Wearing my hat of the Bookwright, I have been talking for a while now about how a book becomes your best business card …
With my book Flavours of Thought, I have surpassed even my own expectations [and advice] and it has lead me into a new area I simply hadn’t planned.
For starters, I didn’t plan to write this particular book last year – it just kind of happened. It was inspired by an eponymous chapter in my book on light bulb moments. In addition, I had for a while being studying the Major Arcana of the Tarot and wanted to write a lay person’s guide to it.
The two themes came together perfectly and the book ended up ‘writing itself’ during a single month last August. I opened my email after finishing the very last recipe in the book only to find a message from a new publishing service called CompletelyNovel. Within a couple of short weeks, I ended up with the book in print and available worldwide for download from the Amazon Kindle Store.
Now that would be a good result for most people in itself – and it was for me too – but the Universe wasn’t finished with me yet. By the time the year was out, I had a training course running teaching people how to concoct their own recipes …
… AND a 1-2-1 karmic mentoring programme that takes people on a tour of the flavours called the Cube of Karma.
To find out more, have a listen to Jackie Walker, the first trained Master Chef on her experience of it all …
Blocks is an easy to follow guide to unlocking your true creative potential.
This practical and comprehensive book takes you on a journey of the mind to help you banish your blocks forever and tap into an abundant flow of inspiration and creativity.
This book is for anyone who writes regularly, whether professionally or for pleasure. Nearly everyone will at some point have found themselves unable to get into their creative flow and achieve the literary results they are looking for.
‘Blocks’ explains why we get stuck and how to get unblocked. It is available in ebook form and, optionally, with 6 guided MP3 visualisations designed to get your creative juices flowing.
Note that although ‘Blocks’ was written primarily for authors, it can equally be used by artists, musicians and any one involved in any creative process.
List of Contents
So Why Write A Book?
Making Time To Write
Getting In The Groove
So What’s Stopping You?
Mapping Your Mind
Whole Mind Not-Thinking
The Superconsciousness
Becoming Fear-less
Vestigial Minds
The Physicality Of Inspiration
Food For Thought
Using Dreamtime
Reader-Centric Writing
Expanding Time
Writing In Trance
Being An Author
Putting It All Together
Voiding Karma
100 Years of Ermintrude is a book of meditative poetry and my first real foray into the world of publishing. It comprises three intertwining life stories and is told in just 99 stanzas. Although it can be read in less than an hour, it’s something that will stay with you forever and you will want to read again.
Find out why this story is making grown men cry, mothers smile and children laugh and one man said, “Stunning. I cried. That’s all.”
“Inspiring, moving, emotional, poignant and full from cover to cover with the most amazing energy. Thank you Tom. I am a different person for having read 100 Years of Ermintrude.” “Truly a touching piece of work and artistry wonderfully complimented by the guitar music. Thought provoking to the extent I just wanted to ‘hug’ someone.”
‘Ermintrude’ started life as a PDF and morphed into an MP3 download and MP4 Jackanory-style video before I wrote the two sequels and made it as an author in print for the first time.
If you have an iPhone you can get a full multimedia version of the first story in the trilogy which will make a commute fly by here.
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
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
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.
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.
Wearing my hat of the Bookwright, I have been talking for a while now about how a book becomes your best business card …
Blocks is an easy to follow guide to unlocking your true creative potential.
100 Years of Ermintrude is a book of meditative poetry and my first real foray into the world of publishing. It comprises three intertwining life stories and is told in just 99 stanzas. Although it can be read in less than an hour, it’s something that will stay with you forever and you will want to read again.
Two ways to get 100 Years of Ermintrude: 
Apple announced recently that they’ve followed Amazon’s lead and iBooks can now have audio and video embedded in them.
When people repeat the same thing often enough it can enter the common psyche and be assumed to be true.
