Literary Magnet » author

Finding Someone with Specific Skills on the Web

creativebyline — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:06:04 +0000

Over the last couple of months it has become much easier to find a particular person on the web. Facebook’s early June implementation of vanity URLs, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn indexing profile pages for search engines have made this easier than ever. However, if you are trying to find someone with very specific skills… forget it. For example, one of our publishing clients recently was trying to find “a writer with experience running a home-based personal training business.” They were ready to offer the right writer a contract, but—although search capabilities keep getting better—this was still too complex to google.

When we interviewed writers earlier this year, we confirmed that most of them have experience writing in a variety of media (blogs, magazines, newsletters, scripts, and, yes, books). They are writers first, book authors second. Putting this together with our publisher client’s challenge with finding a writer with very specific experience led us to conclude that we could help our writer members (and our publishing clients) with a new set of tools on Creative Byline.

These new tools allow writers to develop a robust online portfolio of their writing background and experiences. This is matched with a sophisticated search capability for editors and publishers to find exactly the type of writer they are looking for. There are a number of other “profile” capabilities on the web for book authors to create a platform and attract readers, but ours is focused earlier in the process… attracting editors who may be interested in acquiring a writer’s content. We’ll roll out this and other exciting enhancements to Creative Byline soon.

No Such Thing as a Perfect Plan

creativebyline — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:05:04 +0000

Raising money is just part of life for an Internet entrepreneur—and an opportunity for a lot of interesting questions from potential investors. The one that baffles me most is when they pore over our business plan and then ask a detailed question about the financials out in year five.

Year five? It’s not that what’s in the business plan isn’t my best estimate of what will transpire: It is. I spend a lot of time making make sure all of the information and figures are congruent and consistent, even out in year five. But the odds of us actually hitting the year five plan as written are 1000:1.

It’s not because I’m bad at forecasting. It’s because we’re starting a new venture, and we’ll learn things along the way that will enable us to adjust our path. Which I think is a good thing and part of the fun of building something new: You’ve got to be willing to adjust along the way—and get good at it!

It’s not enough, of course, to be willing to make changes to the business plan. It’s critical that you’re gathering feedback from customers and using that information to make adjustments to your products and services. Over this past year we’ve received great feedback through Creative Byline Client Services (and one of the pieces of feedback is that you love our Client Services service. Thanks!).

So a couple of months ago we set out to determine what we could do to make Creative Byline a more valuable tool for connecting writers and editors. We did surveys and phone interviews with writers, we spoke with editors, we brainstormed, we tried to get a sense of where the industry was headed (both for writers and for written content). Then we adjusted our plan. And we think both our publishing clients and our writer members will like where we’re headed.

So, in August we’ll formally drop the “Beta” from our site name and introduce new capabilities and services for both writers and publishers. I doubt these are the last changes we’ll see for Creative Byline before we get to year five of our plan, but for right now, they’re feeling right on target. We’ll share more details over the next few weeks.

E-Readers: Growing and Here to Stay

creativebyline — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:08:48 +0000

Here’s another theme from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last month in New York: E-readers. New versions were demoed and, the day before the conference, Amazon had announced they would start delivering the updated version of their popular Kindle Reader. There have also been many articles and blog posts declaring the “death of the book” or questioning whether (when?) e-books will overtake traditional books in sales. I didn’t hear that at the conference; the prevailing wisdom was, as one of the speakers said, “It’s not about the final format the content takes, it’s about the IP [content] itself. Just assume, as publishers, your content will need to be available in a variety of formats. Don’t worry about which one.”

This makes a lot of sense, but it also brings up two other points. First, will publishers earn the same margin on different formats? Clearly, publishers are thinking not, because Amazon offering e-books for $9.99 seems to be raising a stink. Recently, Carolyn K. Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, told the New York Times. “I don’t believe that a new book by an author should ipso facto be less expensive electronically than it is in paper format.” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, argued to the contrary, saying, “readers are going to demand that [e-books are cheaper than printed books], and they are right because there are so many supply-chain efficiencies relative to printing a paper book.”

Secondly, as the popularity of varying formats grows (dedicated e-reader, mobile devices, traditional format, audio) what do authors need to consider that wasn’t important before? For example, e-readers have crisp screens that can be read in just about any light, but they are [now] monochromatic. In nonfiction, color photographs won’t have the same impact; charts and graphs need something other than color to be meaningful. Or, for a fiction author, what are the pacing implications of reading a novel on an iPhone with smaller page sizes? Scott Meyers gave a great talk (“Authoring Challenges in a Multiplatform World”) on this at TOC.

I believe in addition to challenges for authors, these expanded platforms offer opportunities for new types of authoring that weren’t possible before (blog post). E-books and e-readers will continue to gain popularity, but they will also push traditional thinking about books, publishing, and authoring.