April 2010
1 post
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For Writers, a Less Lonely Life →
NY Times tech writer Eric A. Taub gives FastPencil a spin:
Cleverly, FastPencil offers its writing services for free. You don’t anything unless and until you want other services, like professional design, editing, proofing and publishing.
FastPencil is easy to use. Navigation is a breeze and costs for various services are easy to find, with examples as to what you can expect to pay for different...
March 2010
17 posts
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Authors, What Do You Need? →
Taking a nontraditional publishing route? Tell us what you need.
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iPad Killed Kindlenomics →
This post makes the case that the Kindle is doomed, not because of the iPad per se, but because the iPad is just the first of many devices that will provide more than the Kindle, making the Kindle’s price unsustainable.
Kindle owners, do you agree?
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iPad Means More Flexibility for Authors
If you want to not just write your book, but also have control over distribution, the Apple iPad will be a bonanza for you and your readers. You can sell your book in ePub (the format used by the iPad and many other eBook readers) through the FastPencil Marketplace (taking advantage of our BookBuy widget), and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online retailers.
As this NY Times...
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lethologica
wordjournal:
noun • inability to remember the correct word
from Lethe, a river of Hades that caused forgetfulness + logikos, the Greek word for word.
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Project Gutenberg eBooks Will Work On iPad →
Excellent! Thousands of public domain books made available by Project Gutenberg will work on Apple’s soon-to-be-released iPad. This isn’t really a surprise, but it’s good to hear.
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Heroes in Our Midst →
We’re launching an exciting new collaborative book project today. If you’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan and have a story to tell about a hero you served with, you can contribute to this book. Check it out at http://www.fastpencil.com/militaryheroes and spread the word.
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Authors Feeling the Pinch
Authors are between a rock and a hard place, as today’s TechCrunch piece by Paul Carr illustrates. He describes how Amazon customers expressed their displeasure at the lack of a Kindle version of Michael Lewis bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by giving 1-star reviews of the book, even though they hadn’t read it. They were so upset that W.W. Norton, the publisher,...
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FastPencil Insider blog →
The latest from the people who operate FastPencil, an online book publishing company headquartered in Campbell, CA.
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Would You Pay $6 for An Interactive Magazine?
Expectations in the publishing industry for an iPod-powered resurgence have given rise to all kinds of demos. The latest, from VIVmag, shows a melding of newspaper and cinematic form.
Do all of these demos mean the end of good old-fashioned paper magazines? Or is a lot of money being thrown down a hole? Would you pay $6 for an interactive magazine you could access from an iPad or other tablet...
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Making It Easier to Write and Publish
The FastPencil user interface just got a big overhaul. Our aim with this update was to make it easier for writers to use FastPencil. Providing enough options while simultaneously keeping the interface clean and easy to understand is always a balancing act, but we feel this update is a major improvement.
As an example, the old version of FastPencil forced writers to use the Dashboard screen and...
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Amazon, Apple, and Big Publishers Still Duking It...
As this NY Times article illustrates, there’s a war on. It’s a war for the future of eBooks. The combatants are fighting over who controls pricing. Will the “agency model” used by Apple (publisher sets price and Apple receives a 30% commission) prevail, or will Amazon’s approach ($9.99 standard eBook price) win?
And while the big guys slug it out, where are authors?...
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Jennifer Smart Interviews Dave Claytor
During CES back in January, a hard-charging young reporter named Jennifer Smart hit FastPencil’s Dave Claytor with some questions about our service. Check out the interview:
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Writers Need Social Media... →
If you’ve been scratching your head about social media and where you as a writer fit in, check this out.
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Who will save us (the publishing industry)? →
Seth Godin:
If by save you mean, “who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys,” then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
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Boom in printing on demand: Just press print →
From the article:
Estimating the demand and thus the print run for a book has been a guessing game since Gutenberg’s day. This means that the industry’s supply chain is exceedingly wasteful. About 30% of books in America are returned to the publisher.
Enter print on demand (POD), one of the technologies that is transforming the publishing world. Without POD, there would be no FastPencil.
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No dustjackets required →
The UK’s Guardian newspaper has an interesting article about the rise of the casewrap cover (what we call case laminate).
February 2010
3 posts
2 tags
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fastpencil: Another AuthoREvolution moment... →
(via fastpencil)
January 2010
18 posts
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Fraser Speirs - Future Shock →
Steven Franks gets it. Fraser Speirs gets it. Geek Overlords, the iPad ain’t about you.
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iPad vs. Kindle vs. HP slate →
Electronista takes a closer look at the three devices. While the Kindle’s capabilities are limited, it costs less than the iPad. The HP slate will run Windows 7, so could be more like a full-fledged laptop than either of its competitors, but it will also likely cost more.
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Editors, Editors, Editors
Cormac McCarthy uses an editor. So does Barbara Kingsolver. Everything you read in a book store has gone through an editor. If you want to create a polished work, you need a skilled editor to spot the rough spots.
The FastPencil Marketplace is jammed with talented editors. Just to give you an idea of the range of talented editors you can find in the Marketplace, check out these professionals.
...
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AuthoREvolution →
FastPencil cofounder Michael “Mash” Ashley has just started an experiment using “every possible new social technology, mobile phone, e-publishing resource available” as he creates a new book over the next 30 days.
It’s a public experiment designed to reveal how Web 2.0 tools can be used together to create an entirely new writing experience, one that leads to rapid...
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Blog to Book in About a Year →
Jarie Bolander offers some wonderful insights about how blogging can be excellent preparation for writing a book, and about the value of social media during the writing process. It was this very realization that caused us to put social media tools into FastPencil, so you can receive feedback and start marketing your book before it is finished.
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Happy MLK Day
Background on the creation of the national Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr._Day
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Apple and Red Cross accepting Haiti donations via... →
mrgan:
Apple and the Red Cross worked together to create a frictionless way to donate to the Haiti relief effort through iTunes. Click the link (or hit the iTunes Store on your own) and pick your amount - that’s it.
Everyone donates more when it can be done in fewer steps, using an existing, trusted payment system. Any company sitting on such a system has a responsibility to make things like...
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Website of the Day: FastPencil
ambition01:
If you’re a novelist (or someone who hopes to be someday), don’t get too frustrated with the publishing process — just do it yourself with FastPencil. We’ve posted about self-publishing sites before (including those for magazines), but FastPencil is great because it helps youbreak into the eReader market (which we all know is so hot right now) and sell your book online, while still...
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Doctors Without Borders on Tumblr →
staff:
Doctors Without Borders is doing an extraordinary amount in Haiti. Please support their efforts and donate anything you can.
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Marketplace Improvements
We’ve made it easier than ever for FastPencil authors to find editors, illustrators, marketers, and other publishing service experts. With the upgraded Marketplace, you can examine portfolios and ask for quotes directly from service providers. You can still obtain publishing services packages and individual publishing services from FastPencil Publishing Services, but if you prefer to...
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CES 2010: Top 10 New eBook Readers →
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Style Manuals for Editors and Writers
Have you ever wondered how editors keep all the rules of writing straight? For example, how does one know to keep the apostrophe out for the 1990s, while keeping it in for PhD’s? What about the difference in meaning between further and farther, and how does one determine whether to use “a” or “an” before the word offer?
Style manuals are the unsung heroes of...
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Micropublishing is Already Here
The success of Amazon’s Kindle and speculation about the Apple iSlate has led to many a blog post about the future of eBook publishing. Neven Mrgan’s take is one of the most interesting. He hopes Apple will unveil an eBook publishing system that will make micropublishing easy:
Let’s say you’ve written a short story. (You’re still working on your first novel; courage!) As a piece of...
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Using the FastPencil iPhone App
Inspiration can strike anywhere. With FastPencil’s free iPhone app, you can work on your book wherever and whenever you like. Just log in, open up your project, and write.
Dashboard
Project Home
Writing & Editing
Review Collaborator Comments
Add A Note to Yourself
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Getting Old Documents Into Your FastPencil Project...
I’ve been using FastPencil’s book writer software to create a memoir. In the process of sifting through my source materials, I came across a multi-page document that I wanted to put into my book project. I had two options:
Copy the entire document, word by word, into FastPencil. This was a nonstarter because I wanted to spend my time creating new text, not retyping text from years...
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Books from Experts
We’re excited to see so many subject matter experts taking advantage of FastPencil’s streamlined writing and publishing system. Here are some notable recent titles from thought leaders in disparate domains:
Treat Your Poker Like A Business: An Inspiring Guide To Turning Your Hobby Into An Empire by Dusty Schmidt & Scott Brown
$39.99 PDF, $39.99 ePub
Poker star Dusty Schmidt...
December 2009
6 posts
6 tags
Write First, Design Later
Sometimes new FastPencilers think of the book writing tool as word processing software, and try to make a lot of formatting adjustments as they write. But one of the great things about FastPencil is that unlike Microsoft Word and other word processors, it is truly book writing software.
When you have enough text in your writing tool project, you can easily preview one of several formatting styles...
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Seth's Blog: What Matters Now: get the free ebook →
The collaboration tools built into the FastPencil writing tool make projects like Seth’s accessible to the less tech-savvy as well as tech maestros.
fastpencil:
Here is another great example of a shifting paradigm in publishing. Seth Godin not only breaks rules by giving his book away free, but the book is a collaboration between 60 or so big thinkers, and it’s being spread all over the...
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“Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie...”
– Dave Eggers
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How to Write A Book in 30 Days →
If you’ve ever wondered how to write a book in a short period of time, Joel Orr’s How to FastPencil Your Non-Fiction Book in 30 Days gives you a road map. Joel is an engaging, lively guy, and his enthusiasm comes through in this book. It’s a fun combination of FastPencil tips and writing advice that really works.
Joel actually completed this book using the very techniques he...
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Baby Boomers: The Worst Generation →
Author Keith Rearick states, “The author hopes that from that reading this book, generations after the Baby Boomers will better understand this generation and know what’s needed to get our country back.”
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Children's Book - TugChug the Cloud →
Joshua K. Wolfe’s book about a little cloud discovering his abilities and purpose.