Markets & Manners: Tips for Writers

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This post, by Bobbi Dumas, originally appeared on The How To Write Shop.

Last month, I mentioned buying a Writer’s Market as a first step to making money as a writer, and this month I’m going to expand on that tip a little.

But first, a cautionary tale.

A few years ago, I met an artist (we’ll call her Kelly) who was working on illustrating a children’s book written by a friend of hers. Being fairly new in town, I decided to invite a few women to lunch to get to know them better. One of these was Kelly; another was a writer we’ll call Maureen, a published non-fiction author.

A few weeks after the lunch, Maureen called me up and hesitantly asked me if I knew that Kelly had sent her an email asking to be introduced to her agent.

Mortified, I assured her that I did not know she’d done this, and that I would let Kelly know that this wasn’t appreciated. (I realized that she must have used the email address from the group email I’d sent with details for the lunch.)

I called Kelly and gently told her that this was out of line on a number of levels. First of all, I know a bunch of writers, personally, and I would think long and hard before I ever asked any of them to introduce me to an agent. Generally that’s the type of thing that’s offered, not asked for. It’s professional etiquette.

Secondly, Kelly and her friend were novices in the publishing field. They had no idea where to start or what to do. During the conversation, I gave her a slew of advice. She was interested in children’s book publishers, so I directed her to SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers & Editors). I told her about the Writer’s Market, a great resource for beginners, since it offered a lot of “how-to” information (writing query letters, time management, negotiation, pitches, etc.) as well as resources on actual markets.

 

Read the rest of the post on The How To Write Shop.

Simon & Schuster / Archway Update

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Last week I posted about the “bounty” Simon & Schuster offered to pay me to refer indie authors to their new self-pub Archway imprint. Since then I’ve learned many of my colleagues received the same offer and were just as outraged as I was.

[On Friday March 8] I received a follow-up email from a different S&S staffer. It reads:

Hi April,

Veda forwarded your e-mail to me. I manage Archway Publishing for S&S, and would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you about the service. There are a lot of options available to self-publishing authors today, and we believe Archway delivers real value. Please let me know if you’d be interested in speaking, and we can schedule a time.

Regards,
[name, with a simon and schuster email address]

And here is my response to that email:

Unless one of those options is to detach AuthorHouse from Archway, I have no interest in hearing anything more you have to say.

You cannot partner with Bernie Madoff to offer investment services and expect people to ignore the fact that your partner is Bernie Madoff.

———————
‘Nuff said.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton’s Indie Author Blog.

Book Design Quick Tips for Self-Publishers

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Recently I was asked to contribute an introduction to print book design for a publication that will be out soon. I decided to address the piece to an author who was thinking about self-publishing, but wondering whether it’s worth doing a print book. Here’s my response:

If you want to sell books at events or give them away to reviewers or to friends and family, you’ll want to use print books. And many people prefer reading print books, even people who own laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

So there’s a big role for print books to play in your publishing plans.

But as a new self-publisher, you may not know how to get your book ready for printing.

Print books haven’t changed much in 500 years and they are far more complex than ebooks when it comes to preparing your book files.

With ebooks, you’re just converting your file from one format into another, then adding some cover art.

But with print books you have to know how they will be printed, who will be printing them, and that specific printer’s requirements. It’s good also if you’ve designed a lot of books before, so you know how the image on your screen will translate into paper and ink.

And if you’re thinking about marketing your print books, they will need to look even better. After all, they’ll be competing with books from big publishers, where all the books are designed and produced by professionals.

Now I’m not going to pretend that I can give you an education in book design and production in this article. But what I can do is give you a big head start on your journey to creating a good-looking, reader-friendly, market-oriented print book.

And point out a few things to avoid so you don’t look like a complete newbie. That would be good, right?

Okay, let’s dive in and start at the beginning.

Newbie Mistakes to Avoid

One thing you probably don’t want to happen is have your book “look” self-published.

Honestly, it doesn’t cost any more to print a book that’s properly put together and intelligently designed than it is to print a book that ignores book publishing conventions and looks like an amateur production.

In fact, I’ve got an idea of exactly what would help you get that book, and I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. No matter what you plan to do with your books, they will be more likely to succeed if they avoid the most common mistakes new self-publishers typically make.

Here are some to watch out for.

  • Getting your pages switched around—remember that all the right-hand pages in your book, starting with page 1, are odd numbers. All the left-hand pages are even numbers.
  • Make sure your blank pages are blank—a blank page doesn’t need a running head, a page number, or “this page intentionally left blank” on is. In printed books, blank pages are just that—blank.
  • No blanks on the right—your book should never have a blank page on a right-hand page.
  • Forgetting the front matter—you want to include at least a title page and a copyright page, and probably a contents page before you start the text of the book.
  • Tiny page margins—trying to save money by printing fewer pages rarely produces a book people actually want to read. Leave enough space on the outside for the reader to hold the book, and on the inside (or “gutter”) so that it doesn’t swallow your text.
  • Not capitalizing properly—titles, subtitles, chapter titles and subheads should all be title case, not sentence case. In other words, all words except short prepositions are capitalized.
  • Avoiding full justification—you don’t really want your book to have “rag right” typesetting, where the right margin is ragged. You want your book to be fully justified, which means that your page of type is a rectangle with all the lines (except the last line in a paragraph) extend from the left margin all the way to the right margin.

If you’re curious about any of these tips, have a look at some of your own books.

You’ll discover that these are rules or conventions of book publishing. Virtually all books produced by professionals will follow these rules and conventions unless the designer has a good reason not to.

By watching out for newbie mistakes, you’ll make your book look a lot better, and your readers will thank you for it.

Picking Fonts for Your Book

One of the big decisions you’ll need to make when it comes time to get your book ready for printing is: What fonts will you use?

What fonts you have available might depend on the software you’ve installed on your PC, and what fonts came along with the program. Or you might have purchased or downloaded fonts from one of the many font sites online.

In any case, here are some guidelines that will help you choose typefaces for your book.

  • Readability—this is the most important quality for your text font, the one that most or all of your book will be set in. Many designers feel that the most reliably readable are fonts based on oldstyle typefaces like Garamond, Bembo, or Caslon. More modern versions include Minion, Adobe Garamond, and Sabon.
  • Contrast—you’ll want a different typeface to use for chapter titles or part titles, and for subheads in nonfiction books. Combining a text typeface with a san serif display face can add drama and subtle allusions to a specific era or style.
  • Legality—fonts are intellectual property, just like your book manuscript. Make sure you have the rights to use the fonts in a book by checking out the licensing agreement, if possible. Most fonts that ship with software are licensed for commercial use, and there are reliable sites where you can download free, commercial use fonts online.
  • Appropriateness—you’ll want a text font for your text, and a display font for your title and perhaps for interior display use. For an academic treatise, you don’t want your chapter titles in Comic Sans, do you? That wouldn’t be appropriate. If you can’t decide, have a look at other, similar books and try to do what they did.

Researching Book Interiors

As many other authors have discovered, there are great guides to how your book should look right nearby. Start taking a critical look at some of the books on your own bookshelf:

  • How do they treat the various elements of book design, like the chapter opening pages, the running heads (or running feet, if they appear at the bottom of the pages), the page numbers?
  • What do you notice about the typefaces these books use to convey the author’s ideas? Is a separate font used for the chapter titles or part titles?
  • How are titles, epigraphs (those are the quotations often found at the beginning of a chapter), and subheads aligned? How are the spaced compared to other elements on the page?
  • What are the margins like, are they symmetrical? Are the outside margins larger than the inside margins? How close does the type come to the edge of the page?
  • If there are illustrations, charts, tables, figures, graphs or other graphics, do they have captions or explanations of some kind? Are they numbered or referenced to the text somehow?

This is one of the fastest ways to educate yourself about how books are put together and what might work for your own book.

Concentrate on books that have been successful in your own genre or category, that will help keep you focused on finding a style that will work for you.

A few hours absorbing these seemingly minute details will give you a grounding in book design as it affects your kind of books. Make notes on the elements you like the best, you’ll use them later on.

You also want to make sure your book is put together properly, that’s really important.

What Will Help

Okay, I promised to tell you about something that would help.

I’ve been working for years on ways for new self-publishers to produce better books. A lot of the over 900 articles on this blog are a testament to that effort.

But guess what? I’ve had a breakthrough, and I’m almost ready to share it with you.

In about a week I’m going to open the door to a new way for DIY authors to create industry-standard, great-looking books. I’ve seen too many of the other kind of books, and it’s time to do something about it.

I’m really excited about this, there’s nothing else like it anywhere. Inexpensive, simple to use, effective.

So stay tuned, I know you wouldn’t want to miss it.

 

Publetariat Editor’s UPDATE – Joel Friedlander announces: Self-Published Books Get a Major Overhaul with BookDesignTemplates.com

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Atlantic Guy Continues To Mansplain Why It’s OK To Work For Free

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This post, by Kris E. Benson, originally appeared on Wonkette on 3/6/13.

Well, well, well. First, let us all take a step back and appreciate exactly where we are right now: we are in a place wherein paying people for their work has become a topic worthy of debate and discussion. Let’s just let that soak in for a second: paying people for their work has become a topic worthy of debate and discussion. See, for example, Alexis C. Madrigal’s frantic tweets wherein he tries to defend the system at the Atlantic and explain to us what it is like to work for a digital newspaper. Thanks Alexis C. Madrigal, it is duly noted!

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

Shall we examine this long post wherein Alexis C. Madrigal talks about why it is OK for other people (not him) to not get paid for their work? Sure, let’s do that!

When Nate Thayer published emails with our newest editor (second week on the job), I can see how that might happen. How you might finish writing your last email, “No offense taken,” and then staring at your blog’s CMS that night, decide, you know, what? I’m tired of writing for peanuts, because fuck that. And if a young journalist in her first week on the job was part of the collateral damage, hey, the world just isn’t fair, kid. Pay it forward.

I get it, but it was still a nasty thing to do.

[Publetariat Editor’s note – follow the link to read the Nate Thayer post, it will clarify what Wonkette’s post is about (and it will open in a separate window). Essentially, Nate Thayer was offered, and turned down, a non-paying gig at The Atlantic which was offered to him by a newish Atlantic editor named Olga Khazan.]

To be sure, this is not Olga Khazan’s fault; it is the fault of the Atlantic for putting her in the crappy position of having to ask people to work for free.

Still, what NATE THAYER did was a “nasty thing to do”? It isn’t “nasty” to imply that Nate Thayer’s work has no value? And then defend that position on Twitter and on the Atlantic website?

Whatever, anyway, moving on (and we are going to skip a lot because Alexis C. Madrigal’s post is really a whole lot of nothing. Maybe someone — another editor, perhaps, if he can find the budget? — should have taken a look-see before he posted it, but that’s another story). Did you know that it’s ok to defend not paying people for work because Alexis C. Madrigal got paid NOTHING or NEXT TO NOTHING when he first started writing? But man, he did his best and he worked really hard and wrote for free here and there and now, well, look where he is! See? Maybe if YOU write for free and suck it up, YOU can be an editor at a major publication too!

 

Read the rest of the post on Wonkette, and also see People Writing for Free on the Internet Is an Enormous Boon to Society and Writing For Free Part II, both by Matthew Yglesias on Slate.

Secondary School Children 'Shunning Difficult Books'

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This article, by Graeme Paton, originally appeared on The Telegraph UK site on 3/7/13.

Research shows that rising numbers of 13 and 14-year-olds – including the brightest pupils – are opting for simple texts aimed at children towards the end of primary school.

Academics from Dundee University analysed children’s reading habits throughout primary and secondary education and found the relative difficulty of books “declined steadily” as pupils got older. Boys were also more likely to shun problematic books than girls.

It emerged that The Twits by Roald Dahl was among the most popular books for pupils aged 13 to 16 despite also featuring among the top titles for seven and eight-year-olds.

The study suggested that primary school teachers were more likely to push children towards challenging books because of awareness of the importance of developing literacy skills at a young age.

But the study warned that there was “something seriously amiss” in secondary schools, suggesting that a failure to promote reading may cause pupils to effectively go backwards between the age of 11 and 16.

It follows the publication of official school-by-school league tables earlier this year that showed one-in-six bright pupils performed relatively worse in English exams sat at 16 compared with tests taken at the end of primary education.

Read the The Telegraph UK site.

Six Tips to Bring Your Book Back from the Doldrums – Reading the Reader Tea Leaves

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A few times each month, I’ll receive a plaintive email from an author asking me why their book isn’t selling better.

It’s always tough to receive these emails, because I know behind the email is an author who’s feeling disappointed, or possibly depressed their years of effort have borne no fruit. The impossibly of answering such a question makes it all the tougher. There’s no one single magic bullet.

Some of the authors who contact me are considering throwing in the towel. I always try to respond with some feedback that might set them on the right course, often by encouraging them to study the best practices of their fellow authors, as I chronicle in The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide and The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. Sometimes my feedback is well-received, and other times they’re offended when I share opinions they don’t want to hear.

The cold hard truth of the matter – which we advertise front and center in our account registration emails, the FAQ, the about us page, and in my free ebooks about e-publishing – is that most books don’t sell well. Period.

In my RT Booklovers presentation last year, I shared some charts on the sales distribution curve. One such chart is at left (slide 16), and it’s the friendliest, most sugar-coated of the charts.

Book sales tend to conform to what’s known as a power curve. There are a very small number of books that breakout big, as shown on the left side of the chart, then there’s a middle area where a bunch of authors are doing reasonably well, and then there’s the long tail that stretches out a mile beyond the right perimeter of the chart. Most books land in the long tail. They might sell a few copies here and there, or sell none at all.

Your mission as author/publisher, should you decide to accept it, is to take the necessary steps to move your book’s performance up to the left side of the power curve.
In the traditional world of print publishing and brick and mortar distribution, you had only one shot. If your book didn’t take off immediately, stores would pack up your book and ship it back to the publisher for a full refund. Stores effectively forced your book out of print before it had time to find its audience. Stores had no choice – they were hamstrung by limited and expensive physical shelf space, and they needed to make room for the flood of incoming, potentially more-promising books on the way.

In the new world of self-published ebooks and democratized ebook distribution, the virtual shelf space is unlimited. Even if your book sells zero copies per year, the retailer will still happily list it. This means your book is immortal. If you don’t get the formula correct, right out of the gate, you always have another day, another month, or another year to improve your book so it can start selling.

This is the topic of this blog post. I’m going to share six tips on how to take a fresh, honest look at your book and evaluate what you might do to improve your results. Most of my tips help you discern what it is about your book that’s preventing readers from connecting with it. I should note that many of these tips below apply to authors with free books too, because there are many books that get very few downloads.

Six Makeover Tips: How to Bring a Book Back from the Doldrums
Makeover Tip #1 – Look at your reviews at Smashwords, Apple, B&N and Amazon.

Ignore the reviews from friends and family, they don’t count. Average them up. How many stars are you getting out of five?

< << Reviews of Never Too Far by Abbi Glines (Apple iBookstore)

Today, when I look at the top 20 bestsellers at the Apple iBookstore, they’re averaging 4 stars. On other random days I’ve done this test, they averaged 4.5. The #1 bestselling book today at Apple is Never Too Far by Abbi Glines (distributed by Smashwords), and it averages 4.5 stars. Some of the representative comments are, “loved this book,” “Amazing,” “couldn’t put it down,” “couldn’t stop reading,” “such a wonderful story,” “cannot wait for book 3!” and, “this book hasn’t been out 24 hours and yet I read it twice already.” If you want to be a bestseller, good or good enough is not good enough.

You need to WOW your reader. It doesn’t matter if you write romance, mystery or non-fiction, if your book doesn’t move the reader to an emotional extreme, your job isn’t done. Take the case of my novel, Boob Tube. It averages around 3.5 stars. That’s not good enough. We’re not wowing readers. My wife and I should probably do a major revision if we want better reviews. Our sales range from 20 to 40 copies a month. What if after a revision, we averaged 4.5 stars? Imagine how that would move the needle on sales.

What if you don’t have reviews? – This is as big of a problem as poor reviews. If your book has been out for more than three months and it’s not selling well and you don’t have reviews, I’d set the price to free, at least for a limited time. What do you have to lose? Readers aren’t finding you anyway. That’s the decision we came to with Boob Tube. For the first two years (2008-2009), Boob Tube sold maybe 20 copies. It had only one or two reviews. My wife and I decided to set the price to free for six months. We got 40,000 downloads, a lot of reviews, and even our first fan mail (yay!). Then we set the price to $2.99 and it started selling. Without reviews at the retailers, Goodreads, LibraryThing and elsewhere, few readers will take a chance on you. FREE helps readers take that chance.

 

Read the rest of the post —it’s pretty lengthy, and includes MANY more ‘makeover’ tips— on the Smashwords blog.

 

Simon & Schuster Is Trying To Bribe People Like Me…

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…to refer people like you to their new vanity imprint, Archway, which they formed in partnership with AuthorHouse (aka “ASI”) late last year. A couple of days ago, I received the following, kind of astonishingly brazen email from a Simon and Schuster staffer:

Simon & Schuster recently launched Archway Publishing as a new type ofoffering for self-publishing authors. With services delivered by Author Solutions, Archway was developed to help authors achieve their publishing goals and reach their desired audience. S&S has provided guidelines on book design, introduced certain unique self-publishing services, designed packages tailored to meet specific author objectives, and will monitor titles for potential acquisition.

Your blog is an important resource to help authors navigate the variety of self-publishing options. We believe Archway is a unique new service for authors, and would be valued by your readers. The Archway Affiliate Program enables partners to earn a $100 bounty for each author they refer who publishes with Archway*. Click here to learn more about the affiliate program. In addition, we’d like to extend to your audience a 10% discount off any Archway package, when referred though affiliate links on your site. We can also create contests, webinars, and creative for your site, or discuss other ways to work together.

[*emphasis added by me]

Note that when industry people write to me and make reference to my “blog”, they’re generally talking about Publetariat.com, not [my Indie Author] blog.

Anyway, it’s obvious that this person has zero familiarity with me, aside from the fact that I own and operate a site that’s very popular with writers, authors and publishing professionals. Anyone who bothered to peruse [my Indie Author] blog would’ve very quickly discovered there’s no way I’d ever sign on for such a thing, and I’d be inclined to publicize the offer.

After re-reading the email a couple of times to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding anything, and giving myself a couple of days to put together a more reasoned (and less pissed off) response, I hit Reply on that email, and this is what I said:

I have always advised indie authors to avoid vanity publishers, and AuthorHouse is one of the most notorious among them. The reputation of AuthorHouse as an overpriced, under-performing scam agency far precedes its name. I have warned many a writer away from AH in the past, and will continue to do so in the future.

I am very disappointed to see such an august and respected publisher as S&S moving into this new, arguably predatory market area: pairing up a respected publisher with a vanity press to offer desperate would-be authors various, fee-based “services”—any of which the writer could retain him- or herself from freelancers at a fraction of the cost—and/or a publishing contract offering terms that virtually ensure the publisher will turn a profit, but the author will not. Surely the strongly negative reaction to Random House’s Hydra imprint hasn’t escaped your notice?

I’m also troubled by your affiliate offer, as I fear many others you’ve approached with the offer will accept it and be motivated to lure naive aspiring authors to Archway like so many lambs to slaughter. The mere fact that Archway can afford to pay affiliates a $100 “bounty” per referral attests to unnecessary fees your author-clients are being asked to shoulder. I have little doubt that bounty is being paid by the author who was referred, probably bundled together with many other fees under an innocuous, yet vague heading like “book set up”.

I am sorry to be so negative, and I understand you are not personally responsible for the existence of Archway. However, having been a supporter of indie authorship since the days when people scoffed at the possibility of brick and mortar bookstore chains failing, I’ve seen far too many companies like yours take advantage of far too many of my peers. To say I feel very strongly about this sort of thing is a gross understatement. Nevertheless, I am glad to have received your email for one reason: now that I am aware of Archway, I can warn others about it.

So if anyone on any site you frequent is starting to advertise Archway, referring site visitors to Archway, or running content or contests provided by Archway, in all likelihood it’s because that person said “yes” where I said “no”.

It would’ve been more honest for Archway to offer a “bounty” of thirty pieces of silver per referral, because anyone in the indie community who takes them up on this offer is a Judas.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton’s Indie Author Blog. 

Free eBook Formatting & Marketing Guides for Writers

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This article, by Jason Boog, originally appeared on GalleyCat.

As self-published authors enter the eBook market, formatting has become more important than ever.

Indie authors don’t have the same support as a major publisher, so we’ve assembled a list linking to formatting guides for all the major eBookstores.

Follow the links below to access these free style guides…

1. Smashwords Style Guide (provides guidance for “major ebook retailers such as the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel”)

2. Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines (PDF link)

3. Barnes & Noble PubIt! Support & Resources Page

Read the rest of the article, which includes 7 more resources, on GalleyCat. Also be sure to scan the comments section, where many indies are sharing similar resources of their own.

Former Indie Author Jamie McGuire Penalized For Self-publishing?

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This post, by Sara Fawkes, originally appeared on her Erotica by Sara blog on 3/2/13.

Earlier this evening, during a break between edits for AHW6, I saw something on a Facebook page “What To Read After Fifty(50) Shades Of Grey” regarding Jamie McGuire, author of the indie (and now traditional) bestseller Beautiful Disaster:

** SPECIAL NOTE: Please Read This!! **

From Author Jamie McGuire:

I have looked into this as best I can, but being a Saturday, Amazon isn’t responding.

It appears that Amazon has sent a mass email to everyone who’s ever purchased the self-published version of Beautiful Disaster. They are encouraging readers to request a refund. When asked why they are offering this refund, Amazon customer service has given several different reasons, the most common is problems with content. THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH THE CONTENT OF BEAUTIFUL DISASTER, and it makes no sense for them to encourage a refund for a book that has already been read and enjoyed 6+ months later, but that is the only information I have for now.

Customer service admits that if you do NOT get the refund, your copy of BD will NOT be affected. If you get a refund, they are offering to reimburse the $4+ difference it costs to purchase the $7.99 version, but what they aren’t telling you is that **I** am paying for every refund.

Last week, I sent an email to Amazon asking why the self-published version of my book is still experiencing returns. Returns are only allowed for up to 7 days after purchase. 6 months after the self-published version of Beautiful Disaster went off-sale my account was still seeing negative amounts for returns. I’m not going to assume the reasons behind this mass email, but it appears that Amazon customer service is now encouraging these returns.

I was not notified of this. This email has nothing to do with my publisher Atria books. If you do not get a refund, your copy of BD will not be affected. If you do, the refund will show as a negative amount in my Amazon KDP author account. Because BD is no longer available, this money will be taken out of my Providence sales.

In other words, this is very bad, and I have no idea why this is happening. Please do not return your copy of BD, and please help me spread the word to not return your copy of BD.

I will let you know what else I find out from Amazon. In the meantime, your support has brought me to tears. I love you all. ♥

Well, you can imagine my shock at reading this. While I have yet to meet Ms. McGuire, she and I were fortunate enough to share similar career choices around the same time when our bestsellers were picked up by (separate) publishing companies. I won’t lie, I found this story difficult to believe; Amazon surely wouldn’t be this stupid, would it? I purchased BD as an indie book in 2011, long before the author signed a contract allowing the novel to receive a wider, worldwide distribution.

Yet, an hour ago, this is the email I received in my inbox:

 

Read the rest of the post on Sara Fawkes’ Erotica by Sara.

The Importance Of Keywords For MetaData And The Discoverability Of Your Book

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Keywords and search engine optimization have been considered important for a long time in the online world, particularly for ranking in the search engines on the first few pages so people can actually find you.

But these principles and tools are also important for your book page on the retail stores. They make up a critical part of the meta-data which is crucial in the discoverability of your book. I also realize this might sound like gobble-de-gook so I will explain further using the example of my non-fiction book, and also my novels, because keywords can also be important for fiction authors.

Although I am wary of anecdotes, because they have no statistical value at all, I do want to share the sales figures for my non-fiction book. Written as a labor of love, it has never sold very well (like many first books) and now I focus on fiction, so I barely mention it. As my worst selling title, it is a good example to use. Here’s the background.

I spent 13 years as a miserable IT consultant, unhappy with my work for many reasons and so I embarked on a journey to find work I could be passionate about. The journey of how I found it (and how you can too) is encapsulated in my book: Career Change: Stop hating your job, discover what you really want to do with your life and start doing it! That’s the title that I adopted in Dec 2012 after I rewrote the book and also updated the cover. The previous title was How to enjoy your job … or get a new one, and was first published in 2008.

At a purely gut level, I hope you can see which title is better :) but as we go through, you will also note the keyword shift.

What is a keyword anyway?

A keyword is a word or phrase that is associated with your book.

It’s based on the words that people actually use to search online and this is a crucial aspect, because often the language you use online is not the language customers might use. For example, many of us have claimed ‘indie author’ or ‘indie publishing’ but to a new author who is not yet in the tribe, they would only recognize ‘publishing’ or ‘self-publishing’.

Importantly a keyword is not just one word and that is critical to remember as you go through the following process. For example, my thriller novel Exodus is associated with the keyword “ark of the covenant” and my non-fiction book with “career change”.

(1) Brainstorm words and phrases

First, make a list of all the words and phrases that are associated with your book. For fiction that will include themes, places, things and anything concrete you can hang your book off.

career changeFor Exodus, I might consider keywords: thriller, action adventure, exodus, ark of the covenant, israel, freemasons – as those are the themes of the book and people searching for those things will be interested in it.

For my non-fiction book Career Change, I tried: career change, what should I do with my life, career help, hate my job, career match, career books, choosing a career

(2) Check the usage of keywords in the search engines

Google has a Keyword Search Tool that you can use to discover what search terms people are using and what is most popular. It is primarily used for people wanting to bid on advertising terms, but we can use it as an indication of interest, as well as a verification of the kind of language people use when searching.

As related to my book on Career Change, I tried the following: * How to enjoy your job – 5400 global monthly searches * Changing careers – 27,100 global monthly searches * I need a career – 60,500 global monthly searches * Choosing a career – 40,500 global monthly searches * career change – 165,000 global monthly searches

For each search term, Google will recommend a whole load more options. Look through that list and write down anything else with a high number of searches. (Don’t worry about the Competition column as that is aimed at the advertising crowd.)

(3) Check the usage of keywords on Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have a specific tool to check keywords but it does have an auto-populate tool that enables you to see a drop-down of specific words or phrases. Just start typing something in and you’ll get a drop-down. Make sure you’re in the Books/Kindle store if you want to narrow the search down. Go into Amazon and start typing in the word/phrase you want to check.

careerchangedropdown
My example with career change is shown [above].

You can see that I typed in ‘career c’ and it came up with everything that fitted with that. This can help you with deciding on topics or titles, particularly again with non-fiction.

But the principle is the same with fiction. You want the most commonly used keywords in your meta-data.

You should find that some of your keywords from Google don’t even show up in the Amazon listing, so discard those and focus on those which appear in both lists.

[I’d like to acknowledge Michael Alvear who featured this technique in ‘Make a Killing on Kindle’ which is a book I can only recommend with a caution as I definitely don’t advocate fake/bought reviews which he also includes in the book.

With any kind of marketing tactic, please be authentic, honest and consider the value to your customer.

Feel free to read his advice, but as with my own advice, please weigh it up against your own situation and don’t assume the same things will work. This is a constantly shifting environment.]

(4) Add the keywords into your metadata

careerchangecopiesFor non-fiction authors, you can use this technique to decide on your book title, and indeed, I changed mine based on the keyword search. This can make a huge difference to appearing in search results and significantly impact your success.

Although I don’t have a full year for each title, you can see the difference between January 2012 and 2013 (a huge month for career change books). I changed the title mid Dec. I also changed the cover but not the price. Remember, this is basically a ‘write-off’ book for me and not something I market in any other way at all, so any sale is a good sale!

My book sales rank rose within days after the key word changes and now the book ranks on the first page of Amazon.com for the keyword ‘career change’.

Changing a fiction title to include keywords is far more unlikely, but there are two more places to include keywords.

Description: You need a description any time you enter information about your book, so make sure it includes some of your keywords, BUT as a primary rule, ensure that it is people-friendly and not just a list of keywords. More on creating a book description that rocks in this interview with Mark Edwards on secrets of Amazon metadata.

Keywords: On every publishing site there is also a place to enter keywords. This is usually 5-7 keywords/phrases that are associated with your book. Just type in the ones you want to use based on your research.

NOTE: if you don’t have control of the publishing process you won’t be able to access these keywords, but you can do the research and advise your publisher of what you think is the most appropriate.

The most effective usage will be if the keywords resonate between the title, description and keywords box, ticking all three boxes of metadata.

You can also use these keywords for marketing purposes as well, for example, use them in a guest blog post title, or as part of your website.

OK, I know things like meta-data, keywords, search engine optimization, algorithms and stuff can blow people’s minds, but it is an important part of being an indie author!

Please do leave any comments or questions [in the comments section on the original post]. Have you done keyword research? Has it made a difference to your book?

 

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

Legal Issues in Self-Publishing: What Authors Need to Know

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This article, by Bernard Starr, originally appeared on the Huffington Post Books blog on 12/24/12.

Self-publishing continues its exponential growth. More and more authors are choosing this route for presenting their work to the public, encouraged by impressive success stories, including accounts by bestselling writers who have moved over from traditional publishing to take advantage of greater profits and better control of their works.

But there is one domain that self-published authors rarely think about, which mainstream publishers have traditionally managed: legal issues.

If you self-publish, you are the publisher and thus assume all the legal responsibilities. At first this might seem frightening. But it doesn’t have to be, as I discovered in my interview with Paul Rapp, an attorney who specializes in intellectual property rights in Monterey, Mass. and teaches Art & Entertainment Law and Copyright Law at Albany (N.Y.) Law School. He also discusses copyright issues in publishing on Vox Pop on Northeast Public Radio.

Rapp says he is working increasingly with self-publishers and self-published authors. He cited the prominent legal issues that authors should pay attention to: The use of images, quotes, and other materials from copyrighted works, the use of public domain works, the amount of a published works that can be quoted, portrayals of real people in fictional works, the standards for portraying famous and non-famous persons, portrayals of real people in non-fictional works, and the importance of copyright registration.

Starr: Isn’t the provision of legal services an area where traditional publishing offers an edge to authors?

Rapp: The issues don’t go away whether you are publishing traditionally or self-publishing. While the legal department of a publishing house may assess the legal issues in a work and advise, or demand changes if necessary, that doesn’t release the author from responsibility. Every publishing agreement that I have ever seen has an indemnification clause in which the author agrees to hold the publisher harmless if there are claims against the publisher for any infringement or violation of personal rights. That being said, most publishers vet books before they go out and have insurance policies that cover most of these lawsuits; the insurers may also vet a manuscript prior to publication. But I think this is happening less and less, leaving the author exposed. And I’m seeing a lot of agreements that, particularly for non-fiction books, require the author, rather than the publisher, to get necessary permissions and licenses to use any third party material.

Starr: What advice do you have for self-publishing authors who have legal concerns?

 

Read the rest of the post on the Huffington Post Books blog.

Publetariat Hacked Again: A Call To Action

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Publetariat was brought down by yet another hacker attack this weekend, and Evernote reports hackers succeeded in breaching its site this weekend as well. While nothing on Publetariat was actually compromised, thanks to all the security updates applied following the last hacker attack in December of 2012, this attack’s brute force attempt to run multiple malicious scripts on the site overloaded the server and caused Publetariat’s host company to shut the site down. The attempt was traced to two suspicious user accounts, and those accounts have been deleted. But that’s not the end of the story, unfortunately.

Recall that following the 12/12 attack, all new user memberships were suspended, precisely because of the excessive demands of weeding out hacker / spammer registrations from legitimate ones. However, shutting down new registrations wasn’t enough, because it turns out there were already nefarious user accounts previously registered on the site. For security purposes, all user accounts were put under review over the weekend and any that looked suspicious for any reason were deleted. Since all site content is visible to anonymous site visitors, even if a few legitimate users were caught in that net, it shouldn’t have a seriously negative impact on most Publetariat visitors’ use of the site. Unfortunately, these are the lengths to which we are now forced to go in trying to thwart cyber attacks: we ALL suffer.

Remember, Publetariat doesn’t make any money, it’s an entirely volunteer effort, funded totally out of pocket by myself. These attacks make it more and more difficult to justify keeping the site going at all. This time, after the many hours of work spent getting the site back online and culling user accounts were over, I decided to do something more. From my Digital Media Mom site:

I am sick and effing tired of working months and years to build a site and grow an audience for that site, only to have a target painted on my back by spammers and hackers precisely BECAUSE my site has become successful (and heavily trafficked). Every time it happens, I ask myself if it’s worth all the bother to run my sites at all. And one of these days, when the damage done is severe enough, the answer to that question will be, “No.” And on that day, some valuable resources for writers and people who need tech help will be gone.

I think all organized spammer and hacker collectives should be prosecuted as terrorist organizations, just like any other collective that sets out to commandeer, attack or subvert a public utility. The internet has become a necessity of life in the developed world, no different from electricity, phone or sewer service. Any group that attacked THOSE services would be dealt with very severely. It should be no different for hackers and spammers who are sucking down untold millions of our productive work hours and valuable technology. Maybe if the punishment were severe enough, more of those pieces of human garbage would find less risky means of employment.

Sign my White House Petition if you agree, to ask the President to classify organized spammer and hacker groups as terrorist organizations for purposes of law enforcement and prosecution. The deadline to get 100k signatures is 4/2/13, so please share this link with anyone you know who would like to see this done: http://wh.gov/fWcw

And yes, of course I know many, if not most, of these collectives are operated from overseas, which makes them harder to find and prosecute. But this is no longer a mere annoyance, it’s a daily threat to our productivity, financial stability, and even national security. And again, if some foreign collective were to target a U.S. power grid, there would be no question of tracking that group down and bringing them to justice. Hackers and spammers are no better, and should be treated no less severely by international law enforcement agencies.

I’m asking all American citizens who use and value Publetariat to sign this petition, and share it with their social media networks. If 100k signatures are collected by 4/2/13, the White House is required to look at the petition and issue an official response: either that they are not going to take action and why, or that they are going to take action and how.

For those who are concerned that approval of such a petition would take valuable resources away from the fight against other types of terrorism: the White House has always prioritized all threats to the nation, and it will always do so in the future. Hackers and spammers will usually be pretty far down the list, but having them classified as terrorists gives international law enforcement agencies more and better tools to track them down and subjects them to much stiffer penalties when they are caught.

Note that I include organized spammer collectives in this petition because they now regularly employ hacker tactics. Spammers waste millions of man-hours of website administration staff effort all over the world in finding and deleting their fake comments, fake user accounts and unwanted links. They waste millions of man-hours that belong to the general public, too; how many hours have you wasted over the past month deleting spam from your email inbox, your Facebook pages, your author sites and blogs and your Twitter account? Spammers have made hijacking our tech resources for purposes of inflicting unwanted advertising a for-profit business model. They infiltrate sites like a swarm of despised parasites, and are no more welcome than their hacker brethren.

Hackers and spammers continue to proliferate and make all our lives miserable in a multitude of tiny ways because it’s very easy and mostly consequence-free. They have automated scripts they can unleash online to seek out vulnerable sites, email accounts and devices. They have automated systems in place that make it difficult to trace the source of those scripts. And when their destructive handiwork is discovered, site, computer and device owners have to invest many hours of effort —and sometimes considerable amounts of cash, too— to undo the damage, but no harm befalls the criminals who caused all the trouble in the first place because we’ve largely adopted a “whaddyagonnado?” attitude about it. Even if we can find them, it’s nearly impossible to successfully prosecute them under existing civil and criminal statutes.

Maybe if those criminals were facing the much more draconian penalties facing other terrorists, and if the government were empowered to use the same tools employed in tracking down terrorists to track down organized hacker and spammer collectives, would-be and existing hackers would start looking for a new line of work.

The more connected our society gets, the more this problem is going to snowball. Now is the time to take action. Please sign the petition, and share it with everyone you know who’s just as sick of spam and hacker attacks as I am. The direct link to the petition is http://wh.gov/fWcw .

 

350 Words

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I’m always trying to tweak my process to become more productive. On the one hand, I don’t like to work on edits and rough draft of something else at the same time on the same day because it feels like multi-tasking. Why not finish the most close-to-being-ready thing and then move on to the next thing to take your full focus?

At the same time, when I do that, what tends to happen is I will get out of the “writing groove”. So while it can take a lot of time and energy to switch between tasks as one does with multi-tasking, it can sometimes take longer to get into a new groove after it’s gone, particularly with writing.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

Chuck Wendig wrote a post that I found inspiring toward this end: How To Push Past The Bullshit And Write that Goddamn Novel: A Very Simple No-Fuckery Writing Plan To Get Shit Done

From the very beginning I knew that this was going to be great because anybody who says No-Fuckery is someone I feel I ought to listen to just on principle.

I had previously tried a 250 words a day writing goal. The idea was to JUST START and even if you JUST do the 250, you’ve got some word count down and you started and if you write more awesome, and it adds up over time. It’s like stealing your novel through fifteen minutes here or there. And while it can take that long to even get into a groove, period, if you do it every day, the time it takes to get into the groove is much shorter.

So, I figure… even while I’m editing, there is a burnout point. There is a point at which I’m not going to edit any more that day. I’m going to do a certain amount generally and then the rest of my time for that day is my time. So, in THAT OTHER TIME, the non-editing time… I can’t carve out 15 minutes to work on my WIP? REALLY???

One of my excuses is that I have to outline/plan a book and that’s hard to do while also editing a book. But I have a WIP in progress right now that I can chip away at. Yes, in the long run it’s going to need to percolate some because I’m a little burnt out on that pen name and I need to get back to Zoe and write Hadrian and Angeline’s book but still… chipping away at it while I work on edits for the other book and then planning for Hadrian and Angeline is forward momentum. And that’s what I need. Forward momentum.

So 350 words a day. Anybody can do that.

 

This is a reprint from Zoe Winters’ weblog.

Second-Class Contracts? Deal Terms at Random House's Hydra Imprint

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This post, by Victoria Strauss, originally appeared on Writer Beware on 2/28/13.

Over the past few years, more and more trade publishers have created digital-only imprints. Another new one just popped up in my newsfeed today: Little, Brown UK’s Blackfriars will be launching its first list this coming June.

Last November, there was some excitement over three brand new digital imprints from Random House: Hydra for SF/fantasy, Alibi for mysteries and thrillers, and Flirt for the is-it-or-isn’t-it category of New Adult. I was interested by the fact that these new lines were pitched in language reminiscent of self-publishing services:

Under this program, authors will have a complete and unique publishing package. Every book will be assigned to an accomplished Random House editor and a dedicated publicist. They will also have the invaluable support of Random House’s experienced marketing and digital sales teams, who know how to reach out to and expand each book’s dedicated readership. Not only will authors benefit from working with the finest cover designers to ensure irresistibly eye-catching books, but they will also be offered the unique advantage of social media tools and training that will allow them to connect directly with their readers. To reach the widest possible readership, every title will be available for purchase at major e-retailers and will be compatible with all reading devices.

I wasn’t alone in this impression–much of the news coverage of the new imprints speculated that Random House was attempting to snag self-publishers, what with the imprints’ focus on short content, their willingness to accept previously-published books, and their literary-agent-optional submission procedure.

Authors who are accepted by Hydra and the others will have access to professional editors and designers, and will benefit from Random House’s publicity team–just as with conventional imprints. If they desire the prestige of being able to say they’re published by Random House, they’ll have that too.

Even so, I can’t help feeling that, with digital-only or digital-mostly imprints, print-based publishers are offering a kind of second-class publication.

Read the rest of the post on Writer Beware.

The Slippery Slope of E-Originals, Part 1

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This post, by Richard Curtis, originally appeared on Digital Book World on 10/14/12.

In the last year a number of major publishers have begun offering authors contracts for “e-originals” – books released originally – and exclusively – in e-book format. Though this is a logical step in the evolution of traditional publishing houses from tangible to virtual formats, the deflationary nature of its business model poses a serious threat to author earning power. Less obvious but ultimately more dangerous is the implosive effect the shift may have on the publishing companies themselves and the people who work for them.

What’s Wrong with Paperback Originals?

The first and obvious question is, what’s wrong with paperbacks books, that publishers are abandoning them in favor of digital originals? The fact is that in the past fifteen or twenty years, mass market paperback books have transformed from a breeding ground for fresh talent to an exclusive club for bestselling authors.

The reasons for this metamorphosis are complex (you can read about them in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback: Part 1, Part 2), but in essence the ruthless math of an industry based on the returnability of books has made it almost impossible for fresh talent to develop over time in the nursery of original paperbacks. Though many promising genre authors, especially romance writers, continue to be introduced in mass market paperback, the sales thresholds they must achieve in order to make a profit for their publishers have risen to almost unattainable heights.

Cue e-book originals.

At first blush, e-originals appear to be the perfect way for publishers to pull authors out of this death spiral, for many of the costs of manufacturing and distribution are lower or negligible. You would think that the savings would be passed along to authors in the form of higher advances and royalties. So far, that has proven far from true. Why?

Read the rest of the post on Digital Book World, and also see Part 2.