The FastPencil Marketplace brings authors, editors, illustrators, marketing professionals, and other experts together as part of a new approach to writing, publishing, and distributing books and eBooks.
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 ones.
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 article makes clear, there will be all kinds of options for iPad owners seeking to buy eBooks. Take advantage of the flexibility of ePub and FastPencil. If you haven’t thought of producing in eBook format, now is the time to rethink your position.
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.
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, had elected to “embargo” the Kindle version, milking sales of the hardcover version as long as possible.
For Carr, this sort of customer activism is problematic. He understands customer annoyance at W.W. Norton’s antiquated belief that denying customers what they want is actually good business strategy. But as a published author, he feels for authors whose books are impugned because of these business decisions:
I speak from pained experience as an author when I say that we have absolutely no say on when our books are released, in what format and at what price.
As an author you are beholden to a big publisher like W.W. Norton. You place your hard work in their care and hope that they’ll understand your audience. You hope that they will stop thinking of themselves as publishers of printed books, and start thinking of themselves as purveyors of your work, in whatever printed or digital form it might appear.
You’re also beholden to Amazon. You’re almost asking to get stepped on as the online goliath battles the titans of old world publishing. You are in the middle. They fight over pricing and distribution, while you hope that somehow, miraculously you will emerge from their duel unscathed.
If you’re an author, published or not, it’s time to realize that business as usual doesn’t favor you. It’s not about you. It’s about big publishers trying to stave off the future, and Amazon trying to control it. Meanwhile, they’re both pissing off your customers.
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 the My Projects screen to manage projects. So we eliminated the Dashboard altogether, and created a new My Projects page that incorporates the functionality of the old Dashboard and My Projects pages.
Old My Projects Screen
This screen provided a great deal of information about what other people were doing in FastPencil, but it didn’t make it easy for writers to move directly to their project work. So we tightened it up.
New My Projects Screen
In the new My Projects page, projects are front and center, and writers have easy control of which projects are shown. We also eliminated extraneous links and buttons.
The Big Picture
We’ve made changes across the board with this release. Beyond user interface upgrades, we’ve made some big improvements on the back end. For example, image uploading in our Photo Book Creator is much, much faster. The blog importing tool can handle more blog types. We’ve even simplified the publishing wizard, so once you’re finished writing, you can more easily finalize the sizing, cover, and other publishing options.
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? Who is watching out for their interests?
What about a model in which the author sets the price for eBooks? In fact, why not let the author set the price for any book they publish, regardless of format?
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:
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.
Lindsey Alexander worked as an assistant editor at HarperCollins before going freelance. She edited seven Book Sense (now Indie Next) Picks, an Edgar Award nominee, and two titles in an 11-million copy picture book franchise. Her current clients include HarperCollins, Scholastic, Chronicle, Abrams, several university presses, and a well-known literary agency.
Journalist and editor Scott Cooper worked for dozens of publications across the country including the New York Times syndicate, Los Angeles Times syndicate, Denver Post, and others.
Writing fiction (particularly science fiction) or a memoir? Melody Culver has worked on multiple FastPencil projects and is an expert FastPencil user.
If you’re an editor and you haven’t created a FastPencil portfolio, now is the time! Just sign up for a FastPencil account and build your portfolio. It only takes a few moments, and it’s all free.
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