How to Publish eBooks: Twitter and Linkedin. The Personal vs the Professional

Last week Twitter announced an end to a significant part of its near three year relationship with Linkedin (many news links on this include http://mashable.com/2012/06/29/twitter-drops-linkedin-partnership/ and http://allthingsd.com/20120629/twitter-cuts-off-linkedin-whos-next/). Some of these stories are pretty technical and for self-publishers might seem rather abstruse, but they reveal an essential truth: the need to think carefully about how you use social media to develop your self-publishing brand. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest can all be employed for different facets of your life and control the interaction between these different services.

On the basis that both self and traditionally published authors use social media to promote their work, at least for some of the time, it is important to think it through:

1. All forms of social media are instant. You can post a blog and receive an instant reply, you can see an interesting tweet and immediately respond. No waiting for the post office to open, no irritation over early closing, weekend shutdowns, or 1970s style communications. BUT, keeping control is the key to making social media work for you, not the other way round.
2. Personal contacts with true friends are different to even the most subtle forms of promotion for your ebook, or writing projects. Being true to your personaility and writing heartfelt social media posts are not the same as telling a friend what you had for breakfast, or whether your children are ill, or what your 5K running time was this afternoon. Real friends are forgiving and affectionate so you can be relaxed with them. 
3. Professional contacts can be addressed in a relaxed way as well, but some caution is required. A visit to the bank manager requires a little preparation, slightly smarter clothes perhaps, carefully formulated sentences in discussion. Online, even a chance encounter with any professional contact can be loaded with significance.
4. Twitter is used for both personal and professional reasons by millions of people. Generally though it's a swift form of interaction, reaching out to a global community of like-minded individuals. You can choose how to make it work best for you and mold it  accordingly. Some people have two accounts, one for their work, one for personal contact. The distinction forces you to be clear about what you say, when and to whom.
5. Some also make a distinction between their use of different social media: Facebook feels more personal for instance, Linkedin is clearly professional, Google+ can be both, Twitter can be both. It is worth having a view about this. Once you’ve posted online your words live forever as part of your slowly accumulating digital identity. 

So, the separation of Twitter and Linked in interesting because Linkedin is a dedicated professional network, while Twitter is used for both the personal and the professional. Twitter will have their own commercial reasons for their recent action but it highlights the need to be clear about the nature of your posts. Twitter feeds will no longer be sent automatically onto Linkedin, but you can send your Linkedin status to Twitter. For self-publishers this can be used as part of the build for your author brand, because when you use Linkedin as the starting point, there is no confusion in your mind about how to approach what to say - it’ll be focused and professional, clear-headed and targeted to your market. 

By the way, you do have a Linked in account don’t you?

Coming Soon: More Twitter Hints and Tips and Why I chose Indie Publishing.

How to Self-Publish: Greedy Publishers?!

Have consumed a large amount of bile and invective over the holiday period (mainly at the BookExpo in New York)! Actually, have been looking at the blogs and web sites of successful self-publishers to see what they do, how they do it, why, how and what advice they have to pass on to others. Almost all of them are generous to a fault, but quite a few are also voraciously anti-publisher. If you check the sites of successful self-publishers (such as the mighty J A Konrath and the industrious Kristine Katherine Rusch) you’ll find they really do hate the bricks and mortar publishers, regarding them as greedy, self-serving, crooked and above all, anti-author.

I’ve worked in the industry as a writer, publisher and marketeer for a long time and I think there needs to be a clearer understanding about what’s going on.

It’s true that publishers do not give enough to the authors, it’s also true that authors can now go direct to market in a way that was impossible even five years ago. But that doesn’t mean that publishers are instrinsically bad, but they are slow, out-of date, stuck in their ways and too reliant on the ‘old boy’ network! That makes them an easy target for those who can now break free from the old thinking.

What’s really going on here, is the creation of a fairer system, because there are genuine choices to be made, informed choices for both readers and writers, a new system and quickly evolving system.

The key word here is informed.

A traditional publisher is basically a business that has made its own choice to create or distribute products which happen to be books. Some people within publishing love what they do, others perform straightforward business functions such as administration, accounting, sales, marketing or straightforward management tasks. That’s a long list of job functions: the bigger the publisher, the larger its infrastructure. It has to make money from its activites to pay this long list of staff. It also has to satisfy investors, owners and bankers. It has to make a profit to do this. Within this structure the author plays as important, but not necessarily defining part. Of course, without the author the traditional trade publisher would not exist, but up to a few years ago, an author could not be successfully published, without a publisher. For over two hundred years an ecosystem of publishers and literary agents has developed both to feed itself and its authors, a sympathetic parasitic structure which has achieved an uneasy truce within itself for the sake of long term self-interest.

One part of this uneasy truce was the author contract. 

It may not be obvious now, but the hit rate of published books is very low. When I first entered publishing (an embarrassingly long time ago) I worked for a while at a large conglomerate. Only one in twenty books made its advance back. The imperfect process of commissioning new books, picking the "gems from the dirt", was an art at best, guesswork for much of the time. So while many books were left in the slushpile, even those that did make it onto the Publisher's list rarely made any money for publisher or author.

In such circumstances the author contract was designed to give the publisher all rights in case something could be made from a book: TV, book club, electronic, audiovisual, serial rights all would be considered if not tried, but again, only a small percentage would be successful. Part of the problem was the volume of books published each year by each publisher.

But along came Amazon, then ebook formats, then the iPad and a revolution fuelled by smartphones and tablets. The old model really is, suddenly, out of date and turned on its head. And the entire structure of the traditional publishers is being forced into a complete rethink. Technology has overwhelmed the book industry, it's a Great Deluge and just as potent.

So, the traditional publishers are engaging in a massive landgrab. As businesses, they are complicated systems of vested interests and will try everything they can to survive, including the aggressive chase of electronic rights in old contracts. At their best, the publishers are also trying to assert their historical skills in editing and marketing (although spread very thinly, more on this in forthcoming post), to allow an author to focus on what traditionally they are good at, writing. But you’ll notice that the most successful authors are also very good at marketing. J K Rowling, James Patterson, George R R Martin – these people know their market, they keep in touch with the different facets of it, they engage in many different ways, through videos, films, magazine articles. The top authors are top marketeers, whoever publishers them.

But now, back to the choice. 

A self-publisher too must be good at marketing, in fact you must be a good business(wo)man. The big difference between you and a traditional publisher is that you only have yourself to feed (perhaps a family, or two!), but a publisher still maintains its structure of staff and buildings. It's an unequal battle which is begining to make the publishers seem more like the dinosaurs wiped out by the comets that struck the earth 65 million years ago. The insects and the mammals survived because they were more adapable. Publishers are beginning to walk the Dinosaur Road.

Self-publishers need to understand that the traditional publishers are trying to find their place in this new world, and that in order to survive, keep employing people and buildings they make different choices than motivated individuals. Understanding this doesn't make it acceptable for you, but it does help make a credible choice because now you can self-publish, do the marketing yourself and reap the full rewards of your hard work.

Coming soon: New Markets for Short Stories and Take Your Time.
image courtesy of imageegami/Shutterstock

How to Self-Publish: Review Other Writers!

In the modern world, with social media networks, online retailers, ereader devices, smartphones and tablets the job of a writer, any writer, is more rewarding than ever before. Your work can be published more quickly, you can engage directly with readers and the community of writers is vocal and supportive.

In the last week or so I’ve been taking a good look at online reviews, particularly those of writers on writers (take a look at this site by Jade Varden (author of the Deck of Lies series), for instance which has both a terrific post on this subject and a range of useful comments from many different writers). 

With the explosion of self-publishing the competition between authors to gain those rare places in lists of the traditional trade houses is greatly reduced, because anyone can, and many are, doing it for themselves! The number of indie publishing houses, author co-operatives and self-publishing blogs has blossomed into a huge eco-system. The liberating effect of the internet and the obvious need for all writers to seek advice has created a supportive framework that celebrates the fact that the community of writers is part of the greater community of readers, participating and engaging with each other –  helping, commenting, critiquing.

This is considerably more healthy that the competing network of professional reviewers whose views we all seek for the kudos and authenticity, but whose job it is to entertain, often by taking a negative or deliberately contrary view. 

On the whole, writers are cultured people, with considered (often wildly differing) views, who work hard and juggle their daily lives with the joy and pain of writing. Anyone who writes often or regularly, understands the efforts of another writer. We might dislike the subject, the story, the angle or the characters, but we take a fundamentally empathetic view of the effort. And that leads to a degree of compassion that can turn constructive criticism into a powerful force of good.

So, if you read a book and have something to say about it, go to Amazon or your blog, or the author’s blog, and say it. It doesn’t have to be long, but make it constructive, useful, think about how you would respond to a comment, how you might use it to make your next book better. Dictatorial comments are not required, but genuine responses are very helpful to an honest writer and the mirrorball of comment in the form of multiple reviews can be the most helpful teacher for all of us.

Perhaps this is the great liberation, the great release of the Internet, not just that anyone can publish, but that anyone can comment on anything that’s published. Of course, we have to write well, submit ourselves to editing, to market ourselves and our books well, but ultimately we can now listen to the wide range of comments of our fellow writers and our readers. It's a virtuous circle that benefits us both as readers and as self-publishers.

Coming Soon: Audiobooks for Promotion and Podcasting for Fun!

How to Self-Publish an eBook: Pre-Launch Marketing

Gathering Momentum

Promotion and publicity in the weeks, months even years before actual publication is critical to the success of your ebook. A common criticism of traditional print publishers is that they take so long to put the book out (somewhere between 12 and 24 months). Some of this is to do with the structure of the industry and the demands of wholesalers such as Ingrams, B&T and Gardners, but, in fact, it also gives a focal point for the essential pre-launch marketing, the momentum for successful publication.

This blog is about self-publishing ebooks, but the the lessons are the same. As I’ve mentioned before, there are some basic assumptions that you’ve done or are doing the following:

• researched your market, studied the authors and publishers you admire
• joined as many social networks as you feel comfortable posting in regularly.
• included your Twitter, blog and/or Facebook links in all your contacts
• sent your ms to an editor and proof reader
• created, or briefed the best cover you can
• you intend to published through a widely-distributed route, such as Smashwords, BookBaby or Amazon Kindle.

There’s a big difference between writing and publishing (or successful self-publishing), and you can write it as an equation:

Publishing – Writing = Marketing

Or to put it more positively:

Writing + Marketing = Publishing

The pre-launch phase of self-publishing your book can take many, many months, but every second of this is worthwhile to achieve the momentum necessary to create a successful self-publication:

1. Use your market research to create key words and themes based on your book
2. Release a planned stream of content based on the key-words and themes. This should include blogposts, recommends of others blogs, interesting news items and websites on your themes.
3. Create a blog which is the focus of this stream of content. Make it snappy, consciously offering items of interest to others, not just promoting your own work.
4. Invent ways of adding video to your blog. You can open a YouTube account, upload files to your YouTube channel, then embed them in your blog. The video content could be as simple as you describing where you write and why, with shots of view from your window.
5. Make sure your blog includes links to other sites and blogs on your subject area, so that your potential reader begins to trust your blog as source of genuine interest.
6. Create a Facebook page for your book and ask people to Like it. Interact with them as you write the book, giving them insights into the characters and landscape, and the process of writing itself.
7. Consider guest posting. Google for blogs which cover your area of interest, comment frequently and productively, then offer yourself as a guest post. This is a good way of building a reviewer list, so that you can request their help. When you’re ready, consider sending them privileged access to a pre-publication offer. Be open with them and ask for a review, either on their blog or, preferably on Amazon.
8. Use your email contact list. If you have someone’s email address, this is much more powerful than any of the social network techniques, although needs to be used with great care. Over a period of months, send just three or four emails, without a hard sell, to keep people you know, in touch with what yu are doing. Again, when you’re ready, consider sending them priviledged access to a pre-publication offer.
9. Offer potential book covers for comment on your blog and use this as a genuine way of engaging with your audience. People will be more committed to your book if they feel they’ve been involved in some way or other.
10. Just before publication offer a limited time, limited edition offer, and give yourself a whole month to promote it.

These are just a few ideas for pre-launch Marketing. There are plenty of other good resources and case studies out there to help you with this, such as Victorine Writes, and Scott Rauber's marketing Your Own Ebook.

Coming Soon: Help with Facebook and How to Write a Review

10 ideas for Successful Promotion

So you’ve made your ebook, it has a great cover, it’s well edited and your friends are busy helping you out with recommendations and reviews. The first few days of sales on Amazon, the Nook and the iBookstore have been great, better than you dared hope, and you go to bed each night smiling at your good fortune, patting yourself on the back for a job well done. But then, you watch the sales reports and figures are slowly dropping away, dwindling into single figures.  So what’s next? More hard work I'm afraid. Here are some ideas:

1. Write a short story and give it away free, but promote your main book at the end, and in the short story description, and in your biography.
2. Give your book away for 1 week. Promote the pants off it on Twitter, Facebook, Google plus and Pinterest.
3. Collect your best reviews together and make a website out of them. Buy a cheap domain based on the name of your book, use the cover image as the landing page, then set up a click through to a single page with all the great reviews and a link to the Amazon, B&N and iBookstore page with your book.
4. Write thirty marketing stings of 120 character descriptions of your main characters, plots, themes and locations. Use the last 20 characters to link to the Facebook page of your book (you do have one of these don’t you?). Spend one month tweeting with these stings.
5. With your smartphone (or your children’s, or friends!) make a short video of your workplace, room, study. Pan around the room describing the books, paintings, computers and other detritus, connecting everything to the writing of your book. Post this on your Youtube channel (you do have one don’t you?) and link to it on Facebook, Twitter etc.
6. Set up a blog and write it in the style of one of your characters. Wordpress or Blogger are both free. Pretend to be your main character and commentate on news and trending events. Facebook and Tweet about this.
7. Depending on your subject matter, set up a blog or forum on the subject of your book. Make sure you think this through and give real advice or links, or help so that readers can gain something genuinely useful.
8. Find an extract from your book which is self-contained, perhaps 2000-4000 words and send it to the editor of online magazines which feature your sort of writing. When you’ve identified the magazines, makes sure you follow all the subscribers and followers of the magazine and focus on the content of the extract in your tweets.
9. Use emails. You have friends and work colleagues. Send them an apologetic but simple email asking for their support in promoting and selling your book. Include a small jpg, png or gif file of the cover as visual stimulus. Make the email creative and interesting, don't just beg!
10. Use Pinterest. Create a board which shows the places in your book. Find images on Google (with proper credits to the original website) and your own photographs. Use short snappy captions. Add a link to each image, leading either to your Facebook page or directly to your Amazon book page.

So, it's all about social media engagement: be creative and give ‘em something free. 

Coming soon: Print on Demand: a Useful Complement to eBooks?

Successful eBook Marketing: Pinterest

I love Pinterest. It allows you to express yourself in a completely different way to Facebook (FB), Twitter (TW), Google+ or any of the other social media outlets. But the best thing is it complements rather than competes all of the other forms of social engagement.

So, for writers this is a big benefit. If you self-publish, setting up a virtuous circle of links between Pinterest, FB, TW, your own blog, and the various places where you books is being sold, you can watch your audience grow and engage with your readers. 

Pinterest is almost entirely visual. Its immediate impact is completely different from FB and TW, because it focuses on images. Using the concept of boards (the sort you might have in your writing room/space/study/understairs cupboard) you pin images of your own, or clips from web pages.

At first I was slightly disenchanted with it because the various feeds and boards they highlighted showed so many shiny, perfect photographs that I wasn’t sure that any normal person could match up. However, as the weeks have gone by I’ve realised that its the interface that’s shiny and perfect! Almost everything I’ve put up has looked good. And it’s adaptable to mobile devices so still manages to look good on iPods and Android phones. You can follow and like others, and they can reciprocate.

So how can you use it to promote your writing?

1. Create a mood board with images that represent themes of your book. Obviously if the book’s about Rome, then let’s see some images of Rome, but also, if your book is romantic, you might find some beautiful places around the world that give the reader a sense of how you’re thinking.
2. Created a board for each main character in your book. Using Google searches you can find so many fabulous shots. Your main character might be a knife-toting zombie from New York. Well, find some shots of New York at night time, a spooky cemetery, and some sharp hunting blades. You might write a recipe journal, so you can find some ingredients shots, some victorian kitchen parlours.
3. If you have some cover ideas, sketches, or images you’ve created for the book, put them in here too. If you multiple books, put all the covers on a board.
4. Readers are often fascinated by a writer's inspirations. Give them a board with the places, peoples, buildings, colours or shapes that have influenced you.
5. Each image can be linked to another page, so you can link it to your Amazon  page, or the iTunes link for your book, or your blog.
6. Pin responsibly! The copyright dangers are obvious. Always give a full credit to the source of the image. Always give generous praise to the source. 

One major criticism of ebooks is that we lose the touch and feel of books. Pinterest gives us a new way of extending the look and atmosphere of what we write, so try it out and see what you think.

Some great people to try on Pinterest include Sarah Dessen, Kaitlin Ward both included on a longer list of recommended Young Adult authors on Pinterest on the YA Highway blog. Of course, I have my own which you could look at too!

Coming soon: Using a Facebook Page for your Book and Going Exclusive with Amazon.

Successful eBook Marketing: Twitter

I read an interesting article the other day about how Twitter is dealing with spammers by suing some of the software sites that generate automated spam and phishing activity and it reminded me of some basics for Twitter. I have two accounts, one as an author (a pen name) and the other as a publisher. They have very different dynamics, because one is promoting a single product (on a long, slow burn), the other has a multitude of agendas and this leads to some very different interactions. But there are some common lessons:

1. Engage. Above all engage. Join in conversations, politely, but have something interesting to say.
2. Your main purpose might be to promote your ebook but don’t do it all the time, it will put people off. And find interesting ways of promoting in 140 characters: some writers take quotes from their books, others link to their own blogs with teasing questions, some will write about their characters. Variety and mystery are essential factors in gaining and keeping an audience on Twitter.
3. Identify people who are interested in the same things as you - music, art, cupcakes, gardening. It doesn’t matter what. If you’re genuinely interested in the subject(s) then you’ll have more natural interchanges with your fellow tweeps.
4. Retweet tweets that you think are useful, or which complement the subject matter of your writing. If you can, add a comment to say why you've retweeted. Over time this will make you more helpful to others who will begin to retweet you back.
5. If someone follows you, don’t automatically follow them back. Check them out, see if they’re real, see if they have interests that chime with yours. Ask yourself if you’d be happy to see a tweet from them, even if it’s just once every ten days.
6. If someone follows you, follow them straight back. Yes I know that contradicts what I’ve said above, but this is a valid method for building followers and that’s how some people have several thousand of them. Personally I worry that of the 12K followers for some tweeps I've seen, only a few hundred must be fellow travellers, the rest being marketeers, evangelists and spammers who will never engage.
7. Be clear about your goals. Having fun and exploring is just as valid as being heavily focused on your own ebooks. Some people tweet in order to find friends from other parts of the world, or connect with new ideas. It doesn't matter what, just do it with conviction!
8. Be patient. Quality is definitely more important than quantity. It takes time to build genuine groups of like-minded people. Watch how others talk about their work, see how effective they are, read the blogs they read, join the forums they discuss.
9. Be persistent. Whenever you tweet, always look for new tweeps to follow, chase down the bloggers and online mags in your areas of interest and see who is following them.
10. Deal with spam. Personally I report any spam I find. I’ve had hundreds of follows from so many innocent sounding porn stars from a every US State. A quick look at their web-address usually gives it away, or the randomness of their three tweets. A follow can also qualify as spam if its unwelcome attention from marketing companies promoting a product which is of no interest to you. So, block it. You don’t have to clutter your news feeds with stuff you don’t want to read.

Some people like to tweet all the time and scan all the tweets that come into their feed. Others allocate a small amount of time every day or week and so restrict their activity. Whatever you do, be consistent and try to integrate the activity into your daily/weekly routine. In time you'll find you have an audience that will respond to your requests for downloading that free chapter of yours on the Kindle, enjoy it so much that they'll buy the full ebook!

So, even with the ever-present dangers of spam, there are so many ways to promote your ebook through Twitter. It's fantastic.

Coming soon: Nook vs iBookstore vs Kindle and Yes, Size Matters, Even for ePubs.

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2

Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?

Self-Publishing eBooks: Ask Yourself Some Questions.

So why not find a good freelance proof reader, and an editor, perfect your book, then release it as an ebook, straightaway? 

In the last post I looked at some of the issues relating to finding a traditional publisher. While there’s much more to say on that subject, the real purpose of this blog is give people information and inspiration about self-publishing. That’s because there’s so much on the internet about this, it can be difficult to relate it to individual needs.

So, yes, absolutely it is possible to write a text, find a good proof reader and a constructively critical editor, find some simple software and send it off to Amazon, the Apple iBookstore and Google. Self-publishing for the modern world. 

But before you take the plunge you need to ask yourself some questions:

1. Am I passionate about what I’m writing?

2. Will I be able to advocate for it, at every opportunity?

3. Am I interested primarily in the writing itself, the achievement of having done it?

4. Do I want recognition for my achievement?

5. Is the nature of the recognition more important than the sales?

6. Are sales, and a means of earning a living, more important than kudos for its own sake?

7. Am I promoting some other product (seminars, exhibitions, healthcare products)?

If the answer to 3 and 5 is yes then self-publishing may not work for you. That’s because, in the digital community the marketing of what you write is at least as important as the text itself. 

If the answer to any of the other questions is yes, then you’ll need to embrace, if not master, the power of marketing in all it all it’s forms. At the most basic level, engagement with social media is essential, using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and the rest. It’s about momentum, talking to friends and family, asking them to recommend your publication and help you advocate for it. 

Coming soon: Which software is best to make ePubs? How do I create a Facebook Page for my book?

Easy Steps to eBook Success

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at the entire process of creating and publishing your own ebook. This will cover several key elements:

1. Writing
2. Editing and proofing
3. Making an ePub
4. Distributing your book through Amazon, Apple, B&N etc
5. Online marketing, including Google Ads
6. Social media, using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc
7. Traditional marketing, with a special focus on your local media

Self-Publishing and Marketing

Self-publishing is a good option for entrepreneurs because as part of a their strategic offer an ebook presents an easily digestible focus for marketing. Many authors aren't like this and find promotion very difficult so the lure of a traditional publisher seems attractive. However, in this ultra-competitive modern world, where everyone has a book in them, and the means to distribute it, it is impossible to avoid self-promotion in order to create any form of success. A traditional publisher confers respectability but to get the book published in the first place either an agent or an editor has to be persuaded that not only can an author write, but what can they do to help promote their book. The best advice anyone can give to any aspiring writing, in any subject, is *learn how to market*, *learn how to use social media effectively*, *learn how to harness your local press and traditional media.* With these things in your armoury it is possible to build an audience by engaging with potential readers directly and settle in to a means of sustainable communication that works for you, the author. Making the ebook is the easy bit, marketing it effectively is what makes the difference between a bestseller and just another title on a long list of worthy but unread titles.