Seth Godin: Open conversations

A guy walks into a shop that sells ties. He's opened the conversation by walking in.

Salesman says, "can I help you?"

The conversation is now closed. The prospect can politely say, "no thanks, just looking."

Consider the alternative: "That's a [insert adjective here] tie you're wearing, sir. Where did you buy it?"

Conversation is now open. Attention has been paid, a rapport can be built. They can talk about ties. And good taste.

Or consider a patron at a fancy restaurant. He was served an old piece of fish, something hardly worth the place's reputation. On the way out, he says to the chef,

"It must be hard to get great fish on Mondays. I'm afraid the filet I was served had turned."

If the chef says, "I'm sorry you didn't enjoy your meal..." then the conversation is over. The patron has been rebuffed, the feedback considered merely whining and a matter of personal perspective.

What if the chef said instead, "what kind of fish was it?" What if the chef invited the patron back into the kitchen to take a look at the process and was asked for feedback?

Open conversations generate loyalty, sales and most of all, learning... for both sides.
-- Seth Godin, Open conversations (or close them)

I love Seth's blog. Often, after reading one of his posts, and I'll look at the world -- even if it's only one small corner of it -- in a new way. Take his post on opening conversations, above. He is right! Rather than saying, "Can I help you?" when someone comes into the store, say, "Hey, I love your handbag, where did you buy it?" That opens the conversation. "Can I help you?" gives the customer an obvious out, just say: No thank you. No further interaction.

It's common sense, but I'd never have thought of it in just that way.

Now, how do we apply this to writing?

My State of the Union

I haven't blogged for a couple of days, I'm sorry about that. Making at least one blog post a day is a priority for me and I wanted to let everyone know what's up.

My Dad is ill. I've shared this was some of you, usually I've just said I have a family emergency. After a decades long fight with kidney disease, my father's kidneys are failing. A week or so ago a nurse told me Dad's kidneys were very close to ... well, she just said that he would probably need to be rushed to the hospital sometime in the next two weeks. Hopefully, with the aid of a kidney machine, my Dad still has time left.

Obviously this is an emotional time for me, but it is also a busy one. My mother passed away in January and I have no siblings. My father is nearly blind -- I suspect he is legally blind -- and is hard of hearing, so he needs an attendant for his appointments. I do this gladly, but between taking care of my father and working, I have less time to write.


SO! Wow, I feel bad about dumping all that on you. Are you ready to hear my solution to my time problems? Here it is: Video blogging.

I'm a slow writer. I make slugs look like cheetahs by comparison. That was one reason I took up blogging; I figured I couldn't spend an eternity on a blog post and blog every day -- or even every week! And yet, I've managed to. Perhaps video blogging, as long as I don't read from a script, will help me to stop obsessing over every little thing. (A little voice is chuckling and saying, 'When pigs fly'. Whatev. ;)

My plan is to keep up with my links on Twitter, to keep posting about articles on my blog, and to begin posting perhaps a video a week. My videos will likely be sporadic and less than perfect, and I will deeply appreciate your patience as they improve.

I've felt guilty about not writing more personal posts, post like this one. Hopefully, video blogging will help with that. Also, I've discovered the Daily Post over at Wordpress. It's a blog that, each day, gives blogging suggestions for that day. I look forward to writing a couple of posts inspired by the topics of the day. And of course there's NaNoWriMo, I'm doing that this year; first time!

Reading over this post it looks as though I've explained why I don't have as much time as I used to and then decided to keep up with what I'm doing as well as add a whole bunch! lol Well, we'll see how that goes. Whatever happens, thanks for being understanding. :)

Cheers.

The Passive Guy writes about monopolies

He writes:

Major publishers have worked themselves into much the same position that Microsoft has. There are separate publishing companies, of course, but in important ways, they act in concert like a single monopolistic company.

For example, each offers virtually identical royalty terms to writers. Each offers very similar contract terms to writers. The only way publishers compete for a particular manuscript is by the amount of the advance. They have tacitly agreed not to compete in other ways.

As others have observed, big publishers have a remarkably haphazard manner of finding what they need to survive – new books.

Generally speaking, big publishers don’t develop their own products. Each sits around and waits for someone outside the company to give them a good new product idea. PG suggests that only in a shared monopoly could such a bizarre business practice be sustained.

The big publishers work with highly monopolistic big book wholesalers. The big book wholesalers work with a network of bookstores that has become highly consolidated over the last 20 years.

PG suggests the entire distribution chain from publisher the wholesaler to bookstore manifests classic features and behaviors of a monopolistic system – lack of innovation, lack of flexibility, narrow-gauge management and inbred thinking.

As one evidence of monopoly among Big Publishing, PG would point to what he believes to be a credible suit against all the large publishers for price fixing, one of the harms of monopoly.

While it is possible that Amazon may someday become a monopoly with all of the drawbacks that accompany such status, today, Amazon is primarily an Internet company. It is very close to its early history fighting its way up through a very competitive environment and is most definitely committed to innovation and very fast and flexible.

In your wildest imagination, can you conceive of Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins developing the Kindle? Elephants would flit back and forth among the clouds before that would happen.

A monopoly believes it is a permanent fixture in its industry. An Internet e-commerce company worries obsessively that it can be destroyed at any time if it doesn’t stay fast and smart. The contrast between Amazon and big publishing could not be more stark.

Big publishing is essentially unable to compete because its monopoly position has caused it to become inflexible and it has lost the ability to innovate. In the same way that Microsoft bumbles and stumbles when it tries to take on Apple or Google, big publishing is slow and oafish when compared to Amazon.

Read the entire article here: Will publishers be able to maintain primacy as ebook publishers?

Ebook: A book with no body?

Have you seen those old and marvelously cheesy sci-fi movies where someone is disassembled, digitized, and lives -- non-corporeally -- in a computer?
The other day I was musing that this is what has happened to the book.

Originally stories were written in pictures on walls, then on scrolls and, later still, the codex was developed. Stories were embodied in various physical mediums over the years and each new embodiment was considered a technological innovation.

Enter the ebook. With the advent of electronic books, the story has shed its physical, corporeal, form. Physical pulp and paper books have a shelf life and the story they contain has to be copied over to a new book, a laborious process, one that conjures up images of monks stooped over velum, quill in hand, painstakingly scribing words, sentences, into a new volume. Now the process is instantaneous and costs practically nothing.

It is an interesting thing to think about; at least for myself. But, then, I'm strange. ;)

For more weird and wonderful musings, check out Lev Grossman's article in The New York Times, From Scroll to Screen. (Thanks to Bob Mayer, and a comment he made on Kris Rusch's post, for the link.)

Joe Konrath: Hiatus Part Deux

In about 24 hours Joe Konrath received over a hundred guest posts! Unless Joe intends to be on Hiatus a long, long, time he's never going to be able to use that many. Joe's idea is to put together an ebook. As he writes:

Over one hundred ebook authors writing about their personal publishing journeys. We'd all want to read that.

This is how he'd do it:

I'd write the intro, and put a few pieces in there, so it would be an ebook edited by J.A. Konrath & Rob Siders. So far, no one has written the definitive tome on ebook self-publishing. This could be it.

Rob does amazing work, and he's going to put in dozens of hours on this project, and he deserves to be paid. I'm not going to pay him, because I'm not going to make any money on this. I'm just the figurehead.

So this is my proposal. I think this ebook should be priced at $2.99, and Rob keeps the money.

If you're a writer who sent me a guest blog, I'm sure part of the reason you did it was to reach my readers and publicize your ebook.

An ebook collection would work in the same way. You get the exposure and links to your titles, Rob gets paid for the untold hours he has to put in, and I don't have to disappoint anyone.

I don't pay people for guest blogs. And I've always allowed people to repost my blog entries on their blogs (or in their how-to books) for free, so I'm not asking you for anything you weren't already willing to give away.

I'll make zero money on this, but my name is pretty well-known, so you'll get your article in front of a lot of eyes. Your article, plus links to your ebooks and your websites and blogs.

Rob would be asking for non-exclusive rights, meaning you could use your piece elsewhere, and you could have it taken out of the collection at any time.

Sounds good to me! Read the rest here: Hiatus Part Deux

Leader of the indie movement, Joe Konrath, goes on hiatus

I have screamed into the wind for a long time.
Screamed so loud, some have heard me.
But I'm tired of screaming.
I'm taking a hiatus from blogging for an indeterminate time. This indiestry (just coined that term) is sustainable without me.
- Joe Konrath, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, Hiatus

Joe has earned a break and I wish him well. But he continues:

However, I am going to open up this blog to writers, and let other people do the screaming for a while.

If you'd like to write a guest blog, email me your piece.

I'm glad I wasn't holding my coffee, I might have dropped it!

What sort of guest blogs is Joe looking for? Here is what I've gleaned from his post:

- You must share what you have learned about publishing.
- You must talk about your own story, your own writing journey. What have you done to sell your book(s)? What were the results? What would you change, if you had the chance? What are you thinking of trying in the future? What have you learned? What advice do you have for folks who are thinking of going indie?
- Keep your post under 1,200 words.

In Joe's words: "Show me, and the world, whatcha got."

Although I eagerly await reading about what other indie authors have tried, I hope that Joe starts blogging again soon.

You can read Joe's entire article here: Hiatus

Amazon versus the big-6 publishers

Is it any wonder that Amazon isn’t too worried about competing with Big Publishers? It’s like the Army Rangers taking on the Des Moines elementary school crossing guards.
- PG, Why Publishing is Like Baseball and Politics

PG has written an excellent commentary on Kris Rusch's post, The Way We Were.

Datastreams can be very valuable. Lots of people are working to parse Twitter’s datastream these days.

Passive Guy recently read an article that said news of the big East Coast earthquake south of Washington DC reached New York City faster by Twitter than it did via official disaster warning networks. Researchers are watching Twitter for everything from who’s rising and who’s not in Republican presidential politics to how the latest revolution is progressing in the Middle East.

At this point, the most valuable part of Amazon is the proprietary datastream it receives from its sales each day. An enormous competitor with bazillions of dollars could set up an online store, regional warehouses, etc., but it would be blind compared to Amazon because it doesn’t have the current and historical data and the ability to predict what customers will want next.

Wal-Mart was the first big retailer to actively exploit the value of its sales data. That was one of the reasons it beat Sears, K-Mart and some store chains that don’t exist any more.

Before widespread internet access, each Wal-Mart had a satellite antenna that beamed daily, then hourly, then real-time sales data back to the mothership in Bentonville, Arkansas. Bentonville is a fine place to operate the world’s largest retailer. When you’re digital, it doesn’t matter where you are located. Being in Manhattan is becoming a less and less valuable business asset, but PG doesn’t want to fight with any New Yorkers. He agrees it has a unique vibe and enjoys his trips there. He never heard a cab driver speaking Farsi in Bentonville.

Wal-Mart began to rearrange its stores based upon its sales data, featuring different items on its end-caps (displays at the end of aisle) each day depending on what it knew would sell best on Thursdays. One illustrative story has Wal-Mart putting diapers next to beer on the weekends. Dad’s at home. When he is sent to the store to buy diapers, he decides he deserves a beer for his sacrifice.

Unfortunately, PG heard the Wal-Mart data guru speak at a conference a few years ago and he said the beer/diapers story is apocryphal, but confirmed that Wal-Mart knew about a lot of products that sold better when they’re placed next to each other. With today’s technology, Bentonville data gnomes can drill down to sales made at individual cash registers located half-way around the world.

As Kris points out, sifting through a datastream the size of Amazon’s or Wal-Mart’s to discover important information about where customers have been and where they’re likely to go was impossible before the tremendous boom in computing power. The area is usually described as business analytics or data mining and smart companies do a lot of it. When PG was an executive in a business analytics software company a few years ago, he negotiated contracts with every big and rich firm on Wall Street.

But no contracts with publishers. As we’ve read, Big Publishing is having problems getting ebook royalty reports from Amazon and Nook plugged into their ancient royalty reporting software, a trivial programming job. PG doesn’t see them moving into data mining very quickly.

People sometimes believe that Amazon’s major advantage over traditional booksellers is its willingness to aggressively discount. That certainly plays a role, but the folks in Seattle are also much, much smarter about what sells and what doesn’t.

Amazon doesn’t discount everything every day. The people making pricing decisions know exactly how much money they make from selling a currently-available Kindle ereader. They have a very good idea of how much profit they’ll make from each Kindle Fire they sell for $199 even if Amazon pays more than that to buy the Fire.

Amazon is not just selling a tablet. They’re selling a tablet that will generate a stream of new purchases of ebooks, movies, music and almost everything else they sell. Whatever loss they take on the tablet itself is an investment in a future customer.

Is it any wonder that Amazon isn’t too worried about competing with Big Publishers? It’s like the Army Rangers taking on the Des Moines elementary school crossing guards.

Read more over at The Passive Voice.

Book Promotion Tips for Hardcore Introverts

Hardcore introvert, that's me! I just found Lindsay Buroker through twitter (@GoblinWriter) and I just had to share a few of her tips for how introverts can flourish on the web:

Ignore the people who try to be everywhere (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, every forum, etc.), using these platforms as billboards for their stuff, sending out grating sales pitches all the time. If they’re selling books, it’s in spite of what they’re doing there rather than because of it.

So, what do you do?

1. Start a blog (if you’re like me, you’ll be most comfortable sharing your thoughts, and maybe throwing in a post or two about your books, on your own site because it’s a place people have voluntarily chosen to visit — you’re not bugging anyone in a “public” venue).

2. Pick one or two social media sites to get involved on (I’ve been on Twitter for ages — I like it since you’re forced to keep messages short so it’s not a big time sink — and I’ve recently started doing more with Facebook, since much of my target audience hangs out there).

3. Use those sites to get to know your fans (or people who, based on their profiles, might become your fans!), and also use them to promote interesting posts on your blog. People are a lot more likely to click on a link to a possibly-useful-to-them blog post than they are to click on a buy-my-book link. Then, through your blog, people can get to know your writing style and what you’re all about. (I use affiliate links to track sales that originate from my blog, and I sell more than I’d expect, given that I write about e-publishing instead of fantasy or something specifically for my target audience.)

You can read the entire article here: Book Promotion Tips for Hardcore Introverts

Experts making mistakes

Amazon had to pull, redo and reload Neal Stephenson’s latest title Reamde after readers complained about numerous errors costing Harper-Collins and Stephenson considerable money and causing bad publicity. Beta testers for JK Rowling’s Pottermore web site were so underwhelmed with it, the opening of it has been pushed back. Reading reviews on Amazon I find numerous books from the Big 6, like Dan Simmons’ classic, Hyperion, getting savaged in eBook reviews because of serious formatting errors.

In his latest article, Bob Mayer talks about Experts making mistakes in publishing. Here's a link to the rest of his article, Reamde, Pottermore, Hyperion and other mistakes from publishing “experts”

I'm excited! Later this month I'm going to be taking a couple of Bob Mayer's classes at the Surrey International Writers' Conference. I attended last year and had a fabulous time. Not only did I meet dozens are people like me -- people I didn't have to explain myself to! -- but I learnt an amazing amount about the art and craft of writing. The keynote speeches alone were worth the price.

Okay, back to my blog post. Although Bob Mayer came at it from a different angle, some of what he wrote reminded me of Dean Wesley Smith's latest blog post: The New World of Publishing: Traditional Publishers Are Getting What They Deserve. Well worth the read.

The Night and the Music by Lawrence Block: 5 out of 5 stars

I thought I had read all Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder short stories, but I had missed one or two, and of course One Last Night At Grogan's was brand new. It was a joy to be drawn into Scudder's world again. It's one of those things you know is going to happen but is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment it occurs. One moment I was reading words and thinking about writing style and point of view and the next I was in the story, sharing Matthew Scudder's thoughts, alive in his world.

It was a thrill to read this collection of Scudder stories; this is Lawrence Block at his best. Here's hoping he never stops writing.

One more thing, at the end of THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC, is a section titled, 'About These Stories,' in which Lawrence Block writes a bit about each of the stories in the volume. For me, this was one of the best parts of the book since I love reading writers discuss their writing, what they were thinking, what influenced their craft, and so on.

All in all, THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC was a treat to read.

I know I've probably left a lot of questions about THE NIGHT unanswered, so here is a FAQ about The Night and the Music from LB's blog:

Far as I’m concerned, it’s not a real book unless a tree dies. How do I get The Night and the Music in real book form?

There’ll be print-on-demand trade paperbacks on sale at online booksellers, or through your local brick-and-mortar store, in two weeks or so. The price is $14.95.

You don’t understand. I want a signed copy.

No problem. At last count, there are thirteen top mystery booksellers who will be carrying signed copies. You can drop by one of their stores, phone up, or order online. The full list is on Matthew Scudder’s Page.

Or you can order from our own website operation, LB’s Bookstore. Our price is $15 plus shipping.

You only ship to the U.S. I live in Canada/Scotland/Tierra del Fuego. Don’t you care about your overseas readers? How can I get a signed copy?

I cherish my overseas readers, but stopped shipping out of the country because postal rigamarole makes it way too much trouble for an operation our size. The booksellers on Matthew Scudder’s Page are not thus constrained, and most if not all of them will be delighted to fill your order.

And, of course, the eBook is accessible just about anywhere. International prices may vary among online retailers, so you may want to shop around, but you’ll find it.

Will there be a hard cover edition?

Otto Penzler of Mysterious Bookshop has an upscale leatherbound signed-and-numbered edition of 100 copies that should be ready sometime in November. It’ll be gorgeous—and, at $150, it ought to be. (It’ll also sell out, so if you want one, better call: (800) 352-2840.)

It’s possible there’ll be a hardcover trade edition as well, sometime in the future, but at this stage I’d say chances of that are fairly slim.

What about an audiobook? What about foreign editions? Some of us like to read with our ears, and some of us prefer our native tongue. What are we, gehackte Leber?

I should have audiobook news soon. And my agent, the estimable Danny Baror (danny@barorint.com), will be representing the book at Frankfurt Book Fair. The Matthew Scudder books have been translated into a couple dozen languages, and I have every expectation that The Night and the Music will join them.

To read LBs entire post, click here: THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC--some FAQs.

Here are some links to THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC:
- on Amazon
- on Barnes & Noble
- on Smashwords