By guest writer Mary Artz

Noah Brockman, a business advisor at the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) hosted by Portland Community College, stopped by Inside Ink this week to lend his virtual shoulder to cry on, to spread his wealth of wisdom, and to toss a proverbial life preserver to you and your indie publishing business during these unpredictable times.

He cites these Top 5 (recent) Concerns of Small Businesses:

1. Decreased revenues compared to last year at this time. Solution: Increase sales, lower operating expenses, or increase gross profit margins. Suggestion: Ask yourself, “How can I make my company more efficient?” Cut costs on book shipping and warehousing—scrutinize your operation logistics. Work with authors who have a budget, start-up $$$, and/or their own marketing and promotional plans. Often, authors already have relationships within their book’s niche. Research and develop this market to enhance your product’s worth.
2. How do I drive sales? You may feel as though your product has tapped the market domestically, so develop a foreign rights plan. Consider cross promotion; it’s a great way to split the bill. Send your book (but not yourself) to valuable trade shows via the Independent Book Publisher’s Association.
3. As existing sales slow, people start considering, “What else can I sell or produce?” Before choosing new products or services, perfect what you already have and leverage existing products. Perhaps you could convert some of your titles into audio books or e-books. Hone in on your specific market; concentrate your energy and monies there. Consider marketing to libraries or marketing your book as a textbook. Get creative about reaching professors and the academic market. Look for ways to differentiate your book from the competition. Apply for awards! They’re a great addition to any press release. Optimize meta-data (tags), and visit bowkerlink.com and booksinprint.com. Do an audit of what your books look like and enhance them. This will allow book buyers to find your product more easily. Consider Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, where he advises small business owners to put their marketing budget into product development; push yourself to make an exceptional product.
4. Access to capital (bank loans, lines of credit). See #1 and tighten those bootstraps. Cut excess costs, and work with what you have.
5. Fear: don’t let it overrule you. Prevent yourself from being consumed by the fear of global economic crisis. Right now, information about our tumbling economic crisis is proliferating across the media. Fear sells newspapers and makes ominous sound bites for the evening news. Focus on managing a responsible business within its means and, as Tim Ferriss suggests in his book 4-Hour Work Week, “practice a low-information diet and unplug from CNN.” Shift spending from wants to needs. Perhaps consider less hardcover copies and more paperbacks.

You can survive this! Just remember to stay focused and to stay the course. And if you need further assistance or information, please call or visit one of Oregon’s nineteen Small Business Development Centers. The SBDC provides many pro bono services, including one-on-one business counseling. You can contact the PCC branch at 503.978.5000.

Noah Brockman holds an MBA from the University of Portland’s Pamplin School of Business, and, in addition to being an SBDC Business Advisor, he owns and operates PointMan Consulting, LLC.

© 2008 Mary Artz

By guest writer Tom McCluskey

Welcome back to the world of e-book design! Last time, we talked about the necessity of mutable design for e-books, specifically about the need for things like reflowable text and proportional rather than static margins. Today, we’ll be looking at how to achieve that mutability of design.

Fortunately for us, web pages are already built with this root of flexibility in mind. In fact, most e-book formats are based in XML, a language that allows you to build your own markup languages. The most widely-known of these markup languages is HTML, the language that web pages are built in.

So what is a “markup language?” Essentially, it is a language that allows you to assign semantic meaning to text. For example, when using HTML, you can use the <h1> </h1> tags around a term to mark that term as a primary header. While this will usually result in that term being set in large print and perhaps bolded, that is not the primary intent of the tags. Those tags are there to let the computer know that that term is a primary header, and what follows that header is related to that term, at least until another <h1> </h1> tag set is encountered. This is particularly important to know if you think that search engines might be interested in checking out your e-book, as proper tagging will allow search engines to provide more meaningful results and better matches to people using those search engines.

HTML and other markup languages, then, are not used to change the layout of a manuscript, though they will do that to a minimal degree. Instead, they are used to define the parts of a manuscript, saying things like “This is a paragraph but this is a chapter header, and this section here is a block quote.” In order to change the layout, we borrow another tool of the Web: style sheets. Cascading style sheets, or CSS, are where the lion’s share of the layout information of any modern website is. Essentially, you use a style sheet to tell your browser or other e-book reading device “I want the text to be in 12-point Arial, except that the chapter headers should be 18-point Papyrus and the block quotes should be indented and set in italic.” You can also define text and background images, colors (though colors, of course, will not work on black-and-white screens), and many other aspects of design. However, most e-book formats use only a portion of CSS, so it is not as powerful as it is on the web.

And this brings us to the different formats of e-books that are available today. A quick glance at Wikipedia will show that there are many different options available; at the time of writing this, there are over two dozen. Many of these formats are a bit too limited for one reason or another, however. Plain text files, for example, are very flexible but contain no formatting information other than line breaks, which make for an unsatisfactory reading experience. By contrast, PDF files offer too much format and not enough flexibility—there is no reflowability of text. Other formats are outdated, not widely used, or too proprietary.

Two of the biggest formats at the moment are epub and Mobipocket. Epub is a nonproprietary format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It is based on XML, so it offers excellent flexibility. And because it is nonproprietary, it doesn’t lock readers into using a single device. It is a relatively new format but is gaining a lot of support. Of particular interest to publishers, in late July Sony opened up their Reader to epub files, so people with Sony Readers will be able to read e-books in epub format.

Mobipocket is another XML-based format. In contrast to the months-old epub, it has been around since 2000. While it is nonproprietary, the company was purchased in April of 2005 by Amazon, and Amazon uses a DRMed version of the Mobipocket format on the Kindle. The Kindle can also read a standard Mobipocket file, though it cannot read one that has been encrypted with Mobipocket DRM.

Both epub and Mobipocket can be read on personal computers; the Mobipocket Reader is available for free download from Mobipocket.com, and Adobe has recently released Digital Editions, which reads both Adobe’s own reflowable PDF files and epub documents. In addition, both epub and Mobipocket can be secured with Digital Rights Management should you wish to (and I’ll leave it to Cory Doctorow to explain why that’s a bad idea). Again, though, the Kindle cannot read files that have been secured with Mobipocket’s DRM system—Kindle files have their own version of the Mobipocket DRM that is just different enough to make them unreadable.

Creation of Mobipocket files is, for the moment, somewhat easier than creation of epub files. Mobipocket has a free Creator tool that allows you to easily create e-books from a number of different sources, including HTML and epub files. Epub is a new enough format that there are far fewer tools available for it, but Bookglutton.com has developed a web page that will convert HTML to epub. Your other option is to consult Harrison Ainsworth’s epub Format Construction Guide to make your epub files by hand, but be warned that it’s not for the faint of heart.

Creating your own epub or Mobipocket file is great if you are distributing e-books yourself, but if you are interested in selling on Amazon.com or Sony’s e-book store, you’ll need to submit your e-book to those companies. Sony’s submission site for publishers is now up and running, and they accept several different file formats. Amazon’s Digital Text Platform also accepts submissions in a number of different file formats. These large online stores certainly expose your e-book to a much larger market, but they take a very large slice of the money you make (Amazon takes 65 percent of the cover price from each sale).

There are, of course, many other formats and many other options available; this article is by no means exhaustive. Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, follow the links and explore the world of e-book publishing. Like any high-tech field, it is rapidly changing, and there’s no telling what the next Big Thing will be. Whatever happens to e-books, though, it’s bound to be a fascinating ride.

For more of Tom’s helpful musings, please visit his blog at tom-mccluskey.com.

© 2008 Tom McCluskey

Are You My Customer? Culling Your Customers from the Wanderers
By Cameron Marschall

Book publishers straddle the line between the artistic creatives and the business minded. Unless you come from a marketing or sales background, the idea of manning a booth for hours or days in a roomful of strangers may not top your list of fun things to do. When you factor in the cost in money and energy, and the opportunities of reaching new customers, the need to plan how your trade show booth operates becomes crucial. Too many companies head off to a trade show without having SMART goals to pursue and without pre-training on how to interact with attendees. This article will touch upon attendance goals and how to separate the potential customer from the casual visitor.

Why are you attending the show? You are investing precious time and funds. What do you hope to gain? Too many employees treat booth work as a chance to canvass the competitors booths for a future job, for freebies, or as a mini-vacation. Independent book publishers, with limited means, should employ a steely-eyed commitment to working the trade show to the utmost, while maintaining a cordial attitude to all participants. Booth work is exhausting but fun, as long as you have set goals and practiced routines to maximize your outcomes. Possible goals can be selling large lots of books to book buyers, such as libraries or teachers. Or rolling out a new imprint or product line. Or capturing 300 new names for your newsletter. (You do have a newsletter, don’t you?) Attending because “everyone expects us to be there” is not enough of a reason. Have a goal or two, and, even better, make them SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. “Get more customers” is not a SMART goal. Capturing 50 new contacts interested in a follow up call on a product line the week after the convention is a SMART goal. (And you will follow up with each of the 50 contacts, won’t you?)

Goals in mind, you are now faced with running a successful booth. Here’s an important tip: you can only interact with a fraction of the attendees. A tiny percentage, in fact. Of those, the majority probably will not end up being customers or clients. They are “just looking.” Maybe they know a booth worker or are just walking down the aisle, drifting from booth to booth. Being friendly, polite people, they are glad to talk about the weather, the free gifts they found one aisle back, or books that are like what you offer. You must greet them with a smile, ask a few questions, and let them continue on their way, a simple list of your offerings in hand. Why? Because you only have a few peak hours to separate customers from the friendly wanderers. In the time it takes to talk about your high school days with a wanderer, the perfect customer may have come into the booth, been ignored, and walked away. Now that might happen anyway, but you must use your attendance goals to identify your targeted booth visitors.

I’m going to customize the vetting advice I’ve seen online, my past experience, and one prime source, Trade Show and Event Marketing by Ruth P. Stevens. At a trade show one of your biggest limitations is time. You have a small set of prime hours at a show, when the floor is hopping. If you have two people in your small booth, they can only talk to a certain number of passersby per hour. Let’s say each of your two reps in the booth can comfortably speak to 10 people in an hour. (Speaking means talking to someone who might be a customer, not saying hello, and handing out a brochure.) Now, let’s say 20 percent become likely prospects who agree to be contacted the following week. The show has four hours over two days of peak attendance, or eight peak hours. So, each of those hours 10 prospects are talked to, times 2 reps, for 20 X 4 or 80 prospects per day. The second day the same thing, 80. Eighty times 2 nets 160 possible customers! Of course, there will be other prospects found during the off hours, but the booth staff should put their “smile-power” into the hours that gather the most business. After the show, these 160 people are contacted, and 40 percent say yes to your great business offering. So, 64 actual customers out of 160. Even if there were 4000 attendees, your booth staff came away with 64, or under 2 percent of the visitor total!

If you are thinking, “Our little company never follows up on most leads and is happy to just break even by selling books at the booth,” then that’s fine, if this approach gives you a growing publishing company and achieves other goals such as meeting other publishers.

But how did you identify the real customers from the wanderers? Here are the steps in brief:

1. Greet each visitor with a smile and ask him/her something, like if the show is meeting his/her needs.
2. State what your company does and for what audience.
3. Ask the visitor if she is interested in what you offer.
4. If the answer is no, thank her for coming to the booth, and give her your basic sales literature. Ask for her e-mail for your mailing list, enter her in a giveaway, or do whatever else fits your goals.
5. If the visitor is interested in what you have to offer, then ask questions to find out what is needed and when. Gather the information into a prepared form. Just the basics: name, phone, e-mail, workplace name, job title, and a quick note of what the visitor has requested. If the visitor has a business card, staple it to the information sheet. Just remember to write clearly! (And take the extra seconds to get e-mail addresses correct.)

Of course, this is a simplified procedure, and you will add your own variations and unique touch. The key step is number 3. You must qualify each visitor and identify the true prospects. Done correctly, the visitor to your booth will never know that they are being “tested” for their hidden motives.

Creative individuals often have a hard time with sales. The stereotype of a used car salesman is often conjured up, when in fact sales is really about talking with a person, seeing if your offering can solve a problem or cure a hurt, then asking the other party to commit. No trickery or pressure. And you, in your booth, might use the techniques in this article to start a lifelong relationship.

© 2008 Cameron Marschall

By guest writer/editor Rosie McKinlay

Western Fiction is a genre you don’t hear much about these days. Its popularity may have peaked in the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead, not by a long shot.

I knew little of these Old West tales (by definition, Western Fiction covers the years between 1860 and 1900) and thought of them as nothing more than special interest collector’s books that were no longer being produced. Turns out, I was way off target.

I had the opportunity to read submissions from the Idaho Writers League Conference, which was held in Idaho Falls last month. Many of these courageous authors are ignoring the stigma attached to Historical Fiction in these oh-so-modern times and capturing the essence of a wild west that should never be forgotten.

And guess what? There are several publishing firms in the USA that are seeking this very genre. Sounds like the Old West is making a comeback!

Here’s a brief list of companies that list Western Fiction in their submission guidelines:

For Books:
Kensington Publishing Corp.? (www.kensingtonbooks.com)
Forge Books? (http://us.macmillian.com/forge)
Five Star Press ?(www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar)
Tres Picos Press ?(www.trespicospress.com)
Harcourt Trade Publishers ?(www.harcourtbooks.com)
Wheatmark Publishing? (www.wheatmark.com)
Bantam Dell Publishing Group? (www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell)
Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster? (www.simonsays.com)

Other:
Roundup Magazine, Western Writers of America ?(www.westernwriters.org/roundup.html)
Virtual Tales eBooks ?(www.virtualtales.com)

© 2008 Rosie McKinlay

Writers participated here and there and everywhere in Portland the weekend of October 18 and 19, searching for clues and gripping their well-worn pens to meet the Sledgehammer Writing Contest’s 36-hour deadline. Ink & Paper Group was a proud sponsor of the event, participating as both a writing prompt stop as well as a contributor to the $3,000 in prizes.

Congratulations to Indigo Editing and Publications for a successful first-time event, and more of the same to all those robust writers and their words! We look forward to reading the winning story at Wordstock next weekend, and in the meantime, we offer a link to this Oregonian report on the event.

“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

~ George Carlin

by guest writer Robyn Crummer-Olson

The click-clack of six unruly antique typewriters sharply contrasted with the chic modern furnishings of what Robyn Steely called “Portland’s other living room.” Steely is the Executive Director of Write Around Portland, a nonprofit organization dedicated to a three-pronged purpose: facilitating writing workshops, publishing a thrice-yearly anthology of the writers’ works, and hosting readings around Portland.

On Saturday, October 4, Write Around Portland hosted their third annual Wordigo fundraiser at Design Within Reach. Write Around Portland raised over $14,000 to continue providing their much-needed services to communities such as at-risk youth, low-income seniors, the homeless, domestic violence survivors, and people living with mental illness and addiction. This year, Write Around Portland will host 47 different workshops for over 500 writers. The workshop facilitation, materials, bus tickets, childcare, and snacks are all provided to participants free of charge.

Wordigo’s primary fundraiser was a silent auction of Moleskine journals customized by local artists and entrepreneurs including Manya Shapiro, Zoe Trope, Michael Powell and Jim Riswold. Upon arrival, guests were provided a program, nametag, and blank postcard with the instructions: “Write a postcard. Hang it on the red ribbons. Watch your mailbox. And wonder who will get yours.” Guests enjoyed a signature cocktail concocted by The Oregon Bartender’s Guild called the F. Scott—a vodka tonic mixed with an herbal reduction. Tables and desks held low-tech delights such as Wordigo Poker, a vintage slide projector show, Boggle, and Speed Scrabble as well as the aforementioned antique typewriters next to prompts such as “It wasn’t my car,” and “The people in my tea leaves.”

The journals, games, postcards, and group writing activities, mixed with some good old-fashioned mingling, all underscored Write Around Portland’s primary mission: to help isolated people find their voices and their communities through writing together and sharing their stories. During her address to the gathering, Steely described the impact of the anthologies on workshop participants, “People tell us that they go to Powell’s and see their names on the same shelves as bestselling authors, and it is life changing.”

Asked about next year’s Wordigo, Steely replied, “We received very positive feedback. This was our best Wordigo yet. It has launched us into our 10-year anniversary planning for next year. We plan to do something very exciting….”

To learn more, volunteer, or donate, visit www.writearound.org.

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

~ Mark Twain

By guest writer Tom McCluskey

At first glance, e-books may seem just one short step removed from the electronic files used in publishing. After all, once the book has gone through editing and design, it is usually in a PDF or InDesign format. Why not just package that up and put it on the Internet as an e-book?

The answer to that question is that e-books require a different design paradigm than standard printed work, because with e-books we can never quite be sure how the book we have published is being read. Consider three persons reading the same “traditional” book: a commuter on the train on the way home from work, a child reading by flashlight under the covers after bedtime, and a student relaxing with a book in a coffee shop. The book they read is perhaps 5½” by 8½”, with black text on white or off-white paper and a fixed number of lines per page. Page 44 for the student will be page 44 for the commuter and page 44 for the child.

E-books, however, are completely different in that one person may download an e-book to read on his Sony Reader, while another may view the same book on her iPhone, and still a third person may be using his desktop computer’s 22-inch monitor. These devices have quite different screen resolutions, screen sizes, and overall appearances, which means that the notion of fixed book design needs to go out the window to avoid the very real risk of creating e-book content that is not viewable on some devices. A PDF file of an 8 ½” by 11″ document, for example, would be larger than the Sony Reader’s screen and far larger than the iPhone’s.

In order to deal with this issue, e-books must either be designed individually for each specific e-book reading platform (a project so massive in scope that it would not be surprising to learn that it was never-ending, as more platforms are added faster than old ones can be designed for), or they must be flexible enough to fit any platform. Reflowability of text is one of the most crucial elements to ensure this flexibility. In essence, text must be able to flow by itself, much as text on web pages will shuffle itself about in order to fit on the page as width changes. And this, of course, leads to many consequences for editors, as it becomes meaningless to ensure that there are no widows, orphans, ladders, or other such typographical eyesores in a given manuscript.

Fonts are another important area to consider; beyond a certain few basic fonts common to nearly all systems, it’s impossible to know which fonts a reader will have on his or her device. Font families (serif, sans serif) rather than individual fonts should be specified for e-books, and margins, padding, and other spacing should be proportional (4.5 em margins rather than 1-inch margins). This helps to ensure that the page will scale well and be presented well on a screen of any size. In many ways, the design of e-books is similar to the design of web sites.

Publishing e-books, then, requires a shift in how we think about design. The format of a book is no longer static and unchanging; rather, like the publishing industry itself, it must be flexible and adaptable.

In the next issue of Inside Ink, we’ll look into the specifics of what sorts of e-book formats are common in the market, and the nuts and bolts of formatting for them. Until then, enjoy the flexibility of a new way of looking at book design!