Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Attract National Media And TV By Using Keywords In Your Non-Fiction Book Title

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 1/20/14.

Most marketing activities are (unfortunately) not directly measurable.

It’s widely agreed that the very best marketing is write a quality book, then write some more of them, and each of those books finding an audience will help market the other. I agree with that, but it generally takes a while!

You can buy advertising, which is measurable, or do other specific promotions. But for non-fiction in particular, there is one thing that makes a huge difference to sales, whether you have a platform or not.

Optimize your non-fiction book title for keywords people are actually searching for.

I’ve blogged before about the importance of keywords for metadata and discoverability, and that post contains the details of how to do the research and choose the right words.

I explained how I changed my book title from ‘How To Enjoy Your Job’ to ‘Career Change: How to stop hating your job, discover what you really want to do with your life and start doing it!‘ In this post, I’m going to outline some of the results of that book title change.

I can attribute pretty much everything to the book title alone, because this blog is not a platform for the topic of career change, I don’t tweet about it, or speak about it, or in fact, do anything at all to market that book other than have it in my blog header (which subscribers don’t even see). But the audience of this blog aren’t the target market for the book, so I would say that 90% of sales are due to the title alone.

Here’s how it works.

 

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

 

Print as the Future of Barnes & Noble

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on her Dear Author site on 1/19/14.

Barnes & Noble is a venerable brand in US consumer circles. It touts itself as the world’s largest bookseller and is composed of three segments: the main retail segment, B&N College. and Nook Media.

In 2009, B&N launched the Nook, a product aimed at the upper middle class mother with two children. Overpriced and underfeatured, the Nook tablets have faltered despite the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Nook segment of the business.

After poor holiday sales in 2012, it was acknowledged that BN would need to move away [from] developing hardware devices and look toward licensing its product on existing platforms. After the disappointing 2013 holiday sales, BN’s CEO was fired and the Nook Media head moved into the position leaving Nook Media without an internal leader.

Everyone in the business of publishing is holding its collective breath about the health of BN. On the plus side, the largest portion publishing revenues come from the sale of educational books (textbooks and other educational products) but that market is headed for a disruption soon. On the negative side, overall consumer dollars spent on books is contracting. One think tank believes that it will continue to contract over the next five years as consumers shift dollars from higher paid books to self published and free books.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dear Author.

 

Astroturfing: The Source of Zombie Memes in Publishing?

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This post by David Gaughran originally appeared on his Let’s Get Visible site on 1/8/14.

Why are there so many zombie memes in publishing? Why is there so much groupthink? It might be because the industry isn’t particularly diverse. Or it could be that book-lovers are nostalgic types who are automatically wary of change.

But I suspect it’s astroturfing by the publishing establishment, a practice admitted to last month by YS Chi, chairman of Elsevier and president of the International Publishers Association, in paragraph six of this article.

For the click-lazy, here’s the money quote (emphasis mine):

“We gathered all the communications people together to discuss the issues and create an action plan. We have a multi-faceted audience to address, and in the next 12 months you will see key messages delivered, compelling stories of our impact on society for culture and education. We’ll ask you to personalize that message. I’m very excited that there is a meeting of minds on this.”

Yey, talking points! I don’t know if I’m more excited about the centrally approved messaging that’s going to flood the blogosphere, or the mental image of YS Chi doing a mind-meld with everyone in publishing.

But I digress. This post attempts to dispel multiple industry myths in one fell swoop. Perhaps then we can start having meaningful conversations, instead of batting around boardroom memos.

 

Self-publishing is a bubble

Remember Ewan Morrison’s prediction in The Guardian? “Epublishing is another tech bubble, and it will burst in the next 18 months.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Let’s Get Visible.

 

How to Curate Your Facebook News Feed

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This post by Kurt Wagner originally appeared on Mashable on 1/19/14. The post explains recent changes to the Facebook news feed design, and what users can do to control the content shown there.

Baby photos. News articles. Selfies. Advertisements. Job announcements.

It’s likely your Facebook News Feed contains some combination of these, if not all of them (and likely other categories, too). That’s both the beauty and the curse of News Feed: It provides updates from all aspects of your life in one place, including those you may not care to see.

In March, Facebook announced a News feed redesign. Mark Zuckerberg told press, “What we are trying to give everyone is a copy of the best personalized newspaper in the world.” The redesign has since stumbled, but the goal of turning Facebook into a “personalized newspaper” remains strong. And Facebook could use your help.

Mashable sat down with Greg Marra, Facebook’s product manager for News Feed, to discuss how users can best curate the content that they see in News Feed. The easiest way to change what you see? Engage with content, says Marra.

“The basic interactions of News Feed are some of the most important signals that we get,” he explains. “Unfortunately, those interactions aren’t able to capture everything that we want to know, so we also give people additional controls to tell us things we can’t figure out just from normal usage of News Feed.”

Here’s what we learned.

 

If You Want to Stop Seeing Posts From a Facebook Friend…

If you’re cold-blooded, eliminating News Feed posts from an annoying friend or ex-flame is simple: Unfriend them. But many people don’t have the heart to completely eliminate someone from their Facebook life.

 

Click here to read the full article on Mashable.

 

How to Write a Killer Scene

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This post by Jean Oram originally appeared on The Helpful Writer on 1/30/13.

I’m going to give you a secret on to how to write a killer scene. Are you ready for a very easy and very effective scene writing tip?

 

Come in Late, Leave Early

Wait… what?

Jean, what does “come in late, leave early” mean? And what does that have to do with writing a killer scene?

Let me explain.

 

Come in Late

When writing a good scene, you want to come in late. In other words, once the action is underway. There always has to be some movement or the reader gets bored. For example, I just cut a scene last week where I was not coming in late by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, my character was sitting with her grandmother DISCUSSING what action she should take and her gran suggested some ideas.

Borrrr-ring.

So I came in late. I scratched that scene and opened the next scene of Champagne and Lemon Drops with Beth already taking the action.

The benefit? The reader has to play catch up. Not so much that they feel as though they missed something huge and give up, but enough that they are curious. What is Beth doing? What is her plan? Who is she going to see? They know there is action because they are in it. And not having it all laid out beforehand I’ve created a hook that draws them in.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Helpful Writer.

 

Barnes & Noble's Nook Nightmare Stars Amazon and the DOJ

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This article by Brad Stone originally appeared on Bloomberg Businessweek on 1/9/14. It’s a worthy read for authors or publishers releasing books for the Nook platform.

Let’s boil down Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) Nook nightmare into a handy juxtaposition concerning the price of the digital version of Donna Tartt’s gripping new novel, The Goldfinch.

Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle price: $7.50.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook price: $14.99.

There are plenty of reasons for the stunning decline of the once-promising Nook. Barnes & Noble has found itself unable to compete with the likes of Apple (AAPL) and Amazon in the broader arena of multipurposed tablets. The New York-based retailer has also been undermined by the continuing migration of its customers from physical stores to online book-buying and by the desire of its risk-averse institutional shareholders to support deep, profit-draining, long-term investments in new frontiers.

Even that doesn’t completely account for the dramatic upending of its Nook business. Barnes & Noble today reported gruesome numbers—a 60 percent drop in its digital division, to $125 million, from its sales in last year’s holiday period. (Sales in its physical stores fell 6.6 percent from the previous year.)

 

Click here to read the full article on Bloomberg Businessweek.

 

The Yiddish Handbook: 40 Words You Should Know

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This post originally appeared on the Daily Writing Tips site.

The Yiddish language is a wonderful source of rich expressions, especially terms of endearment (and of course, complaints and insults). This article is a follow up on Ten Yiddish Expressions You Should Know. Jewish scriptwriters introduced many Yiddish words into popular culture, which often changed the original meanings drastically. You might be surprised to learn how much Yiddish you already speak, but also, how many familiar words actually mean something different in real Yiddish.

There is no universally accepted transliteration or spelling; the standard YIVO version is based on the Eastern European Klal Yiddish dialect, while many Yiddish words found in English came from Southern Yiddish dialects. In the 1930s, Yiddish was spoken by more than 10 million people, but by 1945, 75% of them were gone. Today, Yiddish is the language of over 100 newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, and websites.

1. baleboste
A good homemaker, a woman who’s in charge of her home and will make sure you remember it.

2. bissel
Or bisl – a little bit.

3. bubbe
Or bobe. It means Grandmother, and bobeshi is the more affectionate form. Bubele is a similarly affectionate word, though it isn’t in Yiddish dictionaries.

4. bupkes
Not a word for polite company. Bubkes or bobkes may be related to the Polish word for “beans”, but it really means “goat droppings” or “horse droppings.” It’s often used by American Jews for “trivial, worthless, useless, a ridiculously small amount” – less than nothing, so to speak. “After all the work I did, I got bupkes!”

5. chutzpah
Or khutspe. Nerve, extreme arrogance, brazen presumption. In English, chutzpah often connotes courage or confidence, but among Yiddish speakers, it is not a compliment.

 

Click here to read the full post on Daily Writing Tips.

 

How Writers Can Stay Productive Even During Sick Days

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This post by Jennifer Mattern originally appeared on the All Indie Writers site on 1/13/14.

So far this year, I’ve had one normal work day. One. Just a day after returning to work from my holiday break, I needed a sick day. That turned into a “sick week.” And it’s now going on week two.

Surprisingly though, those sick days have still been productive days. I launched several new features here on this site. I published several blog posts on various sites I own. I installed and customized a new theme on my business site. And I completed plenty of other smaller projects in a fairly long to-do list.

The key? I stayed away from business emails, and I was officially off in terms of working with clients.

Why was this key? It meant my schedule in no way revolved around anyone else. If I wanted to work for ten minutes, I could. If I wanted to work on something for hours and I felt up to it, I did. And if I wanted to say “to Hell with it” and climb back in bed for the day, I could do that too. It also meant I wasn’t putting out client work when I was far from 100%. That wouldn’t have been good for anyone involved.

By all means, if you feel too sick to do anything, take off completely. Your health should be your top priority. But if you have even a little bit of energy, there are many things you can do to make sure you stay productive, or at least don’t fall too far behind, when you take sick time as a writer.

Here are some specific ideas for work you can do, even when you’re not feeling well.

 

Catch up on some reading.

Read blogs. Read books. Read magazines you plan to query. As a writer, you can never read too much. And this is something you can do even if you’re confined to bed while you recover.

 

Click here to read the full post on All Indie Writers.

 

Show Versus Tell

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This post by Ksenia Anske originally appeared on her blog on 1/14/14. Note that it contains strong language.

Amazing how in the years of writing my blog, I’ve never touched on this subject. How did it get skipped? Perhaps because it’s spoken about everywhere all the time, so it became one of those obvious things everyone heard about and is therefore sick of. I dunno. Let me try a crack at it and see what you think. Of course it’s all about showing and not telling, as we have been told by teachers, writing peers, and all the other smart folk who have written awesome shit and are willing to give out advice. Well, I’ve written shit too, but not much yet, only on my 3rd novel. I can tell you that it’s not so much about show vs tell as it is about you vs your characters. WHAT THE FUCK? You say. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TO SAY THAT? I know, just a newbie writer, but bear with me. Let me explain. Okay, here goes.

It’s not you who is writing the book, it’s your characters. This was hard to realize, because it meant I had to rewrite whole passages in my current draft. What is it, you wonder? It’s life philosophies, the outlooks, the goals, the whatever you want to call it (various sources will call it various things), but basically, it’s what your characters want from life, at least from life you carved out for them in your book. It can be as primitive as getting drunk, still, it’s a valid goal, and with it comes a certain belief in certain things. Like, for example, in IRKADURA I’m describing one old drunk, a chauvinistic communist to the bone (I’ve met people like that) and a people hater, he especially hates those who are not Russian.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ksenia Anske’s blog.

 

Just The Way We Do This Now

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This post, by John E. McIntyre, originally appeared on the Baltimore Sun You Don’t Say column on 1/8/14.

When you hear someone going on about The Rules in English, you should be on your guard, just as when some personage with a clerical collar starts to say, “The Church has always taught. …” You are likely to hear, at best, a misconception, at worst, an outright whopper.

I have tried to establish the usefulness of distinguishing rules from conventions, shibboleths, superstitions, house style, and individual aesthetic preferences.

Take, for example, the eighteenth-century convention of separating subject from verb with a comma. Use it today, and your English teacher will mark it as an error.*

Or, better, take the custom of typing two spaces after a period ending a sentence. It was drilled into generations of students in typing class as a Rule, and it became a firmly established habit. Just try to explain to these people that proportional type in word processing software has made that obsolete, and you get reactions like those of gun owners convinced that black helicopters are in the air, full of jackbooted federal thugs determined to loot their arsenals.**

 

Click here to read the full post (and asterisked footnotes) on You Don’t Say.

 

25 Things A Great Character Needs

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 1/13/14. Note that it may contain strong language.

1. A Personality

This seems rather obvious, sure — in a way it’s like saying, “What makes a really good tree is that it has an essential treeness” — but just the same, it bears mentioning. Because some characters read like cardboard. They’re like white crayon on white paper. Sure, the characters run around and they do shit and say shit but none of it has anything to do with character and has everything to do with plot — as if the characters are just another mechanism to get to the next action sequence, the next plot point, the next frazza wazza wuzza buzza whatever. Point is: your character needs a personality, and the rest of this list should help you get there.

 

2. Agency

The character should run an advertising agency. *is handed a note* Oh! Oh. I mean, The character should belong to the FBI and– *gets another note* JESUS CHRIST WITH THE NOTES, PEOPLE. But fine, yes, okay, I get it now. Agency means that the character is active, not passive. The character makes decisions and is attempting to control her own destiny as an independent operator within the story. She is not a leaf in the stream but rather the rock that breaks the river. *receives one more note* Oh, thank you, what a wonderful note! I do agree my beard is sexy, yes. I know! So rich! So full! So shiny. I oil it with secretions from squeezed ermine scent glands which also lends it that musky zing that sort of… crawls up your nose. *flicks beard sweat at you*

 

3. Motivation

Characters want things. They need things. They are motivated by these desires and requirements and they spend an entire story trying to fulfill them. That’s one of the base level components of a story: a character acts in service to his motivations but obstacles (frequently other characters) stand in his way. We need to know what impels a character. What are her motives? If we don’t know or cannot parse those motivations, her role in the story is alien to us.

 

4. Fear

Everybody’s afraid of something. Death. Taxes. Bees. Dogs. Love. Carnival workers. Ocelots. (I am afraid of the number 34 and the color “puce.”) Characters suffer from their own personal fears relevant to the story at hand. Characters without fear are basically robots who use their pneumatic doom-claws to puncture any sense of engagement and belief we have in the story you’ve created. The great thing about being a storyteller isn’t just giving characters fear — it’s ensuring that that their fears will arise and be present in the tale at hand. You shall be cruel. This cruelty shall be great fun and a veritable giggle-fest because storytellers are dicks.

 

Click here to read the full post on terribleminds.

Also see Chuck Wendig’s The Zero-Fuckery Guide To Kick-Ass Characters, from the same site.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.