 So, today I'm going to talk about mobile self-publishing, our community publishing partners initiative. My clicker is working. So the story of our mobile self-publishing community partners initiative is kind of about my relationship to this dude here. And I'm so used to presenting with him that I'm kind of having a little, like, ghost loss of him at this thing, but I'm going to do my best to channel him. His name is Mark Coker, and I met him back in 2010, about the time that iPads were first getting big and eBooks were becoming kind of a thing that libraries were seriously going to have to deal with. And one of our pages said to me, he knew that I was into eBooks, and he said, Henry, have you heard of this company Smashwords? And I'm like, no. And he said, yeah, they published eBooks in Los Gatos. That's the connection, because Mark's company is in Los Gatos, and he went to Los Gatos High School, which we become relevant further on in the presentation. And what was interesting is that we were both kind of involved with books and the whole kind of phenomenon of people reading books, but from a vastly different perspective. So I'm a librarian, and I have the whole kind of librarian point of view and our challenges. So my question for him was, what's up with Smashwords and this whole self-publishing thing? And I think the biggest thing at that time for me, and this is going away, was like the traditional kind of librarians' kind of suspicion. And dare I say, the stigma associated with self-published works, which traditionally were kind of like the vanity press. You're not good enough to make it like in New York with the big five. So you had to go and pay money to get your book printed, and now you're coming to the library, giving it to us. And we're very happy to have that. I see that as changing with this alternative with the free tools of self-publishing, and maybe indie publishing is kind of a better way to look at that. And then Mark's question, I think, coming from the business end, I too improve business. And the sort of landscape where people buy a single book and read it was kind of what's up with this whole library e-book lending model. Because his whole backstory is he wanted to get a book published. He went, got an agent, worked in New York, was trying to shop the book around, and kind of realized, or his statement would be, like, traditional publishing is broken. And in the same way, he'll say that the library lending e-book model is broken. So when he was unable to get his book published, he created a platform for people to publish books directly to a worldwide audience. And it really is worldwide in that it distributes to iTunes, Flipkart, Barnes and Noble. It doesn't distribute directly to Amazon. You have to sort of push that out individually. But that kind of was his kind of inspiration to do what he did and create Smashwords. So the first question was, like, can we put Smashwords books in the library? Can we make those available to library patrons to check out? And the answer was no. There was no platform to distribute self-published e-books through libraries back in 2010, though that has changed. So we had that as a goal, and we would have kind of a bunch of conversations. Could we put them behind easy proxy? Can we do this? You know, and it was like, no. This isn't happening right now. So we went with other ways of collaborating, and our evolving collaboration initially had to do, well, it surrounded, it was about co-programming, and that was followed by co-branding, and then our community partnerships. So the co-programming was basically doing programs together. It's an easy thing to do, and we model that with other organizations in the community, like the rec department brings in the kayaks, and they talk about that. So we brought in someone from Smashwords and literally did a three-part program. The first part I was involved with, and I talked about e-book lending in the library, and then someone from Smashwords, Mark Coker himself in the first one, talked about the whole e-book lending landscape and self-publishing. And that was followed by a primer on e-book self-publishing. And then e-book publishing best practices. And that kind of was an eye-opener for me because there were like tons of local authors at these programs, especially the last two, and they were like intently following the whole thing. They weren't just like sitting back and, you know, this is nice. They had an agenda. They wanted to publish their book to a worldwide audience. So it was successful in the sense that it kind of energized the local author community. We then followed that up with co-branding, which kind of is emblematic of our approach to this. It's kind of, we're pointing the way to success, rather than some other libraries that were more involved with holding the hands of the local author community through the entire process. We were just kind of saying to the people, you know, here's a link to Smashwords and when they got to Smashwords, they'd see our icon on the Smashwords portal. And if they submitted a book, it would be tagged with Los Gatos Library with sort of metadata throughout the process. This was based in co-branding that was seen at the Sony e-reader store. Now defunct, where, you know, you just put up an icon where you, a graphic where you think authors might run into it. And that kind of leads them down this bread-come-chale to, you know, the ability to use the free tools of Smashwords. And that bread-come-chale is kind of largely dependent on them reading the book, the books that Mark wrote, like about how to do this with very detailed instructions and how to format your book in Word to make it come out as a well-formatted e-pub and eight other formats. Smashwords has this thing, which I love, it's kind of like making sausage. It's called the meat grinder. So when you upload your Word document, it goes through the meat grinder and then comes out as nine different formats. What, like, how cool is that? Multi-format. Also, here's the first time I'm going to say it. Imitation is a sincerest form of flattery. So Seattle is kind of doing a similar co-branding thing. And local authors, as I said, are dear to our hearts. They have a shelf in our library where we take those sort of vanity press books that they paid to produce and stick them on a shelf in the local author section. So the idea for the local authors was to transition them to an e-book format, which is easier for us, so we don't have to process the book and wonder where it is, is it lost. We have authors that come in every week to see if their book is still there on the shelf. They want to know the stats. They're like, you know, like, yeah. And then for them, it's a win-win both ways, because they're making it as an e-book, reaching the world. With just in our library, it's like tiny. But on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, they have an opportunity for success in like the mega, you know, orders of magnitude. So that's kind of like a cycle. They come to us. We push them over to Smashwords or other self-publishing platforms. And then those like offerings, when they get into Smashwords, get sucked up by Overdrive recently, three I'm not yet, Baker & Taylor for a long time, Enki and like something like DCPL, Douglas County Public Library. And then the library is able to then decide based on our existing collection development material selection policies, whether these books fit in the collection, and then can be available for patrons to check out. Using the traditional one book, one user model, I should say. So this is Mark's line, so I'm challenging him now. Henry, we're going from the culture of reading to the culture of authorship. It takes a village to publish a book. So we did these first two things, and we were talking, I think, last year about this time. And like, what's next, Mark? What should we do? And he seriously was interested in partnering with the high school because he goes around and talks nationally, and he goes to NYU and is involved with their journalism school or some school over there. And he felt like it would be a great opportunity for high school students to learn about self-publishing in the classroom environment and actually work together to publish a book or a bunch of books together. Our project turned out to be an anthology, and it takes a village to publish a book. At the time, I was somewhat skeptical as I am. That's my MO, skeptical person. So, but it was kind of awesome in a way that an idea that started out as just a conversation actually led to kind of a successful project. And it was helped by the fact that my co-town librarian, Heidi Murphy, knew the English teacher that we ended up working with pretty well, so we were able to kind of partner with the high school, which isn't always so easy. So, Community Publishing Partnerships was the name we slapped on this. That was in conjunction with a PLP innovation grant that we received. And I remember at the time I said to Heidi, if I get this grant, are you going to help me out with this? Because for me, getting grants has equaled more work, but it's awesome. So we decided, and we modeled this grant closely on something Paul Sims put together for the pop-up maker space thing. Shout out to Paul Sims for being a great organizer. It was kind of a mobile self-publishing lab idea. And we were going to go to high school classes, library writers groups, other libraries. Some of you were at the Mountain View Library for a workshop on this very thing with Mark Coker there, and senior facilities, that being the rec department in Los Gatos. We already work pretty closely with teens. We provide them their summer reading books in nice cubby-like locations in the teen room. This is our partnership with the high school. We provide them with a reference collection of current textbooks that they use to do their homework, which is an awesome thing. And it's all because the high school has extra textbooks that we can use. So we built on that to kind of use this POP innovation grant of two mobile self-publishing labs. I did not bring them here today, though I thought I would possibly, but because the thing's heavy and there was parking, all that kind of stuff. But they're one Mac Air laptop and 10 iPads in this convenient charging and syncing cube. And then what the model is, is to deploy said lab to the classroom or group that's working to engage in self-publishing. One of these labs currently is at the Mountain View Library as we speak. So the technology it should be noted is not kind of required to make this all happen, but it provides an interesting focus and enthusiasm for the group that's engaging. It's sort of like, I would say, the piece of dust. And then the pearl of the publishing and the writing happens kind of around that. They also have Word on all of the devices because you need to have your document, your e-book in Word before you can go to Smashwords and become an e-book. So we worked with an English class 9H to publish an anthology called Windows to the Teenage Soul. We also did a couple more anthologies right at the end with the New Tech program at the high school. So this was a great collaboration because it was kind of a three way, us, Smashwords and the high school. Windows to the Teenage Soul, the cover you see here was designed by one of the students. And the whole project in and of itself was not the teacher kind of making it happen so much as her allowing the students to break up into groups. So I'll work together and write individual original poetry and put that all together in this anthology that was then published to Smashwords and then went into Overdrive and we have it available to our patrons. Mark started us off by partnering with me by going into the classroom. And we did a set of six presentations for two different classes. Actually, Tonya McQuade's class in the English 9H. Jen will be mentioning Tonya McQuade this afternoon. Without her, this thing couldn't have happened. And then Christine Ware was another teacher at Los Gatos High who her class contributed to the anthology. So Mark did his intro presentation with me there as this wing man talking about the library and ebooks. And then he came back and did a set of six more presentations about best practices. The class divided into these five functional teams, layout and design, editing, art and photography, marketing, and event planning. The layout and design team kind of did the sort of breaking up of all the content into the kind of categories that it fell out logically into for the book. So the sections are about five sections with five different headings. This photo has been artistically altered to protect the identity of the minor children involved. The editing team did what editors do, corrected misspellings, worked with the formatting. You'll see there they're actually using the iPads that your money provided, which, oh, there's one too, which makes me feel awesome because I spent your money and they use these iPads. Art and photography team put together the drawings and some photographs that were in the book. The kids really picked up on the fact that if they draw something, they're totally free and clear with the copyright thing. So they didn't have to worry about stealing someone's image or getting a creative comment license. So you will see many illustrations throughout the book, some very emotional. And that kind of added their mark to the whole thing. This kid's using an iPad. Check it out. And the PR team was huge. They did this professional press release. This guy is Jim Asvedo from Smashwords. He worked with the group to help them craft the press release. It went out to major news outlets. We got the story picked up by school library journal, which was huge. They used social media also to push their information. It was finally uploaded. And at the time, it was made available for pre-order, which is huge. Pre-order is huge because if your book is available for pre-order, people can order it in advance. So when it actually is available, it builds up numbers behind it and pushes it up in the rankings. So initially, it was in the top 50 of iTunes, and iTunes being sort of the most exciting part of this. So the more the pre-orders built up, possibly the students, more than likely their parents buying the book. It's $2.99, so. Those numbers build up. And notice I included Anki as the distributor here. And this is the book in Overdrive as it's actually checked out. You have to place a hold on that. So the event planning team got together, did an event in the library. The day of the event, it hit number one in iTunes poetry section. It's no longer number one, but that day it was number one because of all the pre-orders and stuff. And then that night, sorry, we did the release party, standing room only in our awesome children's section that has kind of that cool ceiling. And the kids stood at the podium and read their poems. They were kind of very diverse. Like some were kind of playful, more like rap-like, and some were very like solemn and serious. I think the most exciting thing for me was seeing all the parents. The parents were very excited about this, that being kind of real-world experience that their children were gaining in school. When we were talking about the idea, we really talked up the, you can put this on your college application factor. You will become a published author. It's kind of weird, I didn't really hear a lot about that afterwards, but I think that's an awesome thing, too. It was kind of like eclipsed, I think, by the just like I am writing and expressing myself type of deal. Additionally, I was surprised to learn that the other parts of a poetry anthology that might be included are contributions from the people that organized it. So Mark wrote a preface to the teacher's guide, like how to change the world with self-publishing, which I believe is totally possible is happening right now. World's changing. And Tonya wrote a guide, how to replicate this. And again, without her, this whole thing would not have happened. She was kind of the brains behind the operation and kind of the conductor of the orchestra. How to do this project in any other classroom was her contribution. And they asked Little O Me to contribute how to do this in another library. So you guys should all buy the book just to read these parts. Available on Amazon, iTunes, Bronze or Noble. Rapidly, we had imitators. This is the second time I'm going to say it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I just love that. So the New Tech program at Los Gatos High is like a cohort of 100 kids all with Chromebooks that are individually project-based. They had already written stories that they were looking to publish somewhere. They heard about the project. They wanted someone in the classroom the next day. We were able to go the day after that and bring someone from Smashwords to do a formatting demo and talk about, in a microwave, what we talked about with the other class. And in about a week, granted they had already written the stuff. The other project took about six weeks. This one was like about six days. They published these two anthologies that are story anthologies on iTunes. So other community partners are writers groups are right here. There is a fiction and nonfiction group that meets in the library regularly. I've seriously talked up how this would be awesome for them to learn about. We have committed to them to do a project with them. Community groups, the rec department does a similar writing class that they charge people for. It was interesting. And we're going to do a free offering surrounding the self-publishing labs and the appearance of Mark Coker. And then other libraries. This is the beautiful Mountain View Library, where we did a staff workshop. Extensive information was imparted to those that attended. I know some of you are in the audience, including Mark's whole industry view, which was interesting. So that's it for today. Thanks for coming. Here's some links in your material. You'll see the article that was in school library journal, a library journal article about overdrive integration, and a Huffington Post article. All very interesting. To summarize, overdrive has made it incredibly hard for you to find this book in content reserve. But if you look and find the self-publishing tab in the upper left, you'll be able to find it. Though now that I've criticized overdrive, I'd also like to say that if you ask them, and not even nicely, if you demand that they put a Smashwords book that's not available to you, but is in Smashwords, into the overdrive collection, they will respond promptly. Hi. Can you make money from these books, and what can you do with it? Awesome question. So the kids involved decided that they were going to make the book not free, which blew me away initially. I was kind of like, here I'm working. I'm doing this for free. You guys are charging. They wanted to charge for the book for $2.99, and they were going to get that money for their class fund when they become seniors or something like that. The larger question is, there are entirely successful authors making a ton of money on Smashwords, and that kind of comes from building a following tradition. Like Mark would say, that the difference between traditional publishing and e-book self-publishing is your book never goes out of print, so it's like this long tail of opportunity, so that if you market it or change the cover or do other things, people will discover it, and it can possibly rise in the ratings and become outlandishly successful. I think Amanda Hawking was a big Smashwords success story, but then she went to McMillan. There are still people in Smashwords who are actually being successful, but the other thing to bear in mind is 99% of the books are not good, but that 99% of all books are like that, so no biggie. Any other questions? Hey, Henry. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the Mark Records issue with Smashwords titles. Oh. Thank you. OK. Well, a couple of things. When I first mentioned Mark Records to Mark Coker, he was like, he had no idea what it was talking about. So they don't deal with Mark Records at Smashwords. It's kind of like they have no reason to. I mean, I come to them with many innovative ideas. You should do this. You should do some simultaneous use model. And from the private sector standpoint, they're happy with what they're doing and why change. I think that what I would assume would happen, though I'm not 100% clear, sure of this. This once any ebook went to Overdrive, you could get a free Overdrive Mark Record for it. I could be wrong. Yeah. I mean, Overdrive has been providing us with the free records. Yeah? Oh, Elliot has an answer. I have a bit of an answer. OK. Wait for it. Sure. Hi. As many of you know, Inkey, the Inkey Project, which is the ebook project that was built by libraries, four libraries about a little over a year ago, includes hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Smashwords product. And as part of that project, we took the metadata from Inkey and built Mark Records. It wasn't like rocket science. And it is something that I'm sure that Mark Coker could develop with a little bit of either money or encouragement. Meaning? Yeah, I'm on the encouragement side. You're on the encouragement side. But many of those Mark Records are available through Inkey for free. It is something that's provided for free. They're not the most beautiful Mark Records. For those of you who are into beautiful Mark Records, but they are good Mark Records and useful. Awesome. I was also thinking that in Baker and Taylor's title source, all of Smashwords is in there. And you can just take Mark Records from there. It will, if you like. But you make a very good point that it wouldn't be that tough. I was actually trying to craft some kind of an XSLT thingamabobby that would kind of take their info and spit out Mark Records. Someone in this audience might solve this problem today. Thank you, Henry. That was wonderful. Thank you.