Has a Book Become the New Business Card?

With the advent of self-publishing, realizing the dream of writing a book has become a reality for more people.  Many guests on my nationally-syndicated radio show have been authors. I was fortunate to interview Sharon Lechter recently, and she brought up how a book has become the new business card.  Sharon, of course, is the co-author of the Rich Dad Poor Dad series and several best-selling books based on the recently re-energized Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich series.  Sharon is the ultimate example of a successful author.  Most authors do not have Napoleon Hill Foundation behind their work.  However, many have access to sites like Createspace and others to showcase their writing skills.

Years ago, Seth Godin, is a well-established author, made news when he decided to self-publish.  Godin had enough customer relationships that he no longer needed his publisher.  Publishers can offer a lot of advantages for a new author.  However, once an author is established and has identified their audience, they may not be as necessary. At that time, Godin told the Wall Street Journal, “Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books. What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers.” The Internet offers a platform that has changed publishing forever.

The popularity of self-publishing is undeniable. The old definition of what qualifies as a book or being published has changed. Books can include fewer pages than in the past, and they can be downloadable e-books.  They open doors for speakers and consultants.  They offer international recognition.  More than 725,000 self-published works were registered in 2015.  “As the field of self-publishing matures, the quality of both content and format for many of these titles is becoming indistinguishable from those published by traditional houses,” said Beat Barblan, Direct of Identifier Services at Bowker. “In recent years, the number of independent authors topping prominent bestseller lists is a clear indication that readers are embracing author-published titles.”

Has this made a book become the new business card?  Andrew Medal believed it had, as he explained in his entrepreneur.com article Books are the New Business Card in 2015.  This question has become an even more intriguing since that time. Books are a marketing tool just as a business card has been in the past because it establishes expertise, sets you apart, opens doors, and brings in new business.  It also begs another question: If everyone has a book, how has that impacted the value of having one?

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Create Infographics Easily with Easel.ly

Infographics can add some flare to an article. It may be a challenge to create one without the ability to navigate and comprehend complicated software.  That is why Easel.ly is such a helpful program.  In Edudemic’s article 10 Fun Tools to Easily Make Your Own Infographics, Easel.ly is listed as one tool that does not require a great deal of skill.

It is simple to take a template and simply add and change things.  For example, the original template, looked something like this:

While, this may be graphically appealing, it may take quite a bit of time to change something with this much detail.  If less information is required, it is simple to change a few things here and there.  Here is an example:

It may be costly and/or difficult to find just the right visual for an article. This site may be a great source of choices that can be easily tweaked to fit the topic at hand. The site offers quite a few templates and is growing daily.

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Self-Publishing with CreateSpace

Today’s Ask Dr. Diane:  I am interested in self-publishing a book.  Can you tell me about your experience with self-publishing and things you have done to market your books?

That is a good question and one that I often receive.  Check out my previous posting:  How to Publish or Self-Publish Your Book.  I used Createspace for self-publishing.  I had a great experience with them. They are affiliated with Amazon.  The site offers different options based on authors’ needs.  Some of those options included:

• Do-it-yourself tools to design interiors and covers
• Comprehensive design and editing
• Expanded distribution options

I found that the company was very responsive to my questions.  They took my design ideas and gave me a couple of covers to choose from based on my input.

Createspace is not limited to book publishing. They also work with musicians and filmmakers.

Once your book is published, and available on Amazon, you will then have the ability to create an Amazon author page.  That author page can incorporate links from your blog. Authors also have the option of making their books available on Amazon’s Europe-based site.

There are plenty of books that can help increase your sales on Amazon’s site.  One book that I thought was pretty useful was: Aiming at Amazon.

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How to Paraphrase and Avoid Using Direct Quotes

Some professors require that students avoid direct quotations within their writing.  One reason for this is that students may have a tendency to rely too much on what others have written.  They may take large amounts of directed quoted material and copy and paste it into their writing in order to meet page or word requirements.  This is not acceptable.

Students must still cite to explain where they obtained their research.  To cite correctly, students should get into the habit of paraphrasing. In this way, students give the original author credit for their work by citing the source of the information without quoting it word for word.  Citing means acknowledging where they obtained the information.  A student must be careful not to paraphrase everything they write.  The student should not neglect to include their own analysis.  Duke University provides useful information about avoiding patchworking and paraphrasing in APA style.

Paraphrasing occurs when the writer take someone else’s thoughts and information and restates it into his or her own words.  Think of it as more of a restatement than a summary. Owl Purdue explained that it is better than quoting word for word because it eliminates the temptation to cite too heavily.  Owl Purdue’s Paraphrase:  Write in Your Own Words is an excellent learning tool and it includes 6 Steps to Effective Paraphrasing.

To learn how to cite correctly, check out a helpful link from plagiarism.com that explains how to paraphrase properly.  For more examples of how to paraphrase, check out:  Examples of how to paraphrase without plagiarizing.  The Writer’s Handbook also gives some helpful tips about methods of paraphrasing and how to paraphrase difficult texts.

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How to Publish or Self-Publish Your Book

Today’s Ask Dr. Diane:  I am thinking about publishing a book.  What do I need to know about finding a publisher or trying to self-publish?

It can be quite challenging to get your first book published through a large publishing house.  Many new authors find that they must end up self-publishing.  Some are choosing to self-publish now because of the way that the industry is changing as well.

Seth Godin, is a well-established author who used to use the big publishing houses, recently decided to self-publish.  Godin decided to do this because he had enough customer relationships and felt he no longer needed the publisher.  Publishers can offer a lot of advantages for a new author.  However, once an author is established and has identified their audience, they may not be as necessary.  According to the Wall Street Journal Godin is quoted as saying, “Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books. What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers.”

If you decide to go the publisher house route, here are some things you must keep in mind.  There is a very high probability that publishers will turn down you book unless you have an agent, a strong proposal, a very unique book idea, and most importantly a strong platform. 

The word platform gets tossed around quite a bit in the publishing world.  What they mean when they say they want you to have a strong platform is that they want you to have a “following” of people that will probably already want to buy your book once it comes out.  They would like to see you have a popular blog, a TV show, a radio show, are a celebrity or have written previous books, etc.  If you don’t have a platform, there is a good chance that they will turn you down. 

If you do have a platform and want to use a publishing house, you will need to start the process by finding an agent.  To do this, you must develop a query letter.  Once you develop a good query letter, you will send this to agents that handle the type of writing that interests you.  I suggest reading Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents.

Once you send your query letters to agents, you may get some that respond.  If so, you must be prepared to have a strong book proposal to give them.  There are plenty of books about how to write a book proposal based on the type of book (fiction or nonfiction). There is a very specific format about how to write a proposal and it is important that you stick to that format.  The proposal will contain several things including some brief information about the proposed chapters. 

Many people think they need to have written the complete book prior to finding an agent. This is not true.  It is good to have one solid chapter to send to the agent, though, in case they do like your proposal.  Do not send this chapter until it is requested though.  It is important to start with the query letter. If there is interest, then you would send the proposal.  If there is interest, then you would send the sample chapter. 

If you cannot get a publishing house to publish your book, many people go the route of self-publishing.  There are some very simple ways to self-publish including using Amazon’s CreateSpace. Sites like this have made it easier and less expensive than ever before to get your book published.  The nice thing is that the days of having to print large amounts of books that require storage are gone.  With sites like Createspace, books are printed as they are ordered. 

Self-publishing has changed the publishing industry.  Because of sites like Amazon, many stores like Borders have had to close their doors.  People have enjoyed the ability to have a variety of book choices and the ease of ordering online. 

If you do decide to self-publish, be sure that you have a good editor and an indexer.  Createspace and others like them, offer help with a lot of things like cover design and more.  The more things that you need help with, the more it will cost.  However, these sites have made self-publishing a much easier and more realistic choice for authors than anything offered in the past.

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Inspired by One Tweet: Quakebook’s Creation is Helping Japan Raise Money

 

via google.com

An expatriate in Japan, Our Man in Abiko, sent out a call with a single Tweet to social media contributors that eventually led to the creation of an e-book called Quakebook.  “The idea was to share the stories and experiences of people actually on the ground during the earthquake,” claims Quakebook.org. “In just four weeks, the 2:46 Quakebook project has turned an idea first voiced in a single tweet, into a rich collection of essays, artwork and photographs submitted by individuals around the world, including people who endured the disaster and journalists who covered it.”

Quakebook is available on Amazon for $9.99.  Amazon stated the intentions of the editor who created the book, “is to record the moment, and in doing so raise money for the Japanese Red Cross Society to help the thousands of homeless, hungry and cold survivors of the earthquake and tsunami. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the price you pay (net of VAT, sales and other taxes) goes to the Japanese Red Cross Society to aid the victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. ”

The book has the title 2:46 Quakebook because it begins by showing the effects at 2 minutes and 46 seconds after the quake hit.  There are over 30,000 words of accounts and over 200 people who have chipped in for this project.  This whole project was completely volunteer-oriented and the e-book became available in only one month after the disaster.  Quakebookorg stated, “The contributions in 2:46 Aftershocks have come from a wide variety of sources, and include photographs, personal accounts, drawings; each telling their own tale.”

Click here to read some excerpts from 2:46 Quakebook:  Aftershocks Stories from the Japan Earthquake. To follow on Twitter, check out #Quakebook.

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Bloggers and Social Media Junkies: 5 Tips to Improve Your Writing

Today’s Ask Dr. Diane:  What are some things I can do to improve my blogging and writing skills?

The Internet has turned lot of people into writers.  Bloggers and social media junkies may have great ideas to share but may lack some writing skills that could help improve the message they want to convey.  I know I make a lot of mistakes when I write.  I try not to, but when you blog as much as I do, it is inevitable.  I never intended to be a writer.  However, I found that I liked sharing information, so writing became a means to an end.  When I write my books, I use a professional editor.  Not all of us can be editing experts. It could be very expensive and inconvenient to have to use an editor for every blog and social media posting.  However, there are some simple things that can help to improve writing skills. 

1.  Don’t End Sentences in Prepositions. The problem is that many people have no idea what a preposition is.  Susan Thurman, author of The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need, claims there is a trick to helping recognize a preposition.  “Look at the last eight letters of the word preposition; they spell position.  A preposition sometimes tells the position of something:  in, out, under, over, above and so forth.”  My seventh grade teacher suggested we think about a box.  For example:  in the box, over the box, and so forth. The following are the most common prepositions according to Thurman.  Try to avoid ending a sentence with any of these words:

• About
• Above
• Across
• After
• Against
• Along
• Among
• Around
• At
• Before
• Behind
• Below
• Beneath
• Beside
• Between
• Beyond
• But
• By
• Concerning
• Despite
• Down
• During
• Except
• For
• From
• In
• Inside
• Into
• Like
• Of
• Off
• On
• Onto
• Out
• Outside
• Over
• Past
• Since
• Through
• Throughout
• To
• Toward
• Under
• Underneath
• Until
• Up
• Upon
• With
• Within
• Without

2.   Learn to Spell without Spell Check. If you rely too much on a spell checker, you may find that words you meant to write are replaced with words that have entirely different meanings.  I can’t count how many times that a student has sent me a note saying to “please excuse the incontinence”.   It is best if you take the time to learn to spell correctly so that you don’t have to rely on a device that may change your intended meaning. The following are fifty of the most commonly misspelled words according to author Gary Provost of 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing:

• Acceptable
• Apology
• Appetite
• Architect
• Assassinate
• Autumn
• Calendar
• Changeable
• Conscious
• Correspondence
• Criticism
• Deceive
• Discernible
• Embarrass
• Eminent
• Existence
• Fascinate
• Grateful
• Hygiene
• Imaginable
• Immediately
• Irrelevant
• Jewelry
• Judgment
• Lovable
• Miscellaneous
• Mischievous
• Mortgage
• Necessarily
• Occasionally
• Occurrence
• Omission
• Orchestra
• Potatoes
• Professor
• Pseudonym
• Quarrelsome
• Religious
• Reservoir
• Rhythmic
• Scissors
• Syllable
• Tragedy
• Umbrella
• Vanilla
• Vengeance
• Weird
• Wholesome
• Youthful
• Zealot

3.  Vary your sentence length.  Some of my students like to write in either really long run-on sentences or overly short monotonous sentences.  Try to vary your sentence length.  Notice how the first sentence in this paragraph was longer and more complex.  That was followed by a shorter more succinct sentence.  It makes your writing easier to read if you vary the sentence length and mix it up a bit. 

4.  Ask yourself some questions once you have finished your draft.  Does the initial paragraph let the reader know what your paper, blog or article is going to contain?  Do you have needless repetition of ideas?  Is your tone and tense consistent?  Does one paragraph advance to the next in a smooth fashion?  Does each of your paragraphs contain a topic sentence that conveys the thought you have developed throughout that paragraph? 

5.  Work on expanding your vocabulary.  Rather than learning overly complicated words to express what you want to say, try varying the way that you say things by using a thesaurus.  If you are talking about a house, perhaps refer to that house as a dwelling or a building in the next sentence.  If you find that you are using the same word over and over, check out some alternatives words in a thesaurus to add dimension to your writing.

I know I am guilty of making some of these mistakes.  Through practice, we can all improve our skills. 

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Using Calibre for Your e-Books Conversion Needs

On their site, Calibre states that their product is a one stop solution to all of your e-book needs.  I have used Calibre to convert my books and PDF files for use on my iTouch and iPad.  I like their product.  It is a free open-source program that is used in over 160 countries.

You can download it for Windows, OS X or Linux by clicking here.   

I like that they have some easy tutorials that can show you how to convert your files. 

Features of their program include:

• Library Management
• e-Book conversion
• Synching e-Books to Reader Devices
• Downloading News from the Web and Converting to e-Book Format
• Comprehensive e-Book Viewer
• Content Server for Online Access to Your Book Collection

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Top 15 Articles to Help with Confusion about How to Choose an e-Book Reader and Application

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am confused as to why there needs to be so many e-book devices and applications. How do you know which device to buy to be able to read the books you want to read? It can be even more confusing as there are more and more applications being created to allow access to books from each of these devices.

To help relieve some of the confusion, check out the top 15 articles explaining eBook devices and applications:

1. 5 Fantastic Free iPhone reader apps http://mashable.com/2010/04/06/free-iphone-ebook-readers/
2. Reading Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363078,00.asp
3. How to download Kindle for your iPad: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000490441
4. Kindle receives favorable reviews over iBook app: http://notratched.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/kindle-app-beats-ibooks-for-reading-on-ipad/
5. Reviews of ebooks apps for Ipad: http://www.iphoneness.com/iphone-apps/8-best-e-book-reader-apps-for-ipad/
6. Google Books has a large assortment of free books you can read right on your PC.  Check out:  http://books.google.com/
7. Google Books competing with Apple and Kindle:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/05/google-ebook-store-launch
8. Barnes and Noble free eReader application:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks/index.asp
9. Stanza for iPad http://ireaderreview.com/2010/06/04/reviewing-the-new-stanza-for-ipad-app/
10. 50 Free Kindle books http://ireaderreview.com/2009/08/17/40-free-books-in-the-kindle-store/
11. Kindle vs. Nook http://www.best-ereaders.com/2010/05/02/kindle-vs-nook-2010-ebook-reader-reviews/
12.  iPad vs. Kindle http://www.pcworld.com/article/193242/apple_ipads_ibooks_vs_amazons_kindle.html
13.  iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad http://waltshiel.com/2010/09/06/ibooks-vs-kindle-for-ipad/
14.  Reasons why iPad won’t Kill Kindle http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/three-reasons-the-ipad-wont-kill-amazons-kindle/?src=twt&twt=nytimesbits
15. iPad, Nook, Kindle or Sony http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/2658254,ihnatko-kindle-ipad-nook-ereader-083110.article

via cache.gawkerassets.com

E-Books vs. Traditional Books

 

Ask Dr. Diane:  Which do you like better .  .  . e-books or traditional books? 

I am often asked about my preferences for e-books vs. the traditional book for use in the classroom setting.  I teach for many different online universities.  Some of these universities use e-books and others do not.  Initially I was leery about using them because I am a page bender, a highlighter and basic destroyer of books, in order for me to get the most out of them.  Technology has improved though and you can now do more to the e-book to mark things of interest.  Also there is the option of printing out a few pages here and there if you really want a hard copy. 

When I wrote the book The Online Student’s User Manual, I had no intention of offering it as an e-book.  However, within weeks of its publication, one of the universities where I teach asked for it in that format so that they could make it required reading for all new students. Needless to say, I got over my reluctance quickly and made it available.  I also made it available on Kindle: http://amzn.to/aCvMI1

Through time and experience using them, I realized that e-books are a great option for many students.  A typical example is the student who attends a regular university and doesn’t want to lug a ton of books all over campus.  However, my students are online students.  Many may tend to have an ease with technology which is why they chose online learning in the first place.  Some of my older students may have more of an issue with it than the younger ones.  However, the portability and ability to read at work online or print things has made them accept the transition and appreciate it more.