Got a book or a piece of writing that’s only in hard copy form? Submit it to the Google Books Partner Program and they’ll index it for you.

Google’s initiative to make printed copies of books search able is an old and a controversial one. With the appearance of a beta tool for authors and publishers to submit books, they’re probably hoping they can get the “wanna-be discovered” talents to build their content base, thus threatening the current powers that be. (See Napster and KaZaa as examples of how “controversial” technology drove the powers that be to come up with a way to beat them. iTunes? ahem…)

As an author, publisher or even an agent you can submit books by ISBN, title and author, and also include a link to buy the product.  You can also restrict how your book is displayed, making only portions of it searchable and viewable.

The cou de gras? Ads can appear next to your book results, earning you money just for having your book searched. Ahh, the Google contextual empire continues to grow.

It’ll be awhile until we see if book results can make it to the top of regular search results and blog results. But if you’re a self-published author and are looking for yet another way for people to view your content, here it is.

Check out Google Books 

Stuff You Can Use | No Comments »

Any idiot can make something complicated. It takes smarts, passion and a healthy dose of excruciating pain to make something simple.

But simple ideas are the ones that work the best.

If a person has to figure too many things out to get what you are trying to say, you’ve probably failed. There’s a lot of power in something that people “get” just by looking at it.

A lot of creatives look at their ideas and think “There’s nothing too this. It’s too simple.” Wrong! What you should be saying “This isn’t simple enough!”

Simple does not mean boring. Simple means finding the essence of your idea, the main point that you want to get across, and making everything serve that. If every detail and layer you’ve added to what you’re creating builds on that central idea in a significant way, and in a way that people understand in one second, you’ve succeeded.

Now go subtract something!

Thoughts | No Comments »

Finding time to be creative is something everybody struggles with. Often times there’s only a half hour or an hour to write, paint, what have you. By the time you sit down and get into your creative groove, it’s time to quit already.

Don’t you hate that?

The key to making the most of that time is to always be prepared for inspiration. If you have to set up anything or do something to get ready for generating ideas, you’re dead in the water.

Here are some quick tips you can use:

• Reserve your own space for creativity. Find a quiet corner or room in your house that has all your supplies, computer and files in one place.
• Be ready, always. Always carry a notebook and pencil. Always have a brush and paints ready to be uncapped. Keep your camera in the trunk of your car. Once you have an idea, you shouldn’t have to stretch some canvas and dig around for paints first.
• Get support from your friends and family. Tell them that your creative time is yours, and hold to that schedule. It’s easy for other things in life to steal 5 or ten minutes of that precious time.
• Plan for set up and tear down. If you know you absolutely have to do things like mix paint or strike a set, build that time into your schedule. If you need an hour to be creative, set aside an hour and a half.
• Keep focused. Unplug your computer from the internet (unless you are doing research). I’ve convinced Google Reader is creativity’s worst enemy.

How to Be Creative | No Comments »

So you want to make an action movie?Be sure to pick up The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap and take it with you through the whole process from storyboard to screen.

If you are a true beginner, this book might be a little to advanced for you. Some of the concepts and terms Stu Maschwitz goes over in the book are for people who have worked with a camera and effects programs before. He assumes a bit of prior knowledge, but he lets you know up front that this is the case.

I see this as being a great reference book for the intermediate filmmaker who knows a few of the ropes and is looking to give his action movies (or any movies) for that matter a more polished look. Everything from shot composition to final onlining is covered with step-by-step tutorials, color commentary and a practical, no nonsense approach that is geared towards having you produce a sweet looking flick for less than the price of a used car.

If you buy the book, you get a great accompanying DVD with more tutorials and advice, a sample project to practice on and effects templates you can use in your movie, like smoke and gun flashes. Sweet.

A drawback to this book is that the author gives pretty specific instructions and examples of tricks he’s done for certain effects. In some places he elaborates on the concepts to help you understand the “why” behind the effect, so if you need to create something similar but not identical to his shot you can figure it out. In other spots, the instructions are specific to his experience and he doesn’t elaborate on the concept, leaving you to figure it out for yourself.

Overall, well worth the thirty bucks.

Rated - 8 out of 10

Pick up a copy

Stuff You Can Use | 1 Comment »

Angela Booth had an interesting thought over at her writing blog today.

Many writers think that they procrastinate, when it turns out that they don’t leave room it in their writing lives for gestation . Every writing project needs time to “cook” so to speak. A gestation period is vitally necessary, and if you don’t leave time for your projects to gestate, you’ll find writing much more difficult than it should be.

How do you know when gestation is over?

Ideas for the project will suddenly stream into your mind.

I find this is true at the initial part of the ideation process. Half-thoughts and snippets of ideas drift in and out of my mind, and I generally paint in the details of a good idea over a period of time where I don’t specifically think about it.

I make sure to write these thoughts down as they come, sometimes over month long periods. Then, if I’m excited enough about the idea, I sit down and bring all my separate thoughts together to create a fleshed out idea.

At this point, I usually know if it’s worth working on further, or if I need to kill it.

There is a difference between procrastination and gestation - you have tangible results at the end of one of them. And I’m not talking about new high scores in Free Cell.

See the original post

Thoughts | No Comments »

Creative people do things. Everyone else talks about what they do.

Is it really that simple?

The only difference between “creatives” and “everyone else” is action. Movie critics can rip apart a film, but do they have the guts to risk their dignity and make their own? Art buyers can stand around with glasses of Shiraz and pontificate about the use of blue in a painting, but do they have the heart do put emotion to canvas?

Are you a talker, or a doer? Next time you find yourself criticizing or praising someone else’s work, stop. Go out and do it better than them.

How to Be Creative | No Comments »

The Idea

Parentography is a site that connects parents looking for family friendly things to do with parents who have already done family friendly things.

You can:

• Read and review activities, restaurants, lodging, parks and playgrounds and attractions near you
• Create and view excursions for anything from an hour trip to an all-day event
• Connect with other parentographers
• Search near you or across the country

Why It’s More Than “Average”

This is a perfect example of taking something that exists already (search-able restaurant reviews and activities), improving it incrementally (better design, focused user goals).

Lots of people have kids. And those people need things to do. The makers of parentography recognized that this was a huge audience who wasn’t having their needs addressed by anything that was currently out there. And they gave them a user-experience tailored exactly to what they wanted, as well as making their site super-usable and well designed.

Basically, they took an existing idea, improved it first and did it better than everyone else for a specific audience.

Ideas don’t have to be completely different or new. Sometimes the best innovations are ones that improve what we already have.

Will It Succeed

It’s still in beta, so there’s not a lot of content on there. Plus, it looks like they’re still working out a few bugs. But, if they get it executed well and they can attract users to create good content, I have a feeling this will be a valuable resource for a lot of people.

So if you’re a parent or are thinking of doing something similar, go check them out.

How I Found Out About It

This idea was brought to my attention by the good folks over at Lifehacker.

See the original post

You can also check out my post about it at my parenting blog, 365 First Time Parenting Tips.

Idea of the Week | 2 Comments »

Unless you’ve got a job that completely fulfills you creatively, you’ve probably got a day job to pay the bills.

And a lot of creatives, like myself, have full time jobs as writers, designers or artists. But between the client, the realities of business and budget limitations, a full-time creative can go home at the end of the day feeling pretty un-fulfilled.

So how do you find the energy and the time at home to do something as intellectually exhausting as being creative, or even tougher, marketing yourself and dealing with rejection?

The number one criterion is passion. Time at home is free time. If it isn’t something you’re prepared to give up valuable free time over, you probably aren’t going to do it.

Number two is discipline. There will be days when your passion won’t be enough. You’ll be tired. There will be a movie to watch. Garbage will need to be taken out. (It’s sad state of affairs when you’d rather take out the trash and put off working on your idea).

This means finding some way to get yourself to do something you don’t want to do. Try:

• Rewarding yourself after an hour of work on your idea with dessert
• Punish yourself by returning that movie you picked up until you’ve worked on your idea
• Find something that inspires you. (Being outside, a good movie, a painting are all good candidates). Pull it out when you feel uninspired
• Find a friend who is creative as well. Like a running partner, you can lock yourselves away to work on your ideas for an hour or two and keep each other honest
• Do things by hand. Take away the computer and you take away lots of potential distractions

Number three is to take a break every once and awhile. If all you do is sit in your room and create, you won’t be very interesting. Get out and actually do things. Live a vivacious life. You’ll have a lot more material to draw on and you’ll meet more people like you.

Number four? Don’t get overwhelmed by your own genius. If you’re like me and generate tons of half thoughts and small ideas that don’t go anywhere, it’s very easy to feel like you’ve got so many things up in the air. Where could you possibly begin? It’s OK to put things to the side.

Focus on one project at a time. You’ll get to the other things later. It’s far better to work on one thing for a month and have five ideas waiting in the wings than to work on five things for six months and have nothing to show for it. That type of approach can be very discouraging.

How to Be Creative | No Comments »

If you’re a writer and hate discussing your work in front of people and getting constructive criticism, Urbis is the perfect site for you.

It’s essentially an online writer’s group that encourages the participation of authors, based on the concept of “You review mine, I’ll review yours.”

You post your work. Other people read your work and review it. Then, if you have enough “credits” earned by reviewing the work of other people on the site, you can unlock those reviews and see what people have to say.

You can publish anything from short poems to chapters of your next novel. It’s a nice way to get unbiased criticism from total strangers.

Another nice feature of Urbis is that you can set up a group with people you know and keep the viewing of your work restricted to just you guys. A nice feature if you know writers outside your area, or if it’s too hard for everyone to physically get together and meet.

They also allow you to set goals for the items you publish. This means once you’ve got your masterpiece done, upload with goals of “Getting Published” or “Published in Literature Magazine.” They haven’t posted success stories, so it’s unclear if any publishers or agents are actually using this site yet.

Stuff You Can Use | No Comments »

CNN reported on an interesting study done by the good folks over at Harvard’s Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (maybe you’ve heard of them).

According to them, the brain’s “default setting” is to daydream. In fact, we’ve got quite a bit of hardware to support it.

“There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don’t give people something to do,” psychologist Malia Mason said.

Science now seems to provide reasoning to something creatives have known all along.

Ideas come out of nowhere at the oddest of times.

When your brain is down, it’s jumping from thought to thought, not really focusing on anything. It seems to be the best way to do free-thinking without constraints. Trouble is, you have to do nothing, to do it.

Make sure you always carry a pen and paper. Let yourself drift off every once and awhile. Then, when that idea hits out of nowhere, you’ll be ready to capture it.

For instance, I always have to carry pen and paper when I drive. Ideas seem to always hit me when I’m on the open road, ready to succumb to highway hypnosis.

Check the original article

Thoughts | No Comments »