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Articles about book / author promotion and marketing, and author platform.

Why the Amazon–Hachette Deal Is Likely Good for Writers and Publishers

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This article by Vauhini Vara originally appeared on The New Yorker on 11/14/14.

The end of the months-long impasse between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing was a bit anticlimactic for those who had been watching the drama unfold. For months, the companies and their supporters had been accusing each other of bad behavior, warped motives, and plain dimwittedness. At one point, Amazon, apparently hoping to put pressure on the publisher, began delaying shipments of hard copies of Hachette-published books ordered through its site, to the ire of those books’ authors. In response, many writers signed an open letter from a group called Authors United, begging Amazon to back off; later, Authors United announced that it would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon’s delays, or other tactics, amounted to antitrust violations.

Journalists covered each of the escalations attentively, and the negative publicity hurt Amazon’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. The company posted disappointing earnings results in late October, including the slowest growth it had seen for North American media sales (which includes books, movies, and music) in more than five years. But then, on Thursday morning, the companies issued a joint press release announcing that they have agreed to make Hachette responsible for setting e-book prices, as Hachette is thought to have sought. It is believed that Amazon, which has typically favored keeping e-book prices low, had hoped to set those prices itself. Instead, with this agreement, Amazon will, according to David Naggar, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, offer “specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices.” The agreement will take effect in early 2015.

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

22 Common Problems Associated with Short Story Submissions

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This post by Amanda Pillar originally appeared on Alan Baxter‘s Warrior Scribe site on 11/7/14.

Do you write and submit short stories to anthologies and magazines? If so, you really need to read this, from the award-winning editor, Amanda Pillar. Thanks, Amanda!

I’ve worked on seven anthologies over the past six or so years. I’m onto the eighth, the Bloodlines* anthology to be published by Ticonderoga Publications. I’ve also judged a couple short story and flash fiction competitions. Over the last six years, I’ve noticed reoccurring issues with authors’ submissions. While I will not reject someone outright for forgetting to use standard manuscript format, or for misspelling my name, there are editors who will. So it’s these basic mistakes that may be hindering authors from getting published. There are other issues as well – the quality of writing, willingness of an author to be edited, attitude of an author (if you’re rude, people won’t want to work with you) and so on.

But to help, I’ve compiled a list of 22 common problems associated with short story submissions, shown below in no particular order:

1. Proof read* your work. More than one or two typos (on the first 2 pages) are not your friend. In fact, it looks like the author rushed the submission or that they cannot proof read their work. The latter can leave an editor worried about the entire editing process to come.

*Publetariat Editor’s Note – here in the U.S. we’d use one word, “proofread,” but this author is from Australia and spellings are sometimes regional.

 

2. Read the submission guidelines properly. If it asks for fantasy, don’t send science fiction and vice versa. If I say I want urban fantasy, do not send stories that are set in the future, or contain aliens, etc.

 

3. Send your manuscript in standard format unless otherwise asked for. This is an example http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html. (I tend to ask for Times New Roman font, because I hate Courier New. So check the guidelines to make sure!)

 

Read the full post, which includes 19 more specific tips, on Warrior Scribe.

 

10 Key Questions That Can Determine Your Success As A Writer

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This post by Jonathan Gunson originally appeared on his Bestseller Labs site on 6/26/14.

There are many powerful ways to significantly improve your chances of building a large book readership.

To help determine the likelihood of you succeeding, I’ve put together ten key questions for you to think about when starting a new writing project.

Prepare to be “caught in the headlights” by these questions – they’re designed to expose the reality of being an author, but also to give a useful insight into your career pathway.

In truth, this is not a definitive list, but I’ve found these particular questions to be helpful guidance in my own work. Let me know in the comments which of these is relevant to you – I’d value the feedback.

 

1. Do you employ the potency of your TRUE self?

The most effective way to attract a large and committed readership is to develop your own unique “Writer’s Voice”.

This requires reaching into your deepest emotional wells, and writing about what you genuinely love – the things you obsess over.

You need to invoke the potent uniqueness of you.

A unique voice gives you control of a market, because committed reader fans can only ever buy this particular magic from you. You alone. Think about the gravity of this.

More about the power of “Writer’s Voice” here.

 

2. Are you writing for a particular genre because it’s popular?

 

Read the full post on Bestseller Labs.

 

The Best Time Of Day To Market Your Books

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This post by Mike Lowndes originally appeared on his site on 2/5/14.

What Is The Best Time Of Day To Market Your Books?

Marketers have known for decades that people respond better to offers at different times of day and on different days of the week. But the internet has made things a whole lot more complicated, as well as opening up fresh opportunities for clever timing-based targeting. So how do you know what to send, when?

There’s plenty of research available on the subject, but a lot of it contradicts itself. In our experience your best bet is to let your target audience drive timing decisions. Here’s some guidance to help you hit the nail on the head at a time the nail actually wants to be hit.

 

When is the best time to market to your audience?

Facebook news feeds go out of date in no time. Old news gets buried and unless people are on there all the time, it’s likely they’ll miss your gems of wisdom and amazingness. The recent introduction of Story Bumping means time decay matters less than it did. But it still makes sense to post stuff on Facebook when people are most likely to see it. And the same goes for other social media. Old messages are buried fast, so it helps if you know the optimum time to release them.

Some studies suggest engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays – probably because people are at the end of their tether at work, looking forward to the weekend and more inclined to take a sneaky peek at Facebook than earlier in the week. Obviously there are variations, but as a general rule posting Wednesday to Friday seems to reach the most people and generate the best response.

 

Read the full post on Mike Lowndes’ site.

 

Why Worrying about Genre is Holding You Back

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 10/29/14.

I get a lot of emails from other authors who are struggling to gain momentum on their titles. Some of these authors have dozens of books out for sale (one industrious chap even had 70+) but sales aren’t where they’d like them. The main reasons I hear about?

“My book is in an unpopular genre.” Or, “Advice about book marketing doesn’t apply to my books. They’re too obscure.”

I get it, I really do. You’ve written something totally outside of the traditional idea of BISAC codes (the genre categories the ISBN companies use) and you’re not sure there’s a market. You’re more interested in writing for yourself first. And that’s cool. But it doesn’t mean there’s no audience.

Hell, if you can get ONE person to read your book, there’s nothing stopping you from getting a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or a million. I’m yet to see a genre of book that doesn’t have an audience large enough to sustain a decent income. But you’ve got to make it easy for readers to find out about your work. And this is where the 80/20 principle comes in. Here’s what I mean:

The 80/20 rule in a nutshell: what’s the 20% of effort that leads to 80% of results? What’s the 80% of effort that leads to 20% of the results? The exact percentages are flexible, but you get the point. Here’s an example:

 

Read the full post on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

The War of the Words

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This article by Pete Gessen originally appeared in Vanity Fair‘s December 2014 issue.

Amazon’s war with publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing has earned it a black eye in the media, with the likes of Philip Roth, James Patterson, and Stephen Colbert demanding that the online mega-store stand down. How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money? Keith Gessen reports.

 

I. Discovery

Otis Chandler is a tall, serious, bespectacled man in his mid-30s whose grandfather, also named Otis Chandler, used to own the Los Angeles Times. Chandler grew up in Los Angeles, attended boarding school near Pomona, and then, like his father and grandfather, went to Stanford. Upon graduation he entered the computer field. Because it was the turn of the millennium, that meant working at a start-up: Chandler found a job at Tickle.com, which was an early venture in social networking. At Tickle, Chandler eventually became a project manager, starting a dating site called LoveHappens.com. It did O.K. In 2004, Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide, parent company of Monster.com, the huge job-posting site, and about a year and a half later, Chandler left.

He started to think about what he should do with himself. One day, while visiting a bookish friend, he had what he calls an epiphany. “He had one of those bookshelves in his apartment,” Chandler told me when I met him in San Francisco. “You know what I mean, the bookshelf when you walk into someone’s house, the one where they keep all their favorite books. I walked into his living room and started checking out his shelf and just grilling him, like, ‘That looks cool. What’d you think of it? What’d you think of that?’ ” He left his friend’s place with 10 good books. “I was like, if I could go to all my friends’ living rooms and grill them about what books they like, I would never lack for a good book again. But instead of doing that, why don’t I just build a site where everybody puts their shelves in their profiles?”

 

Read the full article on Vanity Fair.

 

The Perks, Pitfalls, and Paradoxes of Amazon Publishing

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This article by Nina Shapiro originally appeared on Seattle Weekly on 11/4/14.

Amid a boycott and bicoastal culture clash, Amazon has created a new model of publishing. Where does that leave authors?

One day in 2012, Megan Chance, a historical-fiction writer from the Kitsap Peninsula, arrived at Amazon.com’s South Lake Union headquarters for a meeting. The retail giant’s sleek new campus was bustling with software engineers of various nationalities, marketing mavens, and MBAs. The floor Chance visited, though, was practically empty. “There were, like, four people there,” Chance recalls. “It was bizarre.”

The two-decade-old online retailer was still getting a relatively new and little-understood division going—one devoted not only to selling books on the vast digital platform it had created, but also to publishing them. With the frenetic speed of a start-up, Amazon Publishing had in a few years launched a series of imprints devoted to different niches: mystery, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and more. Now, the company’s fledgling imprint devoted to her genre, Lake Union Publishing, wanted to publish Chance’s latest work, Bone River, a novel about a 19th-century ethnologist who develops a mystical connection to a mummy.

Chance, in her early 50s, was at a low point in her career. She had spent two decades writing books that languished on bookstore shelves, caught in what she believed was a “vicious cycle” common to the publishing world. She had sold her first book to Hachette, which saw enough promise in the work to give her a big advance. The book sold poorly, though, and the publisher paid for a smaller print run the next time around, according to Chance. Those numbers weren’t great either. After that, she says, Hachette “was done.” She moved on to another publisher, where the downward spiral continued.

She was ready again for a new publisher with Bone River, but the New York publishers she approached didn’t bite. “Come back to us when you have better numbers,” she recalls being told.

 

Read the full article on Seattle Weekly.

 

The Amazon/Hachette Battle and Why It’s Great to Be a Self-Published Author

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This post by Miral Sattar originally appeared on PBS Mediashift on 6/3/14.

After a fantastic BEA (Book Expo America), I’ve been digesting the whole Amazon/Hachette battle. I’ve basically come to the conclusion that it’s an incredible time to be a self-published author.

The first thing that surprised me is that so much has been misreported about the Amazon/Hachette battle. Amazon and Hachette are negotiating their contract terms, and what normally should have been behind-the-door talks is turning into an all-out flame war in the media.

 
Myths:

a) Amazon increased publisher prices.

Amazon can’t increase prices. Amazon acts as a retailer of books. The publisher always sets the price of the books. Amazon only changes the amount of the discount similar to the way Walmart, Target or anyone else would.

b) Amazon removed buy buttons from Hachette titles.

No, Amazon didn’t remove any buy buttons. They just removed pre-order buttons from Hachette titles. Amazon doesn’t make pre-order buttons available to everyone and negotiates with each publisher individually. Readers can still buy their books albeit with delays as posted in the Amazon forums.

 

Read the full post on PBS Mediashift.

 

3 Vital Questions to Build Website Impact

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This post by Donna K. Fitch originally appeared on D’Vorah Lansky’s Build A Business With Your Book.

Why do you have a website? What a silly question. We have websites because we’re supposed to. Everyone else does, right?

But a website without thought behind it, without intentionality, may be doing you more harm than good. Professional web designers ask their clients a series of questions before they do any design work. Improve your website by asking yourself these three questions:

 

1. What do you want to accomplish with your website?

It’s so tempting to pile cool widgets and generic text (“Welcome to my website, I hope you enjoy it”) on your site without considering the purpose. Besides overwhelming the site visitor, the items may be sending mixed messages—or give the impression you’re not sure what business you’re in. If you aren’t sure what you’re trying to achieve, you won’t know when you’ve arrived.

 

Read the full post on Build A Business With Your Book.

 

Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 10/27/14.

Almost everything being said about publishing today is predicated on two facts that are dead wrong. The first is that publishers are somehow being hurt by ebook sales. The second is that independent bookstores are being crushed. The opposite is true in both cases, and without understanding this, most of what everyone says about publishing is complete bollocks.

Let’s take the health of publishers first. Below you will see that profit margins at the major publishers are either flat or improving. For three of the top publishers, margins have improved quite a bit:

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous infographics and much further analysis, on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

How to Create an Audiobook with ACX

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This post by JD Smith originally appeared on Words With Jam on 9/23/14.

ACX is a service provided by Amazon where authors can hook up with narrators and turn their book into an audio book for distribution through Audible, Amazon and iTunes. Up until this year the service was only available in the US, but now it’s available in the UK. Over the last few months I’ve been working with narrator Paul Hodgson on by book The Rise of Zenobia. You can listen to a sample here.

 

What does ACX actually do?

ACX is basically the interface you use to meet narrators, and deal with all the contractual information once you’ve found a narrator you want to work with. They check the recording quality of audio submitted before it’s put through for distribution. And they also provide a dashboard to keep track of sales and payments.

 

How do I start?

You log in using your Amazon account and the set up is fairly minimal. ACX pulls most of the information of your book from Amazon and you then add a bit more information, to make your book enticing, such as review quotes and possibly sales figures.

 

Read the full post on Words With Jam.

 

How to Write an Author Bio When You Don't Feel Like an Author…Yet

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This post by Anne R. Allen originally appeared on her blog on 9/9/12.

Maybe you’ve got a novel finished and you’ve been sending out queries. Lots. And you’re getting rejections. Lots. Or worse, that slow disappointment of no response at all.

Or maybe you write short fiction and poetry and you’ve got a bunch of pieces you’ve been sending out to contests and literary journals. You’ve won a few local contests, but so far you haven’t had much luck getting into print.

You may still be afraid to tell more than a handful of people you’re a writer. You’d feel pretentious calling yourself an “author.”

But it might be time to start—at least privately.

Because one day, in the not too distant future, you’ll open your email and there it will be:

The response from an editor: “You’re the winner of our October ‘Bad Witch’ short story contest. We’d like to publish your story, Glinda: Heartbreaker of Oz in our next issue. Please send us your Author Bio.”
Or just when you were giving up hope, you get that reply from your dream agent: “I’m intrigued by your novel Down and Out on the Yellow Brick Road. Please send the first fifty pages, and an Author Bio.”

You’re so excited you’re jumping out of your skin, so you dash something off in five minutes and hit “send.” Wow. You’re going to be in print! Or maybe get an agent. Let’s get this career on the road!

Whoa. You do NOT want to dash off an author bio in five minutes. Every word you send out there is a writing sample, not just those well-honed pages or stories.

 

Read the full post, which includes a 10-step guide to writing an author bio, on Anne R. Allen’s blog.

 

No Author Is Too Good for Her Amazon Critics

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This post by Jennifer Weiner originally appeared on New Republic on 10/19/14.

Dear readers, the commoners have reviewed Margo Howard’s book … and Ms. Howard is not pleased.

A bit of background: long-time advice columnist Howard wrote a memoir called Eat, Drink, and Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife. Publisher’s Weekly called it a “touching” memoir by a “pampered princess” that relied heavily on name-dropping for its draw.

Amazon’s critics were less impressed—specifically, Amazon’s “most trusted” reviewers who, Howard says, are given “freebies…cold cream, sneakers, pots and pans, and…books!” and allowed to review them in advance of their publication date. She is not a fan. These reviewers—“the freebie people,” Howard calls them—are “dim bulbs,” they are “evangelical, unworldly,” “barely literate, and “deluded.”

The irony, of course, is that in trying to show that she’s not, as the “freebie people” say, a coddled, name-dropping, well-connected rich lady, Howard comes across as a well-connected rich lady. Everything from her name-dropping (both a MacArthur genius and a long-time Vanity Fair staff writer loved her book!) to her solution to the problem (it turns out that Howard knows two members of Amazon’s board of directors!) smacks of barely-examined privilege.

Still, I can feel Howard’s pain. Show me a writer who hasn’t felt savaged, misunderstood, unfairly attacked, or completely misread by an Amazon reviewer, and I’ll show you a writer whose books live in shoeboxes under her bed. I suspect that there are, indeed, reviewers who skim books looking for references of stuff they don’t have—a nanny here, a remodeled kitchen there—so their review can scream RICH LADY PROBLEMS in all caps.

 

Read the full post on New Republic.

 

'Am I being catfished?' An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic

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This post by Kathleen Hale originally appeared on The Guardian on 10/17/14. Note that it contains strong language.

When a bad review of her first novel appeared online, Kathleen Hale was warned not to respond. But she soon found herself wading in

In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.

“No,” she said firmly, taking the pen away. “Kathleen, you understand we can’t make any more changes, right?”

“I was just kidding,” I lied. Eventually she had to physically prise the book from my hands.

A lot of authors call this “the post-partum stage”, as if the book is a baby they struggle to feel happy about. But for me, it felt more like one of my body parts was about to be showcased.

“Are you excited about your novel?” my mom asked, repeatedly, often in singsong.

“I’m scared,” I said. Anxious and inexperienced, I began checking goodreads.com, a social reviewing site owned by Amazon. My publisher HarperTeen had sent advance copies of my book to bloggers and I wanted to see what they thought. Other authors warned me not to do this, but I didn’t listen. Soon, my daily visits tallied somewhere between “slightly-more-than-is-attractive-to-admit-here” and “infinity”.

For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. “Well, it’s a weird book,” I reminded myself. “It’s about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to fight crime.” Mostly I was relieved they weren’t all one-star reviews.

One day, while deleting and rewriting the same tweet over and over (my editors had urged me to build a “web presence”), a tiny avatar popped up on my screen. She was young, tanned and attractive, with dark hair and a bright smile. Her Twitter profile said she was a book blogger who tweeted nonstop between 6pm and midnight, usually about the TV show Gossip Girl. According to her blogger profile, she was a 10th-grade teacher, wife and mother of two. Her name was Blythe Harris. She had tweeted me saying she had some ideas for my next book.

“Cool, Blythe, thanks!” I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I’d been asking Twitter for ideas – “The weirdest thing you can think of!” – promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.

Curious to see if Blythe had read my book, I clicked from her Twitter through her blog and her Goodreads page. She had given it one star. “Meh,” I thought. I scrolled down her review.

“Fuck this,” it said. “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.”

 

Read the full, lengthy post on The Guardian.

 

The Do's And Don'ts Of Writing A Blurb For Your Novel

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This post by Milena originally appeared on blurb on 10/9/14.

When writing a novel, there are few selling tools as important as writing a solidly written blurb. Sure, the cover design creates intrigue, but, if you have caught a potential reader’s attention, the blurb is what will sell your book—and convert readers. A “blurb” can refer to both a “description blurb” that you write for the back cover of your book and a “review blurb.” For the purposes of this post, we’ll be focusing on the former, and how you, the writer, can craft the best possible blurb.

 

Dos
-Reference the genre and central theme
-Create intrigue around the main conflict
-Dive right in and introduce your protagonist
-Keep it short and punchy
-Reference your book-writing or professional status, if it relates to your book.

 

Read the full post on blurb.