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My Leopard Book

My latest book — Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — is now available for purchase from major online resellers and your local bookstore. 

This book was a real pleasure to write. 

As a relative newcomer to the world of Apples and Mac OS, I was able to discover and reveal the fun in Leopard and I sure hope my joy effectively translates from keyboard to words on the printed page.

Thomson/Cengage Learning is my outstanding publication house and one thing I really love about the book is the semiotics in the teaching:  You get full-color, super-high quality images of the Mac Operating System in action on every page!

The word can slay — but the image burns the eye forever!

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Books Must Be of the World

All books must be of the world. 

Books are required by their very nature to reflect the values and conscience of the author as well as the world currently framing the context of the word.

Too often technical books and computer books are not of the world; they are instead stale and bone-dry and have no sense of humor or spirit or effective memes or identifiable passion and magnitude.

Current events and poems and the news and response cries and personality and dreams and wishes and colloquialisms are required to be embedded in the sinew of any book written by all authors. 

Why should a computer book be less compelling than an Epic Poem or a Fantasy Novel?

Technical books must sing and twirl and express joy — or the journey created for the reader is dull and rote — and that goes against the craft of the writer who must forever aspire to higher leanings and who must always lift the reader from pinnacle to pinnacle while avoiding the pitfalls of temptation and merely writing to fill pages instead of brimming imagination.

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Why Amazon Takes Sixty-Five Percent

Some amateur authors are bemoaning the fac Amazon takes a 65% cut of your Kindle-published book sales.

What those inexperienced authors fail to realize is a normal hardcopy publisher will take a 94-90% cut of the price of your book as payment to recover the cost of creating and printing your book and as the means of making a profit off your words.

Continue reading → Why Amazon Takes Sixty-Five Percent

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Banning Cell Phones in Public Places

Have you ever been with a group of friends, having a good time – talking, or whatever activity you may have been involved in – when everything was abruptly interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone?

Continue reading → Banning Cell Phones in Public Places

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Curse of the Blue Pencil

If you give someone a blue pencil and the title of an editor — I promise you that blue pencil will be used to edit and change your work merely because of the title in mind and the pencil in hand. 

Editing someone else’s work is a tender task that must put you, as the editor, in the mind of the author.  It is not the editor’s job to change the work just because the work can be changed. 

As the publisher of Go Inside Magazine and Urban Semiotic and Boles Books — each day I deal with the delicate task of preserving the author’s voice and perspective while making the whole work work better.

The editor’s primary directive is to make the work better and sometimes that means dropping the blue pencil — and its uncanny, innate, instinct to propel you forward with editorial power — and let the work breathe its own life into the world without your direct interference.

The best editors are those that edit with an invisible hand and a steady eye and they are always deferential to the work and a tie forever goes to the author.

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Rising Scale Payouts

I have been wondering a lot lately about why “hot” books don’t cost more than ordinary books and also how a Rising Scale Payout might work in our new eReader world of direct book distribution:

I can also see a rising scale that, as a text becomes more popular, the price will rise 1 percent of a penny or so for each one sold — so hot texts will become hotter faster as readers will want to jump on the train before the price becomes too high.  Then, as the text begins to die, a sliding scale tips in that will more quickly reduce the price of the text down to nearly free — unless it gets hot again!

I’ve never understood why hot “books” are discounted so deeply and ordinary books have such a high price.  I understand the thinking that a hot book will sell more at a lower price — but what makes a hot book?  A low price?  I don’t think people care about price when they want to really read a book.

Continue reading → Rising Scale Payouts

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Kindle Makes Authors Publishers!

Kindle is Amazon’s new amazing e-book reader and it is a tremendous boon to authors everywhere because we can now, through Amazon’s network, directly publish our work for purchase.

You need to buy a Kindle — RIGHT NOW! — if you haven’t already to help build the device niche and to help propel the buying habits of your readers into the electronic age of virtual ink.

Continue reading → Kindle Makes Authors Publishers!

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Naked Blogging as Semiotics Shall Rule the Word

We are living in the Golden Age of Text. We most effectively communicate on blogs, in email and via instant messages where The Word is King. However, in the next five years or so we will toss away our text — along with our newly enhanced ability to cogently write to persuade others — in favor of video: Semiotics Shall Rule the Word. There are active rumors that the next iPhone will have a touch screen that is a camera so you can do live video conferencing via iChat right on your phone. There is one proof-of-concept using the current iPhone that persuasively argues for video communication over text right now.

Continue reading → Naked Blogging as Semiotics Shall Rule the Word

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One Million Served

On my Urban Semiotic blog we are trying to reach the historic and substantial goal of ONE MILLION READERS by January 1, 2008.

It’s pretty amazing we currently have around 863,000 Urban Semiotic readers in a little more than a year of being hosted on WordPress.com.

Please visit Urban Semiotic to help us reach our readership goal for the New Year so we can watch the numbers turn together!

We thank you!

We appreciate your keen support!

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Hitting a Million Readers

I need your help in accomplishing an important milestone in the four year history of this Urban Semiotic blog. As you can see on the right in the sidebar, we currently have (at the time I am writing this article), around 863,000 readers of this blog since 10/27/06 — that’s when we moved to WordPress.com from being privately hosted — and I am asking for your assistance to help us hit the ONE MILLION READERS mark on or before January 1, 2008!

Continue reading → Hitting a Million Readers