Sell

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

Amazon, World Adult Content Police?

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This post originally appeared on Adele Journal on 5/23/13. Note that it is on the topic of book listing challenges faced by authors of erotica and other adult-oriented fiction, and the full article (link at the end of this excerpt) may include content that’s NSFW and inappropriate for children.

There’s a new sheriff in town, but I was quite happy with the land being lawless. Because, you know, us settlers were pretty good at regulating ourselves. From recent events, it’s clear to me, at least, that Amazon is trying to take control of the wilderness that is electronic publishing.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t be that surprising. They did make the Kindle, after all, and were pretty successful in making their name synonymous with ebooks for the general, mainstream public. But at the time, it didn’t look like Amazon was taking anything away from the ebook-reading people, just making it more available.

Now, they’re starting to impose their order on the wider landscape of all e-publishers, both amateur and professional, and they are taking things away from us.

 

The Amazon Adult Dungeon

If you haven’t heard of this, the Adult Dungeon is what some erotica authors are calling it when Amazon internally labels a work as “adult.” In itself, this is not problematic, as most erotica authors do a damn good job of laying out warnings and content labels in their descriptions. But when a work gets put into the Adult Dungeon, it is no longer searchable. If you search specifically for the title and author, you will not find it.

Nor will it get recommended in the “Customers who bought X also bought…”

They essentially blacklist any book thrown in their Adult Dungeon. They don’t tell the authors they’re doing this, and they don’t tell the readers, either. It’s done behind the backs of everyone involved. Amazon is taking away your right, as a grownup reader, to make your own decisions about what to read. Or, they think you can’t control your (non-mainstream) sexual imagination, so they feel like it’s their place to do it for you.

(This is also what happened, apparently, a few years ago, when they “mistakenly” marked all LGBT related books as ADULT. Of course, they claimed that it was a “glitch…”)

Author Selena Kitt points out — quite rightly — that erotica readers created the Kindle market. Why does anyone want an e-reader? For a private reading experience.

 

Click here to read the full post on Adele Journal.

 

William Saroyan International Prize for Writing

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Nominations are now being accepted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, which awards $5000 each to a fiction winner and nonfiction winner. Deadline for nominations is 1/31/14. From the Stanford University Libraries site:

The Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation jointly award the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, a biennial competition for newly-published books.

The prize commemorates the life, legacy and intentions of William Saroyan – author, artist, dramatist, composer – and is intended to encourage new or emerging writers, rather than to recognize established literary figures.

Entries are now being accepted for the 2014 Prize and must be received by January 31, 2014. Please view the FAQ page for further information.

Funding sponsored in part by Stanford Associates.

 

Click here to view the Saroyan International Prize web page, where full details of the judging criteria and award process can be accessed.

 

Invitation To Guest Blog For The Book Designer

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This post, by Joel Friedlander, originally appeared on his The Book Designer site on 1/12/14.

I want to make you famous.

Well, famous to a well-defined group of people; the readers of this blog.

As the world of self-publishing expands, it becomes more difficult for any one person to stay up to date with new services, advancing technologies, and the people who are making change happen.

At the same time I’m finding new ways to address the needs of indie book publishers by offering more and more choices for solid, well-constructed books.

This started with the articles on the blog that deal with
◾ Self-publishing basics
◾ Book design and production
◾ Distribution and discounting
◾ Marketing and platform building

It grew with the launch of my video-based training course for authors, the Self-Publishing Roadmap.

Now it includes the tools for authors at Book Design Templates, and will soon expand again.

However, this leaves me less time than ever before.

 

Write for The Book Designer

To accommodate all this growth, I’m looking for a few bloggers who would like to get “famous” by appearing on my blog. I’m looking for people who can make complex ideas simple, respond to what readers want to learn, and inspire writers to believe in their own publishing dreams.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post, which includes directions for how to contact Joel, on The Book Designer.

 

Scribd's New Ebook Subscription Service: Partnering with Publishers, Profiting from Piracy

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This post, by Michael Capobianco, originally appeared on Writer Beware on 1/9/14.

I was contemplating what to write for my first Writer Beware blog post, when a subject popped up out of the blue, packed with all kinds of fascinating questions.

Some of you may remember when SFWA tangled with the online “digital library” Scribd back in 2007. Scribd was loaded with unauthorized uploads of copyrighted material, but SFWA screwed up big time by sending a sort-of DMCA notice (it wasn’t really) to get works by many sf writers removed from the site. It was an embarrassment for SFWA, and over time made it less and less likely that the organization would do anything directly about illegal uploads, even though a plan had been developed to do so for members who had specifically authorized SFWA to act as their agent.

Since everything to do with online piracy left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth, I decided I would not go looking for illegally uploaded copies of my or other authors’ works, and I didn’t check to see if Scribd was following through on the promises it made at the time to provide real-time checking of works uploaded to the service.

Jump forward six years to now. The subject of Scribd came up on a SFWA forum as part of a controversy that I needn’t go into here, and I decided that it was finally time to check it out.

Six years has made a big difference. Scribd has set out to become a full-fledged bookstore to compete with Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and takes it one step farther with the addition of an all-you-can-eat subscription service that allows access to an unlimited number of ebooks for $8.99 a month. They are now partnering with HarperCollins and various other publishers, such as Smashwords, E-Reads, and Rosetta Books, with the promise of more to come. They cover a lot of ground; not only do they sell ebooks and subscriptions, they offer what look like unauthorized “previews” of many other books, with links to authorized retailers.

But finally, beneath all the new things, the old Scribd–offering not-necessarily-legal user uploads of copyrighted works–is still there. Only now Scribd has monetized them, since you can only see a “preview” of the material for free, and must be a paid subscriber to access the whole unauthorized upload.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Beware

 

How To Sell Your Integrity, $470 At A Time

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This post, by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 1/9/14.

Here are two new questions authors need to add to their vetting process when considering hiring out for author courses, services and how-to books:

Do you have an affiliate program for this product or service I’m considering, and if so, how much of the sales price will be paid to the affiliate advertiser?

Imagine that the answers to those questions are, “Yes, I do have an affiliate program, and half of the price you pay is sent back to the affiliate whose link you followed.”

So far, so bad. Now imagine the price you’re being asked to pay is $940, and $470 of that fee will be paid to the affiliate.

Pick your jaw up off the ground because I’m sorry to tell you, this is not some far-fetched scenario. Today I received this exact offer to become an affiliate advertiser for someone offering author and book marketing/publicity products and services.

I get affiliate requests pretty frequently but anyone who reads this blog or visits the Publetariat site regularly knows I don’t say “yes” to many of them. Today’s request is just about the best example I’ve seen to date for explaining why.

Here are the pertinent excerpts from the email invitation, with my comments below each. Note that any boldface emphasis in the quoted passages has been added by me.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Indie Author Blog.

 

Brave New Bullying: Goodreads Gangs, Amazon Attacks—What Are Writers to Do?

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In this post, Kristen Lamb shares her own experiences with bullies, from childhood days right up to the present, as well as her tips for dealing with online bullies who may be stressing you out, wasting your time, or even negatively impacting your sales. From the post:

Brave New Bullying
Now we live in a Digital Age and bullies abound. The Internet gives them access to torment us 24-7 no matter where we go. I was so thrilled the day I was asked to blog for Huffington, yet unlike here, I have no control over the tone of the comments. There are people who are simply made of spite and hate and they will take it out from the safety of a computer behind the anonymity afforded by monikers. Now when I post, I simply scan and, if anything is hateful in tone? I won’t even read it.

Sad to say, this is why I don’t read reviews before buying any book. There are too many sock puppets and trolls. Goodreads and Amazon are RIFE with bullying. I’ve had friends bullied on blogs and even once had someone start a hate blog directed toward me, “Kristen Lamb The Face of Misandry” which is “Man-hating”, btw. I had to look it up.

It’s sad to say, but when researching for this topic, it seemed most of the information was for kids, schools and teens. But bullies never go away. They often can’t be stopped, but maybe we can make it tougher for them to spread their cruelty.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes concrete steps you can take to discourage online bullying of yourself and other authors, on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

7 Ways To Deal With Troublesome Facebook Fans

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This post, by Aubre Andrus, originally appeared on Mashable on 1/4/14.

Social media managers know what’s up — with thousands of fans on a Facebook Page, there’s bound to be at least one who ruins the fun for everyone. He shoots down every post, is the first to call out a typo, and loves incorporating profanities into even his most positive comments.

Add your textbook spammers, angry customers and historically unhappy people to the mix and it’s no wonder someone has to keep an eye on your company’s Facebook Page at all times. It’s easy to consider banning every user who ruffles your feathers, but you should weigh multiple options before planning your attack strategy. Here are seven ways to deal with your least favorite Facebook fans: the a-holes.

1. Hide the post or comment.

To hide a comment, hover over the top-right hand “x” and click “Hide.” Now the post can only be seen by the person who wrote the comment and his or her friends. They’ll have no idea the post is hidden, and you can always click “Unhide” later if you like.

When someone posts on your Page’s Timeline and you’d like to delete it, click “x” in the top-right corner, then “Hidden from Page” from the dropdown menu. Be warned: If you hide a photo from your Timeline, it will still appear in your Page’s photo album. So be sure to delete it from the album if you’d like it to disappear for good.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Mashable.

 

The Getty and Google Unleash Free Art — And Your Creative Potential

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This article, by Drue Kataoka, originally appeared on Wired on 12/30/13. Those who do book cover design or who want photos or illustrations for books or marketing purposes will want to pay particular attention: you now have 5,400 more pieces of free, unrestricted artwork and photos to use.

Open sharing has been around forever, accelerating progress in diverse fields. Computing (e.g., Homebrew Computer Club), code (open source), and even academic publishing (“open access,” which goes beyond peer review) are just a few that have multiplied their social impact thanks to this openness. Art may be next, and here, too, technology will play a central role.

Just a couple months ago, The Getty quietly released 5,400 new, high-resolution (800dpi) images from its Getty Research Institute for public use. But here’s the revolutionary part: They did it without fees or restriction. To put this in perspective: Not one of New York’s largest museums — the MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan, or the Frick have done that yet.

The big deal here isn’t just that a premiere cultural institution is making so many images available to all, but that it signals a broader, emerging “open content” art movement.

Besides the Getty, the other art institutions leading this open content movement include Los Angeles’ LACMA (which made 20,000 images available for free, albeit in a smaller file size than Getty did), as well as D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. And Google. Yes, Google: its Google Art Project (now called the Google Cultural Institute) has been working since 2010 on changing attitudes towards digitization among cultural institutions. The resulting meta-museum now includes high-resolution images of artworks from over 300 institutions available online. Google’s collection is the largest and, not surprisingly, has the most sophisticated and user-friendly UI. However, unlike the Getty, LACMA, or the National Gallery, Google restricts image downloading and sharing.

Open content in art is a huge shift in attitude compared to fairly recently, when art museums viewed the web cautiously, at best.

 

Read the rest of the article on Wired.

 

Author's Year-End Marketing Checklist

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This post, by Stephanie Barko, originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 11/14/13.

Do you think of your writing as a hobby or a business? If your books mean business to you, this is a great time of year to evaluate how your 2013 marketing fared. Beginning now, there’s just enough time before the end of the year to assess performance-to-goals and plan for taxes.

Here is a list of questions designed to either save you money [this year] or expose some issues to correct before [next year].

SALES

How many books did I sell this year?

Which formats sold best?

Do I want to put my 2013 title out in another format or publish my next book or both?

Did I sell branded merchandise this year? Do sales indicate that it was priced right?

Do I want to merchandise my brand next year?

 

EXPENSES

Do I have the right amount of expenses to offset sales?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

62 of the Top Writing Articles from 2013 (That Can Help You in 2014)

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This post, by Brian Klems, originally appeared on Writer’s Digest on 1/2/14.

Over the past year I posted articles on this blog that covered everything—from grammar to writing better characters to getting published and more. Here’s a cheat sheet linking to what I consider the 62 best articles that can help you reach your writing goals. I broke it down into categories, as you’ll see below. These articles can help you no matter what phase of the writing process you are in. My goal is to help you move your writing career forward, and, by making this easy-to-reference guide, you’ll have a chance to bookmark it and have a one-stop place to help you have a successful year of writing.

Here’s to your best year of writing yet! ~Brian

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Writer’s Digest. It includes links to 62 WD articles on everything from craft to marketing.

 

6 Ways Micro-Publishing Strengthens Your Author Career

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This post, by Christina Katz, originally appeared on Jane Friedman’s site on 12/27/13.

For writers—especially nonfiction writers—a well-lit publishing-path through the murky wood of pundits, doomsdayers, and bestseller advice is micro-publishing.

Micro-publishing is not new, but when I use the term, I am referring to both the size of my publishing “house” and the length of my publications. In other words, micro-published books are short, tight, and swift. Experienced authors can deliver them in a steady flow, which can be less demanding and taxing than what it takes to create full-length books.

Micro-pubs vary widely in genre, format, and price point. (And fiction writers might consider serialization to be a better description of their micro-publishing landscape.) Micro-pubs with enough demand can become physical books eventually, usually when there is existing readership or demand for physical copies.

A meaningful discussion of micro-publishing has been pushed aside during the ongoing tug-of-war between traditional publishing and independent publishing (self-publishing). But we are well beyond “everyone is a writer” at this point. We have progressed into “everyone is a publisher,” if they wish to be—and we have been living in this realm for some time already.

Fortunately, micro-publishing benefits the industry as a whole by bringing some much-needed simplicity and directness into a publishing equation that is often weighted down by its own complexity and contracts. And it also benefits you, the writer. Here’s how.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

On Breaking Up With An Author: An Open Letter To Stephen King

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This post, by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 12/30/13.

I originally posted this open letter to Stephen King on my Facebook page, but it generated such a lively and sometimes heated discussion that I’ve decided to share it here. Let me preface what you’re about to read by saying I’ve been a big fan of Stephen King going all the way back to Carrie. Granted, I was only 8 years old when that first book was published, but I started in on King at the age of 13 or so and happily devoured everything he had to offer well into my 20’s. Whenever I wanted a good, old-fashioned scare from the type of book I didn’t dare read alone at night, King was my go-to source.

In 1999 King was hit by a car and needed an extended period of convalescence. He even spoke publicly about the possibility of retiring. It didn’t last, he came back in 2006 with Cell, and he’s continued to release new novels, essays and other works since. And I haven’t liked a single one of the novels he’s written since his return. Book after book, year after year, he continues to disappoint me and make me regret having given him the benefit of the doubt (and my time and money) yet again.

With that said, here’s my open letter.

– – – – –

Dear Stephen King:

It was a lovely reader-author relationship while it lasted, but it’s been over for at least a decade and it’s time for me to move on. I think it’s really wonderful that you’ve found faith and feel that it, and sobriety, have turned your life around. I just don’t enjoy the fact that those two things have become the central themes of virtually every piece of fiction you’ve written since you discovered them.

I came to you looking for truly frightening, taut, dark and edgy supernatural horror that explored the limits of human strength and character in the face of pure, inexplicable evil. But you haven’t been writing that kind of material for a very, very long time and what you have been writing has been so self-indulgent, maudlin and overwrought that’s it’s difficult for me to believe you even have an editor anymore.

I held out hope that with Dr. Sleep, your long-awaited sequel to The Shining, you would return to form at last. I was wrong. It’s less a supernatural horror thriller than an overlong, overwritten examination of sad-sack, grown-up, recovering alcoholic Danny filling in as your usual Christ figure as he takes on your recently-typical cadre of banal baddies.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Indie Author Blog.

 

Reviewers Behaving Badly

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This post, by AJ, originally appeared on Apology To John Keats on 3/24/13.

I’ve become just as suspect as anyone about the legitimacy of reviews. With authors paying for reviews, begging for five stars and dressing up as consumers to write inflated reviews of their own books it’s hard to trust all five of those shiny stars. But what happens when those seeming “authors behaving badly” are actually reviewers doing it themselves? Can a gushy, happy, joy-joy 5-star review actually be more detrimental to an author than a 2-star one?

From some personal experience, some fellow author’s experiences and a little observation, here are some pitfalls authors may encounter even in honestly obtained reviews.

 

1. The Facebook Comment As Review

“Omg, my cousin totally wrote this book and it’s amazing! I don’t read at all, but I think everyone should buy this book because my cousin spent a lot of time and money on this and it’s so cool that I’m related an author! 5 stars for Brooke and her awesome accomplishment!”

Ok, fine, if you want to put something like this on your Facebook page, knock yourself out but for the love of literary kittens do not post it on a distributor like Amazon or B&N or a review site like goodreads. It makes the author look like they have been soliciting reviews. I have no doubt the author (poor made up Brooke in this case) did NOT ask for an overzealous cousin to post this, but sadly some excited friends and family members do. Unless you have read the book and have more of an opinion as to why it’s good besides knowing the author personally, keep things like this on Facebook, not on review sites.

 

2. The Skimmer Writes a Review

“This is a great time-travel piece. The characters find a magical creek and drink the water and are transported to the Civil War where they free slaves from an auction. I loved the narrator and her brother was so funny. 5 stars.”

Well, that’s great, but in the book, they go to the creek AFTER they get tossed back in time because it is the only natural landmark they have to go by. Then they find out they are in 1855 (the Pre-Civil War era) and a vigilante group of abolitionists plots to steal slaves from an auction. And the narrator doesn’t have a brother, that guy is just her friend, though the narrator does lie that he’s her brother so it doesn’t seem so improper they are traveling together for the time period.

See the difference? I’ve had authors mention people recounting events in their books that never happened or are so skewed they make the story seem, well, stupid. Especially in fantasy, horror, or sci-fi when oversimplification can make even great books sound lame, it is pretty darn important for reviewers to know what they read. I’ve seen many readers at the library claim to “love” books they’ve only skimmed. It happens. But don’t write an incomplete review. It makes the author look like they don’t know how to tell a story and consumers will think the 5-star rating is unjustified.

 

3. The Stalker

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Apology To John Keats.

 

How to Get your books into the right Categories and Sub-categories: Readers to Books/Books to Readers—Part Three

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This post, by M. Louisa Locke, originally appeared on her blog on 12/16/13.

Introduction:

Two years ago, I wrote a blog piece about the importance of using categories, keywords, and tags (which no longer exist) to make your books visible in the Kindle Store. A year later I wrote an update that expanded on this and discussed how having your book in the right categories could make free and discount promotions more effective. The basic argument I made hasn’t changed––that an author needs to understand how categories work in order to use them to improve the chance their books will be found by readers who are browsing in the Kindle store.

If you aren’t convinced of the importance of categories in improving discoverability—you might want to go back and skim through those two posts or just Google “discoverability and categories” to see the multiple posts on this topic. However, for most of you, it isn’t the importance of categories but how to get your books into the right categories that you are most interested in––and there have been a number of significant changes warranting a new update on this topic.

First, the number and kinds of categories and sub-categories in the Kindle Store have increased dramatically in the last year.

Second, the methods of getting a book into the correct categories and sub-categories have expanded, with keywords becoming particularly important.

Third, these changes have made the process even more confusing to authors.

Definitions:

Because these changes have resulted in a good deal of confusion in terminology—I am going to start here. While KDP has generally improved the experience for authors by introducing a whole plethora of help documents, the terminology used in these help documents and by KDP help staff is not always consistent. I will try and delineate some of these inconsistencies and provide some clarity below.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

The Good And Bad In Chaotic eBook Pricing

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This post, by Mike Masnick, originally appeared on Techdirt on 10/8/13.

For years we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of ebook pricing, where some publishers seem to think that sky high prices for ebooks (often higher than physical copies) make sense, despite the lack of printing, packaging, shipping and inventory costs. And, of course, we won’t even get into the question of the price fixing debacle. Art Brodsky recently wrote a fascinating piece over at Wired about how ebook pricing is an “abomination,” because it’s designed to price people out of reading. He points out that we should think more about ebooks like we think about apps, since that’s a much more direct comparison than “books.” And then he gets into a discussion of how publishers are going crazy with their library pricing:

Take the example of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymous book, Cuckoo’s Calling. For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 from book distributor Baker & Taylor — close to the consumer price of $15.49 from Barnes & Noble and of $15.19 from Amazon. But even though the ebook will cost consumers $6.50 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, libraries would pay $78 (through library ebook distributors Overdrive and 3M) for the same thing.

Somehow the “e” in ebooks changes the pricing game, and drastically. How else does one explain libraries paying a $0.79 to $1.09 difference for a physical book to paying a difference of $71.50 just because it’s the electronic version? It’s not like being digital makes a difference for when and how they can lend it out.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Techdirt.