Marketing

I have sold a textbook through a publisher (for 15 years) and through Amazon as a Kindle book. I decided to move to Kindle so that I could create resources in a different format (a Primer at low cost in combination with free online web resources). We negotiated the return of our copyright when we could not agree on price and format. In making this transitions I gave up two significant things. First, I now longer have a dedicated editor. An editor is very helpful to even an experienced author. However, because I am selling a book at less than 1/10 of the cost from the publisher, it was not practical to pay someone what my editor was paid. Second, I no longer have an army of regional book reps going door to door to offer faculty members a free desk copy of the book and attempt to encourage the faculty members to take a look. Of the two forms of support, it is this second service that is most challenging to overcome. Of course, it greatly increases the cost of the product, but unless faculty members take a look they will not consider a book for adoption.

I have come to the conclusion that this is the challenge I must address based on the pattern of sales our book generates. The book sells at a steady pace with no spikes that would seem to indicate the adoption for college classes. I also search for references to the book online. When I was selling through a company, I could locate syllabi that would indicate the book was required of students. I am pleased individuals purchase the book, but the book was really written to be used in a class setting.

Anyway, I am attempting to use some of the promotional approaches Amazon recommends. I am doing this at this point in time as this is when educators look to select books to be used in the Spring semester. For a limited time, the book is available for $1. The price then gradually increases back to the normal selling price. This approach cannot compare to free in your office, but it makes sense to me.

Publishing with Amazon

Our book, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning, has been updated and is available for Kindle users (or users of the Kindle app). It is difficult to know what to call this edition. We had 5 editions with a commercial publisher and have since updated the Kindle version twice. Our reasons for moving from a commercial textbook publisher to Amazon were complex and we have explained this in a series of posts some years ago. Short version - we wanted to author content not suited to the once every three years textbook model.

Perhaps some thoughts on getting a book into the Amazon environment might be useful to others.

Issue 1 - update or new book

Amazon has a feature I like in books that may involve updates. Updating a book once you have prepared the appropriate files is trivial. When I say trivial, I am referring to the process of offering new content online and not the process of preparing the content. You can change the content of an existing book by uploading the new files and the modified version of the book will appear in 72 hours or less. You might want to update because you have identified errors that need correction or because it is time to update the content. What we just finished is a major rewrite.

The nice thing about the update is that those who already own the older version can move to the new version at no cost. However, it seems to me that there is a problem with updating a book. The publication date on the Amazon site is the original publication date. As an author, you have the opportunity to write a description of your book and could include the date of the most recent update, but this information tends to get buried. The original publication date is prominent. I am concerned because what appears to be a dated book about technology is likely to be ignored.

I am not sure what to do about this. I want those who have already invested in our content to be eligible for the update. I think I will give it a month or so as an update and then I can easily delete the existing book and upload the book again as a new book. I will have to see how things go.

Issue 2 - formatting

Many previous authors of a Kindle book have discovered that formatting a book for the Kindle is quite a task. What you see in your word processing environment is not necessarily what you get in the ebook. Some of these authors have decided their experiences were worth another book and you can purchase multiple Kindle books on preparing a book for the Kindle. My recommendation - these books can be helpful, but the information in this area seems to become dated very quickly and is very specific to your operating system, the original software you used in writing, the format you used to save and then recode your content, and other mysteries that are not fully explained.

I found that things kept changing on me and I had to experiment each time. The last time I found what turned out to be a fairly easy approach. I wrote in Google docs. I used Apple Pages to finalize the manuscript and save it in a format I could submit. Apple then updated Pages and removed the system I had used to create the Table of Contents. You need a TOC. This time I again wrote in Docs, but I had to use both Calibre and Sigil to generate a final product. I should give credit where credit is due and point any interested Kindle author to a YouTube video that explains the process. To be fair, part of my issue has been not using MicroSoft Word, but even Word users have to do some post-production work.

I wish Amazon would invest more in tools for formatting. I am proposing something like iBooks Author. iBooks Author has a lot going for it, but it is simply not flexible in the platforms it supports. I must prepare a textbook learners can use even if they do not own Apple hardware.

Participatory content

One of the ways I (an old academic) think about technology is as a tool for implementing great ideas that have been around for some time but would be impractical without the advantages offered by the new tool. If I have a way to identify new opportunities (which are not really new), this is it. If old folks are credited for wisdom, this how I think it works.

I am a fan of digital content (ebooks and online content) because the format allows manipulation and not just consumption. While I do argue that it is personal cognitive behavior that makes any learning experience productive (minds on rather than hands on), the integration of tools and tasks with content is about the best we can do to encourage such productive personal behavior in others.

I refer you to a recent blog post explaining the highlighting/annotation potential of Newsela as an example. This is a commercial example of the type of idea I have been exploring  and you may have tried without considering the learning benefits. For example, you may highlight and annotate what you read in Kindle books. Now, add a social component to such activities and you may really have something. A discussion (teacher or author led or not) can spring up as learners react to the content they encounter. Challenge the author, ask a question, add an example - use the opportunity provided by the technology to make an encounter with ideas more active.

(also see a previous post)

More on this later.

Borrowing vs owning ebooks

I decided to research the advantages and disadvantages of owning and borrowing Kindle books. I am interested because I publish a Kindle book and also because I purchase an average of about one Kindle book a month.

As a reader

Amazon Prime $100 a year provides the opportunity to "borrow" one book from the Lending Library per month. Amazon claims there are 500,000 in the lending library. Not all books are available, but this is a pretty good collection. You do need to own an Amazon Kindle device and not just the app to take advantage of this opportunity.

Kindle Unlimited costs $10 per month. You can keep up to 10 books as long as you continue to pay the monthly fee.

I am guessing these three alternatives - purchasing approximately a dozen books a year, borrowing a book a month with Prime, or the Kindle unlimited plan would work out about the same for me. Presently, I have the books I have purchased. I seldom return to these books, but I could. It appears you can save your highlights and notes in all cases. However, when you own the book you can go back from the saved highlight or note to the page in the book should you need additional information. With Kindle Unlimited, you could take a look at more books and focus you reading time on what you found to be most useful.

The best plan for you could also depend on other factors. With Prime, you get free shipping and you could think of access to one book a month as a freebie.

While the unlimited plan seems attractive, I would say you need to be a heavy reader to make it the best choice.

As an author

What about the situation for the author? When someone buys your book, you receive 70% of the cover price minus a small amount for sending the reader the book online. This means I receive about $6.25 for a book sold in the U.S. When someone reads our book as part of a borrowing or unlimited program, we receive approximately 5 cents a page. I must admit that I read this online and the amount seems close. The report I get from Amazon is not clear. Amazon appears to set aside an amount of money and then divide it up based on the number of pages served through these various programs. I am also not certain exactly how the number of pages in a book is determined, but Amazon lists our book at 99 pages. This means we receive about $5 if someone reads the entire book through one of these lending programs, but does not keep the content.

 

Fall Preparation

Mid August is time to get serious about preparation for the Fall semester. I realize that some educators are already back and hard at work, but this is for the rest of you.

I have spent the past month or so updating "Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web". This is one of Cindy and my online textbooks for preservice and in-service educators. We have two textbooks one derived from our original textbook (now a Kindle book "hybrid") and our experimental online book. We first used our online book to explore how our traditional book might be modified so that educators and students were not forced to rely on a hardcopy book within a field emphasizing other methods for learning. We did move beyond our traditional commercial textbook, but we have retained both products to continue our exploration of content options.

Our online book has gone through a number of iterations over the past ten years. It was first written as a wiki. We then recreated it as a set of web pages. Now, we have redone the book as pages within WordPress. Most use WordPress as a blogging platform, but the software is quite flexible and offers advantages as a content management system. The content of the book has been continually updated and the WordPress environment should make future updates easy.

Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web is out effort to demonstrate the generative learning potential of technology. Using the long accepted value of "writing across the curriculum" or "writing to learn", we redefined such as activities as "authoring to learn" and "teaching to learn" in keeping with the participatory theme and the enhanced capabilities of digital technology. The book uses the interrelated concepts of tool and tactics to propose classroom activities. For each category of application, we connect tutorials explaining technology use (tool) with classroom applications (tactics).

All of our online resources are available at no cost.

Page Builder

I work on two major writing projects. The first is our hybrid textbook combining a Kindle Primer with online resources. The second project is also a textbook of sorts, but has always been online and has always been available to anyone at no cost.

I first wrote Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web as a wiki. I then converted this resource to individual web pages so I could offer better multimedia. Now, I am converting the Participatory Web site from individual web pages to pages delivered by the WordPress "blogging" engine. The conversions each have taken a considerable amount of time, but the work provides enough experience I feel I can  speak with some insight about each form of authoring.

The multiple web page version of the Participatory Web content was created with Dreamweaver. Working with CSS, templates, and a high end development environment is certainly the way to create sophisticated and attractive sites. I moved on because the sophistication of the tools was no longer necessary to generate the content I wanted to offer and because I prefer not to "lease" software (which is the present Adobe model).

WordPress is probably more known as a blogging platform, but it also allows the creation of "pages". With the addition of specialized plugins (I am using Page Builder from SiteOrigin), it is possible to create a wide variety of page formats. The combination of the blogging platform with the page plugin has more than provided the flexibility I need to offer my "book".

There are some interesting differences between building a site with a traditional web authoring tool and with a "blogging" tool. The traditional way to create a complex web site involves creating multiple pages stored as individual files. The page files may load a common CSS format file. In contrast, a blogging platform uses a database with content stored as "records" rather than multiple, independent files. With the traditional approach, the web authoring tool creates pages locally and then uploads the content to a server. With the blogging tool, the content is created within the online environment provided by a server using a conventional web browser. Working online requires different backup strategies. The traditional web page approach already leaves you with a copy on your personal development machine. The use of an online development platform does not and it is important to find a way to backup the database and media files you have uploaded. Of course, an advantage of the online approach is that your work does not require that you work from the same machine or purchase software for the multiple machines you might use/

If you are interested in this project, I encourage you to take a look. The WordPress version of our Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web book is partly finished and available for viewing. I would wait until the entire project has been completed, but I estimate that the conversion project will take another 20-30 hours because of the amount of content involved. I want to offer instructors and K-12 staff support personnel an opportunity to view what is done as soon as possible.

Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web

Amazon/Kindle announcements

Amazon announced a new Kindle-related service today. The announcement concerns 5 gigs of storage for documents. You may have sent pdfs to be read on your Kindle previously, but this new service expands this opportunity.

In a development I consider of greater significance, Amazon now allows Kindle users to select an option that automatically provides access to updates of books they have purchased. This capability offers some meaningful opportunities that extend far beyond error correction.

My wife and I have a Kindle book (our transition from traditional publishing to self publishing is explained in a series of posts you can read if interested). One of our motives for this move was the pattern and delay in traditional publishing of textbooks. As a textbook author, you work frantically every three years to generate the next edition. This is not ideal. Why not write continuously as relevant developments occur and push them out to those who purchase your book (or at least provide online updates as an alternative). This is simply not the way the book business works and a significant liability if your writing focuses on a field that changes quickly; e.g., educational technology. In addition, the purchase of a book that automatically updates means the content you have will remain current. We consider our book a textbook, but the upgrade feature also allows us to argue the book has value as a reference.

You should find a link to control this feature (default is off) from the Amazon "manage content and devices" page.

New chapter on computational thinking

One of my motives in moving from a commercial textbook company to writing through Amazon was the desire to write on a continuous basis. My frustration with the commercial approach was that you ignored your work for three years and then worked feverishly for 3-5 months in order to generate the next edition. I saw there were two problems in this approach. First, hard copy textbooks are out of date when first published (at least when addressing technology) and it made sense to me to take an approach that would allow me to continue to offer new content (online) as soon as the content was relevant. Second, the hectic pace of meeting a deadline does not allow for the best analysis and writing. This was particularly the case for me as my academic job means I have the most open time in the summer and this was not the time frame during which the work had to be done. The commercial folks never disagreed with my analysis, they just did not want to pay any amount for a future edition and would not offer an advance.

You may or may not understand how textbooks are financed. After the first edition for which you should be able to secure an advance on sales, the company decides whether or not a future edition will be offered and does not offer an advance. Since you, as the author, do not own the copyright but share it with the company, you are not free to suggest that a different company might be more willing to support the authoring model you propose.

Anyway, we have now exclusively held our copyright for several years and I have been offering resources based on this approach. We have a web site offering “supplemental” content to our book since it was released and I plan to rework the core book based on this content this summer. Since, the release of the latest edition the topic of “computational thinking” (programming or coding to many) has kind of returned to favor among practicing educators. You may be aware of this trend or perhaps interest in the “maker movement” which often incorporates programming skills. I have prepared a chapter and supplemental resources for our the next revision of our book. Rather than wait until this summer to make the “chapter” available, I am offering the draft of this chapter on our web site. This content will be available from the site until the revision of the book is complete. If you are interested in computational thinking and would like to review my take on the topic, access to our web site is available at no cost.

Beta content - http://learningaloud.com/grabe6/code/index.html

What I thought was important may not be what you thought was important.

I read a lot of Kindle books. My wife and I have written a book available for the Kindle. The "Kindle model" offers some capabilities that are under appreciated and often unknown to many readers.

For example, I am interested in the potential of sharing highlights and annotations. I have taken the time to highlight and annotate our own book and the books I assign for me graduate classes. 

I have a new fascination. I was searching our Kindle book for a specific reference and discovered that I can now view the most frequently highlighted passages by readers. Do the readers highlight the same content as I highlight? Do they highlight what I think is more applied content or content I would describe as conceptual and likely to be unfamiliar. There must be something here for deeper analysis. I had thought shared highlights was something I could share or readers could share with each other, but now I see value in the annotations as feedback to the author.