Sometimes being a sci-fi geek has its benefits. It’s often said that not everything written about in science fiction exists, but everything that’s discovered in science existed first in science fiction. Now, sci-fi is leading the revolution in book packaging that we discussed in a previous blog post.

A new book by Daniel Wallace, The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force, won’t be your usual reference tome. With a hefty US$99 price tag, the promise is a full-color interior, “missing” pages, removable trinkets, flashing lights, sound, and movable parts. Oh, and there’s even an actual printed book to read somewhere in the package. Clearly not your usual hard cover edition.

With all the new formats — e-books, vooks (video books), audio books, enhanced books, collector editions with special features — it can seem like a confusing time. Or is it just the most exciting opportunity we’ve ever seen for creating new ways of communicating with your audience?

Gino Wickman, business leader and coach, wanted to publish a book that shared his successful system for helping companies get what they want from their businesses. The ultimate goal was to increase implementation of his proprietary Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) by getting his message out to as many people as possible.

Gino drafted a manuscript that captured his passion for EOS and his determination to share its tools, model, and process with entrepreneurial businesses. His first thought was to find a traditional publisher—but after many frustrating months of shopping the work around and finding no takers, Gino decided to explore self-publishing as a way to bring what he knew was a valuable idea to the market.

Making It Happen

• Highspot put together a realistic assessment of the time, process, and budget required to take Gino’s manuscript and turn it into a finished book.
• Highspot then managed the entire project, from an initial edit to sharpen the book’s message right through to final printing and e-book production.
• Along the way, Highspot was available as a trusted resource for testing ideas and asking questions about book production, marketing, and distribution.
• For Gino, one of Highspot’s most valuable contributions was the team’s role in keeping him free to serve his own clients while Highspot handled the many details involved in getting a book to market.

Seeing Results
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business launched as a hard cover book in November 2007 and as an e-book in 2008. Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other leading retailers, the book has sold over 10,000 copies.

As a result, Gino has seen an upswing in his business. In the last two years, he has added 20 new EOS implementers to his team and successfully helped more than 200 companies implement EOS.

“There’s no question about it,” says Gino. “We’ve leveraged our business model because of this book. Our long-term goal is to help 10,000 companies run on EOS. Every book we sell gets us closer to this goal.”

Gino is now working on a second book, excited to repeat his positive experience from Traction.

Download a PDF copy of this case study.

High on the wish list for many of our clients are books that can be read in 2-3 hours, tops. With Twitter conversations and other online articles talking about this very thing, it seems our clients aren’t alone. This is definitely a trend authors and publishers, both traditional and online, should pay attention to.

With the average Canadian working nearly 40 hours per week and our neighbours to the south even longer,  there isn’t a lot of time left over for things like reading — especially a traditional 300-page business book that could take hours and hours to finish. So if authors and publishers want to get non-fiction works into the hands of consumers, it could be strategic to significantly prune those longer books.

Quicker to write and get out to market, this easily digestible style of book could compete with magazines and online publications, allowing consumers a quick and timely read, but still with substance. However, these shorter-format books need to feel sizeable enough, both in terms of experience and takeaway, to justify the price.

The challenge will be to find that sweet spot: the point where price, value, and length all come together to create a book that flies off the shelves and opens an entirely new niche market.

What’s your take? Is short and sweet a better model for non-fiction?

Designer: Tania Fitzpatrick, Red Dot Design

The Brief
Fit to Succeed is a book that demonstrates how companies can reduce health care claims and insurance costs by encouraging health and wellness in their employees. The lessons are conveyed through a story about two fictional CEOs in the construction industry — an industry the author had worked with extensively.

The cover brief began with six key words: Fitness, Healthy, Strong, Company, Growing, Construction.

The Concepts

	Cover A combined a number of the key word elements. The tall building represents the corporate world, and the orange and yellow color scheme are drawn from the construction industry. The tape measure cinching the building stood in for both construction and fitness. But the cinching of the building created a feeling of budgetary belt-tightening and reduction that contradicted the sub-title of “driving profits.”
	Cover B used just the tape measure and a variation on the orange-yellow palette. Note that the sub-title was still in development at this stage, so different ones were being mocked up on the covers. This cover lacked too many of the key word elements — nothing here really spoke to fitness, health or strength. And at this stage, it was decided that visually tying the book to the construction industry was too limiting. Though the author used construction company executives as the protagonists in his story, the concepts he was conveying were applicable across every industry.
	Cover C changed things up with the introduction of an apple and a fresh green color, but the design looked too much like that of a food or cookbook. The corporate tie-in was missing.
	Cover D married elements of the earlier covers. The apple and green palette remained, and the tape measure was added back. Here, though, combining the tape measure with food spoke to dieting, and the book was about a much broader approach to health than just weight loss. It was also felt that the diet imagery made the cover too feminine. By this time, the sub-title had been finalized.

The final cover, shown below, removed the tape measure and instead punched a dollar-sign bite mark out of the apple to make the corporate connection. Stronger shades added to the colour scheme helped ramp up the energy and visual impact. The result is a crisp, vibrant cover that matches the themes of the book.

HarperCollins just announced the release of a “video book” — a 23-minute video that encapsulates the information found in What Would Google Do?, a business book by Jeff Jarvis. The video sells on Amazon for $9.99.

But is the video really a book? What makes a book a book anyway?

In his brilliant examination of the e-book market, past and present, John Siracusa points to a key problem with terminology:

In the print world, the word “book” is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, “e-book” refers to the content only — or rather, that’s the intention.

This is not the case with music, for example, where the medium and the content are separate. The medium changes — vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3 — but music is still music. Music is the product. Music is what you’re buying. The medium is just a vessel, and that vessel changes ruthlessly. When a better, cheaper, faster, or more convenient medium appears, the music follows — with or without the content owners.

But books…there’s a lot of baggage attached to that name. Giant tomes, portable paperbacks, or standard hardcovers, they’re all recognizable as books. In the modern era, there have been no discontinuities of form on par with the those in the music industry to emphasize the separation of content and medium for the written word.

So a “book” is technically the medium — the printed pages bound between covers — but the information (non-fiction) or story (fiction) is the content, the stuff we’re really buying. In which case, to be really clear to the consumer, e-books shouldn’t be called e-books and videos containing information from a book shouldn’t be called video books.

If we look again to the music industry as an example, there are some packaging distinctions that help consumers know what they’re getting. People don’t buy music, they buy songs. Everybody knows that, generally speaking, a song will be 3 or 4 minutes long and follow certain conventions. Group a bunch of songs together and you have an album, also an agreed-upon convention. We’re still not talking about the medium (the CD or MP3 file) but some structure has been wrapped around the content, making it easier for us to understand, buy, and consume the product.

When it comes to information, we have chapters and we have books — one might argue that these are roughly analogous to songs and albums. But the word “book” is still firmly wedded to the medium as well. And so we arrive back where we started with only one word to describe both a collection of content and how that content is conveyed.

If you think that quibbling over word choice is a waste of time, consider the negative comments that have been fired at HarperCollins over the new Jeff Jarvis “v-book”.

The Washington Post describes the content of the video:

The 23-minute video has Jarvis speaking into a single camera with a white background. Instead of reading directly from the book, which was published last month by the company’s Collins Business imprint, Jarvis runs through the basic concepts in the book…

One commenter’s response:

It is impossible to pack the depth, research and resonance of What Would Google Do? (or any other long-form work) into a 23-minute video.

Clearly, he doesn’t consider the video to be the book in visual format, not a v-book. Instead, he considers the video an excellent marketing tool and says HarperCollins would have been smarter to give it away for free rather than charging for it.

So, could HarperCollins have avoided much of the criticism levelled at them if they hadn’t tried to tout the video as a different version of the book? I say yes. Semantics could have made a difference here.

Note: I have to give HarperCollins props for at least trying something new, even if it didn’t quite pan out the way they might have liked. They’re innovating, and no doubt they (and others) will learn with each new step about what works and what doesn’t.

I’ll admit it. I’m something of a contradiction.

In my work for clients, I am constantly exploring the newest ideas in publishing, looking for ways to innovate and adapt. I find that exciting.

At the same time, I thrill to everything old. I love old books, old paper, the old models. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are especially intriguing to me.

So when I came across this Printer’s Dictionary and Guide Book, published in 1892, I just had to snap it up for my collection. Issued by Kelsey Press out of Meriden, Connecticut and priced at 25 cents a copy, the guide is a small, hard cover volume of advice for the would-be printing press operator.

Click thumbnails to enlarge.

The sub-title sums it up:

Containing Webster’s spelling and division of the most used words of the English language and chapters on job work, punctuation, useful receipts, etc. Not complete treatises, but a brief, handy guide for every day use, for professional and amateur.

It just so happens that the front and back contain ads for printing services and equipment from Kelsey Press. It’s a clever little piece of marketing, an early information product.

Click thumbnail to enlarge.

While most of the advice it contains is now antiquated, some of it is strangely timeless, including these tips on how to start and conduct a small paper:

Arrange a definite plan, to begin with. Give your paper some distinguishing feature, and not follow in the old ruts. If you are personally interested in some particular art, science or sport, you can, if you have energy, make your journal popular among others interested in the same subject. Or a paper can be made popular by making the leading matter village news, wit and humor, puzzles, rebuses, and the like. Church papers help the work much. Subjects are plenty. Choose one to your taste or ability, and make it your specialty. Make your paper alive with that subject, and fill the space not occupied therewith by pleasant miscellany. In a small sheet long, prosy articles appear out of place. It is seldom that a single article occupy more than a page of paper, and a column and a half article should be considered long.

Having perfected your plan for conducting a paper, you choose a name for it, which requires considerable thought. You want one appropriate to your leading subject. Let it be as short and striking as possible. There is much in a name. Whether you propose to circulate the paper free, as an advertisement or otherwise, or to make money out of it, it is best to fix upon it a subscription price; it gives it an apparent value even if given away…

So there you have it. Your “paper” — book, blog, articles — should have a focus that you’re passionate about. Make it your specialty and others with the same passion will be drawn to you. Keep your content and your name short and punchy. Value your work, even if it’s given away for free.

Maybe my love of new and old aren’t such a contradiction after all. A look at where we’ve been can sometimes provide guidance on the road to where we’re going.

A couple of years ago, in a Halifax used bookstore, I managed to nab a first edition copy of Adventures of a Columnist. First published in 1960, the book is a collection and commentary from Pierre Berton, who at that time was a daily columnist with the Toronto Star.

The book sat on my shelf for a while but just recently I picked it up again to start reading.
In between reading sessions, it’s been sitting on my kitchen table, desk, and coffee table, and every time I walk by it, I’m arrested by the design.

The copyright page reveals that the book was designed by Frank Newfeld. Of course! Newfeld has been a top designer in book design and illustration for the last five decades. He’s designed hundreds of covers for many of the big publishing houses, and has illustrated some of the best known books in Canadian children’s publishing. (Any 30-something Canadian will be familiar with the drawings in Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee — all of them Newfeld’s marvellous work.)

With Adventures, the first thing that grabs you is the front cover.

There’s something intensely compelling about Pierre’s last name in that huge typewriter font. The book title set in a handwritten script — and sharply picked out in red — is a nice contrast and keeps the cover from being too cool.

The banded design of black and white above the main section of the jacket is echoed in the case design. And look at that elegant addition of Pierre’s scribbled signature, again in red to echo the title treatment.

Finally, take a look at the double-spread title page; it simply commands your attention.

Trends in design come and go, but Frank Newfeld’s work proves that great design is great design, no matter what decade it comes from.

Printing books uses a lot of trees. Short of going for a fully electronic release, here are some ways you can minimize the environmental impact of your book.

Know the 3 Kinds of Material for Making Paper

1. Virgin fiber: made from fresh trees
2. Pre-consumer waste: composed of the scraps generated at the paper mills during the paper-making process
3. Post-consumer waste: the material you put in your recycling box

Choose Recycled Stocks
From an environmental perspective, the more recycled content in your paper, the better. Avoid virgin fiber if you can. If you buy virgin stock, at least make sure it is certified as having been responsibly harvested and not from old-growth forests. You save one tree for every 90 books you print on 100% post-consumer recycled stock.

Pay Attention to the Bleach
The whiter the paper stock, the more chlorine is needed to bleach it, so choose papers that are less bright. For book publishing, papers that are less bright are better anyway because they’re easier on the eyes for long periods of reading. If you do want a brighter stock, look for papers that are certified “elemental chlorine free.”

Let Readers Know
Let your readers know you support and use tree-friendly printing practices. In North America, if your chosen stock contains at least 50% recycled content, with a minimum of 10% post-consumer waste, you can display the EcoLogo. In the United States, if you print on recycled stock, you can display a recycled content logo from the American Forest and Paper Association.

Rate My Book Cover is a simple website that lets you view and rate cover designs on a scale from 1 to 10. I’d guess that most, if not all, of the covers are from self-published authors. You can even submit your own cover design if you’re interested in what others think.

I can’t say I agree with many of the rankings. Some downright hideous covers rank above 5 and some quite good ones are down in the 3s and 4s. I wouldn’t trust the feedback as market research into whether your design is any good or not — but the site is an interesting way to while away some time. Have a bit of fun with it.