E-books, publishing

Very rich indie writer

• Amanda Hocking is a rich publisher - 26 years old and has self-published 9 books
• She sells 100,000 e-books per month
• She doesn’t traditionally publish and she sells e-books at 3$ per book
• A view of a private publisher states that she gives a better offer than any other traditional publisher
• Indie publishers get a 70% split and sell at lower prices but still make more money because there are less costs and more people buy these books because they are cheaper
• It is easier to follow because you don’t need to worry about producing more copies
• Amanda Hocking is top selling e-book publisher but is not very famous
• People are putting web fictions on kindle e-book store
• Web-fiction writers will further evolve and combine e-books with web sites
• Writers can make a lot of money if they work hard and are smart
• In 2011 January she sold 450,000 e-books

I believe that this is a big change to come in the future and slowly publishing will be centralised around e-books. I am not sure how good this will be for the future of books and eventually as this sector of publishing starts to over-crowd it will be interesting to see what will be done to solve this problem. However, after all this change and the embracement of technology in publishing there will still be publishers who take advantage of the traditional way of publishing.



Some things that need to be said

• This is Amanda Hocking’s blog, where she talks about how she is being noticed by the internet
• She is now 1000+ followers on twitter
• She is being noticed and got a flood of e-mails so she has less time to write
• Not many people will be super successful e-book publishers like her
• Hard to be best self-publisher
• She does a lot of work
• Hours a day for years, has not got a lot of free time
• She can not stop working now or it will all collapse
• Hard to edit or find an editor - has to look out for a lot
• Traditional publishers want share of money not scared of her
• Traditional publishers still own 80% of market - e-books could gain majority in 5-10 years
• Still about half e-books are traditionally published
• Publishers want money - authors should see them as evil companies
• Authors who are better and do the same genre and price low are still not as successful as her for unknown reasons
• More people will sell less than 100 copies than 10000+
• A writer has more control now

I personally think that she makes some great points in this blog post. One thing that is striking is how the sales of an author is a mix of luck and hard work. An author who works for their whole life trying to be a successful publisher and may not get the crucial break through, which could make a big difference. Also the split of the market is quite incredible, this was a few months ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has already reached 25% because of the fact that the e-books have sky rocketed in the past months and will continue to do so.



How many imprints does Amazon run?

• Amazon made 4th imprint
• First imprint genre specified - on romance
• Eventually Amazon will do this for all genres
• Amazon maybe interfering too much
• Their first imprint in 2009 would use information like customer reviews to find very good books and over-looked authors
• Then Amazon would promote these books
• This is like an injection of views and publicity
• Another imprint was then launched to translate foreign books into english by identifying good books like the previous imprint
• Translating isn’t always economically viable

I think what Amazon are doing can be useful at this economic time and can help both them and the author, however, may undermine publishers. Also the fact that amazon is getting money out of this can be slightly unfair but is useful for users.

games

I am interested in the way that games have developed in the recent years. It is a major area of technological development.

It started with the simple board games played for decades but it slowly moved to the electronic front.

There are many claims for the first video game and will not delve into which is but I believe some of the earliest hand held video game came in tetris, an all time classic. Early computer games are found in space invader and pacman.

Though instead of the early history, I'll skip to more recent. Since then we have increased our limits for portable games, starting at a gameboy and moving to colour in the gameboy colour. Since then we have advanced to the nintendo DS and the 3DS, a 3D portable gaming system.

Consoles, which can be wired into a TV have always been popular. They have also had humble beginnings in the game cube, with which you used controllers. After many minor changes to this system, the eyetoy device was made for the playstation 2. It uses a camera and it was the first console where you didn't need controllers and you were the controller. It has since been altered into the widely popular wii, which uses a controller but your movement controls the controller instead of the buttons. Most recently the x-box kinnect was made and is the newest device of this sort.

Downfall remix

This is an example of a downfall parody, which wasn't taken down because it has no visual media. You can read the subtitles, which replace the words Hitler actually says as the maker of this video makes an argument against constantin films.

Downfall parodies removed

The 2004 film, Downfall is very well known for its parodies. A scene in the movie, when Hitler going into a rant about the war is used and then english subtitles are placed so that people could make a parody. In April 2010 Constantin films asked youtube to block all downfall parodies. Doing this caused much uproar an shows the strain of copyright laws for the visual media. Many people have different opinions about how fair this is because the makers of the parodies advertised the films and made no money. This has been a central debate on copyright in films in the last year and much more could follow.

self powered devices

These are devices which can power themselves without using batteries or ever having to re charge equipment. For example a mobile phone would power itself with the sound waves created from talking. This done by using a special material and is helped by nano technology. This would revolutionise portable technology. Imagine never having to charge your mobile phone. This technology will probably also be utilised by secret services because sensors for bombs can be given to soldiers so that they are not killed. This technology is quickly advancing and expect new things soon.

How to put a google doc onto your blog

If your not sure how to do this here is a guide for each type of google doc.

Document - this is a word style document.

In the top right hand corner they will be a button with the words share. Click the arrow next to it and select publish as web page. Then press start publishing, this will give you two codes the link to the page or the embed code. Select the one you want then put it into the html of a post on your blog and there it is.

Note - if you want it to change on your blog as you change it on your google doc leave the tick in the "Automatically republish when changes are made" box.

Presentation - The same as document but press the embed/publish button instead. You can embed the presentation with the code given and put a link to the page by copying the link under the word "Your document is publicly viewable at: "

Spreadsheet - This is the same as the document but you can make it into many different things. You can put a link, embed it, make a picture etc.

Drawing - identical to document 

Good luck with Google docs.

embeded history of tennis presentation