Israeli authors fight discount deals

Discount book deals could become a thing of the past in Israel, where authors have launched a battle against two leading bookstore chains.

The writers claim slashed prices are eating into their royalties.

Price-slashing is common at Israel's two largest competing booksellers, Steimatzky and Tzomet.

Customers have welcomed the discounts - as low as $6 a book (£3.80) compared to catalogue prices of $15 or $20 (£10 or £13) - which have also benefited younger, unknown authors.

However, established authors, publishers, editors and others in the book industry have struggled to survive.

Parliament is expected to approve a bill enforcing tough limits on discounts, where retailers would be banned from cutting prices on new books for the first 18 months.

The bill would also see royalties set at a minimum of 8 percent of the book's marked price for the first 6,000 sold, and at least 10 percent for all books sold after that number.

A statement from the prime minister's office said: "As the People of the Book, we are committed to maintaining the income of the authors who create our cultural treasures."

Jews are known as People of the Book because their identity is rooted in the Bible, but literary books are also a big part of Israeli culture.

READ MORE FROM THE BBC

New tablet from Microsoft?

Microsoft Tablet Announcement Expected Today

Microsoft is convening "a major announcement" in Los Angeles at 3:30 local time (or 6:30 Eastern) at a location that will not be unveiled to invited press until some time this morning. (Preliminary invitations went out only last Thursday.)

Publishers Lunch speculates that they will announce a Windows tablet of some kind, and in another guess, reckons that the LA-venue inidcates a strong emphasis on entertainment.

Today's post continues with more speculation based on the sharp eye Publishers Lunch keeps on the ups and downs of the stock market. Barnes & Noble's Nook--in which Microsoft now owns a minority stake--will undoubtedly have at least a presence on a Microsoft tablet, they say, going on to add that from there the extent of the involvement is currently unconfirmed, with some rumors indicating the new tablet could be built in conjunction with Nook's Palo Alto unit.

Barnes & Noble's stock rose briefly on the first news this morning and then dropped after Dow Jones wrote that reports of Barnes & Noble playing a role in the event were "not true at all" and a spokesperson for the bookseller denied they were participating in any way. But shares rose again later in the morning; Nook doesn't have to have a role in the event to gain from a presence on a Microsoft tablet.

Publishing your novel on Kindle:3

Your document is ready ... almost

But how about a last check?

You might want to bring up show/hide to check that you have removed all manual formatting except for the "new paragraph" sign that shows where you have hit enter.  Otherwise there will be dots to show spacing between words, which should be single.

And clever you, you have used style-sheets to format the title page, chapter headings, section breaks, and quotes.  It's a very good idea to check that these all worked properly ... and do another stint of proof-reading, just in case your style-sheets have removed a few necessary letters, quotation marks, or spaces.

There are a couple of additional wrinkles that might or might not interest you.

In traditional print publishing, as you may have noticed, the first line of every chapter is not indented.  Whether you want to follow this style or not is up to you; personally, I don't think it makes a tad of difference.  However, if you do want to try it, just click the first letter of the first word of the first sentence of the chapter, and go up to "paragraph." Then go to "Special" and change the box to "none."

Hit OK, and presto, your first line won't be indented any more, but the rest will be indented the way you want it.

Do this for every chapter.

Secondly, when a sentence trails off with three dots ... or ends abruptly with -- on Kindle the dots or the long dash can leak over to the next line, which looks odd.  If you wish to be particular, go through your document and close up the gap between the last letter of the word and the dots... or the dash--  This fixes the problem.

And that's it.  In the meantime, close your document, keeping it in .doc or .docx  We will adapt it for publishing later.

<><><>

 Now for the COVER

I found a really nifty website with a revolutionary and miraculous method for creating a jacket with powerpoint, created by William King and called "Creating your own eBook cover, step by step, with pictures."  So I recommend you read it, as my method is much the same, with a few extra tips (and different pictures).  The method, apart from being incredibly easy, also has the huge advantage that throughout the process of creating your cover you can see a thumbnail to the left.  On Amazon, only thumbnails are shown, remember, so you have a very good idea of what the finished product it like.

So let's do it.

Open powerpoint.

Hit the "home" tab, and then hit "new slide" and in the layout (immediately to the right) choose "blank."

Now you must change the page setup.

Go to the tab in the ribbon that says "design" and hit it.

Now, at the far left of the new ribbon, you will see "page setup."

Hit it, and you will get this screen:

First of all, click "portrait" beside both letters A. 

On the lefthand side, choose "custom" for slide use.  The width and height are more complicated. As King says, the ratio should be 3:4  My powerpoint is set up for metric, so I have a height of about 20 and a width of about 15.  If you have inches on your screen, follow King's advice, and have a height of 8 inches and a width of 6.

Now, you insert the image you have very carefully chosen for your cover.  In my case, I sorted through Ron's huge collection of maritime photographs, ending up with exactly what I wanted, the tiny silhouette of a ship sailing into a hugely dramatic sunset.

And remember, INSERT it.  Don't paste: it won't work. Hit the "insert" tab in the top ribbon of powerpoint, then click "picture" (NOT "photo album), and browse for the image that you have saved in your pictures library.

Now you add the author's name and the title of the book, with the insert tab again.

Go up to the top ribbon, hit insert, and then hit "text box."  Then click on the slide in the place where you want the words to start. The shape of a box will form.  Type in the words.  I chose to put the author's name at the top, and the title near the bottom, because there was good contrast with the dark sea.

Then you play with fonts and effects.  I chose Baskerville Oldface for the author's name, and the more romantic Brush Script MT for the title.  Adjust the size so that it looks bold, keeping your eye on the thumbnail to check readability.  I chose 60 pts for the author's name, and 54 for the title.

I chose to keep the lettering plain white for good contrast, but you can have fun with effects, such as beveling, or putting a glow around the words.  Highlight your words, and "format" will come up in the ribbon.  Hit this, and find "text effects."

Hit this, and a drop down menu with all sorts of choices will arrive.  Experiment as much as you like, but keep an eye on that thumbnail in the lefthand screen, to make sure that you are not blurring the words beyond recognition.

Save your cover, making sure you save it as jpeg (not as powerpoint).

Go to the button at the top lefthand corner of your powerpoint page, and click "save as."  In the screen that comes up select the place where you want to save it in your pictures library, put YourBookCover in the "file name" box and then run down the options in the "save as type" box until you come to "Jpeg file interchange format."

Click to save.  When a box comes up saying "Do you want to export every slide or only the current slide," click "current slide only."


Keep on going back to it -- to the powerpoint slide, NOT the picture in your jpeg file, as the jpeg will degrade every time you do something to it. Tinker, tinker, and revise, until you are absolutely happy with it.  Save it anew each time, either overwriting the original jpeg or giving it a different title.  Then, when you are absolutely sure this is the cover for you, bring it up in Microsoft Picture Manager.  Click "edit pictures" in the top ribbon.  When the menu arrives, click "resize."

Kindle have new rules: the longest side of your cover must be at least 1000 pixels. So you have to adjust the figures to match.  I coped by making the smaller ratio -- the width -- 1000, and the program specified the height to suit.

So it was 1327 x 1000, which was a little larger than the usual Amazon thumbnail but seemed to work very well.

Save, and your cover is ready.

Next step, the blurb.

<><><>

Inter alia. I adapted King's method for making the screen shots used throughout these little tutorials. I went into document, brought up the screens I was talking about, then hit ALT + "Print Screen" -- which is a key at the top right of my keyboard, but might be somewhere else on yours.

Then I opened powerpoint, created a blank slide, and pasted the screenshot onto the slide by hitting CTRL + v Hitting "format" in the top ribbon of the powerpoint screen allowed me to crop and resize the image as necessary. Then, by right-clicking on the image, I brought up a menu, hit "save picture" and saved it as a jpeg in my picture file.

Thus it was ready to use in my blog.

PROMISES TO KEEP

A very successful series by indie novelist Shayne Parkinson

Set in 1880s New Zealand, the "Promises to Keep" series stars Amy, the youngest daughter of an isolated farming family.  In order, the books are:

Sentence of Marriage
Mud and Gold
Settling the Account
A Second Chance

Amy, a very young and innocent teenager, leads a mundane, industrious but reasonably happy existence on her widowed father's farm, cooking and cleaning for her two older brothers as well as her father, Jack.  Then her life is disrupted by the arrival of two colorful characters. 

The first is the new wife Jack brings home from a farm-machinery-shopping visit to the bustling colonial port of Auckland. Susanne ("don't dare ever call me Susie") is a high-and-mighty would-be socialite who married Jack because at the age of 25 she was on the shelf.  Naturally, she didn't expect the grim existence of a back-country farm.  Amy does her best to make up for her new stepmother's laziness, but gets no thanks at all from the miserable creature, let alone appreciation.

A kind of rancorous peace is established over the next two years ... but then, when Amy is at the very vulnerable age of 15, her stepmother's elegant and charming 20-year-old brother arrives.  Though it is obvious that Jimmy is eminently untrustworthy, the ignorant and innocent lass trusts him completely, with a predictably tragic result.  It is a classic tale of seduction and betrayal, perhaps, but leavened by such excellent descriptions of daily life in the rural setting, and with such an unexpected outcome that the reader is compelled to carry on from one book to the next.  As one amazon reviewer said, "I found myself really caring for the characters."

A canny marketer, Shayne Parkinson published the first eBook for free, hooking the reader into the story of the fortunes and misfortunes of her hard-working, well-meaning, biddable heroine.  It has been a very successful ploy: according to smashwords ratings, she has sold over 50,000 books.  The series is also published in print.

You can read more about Shayne Parkinson on her website.  You can also read an interview HERE.

HUNGER GAMES

Just another YA novel?

I was signing copies of Tupaia in Muir's wonderful bookstore in Gisborne, and got into conversation about books and bestsellers with the vivacious and knowledgeable manager.

I asked her if she sold many copies of that erotic mega-bestseller, Fifty Shades of Gray, and she laughed and said she thought Gisbornites were probably a little too conservative for such steamy stuff.  From there we got onto Young Adult fiction, via the Twilight books, which I found somewhat disturbing, particularly the fourth in the series.  Not only was the childbirth scene a recipe for future panic for young female readers, I said, but it trivialized the social responsibilities that should come with vast wealth.

"In that case," said she, "you must read The Hunger Games. It is very well written and has a compelling story, as well as a social message."

So I didn't hesitate to follow such sage advice: as soon as I reclaimed my new Kindle, I downloaded the book.  And she was right: it is a terrific read.

For the first time in years, I actually wished I was back in the classroom with a fourth form (year 10) class in front of me, because this book would not only enthrall the most restive of 14-year-olds, but there is material there for a bunch of lesson plans.

As we all know, Hunger Games is set in a dystopia near-future, where a handful of mega-powerful, mega-rich people rule the country called Panem.  The great unwashed majority live in 13 districts -- well, there used to be 13 districts, until District 13 rebelled against the extremely unfair system, and was reduced to ashes. 

Now, to remind the masses how vulnerable they are, the powerful in the reigning city, Capitol, stage an annual gladitorial contest.  Each of the 12 surviving districts chooses two adolescents by ballot, and these "tributes" are swept to the Capitol to be prepped for a really nasty reality show, which will be televised throughout Panem, and is compulsory viewing for the folks back home.

Once groomed, the tributes are dropped into an arena, under the understanding that only one walks out, all the rest having been killed by their fellow contestants.  The ensuing battle for survival is seen through the eyes of one of the tributes, Katniss, who is a gifted archer and adept at living off the land, but is otherwise both rebellious and scared out of her wits. And, unlike the incredibly privileged in Capitol, she has a strong sense of ethics.

Loosely based on the gladiator system in ancient Rome, it offers a wonderful lesson in history, seen through the eyes of one of the gladiators.  It also questions the huge and growing gap between the rich and the poor.  Suzanne Collins, the gifted writer, says she thought of the premise while surfing the internet, alternating between a reality show and footage of the invasion of Iraq.  The loss of her father in the Vietnam War also played a part, as did the saga of the Greek hero, Theseus.

The result is gripping, and immensely thought-provoking.  Highly recommended for adults as well as intelligent fourth formers. Ideally, it would lead to deep discussions about the family dining table.

"a modern publishing scourge"

Circumventing the system

Author Patricia O'Brien had trouble publishing her sixth novel, a timely historical with a Titanic setting, called The Dressmaker.  More than a dozen publishers turned it down, because her fifth novel had not sold very well.

So her agent, Esther Newberg, had the bright idea of sending it out under a penname, "Kate Alcott."

It sold in three days--to Random House.

The New York Times commented that the two women had "cannily circumvented what many authors see as a modern publishing scourge--Nielsen BookScan, the subscription service that tracks book sales and is at the fingertips of every agent, editor and publisher" who is willing to pay to get the figures.

And they had done it "with a centuries-old trick, the nom-de-plume."

steamed-up specs

Eyeglasses gone all foggy?

They drive me crazy. One expects one's specs to steam up when one opens the oven door or takes the lid off a boiling pot, but should eyeglasses steam up simply because you have been reading a while?

Not to mention going foggy just because you have put them on.

I have special cloths, anti-fogging sprays, and cannisters of special lens cleaner.  I use them all the time, but they only work for a very short time.

Then, by accident, I found a much better alternative.  I was leaning over the newspaper, trying to read it, and in a fit of impatience I took off my specs and gave them a good wipe with the corner of the current page.

Presto.  I already knew that newspaper is great for finishing off windows after you have cleaned them.  A piece of newspaper is just as good for eyeglasses.

It must be something to do with the ink.

NZ Post Book Awards

People’s Choice Award

Voting opened 6 June for the nation’s favourite book. Nominations can be made from this year’s finalist books on-line at www.nzpostbookawards.co.nz. The 2012 finalist book with the most votes will be honoured with the much-coveted People’s Choice Award.

In addition to individual category winners, and a People’s Choice Award, there will be a Māori Language Award winner and the overall New Zealand Post Book of the Year winner announced at a gala dinner in Auckland on 1 August 2012.

The overall New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award winner will receive $15,000. Winners of the four Category Awards will each receive $10,000. The Māori Language Award winner will receive $10,000 and the People’s Choice Award winner $5,000.

Publishing your novel on Kindle:2

Well, here is what I have (hopefully) established in post #1:

To publish on Kindle you need: a book, a cover, and a blurb.  And all of these can be created at no cost at all.

Right now, we are looking at the book -- the manuscript, which might be original, or might be a revision of a published novel. Whatever the origin of the word document, it has to be cleaned up of manual formatting.

I mentioned getting rid of tabs, but didn't describe the easy way of doing it on word.  This tip comes from writer Rachel Abbott, who wrote two very useful posts, introducing formatting for eBooks, on her blog.

So, to get rid of tabs throughout your manuscript, go to find/replace.  In the "find" line, type ^t  (You will find ^ above the number 6).  In the "replace" line make sure there is absolutely nothing.  Then hit "replace all."  Lo, your tabs have all gone.

She also gives a method for getting rid of unnecessary spaces, for people who habitually hit the return key at the end of every sentence.  It's complicated: the best advice is avoid doing it.  The return key should only be hit at the end of a paragraph.

Indentation.  This should be done automatically, via the paragraph formatting screen in your "normal" style sheet.   Let's look at that screen again: right-click the "normal" style sheet, go to "modify" and click "paragraph" to bring it up.

The alignment should be left.  DON'T JUSTIFY.  There is a big temptation to do this, because on eReaders, as in print books, the right margin is justified.  On Kindle, however, the reader is in charge of font size, and every time the font size is changed the righthand margin changes, too.  So Kindle won't be able to cope if you justify your document.

First line should be by 0.5 cm -- or 0.4 cm if you prefer.  Not more than 0.5 cm, though.

Spacing should have zero in both boxes.  Nothing before, and nothing after.  This is contrary to the advice given by the Kindle builder (which you can download for free as a Kindle book from Amazon).  The builder tells you to put something like 10 pts. in one of the boxes.  Don't do it.  I followed instructions, and had to fix it fast.  Believe me, it looked awful.  So, I repeat, have 0 in both the before and after boxes.  Also, the spacing should be single.  Kindle automatically puts a good space between lines, for easy reading, so you don't have to worry about it.

Hit OK and close that screen, hit OK again, and go back to your manuscript.

Now, get rid of all manual page breaks.  I did this by running quickly through the document and deleting them.  This will make your document look messy, with all the chapters running together, but another style sheet will fix that.

Chapter headings

Go back to your style sheet ribbon. Choose "Heading 1" and right-click to get the drop-down menu.  Hit "modify"

Keep the font as Times New Roman, but change the font size to 16.

Then go to "format" in the bottom lefthand corner, bring up the menu, and hit "paragraph."

Change the alignment to "centered."

Change the special to "none"

Spacing -- put 42 pt in the "before" line and 18pt in the "after" line.  But keep the line spacing single.

Now, go to the top and hit "line and page breaks," bringing up this screen:

In the screen that comes up, click the box by the fourth option "page break before."

(You don't have to click the widow and orphan box or the keep with next boxes; I prefer to do it as it saves having the last line of a paragraph leaking onto the next page.)

Hit OK and then OK on the modify screen to close it.

This makes "heading 1" your style sheet for your chapter headings.  Now, go to each chapter head -- easy to do if you have prefaced each one with the word "chapter" by using your "find" facility; if not, you will just have to hunt.  Highlight your chapter head -- even if it is just your chapter number -- and click "heading 1" in your style sheet ribbon.  And lo, you will find that chapter heading set off from the rest. 

Now then, if you write as I do, there are sub-sections within your chapters, which you might have separated with a double hit of the return key, to make a line space.  This can be done very neatly by using symbols such as ### or ()()() or <><><>  I used the last one, by hitting return three times, and inserting <><><> after the second return. Then I formatted it with yet another style sheet -- the "subtitle" one this time.

Again, go to "modify" and then hit "paragraph."

Make alignment "centered"
Make special "(none)"
Put 3 pt in the "After" box at "spacing."

Hit OK and the OK again to close the style sheet.  Now, go to all those triple returns (easily found with the find facility, if you have used a symbol), highlight all three and click "subtitle."

Quotes

I had an extra problem, because I quoted from a lot of sea chanties in the book, and I wanted these quotes to be set off from the rest of the book.  So I adapted the "quote" style sheet:

Right-click that style sheet in your ribbon, bringing up the "modify" screen. Click "format" in the lower lefthand corner, and click "paragraph" in the menu.

This time, you are allowed to justify.  I don't know that it is necessary, but it seems to help set it off on Kindle.  The important thing is to adjust the indentation: after some experimentation I found that 1.5 cm was best. Make sure that the special is "(none)"

Click OK and OK to close the screen, and go to all those quotes.  Highlight them, click the "quote" style sheet, and lo, the chantey is indented the way your want it.  I also set the quotes off with a double hit of the enter key both before and after. 

If your quotes are not poetry, but are items from letters or newspapers, you can fix this by putting 6 in the before and after boxes -- not only will this set off your quote from the rest of the manuscript, but it will put spaces between the paragraphs within your quote.

Front matter

Insert two blank pages at the front of your document.  The first will be your title page, and the second your copyright claim.

Title page

And guess what, you do it with yet another style sheet -- the one called "Title."

At this stage, I decided to change the title of my book. I had always hated the title "Abigail" as I thought it limited my audience, but all the publishers (save the Germans, who called the book Abigail's Legacy) insisted on using the name of the major female character.  I wanted to call it "A Love of Adventure," as not only is it the first line of the chantey that is quoted the most, but whaling was one of the ultimate adventures, particularly for a young woman.  And the book was revised, so I thought, Why not?  As long as I made it plain that the title had been changed, to make it fair to people who might have already read it ...

Right-click it in your style sheet ribbon, and click on "modify"

Don't play around with your font face -- believe me, it doesn't work, as Kindle won't take a blind bit of notice.  Keep it Times New Roman, but click on "bold" and change the font size to 28.

Now go to "format" and click on "paragraph"

Make your alignment "centered" then make sure that special is "(none)".  Go to spacing and put 42 pt in the "before" box.

Hit OK and OK, and bring up the first of the two blank pages you have created at the start of your document.  Type the title of your book, and then the author's name underneath (Kindle is strict about this).  Highlight both, and click the "title" style sheet box.

Credit

This is the page that gives legal credit to the people behind the book.  This is what I wrote:

A LOVE OF ADVENTURE text © 2012 Joan Druett

Cover Photograph © 2012 Ron Druett

All Rights Reserved

Adapt it for your own book, and then create a style sheet for it by going up to "Heading 2" in your stylesheet ribbon.  Right-click for "modify." Bring up "paragraph" in the format menu

Alignment centered, special none, and 6 pt both before and after.

Click OK and OK.  Highlight your credit, and click on heading 2.

That's your document.  Next time, we will look at making a jacket.

Amazon gets huge no-bid contract ...

From the State Department -- which has offered Amazon up to $16.5 million to hand out Kindles to their embassies

The U.S. State Department did look at the iPad and Nook, but dismissed them in favor of the Kindle Touch -- offering the e-Reader-maker a multi-million dollar no-bid contract to ship the device overseas.

According to Dara Kerr, reporting on C-Net, the State Department did look at all the devices available, including iPad and the whole range of Kindles, and decided that only the Kindle Touch would fit the bill.

Theoretically, once the contract is beaten out, Amazon will provide 2,500 Kindle Touches preloaded with 50 titles each, at a cost to the State Department of $2.29 million (or about $163 per reader). This number, however, could grow because the government is looking to negotiate a contract that could last up to five years.

This would replace the previous system, which was to supply embassies with hardcover books, so it is more cost effective than it may seem at first glance.

There has also been a pilot program. Over the last year, the State Department bought 6,000 Kindles(costing roughly $985,000) to see how e-readers would work in lieu of hardcopy books. The program was a success because e-readers turned out to be more flexible, provide more content, and ultimately were cheaper. So, the government decided to expand the program.

And it was Amazon that got the nod.