Tag Archives: Paperight

A quick guide to self-publishing: start small and cheap

Posted on by

I was asked recently for advice on self-publishing a science fiction novel written by a teen author. He’s been quoted R9000 (about $1000) by an ebook-only self-publishing company, but was also keen to produce a paperback edition.

Now, paying R9000 for book production may or may not be worthwhile, as long as it doesn’t involve any kind of exclusive licence or copyright assignment, and the provider does more than just convert a Word file to EPUB format. But really that’s not the point. For a novel, he should be getting the book into the market himself, and saving that R9000 for later.

Every book is a unique project, so there is no simple template of what to do. In fact, publishing a book is like starting a business, with all the attendant risk and uncertainty. So the best thing for a new business is always to start off as small and as cheaply as possible, and to gather feedback from customers from the start. You must find out as quickly as possible what your customers want, and whether they’ll pay for your product.

The best guide to first-time publishing is really The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – it’s written for entrepreneurs, but the lessons are all the same for self-publishing authors. Its most important lesson is that you should spend as little time and money as possible before getting the product (your book) in front of customers and getting their feedback. The clearest feedback will be in actual sales, but verbal feedback can be just as valuable.

So, even though there’s no template for how to publish a first book, I would say these are some fundamentals:

  1. Create a single neat, edited file in something like Word, OpenOffice or Google Docs. (If you want to create an ebook file, you shouldn’t pay more than about R2500, or $250, for the conversion. You may want to pay for professional editing, too.)
  2. Distribute it as an ebook on Amazon Kindle using Kindle Direct Publishing. (There are loads of other places to sell ebooks, but don’t invest time on them till you have good sales on Amazon, which has about 80% market share in ebook retail.)
  3. Market it by telling your friends about it and hoping word of mouth spreads. Just use email, social networks, and meeting people at any events related to the book’s genre.
  4. If sales pick up, and you think there’s demand for it, use the proceeds to pay for more expensive versions like a paperback, where you have to pay for design and print distribution too.
  5. When you do produce a paperback, never print a large print run. Always use print-on-demand services like CreateSpace or LightningSource.

(If you think there’s a market in South Africa, consider putting it on Paperight, too, to reach a large, low-income market. Paperight is my distribution company, a network of independent copy shops that print out books on-demand for walk-in customers. It’s simple and free to sell books through the Paperight network.)

For some technical guidance on ebooks, check out the Electric Book Works Knowledge Base, which contains lots of guidance I’ve written on technical and admin matters. You could skip to the section on self-publishing ebooks.

 

Why I put ebooks on paper for South Africans

Posted on by

On Publishing Perspectives today, I explain why – in an age of digitisation – it’s more important than ever to keep books on paper.

The irony of the digital revolution is this: as it democratizes publishing, it widens the gap between those with Internet access and those without. For instance, take Wikipedia: this is perhaps the most useful collection of human knowledge ever created. And it’s wonderfully democratic. But where a few years ago you could read a relatively up-to-date paper encyclopedia in your local library, today you can’t — because of Wikipedia. Up-to-date encyclopedic knowledge now exists only online, and if you don’t have Internet access, too bad. The gap between the Internet-haves and the Internet-have-nots is getting wider.

That gap in turn will translate into an education gap, an economic gap, and a healthcare gap.

Wikipedia is a microcosm of the book industry. Hundreds of thousands of books are produced every year, by more and more people, at lower and lower costs, and increasingly unavailable to anyone without Internet access to buy or read them.

I founded Paperight specifically to address that problem …

I hope you’ll head over there and read the rest of the post.

A conversation on innovation at Paperight (and beyond)

Posted on by

I recently enjoyed an email conversation with Wouter Burger, a marketing executive who, for his part-time studies, is writing a paper on innovation and brand leadership. We talked about Paperight in particular, and innovation in general. Here is the conversation.

WB: An organisations ability to innovate is a strategic asset. What is your view on innovation?

AA: Innovation is a bit broad to have ‘a view’ on. It’s a big, complex area. I suppose in short you could say that without innovating, a company will die quickly. But that’s obvious, and not an interesting or useful thing to say. My two favourite takes on how innovation does or can happen are described in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. Both centre around the principle that to innovate you have to be enthusiastic about experimentation and learning from failure. Everything I’ve built at Electric Book Works and Paperight is the product of a long genealogy of experimentation and failure.

WB: How is Paperight set up to drive innovation and not see the same fate as Kontax?

AA: Kontax was great – it proved that teens would read if they had easy access to stories, something many publishers doubted – but it never set out to have a self-sustaining business model. Paperight is structured very differently: it’s a for-profit company with a clear revenue model. This means the team culture is oriented around self-sustainability. Our conversations are literally of a different sort. And then that self-sustainability requires constant innovation. Every day we’re tweaking the system, our marketing messages, our promotional strategies, our approach to content. And those tweaks can add up to or precipitate large strategic shifts.

WB: Do you actively consider the appointment of employees in relation to their ability to contribute to the innovation process?

AA: We’re lucky to have attracted a team of naturally innovative people. I think innovative people get what Paperight is about more quickly than those who think ecosystems are static. So they tend to apply to work with us first. If I’ve had not-very-innovative team members over the years, I suspect they moved on, I can’t even remember. Statically minded people struggle with constant experimentation and failure. Innovative people thrive on it.

WB: Can you explain your organisations culture?

AA: Culture is hard to describe briefly. Perhaps most importantly, we’re a tight-knit team of multi-talented people who focus above all else on shipping – getting stuff done and out the door. But there is so much more to company culture. We follow a similar ethos to two companies who have tried to write describe their culture clearly: Valve (the game-software company) gives its new employees the Valve Handbook, and there’s a lot there that rings true for us. And HubSpot have summarised their culture in a great slide deck. HubSpot’s approach is almost exactly ours, except that we don’t have unlimited vacation time!

WB: Was it a conscious effort to get to this place (the culture mentioned above)?

AA: Absolutely. Culture does not happen by accident. It starts with conscious decisions by a company’s leaders about how a company must feel to be a part of. Then you have to translate that feeling into clear, concrete ways of working that get passed on to the team as they join. Every recruitment decision must take culture into account (I’ve turned away highly talented job applicants because their personalities don’t suit the culture we’re building), but also tiny decisions like where people sit, where and how they make coffee, how meetings are run, what software we use, and how we answer the phone.

WB: Do you mix teams to get the innovation going i.e. a creative with a strategic person?

AA: Yes. There’s no pre-existing formula. But when you put a team together for a project, you’re making a decision about the culture of that project. It will have a subculture of its own, within the greater organisational culture. I take for granted that our project teams will be innovative, but perhaps unconsciously I’d avoid teaming people who as a combination might stifle each others’ ability to innovate.

WB: Do you think innovation is a creative or a strategic spinoff and which type of thinking is better conducive for this?

AA: Creative and strategic ways of thinking can’t be neatly separated. They’re a big grey jumble. Any successful project needs both to be innovative, effective and sustainable. But there’s no recipe.

WB: With the innovation of Paperight, who played the roles of creative and strategist?

AA: Since I’m the sole founder, I suppose I’ve worn both hats. I designed the logo, wrote most of the early messaging, and developed the product-development strategy, for instance. But if I’d been on my own entirely, it all would have sucked. What we’ve done well has only been good because I and my team have actively gathered input from others. You have to be humble about what you can do yourself, and excited about what others bring to a project. In addition to the amazing team I have around me now, over the years my co-workers, friends and suppliers have helped invent and refine many of the creative and strategic innovations at Paperight. Nowadays, my role is to filter that input, organise it usefully, and have a casting vote on what we implement.

WB: Looking at yourself as the leader of a brand awarded with such a prestigious innovation award must feel great and validate your efforts. What qualities do you see compulsory for leaders looking to drive this innovation?

AA: There are many different ways to drive innovation, so there’s probably not a single set of qualities you have to have. If I have to name one, I’d say empathy. You have to be able to put yourself in others’ shoes, to see the world as they do. Who you choose to empathise with may differ: not many would say Steve Jobs was empathetic to his staff, but he was masterfully empathetic to his customers: he understood perfectly what it is and should be like to use a device as a consumer. When I encounter people who struggle to innovate, I get the feeling they’re low on empathy: they’re locked into their own worldview and don’t see the world as others do.

WB: While working in your previous publishing position, did you always look out for ways to innovate?

AA: Absolutely! I genuinely can’t believe everyone isn’t always trying to innovate, whether that means changing the world or changing your doorbell. Wherever a system isn’t perfect, there’s an opportunity to innovate – why wouldn’t you want to take that opportunity? Improving things, doing them in new, better ways is the most fun you can have in life.

WB: In the commercial sense, Amazon did a lot for digital publishing with the Kindle – however, this did not help lower income groups attain quality reading materials. The spinoff for Africa came in the form of Worldreader – looking to bring the e-readers to Africa. This is also happening too slow to get the level of reach and education you are targeting. There will be a stage where the above scenario starts changing and copyshops will then become less frequented (although quite far in the future). How will you position your offering to innovate for such a challenge, or is it something you keep in mind but only assess when you’re at that junction?

AA: Ereading is the future. No question. But that future is much, much further off than most people think. We could build Paperight for twenty years and never run out of customers.

That said, Paperight is a small piece of a bigger puzzle. It may look like we’re just printing books out. What we’re really doing is building a rights marketplace where licences to repackage content are instantly and effortlessly traded. In time, those licences might be for repackaging software, music, or video. Already most African economies are driven by small-scale entrepreneurs who understand their specific local markets. Those entrepreneurs are best placed to know what their communities want and how to package and sell it – not some suit-wearing editor in London or New York. The editor should create great content, and leave it to the entrepreneur to repackage and sell it under licence to specific, local markets.

Most exciting of all, a network of local outlets could produce 3D-printed objects, like crockery or spectacles. Right now, we live in a world where, for the most part, the creators of objects control their design and their physical production: Ikea designs your desk lamp and controls its production. Oakley designs your glasses and controls their production. But production of even the most complex items is getting cheaper and cheaper to do locally, on-demand, using generic tools and open hardware, like 3D printers. In future, Ikea may design your new desk lamp, but your local corner store will print it for you on demand, with a quick, easy licence from Ikea. At that point, I hope we’ll power those licensing platforms, and serve that network of printing and repackaging outlets.

Good writing is a pinnacle skill

Posted on by

When I’m hiring people for Electric Book Works or Paperight, I know whether they’ll work out the moment I read their cover letter. When I read a really good cover letter, I can essentially ignore the CV attached to it. (Though I do expect the CV to be well constructed, neatly laid out, and error free.)

Why is there such a clear correlation between a well-written cover letter and an excellent team member? Because of what good writing represents.

Writing is a pinnacle skill. In order to write well, you have to have a range of other skills in place first. They are the underlying foundation. Once you have those other skills, good writing represents their combined result: the pinnacle of their positive effects.

Writing as a pinnacle skill

When I read a great piece of writing, I know the writer has those foundational skills. In this diagram I only list a few off the top of my head: empathy (which is an appreciation for what your audience is thinking and feeling), attention to detail, a broad general knowledge, logic, clarity of thought, persuasiveness, the ability to critique your own work (also called a crap detector), an appreciation for rules and the smarts to break them, self-discipline, the ability to prioritise, a sensitivity to cliché and stereotype – and more.

As an employer, that’s much of what I’m looking for. (I do, of course, factor in whether a person is writing in their home language, but even then many of the skills of good writing transcend a person’s grasp of grammar.)

Writing is not a bag of skills learned for their own sake – spelling, grammar, punctuation, metaphor, and so on – though sometimes they’re presented that way. In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Jessica Lahey argues that spelling counts because, in a busy world, people need a quick and superficial way to measure you:

you’ve already spent nine hours today reading through these applications. The one in your hand looks pretty much like all those thousands of others. If only there were some way to decide without having to wade through the 500-word essay about the summer spent digging latrines in Kenya…

And there it is — an easy way out, right there in the third sentence: “The days are hot and dry, your thirsty, tired, and homesick.” Not “you’re,” but “your.” The essay may go on to articulate inspired truths about human nature. It may reveal some novel insight that has never been revealed before. But here’s the rub: This admissions officer with the limited time and frustrated spouse is done. Three lines into the essay, the application lands squarely on the “No” pile.

This example tends to upset my students. They wail, “But that’s unfair! Shouldn’t it be the ideas that count? That’s about appearances, not content!” And they are right. Ideas should be judged on substance rather than appearances, but this simply is not how our world works. We live in a society where appearances matter, where in order to be heard and taken seriously we are judged quickly and superficially.

That’s a shame coming from a writing teacher. It reads like an apology: ‘I’m sorry you have to learn this spelling rubbish, but the world’s so silly about these things!’

There is nothing superficial about judging someone on their spelling. Unless you really are stranded on a desert island without a dictionary, the Internet, or a smart friend, a spelling mistake demonstrates a clear lack of fundamental skill or temperament. Misspellings – especially in business documents – are the symptoms of an underlying carelessness that to employers, clients, colleagues, and fans can and should be deeply troubling.

The quality of your writing is a clear indicator of the quality of your mind. And while spelling is only one part of good writing, it’s a crucial one: get it right, and you give your work a chance to shine – and you to shine through it.

Open licensing vs sales: tricky decisions and the Pratham Books data

Posted on by

Few questions in publishing are more clearly polarised by personal opinion than whether open-licensing is compatible with increased revenue. In general, fans of open-licensing don’t work for commercial publishers, and claim that open-licensing boosts sales. And those whose salaries depend on selling copies of books won’t even risk trying open licences. There has been precious little data to prove either’s case.

I have feet in both camps. As someone who genuinely believes widespread literacy could solve deep-rooted problems, open licensing seems to be a necessary leap of faith for any publisher who gives a damn. That’s why at Bettercare we put Creative Commons licences on our books. Still, as someone who needs Bettercare to stay afloat, this gives me the shivers.

At Paperight, too, we struggle with this. We recently spent tens of thousands of rand developing a CC-licensed book that Paperight outlets would sell. When a partner organisation started giving the PDF version away for free, we felt disappointed: those should have been our sales! We need that cash!

Of course, those giveaways were probably never going to be our sales, anyway. The book’s market is huge, so we’ll find our own customers. Still, it stung emotionally. We wondered whether the CC-license was a good idea. And in the absence of real data, emotion rules.

So it’s very encouraging to see that for Pratham Books, sales data clearly shows that open-licensing correlates with increased sales. Not only the licensing, though, but easy, free access to that content, too. In their case, on Scribd:

… when we looked at the cumulative sales data for CC books that were available on Scribd vs. CC books that were not available on Scribd, we were astounded to see that the former outsold the latter in such dramatic fashion in almost a 3:1 ratio. While we would be hesitant to say, given the specifics of our market and our model, that making books openly licensed and available online increased sales, we are a lot more confident in claiming that, at worst, it does not seem to depress sales of those books. And that, in itself, is an important learning for us and as it should be for the rest of the publishing industry.

I highly recommend reading the entire post, which explains how they gathered the data. It wasn’t an easy journey for them either. Just as it isn’t for us.

Luckily, I work with people who are willing to take the leaps of faith we need to overcome our worries and do the right thing. If all goes well, Pratham Books’ experience will be ours, too, and the gods will keep us in lunch.