Asiam Luxe
Check out Asiam Luxe, a new luxury, lifestyle online magazine for the Asian Community. Impeccable writing and intriguing articles abound.
Bob Dylan Prints
Elliott Landy author of Woodstock Vision: The Spirit of a Generation and The Band Photographs penned a fascinating article about the making of Bob Dylan Prints and his history of interaction with the famous singer:
Here is part of that article:
Elliott Landy talks about photographing Bob Dylan in an excerpt from his book, Woodstock Vision. A selection of Bob Dylan Prints are available in the e-shop.
Bob Dylan Prints
The first time I photographed Dylan was at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1967. It was his first public appearance since his motorcycle accident a year earlier. He was playing with The Band, who were unknown at that time.
I was just starting my photographic career and wanted to see the show as well as take some pictures that I could sell. So I called up Dylan’s office, identified myself as a photographer for an underground newspaper, and asked for two press tickets. I brought my cameras to the concert, assuming that since they’d given me tickets as a photographer, I could take photographs. But when I got to Carnegie Hall, there were signs posted stating “No Photographs Allowed,” and the ushers insisted that I check my cameras. I argued, showing my press pass and the tickets from Dylan’s office, but to no avail. So I said, “OK, no pictures allowed,” and checked half my cameras, but kept the other half—everything that would fit into my pockets and my date’s bag.
Bob Dylan Prints – With The Band, Woodie Guthrie Memorial Concert, Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1968. Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson.
I had a good seat near the front of the hall. Dylan came on stage, and I started snapping away, clicking my shutter only during the loud passages in order to be as discreet as possible.
After a couple of songs Arlene Cunningham, who worked for Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, spotted me taking photographs. Soon she and Albert, whom I did not know at the time, and a guard were all waving to me from the side of the hall telling me to stop taking photographs. I pretended not to see their increasingly frantic waving.
Then Albert gestured to the guard to get me out of the seat. Meanwhile Dylan was playing with The Band, and it was very exciting. The guard came toward me. I knew what was going to happen next. They always go for your film.
Read the full article about Bob Dylan Prints here.
The Systematic Abuse of Britney Spears:
An interesting post by Cathy Schottenstein author of the upcoming book, Twisted: Conflict, Madness, and the Redemptive Power of a Grandaughter’s Love. Read more about Cathy and Beverley’s fascinating story at cathyschottenstein.com
How the Legal System Allowed a Criminal Family to Seize Control of One Woman’s Life
The New Yorker recently published a comprehensive article entitled “Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare” chronicling how the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life, her career, and her finances—and held onto that control for well over a decade. Spears, thirty-nine, has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, “a legal structure,” The New Yorker defines “in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others.” Commonly called a guardianship, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves.
The conservatorship was instituted by Spears’s family—in part out of real concerns for her mental health, people close to the family told The New Yorker. But the family was divided by money and fame, and Spears was ultimately stripped of her rights to such an extent that she recently called 911 to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse and alleged in public court that one of her most basic rights—her reproductive freedom—had been taken away. (You can find a link to The New Yorker article at the bottom of this blog.)*
Conservatorships can protect people who are elderly, or who live with severe disabilities or debilitating mental illness. But The New Yorker points out that there is also a wide range of alternatives to conservatorship that are less strict than what Spears has experienced, such as conditional powers of attorney or formal shared control of finances. Read more
Inside the Minds of Authors Podcast
Ever wondered what inspires authors to write their book? Inside the Minds of Authors explores this question and many more with popular and up-and-coming authors.
The host, D.C. Gomez- an award winning author, understands the journey authors go through in bringing their works to life and uses her podcast to share it with the world. The podcast features Authors from all genres who are passionate about their craft.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-the-minds-of-authors/id1513839329
DC’s podcast is a fabulous way to hear about authors, their book and the processes they go thru in writing, publishing and promoting their books. Highly recommended!
Read more
Publicize your book in an hour a day
If you can spend an hour a day online searching for new ways to promote your book you’ll be doing yourself a great favor. Probably about 90% of independent authors never sell over 100 books because they spend a great deal of time writing their books and get them up on Amazon, only to sit back and do nothing about promoting the book. Trust us, people are not going to buy your book just because it’s available for sale. You need to keep at it and realize this will be a long haul campaign. So what to do if you’re just starting out?
To publicize your book you’ll want to find bloggers who will read your book and leave reviews for free, especially those who will take an ebook rather than a hard copy for doing so. Take notice if the blogger lists the review on their own blog website. Read more
Make an Author’s website – just don’t use GoDaddy
It’s a wonderful idea for an author to have a website to promote their book. If you have a single book a page with the title of the book in the url of the website it’s a great thing (www.mygreatnovel.com), if you plan to or have multiple titles you may want to use the author’s name as the url (provided it is available. God help you if your name is John Smith. Maybe use a pseudonym). Link your website to your social media like Facebook and start promoting yourself. Now, perhaps you’ll work with a designer who will handle setting up the hosting for you and not have to determine where that should go. Maybe you’ll use a free wordpress site rather than one you host yourself (see wordpress.com).
Ok but that’s not the topic of this post. This post is a cautionary tale of sorts for those of us who have dealt with GoDaddy as a place to host our websites. Read more
How much does it cost to self publish a book?
You’ve written a book, you want to get it on Amazon and KDP, and maybe a few other online outlets. So, how much does it cost to self publish a book? Well, that all depends…
First you need to lay out the book and come up with some cover art. You can achieve this with desktop publishing software like Adobe Indesign, or more likely for the average user, Word Processing software like Microsoft Word. If you can save the document into a PDF you will have the file you need for the interior to upload.
Your cover art will likely be a PDF and need to be high resolution. For instance 300 dpi. If you’re making the artwork yourself try to save into the PDF format which will preserve the quality of the text (something called vector art) as opposed to saving as a JPG file which will make the type part of the picture (called raster art). Vector art will produce clear text on the cover. All the text on the inside PDF will be vector. When you upload your artwork if the resolution isn’t right generally you’ll get an alert. The on demand publishers we recommend have specifications which make clear what the resolution of the images need to be.
So if you can pull this off by yourself, so far your budget is zero. That being said, hiring a Graphic Design Professional is certainly worth thinking about. They also may be able to help you with the ebook version, which is a little harder to do on your own as it requires the ebook format (.mobi is the final format on Amazon but you can upload an ebook) and an interactive table of contents. How much this will cost depends on the designer, but a top notch graphic designer who can design a professional cover and interior for you could be $2000. A discount designer could be a few hundred. Remember though you generally get what you pay for. Read more
Facebook Marketing
Ok so you’ve published your book. Now people have got to see it. Don’t assume thousands of people will just find your book on Amazon and you’ll vacationing in the Caribbean off of the royalties. You have work to do. One of the best means of getting seen besides a companion website with a blog, is to make a Facebook fanpage. You must have a personal Facebook page to create a fanpage. You’ve seen them and probably liked a few of them. The main difference is you like a fan page whereas you friend someone on a personal page. Read more
On Demand Printers and what has happened to Createspace?
While there are other options to the two main players in on demand publishing for the independent author have been Createspace and Ingram Spark. Createspace has essentially been Amazon’s in demand publisher of choice. They where the sound choice for paperbacks which were mostly text. Affordable, of decent quality and with a fast turnaround and a no hassle integration with Amazon. Recently they were taken over by KDP publishing which has been where you would upload your ebook to appear on Amazon Kindle. The merger is actually a good thing as it makes matters easier if you are just publishing now. One place for both, instead of two. Read more
What is On Demand Printing and how can this help me get published?
How on demand publishing has changed the literary landscape.
Let’s first talk about traditional publishing. A book is mass produced on something called an offset press. This is a large scale production which takes a good deal of time to set up and costs thousands of dollars on average for a ‘print run’. The advantage of traditional printing is if say, 10,000 copies are printed the actual cost per piece is fairly low. The downside is it isn’t really worth using traditional printing unless you print thousands of copies because if you do a small run, what with all the prep time and press time, the cost per piece would be extremely high. You might look at it this way. If you produce 10,000 the cost per book might be $2.00, but if you only wanted 50 books the cost per piece might be $200. Not very practical, huh? Read more