Is This Thing On?

Patricia Fry is the President of SPAWN, the Small Publishers, Artists & Writers Network. She is the author of 28 books and many articles on the subject of writing and publishing, and brings her years of experience directly into her work.

She recently released the second edition of her comprehensive book on writing, publishing, and promotion entitled THE RIGHT WAY TO WRITE, PUBLISH AND SELL YOUR BOOK: Your Complete Guide to Successful Authorship. The book is truly a step-by-step manual for anyone who wants a career as a self-published author. It is full of advice and anecdotes, checklists, directories of resources, samples and examples, and more.

DS: Patricia, thank you for this opportunity to interview you. Though it is a large book, I really appreciated everything that you detailed in so many topics. There was no chapter inside where I didn't learn something new and I always enjoy learning more, especially about this industry.

PF: Thank you Dan. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to hopeful and struggling authors through my books (I have 11 on writing/publishing-related topics) and interviews such as this one. In an industry where approximately 3/4 of titles fail each year, authors certainly need information and knowledge. It's their insurance against failure.

DS: In a marketplace full of other books about writing and publishing, written in many cases, I imagine, by friends and colleagues, what makes your book stand out?

PF: Yes, I do have many friends and colleagues with books related to writing and publishing. Most of these books focus on one aspect of publishing or writing--self-publishing, book promotion, writing fiction, making money through your writing, etc. Mine is unique in that I've attempted to capture the entire scope of the publishing industry: your options, the possible consequences of your choices and your responsibilities as a published author. I want hopeful and struggling authors to understand something about the industry before getting involved. But I also walk the author through the entire process of publishing whether they want to land a traditional royalty publisher, go with a fee-based POD "self-publishing" company or self-publish in the traditional way--establish their own publishing company.

DS: Did you sit down with the intent to write this because you felt there was a need for one "complete guide", or was this the result of a lot of previous works you wanted to collect together?

PF: As the president of SPAWN (Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network) and as a professional in the writing/publishing field, I travel and I meet a lot of authors. Many authors tell me the same story of failure. They are disillusioned with the industry, deflated and broke after making some bad choices. They tell me, in essence, that if only they had spent more time studying the industry, they might have made better choices. Most of them didn't know they had options. They just went with the first "publisher" who expressed an interest in their manuscripts. So I decided to write a book designed to educate hopeful authors so they would be more well-prepared and definitely informed when they entered into the world of publishing.

DS: How long have you been writing professionally, and do you think your purpose has changed over time?

PF: I started writing for publication in 1973. I began dreaming of writing articles for magazines when my three daughters were babies and vowed that someday I would follow this dream. In 1973, when my girls were in their early teens, I sat down at a borrowed manual typewriter, set up in the corner of my bedroom and I wrote my first article. I began writing to fulfill my own creative desires. I guess I needed to be published in order to validate my writing. But I also wanted to help and teach through my writing. I've told people for years that I can't not write and this is still true. And I continue in my efforts to teach and help. So, while my writing focus has changed over the years (I write fewer articles and more books), my purpose hasn't changed all that much,

DS: When you first started writing and tried to get published, how hard was the process? Do you find it to be easier today, or do the choices available makes the process even more difficult?

PF: The first article I wrote I sold to the first magazine I submitted it to. I also sold my first book to the initial publisher I approached. You don't hear about this happening in today's highly competitive market. But I had done my homework. I studied the magazines before I submitted, so I knew what was lacking, what type of articles they used, their submission policy, etc. The same is true of my approach to the publishing house. My book fit a niche market and I chose a publisher that published books in this niche--books for horse enthusiasts.

DS: How much time do you devote to marketing your books and what has worked the best for you?

PF: I guess I market my books constantly, through my informative blog (which I add to daily) http://www.matilijapress.com/publishingblog/, through articles for writing/publishing-related magazines and newsletters, through presentations to authors, through SPAWN and so forth. I found you through a mention on my Google Alerts and contacted you about reviewing my book. While I certainly have other projects going on--those for clients as well as my own--the task of marketing my books is always on the front burner and I take every opportunity to promote them.

DS: Do you travel often to promote your book, or focus on other means?

PF: I use any and all means that occur to me and take advantage of marketing opportunities as they are presented. For example, if someone contacts me with a question about a publisher or how to determine the genre of their book or do they really need a book proposal, I will respond in the most detail possible and then I always recommend one of my books that I think would most benefit them--generally it is THE RIGHT WAY TO WRITE, PUBLISH AND SELL YOUR BOOK. But yes, I also travel. I participate in approximately eight or ten writers' conferences, writers' group meetings and book festivals each year both locally and in other locations. I'll be conducting a 3-hour seminar on writing a book proposal in Atlanta at the Spring Book Show (Georgia World Congress Center) March 29, 2008. I have to be in Nashville for the PMA Affiliate Retreat the following week, so, with the help of a writers' group leader in Nashville, I've set up a workshop and book signing at a local Borders Bookstore on March 31. I taught 5 workshops at the San Diego State University Writers' Conference in January. I'll travel to Baltimore for a writers' conference in May and I'll be in Phoenix in October. There are about half dozen events locally here in Ventura County, CA that I'll be participating in this year. Plus, I'll be in the SPAWN booth with my books at the gigantic Los Angeles Times Book Festival.

DS: Where was the most exciting place you've been on tour?

PF: By far it was Dubai in the Middle East. I went there as a guest of the Toastmasters. I was the first woman ever to be invited to deliver the keynote speech at their annual Toastmasters convention. I spoke in front of 800 Toastmasters from the UAE, of course and Kuwait, Behrain, Saudi Arabia, Qa'tar, Pakistan, etc. for an hour. And this was an all expenses paid trip including a first class flight. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and the people. They are most gracious. While my speech was not on writing--I spoke on creativity as a speaker--I took a dozen copies of the first edition of THE RIGHT WAY TO WRITE, PUBLISH AND SELL YOUR BOOK and sold them all within a period of 5 or 10 minutes.

DS: What was the impetus behind SPAWN? Were you involved with it from the beginning, or was it a network that you joined and later came to manage?

PF: Mary Embree, author of "Author's Toolkit" started SPAWN (Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network) in 1996 and I came along for the ride. I was with her from the beginning when we used to have face-to-face meetings in three counties each month. The Internet eventually became a more important way for authors to meet up and we closed down the real time meetings and became an Internet presence only. Mary's idea was for authors, graphic artists, printers, illustrators, booksellers, to network and maybe even collaborate on projects. This is still going on through SPAWN and we have also become a major resource center for anyone interested in publishing. I write the incredibly useful SPAWN Market Update each month for members only. It is designed to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry and I always include opportunities for freelance writers, authors seeking publishers and authors promoting books, artists, screenplay writers, etc. I include resources for folks interested in publishing and I conduct interviews with people from the industry. The March edition features an interview with publicist, Kate Bando.

DS: What other projects are you actively involved in right now?

PF: As you can tell, my plate is pretty full. However, I have just finished writing a new book. It is a small ebook and it developed from a popular article I've been circulating on how to write a post-publication book proposal. The book is called, "The Author's Repair Kit." The subtitle is, "Heal Your Publishing Mistakes and Breathe New Life Into Your Book." It will be available soon at http://www.matilijapress.com/ and as a free giveaway book for new members joining SPAWN.

I also work with other writers and authors on their projects. I do editorial work, I help authors write their book proposals and so forth. I have some incredible testimonials from happy clients at my website. I also teach online courses on demand. This means that you can sign up at any time for one of my 6 or 8-week courses. The choices are "How to Write a Successful Book Proposal," "Book Marketing Course," "Establish a Freelance Writing Business," and "Self-Publishing." http://www.matilijapress.com/courses.htm/.

DS: You have written in a wide variety of genres. Is there any other subject that you have thought about tackling next?

PF: Hmmm, I have written a book for long-distance grandparents, for people who want to have a Hawaiian luau in their backyards, for horseback riding enthusiasts, for local history buffs, for those interested in youth mentoring and for teens who want to learn more about journal-keeping. But I am so focused, right now, on writing about writing and publishing, I can't see too far beyond this topic. This is my passion.

However, another passion of mine is cats. And I have a book of cat stories on the back burner. I would like to bring it out some day. Maybe I will.

DS: Is there anything in particular, an author or favorite book that influenced and inspired you?

PF: I've pondered this question before during interviews and can never come up with a great response. Actually, I feel as though I carved out the hand and footholds in the steep mountain toward publishing success so that I could make the climb to my goals and my dreams. It seems as though my inspiration came from within in the form of extreme desire and commitment.

There was a time in my life when I had to go out and get a job. I had been writing articles from the corner of my bedroom for about 13 years by then. I had completed two books and established a publishing company in order to produce the second one, a 360-page comprehensive history of the Ojai Valley, CA. But when circumstances in my life changed and I had to earn my own way, I realized that I wasn't making enough with my writing to support myself. The job was lovely, as far as jobs go, but I hated working on someone else's agenda. I wanted to go home and write. When I realized that a full-time job would be my future, I became despondent.

One day while walking, I realized that I had to figure out a way to write no matter what else was going on in my life. I started getting up at 4 every morning and writing before work. I also wrote on weekends. I completed my book--a memoir, "Quest for Truth" in 8 months on that schedule. I decided to use those two hours every morning to establish an article-writing career. Remember, this was back in the day before home computers. But I had graduated to an electric typewriter.

Within the next 7 months or so, I had established myself as an article-writer to the point that I could quit my job and I've been supporting myself through my writing ever since--for about 20 years.

DS: Your book is all about advice in all aspects of the business of writing. But if you had just one piece of advice for aspiring authors, what would it be?

PF: Good question. Study the publishing industry before getting involved. Know something about the business of publishing. When I go out and speak to authors, I generally share two pieces of advice. One is to study the publishing industry and the other one is write a book proposal. A book proposal can make the difference between a successful project and a failed attempt. You can learn volumes about your project and yourself as a potential author through a well-written, well-organized, well-researched book proposal.

DS: Thank you again, Patricia. I wish you and the folks at SPAWN all the best.

To find out more about Patricia Fry and her books, visit http://www.MatilijaPress.com/ and http://www.SPAWN.org/.
___

Copyright © 2008 Dan Shaurette. Reprinted with permission. Besides being the newsletter editor for http://SelfPublishedAuthors.com, Dan is the author of LILITH'S LOVE, a modern vampire romance novel, which you can learn more about at http://Liliths-Love.com/. You can find out about all of his projects at http://DanShaurette.com/.

THE RIGHT WAY TO WRITE, PUBLISH AND SELL YOUR BOOK: Your Complete Guide to Successful Authorship
Genre: Non-fiction/Reference - Publishing
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Matilija Press
ISBN: 9780977357628
Price: $19.95 USD

It would be a tragic understatement to say this book is a comprehensive discussion of writing and self-publishing topics. Patricia Fry has laid out for the reader nothing short of a step-by-step manual for anyone who wants a career as a self-published author. The book is full of advice and anecdotes, checklists, directories of resources, samples and examples, and more. It explores all topics ranging from book proposals, to writing advice, how to find an editor and publisher, how to promote yourself, and what you can expect along the way.

Patricia is the President of SPAWN, the Small Publishers, Artists & Writers Network. She is the author of many books and articles on the subject of writing and publishing, and brings her years of experience directly into the book.

For such a massive collection of information, she has made a great effort to categorize and organize it all so that the reader can find exactly what they are looking for. It makes a better textbook on the craft than any I've ever read.

Note also that while she does share her opinions on every topic, she's sure not to steer the reader down any primrose path. We all know there's no one solution to turn your dreams of becoming a published author into reality. Her book lists all avenues, with their pros and cons, and straight answers to the questions we all ask.

Then if that wasn't enough, she also sells THE AUTHOR'S WORKBOOK companion to THE RIGHT WAY. In it, she breaks everything out into checklists and forms to help guide the reader in their progress. It goes hand-in-hand with the book, and really fleshes out key concepts for beginning writers.

All told, this is a great book for old hands and new writers alike, and that is what I like most of all. This book deserves to not only be on your bookshelf, but truly on your desktop along with all of your tools of the trade.

To find out more about Patricia Fry and her books, visit http://www.MatilijaPress.com/ and http://www.SPAWN.org/.
___
Copyright © 2008 Dan Shaurette. Reprinted with permission.
Besides being the newsletter editor for http://SelfPublishedAuthors.com/, Dan is the author of LILITH'S LOVE, a modern vampire romance novel, which you can learn more about at http://Liliths-Love.com/. You can find out about all of his projects at http://DanShaurette.com/.

* My name is Dan Shaurette, welcome to the podcast.
- This is special sneaky-like-Santa episode #32, for December 23rd, 2006.
(Download MP3 - Listen to Streaming audio)

* To all my friends and constant listening audience, Merry Christmas! I had the chance to get Mark Levine’s interview in this episode. Also, because of the terrible audio of the last episode, I have included in this episode “Baby Blue” by Ethereal. I included the Podiobook promos in this episode also.

Ever wish you had a buddy who was a lawyer who could take a look at that publisher’s contract for you? Even better, do you wish you knew a lawyer who would critique about 50 contracts for you — for less than $20? Mark Levine has done just that in his book, “THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING: The Contracts & Services of 48 Self-Publishing Companies — Analyzed, Ranked & Exposed”. Moreover, he’s done it well, with tips and advice that every self-published author — prospective or published alike — should read.

DS: I found this book to be an excellent guide through the fairly overwhelming world of self-publishing contracts, of which I’ve seen a few myself.  Thank you, Mark for joining me for this interview.

ML: My pleasure.

DS: I wanted to start be saying that you were an attorney, and you are a self-published author. When did you write “Fine Print”, and what was it that made you realize that this was a book that really needed to be written?

ML: I didn’t really realize that it was a book that needed to be written until I wrote it, actually. About six, maybe seven years ago now, a fellow author who was also with me first publisher got my name and contacted me and said, “Hey I signed this really bad contract and I can’t get out of it. I know you’re a lawyer, can you take a look at this for me?” So, at the time I had not looked at a lot of publishing contracts, but I’d looked at hundreds and hundreds of commercial contracts, and that’s really what all these contracts are.

So I take a look at this contract and the first thing that comes to my mind is that you’d have to be crazy to sign this thing.  In this guy’s case, it happened that he licensed his copyright to them in the book for the term on the copyright. So the copyright lasts for seventy years after this guy’s already dead. Now this guy also happened to be a professor at a very prestigious university out west. That’s really what got me thinking that if this guy doesn’t have any idea of what he’s doing, then there has to be thousands of other people who really don’t know and are so eager to have somebody validate their writing that they sign anything that’s put in front of them.

So that’s what really gave me the idea to write the book, and I didn’t really know the impact the book would have in the self-publishing community until I started hearing from self-publishing companies who I just assumed had no idea who I was. It turned out that every self-publishing company has a copy of my book. The companies that were rated well, it was really increasing their business. The ones who weren’t rated very high, it was killing their business.

So there were some publishers that said, “Hey, you weren’t fair, and you didn’t do this and you didn’t do that, and we want you to fly out and see what we do and I’m going to prove to you that when you do another edition you will say something better about us.”

DS: A lot of them have actually changed their contacts as a result as well, yes?

ML: That’s true, well, eight pretty big ones, including iUniverse, made changes to their contracts. I said in the second edition of this book, which turned out to be the paperback version that you have, I sent an email to every publisher that I was going to cover a list of questions. After I reviewed everything, I then went back through their contracts and said, “Hey, if you don’t do this, this, and this, I’m not going to be able to say anything good about your company. This is not an acceptable term for a writer in my mind.” I think they all realized it, so they all made changes to their contracts.

You know, since then, I get emails and phone calls from people all the time. About 50% percent of them are thanking me for saving them heartache, and the other 50% say I wish I’d read this earlier because I’m stuck with XYZ and what do I do?

DS: Right and you did mention this is the second edition of the book. Did the first edition come with a PDF version?

ML: The first edition was only a PDF; there was no paperback. Though there was a lot of demand for the paperback, so that was really what facilitated me putting it out in paperback. You have to redo this book every year anyway, so it’s worked out really well. I think the paperback version is probably better for the author who’s buying the book, but for the guy selling the book it’s not as good as selling an e-book. As you know, a non-fiction reference type e-book can sell for much more than the same book as a paperback with no cost. I don’t know why that is, but that’s the way it is.

DS: It is a fine book and it is easy to read through, and I think it’s very handy to jump through it as a paperback book as well. I really enjoy e-books; I like the ability to be able to search through them, too. I was just curious if there might be an e-book version of the second edition.

ML: There is an e-book version, but it’s just not available on Amazon. The e-book is only available through the website. People have an option where they can just buy the book, they can buy the book and the e-book, and book marketing tools, and certain discounts on our copyright service that we do for writers, artists, and musicians. So there are different levels that people can choose.

DS: O.K., good. Now, the title of the book is perfect because it tells you exactly what you are going to find in this book. But I wanted to make sure that I made it clear that this really does specifically deal with Print-On-Demand publishers.

ML: It does. It used to deal, in the first edition, with e-book publishers as well.

DS: That were just solely e-book publishers?

ML: That were just solely e-book publishers, yes. But there were so many publishers that were covered that I had to pare this down to have it in some kind of manageable size for the paperback.

DS: Oh, understood.

ML: I really think e-book publishing is waiting for some great e-book reader that looks and feels and smells like a book. Until somebody creates one, when that comes out, e-book publishing will be a lot different. But it’s not where people are really going to publish.

DS: Well, they’re not comfortable with it still.

ML: Right.

DS: What I thought was interesting, that some of the publishers that you mentioned in the book were kind of concerned that you mentioned that they were “Print-On-Demand” publishers.  Why do you think that is? Why do you think they want to be called “Self-publishers” instead?

ML: Well, I think that there is some bad connotation with “Print-On-Demand”. They think it cheapens what the author’s doing, or at least that’s their perception.  What they didn’t like being called was “POD publishers”, because POD is associated with some of the shadier characters in this business. But as I mentioned in the book, I’m going to call them “POD publishers” to save space, and I’m trying to make this book as affordable as possible. I’m printing it as a Print-On-Demand book, so they’re going to be called a POD publisher, and it’s not a very big deal.

I also think that self-publishing has evolved so much and it continues to evolve that this is going to do — and it is doing — to the publishing industry what has many parallels to the music industry. These large publishing companies, what they can offer a writer starts to become less and less. If a writer knows how to market their book, then the only thing that they would need a large publishing company for is for some large-scale distribution. Even then — and I talk to writers everyday and point this out — even if you got into Barnes & Noble, you’re going to be one book in a sea of a million books. I mean, they’re not going to put you up in the front when people walk in. So authors spend a lot of time with the idea that they have to get into these bookstores and that’s how they’re going to sell books, and I don’t really agree. I think that’s kind of a waste of time. I guess that’s kind of off the subject.

DS: Well, no, but it’s a good point, and a lot of authors these days do still see that Brick & Mortar as the goal. I think as long as you are out there promoting your book and it’s something that readers can get to easily, that’s the key: making it available to people.

Now, not only have you listed the most of the prominent POD publishers in the book, you’ve ranked them into categories. Running from “Outstanding”, to “Publishers to Avoid”. But in the previous edition, you had them actually numerically ranked, is that right?

ML: That’s right, and that became a problem, which is why I switched to this format. Because what was happening, and it was unfair to the publishers, the thing that differentiated a 9.2 from a 9.8 — and I’m not saying it’s totally trivial — may be that I liked their website better that somebody else’s, for example. It’s the sort of intangible that comes from me making that judgment and it wasn’t fair. The companies began using my ranking as advertising, saying we’re the best, and then they started threatening to sue each other, going back and forth, and were copying me on the emails. That’s why I decided to put them into broader categories.

DS: Yeah, and it helps make finding them easier, too.

ML: First of all, anybody who changed their contract automatically got into the “Outstanding” category. Anyone who really realizes and accepts that, hey, we have to do things to make ourselves more author-friendly, and they were willing to do it, to me that says a lot. Every one of those companies made it in there. Also, what I tried to do was, of all the big companies - iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford — all of the real big ones, that people know, iUniverse is the best of that group. Do I think that they are better than some of the other ones in the Outstanding group? No, but if you want all of those frills — all the bells and whistles, the slick website and all of the advertising, all of that stuff — they’re fine and they’re not going to rip you off, and they’re going to give you an O.K. product. I tried to put one big one in there, one Christian publisher in there; so I put the best in every category in there and the ones that changed their contracts. What I will say about iUniverse is that they have really improved their author-friendliness.

DS: That was one of the things I really liked that was your “author-friendly ratings” for each of the publishers, too. That really helps explain why you ranked them the way you did.

ML: To me, I think that’s a great part of the book if you’re choosing a publisher, and if you go through the part where I break down these contracts. Because everybody’s contract, the general idea of them are the same. I think I did pretty good job of explaining this in ways that you don’t have to have gone to law school to understand what these things mean.

DS: Exactly.

ML: You can look at a contract, and look at what I wrote, and figure out what they’re talking about.

DS: Absolutely. Now, while the draw of this book is definitely those ratings that you give, you give a lot of good advice and you do go into some very good detailed explanation about the key parts of the contracts that can be missed when you are going through the fine print. You also spent a good deal of time listing what you consider the nine qualities of a good self-publishing company. That was very helpful as well.

ML: Yeah, I think that’s important, and now on the website I have what I call “The Author’s Bill of Rights”, which anyone can download for free. That kind of takes those nine things and expands on those. When I do the new version of the book, of those things that a good self-publishing company has, those nine things are going to be changed a little bit. Because now I’ve discovered things that are even more important.

For example, I don’t recall off hand if I said as one of the nine things that if you paid to have a cover done and a layout done that you have to own that material. That’s in my Author’s Bill of Rights, but I don’t know if it was in my top nine, but that says a lot about the kind of company that somebody should work with. I mean, if I’m paying for you to do this and I decide to leave you, I should be able to get everything, swap out an ISBN, and take it anywhere else to print that book, because I paid for it. So the notion that I might own the cover art but you own the cover, I find to be insulting. That for sure will be in there. You know I mention a lot about what the print fees are?

DS: Yeah.

ML: The level that these companies mark up the print fees is outrageous, and that I’m actually going to cover in more detail, probably in the next round. What happens with these companies is that they tell the author, well you can buy the book at 40% off of the cover price which sort of implies that is what it costs to print the book. At least in my mind that is what it implies.

They don’t tell you that when you are buying it at 40% off of the cover price, they still made 100% profit on the printing or 50% profit on the printing. They don’t tell you that on the back end they’re taking a royalty for not doing anything. I understand if someone is going to handle your fulfillment and those types of things, they certainly deserve money for that. But just giving you a page on their website that just goes to Amazon, of which they get a cut anyway, they mark up the printing on the front end, taking a royalty on the back end, and the only person making the money is the publisher. You paid them to publish, they’re making it up front and on the back, and they’re saying you get 75% royalty, but it’s 75% of something they jacked up on both ends. So it’s not a real number. In the new edition that will be covered in a lot greater detail with some real examples.

DS: Yeah, that was definitely something that stood out as something that I remember. Another important point that I remember, and I don’t think it was one of your nine qualities, but it might have ended up as one of your Bill of Rights, was don’t pay a dollar, until you can see the contract first.

ML: Oh, absolutely. When I go to a company’s website in this industry, if I cannot download that contract easily — that contract should be on the front page as if to say we have nothing to hide, take a look at what we do. If I can’t find that and I can’t find what you are going to charge me, and I can’t figure out what I’m paying to print the book with you, those are problems to me. I was just on some company’s website the other day that was not covered in the book, Dorrance Publishing, and when you go on their website, you can’t get anything unless you give them your name and email address and let them send you packets and then you are on their mailing list for the rest of your life. That’s not the way it should be. If I’m thinking of spending $1000 or $1500 on somebody, they should be happy to give me their contract; I don’t need to be sold on anything until I know what it is that’s going to happen when I sign on the dotted line.

I am the person who’s buying the book. I am that author. I have fiction out there. THE FINE PRINT is probably not a great example because that has really taken off and it has a larger distribution and it’s in the library market. I mean, it’s a good example that if you have a good idea and a good concept that you can certainly sell a book. But it’s probably not what the average writer is going to go through. So when you are the average writer and you have a World War II novel, it’s that person that I feel the most protective of. Who I don’t like to see ripped off, and don’t want to be suckered into buying junk that is worthless like bookmarks and posters of your book cover. I mean that’s all junk; it’s worthless. Then they’ll send your book out to all these people and market it. They’re just sending it out and the thing is going to end up in someone’s trashcan.

Anytime I hear from one of them and they tell me that I’ve saved them, or I get the call before they buy the book and they say “I’m thinking of going with somebody who’s in my Publishers To Avoid list,” the only thing I say is, “Buy this book and if you don’t think it’s the best $15 you spent, send it back to me and I’ll send you the money back, but I promise you I’ll be saving you a lot of heartache.”

DS: I definitely think it’s a very good investment for any author who’s contemplating finding the right self-publisher to go to bat for them, basically.  I mean, they’re working for you; you’re not working for them. So, I actually had considered, when I was starting looking at contracts, I was considering having a lawyer review some of the contracts to help me understand what was going through them. So I think $15 is definitely worth it for everything you go through, picking apart the contracts and helping to make them very clear. That’s my pitch.

ML: I appreciate that.

DS: OK, well, why don’t you go ahead and tell me a little bit more about the other services that you do offer on your website. Besides the book, you’ve got Click & Copyright, and a few other services.

ML: Well, we have a copyright service, and actually, since the book came out, and I do not mention this in the book — and I never will mention this in the book — after I wrote this book I realized all of the things that I complained that these companies aren’t doing, that they should be doing, that I could be doing. I mean, I published my own book, I’ve been very successful at it, I know how to market these things.

So, what we did — my company is not just me and a computer — we have a staff of ten people, so it’s a growing company of about thirty websites. So what I did was I created a self-publishing company that does everything that I say these companies should be doing. So for obvious reasons I couldn’t mention it in the book.

DS: That’s plugging yourself.

ML: Not only is it plugging myself, but the honest truth is it is better than what any of these other people are doing so there would be no use for the book. The author pays the exact print cost that we pay. There’s no markup in print, and there’s no royalty on the back end. None. They own all the files. All of the things I say in my Bill of Rights, that’s exactly what my company does. The way we can afford to do it is that I don’t have sixty or seventy people on staff. I don’t have to have these outrageous markups. What we do is make, for under $900 we do everything custom in-house, the layout, and original cover design. There’s no templates, none of that. We do it exactly the way we do would do it for my own books.

So anyone who reads THE FINE PRINT and calls me ends up signing up with us because they know that it’s everything that I talk about. My whole idea here is that if you are going to publish a book, and you want to market the book, in my opinion there’s only one way that works to do this. That is to treat your book like a little e-commerce company. That is the way to have a lot of success.

For example, I just spent all day today with one of our fantasy authors putting together his online advertising campaign. So we build websites for authors that are very optimized, just like THE FINE PRINT one is. So those things will eventually rank high. We then put together online advertising campaigns. I have one person whose whole job it is to be on MySpace and the social networking sites to promote people’s books and get a buzz going about them. Those three things together — an optimized website, an effective online advertising campaign, and generating a buzz with MySpace — are a much better way to spend money if you want to promote a book than anything any of these other companies could possibly do. Because it’s the only way to get your book in front of the people who might want to read it. That’s why I don’t concentrate about going into bookstores. I mean all that stuff, about going to a book signing and there will be a whole line of people. The only way that’s going to happen is if you start promoting your book and you generate enough interest that someday something like that can happen.

Even in my case with my novel, I had a woman about a month ago who found my book on MySpace — through the person who works for me doing the promotion — she wrote me and said she loved the book, etc., then she said she was going to get her whole book club to read it. She happened to be local here in town, and then ten people ordered the book in one day. Then I went and spoke to the book club, and when I was there, and then they started buying other copies that they wanted to give away for Christmas and the holidays.

DS: That’s how you do it.

ML: That’s why this thing works. I just got the new website up for my new novel. I mean it just finally went up, so I’ve been doing that, driving the right kind of traffic to it. I didn’t even have the order page up, but I wanted to see if I could make a dent in the Amazon ranking. So last night was the first night that I had ads up for my novel, and last night I was at about 650,000 on Amazon, when I woke up today I was at 30,000. Now that may not be more than 10 or 15 books, but that’s still a nice chunk of books.

DS: Absolutely.

ML: So that’s something that I’m really excited about, I believe in it and know that it works. Any author whoever calls me, they can only find us because I only advertise online. I don’t advertise in Writer’s Digest. The internet is so targeted I don’t believe that even if I advertised THE FINE PRINT in Writer’s Digest — and I get asked all the time why I don’t — it’s because I have to hope that the person reading Writer’s Digest sees my ad, happens to be thinking about self-publishing a book, then from that ad goes immediately to the internet to order the book. If that chain is broken, if they think this is a great idea and they rip this page and come back later, my chance of getting that sale just went down. Because it gets filed in a drawer, they pull it out two weeks later, and they say, aw you know what, forget it. Now look at all of the screenwriters that are reading Writer’s Digest, there’s all sorts of people reading it, that have no immediate interest in publishing a book, and I have to be in that magazine a whole bunch of times to even have any recognition.

Whereas I can go out and advertise so that when someone searches for AuthorHouse my ad comes up. I know that when somebody types in AuthorHouse there’s a bout a 99% chance they are thinking about publishing a book. If they click on that ad, it takes them right to a page on THE FINE PRINT website that says, “Is AuthorHouse the right publisher for you?” So that is a much better way to spend money than putting an ad in even a writing magazine, which is extremely targeted.  So now when you think about it, if you are an author that is doing a western or a romance novel, you have to find creative ways to bring the people to you.

So, this is a new venture for our company, we hired somebody to run it who comes from the traditional book publishing world, so we have a lot of the ins to the book distributors and the book buyers. Her closest friend is a small press buyer at Ingram. So it has given our authors a lot of opportunities and we’re able to put together things that make sense. Of course, the great thing about when you have a good website is that every day that thing is online it keeps aging. The more a website ages, it’s like wine, it becomes better; it goes higher to the top. Even having a MySpace page set up, once it is set up, it is always working for you.

DS: Right.

ML: If you’re not out there actively doing it, people are going to have to fall upon it. But when someone falls upon it, it’s there. Those are the things that always work. So all the bookmarks, and book signings were only the people you invite are going to buy the book anyway, all that effort can be put into something where you can continue to market your book for a longer period of time for less money.

So it’s something that I’m very excited about and I kind of wish I could talk about in THE FINE PRINT, but I couldn’t in anyway that would make that book objective. I sort of see it as, if someone buys THE FINE PRINT and they never even learn about my company, they will have saved themselves the heartache of going with a really bad company, and any company that I say is good in my book is fine and you will get a book and they aren’t going to screw you. So that’s the only way I can do that and keep doing THE FINE PRINT.

DS: Wow, that’s awesome.

ML: I should mention one more thing, my company just bought Published.com, which is a big free directory where writers can go and put their book covers and blurbs about their book online and links to their sales page all for free.

DS: Oh, excellent.

ML: The guy who used to own it was one of the first affiliates of Click & Copyright and we’ve known each other for years and one thing led to another and I made him an offer to buy it.

DS: Very nice.

ML: That’s a free directory and anybody can go there and it’s a very high-ranking site, so a link back to your own website is beneficial to the author if they have a website.

DS: Nice. I would like to learn a little bit more about your paperback novels that you have published.

ML: My first one, I did back in 2000 and it came out with a company called Bookbooters. They were one of the first people in this industry, and in fact, back then, they used the print on-demand technology, but nobody charged. I mean this company Bookbooters, they edited my book, and they did everything. I think I only had to pay them a $60 fee or something to cover some kind of cost. These kind of print on-demand publishing things had not really come to the surface yet. Bookbooters eventually became a print on-demand company and then couldn’t make it and then went out of business.

But my first novel was a political thriller and the highlight of the whole thing was that Bill Clinton ending up reading the book when he got out of office. He’s a big fan of political thrillers and he wrote a great handwritten note that will be on the website and is hanging on the wall behind me right now, where he really got into detail about why he liked it and all the bad guys were Republicans so maybe he was a little biased. It’s a very funny note. But that was my first novel.

DS: What is the name of the novel?

ML: I WILL FAITHFULLY EXECUTE, which will be getting a second life up here, as it is on my list of about a million things to do. My second novel, SATURN RETURN, is the one that just was released in July, or spring/summer, and it was the first book that our company did. So I was the actual guinea pig of my own company.

DS: That’s the way to do it.

ML: So I didn’t go out and seek agents or anything. I know how to sell things online, so there was no reason for me to go out and do that. The website turned out great, the book turned out great, and people have really liked it. It’s been selling fairly well. I expect it to sell a little better now that it has a website and I’m getting some advertising for it.  The only thing we were doing was the person working for me was marketing my book on MySpace. That’s where all of the sales came from initially. Now that will be a little different, but that website will definitely be a good example for writers to understand when I talk about an “optimized website”.

When you look at any of my websites, every page, every word, everything is there for a specific purpose. We build websites around the terms that people are searching for that coincide with my book. So like for instance, the tagline is that it’s a novel about who you are, where you’re going, and who you’re meant to be with. So it’s kind of a coming-of-age story and it follows some people in their thirties. There’s a lot of dating and relationships. So I have these pages on my site, that say why reading SATURN RETURN is more fun than being on a Match.com date. I have something different for Yahoo! Personals, for another site JDate. I have a page “Fun Martinis to drink while reading the book” and “Songs to listen to when you’ve been dumped”. So, it’s a very irreverent site and it’s a lot of fun and I needed that to show to a lot of fiction authors who are starting to come in here, because I can’t just keep showing them THE FINE PRINT website.

So that’s my second book, and I really don’t know when there will be another book coming out of me.

DS: I bet you’re very busy right now.

ML: I had that one and the second edition of THE FINE PRINT come out at the same time, that and running this company, it felt like I was back in school. Like I would get home and then I would have to start working on the books again.

DS: Right.

ML: I love them, and SATURN RETURN I started writing in ‘97 so it took a while to get it done. I know what the next book is going to be, I just don’t know when it’s ever going to be written.

DS: Is it another novel?

ML: It’s another novel. I mean, non-fiction is a lot easier to write, I think. Especially a book like THE FINE PRINT. I mean, you’re just doing some research, and if you know how to write, and put a thing together, and make it so people can understand it. It’s not easy, but writing a novel is a little more difficult, I find. It’s more fun, but a little more difficult.

DS: And when is the next edition of THE FINE PRINT coming out?

ML: The great thing about this is that all I have to do is write it, and upload it, and it’s ready to go. You know, I don’t have to wait. I just need an editor to go through it. I expect it to be maybe in the spring. I mean it’s kind of a project where I’m going to have to have someone help me, to contact the companies, compare what I wrote last time to what they are offering now. So I’ll probably bring someone in here in about a month or so and have that done, then write it and it’ll be done. Then when someone comes to the website, the new version will be out.

DS: Is it going to have more publishers in it, do you think, or just more details?

ML: I don’t know if it going to have more, but some of the ones in here will probably fall out. I’m going to spend some time concentrating on some of these companies like Dorrance and Wheatmark that I consider to be more book printers than self-publishing companies. But so many people use those companies and have asked me about them. So those types of companies will probably make it in. I’m also going to spend some time talking about how you can effectively market a book, beyond just signing a contract.

DS: That’s just the first step.

ML: I also had the Alexa ratings in the book; I will not have that in there again. Most of their traffic is people looking to publish a book, not the people buying the books. Authors have to understand that you can’t just put a book on Amazon and have people find you. The exception is a book like THE FINE PRINT where people are typing in a term like “self-publishing”. The book used to be only called “THE FINE PRINT”, but I changed the title to “THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING” when it became a paperback and it went on Amazon, because Amazon works like a traditional search engine.

DS: Absolutely.

ML: So I wanted that term to be in the main title of the book. So, a non-fiction book is a little bit different, especially in a niche area like that on Amazon, because people are actually searching for it. My Amazon ranking everyday is somewhere between 9000 and 30,000 which is pretty phenomenal for a book from not a major publisher. A lot of that is because people are searching for that type of a book. So when you type in “self-publishing”, my book is #3 or #4 in the list that comes up. But if you have just a regular fiction book, you have to do something else, and a lot of people have no idea what to do.

DS: That’s true.

ML: They buy into the “hey, we’re going to send this out to all of the reviewers.”

DS: That’s all well and good, but that’s not all of it.

ML: That’s all well and good, except at the end of the day, you’re going to get nothing out of it.

DS: Well thank you very much Mark, for joining me tonight. I wish you the best of luck with THE FINE PRINT and your other books and all of your projects,

ML: Thanks, Dan.

To find out more about Mark Levine and his book, THE FINE PRINT OF SELF-PUBLISHING, visit http://www.book-publishers-compared.com/.
His latest novel, SATURN RETURN, can be found at http://www.Saturn-Return.com.
To find out more about his new Self-publishing company, Mill City Press, visit http://www.millcitypress.net/.

* PROMOS:
- Heaven by Mur Lafferty (Now in Season Two: Hell)
- The Rookie by Scott Sigler
- 7th Son trilogy by J.C. Hutchins (the other J.C.)
- Billibub Baddings by Tee Morris (Coming Valetine’s Day 2007!)

* Michelle and I are working on a new website that is sort of a blending of many of the other projects we work on.
- The new site will be The Procrastinators’ Guilde.
- Coming soon… or later…

* I don’t know if and when we will be back on TalkShoe. I’ve not given up on them, but I’ve got to find a way to improve the audio if I am to keep using the service. vEmotion is a great program for sending music out over the phone line. But I’ve got to have more tests before going live again to make sure the audio level is right.

* I wrapped up the episode with “Play Like Children” by Ethereal.

** HAPPY HOLIDAYS! **

That wraps up another episode of Is This Thing On? Thanks for listening.

This Blog and Podcast are © Copyright 2006 by Dan Shaurette, under the Creative Commons “Attribution, No Derivatives” License. Some Rights Reserved.

If you have any comments about this podcast, feel free to drop a note at shaurette.net/podmail.

Or, if you’d rather leave some voice mail, you can call us at 1-206-350-7638 that’s (206) 350-SNET.

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Publishing Guidelines: My articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.You may publish this article in its entirety, electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you include my full signature below. Please let me know you are republishing the article with an email to Dan@Shaurette.net.
_______

Podcasting for Authors - Part 3: Recording Interviews
By Dan Shaurette

In this continuing series of articles about podcasting, my goal is to help my fellow authors get familiar with getting the most out of your web presence. As an author, a blog is a great vehicle for sharing your thoughts with your readers, and since it is the written word, it shows off your talent as a writer. Even still, verbal communication is valuable and a podcast allows your fans to hear your wit as well.

On my podcast, I talk about everything and anything. I do talk about my writing and web projects, but it’s more about sharing my interests than promotion. Yet, it is promotion, and that cannot be denied. It’s one more medium where you have a chance to connect to a reader.

In the last article, I wrote about the technical side of podcasts and explained how you can create a podcast of your own. I covered a lot of ground detailing various hardware and software requirements and best practices.

In this article, I will focus on some ways to record yourself and others for a podcast. Not only will this help you if you plan to conduct phone interviews of other authors, for example, but if you simply want to be able to do a podcast with a co-host without expensive audio equipment.

As I mentioned in the last article, you will need software for recording and editing your audio. I highly recommend Audacity, which you can download for free from: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Audacity is a fully featured, multi-track recording and editing program, which is offered for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Since it works on most computers and is free, it really is all you need for recording, saving and editing most of your audio.

If you are going to be the only person ever speaking on your podcast, then you just need a computer, a microphone, and Audacity. However, most podcats that I enjoy listening to either have co-hosts, “in-studio guests”, or recorded interviews. Audacity can still make this possible.

What you need is a way to get everyone’s voices onto one computer that will record them. One of the technologies which has come along in the last couple of years and has greatly contributed to podcasting is voice chat and Voice-over-IP (or VoIP) telephone services.

These programs have made it possible to not only speak with many people at once online, but also provide a bridge to standard landline telephone services. The ability to call out or receive incoming phone calls usually cost some money, but at decent per minute fees.

Many services exist to provide the software and channels to do this. The heaviest hitters are Yahoo, Google, AIM, MSN, Skype and Gizmo. All of these programs are free to download and use, and allow free calling between users of their respective networks.

Voice chat is done by using a chat or instant messaging program on two or more computers connected over the internet. This works very well if you and the people you want to chat with all have computers running the same chat program and have a microphone and headphones to hear. Headset microphones work the best. If you or the other people only have speakers instead of headphones, then the microphone will pick up what comes from the speakers and you’ll have an echo.

However, if the people you want to talk with do not have their own computer with this minimum setup, there is still the option of VoIP incoming or outgoing PC-to-Phone service. With one of these services, your guests can either use their phone to call your computer, or you could call their phone from your computer. Once the call is made, you are hearing and speaking with your computer and you can begin recording.

Here is a list of the details of the more popular voice chat programs, most of which also have VoIP phone features.

Gizmo: http://www.gizmoproject.com/
- Windows XP/2000 - Mac OSX - Linux - Nokia 770 Tablet
- Built-in recorder
- Phone out - $0.01/minute within US. Other rates Intl.
- Phone in - $12.00/3 months

Skype: http://www.skype.com/
- Windows XP - Mac OSX - Linux - even mobile devices
- Phone out - Free Long-distance outgoing within the US! Other rates Intl.
- Phone in - 10 Euros/3 months

Yahoo: http://messenger.yahoo.com/
- Windows XP - Mac OSX
- Phone out - $0.02/minute within US. Other rates Intl.
- Phone in - $2.49/month

AIM Triton+Phoneline: http://www.aimphoneline.com/
- Windows XP/2000
- Phone in - FREE
- Phone out - $9.95/mo to anywhere.

MSN/Live Messenger: http://get.live.com/messenger/overview
- Windows XP only
- Phone out - $0.019 within US. Other rates Intl.
- Phone in - Not available

AIM 5.9: http://www.aim.com/get_aim/win/other_win.adp
- Windows 98/ME, WinNT4/2000/XP
- Voice Chat only - no phone service

Google Talk: http://www.google.com/talk/
- Windows XP/2000 - Jabber/XMPP clients on Max OSX/Linux
- Voice Chat only - no phone service

Note that I put Gizmo right at the top of the list. It runs on most computers, has a built-in call recorder, and also has competitive phone rates. Gizmo saves recorded phone calls in regular .WAV audio files that you can use Audacity to convert into MP3 for you.

Even if you chose to use another program to have the conversation, you can still record the audio. You might choose to use Skype since SkypeOut calls to telphones within the USA and Canada are free until 2007. This is a great deal and the service works very well. So how do you record that call?

Well, you have two ways. The method I used once upon a time was to connect the line-out from my sound card into the line-in with an audio patch cable. These are relatively inexpensive and can be bought at most Radio Shack and similar electronics stores. You must then set Audacity to record from the “Stereo Mix” or “What U Hear” channel. This routes all incoming and outgoing audio into the Mix for Audacity to record.

This option is doomed to fail for most people because their sound cards do not have a line-in and line-out. Moreover, not all sound cards have the “Stereo Mix” channel, and therefore you could try “Line-In” since you’ve directed all output back in to that source. Again, this only works if you have a Line-in jack. (Trying to route speaker out into the mic jack is just a recipe for audio disaster.)

There are software solutions that make this more feasible, but they are not free. Many are fairly inexpensive. One option called Virtual Audio Cable (VAC), enables you to record any audio much like the audio patch cables do. You can check it out at: http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html

VAC allows you to do the same patching of audio output to the input for the purposes of recording them with a program like Audacity. VAC is only for Windows XP/2000 and sells for $30.00. It’s a nice program that can have uses outside of recording audio. You can, for example, use it to pipe audio into a voice chat so that you have a live teleconference.

Beware that when you are using the methods above to mix various audio channels, you need to pay very close attention to the volume of the channels. You will most likely not be able to separate the voices after the fact.

Beyond this lies probably the best choice for recording voice chat calls, a program called HotRecorder: http://hotrecorder.com/

HotRecorder can record conversations using Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger 7, AIM, Net2Phone, and FireFly. It costs $14.95 and does the job perfectly.Moreover, calls recorded with HotRecorder have your local audio on one channel and the audio from your guest on the other channel. This makes post-production editing of the chat very easy.

Most people I know use Skype, so recording chats with them is made easy with HotRecorder. However, I have used Gizmo and I personally favor that over the Skype/HotRecorder solution. The audio tends to be a little cleaner and I don’t need to use HotRecorder with it.

Just remember, that no matter which software you use to record your conversations, there are laws in many countries that forbid the recording people without their permission. If you are interviewing someone, be sure to let them know you are going to record them and all should be well.
___

Copyright © 2006 Dan Shaurette.
Besides being the editor of the newsletter for http://selfpublishedauthors.com/, Dan is the author of LILITH’S LOVE, a modern vampire romance novel, which you can learn more about at http://liliths-love.com/. He also hosts “Is This Thing On?”, an eclectic podcast featuring chat, interviews, and independent music at http://is-this-thing-on.net/. You can find out more on his blog at http://danshaurette.com/.

This is Episode #25 for August 14, 2006. Hey, Is This Thing On?
(Download MP3 or listen to the stream)

* My name is Dan Shaurette, welcome to the podcast.
- Michelle is home safe and sound from her trip, even though it was a hell of a time on Thursday.
- She was supposed to come home Thursday, Aug. 10th.
- The same day the U.K. terrorist plot was foiled, planes were grounded, and chaos reigned supreme at Logan Airport.
- We’ll talk more about this on the next podcast.

* Music this week is provided by Magnatune Records.
– We opened with “Erase” by The Kokoon.

John Buckman is the CEO of a record label, but he is definitely not evil. He is the founder and CEO of Magnatune Records, an independent record label that from the beginning embraced the Creative Commons license for the distribution of their music. Now he has a new project: BookMooch.com, a website that hopes to bring book lovers together to exchange their used books.

DS: John, thank you for this opportunity to chat with you tonight.

JB: You’re welcome.

DS: While I do want to talk about Magnatune, I want to start out talking about your new project, BookMooch.com. Can you give us a quick rundown of what BookMooch is?

JB: Well, quite simply, it’s a community for exchanging used books. So you take books that you’ve read and that you’re not going to read again, and you send them to people who ask you for them. In exchange, you get a point for every book you send out and you can ask anybody else in the network for a book.

DS: Are you the sole developer of this project, or do you have people working with you on it?

JB: I’m the chief bottle-washer and floor cleaner and everything.

DS: All right. The site just went live. What has the response been to the site thus far? What challenges does it bring to you already?

JB: Well, I hit two of my friends up to blog it. I hit Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow up and both of them blogged it. Joi Ito on his and Boing Boing, which was nice. Then MetaFilter picked it up, and that’s it so far. So far, in one day, we have had six hundred-and-some people sign up. More importantly, a little over than two hundred people have typed books in. So there’s about 2,000 books in one day, which I don’t think it is going to keep going at that pace, but I’m real happy with that.

DS: Right, that’s a very good first day. There are a good number of other book-centric community sites out there, like LibraryThing, Listal, bibliophile.org, even BookCrossing. There are a few websites that make the exchanging of CDs and DVDs available. But why do you think nothing like BookMooch exists? Why has it not been done before?

JB: Well, the big problem is how to make money from it and it turns out I’m not that interested in making money for it. So that really helps. I just want to do it because I think it’s a fun thing to do. A website like lala.com for example, that’s an exchange for CDs. The way they make money is you sign up and they charge you a dollar per trade, and you also have to use their mailers which they send to you. So they make money from postage as well.

With books, well you don’t know how much a book weighs, so mailers wouldn’t work. And I didn’t want to charge per trade because I just thought that would be an impediment. People wouldn’t want to trade if they are giving me the money. Hell, I’m not even doing anything. They’re just trading books directly. So there’s a DVD club as well that works the same way with mailers and fees.

I love BookCrossing, the idea behind BookCrossing is that you leave a book somewhere in the real world and leave a message that you’ve done so and someone should come by and pick it up. Of course, I think that a lot of the time the book just gets thrown out. Which to me is a lot worse. I love the way the site feels. It’s a great community and it’s really fun. But, God, books getting thrown out — that’s just a bad idea.

LibraryThing is awesome, too. That’s where you catalog your books, but they don’t really make exchanging books possible.

DS: Right. So, with BookMooch though, you make a catalog of the books that you want to give away. That’s all you can do, right? You’re not making a catalog of books that you want to say is everything on my bookshelf but only this shelf is what I’m giving away. Everything on BookMooch is “have at it, folks.”

JB: At least right now, I’m not going to do what LibraryThing or Amazon does where it knows what you already have but what you don’t want to give away, and then makes recommendations. This is really about exchanging books and the reason is that it is a lot of work to type books in and LibraryThing is awesome. I’m not gonna compete with them on features to manage your book catalog. There’s also Delicious-Monster, that does a good job of cataloging. So this is a website, it’s a community. It’s not about an application to manage your personal library.

DS: When did you come up with the idea for this, and was it just that you had a lot of books that you wanted to give away and you didn’t have any vehicle before to do it, so you just decided to make it yourself? Is that what happened, and when did you come up with the idea?

JB: So I’ve been working on this for a year, which is kind of insane. I immediately knew I wanted an illustration. If you go to the site you’ll see there’s this crazy cartoon on the front. So, it’s been a year, and it’s been nine months of really active development. Like fifty or sixty hours a week which is a lot of fun when you are working on something new.

But to answer your first question, which is how did I come up with the idea, I was in a little town in the U. K. and there was a community center there that had bookshelves and couches, and it just said “Leave a book, take a book.” People were sitting in those couches, pulling books off the shelves and reading them and seeing what was good and taking them home. Once they read them, they brought them back, and it was really working. Of course there were only three or four shelves and only a half-dozen couches. It just occurred to me that sense of community of giving and sharing was something that the internet is really good at, not to mention a much larger catalog.

DS: Right. You have basically created a large library from every member’s bookshelves.

JB: Of course it’s not a library because you don’t have to give the books back. If you’ve got a book that you read and you liked but you want to get rid of it, someone else takes it and they could just keep it. There were many reasons I made this site. Another one is that, I’ve read a lot of books and it’s a great book, like say The Tipping Point, and it’s quoting a lot of interesting stuff, and then I go to the bibliography, and there’s twenty other books that he quotes or refers to that looks really interesting. Well I’m not going to buy twenty books from Amazon just to see if I might want to look at them, and I don’t have access to a university grade library that will get those books for me.

So I thought, “Hey if I could just mooch them all, then the books of those twenty that I really like, I’ll keep those and then I’ll give away the rest to somebody else.” I also have some friends who are authors and their books are out of print and that’s kind of sad. I have other authors who’ve got boxes of books in their closet that they don’t have distributors for, this is a way to get rid of them and get other books. So, generally it just seems to solve a lot of the problems.

DS: Yeah, cool. Have you heard from any authors yet about BookMooch and what the site can do for them?

JB: Well, the suggestion, and I like it is, is that for each trade, if the author has contacted us, that there be a “tip jar” or a tax. My idea was that it might cost you a point to get a book, but if the author shows up and lets me know they exist, I’ll give them half a point for every time their book is traded. So that way they would benefit from the used book exchange. Right now when used books are traded the authors don’t benefit at all. That would be interesting because thanks to Amazon, there are a lot more small presses and independent writers out there and that would be a way to help them benefit from seeding a community like BookMooch.

DS: Definitely, that is a cool idea. I like that.

JB: I mean, let’s say you have you own books and put them out on BookMooch, every time it’s traded you earn a little bit more points. That’s a good reason to do that.

DS: Well, just so you know, I do have a copy of my book up on there.

JB: I did! I saw that. I saw the Lilith book. What is that all about?

DS: It’s a vampire romance novel, modern setting, in Phoenix, Arizona, that I wrote thirteen years ago. I self-published it. I thought it would be a nice idea to try and put it on the list and see if there was any people interested in it or not. It’s print-on-demand that I have right now so it will cost me to put copies into BookMooch, so it may not happen a lot. The tip jar idea does sound good for us self-published authors to give that a try. But I’m always open to new avenues to get word out about my book.

JB: Excellent.

DS: So, how does your point system work?

JB: OK, well, more or less it works out that for every book you give away you get one. But, that’s more or less, because it turns out that’s just kinda doesn’t work out really well. Like if you have to send a book out to another country, well that costs you more money. So I give you two points if you have to send it to another country. Also, you need to get points to start out and I want you to type books in. So for every ten books you type in, I give you a point as well. There’s a couple other places, too. The idea just generally being that it’s a community and since it’s completely transparent, you can see every book that you’ve given and received and people can choose to honor your requests or not I kinda give away points fairly generously to good behavior like typing in books and sending them out.

DS: Yeah, I was wondering about that, too. For the listeners out there, I did list a few books, and I got a book from John. It’s Cory Doctorow’s excellent book that I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom. I just got it today, so that was very quick turnaround. I liked the ability when you go into the website and you mark that it was received, you are also able to give a little plus or minus of how you want to rate the person you got the book from. So I was curious about how that will play out, if it does in points or not, if you rate somebody higher or lower. How does it affect them?

JB: Well, the main way that it affects them is that you’ve got negative points, people are likely to not send you books. So you have the points but you have negative feedback. So you ask for a book and the person absolutely can deny your request, and say “I don’t want to send it, you don’t look trustworthy.” Which is kinda neat. On eBay, if someone bids but they have a shady reputation you still have to accept their bid. I never did like that. That’s how that plays out. I don’t know. I may do something but I haven’t figured it out yet, if you have really good feedback then you should get a point and a half for every book you send out, because you are one of the super-duper people. I don’t know, those are things I can play with.

DS: Absolutely. The site is absolutely free for people to put their books online. The requirement is on the person sending the book to make the payment for the shipping. So that’s involved, but how does your website, if it’s going to at all, to make any money to keep it running?

JB: Well, the main thing I’m trying to do is make a community where it’s lots of fun and that’s actually why I do it. Because I already ran a company that did well and I sold it, so I don’t need to make a living anymore. So, that’s the first thing. Secondly, to make a little bit of money just to pay the bandwidth bill and such, on each book there’s a link to Amazon which is helpful for example if you want to read user reviews which is often the case, because I just have the book description. I don’t have all of the Amazon discussion there. So if you click Amazon, or let’s say you have a book on your wish list, and you’ve been waiting a few months, and the book hasn’t appeared yet. So you click the Amazon link, well in those cases I get 5% back from Amazon, for you buying the book from Amazon, and that’s fine. It doesn’t cost you anything, it doesn’t cost anybody anything. It’s just kind of a transparent way.

DS: You also make it possible to give books to charity. How does that work?

JB: Well, since it is possible to earn a lot of points, for example I’ve typed in 250 books, so I’ve got twenty-five points. Which is a lot of points that I’m not going to use them up. I’ve worked so far with two charities, and there’s also “John’s Own Choice”, so you can give points, for example to the library pool, and what I do is that when libraries approach me and they’d like to participate in the charity program, I give them an allotment of points, so that they can get books for free. So since public libraries have such a limited book buying budget, it’s a good way for them to stretch those dollars a bit and get books that people want to borrow for free.

I also have a thing with a children’s hospital, where a charity that works with the children’s hospital can get books to the kids in the sick beds that they can read while they are hopefully recovering.

DS: OK, is that a system where they’re able to get the books that people have listed, or is it actually money towards those charity organizations?

JB: So, it’s just points, they’re getting like anybody else.

DS: So that they can go onto BookMooch and then make requests.

JB: That’s right.

DS: Very nice. Do you have any thoughts for any other similar systems like this, with CDs and DVDs? Is that rolling around in your brain? Or is that something you do not want to think about right now?

JB: Well, I mean the whole infrastructure system ties into the Amazon database, would work fine with CDs, with DVDs, and also with games. That would work fine. The thing is I have a real passion for books, and also I think “don’t bite more than you can chew at once.” For DVDs, I’m not sure if it would work or not, because every DVD you want is already at NetFlix. For CDs, well, people tend to pirate CDs, or pirate music. They would rip the CD and then send it off, and I’m not sure I want to be part of that. I’m not sure I want to invite the RIAA’s wrath, either.

Also, I’ve seen a few sites that do that, that are CD exchanges. I have a friend who was running a company that was a NetFlix for video games, and it is still running but it hasn’t been a huge success. So I know that the game thing could work, but again people mostly want first-run games. So the used games, the old games, don’t get traded much. So it’s not as obvious to the other ones. It’s something I may do, but it’d be more if people just say, “God, I really like what you did with BookMooch, I love the feel, and the other places don’t do what I want.

DS: So, let’s talk about Magnatune.com. When did you start your record label and what was the reason behind that?

JB: Well, it’s April 2003, so almost three and a half years ago. I started it because my wife had a really bad experience with her record label, and I just saw her not wanting to do music anymore, because the experience was so bad. I just thought, well, if musicians don’t get paid and have these terrible experiences with the labels, and the labels can’t even get the CDs in stores, then the future for a lot of the second-level genres, not the top-ten stuff, is pretty dubious. Indeed, it’s not just classical music that’s collapsed from 20% of sales to 2%, in the last twenty years, but also things like Electronica is very hard to find. When you go to your average CD store and they just don’t have a very good collection. If it’s not on a major label, it doesn’t exist. So that was the idea behind Magnatune, to try and figure out some business model where interesting independent music could survive and musicians could get paid.

DS: You actually do a 50/50 split with the artists.

JB: Yeah, it’s 50/50 of the revenues. So labels always do their calculations based on profits, which they can control. With Magnatune, the goal was if you pay $8 for a CD, or a download rather, $4 goes to the musician. And on Magnatune, you can choose how much you want to pay for a download, from $5 to $18, and half goes to the musician.

DS: And that is flexible for the purchaser. Do you find that most people are being honest and generous with the payments that they are making?

JB: Well, I mean everyone is honest if they’re buying. So, not honest would be just downloading it and saying, “to hell with this, I can get it for free.” So, they’re already hitting the Buy button, so they’re one of the honest people. On average people pay $8.50, and actually in the last year that’s traded up from $8.10 to $8.50. So, that’s kind of interesting. But, to hit the honesty thing, it turns out that the poorer countries like Mexico are typically paying more like $5, but the richer countries like the U. K. , Switzerland, and even Italy, are up around $10. So that seems pretty honest to me. They’re paying what they can afford.

DS: That’s true. That’s awesome. So, you’ve also decided to make, at least some of your artists, “Open Source Music”. How does that work? How do you make music open source?

JB: Well, if you can convince the artist to release the tracks, that’s great, that’s hard though. Also the software doesn’t really support it. It isn’t like source code that is standardized. But what I do is, what people think of as open source, they usually think of the GNU public license, the GPL, and in the media world the corollary to that is the Creative Commons license. All of the music on Magnatune is Creative Commons licensed. Which does allow a lot of open source values like the ability to pass the music on, the ability to make derivative works, the freedom from DRM for copy-protection so you can use it in any way you choose. And in fact, if you go to the Open Source Institute, they have a definition of what is “open source” with ten points, and nine of those points are things that Magnatune does. The one-tenth that I don’t do is we don’t allow commercial use of the music for free. We ask for a fee in that case because that’s a way for musicians to make money, if it’s in a TV commercial for example.

DS: Sure. If I may ask, how has the commercial licensing been going for your artists? Have you been finding lots of takers in the advertising and/or movie industry, or anything?

JB: The biggest success has been with independent filmmakers, and about thirty films a month license our music and use it.

DS: Really? Thirty a month?

JB: It’s quite a few, and these are typically films under $40,000 budgets, and the film festival license is really cheap; it’s $44 at Magnatune. So it’s basically the cost of dinner lets you use the music and show your film at a festival. If you are picked up, which means you sell your film for big bucks, then there’s an additional fee, and that’s a couple thousand dollars, but then you can afford it. So we don’t really charge the poor filmmakers much, we just get them onboard and it works out well.

DS: Very nice. So, your tagline for your company is, “We Are Not Evil.” What is the evil that you see in the music industry that you are fighting?

JB: Well, there’s evil all around. The industry is evil to musicians, it’s the record labels themselves actually get a bad deal, and the whole distribution system is evil. I mean the most obvious one is when you buy music and you get copy-protection all over it, and then you have trouble playing your own music or they sue people’s grandmothers because they think they are using peer-to-peer software. That’s pretty obviously bad behavior and it’s not helpful. Not to mention the systematic destruction of musicians’ lives. I mean it’s a cliché now of the musician not getting paid at all and committing suicide. It just happens so much. So, musicians getting ripped off with bad agreements; not being able to record anywhere else, not getting paid. That’s another part, but also record stores like Tower isn’t paying any of their bills anymore. They just decided not to pay anybody for any of the CDs. So, big surprise, people are stopping to send them CDs anymore. They’ve been doing that for a long time for independent labels, it’s just that they recently did that to the majors. Which, you know, they’re not quite as agreeable to.

So, the system is just lousy, and you know my favorite example is Sony getting sued by the government because they bribed radio stations to play their music.

You know, what’s hilarious is, who would wanna have to pay radio stations to play music? It’d be much better if they just played it. So, they get sued, they get fined, by the government, and then what’s funny is, they won’t let podcasters play their music because that’s piracy. Which of course is silly because podcasting is just internet micro-broadcasting.

DS: Right, and it’s free advertising.

JB: It’s free everything. It’s free broadcasting, it’s, you know music has to be heard to be sold.

DS: I find a lot of artists and some labels are starting to roll with the idea of making some tracks podsafe. In fact, Hungry Lucy just released a new album that is completely podsafe. Do you think that trend is catching on?

JB: Well, I mean, right below sort of the major indies and the major labels, there’s absolutely no commitment to DRM. There’s an absolute commitment to internet and internet sharing, and things like MySpace So, it’s not so much a trend that’s catching on, as much as everybody but sort of the top twenty labels thinks that the whole DRM/anti-podcast/anti-anything is just brain-damaged. And it is just a question of the smaller labels getting around to doing what they think is right on the podcasts. But everyone there is pro-podcast. Well, just get on eMusic and you’ll see, you know eMusic is an MP3 subscription service and tons and tons of labels are on it, even though, hey there’s no DRM. God, it’s MP3s. That’s because we know we can make money there.

DS: Right. When you started Magnatune, what was the current state of podcasting then? When did you decide to embrace making your music podsafe?

JB: Well when I started, there was no iTunes. So, there was no podcasting, there was Adam Curry out there maybe trying to make an RSS standard. But, you know because the music was Creative Commons, I thought it was podsafe anyway. But people were unsure about that and also I wanted to make it so that if you had a podcast that had, for example, some banner ads on the website, I wanted to say that was O.K. Which isn’t necessarily clear with the Creative Commons license.

DS: That’s true. It’s kind of questionable on what is a commercial podcast.

JB: And a lot of podcasters are charging, but not making much money. They’re trying to create a new business model. Or say it’s a big podcast, like NPR. They’re non-commercial but they don’t think Creative Commons works for them, for whatever reason. So I wanted to create a license that just explicitly said this sort of podcasting is O.K. and in fact I even have a “Commercial But Poor” license so if you are charging but don’t make much money, that’s O.K., too, as long as you just stick an ad about us at the end of the show.

DS: What does a podcaster have to do if they want to play music from Magnatune?

JB: Well, they have two choices. One is they can just hit the “License” button on Magnatune, and then hit the “Podcast“, and then they just agree to the legalese that’s there that says how you’re going to use it and then they can just download the music. Those are 128k MP3s, and that works fine. But generally I’d rather podcasters have the WAV file so that their podcasts sound as good as possible. So there’s an email address there that they can send to and just send a URL of their existing podcast. We’ll give the podcaster a dummy credit card number where they can buy all the music on Magnatune at no cost in order to include that stuff in their podcast, and we get dozens of requests every day that I have someone that looks at them and makes sure it’s a real podcast to her and off it goes. You’ll find plenty of discussion boards there talking about how they use Magnatune music all the time because of that.

[http://magnatune.com/info/podcast]

DS: Do you actively seek new artists, or do they come to you?

JB: Both. We get about 400 CD submissions a month, and then about 2% works out that we love. It isn’t a percentage base, it’s just based on what we love. And we also go after people, specifically typically friends of musicians who we already know are good. So for example, Drop Trio, which is this groovy jazz band, the organist in that band plays solo music, and does this intense rock thing with Jade Leary, and that’s now we got a recommendation there. We found him and that works really well, and generally most of the time good musicians know other good musicians.

DS: Right. How many of the artists come to you with a finished product and do you offer services for those who don’t have a CD for you to sell?

JB: Yeah, well I don’t actually need a CD. All I need is an FTP upload or some WAV files on your website or MP3 files to listen to. I do need a CD-R in the end that I can duplicate if I accept it. So, you do need to have a complete album and it needs to sound good otherwise I just won’t have time to listen to it with the other 400 things that come in. And if something is really just amazing but the production is not all that good we’ll occasionally send it to one of the producers that we work with who want to help out and if they like it too they’ll talk with the person. We’ve done that two or three times. But it’s got to be something awesome. But it happens.

DS: Cool. What other projects are you working with, besides Magnatune and BookMooch that’s keeping you busy? Or is that enough for you?

JB: Yeah, I’ve gotta take down my sleeping schedule there. Those are the big two things. My wife works on a bunch of things that