Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Seaborn iPad app update in iTunes

Just received word from Apple.  Version 1.1 is available.  Please update!

...or is it "fewer" typos?

 

Ebook conversion tip: MS Word to clean HTML

CKEditor (http://ckeditor.com) is a free editor built for web pages. You can run it locally, or copy it to a hosted site, and what's really cool is the MSWord to HTML conversion built into CKEditor. I've been using it to convert docs to HTML for a while.

You can try it out the editor on my site here:
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/ckeditor/editor/

A few easy steps:

1. Open CKEditor in your browser.
2. Click the MS Word button. Looks like this:

3. Select your book/story/document from MS Word and paste it into the CKEditor Word conversion dialogue. Looks like this: 

4. Hit the OK button and when you see your doc show up in the editor, click the "Source" button at the top left. This shows you what CKEditor's using behind the scenes. Yes, very nice, clean HTML.

The "Source" button:

The HTML:

"Enhanced ebooks" and the near-future of book promotion

I'm designing a framework for a book promotion app--a framework that will allow me to drop in content, a bit of custom work, and create something exciting and fresh for just about any book.  The first title is Seaborn--really a first test of this framework to get it out there, into the app store, get some feedback, and then come back and refine everything.  The general idea is an app that showcases a novel's story, characters, art, notes, author info and linking, all wrapped around a complete (animation, music, scoring, progression, etc.) and engaging game based on the world, characters, scenes, or ideas from the book.  

And I'm nearly complete with the first iPad book/game app...expecting to wrap it up this week.

Seaborn--the app--will feature a fast paced, animated, deep-sea diving adventure called "Jelly Jam"--which, although there are boatloads of Cnidarians (the phylum that includes jellies, sea anemones, corals, etc.), it also includes what I think are some cool visual bursts of action--the one with Kassandra rocketing past a whale in the abyss gave me goosebumps.  It's one thing to know your characters, having written books about them.  It's also one thing to draw and paint your characters.  Somehow--I didn't expect it--it's entirely another thing to see your character in motion. Unexpectedly beautiful motion.

A bunch more to say at this point, but I'm tired, and I'm going to sleep. 

Here's a batch of screenshots of a test sequence on the iPad--and I'm telling you, as stills, these just don't do the game justice.  Here's the one that gave me goosebumps--I'm playing a game, and it's like I'm in the freakin' story.  I've designed this game, created this look, every animation, coded it all, and still it shocked me to see my character shooting past this whale in the deep blue.

Click on the others to see the full view.

Love to hear what you think!  Email me at chrishoward.author@gmail.com

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Games for books

So, I'm busy developing games and game ideas on the iPhone and iPad.

At some point I'll post something useful and somewhat detailed on iPhone/iPad development using the Cocos2D  game engine and the integrated physics engines Box2D and Chipmunk...

But right now, I'm having too much fun digging into Cocos2D to do anything. I haven't even had time to pay much attention to the iPhone OS4 licensing debate/debacle.

I've been playing around with OpenGL programming on the iPhone for a month or two, getting some crazy wonderful results on a 480x320 screen—and now on the 1024x768 iPad screen, and although it's been fun to work at the OpenGL level—and I enjoy thinking about game engine design, I don't want to write a game engine.  I don't want to build event structures and layering and physics and sprite management and background and effects audio and scene transition handling and... (I'll leave the process of continuing this list as an exercise for the reader).

Why, when I can use any of the kick ass game frameworks out there?  I'm primarily looking into developing 2D games with book tie-ins—top down and isometric rpg games, scrollers, etc.  

Think interactive book trailer.  Here's what I'm thinking: wouldn't it be cool to get a sense of the characters and world for a book coming out this summer through a fun, easy-to-get-into adventure on your desktop, notebook, or mobile device?  Picture an app with sample chapters (or all of them!), author info, world and character notes, wrapped around a game.

All the naysayers on "Enhanced eBooks" be damned, I say!

Enter Cocos2D for iPhone (http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org), a strongly supported, full-featured 2D game engine for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. 

Keep in mind that at this point, even though I've just started, I have a full working game "scene".  I'm actually building a game while I'm exploring Cocos2d features--along with some of the features of the physics engine, Box2D. 

I've created some background art, a few animated sprites, and spent several hours building a game—screenshots below.  I have a main character who can walk or swim around the ocean floor, has a choice of weapons--with sound effects and scheduled reload times, a batch of skeletal bad guys who want to kill this character with terrain and character following behavior, and some sinister music playing in the background.  I can drag my animated character around the screen with transitions into swimming, landing, and pulling out a crossbow—weapon of choice for underwater combat.  I have a bunch of events set up, including game pausing and interruption handling, display effects, and scene completion—when all the bad guys are out of action, and my character's still standing...or not (see the second screenshot below) 

All in a matter of hours.  That's how badass Cocos2D is.

Screenshots of a working piece of a game:

And if the bad guys get you...

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/about

Dude, where's your iPad?

According to UPS, which claims it will have it on my doorstep on April 3rd, it's right there in beautiful downtown Shenzhen with an ORIGIN SCAN and just this morning, BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED!

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Ebooks: Apple will be the one to beat.

I'm on an email thread with some colleagues talking about ebook readers (Kindle, Sony, Nook, etc.) and social reading services like copia (http://www.thecopia.com).  And as promising as a lot of this is—I love every bit of this because it's heading in a direction I want reading and publishing to go: more ebooks—to me, Apple's iPad looks like the device to get. 

I've gone through a few generations of iPhone—the original, 3G, and I currently use the 3GS.  I love the Kindle app for the iPhone.  I’m also a fan of eInk and have used Sonys and Kindles for several years—love the paper-like experience of the tech. 

I haven't used an iPad yet—I just ordered one, but I already think eInk's days are numbered. 

Apple's really done something here with the iPad.  Here's what every other ebook reader vendor is up against: color, clarity, brighter, bigger screens with support for full length video, superior audio, ability to plug into full sized TVs and projectors, WiFi and 3G access to the largest media channel—audio books, movies, television, podcasts, indie content—and ebooks!, not just annotating but full word processing, video editing, and presentation capabilities built in, 150,000 existing apps, a device that’s ready and adaptable through app development with the largest developer community of any mobile device.  I can't see any ebook reader effort coming close to what the iPad seems to promise, except maybe a better name.

As far as the social reading side, the Copia thing, I think that’s an even steeper climb than the device market.  The major social nets like Facebook already provide the groups, apps, linking, twitter cross-posting, commenting and content creation tools for readers—and all the authors and readers are already there, registered, friending, communicating.  Who's up for joining a new community on the ground floor? Unless copia is radically different or focused in the way that Mendeley is different, focused on providing community and content services for academic and corporate researchers, I can't see it taking off. 

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

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Kindle pricing and boycott hubub

Jay Lake posted a good one on an email he received about Kindle users boycotting books over $9.99, and the resulting comment thread was enlightening and somewhat weird.

Here's my comment:

I think it's crazy to think that "almost all Kindle users honor the $9.99 boycott of digital books." I have a Kindle and a Sony and the Kindle Reader on my iPhone.  I buy textbooks, programming books, many books over $9.99 for my Kindle. Most of the Kindle users I know also buy books $10 and up. Maybe the boycott only applies to fiction?

The "no publishing costs" error is also common. Time is money, and I know how much time it takes to convert, test, review any book that goes from one format into another--and the crazy things that happen to characters, line-spacing, paragraph styling, chapter headings, tables of contents, when books are fed through automated converters.  It's a costly process.

I'm wondering if what's really happening here with the pricing is that Green is out in hardcover, and Tor wants to drive buyers to it.  Seems like good sense to me. Tor can, at any time, go in and change the Kindle price to suit the market, to suit the shift to a new edition, to suit any ebook strategy they're working.  It's not like the book price is printed on the cover.  It's changeable. 

Here's what I know about item pricing for the Kindle:
A publisher can set any price between USD $0.99 and $200, and the publisher will always receive a set percentage of that suggested retail price, even if the product is sold at a promotional price by Amazon.  The standard is 35%, but I imagine the big pubs negotiate a far better rate.
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I love Kindle, too

From the ordering process and subsequent email from Kindle Support--"Congratulations on your purchase and welcome to Amazon Kindle 2" to the day it was carried off the UPS truck and right down to the damn cool black packaging with the tear-off with the words, "Once upon a time..."

I really got into ebooks and the eInk technology a couple years ago with my first generation (US) Sony Reader (Alice bought it for me for Christmas).  My e-reading went almost immediately to around 15% and climbed from there.   I was buying books at Fictionwise, through the Sony store, anywhere I could get them.

I also started using the reader to read and edit my own work.  My normal process is to write and keep a running updated version of my current book on paper.  There's just something different about reading and editing on paper over the screen.  I write almost entirely on the computer, but have to do editorial reading on both.  I see the words differently on paper.

Earlier this year I added the free Amazon Kindle app for my iPhone and, for the first time, I was allowed into the Kindle Store as a consumer.  (My books have been in the Kindle store for a while).  I read the predictions of doom for Amazon's move in this, but it just seems like cheap armchair business strategy.  My opinion: Amazon's brilliant for opening up the Kindle Store to the millions who live off their iPhones, but already have readers, can't afford one, or don't want one.

I have friends who bought the first gen Kindle, and so I had the opportunity to play around with the device long before buying one. 

I like everything about the Kindle except the delicate feel of the device.  My Sony seems tougher to me, with a metal body, fold over case.  I'm afraid to throw the Kindle into my backpack. 

What am I reading on the Kindle?  Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss, Patricia McKillip's Od Magic, China Mieville's The City and The City.

Interesting note:
My daughter Chloe was asking for a Kindle for Christmas--has been asking for a while, but she's changed her mind, wants an iPod Touch instead.  Then she can get the Kindle app, and have a more capable device.

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Kindle

I'm off to buy a Kindle! Alice bought me a Sony Reader for Christmas a couple years ago. I love it, and I've been using it since. But it's time to get the new thing.

Get your own:

Does FREE work?

To narrow that down a bit, does the posting of stories, novels, and art for free downloading, reading, viewing, and even sharing, make any difference in print book sales, in attracting more traffic to an author's or illustrator's blog, in doing anything to help that artist's career?

I give away a lot.  I have a whole blog dedicated to some of my Creative Commons licensed content.  I post my art regularly here on theophrast.us, on Flickr, deviantArt, and other art forums and presentation sites.  I posted an SF novel Nanowhere almost four years ago under Creative Commons license.  I post 3 to 5 panels for my web comic Saltwater Witch every week. 

Free, all of it.  Free to download, to read, to share, some of it out there for years. 

Does it work, giving all of this away if you're just starting out?  (I know it works if you're an established author, celeb, marketing guru, so I don't need the Doctorow, Scalzi, Anderson, Godin, etc. cases). 

I'm curious to hear what other writers, illustrators, and readers think.  Maybe you can guess what I think by what's on my blog or the Saltwater Witch site.  I'm considering posting my entire novel Seaborn, which came out last July.  And I'm wondering about the effectiveness of free.  I completely get Tim O'Reilly's aphorism that the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.  Maybe my real question is does giving things away solve that problem?

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ChrisCommons
Saltwater Witch Web Comic.