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Recently Somersault (@smrsault) had the privilege of helping sponsor the American Christian Fiction Writers (@ACFWTweets) (#ACFW) annual conference (@ACFWConference) held this year in Dallas (see our previous blogpost).

Michael Hyatt (@MichaelHyatt), former CEO and Chairman of Thomas Nelson (@ThomasNelson) and author of Platform (#PlatformBook), spoke in two plenary sessions about the necessity for authors to learn social media marketing and build a targeted fan base (see our previous blogpost, "The Importance of Building Your Platform"). His message exactly supports our new SomersaultSocial program.

During the conference, we asked authors, agents, and publishers to give us their opinions in response to one question: “What major challenges are facing Christian publishing today?”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you embrace and surmount publishing and marketing challenges in this new digital age.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

In this Fast Company (@FastCompany) article, Ryan Holiday (@RyanHoliday) says authors are increasingly writing non-fiction books, not as a means unto themselves, but as a means to the end of being a professional introduction of themselves for speaking, consulting, and deal-making.

Faced with declining sales and the disappearance of book retailers like Borders, authors have diversified their income streams, and many make substantially more money through new business generated by a book, rather than from it.

Today, authors are in the idea-making business, not the book business. In short, this means that publishing a book is less about sales and much more about creating a brand. The real customers of books are no longer just readers but now include speaking agents, CEOs, investors, and startups....

Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility signals.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you communicate your brand message.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The American Christian Fiction Writers (@ACFWTweets) conference (@ACFWConference) (#ACFW) is being held in Dallas, TX and Somersault (@smrsault) is here telling authors, agents, and publishers about

• our online dashboard for publishers and marketers, SomersaultNOW
• this blog as a telescope helping industry professionals “see around the corner” to prepare for the future of publishing
• and SomersaultSocial, our new program to educate authors and speakers in the strategic and effective use of social media marketing.

Congratulations to Allen Arnold, winner of the ACFW’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his impact on the Christian fiction industry, its authors, and its readers.” He’s the former publisher and senior vice president of Thomas Nelson Fiction, having launched the Fiction group in 2004.

ACFW’s other awards are Julee Schwarzburg - Editor of the Year, Nicole Resciniti - Agent of the Year, Allison Pittman - Mentor of the Year, Genesis winners for the best unpublished Christian fiction projects, and the Carol Awards for the best Christian fiction published in the previous calendar year.

If you’re attending the conference, please come to our exhibit booth and say hi!

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A report by Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) for paidContent (@paidContent) says, “On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine (@espressobook), and Kodak (@kodakCB) are partnering to add print-on-demand technology to Kodak Picture Kiosks (@KodakKiosks) [of which there are 105,000 nationwide]. That means consumers will be able to print paperback photo books, self-published books, and the seven million backlist and public domain titles in On Demand’s catalog from retail chains such as CVS (@CVSCaremarkFYI).”

Read the paidContent article.

About 30 Espresso Book Machines are installed in stores around the US, with 30 more being readied for installation.

HarperCollinsPublishers (@HarperCollins) says it will make about 5,000 current paperbacks available through the Espresso Book Machine.

Read The Wall Street Journal article.

On Demand also announced a partnership with ReaderLink (@Readerlink), which distributes books to grocery stores, drugstores, mass market and club stores, to make more titles available through the Kodak Picture Kiosks.

“We envision an integrated solution that can substantially redefine the publishing industry and bring exciting new solutions to customers," says Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books.

Read the news release.

But according to USA TODAY (@usatodaytech), "this all comes with one huge catch — Kodak is in the midst of selling its photo kiosk business as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy."

Neller said the Kodak agreement, though announced [Sept. 12], was signed before the Rochester printing and imaging company announced last month it had decided to sell a set of businesses that include its photo kiosks, document scanners and still camera film operations. He said On Demand's hope is that whatever company buys Kodak's kiosk operations would also continue the Espresso arrangement.

Read the USA TODAY article.

See our previous blogposts “Mardel Acquires Espresso Book Machine” and “3D Printing a Gun.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate the fast-changing world of book publishing.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The above Infographic, based on research from the My Hope with Billy Graham (@BGEA) outreach campaign, depicts statistics of the average American neighborhood of 100 people.

How might this information shape your publishing agenda? Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

In an opinion essay for The New York Times, author Andy Martin (@andymartinink) says settling on a book title is one of the hardest things to do – even if you spend all day thinking of names for other things. How do you summarize 50,000 or more words into five?

Perhaps the rule about titles is that there is no rule. Like everything else we write, a title is a bunch of words that are arbitrary, random, largely meaningless, and yet still striving to sound as indispensable as the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony….

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you title (and market) your book(s).

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

For a humorous (and accurate) ☺ depiction of the publishing process from an author’s viewpoint (using animated GIF images), see this blog post by Nathan Bransford (@NathanBransford).

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Here’s a new page in the print-on-demand saga and its growing impact on book publishing (see our previous blogpost, “Mardel Acquires Espresso Book Machine"): 3D printing. There may be innovative applications for publishers to consider for print books, especially in light of the current capability to 3D print a functional human jaw and a working gun made out of resin.

Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain), author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (book) (blog), professor of law at Harvard Law School (@Harvard_Law), and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (@berkmancenter), says

Resin is the toner of the modern 3D printer. No doubt 3D printers will come to be able to commonly use other raw ingredients. There's no reason they couldn't be someday in the mainstream metals and all sorts of forms of porcelain, but in this case we're talking plastic.

Read this in full at Marketplace Tech (@MarketplaceAPM).

Another foray into the future is the possibility that smartphones will be fashioned into glasses, and the opportunities this may bring to publishers.

"This idea of wearing glasses and being able to see data as we walk around is where I think things are heading," says Brian Chen (@bxchen), columnist for The New York Times Bits blog (@nytimesbits) and author of Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future—and Locked Us In. And once the interface for glasses is less intrusive, he noted, the potential use cases are wide open. “Say you were giving a speech," he said. "Glasses could serve as a teleprompter."

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you sort out the fast-changing world of publishing.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Futurist news tab.

The Guardian’s (@guardian) Style Guide (@guardianstyle) editor David Marsh (@davidrmarsh) has declared today to be International Apostrophe Day (#apostropheday).

For proper execution, see The Writing Kit’s tutorial, Using the Apostrophe, and the above poster (see it enlarged).

Read why the British bookstore chain Waterstone’s (@Waterstones) dropped its apostrophe earlier this year, then listen to two BBC commentators discuss its implications.

See The Apostrophe Protection Society and the blogs Apostrophe Abuse (@apostropheabuse) and Apostrophe Catastrophes.

For fun, see this apostrophe/comma Speed Bump comic by Dave Coverly. J

And remember that the popular Bible translation Common English Bible (@CommonEngBible) uses the apostrophe in its copious number of contractions (which are used where the text warrants an engaging conversational style, but not used in divine or poetic discourse).

Let Somersault’s (@smrsault) editorial expertise help you properly use apostrophes when communicating your brand’s message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.