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Adventures in Self-Publishing: Establishing a Web Presence (Part II)

2/02/2014

Public Domain, courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife/WikiMedia Commons In the last post, we talked about the different types of Web sites you can create or take advantage of. In this entry, we’ll talk about actually creating the Web-based pages you’ll need to sell your self-published book, leaving to a later date how to create and manage more social-media oriented pages such as Twitter and Facebook.

Setting up the pages discussed below is well within the abilities of most authors, even if you don’t consider yourself to be very tech-savvy. But as a client of mine often observes in similar settings, “Says easy, does hard.” That’s particularly true when it comes to Web-based promotion, because you should not – must not – assume that if you simply build it, that they will come.

UK Cabinet Office Signals Move Towards Open Source Office Suites

1/30/2014

UK_Cab%20154.jpg It was ten years ago that the CIO of Massachusetts rattled the desktop world by announcing that the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth would henceforth license only office suite software that complied with the OpenDocument Format. The shock waves that followed were attributable to the fact that while the open source OpenOffice office suite was built around that standard, the dominant product – Microsoft’s venerable Office suite did not.

Yesterday, the UK Cabinet Office blew some life back into the embers left behind by what was one of the most epic standards wars in history (you can follow that saga from the beginning here and the first five chapters of a book I started to write about it here).

Adventures in Self-Publishing: Establishing a Web Presence (Part I)

1/24/2014

Spider%20Web%20140.jpg It’s obvious that any self-published author needs a Web presence. Why? Because promoting your books at many venues is free and most of the rest are cheap, and the Internet is where people go to find out anything and everything.

And that’s great, isn’t it? In the old days, an author without a publisher had virtually no way to reach the marketplace at all. The problem now is that there are so many Internet-based avenues to choose from that it’s hard to know which to use, where to begin, and how to get the most out of each one. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, and for the next few posts in this series.

Adventures in Self-Publishing: Launching a Promotional Campaign

1/17/2014

Rocket%20Launch%20140.jpg According to proponents of the Brave New World of self-publishing, there’s never been a better time to write a book. They seem to have caught a few ears with that claim, since in 2012, 391,000 new titles – an incredible number - were self-published in the U.S. alone – up an even more incredible 59% from just the year before. For the lucky few, that approach has succeeded brilliantly.

But what about the rest of those authors? The same proponents point out that social media can turn a title into an overnight sensation, and that a self-published author has exactly the same access to social media channels as do published authors. That’s perfectly true. But needless to say, not every author is able to ring the social media bell, or it wouldn’t remain true that the average self-published author still sells only a few dozen books. So what’s the secret? Is it mostly luck, or should any self-published author of a decently written book, well advised and diligent in his or her approach, be able to find an audience?

Introducing “Ideas Today, Politics Tomorrow”

1/10/2014

Ask someone of a certain age today how politically engaged they think young adults are, and they’re likely to respond “not very.” And in fact, the current U.S. political system is dysfunctional enough that someone of any age could be forgiven for simply turning away in disgust. Of course, that does no one any good. Or, as we used to say back in the 1960’s, “If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.”

All of which makes me happy to bring your attention to a Web site called Ideas Today, Politics Tomorrow, for which my daughter Nora is a staff writer. She writes primarily about foreign affairs, and like everyone else at the site (including the founders), she’s unpaid.

When FRAND meets FOSS: Bottom Up or Top Down?

12/23/2013

Still looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy-for someone?

Problem solved!

Courtesy Yuval Y/Wikimedia Commons GNU Free Documentation License, The U.S. may be the place where more emerging technologies bubble up than anywhere else, but when it comes to developing public policies to address new technologies, Europe continues to hold the lead. That reality was underlined recently with the release of a report summarizing the proceedings and conclusions of a European Commission (EC)/European Patent Office (EPO) workshop titled Implementing FRAND standards in Open Source: Business as usual or mission impossible?That workshop (on which more below) is only part of a larger series of efforts surrounding the ongoing evolution of the EU legal framework, ICT Standardization policy, and much more.

WIPO Builds a FRAND Arbitration Business (but will they come?)

12/12/2013

Bob Stein Field, courtesy of Zach J. Beavers/Wikimedia Commons - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Ever since Apple set off the mobile platform wars by suing Samsung for what Steve Jobs believed were egregious borrowings of patented Apple smartphone innovations, the courts have been busy processing the disputes. One of the most effective weapons the combatants made use of has been the so-called “standards essential patent” (SEP). And the armament of SEPS is very large, because each mobile device which implements many hundreds of standards. For example, if a company owns a SEP necessary to include a camera, wireless function or other key feature, the owner of the SEP can its price to license it, or even refuse to license it at all.

That is, of course, unless the SEP owner was part of the standards setting organization (SSO) that developed the standard in question, and had made a commitment to license that SEP on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

The Launch of AllSeen Alliance (and the Next Generation of Open Collaboration)

12/10/2013

If you read the technology press today, odds are you already know about the launching of the AllSeen Alliance (a Google News search I just did produced 412 results in a wide range of languages). That’s not a surprise, because this is an important and ambitious project. But there’s a story behind the story that likely won’t get the attention that it deserves, and that’s what this blog post is about. (Disclosure: the AllSeen Alliance is a Linux Collaboration Project – the 11th so far – and I assisted in its structuring and launch.)

Where I Was Then; Where we Are Today

11/22/2013

It seems easier to accept that it has been a half century since JFK was murdered than that most people now alive were then yet to be born. The enormity and impact of that event were so unprecedented that one feels everyone should somehow be able to remember where they were when those terrible shots were fired.

Like everyone who was old enough to grasp the fact of the young president’s assassination, I remember where I was when the news began to spread. Just turned 10, I was sitting in my second floor classroom at the Hay School, a one class per grade elementary school in Easton, Pennsylvania. There was a knock at the door, whispering, and then more quiet voices as the teachers congregated, shocked and no doubt fearful, in the hallway.

Judge Chin Reimagines “Fair Use” for the Internet Age

11/20/2013

Last week, Judge Denny Chin handed down the latest opinion in the now-eight year battle between Google and the Author’s Guild (among others) over Google’s massive book scanning project. If the Author’s Guild fails to overturn the Judge’s decision on appeal, it will mark an enormous watershed in the ability of Web site owners to display copyrighted works without the prior permission of the owners of those works.

At issue was the appropriate application of the “fair use” doctrine under U.S. law to the Google project, a rationale that allows certain types of copying to be permissible that would otherwise be actionable. As applied by Judge Chin, the scope of that doctrine has seemingly been expanded by orders of magnitude. Indeed, in the case at hand, the judge has broadened its scope so dramatically that it’s difficult not to conclude that he was struggling to find sufficient legal precedents to justify a favorable outcome for Google. Many will contend that he fell short in that effort, and that his intent was instead to rebalance, if not rewrite, the doctrine itself in order to bring it into the Internet age.

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