I’ve been working on my website, Customline Wordware, and I’ve been trying to take a step back and figure out what I really do for a living. I write. I edit. I coach. I teach. I present. I strategize. I engage. And while it’s always seemed something of a seamless whole to me, I realize that it may not seem that way to others.

Searching for a catchy catch-all phrase, I spent a long time writing words on paper, staring at them, rearranging them, until it came to me as I was falling asleep one night. What I do is content. I do all sorts of things to content—I create it, I manage it, I change it, I adapt it, I enable others to produce it—but at the end of the day, it’s all about content.

And it also draws in some of the more practical aspects of my work: doing search engine optimization, doing social media marketing and helping others do the same—because it’s a complete package. You create the content, you make sure it’s the right content, and you put it in the right places.

So that’s what I am: a content consultant. Cool name. We’ll see how it works!

What is it that you do? When you step back from your everyday work, your life in the trenches, how do you define your efforts? Let me know, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

***

“Browsing my own website often starts me wondering about things I have no answers for. It can also nudge me into another web-surfing binge; this time about copyright ownerships in ebook publishing.

“Scrolling through my recent posts, I realized that many dealt with epublishing. Rapidly emerging epublishing is formidable in its potential, and like all first encounters with something new, it both fascinates and frightens.

“I confess that, initially, fear triumphs over my fascination. I’m afraid that the technology of writing ebooks might be beyond my grasp. And what about the business side of epublishing?

“In the early 1960s, becoming a local news correspondent required me to dust off an ancient typewriter, brush up on rusty typing and business skills, and surmount challenges as they came. That first writing leap scared me, too. However, within a year I was teaching other writers how-to avoid pitfalls (and lawsuits) while covering a newsbeat.

“Confidence came with experience. In the early 1970s, fellow writing group members said, “You should publish your stories in a book.” The allure of authoring a book to memorialize the homesteaders I revered was irresistible. Totally ignorant of the many aspects of authoring regional history, I began what was to become a series.

“Boy, did I learn!

I mastered tape recording oral history, writing indexes for chapters and for people included, and photographs. I created the bibliographies, wrote cut lines for photo reproductions, and worked with editors, graphics and printing departments.

“Attending to dozens of details I’d been ignorant of meant that by the time The Statesman-Examiner published my three-volume Behind These Mountains series (1986-1992), I was also inducted into book marketing.

“That really broadened my outlook!

“My experiences became subjects when I was asked to teach at writing workshops and history conferences. Idaho Writer’s League awarded me Writer of the Year. That, I have to confess, was because of my excellent documentation rather than the quality of my writing.

“Similar to today’s intrusion of epublishing in my life, back then, it was access to the Internet that came to my sparsely populated Montana valley.

“Maybe I was braver then.

“No matter the minimal instruction of the telephone company’s two-hour program on the wonders of the Internet and how to connect a dial-up, I just HAD to take the leap and gain the world!

“I whooped for joy over the 1996 Edition of Mecklermedia’s Official Internet Yellow Pages. I still have that four-pound book which was my most exciting Christmas gift, given me by my ever-thoughtful daughter.

“Overcoming daily computing challenges spun into articles like Fire In The Wire, which explains how to resolve computer modem failure; published by Mother Earth News in 2001.

“With research at my fingertips instead of a hundred-mile drive away and email query responses within hours, I soon thrilled at seeing my byline in national magazines.

“So why my apprehension about the challenges of epublishing when experience has taught me to overcome fear?

“Conquer fear in small increments.

“I took the first step about a year ago. Blogging is epublishing. I let it intimidate me far too long. But overcoming my fear of blogging quickly encouraged me to create a website, Montana Scribbler . Do those count as two baby steps toward publishing ebooks?

“I may soon succumb to the inevitable and begin using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Resistance is as futile as forgoing Paypal and teleconferences! All that really matters is determination. So why not tackle ebooks.

“Maybe my website posts are my way of building my courage to tackle learning the technology necessary to become a published ebook author? Wisdom tells me now is the time to begin exploring the business side of this endeavor, like how author’s copyrights and right to reprint elsewhere can be affected by epublishing.

“Minimal web surfing brought more questions than answers. But why delay while experts are still debating copyright details? Articles like The National Academies Workshop on Copyright in the Digital Age, Bill Rosenblatt’s Copyright and Technology website (which covers digital rights technologies), and commentaries on Laura Hazard Owen’s Publishing Trends are online. The complex issues won’t be resolved quickly.

“I’m secure in knowing experienced writers will encourage and support my efforts. My good friend, Clive Warner already pointed out one important factor, “Ebooks can be apps—and a programming team has to make the app. Increasingly, the writer may be only one part of a team making a ‘product’.”

“The writing journey need never be lonely, and at least four reputable organizations offer contract help: the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Authors Guild, the Authors Registry, Text and Academic Authors and the Writer’s Union (Canada).

“Years of visiting Ivan Hoffman’s website has made me prudent enough to consult an intellectual property attorney as well.

“My fascination with the future of publishing hasn’t abated one little bit, offering as it does new dimensions to enhance my life.”

*****

Mona welcomes help from tech-savvy readers! Email her at mtscribbler@air-pipe.com. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

But it’s not fun always working with the Big Three of search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN — so today I was delighted to come across this article that announces some new and interesting search engines. I looked at them with some trepidation (after all, who doesn’t remember the dazzling failure of Cuil?), but was pleased with what I saw. No, we won’t be optimizing for them anytime soon, but they’re great tools to keep tucked in the back of your mind as you roam the web.

I won’t rehash the article, but will note the names of the new search engines reviewed:

• Soovle
• facesaerch
• Tastekid
• fasteagle
• FanSnap
• compfight
• Kedricx

Check the article out and play around with the engine that interests you most. With Google’s domination of the search engine landscape, we often forget that there is more than one way to skin a cat. These (and my own perennial favorite, Kartoo) will challenge your boxed-in thinking. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

People talk, and people write. Talking hasn’t changed much over the years; but reading and writing certainly have.

I like this brief history, neatly summarized by David Usborne last year in The Independent:

The first “manuscripts” are thought to have been produced around the seventh to 13th centuries, with largely religious texts produced by hand. A well-known example is the Book of Kells, a Latin collection of the Gospels lavishly decorated with an eight-circle cross. From the 13th century, with the “secularisation” of book production, books changed from being objects of worship to descriptive works. This expansion – though limited, given the lack of printing presses – was driven by the Rennaisance (sic.), and with it the rise of European universities and the return in the 13th century of Crusaders, who brought texts from Byzantium – books from ancient Greek and Roman times about world affairs.
The first printed – religious – books emerged in the 15th century but books as we know them took off in the 17th century. In the 1600s Gutenberg printing presses were invented in Germany. By 1424, the Cambridge University library owned 122 books. Woodblock printing and paper arrived from the Far East and in 1800.

I’ve finally taken my own first steps into the future of the manuscript: last week I bought my first ebook reader in the form of Amazon’s Kindle. And it’s certainly an interesting experience.

I bought it mostly because, as a writer myself, I feel I need to experience what is clearly the future of books, at least for many people. I also am enormously attracted by the ability to carry a whole library with me when I travel, and (with the easy ability to order more books) no more panic when I’m on a trip and run out of things to read.

So while it’s early days, for what it’s worth, here are my impressions so far:

• The screen is terrific. It’s really easy to read and the font size can be changed quickly if necessary.
• I have not yet gotten used to the page forward and page back buttons, which are all aligned on either side of the screen — the places where I’m most likely to grasp the “book” and therefore inadvertantly flip around. I expect that ease will come with practice, but right now it’s damned annoying.
• Also annoying is the fact that the spiffy jacket fits loosely and falls off easily.
• I thought I’d be mostly reading books, but it’s absolutely marvelous for magazine reading. So you don’t get the pictures (and obviously Smithsonian and National Geographic aren’t therefore good candidates); but I get to read articles in one of my favorites, the Atlantic Monthly at a fraction of the offline subscription price, and don’t use dead trees to do it. That pretty much rocks my world right there.
• I haven’t yet got the process down, but a deal-breaker for me had always been that I was confined to buying books from Amazon to read via the Kindle. This is not the case: other ebooks and even pdfs can be sent to the Kindle from my very own MacBook. It’s trickier to do than to simply buy from Amazon, but it’s feasible, and some rainy Saturday afternoon soon I shall learn how to do it.
• The looks aren’t as bad as I’d feared, Yeah, it looks like a clunky version of some medical device that would be used in sick bay on the starship Enterprise, but it grows on you. I have dreams, still, of what Apple’s eventual ebook reader will look like, but for now I’m willing to settle for this one.
• The first three days I had the Kindle I was in Boston taking the subway all over the place and it’s absolutely terrific for reading in small crowded spaces. It remembers what page you were on and gets you admiring glances from people around you.

I don’t yet have any gradiose conclusions about the future of printed books or how we’ll communicate our ideas in the next century. But I’m having a lot of fun in this one dipping my toe into the waters of the future.

As long as there are words, I’ll survive … beyond the elements of style!

And now we have Second Life, with which I’m intimately acquainted, as I co-author a site, SecondSeeker.com, that reviews places in Second Life that new (and not-so-new) residents might wish to visit. And as I move about that particular virtual world, I’m struck again and again by the names that people acquire.

I should digress to say that one has a limited choice of both first and surnames in Second Life, unless one wishes to pay a significant amount of money to keep or choose one’s own. Otherwise, it’s pretty much mix-and-match with what’s available, and with millions of residents, fewer and fewer “good” names are available.

The fact is that most of them sound like the friendly bots who bring you your daily serving of spam: Hammond Gillnose, Tarteru Higglebottom, Sally Tennyfeathers, Brice Haiku.

Creative … or confusing?

Remember Lewis Carroll? In The Hunting of the Snark, he writes,

His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends,” And his enemies “Toasted-cheese.”

The Internet has changed the way that we look at a lot of things, and we’d do well to learn its lessons. But let’s not let that keep us from being creative – with subject lines, names, or indeed anything else in which we engage.

And then we’ll all be … beyond the elements of style!