Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.
The grass roots project (started by me) to get Indie eBooks sent to deployed members of our Armed Forces, is now ssupported by Mark Coker’s team at Smashwords. If you want details on how you can support our brave men and women in uniform overseas, stop by for the details at::
http://blog.smashwords.com/2009/09/smashwords-supports-operation-ebook.html
Edward C. Patterson
Book Oven pal Mark Bertils writes about Cloud Publishing on indexmb, focusing mostly on the reader-side, with services like Shortcovers and the more forwardlooking expectation of booky-APIs, Kindle’s or big cloud-based catalog initiatives. The stuff that’s happening and going to happen on the finished product/reader side is exciting, but it pales, I think, in comparison to the changes that will come on the creation side. I posted the following comment on Mark’s site: For obvious reasons, I think the cloud looks most promising as a publishing enabler, rather than as a reading enabler. Cloud-publishing for me means: a) a text can be instantaneously published at zero-cost to the world b) a text can be worked on by an editorial team distributed across the globe, yet the text will still be in “one place” in the cloud The implications are huge for the structures of the publishing business (or at least, we at Book Oven are betting they are). The two things that have given shape to the “modern” publishing industry are: a) the cost of distribution of books b) the need for centralization of workers-on-books But a) goes to zero, and, as you suggest, b) has been going towards decentralization for some time now. But b) is going to fragment massively now. So really the two main forces that have shaped the book business have essentially disappeared – or at least, should disappear within the next 5 years. The changes on the production side will, I think, be far more significant than the changes for readers.
My children’s book "My Children Are More Precious Than Gold" ISBN 1438240953 sold on amazon and buy sell community or by me.
This was my inspiration.
I had a grandmother that I grew up respecting and loving. Though Veder Bright had to be prompted to talk about her early years, she did tell me as much as she wanted me to know. While in school, had an assignment to do a family tree. I’ll always be grateful that I talked to Grandma and got all the information she knew. Now communication with second and third cousins on the Internet has helped me fill in more of that family tree. I’m proud that younger relatives ask me for a copy of our tree for their homework. Backgrounds are very important. Trouble is, most people don’t start questioning who was related to who until the elders in their family has passed away. You can find most of the names and dates on the internet, but that’s not nearly as interesting to me as my grandmother’s stories that went along with those names and dates.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, died in the late seventies about three years after my grandfather. When many of her nine children cleaned out their parents last home in Belle Plaine, they found the family bible. Under the names and dates of all her children, including the two infants that died, was the sentence in Grandma’s scrawling hand, " My children are more precious than gold".
My grandparents struggled to keep food on the table for their large family during the twenties and thirties. Through all the tough times, those children knew they were loved. They did their best to look after each other. My mother and an uncle have passed away, but to this day though the siblings are scattered between Missouri where they were born and Iowa, they are very close, because family is still important to them.
In the late eighties after the writers workshop in the library, I was thinking at trying my hand to write a book. Hadn’t clue what the story would be. Once day, my mother was looking for something in the antique sideboard in the kitchen. The Great Depression had trained my mother, the eldest of that large family, to never throw anything away. That day, she was rifling through the tablecloths and napkins when a legal size paper slipped out from the pile. She glanced at the paper and handed it to me, wondering if I might be interested in some family history her mother had given her a decade before.
One of Grandma’s sisters had been interviewed by a granddaughter as a 4 H project about their early life and submitted the story to a newspaper. My grandmother and her 11 siblings were born in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Riner, Virginia. At the turn of the twentieth century in that area conditions were rough, and families were poor. I found it interesting to read how the Bishop family lived and what they had to do to survive. That was the start of my book project, but I needed to know more so I went to the Keystone Library and checked out a book on Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and the customs of the people. I made extensive notes from that book.
By then I had bought a word processor which had some memory. I don’t remember how long it took me to write the book but at least a year. The title is "My Children Are More Precious Than Gold". Befitting I thought since I assumed my grandmother got her mothering instincts from her mother. Finally, I took a copy in a notebook to my retired teacher mentor. She read and edited the story. Her review was – This book is good reading for anyone and especially a good story for junior readers – sad, funny and dramatic.
I sent out queries and chapters to several publishers but the era the story was written in wasn’t what has been popular with children was my reasoning. That being my first book, down deep I was pretty sure I needed more experience to write a book worth publishing. After months of waiting, I got the rejections slips, gave up and hid the notebook away for over a decade.
My next attempt at writing a book didn’t happen for ten years – 1999
This post, from Daniel "Dust" Werneck (aka Daniel Poeira), originally appeared on his Empire of Dust site on 9/4/09. The majority of it is reprinted here with his permission.
“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
– Old proverb
I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to cover this subject for a while. Now, thanks to April Hamilton – a.k.a. @indieauthor – and a link she just posted on Twitter, I think it’s the right time to talk about punk rock and self-publishing.
Since I halted my career as an independent animator and started to focus on my writing, I’ve been reading everything I can find about the current state of affairs in the world of book publishing. One of the ugliest feuds right now is between the publishing companies and professionals, and the self-publishing companies like lulu.com that print and sell books without editing.
The link Mrs. Hamilton twitted pointed to an article by Rose Fox, a professional reader and book analyst, criticizing people who self-published books. Her article, entitled “I Don’t Want To Hate Self-Publishers”, starts with two quotes; phrases she hears all the time coming from people who publish their own books. One of the sentences read:
“I’d love to see self-publishing have a similar vibe to it as punk rock – anyone can do it.”
And then she adds her view of that statement:
I know next to nothing about punk rock and I’m still pretty sure that that “anyone can do it” line is not only wrong but offensively wrong to people who do know anything about punk rock.
I also can’t see how it promotes self-publishing in any way at all, as the idea of “anyone” attempting to play punk rock only makes me want to cringe and cover my ears, much like the idea of “anyone” attempting to publish a book.
There’s plenty to criticize in both the recording industry and the publishing industry, but there’s also a lot of value in putting your raw creative endeavors in the hands of people who do things like produce albums and edit books for a living.
I am glad that she started her comment by confirming she knows ‘next to nothing’ about punk rock. Being born and raised in punk rock, I feel in the position to enlighten her shadowy views on that remark about ‘anyone’ being able to do it.
This assertion is not by any means offensive to punk rockers. Quite au contraire, it is one of the pillars of the entire punk rock experience.
When punk rock first appeared with this name, in mid-1970s New York city, it was basically a bunch of amateur unsigned rock bands who wanted to make music. Back then, Disco music was the norm, and studio execs didn’t care much about rock, unless it was something gigantic and popular like Peter Frampton, or elaborate and complex like progressive rock. If you were just an average lower-middle-class bored kid with close-to-none access to musical education, making music was not a realistic option for you.
But even so, punk rock was born. It didn’t start like an organized movement, but more like a philosophy of how to do things. Bands like the Ramones, the Dead Boys and the Talking Heads had to play in an almost abandoned music venue called CBGB (an acronym for Country, Blue Grass and Blues) simply because no other place would accept them. But they did, anyway, and a lot of people loved them.
After the Ramones toured the USA and the UK in 1977, hordes of bored kids who wanted to rock bought or stole whatever instruments they could grab and started making their own rock music. They had no musical education, no media training and no producing values–but they sure had a lot of fun, and ended up creating timeless and enduring pieces of music.
The trick behind the success of punk rock back in the late 1970s and 1980s was simple: besides it being fun, thought-provoking and stimulating, you didn’t have to spend a lot of money or a lot of time to become a punk rocker. Clubs, tapes, instruments, magazines, records–everything was cheap, and felt very true to the soul. And also, at least in the beginning, on those long lost days of punk rock Alcion, you didn’t have to follow any rulebooks, or please the masses. It was a raw and free art form, and no matter what you were looking for (artistic expression, free beer, making new friends) you could get it out of punk rock.
*.*.*
What does all this has to do with self-publishing books? Well, first of all, the very name of this thing called ‘punk rock’ came out of a self-published magazine. “Punk” was created by a cartoonist, a publisher and a journalist in 1975. All of them were independent, self-employed, eager and curious. Their fanzine went on to become one of the most important artistic statements of the late XX century, and is still imitated, revered and plagiarized.
Fanzines in general have also become a staple (no pun intended!) of the punk rock subculture, and thousands of them have been printed since then. I have been personally involved in many a punk zine, and my entire career as an artist [was] spawned from my amateur experiments with self-publishing those little pieces of folded A4 paper I gave out for free or sold cheaply at concerts, clubs and gatherings. I am not an exception, and have met dozens of people who [followed] the same path as I did, not to mention the literally hundreds of visual artists I’ve heard or read about who first became interested in graphic design and printing through punk or geek fanzines.
The thrill of it all? Exactly the same as with the punk rock bands. We did everything by ourselves, for ourselves, with no restraints other than the financial and technological. This led to extremely experimental solutions that became part of modern design language, xerox art, etc.
Read the rest of the post at Empire of Dust.
Hi, Joe or Jane Author. My name is…well, it doesn’t really matter what my name is, all that matters is I’ve just signed up for your newsletter, or started visiting your site or blog, or registered for membership on your site, or started following you on Twitter, or friended you on Facebook or MySpace or FriendFeed or Goodreads or LibraryThing or something similar. This should be the start of a wonderful relationship, in which you share useful and amusing information with me and I sing your praises to everyone I know, buy your books, register for your webinars and show up to your speaking engagements. So far, so good.
Now here’s how to f**k it up.
Bombard me with emails. When I signed up for your newsletter, Helpful Tips or the like, unless you specified otherwise at the time I signed up, I’m expecting to hear from you no more frequently than once a week. And in all honesty, if your messages take longer than about five minutes to read, I won’t. Between my job, my family commitments, my social commitments, my own reading and writing, and the fall TV schedule ramping up again, I don’t have time to wade through your too-frequent or too-lengthy missives.
Bait and switch me. It might surprise you to learn that when I signed up for your newsletter or Helpful Tips I was expecting to receive…wait for it…news or Helpful Tips, NOT advertising messages. It’s fine to have a one- or two-line sales pitch at the end of your email, or to send out the occasional message about your upcoming book or speaking engagement, but the rest of your content better be worth my time and attention. Look at it this way: would you read a magazine that had nothing but full-page ads in it? If your favorite TV show suddenly started consisting of 80% ads and 20% show, would you keep watching it?
Son of bait and switch me. If you’ve promoted your free webinar, ebook, members-only site, newsletter or whatever else you’ve got as Twenty Surefire Strategies to accomplish some goal, and I sign up, I’m expecting to receive…you guessed it: Twenty Surefire Strategies. When you give me a series of sales pitches for twenty fee-based products or services from you and your affiliates instead, I tend to conclude you’re a lying liar.
Return of the son of bait and switch me. Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari and other reader community sites are places where people share their reactions to books they’ve read and engage in discussions about all things book-related, generally from a reader’s perspective. If the only books on your virtual shelf are those you’ve written yourself, or if you’ve got a variety of books on display but reserve your gushiest reviews for your own work, it’s obvious you’re using the site as a marketing outlet. Way to give new authors everywhere a bad name.
Bait and switch me, the revenge. It’s great that you’re branching out into new areas, or already operating in multiple areas, but don’t assume I want to branch out with you. I signed up for your Sci Fi Wonks site because I enjoy science fiction in general, and yours in particular. Imagine my surprise (and annoyance) when I also started receiving emails from your Gory Horrors site. And your Renaissance Romance N’ Ribaldry site. And your [insert religious affiliation here] Inspiration Of The Day site. And your eBay store. Bonus question: how angry do you think I was to find there were no “unsubscribe” links in any of the unwanted emails?
Bait and switch me, the final chapter. I understand I may need to provide my email address when posting a comment on your blog or site, because it protects you from spammers and hackers. And of course, if I’ve used the Contact form to send you a remark or question off-site, you need my email address to respond to me. But neither of these actions gives you the right to add me to your mailing list. Even if you’ve added some verbiage to your site pages to indicate that’s what you’ll do anytime someone enters his or her email address anywhere on your site, since that’s not how upstanding and honest most sites operate, if you want to avoid any appearance of bait-and-switchery you need to have a separate page just for mailing list signups.
Bait and switch me, the remake. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and other social networking sites are intended for…seriously, do I have to say it? Social networking. Not marketing or sales pitches. If most (or worse, all!) of your tweets, status updates or blog entries are only there to promote yourself or your work, you’re wasting my time. Just like I said about signing up for your newsletter or Helpful Tips, I wasn’t expecting to get a steady stream of advertising.
Are you beginning to sense a common thread? When I’m getting a lot of quality content from you, I don’t mind getting a modicum of advertising and promotion too. Sometimes I’m truly glad to hear about your new book, service or product, especially if I’m getting a special discount, premium edition or access to material or events not made available to the general public. But the moment the balance between content and advertising tips in the direction of advertising, I’m out. The moment I start thinking you’ve abused my trust, I’m out AND spreading the word. So please, don’t make me tweet angry.
April L. Hamilton is the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat. This is a cross-posting from her Indie Author blog.
This post, from Darren Rowse, originally appeared on ProBlogger on 9/3/09.
Two days back I explored the myth that all you need to do is write great content on a blog for it to get readers and introduced the idea of ’seeding’ content rather than ‘forcing’ it upon readers.
Today I want to take the ’seeding’ idea a step further and give a few examples of ways that you can do it – and in the process hopefully grow your readership beyond your immediate family (not that there’s anything wrong with Mom reading your blog).
I should say that while this post contains 9 ways to promote a blog post – that I rarely use all of them at once. Keep in mind that the idea of ’seeding’ is not about forcing things but rather it is about getting things going and then letting something organic happen. You might need to put a little more effort into things somewhere along the way to keep momentum going (like ‘watering the garden’ helps a seed to grow) but the idea isn’t for force things.
So without further ado – let me share a few of the techniques that I use to ’seed’ content:
I find that one of the most effective ways to get a link to a new blog post ‘out there’ is simply to tweet it. Tweeting a link is quick and easy to do – and if you do it well it can be quite effective at both driving direct traffic to a blog post but also in starting other little viral events on other sites.
The effectiveness of this does depend a little on the size of your follower group – but other factors you can have a little more control over include:
I find that when something does well on Twitter (and not every post will) that it can often trigger a secondary event on a site like Delicious. This in turn can trigger blogs to link to my posts or other social bookmarking sites to pick up links.
This is of course similar to Tweeting a link. I’ve not had as much success with Facebook as a promotional tool for my blogs but know of a few bloggers in different niches who find it to be more effective. Whether it sends loads of traffic or not it can be helpful in an overall strategy.
Similarly I sometimes also use other social media sites like LinkedIn’s status update if I feel that the content I’m promoting is better suited to other audiences. Again – it depends partly upon the size of your network on these sites but even a small but relevant network on these sites can trigger other bloggers to link up or secondary organic submissions on other social sites by those in your network. You never know what impact sharing a link in these sites can have until you do it.
Is the post you’re promoting relevant to the audience of another blog?
This is a question I’m always asking myself as I’m writing blog posts. As I write I jot down the names of other bloggers that have an audience that might find what I’m writing helpful. This means that when it comes time to promote the blog post I have a ready made list of people to shoot out an email to to let them know about my post.
I don’t send these emails out often, nor do I send them out to the same group of bloggers repeatedly – but if I genuinely think my post is of high quality and that the blogger will find it relevant I will.
Check out these suggestions on how to pitch other bloggers for some more tips on how to do this effectively.
Read the rest of the post, which features six more options to spread the word about your blog posts, on ProBlogger.
This article, from Bryan Gilmer, originally appeared on The Millions on 5/18/09.
Bryan Gilmer of Durham, N.C., teaches newswriting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and writes for institutional and corporate clients. Until 2003, he was a reporter at Florida’s largest newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times. He has just independently published a crime thriller novel, Felonious Jazz.
Last week, I created a Kindle version of my indie crime thriller novel, Felonious Jazz, using the tools at Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. It took about nine minutes, a “why-not” side project alongside my trade paperback, which I published using Amazon’s print-on-demand company, CreateSpace.
My Kindle edition went live last Monday at $7.99, so I announced it on a couple of Kindle message boards online. By Wednesday, I’d sold one copy. One! Message board replies said, “If you want us to try a new author, give us a really low price. It’ll generate sales and reviews.” So I marked it down to $1.99 Thursday morning and posted the price change on the same boards. What happened next was remarkable:
As of 5 p.m. Friday – about 36 hours later – Felonious Jazz was the No. 1 selling hard-boiled mystery on the Amazon Kindle Store and the 17th best-selling title in Mysteries & Thrillers – the only title not by huge names like John Sandford, Michael Connelly, and Elmore Leonard in the top 25. Its overall Kindle sales rank was as high as 133rd out of all the 283,000+ fiction and non-fiction titles available in the Kindle Store.
I thought, now that I’m in the rankings, I shouldn’t have to be so cheap. I bumped the price to $4.99. Sales continued, but at a slower pace, (and Felonious Jazz has slipped in the rankings. I probably should have stuck with $1.99 longer). I also drew in some people who just buy cheap Kindle offerings who don’t normally read the genre, though they may have been less likely to enjoy it than fans of similar books.
But overall, what a no-budget way to gain visibility. A few big lessons here: Readers expect Kindle books to be much cheaper than dead-tree books (because they know it costs less to publish them and they can’t share them and worry they won’t have them forever). A cheap price is enough to buy your way up the rankings among national names with a zero-dollar PR campaign. Now that there’s a free Kindle app for iPhone, the potential audience for a Kindle title is not just the half million people who spent $359 for the device but many times that large. It’s surprisingly comfortable to read book text on the Kindle iPhone app. If you haven’t tried it yet, get the app and grab my free sample from Amazon, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s transformative to have a book you’re reading (or several) on your phone to pull out whenever you have to wait in line or for an appointment.
Read the rest of the article on The Millions.
Also note, Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton offers a free guide to publishing in Kindle format on her website in downloadable, pdf format. Also, Publetariat contributor Joshua Tallent is the founder of Ebook Architects, a company that offers consulting, formatting and conversion services for authors wishing to publish in various ebook formats .
This post, from Gallagher Girls series author Ally Carter, originally appeared on her Ally’s Diary blog on 9/11/08.
I attended a couple of writers’ conferences last summer. I enjoy conferences. I like notebooks and name badges and having an excuse to wear the three cute outfits I own.
But this year it felt like I gained less from the sessions themselves than I usually do.
This is probably due to a lot of things, not the least of which is that I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’m simply farther along the learning curve than I used to be.
As a result I spent a lot of time twisting in my chair, wanting to shout out the things that I’ve learned so far. But I couldn’t. Because shouting is a good way to get escorted out of the Hyatt or the Marriott.
So instead I’ll do my shouting here–in the comfort of my own blog.
Please note that what follows is my HONEST opinion about the differences in writing for teens and adults. If you don’t want my honest opinion, stop reading. If you continue to read, consider yourself warned.
One of the sessions that I attended was a session on the differences in writing for teen and adult audiences. But two minutes into the session I wanted to stand up and tell everyone in the audience that they were asking the wrong questions.
Now don’t get me wrong, they were no doubt very common questions, but in my opinion if you want to be successful in the YA market, they were the wrong questions.
So here is my lame, Thursday-morning-just-got-back-from-the-gym-and-I’m-too-lazy-to-go-upstairs-and-do-some-real-work attempt at answering the wrong questions and steering people toward the right ones.
WRONG QUESTION: How do I develop an authentic teen voice?
THE RIGHT QUESTION: Do I have a voice that’s appealing to teens?
After all, would you ask "how do I write in a voice that mystery readers would respond to?" Or "how do I sound like a science fiction reader?" No. You wouldn’t.
Your voice is your voice is your voice. Period. And frankly, either you’ve got a voice that teens will enjoy or you don’t.
Furthermore, all teens don’t sound the same and neither do all teen novels.
There are very successful teen authors who use long sentences and huge words and very complicated sentence structures. And then there are teen authors like me.
There is no such thing as a "teen" voice. And no amount of hanging out in shopping malls and eavesdropping on the kids at the next table is going to teach you to write in a manner that will appeal to those kids.
Furthermore, trying to mimic those readers is an almost surefire way to make those kids hate your book. They know imitators when they see them. They don’t take kindly to pandering.
Trying to write like you think teens want you to write is the fastest way I know to fail in this business.
Write how you write. Either it’ll work for the YA market (or the horror market, or romance market, or scifi market, etc) or it won’t. At the very least, teens will respect you for it.
Read the rest of the post (it’s quite lengthy, so there’s still much more to learn from it) on Ally Carter’s Ally’s Diary blog.
This post, from Jane, originally appeared on the Dear Author site on 8/2/09.
The point of the Google Book Settlement is to make money. There are some that argue that it is designed to provide more access to literature than is currently being provided, but money is involved here otherwise there wouldn’t be lawsuits.
Google Book Settlement has authorized four different revenue models and contemplates others. The four approved revenue models are as follows:
Through the GBKS, Google is given the right to display advertisements on “Preview Use pages and other Online Book Pages.” Ads that appear on a general search results page are not considered “Advertising Use” and that money, then, is kept by Google. Revenues generated through ads within the pages of the books themselves (or ads that appear on searches within a particular book) will be shared with publishers and authors at a rate of 63% less BRR administrative fee.
Per Section 3.10(c)(iii) Google is not permitted to use “any pop-up, pop-under, or any other types of advertisements or content of any kind” and the Registry may restrict Google’s advertising for non Registered Rightsholders if Google is using animated, audio or video ads.
Institutional Subscriptions is subscription access to a database of scanned books sold to institutions. The pricing will be set by Google and the BRR. It is likely that subscriptions will be offered in full access and smaller discipline-based collection but Google intends to price the different versions so that there is an incentive to purchase the access to the entire database. Section 4.1(a)(v)
To provide an incentive for institutions to subscribe to the entire Institutional Subscription Database, Google shall design the pricing of the different versions of the Institutional Subscription such that the price for access to the entire Institutional Subscription Database will be less than the sum of the prices for access to the discipline-based collections.
Google and the BRR will consider “the pricing of similar products and services available from third parties, the scope of Books available, the quality of the scan and the features offered as part of the Institutional Subscription.” 4.1(a)(ii)
The Uses contemplated by the agreement include “view, copy/paste up to 4 pages in a single command, and print pages of a Book (no greater than 20 pages in one command), and may enable Book Annotations.” All printed pages will include a visible watermark. Section 4.1(d)
The agreement confers consumers the same use rights and restrictions as under Institutional Subscriptions including view, copy/paste, print & annotation if the latter has been permitted. Section 4.2(a).
Pricing is determined by Google & the BRR by default. The Rightsholder (and remember that could be any number of people with any disputes headed for arbitration) can notify Google of the price she wants the access to be sold. Failure to notify Google results in the Settlement Price being used. Section 4.2(b). Pricing Algorithm will be based on comparable sales data. Section 4.2(c)(ii)(2). Books are not individually priced but rather allotted placement in a Pricing Bin.
Read the rest of the post, including a detailed breakdown of the ‘Pricing Bin’ categories and payouts, on Dear Author.
This post, from Merrilee Faber, originally appeared on the e-Fiction Book Club site on 8/16/09.
Here’s a tip for the clueless author. Self promotion does not mean spam. Word of mouth? Not YOUR mouth. Getting noticed? Not successful if people remember you as an arrogant arse or a nutter.
(Obligatory disclaimer; the opinions expressed in this post are mine and do not represent the views of other members of the e-Fiction Book Club.)
Back to the soapbox.
I know you want the world to hear about your opus. I get it. And getting noticed in the vast sea of information that is the internet can be an uphill battle.
But just think for a moment. Remember those comments you get, the ones trying to sell pharmaceutical products, or encourage you to explore the dubious delights of a XXX site, or the ones that promise to make your sex life better? How many of those do you read? How many of those do you post to your site, thinking ‘wow, I’m so glad someone told me about that’?
My blog is not here as a vehicle for your marketing activities.
When you post a long advertisement about your book/site/product whatever, you are spamming me. Your information is unsolicited, and that means it’s unwelcome. Yes, even here, on a book review blog. The rules for submission are posted on the front page and on the submission page. 90% of the authors who find us can figure it out, why can’t you?
Wail, bitch, moan, they say, how am I going to get noticed if I don’t spread the word about my book? Oh, I noticed you, all right. But I’m certainly not encouraged to click through and read your book. I’m going to hit the Spam It button, and say bye-bye.
There are ways to do self promotion right, and the internet is a great vehicle for it. If you can’t be bothered to Google ‘internet marketing’, I can’t help you. But I will pass on 3 marketing guidelines for the clueless author (and any authors who might just be uninitiated. There’s a difference, and mostly it’s to do with attitude.)
People connect with people. Want to be noticed? Get out there, on Twitter or Facebook or WordPress or whatever. Find your community. Get involved. Read blogs, post comments, tweet about your day. Connecting, finding followers and building your audience is primarily about making friends. You don’t have to be the life of the party; networking is just getting to know people, and letting them get to know you.
Read the rest of the post, including tips #2 and 3, on e-Fiction Book Club.
This post, from Eoin Purcell, originally appeared on his Eoin Purcell’s Blog on 5/14/09.
Sometimes you get tired of being outmaneuvered
In some senses, what Amazon launched yesterday with Amazon Encore is neither that amazing a project, after all there have been several small-press or self-published titles taken on board by large publishers as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, nor is it even that innovative, Authonomy is at its core a way to tap the self published and slush-piled manuscripts out there in the wild.
But the key point is that this moves Amazon directly into the role of publisher as James Bridle makes clear on his post on the topic:
"It’s been a while coming, but some of us have been predicting this move for some time: Amazon have finally made it to the penultimate step on the publishing chain. I say penultimate, because although they are now, by any definition, a publisher, they still appear to be cherry-picking from existing books rather than seeking out their own authors."
I think this move suggests a couple of key questions:
First, Cui bono
On the face of it, this seems like an amazing opportunity for the author, reading her Amazon blog she certainly seems happy. Amazon’s platform (and as Personanondata point out platform is pretty key) allows for so many things that the average (or small press) publisher cannot. View for instance the neat homemade (and windy) video that amazon have on the main product page. The extra push that Amazon can give a product is really impressive. It will certainly be interesting to see how this works. I think it is fair to say then that the author gets a fair shake of this tail, though it would be interesting to see how the royalties split out.
As for the publisher who backed the book in the first place (always assuming that this encore element remains true) the deal is a win-win. So long, that is as rights for the project were acquired to begin with. A smart author would try and retain the rights for any potential Amazon Encore deal if that was even remotely possible. but allowing for the rights being with the publisher, they will surely gain something from the deal, though if the split of revenue is as one sided as in the case of the new amazon blogs-on-kindle deal (70-30 in favour of amazon) it’ll not be a huge amount. So there is a sense that the publishers who are “chosen” will benefit. But a note of caution from two sources Personanondata & James:
"Amazon as producer is a subtle but important change in the operations of the largest retailer. I often mull what would happen to some of the largest publishers if they lost their top two or three authors to Google or Amazon. It may be that the Amazon Encore program sets the stage for a much larger program by Amazon to establish their own publishing and media production operation – their content supply – that feeds their retail presence. There may be further ramifications from this seemingly innocuous press release."
"Those who suggest they’ll just keep picking stuff up from the little guys hasn’t been paying attention. In the last five years Amazon have, in addition to dominating online bookselling, bought a book social network, a major print-on-demand supplier, a complete end-to-end self-publishing system, pretty much the entire used books marketplace, the biggest audiobook distributor, the best iPhone ereader, and designed, built and delivered the only truly mass-market dedicated ereading device, with a proprietary format that sets them up to be the iTunes of eBooks.* It’s big, it’s scary, it’s Amazon. But the publishing industry is under so many different pressures at the moment, this is unlikely to be as big as it could be: Amazon don’t want to annoy their major suppliers, not too much, and not yet. They will though, and by that point, they’ll be past caring. Like Google with their ebooks programme, they’ve been given so much leeway for so long, they think they can do whatever they like, and chances are, they’re right."
So, there is a benefit but they might just eat publishers’ lunch next week, next month, next year or next decade!
Read the rest of the post (be sure to read through the excellent comments thread, too) on Eoin Purcell’s Blog.
This post, from Pat Bertram, originally appeared on her Book Marketing Floozy blog on 8/24/09.
Alan Baxter is an optimistic cynic and dark speculative fiction author, based on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia. His writing is primarily based in the magical, the spiritual, the religious and the arcane with tendencies towards horror, depravity and battles between light and dark. Baxter says:
A blog book tour is a great way to generate buzz about you and your book. It’s essentially free, it generates a lot of hits on your site and others, and it creates an ongoing interest in your work. As a result of a blog tour, your books and name will gain exposure to potentially thousands of new readers. And all it really costs is time and effort on your part.
Any author, however they’re published, needs media attention. The new media of blogging and social networking is a great tool to use to your advantage. Working with other people, cross posting on a variety of media, gives you a saturation coverage for a period of time that can have excellent ongoing results.
So what is it? A blog book tour is essentially taking your books out on the virtual road, in much the same way that authors would traditionally tour the country, visiting various bookstores promoting their work. In this case, an author visits a different blog every day where they engage in various activities (interviews, guest posts, reviews and so on) and make themselves and their books known to the audience of that particular blog. There’s great cross-promotion as the writer’s audience gets exposed to a variety of blogs they might not have discovered otherwise (which is good for the blog owner) and that blog’s existing audience learns about the author and his or her work.
I currently have two novels out, RealmShift and MageSign, and it was these two books that I recently took on a blog book tour. My books are available in print and ebook format and I also have a novella available as a free ebook, Ghost Of The Black: A ‘Verse Full Of Scum. By taking my two novels on the virtual road, I opened up my both those novels, my free novella and my other work featured on my website to a wide audience that may never have heard of me or my writing before. It also helped to increase exposure to my indie press, Blade Red Press. Building an author platform online is essential for indie authors and a blog book tour like this is a great way to expand that platform.
It helps to offer something special. I really wanted to make an aspect of this tour something attractive — a special offer for people following along. It’s difficult with the print editions of my books through Amazon or places like that to make any changes in the short term. However, all my books are available as ebooks in a variety of places including Smashwords.com. With Smashwords there’s an excellent degree of control for the author/publisher. With any title you have there it’s possible to generate vouchers to vary the cost of your books however you please. So that means that I was able to set up a voucher code that was made available to anyone following the tour, valid only for the duration of the tour. If those people then came to Smashwords to buy RealmShift or MageSign they could enter that code and the books only cost them $1 each, instead of the usual $3.50. Giving very cheap or free content has proven itself many times over as an excellent way of generating interest in new work and it also gives people an added reason to check out the blog tour.
As for how successful a blog book tour can be, it depends on how much work an author puts in? With anything in this game it’s all about how much work you do. It’s also about working smart. If you get involved with a variety of blogs, with a widely varying audience, and you ask those people to promote the tour for you, then a lot of publicity can be generated. You can also make sure that you and those others involved cross-media promote with things like Twitter, Facebook and so on, to attract as many potential readers as possible.
Read the rest of the post on Book Marketing Floozy.
On a rain-soaked morning, in rugged County Mayo, a reclusive shepherd with little formal education learns a secret that has tied his family to the same small plot of land for millennia. An unexplained drowning, and a single misstep: are they connected? The answer may cost him everything. Can he prevent the world from learning what has been kept hidden for so long? Will he still have time to tend his sheep?
The Red Gate, will transport the reader back almost 100 years, to the wild coast of Ireland, into the painful struggle a small, traditional family undergoes as it tries to protect its legacy from the outside world. Follow the O’Deirgs as they learn the real reason their flocks graze the grassy slopes.
an outstanding debut novel for Richard Sutton
ISBN 1441472258
Historic Fiction/Fantasy
Available at Amazon.com US$15.95 Preview Available
Available also on Barnes& Noble.com discounted!
eBook Available on Smashwords for US$4.95 Preview Available
eBook Available on Lulu for US$4.95 Preview Available
Kindle Edition also Available
For more information, visit RLSuttonBooks.com
This article, from Jeremiah Tolbert, originally appeared on his site on 5/11/09.
As a designer, I’m always stumbling across useful resources and tools online, but for whatever reason, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writers’ lives easier. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. It just means you have to dig a little deeper. Today, I thought I would share some tools that can make certain aspects of the writer’s life a tad easier.
If you’re anything like me, you don’t always remember to run your backups. With recent computer troubles, I’ve been making a much bigger effort to backing up everything of importance. About six months ago, I started using Dropbox and I haven’t looked back.
Dropbox is an online versioning and backup system. You install dropbox on your windows or mac computer and everything in the folder called “My Dropbox” is constantly uploaded to the server. When you make modifications, it keeps a record of these changes and you can go to the web interface and load older versions. Accidentally overwrite a file? Dropbox can save your butt. It has saved me on more than one ocassion.
Even better, Dropbox can be installed on multiple computers, keeping your dropbox folder synced up to all of the machines. Whether you’re on your office computer or your laptop, you will have access to your files.
Finally, Dropbox users can share folders with one another. We use this feature extensively at Escape Artists to deal with our production files, contracts, and various business documents and resources.
My biggest concern when I first started using Dropbox was that it would constantly be uploading my 50+ megabyte photoshop files, and my bandwidth would be devoured. It actually tracks the differences, though, and only uploads the changed bits. I’ve never noticed Dropbox being a hog of my writing.
There’s a free 2 gigabyte account, which should be more than enough to protect your writing documents. I pay for the 50/gb a year plan for $99 per year because I truck in larger files. Dropbox is available for Mac, PC, and Linux.
I work across 3 different computers, and keeping my research notes in an easy-to-access format, while maintaining flexiblity and a variety of formats, isn’t easy. That is, until I discovered Evernote. What I was looking for originally was productivity software to help myself implement the GTD method. What I found instead was a very useful program for organizing all those little bits and pieces of things that I need to access from time to time.
Evernote works on a very simple system of notebooks and notes. You can add tags, and just about any kind of media into a note. You can clip entire webpages into a note, or just the URL. You can make screen captures very easily. And then the real power is, it’s constantly backing up your notes to the server, and syncing them with all machines you run it on. There’s a usage limit for free accounts based on data transfer, but I’ve never even gotten halfway there. I don’t tend to use much in the way of multimedia files though.
Not only do I use Evernote for sorting and keeping track of things like research notes, storynotes, and so on–I often start writing my blogposts there. Any kind of document where the format isn’t necessary, that I want to be able to access from anywhere. You can even record voice notes with the iPhone app and they will be synced to all your machines. I used this feature to take down some notes on my novel project while I was driving across Kansas alone. Very useful feature.
There are a few things about Evernote I do find lacking. For one, you can’t sort notebooks into collapsible hierarchies. I would really like to be organize my notes in a similar fashion to my email program. You can kind of fake this with saved searches for tags and so on, but I don’t really need a more detailed system of organization than notebooks/folders.
Evernote is available on Mac, PC, and iPhone. It has a very nice web-based interface as well. If you have an internet connection, you can get to your notes.
Read the rest of the article, including tools #3 and #4, on Jeremiah Tolbert’s site.
This post, from Yvonne Perry, originally appeared on her Online Promotion Made Easy blog on 8/17/09.
Getting started on social media can often be deceptively simple – What’s the big deal? You sign up. – or intimidating – Why am I being asked for my date of birth? – or overwhelming – How do I find people to friend or follow?
The truth is that this is a world of official and unofficial rules. It is easier if you start out knowing what’s what, and this is probably especially important if you’re more of an introvert.
Let’s imagine you already use email, search for information on Google, and read blog posts. But you’ve never joined any social media sites. How do you start?
1. Decide how comfortable you are sharing information about yourself. And the corollary to this – how wide a sharing of this information are you willing to do.
If you’re a book author and want people to buy your book, it’s a good idea to decide that you will share personal (although not private) information to as wide an audience as possible. If you only want to connect online with former high school friends, your target audience is much smaller.
If sharing information makes you somewhat nervous, think about what it means to be personal as opposed to private. Personal is a good marketing book you just read that you can recommend to help others; private is a fight you had with your business partner over implementing the marketing steps recommended in the book.
2. Ask online savvy friends which popular site they would recommend you start with based on your goal. (And do start with just one while getting your feet wet in this brave new world.)
• If your goal, for example, is to have a wide audience, then Twitter may be the best choice because of its "open to everyone" format.
• If you only want to search for high school friends, then Facebook may be the best choice as you can confine your information to a very small circle and can search by name for those long-long friends.
• If you want to make connections to help with a future job search, then LinkedIn, whose format is set up for such a process, may be the best choice for you.
Read the rest of the post, including tips #3-5, on Online Promotion Made Easy.