Entries tagged with “authoring” from Tools of Change for Publishing
NaNoWriMo Now Underway
Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen 
One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out the website for ways to support and participate.
Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online
Andrew Savikas
October 2, 2009
| Permalink
|
Listen
Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel).
Keith also offers up a nice post-mortem on the first book to go through the system, Programming Scala, where "over the months, nearly 100 people left a total of 543 comments. Ten contributors stood out in particular, giving more than a third of the total comments."
New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System
Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs:
Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.
You can see the system in action at the site for our upcoming book Programming Scala.
StartWithXML Research Report Now Available for Sale
Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
If you weren't able to attend the StartWithXML Forum last month in New York, the accompanying research report is available for sale. The report covers topics like:
- Where am I and where do I want to end up?
- How much benefit do I want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing?
- How much work do I want to do myself?
- How much time and money will this take?
When you purchase the report, you get it as our full eBook Bundle, including PDF, EPUB, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket formats.
If you're ready for a deeper dive into XML, there are two very complementary tutorials lined up during next week's TOC Conference:
And if that's still not enough angle brackets for you, check out the Introduction to XML course from the O'Reilly School of Technology, which earns you four CEUs (Continuing Education Units) and a CEU letter from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education. Save $50 with discount code SWXML09.
BeyondPrint Offers Helpful Review of StartWithXML
Brian O'Leary
January 15, 2009
| Permalink
| Comments (26)
|
Listen
George Alexander, who attended the StartWithXML forum in New York on Tuesday and made quick work of reading the research paper (thank you!), offers a helpful review of both.
In his review, George also offers a view he shared with the StartWithXML team the day after the forum: the current tools are not yet ready for widespread use, and the forum and the research paper were largely silent on his concerns.
I think that George makes an important point about the tools for authoring and editing. I responded yesterday to say that what may have felt like a "middling" position at the forum reflects a range of opinion within the project team.
At the forum, O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas, for example, advocated use of XML authoring tools in his afternoon remarks, showing some examples of what worked. In contrast, Laura Dawson, who co-wrote the research paper, is more critical of the tools, something she made clear in her comments. I'm somewhat in the middle, feeling that the tools are not necessarily ready for widespread deployment, but that balanced changes in processes, technology/tools and organizational structures can provide a path to moving the tagging work upstream.
One thing less evident at the forum or in the paper is the healthy discussion that took place within the team about this issue. At one point in the e-mail exchanges, I wrote (paraphrasing) that "waiting until the tools are "ready" isn't the right answer; people developing the tools will improve them when publishers in adequate numbers use the tools and advocate for better and more features.
When I presented the "solutions" grid in the afternoon, I pointed out that the bulk of the most developed software and systems are in the production editorial and operational areas, but that upstream options were becoming more available. I stopped short of saying "not ready," in part because I don't want publishers to hear me and walk out saying "we'll wait until the tools come on line" and let production worry about tagging until then. Changing workflows is painful, and people are prone to avoiding pain. That's smart in the short term and potentially disastrous in the mid-term, so I stuck with the recommendation to push upstream as much and as fast as you can.
We view the research paper as a living document, and we expect to revise it based on feedback from the forum as well as an evolving understanding of the number of case studies that the paper and forum started to capture. Look for a subsequent draft to articulate a position on XML tools that may not match what George sees but more clearly captures the project team's thinking.
What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)
Laura Dawson
September 30, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for ... well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging -- all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."
So no wonder people get confused. Particularly people who are in the business of creating content, not formatting, categorizing, packaging and marketing it.
So what are we talking about when we're throwing around this term? It depends on what you do for a living.
If you're a writer, it might mean using Word a little differently, quite possibly according to specific author guidelines given to you by the publisher. It might also mean including lists of keywords along with your manuscript. It may mean including lists of keywords for each chapter.
If you're an acquisitions editor, an XML workflow may mean deciding whether you want a book to merely exist as a print product (as a single source of revenue), or whether it's also appropriate as an ebook, to sell by the chapter (as numerous textbook publishers are doing), to publish iteratively (as O'Reilly does with its Rough Cuts), to make excerpts available for free download, etc.
If you're a book production editor, an XML workflow will be very concrete -- you tag a manuscript according to its format ("chapter heading," "illustration," "copyright page"), and those tags are applied to a pre-defined style sheet.
If you're in marketing, an XML workflow allows you to work with the author's keywords, target specific audiences for the content, and package the content in appealing ways.
Could you do all of this without XML? Sure. You could use a relational database and shove your manuscript, chapter by chapter, into tables in SQL. You could assign keywords in a relational database. But you couldn't do formatting. You could use InDesign or Quark to do your formatting. But you couldn't break up your manuscript into "chunks" and repackage those "chunks" into new products with those programs. XML has the capacity to handle both, and handle them well.
Like most acronyms, XML is a tool. It's not a goal in itself, but a way to get to your goal.
Why You Should Care About XML
Andrew Savikas
September 25, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (26)
|
Listen
Since we began talking about the StartWithXML project, a few offline comments have come in suggesting that imposing XML on authors (and editors for that matter) won't work.
When framed that way, I'm in violent agreement. I would never argue that authors and editors should or will become fluent in XML or be expected to manually mark-up their content. I naively tried fighting that battle before, and was consistently defeated soundly. It is simply too much "extra" work that gets in the way of the writing process.
But there are several reasons why it's really really important for publishers to start paying attention to XML right now, and across their entire workflow:
- XML is here to stay, for the reasonably forseeable future. While it's always dangerous to attempt to predict expiration dates on technology, I think it's fair to assume XML will have a shelf life at least as long as ASCII, which has been with us for more than 40 years, and isn't going anywhere soon.
- Web publishing and print publishing are converging, and writing and production for print will be much more influenced by the Web than vice-versa. It will only get harder to succeed in publishing without putting the Web on par with (or ahead of) print as the primary target. The longer you wait to get that content into Web-friendly and re-usable XML, the worse.
Many in publishing balk at bringing XML "up the stack" to the production, editing, or even the authoring stage. And with good reason; XML isn't really meant to be created or edited by hand (though a nice feature is that in a pinch it easily can be). There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."
Read more…Writing Novels with Twitter
Peter Brantley
September 2, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
ReadWriteWeb has a brief survey of mini serialized novels in the U.S.:
In Japan, mobile phone novels called "keitai shousetsu" have become so successful that they accounted for half of the ten best-selling novels in 2007. Here in the Western world several would-be novelists are attempting to use Twitter to create the same phenomenon. Some of the novels tweeted so far have been interesting and engaging, but others, sadly, appear to be abandoned. Will micro-format fiction ever take off here as it did in Japan?
Author Paulo Coelho Illustrates the Upside of Openness
Mac Slocum
August 7, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Budding authors may not be able to duplicate the success of Paulo Coelho, but Coelho's willingness to experiment across mediums is certainly worth studying. From Jeff Jarvis' Guardian column:
Coelho is the thoroughly modern author. But he still believes in print. For him, this isn't a matter of print v digital. It's a question of what comes when you add digital to print. What does it bring him? "It gives me a lot of joy," he said, "because writing is something you do alone." He recalled the night in 2006 when he read that he had become the second best-selling author in the world. He was bursting. "My God, my wife is sleeping. How can I share this news with anybody?" Now he can shout it from the mountaintop of his blog.
Coelho's embrace of digital outlets is liberal, even by Web standards. In addition to his blogging and social media efforts, Coelho set up a site that aggregates P2P links to free (pirated) versions of his books. He briefly discusses his P2P moves in a New Statesman column:
... I knew from previous experience that the free-sharing of my book over the internet would increase its visibility, so I didn't hesitate to post it on peer-to-peer websites and on my blog.
The more I've ventured into the virtual world, the more I have realised that the internet has a logic of its own and its credo is: share everything freely.
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
August 7, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
What's Really Killing Newspapers (Jack Shafer, Slate)
Other institutions do far better jobs at issuing social currency these days. What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency? And it's all social currency you can use! Like cocktail chatter, a Facebook posting--be it a link, a list, a photo, or travel plans--conveys the message, I am here. Listen to me. A well-executed Facebook presence, like a superb pontification at the bar or a great phone-in to sports talk radio, demonstrates one's status within one's existing social network. If skillfully wielded, a Facebook page can increase a person's status by attracting "cooler" or more influential friends. These days, you can't raise your status more than a bump by carrying the Wall Street Journal under your arm.
The Plight of Politico -- And Everyone Else (Ezra Klein, The American Prospect)
A year-and-a-half after launch, [Politico is] getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn't come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.
Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known (Mark Hurst, Good Experience)
Publishers and bookstores are in it for the money. But you, the author, can't be in it for the money - it doesn't pay enough. You should write a book because you believe in it. And that's the trouble: what you love isn't necessarily what publishers believe will sell. If you can find a topic that you love and that will sell in the market, well then, go forth and type. You're one of the lucky ones. [Emphasis included in original post.]
O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures
Andy Oram
June 20, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (5)
|
Listen
My goodness, the Internet certainly brings transparency to every human interaction these days. One of my authors, Baron Schwartz, has posted a long blog about his personal experiences writing for O'Reilly, and a lot of it is scary. So I suppose I need to provide an editor's and publisher's perspective (developed over 15 rapidly changing years) to Baron's recorded experiences.
Over the past several years, many publishers and other content-centered firms have been feeling incredible pressures from the increasing speed at which information travels (and ages). Publishers inevitably transfer some of these pressures to the authors, who in turn sometimes react with frustration. Authors and publishers are at risk of a growing disconnection.
For instance, just a few days ago the Boston Globe printed an article highlighting the anxiety felt by successful novelists (those fortunate few). Many of their publishers are asking them for a new book each year. It's obvious how convenient this strategy is for budget-makers at the publisher, but the novelists are rarely happy with the expectation.
In the computer book industry, these universal pressures are felt mostly in terms of author motivation and the threat of books slipping, which can cause canceled orders or loss of relevance in a fast-moving market.
The key take-away in my response to Baron is that some books do slip a lot and have enormous, unpredictable demands -- but many don't. It's hard to know in advance. If you want to be an author, don't be scared, but be prepared. (In short, I pretty much endorse everything Baron says.)
I'll organize my comments under three categories: unpredictable time commitments, external market pressures, and staff responses. I've run these comments by Baron.
Read more…Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks
Mac Slocum
May 23, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
O'Reilly author and New York Times columnist David Pogue points the way to an April post from author Steven Poole that offers an interesting look at the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding free digital books.
Last year, Poole ran his own experiment with free PDFs of his book Trigger Happy. The result: it was a "pretty good publicity stunt," but it didn't yield any notable revenue.
Although I didn't do it for the money, I was also, of course, interested in testing the idea of giving stuff away and allowing people freely to express their appreciation. So I put a PayPal button below the download. Is this, as some people say, an exciting new internet-age business model for writers and other creative types? Er, not really. The proportion of people who left a tip after downloading Trigger Happy was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%.
Despite meager returns, Poole says the current separation between electronic and print books makes the free digital avenue wortwhile:
... the happy truth is that right now, electronic downloads don't cannibalize printed sales; if anything, they encourage them. In fact, I would gladly give away my newer book, Unspeak, in the same format right now, except that I am contractually obliged to wait until next year to do so.
But -- and this is a big but -- Poole says if/when digital delivery overtakes print as the dominant delivery mechanism, the upside of free drops precipitously:
Giving away your work in the same format in which you hope to sell it is a dangerous game, if that's how you hope to make a living.
Poole's points on both sides of the debate are well put. This is a daunting and exciting time for content creators. It's an odd period that's marked by legitmate revenue concerns as well as new opportunities to build a following. Poole's post does a nice job capturing these dueling perspectives; the entire piece is worth a read.
UPDATE: Mike Masnick at TechDirt has posted a detailed rebuttal to Pogue (and Poole) on the subject:
Just because "give it away and pray" isn't a workable business model, that doesn't mean that there aren't business models that do work. Hopefully, Poole and Pogue will eventually recognize that they're dismissing the wrong thing. They shouldn't be complaining about free (or making misleading accusations about those who simply recognize the economic forces at work) -- they should be complaining about a failure to put in place a real business model to take advantage of what will be free.
Early Look at HarperCollins' Social Network for Writers
Peter Brantley
May 8, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
HarperCollins' social network for burgeoning authors, Authonomy, is now in private beta. Booktwo.org provides an analysis:
The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all -- in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being 'stolen', enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer ... Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns ... As they put it, "if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they'll probably find a way" ... Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: "here at Authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden -- and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support."
News Roundup: Google's Book Scanning, Kindle's Future Path, Authorship Increases Exponentially, Amazon Takes on "Amazon Tax," 5 DRM Messes
Mac Slocum
May 2, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
A Glimpse into Google's Book Scanning
Google doesn't divulge specifics about its proprietary book scanning set-up, but the Associated Press offers a brief look into the manual scanning process used for old/fragile titles. (Continue reading)
Kindle's All-Encompassing Future Path
Jeff Nolan writes about the path of the Kindle:
It's clear that [Jeff] Bezos sees a day when any and all content can be delivered to a Kindle and not only won't Amazon have to store inventory, they also won't have to ship anything but the Kindle itself to support their book business. In that light, the Kindle totally fits and is an impressive disruptive strategy to boot. Having said that, we have 550 years of mechanical printing to overcome and in terms of simplicity and cost, it's hard to beat a hard copy book.
Book Reading Down, Book Writing Up
In a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay, Rachel Donadio notes the interesting discrepancy between book reading and book writing. Namely, people aren't reading, but they're certainly doing a lot of writing. (Continue reading)
Amazon Challenges New York's "Amazon Tax"
As expected, Amazon is challenging New York's recently passed sales tax statute. From Amazon's filed complaint (pdf):
Because some independently operated, New York-based websites post advertisements with links to Amazon and are compensated for these advertisements, Amazon is now presumed to have engaged in "solicitation" under this statue ... despite the fact that Amazon lacks any physical presence in New York and that no solicitation by Amazon actually exists. This presumption is effectively irrebuttable. Accordingly, Amazon seeks a declaratory judgment that the Statute is invalid ...
In the wake of MSN Music's authorization decision, Steve O'Hear from last100 looks at five DRM-based businesses that left customers high and dry. (Continue reading)
Q&A: Philip Parker, Developer of Automated Authoring Platform
Mac Slocum
April 30, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Philip Parker, founder of ICON Group International and a management science professor at Insead, has developed a patented approach to publishing that combines databases and programming with editorial management -- sometimes via humans, sometimes via computers. ICON Group produces books in 17 genres, including health care, business, reference and crosswords.
In this Q&A, Parker discusses ICON Group's computer-driven process.
How do you identify book topics?
Based on personal and research interests, I select a genre. Once a genre is selected, I do all titles in that genre (e.g. all trade categories that are officially recognized).
Are writers, editors, or designers involved at any point?
Depends on the genre, but yes, all are relied on heavily at many stages. Health guides are written by medical professionals and hand edited. The business reports have highly edited sections, but 90 percent is computer based.
What types of sources/databases do you pull information from? Are there data sources you don't currently have access to that you think hold promise for this type of publishing?
Depends on the genre. I use the sources that are used by regular authors. For example, an economist uses well established sources to do econometrics, I use the same sources. Many companies and governments have under-utilized data sources and databases that may yield interesting genres; I have worked on the ones that I found of interest to me. I have a huge store of proprietary data. If I use a government source, this is cited, and will vary by genre (e.g. CDC for infectious disease information).
You were part of a print-on-demand (POD) panel at TOC '08. Are all Icon Group books POD? What POD service(s) do you use?
No, not all are print-on-demand. We use LSI [Lighting Source] and Booksurge for POD. We do some POD ourselves for specialized orders.
Could your company -- or a similar company -- function without POD?
Yes, in fact, most of our titles are not POD, but electronic via subscription for large libraries -- corporate and non-corporate.
Are all books also made available as ebooks? What ebook formats do you use?
Yes. PDF, DOC, Mobipocket (coming soon), Pocket PC.
Do researchers or clients ask you to prepare specific books?
Yes. We are able to do financial and labor studies on demand.
Mike Maznick says there's some fairly negative feedback on some of the titles. Is that a consequence of the automated nature of the content creation? Do you feel confident people buying these books know they're generated? Or does that not matter?
All publishers have negative and positive comments (e.g. O'Reilly). I would find it strange if our titles did not. Of the titles we have on Amazon, some 50/210,000 have real comments. Many are satirical. Of the ones from actual buyers, all publishers will receive negative and positive feedback (both can be not real, as Amazon comments are almost wiki based; posted by various people, including affiliates who are trying to sell titles).
I do not track the feedback on Amazon, but I imagine of the 17 genres (crosswords, classics, trade, outlooks, etc.), the negative ones are probably only on the health care guides, which are sold mostly to libraries and patient associations. Of all the genres, this one [health care] is not "generated by computer" -- all the text is written by professionals. The computer is used for formatting and doing the index, and compiling the glossaries.
I have a feeling that the low ratings are because the person does not like the content, thinks that better content or similar content is available elsewhere (e.g. the Internet) or was hoping for more. The health guides are clearly marked as Internet guides, and they cite Internet sources. All of the guides are vetted (by librarians, etc.). If people are dissatisfied because they think the computer wrote the text in the books, then they are dissatisfied for the wrong reason, which is unfortunate.
Many patient associations have not only reviewed the books, but also recommended them to patients and families. On balance, I think it better to make these available to patients with rare diseases who wish to better know how to navigate the Internet, beyond a Google search. For the other genres, I have never received negative feedback, only positive feedback or questions about methodology.
What is your most popular title? How many copies were sold?
Our trade reports, which are purchased by consulting firms, investment banks, and companies involved in international trade. This series is very popular. We gauge sales by series, not by individual titles. Traditional publishers think in terms of individual titles.
On average, how many copies of a single title do you sell?
There are thousands held by libraries (this is public data at World Cat). Some firms subscribe to all titles. Again, we often sell series. Some [titles] sell hundreds, some sell just a few, as a part of a series sale. The prices seen on Amazon are one-off -- we sell few or none of these.
For a typical title, what percentage of the total retail sale is profit?
We do not have a typical title. ICON Group as a whole makes no "profit" -- all resources are plowed into R&D for new genres. The margins of the books at retail -- as opposed to profit -- are very low for the POD titles, and higher for the business titles. The margins for the low-priced products follow the industry, though we have lower margins as POD can be expensive compared to short-run printing.
A recent New York Times article says that each book costs you "about 12 cents in electricity." What other costs are involved in the process?
It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, to set up a genre (programming, licensing, editing, research/analysis, etc.). Many [genres] take about 1 year to create, some take 3 to 5 years. I have been doing this for about 8 years now.
How is pricing determined?
Same as in the publishing industry. In some genres we try to equate marginal revenues to marginal costs. On lower-priced POD we make sure we cover the basic costs. On higher end, we try to be substantially below related titles (e.g. trade and outlook, and other business reports). The latter [higher end] are really not sold via Amazon much, but rather through MarketResearch.com, EBSCO (content inclusion), NetLibrary and traditional channels for those markets (direct sales).
How many titles do you plan to develop this year?
Depends on the genre. For Mobipocket (mobile books), we plan on about 68,000 titles. For others, maybe around 50,000. We are working heavily on my dictionary and animations.
Book Reading Down, Book Writing Up
Mac Slocum
April 29, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
In a New York Times Sunday Book Review essay, Rachel Donadio notes the interesting discrepancy between book reading and book writing. Namely, people aren't reading, but they're certainly doing a lot of writing.
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles ... In short, everyone has a story -- and everyone wants to tell it.
Writing and Tracking through Subversion
Mac Slocum
April 23, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Programmers use version control systems to track and monitor code revisions. Writers can bring the same functionality to their drafts by following Rachel Greenham's Mac OS X Subversion tutorial:
What does it [Subversion] do? It manages multiple versions of a project in development. You check your project out of the repository, make changes and you commit those changes back to the repository. At any time you can view older versions of the whole project or of individual files, and revert to them, if the work done since was in error. You can make branches, which allows you to develop your work in two (or more) ways in parallel, and you can tag your project to say, at this point I met a certain milestone (eg: first draft, second draft, version sent to publisher X, version sent to publisher Y, published version, etc.)
(Via TUAW)
Pan Macmillan Plans Ebooks Showing Edits and Changes
Peter Brantley
April 15, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
Pan Macmillan is releasing ebooks with extra sauce. From thedigitalist.net:
The idea that a special edition eBook can contain marginal material produced before, during, or after a print edition features in two other eBooks to be published by Picador this year. Sid Smith’s China Dreams, which we published in hardback in January 2007 and in paperback in January 2008, will be issued in a uniquely up-to-date edition, in the author’s latest version, with corrections, changes, and new material, and a foreword in which he considers the process of composition and revision.
Cliffhanger, by T. J. Middleton (the alias of our established Picador author Tim Binding), takes this idea in the opposite direction: alongside the print edition, which we publish in October 2008, will be an urtext: a composite version of the novel as it was before it was edited here at Picador, with the text in its original form, reinstated and modified scenes and characters, and a radically different ending, also with a foreword by the author explaining the urtext’s conception and the editing process that turned it into Cliffhanger."
Q&A with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner
Mac Slocum
April 15, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
WEbook is a new Web-based platform that blends traditional writing workshops with Web 2.0 functionality. Authors and groups can use the site to develop manuscripts, novels, screenplays and other publishable content, and if their efforts are well received, the projects are published by WEbook.
In the following Q&A, WEbook president Sue Heilbronner offers further details on the company and its collaborative process.
How did WEbook start?
WEbook is the vision of Itai Kohavi, our founder and CEO. In addition to being a twice successful entrepreneur in the technology space, Itai is a twice-published author. When he "completed" his manuscript of his third project -- certain that it was in good shape -- he sent it to a few sharp friends for their feedback. The critiques he received were superb and comprehensive, but he realized that if he had the reactions and input throughout the writing process, he would have produced a far better written product in far less time. In addition, he would have enjoyed working together with friends and fellow writers. He looked online to see if anyone had created a cooperative publishing tool that would have met his needs. Finding nothing suitable, he conceived of WEbook, doing away with the age-old vision of the lonely author and embarking on a community-sourced content creation environment for book publishing.
Is the platform based on wikis? Blogs? Is it proprietary?
Our platform is proprietary and was built for this purpose. It is based in part on wikis, with additional focus on inline comments, inline ratings, and versioning.
How many people are currently participating in projects?
As of April 9, the day WEbook opened its public beta following the alpha, there are 750 registered users of WEbook. Many of the alpha users were recruited in to the process to help provide valuable feedback on the platform and prove that collaborative authoring works.
How are projects created and managed?
Projects are created by an instigator who has an idea for a new book, collection, story, screenplay, etc. That person, the "Project Leader," has the ability to invite others to participate in the writing, give feedback, or both. She sets exposure level and permissions for the project when she establishes it. The Project Leader is charged with managing the project, but in many cases the work can take on a life of its own, with other writers or reactors moving it ahead at a rapid pace.
Are all projects public?
No. WEbook felt it was extremely important to balance the interests of writers -- who feel very strongly about the ownership and protection of their written work -- with the wish of WEbook to create a vibrant community. WEbook allows a project leader or author to make a project private. In doing so, she can be the only member of the project or elect to invite a few friends. A "private" project can stay that way so long as it stays under 35 people (not coincidentally the size of the largest possible creative writing class). At member number 36, the project is effectively a WEbook public project. Users are made aware of this when their project hits that limit, and there are implications of this decision within the Terms of Use and the rights allocation.
Do authors maintain copyright?
The Terms of Use for WEbook required some really new thinking, as the model doesn't exist anywhere else on the Web, and we needed terms that departed in important ways from copyright law in order to make the process possible. Authors who work on private projects with fewer than 35 people retain rights throughout. Once they hit that 36th member, put their work into the public realm, or submit their work for contention as a published WEbook, WEbook takes a six-month option to publish. If WEbook does indeed publish a book, rights are transferred to WEbook, the publisher. If WEbook does not publish, rights revert to the author. That's the simple version. The WEbook Terms of Use are more detailed. We're also producing a short, snappy video to highlight key issues of this all-important topic.
What is the revenue split with authors?
Authors and substantial contributors receive a total combined royalty of 5 percent of net sales.
How are substantial contributors determined? Is it a quantifiable level (i.e. they posted x number of times)?
We use a formula to determine materiality. It has a few softer inputs beyond quantity, which constitute attempts to create a measure of quality and significance to the ultimate work. This is not fully refined, and we expect this algorithm to be a continually moving process as the site evolves. Ultimately, users will see a measure of how they stack up against the algorithm to give them motivation and transparency. We also are intrigued by the idea of giving authors marketing tools to motivate users to contribute to their projects. This might have royalty implications in the future.
Have you found certain topics that are suited for collaboration?
Our goal is to provide a platform that adapts and grows in the direction the community sets. Our first book is Pandora, a fictional thriller written by 17 authors and 17 other contributors and editors. We believe a novel is the highest challenge for collaborative writing, and we took it with the alpha community to prove the concept and learn how writers could write together in the hardest scenario -- a continuous work of fiction.
That said, we think the majority of the WEbook successes will fall into the category of non-fiction or fiction collections. Topics that resonate most with users and, presumably, with the reading public, will be those that are enhanced in coverage because they have input from a community. So, for example, we have a project on our site related to successes families have achieved at home with kids diagnosed on the Autism spectrum. On a far less serious note, there is a great collection of essays on 101 Things Every Guy Should Know How to Do and The First Year, a collection of harrowing essays from first-year teachers.
How will books be selected for publication?
The community will vote on projects that have been put into contention for publication.
How will voting be managed?
Voting will be done on the site. Ratings already occur there for in-progress works and submissions. You will need to be a member of the community to vote. The bar to join is low, joining is easy, and we feel that in order to give an important thumbs-up or down to a work, you should at least identify as a member of the community.
The community will be the overwhelming majority voice in what is selected for publishing. This makes sense, as we view the community as an ingrained base of potential buyers. That said, it would be disingenuous to say that WEbook will move ahead on 100 percent of their top selections or not move ahead on something that just missed the cut. We have strong writers on staff and in our adviser circle (mainly coming out of the alpha experience), and we intend to use them as an occasional input to ensure we're on a good quality path for constantly improving the brand and the work we bring to the market out of the site community.
What formats will books be available in?
WEbook plans to leverage the full range of existing formats -- paper books, ebooks, audiobooks -- as well as delve into new potential formats, including mobile dissemination and unique, customizable downloads.
Will the books be made available through retailers?
Pandora will be available at Amazon.com, BN.com and other Ingram-related online retailers. As WEbook establishes critical mass, a following, and a brand, we will pursue favorable distribution opportunities with brick-and-mortar retailers.
- Stay Connected
-
TOC RSS Feeds
News Posts
Commentary Posts
Combined Feed
New to RSS?
Subscribe to the TOC newsletter. 
Follow TOC on Twitter. 
Join the TOC Facebook group. 
Join the TOC LinkedIn group. 
Get the TOC Headline Widget.
- Search
-
