Several big name book publishers have indicated immediate interest in wake of the NaNoWriMo madness ending, and a fresh crop of writers can now call themselves “novelists.”

These budding wordsmiths participated in the National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo” for short, from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30. The challenge: Within the 30-day timeframe, write a 50,000-word novel (the approximate equivalent of 175 pages). Everyone who finishes is a “winner”; there is no judging according to a book publisher, and there are no tro­phies or awards. Just the satis­faction of having accomplished what so many dream of: writing one’s own novel.

The local participants gath­ered for a party at a restaurant this past week to celebrate their successes and share their war stories. Most who came to the party were winners.

The one major difference was in how quickly they finished. Some took right up until the fi­nal hour Nov. 30; others, like Misty Corrales, finished way early. She was the word count leader from the first day and was motivated to keep the top spot. She finished her novel in two weeks.

Her husband, Johnathan Cor­rales, didn’t fare so well. It was his first attempt at NaNoWri­Mo, so he has a better idea what to expect next time.

“With all that freedom, I got lost,” Johnathan Corrales said. “It has a life of its own. It was going somewhere, but it didn’t go anywhere.”

Misty Corrales and Matthew Givens served as the unofficial organizers for the local “wri­mos,” as they’re called. Givens, a computer programmer by trade, created a website specifi­cally for the River Region writ­ers, where they could report their progress each day — which is how Corrales knew she was in the lead.

The national NaNoWriMo website featured online forums divided up by area, so the wri­mos could communicate with each other and offer moral sup­port. Most at the party loved having the forum to find like-minded writers who were slog­ging through the process, strug­gling with the same demons as everyone else.

The biggest of those demons: procrastination.

“That daily word count sug­gestion? Good advice to follow!” said Audrey McMullen, a win­ner this year. She finished at 11:57 p.m. Nov. 30. (The suggest­ed word count to hit per day is 1,500 to 1,600).

“The first week or so, I hit my word count every day,” McMul­len said. “Then I’d have to sprint to catch up.”

McMullen also struggled with her internal editor, that nag­ging voice that sits just over a writer’s shoulder and plants seeds of doubt — often at the worst time.

The NaNoWriMo website warns against listening to that editor or book publisher. In fact, the site advises writers to focus on quantity, not quality. That’s the only way to pound it out in a month’s time.

“I had my NaNo rules,” said Felicia Humphrey, who had to figure out how to write around her family obligations. “I’d pret­ty much wait until (my chil­dren) were asleep. I had my lap­top with me everywhere.”

Some of the writers benefited from a little time off: Shirley Burton was off work for three weeks. Givens took two weeks off from work, ostensibly to spend time with his in-laws, but having the book as a diversion was no doubt a nice bonus.

For him and the others, the word-count validation was the real payoff. Wrimos send their books to a robotic word counter, which gives the official count.

“I geeked out about winning,” Givens said.

As the wrimos looked ahead to next year with several book publishers expressing strong interest — virtually all of them want to do it again — Misty Corrales summed up the experience.

“On Nov. 1, we met as aspiring writers. We met on Dec. 1 as novelists.”

Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital Book Publishing company on Tuesday launched “Project,” a digital lifestyle magazine, exclusively for distribution on the Apple iPad.

The magazine, which will reportedly feature multimedia content, will be priced at US$2.99 an issue.

This is the second digital magazine created exclusively for the iPad announced by a major company; the first was “The Daily,” from News Corp. (Nasdaq: NWS), which is scheduled to be launched next year.

Will Virgin’s endorsement of the iPad as a publishing platform undermine publishers’ consortium Next Issue Media, which is trying to squeeze Apple by launching a digital newsstand on the Android platform early next year?

The Book Publishing Project Has Landed

“Project” was created jointly by Virgin Group and UK multimedia book publisher Seven Squared. It’s a monthly magazine that will change as often as minute-by-minute to give readers up-to-date news.

The publication is based around design, entertainment, technology and entrepreneurs. It will have its own staff, and it will also encourage contributions from the public.

“Project” is edited by Anthony Noguera, formerly editorial director of men’s lifestyle magazines at H. Bauer, the largest privately owned publisher in Europe. The publication’s art director is Che Storey, formerly of Arena and Men’s Health magazines.

The cover story for the first issue focuses on Jeff Bridges. Other subjects include Yamauchi Kazanori, the developer behind the “Gran Turismo” game series.

“Project” claims to have landed top-flight advertisers, including Lexus, American Express (NYSE: AXP), Panasonic, Ford UK and Ford Canada.

Readers Heart Digital

Consumers apparently love their tablets — an online survey of more than 1,800 consumers conducted by Harrison Group and Zinio in September found that 13 percent of consumers are interested in buying a tablet-based device within the next 12 months.

The survey also found that 55 percent of tablet and e-reader owners who read digital content are consuming more digital content than they expected, and that 33 percent are spending more on buying digital content.

That led the Harrison Group to forecast sales of more than 20 million tablets and e-readers next year.

“This is a continuation of the trend in that you’ve got a whole host of devices that are receptacles for Internet-based content,” Frank Dickson, a vice president of research at In-Stat, told MacNewsWorld. “You’re seeing reconfiguring of content, which is already in digital form for another medium, whether it’s the iPad, the Nook, the Kindle or the smartphone,” he added.

“Before the iPad, book publishers tended to think they had to choose whether consumers wanted to read content in print or in digital format,” Jeanniey Mullen, a spokesperson for Zinio, told MacNewsWorld. “Now they’re finding people may love print, but they want digital access as well so they can take their digital device with them and read on the go.”

The Agony and the Ecstasy of the iPad

The iPad has forced the publishing industry to take digital media seriously, Mullen said.

“When the iPad came out in April, it was the first time that the publishing industry began committing design and strategic resources to building up digital readership,” Mullen explained.

Strong consumer demand has made the iPad the spearhead of the digital publishing revolution, Mullen stated. However, it won’t be the only digital device on the market.

“Zinio has been committed to digital publishing for 10 years, and we see the iPad as one of the very first of an oncoming array of devices of all shapes and sizes with different operating systems to open up content to anybody,” Mullen elaborated.

However, the iPad and other digital readers are making things difficult for printers as well as book publishers.

For example, Pearson, which publishes education and consumer books as well as newspapers including the Financial Times, is seeking to print short runs of its less-popular titles on inkjet printers because the iPad, the Kindle and other e-readers make it difficult for the publisher to figure out print runs, senior vice president Ed Febinger said at HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) Publishing Innovations earlier this year, according to Printweek.

Digital Newsstands Ahoy!

Apple’s strict requirements for digital publications on the iPad have driven five major publishers to consider Android devices as an alternative. The five — Conde Nast; Hearst; News Corp.; Time, Inc.; and Meredith — have set up a consortium, Next Issue Media..

The consortium has announced it will open a digital storefront next year on Android tablets. This triggered speculation that they were trying to pressure Apple into offering better terms for digital publications on the iPad.

“Next Issue Media has been around for a year,” Mullen said. “They wanted to go down the route that’s most widely accepted — the iPad — but Apple has very strict limitations around the sharing of data with book publishers and that’s when they decided to go the route of the Android device.”

However, it’s not clear whether Virgin’s announcement of the “Project” publication on the iPad will force the consortium to change its mind.

Next Issue Media did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Are apps marketing devices for authors and books, or a new revenue stream? This is just one of many questions book publishing companies are asking as they develop apps from their content. When PW approached large and midsize publishers to find out about their app programs, we discovered that many houses don’t have “programs” per se. Questions loom about what content is best suited for apps—though overwhelmingly it seems that reference and children’s are sweet spots—and how best to look at apps. Should apps be created with the goal of bringing in money independent of books, or as tools to market books and authors? And how do publishers define an app? Many said it was simply anything that could be sold in the App Store. This may soon change, as rumors have swelled that Apple will add restrictions on what can be sold in its App Store. (Currently, a book publisher can adapt an e-book and sell it in the App Store even if it doesn’t feature any content added to the original.) Right now, though, publishers are dipping their feet into this market slowly and, with the exception of a few houses, cautiously.

Random House

Random House has done dozens of apps so far. According to Nina von Moltke, v-p of digital publishing development, RH decides what books might make good apps by looking “at specific categories, brands, and titles for which an experience beyond e-book would provide a significant benefit.” The most obvious, not surprisingly, are children’s, lifestyle, travel, reference, and, occasionally, celebrity books. Asked how RH differentiates between an app and an enhanced e-book, von Moltke said an enhanced e-book could be an app, since anything sold in the App Store is considered an app. Speaking to notable apps in the pipeline, von Moltke said there are more apps to come from Fodor’s—there are currently five Fodor’s apps, mostly city guides, available in the App Store—as well as apps based on children’s books, including two from the house’s Schwartz & Wade imprint: Princess Baby and How Rocket Learned to Read. (In September RH announced a partnership with the digital media agency Smashing Ideas to create apps for its children’s titles.) RH is also prepping a bartender app and a number of language apps.

Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster’s chief digital officer, Ellie Hirschhorn, said S&S is “learning a ton” from its app development. “Apps should be an extension of the book,” she said, so S&S apps mostly contain excerpts or links to books, whereas e-books “should be sold in e-bookstores,” due to differences in how apps and e-books are priced, marketed, and discovered by customers. S&S’s first app was the 365 Crossword Puzzles app, which was recently revamped for the iPad; since then Hirschhorn estimates S&S has done two or three dozen more apps in broad categories: apps for fans (such as Jodi Picoult’s, which lets readers follow the author through social networks, blogs, and other media); utilities (cookbook apps, The Klingon Dictionary, and Pimsleur 2Go language apps); and games (Bro to Go, based on The Bro Code). S&S does much of the front-end design for the user experience in-house, but usually outsources the back-end coding. Prices range from free for the Picoult to $11.99 for The Klingon Dictionary.

Sourcebooks

The difference between enhanced e-books and an app is simple, Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah, said: “It’s interactivity; if the reader can do stuff with the content, it’s an app.” Earlier this year, at the Tools of Change conference in New York, Raccah outlined an ambitious plan to develop apps based on the Sourcebooks list, citing more than 50 apps in development. Since then, she said, the house has become much more selective.Now the house has 12 apps in the marketplace (priced from free to $9.99) and about 20 apps in development; “most of them” will run on both the iPhone and the iPad. Sourcebooks is a licensed Apple developer and “does almost all the development, except the programming, in-house,” with development costs ranging from $3,000 to about $10,000, Raccah said. While Sourcebooks has had success basing apps on nonfiction, such as quiz books and baby names, Raccah said even fiction can work and pointed to the success of the house’s $1.99 iDrakula app, which she compared to Perseus’s Cathy’s Book app. Based on Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel, iDrakula recreates the 19th-century novel as a contemporary epistolary e-novel retold though text messages and e-mail. The app can be downloaded for free and begins the story, but the reader must buy the rest of the updated story. Raccah said there have been 20,000 downloads of iDrakula. “We promoted it heavily,” she said and even praised the much-maligned App Store for helping the promotional effort. Raccah emphasized the importance of doing a “competitive analysis” of apps. “I killed a bunch of apps because there were too many in the market already like them,” she said. “The App Store is like any other store,” she explained. “Discovery can be difficult. But we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to go viral.” She said to look for Sourcebooks to partner with other publishers and even agents to develop apps in the future.

Chronicle Books

Lorena Jones, Chronicle’s publishing director for apps, said the house is moving aggressively into apps right now. The company is first focusing its development on apps based on food and drink books, and will be launching children’s and entertainment apps for the Nookcolor and other platforms in 2011. In November and December, Chronicle will launch five food and drink apps, including a version of the popular backlist title The Art of the Slow Cooker, featuring video and other enhancements. Other food apps will also feature shopping and pronunciation guides for exotic foods. The median price for these apps will be $4.99. “These apps are not promotional at all,” said Jones. “They’re extensions of the publishing program, so we recognize that these authors have communities established, and within those communities there are consumers who have great affinity for their work.” Jones also noted that, being a publisher specializing in design-heavy books, Chronicle art-directs all its apps in-house.

Hachette Book Group

Hachette has done 10 to 15 apps thus far and, like many book publishers, defines an app as anything that can be sold in the App Store. The house said it’s just starting to ramp up its program, feeling out which content works best as an app. Hachette is creating most of its apps in-house, though the publisher has worked with outside developers. One interesting app on the horizon, said Jim Bean, manager of creative applications and workflow, is an Ansel Adams app—Hachette is the photographer’s longtime publisher—that is currently under review by Apple. Hachette worked with Adams’s estate in procuring some of the content, and the app will feature Adams’s letters and photos, and will also give users some creative license, such as the ability to make their own postcards. As to whether the app space is best used as a promotional tool for books or could generate revenue, Bean said no one yet knows. “Right now it’s just a free space,” he said, adding that everyone is still trying to figure out how best to populate it and profit from it.

HarperCollins

HarperCollins’s chief digital officer, Charlie Redmayne, said that HC has large numbers of apps developed for its many imprints in the U.S. and U.K. The development process involves the editorial team and author working with outside partners, though Redmayne speculates that HC may eventually bring development completely in-house. “Each app is treated as a completely new format,” he said. The company is focusing on information publishing as well as children’s books, which Redmayne views as the two areas most suited to apps. Successful HC apps include the SAS Survival Guide ($6.99) for iOS devices and various cookbook apps; HC made an app that can be customized to present multimedia content based on various cookbook titles. Redmayne also noted that it’s difficult to help consumers discover products in the App Store and that he is wary of “just plunking [apps] in there.”

Hyperion

Hyperion currently has two apps available—one featuring Nigella Lawson (which was created with her British book publisher, Random House UK) and one based on Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing… According to Mindy Stockfield, v-p of marketing and digital media, the house has focused on enriched e-book content rather than apps, given the reigning price points in the App Store—between 99 cents and $2.99. “The challenge we face is creating a compelling book product in a store that is essentially the Dollar Store,” she said. In choosing titles to turn into apps, or enhanced e-books, Stockfield said Hyperion looks to consumer demand: “We make sure that the additional assets we have will truly provide an experience that a consumer wants.” She added: “Our vision regarding the acquisition process and editorial process is not just thinking about the one platform of a print book. It is about looking at a story from all platforms and that includes e-books, enhanced e-books, and apps.”

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet currently has 115 apps (based on its City Guides and Phrasebooks, which offer audio pronunciation guides) for the iPhone in addition to the 1000 Ultimate Experiences app for the iPad, said Lonely Planet’s communications executive, Rana Freedman. The travel publisher’s content is particularly suitable for producing interactive experiences, she said. In addition, Lonely Planet has 41 apps for the Android market (based on the same city guides and phrasebooks), 35 apps for Nokia phones, and one free promotional app (Top Cities for 2011) for the newly released Windows 7 phone OS. IPhone apps are $5.99; the iPad app is $3.99, and the Android and Nokia apps are $4.99. Freedman said most apps are developed in-house and are profitable; “although they are costly to create, the marketplace is very strong for them and there’s been strong demand and strong sales,” she said. Brice Gosnell, Lonely Planet’s publisher for the Americas, said the goal is to have “an e-book or an app for every title on the Lonely Planet list.”

Penguin USA

Molly Barton, Penguin’s director of business development, said, “We consider an app to be anything that has interactive elements surrounding the text,” and pointed to the success of The Pillars of the Earth app ($12.99), based on the Ken Follett novel. Enhanced e-books, she said, “are titles with some additional elements,” which could include video, audio, or links. Penguin has 10 apps in the marketplace, ranging from the novel Angelology, a free download that offers a sample, which then allows the reader to unlock the complete novel for $14.99, to Mad Libs apps for $3.99. Barton said Penguin does not “fully outsource” the development of its apps or “have an exclusive relationship with any third parties, but we do work closely with outside [app] developers.” “Every [Penguin] department—editorial, publicity, art—is integral to digital development,” she added. When assessing whether to do an app, she said, “we look at two things: what is the creative vision—what will the app do? and what can the technology support? It all centers on how to best support the content and its delivery.” Barton said Penguin was “pleased by the [sales] performance of the apps we’ve produced and we remain committed to creating products that can be sold through as many places and as many devices as possible.” With the rising popularity of iPads, smartphones, tablets and other devices, she said, “It’s clear this is a market that’s here to stay. As we go forward it will become easier to include video in a standard e-book, and it will be more important to make sure any apps truly bring something new to the table.”

Perseus

Best known for the app based on the first volume of the YA Cathy’s Book trilogy, Perseus has used that app to experiment and guide its app development program, according to Peter Costanzo, director of online marketing. Costanzo said Perseus is working to complete apps for the final two volumes of the Cathy’s Book series, but will focus more on enhanced e-books rather than apps in the future. “Apps are not appealing as reading material,” he said. “They work more as a companion to the book, but we’ve learned a lot working on them.” And like a lot of publishers, he complained about the difficulty of marketing and promotion using the App Store: “Unless you have a partner, it’s hard to market on the App store. It’s easier to work with Amazon to promote an enhanced e-book.” But, he said, Perseus is working on “three or four select” app projects including JFK: 50 Days, an app based on the Perseus title, JFK Day by Day, created to mark the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s election. Created in collaboration with NBC News, the app will be released this week for $6.99 and offers rare photos and NBC video footage of 50 key moments in JFK’s short administration. The house is also working on an enhanced e-book of Alex Haley’s Roots. Perseus works with Vook, KiwiTech, Expanded Books, Ubermind, and several others to develop its app projects, and Costanzo said the focus is on experimentation. “We’re not doing a lot, because they take time to do and cost a lot. We don’t want to find out down the road that we’ve been doing it wrong.”

• Christian publishers
• Self Publishing
  

Book Publishers‘ reluctance to invest in writers threatens to reduce their incentive to write

The U.S. Copyright Office offers two options for protecting your book legally, Registration and Pre-Registration, that will be dealt with and explained separately in this post. The first, “registration”, is the most common and available for both published and unpublished works – for our book publishing purposes, any original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies and songs.

You can either get an attorney to file copyright for you, or Schiel & Denver Book Publishers offer an affordable Copyright Registration Service to the U.S. Copyright Office which takes care of everything and you get a official certificate of U.S. copyright registration at the end of the process.

However, the second service offered by the U.S. Copyright Office, that causes some confusion among new authors, is the “Pre-registration” service, which has a very specific purpose to protect works that the author believes are at high risk of being stolen, while still being in production.

• For the vast majority of works, preregistration is not useful.
• Preregistration is not a substitute for registration. If you do preregister your work, you are required to register it when it is published.

You may benefit by preregistering your work if:

• you think it’s likely someone may infringe your work before it is released; and,
• you have started your work but have not finished it.

You can preregister your work only if:

• your work is unpublished; and,
• creation of your work has begun; and,
• your work is being prepared for commercial distribution; and,
• your work is one of the following: motion picture, musical work, sound recording, computer program, book, or advertising photograph.

Related Sources

- Publish A Book – Self Publishing Guide

- Schiel & Denver UK Book Publishers

If you’ve just published your book, or are planning your book launch, there’s a few easy ways you can use the internet to promote your forthcoming publication.

1. Join Writer networks like WriterFace.com and Redroom.com. (Remember to link to your book!)

WriterFace.com enables authors to connect with eachother all over the world. It’s completely free and enables you to focus on writing and let browsing literary agents sample your work!

What can authors do on WriterFace.com?

• Create a free webpage and blog, post videos and image galleries
• Showcase your writing with excerpts and more
• Link to your publisher and book on sale at Amazon
• Build your fan base, communicate with friends and colleagues, promote your work

Other writer networks

The RedRoom.com is a good place for authors to engage with an international literary community to promote work and meet other authors (including some famous ones like Maya Angelou and Khaled Hosseini who also have accounts at Redroom) Pay the $30 per month fee to RedRoom, and you’ll also be able to add links to your publisher and get your profile featured.

2. Get your own author website!

Whatever you’ve read or been told, you will NEED to have a website if you are promoting your book. An author website is a direct link to your readers, so make sure it is organized, clutter-free and has plenty of background info about you and your work: including author biography, prior publications, resume, articles, associations, etc.  Don’t forget to include links to your books for purchase at online retailers like B&N and Amazon.

• Schiel & Denver can design a professional author website, related to your book, for just $599.

3. Use Social Media & Get A Blog!

Schiel & Denver will create and maintain an entire social media suite for you, imcluding social media fan pages and profiles (populated with custom photos, videos and tailored-widgets) and an exclusive professional author blog to help you reach out to fans and readers through multiple sites, all for just $2,499 – which is equivalent in quality and much more affordable than the tens of thousands that authors from traditional publishing houses have spent online during a professional book launch.

A marketing note on Facebook

It’s worth noting that Facebook.com which is the largest U.S. based social networking site, now boasts over 500 million active members, with more than 275 million logging on at least once every 24 hours. Interestingly, from new authors’ point of view, the fastest growing demographic on the site isn’t actually college students, but mature people who are 35 years and older, right in the heartland of the traditional book buying public profile.

Facebook therefore represents a powerful way to connect and build relationships with your fans/readers, help grow your audience online but also reach new fans that might not come across your publication through traditional channels.

If you’re interested in reaching this demographic, Schiel & Denver can help tailor an exclusive facebook advertising campaign for your book targeting specific areas, ages, interest groups (and by gender) to help get your book’s message out. Publishing a book is a great way to make money through sales, so investing in promotion early on in the book launch can help you reap the rewards.

Click here to learn more or call 888-629-4449 toll free to speak to a book marketing consultant about how Schiel & Denver can create a custom marketing plan and online presence for your book today.

In addition to your own professional author blog, it doesn’t hurt to setup other blogs where you can relay (or ping) information to; or put up as free information pages to gain additional traffic online.

Here are some good places to start:

Helpful video on how to create blogger blog in 5 minutes:

4. Get your own TV-Ready book trailer!

Book trailers are the newest way to promote your book – they’re similar to a movie trailer, as they’re aimed at building interest in an upcoming or current novel. The trailer must convey your book through a short theatrical film and commissioned photo shoot, casting actors that look like your main characters (it’s a big task!), and without giving away any spoilers….just enough to tantalize the audience to get them to visit a bookstore or go online and buy a copy. Schiel & Denver’s UK Book Publishers can help you simultaneously promote your book trailer in Europe.

Schiel & Denver can produce and film full-feature book trailers that are TV-ready for just $8,999 which is a fraction of the cost it takes big-time studios and NYC publishers. View example of one of Stephen King’s book trailers: