WHAT'S NEW?

SITE OF THE WEEK

The book business is a tough field to plow. Writers who make a living wage are rare. For every Stephen King or John Grisham or J.K. Rowling, there are tens of thousands of struggling wordsmiths. I hear that the average freelance author makes under $7,000 a year.

VISIT PubBuzz.com

I know a couple of writers who do considerably better, but I can count them on two fingers. "Cold Mountain" author Charles Frazier reportedly received an $8 million advance last year for his second novel. That price was based on his one-page summary of the book he intended to write.

By contrast, when two regional publishers offered me a disappointing $2,000 advance for a book recently, a writer friend told me that figure "wasn’t too bad". That’s because most books are published in very small press runs. A lot of "successful" local writers sell only a couple thousand copies of a book. In negotiating contracts, I learned that the author gets roughly 10 % of the publisher’s portion of the retail price. The bookseller takes 40% at least and the distributor gets a healthy slice too. If a small publisher can hang on to half the income of a $25 hardcover, that leaves the writer with – like I said – around $2,000, assuming the book sells out.

The math gets more complex in the world of big publishing, but the principle is the same. Publishers have to pay the author, and bear the expense of editing and designing and illustrating the book. They pay to promote it too. To that end publishers are always looking for ways to cut costs and one of the most costly publicity techniques is the author book tour. As publishers trim back on promotion and print books with less and less risk, authors lose again.

"The more you put out," book publicist Kurt Aldag says of publishing expenses, "the more risk you take."

The problem, Kurt says, is due partly to the disappearance of locally originated TV. Authors used to be able to push their books on local television, hit a few bookstore signings, talk to the print media and quickly hit the next town. Today, he says, authors who have sales appeal may visit only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Washington, vying for spots on national TV and bigger audiences.

So Aldag, who left the Big Apple for sleepy Lee, NH a few years ago, has invented a low-cost way for writers and publishers to spread the word without moving the author an inch – the virtual book tour.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

Actually Aldag created two web sites. PubBuzz.com, as the name implies, captures the buzz about recently published books. It is a sort of news service, he says, for people who read. The other site, iReadNet.com, features video clips of authors, and is the PR site. Both share data using a open source Web protocol called the RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) news reader.

"Initially we built it as a static web site in html," says web developer Dustin Ruoff of Hatchling Studios (www.m23d.com) in Portsmouth. "We had the basic template of how the site would look, but without the functionality."

That was in March 2002. Aldag tested the idea among authors, got a few to sign up, and then the Web team developed the video database "virtual book tour" concept into a working prototype. Now Aldag can control both sites from his home computer. He can also offer clients the ability to run their own book publicity Internet-Television programming from their homes.

A 30-year veteran of the book promotion business, Aldag now takes his own digital camera to important book events like the recent Book Country in New York and Book Expo America in Los Angeles. When right-wing political commentator Bill O’Reilly got into a war of words with satirist Al Franken, Kurt Aldag was there with his camera. Flashing a media press pass, he films literary events and interviews authors individually. Then he pops video clips onto his web sites in an appealing, accessible format. It is guerilla digital TV focused on books.

"His search ratings are very high, Ruoff says. "The software allows the user to tie all the key words to search functions."

The RSS capability allows even more flexibility. Now any computer user with an RSS reader can access the new data from Aldag’s site directly to the computer desktop.

"RSS users don’t have to rely on whatever Google says is at the top of the news," Ruoff says. "This kind of direct communication can replace email newsletters and has come back into vogue due to all the spam and viruses in email. This ‘push’ technology does an end run around email and goes directly to the end-user."

THE UP SHOT

I like this idea both as an author and as a book reader. I watched my way through all of the video clips on the PubBuzz.com homepage just to see Michael Moore and Susan Orlean and Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly in the flesh. The idea that I too could appear, as a writer, talking on the same clickable database is pretty appealing. Readers like to see the personality behind the book, and video is the ideal medium. Just a few seconds with Walter Isaacs, author of the new Ben Franklin biography, and I felt I knew the guy personally. Video is an incredibly intimate medium.

The video footage is a bit on the shaky side at times. Aldag is not a professional cameraman, not yet. His video takes us into places where authors meet the public, so if the microphones are bad, or the cameraman is way back in the tenth row, so are we. Since the celebrity footage comes from big book events, we get dishes clanking at dinners and the inevitable crowd coughing and jostling. The videos should load faster, and will in later editions, I’m told. Viewer also need a time counter that tells us how long the tape will last in minutes, and maybe a slider bar, typical in streaming video, that lets us advance the movie manually.

This is, after all, a project in motion. Now that we know the concept works technically, Aldag has three huge tasks ahead of him. First, he has to fill the site with content, adding new film clips and new authors in a never-ending series of updates. Web users are ravenous. They consume new stuff, more new stuff, and then more. But Aldag is fearless and promises an endless supply of literary film clips coming.

Secondly, iReadNet.com has to make sure the "right" people are looking at the web site. If I could get book editors at top publications or TV stations to see my novel online, and then that lead to book reviews of media coverage – wow. Authors live for that kind of publicity, the kind many publishers no longer can afford to provide. Aldag’s "virtual tour" concept could be the missing link between authors, the media, and book buyers.

Thirdly, he needs paying customers. Authors and publishers and book promoters need to sign up to run their video clips on the network. The current rate is $500 a month, which Aldag says, literally gives the buyer his own dot-TV channel on iReadNet. The user can then update data whenever he pleases. Since most books, Aldag notes, only get a three-month push by publishers, the tab comes to $1,500 for the online service. That’s less, Aldag points out, than the cost of sending one author to one city in the flesh.

The system seems ideally designed for publishers. St. Martin’s Press, for example, releases nearly 700 books a year. By creating their own TV channel on iReadNet, the publisher could introduce readers on PubBuzz to as many as 50 authors a month, since the clients of iReadNet provide the content for its sister web site.

"My idea is to automate as much of the process as possible," Aldag says. "And take the drudgery and cost out of things. This is a way to eliminate postage, airplanes, hotels. Those are all high-ticket items that don’t do a darn thing to sell a book. There’s no other dot-TV dot-journalism venture like this in the field."

And with 55,000 commercial books published in this country every year -- Aldag has a big field to plow.