Kriya Kaleidoscope

The Karma Equation
By Sowmya Mahadevan

An excerpt - 

"Why me?” — the quintessential question that arises in all our minds when faced with a failure.
if you had really, in true honesty, put in your very best efforts towards achieving a goal and yet faced a devastating failure, there are probably even more questions and thoughts that come into your head. For the full article, read on>>
 

Publishing the Hybrid Way

Nowadays, more and more authors are moving from traditional and self-publishing to pursue a new and exciting alternative: Hybrid publishing. Since the term “hybrid” may mean different things to different people, these types of publishers are still a bit of a mystery to many authors. So let’s cut through the noise and answer some of the questions surrounding hybrid publishing.

What is Hybrid Publishing? Let’s dive deeper!

Hybrid publishing is an advanced publishing model that offers more options and benefits to the author and the publisher. This is basically an emerging area that occupies a middle approach between traditional and self-publishing and therefore includes many different publishing models. Here are the 5 things you should know about Hybrid Publishing:

1. Creative Ownership: With a hybrid publisher, authors generally maintain ownership over packaging, marketing, design, and distribution.

2. Creative Flexibility: With hybrid publishing, your artistic vision remains intact. You absolutely do not have to change your artistic vision to impress a publisher.

3. Leverage your Expertise: Any industry expert can consider becoming an author because there’s no way to leverage your expertise and be seen as the authority leader in your field.

4. Less Time Consuming: With hybrid publishing, authors can come with an idea and the same idea can come to life in as little as six months.

5. Increased Royalties: With a traditional publisher, authors normally only retain a small amount of royalties from their books. But with a hybrid publisher, royalties can higher depending on the company.

Continuous development means faster and more frequent releases. With more features being released, more bugs being fixed, and more improvements and changes in general happening, we want to keep our users in the loop with release notes. Hence, Kriya has introduced a new feature that allows for the review of release notes within the Kriya Dashboard. This will be a helpful resource to learn about new features, product improvements, and updates. Do check this out when you get a chance. 

STM Conference 2019 Keynote - A ringside view

By Ravi Venkataramani

I had the opportunity to attend the STM Conference in Frankfurt just before the book fair. It was a very well attended conference with some interesting discussions around publishing and the challenges faced by publishers. The conference kicked off with a wonderful keynote titled “The Worst of Times; The Best of Times”  by Annie Callanan, CEO of Taylor & Francis. I decided to play the role of a journalist and took notes diligently. Here is my attempt at paraphrasing her remarkable presentation.

She started off with a stark view of the challenges and threats faced by publishers.

It feels like the worst of times for publishers, a winter of despair. Every global citizen is a publisher. Everyone can share their unique perspectives, opinions, outrage and some truths. The world now appears complacent or even smug that we have reached the pinnacle of wisdom thanks to the internet.

Is the 19th century classroom fit for purpose? The world's knowledge can no longer fit on bookshelves. The curious can now self-serve and learn from anywhere at any time.

Are publishers super profitable? Are they evil? Why do we need them when content is now open and accessible?

After lowering the audience to despair, she then presented the perils of content being shared with bias and without curation and the spread of false truths.

We have plunged into the age of foolishness. Facebook is the largest source of fake truths on cures for cancer.

Fact vs Fake. Right vs Wrong. Good vs Evil. We can't turn away!

The data being generated has not yet been analysed as it is being done at an incredible pace. All opinions do not add up to shared facts. There is a need for one shared scientific truth. Truths have become subjective. Digital pollution is rampant and we are all contributing to it.

Sharing economies mean that impartiality is essential to one shared truth. There are many motivations for silencing truths. The prevailing mood is to reject impartiality for ideology. The post-modern world has led to tribalism. We now have modern collective amnesia in terms of remembering past mistakes. Micro targeted messages mute inconvenient facts. Truth is now according to our own experience or truth superimposed to manipulate or control. Crowd psychology now crowns or beheads us.

Da Vinci was right when he said - The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions

Annie then presented a wonderful way forward for publishers to follow.

But don't be misled, rebirth will follow as it has for centuries. Publishers will march on collectively to a modern world by addressing the challenges head-on.

People are being left behind because of digital exhaust rather than human-centered advancement. As technology proliferates, new digital norms are displacing the older behavioral values we have been living by. Cyber harms cannot even begin to be quantified. Hate crimes and hate speech are inevitably fed by false facts.

Who is validating what gets published to ensure accuracy? Authority is rapidly yielding ground to influence. Substantiated truth appears a mere hair's breadth from extinction.

Publishers can help mitigate these biases. Publishers have kept shared truths recorded and preserved. Well-funded evidence-based research are far and few. We are being confronted by a digital wasteland. Postmodern questions need answers. Wisdom is essential for a new generation of challenges. We need information artefacts to inspire learners and improve the collective well-being of our people. Evidence-based publishing will be a force of change.

Who can we trust? Is there a spring of hope? The purpose is what should drive us as publishers. It is early dawn into the journey of enlightenment. Search for substantiated knowledge persists as the greatest need in the 21st century. Publishing enables the purposeful collision of opposing theories in the search for truth. We have a shared purpose and have made a collective pledge to be curators and caretakers of the world's advanced knowledge and to cultivate wisdom with a higher purpose of sustainable human progress for all. It's a season of light for our evidence-based communities. Let's recall to light the evidence-based publishing aim to cultivate and substantiate the truths that matter from the digital wasteland. 

Human-centered progress is needed to propel human-centered purposes. Humanity can learn how to get better. Publishers need to focus on what gets created and less on what gets destroyed. Passion is not progress. Curate and create impartial truths. Evidence-based assertions that cannot be manipulated or denied or hijacked. We have the responsibility to transform as a global community of evidence-based experts. We need to harvest the diversity of perspectives to discover the truth. Truths cannot be freely derived.

Let's stop apologizing for our mission. Let's get ready for a new knowledge endowment to replace digital folly with the collective wisdom. Knowledge transformed will beget wisdom. Knowledge applied will solve real problems. Knowledge democratized will alleviate social justice. We need that courage and a sense of shared purpose. We can be a positive force for change.

What a way to kick off the conference! Bravo, Annie Callanan!! May your words come true!!!