Graphics Interns: Datebook Cover Design Poll

Blogging has been light lately; then again, blogging has been intentionally light for a while as we rethink exactly what audience we both want to reach and serve with this site. However, one thing we have been wanting to do for a while now is get feedback on different cover designs that the graphics interns work up in the office for different projects. To that end, our first experiment with trying this out are some cover roughs our second semester graphics intern Adam Chumley has come up with for a datebook/planner we have in the works.

Web-Based Applications: Issuu vs. Scribd Deathmatch

Just as soon as I did my last post about Issuu, a documenting sharing Web site that we’ve started doing some book previews on, I almost immediately came across Scribd, another site that provides the same basic kinds of online publishing services. I haven’t been able to find exact user/member/subscriber figures for Issuu, but supposedly Scribd is the largest of these sites with +50 million users and 50K documents being uploaded every day. So, I thought I would upload some of the same materials we’d put on Issuu and then track the results to see which one was generating the most views/traffic.

Web-Based Applications: Issuu

One of the things that we’ve been looking for lately is a good online book previewer to integrate into the individual product pages at our e-commerce site (as well as using elsewhere as applicable). The first good application I remember coming across like this was Amazon.com’s system. Another one is used by National Academies Press. Both these systems, though, are proprietary and what we needed was a system that was robust enough for our purposes and, because we don’t have tons of money for a new stand-alone application or one off the shelf, at the right price.

Thankfully, I think we’ve finally found what we’re looking for with Issuu.

Web 2.0 Social Networking: The Texas RV Professor Rides the Twitter Wave

I’ll be the first to admit that personally I’m a pretty slow adopter of new technologies. I finally broke down and bought a cell phone barely two years ago (if it was even that far back). Until last year ago I still had my $9.95 a month dial-up Internet service. I’ve yet to hold a Kindle, much less read a book on one. A big part of it is that it’s hard to tell exactly what the Next Big Thing is vs. just the Next Big Hype and what’s worth your time vs. just being a waste of time. Plus, when talking about tech gadgets or Web-based applications, you have the tech geeks who love anything as long as it’s the absolutely newest thing around however impractical, convoluted, and/or nonsensical it may be. (In fact, they’ll love it all the more for being exactly those things.) Then you have your average (that is, normal) person who likes new applications/gadgets that are both simple and powerful.

Falling into this latter category, I will happily admit, is Twitter, which we got one of our authors, Terry Cooper (better known as The Texas RV Professor), set up on this week.

Strategic Publishing Initiatives: Flat World Knowledge

Week before last it was time for the annual Texas Community College Teachers Association (TCCTA) Conference that was held this year in Austin, Texas. This was the third year in a row we’ve exhibited there and it was familiar yet still interesting. (Odds and ends of photos can be found here.) In the exhibit hall we visited with folks from the various TSTC colleges as well as with other people we’ve come to know from Cengage, Norton, American Technical Publishers, and Hampden.

A personal highlight was tagging along to a dinner that Thursday night with Dr. Eric Foner, historian extraordinaire, while, in a more practical sense, the most helpful (and surprising) thing that happened was my wife showing up unannounced in the exhibit hall Saturday morning with a couple of IKEA tall chairs for me and Lindsey to use. That is, if you sit in a regular chair at your booth it tends to make you look slouchy; however, standing on your feet all day is just murder. Murder! Last year we noticed that the president of ATP in the booth next to us used a tall chair—that way you’re at eye level while sitting down when people come up to the booth instead of looking like you’re working a garage sale waiting to make change in nickels for crazy people buying your junk—and we had talked about getting a couple of them; however, it took my blushing bride to actually pull the trigger on that.

Anyway, old home week, dinners, and tall chairs aside, the most interesting new thing I saw in the exhibit hall was the Flat World Knowledge booth.

Publishing Conferences: The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age 2009

Whoosh. What a day: five sessions in a row at The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center next to the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M. Overall, though, it was a good day.

First thing this morning I tried to get a wireless connection at the conference center but when that didn’t work I struck up a conversation with a guy sitting in the lobby next to me. Typically, I can contentedly stand in a corner all day at the periphery of a crowd with some kind of dour look on my face that is inherently uninviting so in the interest of “networking”—that is, as I call it, “schmoozing” and/or, as my wife refers to it, “being sociable”—I did my best to break out of that mode.

Publishing Conferences: The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age

Blogging has been light lately—then again, blogging is almost always light—but the last month has been particularly busy with the PR blitz about to kick off for the new RV DVDs and forthcoming RV books. (Certainly, however, it does seem like a million years ago, not just a month, since I had the time/inclination to spend a big chunk of publishing-related energy doing things like editing videos of trips to Abilene.) This next week, though, will be a change of pace as I’ll be attending The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age conference at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas.

Book Publishing Operations: Somebody Get Me A Webcam!

So, I finally had one of those moments of clarity that Jules Winnfield talked about in Pulp Fiction and have decided, you know, that there may be something to web video conferencing after all. I think it all occurred last Friday as I left the house at 6:30 in the morning to drive the three hours out to Abilene, be in meetings until about 2:30 and then head back to Waco. Or maybe it was on Saturday as I was making a YouTube video out of Flip camera footage I shot during the drive.

Blogs About Publishing: Life on Avenue Z

A big “thank you” goes out to Beth Ziesenis (that’s her in the photo to the left!) of Avenue Z Writing Solutions for letting me write a guest post today at her blog Life on Avenue Z. Beth is a freelance copywriter & editor out of San Diego, CA, who blogs about her newly founded career as a work-for-hire professional so, as  a kind of counterpoint, I wrote about working with freelancers from our perspective as book publishers here at TSTC Publishing. However, in all honesty, I wouldn’t rush over there to read what I had to say . . . instead, I’d suggest visiting Beth’s blog on a regular basis to get her take on the the ever hectic life of being a freelancer writer.