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

Free & Discounted Ebooks During Read An Ebook Week!

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March 8 – 14 is Read An Ebook week, and in honor of the event many authors who publish their books in electronic format are making those books available for free or at a discount for a limited time. 

 

Some of the books on offer from Publetariat contributors, members and friends are listed below (click each cover to read more about each book and access download links).  See this page at Smashwords for even more free and discounted ebook selections—note that you may need to click through to each book’s detail page to view the coupon codes that allow you to buy the ebook for free or at a discount.

Authors who are offering their ebooks for free or at a discount and are not listed here, feel free to add to this list via the comment form at the end of the article.

RealmShift – Supernatural thriller from Publetariat contributor Alan Baxter – available in multiple formats at Smashwords – use the coupon code displayed on the book’s product page at Smashwords to download for 50% off!  Be sure to check out Alan’s other supernatural thriller, MageSign, also at 50% off on Smashwords this week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kept – Supernatural romance from Publetariat contributor Zoe Winters – FREE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As The World Dies: The First Days, A Zombie Trilogy – Supernatural thriller/horror from Rhiannon Frater – available in multiple formats at Smashwords – use the coupon code displayed on the book’s product page at Smashwords to download for 49% off!  Be sure to check out Rhiannon’s other two books on the site, Pretty When She Dies: A Vampire Novel and As The World Dies: Fighting To Survive, which are both also available for 49% off.

 

 

 

How To Enjoy Your Job – nonfiction from Publetariat contributor Joanna Penn – available in multiple formats at Smashwords – use the coupon code displayed on the book’s product page at Smashwords to download for 49% off!

 

 

 

 

 

Boob Tube – Chick lit from Publetariat contributor Mark Coker, co-written with Lesleyann Coker – available in multiple formats at Smashwords – use the coupon code displayed on the book’s product page at Smashwords to download for 49% off!

 

 

 

 

 

Snow Ball – dark, comic mystery from Publetariat’s founder, April L. Hamilton – available in multiple formats at Smashwords – use the coupon code displayed on the book’s product page at Smashwords to download for FREE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adelaide Einstein – comic fiction/chick lit, also from Publetariat’s founder, April L. Hamilton – available in multiple formats at Smashwords – use the coupon code displayed on the book’s product page at Smashwords to download for FREE!

 

 

 

 

AND NOW, as a special reward for those of you who read all the way to the bottom of this piece and are paying attention, here’s another special gift from Publetariat’s founder in honor of Read An Ebook week.

Tweet to share this page!

Affordable Advertising

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From the Publetariat Editor’s Desk: 

A major challenge facing indie authors, small imprints and freelance author services professionals is promotion. 

Advertising on heavily-trafficked sites is typically too expensive for indies and freelancers, but the more affordable ads on smaller sites may not get the traffic needed to make the investment worthwhile. 

This week, Publetariat is rolling out its paid advertising program.  Now, you can get your ad in front of the thousands of people who visit Publetariat each day for just US$32 – $75 per week when you book for a whole month, and US$50 – $100 per week when you book one week at a time. Even if you want to go crazy and book the most premium ad slot, right beneath the login block on the front page of the site, for a whole month, it’ll only set you back US$300. Ad space can be reserved weeks or even months in advance, to synchronize your ad’s timing with your book, site, product or service launch.

But that’s the pricing for just anyone off the street, we can do better for our friends.  Registered members are entitled to a 15% discount off regular rates. 

Since its launch on 2/11/09, Publetariat has quickly gone viral and already has an Alexa traffic rank in the top 3.66% of all websites worldwide.  But Alexa ranks are based on a 3 month average; since Publetariat has only been open to the public for 25 days, its adjusted rank is actually in the top 1.33%.  Publetariat is already averaging 5,000 hits per day, our RSS feed has received over 4,500 hits in the past 25 days, and average time spent on the site per visitor is 8 minutes.

To view Publetariat’s full ad rate card with booking information, click here.

Personal [And Author] Branding In The Age of Google

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In his blog entry of 2/28/09 , Seth Godin offers the following anecdote:

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper. Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, "binge drinking."

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, "I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings."

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Of course, you don’t have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you’re on Candid Camera, because you are.

This cautionary tale is just as relevant to authors as it is to job-seekers.  Whenever someone reads or hears about your work and would like to learn more, Google is likely to be the first stop on the fact-finding mission.  All authors want to present a polished, professional web presence to the world, but it’s even more critical for indie authors to do so because indies are still working to gain mainstream acceptance and a wider readership.

So take a long, hard look at your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blog and personal website pages, and ask yourself if the content there will leave viewers with a positive impression of you as an author.  If not, edit and clean up accordingly, but don’t expect those skeletons in your web closet to vanish the moment you hit the Delete key; Google and other search engines can keep archive copies of web pages for years. 

As Mr. Godin suggests, the best you can do following an online image scrubbing is to load any search engine results with pages and references that do you proud. Post fresh content on your site(s) and blog(s), and post comments to popular online discussion boards, sites and blogs—under the same name as that under which you publish, since that’s the name interested parties are most likely to type into a search engine when seeking more information about you.  In a day or two, the new content and comments will turn up in web searches of your name, pushing the old, archived stuff you no longer want so prominently displayed further down the list of search results.  Continue with your front-loading mission, daily if necessary, until the undesirable, archived content is buried at least a couple of pages down in web search results for your name.

My Big Rant On Self-Publishing

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This piece, by Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest, originally appeared on her There Are No Rules blog on 2/27/09.

I can’t tell you how tired I am of hearing people bash self-publishing. The things I hear usually fall into two categories:
 

  • Most self-published books aren’t quality
  • Some self-publishing services are unethical

If you agree with one of the above statements, let me lay it out real clear for you: The landscape is changing, and if you haven’t noticed, you’re behind the times. This particular blog post addresses the quality issue, because the ethics issue is becoming less of a problem. The moment any self-pub service tries to pull a fast one or do something questionable, it’s trumpeted far and wide online. And often it’s the people who aren’t doing their research and due diligence that get taken advantage of. I’m not saying it’s right for this to happen, nor do I condone it, but all industries have bad eggs.

But moving on, consider:
 

  • Traditional publishers now rely on authors to do all the marketing and promotion. It used to be that writers could concentrate on writing and forget about that icky sales and marketing stuff. Well, welcome to the new world. Marketing is now expected from authors. And authors who survive will be the ones who find ways to authentically grow their platform and meaningfully reach their readership.
  • Communities will decide what books are worthwhile, and communities won’t have ego-filled judgments. Publishers will always be giving their authors one thing that is hard to come by: a measure of instant credibility. (That is: Someone thought this was good enough to take a financial risk on.) In good scenarios, there is also collaboration: to make a good book a great book. But soon, communities will have as much power as publishers to decide what books deserve attention. Plus you and I will be more likely to trust judgments coming from people we know and have something in common with, not necessarily The New York Times. It goes back to the whole end of cultural authority.

Read the rest of the article at the There Are No Rules blog.

Advertisements For Yourself: Can, and Should, Book Authors Become Brands?

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This piece, by Jill Prulick, originally appeared on The Big Money on 1/28/09.

People in the book business rarely agree on much, but no one disputes that the long-suffering industry is slogging through one of its worst periods ever. Editors are freezing their acquisition budgets; publishing houses are shrinking; booksellers are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands.

What does that mean? It depends. In the book world, where the word "brand" is either sacrosanct or dirty, there’s little consensus. Is there a difference between a best-selling author and a brand? What is the process by which an author becomes a brand—and is it a good thing?

The answers are as varied as weather in New England: A brand goes beyond one format into television or film; a brand is someone you would read regardless of the subject. For every theory ("All best-sellers are brands, but not all brands are best-sellers"), there’s a near converse ("You need to achieve best-seller status to launch a brand"). And some shun brands entirely. "Authors of best-selling books are not brands," insisted former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman.

There are even more contradictions. Traditional branding—a mix of ads, media appearances, and book tours-is dying. Marketing departments are being slashed. Authors are pushed to promote their own books, while reviews-and their accompanying ad space-are shrinking. Independent advertiser Verso, which recently launched targeted online advertising, now spends about $2,000 to $3,000 per book on marketing, a fraction of its budget a year ago. And yet publishers, agents, and editors all say that recognition, dependability, and longevity sell books.

No one questions that James Patterson, author of 45 New York Times best-sellers and subject of a case study in brand management at Harvard Business School, is a brand, thanks to an army of consultants. Patterson’s books, which have grossed more than $1 billion and have filled the author’s coffers to the tune of more than $100 million, are practically encoded with unifying, Patterson DNA—from the title to the packaging to the hook and hanging cliffhanger.

The clear lines end there. Five percent to 10 percent of publishers’ lists, the so-called blockbusters, are top-performing authors with built-in, expanding audiences—i.e., brands. Tom Clancy. Patricia Cornwell. Suze Orman. Mitch Albom. Or are they? "I don’t really look at him as a brand," said Albom’s agent, David Black, who recently negotiated the deal to release an Albom commencement speech on the Kindle to extend the author’s reach. "Whatever we can do to expand his audience we will do."

Brands are often the elephant in the room no one wants to confront. Some authors consider it unwise to be branded as, er, brands; it’s a signpost for low-brow, mass-market sensibility. And it’s also the case that the vast majority of fiction writers, even today’s best-sellers, did not begin their lives as brands. Many were unknowns whom publishers rejected. Believe it or not, there was a time when few had heard of John Grisham. He sold his first book from the back of a car and no one was interested. Then came The Firm. "I took John to bookstores, and, at every turn, clerks were putting his book into the hands of customers," said Ellen Archer, president of Hyperion Books. It became a hit and launched the author into a brand name.

In today’s fickle marketplace, the Internet—with blogs, videos, Twitter, and other promotional tools like Amazon’s Author Stores—is the modern-day equivalent to hand-selling. Thomas Friedman even posted a chapter of Hot, Flat and Crowded on LinkedIn and asked members to weigh in. (Disclosure: I was part of Friedman’s publishing team.) In a way, authors are empowered in this new model, provided they can leverage their networks into living, breathing communities who have a stake in—and benefit from—an author’s ballooning platform.

But it comes with a price. When authors are beholden to a brand, they ally themselves, almost like actors and athletes, with agendas and meanings that are well beyond their control. In their desire to fulfill the dictates of a brand, authors can compromise their integrity as writers, especially if they cubbyhole themselves.

The Chick Lit genre provides numerous examples. The Nanny Diaries, published in 2002, sold more than 1.5 million copies and was made into a film starring Scarlett Johansson. But the author’s 2004 follow-up, Citizen Girl, pitched as social satire—male bosses filled in for Park Avenue socialites—was a flop. The authors, who reportedly were unable to sell their idea to Random House, settled on Simon & Schuster’s Atria—and satisfied the beast that was the brand. Lauren Weisberger, "Bridget Jones," and Melissa Bank suffered similar trajectories—some worse than others—and their careers as writers have waned.

Read the rest of the article at The Big Money.

Mur Lafferty and "New Media"

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This post, by Edmund Schubert, originally appeared on his Side-Show Freaks blog, and features a guest post from author Mur Lafferty.

A few weeks ago I posted an essay about achieving success in the publishing industry that included a link to an article posted on Time Magazine’s website. One of the people quoted in that Time article was a friend of mine named Mur Lafferty, a fiction and non-fiction author who has built her career on using new and open media.

She can be found on Suicide Girls as a regular columnist, on Tor.com as a blogger, or on her home page, murverse.com. Her first novel, Playing For Keeps, is available via print and free audio podcast (and was reviewed on IGMS by James Maxey). She graciously agreed to write more about the subject of new media, for which I am grateful. I’ll let her take it from here…

Edmund posted recently on this blog about podcasters getting publishing contracts. He then invited me to guest blog here, and I wanted to discuss this in more detail.

I am a podcaster who built an audience of over 40,000 via free giveaways of audio podcasts and PDF podcasts, so you can guess I’m rather gung-ho about new media. Podcasting my book led directly to it being picked up by a small press and released in print.

Yes, print publication, or "old media" is my ultimate goal. Giving work away for free is not a way to directly make money, obviously. But new media allowed me to connect to an audience, make them care about my work, and then ask them to help me with the marketing of the small press book. Many bought copies of the book for themselves and to give as gifts. I received one email from a woman who appreciated the free podcast so much that she promised to buy several copies for Christmas gifts.

I’m never clear on what number makes a small press book a success, but I earned out my advance and had a strong showing on Amazon for several weeks after the release, so I’m pretty pleased with the sales numbers of a book that never hit the bookshelves.

New media is not a fad or a gimmick. It’s not a pipe dream or a crazy idea. It’s a way to connect directly to an audience in a way that just a website will not do. Established authors with existing audiences can afford to look down on new media, but new authors with no audience would do well to consider audio or ebook releases of their work.

The relationship with the community is what it’s all about. What I’ve discovered from the listeners who hear my voice talking to them in intros and read me on blogs and Twitter, is that they want me to succeed. I’m not an author in an ivory tower to them, I’m a person trying to climb a pretty big mountain and can’t do it alone. (Yeah. Sometimes I mix metaphors.) When these people see my book, they don’t think, "Oh, a superhero novel by that author I heard of once." They think, "Mur’s book came out! Awesome!"

I had a man approach me at DragonCon last year. The conversation went something like this:
 

Read the rest of the post at the Side-Show Freaks blog.

Social Pressure Can Solve The 'Copying' Problem Even Without Copyright

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This article, by Mike Masnick, originally appeared on techdirt on 2/23/09. 

from the reputation-is-a-scarce-good dept

Whenever we talk about a world without copyright, people chime in about how awful it would be because someone can just "take" someone else’s content and pretend it’s their own. However, that’s not nearly as easy as people make it out to be.

As we’ve pointed out before, in many such cases, it won’t take people long to figure out where the content really originated from, and the end result is that the "copyist" (especially if it’s blatant, and they do little to improve the content) has their reputation slammed. And, since your reputation is a scarce good (often one of the most important in any business model), there is strong social pressure to stop any such copying.

Two recent examples demonstrate this in a very clear manner.

First, MAKE Magazine noted that publishers Klutz/Scholastic were publishing a book on BristleBots, small robots made out of toothbrush heads, and failed to credit the folks who had originally created BristleBots, a group called Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, as an example of a simple, do-it-yourself, robot making system. It was a pretty blatant copy, from both the name to the design. And, while Klutz/Scholastic at first tried to claim that it was independently created, the similarities between the two made that difficult to believe. This resulted in a public outcry from many different sites, and Klutz/Scholastic finally agreed to back down and will credit the Evil Mad Scientists in all future releases. Notice that this didn’t involve any copyright claims or lawsuits — but pure public pressure, and the potential (serious) damage to Klutz/Scholatic’s brand and reputation. Already, the reputation is damaged, and the company will likely be much more careful in the future.

Meanwhile, angry jonny points us to another example. The community over at the excellent website Metafilter discovered that the author of the webcomic User Friendly has been blatantly copying punchlines to his comics from the Metafilter community.

 

Read the rest of the article at techdirt.  Publetariat editor’s note: since the piece was written, the creator of the User Friendly comic strip has taken down the strips at the center of the controversy.  Therefore, links to those strips in the second half of this article will not display the comics in question.

Where to Submit Your Book for Review

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Book reviews can be a powerful marketing tool for books of all types. Potential customers learn about books by reading reviews in newspapers, consumer magazines, professional journals, newsletters, ezines, book review websites, and other websites and blogs. In addition to bringing books to their attention, well-crafted reviews also help the reader determine if a book is a good fit for them.

Submitting books for review can be time consuming and the costs can add up quickly, but the selling power of reviews is well worth the effort. You can save time and money by planning in advance and being selective about where you send review copies.

When submitting review copies to publications, make sure your book’s subject matches the audience and the book meets the publication’s review guidelines. Some publications only review certain types of books and some only review prior to or within a certain time after publication. For example, The New York Times only reviews books available in retail bookstores.

Book reviews in newspapers are getting harder to come by, but many special interest magazines and newsletters do book reviews or mention books in articles related to the book’s topic. Publishing expert Dan Poynter sells lists off special interest publications in dozens of subject areas for a modest fee.

Bookstore buyers and librarians base many of their ordering decisions on reviews in the major book review journals. Eligibility and submission instructions vary by publication, so be sure to read the requirements carefully.

Online reviews can also be a great book marketing tool. Having lots of good reviews on Amazon.com can boost sales, especially for nonfiction books where customers are comparing several different books on a particular topic. There are numerous other websites that feature book reviews.

For a list of online book review sites, along with tips on getting reviews on Amazon.com and other websites, read Annette Fix’s article about online book reviews at the WOW! Women on Writing website. Yvonne Perry at Writers in the Sky has also compiled a list of people and organizations that do book reviews.

Use caution when sending review copies to individuals who request them. Some people have good intentions, but simply won’t find the time to write a review, while others offer to write reviews mainly as a way to get free books. If you don’t know much about the reviewer, it might be a good idea to politely inquire what other book reviews they have done and where they were published.

"I sent copies of my book to book bloggers who responded to my email that they indeed wanted to review the book, but who never reviewed it. I later realized that I wasn’t anyone to them, so my book got buried in the avalanche of books they receive," says Phyllis Zimbler Miller of MillerMosaic.com. "I found that bloggers on my virtual book tour and book reviewers whom I connected with through social media were much more committed to actually reviewing my book." For more tips from Phyllis, see this book review article.

Several services, including Kirkus Discoveries and Clarion, offer paid review services. The practice of paying for book reviews is controversial. Some people think that paid reviews are biased since they are done for a fee and that it’s a waste of money. Others maintain that paid reviews are just as fair as other reviews and that reviewers need to be compensated for their time.

Librarians and booksellers know which publications do paid reviews, so reviews from those sources won’t carry much weight with them. Paid reviews could generate good quotes for consumer marketing purposes, but there are so many places to get free book reviews that it’s generally not necessary to pay for reviews.
 
Wherever you choose to send your galleys and review copies, plan ahead and get them out as quickly as possible. And, whenever customers give you good feedback on your book, be sure to ask for permission to add their quote to your testimonial list and ask if they would be willing to post their comments on Amazon.com.

Book marketing coach Dana Lynn Smith is the author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides, a series of book marketing ebooks that are available at http://www.SavvyBookMarketer.com. For free book marketing tips, visit http://www.BookMarketingMaven.com.

The Problem With Self-Publishing

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by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

[A version of this article originally appeared on loudpoet.com]

 

Unless you’re a traditional publisher with a vested interest in the status quo, or an insecure writer who puts a lot of stock in the name of one’s publisher, there’s really nothing wrong with self-publishing that’s not a problem for the publishing industry in general:

  • Too many mediocre books being published? Check!
  • Minimal marketing support for the vast majority of books being published? Check!
  • Too much up-front money being put towards vanity projects? Check!
  • Lackluster editing and/or pedestrian design? Check!
  • Huge, out-of-control egos in need of a reality check? Checkity check check!

Except for Marvel and DC Comics, very few publishers have the kind of brand recognition that can influence sales at the retail level. Their strength is primarily on the backend, their ability to get books onto bookstore shelves and into influential critics’ hands. Ask 100 people in a bookstore who publishes Stephen King, or Stephenie Meyer, or the “For Dummies” series, though, and you’ll likely get a blank stare and a shrug from 75% of them.

Most people would say their decision to read a book comes from some combination of three criteria: personal interest in topic/genre, recommendations, and sampling.

Only the latter point is really influenced by a traditional publisher, as theirs are the books most likely to be on a bookshelf available to browse and sample, but between Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, free samples via the Kindle and iPhone, and smartly designed and optimized author (or publisher) websites, even that isn’t an obstacle for any book, self-published or not, that hits someone’s radar via the other two, significantly more important criteria. In fact, the ability to sample a book digitally opens it up to a much wider audience than having 1-2 copies in a bookstore, buried in alphabetical order between a bunch of similarly unknown authors’ names and unimaginative titles.

Distribution and visibility aside, the most commonly noted “problem” with self-publishing, of course, is that self-published books mostly suck and there’s so many of them being cranked out every year that finding a good one is a near impossible and not terribly worthwhile task. While literally true, it ignores the larger reality that taking a stroll through any Barnes & Noble or Borders in search of a good book can be a similarly frustrating and unfruitful undertaking.

The fact of the matter is that writing a book is hard; writing an objectively good book is even harder; and writing one that can survive the subjective tastes of influential critics, well, that’s practically impossible.

Just ask Stephenie Meyer, best-selling author of the Twilight series, who got ripped by Stephen King in USA Today a while back: “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”  I’ve never read any Potter or Twilight novels, but King’s criticism of Meyer’s writing is one I’ve seen made many times, in a variety of places, of both of them.

It’s true that the vast majority of self-published books are vanity projects, most by authors who never bothered to attempt to go the traditional route because their primary goal was getting the finished product into their own hands, not the “validation” and “legitimization” so many tend to associate with a traditional publisher. As a result, the closest they’ve come to being edited is a cursory reading by a couple of friends or family members followed by compliments and encouragement to pursue their dreams. It’s like a poetry slam where 10s are mandatory; most of it is self-indulgent dreck with a narrowly defined audience of one.

Less typical, but often lumped in the same category, is the wannabe author whose work probably wouldn’t get past the critical eye of an editor or agent without a revision or three, and goes the self-publishing route of out of frustration (or pride), usually in hopes of landing a copy on an influential someone’s desk to become the next one-in-a-million success story who nails a lucrative publishing deal after proving their worth. While this certainly does happen, it’s rare because of the stereotypical stigma that still defines self-publishing for those on the inside of the industry.

Finally, and for whom Publetariat was primarily created for, is the ambitious author who understands that, no matter who their publisher is, they’re going to have to bust their ass to market their book and hand-sell it to as many people as possible, one copy at a time, in person and online. These are most often non-fiction writers with a niche expertise and poets — and to a lesser degree, REALLY ambitious comic book creators and fiction writers — who have the ability, innate or developed, to perform in front of a crowd of tens or hundreds (or online, millions), able to schmooze just as comfortably on a one-on-one level as on Twitter.

These savvy authors tend to have built a platform for themselves over time — something almost every traditional publisher pretty much requires these days — and know how to use it, attracting a loyal tribe and continually nurturing it.

For these entrepeneurial authors, there aren’t any problems with self-publishing at all, as they stand to reap significantly greater rewards for their greater effort. If anything, it’s traditional publishing that has the problem, with expectations for the same level of author effort in return for minimal marketing support and a much smaller cut of the sales of each book.

For these authors, self-publishing is ultimately a question of independence, and for them, Publetariat is a community where that independence is encouraged and honored, while also serving as a much-needed support system.

Nope, no problems here!

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Spindle Magazine. He’s won some poetry slams, founded a reading series, co-authored a book of poetry, and still writes when the mood hits him and he has the time. Follow him on Twitter: @glecharles

The POD Pocket Guide to Marketing & Selling Your Book on Amazon

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Have you written a book? Self-published it? Need to know what to do next? It’s time to market and sell your book! But where do you start?

 

In today’s growing technological society, the internet is the best place to start promoting yourself as an author. You can write a book, publish a book, and market it all on the World Wide Web. But again, where do you start?

 

Amazon.com is the world’s largest online bookseller today, but at times, it can be quite overwhelming. There are lots of pages of books with lots of links to take you to lots of different places. But you only have to start with one page…your book’s page.

 

Everything you need to successfully market and sell your book is right there on your book’s own product page. And everything you need to know to get started is in this book! The Deluxe POD Pocket Guide to Marketing & Selling Your Book on Amazon now includes The POD Diary, the candid story of one self-published author’s journey in the world of POD.

 

Just want the goods, and not the diary? No worries.  There’s a condensed version also available.

Also downloadable to your Kindle here!

Or in any E-format at Smashwords!

Citizen Journalists Will Bring The What, While Professionals Bring The Why

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This article, by Pat Thornton, originally appeared 2/8/09 on The Journalism Iconoclast blog.

   

Citizen journalism is a gift to journalism, professional journalists and people all over the world.

It’s an army of active citizens who want to report about the world around them — for free. They can cover far more ground than professional journalists and can provide coverage of events as they happen in real time — not afterwards. 

 

As a reporter you can’t be everywhere, but billions of people are everywhere.

 

That’s the power of citizen journalism.

 

Citizen journalism won’t replace in-depth reporting anytime soon — if ever. You probably won’t see citizens uncovering government corruption, but citizen journalism offers the ability to cover breaking news better than professional journalists ever could. Faster, better, uncensored and in real-time.

 

Wherever news breaks, there are always people around, but there aren’t always journalists around. Increasingly, these people are armed with mobile devices with Internet access that can post text, photos and videos from anywhere.

 

When you think about the power of citizen journalism, and how increasingly news stories will break first by everyday citizens instead of by professional journalists, one has to ask how much resources should news outlets dedicate to covering breaking news? Should professional journalists be belatedly duplicating the work of citizen journalists? Citizens can handle the what, while professional journalists can handle the why.

 

That’s the power of professional journalism.

 

Camera phones, smartphones, Web apps like Twitter and other technologies are helping make citizen journalism a reality. It’s just so easy today to report on the world around us, many people are asking, why not?

 

Why not snap a few photos with a cell phone and send them in to Twitpic? Why not send off 140-character bursts to Twitter and other micro-blogging services? Why not make a short blog post to WordPress or TypePad via their free mobile versions? Why not record real-time video and broadcast it to the world with Qik?

 

And this is just the beginning. A year from now more people will have more capable mobile devices, existing services like Twitter will be more robust with more users and many new Web apps will pop up. Imagine five years from now. 10 years from now?

 

I’m excited, and we are just in the nascent stages of citizen journalism. Combine citizen journalism with beat blogging, and I think we have a path forward that will allow news organizations to cover a lot more ground with a lot fewer resources. Better coverage with less. I like the sound of that.

 

Read the rest of the article at The Journalism Iconoclast.

Notes from the TOC conference

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I just returned late Thursday night from the O’Reilly Media Tools of Change conference in New York City. This was my third year at the conference. The first year I attended as a reporter for VentureBeat, and then these past two times as a speaker. For the benefit of those of you who didn’t attend, I’ll share some of my personal highlights, in no particular order:

Twitter Forever Changes the Conference Experience – Thanks to Twitter, conferences will never be the same. For every session of the three day conference, hundreds of TOC attendees were Twittering real time quotes, analysis and conversation. I found myself monitoring the Twitterstream (check it out here) as I listened to the speakers, and it added another interesting (though distracting!) perspective on the conference.

Twitterers held nothing back. If the speaker started giving a sales pitch, or made questionable statements, the Twitterers were merciless. If the speaker said something interesting (or not), Twitterers would tweet it and then that would cause a cascade of retweets. For three days straight, TOC was in the top five most discussed subjects on Twitter. Thousands, if not millions, of people who weren’t at the conference were getting a taste of the not only what was happening but what people thought about what was happening. Many of the Twitterstream participants weren’t even at the conference.

One of the most profuse and entertaining Twitterers on the TOC Twitterstream – and he wasn’t at the conference – was Mike Cane (@mikecane for you Twitterers), a self-described "ebook militant" and writer who lives near Staten Island. Twitterers from around the world tweeted their friends at the conference and had them convey questions to the presenters. At one great panel on social media in publishing, moderated by Ron Hogan (@ronhogan for you Twitterers) of MediaBistro/GalleyCat, Ron actually introduced his panelists by their Twitter handles.

Is Twitter going to become a secondary form of identity? I think yes. I think it’ll also forever change the dynamic between conference presenters, attendees and wannabee attendees. At some points, the Twitter echo-chamber reached heretofore unknown limits of, well, echo-chamberness. During the Blogging and Social Media Workshop led by social media guru Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) who told attendees he considers Twitter the new phone, session attendee Chad Capellman (@chadrem) uploaded a YouTube video of Chris speaking. When Chad told Chris about it, Chris logged on to YouTube and the audience watched Chris watch a big screen projection of the Chris video taken minutes earlier, and then Chad or some other attendee joked they could take and upload a new video of this special moment as Chris watched a video of himself that we could all then watch.

Several times during his three hour workshop, Chris checked the Twitterstream to gauge audience impressions of his live performance. At one point after he walked on stage drinking from what looked like a beer bottle, Susan Danzinger (@susandanziger) of DailyLit tweeted she thought Chris was drinking a beer onstage, then yours truly (@markcoker) retweeted it because I was wondering the same, then Kat Meyer (@katmeyer) set the record straight, as did Chris when he saw the tweetstream on the big stage monitor. Twittering while watching Twitter while listening to and participating in a conference while the presenter talks about Twitter and is the subject of a Twitterstream while he himself Twitters makes for a very surreal experience.

Peter Brantley on Literature as a Driver for Services – Peter Brantley directs the Digital Library Federation, and he’s one of my favorite thinkers about the future of the books, and about the sacred place books occupy in culture. In a keynote address, Peter challenged the audience of publishers to consider how moving books from print to digital can change the nature of reading, and how the move to digital can open up new business opportunities for publishers. "What’s published will be less about the book and more about the people who read them," he said. He talked about how books will become networked and empower more participatory methods of reading.

Cory Doctorow Eviscerates DRM – In a keynote, author Cory Doctorow (@coreydoctorow) had the audience in rapt attention as he proceeded to disembowel Amazon and all those who would seek to perpetuate the short-sighted practice of DRM. He challenged publishers to step up to the plate and demand Amazon accept their ebook files DRM-free. If anyone knows where I can find a transcript of his talk, let me know so I can link to it here.

Chris Baty of Nanowrimo Says Authorship has Bright Future – One of my favorite presentations came from Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month, which just completed its tenth year of operation. Although Steve Jobs says people don’t read books anymore, Chris made clear that you can’t stop writers from writing, and for this reason alone books face a bright future because the process of writing helps writers appreciate books. "Novels are not written by novelists," he said, "novels are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels."

At least one Nanowrimo participant has landed on the New York Times Bestseller lists, and several have earned book deals. The international Nanowrimo challenge has grown from only 21 participants in its first year, 1998, to 119,000 participants in 2008. Chris spoke at length about how the success of Nanowrimo has been driven by the powerful community that develops between writers as they share the deeply emotional experience of "meeting the book inside them."

The Rise of Ebooks – Ebooks were a big theme of the conference. The first year of the conference in 2007, there were maybe one or two ebook-themed sessions. Last year there were maybe three or four. This year, ebooks reigned supreme with at least ten sessions squarely focused on ebooks and with most of the other sessions touching on related themes. I moderated the "Rise of Ebooks" session. I admit, I’m biased, because I think my panelists (Joe Wikert of O’Reilly Media; indie author advocate and Publetariat founder April Hamilton; David Rothman of Teleread; and Russ Wilcox of E-Ink) did a kick *ss job of surfacing and debating some of the most interesting trends facing ebooks today. We covered a lot of ground in just 45 minutes, including:

  1. What’s driving the rapid sales growth of ebooks? (Answers: better screen display technology; availability of more titles; Oprah; lower prices; e-reading becoming as, or more, pleasurable than print; DRM starting to slip away)
  2. How long until ebooks go mainstream? (Russ predicted 2-3 percent of American households will own a dedicated e-reading device in the next 18 months [this is huge, and even if he’s off by half, it’s still huge], and most of the panelists agreed the ebook market will be dramatically larger in the next couple years.
  3. Screen technologies, present and future (screens will get faster, cheaper, better color, different sizes)
  4. Print vs. ebook, complementary or competitive? (most concluded they’re complementary, though I don’t think we’ll know if they’re a net positive or net negative for a few years – I suspect the latter)
  5. Supply chain implications for ebook intermediaries (new supply chain models forming, may not look exactly like print model; publishers and authors likely to get closer to consumers)
  6. Rich media ebooks, integrating video, audio, sensory feedback such as vibrations (lots of interesting stuff happening; a worthwhile opportunity to leverage traditional "book" content to offer readers a more engaging experience)

Artist Nina Paley Argues, "Give Away the Content, Sell the Containers." – Artist Nina Paley closed out the conference with a thought provoking talk in which she argued that artists and writers should give their content away for free but sell the packages that add value to their content. For example, she argued, water is free from the tap or filter, yet people will pay for water in a bottle for the benefit of the packaging, the brand, and the perceived benefits of that bottle or brand. Customers will pay for free content that is packaged in such as way that it adds value to the consumption of the content.

She showed a trailer for her new animated feature film, "Sita Sings the Blues," which she plans to make available online for free. She plans to make money (and pay off the debts incurred to make the movie) by selling the film to theaters, and by allowing publishers to publish coffee table books of the movie and its art. She also plans to sell value-added packaged versions of the movie, such as the limited edition DVDs she sold at the conference (Corey Doctorow was the first buyer).

Amazon Announces the Kindle 2 – Amazon tried to steal some of the thunder of the conference by choosing to announce the Kindle 2 a few blocks away on the first day of the conference. Amazon, however, was conspicuously absent from the conference. While attendees generally praised the new device for it’s faster screen refreshes (enabled by new E-Ink technology) and improved user interface design, as mentioned above in Cory Doctorow’s keynote and repeated by other keynoters, presenters and conference-goers,

Amazon was ridiculed throughout the conference for its adherence to DRM on the Kindle. Download O’Reilly’s Free "Best of TOC" Ebook – There was a ton more of interesting opinions and news from the conference, and I couldn’t possibly capture it all here. O’Reilly put together a good ebook (it’s free) that captures the best of the show (its only big omission is it doesn’t mention the Rise of Ebooks panel!) you can download it as long as you don’t mind jumping through all the convoluted hoops necessary to register for, and "purchase" the free ebook. Check it out here: https://epoch.oreilly.com/shop/cart.orm?prod=9780596802110.EBOOK Watch TOC Videos – O’Reilly has created an online archieve of some of the videos from TOC 2009 and prior years you can access here.

Citizen Reviewer

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At the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, the buzzword of the event was community. In the hearts and minds of today’s reader, the opinions of fellow readers far outweigh those of professional critics, whose views can be seen as too ‘ivory tower’ or worse, too heavily influenced by the stature of the author or publisher. Increasingly, before buying, readers are turning to blogs and sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing to get a bead on what the community of readers thinks about a given book. This is a trend that works in favor of indie authors and small imprints by giving us an avenue to get on an even footing with our mainstream competition where reviews are concerned.

On his blog today, Seth Godin not only talks about the reach of influential bloggers but becomes one of those book-promoting bloggers himself on behalf of an author friend (and a tip of the cap is owed to Mr. Godin for the title of this article). You may not be a friend of any blogger quite so influential as Mr. Godin, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the trend. There are two approaches to consider.

The first is to bring the bloggers to you, the second is for you to go to them. Either way, you must provide free review copies and you must be willing to graciously accept the reviews, whether positive or negative. You must also agree with each reviewer on a likely timeframe for the review to appear, so you don’t end up having to repeatedly pester them for status updates.

To bring the bloggers to you, on your site or blog, simply offer to give away free copies of your book to book bloggers in exchange for reviews posted at those book-centric blogs. You can set a limit on the number of free copies available, or you can have a standing offer to all takers.

As bloggers write in to take you up on your offer, you will want to take a look at each blog to learn four things:

One, is the blog really primarily about books?

Two, are there numerous reviews already posted there about books similar to yours (i.e., fiction vs. nonfiction)?

Three, what is the quality of those reviews; does the reviewer give thoughtful and insightful remarks, or just seem to delight in the sport of shredding books and authors?

And four, how much traffic does the blog get?

The main advantage of this tack is that it’s easy to do. However, there are pitfalls. First, there’s the uncomfortable task of turning down bloggers whose blogs don’t meet the four criteria above, and potentially alienating those bloggers. There’s also the limitation imposed by your own site traffic: does your site get enough visitors to give your offer high visibility, and are many of those visitors likely to be reader-bloggers? If most of your site visitors are fellow writers, this approach isn’t likely to work.

To go with the second strategy, of reaching out to reader-bloggers yourself, begin by doing a Google search on "blog + reader" or "blog + books" You can also use the "more" drop-down menu on the main Google search page to limit your search results to blogs only, as shown below. Google Blog Search In that case, your searches can be limited to terms relevant to your type of book, such as "fiction", "historical fiction", "supernatural romance", etc. Go through your search results and check out any blogs that seem like a good match.

Use the four criteria listed previously to winnow the field, then contact the most promising bloggers via email with a review request.

The second approach is much more time- and labor-intensive than the first, since you have to do all your own legwork. On the plus side however, since you’re choosing the bloggers yourself, you can exercise quality control without any risk of angering potential reviewer-readers. Either way, once a review goes up you’ll want to read it and personally thank the reviewer (in a comment form under the review, if possible) for taking the time to post it – again, regardless of whether the review is positive or negative. You’re far more likely to win over readers by responding graciously to a negative review than you are by savaging the reviewer.

If the review is positive, promote it with an excerpt and a link on your own site(s) and blog(s). If it’s negative, while you can’t avoid all the views on the reviewer’s site or blog, it’s probably best not to add fuel to that fire with promotion on your own site(s) or blog(s).

April L. Hamilton is an indie author, blogger, Technorati blog critic and the founder of Publetariat.com. She is also the author of The IndieAuthor Guide.

Blogs: 10 reasons authors should have one

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Blogs are a few years old in the tech industries, but now they are a must-have for authors who want to get the word out. If you don’t have a blog yet, here’s why you need to get blogging!

1. People can find you and your books on the internet.

Google loves blogs and regular content updates. Blog software allows you to update your blog whenever you like, creating extra pages for your website. These are indexed and over time you can build up a great internet presence so people can find you when searching.

2.Connect with like-minded people.

Being a blogger opens up a new world of networking. You can connect with other authors who blog, or literary agents, publishers and communities all over the world.

3.Two way interaction and feedback.

You can allow comments on your blog so people can connect with you directly by leaving a message. You can also comment on other blogs. This allows an interaction that cannot be achieved by a static website or email.

4.Marketing you as an author.

You can add all sorts of information about yourself at your blog, including photos, videos and examples of your work. You can list your publishing credits, your ebooks, articles, media appearances and anything else you want to use to market yourself as an author.

5.Book promotion.

Have a special page for your book where you can add photos, your book trailer, downloads of chapters and any other information on your book. You can do special blog posts, for example, an interview with you talking about your book, or a giveaway.

6.Online sales channel.

You can use your blog as a place to sell your books and services. If you integrate with a shopping cart or use a service like Smashwords or Clickbank, you can add links for these Buy Now pages.

7.Writing practice.

Blogging is a very dynamic way of writing. Sometimes you will get an idea and want to blog on it immediately. You will do some research, try to write something catchy or useful, and then post it all very quickly. Sometimes you might spend a lot longer on one piece, but generally you write between 500-800 words and get it out there. If you get “bloggers block”, then chances are you are not interested enough in the material to sustain a blog on it, so move on!

8.Blog your book.

You can use your book as the key material for your blog. Take excerpts and use them as posts, and then spin off from those posts into new things. This will get you traffic related to your topic/book subject so make sure you have a sales page that allows people to buy your book.

9.Build an audience.

People can subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed which means you can build a following who read your work. You can build relationships with these people and get direct feedback through comments and seeing how people respond to your posts.

10.Build your platform.

Publishers these days want a “platform” meaning that you have a following, people who will buy your books. If you are self-published, this is even more important as you will need to sell it yourself. Blogging enables you to build this platform in terms of a body of work, an online presence, knowledge of the industry and marketing as well as hopefully some people who are interested in what you have to say.

#TOC Trip Report, Part I

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So far, in the various sessions here at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, two messages about publishing in the digital age are coming through loud and clear. The first is that publishers need to reconsider exactly what it is they’re selling, the second is that going forward, the most successful books will be as much about community as about content. While these concepts are new and difficult for large, mainstream publishers, indie authors and small imprints have embraced them from the start without even realizing we were doing something revolutionary. It seems big publishers now have a thing or two to learn from us.

In the first two keynote speeches of the morning, Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book and Peter Brantley of the Digital Library Federation gave complementary talks about the very nature of that thing we call “book” and commonly think of as pages bound between covers. The upshot was that this is far too narrow a definition in today’s world, to say nothing of the future. Audiobooks and ebooks have been around for some time, and they’ve stretched the definition to some degree.

However, the digital age has ushered in entirely unexpected new forms of media which are book-like, but are not books in the traditional sense. For example, blogs, wikis, online comment forms, Japanese novels being composed and distributed entirely on cell phones, in-progress manuscripts being workshopped online, and even Twitter messages are all forms of written communication, and they blur the line between what is book and what is not. They also blur the line between who is considered a “legitimate” author and who is not. More importantly, they are all collaborative and social in nature.

Today, media consumers expect a conversation, not a one-way infodump. Mr. Stein remarked on the desire of today’s media consumer to be involved in the creative process, and went so far as to say that when players log on to World of Warcraft, they’re essentially paying to be involved in a collaborative process of creating a narrative.

In his session on Extending the Publishing Ecosystem, Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship emphasized the need to build an online community around your content. Laurel Touby of Mediabistro gave a talk on Bringing Sexy Back to the Book Party, and guess what? It was all about online book launch parties and leveraging social media such as Facebook and Twitter to promote those parties. The panel presenting a session entitled Smart Women Read Ebooks hammered away on the necessity of engaging with your readers to learn their wants and needs. The Long Tail Needs Community was another very popular session here.

In all these sessions, mainstream publishing attendees furiously scribbled notes, leaving me with the impression that a lot of this stuff is entirely new to them.

The closing keynotes by Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan, Jason Fried of 37 Signals and Jason Epstein of On Demand Books (the company behind the Espresso Book Machine) again underscored the same two messages conference attendees had been hearing all day: if you want to survive, you must expand your definition of the book and focus on building communities around your content.

These two directives are incredibly challenging for big, mainstream publishers. Rethinking the definition of the book demands that they rethink virtually everything about their way of doing business. Either that, or that they create entirely new, ancillary businesses to handle non-traditional forms of bookish content. The possibility of allowing consumers to play a significant role in the creation of mainstream-published content seems like a minefield of legal issues and rights management on the face of it. For big publishers, fully investing in ebook production and distribution begins with six months to a year of strategizing, budgeting, forecasting and running ideas up the chain of command. Building communities for the primary purpose of promoting content is a mighty tall order as well once you realize how jaded and marketing-averse today’s average web surfer tends to be.

For savvy indies, on the other hand, doing these things has become second nature, born of necessity. We leverage the internet and social media for all they’re worth because it’s the most cost-effective way to reach a global audience. We throw virtual (online) book launch parties because we don’t typically have the resources to throw traditional book parties nor the media connections to widely publicize them, and because we realize virtual book parties can offer numerous advantages over the traditional type: wider reach, longer duration, and the ability to offer attendees a fully interactive experience in a controlled way, for example. We blog and engage with blog commentators because we are passionate about what we’re doing and what we’re trying to achieve. We’re quick to adopt new forms of media such as podcasts, ebooks and wikis because we want to reach the widest possible audience, via every device possible, and on the audience’s own terms.

Even if we don’t think we know much about “viral marketing”, the fact is that we’ve been engaged in one long viral marketing campaign from the time we began our journey down the road of indie publishing. Newly-minted indie authors and small presses not already engaged in these activities can easily undertake them, because they’re independent and nimble. Being small-time operators enables indies to quickly change gears as needed, and our relative ‘outsider’ status confers a degree of street cred not accessible to faceless, corporate publishers. We can afford to take risks on new ideas and technologies because we don’t answer to shareholders, thousands of employees or even an industry. If we decide to release our work in ebook form, we can do it the same day we make the decision via Smashwords or Amazon DTP—and we can do it for free.

We can relate to the community of media consumers in a genuine and meaningful way because we are still very much a part of that community; to big publishers, media consumers are the “them” in an “us and them” equation. Moreover, however hard they try big publishers will have a hard time concealing the fact that their community-building initiatives are fundamentally about selling more books, whereas ours are fundamentally about connecting with people who are interested in what we’re doing. For us, increased book sales are a nice, but entirely optional, byproduct of the activity.

Congratulations, savvy indies. You’re already doing the right things and are ideally positioned to meet the current challenges of multi-format publishing and building readership through building community. Where big publishers see little but expense, risk, a nightmare of change management and major, possibly painful shifts in their corporate cultures, we can look forward to another few years of business as usual.

 April L. Hamilton is an indie author, blogger, Technorati blog critic and the founder of Publetariat.com. She is also the author of The IndieAuthor Guide.