UK book price – fixed or variable?

I’m busy setting up a print-on-demand publishing agreement for Fraudcast News with Lightning Source, part of my ongoing and rather haphazard marketing and promotion efforts for the book.

I’ve been told Lightning Source will be a better bet than Lulu, my existing choice, for distribution and trade catalogue services, amongst other things. The idea is that that will help get Fraudcast News into bookshops and elsewhere. I’ll only know for sure once I’ve tried. I failed to tick some box or other when I got started on Lulu which meant that up until now, the book has not shown up via conventional retail channels.

The process is a tedious, time-consuming one, not least because I have to get a new ISBN to identify the book. What would cost me £126 for a block of 10 in the UK is a free service in France, where I live. Amazing that the UK charges so much money for the right to exclusive use of a few digits to identify your publication. Total rip off, if you ask me.

I then used a free online service to convert the new ISBN into a bar code, throwing up the question of what the sequence of digits actually means. I now know that the subsidiary line of code 90000 tells a computer a book has no suggested retail price.

Given that Fraudcast News is free to download as a PDF, it all gets a bit complicated. All the more so given the possibilities of people buying via different retail channels in physical bookshops, online via retailers or direct from Lightning Source itself.

While trying to find out if I had to set a price via the bar code or not, an answer that still escapes me, I came across this interesting piece about national fixed-price book rules versus a free-for-all. It includes the following:

Recently three French economists produced a study comparing 12 European countries, some with fixed price laws and some without, and concluded, “Over the past decade, the growth rate of book prices is weaker in countries with fixed prices than in countries with free prices” and “the increase of new titles is stronger in the countries which have a fixed price.”

At the same time, I’ve also been lucky to get some help from the good people at Positive Money with a re-design of the book cover, a much needed improvement to my own DIY effort.

The result is the following image, which I like a whole lot better.

Fraudcast News one of Green Left Weekly’s books of the year

Nice to get some positive feedback on Fraudcast News from Green Left Weekly’s Mat Ward.

For me, a truly great book is one that stays in your thoughts for a long time after reading it.

I thought about this book daily for months after finishing it, because its main argument seems to be at the root of almost every injustice in the world. Former Reuters reporter Patrick Chalmers gradually realised, through his job reporting on the European Union, that what is commonly passed off as democracy is anything but. Politicians are held accountable only once every four years or so, after which they break nearly every pre-election promise.

Chalmers wants truly accountable democracy, in which politicians are held accountable for every decision they make. In this endlessly quotable book, Chalmers says it is the job of every journalist to make accountable democracy part of the conversation. Technology may hold the key to eventually making it a reality.

Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

‘We’ve created some feminists!’ … A study group on the Demand the Impossible course at Goldsmith’s. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics.

I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere.

Just in case such shameless self-promotion gets stripped off the comments section by the moderators, I’m pasting it here

Sounds great – shame the author had to pepper his article with leftie this, leftie that cheeky, chappy stuff.

This sort of teaching shouldn’t be classed as radical at all but part of a balanced, thoughtful education that teaches people to think for themselves rather than turning them into consumer automatons. Our existing system is all capitalist-, profit- and economic-growth driven.

You don’t get accompanying “rightie” this, “rightie” that when it comes to articles about Alan Sugar or Dragon’s Den as they vaunt the benefits of loadsamoney lifestyles that ignore what a complete mess we’re all in as a result.

That would be too “radical” for prime-time entertainment – too many people might get “the wrong ideas”. You’re not allowed to add together one + one to see the result of such thinking as consumer craziness and excess, tottering debt mountains, poverty, inequality, climate change, loss of green spaces, war etc. all that fun stuff which would make crap reality TV, piss off the professional politicians and frighten the business advertisers away. Oh no.

I would love to help out with this course – giving some insight from my own career as a Reuters reporter to talk about how our governance systems fail us and how conventional journalism is generally blinkered to those failures. On the upside, the good news. There are genuine, grassroots alternatives sprouting up around the world that could address both of these problems. There are some Creative Commons materials on my website you can take for free, if you want. I haven’t posted the address for fear of comment removal but I’m sure you can work out how to find it.

What would be interesting is to think about how to seed the ideas of Demand the Impossible to make it deliverable all over the place, not just in the UK.

Creative Commons How to manuals and accompanying video journalism reports made by participants and uploaded online would be good places to start.

Worse than “cock-ups and casualties” at Thomson Reuters

I wrote this comment in response to a commentary piece by ex-colleague and current friend Paul Holmes about recent editorial changes being for the better at Thomson Reuters, despite the recent “cock-ups and casualties”.

I disagreed.

Patrick Chalmers • I have a great deal of respect for Paul Holmes as an ex-colleague and as a human being. This measured critique of Thomson Reuters today versus all its yesterdays is very much true to Paul’s style.

Where I think Thomson Reuters totally misses the mark, as I told Paul when we were both on staff and which I say all the louder now I’ve left, is that it fails to imagine anything but the narrowest idea of “independence, integrity and freedom from bias”.

The Reuters of my dreams, before I joined it and during the 11 years I worked there, was one that served the whole of humanity. That is what I imagine as freedom from bias. This is far from being the case.

As Paul notes in his piece, there are examples from today of excellent journalism by Thomson Reuters staff. These are, however, the exceptions rather than the rule. It is in the mass of coverage, the flood of day-to-day stories, that Reuters old and new totally fails its tests of “independence, integrity and freedom from bias”. Given its role as wholesale news supplier to the world’s media and also the internet – this is a spectacularly important failure.

This coverage is chronically biased towards the interests of established governments and capital, to the global corporations and financial markets that wield such outsized influence on the world’s seven billion people. The former come to power by electoral processes that are wide open to abuse by the latter. The latter are never elected, subject to only the scantest of scrutiny or global regulatory oversight yet they are so extraordinarily powerful. They also contribute the vast bulk of Thomson Reuters income.

So here comes the self publicity – I’ve written about all this in Fraudcast News, How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies. Not only do I lay out this case in detail, I also suggest governance and journalism solutions to be built from the ground up.

You can buy a copy or download it for free via this page (http://fraudcastnews.net/).

Setting The People Free – a meeting with the author

I was delighted to spend a couple of hours today talking democracy with John Dunn, emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King’s College, Cambridge.

Professor Dunn wrote the excellent “Setting the People Free“, a book that helped me nail down my thinking on the evolution of “democracy” since the Ancient Greeks coined a term for government by the people. That learning process was an essential step for me to take in fleshing out the arguments and observations I make in Democracy Now?, the fifth and final chapter in Fraudcast News.

We talked about what he’s planning as a follow-up to the book – a text due out next year in which he intends to lay out the book’s political implications, not least for the United States.

The meeting was a great way to prepare for a Fraudcast News reading and Q+A I’m due to deliver later on Sunday in CB1 cafe in Cambridge.

For a potted take on Dunn’s thinking, this Russia Today interview from a couple years ago does a good job. That should only be as warm up to the full works presented in Setting the People Free, which I can’t recommend enough for anyone interested in the way their lives are governed.

Food and land: base camps for community building

Pogo Cafe in Hackney, London (Copyleft photo by Patrick Chalmers)

I wrote this blog entry for Stir magazine, which has a kickstarter campaign underway to raise funds for printing offline versions of the wonderful work it does already online. Have a think about the stuff you usually fritter your money away on, petrol for the Porsche, a Lear jet flight to Monaco, private banking advice and so on, then consider giving some of that money to Stir instead.

The Pogo Café in Hackney is everything we’re told modern Western consumers aren’t capable of doing, which makes it a treat to visit. The place serves great-quality vegan food, it’s staffed by enthusiastic volunteers who host a space that nurtures alternative culture, co-operative working, exhibitions and events.

Just the place for an evening themed on Land & Liberty! — stories from communities across the world that are trying to control where their food comes from and how it’s grown. London food-growers recounted tales from their visits to like-minded souls in Ljubljana Slovenia, Jaos Palestine, Chiapas Mexico and Havana Cuba.

For the rest of this post, read on here.

Fraudcast News – the flyer

 

 

This is the draft publicty flyer for Fraudcast News, trying to squeeze the essence of 68,000 words or so into 300ish.

All/any feedback gratefully received.

The bloody realities of self publishing

Creative Commons

- not your standard

copyright

Self-publishing is a grind. Don’t kid yourself that you can just kiss off that bestseller, throw it up on line as an eBook or paperback then lay back and count the royalty cheques as they roll in, particularly if you forgot to put in the teen vampires chapter.

Here in the grunt room at Fraudcast News, I’ve got to the stage of promoting my book beyond the immediate circle of family and both of my friends. Time for a brief run through what got me here.

There’s quite a skillset to build up or borrow just to get this far, the first being to have the idea for a book.

The ones behind Fraudcast News  began germinating 15 years ago, when I first wondered about the realities of political power in the European Union. No really, it’s sad but true, that’s the sort of thing that bothers my head in idle moments, I can’t help it.

As a Reuters reporter in Brussels, I witnessed political decisions being taken over the heads of European environment ministers – by finance ministers, heads of governments and even European Commission civil servants. It made me think about where power truly lay, who had it and what I as a journalist should be doing to write about that. My immediate concern was why so little ever got done to resolve environmental issues such as climate change. As I now know, the problem goes far wider.

My questions about power and how journalism should cover it mushroomed out over the years, eventually forcing me out of Reuters. They spread down to national and local levels of government and up to the global level. It took ages for me to work them into the broader critique of representative democracy and journalism, and possible remedies, that is Fraudcast News. It’s complicated but not impossible stuff.

The work required me to write and re-write the text, getting various clever friends to read through each version for coherence, content and so on. With a complete first draft in hand by last May, I re-wrote it all again in the subsequent months on the back of people’s comments, positive and negative. Many times over the years, I considered jacking it all in as a bad job. The project survived, emerging complete at the start of 2012.

That took me to lulu.com, one of several self-publishing sites. My first goal was to publish an eBook, which took a few days to work through their system.

My Word document needed juggling about to strip out unnecessary formatting and to make its chapters suitable for the table of contents generator Lulu uses to turn a document into EPUB format. There were all the usual annoying glitches you get with any formatting process but I got there in the end, this being the result. I used one of their off-the-shelf covers to get me going. Once it was done, I read the ebook from start to finish, picking up quite a few grammar howlers, spelling mistakes or wooly sentences as I went. Strange how a changed format threw up errors I’d missed in the previous one.

Next was the paperback, which was more straightforward. I created a PDF from the Word document, played around with fonts, headers and footers and the extra pages at the front. I appealed to the world for help designing a cover before eventually doing one myself and market testing it with my Facebook friends. They were great – I got tonnes of helpful and useful advice.

The process was faster than it would have been with a conventional publisher, once I’d worked the text through to its first complete draft. I’d tried but failed to get a conventional publisher a few years back and decided this time around to do it myself.

Would I recommend that others do the same and bypass the old-style route?

It depends, though probably yes. I’ve learnt a lot having to do all this stuff myself, to say nothing of the experimenting I’ve been doing with Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

You certainly need friends who are willing and able to help and plenty of time that you don’t have to spend on other things, with or without full-time, paid work.

No conventional publisher would have accepted me doing a Creative Commons book or giving away free PDFs, so I was probably always destined to do it this way. Technology set me free then made me work my backside off.

Undercurrents – advice from the veterans of radical video activism

Paul O’Connor of Undercurrents gave an inspiring, enlightening and entertaining talk about the potential of radical video film-making at the Bristol Radical Film Festival 2012.

This animated film is a neat depiction of the why in all this. It’s all about trying to break up the effects of corrupted government and their collusion with corporate sponsors (If you think that’s all a bit too radical, check out today’s Observer front page).

Paul gave some great tips for activists trying to get their messages out, while also trying to earn enough to keep themselves on the streets.

“We want to create an alternative, vibrant media but also get our stuff into the mainstream,” he said.

Don’t be put off by the idea that using cheaper technology, camcorders or even smartphones, will prevent you selling your footage to fund further actions in the future.

“The whole thing about broadcast quality is bullshit really. If your images are strong and they want it, they will take it,” he said.

Other great films from the Undercurrents Youtube channel include the one below. It features the amazing story from 1996 of four women as they plan and carry out smashing a BAE war plane in the UK to stop genocide in East Timor. They were found not guilty despite rendering the aircraft useless.

“Images are a very powerful way of remembering, and building stories around,” says Paul.

Activist Video training in Bristol’s Stokes Croft

I shot this brief, smartphone film this morning using a visionOntv video-making template, warming up for a day at the Bristol Radical Film Festival in Stokes Croft.

This week-long event has a hoard of film treasures, meaning the 15 or so participants in today’s training workshop didn’t need any explanations about why our conventional media need a root-and-branch revamp themselves.

The results were impressive, many people buddied up to produce three-shot, no-edit films explaining a where, what, why story of their choice.

The why of using a template is to cut-out the black holes of editing, processing and the rest that accompany conventional video film-making. What you lose in quality you gain in spades in productivity – the good kind – and in getting stories out there that otherwise just wouldn’t get told.

I helped out as a volunteer so as to practise using the template myself and to begin learning how to train others to be reporters – a core part of my conclusions in Fraudcast News.

Everyone here is talking about how to get funds to continue their work, meaning I will be giving away more PDF copies of the book than selling paperbacks.

That’s fine by me. Send me an email or make a comment below if you want one.