Thanks all for your suggestions, I've thought long and hard about the title and then I just stopped thinking and my current preferred title is as above. 2:46 is the moment everything changed, and there are other good reasons you'll have to work out for yourself, but also the byline as we old newspaper hacks used to call it, is #quakebook - the good folk of twitter made this possible, so they should get recognition. Should we have the words Japan and Earthquake to optimise those search engines? I'm open to suggestions, but the bottom line is
we ain't writing for search engines, we're writing for our future.
Anyway, if you have a better idea, drop it in the comments field here, and I'll have a look later.
Got bigger fish to fry today. We've got 30 hours left to pull this off and publish our book by 2.46, Friday, exactly two weeks since the earthquake. The good news - we've got some cracking tales from the frontlines and the home front, all beautifully cleaned up and headlined, some great art - all the ingredients of a great book (oh, not to mention a previously unpublished William Gibson piece and an article by Jake Adelstein, you know the yakuza dude).
I've given up waiting for our literary agent to check her email, and I don't really know what a literary agent is or does, I frankly don't have the have time to find out right now. What I do have is two pressing problems:
1. Need to format the book to sell it on the internet. Does this mean different formats for kindles, iphones and whatever else? Advice is needed urgently. The manuscript currently is on a Neo Office word file if that means anything to you all.
2. Need to set up a payment system so that every penny goes to the Japanese Red Cross.
I don't have time to keep checking back to the comments here, so if you can help on either topic, drop me a line on twitter to @ourmaninabiko. The line's always open, even if we lose power today.
Chop, chop. Clocks a tickin.
10 comments:
Can't help with the questions ... but I like the name and cover, and I want to buy one for a Kindle.
I like it. As for the search engine I don't think it will matter that much - if enough people twitter about it and link it on our websites then I am reasonably sure that sort of thing gets more weighting on google searches than stuffing a whole bunch of words in a title. Probably other SEO options so wouldn't worry about it. Nice and simple & clean- perfect aesthetics for a Japan project.
I love it - simple, clean and with impact. I like the way you kept the hashtag to make reference to Twitter, one of the biggest contributors to the quake in general and the tool that links most if not all of the writers together.
I don't know a lot about publishing, but the pdf format is often used for ebooks, is widely supported and retains its formatting on most systems. Best to avoid a device specific format or - God forbid - a word document.
You don't need to reformat for all the different eBook formats if you use a site like Smashwords.
I'm a book publisher myself (small press, admittedly) and we use Smashwords in particular because it reformats everything for us. We just upload one Word document and let it do the dirty work.
As for making sure the money goes to the Japanese Red Cross, I'm more than certain that you could have the funds sent to them regardless of the service you use.
I've registered some quakebook domains so that when it goes viral, they are yours and not a spammers'. Any help you need with a site/blog and SEO, let me know
another possibility for getting it into e-book formats is to start with an HTML output (since nearly all e-book standards rely on that) and then use treesaver to get it show up all right. Treesaver is open source and they gonna get a wordpress plug in going right now.
maybe a good way to go, as you can easily get a local wp install (or on a domain cybersavvy has) and go from there. that would be free and save loads time and word (or neo office, prefer that too) to wordpress is a short way ^-^
Hi,
I'm in Hitachi Omiya City.
Please read this
http://candobetter.net/node/2407
You can have it in the book or I can write something new...
Tony
tonbo@green.ocn.ne.jp
As a small publisher we also use Smashwords to format eBooks ready for iPad or Kindle. The money can be sent to a charity account but if you're not in the US they will tax you 30% at source so watch out for that!
Best of luck
I have used lulu.com for my books since 2004. You can make a pdf for download and various sizes of paper book, hardcover etc. You can set up a paypal account for receipts. You should be able to get a tax exemption also.
I have also made Kindle books but the issue there is getting paid - if you don't have a US bank account it is hard because they will want to pay you by cheque. (Have you ever tried cashing a cheque at a Japanese bank?)
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