Last week Rachel had a Significant Birthday, so we’re giving you a birthday present.

All you have to do is enrol yourself (or a group) in our Diploma in Web Content before midnight, 19 March 2010.

With every enrolment before the deadline we’ll send a terrific free e-book worth USD17.00.

“Write Me A Web Page, Elsie!” (abridged, PDF) contains 8 of the 21 chapters in the popular paper version. These chapters are all highly relevant to the 10 courses in our Diploma in Web Content. It’s a mini-textbook, with tons of up-to-date, practical and entertaining advice on how to write web content.

Until now, only a few people have received this ebook, and it certainly wasn’t free.

Act now! Either contact us on sales@contented.com
or purchase a Diploma for one person online

I find writing books easy and fun, but writing a book title terribly painful. (This is Rachel talking, by the way.) And so much depends on the title—sales, for instance! By sheer luck, my latest book has a pretty good title, but it went through the usual hair-raising cycle.

1. While I was writing, the book had a working title: “Mrs Palin Reads a Naughty Story”.
2. I got used to it and came dangerously close to using this misguided title for real.
3. I user-tested the title on friends. Someone asked, “But what’s the sub-title?” Good question.
4. Just in time I got some radical advice: rip out the first chapter. Result: new title: “Scarlet Heels”, sub-title: “26 Stories About Sex”.

Does this remind you of editorial processes in your workplace? I figure since I wrote this book all alone for my own amusement, the sloppy development of a title was all part of the fun. But in the workplace, better not leave such things to chance!

Available from good New Zealand bookstores real-world or online:
ccpress.info/scarletheels.htm

Once again I’m copyediting a book, a crazy little one of my own this time. (Don’t ask.) No, do ask, because this type of book allows me to ignore many issues of correctness and grammar.

First, let’s get this straight: the big edit is done and dusted. For example, the manuscript has been dismantled and restructured, and four chapters chucked out. Now the book’s ready to give the designer, but for one last tidy-up.

These are short stories: 26 different narrators tell their stories as if they’re being interviewed. Most of them speak informally, so like most fiction writers I can set my own rules for style, within reason.

Consequently the only tools I need are my old faithful Roget’s Thesaurus, an Oxford spelling dictionary and a wee style sheet for consistency. Copyediting fiction is such a breeze — when you wrote the book!

Confession: I do have style guides on hand, just in case. These are my enduring favourites:

• The Australian Editing Handbook, Second edition (Wiley)
• The Bedford Handbook, Diana Hacker (Bedford/St Martins, Boston)
• New Hart’s Rules (Oxford)

Are people speeding dangerously fast through your street? Consider removing all traffic signs, so that drivers need to slow down and make eye contact before crossing a road. Or have dinner on the front lawn, so that drivers slow down to find out why. It’s the human way to calm the traffic.

These counterintuitive findings are being used in Europe and Australia for speed control.

When David Engwicht spoke on Radio NZ about this, he said humans have two opposing urges that are both strong:

• to go fast (to escape, travel, achieve?), and
• to listen to a story.

The trick is to make the story stronger. A child playing on the street. Dinner in a front yard. A motorist hesitating at a crossroads. That’ll slow us down, because a story is intriguing.

There’s a parallel in reading. With web content and indeed and files sitting on a computer screen, the urge to go fast has become almost overwhelming. I’ve found my eyes popping all over a paper-newspaper, looking randomly for a punchline. I’ve read an article and forgotten it instantly.

At the same time, when I read an online *newspaper*, I skim the headlines and read a few articles from beginning to end. So I have hoped all is not lost. But I’ve been concerned about what this has been doing to my brain—and yours.

Maybe I’ve only got the guts write about this now because I think salvation is at hand, in the form of readable ebooks. OK, I’ve come clean.

Reading by iPhone or Kindle is best with straight narrative. No pretty pictures. No fancy fonts. Just text, pure and simple, that tells a story. And so I see one of my friends reading Jack London on her iPhone, and a couple of others working their way through Dickens. Jack London! Charles Dickens! And loving it.

These are the same friends who use computers or fix computer systems by day, their eyes darting rapidly from key point to key point, in a mad race to consume information.

We all need to do that kind of reading. It’s not so much speed reading as kangaroo jumping over the words, squashing them wherever we land. Thump, gotcha! Thump, gotcha! It’s not a sweet, subtle, satisfying kind of reading, this web reading. But we have to do it, and we have to carry on writing stuff for that type of reader. They haven’t got a second to waste. They’re in a hurry, dammit!

But now, in the dentist’s rooms, at the bus stop, on the train, they’re reading stories again. For no reason. Just for pleasure. Not in a rush, but loving it.

Maybe this development is simply the swing of the pendulum. But for me as a writer and a reader, the iPhone and ebook explosions came simultaneously and just in time. I don’t mind being a gobbly reader if I can still enjoy books. And I am extremely happy to train people to write for gobbling readers, provided we all slip into a Superreader suit at private moments.

SALT publishers have good advice for authors. 100 words, they say. I didn’t count them.

Here are some:

If you’re not on the Web, pretty soon you won’t exist in the minds of readers. Only networked writers will survive. This is an issue of discoverability and of consumption. Being a writer has a lot to do with the three Ps: profile, publicity and presence. That’s Web presence. Out of thousands of books published each year we encounter very few and choose less from among them. The back story to a book is as important as the book itself. Readers must know you to choose you. This is a core competence in using the Web, because collision equals sales.

If it matters for authors, it matters for you too, if you’re in business.

The Future of the book conference (Auckland, 24-25 June 2009) was deeply satisfying for me. It answered all my burning questions about jumping into the ebook arena. Like:

• Why am I confused? Because there’s a major announcement every week about the ebook explosion, doh! so it’s confusing.
• Could I be locked in to a proprietary ebook system and never escape? No no no no no. But do start with XML.
• Are there do-or-die, irrevocable choices to be made here? No, Milady Author, you can have it all. But some paths are less knobbly than others.

To-do list
1. Buy iPhone OS3 in July, or the new Apple device if it truly is born in July.
Let it change my lifestyle.

2. Check contracts: do I have electronic rights (or all rights) for my back list of books? If not, get them. (List of publications to check off…)

3. Compile a poetry collection for iPhone ‑- but nothing rude or sexual!

4. Tidy the manuscripts:

• no page breaks
• simplify pre-pages
• Re-do all screenshots in Write me a web page Elsie! High res., colour.

5. Get new ISBN numbers for electronic version of the books.

6. Get manuscripts converted:

1. convert to XHTML
2. convert to e-pub
3. For Kindle, convert to AZW (last on the list)
4. DRM (digital rights management, i.e. preventing theft) e.g. Adobe ADEPT
5. Zinio.com for Write me a web page, Elsie! because of screenshots

6. Research channels ($%, rights, format) and send to all channels.

• Iphone – App Store – Legend? Stanza?
• ecoreader.com.au
• ScribD.com
• nz stores, libraries
• 1000 great NZ e-books
• ebook warehouses, and lots of others.

7. Carry on marketing for years!

At next week’s conference on the Future of the Book, I’ll be really interested in one topic as a writer. And this topic affects you too, if you write for work. Which you do.

How People Will Read Digitally
To create effective digital publications, you need to understand how people read digitally. This session explains the latest research findings and shows some cutting edge techniques being developed to enhance the digital reading experience.

David Bainbridge, University of Waikato

Since this is about ebooks, the implications for writers go far beyond what we know about how people read web content on a computer screen. Ebook readers do not have the same type of computer screens, and they’re not online, usually. And people read ebooks on iPhones: the tiny screen is an everyday book “page” for many.

I’m sure I’ll learn much about how to write ebooks for the new environment. Obviously, any old book can be turned into an ebook. And obviously, endless examples of short, easy, how-to books have been written expressly for sale as a PDF.

But as a writer I want to know how I can make a work of fiction desirable, enticing, comfortable, and friendly, in the new environment? What design tips will work regardless of how the books are read? What sort of structure might work well — must every future novel be picaresque, for instance?

The same information will apply, somehow, to business writing. It’ll be fun trying to figure this out.

Exciting times. Meantime,

Radio NZ audio: Sherman Young discusses the future of books.

Image: bolted books by artist David Boyle.

“All publishing is digital publishing. All writing is writing on the Web.”

Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media says this in his speech on The Future of Publishing. That’s not just a glib soundbite: these are his closing words in a 31-minute video full of facts and figures and graphs. It’s his summary of the future of publishing.

CONTENTED courses train people to write content for web sites and intranets. But these same courses teach precisely the skills we all need for pretty much everything we write — including books.

I still encounter editors and writers who assume that “good writing is good writing”, and that Strunk and White’s old mini style-book tells them all they need to know. Wake up and smell the electronic paper! It’s more urgent than ever to get some vital skills that were not taught in journalism classes 15 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.

Since then, everyone’s familiar with these basic technology developments:

• desktop PCs, laptops, netbooks and mobile phones
• the internet, hyperlinks and browsers
• search engines and EDRMs.

So how come those writers cannot see that those elements have irrevocably changed the way we ought to write?

Andrew Savikas says we need to make books look more like web pages. Add links! That’d be a start. I’m very curious about other changes that might make novels, for instance, more tech-astute.

Writing content to be read on Kindle is Jakob Nielsen’s topic of the day. Pretty fascinating for any writer to see examples of content that show exactly why:

Adapting content for the Kindle e-book reader requires that you follow an unholy mix of usability guidelines for other environments:

* Print guidelines for body text
* Web guidelines for headlines and summaries
* Mobile device guidelines for page design and interaction design

In the last few months I’ve seen three people reading with a Sony e-book reader, and nobody with a Kindle. Not surprising, as in New Zealand we can only read Kindle content on an iPhone.
Image (c) Bradleygee on Flickr

Google’s advertisements in newspapers around the world, including Niue and the Cook Islands, amuses the New York Times writer Noam Cohen and many others.

But the reason for the retro ads is a bit scary.

Google, the online giant, had been sued in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.

As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.

Take it or leave it, o ye copyright holders: if you don’t like it, opt out… provided you noticed that advertisement in the first place. I’m personally all for Google’s grand plan for my own works, in principle, but this strategy is rather like being judged guilty unless found innocent. I want control over my own works and who publishes them.

And if it comes to a battle between a Niuean poet and Google, I wonder who would win? Hm, that’s a tough one. But give me a couple of days and I’ll figure it out.