by Tom Evans | Oct 5, 2010 | Scribing
Blogs that list “things” are some of the most popular and retweeted blogs on the Interweb. Like all these things, there are some do’s and some don’t.
Here’s my top seven tips:
1. Make sure the title is snappy, contains a pun or humour and even try and make it rhyme – kind of like this one
2. Go for something that’s topical – e.g. iPad, Ryder Cup
3. Seven is the optimum number as most people can (just about) hold seven things in their short term memory
4. If you have to list more than seven either rank them – e.g. Top Ten in order of popularity – or group them
5. For grouped lists, three is a brilliant number – e.g. Good, Bad and Ugly or Top, Middle or Bottom
6. Three and five are also good numbers, especially when the list have equal weighting like an equilateral triangle or five pointed star – your 3, 5 or 7 points can also form an ACRONYM or MNEMONIC so the list can be remembered more easily
7. Make sure you end with an invite for others to add their thoughts to the list as I am doing now … please add your tips below
If you want to know more about the psychology of writing brilliant blogs with eye catching and brain-catching headlines, come along to the You Only Have 1 Second series of workshops – details here
by Tom Evans | Sep 3, 2010 | Scribing
Apple announced recently that they’ve followed Amazon’s lead and iBooks can now have audio and video embedded in them.
See the blog on The Bookwright site Do iPad or do I Kindle for more on this …
So with increased functionality in iBooks, I thought it worth pointing out the pros & cons of publishing your ‘work’ as an iBook or as an App.
Why iBook?
If your content is essentially uni-directional – i.e. read, listen or watch only – then iBook is a good route. It is worth doing a Kindle version too though to get on both platforms at not much extra complexity or cost.
The production costs for a text-only iBook are in the low hundreds of dollars and for a multimedia iBook (if you have the assets), about 20% of the cost of producing an app. This means you will be able to get your investment back quickly for a reasonably popular title.
At the moment, authors and publishers need a US Tax ID to submit self-published works – this will change shortly.
Note that Storyist software is brilliant at generating compliant ePub files as is now Apple Pages.
Note also that various aggregator sites, like Smashwords and Lulu, allow international self-published authors to submit to the iBookstore. They will have to catch up a little to support the new format though.
See this blog from Bubblecow for How To Publish Your Book On Kindle and Ipad
Why App?
An app is a completely different kettle of bananas. When you build an app, you can access all the features of the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad operating system.
Apps are interactive and bi-directional. In my opinion, they should be used to either augment a conventional or ebook OR to extend the idea of what a book is about in the first place.
For example, see these App Books and note their main features:
140 Characters – embedded discussion forum for author and readers to interact and inclusion of live Twitter stream based on keywords, Twitter handles and hashtags
Kryo Pro – card set and book integrated with auto-switch between four languages – English, Russian, German and Spanish PLUS ability to email or Tweet a sample card
The Elements: A Visual Exploration – incredible multimedia experience with 3-D rotating graphics
Top 10 City Guides – geo-coded information, latest news via live RSS feeds
Now before you get excited, your investment in an app like these starts at a few thousand dollars. Get it right though and you have access to tens of millions of owners of a device.
Even if you give your app away, the exposure alone can be worth it.
Note also that the other advantage of an App over an iBook is the separate listing on the iTunes store on the web, as opposed to within the iBookstore which is only accessed via the device at the moment. Your app also appear as an icon on a device as opposed to a book inside an app.
This is perhaps not of great significance but you do have your own App URL and it seems to get great Google rankings too.
Note also that as Apple and others allow more features of HTML5 to be introduced, this gap will narrow even more … watch this space … ePub2 will be with us before you know. Great time to be an author and a publisher.
by Tom Evans | Aug 24, 2010 | Scribing
When people repeat the same thing often enough it can enter the common psyche and be assumed to be true.
A good example might be an urban myth like the lemmings jumping off a cliff. It’s now equally well known (or thought as such) that this was a staged scene in a Walt Disney friendly critters-type movie. Perhaps this is just an urban myth derived from an urban myth.
It’s also become a bit of a myth that people spend 5 to 10 seconds on a web page before they decide if they like it or not.
The reality is that, in our increasingly connected world, we make our minds up about a web page in less than a second. If you are still reading this, that’s a testament to this in action. If you aren’t then this of course means I have not succeeded in my intention.
What’s worse still than my failure to get people to read this far is that before you came to this page, the title will have grabbed you or not. You may have seen a tweet or clicked a link in a newsletter.
If you did click the link and you have read this far, it’s worth pondering why and worth noting that there’s both an art and science to engaging with readers and getting their eyes to follow your copy down the page.
This is of course very important for authors seeking to entrance their readers with a page turner and, in this day and age, increasingly so for blogger and micro-bloggers.
It’s of course nothing new – consider these book titles which all became both best sellers and were subsequently made into successful films:
- Trimalcio in West Egg
- A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Would you have gone to see the film based on these titles or perhaps been more enamoured by their eventual titles of?
- The Great Gatsby
- Portnoy’s Complaint
- Blade Runner
When I work with writers, I spend quite some time getting that perfect title which also includes some due diligence and market research. Sometimes the title is just something that gets the author going and sometimes it sees itself on the front cover of the book.
When you get it right, you’re on to a winner in many more ways than one!!
These themes and more are the subject of a new series of 1/2 day workshops I’m running with Nicky Kriel from the 1st November this year.
For more details, you now only have 1 second to decide to click this link …. or not
by Tom Evans | Oct 16, 2008 | Scribing
In September 2012, I wrote a book I wasn’t planning to write and published it in print and for Kindle in just 18 days, from start to finish.
Fellow author Jackie Walker did the same a week or so later!!
In this webinar, we describe the process we followed …
To find out what you can also achieve in less than a month, download our books here …
and to find out how you can create as many hours as you need, check out
and
