By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Who won at the National Book Awards, held last night in lower Manhattan?

By all accounts, the lamb-eating attendees, the institution of dancing, speeches in prose by poets, emotional speeches, a movement for the literary community to occupy Wall Street and, oh yeah, Jesmyn Ward, Stephen Greenblatt, Thanhha Lai and Nikky Finney, who walked out of Cipriani Wall Street into the rainy New York night with the NBA hardware.

Ward, who won the prize for fiction for her Hurricane Katrina novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA), cried on the podium as she spoke of the death of her younger brother and how it inspired her to write. It was the culmination of a night of emotional speeches that paid tribute to the impoverished, displaced and suffering, according to the Associated Press, which also noted the lavish vaulted ceilings at the “luxury venue” for the event.

Mention was made of Occupy Wall Street at the event by poet Ann Lauterbach, who introduced poet John Ashbery, who was given a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

“We are occupying Wall Street,” she said. While perhaps true, this occupation was more in a black-tie, rack-of-lamb-for-dinner sort of way.

Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Co.), has outsold all of the other winning works in print by a factor of five-to-one, according to Publisher’s Marketplace. Last night’s events could, of course, change that, as this morning Bloomsbury announced that it was publishing 50,000 more copies of Salvage the Bones – also via Publisher’s Marketplace.

A wave of relief swept over the National Book Foundation when Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again (Harper) was accurately announced as the young people’s literature winner. Lauren Myracle’s Shine was mistakenly announced as a finalist instead of Franny Billingsley’s Chime in the lead-up to the awards last month, a gaff referenced by awards judge Marc Aronson, who blamed the affair on an “oral malfunction” – in a way, a “wardrobe malfunction” for the Foundation.

Finney, who was honored for her poetry in Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly), also won the “Best Acceptance Speech John Lithgow Has Ever Heard” award for her emotional call-out of slaves who were deliberately kept illiterate.

“That was the best acceptance speech I’ve ever heard from anyone in my entire life,” Lithgow said as he ascended to the podium after her speech.

Lithgow, who hosted the show, was looking very literate at the podium in his dress-wear and requisite-for-the-publishing-world black-framed glasses; he even took a stab at the craft celebrated by the occasion.

“I wish I were one of those people who could blithely speak off the cuff all evening…but I’m not…and, besides, this is an evening all about writing, so, by god, I’ve written something,” he said and then proceeded with his speech to praise the literary world, degrade celebrity culture, and explained where the twain meet: actor and author, John Lithgow. He has written a series of children’s books as well as a personal history (Drama: An Actor’s Education (Harper), which came out this September.

After the presentation, doors were opened to the “riff-raff – junior editors, young agents, reporters, literary party stalwart Jon-Jon Goulian,” according to the New York Observer and that’s when the real fun began. Much was made of the dancing on Twitter (@tomstonemayer, Tom Mayer, a senior editor at Norton, wrote the best part was seeing Alane Mason, the editor behind Greenblatt’s book “dancing it up” and @mrmullin, Digital Book World’s own community relation’s manager wrote that “nobody dances like @calvinreid and @yrstrulyREL,” Publishers Weekly senior news editor Calvin Reid and Random House VP, director of account marketing Ruth Leibmann). The Observer also noted much schmoozing and even cigar-smoking.

A bit uptown, though with more of a “downtown” feel, a younger set watched the awards on flat-screen monitors and projected on a wall at the AAP’s Young to Publishing Group’s second annual House Party on National Book Awards night, held at Tribeca’s M1-5 dance bar. Proceeds from the event went to Brooklyn-based non-profit 826NYC, which supports students and teachers in learning and teaching writing. The merry-making and, yes, dancing, was led there by Kate Childs, chair of the Young to Publishing group. As winners at the ritzy awards show were announced, cheers went up from various factions in the room who enjoyed, rather than cigars, an open dessert-bar of cupcakes and other sweets. There was also pizza.

Other notes: Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Miami bookstore Books & Books, was given an award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community…Lithgow helped to the podium an initially frail-looking John Ashbery, who dispelled any thoughts of frailty with his resounding speech about his career and poetry…videos of the awards presentation can be seen here.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Penguin’s online genre fiction community, Book Country, has launched a self-publishing service, signaling the intention of big publishers to develop additional revenue streams in the face of a changing book-publishing landscape, even if it means letting authors bypass the traditional publishing process.

The self-publishing tool provides prospective authors with the option of either professionally producing their print and e-book or doing much of the production work themselves. It also offers the choice between distribution on just Book Country or a wider network, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other popular e-book stores.

“We’re at a point in the industry where there’s an understanding that there are multiple paths forward for authors,” said Molly Barton, Book Country president and newly appointed Penguin global digital director.

Related: Q&A With Molly Barton on Her New Position and Digital Books

Since its April launch, BookCountry.com has nearly 4,000 members who have posted 500 pieces of fiction, according to the company.

The self-publishing tool is integrated with Book Country’s “genre map,” a detailed classification system of many genres and sub-genres, offering authors fairly sophisticated marketing capabilities, including use of BISAC codes that help readers find books in their area of interest. Users are also given an online marketing guide and advice on pricing through a pricing calculator. Revenues from books sold are to be split between Penguin and the authors, depending on the price the author selects for the book and the distribution method.

“You don’t have to drive around with books in the back of your Subaru” anymore, Barton said.

Users can opt for professional print- and e-book production through outsourced firms for $549, produce it themselves for print and digital distribution for $299 or produce it themselves for e-book-only distribution for $99.

When asked who produces the books for authors who opt into Book Country’s most expensive package, Barton would not confirm a specific company but said it was of the “ilk” of well-known production firms LibreDigital and Aptara and that it was a set of vendors that Penguin would use for its own production.

Penguin plans on adding more a la carte services to Book Country in 2012, potentially like those found on other self-publishing sites like CreateSpace and Lulu, where authors can opt to pay for an online review of their book to generate buyer interest.

Industry observers who attended a series of special demos of the product left impressed. Several who asked not to be named agreed that the marketing integration, pricing and simplicity of the tool were significant selling points to authors.

Penguin was unable to comment on certain issues about the project before press time, including how much marketing support it would get, how much revenue it’s projected to generate for the company in 2012 and the specifics around trade rights for the site’s users.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World

In early 2011, Alex de Campi approached literary agent Ethan Ellenberg with a graphic novel.

De Campi, a 39-year-old music video and commercial director and graphic novelist based in Durham, NH, hoped that a publishing house would pick up Ashes, a follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2005 graphic novel Smoke. After making the rounds at publishers with Ellenberg, de Campi realized she would have to fund the Ashes project herself; while some publishers were interested, they would not agree to pay the artist while the book was being drawn, she said.

These days, self-publishing is common. Once stigmatized as “vanity publishing,” the practice has lost some of its stink with authors such as Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler self-publishing their way to big-time book-sales and commercial success.

What is less common are some of the extreme measures authors take to fund their self-publishing projects. Some sell their possessions – even the clothes off their back – while others enlist the help of their family, friends, clients and colleagues. The point isn’t, as the name “vanity publishing” would suggest, merely to see one’s name in print – the rewards today for a successfully self-published book, some authors believe, are potentially great: a deal with a major publishing house. Hope springs for this self-publishing set, despite the fact that the number of self-published authors who are picked up by a major publisher is dwarfed by those who are not.

Getting creative in the case of de Campi, meant turning to Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing website where entrepreneurs can raise money from the public for their projects. As was widely reported in book blogs, de Campi set up an account on Kickstarter to raise $27,000 to publish her book. Much of the money is to be spent paying James Broxton, the graphic artist for the book. Through Kickstarter, those who want to support de Campi’s book can buy a limited-edition hardcover copy plus a serialized digital edition for $30, or a cameo for themselves as a minor character in the book for $1,200, for instance.

“Next year there will be this little club of people getting chapters of the book,” said de Campi. “Once the book is done, we’ll be sending out hardback editions. This then lets us still have room for a trade edition down the line.”

For de Campi and others, this is the goal: Get picked up by publishers who once rejected them and reach a mass market.

Michelle Dunn, a 45-year-old author who writes about credit and debt collection in Plymouth, NH, risked nearly everything she had for a shot at this goal.

In 2007, she sold her profitable debt collection business and in an ironic twist the buyer soon failed to make his monthly payments to her. High and dry and running out of money, Dunn tried her hand at writing. Publishers weren’t biting and her family needed an income.

To bridge the gap, Dunn literally sold the clothes off her back – on eBay.

“I had some nice, quality, expensive clothing because I had worked in corporate America,” she said. “I was writing and so I didn’t need it anymore.”

Her book, Become the Squeaky Wheel, came out soon after. The title is almost out of print and its success, in part, helped her secure a deal with John Wiley & Sons for her most recent book, The Guide to Getting Paid, which came out in May of 2011 in hardcover and as an e-book. The Guide is Dunn’s 14th book.

“I self-published 12 books. By doing that, I gained a platform,” said Dunn.

It’s the “Blair-Witch” model all over again.

In the late 1990s, Mike Monello, now-executive creative director and partner at New York-based creative agency Campfire, was a struggling filmmaker. He and his film-school friends were just about ready to give up their dreams of careers in movies.

“Blair Witch was one, true, last-ditch effort,” Monello said. “We thought we got to make one last one and make it work or else we have to get real jobs.”

Monello and his film-school friends raised $30,000 from friends, family and other investors to make The Blair Witch Project.

Due in part to a strong grass-roots marketing campaign and a product that was called by critics “the scariest movie ever made” and “ingenious in its simplicity,” the movie was optioned by a major studio for $1 million, plus a percentage of the overall take for the filmmakers, an unheard-of deal for first-time content-creators like Monello and his team.

Anthony Meindl, a 40-year-old acting teacher and writer-director in Los Angeles, also hopes that he can tap the resources and creativity of his family, friends and colleagues to hit it big.

When Meindl met with agents and publishers about his project, At Left Brain, Turn Right, a book meant to help readers achieve success by activating the creative sides of their brains, he was told it was too niche to work for a mass market.

Undeterred, Meindl convinced some of his contacts to provide services usually handled by a traditional publisher. His acting student, Randy Raphael, for instance, designed the cover for the book. In exchange, Raphael is taking classes from Meindl for free.

With the help of those around him, Meindl hopes to publish the book in print in January with an e-book roll-out soon to follow. He and his team plan on sending out review copies and organizing an online advertising campaign.

The goal? Build a publishing empire a la Timothy Ferriss, the self-help author who has sold millions of copies of The 4-Hour Workweek and similar titles. Until recently, Ferriss was published by The Crown Publishing Group, a New York-based imprint of publishing giant Random House. In a twist of the narrative – self-published obscurity to big-time publishing house – Ferriss announced in August that his next book would be published by Amazon, a company that has been a platform used by so many who publish their own work.

Will de Campi’s Kickstarter gambit work? For the funding to kick in and the project to move forward, the graphic novelist will have to raise $27,000 by Sunday, December 18 at 5:02 p.m., according to her Kickstarter page. She has raised almost $12,000 as of November 8. With 40 days to go, she has to raise nearly $400 a day to make it.

Even if she does make it, her agent, Ellenberg, said that there’s no guarantee her novel will then be picked up by a publishing house and re-released to the mass market.

“There are a limited number of slots of the three or four or five publishers who do graphic novels,” he said. “There is a percentage of worthy projects that don’t get published.”

De Campi is optimistic, which is why she left the door open to trade rights in the first place, and, besides, “Part of making art happen is leaning on friends and family,” she said.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Rich Fahle, Founder, Astral Road Media

In this exclusive interview with Susan Orlean, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the just published Rin Tin Tin: the Life and the Legend, discusses short form non-fiction, curation, and author flexibility.

From the interview:

I think all of these new forums, such as the Atavist, Byliner, Kindle Singles, I think it is really exciting. It opens up a chance for a lot of non-fiction that, because magazines have to count their pages and sell ads to buy pages, there is a natural limit to the length and shape of stories will be published. When you’re publishing digitally, and length is no longer an issue, it gives a new kind of freedom. It also allows writers to essentially follow ideas that they want on their own, to control the whole process more. Not to bypass magazines, because I love magazines, but magazines have their own agenda. You have a story that you’re dying to write, it doesn’t just fit necessarily in the agenda of those magazines, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. You do it, you publish it through one of these new media, where there’s a freedom that is just not going to be there otherwise, and you rise and fall on your own sword, which is going to be a little scary.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

By Rich Fahle, Founder, Astral Road Media

In this exclusive interview with Susan Orlean, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the just published Rin Tin Tin: the Life and the Legend, discusses twitter, interacting with readers, and the role of social media in creating an ambient intimacy between author and reader.

From the interview:

When I first really began to understand the feel of social media, which was definitely an adjustment, it was not like writing emails, it was not exactly like a conversation you would have,  it fills this other space that I think takes some adjustment.

It is a kind of ambient intimacy, as opposed to speaking in front of an audience, where there is distance, or an actual one-on-one conversation. It’s something a little bit different that I happen to find oddly very natural and comfortable and really appealing. I loved, as I was working on my book, to be able to talk to people about the progress. One of the people who follows me on twitter sent me a tweet one day saying, “This is like watching an action painter,” because I would write each day about how many words I had written or puzzling over certain things like, “should I write out World War I as words or should I do WWI?” It was so interesting to have people respond, and I began to realize that they felt like they were seeing the inner workings of the writing process, which they really were. I mean, I ask genuine questions, I was really curious to hear. The other day, I said, “Does anyone read acknowledgements?” I was about to sit down and write them. Millions of responses saying “Yes! It’s the first thing I read in books!” I thought, “Well wow, that’s interesting. Now I am going to spend a little more time on my acknowledgements.” So there is something about the level of conversation that became natural to me.

I think writing, especially non-fiction writing, is a form of performance art. It just happens to be delivered to you in a fairly static form, either on a piece of paper or on a digital tablet. But really, it’s the performance of, “I have an interesting story to tell.”  It’s an oral tradition that has been with us since civilization was founded, which is “I have a wonderful story to tell. I can tell it to you in person, or through the marvels of the Gutenberg press. I can tell a lot of you through this amazing thing called publishing.” So maybe now we’re working back, in a funny way, to that earlier form, which is this is an oral, ongoing conversation. Social media enhances the idea that it is in real time, that there’s a real person, that there is a real narrator, that maybe you want to know a little more particularly about that narrator. I think that then enriches what you are reading on the page.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

In this exclusive interview, Maureen Johnson, bestselling author of the just published The Name of the Star, discusses researching her novels, twitter, and author branding.

From the interview:

I hate the idea of author branding. I understand it as a concept. I understand that if you present, for example, were buying an Agatha Christie book you basically know what you’re getting. I mean, it’s going to be a mystery, it’s going to be English, a bunch of people are going to get locked up in a house. You know what you’re getting. But that’s not a brand. That’s just Agatha Christie’s style of writing. I’m very opposed to this idea of building yourself a brand and then forcing yourself into social media. People are being told “Just go online. Just make a website. Just do stuff. Just shout the name of your book.” First of all, it’s boring, and I think the first sin is being boring. If you’re just going to go shout the name of your book, what’s the point? Who wants to listen to that? It would be like listening to someone shout on the street; you would move away, you wouldn’t want to know about it. And I don’t think social media is, well it can be whatever it wants. People can if they want to do it, let them do it, it doesn’t matter. Certainly not to me and probably not to anyone else, but they’re not going to listen to you either. The only thing that I’ve seen that works is just being myself and doing the things that I enjoy.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

By Scott Walker, President, Brain Candy, LLC

In my last post, I explored the concept of value co-creation with audiences and suggested it as a way for publishers to explore new methods for reaching consumers and increasing the value of their intellectual property. This post will provide a great case study of one author’s attempt to literally co-create content with his fans.

In 2006, author and podcaster J.C. Hutchins began publishing podcasts of his 7^th Son technothriller trilogy. He had shopped the property around to different literary agents but failed to secure a publishing deal. As a result, Hutchins began offering free audio installments of his books as a way to raise awareness and establish a devoted fan base. His efforts paid off, and each podcast garnered thousands of downloads. Hutchins kept up the podcasting into 2007, when he secured a publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press for the first book in the trilogy, 7^th Son: Descent.

However, plans called for the book to be published in 2009, and Hutchins struggled to find a way to maintain his audience during the interlude. Given his other professional obligations, he knew he couldn’t single-handedly continue to publish enough content to sustain his fans until 7^th Son: Descent was available.

So, how to solve the problem of sustaining interest in the meantime?

Inspiration for the solution came from the short film anthology, The Animatrix, which was based in the world of the Matrix movie franchise. Nine different creatives were invited to tell their own original story within the Matrix world, using their unique vision and animation styles. The anthology explored both existing characters during the Matrix timeline as well as introduced new characters and storylines that exist before the Matrix timeline.

Hutchins decided to apply this approach to his own trilogy: “The Animatrix was an interesting narrative that took place in the gaps of the Matrix trilogy. I wanted to use that same philosophy of inviting professional creatives to come play in the 7^th Son world.”

Hutchins began by inviting seven other popular podcaster novelists to write and record short stories set in the 7^th Son universe. His plan was to publish them on his site through the existing 7^th Son podcasting channels. Hutchins offered each of the podcasting novelists $100 for their contribution, with the agreement that Hutchins would not commercially benefit from the contributed podcast.

In order to remove additional hurdles for the author-podcasters, Hutchins scoped the chronological boundaries for the contributed podcasts and provided the following guidelines:

• Contributed podcasts would take place during a two-week period in the 7^th Son timeline when the U.S. experienced a crippling nationwide power outage.
• None of the main characters from 7^th Son could be used by the podcasters.
• Authors could write about anyone in the U.S. who experienced the power outage.
• There was a minimum word count but no maximum (essentially a short story in length).

Hutchins also reached out to another group of podcasters he describes as “great verbal storytellers.” These podcasters were invited to contribute much shorter works, possibly as small as a five-minute audio clip).

To help encourage contributions that would dovetail into the existing trilogy, Hutchins provided these invited contributors a single page of information that would be sufficient for podcasters who had never read 7^th Son: Descent to still be able to participate. The page included key plot points from the novel, headline news and common knowledge that any character in the 7^th Son world would know.

Additionally, Hutchins aimed to have every accepted podcast maintain world continuity and be able to be viewed as canonical within the 7th Son world. While this added to the workload of reviewing and editing submissions, the result was a more official feel to the project. Acceptance carried a much greater weight for the 7^th Son: Obsidian contributors.

During the process of ramping up the podcasting collaboration, Hutchins realized he wanted to do more, and he wanted to include not just other podcasters but potentially any existing fan of the 7^th Son podcast. Hutchins named this participatory anthology of audience-crowdsourced content 7^th Son: Obsidian.

Following the same philosophy of lowering the bar for contributing, Hutchins set up a phone number for fans to call to leave in-world voicemails of fictional characters surviving the crisis of the blackout. As with the podcasters, Hutchins provided guidelines for submitting additional audio and video files.

With the infrastructure in place but the public launch date still weeks away, Hutchins “primed the pump” of contributions by directly courting selected fans and friends with a simple invitation to participate in “something very cool” connected with 7^th Son. Cryptic invitations were also sent out on various social media platforms, with the simple offer to contact Hutchins via email to participate in a cool project related to 7^th Son. He included no details about how they could participate.

For those who emailed Hutchins, he provided details about the project and began working out deadlines for the submission. In this way, Hutchins managed to aggregate a lot of contributions – some from professional podcasters, some from regular fans – well before the public launch of 7^th Son: Obsidian.

Much like with the seven podcast novelists, Hutchins constructed the invitation in a way that allowed fans to meaningfully contribute to 7^th Son: Obsidian without having to read any of the novels. He gave the same narrative boundaries to fans as he gave to the seven podcasters, plus some guidelines specific for contributing video. The same non-commercial understanding applied to all contributed content.

Hutchins launched 7^th Son: Obsidian in May of 2008 and began accepting submissions from anyone. Guidelines and rules were published on his website, giving anyone the opportunity to participate. Since Hutchins did not have a mailing list at the time, he promoted the project on his blog, in his podcasts, and by encouraging word-of-mouth promotion among his audience and friends. Part of the appeal for fans was the opportunity to actively contribute official content to a storyworld they were already excited about. Instead of just talking about the 7^th Son world, they could literally tell the next story in that world.

Hutchins set up a page on his website with the same guidelines and rules, and with the exception of the month of September, he published multiple installments each week through mid-October. Installments might be pure audio or video and may consist of a single work or be a compilation of several accepted contributions.

By the end of the project, Hutchins estimates he received well over one hundred submissions from fans, with more than half of them being audio-only submissions (and most of those came through the recordings left on the phone number Hutchins set up). The majority of submissions came after the public launch of the project.

Although Hutchins was responsible for managing the project, confirming that accepted submissions maintained world continuity, and the production of the 7^th Son: Obsidian installments, he did accept help from a fan (Shawn Bishop) to assist with reviewing some of the audio submissions.

The project was well received by Hutchins’ fans, as evidenced by both their willingness to contribute to the 7^th Son world and their interest in the resulting anthology. Downloads of the anthology installments within the first two weeks of publishing consistently fell between 8,000 and 10,000, though audio downloads were always higher than video downloads (Hutchins muses that if the project were launched today, the audio/video downloads numbers would likely be reversed).

Out of pocket expenses for Hutchins were well under $1,000. He used free software already on his Mac computer for media editing/producing (iMovie, GarageBand), and he used free services like k7.net to manage voicemail submissions and YouSendIt to receive large digital files from fans. He offered each of the podcaster novelists $100 to write and record a short story, but not every contributor decided to collect. Finally, Hutchins spent roughly $50 on stock footage he integrated into some of the video installments.

So, for less than $1,000, Hutchins was able to produce a fan-created multimedia anthology of official 7^th Son content and publish multiple weekly installments over a 6-month period. This content remains on his website, serving as additional ways for fans to enter and experience the larger 7^th Son world.

Aside from the obvious benefit of keeping his audience engaged until 7^th Son: Descent was published, there are some important takeaways about this project that apply to any participatory invitation to audiences:

1. Hutchins encouraged a higher degree of participation by creating a collaborative sandbox with only a few rules and limits on creativity. Importantly, the sandbox didn’t require contributors to be intimately familiar with the 7^th Son trilogy podcasts.
2. Hutchins recognized accepted submissions as official 7^th Son world content.
3. Hutchins made the rules of participation very clear from the beginning, and he provided parity for participation in the form of payment (to the seven podcasters) and credit (to the fans).
4. Hutchins ensured there was a critical mass of quality content of at the time he publicly launched the project and invited all fans to participate.
5. Hutchins put a hard deadline on submissions, adding to the attraction of participating before the project stopped taking contributions.

Regardless of the details of the participation, Hutchins acknowledges the value of inviting fans to contribute officially to an entertainment property. Importantly, he recognizes the value his fans brought to him: “The real heroes here are the people who created the content for 7^th Son: Obsidian. They were the ones building the stories. I was just curating and publishing.”

7^th Son: Obsidian achieved several goals. Primarily, it met a business need to maintain a connection between Hutchins and his audience between his podcasts and the release of 7^th Son: Descent. It also pushed at the boundaries of collaborative entertainment within the podcasting space by allowing audiences to extend an existing podcast world in new mediums. It was produced on a very low budget that Hutchins could fund himself. Finally, it gave Hutchins’ fans a chance to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime, unique opportunity to add their voices to the 7^th Son universe.

Hutchins acknowledges the challenge he had juggling his other projects and professional obligations while managing the 7^th Son: Obsidian project. Still, he’s excited about the prospect of another collaborative anthology:

The most important insight I learned during Obsidian was that by providing a welcoming and fun environment, my fans could create without fear. That’s the best kind of collaboration, and I look forward to revisiting the model in my upcoming creative projects.

Value co-creation with audiences can take many forms and use many practices, but at its core is a connection between the creator and an audience. Once established, that connection can produce some surprising and wonderful experiences for everyone involved.

“One of the many joys of managing the 7^th Son: Obsidian experience was watching the roles of author and audience absolutely reverse,” Hutchins said. “With the proper encouragement – not just from a project curator, but from an entire fan community – it can be relatively easy to empower everyday folks to pick up a phone or a video camera to help tell a larger story.”

Scott Walker likes to play in the collaborative sandbox of entertainment, building bridges between creatives and audiences. His most recent project is Shared Story Worlds, a site focused on participatory commercial entertainment. Scott is also a member of the StoryWorld Conference Council.

Want to learn more about inviting your audiences to create value with you or about using transmedia storytelling and cross-media strategies to extend your brand and intellectual property? Then, join us at StoryWorld, the only major gathering of industry leaders, decision makers, and transmedia specialists, to explore new business models, innovative partnerships, and fresh revenue streams.

Branding has become something of a bad word, or, if not bad, one loaded with unsavory implications. It can imply a smeary corporate veneer of insincerity, for example. Branding an author (not with a hot piece of metal, I promise) is really about consistency and making sure readers can recall the authors they like when shopping for books, and can easily identify what they’re going to get from those authors’ books.

The tricky part is that both the publisher and the author contribute to the author’s brand, but the author has more riding on the brand’s efficacy. A publisher’s usually focused on selling the one book by an author that they have in their current release schedule.

The author’s job, however, is to market not only that book but all the other books she has to offer, including older books that may or may not be with the publisher of her current work. So the author, let’s call her Jane Smythe, has to come up with some sort of consistent method through which she can make her name memorable, market herself and, by extension, all her books, even those that may be in other genres or with other publishers.

The most obvious place to begin the branding of an author is her name, or names, if she writes under different pseudonyms. The author’s brand name is what readers will remember – more than any single title, in most cases.

Publishers focus most of their attention on What’s Coming Out Now, though they may also promote backlist titles by the same author when a new release is hitting bookstores. Following in Harlequin’s footsteps, I expect there will be a lot more backlist promotion on the part of publishers, especially in digital releases, but for now, the focus is mostly on the book about to hit the stores – and remember, that’s umpteen-eleventy books every single Tuesday.

The publisher will put together some form of promotion for the current book, but Smythe has to combine her publisher’s efforts with some work of her own. This is not to say that publishers and the publicity and marketing folks who work within them won’t help an author who is trying to build her career, particularly between books. But as one publicity maven said to me, “There’s only so many of us to go around.”

This is where online promotion can be a very effective tool for building an author’s brand name.

Here’s the thing about online promotion and brand building, though: the hard sell does not work. If you show up online and hop up and down like a Jack Russell Terrier on perky pills saying, “Buy my book! Buy my book!” it won’t work. If anything, it’ll associate your brand name with the feeling of annoyance.

Building a brand name is not about selling books – it’s about making your name memorable. Connecting with readers about topics other than sales and promotion is itself a form of promotion. There’s a lot of paranormal romance out there, for example. If you’re the paranormal romance author who also posts a tried-and-true dinner recipe every afternoon on Facebook, maybe tying each recipe to a restaurant in your books, readers will remember your name.

That’s what you want: name recognition and recall, because it will go a lot farther than a simple sales transaction. Demonstrating an interest in the reader as more than just “that person who buys my books” is essential to building an effective brand, because it creates a connection that lasts beyond any one book.

Tricky, and simple, and highly effective.

Sarah will be participating in the 7x20x21 event during DBW 2011′s Opening Ceremonies on Monday, Janaury 24th, guaranteed to be a memorable experience!

Sarah Wendell is co-author of the book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, and co-founder of Smart Bitches Trashy Books.com, one of the most popular blogs examining romance fiction.

When does a book go out of print if it is made available in eBook?

Many contracts, particularly those pre-dating the eBook explosion, are not clear on this point. Some clauses state if sales fall below some ridiculously low number, like less than 100 sold on the last two royalty statements. That means a publisher can keep rights to a book if it sells just 100 copies in a year.

That does neither the publisher, nor the author, much good. It is actually an inducement for authors to NOT promote their books, hoping sales fall low enough to get the rights back. To make the effort to promote a book at 25% of 70% for eBooks is not that thrilling. And for any book that has not earned out, there is zero incentive.

I propose a solution: Reverse royalties.

Give the rights to the book back to the author, along with rights to the cover (if available) and an electronic version of the edited book. In return, the author pays the publisher a 25% royalty. I can assure the publisher that they will make more money this way than keeping the rights, and I have the numbers to back this up (later in blog).

An author will be much more motivated to promote a book they make 70% eBook royalty on and also control. Also, one on which they can track sales daily and get paid monthly. The author has the option to bring the book back into print via Lightning Source if they desire for hand sales (if the book is not available in print from the publisher).

This is a win-win situation. The author makes more money. The publisher makes more money.

Some might ask why should the author pay the publisher anything?

• First, for the rights back.
• Second, for the electronic version of the edited book and the cover, if available.
• Third, and this is something that authors have to start acknowledging about backlist, for the editing and other work the publisher put into the book.
• Fourth, such books have more ‘street cred’ than all the ‘material’ being self-published. Putting on the cover As Originally Published by Random House will make a difference. And it’s promoting the publisher.

Let me give you numbers to prove this.

I have a series with Random House (which I will not name since under the current system, I want the complete rights back to) that has sold over a million copies in mass market. The books are available in eBook form now but sales are anemic since the publisher does zero promotion, but high enough to crest that 100 mark per year. But not enough to make me excited to do any promoting.

Plus, on those books that didn’t earn out, I have zero incentive to promote them, since any monies earned go to the publisher. I don’t begrudge the publisher that money since I got the advance, but there’s no incentive.

If Random House gave me the rights back here is what would happen:

I had a series with Berkley under a pen name. Six books in the Atlantis series. They went out of print before eBooks became big and I got the rights back. I’ve put them back into print via eBooks on an array of platforms (Kindle, iBookstore, etc.) and the first few in POD via Lightning.

My sales per month for those books top my sales per year for my Random House series as I am actively promoting those books via social media, my own publishing company (Who Dares Wins Publishing), at talks, etc. etc.

Random House sales via eBook per year run around 120. My sales for Atlantis books run in the hundreds per month and are steadily growing.

I’m seeing a lot of “I hope traditional publishers die and rot in their slush pile of rejections” coming from authors lately and I think that’s not a very productive attitude. I believe we all have to work together to succeed.

The future is uncertain and we all have the same goals: sell books. So let’s work together.

Here’s where publishers will balk: they’re holding on to those rights not because they necessarily generate income, but on the off chance the author breaks out or something happens and those books become a hot commodity. That’s understandable. Publishing is always a crap shoot. But surely, something can be worked out against that possibility in the meanwhile and keep generating more income for all involved?

My open request to Random House.

Give me the e-rights back to these books and I will pay you 25% of my profit for all books (even those that earned out) for the next four years. If the books or I become such a hot commodity you feel the need to re-issue the books in a major way, rights will revert back to you. In the meanwhile, I guarantee you will earn more money from these books than you currently are and you will have no expenses, such as royalty statements, accounting, etc.

This is a win-win no-brainer. Will it happen? Stay tuned.

This article was originally published at Write It Forward and has been reprinted with Mr. Mayer’s permission.

Bob Mayer is the best-selling author of over 40 books. He is a West Point graduate, served in the Infantry and Special Forces (Green Berets), and in Special Operations Western Command on a variety of classified assignments. He has been studying, practicing and teaching change, team-building, leadership and communication for over thirty years. He is the Co-Creator of Who Dares Wins Publishing.

I’ve discovered that “Something is Dead” headlines attract a lot of attention so I couldn’t resist using one myself today. With Seth Godin announcing that he’s going to ditch his traditional publisher (Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin), does it mean that book publishing as we know it is dead?

I find this topic especially interesting as it’s something that I discussed at length when I spoke at the Digital Book World Conference [click for video] back in January.

Here’s my take. Seth Godin is among the most popular best-selling marketing authors and his latest book Linchpin sold over 50,000 copies. The publisher probably played a big role in the editing and the distribution of that book. However, for future books, Godin is planning to release them over the Internet in electronic book formats as well as in the form of apps, small digital files and even PDFs.

What does this mean?

1. Seth Godin knows his readers better than his publisher does. Godin has realized that he really knows his readers. He knows what they want, he knows how to reach them and he knows quite clearly what he wants to share. He has is own marketing platform via his blog and his twitter account, too. He doesn’t need a publisher to play that role for him. And with the Internet he can distribute his book to his readers electronically.
2. Seth Godin believes in the power of his brand and is betting everything on it. At the most fundamental level, this is a brand play. You’ve got to believe in yourself and in your words if you want something to work, he’d say himself. And that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s putting his money where his mouth is. Will he sell as many books? Fewer? Will he reach new readers versus just his fans? Time will tell but it’s an adventurous move without a doubt.
3. Seth Godin doesn’t believe his publishers provide him enough value. By saying that he’s going to sell his book online and directly to his readers, Godin is basically saying that his publishers aren’t providing him enough value. He appreciates the need to have a strong editor (and he’s going to hire one independently) but everything else is not valuable enough for him. Publishers should be worried, and so too should Barnes and Noble and Borders. If other leading authors adopted this model they’d all be in trouble.
4. Seth Godin knows that the book format itself is worth a second look, too. There’s a secret about writing books that no one likes and having just been through the process, I’ve witnessed it first hand. You have to fill the pages. Even if your idea and what you want to convey only needs a 100 pages, you are obligated to stretch it out into 200 or 300 pages. That’s how books are made. You have to conform to those guidelines. If the book is too thin, publishers won’t be able to charge enough for it. Godin recognizes that micro-book formats as well as audio files and apps are worth exploring as mechanisms to share his ideas. That way he’s not limited by the structure of the book market.
5. Seth Godin has figured out the economics are in his favor. I’m guessing that for every book of his sold, Godin gets probably 15% in royalties. That’s not bad when you’re selling 50,000 books priced at $17.13. He’s made $2.5 per book sold or $128,475 in total.But imagine if he sold online only where he’d probably get something closer to 80% in royalties. He’d make a whopping $685,000. Imagine if he only sold half online versus through the book chains (the distribution channels that the publisher owns), he’d still make $342,600. Or if he sold just a quarter, that would be $171,300. I don’t think it is hard for him to sell 12,500 books directly. He doesn’t need a publisher to be better off.

Time will tell whether other leading authors adopt a similar model. For an author, nothing is better than being able to get closer to your reader. The question is whether this model will work and whether other authors have the personal brand, the distribution platform and, most importantly, the courage to try something like this.

I’d argue that if book publishers followed the model I outlined in this deck, they’d be less worried about what’s happening around them.

This post was originally published at Going Social Now and has been reprinted with Mr. Singh’s permission.

Shiv Singh is a recognized digital marketer who focuses on how brands are being forced to transform with the evolution of digital communications and social media. In September 2009, he was recognized by Ad Age as a Media Maven, and is the author of “Social Media Marketing for Dummies.” He has been with PepsiCo since July 1st, 2010 where he is responsible for digital in its beverages business. Prior to that he worked at Razorfish for over eleven years (one of the largest interactive agencies in the world and part of Publicis Worldwide).