Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: publishing

  • On Medium And Its Likes

    Medium’s open for all, just sign in with your Twitter account and you can use Ev William’s latest publishing platform. It’s good, very good in fact, and focused on content rather than anything else. Content first, as it is and were. I want to like Medium, and I do on many levels.

    The Medium editor is, in many ways, outstanding
    The Medium editor is, in many ways, outstanding

    But Medium’s a bad idea for you. It’s a locked canister for your content, a window to the web that might just as well be gone in a year. I don’t doubt that, should Medium go south, there’ll be export options, and the open source community will make sure that you can import your content to other platforms, but all your links will be dead, even if your content isn’t.

    That’s not all. When you put your words on Medium, when you move your blog to Google+ or Facebook, then you’re effectively building their brands respectively, limiting and sidelining yourself. Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress.com have all solved this problem. You can connect your own domain to these services, and thus should you wish (or be forced) to move your content elsewhere you’ll be able to move it all.

    With Medium, not so much, not at its present state.

    Don’t ever rely solely on a service where you can’t move your content, and keep your domain and links, to another platform. In other words, putting your well-thought words of wisdom on Medium, Google+ or Facebook is a bad idea.

    Unless you don’t give a shit about what you do, and what you publish online, of course. Then by all means, go for it. And by all means use Medium, it’s the best alternative out there, of the bad ones that is.

  • The Day When Nothing Worked

    I had five things to do today.

    1. Test a simple API script on a client server, and report on the findings to a client. This should’ve taken 30 minutes or so.
    2. Tweak a search page for a client, and let them test it thoroughly. This was estimated to take up to an hour.
    3. Launch the new version of TDH.me.
    4. Launch The Writer’s iPad, on a store of my own as well as on Amazon. Possibly submit the ebook to other retailers as well.
    5. Celebrate with the bubbly stuff.

    Things didn’t quite work out the way I planned.

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  • On Editors

    Yesterday I delivered the manuscript for Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, 4th Edition. It is not a meagre revision, but a sensible upgrade to fit the ever evolving CMS it covers. I’m pretty happy with it.

    The manuscript is now in the hands of the editors. Yes plural, my publisher prides itself with several eyes on its books, which is a good thing for the reader as it should mean less errors slipping through. Because there will be errors, obviously. No book is perfect, no book is completely flawless, not even The Elements of Style, although I’d be hard pressed to find some fault of that one myself. That doesn’t mean that errors, mistakes, typos and whatnot shouldn’t be squashed as much and as often as possible, one must always strive to write the most perfect manuscript, to publish the most perfect book, at all times.

    My editors are heroes and heroines. Not because I’m a hard person to work with, although I will speak my mind and have the final say, as any self-confident author should. No, they deserve the hero Hero Status because they are such an integral part of the process, and yet they get no credit other than a line somewhere in the acknowledgement. Sure, editors are paid for their work, but they deserve more than I imagine most people would think.

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  • Breaking News

    Flipping through my RSS feed I was once again reminded that being first isn’t always the key to success. In this case it was web publishing, and Boing Boing in particular. The blog had just run a post about how Darth Vader tackled the Hoth battle in The Empire Strikes Back, originally a Wired story. I had seen the story being mentioned at least a dozen times already, over a 24 hour (or something like that) period of time.

    In conclusion, Boing Boing was late on the ball, which you might think was embarrassing considering this is a pretty typical Boing Boing story.

    The thing is, it doesn’t matter.

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  • The Magazine And What Marco Arment Got Wrong

    Marco Arment, of Instapaper, and more recently The Magazine, fame has written a post on the future of publishing. He says that several parties have contacted him about licensing The Magazine’s platform, a business he is reluctant to be in. He also says this:

    The last thing I’d want is for a bunch of The Magazine lookalikes to flood the App Store with mediocre articles that haven’t passed through an editor and should just be (or already are) someone’s mediocre blog posts, just so they can easily charge for a subscription.

    Well, too bad. Success will be copied, and The Magazine is not only successful, it is successful within a niche where people are starving for a solution, any solution really. I’ve already explained why that is, so let’s all take a moment to remember, shall we?

    Marco Arment then says this:

    If the App Store gets spammed with hundreds of bad clones, The Magazine itself will lose credibility and potential subscribers as people make incorrect assumptions about its article quality.

    I disagree. With that reasoning there could not be any blogs with credibility, since there are so many “bad clones” out there. Still there is, and still there is quality writing, bloggers with fanbases large enough to launch niche tablet magazines even…

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  • The Daily And Tablet Magazines

    Rupert Murdoch shuttered The Daily yesterday, the iPad only newspaper with a staff of a 100 or something like that. Quite an operation, quite a project, and quite a project propelled by the dreams of an old media publisher and their hopes of doing the same old thing on a new media format such as an iPad. No wonder it failed, right?

    The iPad magazine business, if we can call it that, is in an interesting spot right now. To understand this, it is important to remember where it all started, with bloated versions of paper magazines, more or less behaving like an interactive PDF really. Not only did the format, with its “tap to view video” and similar, not engage readers as much as magazine makers might’ve thought, it also meant huge file sizes for every issue. The weight issue has been handled somewhat, but magazines clock in at over 150 MB more often than not.

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  • The problem with self-publishing

    I’ve said it before, but in case you’re not in my fanclub of Extremely Dedicated Readers & Stalkers of TDH here’s a reminder: I’ll self-publish a few books this year. Ebooks at that, although I’ll most likely offer the books as dead tree copies as well. I’m thrilled about this, and I’m taking it seriously. That means paying for a professional editor and getting unique cover art, no stock images for me thanl you very much. I have no doubt in my mind that the amount of money this will cost me will be earned, so I have no problem hiring professionals.

    I will tell you this: I have one major issue with self-publishing.

    It’s not the startup cost, or the technical aspect (hey, I used to publish books and magazines when POD was an acronym most people didn’t know) even. It’s not the royalty cut withh Amazon, Apple or any other outlet of ebooks, and it’s not the lack of an advance.

    No, it’s the fact that I’m supposed to sell myself.

    As in me, selling myself, promoting myself, explaining to people how extremely excellent I am and how happy they should be that I acknowledge their existence. Well, maybe not that last part.

    Don’t get me wrong, I have faith in what I do, and I don’t doubt my talents (any more than I should) or am full of illusions for that matter. I can tell when I’m good, and when I’m good I’m pretty damn good, but that’s not it. I’m just not comfortable with selling myself, or anything else for that matter.

    Usually my publisher does this. When I’m self-publishing I’m expecting to do it on my own.

    This is crazy. I don’t cut my own hair, my hairdresser does that. He won’t tell me how to build a website using WordPress. We’re all good at different things, and since I’m a writer I should write, right?

    But when I’m self-publishing I’m supposed to sell as well.

    This is my main gripe with self-publishing and I’m not at all looking forward to promoting myself. I might in fact end up hiring someone to do that as well, who knows. Either way, it will be interesting to give this a go, and

  • USA Today are happy with their iPad app

    Interesting story over at The Telegraph about USA Today’s success with their iPad app, which incidentally is free and ad-supported. I still think that’s the way to go.