Not sure why you would need to write a book for PE, with so much material already out there for newbies. Anyways, feel free to ask me for any questions you might have, I've been a veteran player of MCPE since v0.1.2, the first iOS release.
Also, just a pet peeve here, Please Stop Using Capitals At The Beginning Of Every Word, It Drives Me Crazy!!!
Not sure why you would need to write a book for PE, with so much material already out there for newbies. Anyways, feel free to ask me for any questions you might have, I've been a veteran player of MCPE since v0.1.2, the first iOS release.
Also, just a pet peeve here, Please Stop Using Capitals At The Beginning Of Every Sentence, It Drives Me Crazy!!!
Not sure to be any kind of spoiler, but I think you meant 'word'.
Well, there are a few of us who just like books. I'll admit to owning a dead-trees book on MC. Yeah, despite all the online references.
That said, a few comments:
First, are you looking at ebook or paper publication? If you're planning on self-publishing an ebook, know in advance that your sales are likely to be dismal. You'll be competing directly with free content (the wiki, these forums, dozens if not hundreds of websites) and you really need something outstanding to get people to pay. If you're planning on paper, do you have a publishing deal lined up in advance? Can you write a better book than "Minecraft for Dummies"? You're going to have to prove it.
Also, hopefully without edging into grammar harassment here (I'd hate to have to infract myself!) he does have a point about the capitalization. Words are a writer's tools. In many ways, they're his primary tools. Just as a mechanic is an expert in the use of wrenches, like they're an extension of his hands, a good writer is equally skilled at using his tools, those written ones. You can't count on someone else to fix your writing. You're the author; that's your job. For dead-trees publication you need to be able to impress a publisher and/or agent, and nowadays they expect to see a book virtually ready to go to the printer. If you're self-publishing an ebook, you need to look totally professional, because your competition is not just professional-looking but FREE. You need to become an expert in the use of your tools. Writing like that implies that you haven't read much, and reading is essential to writing. You can't write without being a voracious reader any more than you can sing without listening to music.
I'm not trying to be a downer here, but as a published non-fiction writer, I know how hard it is ... and I've sold to relatively easy markets, and no book-length pieces (yet). The business is cutthroat, and you have to be one of the best to even have a chance. Good ideas mean nothing; they're a dime a dozen. Writers have more ideas than they know what to do with. Turning that raw idea into something ready for publication is the essential part, and nobody will do that for you.
That said, if you want to write, write. As hard as it is to make money from a written book, it's impossible from an unwritten one. So write, and good luck.
To expand some on my previous post, now that I'm actually on a computer with a real keyboard instead of an iPod Touch with "keys" half the size of my finger:
First, I want to reiterate this part: As hard as it is to make money from a written book, it's impossible from an unwritten one. Don't let anything I say about writing make you want to not write. As Tennyson should have written, 'tis better to have written and flopped than to never have written at all.
If you're going to write a book ... no, let me rephrase: if anyone is going to read your book ... it has to bring something to the table that they can't get somewhere else. That is the most crucial thing for you to think about: If you were in the bookstore (or on Amazon, or however you want to sell it), and you saw that book, why would you want that one instead of a different one? Why would you want it instead of something you could find free somewhere else?
You're looking for "seeds, hints, and cheats." Why should I, J. Random Minecraftplayer, want to buy your book of them instead of coming to this forum and getting, for example, all the seeds I could want, and with pictures, for free? What is special about your book? What is going to make me say "Hey, this thing is worth my money! It's more worth my money than this other book over here, the one abut WWII aircraft, or even this one, the one about tropical fish"? Remember, you're not just competing for your readers' money, you're competing for their time -- and Minecraft isn't the only thing they're interested in. Why will they think it's better to read your book than to watch a couple of YouTube videos? Why would they rather have your book than a CoD strat guide?
These are all things you need to answer if your book is going to be a success. Otherwise, it's just going to be a waste of your time -- not even anyone else's time, since they're not going to read it, just your time.
And, again, to be a successful writer, you have to be a reader. You have to read not just things in the field you want to write in, but everything that holds still long enough -- and writers have been known to ask people to hold still so they can read their T-shirts! (there's an SF story by Damon Knight, "Eripmav," printed in its entirety on a T-shirt ... at the end of one side, it says "please turn person.") It isn't enough to know about MCPE; you need to know how to write.
Again, I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying it's not as easy as it looks. And in particular, I'm saying that you have to think about the important questions: Why should someone buy your book about MCPE? "Because I'm an awesome person" doesn't cut it; they don't know you. Why should they buy your book instead of reading the wiki, the forums, various websites, etc? Why should they buy a book about MCPE instead of about something else? What are you bringing to the table that they need to have?
Not sure why you would need to write a book for PE, with so much material already out there for newbies. Anyways, feel free to ask me for any questions you might have, I've been a veteran player of MCPE since v0.1.2, the first iOS release.
Also, just a pet peeve here, Please Stop Using Capitals At The Beginning Of Every Word, It Drives Me Crazy!!!
What, Like This?I think an app or something would be better. No one reads books anymore
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Forever protecting Hyrule with the power of the Master Sword!
I think an app or something would be better. No one reads books anymore
/me looks around at thousands of books in the room.
/me considers the size of Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and of course the book division of Amazon.
/me thinks people read books.
So, back to the subject of our would-be author here, what would such an app do? Why would J. Random Minecraftplayer want it instead of a different one?
/me looks around at thousands of books in the room.
/me considers the size of Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and of course the book division of Amazon.
/me thinks people read books.
So, back to the subject of our would-be author here, what would such an app do? Why would J. Random Minecraftplayer want it instead of a different one?
What I meant, really, is selling a book is difficult. It's extremely hard to get your book sold in stores or online. I think a digital media would be more widely read.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Forever protecting Hyrule with the power of the Master Sword!
What I meant, really, is selling a book is difficult. It's extremely hard to get your book sold in stores or online. I think a digital media would be more widely read.
There are two things to look at here:
1. Pro publishing vs. self publishing.
2. Paper book vs. e-book.
Pro publishing is hard. You have to convince an agent who sees hundreds of book proposals a year that yours is one worth pitching to publishers, and even then, the odds are against any publisher buying it. Dead trees or electrons, it doesn't really matter; it's a tough market. That said, if you can sell the book to a publisher, even if they do nothing beyond print it and add it to their books-available list, you're miles ahead just because of their distribution network. Buyers for bookstores look first (and sometimes only) at what they can get from their distributor, who in turn generally carries what the publishers are offering. It opens up a lot of doors that an indie doesn't have access to.
Self-publishing has some major advantages in that nobody can stop you (except possibly your banker), but it has the huge disadvantage that you have to do all of the marketing yourself. Not the fun stuff, like book tours, but the hard, nitty-gritty, grinding stuff like contacting retailers directly to get them to carry your work. Think it's hard to convince an agent to rep your book? An indie has to do that with every prospective buyer, right down to Fred's Discount Books. Also, self-published books suffer from the stigma of being "not good enough for a real publisher" and, frankly, 98% of the time, that's true. "If it's so good, why isn't Random House selling it?" Given how the publishing industry has been failing in multiple ways, that might not be the case ten years from now ... but do you want to wait ten years?
So you've got a quandary: Almost impossible to break into, but good sales if you do it? Or minimal barriers to entry, but sales are going to suck? Trust me, if there was a way to publish a book that anyone could do and which guaranteed good sales, every author on the planet would be doing it. They aren't, because there isn't.
In the end, however, it's all about having a book that you can sell, whether you're selling it to an agent and a publisher, or directly to the end user. It has to be something that the reader can't get anywhere else, and that is important enough to them for them to want to get it.
For example, the details of what I ate for lunch are something that you can't get anywhere else. Do you care? Doubtful. It's not important enough for you to want to get it. (leftover chili, by the way) On the other hand, how to install and run Minecraft is certainly important, but it's something you can get anywhere, and for free. So that's missing the second part. It has to be unique and important; just one or the other won't do.
And so far, our OP hasn't responded to any of this.
As a published author myself (actually I just released a few short stories), I must say that if you are publishing to ebook, there is a website called smashwords.com that will publish it and put it on iBooks, Nook, Kobo, etc. for free. The only downside is that you first have to follow a long styling guide.
As a published author myself (actually I just released a few short stories), I must say that if you are publishing to ebook, there is a website called smashwords.com that will publish it and put it on iBooks, Nook, Kobo, etc. for free. The only downside is that you first have to follow a long styling guide.
I've bought ebooks from Smashwords. (you can get them DRM-free, which is a big thing with me) One of the nice things is they stock a lot of authors' backlists, stuff that is out of print, the rights have reverted to the author, and no dead-trees publisher wants to pick up anymore.
That, though, gets us back to the problem of indie versus pro, and ebook versus paper book. Paper books from recognized publishers sell the most, but that's the hardest market to break into. Indie ebooks are easy, but their sales are dismal. It doesn't help that because it's so easy, the overwhelming majority of them are terrible (Sturgeon's Law is squared, possibly cubed) and that taints the image of the whole category. Basically, they're like vanity press publishing for free, and we know how bad vanity press stuff usually is.
That's why the professionalism -- the "fit and finish" of the book -- matters so much. If it's going to be pitched to an agent, or directly to a publisher, it has to look like it's ready for print or they're not even going to bother. Publishers don't develop authors anymore, and IMO that's going to bite them in the butts about 10 years down the road. If you're going the indie route, it has to be at least as good as anything you'd find in a bookstore (whether you're going vanity-press or ebook) or nobody will look at it twice. The world is drowning in crappy ebooks.
I Would Love To Team Up With You OwenTheBest. Links, I Know Lots Of People Who Read. An App Sounds Cool."Also, just a pet peeve here, Please Stop Using Capitals At The Beginning Of Every Word, It Drives Me Crazy!!! "
Okay, Chill. Dont Judge My Typing. I Type How I Like
If you're going to get a book published, you're not going to be able to type how you like. You're going to have to type how someone else likes -- and that someone else is likely to be pretty hardcore about it. They're not only going to demand that you follow the standard conventions of English, as people here do, but they're going to tell you that you have to have your chapter titles set like so, your spacing like so, etc. The exact details vary by publisher (and if you want to get really crazy, I've heard that some of the romance publishers actually specify things like which page the hero first appears, etc!) but they're all hardcore about them.
Also, there's the matter of communication: the purpose of writing, any writing, is to communicate most effectively with your audience. In the case of something like this post, mere communication is enough; for a book, however, you not only need to communicate with them, but you need to persuade them to fork over their hard-earned money for whatever you're selling. Si ellos no pueden leer lo que usted escribió, no lo comprará. Hey, what did I say? I said "If they can't read what you wrote, they won't buy it." The odds are you couldn't read that. (if you could, I can use another language, or a cipher for that matter) So when you're writing for other people to read, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to read it -- and in the case of a book or an app, to give you money for it. It's all about the Benjamins.
Anyway, back to the work at hand. Apps are indeed cool, but consider two facts: One, if you're going iOS, you have to not only shell out for a development system (I bought a Mac just for that) but pay $100 a year to Apple just, basically, to breathe, and then have to have your app approved for their app store. If you're going Android, you save all that, but you have to deal with a much more chaotic marketplace, and most likely more competition. In either case, you have to have something good, because other people are already doing it, and you need to be better than they are or your prospective customers will buy their stuff instead. Remember also that to get in anyone's official marketplace, you're paying a cut to them, and if you're distributing unofficially, you're losing about 90% of your prospective market before you even get started.
Again, if you've read my posts, I'm not saying don't do it. As I said before, you might not be able to sell a book you write, but you certainly can't sell a book you don't write. But it's not easy, and you can't go into it thinking it's easy; if you go at it like the hard work it is, you're far more likely to succeed.
So what, exactly, do you want to write?
What market are you aiming at?
Do you want to sell it to a real publisher or self-publish it (aka vanity press)?
Do you want a paper book or an ebook or an app?
Is there another book like it already?
If an app, what should it do? Is anyone else doing it?
And the bottom line: I'm a Minecraft player. I have some money to spend. Why should I spend it on your book/app/whatever instead of someone else's? Tell me what makes yours better. Tell me why I should give my money to you instead of to Joe Schmoe. What is it that's going to be so good that I just have to have it?
If you can't answer these questions from a friendly poster on a forum, you're not ready to present your work to a decidedly unfriendly marketplace.
Do you want to sell it to a real publisher or self-publish it (aka vanity press)
Do you want a paper book or an ebook or an app?
Is there another book like it already?
If an app, what should it do? Is anyone else doing it?
Okay, that's a lot of questions. I want to write a book on minecraft cheats, tips, etc. I am aiming mostly at minecraft players, or noobs who need help. I want to self publish a.k.a. vanity press. An ebook would be ideal.I will have to do some digging on those last couple questions.
There, my words are normal. Happy Now/ :PSo what, exactly do you want to write?
What market are you aiming at?
Do you want to sell it to a real publisher or self-publish it (aka vanity press)
Do you want a paper book or an ebook or an app?
Is there another book like it already?
If an app, what should it do? Is anyone else doing it?
Okay, that's a lot of questions. I want to write a book on minecraft cheats, tips, etc. I am aiming mostly at minecraft players, or noobs who need help. I want to self publish a.k.a. vanity press. An ebook would be ideal.I will have to do some digging on those last couple questions.
There, my words are normal. Happy Now? :PSorry, dont know what I just did
I want to write a book on minecraft cheats, tips, etc.
Your first research project, then, is to check all of the major categories (paper, ebook -- probably epub and the proprietary Kindle format both -- and app -- both iOS and Android -- and see what other ones there are on the market. Then buy them, or at least a representative sample. Know your competition.
I am aiming mostly at minecraft players, or noobs who need help.
Those are probably not going to be the same market. Noobs would be the people buying say, Minecraft for Dummies, and they're still learning how to build good houses and not get blown up by creepers; they're probably not really ready for hints, cheats, etc. The people who are looking for those are most likely way beyond the newbie stuff, and won't want to waste money on something they already know. Hm, maybe you're looking at two books here?
I want to self publish a.k.a. vanity press. An ebook would be ideal.
Well, the advantage of vanity publishing is you can't be turned down. Dead-trees vanity publishers will print books for whoever pays them -- by the way, do somea lot of research before you choose one -- and ebooks, of course, don't have any barriers whatsoever; you can copy the phone book and sell it somewhere. The down side, of course, is a lot lower sales. Minecraft for Dummies probably sold tens of thousands of copies, if not more. If it had been an ebook, even from the same publisher, sales would be about 1/10 that. An indie ebook can look at a fraction of that number.
The down side to vanity publishing is that you have to do all of the promotion yourself. You can build it but they won't come; you have to go to them. You have to develop a market, publicize your work, and convince people to buy it. This is not easy.
The typical beginner's thinking goes like this: "I've got this great idea. That was the hard part. Now all I have to do is turn it into a book, and lots of people will come and buy it."
The reality is that ideas are easy; they fall from the sky. Turning them into a book that will sell is very, very hard; if it wasn't, there would be a lot more good books out there! And once you have a book that will potentially sell, if you're doing it yourself, selling that book is even harder than writing it.
So before you dive into this, you need to have exactly what you're doing, how you're doing it, and so on, all laid out. Think of it as a business plan for your book. You need to know, in particular, exactly what people make up your target market, what things those people are willing to spend money on, and how to convince them that your book is that thing.
Sorry, dont know what I just did
Looks like a cut and paste problem. Edit it to remove the duplication.
I don't know if I should ask this because I already see a lot of Minecraft books out there, but are we supposed to ask permission from the Minecraft team regarding publishing material that can be bought? For example, i want to make fiction on minecraft but I don't know how copy rights would work though I see a lot of minecraft novels (also I've ghostwritten some of them O_o)
I don't know if I should ask this because I already see a lot of Minecraft books out there, but are we supposed to ask permission from the Minecraft team regarding publishing material that can be bought? For example, i want to make fiction on minecraft but I don't know how copy rights would work though I see a lot of minecraft novels (also I've ghostwritten some of them O_o)
It's actually less of a copyright issue here than one of trademarks (two kinds of intellectual property that people mix up all the time). Mojang holds the trademarks on distinctive elements of Minecraft -- the name, for instance, and the appearance of its elements. If you're going to use their trademarks ... "Survive! A Minecraft novel" ... you are legally required to obtain their permission to do so.
Now, I'm speaking of US laws here, though in most cases these things work mostly the same way in all countries; there are treaties and reciprocal agreements governing them.
One of the ways that copyrights and trademarks are different is that copyright ownership is passive -- you don't have to do anything, you just have it. While you have to file copyright paperwork if you want to be able to collect triple damages for infringement, just the fact that you wrote, drew, or otherwise created a particular piece is enough to allow you to have infringers shut down and possibly prosecuted. (I've actually done this, to the consternation of a teenage warez d00d who had to explain to his mom why there was an FBI agent at the door) Trademarks, on the other hand, must be actively upheld. If a trademark holder doesn't defend their trademarks, they can lose them. Ask the creators of everything from aspirin to zippers; those are trademarks that became genericized. Back when I subscribed to Writer's Digest, I recall quarter-page ads reminding writers that they were required to write, instead of "Fred went rollerblading," that "Fred went skating on his Rollerblades® brand inline roller skates." Not that anyone actually did, of course, but the fact that they were running those ads every month could be used to prove they were defending their trademark.
So, yes, you should get Mojang's permission before you do anything that infringes those trademarks. Read this bit from their website for a start. It doesn't really cover books, so yeah, if I were going to write and sell a Minecraft novel, I'd definitely want to get Mojang's OK on it first.
I should mention that I write fan fiction, which is the hobby of running roughshod over other people's copyrights and trademarks (and, yes, I find it highly amusing that some fanfic writers scream "don't use my characters without my consent!" while they're busy using other people's characters without their consent, or in some cases with their active disapproval!) and, basically, the fanfic community gets away with it because we stay strictly non-commercial. Rights owners are generally willing to give fanfic writers a pass. But were we to move from fanfic to profic -- selling our stuff, instead of just putting it online for free -- I can guarantee you, they would land on the offending writer like a ton of bricks. Or a ton of lawyers. It's happened. For that matter, I'm part of one fanfic community that is still partly underground because of a rights owner freaking out, some years back, and threatening to sue anyone who wrote about their years-dead, no longer even syndicated, TV show. Bad move on their part (I don't think anyone but fanfic writers even remembered the thing, which they finally realized) but they had the law on their side.
The bottom line (down here on the bottom where it should be): Get Mojang's OK. I'm working on a Minecraft-themed project of my own (nothing literary) and I fully intend to present it for Mojang's approval when there is something to show them.
Also, just a pet peeve here, Please Stop Using Capitals At The Beginning Of Every Word, It Drives Me Crazy!!!
Not sure to be any kind of spoiler, but I think you meant 'word'.
(Sorry, just couldn't help myself )
That said, a few comments:
First, are you looking at ebook or paper publication? If you're planning on self-publishing an ebook, know in advance that your sales are likely to be dismal. You'll be competing directly with free content (the wiki, these forums, dozens if not hundreds of websites) and you really need something outstanding to get people to pay. If you're planning on paper, do you have a publishing deal lined up in advance? Can you write a better book than "Minecraft for Dummies"? You're going to have to prove it.
Also, hopefully without edging into grammar harassment here (I'd hate to have to infract myself!) he does have a point about the capitalization. Words are a writer's tools. In many ways, they're his primary tools. Just as a mechanic is an expert in the use of wrenches, like they're an extension of his hands, a good writer is equally skilled at using his tools, those written ones. You can't count on someone else to fix your writing. You're the author; that's your job. For dead-trees publication you need to be able to impress a publisher and/or agent, and nowadays they expect to see a book virtually ready to go to the printer. If you're self-publishing an ebook, you need to look totally professional, because your competition is not just professional-looking but FREE. You need to become an expert in the use of your tools. Writing like that implies that you haven't read much, and reading is essential to writing. You can't write without being a voracious reader any more than you can sing without listening to music.
I'm not trying to be a downer here, but as a published non-fiction writer, I know how hard it is ... and I've sold to relatively easy markets, and no book-length pieces (yet). The business is cutthroat, and you have to be one of the best to even have a chance. Good ideas mean nothing; they're a dime a dozen. Writers have more ideas than they know what to do with. Turning that raw idea into something ready for publication is the essential part, and nobody will do that for you.
That said, if you want to write, write. As hard as it is to make money from a written book, it's impossible from an unwritten one. So write, and good luck.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
First, I want to reiterate this part: As hard as it is to make money from a written book, it's impossible from an unwritten one. Don't let anything I say about writing make you want to not write. As Tennyson should have written, 'tis better to have written and flopped than to never have written at all.
If you're going to write a book ... no, let me rephrase: if anyone is going to read your book ... it has to bring something to the table that they can't get somewhere else. That is the most crucial thing for you to think about: If you were in the bookstore (or on Amazon, or however you want to sell it), and you saw that book, why would you want that one instead of a different one? Why would you want it instead of something you could find free somewhere else?
You're looking for "seeds, hints, and cheats." Why should I, J. Random Minecraftplayer, want to buy your book of them instead of coming to this forum and getting, for example, all the seeds I could want, and with pictures, for free? What is special about your book? What is going to make me say "Hey, this thing is worth my money! It's more worth my money than this other book over here, the one abut WWII aircraft, or even this one, the one about tropical fish"? Remember, you're not just competing for your readers' money, you're competing for their time -- and Minecraft isn't the only thing they're interested in. Why will they think it's better to read your book than to watch a couple of YouTube videos? Why would they rather have your book than a CoD strat guide?
These are all things you need to answer if your book is going to be a success. Otherwise, it's just going to be a waste of your time -- not even anyone else's time, since they're not going to read it, just your time.
And, again, to be a successful writer, you have to be a reader. You have to read not just things in the field you want to write in, but everything that holds still long enough -- and writers have been known to ask people to hold still so they can read their T-shirts! (there's an SF story by Damon Knight, "Eripmav," printed in its entirety on a T-shirt ... at the end of one side, it says "please turn person.") It isn't enough to know about MCPE; you need to know how to write.
Again, I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm saying it's not as easy as it looks. And in particular, I'm saying that you have to think about the important questions: Why should someone buy your book about MCPE? "Because I'm an awesome person" doesn't cut it; they don't know you. Why should they buy your book instead of reading the wiki, the forums, various websites, etc? Why should they buy a book about MCPE instead of about something else? What are you bringing to the table that they need to have?
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
What, Like This?I think an app or something would be better. No one reads books anymore
/me looks around at thousands of books in the room.
/me considers the size of Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and of course the book division of Amazon.
/me thinks people read books.
So, back to the subject of our would-be author here, what would such an app do? Why would J. Random Minecraftplayer want it instead of a different one?
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
What I meant, really, is selling a book is difficult. It's extremely hard to get your book sold in stores or online. I think a digital media would be more widely read.
There are two things to look at here:
1. Pro publishing vs. self publishing.
2. Paper book vs. e-book.
Pro publishing is hard. You have to convince an agent who sees hundreds of book proposals a year that yours is one worth pitching to publishers, and even then, the odds are against any publisher buying it. Dead trees or electrons, it doesn't really matter; it's a tough market. That said, if you can sell the book to a publisher, even if they do nothing beyond print it and add it to their books-available list, you're miles ahead just because of their distribution network. Buyers for bookstores look first (and sometimes only) at what they can get from their distributor, who in turn generally carries what the publishers are offering. It opens up a lot of doors that an indie doesn't have access to.
Self-publishing has some major advantages in that nobody can stop you (except possibly your banker), but it has the huge disadvantage that you have to do all of the marketing yourself. Not the fun stuff, like book tours, but the hard, nitty-gritty, grinding stuff like contacting retailers directly to get them to carry your work. Think it's hard to convince an agent to rep your book? An indie has to do that with every prospective buyer, right down to Fred's Discount Books. Also, self-published books suffer from the stigma of being "not good enough for a real publisher" and, frankly, 98% of the time, that's true. "If it's so good, why isn't Random House selling it?" Given how the publishing industry has been failing in multiple ways, that might not be the case ten years from now ... but do you want to wait ten years?
So you've got a quandary: Almost impossible to break into, but good sales if you do it? Or minimal barriers to entry, but sales are going to suck? Trust me, if there was a way to publish a book that anyone could do and which guaranteed good sales, every author on the planet would be doing it. They aren't, because there isn't.
In the end, however, it's all about having a book that you can sell, whether you're selling it to an agent and a publisher, or directly to the end user. It has to be something that the reader can't get anywhere else, and that is important enough to them for them to want to get it.
For example, the details of what I ate for lunch are something that you can't get anywhere else. Do you care? Doubtful. It's not important enough for you to want to get it. (leftover chili, by the way) On the other hand, how to install and run Minecraft is certainly important, but it's something you can get anywhere, and for free. So that's missing the second part. It has to be unique and important; just one or the other won't do.
And so far, our OP hasn't responded to any of this.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
1. Signatures
2. Irony
3.Lists
I've bought ebooks from Smashwords. (you can get them DRM-free, which is a big thing with me) One of the nice things is they stock a lot of authors' backlists, stuff that is out of print, the rights have reverted to the author, and no dead-trees publisher wants to pick up anymore.
That, though, gets us back to the problem of indie versus pro, and ebook versus paper book. Paper books from recognized publishers sell the most, but that's the hardest market to break into. Indie ebooks are easy, but their sales are dismal. It doesn't help that because it's so easy, the overwhelming majority of them are terrible (Sturgeon's Law is squared, possibly cubed) and that taints the image of the whole category. Basically, they're like vanity press publishing for free, and we know how bad vanity press stuff usually is.
That's why the professionalism -- the "fit and finish" of the book -- matters so much. If it's going to be pitched to an agent, or directly to a publisher, it has to look like it's ready for print or they're not even going to bother. Publishers don't develop authors anymore, and IMO that's going to bite them in the butts about 10 years down the road. If you're going the indie route, it has to be at least as good as anything you'd find in a bookstore (whether you're going vanity-press or ebook) or nobody will look at it twice. The world is drowning in crappy ebooks.
Either way, it's not an easy thing to do.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
Okay, Chill. Dont Judge My Typing. I Type How I Like
If you're going to get a book published, you're not going to be able to type how you like. You're going to have to type how someone else likes -- and that someone else is likely to be pretty hardcore about it. They're not only going to demand that you follow the standard conventions of English, as people here do, but they're going to tell you that you have to have your chapter titles set like so, your spacing like so, etc. The exact details vary by publisher (and if you want to get really crazy, I've heard that some of the romance publishers actually specify things like which page the hero first appears, etc!) but they're all hardcore about them.
Also, there's the matter of communication: the purpose of writing, any writing, is to communicate most effectively with your audience. In the case of something like this post, mere communication is enough; for a book, however, you not only need to communicate with them, but you need to persuade them to fork over their hard-earned money for whatever you're selling. Si ellos no pueden leer lo que usted escribió, no lo comprará. Hey, what did I say? I said "If they can't read what you wrote, they won't buy it." The odds are you couldn't read that. (if you could, I can use another language, or a cipher for that matter) So when you're writing for other people to read, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to read it -- and in the case of a book or an app, to give you money for it. It's all about the Benjamins.
Anyway, back to the work at hand. Apps are indeed cool, but consider two facts: One, if you're going iOS, you have to not only shell out for a development system (I bought a Mac just for that) but pay $100 a year to Apple just, basically, to breathe, and then have to have your app approved for their app store. If you're going Android, you save all that, but you have to deal with a much more chaotic marketplace, and most likely more competition. In either case, you have to have something good, because other people are already doing it, and you need to be better than they are or your prospective customers will buy their stuff instead. Remember also that to get in anyone's official marketplace, you're paying a cut to them, and if you're distributing unofficially, you're losing about 90% of your prospective market before you even get started.
Again, if you've read my posts, I'm not saying don't do it. As I said before, you might not be able to sell a book you write, but you certainly can't sell a book you don't write. But it's not easy, and you can't go into it thinking it's easy; if you go at it like the hard work it is, you're far more likely to succeed.
So what, exactly, do you want to write?
What market are you aiming at?
Do you want to sell it to a real publisher or self-publish it (aka vanity press)?
Do you want a paper book or an ebook or an app?
Is there another book like it already?
If an app, what should it do? Is anyone else doing it?
And the bottom line: I'm a Minecraft player. I have some money to spend. Why should I spend it on your book/app/whatever instead of someone else's? Tell me what makes yours better. Tell me why I should give my money to you instead of to Joe Schmoe. What is it that's going to be so good that I just have to have it?
If you can't answer these questions from a friendly poster on a forum, you're not ready to present your work to a decidedly unfriendly marketplace.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
What market are you aiming at?
Do you want to sell it to a real publisher or self-publish it (aka vanity press)
Do you want a paper book or an ebook or an app?
Is there another book like it already?
If an app, what should it do? Is anyone else doing it?
Okay, that's a lot of questions. I want to write a book on minecraft cheats, tips, etc. I am aiming mostly at minecraft players, or noobs who need help. I want to self publish a.k.a. vanity press. An ebook would be ideal.I will have to do some digging on those last couple questions.
There, my words are normal. Happy Now/ :PSo what, exactly do you want to write?
What market are you aiming at?
Do you want to sell it to a real publisher or self-publish it (aka vanity press)
Do you want a paper book or an ebook or an app?
Is there another book like it already?
If an app, what should it do? Is anyone else doing it?
Okay, that's a lot of questions. I want to write a book on minecraft cheats, tips, etc. I am aiming mostly at minecraft players, or noobs who need help. I want to self publish a.k.a. vanity press. An ebook would be ideal.I will have to do some digging on those last couple questions.
There, my words are normal. Happy Now? :PSorry, dont know what I just did
Your first research project, then, is to check all of the major categories (paper, ebook -- probably epub and the proprietary Kindle format both -- and app -- both iOS and Android -- and see what other ones there are on the market. Then buy them, or at least a representative sample. Know your competition.
Those are probably not going to be the same market. Noobs would be the people buying say, Minecraft for Dummies, and they're still learning how to build good houses and not get blown up by creepers; they're probably not really ready for hints, cheats, etc. The people who are looking for those are most likely way beyond the newbie stuff, and won't want to waste money on something they already know. Hm, maybe you're looking at two books here?
Well, the advantage of vanity publishing is you can't be turned down. Dead-trees vanity publishers will print books for whoever pays them -- by the way, do
somea lot of research before you choose one -- and ebooks, of course, don't have any barriers whatsoever; you can copy the phone book and sell it somewhere. The down side, of course, is a lot lower sales. Minecraft for Dummies probably sold tens of thousands of copies, if not more. If it had been an ebook, even from the same publisher, sales would be about 1/10 that. An indie ebook can look at a fraction of that number.The down side to vanity publishing is that you have to do all of the promotion yourself. You can build it but they won't come; you have to go to them. You have to develop a market, publicize your work, and convince people to buy it. This is not easy.
The typical beginner's thinking goes like this: "I've got this great idea. That was the hard part. Now all I have to do is turn it into a book, and lots of people will come and buy it."
The reality is that ideas are easy; they fall from the sky. Turning them into a book that will sell is very, very hard; if it wasn't, there would be a lot more good books out there! And once you have a book that will potentially sell, if you're doing it yourself, selling that book is even harder than writing it.
So before you dive into this, you need to have exactly what you're doing, how you're doing it, and so on, all laid out. Think of it as a business plan for your book. You need to know, in particular, exactly what people make up your target market, what things those people are willing to spend money on, and how to convince them that your book is that thing.
Looks like a cut and paste problem. Edit it to remove the duplication.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
It's actually less of a copyright issue here than one of trademarks (two kinds of intellectual property that people mix up all the time). Mojang holds the trademarks on distinctive elements of Minecraft -- the name, for instance, and the appearance of its elements. If you're going to use their trademarks ... "Survive! A Minecraft novel" ... you are legally required to obtain their permission to do so.
Now, I'm speaking of US laws here, though in most cases these things work mostly the same way in all countries; there are treaties and reciprocal agreements governing them.
One of the ways that copyrights and trademarks are different is that copyright ownership is passive -- you don't have to do anything, you just have it. While you have to file copyright paperwork if you want to be able to collect triple damages for infringement, just the fact that you wrote, drew, or otherwise created a particular piece is enough to allow you to have infringers shut down and possibly prosecuted. (I've actually done this, to the consternation of a teenage warez d00d who had to explain to his mom why there was an FBI agent at the door) Trademarks, on the other hand, must be actively upheld. If a trademark holder doesn't defend their trademarks, they can lose them. Ask the creators of everything from aspirin to zippers; those are trademarks that became genericized. Back when I subscribed to Writer's Digest, I recall quarter-page ads reminding writers that they were required to write, instead of "Fred went rollerblading," that "Fred went skating on his Rollerblades® brand inline roller skates." Not that anyone actually did, of course, but the fact that they were running those ads every month could be used to prove they were defending their trademark.
So, yes, you should get Mojang's permission before you do anything that infringes those trademarks. Read this bit from their website for a start. It doesn't really cover books, so yeah, if I were going to write and sell a Minecraft novel, I'd definitely want to get Mojang's OK on it first.
I should mention that I write fan fiction, which is the hobby of running roughshod over other people's copyrights and trademarks (and, yes, I find it highly amusing that some fanfic writers scream "don't use my characters without my consent!" while they're busy using other people's characters without their consent, or in some cases with their active disapproval!) and, basically, the fanfic community gets away with it because we stay strictly non-commercial. Rights owners are generally willing to give fanfic writers a pass. But were we to move from fanfic to profic -- selling our stuff, instead of just putting it online for free -- I can guarantee you, they would land on the offending writer like a ton of bricks. Or a ton of lawyers. It's happened. For that matter, I'm part of one fanfic community that is still partly underground because of a rights owner freaking out, some years back, and threatening to sue anyone who wrote about their years-dead, no longer even syndicated, TV show. Bad move on their part (I don't think anyone but fanfic writers even remembered the thing, which they finally realized) but they had the law on their side.
The bottom line (down here on the bottom where it should be): Get Mojang's OK. I'm working on a Minecraft-themed project of my own (nothing literary) and I fully intend to present it for Mojang's approval when there is something to show them.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints