Tuesday News: the Apple Watch, fraudulent DMCA notices, indie publishing challenges, and Eve Ensler’s cancer battle
Publishing NewsApple / Cancer / copyright / dmca / Eve Ensler / Memoir / self-publishing book sales / smart watchComments Off on Tuesday News: the Apple Watch, fraudulent DMCA notices, indie publishing challenges, and Eve Ensler’s cancer battle
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING AND DMCA ABUSE, OR “HOW A SCAMMER GOT MY BOOK BLOCKED WITH VERY LITTLE EFFORT” – A pretty chilling tale about how author Becca Mills had her book removed from Smashwords and Amazon via a fraudulent DMCA takedown notice, filed by someone who then reached out to the author offering to help her get the book restored. Apparently it is quite easy to use the DMCA in abusive ways, one of which is by creating a blog post that appears to show the same content in another, previous venue. A story worth reading, especially for indie authors who do not have publishers behind them, representing or even holding the pertinent intellectual property rights. And fortunately, the author got her book restored on Amazon and Smashwords.
Based on what a Smashwords rep said, I think I know how Rajesh Lahoti/Kushal Das showed evidence of prior publication of the material in my book. Apparently, they pointed Smashwords to a 2011 blog post that contained material from Nolander. Now, I don’t think blogs are a good form of evidence. Here on WordPress, when I revise one of my posts, the platform doesn’t add an “edited” line. The post just keeps the original date. If that’s the way most blogging software works, it’d be very easy to use a blog post to “prove” prior making-public of someone else’s writing: you’d just delete the contents of an old post and fill it up with someone else’s book text. Then it’d look like you’d written the book yourself, years earlier.
Ebook retailers need to be on the lookout for this sort of thing, IMO. –The Active Voice
Hands-on with a (working) Apple Watch – So I convinced myself that no way would I want an Apple Watch, until, of course, they were previewed. Although at a minimum of $349, I’m not going to be standing in line for the first iteration. Folks at The Verge got to play with one, and while there are a lot of cool things it can do, it doesn’t seem so easily manipulated in a very basic (aka with your fingers) way.
There are basically two main ways of using the Watch: pressing the Digital Crown to go to the home screen and picking an app, or swiping up from the bottom on a watch face to access the Glances, which are basically quick views into all the apps you’ve got loaded. Apple had several apps loaded onto the demo unit I played with: Uber, the SPG hotels app, Shazam, and a few others. What’s interesting is that Glances clearly aren’t the apps themselves — when you click on a button in a Glance, you get kicked out to a loading screen and then into that screen in the app. So clicking “unlock door” in the SPG Glance actually opened the SPG app, and showed me the button again. And then I wasn’t on the Glances screen anymore. It’s not a major thing, but it took me a few seconds to understand what was going on.
Pressing the communications button (which, confusingly, looks and feels like the sleep / wake button on an iPhone) takes you to the contacts screen, where you can quickly send a note, drawing, or heartbeat to a friend using what Apple calls Digital Touch. It’s neat, but it’s another set of new UI ideas: a single finger to draw, hold down two fingers to send a heartbeat, a single tap to… tap. Again, it’s not rocket science, but it’s also not anything familiar, or anything repeated across the rest of the Watch interface. You just have to learn it. –The Verge
My Publishing Story (including all the stuff I’m probably not supposed to tell you) – As I was surfing online looking for information for my op-ed post on ebook sales and pricing, I came across this piece by Carey Heywood, whose publishing trajectory goes from modest to list-making and bestselling to crash and burn. It’s one of those chronicles that might be helpful to other authors, and it will definitely give readers a bird’s eye view of the apparent capriciousness of the marketplace right now.
Remember that statistic I mentioned earlier about 98% of all books published not selling more than 500 copies. This book is one of them. To date I haven’t sold 500 copies of this book. Which makes an evil place that lives inside my gut laugh because this is also my highest rated book on Amazon. In fact, that holds for all of my more recent releases. As I’ve grown as an author and as the quality of my work has improved with each release I have become inept at locating readers willing to read my books.
What did I do wrong? Did I publically bash anyone or anything and create a firestorm of drama to alienate readers? Did I unknowingly build my home over a cursed ancient burial ground? Will one hit wonders in the indie author world ever have a chance to compete on dancing with the stars? Did I start releasing substandard work that is unreadable? ?—-is clearly debatable. –Carey Heywood
The Unlikely Roads That Lead Us Back to Ourselves: Eve Ensler on How a Tree Saved Her Life – Although this isn’t about publishing or Romance, it is about Eve Ensler’s most recent book (published last year) on her experience with cancer and chemotherapy (and note: this piece is not always easy to read). Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and creator of V-Day, has done a great deal of courageous, heart-breaking, liberating work on the female body, and this piece offers some really beautiful passages from Ensler’s experiences with a tree just outside her hospital room window. Although the circumstances are pretty devastating, there’s also a poignant circularity in Ensler’s relationship with this tree, and the way it becomes tied to her past, present, and future.
I was raised in America. All value lies in the future, in the dream, in production. There is no present tense. There is no value in what is, only in what might be made or exploited from what already exists. Of course the same was true for me. I had no inherent value. Without work or effort, without making myself into something significant, without proving my worth, I had no right or reason to be here. Life itself was inconsequential unless it led to something. Unless the tree would be wood, would be house, would be table, what value was there to tree? So to actually lie in my hospital bed and see tree, enter the tree, to find the green life inherent in tree, this was the awakening. Each morning I opened my eyes. I could not wait to focus on tree. I would let the tree take me. Each day it was different, based on the light or wind or rain. The tree was a tonic and a cure, a guru and a teaching. –Brain Pickings
