Break the Spine

Welcome to the Revolution! I'm Monique Trottier of SoMisguided.com and I'm tired of the book publishing industry not being able to en masse figure out how to create a free economy for books. By free, I mean libre not gratis. This is not about ebooks or giving away books for free. This is about how do we find a way for creators to make money creating, how do we manage a sustainable industry, how do we get books into the hands of readers. My definition of book can be different from yours. This is not a war of formats. This is a revolution (a full turn of the wheel) on how we think about the creation, editing, production, distribution and promotion of book content.

New! Shortcovers EPUB Conversion Program

Shortcovers announced last week that they’re now converting publishers’ InDesign and Quark files (and just about any other file type) into EPUB. The conversion is free if you list your books only on Shortcovers. If you want to list your ebooks on additional sites, costs start at $29 for a simple book with few images and no bibliographic references, $49 for a book with up to 12% images and some bibliographic content to $100 for a more complex book.  Publishers who pay for the conversion get the EPUB file back to sell from their own website or other third-party sites.

To get more information email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

The Value of Book Publishers

Where is book publishing at and where is it going? Bernard Lunn tackles this question in his two-part article, Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business, giving a fairly thorough overview of how digitization is changing the industry.

Lunn looks at the waves of destruction hitting publishing and how these waves are going to affect the multi-billion dollar market and the percentage everyone involved takes.

Is Amazon taking too much of the pie? Should authors be earning more? Do publishers have a role to play in this new publishing world?

While Lunn suggests that in the future, authors will play a bigger part in publishing their books, where does this leave publishers and the value they provide?

Web Content Management Workshop

Need a strategy for managing all of your digital content?

Join us for an informative workshop on web content management, put on by
SFU Summer Publishing Workshops.

The workshop runs August 4 - 6 at SFU Harbourcentre. The cost for all three days is $500.

From the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop website:
“We’ll introduce you to web content management tools and what they offer. We’ll talk about book content, magazine copy, marketing messages, images and other media, and of course the web itself and the audience connections it makes possible. We’ll cover software and techniques; when it’s appropriate to manage content yourself and when it’s appropriate to contract an external Digital Asset Manager. Most importantly, we’ll focus on how to do all of this without breaking the bank.”

Panelists include Haig Armen, creative director of LiFT Studios; Geoff D’Auria site manager for The Tyee; Kim Elliott publisher of rabble.ca; Joy Gugeler publisher and editor-in-chief of orato.com; Brian Lamb manager of emerging technologies and digital content with the office of learning technology at UBC; Boris Mann entrepreneur and web strategist; Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing; and John Maxwell assistant professor in the Master of Publishing Program at SFU.

For full details go to the Web Content Management workshop page.

Download the PDF registration form here.