Kindle formatting update…

Improvements in Kindle formatting coming soon! For more information, click here.

from the above mentioned link on Amazon’s Kindle site…

We’re pleased to announce a wide range of new features and enhancements – including HTML5 support – coming in Kindle Format 8 (KF8). KF8 is the next generation file format for Kindle books – replacing Mobi 7. As showcased on Kindle Fire, KF8 enables publishers to create great-looking books in categories that require rich formatting and design such as children’s picture books, comics & graphic novels, technical & engineering books and cookbooks. Kindle Format 8 replaces the Mobi format and adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, including fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics, opening up more opportunities to create Kindle books that readers will love.

Children’s books Children’s picture books come to life with brilliant images, fixed layouts and Kindle Text Pop Up.	Comics and graphic novels Comics and graphic novels are presented in high resolution color with Kindle Panel Views.
Technical and engineering Technical and engineering books are created more efficiently with Cascading Style Sheet 3 formatting, nested tables, boxed elements and Scalable Vector Graphics.	Cookbooks Cookbooks and other titles requiring rich design look spectacular with embedded fonts, callouts and sidebars, drop caps and text on background images.

The Infinite Tides

The Infinite Tides: A Novel [Hardcover]

Christian Kiefer (Author)

List Price: $26.00
Price: $17.16
You Save: $8.84 (34%)

It is official.  My novel, The Infinite Tides, is out making the rounds of publishers. Super agent Eleanor Jackson has the reins now and I am trying to have the patience of a zen master.  A dear mentor / famous writer friend wrote a nice blurb about how good the book is, which helps matters a great deal (and is quite the ego boost for yours truly).

Incidentally, if you’ve been paying any attention to the novel writing/editing as it has unfolded here, you might not recognize the new title.  The working title had been Gravity but I’d never been that fond of that as a title.  The clincher was reading that George Clooney and Sandra Bullock have a movie in development called Gravity (about astronauts too).  And so, yes, The Infinite Tides, a title I like a great deal more anyway.  I would have called it The Remains of the Daybut Ishiguro took that one.  Ishiguro has all the good titles.

This title will be released on June 19, 2012. Pre-order now!

Suitable image for Ad Lunum page?

Huck Finn shelf at the ARC Library

Camera: Nikon F3 HP 35mm SLR camera
Film: Ilford HP5 Plus 400 Black & White
Film Scanner: Nikon Coolscan IV

The original image that was up there was from the WordPress template I chose. I had a couple of people mention that this page looked like it might work but that the image just didn’t–that it was too fancy. I had a couple of shots on the end of a roll of film to play with, so I stopped by the ARC Library to get a replacement and was able to get this one developed & scanned. Any suggestions or comments would be welcomed.

Don Reid

What do you think…

The Structure of the Press

Editor-In-Chief

The Editor-In-Chief of the American River College Press will be appointed by the Dean of English and must be supported by the President of American River College.

The Editor-In-Chief is responsible for all final editorial decisions including what the press will or will not publish.  He or she is therefore ultimately responsible for the success and/or failure of the endeavor.  This also means that the final word on editorial decisions will be the sole purview of the Editor-In-Chief.  However, the Editor-In-Chief must take into account the role of the Advisory Board, as described below.

Advisory Board

It is proposed that the American River College Press operate with the assistance of an Advisory Board comprised of faculty, staff, and students.  This Advisory Board will take the form of representatives from:

• English faculty (the majority of the Board membership)
• Library (at least one)
• Art/New Media (at least one)
• Professional Development (at least one)
• Instructional Technology (at least one)
• Students (1-2, likely with experience from the American River Review)
• Interested staff, administration, or faculty from other departments on campus

It is possible that at some point in the future, the Advisory Board may be expanded to include membership from other campuses and/or the District office, but at this time it is believed that the Press would best be served by a Board comprised entirely of American River College faculty, staff, students, and administration.

The Advisory Board may be structured to have ultimate veto power over financial matters or other such veto power in an effort to keep some system of checks and balances in place.  It may be beneficial to hold specific chairs open for specific types of membership and for there to be a cap on the total numbers of the board membership.   For example, we might limit to one representative from the Library, one from Art/New Media, and hold a specific number of chairs open for English faculty.  In this way the overall makeup of the Board is assured and regular as membership changes.

Theoretically, the Editor-In-Chief’s decision to publish a particular work could be vetoed by the Board’s decision not to pay for such publication.  It is hoped that such veto power will keep the Editor’s massive ego in check.

In the advent that an Advisory Board member submits a manuscript to the Press for publication consideration, such a Board member would need to excuse him- or herself from the Board during that decision making process.  It is further proposed that Editor-In-Chief be banned from submitting his or her own work to the Press for publication consideration, although the Editor-In-Chief would likely pen introductions and such for Press publications.

Objectives & Strategies

Objectives

The following objectives are both short- and long-term and provide a vision for the press beyond the boundaries of American River College:

• Provide a potential venue for faculty and staff who seek to publish works of interest to a readership interested in humanities and liberal arts subjects including but not limited to narrative works, scholarly works that are not strictly written to an academic audience, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and other creative work of various genres yet to be defined.  We have currently codified this as “works of high artistic and/or literary value,” although obviously this may need to be developed further.
• Advise and collaborate with such faculty in working toward developing both the best possible version of their work and the best possible publishing solution.
• Create a distinctive “brand” so that American River College Press titles are distinctive, both in terms of content and in terms of publishing platform.
• Work with a solid national / international distributor to ensure that our books can be ordered, purchased, and read on a national, if not international, basis.
• Keep on the cutting edge of new media (digital releases, multimedia projects, and so on), while keeping in mind that American River College serves a population with limited access to such technology.  (This is a potential problem that needs to be addressed.)
  Focusing first on the needs of faculty and staff with the understanding that serving these needs has a distinct and specific benefit to the students who represent our ultimate and fundamental role as employees of the District.
• Including faculty, staff, and students in a vibrant project that furthers the institutional goals of the college while promoting the individual goals of our authors, departments, and student body.
• Establish an endowment or similar funding arrangement to ensure that the press is able to made decisions based on quality of work rather than on immediate marketability, in keeping with District Strategic Goal 5: Organizational
• Effectiveness, ARC Focus Area 5.1, “Increase external funding sources to support college programs and services.”

Strategies to Achieve These Objectives

• Purchase technology necessary and acquire necessary physical space for press production and operations.
• Discuss distribution options with legitimate distributors to ensure we are in a position to publish books that are available on a national basis.
• Apply for grants (especially from the NEA/NEH) to build the necessary funding for the Press.
• Put Advisory Board in place to assist in managing press operations and fiscal oversight.
• Utilize Advisory Board in the shaping of technological approaches to delivery.
• Advertise the Press nationwide in order to solicit manuscripts and interest.
• Work with existing American River Review faculty and staff in order to learn from their successes and failures in the past and to integrate the ARR into the larger vision of the American River College Press.

Stately, Plump Buck Mulligan

The American River College Press is a proposed college press to be operated by American River College under the auspices of the English department and with support and input from various other departments on campus (and perhaps District-wide). It will be tasked with publishing book-length works of high artistic value of interest to a national audience. These works will be published primarily in online formats although it is possible that, funds permitting, some physical publication will occur.

As we all know, American River College serves an extraordinarily di-verse student base in the Sacramento area. It stands as one of the largest community colleges in the state and has been awarded numerous times for its achievements, not the least of which is the ongoing success of the American River Review, the literary magazine that the college has published for more than a decade. Furthermore ARC’s position as a member of the Los Rios District means that it has superior oversight and access to resources (human, intellectual, and so on) that are more akin to a university than a community college.

The continued success of the American River Review proves that the col-lege is quite capable of operating a nationally recognized literary journal. The proposed American River College Press would expand upon that success by creating a faculty-centered publishing imprint that would offer faculty, staff, and students an opportunity to publish book length works with a peer-reviewed press housed here at American River College.

For the reasons stated above, ARC is in a perfect position to operate a college press. Of particular interest is the fact that very few community colleges house college presses. In this way, ARC can once again pave the way into a bright future.

This business plan describes the purpose and goals of the American River College Press. It outlines the objectives, strategies, and projected costs for the first three years of the press, beginning Fall 2011 and ex-tending through Spring 2014. While we hope to set up an endowment to ensure the press is self-sufficient, we also understand the economy—at all levels—may make this impossible at this time. Nonetheless, the press will apply for grants as they are available in hopes to build up an en-dowment.

What We Will Publish

The press is interested in publishing literary works, especially narra-tives, of a non-technical nature, although scholarly works of a high quality and high readability would be of interest. By the same token, the press is less interested in publishing technical manuals, textbooks, or manuscripts specific to fields outside the purview of the liberal arts. What this means is that the press would not be interested in publishing a mathematics textbook but would be potentially interested in publishing a narrative of a mathematician’s work in the field, assuming such a narrative is written for a general intelligent readership. We are partic-ularly interested in publishing literary works of a very high quality.
The American River College Press proposes to publish three book-length works the first year to be distributed via digital distribution channels. Based on discussions with physical book distributors (Small Press Distribution, Perseus, and others), we feel that this is sufficient to launch the press as a viable entity, although it should also be noted that three books per year is a very small release schedule for most university presses. While we would be able to digitally distribute the titles ourselves (via self-publishing channels) there are advantages to being distributed through a reputable network and such options will need to be explored once we have a title in production.

What It Will Look Like

Recent discussions with operational university presses have underscored the rapid changes occurring in the publishing field. With Borders Books & Music filing bankruptcy, we have begun to feel the increasing impact of digital publishing over more traditional ink and paper. Books—the physical paper-between-boards format that we all grew up with—is diminishing in importance, particularly with small presses. What is taking its place is digital.

ARC has prided itself on being a cutting edge college. With this in mind, it makes sense to have American River College Press be a digital-first publisher. We must admit that there is nostalgia to the ink-and-paper model and the idea of “publishing” a book is linked—in our minds—to this format. Nonetheless, the market is changing and the nostalgia of one generation is being replaced by the openness of the next. With digital delivery platforms following below the $200 mark, digital publishing begins, at last, to feel more available than it ever has before.

Obviously, the possibility of digital publishing also serves to eliminate much of the cost of physical publishing, including printing, binding, shipping, and warehousing the titles, thereby making running a small press from ARC an increasingly viable possibility.

The digital format would further allow ARC Press to publish individual short pieces as the need and desire arose. In other words, it would be possible to publish an individual poem or short poem cycle, a short story or novella, a single piece of creative non-fiction, a one-act play. Such works could include an original “book cover,” table of contents, index, or the various ephemera that a full-length book might include. In other words, the digital format opens the press up to a variety of possibilities that would be less possible for a physical press.