Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

Global Publishing For All

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This Beyond The Book podcast and transcript are provided in their entirety by the Copyright Clearance Center.

In this interview, Ingram Chief Content Officer Phil Ollila discusses what book publishers should consider when setting out for new markets, specifically international markets. He explains how the advent of the digital file has changed the barriers to distribution of content, opening up opportunities abroad that previously may not have existed. He also discusses how publishers can go about sharing their work with audiences worldwide.

In the publishing world, regime change is underway. It’s not happening in Tahrir Square or even in Times Square. The old is giving way to the new in the virtual square, and players like Ingram Content Group have declared themselves on the side of the new regime.

In his role as Ingram’s Chief Content Officer, Phil Ollila leads a number of Ingram business units including wholesale merchandising, Lightning Source, Ingram Publisher Services, and digital distribution through CoreSource. Last fall, Ingram launched Global Connect, a program to allow publishers in any country to print and distribute titles in countries where Ingram has its own operations as well as in countries of one of its partners. Ollila tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally what book publishers should think about in 2012 when setting out for new markets.

“Today, when we think about the delivery of books and the distribution books, one thing we should think about is the consumer, and not necessarily the traditional supply chains of bookstores,” he explains. “For publishers, their content can now be available on a worldwide basis with a single entry point. In the past, they had to think about selling rights in a foreign rights market, or the physical delivery of that book on a ship or a train or an airplane.”

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Writing In The Face Of Fear

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I’m getting ready to re-vision my blog. By that I mean I’m going to take a short break to brainstorm some great ideas for future posts. I want to make this a place you can stop by to pick up handy tips and inspirational messages to help you in your day-to-day life, as well as catch a weekly laugh.

That being said, I don’t want to just leave you high and dry while I work up a new plan, so I’ll be re-posting some of the best from the last year. Enjoy!

Writing in the Face of Fear

In his book The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes tells us that every writer worth his or her salt has a fear of writing.  It’s not just a fear of being rejected by a traditional publisher, although fear of rejection often causes the would-be author to become what Ralph calls a “trunk writer” (someone who writes something, then puts it in a drawer or “trunk”).  There’s also the fear of the blank page (or blank screen).  We writers give it the nice euphemism of “writer’s block,” but more often it’s fear.  What if I can’t come up with anything?  What if I do and it’s crap?

Brenda Ueland has an answer to that in her book If You Want to Write.  She says it doesn’t matter.  She dares each of us to try to write the worst story we can because she believes even in the worst we can find great stuff.  Brenda cautions the would-be author not to get too hung up on technical details of writing and encourages us all to put something of ourselves into everything we do.

While I agree with Brenda on both parts, Independent Authors do need to make each work as flawless as possible before going to print.  It’s impossible to get anything perfect, but it is possible to make everything the best you can.  Ralph gives several suggestions on how to do this in The Courage to Write. Another good source for things to look for is Edward C. Patterson’s eBook Are You Still Submitting to Traditional Publishers? When it comes to technical aspects such as punctuation, my favorite resource is The St. Martin’s Handbook.  If you plan to freelance for magazines and newspapers, you’ll probably want a recent edition of The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual.

Knowing I have several good resources at hand helps me face the fear of writing, but I still find myself frustrated by the blank page on occasion.  Ralph points out that many great writers have what he calls rituals to help them get started.  Having a ritual may seem like a waste of time (sharpening 20 pencils before writing like Hemingway did certainly qualifies in my mind), but if it’s what gets you in the right frame of mind then it’s worth the “wasted” time.  Personally, I know I can’t string more than two words together without having my desk relatively cleared of clutter and a hot cup of Earl Grey tea at hand.  Whatever you need to do to psych yourself up to write, do it.  Just don’t let your ritual become an excuse not to write.

Although I won’t go so far as to say embrace your fear, I will say that knowing the fear is there for your fellow writers can be a comfort.  You’re not alone.  Remembering that and having a few good resources at  hand makes writing a little more enjoyable and a lot less frightening.

How do you face your fears?

 

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

Is Free A Price We Can Pay?

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This article, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 2/13/12.

It seems that every book these days — or, at least, every self-published book — is popping up free for a short period of time, an act driven by inclusion in the exclusive Amazon KDP Select program.

I did it with SHOTGUN GRAVY, as you may have seen. To report back on the experiment, the novella has once more gone back to its two or three sales a day mark. The sales basically went like this: after going free for just over a day, the novella moved around 5200 copies. Then, after the promo ended, I sold (daily): 70, 4, 89, 48, 36, 13, then it we’re back to the two or three sales per day. During the time SG spiked, my other e-books mysteriously dipped for a couple days but then raged back strong thereafter. During that stretch, it netted be about 20 new reviews. So, I’m willing to call it a success.

 

And I’m not yet sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

The results were a good thing. But it’s the ramifications of those results that has me feeling wibbly-wobbly.

Here’s where I’m a bit troubled.

First, the fact we’re now seeing a new type of authorial self-promotion (my book is free! hurry up and not pay for it!) is troubling if only because I fear we’re just contributing to the overall noise — and it’s noise that spreads an intrinsic notion about the value of our work, which is to say, it maybe ain’t worth that much. This noise also helps to set up expectation: “If I wait around long enough, this book might just show up free for a couple days.” So, where before readers were becoming trained to wait for a sale — “Oh, now the book is $2.99 instead of $4.99, or now just a buck” — they’re instead waiting for it to cost them absolutely zero.

Second, the boost in sales that comes out of this process is effectively a cheat. It’s an exploit like you’d find in a multiplayer game. It’s not based on human word-of-mouth, it’s based on a programmatic exploitation of Amazon’s recommendation system — a system that is inscrutable and unpredictable. Amazon may intend for it to work that way so, in this sense it’s not strictly an exploit — but my point is that it’s based on an algorithm of recommendations rather than actual recommendations. Moreover, if that algorithm becomes dominated by this mode of juggling books to the top, then those books that are not participating may have a harder time finding a place in that already-unknowable and potentially-overcrowded recommendation system. Right? So, not only is this “free product exploit to boost sales” trick creating a potential ecosystem of lowered expectations in a story’s value (because a buck wasn’t cheap enough!), it’s also enforcing a programmatic ecosystem where if your book does not participate, it doesn’t get to play in the Reindeer Games with all the other once-free books.

 

Read the rest of the article on Chuck Wendig‘s terribleminds – and if you’ve benefitted from any of Mr. Wendig’s sage advice and opinion over the past year, consider picking up his new compilation ebook.

Apple’s iBooks Push Raises 6 Big Questions About The Future Of E-Publishing

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This article, by Rob Salkowitz, originally appeared on Fast Company on 1/30/12.

Last week, Apple made headlines with iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author, the company’s next big moves into textbooks and self-publishing. When players like Apple go wading into the marketplace with game-changing announcements, there’s a tendency to believe that all the outstanding uncertainties have been resolved.

But in the fast-evolving e-book space, that’s far from true. Apple, Amazon, Google, and the various corporate content owners are huge and influential, but when they are all battling each other over fundamentals of the market, it’s consumers, creators, and publishers who have control.

 

The reason for this new flurry of activity is because the e-book market has moved into a new stage. The low-hanging fruit of best-sellers, genre fiction, and perennial classics have been harvested by Amazon and the Kindle-toting masses. The arrival of color tablets with bigger displays and more powerful processors has opened a new frontier for designed and illustrated books, including textbooks, technical manuals, cookbooks, photography, and fine-art books, magazines, graphic novels, and comics. The scramble for this new and potentially lucrative market is on, and it has attracted a wide range of players looking to cash in.

Because so much is still unsettled in this market, everything is up for grabs. Here is a list of some of the issues being hashed out in public as Apple, Amazon, publishers, distributors, established technology companies, startups, educational institutions, individual content creators, and advertisers all try to stake their claim.

Industry-standard e-book formats or proprietary, protected files? This may seem like a technical issue, but the stakes are huge. Industry-standard files and formats are portable across platforms and devices, but proprietary files are only readable using the distributor’s application (or, sometimes, the distributor’s device). With standard formats, publishers and content creators can offer the same file through many distribution channels, and customers can choose where to download based on factors like price and brand ambiance. But when files are locked to an application context, customers and publishers alike get locked to the platform, giving leverage to the distributor. That’s obviously better business for the Apples and Amazons of the world, which is why Apple is quietly tweaking the EPUB standard in its iBook 2.0 strategy.

Android or iOS?

 

Read the rest of the article on Fast Company.

Book Marketing Roundup

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From Savvy Book Marketer Dana Lynn Smith:

Welcome to my roundup of book marketing tips and resources for authors and indie publishers. 

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: in addition to this periodic roundup feature, Dana provides a wealth of free book marketing tips and resources on her site, including numerous articles on the topics of Amazon Marketing Strategies, Article Marketing for Authors, Audio & Video Promotions, Blogs & Websites and Book Marketing Strategy. See Dana’s Learn How to Market Your Book and Yourself page for many more links like these.]

I’m excited about hosting Joanna Penn’s How to Promote Your Novel webinar on February 9! There isn’t much training that’s specifically geared to helping authors sell fiction, and I know we will all learn a lot from Joanna’s tremendous success in selling her own novels. 

If you’re a Nook owner or publish your ebooks in Nook format, check out the new Nook Lovers site, featuring free or inexpensive ebooks for the Nook ebook reader. See this page to learn how to get your ebook listed on this site, which was created by authors Stephanie Dray and Eliza Knight. Other places to learn about free and bargain Nook books include the free Nook book page on the B&N website and the Nook Facebook page.

If you are an iPad owner, check out Macworld’s review of the new "iBooks Author" ebook publishing platform from Apple. 

Have you set up a customized vanity URL for your Amazon Author Central Page yet? Check out this article to learn how.  

Here’s an interesting article from the Huffington Post about the factors that tend to limit the success of indie authors. And check out this article from Carolyn McCray on Digital Book World about how to increase your Kindle sales on Amazon.

That’s all the news for now. For more book marketing advice and resources, be sure to subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss any posts, and sign up for my book marketing newsletter. 

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Ebook Pricing: Or… Where Zoe Says Something About Publishing

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This post, by Zoe Winters, originally appeared on her blog on 2/15/12.

So, you guys know I’ve gotten off the publishing talk a lot. But about every six months or so, I’ll feel compelled to talk about something publishing-related.

I want to talk about ebook pricing. That topic that just won’t go away. In light of KDP Select and writers rushing to give their stuff away for the perceived long-term benefit (which may exist, but seems iffy in the current market with so many doing it), I have stuff I really wanted to say… even though I know it just brings me back into the “Publishing talk” realm. Ick.

People have in the past been offended that I don’t want the bargain basement only-willing-to-pay-99cents-for-an-ebook reader. I’m really not sure why that should be offensive. I guess in writing a lot of people still secretly harbor the belief that an author should just be grateful they are being READ and not complain about the money.

But I don’t see it that way. Writing fiction is my living. It’s what puts food on my table and pays my bills. If I ever can’t make a living doing it, I have to STOP doing it, and go do something else. This is not complicated. If we lived in some free hippie love culture where money didn’t exist, sure, I would write for free, just to share my words and be thrilled doing it. I’m not “in it for the money”. I just “need the money” for it to be worth it in the world we live in for me to put so much effort into entertaining you.

But we live in an economy where monetary value is placed on things. Some people can work full time jobs and have the energy to write fiction. I am not one of those people. I can do one or the other. If I need money and want to write fiction then I have to charge an amount for it that allows me to make that money. 99 cents doesn’t do that. It also attracts too many one night stands. People who will drive by, click on the buy button, but won’t respect you enough to tell others about it (for the most part) and maybe not even enough to read it in the first place. Many a 99 cent or free ebook languishes for months on a Kindle unread until a reader loses interest in it altogether. I’ve done this myself.

I charge $2.99 for novellas 20k-35k and I charge $4.95 for longer work (though I don’t really write anything over 75k). Some people think that is too much. They are welcome to think that and read somebody else. I don’t say that to be nasty or a prima donna. I say it because this is my living and I know what I need to charge to make a living. I know how much my production costs are. I know how much my time costs are. And I know the price point that works best for me to maintain a decent living. I also know the price points that attract the type of readers I want… FANS. It’s not that I never want casual readers. If you want a casual fling with me, I’m grateful to have you, but what I really want long term are rabid readers who froth at the mouth waiting for the next book, read it on release day, and then ask me where the next one is. hehe. ;)

Others can charge what they want, that is their business.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Should You Publish Your Novel To Build Your Platform?

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This post, by Roz Morris, originally appeared on her Nail Your Novel site on 2/12/12.

Here’s a phrase I’m hearing alarmingly often: ‘I’m going to self-publish my novel and use it to build my platform’.

Sorry, but that’s the wrong way round.

Except in a very few cases, it doesn’t work.

 

Non-fiction

You can build a platform with a non-fiction book. If you’re offering expertise, it’s easy to find the people who need it. If you write about a life experience, you can connect with readers who seek similar support. And there are far fewer of you – and more room to be heard.

But novels?

Before you use your novel to launch your platform, go and look at Facebook. Goodreads. Twitter. Everyone is waving a novel.

The number of people you will reach by starting this way is negligible.

Successful self-publishers

There are many examples, of course, of successful self-published fiction authors. Everyone has their favourites to brandish. I’m going to talk about Joanna Penn. She didn’t start with a novel. She started with a blog – The Creative Penn  – and built a loyal following while she taught herself about the writing and publishing world. By the time she launched her first novel, Pentecost, she had a great relationship with a lot of people.

Relationships rock

 

Read the rest of the post on Nail Your Novel.

What? Me? Indie? Yikes!

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This post, by Diane Capri, originally appeared on her Licensed to Thrill site on 1/15/12.

I love e-books. I’ve loved my Kindle since the moment we met. Yet, although I’ve been writing my entire life and owned a business for decades, indie publishing seemed foolhardy. Too many mountains to climb, too much resistance, too hard, too much investment, too little reward, I thought.

But the situation is not what I thought it was. And I have my trailblazing friends J.A. Konrath, C.J. Lyons, Paul Levine, James Swain, and Christine Kling to thank for enlightening me.

Once again, too soon old, too late smart!

Late to the indie party, but better late than never, right?

So I stuck my toe in the water this summer. Quietly, we published my out-of-print backlist and one unsold manuscript, learning the indie business along the way. Recently, we were able to offer two of the books to readers free for a limited time, which pushed them up onto several Amazon bestseller lists. Reader reaction has been so positive. It’s impossible to tell you how wonderful that feels. Thank you all.

Now, my biggest indie book is about to launch in two weeks. A project we’ve worked on for more than three years. Yikes! Have I made the right decision? Will readers love it? I’m holding my breath.

How did we get here?

My story is the same as so many other traditionally published writers. We write, we sell, we lose control of our work. In tough economic times, publishers make perfectly valid business decisions that too often leave us shivering outside in the cold. Publishers are sold, go into bankruptcy, close imprints, reduce print runs, whatever they need to do to stay profitable. And that’s how businesses should be.


Read the rest of the post on Licensed to Thrill.

For The Love Of Online Fiction Magazines

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I’ve had my work published in just about every medium in which fiction can be published. I’m very proud of that. My novels are in print, ebook and, very soon to be released, audiobook. I’d love to see them make it into graphic novel and film. Maybe one day. My short fiction has been published in print and electronic magazines, print and ebook anthologies, podcasts and online magazines. And one of my stories is currently being adapted into a short film. There was a time when print was considered the only “real” publishing and everything else was a poor cousin at best, an exercise in vanity at worst. That’s changing dramatically.

 

To be clear, I love my brag shelf. That’s the part of my bookcase which houses all the magazines and books that feature my work. It’s a thing of beauty. I’m a bibliophile and I love to hold books and feel the pages. I love the scent of ink on a glossy magazine page. But, as a writer, I want to be read by as many people as possible. I want people to enjoy my work, talk about it, get something from it and share it with their friends. And I can’t help thinking that we’ve moved to a place where that isn’t best achieved with print any more.

There are numerous ways to get “published” these days, and that in itself can be a problem. I use quote marks there for a reason. Just because a website will post your story on their garish page, pay you nothing and, probably, don’t really care about quality, doesn’t mean you should be dancing in the aisles. It’s quite likely that nobody is reading that page beyond you and the other contributors. And ask yourself, did you read any of their stories?

Of course, anywhere that an editor of any kind chooses your work over someone else’s is cause for celebration – congratulations, you are a published writer. But we should all aspire to higher things. Personally, I aspire to being paid for my work, ideally being paid well, and being read by as many people as possible.

This is where online magazines are really starting to earn a place of reputation. There are many online zines now which are run just like a “proper” magazine, with editors only choosing the best work and actually editing it. With pay scales that venture well into pro-rates, recompensing authors for their painfully extruded word babies, and with a readership numbering into the many thousands. All these things are great for a writer’s career – recognition, payment and readership.

Many of these magazines are using technology to its best advantage, and making themselves into a kind of hybrid model. For example, they may start with an online edition but also make each issue available as an ebook for people to read at their leisure on their Nook, iPad, Kindle or whatever marvel of reading technology they favour. Some sites also produce limited print runs of each issue, or chapbooks, with added value – signed and numbered, maybe – that readers can collect. Some also produce an annual anthology of their stories, or a Best Of the year anthology. Others use a combination of online text and downloadable podcast. All these things can also help to generate income for said online zine and keep it alive and keep it paying its authors.

All these things are getting the blood, sweat and tears of us crazy writers out to the hungry minds of readers in a variety of ways, of which print is arguably the least important. And they’re doing it with those two most important criteria well in evidence – payment and editing. As a result, hopefully, they garner a wide readership.

The other advantage of the primarily online model is the ubiquitous and permanent nature of the thing. If you read a great story in an online magazine, you can tell a friend pretty much anywhere in the world and that friend can instantly access the story themselves. They don’t have to track down a book or magazine, or pay expensive overseas shipping rates. Bang! One new reader, maybe one new fan. With social media, it’s as simple as tweeting a link to spread the magazine joy out among people well beyond your circle of actual friends and family.

Of course, should the website ever go down or get deleted, the work goes with it. Should that friend I mentioned not have an internet connection, they are excluded. That’s one reason I’m a fan of the secondary print/hybrid option (chapbooks, POD anthology, etc.) as that means the work is preserved, in however a limited way, beyond the inevitable EMP that destroys civilisation. Plus, authors get something for their brag shelf. (We’re petty, vain creatures. Love us and love our work, please!)

On that front, and as a slight – well complete and total – tangent, I’ve recently paid fifty bucks to put all my short fiction to date (around 200,000 words of it) into two Print-On-Demand hardcovers. They’re just for my own shelf, a preserved hard copy of my work. It’s easy today with sites like Lulu automating the process. After all, I back up everything I write on hard drive, memory stick and cloud storage. Now it’s easy to back up in print too.

Online magazines are starting to be recognised industry-wide, pulling in all kinds of awards for themselves and the fiction they publish. More power to them, I say. It’s never been easier for writers to reach more people, though of course, it’s still bloody hard to get work accepted by the really high-echelon, pro-paying online zines. But there’s that aspiration again. I plan to continue submitting to those places and thereby continue to support them by offering my work as well as reading the work of others they already publish. And I’ll tell as many people about them as I can. It’s good for me, my career, the magazine in question, and all its readers and fans. In a future post I intend to list a run-down of my favourite online fiction magazines, which is why I’ve avoided mentioning any specific ones here.

Well, I’ll just mention one. My new novelette, The Darkest Shade Of Grey, will be serialised over four weeks at The Red Penny Papers, starting in a week or two. I’ll be sure to let you know when that’s up. As the publication is so imminent, I couldn’t resist a quick plug.

In the meantime, what are your favourite online fiction magazines? Let me know and I’ll try to include them in the future post I mentioned. Do you read much online fiction? Prefer it over magazines? Buy the ecopy later? Share your habits.

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Invest In Your Own Ebook

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This post, by LJ Sellers, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 2/10/12 and is reprinted here with that site’s permission.

After self-publishing ten books, I’ve come to two conclusions:

1) Digital self-publishing is a straightforward process that isn’t particularly difficult or expensive.

2) There is nothing a small publisher can or will do for writers that they can’t do better for themselves. I don’t mean literally do everything yourself, but a writer can contract for production services as well as a publisher can.

Why? Small presses are often run by a few dedicated, but overworked individuals. They typically contract out most services, and they often pay bottom dollar. I know this because I’ve worked as freelance editor and turned down all of the work offered by small presses because they simply don’t pay enough. Small presses are trying to profit and survive like everyone else and they cut costs where they can.

A large publisher can offer distribution and promotional backing, but most small publishers don’t offer either, so what’s left for the author is the label of being traditionally published and the convenience of having someone else contract the production work. Giving up most of the profit for these small advantages is a hard bargain that I don’t recommend. As the author, you have to sell the book no matter who publishes it, so you might as well make the investment, publish it yourself, and reap the rewards. I know a lot of authors who remain loyal to their small publishers. I understand the sentiment. But those authors are hurting themselves and possibly their sales (if they have no say about price).

The three main elements to producing a quality e-book are editing, cover design, and formatting. Many authors are tempted to do all three themselves to save money. But unless you’re incredibility talented and have all the time in the world, it’s probably not a cost-effective decision.

Editing can be expensive, especially if you contract for content evaluation, but you can keep the cost down by sending your manuscript to beta readers or working with a critique group to fine tune the plot and structure. You should, of course, print and read the manuscript out loud before paying anyone else to proof it. After carefully reading it yourself, send it to a professional editor for line editing and proofreading. Many editors charge $1500 and up, but you don’t have to pay that much. You can find someone to proofread or edit your manuscript for $300–$800. depending on the length of the novel. If you pay less, your editor will be in a rush and probably won’t do a good job. If you pay more, it may take a long time to earn back your investment.

A good cover is also essential. Most cover artists charge a flat fee, and you can expect to pay between $150 and $500. Some charge a lot more than that, but why spend that much if you don’t have to? One way to save money is to find the right image yourself, so you’re not paying the artist for that time. One of the great things about self-publishing an e-book is that you can revise it as often as you want, including creating a new cover down the road or changing the title if it’s not working. The best way to find a cover designer is to network with other writers, including joining listservs that focusing on marketing.

Formatting: I originally thought I would learn to format my own e-books to save money. Other authors make it sound easy. But I quickly decided that the time and frustration spent on the learning curve was not cost-effective. Time is money. For me, it made more sense to send my Word files and cover jpgs to a professional for formatting. The e-book I got back was gorgeous. In fact, I received two files: a mobi file to upload to Amazon and an epub to upload everywhere else. I recommend working with a formatter who produces these two types of files.

Readers’ biggest complaint about e-books is the formatting. Getting it right is essential. Rates may vary, but if you’re starting with a Word document, it shouldn’t cost more than around $150, depending on how clean your file is. For authors who have a backlist and novels that are in book form instead of Word documents, those books will need to be scanned, and the cost of e-book production will be more expensive. The number of errors from the optical character recognition is also much higher.

Taking the lowest rates I’ve mentioned ($300, $150, and $150), you can conclude that it will cost at least $600 to produce a quality e-book. I raided my very small retirement account to publish my first six books, and I considered it a small business loan to myself. I now treat my novel-writing career as a business instead of a hobby and it has paid off for me.

How long does it take to earn back a $600–$1000 investment? That depends on many things, including how many novels you have on the market. The more books you have, the more credibility you have, which is why I decided to do mine back to back in 2009. Assuming you’ve written a terrific story and produced a quality product, the biggest factor is how much time you’re willing to spend promoting. I spent at least two hours a day for six months, plus one exclusive two-week period during which I promoted eight hours a day (blogs, press releases, reader forums, etc.). I continue to spend at least an hour every day on promotional activities. For the record, I made my money back by the end of that year….if you don’t count all the years I spent writing. 🙂

It’s your book and you’ve invested your time writing it, you might as well invest your money too and make it pay off.

 

The Blood, Sweat and Tears of Getting Publicity for Personal & Professional Branding

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This is a guest post from Paul Krupin, of Direct Contact PR.

To me, getting publicity is like making candy – it’s a tasty recipe backed by art and science, psychology, and specific tactics that come into play. It’s a persuasive communications process that one has to go through. It has a very narrow set of requirements that many people simply do not understand.

The blood sweat and tears of getting publicity is always in the writing of the news release. It contains your pitch. The news release is the crucial document that you create and transmit to media. Then you watch and wait to see what happens. It’s a very important document. Your pitch is basically a proposal. A publishing proposal.

When it’s successful, it can be real magic, like lightning in a bottle. Phenomenal things can really happen. Careers and fortunes can be created. Millions of people can potentially see your message and be influenced by your writing and thinking.

But if it’s not, very little will happen, in fact, it can be a painful economic and pride-felt loss.

The hardest part that I find is that people don’t realize that getting publicity is not like marketing. When you market, you try to persuade to sell product or services.

When you seek publicity you are talking to a publisher or a producer and asking them to publish what you wrote, or write about what you say or do.

When you write a news release you are in effect you are communicating a very specific message:

‘esteemed and honored fellow publisher (or producer or host), please give me space in your publication (or on your show).’

This distinctive purpose of this message is one of the most difficult things I have to teach and get people to understand when I work with clients. Many an otherwise brilliant and successful author, marketer and promoter has great difficulty with this concept. Basically they write an ad and expect media to publish it. They are terribly surprised and hurt when it gets rejected. In fact, their failure at this point often times results in them ceasing the whole writing and creative or business development process. How
tragic to come so far and then stop over the failure to be successful at this point.

So heed the words of this publicist, and I truly believe if you grok this deeply, you’ll reduce the pain you go through as you learn what it takes to get publicity. It will make both our lives a lot easier. You’ll give me better more newsworthy information, it will take us less time to write a good news release, you’ll get more publicity when we do send it out, and I’ll get to spend more time fishing.

So here goes. I’ll share with you what I know.

First, understand that media are generally averse to giving anyone free advertising. They charge for advertising. That’s how they make their money. So if when you write a news release and are perceived as asking for free advertising, for a commercial enterprise, the likely outcome is a call or email from the sales advertising manager at the media. So please do not be surprised if and when this happens.

Second, media only publish three basic things:

News
Entertainment
Education

That’s it. There is no more, except for the paid advertising that is.

Don’t believe me? Look at any media publication. Look at a newspaper, look at a magazine. Identify what you see. Do this article by article. Analyze the media. Learn and try to grasp what they do.  Pick up any publication and classify every inch of space into one of these four classifications: news, entertainment, education, or paid advertising.  Prove it to yourself.

Do you get this yet?

And realize that if you want to be published, this is what you need to give the media people you are pitching to and be quick about it.

Now there’s a special psychology you need to really get down about what you are doing when you pitch to a media person.

The real key is to give media what they want. The hard part is in figuring out what that is. It’s crucial to remember we are writing to a publisher and asking for them to publish something about our topic, featuring us. BTW, if you do a good job on the news release, you’ll get some media responses even if you use the free services. But you’ll get greater penetration and quantity and quality response with services that send to custom targeted media lists matched to the message.

There are lots of issues that enter into a media decision to respond to a news release favorably: content, timeliness, quality of thinking, how many people in the audience will be interested, what’s in it for the audience, cost and effort needed to use it, prior and competing coverage of the topic, downstream issues, and the likely audience response.

These are among the many factors that go through an editor’s or a producer’s mind. You find this out when you speak to them, and also when you watch what they select, and of course, by what they publish every day. In fact, this is the greatest source of guidance you can find, and it’s available to you everyday.

What I find is that very simply, if they see what they like, they use it. They may not use all of it, and they may change it, but it gets some coverage if it fits their readership and editorial needs. Media people make decisions based on how it will likely affect their bottom line, which is revenue based on subscriptions, advertising, and market share.

To you and me, it’s a gauntlet of sorts, and we try our best to learn, create appropriate material, present it as best we can, and act
persuasively.

Once you understand this psychology and positioning, then you can get to work, and it’s really not that hard.

So how do you decide what do you put into a news release so that you maximize your publishing success?

Here’s a link to an article I wrote that explains this in more detail:

The Hot Button Theory: Maximizing Media Response to Your News Releases

Here are the basics.

Do you want to see your media response improve dramatically? Send a news release that pushes the media’s hot buttons. I’ve developed a little set of criteria from having sent out thousands of news releases for clients over the past two decades, and the common set of factors that produce the maximum success.

Here’s what you need to do:

Tell me story (a short, bed time story), give me a local news angle (of interest to my particular audience), hit me in the pocket book (make me or save me money), teach me something I didn’t know before (educate me), amaze me or astound me (like in WOW!), make my stomach churn (in horror or fear), or turn me on (yes, sex sizzles).

Your news release needs to do this in 30 seconds or less.

Let’s look at it again from a slightly different perspective.

I’ve studied what the media actually publish for decades now and I believe you can boil it all down to one simple formula. Look at almost every article in USA Today or any other newspaper or magazine or any TV show and try to identify the common key elements that pop out at you. You’ll see it immediately once I tell it to you.

Here it is:

DPAA+H

These letters stand for "Dramatic Personal Achievement in the Face of Adversity plus a little Humor."

If you look at almost every media around you, from the front page of USA Today to the Olympics to the evening news to the sitcoms on TV, you’ll see this is what the American public wants, desires, and craves.

DPAA+H

As a culture, we crave to see the human spirit triumph in matters of the heart, and in trials of hardship and tragedy. We ask to be uplifted right out of the humdrum of our everyday reality into the exhilaration and extreme emotional states of those who are living life on the edge.

It galvanizes our attention. It rivets us to our seats. It captures our attention and our hearts.

It drives us to pay for newspaper subscriptions, to movie theatres for entertainment, to rent videos for fun or education, to bookstores for a good read. This is what energizes and drives the very core of numerous key economic systems and is what creates and maintains the very infrastructure of the publishing, news, and entertainment industries.

And this is what the media seeks to provide. This is what works. Human interest stories with

DPAA+H

You will see these elements everywhere you look in varying degrees. It is a rare media feature that doesn’t contain most of these items. The media uses technology to increase the assault on our senses, enhance the effect, and make our experience ever more compelling and memorable.

And if you are writing a news release to get publicity for yourself or for a client, what you have to do to maximize your chances is recognize this desire and need, and then cater to it as best you can.

If you want to put your best foot forward and take a crack at writing a news release that does this, here is what I suggest:

For any particular publicity project you have in mind, study your target publications (the ones you really want to be in), identify articles that you want to achieve similar success, review prior and existing media coverage of your subject, and then make a list of the top ten things (ideas and actions) that you can write or talk about.

You can use News Search Engines (e.g., Google News) to evaluate media coverage of your topic and to identify articles that you can use as models. Then you can actually put pen to paper.

My 3-I technique is really useful at this point. Identify your success story, Imitate What You See, Innovate with your own information. Learn more about this technique here: http://www.directcontactpr.com/free-articles/article.src?ID=52

Just remember – you need to hit people’s hot buttons and galvanize attention. To do this you need to focus on developing some very special ideas.

One of the most successful types of news releases to use is the problem solving tips article or advice article or entertainment article.

Pretend that you are going to speak to 20 people and you wanted to inspire, motivate and impress the hell out of them, but only had exactly three minutes.

What are the very best eight to ten pieces of advice would you give them? You must identify the topic that will interest the maximum number of people. You must also then present the very best advice or analysis and recommendations, best stories, best insights, or best humor you are capable of to address the problem or the subject you identified. These must be ideas or actions they can take or implement that will produce highly desirable benefits in their life right now.

The reason is that these ideas are just like candy. Candy produces such pleasurable sensations that it results in chemical memory. People always remember where they got good candy. And that’s what you need to make. Good intellectual property candy.

The goal here is to galvanize them into action, so that when you are done, they jump up and open their wallets, and hand you their business card, and say "call me, I need your services".

It is not just to sell your book. It is to sell people on YOU. You are the candy. It is professional branding at it’s best that we seek here, so that people are so enamored with you that they buy everything you have available for sale.

So if you’ve done your homework, and studied what your target media are publishing, you’ll see that this is what is being published day in day out in media of all types.

It is also a pathway that you can probably follow pretty easily if you set your mind to it.

So think about this relatively easy assignment and then start writing. If you do this, I’d like to see what you create. You can send it to me anytime and I’ll be happy to give you comments and recommendations on what to do with it to help you get to where you want to be.

Just remember this: If you give the media what they really want, they’ll give you what you want – free publicity.

Paul J. Krupin, Direct Contact PR
Reach the Right Media in the Right Market with the Right Message
http://www.DirectContactPR.com  Paul@DirectContactPR.com
Blog.DirectContactPR.com
Free eBook download: http://www.directcontactpr.com/files/files/TrashProof2010.pdf

Clever Moves All Around In The B&N And Amazon Chess Game

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog on the Idea Logical site.

Readers who have been following publishing’s digital transition for two years or more will recall the situation in 2010 when five of publishing’s Big Six switched over from selling their ebooks on wholesale terms, by which the retailer sets the price to the consumer, to agency terms, by which the publisher sets a price that prevails across all retailers. Random House stayed out.

 

That decision seemed to puzzle many observers despite the realities for the publishers. Making the change required actually reducing per-unit revenues to the publisher (and author) while at the same time making each unit more expensive to the consumer, so it was done by what was then called the “Agency Five” at some sacrifice (in their view) for the greater good (in their view) of the industry. Agency protected weaker ebook retailers — Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google as well as independents — from having to compete with the deep-pocketed Amazon’s loss-leader pricing strategies. The immediate payoff was the opportunity to sell through Apple’s fledgling iBookstore.

As we explained at the time, Random House’s choice was transparently in their short-term self-interest. It was understandable that their competitive cohort, who saw themselves making a sacrifice on behalf of the industry’s long-term future, were unhappy that the biggest player among them was staying out. But it was a bit hard for me to understand what was so hard for everybody else to understand about why Random House did what they did. (Random House switched over to selling on the agency model in March, 2011.)

Those times are recalled for me by the recent round of indignation and analysis over the jockeying among the retailing competitors over the titles published by Amazon. Everybody is just acting in their own best interest. There really isn’t much mysterious about anybody’s behavior.

We could say the most recent set of events was begun by Amazon’s escalating efforts to capture titles for ebook rendering exclusively on the Kindle platform. They were apparently doing this two ways: by signing up authors directly for their own imprints and by offering self-published authors financial incentives — such as paid participation in their lending library program — for making their ebook a Kindle exclusive.

For the books they signed directly, Amazon recognized that it might not be the most comfortable sales call in the world for any rep to pitch these books to B&N’s buyers. Representing the books of every bookseller’s biggest competitor would be a challenge but it was one that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt decided to attempt. Last year it was announced that HMH had taken the opportunity to license the Amazon-originated titles in paperback. Major publishers had often expressed the view that publishing in print without ebook rights was a non-starter for them. HMH hoped that their efforts wouldn’t be viewed in that light since it is not considered unusual (although I’m not sure how often it has happened) for ebook rights to remain with the hardcover publisher when paperback rights are licensed.

More heat was generated when the Kindle Fire debuted with some graphic novel content delivered exclusively to it. When Barnes & Noble pulled the paper versions of those books off their store shelves, they explained that their policy would be to refuse to stock the print version of something not offered to them for sale “in all formats”.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey

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Steven Lewis‘s Taleist is administering a self-publisher survey. The results will be informative and helpful to self-publishers everywhere, and can be viewed immediately upon completing the survey, so please consider participating. From the site:

How are you doing as a self-publisher? It’s a hard question to answer isn’t it? What are you measuring against?

We’re taking a professional snapshot of the self-publishing industry.
 

There are self-publishing authors like JA Konrath, Amanda Hocking,  John Locke and (on a smaller but perfectly formed scale) Joanna Penn who are generous with their figures but they’re selling books from the tens of thousands to the millions. So does that mean you’re a failure if your figures are more modest? Or are you actually doing better than most? What is the average royalty earning for self-publishing authors? How long does it take for a self-published book to reach peak sales?

What are the most successful authors doing to market their books?

The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey will have the answers

I have partnered with Dave Cornford, an experienced consumer researcher and himself a self-publishing author. We’ve designed a survey that asks:

  • Who is self-publishing? (age, sex, background, experience)
  • How are we doing it? (full time, part time, on what platforms)
  • Why are we doing it? (can’t find a publisher, had a publisher but preferred to go indie, indie all the way!)
  • What’s working for us? (having more books for sale, marketing like a fiend, giving books away)
  • How are we doing? (sales and revenue)

Drawing on Dave’s experience we’re asking these questions in a way that we can follow all sorts of interesting threads, like looking for what successfully self-publishing authors have in common.

We need your help

There are 61 questions in the survey so it will take you a little time to complete it but just imagine how useful it will be to have a professional snapshot of what our “industry” looks like and whether you’re on the right path.

Our target is to reach 1,000 self-published authors to have a truly meaningful amount of data to work from. To do that we need your help.

We’re asking the self-publishing community to:

  1. Fill in the survey now!
  2. Share a link with your networks on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, word-of-mouth (e.g. by using the friendly icons below to link back to this post)
Let’s get to know ourselves better. Take the survey now!

Using Ebooks To Their Full Advantage

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Most of us have heard that eBooks are now mainstream, yet are writers using them to their full advantage? According to James Moushon in his guest post “Real eBooks: Are We Still in the Stone Age?” on The Book Designer, probably not.

Here’s what James says about what a real eBook should be:

My contention is that REAL ebooks should be a different product than their paper counterparts. They should be formatted differently; sections arranged differently and in some cases they should have different covers. In short, to be a REAL ebook, they should not be just a copy of the traditional book version.

He goes on to give tips on exactly how to rearrange an eBook so it’s a “real” eBook, which includes moving large table of contents and author references to the end and including links to other books, especially the author’s other books.

While I agree with James, I admit that it’s difficult for me to actually do that. Writers are avid readers. Until recently we all grew up reading traditionally published paper and hardbacks. To layout a book in any other way seems like we’re trying to walk on our hands and eat with our feet.

However, James has a point. If you want a potential reader to decide to buy your book based on what he or she has read, you have to get them enough material from the book to read to make an informed decision. When online stores offer only a set percent of the front matter for a reader to view as a sample, it makes sense to make the most of it with the actual story and not a lot of added stuff they would probably skip anyway.

With the rise of eBook purchases, we need to do everything we can to make the experience a pleasant one for the reader so they become not just a one book buyer, but a devoted fan.

What other differences have you noticed between paper/hardback books and eBooks? What changes would you make?

 

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

Scrivener: 3 Reasons You Should Use It For Your Book

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I used Scrivener for my latest book, Prophecy. It’s been a truly life-changing experience after the dreadful cutting and pasting process in MS Word that plagued my last novel, Pentecost. I am now entirely converted and am also an evangelist for the product.

I used Scrivener happily without reading the Help (because I hate reading the Help) but then I found David Hewson’s ‘Writing a Novel with Scrivener‘ which I highly recommend. It will convert you and make your writing life a whole lot easier, I promise!

 

Here are 3 reasons you should be using Scrivener (which is on Mac and PC now so you have no excuse.) It’s just US$49 and you can use it for all your books, fiction and non-fiction as well as academic publications and loads more. No, I’m not an affiliate but I truly do believe in the product!

(1) You can write in scenes then drag and drop to re-order.

If this was the only feature of Scrivener, it would still be enough for me!

I write in sporadic scenes, not in a linear fashion so the final scene is often one of the first I write. I’m already plotting novel #3 and have maybe 5 scenes I could set down right now, but I wouldn’t have a clue where they go in the story yet.

So for the Prophecy work in progress I had all these scenes but it was only in the 2nd edit that I decided on the order they needed to go in. Scrivener makes it easy to drag and drop the scenes to re-order the scenes. There’s no cutting and pasting and no huge Word files to manipulate.

I also like the cork-board view of the scenes. If you use index cards, you’ll be at home here!

(2) Auto-create Kindle and ePub files.

This is a game-changer.

Compiling for .mobi

You can now create your own ebooks by compiling and exporting from Scrivener which is under $50, which once paid you can use over and over again. You obviously need to check your created files carefully but for plain text novels with little complications, this is a no-brainer.

I still recommend using professional formatters if you have complicated books or lots of images, but for basic books, you can just use Scrivener. This is also great for providing files to beta-readers and for reviewing your book in the way many will now consume it. You can also export to Doc and other formats including Latex if you want to format in more complicated ways.

The point behind Scrivener is that book length works can be complicated and easier to write in chunks, but when you want to submit them you need it in one document. Scrivener compiles them based on how you have structured your Parts/ Chapters/ Scenes and also by how you define the compile and export settings. There are preset defaults but you can also customize, and there are lots of helpful videos and a forum in case you have trouble.

I have just added a video to my Ebook Publishing mini-course that shows you how to do this if you’re interested in more detail.

(3) Project Binders can also hold notes, research, pictures and more so you have one place for the whole ecosystem of your book

There is one manuscript/draft folder within your Scrivener project and then there are other folders which aren’t compiled into the final document. You can use these for research or for character sketches, for pictures and other associated media as well as pasting scenes you don’t know what to do with (I do that a lot).

You can also split the screen while you are writing so you can reference the notes at the same time as writing text. I use a great deal of art history in my books so having the painting or image in the split screen is useful so I get the details right.

One memorable image is the Escher print of angels and demons (shown right) which is on the wall of a character’s study. It was great to be able to see it on the page as I wrote.

Using Scrivener for my own novel, Prophecy

My own process for Prophecy has been as follows:

* Write first draft scenes in Write Or Die or Pages app on the iPad which I use for writing in the library and out of the house. I have found this the most effective way to write fiction now since my home office is orientated towards podcasts, interviews, videos, product creation and the business of The Creative Penn. I need a different space for making stuff up.

* Paste the scenes into Scrivener and move them around as well as revise scene by scene within the program. It’s easier to revise on bite-size chunks like scenes.

* At the end of every day, compile and export a .doc file which I email to myself on Gmail so I always have a backup of my work. Gmail is online storage so you’ll always be able to find this again. I also back on an external hard-drive and monthly on Amazon S3 cloud storage (paranoid, me??)

* After the first draft is completed, I compile the full .doc and print it out. Read, scribble, self-edit, destroy, rework. Write some more scenes and fill in the blanks.

* Edit full 2nd draft on Scrivener and repeat print and self-edit, then repeat print and self-edit until satisfied

* When I’m finally happy with the draft, I distribute to my editor to review and provide feedback. Then I make changes and send to beta readers.

* Make changes on Scrivener and compile for the final time and output for Kindle and submission to Smashwords.

Once you have the master project saved, you can always go back and make any changes and recompile. It’s a brilliant system and I am definitely going to keep using Scrivener. I can’t imagine writing without it now and in 2012, I will also be revising my non-fiction work using it too.

Are you a Scrivener convert? Do you have any questions about it?

 

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.