and video. Imagine having an ebook with live links to additional content online! Why not?
  • Ebooks should not be protected by DRM. Readers hate DRM because it limits their access to the content. For a reader to get the most from the ebook experience, he should not be held back by limitations and the frustrations of poorly designed DRM software. If you buy an ebook, you should be able to read it on any of your devices that support that format.
  • Ebooks should be priced low enough that anyone can afford them. I believe that most people want to be honest and will not steal content. But people don’t understand why an ebook costs the same (or nearly the same) as a printed book when there’s no paper, printing, or shipping costs. They’re right — ebooks should be cheaper! (They should not, however, be free because a great deal of effort on the part of authors, editors, and layout folks goes into the book.) Fairly pricing an ebook will encourage people who want to read it to pay for it rather than possibly obtain a pirated copy.

And this is where I’ve apparently locked heads with my publisher. I don’t like the way my books are being republished as ebooks. I don’t like dissatisfying or upsetting my readers. I don’t want my readers going to another publisher’s ebooks and authors because my publisher can’t produce a product that meets their needs at a price they’re willing to pay. And I’m not the only author who feels this way.

Thinking Outside the Book

Simply put, my publisher cannot think “outside the book.”

They insist on regurgitating printed books in primitive and inconvenient electronic formats. They insist on sticking to the same price points when the average reader simply doesn’t believe that a paperless book is worth as much as one printed on paper. And they wonder why the books don’t sell, why the authors are angry, why the readers are staying away.

I believe that to succeed in today’s publishing world, publishing organizations need to stop thinking of books in terms of paper and print-friendly layouts. They need to think about the best way to disseminate information to the people who are willing to pay for it. They need to provide quality content in a format that’s convenient for readers. If that’s a printed book, fine. But if it’s an unprotected PDF with hyperlinks to internal and online content, publishers need to accept that — and make their ebooks the ones readers look for when they need information.

What do you think?

I’d love to get feedback from authors and readers about the ebook situation. Use the Comments link or form for this post to share your ideas. You can remain anonymous if you wish.

Work: Feast or Famine

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An empty summer packs up quickly.

Less than a week ago, on the morning of Friday, February 8, I was looking at a pretty empty summer season. I had one book contract lined up — an annual revision I usually work in in June and July — and no idea where or even if I’d be flying for someone else during the April through September timeframe I’d set aside for Alaska.

Two other books had been dangled in front of me on and off for the past two months. If I got them, they’d keep me busy from now until the summer time. But it didn’t look as if I’d get them.

And while I was hoping to spend the entire summer flying for someone else in Alaska, the recent demise of Silver State Helicopters dumped all of their CFIs (certified flight instructors) on the job market. If any of them had 1,000 hours (or said they had 1,000 hours), they’d be lined up for the few entry level jobs at the Grand Canyon, Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska. My experience level is a bit higher than entry level for those jobs, so employers would have to pay me more. Why pay for steak when hamburger will do? Despite four resumes out there in the land of the midnight sun, my phone remained silent. So it didn’t look as if I’d be going to Alaska after all.

And that was the state of things last Friday morning.

A Telephone Call Changes the Scene

I did have one other resume out in the wild: I’d sent it about a month before to an Illinois-based Part 135 operator. They were looking for a full time pilot to help them with a special contract and then do odd flying jobs as needed in the midwest. (And yes, I’m being purposely vague. Last week’s fiasco has put me into high caution mode.) I exchanged a few e-mails with the owner, who said that a contract pilot — which is what I’d prefer — might work out better for him. He told me to call him. I did, but never seemed to get him on the phone. I waited for him to call. He didn’t. I sent him an e-mail, asking if the job had been filled; if it had, I’d stop bothering him. He wrote back to say the job wasn’t filled, he was definitely interested in me, but he was swamped with work. He’d call. He didn’t. All this happened during the course of a month.

On Friday, I decided to call again. I wanted to either cross off this opportunity or bring it into the realm of possibility. I got the owner on the phone. We hit it off right away. I got the feeling he’d spoken to a few other people about the job and they weren’t interested in some of the more unusual aspects. (Again, I’m being vague on purpose; I don’t want anyone to screw this up for me.) I also got the feeling he was being inundated with resumes from Silver State casualties of Chapter 7 — guys who have earned their 1,000 hours in a simulator or as an active passenger during dual instruction flights. He wanted someone with experience flying passengers for hire, which I’ve been doing since 2001. We joked around a little. He told me that mid-month, he would fly me up to his base for a face-to-face meeting and a chance for me to see their equipment. I assume a flight would also be part of the interview process.

I hung up the phone feeling good. This opportunity had gone from a long shot to a 75% or more chance of getting the job. And without going into details, I can assure you that the job will be very interesting, with plenty to blog about — if I’m allowed to.

Two More Calls, Three More Books?

Product ImageMy phone rang on Monday morning. It was one of my editors. He’s been swamped since the holidays and has just dug out of the pile of work on his desk. He pulled one of the dangling books out of the air and slapped it on the negotiation table. We talked terms, we agreed. (My co-author on the book agreed yesterday.) I’m looking for a contract in the mail any day now. Time frame? Well, the book is already listed on Amazon.com, so I guess I’d better get to work on it soon.

He also dangled that other book around some more, but no decision was made. We didn’t even talk terms. So although I can’t count on it yet, it’s definitely still in the picture.

Yesterday, I got another call from another editor I work with regularly. She flat-out offered me a book deal with terms that would be tough to turn down. So I said yes. The contract should come within the next week or so. Timeframe: late summer. Sorry; no details will be forthcoming anytime soon.

What’s good about all this is that I have enough writing work lined up to support me through the summer, when Flying M Air continues to incur expenses but does not incur much (if any) revenue.

Another Call with another Flying Possibility

Between the two editor calls, I got a call from a California-based Part 135 helicopter operator. They’d seen my helicopter forum post that had a subject line like “Single Pilot Part 135 Operator with Helicopter Available for Summer Months.” This guy is interested in expanding his business to offer a major city’s commuters with helicopter transportation into that city from the suburbs. (Yes, I’m being vague again; jeez, I hate this.) Rather than invest in a lot of equipment and train pilots, he thinks we might work together with me and my helicopter subcontracted by his organization to provide the flights. If things work out, he’ll expand; if they don’t, no serious money lost.

While this is very interesting to me, I’m worried that there won’t be enough revenue in it to support me and my aircraft. After all, I’d have to relocate for the entire summer and the city in question ain’t exactly cheap to live in. But it is a really nice city, one I wouldn’t mind living in at all. I told him about my other opportunity and how I wanted to pursue that first. He said that if that job didn’t work out and I was still available, I should call him in a month or so to talk about flying for him.

I’m calling that “Summer Job Plan C.”

Plan D, I should mention, is cherry drying in Washington State, which, as usual, is always dangling out there but never quite attainable.

Today

My helicopter calendar has a few — but not many — things on it. I’ll be doing rides at the Buckeye Air Fair again on Saturday. I picked up a Sky Harbor Charter for March with some folks who already told me they want another day trip when they come to Wickenburg. And I have a Wickenburg area tour prebooked through a tour company for March 1.

The Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure simply is not selling. It could be my limited marketing budget. But I can’t see paying $10-$15K for a magazine advertisement if it’ll take the sale of more than 10 excursions just to pay for the ad. (The trip really is a smoking deal and I don’t make much money on it.)

But I do have some possibilities on desert racing aerial photography gigs lined up for March and April. We’ll see how that goes. The ferry cost is hard for most of those companies to swallow. I’d do a lot better with race photography gigs if I’d relocate to Lake Havasu or Bullhead City. (And believe me, I’m thinking about it.)

Today, I’m finishing up an article I started on Monday for FileMaker Advisor magazine. Then I’m going to work on my outline for my half of our WordPress book revision. If I finish that before the end of the day, I’ll finish up my series of articles about using Viddler with WordPress. And maybe — just maybe — I’ll record another video blog entry.

But only if I can do something with my hair.

Article Length

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My biggest challenge.

Yesterday, I began writing an article for a travel magazine. The magazine is relatively well-known and it pays pretty darn well. I’ve never written about travel — beyond what you’ll find in this blog — but I think I’m up to the task.

But I am facing a challenge: word count. The article cannot be more than 1,500 words.

I’m not accustomed to working with length constraints. On my blog, I can make an article as long or as short as I want to. The same goes for the articles I write for InformIt and other Web-based publishers. (That’s one of the benefits of publishing on the Web — it costs the same to publish no matter how long it is.) Even my book publishers don’t usually limit my page count.

But this is a print publication and the limits are real. And I seriously doubt that the editors there will love my words enough to make an exception for me.

Keeping It Short

The way I see it, there are two ways to keep an article short:

  • Write it short. I’m using Word 2004 (old habits really do die hard) to write the piece. Word includes a live word count feature, so I can monitor word count as I type. This is how I’m trying to write the piece. What I’m finding is that I’m about 1/4 finished writing, but have used up more than half my alloted words. As a result, I keep going back and shortening up earlier paragraphs and sentences to make room for the rest of the story. I don’t think this is the best approach.
  • Write it without worrying about page count, then go back and edit the hell out of it. This is how I usually tackle length problems — especially when I have to shorten up text that appears on a page I’m laying out. In those instances, I’m cutting out 10 to 30 words. But at the rate I’m going with this article, I’ll have to cut more than 1,000 words. This can’t possibly be productive. After all, I’m writing material that I’m just discarding.

Another Way?

It occurs to me that there probably is another way to keep it short: rethink the entire article and reduce the amount of information I want to provide.

This is probably a more professional way to go about it. It requires me to come up with an outline of what I want to discuss and budget a certain amount of words for each part. If there are too many parts, I need to cut out the parts that don’t really communicate the theme of the piece. Once I have a handle on how to approach the article, I should be able to write it close to the proper length. I can then edit it down as needed.

The key, of course, it to stay within budget for each part of the article.

And I think this is a good example of how blogging and writing for the Web can hurt a writer. When I blog, I have no editor — it’s just me. I can write whatever I want, whatever way I want to write it. Sentence fragments? No problem. Slang? Go for it! Extensive use of parenthetical commentary? Why not (since I always have more than just one thing to say)? Bloggers who are also professional writers can lose the discipline they need to produce high-quality work for publisher with very specific needs.

But I think I’ll tackle blogging and how it affects writing skills in another post.

Any Thoughts?

Do any writers out there have some advice for me? Speak up! Use the Comments link or form.

[Mostly] Unmissed Words

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Weekend Assignment #197: Missing Words

The question:

Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What show do you miss most, aside from reruns?

The writer’s strike isn’t affecting me much at all. I’m not a big TV viewer. In fact, there are only three shows I watch with any regularity:

  • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
  • The Colbert Report
  • Boston Legal

Of these, the only one I sorely miss is The Daily Show. Jon Stewart’s take on the news is a real wake-up call. Only he can make it clear how absurd things are getting in this country and the world.

Although I enjoy Colbert, I can take him or leave him.

Boston Legal didn’t start going into reruns until recently — at least I don’t think so. For all I know, it might still be running new episodes.

I watch all television on DVR (Dish Network’s version of TiVo). I absolutely cannot tolerate commercial breaks. We have our DVR set up to record the programs we watch, then, when we have time to watch them, we do. I’d gotten into the habit of watching Stewart and Colbert each night, the day after the show was “taped.” When the writer’s strike hit, we just turned off the DVR timers so the reruns wouldn’t fill the hard drives.

Last night, I asked my husband to turn on the timers for David Letterman. He’s back at work now with his writers and would probably make a good substitute for Jon Stewart.

I occasionally watch science, technology, and history shows in PBS, Discovery, History, etc. But I don’t think any of those are new and have no idea if any of that kind of programming is affected by the strike.

I should mention that my husband watches a lot of television — at least 2 to 3 hours an evening. He’s perfectly happy with reruns (apparently) but also watches sports and movies. He also has a much higher tolerance for commercials and can even watch live television.

Extra Credit: how are you spending the time instead?

I’m definitely spending more time reading. I’m preparing for my helicopter Instrument rating, which requires me to read and understand a lot of very unintuitive material — things like tracking VORs, making procedure turns, and doing other things I still don’t quite get. So each evening, I settle down with one of my study guides and read a chapter or two. Sometimes I take notes.

Yesterday, we bought an easy chair for the bedroom so I wouldn’t have to read in bed. Reading this stuff in bed puts me to sleep.

As a writer, I’m siding with the writers. I believe that writers should get royalties or residuals (or whatever they’re called in this instance) on anything they write that’s sold. While some people argue that it might only be pennies per episode of a show that’s sold on iTunes (for example), a lot of pennies do add up to dollars. If a writer is involved in a hit television show that sells millions in the digital markets, why shouldn’t they benefit?

For the record, I’d love to write for television. One of my dreams is to be part of a research and writing team for an educational show on Discovery or PBS. I could do that. And I’d love to go on the road to some of those exotic places while they filmed scenes and talked to experts and locals. Great stuff.