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Hello

It’s been a while since my last blog post and a lot’s been happening in my personal and professional life as an author… all good stuff by the way and I hope to share more with you over the coming weeks.

So, I have 2 BIG morsels of news for you today.

First of all, my illustrator has finished the illustrations for the next Billy and Monster book titled – Billy and Monster Meet the President.

I subtly deal with an ever present danger in the world we live in today – terrorism.

I hope this book will be a springboard for grown-ups to share with their loved ones how to deal with strangers and practice good etiquette in public places. This should be out mid June and I’ll let you know when its live.

And now for (perhaps) the more exciting news…

The Billy and Monster Collection Audiobook is now LIVE and I’d like to offer you a free copy in exchange for a review.

Simply follow the instructions below to get a copy

1. Go to my book’s page on Audible.com or audible.co.uk

2. Add the audiobook to your basket

3. If you are prompted to sign in, please create a new Audible.com account or log in. Otherwise, proceed by clicking “Do you have a promotional code” beneath the cover artwork of the audiobook.

4. Enter the promo code, and click “Apply Code”

5. A credit for the audiobook will be added to your account. Click the box next to “1 Credit” and click the “Update” button to apply the credit to purchase.

6. Complete checkout, and start listening to a free copy of the book.

I have 12 free codes to share today. Simply leave a comment below and let me know what you love best about the Billy and Monster books and I’ll send you the code asap.

This audiobook contains the five books in the Billy and Monster series and J.B. Burgess – the narrator – did a wonderful job with the sound effects and accents and brought each story to life. My wife and two bambinos were in stitches when we listened to it for the first time.

This audiobook can be purchased on Audible, iTunes and Amazon.

Thanks for all your support and do have a great day.

You've heard it over and over, what worked before isn’t working now. I attended a webinar by online marketer Clay Collins. It was about the newer strategies for successful list building. They've been around for a while now, but many haven't taken that step forward and gotten on board. As with most marketing strategies, once they become overused they become old and tired. What used to work

• NOW ON THE APPLE IBOOKSTORE!
• Kindle
• Paperback

In August, iTunes changed affiliate partners to PHG, which means that if you want to provide affiliate links for people to buy your books in the iBookstore, you had to change all your links. Updating has been a breeze and it makes book marketing more efficient.

First, why add links to your website, blog or your social media platforms? The links take readers directly to the iTunes page about your book. Not only does it encourage readers to buy your book for the iBookStore, it also gives you a small commission. I am currently earning about $100/month on this type of affiliate and by adding in the iTunes affiliate, I hope that figure goes up. (Thanks for your support!)

If you just want a link to your book and don’t care about the affiliate links, then use the iTunes Link Maker tool. If you are writing books for children or teens, this is a great time to add these links because more and more schools are adopting iPads in their classroom. For example, the Los Angles School District spent more than $30 million this summer to purchase iPads for every student. Of course, on the iPad, you can choose to read books from the Kindle or Kobo apps; however, the iBookstore is becoming easier and easier and I expect Apple to start pushing it more.

Becoming an iTunes affiliate is now an easy task: simply apply now. It’s free.

After your application is approved and you provide the proper financial information, you just need to snag links to your books. This used to be a cumbersome process and I was lousy at doing it. With the switch to PHG, it’s as simple as any Amazon affiliate links. More on creating affiliate links.

You simply login to your iTunes Affiliate Dashboard and click on the iTunes Link Maker Tool; it will take you directly to the tool, but this time, it will automatically add in your affiliate ID. The resulting links will still take readers to your iBook page, but will also record that they came from your affiliate link.

As always, if you use affiliate links, you should update your privacy policy to let users know what you are doing.

So, here’s the list of my books now available on the iBookStore. For more information on each title, see here.

• Common Core ELA Activities
  
• Prewriting for the Common Core
  
• 11 Ways to Ruin a Photograph – Darcy Pattison & Michael Jeter
  
• Wisdom, the Midway Albatross – Darcy Pattison & Kitty Harvill
  
• Prairie Storms (English) – Darcy Pattison & Kathleen Rietz
  
• Las tormentas de la pradera (Prairie Storms in Spanish) – Darcy Pattison & Kathleen Rietz
  
• Desert Baths – Darcy Pattison & Kathleen Rietz
  
• Start Your Novel – Darcy Pattison
  
• How to Write a Children’s Picture Book – Darcy Pattison
  

Samuel T. Moore of Corte Magore, an animated and narrated children’s picture book releases on 7/1/13!

Author, Tonia Allen Gould, announces the release date of her animated and narrated children’s picture book, coming on 7/1/13 on iTunes.

This is by no means the only things you can use to format and convert your manuscript to an e-book, it is just to give you an idea of the some of the things out in the market you can use. The Kindle, the Nook and the iTunes Bookstore (which services both the iPhone and iPad) now stand out as the most common targets for e-books. This has helped the e-book boom has helped consolidate formats a bit, but there still isn’t a single gold-standard editing product that guides users through the whole workflow and helps them check their results.

You probably will want to format your e-book for a varity of readers –  it helps to support as many of devices as possible. The Kindle, for instance, is notorious for not supporting ePub format files.

So here is a little information about the most common e-book formats and their drawbacks, so you can decide what to use to format your manuscript and create an ebook.

HTML:

If you are looking for only one fromat, HTML is more or less it. For one, it’s ubiquitous; almost every text-processing program can generate or read HTML. It also supports many features e-books will use: hyperlinks, font control, section headings, images, etc. Downside not everyone knows HTML.

But if you’re starting with a Microsoft Word or Open Document Format document, your best bet is to export it directly from the source application into HTML. Word users should do a “Save as…” using the “Web Page, Filtered” option, which strips out most of Word’s generated left over junk (cruft).

Exporting to HTML from your source program helps preserve the most crucial formatting and usually preserves sections and chapters: outline headers are turned into h1/h2/h3 tags, which most conversion programs correctly recognize. Some are even able to auto-generate tables of contents from those tags. Word typically does a good job generating TOCs without problems.

Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX)

If you’re dealing with an original manuscript, odds are it’s probably going to be in Microsoft Word format. Almost every device on the face of the Earth can read or write Word documents. And the format has native support for most everything you could think of: formulas, chaptering, footnotes, indexes — anything that might show up in an e-book.

Word documents are best as a starting point for an intermediate conversion format, most likely HTML, rather than a format that can be converted directly into an e-book. In fact, most e-book conversion programs don’t accept Word natively as a source document type. They may accept Word’s sibling format, RTF, but that is already at least one stage of conversion away from the original and increases the chance that certain features might not make it through the conversion process. For example, RTF does support features like sections and footnotes, but the Calibre e-book creation suite, for one, doesn’t process them correctly.

OpenDocument (ODF)

OpenDocument is the format used by OpenOffice.org. Microsoft Word also supports ODF as one of it’s formats. it reads and writes.) Third-party OpenOffice offers extensions that let you export directly to e-pub formats. There are also a number of standalone applications, such as ODFToEPub. If you’re already used to creating your documents in ODF, your path to creating a finished e-book may be  shortened, slightly.

ePub:

An open, non-proprietary format. Uses XHTML as the basis for its document format. ePub is widely supported as an output format by various e-book production applications. iTunes only accepts ePub as a source format, so it couldn’t hurt to render a copy of your product as ePub no matter what other formats you use.  Books that require PDF-style page fidelity won’t work well in ePub.

Mobi and Kindle:

After Amazon bought Mobit, it made it into the basis for the Kindle reader’s own e-book format. Mobi supports digital rights management, but unencrypted Mobi documents can be read on the Kindle without issues.

PDF

PDFs can be read as-is in the majority of e-book readers, including the Kindle. It is best used when you want to maintain absolute fidelity to page layout — images, typefaces, etc. But this is the very feature that makes PDFs a problem in some scenarios. Other e-book formats are designed to work independently of any particular device resolution, so pages reflow automatically for each device. This is one of the reasons the Kindle didn’t make use of page numbers at first, since the page numbering for a particular book depends on what device or screen size you are using.

PDFs reproduce the formatting of the original page, no matter what the size of the destination device, so a PDF formatted at a certain size may be readable on a large display, but look cramped on a Kindle or Nook. If you plan to use PDFs, you may want to consider exporting your document with different page sizes for people using e-readers with small screens.

Calibre:

http://calibre-ebook.com/  Calibre is a free and open-source application marketed as a personal e-book management solution. It can be used as an e-book conversion utility.  It is powerful and may be the best place to start, especially if you want to distill output for multiple e-book formats. The program can accept ODF, RTF, ePub, Mobi, PDF and HTML. Calibre can also reformat documents unwrapping plain text that has too many line breaks or insert chapter breaks by looking for certain text structures (such as a line break, the word “Chapter” and then a number).

It doesn’t support DOC or DOCX documents, so anything coming from Word, so you will have to save it in another format first.  Serdar Yegulalp, a computer techology author says, ”Saving in either ODF or HTML from Word seemed to do the best job of preserving formatting and features, including things like monospaced formatting for code examples. Doesn’t process footnotes correctly.”

Sigil:

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ Sigil is a multi-platform EPUB ebook editor – free open source. It’s an editor that exports to e-books (has a built-in document editor) it includes various tools for collating and assembling a finished e-book (such as a table-of-contents editor). Sigil’s main drawback is how it handles importing – only accepts HTML, plain text or existing ePub files as input documents.

Jutoh:

http://www.jutoh.com/ Accepts OPL files and has slightly more robust editing options. The cost is $39.

Adobes In Design is a full blown publishing solution, but it requires a lot more work and knowledge to generate a finished product than a simple conversion utility. Second is the price tag: It starts at $699.

TIP: Include a Table of Contents

An e-book that isn’t properly chaptered is difficult to navigate. Going to an arbitrary point in a book is not as easy as it should be. The Kindle, for instance, has no touch screen, so jumping around in a book without a table of contents is a chore.

If you have gone through the process of formatting and converting your own ebook, we loved to hear what you chose.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

If you read just one article this month about short film distribution, make it this piece at Short of the Week. Written by filmmaker Ivan Kander, the piece is ostensibly about the changing game of short film distribution, but it also contains a sharp critique of short film distributor Shorts International.

Nobody denies that Shorts International works for a handful of high-profile short films—think Oscar-nominated—but, as the article makes clear, their model simply doesn’t work for the average animation filmmaker, a complaint that I’ve heard often throughout the years. Their business model might have been relevant as recently as five years ago, but in 2013, they are an anachronistic presence on the short film circuit. They take far too many rights for the limited financial reward and exposure they offer in return.

Solutions exist, but companies in the short film community have been slow to implement them. Firstly, filmmakers need something like Bandcamp that facilitates the sale of digital downloads and merchandise, the latter of which is a major part of the income stream of established indie animators like Don Hertzfeldt and Bill Plympton.

Vimeo, by virtue of its name-recognition and user base, is perhaps in the best position to make a major impact in the film distribution game. Their recent introduction of the “tip jar” was a step in the right direction, but what I’d really like to see them do is introduce a micro-payment system. For example, a filmmaker on Vimeo could charge 5 cents per film view. As a viewer, I’d purchase a $5 credit from Vimeo, and then everytime I watch a film that requires payment, the site would automatically deduct a nickel from my account. Vimeo could charge 10% for the service (that’s half a penny on a five-cent film). A film with 500,000 views at a nickel apiece would earn $22,500 for the filmmaker and $2,500 for Vimeo. Add in downloads for 25 cents, and you’ve instantly created a more effective model for short filmmakers than Shorts International, iTunes and YouTube’s Partner Program combined.

(Rich man smoking money photo via Shutterstock)

Hippo and Gorilla are two loveable characters, (remember The Odd Couple?) who face problems children will be all too familiar with–things like crashing model airplanes (Airplanes), eating too many donuts (Donuts), and a rainy day birthday (Bathroom Beach) . Illustrator and author Bryan Langdo has created cute, humorous picture books for children. But what makes these different than the thousands of picture books at your library?

These are made for your e-readers! Right now, they are best for an iPod Touch or iPhone or iPad with the program iBooks. I didn’t have this (my iPod Touch is a 2nd generation–I can’t get iBooks on it, oh my!), and so Bryan sent them to me for my Kindle and then the MP3 files, so I could listen to the wonderful readings of the stories by Billy Bob Thompson (he does great voices for Hippo and Gorilla!). I listened to them at Panera Bread, and I found myself giggling out loud. What are the people around me thinking?

Okay, so as a preschool/kindergarten/first grade teacher or parent, what should you know about these cute books and how you can use them with children?

1. Brian and I exchanged a few e-mails, and here is what he said, “The bells and whistles are basically the audio narration, sound effects, incidental music, and read-along feature.” (Kids will LOVE this–my daughter at 2 loves ANYTHING on the iPod Touch or Kindle. She actually says this sentence, “I need the iPod Touch.” I’m not sure if I should be proud? )

2. Here’s what Brian said about his own series (and by the way, I COMPLETELY agree with him!): “I’m hoping to share with you and your readers my new series of early readers titled Hippo & Gorilla. It’s about two best friends who are total opposites. Hippo is a great friend, but he has a tendency to make bad decisions. He breaks things, he eats too much, and he makes big messes. Gorilla, however, doesn’t do enough of those things. Together, they make a great team!

These eBooks for young readers explore the joys—and the pitfalls—of friendship, using simple vocabulary and sentence structure. Each book contains audio narration along with original music and sound effects. They’re available for iPad, Kindle, and Nook.”

3. GET HIPPO AND GORILLA IN DONUTS FOR FREE! Go to this link. This will only work if you have access to iBooks on your iPad or other Apple device. But here’s the link if you are lucky to have one of these: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/donuts/id585686738?mt=11

4. There are 5 individual books about Hippo and Gorilla. One is free as stated above, and the others are only 99 cents (again, right now for Apple devices). All 5 stories can be purchased together for $1.99!

5. These are the perfect books to start important conversations with our little ones–in the classroom or at home. You can ask questions like: Was Hippo a good friend? Should Gorilla fly his airplane again? What else could Hippo and Gorilla do on Gorilla’s birthday? How can Gorilla and Hippo compromise? and more.

6. Bryan has a website and blog for you to check out more details. You can see these at: http://www.hippoandgorilla.com OR http://www.hippoandgorilla.blogspot.com/ .

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments–Bryan can stop by and answer them!

TweetEver since Diamond announced their Diamond Digital initiative, allowing comics shops to sell digital comics to customers, I’ve  been wondering about the future of comics retailing, specifically, How well do comics shops market their stores online? I’ve  been a bookseller since 1994, and I’ve seen how the Internet has affected traditional brick-and-mortar retailing.  Books have [...]

In the latest episode of mediabistroTV’s “Elevator Pitch,” host Alan Meckler meets with Storyville co-founder Paul Vidich. Storyville is a mobile app for short stories that connects readers and authors. A former music executive, Vidich helped Steve Jobs bring music singles to iTunes. He hopes Storyville will do for the short story what iTunes did for the single.

For more videos, check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

Also, find out who’s hiring on the Mediabistro job board.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Spotify just got even cooler with an enhanced version of Spotify Radio (which lets users create unlimited stations by artist, track, or genre, receive recommendations with an improved feature, and skip as many songs as they wish. This should make... Read the rest of this post

Microsoft is billing its upgrade of the Xbox Live platform (as the “future of TV.” The new user interface comes with a wealth of content from video partners, including 26 live channels from Verizon Fios, thousands of On Demand options... Read the rest of this post

Last night, Google announced that its Music service (is out of beta and open to the world at large. So far, the Web has been unimpressed by the service, claiming it’s just a copy of iTunes with its exclusive tracks and free songs of the week.... Read the rest of this post

Publishers should not be too quick to write off physical products and should encourage competition between a number of digital players to avoid the mistakes the record industry made, the director general of the Entertainment Retailers Association has said.

read more

Tony Hawk hosts (the first-ever sports awards show for kids on Cartoon Network, the Hall Of Game awards. The Feb. 25 airing is the result of a partnership between the kids' net, Turner Sports, and "Sports Illustrated Kids" magazine, which brings the... Read the rest of this post

James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host the Oscars (as the Academy forgoes the veteran comedian route in favor of what some are calling the "SNL" approach — and almost everyone is calling an obvious bid to appeal to younger viewers. As... Read the rest of this post

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If you haven’t heard – well, how haven’t you heard? “Refudiate” is the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2010 Word of the Year. (And no, that doesn’t mean “refudiate” has been added to the NOAD or any other Oxford dictionary.) In this quickcast, Michelle and Lauren talk with NOAD Senior Lexicographer Christine Lindberg, and take to the streets to see what people think of this special word – or shall we say word blend?

Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!

Music by The Ben Daniels Band.

While their parents lament dust-gathering vinyl collections and Gen-Xers are still waxing poetic about the mixtape, today's web-savvy teen faces an entirely new set of circumstances when she wants to listen to a new album: Sure, I'll listen online... Read the rest of this post

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By Lauren Appelwick & Michelle Rafferty

Hey everyone! We’re excited to announce that it has finally launched – we now have a podcast! It’s called The Oxford Comment (get it?) and each episode we’ll talk to people smarter than us in hopes that it rubs off.

Our loyal subscribers got a sneak peek a few days ago, but now The Oxford Comment is available to all. (Although, if you’re not using our RSS feeds…what’s wrong with you?) There are several ways to get this podcast. You can:
- listen here on the blog
- sign up for the RSS feed
- subscribe on iTunes

In this first episode, we talk to Benjamin Carp about the drinking habits of the Founding Fathers and visit brewmaster Garrett Oliver at the Brooklyn Brewery. Let us know what you think! This has been a collaborative effort with many, many people, and we welcome your feedback with the most open of arms. Write to us in the comments section below or at [email protected], give us a shout on Twitter, or review us on iTunes.

Special thanks to Paul Harrington, Max Sinsheimer, Grace Labatt, Pat Mack, Bill Murphy, Charles Hodgson, “Jon,” and the Super-Secret-Listening-Focus-Group-Club.

And an extra-special thanks to the Ben Daniels Band for making great music…and letting us use it. We encourage you all to check them out on Facebook. Here’s one of our favorite BDB songs, “Drippin’ Indigo” from their album Can’t You See –>

Admongo.gov (a new government program to teach tweens how to read ads with a more critical eye launches. Over on Gawker, a few points of contention. Look for a future Ypulse site profile with our take) (New York Times, reg. required) - Green Day... Read the rest of this post

Disney targets tween boys (take two. CEO Bob Iger lays out a big budget strategy involving franchises in development from the Marvel acquisition, alongside projects that feature the likes of brain-eating zombies. Also European multiplex chain Odeon... Read the rest of this post

Chris Smith is a music journalist and professor of cultural criticism at the University of British Columbia.  In his most recent book, 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music, he presents his opinion of the albums that changed music - we know you may disagree and Smith addresses this issue below.  Be sure to check back tomorrow for a look at this book through music videos.

What is this human obsession with lists? What is the source of our compulsion to compare, to rank, to lord one work of art just inches over another when their differences can barely be defined? Is it genetic? Is it cultural? If vervet moneys had opposable digits and the intelligence to use them, would they strap on giant foam rubber “We’re #1” fingers and taunt the other species at the watering hole?

These were the questions I asked in December, 2007, when I embarked on a two-year project naming the 100 Greatest Albums of all time in a weekly column for the Vancouver Sun. I had been involved in the Rolling Stone list machine as a music critic in the late 1990s, and in 2006 published my fourth book, 100 Albums That Changed Popular Music.

The answer to my soul-searching inquiry was an unexpectedly satisfying copout: “Who cares?” It’s fun to make lists, and as philosophers from Aristotle to Saussure have noted, we understand things by virtue of their contrasting relationships to their peers. So if the Hendrix’s groundbreaking Are You Experienced was forbidden access to the top of the charts by the Beatles’ Sgt Peppers, then the takeaway detail isn’t that it was Number 2, but that it wasn’t Number 1.

But my book eschewed such hierarchal contrast, instead detailing these albums in chronological order to show how each album influenced (and was influenced by) its peers (hence the book’s emphasis on the most “important” albums rather that the “greatest.”) The Sun editors, however, insisted on a “countdown” list, so the readers could follow along for two years, each week coming one step closer to “the world’s greatest album.” The problem is, I don’t believe such a thing exists—while enough objective data can be gathered to loosely construct a list of the “most influential” albums, the notion of “greatest” albums infuses the equation with subjective criteria based on individual aesthetics, thus changing the nature of the criteria from person to person. (The same is true of all such ranking systems, whether they rate your favorite albums, movies, politicians, or family members).

The solution was simple: surrender to subjectivity. We titled the column “100 Albums You Have to Own,” and told our readers: “Agreeing or disagreeing with our picks is beside the point—write us a letter, rant to your friends, or sit down and make your own list. Great works of art invite such engagement, and we hope these will catch your ear. We only ask you to listen.”

Ultimately, I believe, such lists do serve a vital purpose as a stepping off point for critical engagement with a work of art—provided the author is honest about his intentions and criteria. My second favorite part of the entire process is discussing my selections with readers who object to my choices. My favorite part, of course, is ranking their objections.

Exactly just how big will Twilight's opening weekend be? (So far 500 midnight shows have sold out and advance ticket sales have already outpaced HSM 3. Plus hundreds of teen "fanpires" flock to the premiere in LA. Thanks, Derek!) (Variety) (US... Read the rest of this post