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

C’mon, Book Marketing Isn’t That Hard

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This post by JW Manus originally appeared on her site on 8/2/14.

I see and hear about a lot of writers wanting to sign an agent and go for a traditional deal because, “The agent and publisher know how to market my book and I don’t. It’s too hard.”

Nuh-uh.

Here’s how it works: Agents know how to market to certain editors; Editors know how to market to their editorial heads and marketing departments; Marketing departments know how to market to retail distributors. What none of them know (or maybe they don’t bother with) is how to market to readers. That’s the writer’s job. Trad or indie, if you don’t know how to market, your books are sunk. In fact, if you don’t have a marketing base before you submit to either an agent or editor, your chances of even getting a second look are slim to none.

What’s a poor writer to do? Panic is not an option. Truly, marketing is NOT that hard. Basically, all marketing is: Being in the right place in front of the right people with the right product.

 

Click here to read the full post on JW Manus’ site.

 

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch In Conversation With J.A. Konrath

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/1/14.

Joe: Yesterday I fisked Mike Shatkin, who openly brags he doesn’t read my blog, and has removed my comments from his blog because he felt them too long.

I also fisked Michael Cader from Publishers Lunch.

Cader, however, showed he doesn’t fear debate, and had no problem sharing his opinion in a forum where many have a contrary point of view. He responded to my points in the comment section, and that took integrity and more than a little bit of guts.

Michael Cader: Hi, Joe. I’m glad we have at least some points of agreement. Some of your other replies are tangential rather than on point.

Joe: Thanks for responding, Michael. While it isn’t unprecedented for people I blog about to respond, it is certainly unusual, and shows both an open mind and a willingness to engage. You have my respect.

Cader: Amazon is very careful with their words, even if not elegant. The post begins, “A key objective is lower e-book prices.” A lot of traditional media have written the post up as if it said “The key objective…” What are the other key objectives, Amazon? Why do your conversations with people in the trade talk about looking for your fare share of the “business efficiencies” produced by a rising ebook market and your investments, while your public words are only about pricing objectives.

Joe: Well, we agree that Amazon is careful with their words. It’s unusual to hear an observation like that leveled as a criticism. Does Cader prefer the Hachette approach, which is to clear English what a chainsaw is to a tree…?

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Creative Entrepreneur: Business Models For Authors

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 7/25/14.

This is a continuation in the author entrepreneur series of articles. Recently, I posted the arc of the indie author from first book to CEO of your global business.

Today we’re focusing on the various business models that authors can use to generate revenue and satisfy customers.

Of course, many authors have day jobs which is a great way to pay the bills and writing can then be for fun or extra income, but this article is aimed at authors who are intent on going full-time in this business.

 

Why do you need to define your business model?

Defining your business model can help keep you focused. Opportunities expand as your profile grows and keeping your business model top of mind can help you say no to things that distract you. [I need to remind myself of this all the time!]

For example, renowned indie author JA Konrath states, “I gave up on public appearances a few years ago, because of diminishing returns. They were indeed fun, but the cost and time away from writing wasn’t worth it to me.”

My business model includes professional speaking as well as being an author, but recently I have started to turn down speaking work in order to focus more on the writing and only taking interesting speaking events, like Sweden in September. I’ll be sharing my business plan at some point soon, but in considering where to focus my efforts, these were the most common business models I discovered – and some people mix and match between them.

 

Business model 1: Non-fiction books with info products, speaking and consulting

 

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

 

How Facebook Calculates What Appears In Your News Feed

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This post by Mari Smith originally appeared on her site on 7/18/14.

The problem with Facebook organic reach can be summed up in one single graphic: Only 6 percent of your fans are seeing your content in their news feed. The other 94 percent are not.

Some sources indicate that organic reach may drop to 1-2 percent in the near future. Others say it’s destined to hit zero; it’s only a matter of time.

These stats are a big drop from the already low 16 percent that Facebook indicated back in April 2012.

What is causing the decline in organic reach?

The simplest answer is there is a significantly greater amount of potential content flooding into our news feeds on a daily basis. This bigger firehose of content is caused by several factors, including:

– The average number of Facebook friends users have is 338 (that’s a big increase compared to 130 back in 2008).

– 15 percent of Facebook users have more than 500 friends.

– There are between 1500 and 15,000 pieces of content that Facebook could potentially show in your news feed each time you log on to the site!

– The Facebook news feed ranking algorithm (some folks call this formula ‘EdgeRank’) uses more than 100,000 weights* to determine what you’ll see.

– Ultimately, out of the 1,500 – 15,000 potential stories, Facebook passes them through the mega algorithm and displays approximately 300 stories in your feed.

*Examples of weights: how many mutual friends like the person/page/content, how often you interact with the person/page, when the post was published, when the last comment was made, what types of content you typically interact with: watch more videos and Facebook will show you more videos, like more links and Facebook will show you more links.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes charts, an infographic and 12 concrete tips for expanding organic “reach”, on Mari Smith’s site.

 

Censorship War: Website Unmasks Links Google is Blocking From Search Results

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This post originally appeared on RT.com on 7/17/14.

A subversive website has been launched to keep track of news and other webpages Google has “censored” from the search engine’s index, following the European Court of Justice’s controversial Right to be Forgotten ruling.

The tech giant has reportedly been inundated with 70,000 requests to remove sensitive information from its search results in the aftermath of the ECJ’s decision. While this data may be accurate, it is considered “irrelevant” and possibly defamatory under the EU policy shift.

In a mark of protest against online censorship, a new site ‘Hidden From Google’ has begun archiving links censored by search engines intent on complying with ECJ demands. The site was set up by US web developer and transparency advocate, Afaq Tariq.

The New Jersey developer asserts the removal of links from a search engine’s index amounts to censorship. So in an effort to preserve transparency in Europe’s online realm, he invites visitors to log data that has been removed from Google on the site.

“This list is a way of archiving the actions of censorship on the Internet,” Tariq states on the site’s about page. “It is up to the reader to decide whether our liberties are being upheld or violated by the recent rulings by the EU.”

 

Click here to read the full post on RT.com.

 

10 Alternatives to Goodreads

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This post by Lysa Grant originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 7/14/14.

This post is an addendum to Author Directory Sites: The Complete List. If you’re just looking for library/catalog sites, here you go. There’s no reason to stop at Goodreads, even if it is the biggest and most used.

Well, let me amend that. There are so many hours in the day, so if you want to concentrate your efforts on a library site, it makes sense to stick with Goodreads. If you’ve got time to spare, putting some time and energy into these sites can only help. And if all you want to do is create a profile and bail, that can’t exactly hurt either.

 

Shelfari

Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers (for now). Shelfari is a gathering place for authors, aspiring authors, publishers, and readers, and has many tools and features to help these groups connect with each other in a fun and engaging way. Our mission is to enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.

Tips for using Shelfari

 

Library Thing

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

A guide to LibraryThing for publishers (from LibraryThing)

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes highlights for 8 additional reader sites, on Self-Publishing Review.

 

12 Tips for Writing Blog Posts That Get Noticed

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 7/14/14.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t possibly get to all the blogs I’d like to in any given day. We’re all busy people, so we want to know within seconds whether a blog post will offer anything of value to our hectic lives. And we might even get annoyed at time-wasters that meander or don’t deliver on their promises.

Blogging is a great way to build a community feeling, connect with readers and writers, and get your books noticed. I’m honored and proud to be a member of this award-winning group blog, The Kill Zone, where my fellow bloggers, all savvy, accomplished writers, offer daily value and entertainment to writers, and our community of eager participants enrich every post with insightful comments.

But if you’re just getting started in the world of blogging and want to build a following, the most important thing to remember is that it’s not about you. It’s all about offering the readers value in an open, accessible style and format. A rambling, unclear, too formal, or overly long blog post can be irritating or boring – a turnoff. And can jeopardize your reputation or blog.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes 12 specific tips with details on each, on The Kill Zone.

 

Kindle Book Pricing and How the Big Guys Don’t Get It.

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This post by Dennis Blanchard originally appeared on the K1YPP blog on 7/10/14.

I love to read. For some reason, as a young reader, I missed many of the classics. I’ve made up for lost time over the years by “catching up.” Books like The Catcher In The Rye, Of Mice And Men, White Fang and On The Road have been books that I’ve only read in the last twenty years or so. The same goes for movies, I’ve caught up on The African Queen, Casablanca, The Godfather and others in the last few years. How did I miss them? I don’t know, perhaps I just spent so much time outside when I was younger, I just missed them. That is a subject for another time.

Yesterday, I read a news piece on CNN about an author that was gored running with the bulls in Pamplona. Bill Hillmann, author of “Fiesta, How To Survive The Bulls Of  Pamplona.” How ironic. It occurred to me that I had not read anything much by Hemingway recently, so I decided to take a look online and see if I could find his book, “The Sun Also Rises.” I figured that, surely, by now, it must be on Kindle for an inexpensive price, or perhaps, even free. Surely.

 

Click here to read the full post on the K1YPP blog.

 

Judge Orders Unmasking of Amazon.com “Negative” Reviewers

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This article by David Kravets originally appeared on Ars Technica on 7/11/14. While the case in question concerns nutritional supplements, this precedent has wider implications for ALL Amazon reviews, including book reviews.

Decision broaches anonymous commenting versus unfair business practices.

A federal judge has granted a nutritional supplement firm’s request to help it learn the identities of those who allegedly left “phony negative” reviews of its products on Amazon.com.

The decision means that Ubervita may issue subpoena’s to Amazon.com and Cragslist to cough up the identities of those behind a “campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace” (PDF).

According to a lawsuit by the maker of testosterone boosters, multivitamins, and weight loss supplements, unknown commenters had placed fraudulent orders “to disrupt Ubervita’s inventory,” posted a Craigslist ad “to offer cash for favorable reviews of Ubervita products,” and posed “as dissatisfied Ubervita customers in posting phony negative reviews of Ubervita products, in part based on the false claim that Ubervita pays for positive reviews.”

 

Click here to read the full article on Ars Technica.

Also see this related story on Consumerist: Court Orders Amazon To Reveal Identities Of Negative Reviewers.

 

Amazon-Hachette: The Sounds of Silence

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This post by William Ockham originally appeared on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 7/13/14.

Everybody’s talking about Amazon’s latest move in the Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle and the reactions have been pretty predictable. Lots of confirmation bias going around. While the public broadsides, grand offers, and nasty anonymous leaks are full of sound and fury, I’m fond of looking for the truth in the silence. What the companies aren’t saying is as important to understanding the situation as what they are saying. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but neither side has denied any of the specific factual claims the other has made. In fact, if we read between the lines, we can cut through the noise and see what’s really happening. I have learned* the best way to do that is to make a timeline. Our brains have a tendency to remember the order in which we learned a set of facts and it has a hard to reassembling the chronological order of how things actually happened. We should be continually re-evaluating our understanding of this situation based on new information.

Recent statements from both sides have provided a lot more information about how this dispute got to this point. To avoid turning Joe’s blog into an academic article, I’m not going to footnote all of these events. If you want the source for a particular claim, just ask in the comments. My primary sources are the most recent Amazon-Hachette exchange and Michael J. Sullivan’s account of his interactions with Amazon and Hachette this year. If I have left off any significant events and gotten any of this wrong, please let me know in the comments [section on the original post]. I’m far more interest[ed] in getting this right than being right.

 

Early Jan 2014

Amazon makes the first move, sending an offer to Hachette. Based on Hachette leaks, we know that Amazon is offering a return to wholesale pricing.

7 Feb 2014

Amazon stops discounting Hachette titles.

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Riding a Wave: How ‘Boys in the Boat’ Became a Best-seller

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This article by Mary Ann Gwinn originally appeared on The Seattle Times on 7/13/14.

Here’s a secret that authors and publishers would give a lot to know: What makes a best-seller? Marketing campaigns? Social-media strategies? Media attention? Sales-pushing algorithms?

Redmond author Daniel James Brown has one answer, and it’s none of the above. Here’s the story of the success of one worthy book.

Brown is the author of the best-selling “The Boys in the Boat”(Penguin), the true saga of the University of Washington crew team, winners of an Olympic gold medal in 1936. This team of nine young athletes traveled to the Berlin Olympics, an event staged-managed by Hitler and the Nazis, and vanquished the Germans’ hand-picked crew. The book is in its fifth week as the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction paperback in the country, according to The New York Times. (It’s No. 5 on the best-seller list that covers all forms of nonfiction, both print and e-book.)

Improbably, no Seattle-based author had recognized the potential in the story until Brown, a California transplant, technical writer and author of two nonfiction books, made a visit to the elderly father of a neighbor in Redmond about six years ago. The neighbor, Judy Willman, had been reading one of Brown’s previous books to her dying father, Joe Rantz, and told Brown that it would thrill Joe if he would spend time with her dad.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Seattle Times.

 

Breaking Free – What Happened When I Left KDP Select

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 6/6/14.

“KDP Select is evil”. “Free promotions are pointless”. “Nick, you’re an idiot”. These are things I hear on a daily basis, the latter usually being something I say to myself when I’m looking in the mirror. As for the first two, I talk to a lot of authors who have a strong opinion on the relative merits of signing up for 90 days of exclusivity with Amazon, and the words “shackled” and “dungeon” come up a lot. It’s the same for free days – half of authors think they’re a God-send, the other half would rather cut off their own limbs with a rusty spatula than offer their work gratis. And that’s cool, I don’t have anything against people having wildly different opinions – and there are plenty of authors making a decent income without touching free promotions, and there are plenty who swear by them. But I like to look at the cold, hard numbers before coming to a conclusion, as everybody’s mileage seems to vary.

The two main strategies for free books I see most often are:

1. A variety of titles signed up to KDP Select, with rotating free promotions on each book. This is pretty easy to do with the 5 free days you get to play with under the KDP Select contract.

2.Titles NOT in KDP select, and up on other vendors, with the first book in the series permanently free. This is also pretty easy to do.

There are pros and cons for both approaches, but last month was the first time I’d tried option number (2). I’ve had a bunch of emails and comments asking for me to report back on the results, so here’s the skinny:

Income Report: All Books in KDP Select

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes sales graphs and detailed analysis, on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

The Struggle That Makes the Art

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 6/6/14.

If there’s a frequently asked question I get which isn’t a variation on “How can a girl write boy sex?” it’s a riff on “How can I be successful as a writer?” I think I get the question a lot because I’m clearly mid-list, doing well but not even in the same zip code as people whose signing lines wrap around the building. I have the career a lot of people want, because everybody knows those megawatt stars are rare. But I’m making well more than a living wage as an author, and that seems an attainable dream. It’s just that nobody can figure out how to do it. How did I? How can others emulate me?

I can answer the question, but I’ll warn you right now a lot of people won’t like the answer, and even more won’t even hear it. Because how I did it is that I worked hard. I mean, I worked. Like a dog. Like a crazy person. Like a desperate freak. I struggled like I’ve struggled for nothing else, and I haven’t stopped. I stripped myself down and made myself understand who I was and what I could do, and then I did what I could to expand my limitations. I believe my struggle and pain, both personal and professional, define and make my art. I believe anyone, everyone, can do this too. Yet the short version of why so many people don’t make it even to a comfortable middle ground has nothing to do with the difficulties of publishing or whether or not we should all toss off publishers entirely, or the quality of the art, or whether or not Amazon is an asshole for bullying Hachette. Most people’s art doesn’t earn them a living because they cannot let go of the fantasy that all they have to do is show up with a product and the world will hand them cash. Most people cannot accept the truth that the work required to get money from art is so onerous it changes the nature of the art itself.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog.

 

Why Self-Publishing Authors Must Think Like a Publisher

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This post by Stacey Aaronson originally appeared on The Savvy Book Marketer on 3/18/14.

So many authors write for their love of writing or their desire to share their story or message, but if we want to sell books, it’s important to treat publishing like a business. In today’s guest post Stacey Aaronson discusses the mindset of thinking like a publisher.

After working with over twenty independent authors over the past two years as their editor, book designer, and publishing partner, one glaring issue has come to light:

The majority of self-publishing authors don’t realize that they can’t merely think like a writer; they must think like a publisher—if, that is, they want to sell books.

The thing is, it’s not easy for writers to shift into this mode of thinking—and I would venture to guess that most writers don’t even know they should be thinking this way before they even begin a manuscript. As a writer myself, I confess I didn’t consider the publisher’s mentality until I became a book production professional in the indie publishing realm, so I know firsthand how foreign it can seem.

But here’s the unsavory truth: the various self-publishing portals that have opened the door for would-be authors to get a book into readers’ hands are great, but many writers are running to upload all degrees of manuscripts—from the languishing and rejected, to the unedited and poorly designed—without honoring the legacy of traditional publishing. In short, thousands of substandard books are entering the literary marketplace because a multitude of writers are sadly stuck not only in ego mode, but in the belief that producing a book is somehow not a craft and an art. If we don’t want to destroy the reputation of books altogether—and if we want to reap a financial benefit as an author—this mindset has to change.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

Amazon Speaks!

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This post by Alex Shephard originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 7/3/14.

Amazon does not like to talk. And Amazon especially does not like to talk to the press—when the company felt it had to address its dispute with Hachette in late-May it avoided the media completely, and instead released an odd, condescending statement on its Kindle forum. In every report about its ongoing negotiations with Hachette you could expect to find one, beautiful sentence: “An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.”

That changed late Tuesday, when an Amazon representative—Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of Kindle content—did comment, to the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg. The timing was, perhaps, deliberate—Trachtenberg’s piece went up shortly before “Amazon: Business as Usual?” a panel discussion hosted by The New York Public Library began. That panel discussion featured a number of outspoken Amazon critics, including James Patterson, Bob Kohn, and Tim Wu. Amazon was clearly paying attention: it paid to fly self-publishing blogger and pro-Amazon zealot David Vandagriff to New York City to participate. (That Amazon finds Vandagriff, who does little to hide his disgust with “traditional publishing” on his blog, to be an appropriate spokesperson for the company’s aims is interesting, though it’s possible that they merely wanted to counter-balance the other panelists’ anti-Amazon views. Fight fire with fire: the Amazon way.) Once again, Amazon found the media narrative slipping away, and it decided to fight back.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.