Sell – Page 13 – Publetariat

So You're Going To Pitch Your Book – A Guide

January 3, 2016October 16, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 9/19/14.

It seems that lately there have been more opportunities than ever before for writers to pitch their as-yet-unpublished manuscript to industry professionals. At writers conventions, festivals and so on, more agents, editors and publishers are making themselves available to hear about your magnum opus. It really is a superb opportunity and these things usually get booked out. But man, I’ve heard some horror stories! It’s a hell of a thing, trying to sell yourself and your work with nerves making your guts into an ice storm. So I thought I’d ask a few key people in the industry for some tips to help you formulate your pitch should you get the chance.

Firstly, I’ll throw a tip or two of my own at you, then we’re going to hear from a small press publisher, a literary agent and a big press editor.

My tips are simple: Know what your book is about so you can formulate a killer elevator pitch. This is so named because it’s based on the premise that you meet a publisher in an elevator and have a few seconds before they reach their floor to sell them on the idea of your book. Here’s the elevator pitch for BOUND, as an example:

Underground cage fighter, Alex Caine, is drawn into a world he didn’t know existed – a world he wishes he’d never found. The harder he tries to get out, the deeper he’s dragged in. It’s magic, monsters, mayhem and martial arts in a fast-paced dark urban fantasy thriller.

Read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

Why Is Typography So Important To Content Marketing?

January 3, 2016October 14, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Erika Schneider originally appeared on the Outbrain blog on 9/16/14. Note that while it is aimed at small businesses, the information here is just as applicable to author websites and blogs, and even book cover design.

Content marketing has become one the primary ways of retaining customers, attracting new clients, and generating leads, sales, and profit for a company. While the content itself on a website is incredibly important, another crucial aspect of content marketing is typography. Typography isn’t often given a lot of consideration, but there is no doubt it plays a role in strengthening your brand, creating interest in your product, and highlighting your central message.

What is typography?

Typography is actually a pretty basic concept, and simply refers to the way that text is arranged on a page or document. Often times, typography is referred to as an art, as typography can be incredibly creative and innovative. Typography is great for enhancing a theme, adding personality, increasing emphasis of an idea or reinforcing a thought, demonstrating emotion, creating interest, and crafting aesthetic appeal.

While straightforward black-colored text such as this is appropriate for some forums, colorful and artistic text can be a great advertising tool. Notice how that sentence caught your attention and drew you in based on its font and color scheme alone? That’s the whole point of great typography.

Elements of Typography

You might think that typography is limited to font and color, but typography is actually much more than that. Here are the elements of typography that you should familiarize yourself with:

Read the full post on Outbrain.

Should You Publish Indie or Traditional? A Hybrid Author Busts the Myths

January 3, 2016October 12, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Holly Robins originally appeared on her site on 8/17/14.

Yesterday, I gathered with a group of area writers at the Haverhill Public Library Authors Fair. My table was situated between Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, an author who publishes traditionally, and Connie Johnson Hambley, a self-published mystery writer. This was the perfect place for me: I’m a hybrid author who has jumped from a traditional publisher (Random House) to indie publishing and back to a traditional house again. As I start my fourth novel to be published by New American Library/Penguin Random House, I have no contract for the next one. This means that I’m revisiting the all-important question for many writers: do I want to go solo when I publish my next book, or stay where I am?
This is a good time to roundup what I’ve learned about publishing. In the process, I want to dismantle four common myths:

1. Publishers are Out to Screw Authors
MYTH. Publishing companies are businesses that compete in a global marketplace. Their job is to make money—and, in so doing, they will make money for you.

With a traditional publisher, you will get royalties from your books—typically about 25 percent of ebook sales. This is much less than the percentage of royalties you’ll get if you self publish. Rates vary, but with self publishing, you’ll reap about 65 percent of a book sale as your royalty rate.

On the other hand, with a traditional publishing deal, you will get an advance against royalties—anywhere from $5K to $45K for most first-time novelists, though of course there are some pie-in-the-sky whopper deals. You will also get—for free!–an editor, publicist, marketing team, designers, sales people, etc. Your team at a traditional publisher will help you whip your book into shape and get it into the hands of readers.

Click here to read the full post on Holly Robins’ site.

What Seth Godin Can Teach Us About Book Publishing

January 3, 2016October 9, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Jennifer Tribe originally appeared on clearprose communications on 5/14/14.

If you’ve ever read anything by Seth Godin, you know he’s not a man who’s content to just go with the flow. He’s been questioning and analyzing the business world — “poking the box,” as he calls it — for decades.

He applies that same inquisitive nature to publishing, too. Godin is the author of 17 bestselling books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s worked with a traditional publisher and he’s experimented with self-publishing. In other words, he’s been around the book block quite a few times.

Godin’s commentary on the book publishing industry is some of the sharpest I’ve read, and his techniques for crafting and promoting a book are often ingenious.

If you’re a non-fiction author, you’d do well to tear a page from Godin’s playbook — here’s how.

1] Understand that the idea is the thing

In Godin’s world, a book is a vehicle for an idea — the idea is the product — which means that right now, the traditional publishing industry is focused on the wrong thing.

[Publishers] will only thrive if they understand that an entirely new business model will have to be built and understood. And it will have nothing whatsoever to do with paper. It will be about ideas.Which is what book publishing was supposed to be about all along, right?

Click here to read the full post on clearprose communications.

Thinking of Rebranding Your Blog? Read This.

January 3, 2016October 9, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Stacey Roberts originally appeared on ProBlogger on 10/1/14.

Rebranding an established and successful business? Why would you do that?

For some, the risk of changing the name of something people have grown to know and love is too big. For others, the risk of being boxed into something they no longer feel much affinity for is even bigger.

No doubt it’s a scary leap to rebrand a blog – would people still read? Would a slight shift in direction upset the established audience? Would the to-do list of technical issues be too overwhelming? Would you lose all that Google love you’ve built up over the years?

At some point, if you’ve felt the rumbling undercurrent of wanting to make a change, you’ll decide those reasons are no longer enough to hold you back. And so you research new domain names, you design new logos, you test the waters. And you make the switch – your blog (and your online identity) is something new. Something more you.

Jodi Wilson did that on New Year’s Eve 2013. She took a blog she had lovingly nurtured for six years from online journal to a much larger online place of community and inspiration, and gave it a complete overhaul. Once a place to share the milestones and sleepless nights as a new parent, the blog had evolved into a new space of a woman finding joy in a simple, humble life. And Jodi felt it required a new look and name to reflect that.

“One of the biggest factors in the name change was the fact that my blog was originally named after my son and his teddy – Che & Fidel,” she says.

Click here to read the full post on ProBlogger.

How to Get Traffic to Your Author Website: 30+ Tips for Discouraged Writers

January 3, 2016October 8, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Kimberley Grabas originally appeared on Your Writer Platform on 10/8/14.

Sure is quiet out there.

I mean seriously, with a gabillion people online these days, wouldn’t a few even accidentally stumble across your website?

Isn’t it statistically impossible (or at least, improbable) that you should have so little traffic to this darn blog that you’ve spent hours coaxing into existence, one precious post at a time?

What? Offline rejection isn’t enough, now writers have to be rebuffed online, too?

Don’t be discouraged, dear writer, help is on the way!

Building traffic can take time. It’s not always easy to find the people who are interested in your topic and receptive to your point of view, your voice and your style.

Plus, you also need to consider the “share-potential” of your audience. Do your readers have large followings on social networks like Twitter and Facebook? Or better, do they have their own blogs or websites?

Or does your audience (or potential audience) have small networks of the usual suspects: friends, family and a few peers?

Be careful when comparing your growth with the internet gurus. If your target audience isn’t bloggers, businesses or online entrepreneurs, the share-potential of your readers will be much lower – and your growth, therefore, may be much slower.

Consider changing your goal from quickly growing your traffic, to focusing on ensuring that the traffic you are attracting is right for your author blog. You want the traffic you funnel to your site to be targeted, invested and closely aligned with your way of thinking.

And the results you seek – increased book sales, a supportive community, authority and influence in your genre or niche – are not *necessarily* linked to high traffic numbers.

To achieve those results, you must remember that it’s not traffic or “the numbers” that are most important, but building relationships with people that value what you have to say and how you say it. (Although highly targeted traffic + big numbers = the holy grail )

The more targeted the traffic you draw to your site, the better your chances of turning visitors into fans.

I Know You Want it, But Are You Ready for a Surge in Traffic?

Attracting the right people to your author website is important, but a key ingredient in exponential traffic growth is retaining as many of those readers as possible.

If you don’t stop the leaks, you end up spending a lot more time and resources than you need to.

Therefore there are two components to “getting more traffic”: ready your website and social media outposts to receive visitors AND draw the “right” people to your site. (Tweet this idea!)

You’ll need to focus on both to begin seeing an increase in traffic and to start growing your fan base.

Click here to read the full post, which is very lengthy and includes MANY specific tips and strategies, on Your Author Platform.

A Shower of Golden Rules – or How to Make Social Media Work for You

January 3, 2016October 8, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Derek Duggan originally appeared on Words With Jam on 10/1/14.

There are a lot of pressures on writers these days. Not only do you have to write books and stuff but now, with the demands of an ever present public, you have to write about other things across several platforms.

This can seem a little daunting to the novice, but there are some simple rules and once you follow them you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank (and then, as a writer, crying all the way home again). First, and most conspicuously, you will have to make regular posts on social media sites. This can be a little bit tricky as you have to show people that you, as a writer, are better than everyone else while making yourself seem like a regular Joe Soap at the same time. It doesn’t matter which platform you choose, the rules are the same.

1. Wine/alcoholic beverages. You have to mention wine in at least every other post or people will think you’re not an alcoholic and therefore not a real writer. It doesn’t matter if you’re really a teetotaler, you still have to post things like – Hey, is it wine o’ clock yet? – or – It must be beer thirty – or – It must be time to down a bottle of whiskey and shit the bed by now! Nobody will buy your work if you don’t do this. In a recent study at the British University of Made up Studies it was found that the amount of times wine was mentioned on a writer’s time line was directly proportional to the amount of sales achieved. And that’s a fact. If you can’t think of any wine related thing to say why not simply post a link to some online article that says drinking lots of wine makes you really good at doing everything and makes you really healthy and people who live under bridges and shout at traffic are just doing it wrong. This will help you to connect with regular alcoholics and convince them to buy your stuff.

2. Work in progress. You have to mention this from time to time or people might forget that you’re not just someone who lives under a bridge and shouts at traffic. Don’t go into details – just say something about drafts and word counts and that should keep everyone happy. In this way you can connect with regular people by pretending that you do some work too and don’t actually spend the whole day farting about on the internet.

Click here to read the full post on Words With Jam.

The Self-Publishing Revolution Is Only Just Beginning.

January 3, 2016October 5, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 9/21/14.

Reflections On My Stockholm Trip

I spent a couple of days in Stockholm last week, and did three events in just over 24 hours for Lava Forlag, meeting authors at all stages of the journey. Here are my reflections on my time there.

The indie revolution is expanding…and it is incredibly exciting to see the light dawning in people’s eyes.

The Swedish publishing industry is still in the old traditional, print dominated way of doing things right now. Ebooks haven’t taken off yet, Amazon hasn’t opened its .se store and authors are still focused on the route of agents and publishers to reach readers.

I was told that the biggest publishers are integrated with the media companies – in the same way as Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp owning Harper Collins, the Fox Network, The Times and the Wall Street Journal.

When big media owns all the publishing channels, there is little chance for the independent voice against such established behemoths. But change is coming…

I was asked to Stockholm by the lovely Kristina Svensson, an indie author who sees the digital future coming to Sweden in the next few years. I spoke to the audience of authors about my reality, the world I live in, where authors are writing what they want, publishing what they want, and in many cases, making a decent living from their words.

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

You Know What You Can Do With Your DRM

January 3, 2016October 2, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 9/7/14.

Okay, folks. You heard it here first. I’M NEVER GOING TO BUY ANOTHER BOOK WITH DRM ON IT.

Yes, that’s me shouting. Do I hear you asking why?

I’m so glad you asked. But first, for those who don’t know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially, it’s an attempt by suppliers to ensure that only legitimate purchasers of electronic content (books, software, music etc) are actually able to make use of their products. Wikipedia’s description is as good as any other. Or you could read this one, which describes the restrictions imposed by DRM.

You might think DRM is relatively new. It’s not. The acronym might be, but the technique has been around from pretty much the time when personal computers exploded onto the scene in the early eighties. Products such as dBase III, word processors, spreadsheets and the like were protected with licences. Without the licence key, you couldn’t run them or do anything else with them. Other software companies came up with dongles – a hardware device fitted to the machine running the program. The idea was supposed to be that pirates couldn’t profit from the developers’ hard work.

Uh-huh.

Two things happened.

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s blog.

Giving Readers What They Truly Crave

January 3, 2016October 2, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Joe Wikert originally appeared on his Digital Content Strategies on 8/11/14.

Publishers need to take a page out of the retailer playbook. You’ve undoubtedly noticed how good certain online retailers are at suggesting additional products related to the one you’re about to purchase.

Amazon is arguably the king here with their “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” recommendation sections. These elements typically appear just below the product image and above the product details. That’s prime real estate on the Amazon product page so you can bet these elements drive a lot of add-on sales.

You’re probably familiar with content recommendation links and widgets that have sprouted up all over the web the past few years. Taboola is a leader in this space and they specialize in offering links to related content from other publishers. For example, if you’re reading an article on USA Today’s website you’ll see a headline towards the bottom that says “Sponsor Content” followed by links to a handful of related articles from other sources.

I believe this is simply scratching the surface of content recommendation and we’ll see much more sophisticated cross-pollination in the coming months and years. I also believe many of these will be human-curated and implemented via a lightweight post-production model. An example will help illustrate.

Click here to read the full post on Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies.

Ten Reasons Why The Gatekeepers Of Self-Publishing Have Become… You

January 3, 2016September 30, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 9/30/14.

One of the biggest driving forces behind authors who self-publish has been the declaration that writing has become stifled by “the gatekeepers of the publishing world.” Many writers now go straight to self-publishing. Be self-published? Sounds great! Let’s do it! We can all help each other, right? Right? Guys?

The online self-publishing clique has become incredibly judgemental of its own kind. These didacts are scaring the heck out of those wanting a nice gentle, creative, inclusive experience. Simply, self-published authors have become dictators of their own industry. Here’s why.

1. Online Herdism
Thou shalt not pay for any kind of professional promotion. Thou shalt not pay for book formatting. Thou shalt only use your peers with no knowledge of editing a book to – um, edit your book. If you pay for services, you are dumb. Yeah! Just look at the herd go off on paid book reviews without even understanding the different types of paid review or how to use them! Come on, people. Any book needs promotion. After all, you just spent years of your life writing the damn thing. Give it a life. Building a professional book and marketing it with assistance is nothing to be ashamed about, and this truly has to stop being a “thing.” Forum comments start with “I COMPETELY AGREE WITH YOU!!!!” Or “I HATE paid reviews!” or “NONSENSE!!!!” (I noticed it’s always capital letters, many punctuation marks and absolutes, just to be THE MOST AGREEING PERSON!!!!) I always look up the naysayers’ books on these forums, and 9/10 have sold no books whatsoever. But they are “being true to the spirit of indie publishing.” Pffff…

2. Everyone Is A Self-Publishing Expert – And Get It All Wrong

Click here to read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

Writing: Word Counts in Fiction – How Long Is A Novel?

January 3, 2016September 28, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Debbie Young originally appeared on ALLi on 9/18/14.

Is it a novel? Is it a novella? Is it a novelette? It can be hard to decide what to call your book, but it’s important to get it right so that you don’t confuse or disappoint readers. This post offers guidelines suggested by experienced self-publishing author members of ALLi.

When promoting any work of fiction, it’s important to use the right terms of reference. This will create appropriate expectations in your readers and help guard against disgruntled reviews such as these:

“This turned out to be a short story, not a novel!” (left on a single short story)

“I hate short stories hence my one-star review.” (left on a novel-length collection of short stories)

“I only read non-fiction.” (left on a full-length novel with a cover and title that could have been misconstrued as a biography)

It’s particularly important to get it right when promoting ebooks because the purchaser cannot physically assess the length of the book by picking it up in his hands. Yes, most sites state an approximate page length, but few readers check that detail, which is usually tucked away in small print along with the ISBN and publisher’s name. (Why approximate? Because the actual page length of any ebook will vary in practice according to the settings of the ereader that it’s read on, depending on the text size the user has chosen.)

Common Fiction Classifications

Click here to read the full post on ALLi.

4 Completely Scientific Ways To Know If Your Content Is Compelling

January 3, 2016September 28, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Jennifer Miller originally appeared on Fast Company’s Co.Create on 9/23/14.

What makes for compelling art? Any creator who has given half a thought to paying the rent, or achieving immortality, has considered what makes art sell. We know that the notion of quality–the idea that “the best” art and marketing and media reaches the most people–is insufficient to explain what gives some creations mass appeal. So why do people–large number of people–find books, ads, movies and art works compelling? How can we know, ahead of time, what will pique our curiosity and sustain our interest? Jim Davies, an associate professor at Carleton University’s Institute of Cognitive Science and director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory wanted to find out. The result is a theory of compellingness, outlined in his book Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe.

Davies’s entry point into what makes art riveting, however, did not start with an analysis of best-seller lists or top-40 charts. He came to the question of compellingness through the one thing in human experience that has inspired passionate feelings (good and bad) in the majority of the world’s population: religion. “Unless a religion is compelling in some way, it’s not going to take off,” he says. “Religion has explanations, stories, rituals, and that all caters to our basic psychological proclivities.” Today, he says, we treat old religions, like the Greek myths, as though they are works of art. “Those were stories that people wholeheartedly believed. Even an atheist can look at stories from Bible and admit that they’re good stories.” So what makes religion, and its compelling counterpart, art, truly riveting? And what impact will that have on the way we create and consume culture?

Click here to read the full post on Co.Create.

How To Diversify Your Income Beyond Your Book

January 3, 2016September 24, 2014 by Publetariat

This post by Kristen Eckstein originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 9/5/14.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a children’s book author, fiction writer, non-fiction how-to author, business person, or even a fine artist. The fact is, in this modern age of book publishing, you’re in business…

Period.

You’re in sales, you’re in the business of selling books, and hopefully you’re in the business of using your books as a gateway to make even more money with external products and services.

Any seasoned author will tell you that you won’t quickly get rich off book sales profits and royalties alone. The average traditionally-published non-fiction book royalty is a whopping 6% after print cost and the distributor’s discount.

That’s about 9 cents on a book that retails for $10. To make back the average advance of $500 for this type of book, you’d have to sell 5,556 copies. That’s over 5,500 copies before you’d see another penny from the publisher!

On the same indie-published book (that is, you own the distribution rights and publish under your own name, not through a self-publishing services company or vanity publisher), you’d make about $1.50 per copy.

To make $500 in book sales alone, you’d still need to sell over 300 copies.

Click here to read the full post on The Future of Ink.

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