The Thin Red Line

Panning books is definitely not the fun part of making this blog and much of the time I follow the old adage ‘if you can’t say something nice…’ But having taken the time to read through today’s titles and not having anything else I am yet ready to write about I decided to go ahead and post a very rare Double Don’t Bother.

Who among us has not played Monopoly? I remember many, many Monopoly games from childhood, which sometimes became so heated and emotional that someone would take the board and run home. So naturally I was struck by Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game & How It Got That Way when I was shelving in games at 794. I read a bit about Elizabeth Magie Phillips who invented in 1904 a Landlords game, about the age of the great trusts and the Carnegies and Rockerfellers, about Teddy Roosevelt, trust-buster and the founding of Atlantic City. And finally about the development and marketing of the world’s most famous game, skimmed through much trivia and read a gripping account of life at a very high stakes Monopoly tournament. If you are a Hard Core Monopoly Freak, you will Love this one. For everyone else, it may be a bit much.

As a budding power blogger with two growing blogs, any blogging books that surface at the library catch my attention. This one isn’t worth bothering with unless you are someone who has never heard of or seen a blog before, run a business that could really benefit from having a business blog, and want an explanation of how technically to make such a blog that was neither detailed and specific enough to actually walk you through the job nor focused and tweaked towards guiding you to the resources to do the heavy lifting. I have absolute certainty that no one reading this post will fall into that narrow audience category and have thus lazily refrained from linking this title.

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One of the biggest benefits of blogging for me has been in meeting people with different backgrounds and perspectives. More than once lately I’ve been forced by another blogger to recognize some of my own prejudices, preconceptions and unexamined value judgments. And that’s a good thing.

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With a big thanks to Nina Munteanu, whose blog post last week brought it to my attention, I want to talk about a new Blogger widget that allows visitors to your blog to purchase your entire archived posts as a bound book. Please note that for reasons I will make clear the button below is only an image and has no active link.

From the information in Nina’s post and other information gathered at the web site, I first learned that the retail price for the book is $19.95 soft cover/ $24.95 hardcover of which the blog owner receives a flat 20% royalty on all sales, regardless of volume. In mainstream book retailing, $20 would be High for a trade paperback, and at that price point readers would expect a pretty substantial volume to feel they have gotten their money’s worth. While it is not exactly buried in fine print, the much less publicized fact is that the theoretical book used in the example is only 20 pages in length, and each 2 additional pages add an additional $ 1 to the retail price. (Please note that I do not say the cover price; in my testing no price appeared anywhere on the book’s cover or pages.) There is a limit of 200 total pages per book. If my math is correct ($19.95 + ((180/2)*$1)= $109.95 retail for a 200 page trade paperback book. Speaking as someone with long experience in selling books, I state categorically that this is not a viable price point for any customer other than those traditionally served by vanity presses.

Self publishing an identical book with the publishing service Lulu.com would cost a base $34.53 per unit, plus whatever the author chooses to have added to that base price as their payment. For the sake of argument, add in the $21.99 that the blog owner would theoretically receive on sales (I can’t imagine there would be many) of the $109.95 book and you have a retail of $56.52. This is still more than any reader who does not personally know the author would ever pay for a book. With Lulu, you would have the option of getting that price down, however, first by selecting black and white printing rather than full color Base cost $8.53, then add a flat $5.46 author payment, which in traditional publishing would be a phenomenal net payment for an unknown author of a title with limited distribution potential, and you have a $13.95 cover priced paperback which you can realistically hope to sell to most anyone who can be made interested in what you write.

Additionally, I am very sorry to report that the SharedBook software is not ready for prime time. In my testing, which I repeated twice, my oldest blog posting was dated May 30th and my newest September 21st. I selected the option to publish All rather than specify a date range. This was the only user-available option prior to automatically generating my book. After a long but not unreasonable wait, the site prompted me to download the images of my book covers and pages in an 8MB .pdf file. First, and perhaps most seriously Blog2Print for unknown arbitrary reasons included only posts from July 21st to September 21st in my 40 page ($29.95 retail includes a $5.99 author payment) book. Despite repeating the generation and download steps and insuring that Publish All was selected, I was never able to get Blog2Print to include my May and June posts. An even greater concern is that Blog2Print, apparently choosing at random from images within my blog posts that were of an appropriate scale and shape, printed the front cover of Poppy Z. Brite’s D*U*C*K on the front cover of my book and the front cover of John F. Hunt’s Stuff Guys Need To know on my back cover.

This is extremely unacceptable, not only to my own tastes and sensibilities (I pan both of these books between those covers), but more importantly because it is a clear cut infringement of the copyright rights of Ms. Brite, Mr. Hunt and their respective publishers which could expose both me and Blog2Print to liability were I to actually have this thing printed and distributed as they have prepared it.

Having discussed Lulu as an alternative, I need to make clear some important differences between self-publishing with Lulu and auto-publishing through the Blog2Print widget. With Lulu, the author is responsible for manually preparing the .pdf files from which the book is professionally printed, and this is not a trivial undertaking. However, given that the data to be published is already in precisely formatted HTML, the task is not beyond the reasonably assumed technical reach of a blogger who has progressed to the point of having 200 pages of posts worth preserving in a book. Another important difference is that to publish through Lulu you will have to pay a $100 fee to Lulu that covers things such as getting your book assigned an ISBN and getting the book and it’s ISBN loaded into the standard industry distribution channels that will make it available from wholesalers and retailers such as Amazon.com. You will also be required to buy a copy (at the base price) after you have made all final changes and before the book is irrevocably "set" to insure that the finished product is as you expect while it is still possible to make further corrections and changes should they be needed. (Think of this as a "proof" copy as it is called in traditional publishing.)

It is entirely realistic to believe that you have or will accumulate a sufficient number of sufficiently high quality blog posts to publish a book, and there are realistic means of doing so. Unfortunately, at this time, Blog2Print is NOT one of them.

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I have never been a fan of the "dummies" books and honestly never understood how a publisher that unequivocally calls its audience Stoopid on the cover of every book could possibly become popular, yet the bright yellow tomes on a huge range of topics have become ubiquitous. And sometimes, though certainly not always, the books themselves are quite good.

Blogging For Dummies is a comprehensive reference that begins by defining the term blog and proceeds methodically to tell you most everything you need to know about them. Brad Hill takes a very humorous and self-deprecating tone which somewhat makes up for the very hand-holding, step-by-step ’software manual’ style these books inevitably adopt.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the various options for starting a blog: from the social networks on MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 and Google’s less sociable and slightly geekier Blogger (all free) to paid Type Pad accounts, to using Movable Type or Word Press pre-installed on a blogging specialist web host’s server to downloading and installing one of these programs on your own on a general web hosting server. I started this blog on a whim, without ever considering what options were available and am quite pleased to realize that had I reviewed all of these options before starting I very likely still would have chosen Blogger.

Other sections cover the mechanics of day to day blogging, the use of RSS and other syndication services, publicizing and promoting your blog, netiquette for bloggers and, finally monetizing your blog with ads. This volume would be most useful for someone who has already begun blogging and wants to get a better understanding of what it’s all about and helpful to prospective bloggers who prefer to learn before they leap. Recommended.

Publishing a Blog with Blogger is a highly visual, well-written and concise guide to doing exactly what the title says. Elizabeth Castro does not spare a word or a pixel for the history of blogging, the possibilities of using other hosts and software platforms or anything else except showing you precisely, step-by-step how to build and manage a Blogger blog. This book would be excellent for helping someone like my mother, who has never blogged before, to make their first effort. (My mom has started reading here lately and I hope she will see this suggestion– she has become a great photographer in recent years and I would love to be able to visit her blog and see her latest pictures every day!) Highly Recommended.

The Best of Blogs seems uncertain what it wants to be– a guide for new bloggers, a history of the medium or a directory listing of interesting and unusual blogs. And in its indecision, it fails in all three areas. The history and general explanations, occupying a small section at the beginning of the book are cursory and provide little useful information. The meat of the book, occupying the middle two thirds of the 320 pages consists of a listing of blogs in various categories, which do not seem particularly well chosen. The authors seem to be most interested in parenting and child oriented blogs as well as football and sports centered blogs. If these are not your particular interests this section will not be all that helpful. (I also believe that printed directories of online content are necessarily obsolete 60 seconds after they come off the press and a waste of paper under the best of circumstances, even when the listings are well-chosen, which these are not.) The final section of the book, about 50 pages addresses the particulars of creating your own blog. This section feels like an after-thought and would have very limited utility for a new blogger. NOT Recommended.

All three of these books and many other books about blogging can be found in your public library at Dewey Decimal Number 006.7.

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