Neighborhood Notes: Saving seeds, selling e-books

Did you know you can hand-pollinate plants with a paintbrush? Did you know that you can read e-books and support a neighborhood book store at the same time? True facts! These are things I learned when writing two new pieces for NeighborhoodNotes.com, my favorite hyper-local news site.

As of this morning, you can read this piece about small, independent booksellers who are testing the waters as online merchants and e-booksellers. I had a great time getting to know the owners of Portland’s Broadway Books, St. Johns Booksellers and Microcosm Publishing while diving into the economic and even political issues that have arisen with changes in the publishing industry. My research for this piece harkened back to the Brave New World session on publishing that I attended last year at Wordstock. Honestly, I don’t think the option of indie book stores selling e-books came up at that panel less than a year ago, so I hope this is a sign of new positive options for the industry.

For all you gardeners and locavores, check out this piece on seed saving. I’ve always wondered why anyone would do such a thing when seed packets are so cheap at big-box stores, but it turns out that seed saving can contribute mightily to the biodiversity of a region, or even a neighborhood. And if you’re looking for new ways to dig in to gardening, this story includes advice and workshop dates from experts at Portland’s Independence Gardens, Handmade Gardens, Portland Nursery and Herb’n Wisdom.

Each of these pieces was featured on The Oregonian‘s website, thanks to Neighborhood Notes’ partnership with the Oregonian News Network. The ONN (not to be confused with the Onion News Network) is a hyper-local news stream from several Portland news outlets and blogs, and it’s a good model of the collaboration and web-based innovation that’s helping journalism move forward.

Using a Dipity timeline for Shakepeare

At first glance, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice struck me as odd and fairly racist. I wondered what ole Will was going for when he wrote this play and its comic villain Shylock, with his “pound of flesh” threats, and I wondered what exactly my students were supposed to get from it in our study of Shakespeare this spring.

Then, at my mentor teacher’s nudging, I did a bit of research and found out that this play was written during a time when Jews were expelled from England. This knowledge caused a dramatic shift in my interpretation of the play and I wanted to share the history with my students in a way that wouldn’t put them to sleep.

Having heard of Dipity’s timelines, flipbooks and maps of contemporary news (such as the chronology of the Bin Laden raid or of key events in Charlie Sheen’s string of bad behavior), I created a Dipity timeline showing a brief history of persecution of the Jews in England before Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice.

Overall, Dipity was user-friendly and I was able to combine dates, info and images onto a timeline, flipbook and map in about 20 minutes. The frustrating part came when I realized that Dipity is blocked on many school computers because it’s considered social media. So I remedied this by taking screenshots of each Dipity flipbook page, then cropping them and dropping them into Keynote, and finally exporting to PDF/QuickTime.

I’m pretty new to Dipity and haven’t done much with slideshows in the classroom yet. Any success stories? Frustrations? Recommendations or cautions? The only major caution I have is that every time I look at Dipity.com I get stuck thinking of the “Doo.Da.Dipity.” line from Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours.” Which, of course, is a reminder of that bizarre hip hop hamster commercial. Be warned.

Too many stories! Too many ads! Too many pages!

Flexibility. That’s what all this comes down to.

When our student team initially took to publishing at Issuu.com this year, it was because our newspaper had lost its printing budget. Issuu provided a means of publishing when there wasn’t money for paper and ink.

In April our team used Issuu to publish a two-page tribute to a student who died this year. We remarked over and over again how nice it was to have the option to publish a mini-issue of two pages rather than the typical minimum of four required in print shops.

But in May we found that Issuu helped students solve an entirely different problem. It wasn’t that we didn’t have money for printing, or that we had too few pages to print a full issue. This time was that the students had about 22 pages of content to lay out (that’s right — 22 pages of their ideas and hard work). AND they had raised enough money through ad sales to cover the cost of printing as many as 16 pages.(Our ad sales were almost nil before the budget was cut — necessity truly is the mother of invention, and that should be a blog post in itself.)

So now the puzzle was figuring out how many pages to print (8, 12, or 16?), which pages would be published on paper and which ones would be online-only. There was also the wonderful challenge of juggling page layouts in order to accommodate last-minute ad sales. Can I just say it? These are the BEST PROBLEMS a student newspaper could ever have.

The students handled these challenges deftly, using Issuu as a cornerstone for most of their solutions. (I promise, no one is paying me to say this.) Because it gives them an online publishing option that essentially has the same production process as their print pages, and because Issuu publications aren’t bound by page quantity, students can easily shift the order of their page layouts. If a story needs more time to come together, it can be bumped to the online edition with a longer production timeline. If a page is suddenly dominated by a large new ad, students can add a new online page for the content that gets bumped by the ad.

Once again, it’s all come down to flexibility.

Our final publication of the school year will be released May 31. In the meantime, here’s a link to the newspaper’s previous editions, which have garnered more than 2,000 page views since our online launch in March.

My only complaints about Issuu at this point are that it’s difficult for viewers to post comments, and some readers find the full-screen view hard to navigate. It seems easiest to navigate with a laptop mouse, but a little awkward with a traditional mouse.

If you’re using Issuu for classroom projects or other presentations, let me know how it’s working for you, or if there are other free publishing sites you recommend.

Here’s to having wonderful problems to solve!

My student featured on Smithmag.net

I love me some memoirs. And I love brevity. So when Smith Magazine rolled out the Six-Word Memoir project, I knew it would be part of my life in some way.

Oddly, I’ve never posted my own Six-Word Memoir on SmithMag.net. But I bring it up in conversation and compose mini-memoirs in my head all the time. It’s a brilliant vehicle for sharing personal stories that are razor-sharp.

This month, as a warm-up for their writing exercises, I started asking my high school English students to write six-word memoirs at the beginning and end of our free-writing sessions. I hoped that my students would eventually find meaning in the practice, and I soon found out that one student had taken ownership of the six-word craft in a way I hadn’t expected.

“Ms. Thompson, I love six-word memoirs!” she said when she came to class one morning. “My mom grounded me from my computer, but I told her I had to log on to SmithMag.”

A week or so later, she came to class radiant.

“People are reading my six-word memoirs now!” she said. “I’m getting comments and people like what I’m writing. One of them recommended that I write posts on SheWrites.com.”

Today we were preparing for our last day of the in-class state writing test. I was trying to cross a hundred ‘t’s while dotting a thousand ‘i’s before we started our session. But my mentor teacher asked me to pause and hear some good news from this student.

“They gave me the featured memoir of the day!” our student reported.

I was about to tell her how proud I was of her when she showed me the chosen memoir. Now I’m more than proud of her. I am awed. And grateful.

Classroom Publishing: Issuu.com saves the day!

How does a student newspaper take the prospect of NO MONEY and turn it into an opportunity?

I’ll do my best to make this story short. I’m a student teacher this year at an Oregon high school that is preparing for drastic budget cuts. As such, the budget is nearly gone for production of the student newspaper that I’m helping advise. My mentor teacher and her students were trying not to succumb to doom and gloom, and we started looking for ways to turn this change into an opportunity.

So, again, how does a student newspaper take the prospect of NO MONEY and turn it into an opportunity? First, all of the students agreed to start hustling advertising sales, which is new and kind of scary for a lot of them, but puts them in a situation that is no different than any professional news publication. Second, we started considering affordable (or free!) options for developing an online presence for the newspaper, just in case there were times when we wouldn’t be able to pay for paper publication.

Two years ago a pair of students started developing a website for this paper, and it’s getting close to being ready for launch. But that process is always more complicated than anyone wants it to be. So while that’s in the works, we were looking for free online publishing options. A blog would be the first logical choice, but the school district has blocked any and all social media sites, including blogs. So that was out.

After a bit more digging, I found Issuu.com through an association of journalism teachers in Virginia. Issuu.com is a free (or $20/month for extra features) site that lets you upload just about any kind of document so it can turn into a shiny, almost magical online magazine. The results have a very iPad-y vibe, even when you’re not looking at them on an iPad.

When my mentor teacher and I showed the Issuu.com demo video to our students this week, they were absolutely enchanted. There were pockets of exclamation around the room that were so encouraging: “We could do new issues whenever we want! … We could publish photo spreads in color! … We can put hyperlinks in the stories! … We could link to it on Facebook! … It’s like Christmas morning! … It’s going to make all our dreams come true!”

So our student production manager decided to test the site by uploading files from the students’ most recent issue from December. He showed us the results yesterday and I heard gasps and “wow!” across the classroom. When he finished the demonstration, we actually burst into applause.

We’re planning to use Issuu.com while the newspaper transitions to online publishing, and it’s likely we’ll continue using it even after the paper’s full website is launched. We like it that much. I particularly like that it still leaves room for students to practice page design while incorporating web elements such as embedded video functions (hopefully this will make for a good match with our upcoming use of SchoolTube.com). The students like it because they will be able to share it in school assemblies and recruitment presentations, they will be able to link to it on their social media sites at home, their parents will be able to email it to their friends, the school will be able to link to it on its website, and the students will be able to say on their resumes and college applications that they were part of their school’s first-ever online news publication.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of using Issuu.com for my upcoming school presentations and reports, and ideas are brewing for ways to use the site for my creative writing. I am continually excited and amazed by all of the free or low-cost tools available to us on the web. Our opportunities are nearly limitless at this point. Doom and gloom, be gone!

Neighborhood Notes: Fashion trucks give business a new spin

I just published a story at NeighborhoodNotes.com about people in Portland who fix up old trailers and buses and turn them into  vintage and resale clothing boutiques. Can we say “most-super-fun-story-subject-in-forever”?

(Full disclosure: I have been a vintage clothing collector since coming of age in the thrift store-laden 1990s. Here’s a photo of me the 1920s dress I bought with one of my first-ever paychecks.)

Thanks to Lodekka, Wanderlust, Showvroom, Heather Zinger and NeighborhoodNotes.com for their collaboration on this piece. Now go read it and check out the photos!

Brave New World: The future of publishing

My recent introduction to eBooks reminded me of a panel I attended at this fall’s Wordstock festival in Portland called Brave New World: The Future of Publishing. Industry experts and authors Lauren Kessler, Rhonda Hughes, and Kevin Smokler made up the panel, and discussion was facilitated by Richard Meeker, publisher of Portland’s Willamette Week.

I found the discussion to be pretty optimistic. Sure, things are changing dramatically for the publishing industry, especially when it comes to making money. But the panelists were optimistic because they tended to see technology tools as powers that could be harnessed for the benefit of authors, publishers and readers alike. I was especially interested in Smokler’s work as founder of BookTour.com, a tech start-up that provides marketing tools for authors.

Here are some highlights from the panel in October, which were originally typed on my smart phone. Just sayin’…

On blogging and texting
•    The blogosphere means writers are giving away words for free in hopes of connecting with more people.
•    Limit blog posts to about 300 words. (I am afraid I’m breaking this rule right now.)
•    Blogs such as The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post are now leaders in book reviews
•    Lauren Kessler notes that her daughter is constantly thinking in words and is writing more than Kessler did as a teenager because of texting. You read that right.

On self-publishing and self-marketing
•    Big publishers have been giving less and less to writers so some authors now choose to go with self publishing or boutique publishing. Self publishing is no longer seen as a last resort.
•    Today reputation matters more than in the past. Publishers want to see that you have a history of professional writing and meeting deadlines and a solid portfolio.
•    Today writers often have to be their own publicists. Technology helps facilitate this.
•    Even with all of the technology tools and promotional methods at our disposal, promoting yourself still has to do with building relationships and being nice. Panelists suggest starting those relationships on Twitter. (Sidenote: Twitter is how I first made contact with Lauren Kessler, and that contact was the reason I attended this panel in the first place.)

On eBooks and the industry
•    Technology means larger audiences, and eBooks can mean more money from new audiences.
•    eBooks and self publishers will likely mean there is a greater range in the quality of what we read.
•    Technology makes it easier to promote publishing events and to do direct sales online.
•    Taking a tip from the movie industry, publishers and authors are now making book trailers.
•    Digital book scans provide useful counts of sales and inventory.
•    Technology doesn’t have an either-or relationship with older media. They work together. As an example, vinyl record sales are growing faster sales of than digital music. Smokler predicts that someday paper books will be seen like records are seen today: hard to find, pricey, high quality.
•    eReaders such as Kindle and Nook are likely to become more and more accessible and affordable as time goes on, hopefully helping close some of the digital divide. There is more money to be made selling things cheaply to more people than in keeping things elitist.

For every pro I have listed here, there are still concerns about the way our culture is changing. A shift in the medium for something as ubiquitous as books is pretty major. What do you see as the potential losses that might come with these gains? How will these changes change us as readers? Or are you, like me, just stuck on the idea of carrying your book around in your pocket?

Neighborhood Notes: New reasons to love Portland

Forgive the attempt at gangster language, but Southeast Portland is blowin’ up, yo! That quadrant of our fair city is home to four of the 17 new businesses we got word of in the last month—with even more indie biz goodness in the works. It boasts a board game shop, a gallery and artists’ hub, and a drool-worthy Italian deli, while the rest of town now offers more art and craft fun, a donation-based yoga studio and a vintage store housed in a camper. Did I mention last month that I love living here? Because I love it even more now.

It’s that time again. Time to take stock of some Portland entrepreneurs who are striking out and hoping to make a living and make a contribution to this city. My new business piece was published by the good folks at NeighborhoodNotes.com today and you can read it right here. Oh yeah.

PS: This photo is from the interior of Beulahland on SE 28th around 1 a.m. after a good round of true Japanese-style karaoke at VoiceBox.

Eek! An eBook!

Last week I finished reading my first-ever ebook. The future is now!

Just a few months ago I saw an eReader at the Willamette Writers conference, and was a little scared of it. It seemed like an alien or something that was probably an enemy because it was different. Books are dear friends of mine, and I didn’t like the idea of anything threatening them, no matter how much I enjoy my other gadgets.

But this fall I tried an eBook as an experiment. I needed to do a quick read of a novel for my book group and I heard that Kindle and Nook had eReader apps that I could use on my smart phone (it’s Android, if anyone cares). So I looked into it. I found out that the apps for these eReaders are free. I was interested. I found out that I could also install these apps on my computer for free. More interested. And a quick scan of the eBook stores online told me that electronic books typically cost the same as paperbacks if not much, much less. The novel I was looking for was available for about $5. It seemed worth a shot.

And you know what? I loved it. I could adjust the text to a size that worked for me, and I could adjust the brightness of the page. I always feel a tiny surge of accomplishment when I turn a page in a book, so I really didn’t mind turning the page as frequently as the tiny pages on my screen required. (Read: The pages were tiny, but the font was a normal size.) I could check the table of contents, jump to a chapter, and bookmark pages just like I do with my paper books (in some ways, far more efficiently). The only thing I really missed was having the option to underline passages and write notes in the margins. I do love margin notes.

There were three moments that sold me on eBooks:

• First was the moment when I realized that I didn’t need to lug a book around in my purse all day — I could carry my book in my pocket, along with everything else that’s on my phone. Maybe this means I just really enjoy my phone. But having the book in my pocket was a revelation. It meant I could read whenever I had a free moment. I had it out in line at the DMV, the bank and the grocery store, and on a long car ride (plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter). It felt much better to use those moments for something as peaceful as reading a book instead of repeatedly checking my email or playing Tetris.
• Second was the moment when I plugged my phone into the outlet by my nightstand, laid back on a pillow and read myself to sleep by the light of my eBook screen. I have always loved reading myself to sleep, but paper books can be pretty awkward to hold while laying down. (Can I get an amen?) And paper books require lighting of some kind. So I will admit that it’s really, really weird to take your electronics to bed. But when it involves a book, I find it to be downright magical.
• Third was the moment when I realized that I could use the eReader apps on my computer and download classics for free. As an English teacher in training, I see this as a goldmine. It means that I can have the entire text of, say, a Shakespeare play on the same computer where I am writing my lesson plans. It means that I can do quick searches for key words in that Shakespeare play and copy excerpts directly onto lesson handouts. Just writing about it makes me want to do a dance.
• An addendum: I haven’t done this yet, but I am super-excited to try knitting while reading an eBook on my laptop. Two of my favorites at once!

Admittedly, I have reservations about getting new books on the cheap from a monster bookseller such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble. I still want to support my neighborhood book store. And I wonder if someone is losing out when a book is marked down by, um, 70 percent. At the same time, can it really cost that much to produce an e-book? It seems like it has to be far cheaper than printing, and cutting down on printing could provide enormous environmental benefits. But it’s a complex picture.

Totally by coincidence, Google unveiled its electronic book store today, and it sounds promising. According to this NPR story, the site sells eBooks from large and small publishers, and it can be accessed from a smart phone, Nook device or your computer. You can use the service from any device with an internet connection, and you have the option to download a book so you can read it even without an internet connection. I see all this as key in making electronic books much more widely available. It means that you don’t have to have a fancy device to use the books. It means that teachers can share eBooks with students, and that students can easily access those books on school computers, or on their computers at home. Google books cost about the same as paperbacks and many classics are free, as they are with other services. (Weirdly, I just looked up the Google bookstore while logged in to my Gmail and somehow the program knew of three classic books I have on my phone. That’s either really cool or kind of creepy.)

This whole experience reminded me of a panel I attended at this year’s Wordstock festival in Portland called Brave New World: The Future of Publishing. Industry experts and authors Lauren Kessler, Rhonda Hughes, and Kevin Smokler made up the panel, and discussion was facilitated by Richard Meeker, publisher of Portland’s Willamette Week. Watch for highlights from the discussion in my next post!

“Wear their book… as a necklace”

My “Back to the Basics” post for Ooligan Press is up today, affirming and reminding writers, publishers and marketers why we all do what we do. My post is kind of like Chicken Soup for the Publishing Marketer’s Soul, and I’m good with that.

The post is based on a quote from one of my favorite Ooligan Books, Classroom Publishing: A Practical Guide for Teachers. In this book’s introduction, Ninive Calegari, former chief executive officer of 826 National, says this of her enthusiasm for her student authors:

I want to wear their book around my neck as a necklace and tell all my friends.

Hell. Yes. That is what the work of marketing is all about, and that’s what my post is all about. The rest of the Ooligan blog is chock-full of resources and insights for writers, publishers, designers, marketers, and teachers, and Ooligan deserves a shout-out for that as well as everything else they do.

Watch for more from my colleagues and I on Ooligan’s Classroom Publishing blog.