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I did some research into the top five providers of email newsletter/contact services and decided to share the information. They all offer design and list management tools, a sign-up function for your website, and usually a free trial. The pricing doesn’t vary much, but there are important differences in services. Three offer a pay-as-you-go option for people like me with small lists who plan to use the service infrequently, and only two offer RSS services. Here’s a brief guide:

Vertical Response

• monthly plan or pay as you go
• PAYG: .015 per email for lists under 1000 ($7.50 for 500)
• monthly: $10 per month for 500 or less
• discounts on monthly plans if you buy 6 or 12 months at a time
• free trial (first 100 emails free)
• tracking, segmentation, and ROI reporting
• free customer support
• offers surveys and direct-mail postcards

Constant Contact

• monthly plan only, no pay as you go
• monthly plan: $15 for 500 or fewer
• free 60-day trial
• lots of customer support/phone, e-mail, library, videos
• reporting details (who opened, what links clicked)
• direct download from Microsoft outlook

iContact

• $9.95 month for 500 or fewer
• 15-day free trial
• RSS features for blogs
• offers survey services/features
• offers lots of e-mail marketing information

Vista Print

• $14.99 a month for 500 or fewer
• also offers per-mail options (.03 per-email for 500 or fewer)
• one-month free trial
• reporting tools
• set-up limited to Internet Explorer or FireFox browsers
• can be integrated with Vista Print website (if you have one)

Mail Chimp

• monthly plan or pay as you go
• monthly plan: $10 for 500 or fewer
• PAYG: .03 per email for small batches (uses a prepaid credit system)
• RSS to email list
• no call center phone support
• offers Mail Chimp Expert, service that will do all the work for you
• lots of marketing tools: segmentation, analytics (many of which I don’t understand)

I decided to go with Vertical Response because I need a pay-as-you-go option for infrequent mailings. Vista Print offers that option, but it’s more expensive, and Mail Chimp (will little customer support) is not for beginners like me. If you know what you’re doing and need RSS feeds, then Mail Chimp is probably a great option. Vertical Response also had direct-mail post cards, which I might use someday, and also has a good reputation in the writing community.

What service do you use? Are you happy with it?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, and Passions of the Dead. For more information, visit: http://ljsellers.com

This post, by Bill Walker, originally appeared on his site on 12/3/10.

I posted these once before and thought now would be a good time to re-post them. I don’t who the original author of these commandments is so if you do please let me know so I can give the author appropriate credit.

As you set your writing goals for the new year, stop and think about this list of commandments for writers.  Which one(s) do you need to work on?

1. Thou shalt think like a professional, starting now.

2. Thou shalt begin and keep going till you’re through.
    
3. Thou shalt take your efforts and desires seriously.
    
4. Thou shalt call it work.
    
5. Thou shalt write for yourself, not the market.

6. Thou shalt not wait for visits from the muse.
    
7. Thou shalt not ask whether you are good enough.

Read the rest of the post, which includes ten more writer commandments, on Bill Walker‘s site.

This post, by Kelly James-Enger, originally appeared on her Dollars and Deadlines blog on 11/15/10.

Since I segued into writing books (my first, Ready, Aim, Specialize was published in 2003), I’ve been a traditional girl. Meaning, I’ve only worked with traditional publishers (think Random House) which pay an advance against royalties to acquire the rights to publish a book. To my mind, no money up front=no deal.

Of course I’d heard of POD, or print-on-demand, publishing but knew little about it. It sounded like the “lesser-than” option to me. I’d seen a lot of POD (often called self-published) books that frankly looked terrible. I didn’t like the idea of being wholly responsible for selling a book (even though that’s the case for pretty much any midlist author today). And I couldn’t justify devoting my limited, precious work time to a book that I would have to pay to get in print (as opposed to being paid by a publisher to get it in print). Not for me, I thought.

Well, I was wrong. This year, I published my first POD book, Goodbye Byline, Hello Big Bucks: The Writer’s Guide to Making Money Ghostwriting and Coauthoring Books. But this wasn’t a random act. Rather, it was a calculated decision which included weeks of research and thought to ensure that POD was the right choice. I had five compelling reasons to make the leap:

1. There was no competition for my book. When I looked for books on ghostwriting, there were only a couple—and they weren’t particularly helpful. The authors claimed to be making good money ghostwriting, but didn’t say how much. I hate that. I want specifics! I want details! The authors told you to make sure you had a written contract, but didn’t give any examples. They didn’t discuss how to negotiate fees, how to successfully market yourself to different kinds of clients, or how to address common problems that arise. I knew my book would include all that, and be the only one that gave readers everything they needed to know to break into this lucrative field.

2. The book fit into my platform. While I cover health, fitness, nutrition and wellness, I also have developed a "successful-freelancing-expert" platform over the past 14 years. I’m a contributing editor at The Writer magazine. I’ve written more than 80 features and columns about writing for markets ranging from Writer’s Digest to Writing for Dollars and published two books on successful freelancing. Six-Figure Freelancing continues to sell well, even on a crowded bookshelf. (Seems like every writer wants to author a book about writing and I’m competing against names like Stephen King and Anne Lamott, so this is significant.)
 

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more reasons to go POD, on Dollars and Deadlines.

Hi Everyone,

I work in high tech marketing, but started seriously writing fiction about ten years ago.

My short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery magazines. This summer I made the decision to go Indie and will be release my first novel, The Demise of the Soccer Moms in January 2011.

Since my fiction doesn’t fit neatly into a single genre, I’ve adopted the term Suburban Noir.

I’m looking forward to meeting other Indie Authors at Publetariat.

Publetariat staff will be off duty from now through Sunday, 11/28 in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. Members can still post to their blogs and use the Publetariat Forum, but no new content will be posted to the site during this time and emails won’t be answered until Monday, 11/29. No need to click through – this is the end of the post.

This article, by Rachel Deahl, originally appeared on Publisher’s Weekly on 11/8/10.

The midlist is dying. That sentiment has been a mantra in publishing circles for years as agents, authors, and editors have decried that corporate publishing will no longer support the kind of author that was once an industry staple—the moderate success who was a consistent seller, if not a bestseller. With the "big six" demanding bigger sales numbers from all their authors, indie presses, which have long been the province of riskier, harder-to-market literary fiction, are finding that more commercial writers are showing up at their doors, as well as writers with serious accolades and lengthier track records.

One shift is that the definition of  the midlist author has changed. A number of agents and publishers interviewed said when editors at the big houses look at the sales performance of an author’s last book in considering acquiring that author’s new book, the number they need to see is bigger than it used to be. While it’s been rumored that a publisher at one of the major houses told his staff they couldn’t acquire authors whose last book sold fewer than 50,000 copies, most sources said they thought the so-called "magic number" was closer to 25,000 or 30,000. One agent, noting that there’s far more variation at the paperback imprints of the big six, said most hardcover publishers today "would settle for 20,000."

Munro Magruder, publisher of New World Library, believes presses like his have become the beneficiary of this trend. In the past few years, Magruder said he’s seen an influx of midlist authors who had spent years at the big houses. He cited two books NWL published in October—Alice Walker’s poetry collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing and Michael Krasny’s Spiritual Envy—as books he thought he might not have gotten years back. (Walker wrote the megaseller The Color Purple, and Krasny is the host of KQED’s Forum out of San Francisco.) NWL considers both books to have been successes—Krasny’s title has already sold out its first printing of 8,500 copies, and Walker’s collection sold out its 7,500-copy first run.

While authors often find that they and their books are paid more attention when they move from big house to indie press, there is the sting of losing the bigger advance. Most of the smaller publishers PW spoke to cited $5,000 as a high advance, and others acknowledged paying as little as $1,500, and that can be a tough pill for agents, and authors, to swallow.

Johnny Temple, at Akashic Books, said it’s unfortunate that the big houses can’t afford to publish books on a smaller scale, but it’s a reality of today’s industry and one that not all agents and authors have fully accepted: "These big companies, every book they do they’re trying to knock it out of the park, and they don’t have the flexibility to publish books at different levels. The flip side, though, is authors and agents like to have big advances and don’t like to think about what the fiscal reality of that is." Since the big publishers were overpaying for books for years, Temple added, he thinks "some agents and authors got a little soft, and too comfy, being overpaid."

Read the rest of the article on Publisher’s Weekly.

This post originally appeared on Blogthority on 11/15/10.

This article will compare the book costs and overall costs (including distribution) for three of the biggest self-publishing companies – Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu and Lightning Source.

Ok, so you wrote a great book and were rejected by every publishing company in North America.  Or maybe you would rather self-publish your book and do your own promotion and maintain more control over the book.

The question now becomes:

Which self-publishing company do I use?

Lulu and Amazon CreateSpace are probably the best known self-publishing companies, but there are many to choose from.  Lightning Source is another option, but it is not a publisher – in fact it is a printer and you have to set up a publishing company (easy) in order to get an account there.

Most of the self-publishing companies you will encounter (such as Lulu) use Lightning Source as the printer for your book.  Needless to say, having an intermediary company involved will cost you money, but it should also be a bit easier to get your book into print.

How self-published compensation is calculated

In order to analyze the self-publishing options properly, we need to understand the costs involved with self-publishing – printing and distribution.  Note that the distribution costs are only applied to books sold through a distributor such as Amazon.com.  If you buy the books directly from your publisher and sell them yourself – then you are the distributor.

To calculate the book profit, you simply subtract the printing cost and the distribution cost from the retail price (set by the author).

Example:  An author has a book with a retail price of $10, the distribution fee is set to 40% and the printing costs are $3.50.

The profit  = Retail price – distribution fee – printing cost = $10 – $4 (40% of $10) – $3.50 = $2.50 per book.

Using a Third party publisher

Read the rest of the post on Blogthority.

I’m a big believer in reaching for the stars. If you only ever have mediocre dreams, you’ll probably only ever have medicore results. I firmly believe in working your arse off and holding onto those dreams of great success in whatever it is you want to do. If you don’t have faith in your ability to achieve great things, why should anyone else?

Work hard, dream big, don’t be a tit. That’s my philosophy lesson for today.

With that in mind, Joanna Penn pointed this out to me and I thought it was hugely entertaining. So I’m using it to dream big. Click on the pics for a bigger version. Go and try it yourself.

(I’m not sure if I’m expecting my books to one day be Broadway musicals, but that would be kinda mad.)

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

This post, by Ruth Ann Nordin, originally appeared on Self-Published Authors Lounge on 9/24/10.

I could insert “self-published” into that title, but as an “intelligent” person suggested on one of those “lovely” forums, “Indie means you go with a small publisher.  Self-published means you did it yourself…without the help of an editor, blah, blah, blah.”

There are people who are out there who don’t understand the nature of publishing and the distinct difference between a commercially/traditionally published small press author, a self-published (via vanity press) author, and a true indie author.  Now you know why I have to use the term “self-published” all the time.  A lot of people just don’t get the distinction so to save myself the headache of having to spell it out for them, I opt to make it simple.

Now, how many small press authors consider themselves “indie authors”?  Anyone want to raise your hand on that one? 

Okay.  So this is why I should not go on those stupid forums on a certain website.  I should probably avoid all forums since there’s usually a group of people without a clue.  They don’t do the research, and then they spout their opinions as if they know something when those who know the facts sit back and shake their heads at the person’s lack of knowledge on the subject.

So what prompts this particular rant? 

I’m glad you asked. 

I am sick and tired of this attitude running amok the forums where if a person so much as dares to praise an “indie” book, that author is automatically accused of gathering her friends into a circle so they can suggest a book.  And you know why this author gets accused of this?  Because this is an author who’s been “self-published” instead of “indie published with a small publisher”.  (Hey, their words, not mine.) 

Read the rest of the post on Self-Published Authors Lounge.

This post, by Kristen Tsetsi, originally appeared on her From a little office in a little house blog on 10/16/10.

R. J. Keller, author of Waiting for Spring and the forthcoming The Wendy House, my partner in the PaperRats writers’ relief YouTube series Inside the Writers’ Studio, Backword Books member,  and obsessive Star Wars fan, has recently had her independently released novel, Waiting for Spring, picked up by Amazon’s Encore imprint. Here, she answers some questions about going to the dark side.

Congratulations on Waiting for Spring‘s move to Amazon’s Encore imprint! What kind of day were you having when you heard from them, and what was the rest of your day like after that?

Thank you! The truth is I was having a rather shitty day (pardon my Bulgarian). The rural convenience store where I work, in the very rural town where I live, had recently burned down and I was transferred to a location in the city of Bangor (“city” is a relative term in Maine). My first shift was fairly hideous. The store is busy beyond belief and patronized by a rather rough crowd. Customers without proper IDs were refused alcohol and tobacco. Obnoxious kids spilled sticky Slush Puppy beverages on the counter, then burst into hysterical laughter. Insults and objects were hurled (not at the kids, although they deserved it). After ten hours of chaos, I was physically and emotionally drained, but by the time I got home – at shortly after midnight – I was too wound up to sleep. I checked my email and found a letter from AmazonEncore acquisitions editor, Terry Goodman, in which he offered to take on Waiting For Spring.

My first reaction was shock. It was one of those moments you hear about when you literally can’t believe what you’re reading. Then, of course, I “squeeeed!” a little. Or maybe it was a lot. Then I got nervous. I was afraid it might be a scam and I didn’t want to be taken in like an idiot. I’d heard of AmazonEncore, of course, but as I sat there in my Slush-Puppy-stained convenience store uniform, it seemed a little unreal that this email could actually be from them to me. Finally, I sent a copy of it to Craig Lancaster, whose novel The Summer Son had recently been acquired by Encore, with a note that asked, in part, “Is this the real AmazonEncore?” His response was, “This is the real deal! Congratulations!” After that, the Slush Puppy and obnoxious customers faded from memory.

For a while it seemed you were pretty committed to retaining control of your projects. Was it difficult to make a decision about whether to allow a publisher to assume control? And what is it that made you say yes?

Read the rest of the post on Kristen Tsetsi’s From a little office in a little house blog.