Randy Stapilus Posts

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Of course, someone had to come up with “666.”

But there’s more than this to recent decisions that, at long last, Idaho will move out of its long-standing single area code and into the world of two of them.

The Public Utilities Commission, which oversees area codes, has faced the issue before and managed to kick it down the road. The need has been mentioned as far back as the 80s, but not really confronted head-on until 2001, when the national private company administering area codes figured that Idaho would run out of 208 numbers by the end of 2003. The PUC, putting off that day, cut the numbers assigned to phone companies in single blocks (from 10,000 to 1,000) for the Boise area, which bought some time. It used the same tactic a few years later, on a statewide basis, to buy more time. Now, at last, the game will be up in another three years.

After that, the state could go two ways: Either divide geographically (like it has with congressional districts), which would mean half of the state getting a new area code number. This would allow everyone to still make seven-digit local phone calls. But it would amount to a lot of hassle and changed phone numbers for a lot of people, so the likelihood is an “overlay” – starting a new area code right on top of 208, statewide. That would mean you have to dial an area code even if you’re calling two houses down. But it would also probably mean you can keep your existing phone numbers.

Much of Oregon uses an overlay system that works this way. On one hand, dialing the extra three numbers is a small annoyance. On the other hand, many numbers most of us call these days are programmed into smart phones and the like, so the practical difference is apt to be a lot smaller than in the days when people actually dialed their phone numbers. (Assuming here you’re among the shrinking group who used to use rotary phones? Never mind.) The overlay is a little complicated for callers, but keeping your accustomed number is probably a much bigger tradeoff, especially for businesses and other organizations but for many residents too. A lot of people still do, after all, have local phone tethers, even if they use wireless signals for their local numbers instead of wires (as our house does).

The PUC is taking comments on all this through October 6.

Comes next, of course, the question of what new three-number area code Idaho should get.

It can’t be one already in use elsewhere, which limits the possibilities. The “666” suggestion noted above actually would work, since for some reason no one has gotten it assigned to their local area. But it doesn’t seem very likely for Idaho.

The lively crowd at the Spokane Spokesman-Review’s Huckleberries blog has come up with some additional suggestions too, based on the letters attached to the numbers. You could get GEM (436), which isn’t in use elsewhere. Someone suggested GOP (467), also not in use.

Others suggested that apparently would qualify include LDS (537), LOL (565), or 384 (DUH).

What’s your preference?

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E-books are all well and good, some new authors say, but what about piracy? Wouldn’t it be too easy for someone to steal my book if it’s out there in electronic form?

After all, you can look at the music and video industries and see the important commercial damage done by people illicitly copying and spreading songs and videos. The music industry is making a lot less money now than it was 20 years ago, partly because of copyright infringement. Why couldn’t the same happen to books?

It’s a fair question, and it has concerned even large book companies. In 2012 a group of large publishers and other related companies went to court to stop what they said was illegal sharing of book files (mainly PDF files) online by two websites, Library.nu and iFile.it. That effort reportedly shut down those sites.

There haven’t been many other reports of large-scale book piracy cases since. Piracy doesn’t seem to have become nearly so big a problem for book authors and publishers as it has been in other industries.

When a podcast on book marketing recently opened the topic to discussion, one commenter suggested, “I think the market for pirated books is pretty small compared to music. People listen to dozens of songs (or albums) per day, and collect them just to collect them and have them at their disposal. I don’t see that with books.”

Another pointed out that many e-books are already available either free or at a low cost. And, “Who would use a Napster for books?”

A study released last month by the United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office found the numbers of book pirates are indeed small. While the numbers of music and video infringers remain significant, it said, “The e-book category has the lowest level of infringement with only 6% of category users accessing illegal content.” That’s about a quarter to a third the rate of music piracy.

Pirated books may increase sales more than dampen them. In 2009 publishing consultant Brian O’Leary looked at sales figures for several books (for the technical books publisher O’Reilly Media) after they had appeared on pirate websites, and found that legal sales actually increased. The economic theory behind free copies driving sales is what has encouraged, in more recent years, the rush of many indie publishers to offer their e-books for free, on dozens of websites devoted to the practice, in hopes of generating larger sales down the road.

Indie writers probably have less to worry about in this area anyway than, say, authors of bestsellers whose legal prices for e-book and print versions remain considerably higher.

Still, if you see your book’s electronic file being offered for free by someone who has no right to do that, you probably should take action. One of the benefits of free offerings by indie publishers, for example, is being able to control and analyze the results, which pirates wouldn’t let you do.

If you spot one case of copyright infringement, run a search through Google or other search engines to see if you can find others – either of the same book or a different one you wrote. Record where they’re located.

Check on the web page for a link to either the webmaster or copyright policy, or reports of abuse. Contact through that link and report the abuse, and save your email in a record. Often the “take down” request is enough to kill the link from the site. If you see a link to the specific person who has posted the pirated material, send a “take down” notice, warning that they have no right to disseminate the book, to them too. That warning may be enough to get them to quit. Then, check a few days or a week later to see if the link is gone.

You have the option, as the book companies did, of taking the matter to a lawyer and heading to court. But as in so many other kinds of disputes, everyone (the lawyers excepted) probably will be happier if it doesn’t come to that.

Readers & Writers: I look forward to your feedback, comments and critiques, and please use BookWorks as your resource to learn more about preparing, publishing and promoting self-published books. My blogs appear every other week.
– See more at: https://www.bookworks.com/

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Is Idaho Donald Trump’s kind of place?

We now have a pretty clear idea of who all the major contenders for president will be in 2016: At this point all or nearly all have announced. (The New York Times declared the field unofficially closed after the announcement last week of Ohio Governor John Kasich.)

So who’s the Republican now most likely to pick up support in the Gem State?

The last couple of nomination contests weren’t good normal case studies, because Mitt Romney had unusually strongly connections to the Idaho area, between his ties to Utah and his Mormon religion, which he has in common with about a third of Idahoans, the bulk of that third being Republican.

Romney aside, the hearts of many Idaho Republicans seem traditionally to go toward insurgent and anti-establishment contenders, and candidates who match up with the Idaho self-image.

The biggest share of those Idaho Republicans who didn’t back Romney in the nomination fight in 2012 went for Ron Paul, whose candidacy was an irritant to much of the establishment. In 2000, there wasn’t really an insurgent candidate. George W. Bush got much of the state’s support and was the big favorite nationally from early on, but there was a significant base for Alan Keyes as well. In 1996, Pat Buchanan was the closest thing around to an insurgent anti-establishing candidate, but he never organized substantially in Idaho, and never picked up a lot of national traction.

When Ronald Reagan, still probably as popular in Idaho as he ever was, got his start, he was an insurgent candidate, running from a long-shot mode in 1968 and as a serious but definitely outsider challenger to a sitting president in 1976. And Reagan won that 1976 Idaho primary hugely, with 74.3% of the vote, his best vote anywhere in the country that year. A lot of the affection for him in Idaho built from that time, from his role not as a front runner or incumbent but as a challenger to powers that be.

Also liked: Challenger to powers that be who are dismissed by them. People like Helen Chenoweth and Sarah Palin picked up a lot of traction in Idaho in no small part for that reason. Their backers might call it being unafraid to speak the truth, their critics might call it speaking foolishness, but in Idaho you’ll find enough voters in the first camp to form a significant base.

Does Donald Trump fit into that mold? Or does someone else do so better?

Reagan had been a governor, but many of the people who like Trump say that much of what they like about him is that he’s an outsider, so presumably someone who hasn’t been a governor or a senator might have some particular appeal. They also like the idea that he “can’t be bought,” that he’s independently wealthy enough that he could do as he chooses. These concepts would have some resonance in the Idaho Republican electorate. Across that very large Republican field of candidates, only three, Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, have not been either a governor or a senator. And Carson and Fiorina are not top-rank contenders, at least at present.

And this time there aren’t any Republican candidates who touch the self-identity chords in Idaho the way Reagan, George W. Bush or Mitt Romney did.

Might Idaho be Trump territory? Could be, if The Donald lasts in his campaigning hothouse long enough to get to next year’s Idaho primary.

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People tend to forget now, but Joe Albertson started out working at someone else’s supermarket.

Dropping out of the College of Idaho, he started as a clerk for the Safeway grocery chain. He was successful there, moving into midmanagement in his early 30s, but it wasn’t satisfying. Albertson thought he had a better way to run a grocery – they didn’t call them “supermarkets” then – and wanted to try running one on his own. Merging some of his own savings and some investments from a few other Safeway executives who believed in him, he launched his first Albertson’s at 17tth and State streets in Boise in 1939.

Befitting a store bearing its founder’s name, the Albertsons stores, which expanded quickly to Nampa and Caldwell, had a distinctive approach for the era, emphasizing not only a broad selection of food and other goods but also both self-service and strong customer service. The approach would eventually become standard in the industry, but it was new then, and Albertson’s personal insight and focus, and in many place community involvement, helped make his stores winners. Over the years he ran the company, the stores proliferated into the hundreds in many parts of the country.

Albertson’s company went public in 1959, but its founder kept a close watch until his death in 1986. In the years after that came the mass acquisitions: Seesel’s, Buttry, SuperOne, Bruno, and finally in 1999 swallowed the giant American Stores Company, which operated Jewel-Osco, Sav-on Drugs, Lucky and other stores. Closures and sales of stores followed. The public company, concerned as all public companies are about improving stock prices, began to be, apparently, more about buying and selling properties than it was about creating an innovative and popular supermarket – the basis of Joe Albertson’s successful business.

Financial indigestion was the near-term result, and in 2006 Albertsons was sold to SuperValu, and one of Idaho’s landmark businesses ceased to exist as an independent company. The Albertsons-labeled stores were slips up into various groups, bought and sold and swapped like trading cards.

Then it got a second chance.

Following a series of additional sales and mergers, which remarkably included important involvement by Safeway, Albertsons became a separate, freestanding company again. The Albertsons stores (and some others) were brought together with Safeway and some other store groups, and started operation as Albertsons LLC, still owned by an investor group. It has become again a massive company, running more than 2,200 stores around the country.

Last week, the investor group said it plans to take the company public – to again place Albertsons stock on the public stock exchanges.

What will Albertsons do now?

It could go back to the way it did business in the 90s, and some years down the road go through another round of swallowing and regurgitation.

The suggestion here, though, is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Make that little memorial at 17th and State in Boise to Joe Albertson’s first store something of a touchstone. And remember that while much in the world may have changed since 1939, the basic business sense Albertson displayed back then is, or can be, something more durable.

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Authors find few pieces of marketing advice repeated more often than this: Get thee to a website!

But once you have a website, what do you do with it?

The primary purpose of your website is to promote yourself and your book. Part of the process of selling your book is in connecting with your reader, and a good author website offers many ways to do that.

The basic components of your website should be:
1. Contact information (if you don’t want to provide an email address, then include a message form)
2. Your social media contact information (to Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads or any others you use)
3. Information about your books
4. Biographical information – all about you, your professional background, why you decided to write this book
5. News about your books
6. Events where you will be appearing

Aside from a good photo (a professional shot is recommended), include some memoir material. Kate McMillan, a web designer for many books and authors for more than a decade, advised in a 2012 web article, “frame the content around what led you to writing, and why you write the kinds of books that you do and what you love about it. If you’re also promoting yourself for speaking engagements, or if your book is one aspect of your larger professional career, consider making your photo larger or putting it in a more prominent position on the page.”

This is good, basic advice but not enough to pull lots of people to your site. To do that, remember what the cable television channel AMC does when it promotes the web pages attached to its programs. It points out specific files, video material, games, links of all kinds available only through the website, and uses the tag line, “there’s always more on AMC.com.” It’s an approach worth keeping in mind as you design your site. The more extra information you post, the more traffic you’re likely to get. So as you post it, use the social media to let people know it’s there.

R.C. Butler of Bulldog Press, advised, “The key to a good website or blog, however, is not the information about you or your book. It is the alternative information you post that adds value to the visitor. It is this information that will keep your readers returning to your site which will help to increase your SEO scores, incoming links, and overall presence in the market.”

McMillan suggested that “Depending on the kinds of books you write, you might include a slideshow of photographs, or an audio file, or a YouTube video, or a quiz, or myriad other things that tie into the content of your books. Some authors are experts in their field and their books are an extension of a larger career – this is a great opportunity to include something interesting from the larger context of your career, such as a discount code for signing up for a related service.”

One article from USA Today (January 15, 2015) suggests more possibilities: “leaving their more compelling content on the site longer; creating clutter-free website designs to make it easier to find the best material; posting more quizzes; using prominent “embeds” of videos, links and tweets in stories; assigning long-form articles; creating never-ending pages that just scroll on with more content loads; showcasing photo galleries that stay on one long page rather than flipped pages.”

Dropping by the websites of some of your favorite writers could help too. Observe how bestselling writers, indie and traditional both, use their web space. The site for novelist E.L. James (www.eljames.com) includes soundtracks and wine lists – all background material for her novels. The site for Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train), www.paulahawkinsbooks.com has excerpts and useful material for readers’ groups. Blake Crouch (www.blakecrouch.com), of the Wayward Pines series, posts videos and a regular weekly show to keep in touch with his readers.

Blogging – if it’s done regularly – can keep the site fresh. Writer and marketer Joanna Penn strongly endorses blogging: “Starting a blog changed my life – seriously. It has freed my writing style up completely, and given me the confidence to get into fiction. Without the millions of words I’ve written on my blog, I would never have been able to write Desecration, my latest crime novel.”

A couple of other points to keep in mind as you pull together material for the site.

Make sure your site is “responsive,” which means smartphones, tablets and other devices will be able to read it easily. That’s a good idea generally, but Google has started to give “responsive” sites an extra push, saying that “non-responsive” websites will be downgraded in search lists. Early in 2015 I threw out a web theme I’d had in place on my site for years and replaced it with another one which, unlike the old one, is fully responsive. Fortunately, the fix for this probably won’t be especially difficult if your website is relatively small and simple: It may only involve changing the design on the web site, which often is just a matter of pushing a few buttons.

Be sure also to incorporate keywords and tags that will make the site more visible to searchers.

Visibility and two-way communication are, after all, the key to any successful wevsite.

Readers & Writers: I look forward to your feedback, comments and critiques, and please use BookWorks as your resource to learn more about preparing, publishing and promoting self-published books. My blogs appear every other week.

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The changes keep on coming around here.

I’ve added a new and more extensive bio page for myself, which I hope will mark the development of more such pages here for our authors. The idea is to offer a little more insight into the authors than we’ve given before.

Is it too much? This one started out like a memoir, and then I found it was getting out of hand in terms of length, and decided to wrap it. Suggestions and comments are welcome.

And for our other authors: Collect some material for use on your own pages.

The picture here? I think it was taken sometime in the early 90s (the sign behind me seemed to refer to the centennial, which was in 1990), when I was speaking to some group, probably somewhere in Idaho. Further I knoweth not.

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One of the most pungent, entertaining and candid dialogues you may ever read between two indie writers, available in transcript, came in March 2011 between Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler, two science fiction novelists who were traditionally published before moving into self-publishing.

Both felt strongly about going indie.

How strongly?

Eisler confirmed he’d been offered a half-million dollars by a traditional publisher, and rejected it to self-publish instead. “I know it’ll seem crazy to a lot of people,” he told Konrath, “but based on what’s happening in the industry, and based on the kind of experience writers like you are having in self-publishing, I think I can do better in the long term on my own.”

Even Konrath, a long-time advocate for independent publishing, sounded a little stunned at the dollar amount, but not at the point Eisler was making. He said, “My switch to self-publishing isn’t personal. It’s just business. I can make more money on my own.”

For example, he added: “Currently, my novel The List is the #15 bestseller on all of Amazon. I wrote that book 12 years ago, and it was rejected by every major NY publisher. I self-published it on Amazon two years ago, and it has sold over 35,000 copies. … In self-publishing, I’m seeing more and more books take their sweet time finding an audience, then take off.”

Eisler and Konrath are not rare examples among strongly-selling traditionl authors who take the independent route. In my last post, I wrote about mystery writer Lawrence Block’s experiences in self-publishing. And the numbers are growing.

I’ve had no bestseller books, but this week I’m working on both traditionally published and self-published book projects, one in the mornings, the other in the afternoons.

Many such authors combine traditional publishing and independent approaches.

J.K. Rowling, whose wildly popular Harry Potter print books were traditionally published, is now offering those books in digital form herself on the website pottermore.com.

Susan Wittig Albert, traditionally published fiction writer (of the China Bayles and the Darling Dahlias mysteries and many more) went indie when publishers took a pass on a fictionalized story about the origins of the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books. In the February edition of Writer’s Digest she reported aggressively marketing the book through social media, reviews (highly favorable) and elsewhere, and promptly sold more than 12,000 copies and sold rights to other publishers. “I’d do it all – all over again,” she said.

On the research website Quora, sci-fi novelist Michael J. Sullivan remarked that, “I’m actually moving toward ‘hybrid’ which means I’ll do both traditional and self-publishing. The traditional route has worked out well for me, established creditability and expanded my audience. … But I hate the draconian contracts and the business models of trade. Self offers higher income (per book), complete freedom and a faster time to market.”

In his book On Writing, Stephen King describes writing and making money from his first horror novel – as a self-publisher. That was in high school, the novel was brief and made on a cheap copier, and he had to give back the sales money after the school principal found out he’d been selling copies on campus. But before he was caught, he was making (a little) money on the book.

Later on, of course, King became a traditionally published massively selling author. But as he was an example early on of an author who moved into self-publishing before a big publisher came calling, so has he been among those stepping back into self- and independent publishing. In 2000, he experimented with a serially-released book called “The Plant,” made available through his website. He later released digital-only tales (“Riding the Bullet,” “Ur”) himself, while also continuing releasing his work through traditional publishers.

Many other authors have worked in both worlds. Their approaches have been as widely varied as independent publishing itself.

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A few months ago visiting CreateSpace I took special note of the promotion spot they’d included for a new indie CS author. The promos have been there for a long time, but this one startled me: It highlighted a writer I knew (through his books), one I’d been reading for more than three decades.

The highlighted novel was The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, and the the writer, as you may have guessed, was Lawrence Block, a deeply experienced and solidly-selling author of about 50 mystery and other novels and several nonfiction books, some of them on the subject of fiction writing. (One of those has one of my all-time favorite titles: Telling Lies for Fun and Profit.) The bulk of his books, published over half a century, have been published by houses such as HarperCollins, Macmillan, Dell and Arbor House. Some have been turned into movies. He is a grand master of the Mystery Writers of America, among many other commendations. His books remain popular and continue to sell.

He’s certainly not at CreateSpace because he “couldn’t find a publisher.”

So what’s he doing in this new world of self-publishing?

In an e-mail interview, he recalled “My first venture into self-publishing was thirty years ago, which I’ve blogged about occasionally, was a home seminar for writers called Write For Your Life. I printed 5,000 books and sold them, and that was that.

“When technology allowed me to bring out backlist titles as ebooks, I rushed to take advantage of it. Then, just about four years ago, it occurred to me that I’d written a book’s worth of Matthew Scudder short stories over the years, and that while many of them had been included in my omnibus volume of short fiction, they could make up a book of their own, especially if I wrote one more story for the volume. Now my regular publisher might well have been persuaded to bring out such a book, but I couldn’t delude myself that it would be a hot ticket, likely to fly off the shelves of America’s remaining bookstores. And I saw it as great opportunity to try self-publication. I enlisted Telemachus Press, an excellent work-for-hire company, to handle ebook and POD paperback production, and The Night and the Music has been selling steadily since its debut in the fall of 2011.”

Block has been recovering from publishers the rights to some of his older books, republishing himself through print-on-demand.

“In a sense, things came full circle a year and a half ago with the POD paperback publication of ‘Write For Your Life’,” he said. “HarperCollins issued it in ebook form some years ago, but I could see from reader feedback that it was a book people wanted to be able to thumb through as one can only do with a printed book. So I got it ready for CreateSpace, with a nice new cover, and it’s been selling very nicely with no promotion beyond word-of-mouth.”

He’s also begun to publish new (original) work himself, sometimes using small publishers for the print versions, and keeping (and using) the e-publication rights in his own ways.

This has been ramping upward in recent years. “One thing I always had the urge to do was self-publish an original A-list novel, and I did this on Christmas Day of 2013 with a brand-new Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, ‘The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons’. I could have published the book with my regular publisher, but I really wanted to do it myself. And I didn’t want to wait a year and a half for it to be on sale. After all, I’ve reached an age where it’s not really advisable for me to buy green bananas. This way, I wrote the book in July of 2013 and five months later it was on sale.”

How well has it worked out overall?

“I think, in the short run, I probably left some money on the table. But in the long run I think I’ll come out ahead. More to the point, I did it the way I wanted to do it and had fun throughout.”

I checked out how several other successful authors – with a solid traditional-publishing background – entered and approached self-publishing. I’ll have more on that in my next post.

See more at BookWorks.

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Time moves on. So do websites – at least, as to look & feel.

A couple of months ago, the status was something like this:

We had one main web site (www.ridenbaugh.com) which included in a crammed-in space an extensive blog (accessible through the front page back to 2005), information and pictures of most of our books and those by myself, special notices and offers and a bunch of other stuff.

It had some appeal (I liked it, and I gather a number of other people did), but it was getting tooth-long, five years old or more. Ancient. More significantly, it wasn’t keeping up technologically. In this case, that means keeping up with the newer versions accessing the web – tablets, smart phones and the like, which could read the old site but not optimally. (It wasn’t “responsive.”) New software was needed.

So that’s largely been installed now. There’s new site theme software (it’s called “ignite”) which is intended to highlight to through careful typography the writing on the site, while also keeping it light and well-illustrated. We’ve added sliders at the top, more frequent use of polls inside posts, and several other additions.

As this is written, the www.ridenbaugh.com site is oriented primarily toward writings – toward the blog and some other materials which our and some other writers contribute.

A second domain, www.ridenbaughpress.com, is concerned mainly with what Ridenbaugh Press produces and does – the books and other products, and services, we provide.

Through that second site, we’ll connect a series of sites for our authors and their books. One of them, at www.ridenbaughpress.com/randystapilus/, is up now, though it’s still a largely unstocked kitchen at the moment, We’ll be filling it in, and adding as well sites for most of our other authors.

Whipping it all into shape will take a little while – a few weeks at least. But we should have a far better web presence when we’re done than we’ve had before.

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