Ebook Pricing: Or… Where Zoe Says Something About Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Book Marketing Roundup

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From Savvy Book Marketer Dana Lynn Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Dealing With Chronological Breaks In Your Story

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This post, by Juliette Wade, originally appeared on her TalkToYoUniverse blog on 2/2/12.

Do time-breaks in your story ever drive you mad?

They do me. My current novel is on a very strict schedule – this event has to happen on one day, then this other event has to happen at a three-day delay, and then the next one at the same three-day interval, etc. etc. I get to a certain point and I realize, "I’m on the wrong day. More time has to pass than this. How can I get more time to pass?"

If I were using a more external narrator, this might be easier. I might just say, "The next day…" or "Three hours later…" and there we go. Well, okay, it wouldn’t be that simple. The real problem with chronological breaks is that you have to maintain the story drive in spite of them, which means you have to create a sort of bridging effect across them.

So what kind of continuity links can make this work? There’s quite a range. You can make an explicit reference to the amount of time passing, but this works more easily with a distant narrator; with a deep point of view, there would have to be a specific reason why the character was aware that this much time was passing. Besides which, I don’t prefer to make direct reference to the amount of time if I can help it. I much prefer to use a topic link, or a psychological link.

A topic link means that you leave a cue in the last piece before your time break that you can then pick up again on the other side. I had a case where I was struggling with a break that looked something like this:


Read the rest of the post on TalkToYoUniverse.

A Capital Idea! Knowing What to Capitalize

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This post, by Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 2/6/12.

Capitalization might seem like a no-brainer, but if you happen to write science fiction or fantasy (and possibly historical), odds are you’ve found yourself wondering if something should be capitalized or not. All those made up names feel like they ought to be capitalized, but then you end up with a bit of a mess.

Grundark made his way through the Emporium, carrying his Pouchblade and three bags of Elbonquin wine for the Regent’s Flowering Ceremony. Crowds of Hillmen bumped into him, but the shy Filmori stayed at the edges of the street.

While this paragraph is also a good example why you shouldn’t name everything (do you have any idea what most of those things even are ?), all those capital letters feel off, calling too much attention to things that shouldn’t be focused on so much. It’s just awkward.  

One trick I use is to replace the made up words with their real counterparts. It makes it a lot easier to see what’s actually a proper noun (a specific thing vs a type of thing) and what’s just a noun. 

George made his way through the Mall, carrying his Pocketknife and three bags of Chardonnay wine for the King’s Birthday Celebration. Crowds of Humans bumped into him, but the shy Dutch stayed at the edges of the street.

Some of those capitals look pretty silly now, don’t they? Let’s look at the pieces individually.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Other Side of the Story.

What? Me? Indie? Yikes!

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

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

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

Once again, too soon old, too late smart!

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

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

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

How did we get here?

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


Read the rest of the post on Licensed to Thrill.

Should You Publish Your Novel To Build Your Platform?

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

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

Sorry, but that’s the wrong way round.

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

 

Non-fiction

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

But novels?

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

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

Successful self-publishers

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

Relationships rock

 

Read the rest of the post on Nail Your Novel.

Invest In Your Own Ebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

For The Love Of Online Fiction Magazines

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, media only publish three basic things:

News
Entertainment
Education

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

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

Do you get this yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the basics.

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

Here’s what you need to do:

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

DPAA+H

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

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

DPAA+H

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey

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

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

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

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

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

The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey will have the answers

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

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

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

We need your help

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

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

We’re asking the self-publishing community to:

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

Using Ebooks To Their Full Advantage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

Author Blogging 101: Blogging Platforms & Why I Love WordPress

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I had a book design website once. It was one of those “web 1.0″ websites that you put up because you know you need one, or at least everyone says you do.

It was built with a nifty Mac tool called Rapidweaver and for what it was, it was okay.

It took a lot of time to design and build the 6 or 8 pages and I struggled to get it working right. There were pages describing services and some samples of books I’d designed. The usual thing.

Looking at the little website, I realized there was one question I couldn’t answer:

Why would anyone ever come here twice?

Once you had read about the services and looked at the samples, there was nothing left to do. It was depressing. I couldn’t see how it was going to do me any good, although now I could point people to my company’s website.

Enter Blogging

I tried to use the tools that came with Rapidweaver to add a blog to the site, but it just wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to. And that turned out to be my good luck.

I started reading about blogging, and discovered WordPress.

Even though I had been reading blogs for a while, I had no idea there were different blogging platforms with their own strenths and weaknesses.

For instance, right now you can blog lots of different ways:

  • With WordPress.org software on your own domain
  • On the WordPress.com domain, where you can get a blog for free
  • On Google’s Blogger.com, another very popular platform
  • With Tumblr, where people who seem to like posting photos or other creative work blog
  • On TypePad, a platform hosting many top blogs
  • Or on Movable Type, another robust blogging platform used by big companies and small.

(Note that some of these services are completely free, some have a free trial that then turns into a subscription, and some rely on you setting up your own domain with an internet service provider [ISP]).

Everyone seemed to suggest WordPress software, and I soon understood why.

 

What’s Great About WordPress

Since WordPress is the only blogging platform I’ve used, this doesn’t imply anything about any of the others. But I was immediately struck by how easy it was to do things that once took me quite a while. You could easily:

  • Add an article (or post, in WordPress language), for instance. This took a fair amount of work on my static website. With the WordPress software, it was a matter of dumping the text in, filling in a few fields, and hitting “Publish.”
  • Add a page. In WordPress, you can add a page as easily as a post, and just as quickly.
  • Add stuff to the sidebar. WordPress also makes this very easy, with a whole bunch of pre-coded things like “Favorite Posts”-type lists. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty easy to add other things like badges and social media widgets, too.
  • Change the look. With thousands of different “themes” available free, you can change the whole look and design of your site in a moment. The ability to customize the software is built right in.

It turned out it was much easier to reproduce the pages from my old website—some of which are still somewhere on this blog—and have a hybrid site. WordPress, along with all the amazing add-ins from thousands of developers, make it possible.

Expanding in Many Directions

WordPress is open-source software, and encourages all kinds of software that extend the way you can use it in many directions.

  1. Themes allow you to change the look of the site, add hierarchy, organize content for use by lots of different kinds of WordPress installations. They can also include their own programming abilities, creating photo portfolios or complete e-commerce sites on top of the WordPress foundation.
  2. Plugins add functions like membership site credentials, e-commerce capabilities, spam protection, new classes of Pages you can create, and thousands of other things.

But for blogging, right out of the box, without much customization at all, WordPress is powerful software that’s

  • constantly being improved
  • is available free of charge,
  • is supported by a huge community of users and developers
  • can grow with you for years to come.

That’s why I love WordPress. It made the transition to real blogging fun and enjoyable and immediately understandable. And the software just keeps getting better.

Data

The Book Designer blog runs on the Thesis theme by Chris Pearson.
There are 12 widgets in the 2 sidebars and 19 plugins that do everything from filtering out 106,872 spam comments (as of today), to providing contact forms, doing search engine optimization, creating audio players and the floating social media share buttons sliding up and down the left margin.

 

 

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

Scrivener: 3 Reasons You Should Use It For Your Book

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

(2) Auto-create Kindle and ePub files.

This is a game-changer.

Compiling for .mobi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Scrivener for my own novel, Prophecy

My own process for Prophecy has been as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Building Your Author Platform

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You’ve worked very hard to write your book and submitted it to appropriate agents only to be told they and the publishers aren’t interested because nobody knows who you are. That quickly becomes a dog chasing his tail or a catch-22 problem. How can you become a known and admired author if no one will publish you? The fix for this is to develop a platform or a fan base. The larger your followership becomes, the more books you will sell. The publishers want to use this as a marketing guarantee. It makes their marketing efforts easier and makes them more money sooner. So, how do you build a platform?

It’s not easy but it is doable. Here are some suggestions you may find helpful.

Facebook, UTube, & Twitter—Social networks are a free, excellent way to become known to people who count. Seek relationships with readers, other authors, book publishers, agents, reviewers, genera bloggers, and anyone interested in whatever you write about.

Book Signings—Don’t expect many sales at the signings. Instead, seek positive relationships with owners, managers, and staff who will hand sell your book long after you’re gone.

Interviews—This is a potential treasure chest. Radio interviews are the best because you do them from phone wherever you want to. I did so many radio interviews, that I was eventually offered my own show, which did for two and a half years. TV is more difficult because you must do it from or through a studio. Newspaper interviews can be done from anywhere that is mutually convenient; however, they are getting more difficult to get because of the weakening newspaper industry. Seek a good media booking agent to help you make all these connections. Make the interviewer look good.

Book Fairs—These are good ways to meet the reading public. Some are expensive, so pick and choose wisely.

Industry Trade Shows— These worked very well for me. I would book a couple of adjoining booth spaces, fill them with tables, put colorful table clothes on them, and set up collapsible wire racks. I would fill them with my books and other good books in my genre. I would give speeches and/or workshops and provide my mobile bookstore. I became very well-known for this customer base.

Regional Bookseller Trade Shows— Yes, the Book Expo America is better known, but it’s huge and very expensive. It is worth attending for the networking opportunities and education. If you really want to sell your books, however, go to the regional trade shows. To learn about these, go to http://www.bookweb.org/resources/regionals.html

Book Reviews— These are useful to let book buyers know about you and your book. Even the largest review services have begun charging for their reviews, so use them wisely Reviews make for a good source of marketing blurbs. Never send a book in the blind and expect to get a review—huge waste of money. Be sure to check the reviewer’s submission guidelines and adhere to them.

Book Award Contests— These can get expensive, so be judicious as to how many you register for.

Email Campaigns to Bookstores— Check with the American Booksellers Association for mailing lists at http://bookweb.org/indiebound/indiessentials and at http://bookweb.org/membership/products .

Speaking Engagements— As I mentioned before, this is a wonderful way to become known and respected.

Book Clubs— I went to a mini-trade show for military books, linked up with the editor from Doubleday’s Military Book Club, and sold 25,000+ copies each of two of my titles. They also used my printer and allowed me to participate in their printings of my books at greatly reduced prices because of the economy of scale.

These are some platform enhancing venues I have used to good effect in the past. If you find only one or two that work for you, you’re ahead of the game. Remember, you’re competing against 500,000+ new books a year. You have to work hard to get seen in a crowd like that.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.