This is the last day of November and you should have finished your NaNoWriMo novel today. Once you’ve written your novel you’ll want to publish it, for what is a novel if not read?

Unlike Rowling who had her first manuscript rejected by several publishers, you can get yours published online with relative ease by the miracle that is modern technology.

Here’s a list of self-publishing resources to consider:

• PubIt! by Barnes & Noble - get your ebooks distributed on Barnes & Noble. I couldn’t find any information about their royalty percentage on their website.
• Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) by Amazon – sell your ebooks on the Amazon store. KDP offers 70% royalties.
• Lulu – ebooks are distributed on Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes & Noble in the widely accepted ePub format. Unlike the others on this list Lulu also allows you to publish your books in print and even issues an ISBN. They also offer services such as pre-publishing, editing and marketing. Lulu offers between 80% and 90% royalties.
• Smashwords – similar to Lulu, Smashwords also issues an ISBN and distributes your ebook to a host of online distributors, including Sony Reader Store, Kobo, iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Stanza and more. They offer between 60% and 85% in royalties.

The real question is will the battery last? I’m currently using a rooted HTC Desire running on the lightweight Oxygen ROM and the battery is pathetic (it was worse before root, on HTC Sense). Say what you like about the iPhone, but they’ve taken drastic steps to improve its battery life and given that they have tight software and hardware integration they are bound to have a better battery-to-performance ratio than Android.

I have till June next year to decide on sticking with Android or switching to the iPhone.

Related posts:

1. Google Developer Day and DevFest 2011

Here are some noteworthy events that are definitely worth checking out. They’re very reasonably priced and if you’re looking for something to do over the next couple of weekends in October, check these events out.

22 Oct /2011
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Steven Levitt Economics/ Freakonomics
Featuring: Steven Levitt
Venue: Concert Hall, School of the Arts
Rate: $40

Steven Levitt has a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. He co-authored the non-fiction bestseller, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005), and its 2009 sequel, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Meet the man in person at his SWF lecture, where he will speak about economics and the term “freakonomics”.

28 Oct /2011
8:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Hackwork: Using Craft to Sell Madness for Cash
Featuring: Michael Chabon
Venue: Drama Theatre, School of the Arts
Rate: $30

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) has been described as “a flat-out wonderful writer” (Chicago Tribune), who “has been producing pitch-perfect, at times even dazzling, fiction” (Los Angeles Times). His other novels include Wonder Boys, which was made into a film, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which won the Nebula and Hugo awards for Best Novel in 2008. His SWF lecture is enticingly titled, “Hackwork: Using Craft to Sell Madness for Cash”.

30 Oct /2011
9:30 am – 11:30 am
Screenwriting 101
Featuring: Lee Shinho
Venue: Seminar Room 2-4, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University
Rate: $30

What moves and excites an audience? In this workshop, participants will have a glimpse of how to build feature-film stories. Through lecture, discussion and viewing of film clips, they will have a chance to explore the basic principles of storytelling for film and learn how to incorporate them in their own writing. Some of the subjects that will be covered include character, conflict, structure, visual narrative and dialogue.

30 Oct /2011
6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Building Other Worlds – The Fundamentals of Writing Science Fiction
Featuring: Joe Haldeman
Venue: Seminar Room 2-4, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University
Rate: $15

Award-winning Joe Haldeman will share with participants how they can write and sell science fiction, and what makes a compelling novel in this distinct literary genre. Other questions that he will explore include: Is science fiction all made-up? And does the science all add up? Find out how you can incorporate real science into fiction and imagine worlds out of the ordinary.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Tech Days In Singapore
2. Google Developer Day and DevFest 2011

Design Principles and GoAnimate by Steve Moore

Here’s a teacher’s lesson on design principles. Check out more animated lessons by teachers in the lesson gallery.

Related posts:

1. Google Launches YouTube for Teachers

Wish me luck.

Update: I realised that I will need to work on a virtual private server at the very least to get the upgrades to work. All blog posts are back to normal and are working with their original permalinks. I have made some structural changes in terms of blog category hierarchies which will effect some blog posts. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Now, Google has launched the channel YouTube Teachers. It covers tutorials on how to create a channel, ideas on how to use YouTube in the classroom and even video production tips from screencast tools to lighting.

From cheaper digital cameras with HD video recording capabilities to easy-to-use video editing software that even my mother could use, it is becoming increasingly easy for anyone to make a video and share it with the world. Even Mac OS X Lion now comes with built-in screencasting capabilities. Just as blogging first liberated the armchair journalists and writers to shift from information consumption to information creation, YouTube and improved technologies are allowing everyday users to create videos of their own.

As these technologies continue to improve we’ll start seeing not only teachers creating more content, but also students. Instead of presenting with a PowerPoint slides, students can create videos or use tools like Present.me to create pre-recorded video presentations.

Related posts:

1. YouTube Quick Tip
2. Google Developer Day and DevFest 2011
3. Tilt Shift Photographs In Photoshop

Check out the storyboard below and then compare it to the actual video. They start with the idea in mind, create a sketch of what the video should look like and then create their video.

Here’s another example, the video below is an excerpt from the making of Pixar’s Toy Story. Animated films like this one take over three to four years to produce and require working with hundreds of people, from script writers, animators, directors and artists. In order for everyone to visualise what the animated movie should be like, a storyboard is used to tell the story to the rest of the team.

You can more about the three stages of video production, namely, pre-production, production and post-production, at Video 101 with Professor Monkey.