Away from the Kindle, when I’m performing those introspective reviews and relivings of what I have been reading, an uncanny sensation grows: that I’m reading a single book from a single voice, where a young French boy grows up to be reporter with a fetish for car accidents.

Books, if that word still applies, on the Kindle are content stripped of form. Everything I read is in the same font on the same stock. They all have a wide grey margin with a deep footer. They are all the same dimensions and weight. They are all odourless. Swapping between books is as disorienting as turning a page.

I initially thought the formless content was good – all ideas and writing on a level playing field; weight coming from language instead of paper stock, lightness from style instead of leading and type, profundity from discourse instead of the smell of mould and glue, beauty from writing and not from design.

And except for this conflation of voices it works. Though reading on the Kindle leaves me with the impression of reading third or fourth impression paperbacks – a gray atmosphere, but not from smudged type, tight margins, or cheap paper that started discolouring as it was wound around the roller.

Maybe this internal confusion is a good thing. Maybe it isn’t confusion. These works must be in some way related, just as every dog is related to every other dog. That the works initially appeared on blocks of paper wholly separate and separated from each other by space and time made them appear as independents, amplified their differences, obscured their true relation. Stripped of form and bundled together in the flash ram of the Kindle, where a bit is a bit and a word is a word, their commonality is growing apparent, and the voice I hear in my head, that combination of accents and timbres, the intersection of philosophies, is the voice of every small thing that unites them.

I am now a regular user of Readability. Readability, as well as re-formatting stories nicely and stripping out distractions, can send articles to your Kindle. And reading on the Kindle has made all the difference to me.

Maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s years of reading web pages. Maybe I’ve been trained by “web-friendly” articles and long threads of short comments away from the lengthy concentration needed to follow, absorb and enjoy long form fiction and non-fiction.

It is crazy. I’m happy to read 5,000 words made up of threaded comments, but I can’t sit with my finger on the scroll wheel and read a 5,000 word article.

My long-running theory has been that the problem is scrolling. Reading and scrolling, and reading and scrolling, is hard on the eyes. It’s exhausting. Scrolling forces you to continually track and re-track, scanning for the point in the text you were last reading.

Even page down / page up don’t work very well. The browser doesn’t respect the line or the paragraph. You don’t know what will end up at the top of the screen, where your reading point will be, forcing you again to scan the page to find your point.

I am not even including the difficulties caused by overly long lines, or short lines, or the distractions presented by ads, pop-ups, slide-outs, etc.

On the Kindle, like in books, you have a reliable anchor point in the top left corner. You hit the last word at the bottom right and your eyes can pop back up to the same familiar spot to continue. No scanning, no looking around for textual landmarks. Just the smooth transition of reading we have grown accustomed to since the codex replaced the scroll 1,500 years ago.

You don’t even notice the page refresh on the Kindle. You’re focused on your mind’s eye with the story you’re reading. Nicholson Baker noticed the same thing. The e-ink flash is hidden by the human, physical equivalent of the vertical refresh used by old cathode ray televisions, when the electron beam painting the picture finished, again at the bottom right, and turned off while it was re-directed back to the top left corner to start the next frame (field, really).

A googling session did not turn up any studies on scrolling versus fixed page size on eye strain, or reading exhaustion, comprehension or enjoyment. But, come on, who hasn’t noticed this effect?

I still don’t like reading long articles in the browser, but I am reading more long articles that originate on the internet now that I can easily shift them over to the Kindle. I have a lot of novels on the Kindle, mostly classics I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg, but I don’t have the time for those. That is another problem for another day.

Beyond Instapaper/Readability/Readable/etc I would like to see a bookmarklet that paginates the text it re-formats and provides an ereader like interface, where you can navigate through the article a page at a time without scrolling.

I say bookmarklet because I don’t think the browser makers will ever add this kind of functionality. It would enrage web designers. Beyond the rage they feel for ignoring web standards.

The infinite scrolling page is their territory. They know its shape, they know its properties. They tamed it, they invented a whole new language for it, just so we could look upon a web site and find it whole and compelling.

But they weren’t doing much reading, either.

There was no button for One Dwarf Short.

I thought that was a bit unfair. So I chose a random book, had a look at the embed code, and did a bit of tinkering.

Below is the Amazon supplied embed code:

<div id='kindleReaderDiv20'></div>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://kindleweb.s3.amazonaws.com/app/KindleReader-min.js'></script>
<script>KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: 'kindleReaderDiv20', asin: 'XXXXXXX', width: '530', height: '600'});</script>

The “asin: ‘XXXXXX’” is where the magic happens. The ASIN is the Amazon Standard Identification Number, which Amazon uses to identify products. However, if you follow that link you will find that the ASIN for a product will not necessarily be the same across all of Amazon’s international sites.

The easiest place to find the ASIN for your Kindle published ebook is to go to your Kindle Direct Publishing Dashboard. On your Bookshelf, the ASIN appears below the ebook’s title. The ASIN for One Dwarf Short is B003XNTJL2.

Just replace the XXXXXXX in the embed code above with your own ASIN and it should, hopefully work.

The embedded ebook is not the prettiest reading experience. Click through to see it in action.

Here is the embed code with our ASIN in place:

<div id='kindleReaderDiv20'></div>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://kindleweb.s3.amazonaws.com/app/KindleReader-min.js'></script>
<script>KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: 'kindleReaderDiv20', asin: 'B003XNTJL2', width: '530', height: '600'});</script>

And here it is live:

Deliverance by James Dickey

Why yes, I am a sucker for movie tie-in paperbacks. As long as the condition is reasonable and the movie memorable (for good or for bad) I will buy it when the Universe presents it to me. This is a UK edition of Deliverance. If you care about such things, it is the 9th printing by the Pan imprint, which illustrates how much interest the movie generated. Even Dueling Banjos made it to the top of the charts.

Some Deliverance trivia – it was directed by John Boorman, who also directed Zardoz, which I featured in an earlier Book Club. That’s quite a range of material, Mr. Boorman.

And James Dickey, the author of Deliverance, this story of a weekend canoeing trip turning into a horrorshow of male rape and murder, was a National Book Award winning poet and poet laureate to the Library of Congress.

I have only read the first few pages, but this might be the first movie tie-in actually finish. The writing is a couple of orders of magnitude better than your run-of-the-mill Grishams/Pattersons/Ludlums/you know the breed.

Don’t miss Jake’s entry on Flashman or Will’s planetarium book.

Read the excerpt from Will’s space opera here.

And by die we mean fall out of print, becoming unavailable for purchase, impossible to stumble across, only to be found as an old review in a defunct magazine.

The lifespan of an ebook changes everything, but here we are just talking about online marketing – helping people to find your book on the internet – and a particular subset of that: things you can do that are independent of everyone except you, your authors and your readers.

Word-of-mouth holds the throne

Despite ebooks being cheaper than gum, the mind-blowing selection means we still rely on our friends to tell us about the great books they find as we all scour the internet en masse like literary ants who can feel winter coming.

Facebook, while it is not your friend, is the easiest and most effective away to get your books in the path of readers.

Create a page on Facebook dedicated to each of your books (Book is listed under Entertainment, not Product). Make the cover your Page’s profile photo, hook up each blog to each book’s Wall (see below) and you’re 80% of the way there.

Get another 5% by creating pages for your imprint and each of your authors and hook up the respective blogs the same way. Haters will hate, but followers will follow.

Content is King

You should have a blog around each of your books. This is probably easier to do for genres and genre series, as ancillary content – back stories, histories, biographies, spin-offs – is appreciated and easily explored.

You need the blogs for two reasons. If done well they keep your readers engaged. Engaged readers will be interested in sequels, the author’s new, unrelated book, the publisher’s other books and other authors. Do it right, never let quality slip, never let it go dark, never sell your readers out, and you become a go-to, an authority, when they are looking for entertainment.

Connect your book blogs to their Facebook pages using RSS Graffiti. Now you just have to update one spot – the blogs. Do it at least once week. Nothing is more of a turn-off than a blog or Wall that has not seen an update for months, except the one that has multiple updates per day and all of them of no importance or interest.

And for a blog engine go with WordPress. If you are a publisher install WordPress Multi-site and hang all your book and (if they don’t have their own) author blogs off your main site. We like byrneswoder.com/booktitle/ or byrneswoder.com/authorname/blogentry/, as long paths (“booktitle“) in a URL are common, where as long subdomains – a-staggering-work-of-heartbreaking-plagiarism.byrneswoder.com – not so much. Not that Google cares either way, it’s just personal aesthetics.

Install the Facebook Share and TweetMeme plug-ins to add the power of word-of-mouth to each of your blog posts.

Search is Queen

Word-of-mouth has to start somewhere. Someone has to be the first to find a book and make those initial recommendations. This is where king meets queen – content meets search engines – and the reason why we have blogs as well as Facebook Pages.

Consider Facebook a blackhole; pretend events taking place inside Facebook are invisible from the outside (that makes RSS Graffiti your wormhole). But Google and Bing will find your blogs and index them, and as the material accumulates so will links and visitors. If your content is good, if people like it, it will all happen naturally over time, you just need to stick at it.

Write for people, not search engines. The search engines are getting smarter and today’s traffic-driving technique is tomorrow’s banhammer. When those inevitable changes occur you are not going to have the time or resources to go back and re-work all your titles and links and text, so just don’t do it in the first place.

Write today for that reader who at this moment is lying swaddled in a post-natal ward in a town you’ve never heard of.

Fake it ’til you make it

The above is pretty much what we are doing*. It is a long range strategy that trusts quality will rise to the top. We also think good guys finish first, authors should spend their time writing not marketing, and it takes 10 years of constant work to become an overnight success.

So check back in 2021 and see if following our own advice worked out for us. If you can’t wait that long, we will cover other online marketing options in an upcoming post.

– jimmy

* Instead of a book blog we are inserting a specific category of posts from author blogs into the relevant Facebook page.

I think his name is Justin

Will kicked off this round with his 50s space book, and I am going to stick with kids’ book theme, but stay on our planet. I’m going back to nature with this cute picture book about beavers that I picked up in a thrift store.

I think the greatest thing about vintage children’s books, specifically non-fiction ones like this Junior Science Book of Beavers, is the use of illustration rather than photography.

Even a realistic style like in Beavers results in a great book. I like how the style  of “realism” changes over time. Different artists with different influences using different tools and techniques mean yesterday’s realistic beaver looks different to today’s realistic beaver.

When yesterday’s beaver is the one you grew up with, by which I mean yesterday’s style of beaver, then for you that is the quintessential beaver. It’s a timeless beaver that you eventually forget about until you catch a glimpse of it on the cover of an old book and something in the way it sits, or the texture of its fur sends you back in time.

One Two Fiver - a warm-up exercise for writers

I came up with One Two Fiver a couple of years ago. I was working as a freelance copywriter, which meant I was getting random deadlines on random material, and most of the jobs were less than inspiring. That’s how it goes.

So I needed a way to get in the groove fast. I tried all sorts of things. Coffee made me burrow into the internet, whiskey kind of worked, but either not very quickly, or not for very long. Low-distraction text editors (like Q10, WriteMonkey, WriteRoom) helped a bit, but you were still staring at a blank screen.

I broke the process down. I figured why not start with one word. After I write one word, any word, then I will write two. After two I’ll do five. And so on from there, kind of doubling: 10, 20, 50, 100…, a nice humane, non-binary progression.

It is super effective. I was surprised. I had tried lots of things and this 1-2-5 progression really worked. It takes no effort to start, and you quickly get sucked in, and before you know it you find yourself in the groove.

I knew right away that it was worth sharing. I built onetwofiver.com, which provided a nice single page, distraction free implementation of the exercise. When you were done you could get the results emailed to you.

That was back in December 2008. It got StumbledUpon’ed at the time and saw a lot of traffic over that Christmas. I tried to turn it into a writing community of sorts, but lacked the time and the technical ability to make a go of it. It mainly just sat there, helping out those who knew about it and needed it.

Due to my neglect and lack of expertise it started to turn into a bit of a spam haven, so I decided to strip it back to its original purpose – a simple and effective online writing exercise – and bring it under the Byrnes Woder umbrella. Which mostly means I stripped out profiles and commenting, slapped our logo on it and added some links to it.

But we are glad One Two Fiver is ours, and we’re glad Byrnes Woder is helping writers write as well as get their work in front of readers. Maybe we should do a dating site next…

Go give One Two Fiver a try if you haven’t already, and let us know what you think.

jimmy

The new cover for One Dwarf Short, designed by Drew Reimer

A new year, a new cover. This time we asked an actual designer to do it and we love the result. So much innuendo.

You can get One Dwarf Short with the new cover for your Kindle (Kindle for PC, Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for Banana)  from Amazon.

If you are more of an iBooks  person, and you live in the right country, you can get One Dwarf Short from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, UK, and US stores.

We also got some great desktop wallpapers made based on the cover. There’s a link to them in the back of the ebook.

We thought there was no better way to start off the new year then with some book love. Sure, they are physical books and we’re ebook publishers, but we love books in all their shapes and forms. And contents. Like this one:

Mime: The Technique of Silence by Richmond Shepard

The dust jacket is a little bitten on the spine, and there are some wonderfully earnest notes penciled throughout, but the book is still gold. I am glad Richard Shepard wrote this.

Check out Will’s and Jake’s picks.