Content versus Value

Kelly Abbott | February 19, 2011 - 9:10 am

Jeff Jarvis talk about what it means as a Journalist to add value to a publication. That’s something we’re living with over at CompleteGuides.net. I often get asked by my writer and publisher friends, Why are you giving your book away for free online? That’s insane! Look, I say, you can argue all day about how much money I might not be making on our books. Or you can look at it the other way and say, maybe we add value in other ways. We have community. We have questions and answers. We have the most up-to-date book in the world. And we are easily found via search and social media. For anyone who wants to know about how to get the most from their Droid phone, we’re only a click away. Maybe we are leaving money on the table, but without the free option, we lose the opportunity to prove the many other ways we prove our value. Or as Jarvis puts it:

The economics are not necessarily sweat = work = product = pay. Neither is it any longer true that owning the expensive means of production and distribution assures a return on that investment. There are other expressions of value.

Read more: It’s not all about content and work « BuzzMachine.

Posted in on publishing, our books, the internet as we see it | 1 Comment

Google One Pass

Kelly Abbott | February 19, 2011 - 7:14 am

Google One Pass.

We’ve been looking for a better way to monetize the experience over at CompleteGuides.net. We’re giving serious consideration to Google’s One Pass.

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The Complete Android Guide

Kelly Abbott | September 15, 2010 - 9:31 am

Today we published The Complete Android Guide by Kevin Purdy a writer at Lifehacker and our friend. This book is the second in our Complete Guides series. The first was The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani and Adam Pash. By way of introducing our audience I’ll say a few things about what the book entails. Then we’ll describe how we are publishing it (our backstory on how we want to see tech book publishing evolve). But first, why?

Why Complete Guides?

We’re fans of technology. Like most geeks we want to know more about the things we use every day. Whether they are low or high tech, it doesn’t matter. In the same way that we only use 10% of our brains, we have noticed that we only use a small percentage of what our technology is capable of. Hence, The Complete Android Guide. Hence, The Complete Guide to Google Wave. These are products many people use every day. It’s a shame that they go so under-utilized. The love one has for one’s gadgets knows no bounds. As corny as it may sound, The Complete Guides series is a manifestation of that love.

How Complete Guides?

We are following the model that Gina established with the first book. Publish the book in three formats simultaneously:

  1. Online as a destination with free and open access with Creative Commons DRM-Free copyright terms.
  2. Inexpensive electronic versions available via download also with Creative Commons, DRM-Free copyright terms.
  3. A slight more expensive Print-on-Demand version available via Lulu.com also with Creative Commons, DRM-Free copyright terms.

We partnered with MindTouch to create a publishing platform that has two significant advantages for us and for the reader (indeed we do not make a distinction between ourselves and the reader because we are fans of our own products).

Read-Write-Edit-Publish

While our Authors get the credit and share revenues for the books, we get a ton of feedback from fans, followers and visitors. The site itself is a collaborative platform where we have had the help of over 50 volunteers in proofing the book, recommending content, and generally giving their seal of approval.

New Technology, New Publishing Platform

The platform itself allows us to create the digital and print version of the book ver efficiently. Unlike most books about technology, our version is guaranteed to be up to date because the effort to turn our live content on the site into static content in eBook and print formats is so effortless. It literally takes us less than an hour to turn the entire book online into a print-ready file for Lulu.For ePub it takes a bit longer. But compared to other publishers of technology books, our turnaround time is lightning fast when you consider that most books take 3-6 months to go through a single publishing cycle. We imagine turning around a new copy of the book within a week of any new major product revision. As fast as Google updates Android, so go the data-crunching wizardry of our MindTouch-powered publishing platform.

What is The Complete Android Guide?

I have an iPhone. But after reading this book, I’m on the fence. If ever an iPhone user wanted a reason to switch, he will find it in this book. Quite simply, the Android phone is an amazing product. Yes, Apple changed the game when they introduced the iPhone 3 years ago. But Android is quickly gaining popularity and it’s no wonder. You can do a lot more for a lot less. Wow.

While book is written from the perspective of a new Android user, every chapter covers a feature set from intro to advanced uses. There are 16 chapter in all, plus 7 bonus tutorial chapters on nifty things you probably hadn’t considered doing before.

Additionally, because Android is available on so many carriers and for so many phone manufacturers, the book serves all the above. The samples, screenshots and tutorials consider that Android users are not all experiencing the same thing. When we know the difference between Verizon and T-Mobile, we tell you. When there’s a difference between the Samsung Galaxy S and the HTC EVO, we tell you.

So, if you have an Android phone and you want to show all your iPhone-toting friend what a Droid does better? Buy the book. Learn the lessons. Go forth. Conquer.

Friend, Follow, and Frequent

For frequent updates from the book (tips, tutorials, ideas, news) follow @completeandroid on twitter or join the Fan page on Facebook.

For updates from Complete Guides about our books and authors follow @icompleteme on twitter or join the Fan page on Facebook.

If you’re an author and want to write about technology you use everyday, email me.

If you’re a fan of technology and you want to contribute to our existing books, visit completeguides.net, sign up, share, comment, rate and generally make use of the platform.

From left: Adam Pash, Somebody, Kevin Purdy, Gina Trapani, Somebody else

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(Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story

Kelly Abbott | July 16, 2010 - 7:53 am

Because I know you care, here’s the backstory.

(Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story

A while back we decided to dip our toes into the ePublishing business. It came first with the offer to help Gina publish her book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, in as open and free-as-in-freedom way as possible. As it were, Gina wanted help turning the page on the traditional publishing model. Who are we to blow against the wind?

But Gina’s is a tech book. I come from creative writing stock. Indeed, Jon and Trish are avid readers of fiction and non-fiction as well. So in our collective affinity for the humanities I reached out to see if there would be any writers interested in turning the page on traditional publishing outside of the tech world.

And then came Mary.

Mary L. Tabor is by all counts free. Free-thinking, free-loving, free-wheeling. Free. She’s a graduate of The Ohio State University’s Creative Writing Program (my alma mater as well) and having shucked a past life behind the corporate veil, she’s now proudly living in the ivory tower of creativity. As the title of her book would suggest, she’s older than we are, but challenges us in her youthful understanding of the world. And by youthful, I don’t mean naive. I mean un-blemished. I mean optimistic. I mean joyful and carefree and without pretense or fear. Mary is a breath of fresh air.

Here’s my blurb for the book:

Mary has written a memoir of the highest quality. Her experiences and the way she brings them to us remind us why we bother to read in the first place: empathy is better than callousness, trust more rewarding than cynicism, adventure food for the soul.

A few months ago I was going through the process of helping edit Mary’s memoir and it suddenly occurred to me how important her work was. If you buy the book (and I really hope you do) you’ll see straight away how strange a thing this eBook is. It is, by all counts, a book written in the current times. You’ll be struck at how current the events surrounding her life feel because they didn’t happen too long ago. You’ll be struck at how intimate the memoir can be when it’s raw and recent and un-filtered. And you’ll also be struck at how candid Mary is with her life because, as I mention in her blurb, she has the voice of an adventurer who believes with every gray and flowing hair on her sixty-plus head that there is no fourth wall for empathy. That we are publishing an eBook with her name on it is really the whole point. The medium allows for this kind of recency and intimacy. You should see for yourself.

(Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story

Available on Kindle, iPad, Sony eReader, PDF, Print, and more.

Posted in on publishing, our books | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

(Re) Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story

Kelly Abbott | May 24, 2010 - 9:23 am

Book Cover

Book details coming soon. If you’d like to join the list, please fill out the following form and we’ll send you a note on June 15th when it’s ready to purchase.

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Importing an ePub file into iTunes (to read on the iPad)

Kelly Abbott | April 30, 2010 - 11:44 am

We’ve created this guide to show how you can import a DRM-free version of an ePub eBook into iTunes. All of our books are currently available in ePub format can be imported in this manner so that you can read them in iBooks. When Apple grants access to the iBooks bookstore to small publishers like us, we’ll have a more convenient in-app download process. Until then, this workaround will suffice for our books and anything else you might have acquired in ePub format.

[If you are on a PC and want to provide us with screenshots for how you followed this process on your PC-connected iPad, please send them to us or upload in the comments below. Thanks in advance.]

Unzip the zip file

Select the ePub file to import

Drag the ePub file to iTunes

Confirm it's in your iTunes library

Sync

Confirm it imported in to your iPad bookshelf

Enjoy the read!

Posted in on publishing, our books | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

How do I get a book on the iPad’s iBooks bookstore and app?

Kelly Abbott | April 7, 2010 - 3:36 pm

There is no short answer to this question (yet). But we did figure out a way to get our books on the iPad and in the iBooks app library. Here’s how…

But first, an overview:

1. Apple’s iBooks app supports the ePub format. Therefore  you cannot just add a PDF or Mobi file. You have to create the ePub format.

2. The ePub format is 99% HTML. So if you’re comfortable editing HTML, you’ll do fine. If not, then get comfortable by practicing, perhaps, on your book. Programming HTML is the entry level skill needed for programming Web pages too.

3. Apple has still not granted access to their iBooks bookstore to independent publishers. That said, there are companies that can help you get your book for sale on the iBooks app. Namely Smashwords and Lulu.

OK, now for the tutorial.

Create the Master Template

Create an HTML template that you’ll use to add the content of your book. Keep it simple. You can get more complicated with your formatting later. For now, we just want to get chapters created and bind the virtual book. Here’s what I start with:

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=utf-8″ />
<title>Template</title>
</head>
<body>
</body
</html>

Duplicate the Template for Each Chapter

Each HTML page you create will eventually be a whole chapter in the book once you’ve converted it. So in advance of getting your content into the chapters, you need to create those HTML pages. You can name them what you want, but I recommend giving them names like chapter1.html and introduction.html depending on what content they represent. This will help you later when you compile the pages into the ePub format later. Here’s a screenshot of the pages I included in our book. Notice that there is an images directory. If you have any images, it doesn’t matter where you put them, but if you include them all in one directory it makes the compilation process later a little easier.

Pages in the book

Add Content to Each Chapter

This part looks a lot like old school HTML editing. It’s easiest to describe by showing a sample from our book:
<body>
<H1>Chapter 1</H1>
<H2>Meet Google Wave</H2>
<p>Chapter 1 is an overview of what Google Wave is and the problems it solves. To dive straight into using Wave, skip ahead to Chapter 2, Get Started with Wave. </p>

<p>Google Wave is a web-based collaboration tool that helps groups of people grow documents out of conversations. Google created Wave to alleviate the problems that have plagued email for over 40 years. In this chapter, you’ll see how Wave combines features from several different modern web applications into a single interface, and how it distinguishes itself from existing collaboration software. See the most common uses of Wave, how Wave got its name, and why you won’t have to depend solely on Google to wave for long.</p>

<p>Come on in and meet Wave. </p>

<h2>“What email would look like if it were invented today”</h2>

<p> Google Wave is a group collaboration tool that makes it easy for several people to work together on a single document on the web. Wave combines some of the best features from modern web applications you already know and love—such as email, instant messenger, wikis, and forums—into a single, hybrid interface. As such, it’s difficult to describe Wave in only a few words. The Google Wave team bills Wave as “what email would look like if it were invented today.”[1]</p>

<p>Why does email need a reinvention? </p>

Relative to the lifespan of most technology, email is ancient. Invented over 40 years ago, email predates the internet as we know it—and in fact was a crucial tool in the creation of the internet. Despite its age, email hasn’t evolved much since the 1960s. Electronic mail is based on the paradigm of postal mail, a system of passing messages back and forth between senders and recipients. Wave makes a bet: surely there must be a better way to send, receive, preserve, and grow shared communiqués than via email.

<H4>Email’s Problems</H4>
<p>Email is simple, wildly popular, and works well—or else it wouldn’t have stayed in such widespread use as long as it has. But email has serious drawbacks when used to manage a conversation within a group. </p>

<p>Email propagates multiple copies and versions of messages. As soon as email is sent, the message’s contents are locked in. You can only copy, paste, edit, and send yet another copy of that message. As a result, email propagates copies of copies, storing each in a filing system of “boxes.”</p>

You’re simply entering in the content. Use standard tags H1-H6, P, EM, STRONG, A, and IMG as needed. Your markup works like HTML does in that H1 will be given semantic priority over H6. EM will be italicized. STRONG will be emboldened. Etc.

Compile with eCub

When you’ve finished creating the content and formatting lightly with your HTML markup, you’ll want to compile all of these assets into a single ePub file. Luckily there’s an app for that. eCub is that utility. Its available for use on Windows, Macs, and Linux machines. Download it. Install it.
This is a multistep process. I’ll summarize it in words first and show more detail in pictures below.
  1. Start a new project and import all of your HTML files into that project.
  2. Select each page and rename them, add them to your table of contents, and give them a chapter type.
  3. Compile the project into the ePub format.

Select each page, rename it and give it a "type"

The various types of chapters you can assign each HTML page

Before you compile your ePub book, you need to name each chapter, give it a type and also make sure the order of your book’s chapters is correct. The order they appear in your files menu above is how they will appear to the reader.
Tip: you don’t need a table of contents. The ePub format handles that for you.

Compile your book into the ePub format

Look in your publish directory to find your ePub file.

Import into iTunes

This part’s easy. Just drag your file into iTunes. Right here:

Import the ePub file into iTunes

Sync and Enjoy!

The book imported into iBooks

Posted in lessons learned in the trenches, on publishing, our books | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Complete Guide to Google Wave, First Edition Has Shipped

Kelly Abbott | March 12, 2010 - 6:51 pm

Complete Guide to Google Wave, First Edition

The champagne has popped. The ship has sailed. We’re done.

What have we done?

  • 195 pages of writing with full-color illustration and pics
  • A printed and eBook version
  • A free online version

The Complete Guide to Google Wave book, which we published as a 90-page preview edition back at the end of November, is now all grown up. We added two new chapters, completely re-wrote some old ones, incorporated reader feedback, added tons more pics, and now offer not only online and in PDF but also as a print edition.

It’s been five months since we began production for this project. We’ve sold over 1,200 copies of the preview edition (look for the free upgrade to the First Edition, for you early customers, via email). We’ve had millions of visitors to the site and countless thousands of tweets, re-tweets and blog posts. And we’re still the first book on Google Wave to hit the shelves.

But that’s not the best part. The best part is being recognized by the guys at Google who started it all. Lars and Jens, who are the brains behind Google Wave (and before that, Google Maps), are fans of ours too. Lars even wrote the forward for the First Edition.

What are you waiting for? Buy now…

You can read more about the publishing backstory here.

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Complete Wave Guide Partnership

Kelly Abbott | March 12, 2010 - 6:39 pm

I’ve been on the board of Partnerships with Industry (PWI) for four years. PWI helps developmentally disabled adults find work and learn job skills. The goal of every client we serve is to create a tax payer, proud to have work and devoted to his or her  job.

At the time I joined PWI’s board, I was busy. I was starting a new business, getting ready to start a family, doing a lot of travel, and quite frankly too busy to take on new ventures. When Mark Berger asked me to join the board, I said no. Being a good CEO, he asked me to lunch anyway. Over lunch he explained why PWI needed me. I explained why I couldn’t. He said, “Great, so when can you start?” In retrospect, I realize he was asking me when we should have lunch next. But at the time, I interpreted it as “I won’t take no for an answer.” The more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued. PWI was exactly what I was looking for in a non-profit. I’d love to be on the board. And I told him as much the next week.

Why I wanted to be on the board of PWI is related to that moxie Mark showed that day. He wasn’t taking no for an answer. And much like the developmentally disabled adults that PWI serves, he refused to let circumstance dictate his future. PWI, in short, is a can-do kind of place. And I am more than happy about my decision to get involved, stay involved and, now, extend my commitment to the organization through our most recent venture.

The book we just published, our first, and the business which we’re building behind it, is at once a venture in publishing and a social venture where the major beneficiaries of our work is PWI. Every book we sell half of the revenues go directly to PWI. They are, in every sense of the word, partners with us in this venture. They are doing the fulfillment, customer service, and have even invested directly into the project as a way of building domain expertise in the growing eCommerce space. For them, partnering with us and Gina and Adam, is another chance they have to take control of their destiny. Rather than relying on state funds for their income, they are creating their own revenue streams.

When Gina and Adam first came to us with the opportunity of helping them publish their book, we did not anticipate it leading to this. We had met our revenue goals for the year and we thought this would be a great way for us to stretch ourselves and learn. So when PWI offered to help us, Gina and Adam couldn’t have been more gracious in helping them.

Together, this is what we’ve been able to accomplish. PWI printed 2500 copies of the book at their own cost. When you complete a purchase of a printed book they do the fulfillment – they pack the book in an envelope, include your receipt, slap a shipping label on the front, seal it, and load it ship it. They work with our eCommerce system (google checkout) to send you notification that the book is shipping and, in the unlikely event that the book you receive is something you want to return, process the return. They do all of this in order to share in the revenues on each sale. How much revenue? Half. For each $25 book we sell, $12.50 goes to PWI. They have the talent and they deserve it. We couldn’t be happier to share our wealth with theirs.

There are a lot of alternatives out there for us. At the end of our 2500 copies, we’ll switch to one of them. But know that today, when you’re purchasing the book, you’re sharing in a social venture where each of us – from the publisher, to the writers, to the editors, to the warehouse staff – is super excited to be a part of the production.

Posted in about us, our books | 5 Comments

How Do I Publish a Book in the Apple iPad iBookstore?

Kelly Abbott | January 29, 2010 - 10:32 am

Steve Jobs with the iPad

Hi, Steve. Thanks for innovating. We love your work. But there’s just this one thing that’s irking us now. As an independent publisher who’s primary channel for sales is digital, how can I delivery our titles to iPad owners?

This much we know:

  • The iPad is basically a larger iTouch. Yes, there are differences, but let’s just start there.
  • The iPad will have a native app called “iBooks” which is the way iPad owners will access the iBookstore at Apple.
  • HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette Book Group are already confirmed publishers with books available in the iBookstore.
  • The ePub format will be supported by the iBookstore.
  • And according to Steve Jobs in his Keynote: “We’re going to open the flood gates for the rest of the publishers in the world starting this afternoon.”

Where’s the flood?

I’m asking this because we’ve been researching this for our own book. We have new titles that will be ready for the iPad launch in 58 days. And if it takes weeks to get a book approved (in the same way it takes weeks to get an app approved) we need to have our ePub book(s) ASAP. I’m not sweating. Really. I’m sure Apple will indeed open the floodgates. But they’re already two days late.

After searching, I’m forced to lob this plea publicly: How do I as a publisher get a book in the Apple iBookstore?

iBooks App on the iPad

iBooks App on the iPad

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