Archive for the ‘Book Publishing’ Category

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Author and Book Marketing on Amazon

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

What’s dangerous is not to evolve. ~Jeff Bezos

For the moment, Amazon has the upper hand in the book market. There are plenty of competitors fighting to dislodge them, of course. However, Amazon.com is currently providing the most—and the most creative—support for authors and publishers. They want what the authors and publishers want: to sell lots of books. Therefore, do not neglect the wealth of book-marketing tools Amazon offers. As you develop your website, integrate or emulate Amazon.com features.

I don’t mean this post to be a blatant promotion for the online bookseller gorilla in the room, but the more I look into it, the more they have to offer our authors, mostly for free.

Enroll your book. If you are starting from scratch as a self-published author to get your book into the Amazon.com system on your own, you will enroll in the Amazon Advantage program. Unless you like this sort of thing and were born after about 1989, I recommend you hire your Internet tech support person to set this up for you. For the intrepid author, Amazon.com provides all the instructions. Get started here.

Display your book. If you do not have a shopping cart for direct sales on your site or a direct link to your publisher’s cart, then you will be selling your book through Amazon from your website. There’s a bit of an education required to set this up, but once it’s running, sales are clear and channels for promotion are legion. Sign up to be an Amazon Associate.

Build visibility on Amazon. Here is a solid stack of features on Amazon.com available for you to employ. I recommend you get started immediately.

  1. Beg or bribe friends to post five-star reviews of your book. Reader reviews strongly influence buyers.
  2. Create a user profile so you can write reviews of related titles. Take the time to write assiduous, useful reviews because these also add to your “expert” status.
  3. People love lists, and the folks at Amazon know it. Create your own topical list in Listmania to strengthen your position as an expert and a player, with a link back to your site, as well. Obviously, you can include your own books in your list.
  4. Add images to your product page. There is a link for this just below the picture of your book on the product page. Set your page apart from millions of others.
  5. Also on your product page, below the reviews, you can add tags that will link your book to keyword searches.
  6. Add your author profile to your product pages through Author Central. (Check out these examples: William Shakespeare, Delia Smith, Wayne Dyer). Amazon offers a useful Author pages FAQ.
  7. If you’re already blogging on your own, you can display those posts automatically on your Author Page. Add a blog you already write using an RSS feed.
  8. Amazon will host a video on your author profile. “Share a video interview, book trailer, or book signing video with your readers.”
  9. View and edit Amazon’s list of your books. Even if your publisher is responsible for loading the data in the system, it is good to check all the details yourself.
  10. Opinions fly in the Communities on Amazon. If you have a niche and strong opinions yourself, you may want to participate. And your lists may be tagged in a discussion.
  11. Offer Search Inside! for your book. Insist that your publisher submit material for your book to the Search Inside! program, or do it yourself if you hold the copyright and marketing/promotion rights to your book. According to Amazon, “The Search Inside! Program helps customers discover your books. With Search Inside! customers can search every word in your book and browse sample pages, helping them find the title that’s just right for them.” You are more likely to buy a music CD if you can hear some sample tracks, right? This is the same for books. Join Search Inside the Book.
  12. Create a widget for your product page and install it on various pages of your own site. To create widgets, you need to become an Amazon Associate. Check your contract, but if you have the right to sell your own title independently, this is how you do it. Joining is free and you earn up to 15 percent in referrals by featuring Amazon products on your web page.
  13. Add links and banners to your site. Another way to present your book with a direct product link. Ask friends to place your banner on their sites, too.
  14. If you hold the digital rights to your book, you can make it available as a Kindle Book on Amazon.com. Enroll your books in Kindle. If your publisher has this responsibility, make sure it gets done.

Even more Amazon resources

  • Author and Writing Groups – This page explains, “Amazon.com offers grants for nonprofit author and publisher groups that share our obsession with fostering the creation, discussion, and publication of books.” You may nominate non-profit author and publisher groups for Amazon’s support through a contact link on this page.
  • Amazon Content Guidelines – Official guidelines on what is not allowed for selling or publishing on Amazon.com’s site.
  • Amazon.com Publishers and Book Sellers Guide – Amazon’s own guide with FAQs and details for selling books on Amazon.
  • Amazon Encore – Amazon’s program for promoting little-known authors with a growing readership based on rave reviews.
  • Tools for Nonprofits. Amazon.com is able to support nonprofit organizations to raise awareness, collect needed supplies, and solicit funds. Amazon customers support thousands of nonprofits and worthy causes. You have to admit this is a powerful additional use of the machine they have built.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming. ~Jeff Bezos

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Posted in Book Marketing, Book Publishing, E-books, Self-publishing | 21 Comments »

Self Publishing, Custom Publishing

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Yes, there is a significant difference. And good reasons to pursue publication via one avenue or the other.

Self publishing implies a go-it-alone effort in which you bring the manuscript you have finalized by yourself to a boilerplate layout and print service, then handle all the distribution and marketing. Custom publishing, as I see it, suggests you bring your work to a service that assists with editorial and design, as needed, and works with you to publish a custom product. In all cases the author bears the primary burden of marketing (even with major, traditional houses today) but the custom publishing service may offer a range of  distribution options and promotional support.

Self publishing is the best choice for many authors. For material that was previously edited and published, for example, it’s the short and inexpensive route. Any book project that is meant primarily for an audience of friends and family, there’s no question that self-publishing is the appropriate route. For business materials that have professionals behind them to catch the typos, a self-publishing service delivers the best deal when “repurposing” your content. For entrepreneurs, consultants, counselors, and others who produce frequent but possibly short-lived material, particularly content best suited to eBooks for online distribution only, self-published work gets to your audience faster and well enough.

Self-publishing services will tell you they provide custom publishing services. But I think we should make a clear industry distinction. Does the service offer professional editing and proofreading? Is the cover design from a template or does the design involve the author working directly with a designer to discuss each element? Is the interior layout slapped in—with your unintentional bad breaks and all—or is it hand-tooled? Is the eBook version just on Kindle, or will it be distributed to the dozens of other online venues? What brick-and-mortar store distribution is really going to  happen? Do  you have one person at the service who will stay with you all the way down the road?

Custom publishing is essential for the success of many books. If the book is to compete against titles from major publishers; if the book has to command the respect of a specialized, expert audience; if the book has interior art elements beyond simple tables; or if the book is part of a “brand,” whether of the author or a business — it needs the attention of custom publishing. If you, the author, have a clear vision of the design or the “look and feel” of the book that goes beyond a 6 x 9 softbound print-on-demand item, you will need to apply the expertise of a production team. If you want a long-term marketing plan and the support needed to sustain it, guess what?

The great news is that self publishing costs next to nothing today, and custom publishing breaks costs down to only the services you really need. Better than that, you are the driver, not a helpless passenger along for the ride controlled by a moribund publishing house. Shop around. Do your homework. Ask questions. All the rules have changed, except the one that says readers are hungry for high-quality writing. I confidently continue to declare there has never been a better time to be an author, and there are more opportunities to publish now than ever.

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Posted in Book Publishing, Publishing Trends, Self-publishing | 4 Comments »

All In with Multimedia

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Every book we are working on now has multimedia elements.

Among the textbooks for which we manage production, a large percentage of academic references are website links; that’s where the current, peer-reviewed, accurate sources live now. Most reference works and textbooks have supplemental websites where students go for the in-depth research, study questions, and video. After all, for today’s students, bound books are inefficient and old fashioned.

No longer do the visual arts and the printed word run is separate circles. For an upcoming title exploring the relationship of natural environment and culture, it helps that the author, Osprey Orielle Lake, is not only a renowned speaker at international conferences but also an accomplished sculptor of monuments in bronze. There is no limit to the ways her important words can be strengthened by art in all media, weaving history, ecology, culture, governance, and women’s leadership to map out an integrated approach to working in partnership with nature.

Another White Cloud Press frontlist title is a flagship for books converging with other media. Itself a marriage of lyrical words and art photography, Grace and Tranquility (July 2010, Eric Alan) is tied to a music CD of the same name by Gypsy Soul. The songs draw their lyrics from passages of the book, images in the book mirror the moods of the songs. Author and band are touring together, making a reading also a slideshow and concert. The gift market and booksellers are beginning to see the undoubted beauty of combining the book and CD as an attractive sales package.

A children’s storybook with whimsical drawings tells its story in more ways than ever before. Marketing for the book has to include video of the author reading the story. The author is active on Facebook and her illustrations are ideally suited for sharing across social media (copyright issues alert).

Even a fairly traditional travel guide just released depends on the associated website, which in turn is linked to all the websites of the featured wineries, weaving a true web. The website augments the print book with updates and news, as well as audio interviews by the author.

No author should be thinking only of words on paper  ever again. Your story, your message, will be words on paper, in pixels, in audio, in video, in previously unimagined lively combinations that bring your readers right to your elbow  as never before. Celebrate and maximize the possibilities.

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Standing on the Internet Tracks

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Clay Shirky is the smartest guy out there right now. By “smart” I mean not the first or only guy to see a train coming, but the one who looks down the tracks we’re standing on and says, “That’s the 502, it’s packing 900 tons, and it will be here in one minute ninety seconds. How about that?”

In our case, the train is how we use the Internet. It was a Shirky lecture on TED that helped me recognize that all media is converging: print, audio, video, interactive communication all merging online. Shirky is credited with being one of the first to predict the pervasive power of a collaborative digital world, institutionalized now in Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of social media. Based at New York University, Shirky is now pointing down the tracks and leading the debate about using the Internet for communal or civic values; that is, are we going to share news about Lady Gaga’s wardrobe or are we going to provide clean water to all of Africa?

Leisure time is now a global resource, he observes. So he looks at what people are doing online and notes, “All of these are effusion of people pooling their spare time and talent, but some of them are good for the participants, and some are good for society as a whole.”

Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age Standing on the Internet Tracks (Penguin Press), looks down the tracks at the possibilities of the Internet age and the obligations that will come with it. “If we don’t celebrate civic value, we underuse the medium,” he says.

On traditional publishers adapting to the digital age: Shirky quotes Upton Sinclair. “It’s hard to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.”

On who to watch in publishing: “I’m interested in young writers and editors entering a system that is plainly structured around the vestiges of a world fast draining away.”

On the opportunities for authors today: “…while I hope [Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown] does get recognize and gets picked up to do a book, she doesn’t need a book to have a voice. In literature there’s never been the kind of place for women’s voices that there is now. It’s spectacular.”

I will be buying Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus Standing on the Internet Tracks, which I confidently predict will be full of additional concise observations and conversation-starters. Though I am also standing on the tracks, I’m an old guy, so I hope Clay won’t mind if I buy it ink-on-paper.

Reference: “Here Comes Clay Shirky,” Publishers Weekly, by Parul Sehgal, Jun 21, 2010.

(more…)

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Posted in Book Publishing, Collaboration, Publishing Trends, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Genetic Publishing

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
DNA orbit animated Genetic Publishing

Image via Wikipedia

Even if you are not personally ready for base jumping, you may enjoy watching extreme sports. Now we have extreme publishing: James Joyce has been quoted inside the DNA of a bacterium!

Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute stitched together the entire genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. We have been adding and subtracting bits of DNA for decades, but this engineering feat is a milestone. This time, the scientists started from the raw recipe, the A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s that make up DNA. They cooked up the short pieces of DNA into a working genome. With some help from surrogate yeast cells, they produced a genome of 1,077,947 DNA letters. Then they installed the whole package into a different kind of bacterium. The entire genome was swapped out—and the converted cell switched species.

The goal is to make organisms for environmental cleanup and other commercial purposes. On the other hand, the dangers of customized “bugs” with unknown capabilities getting out into the open will make for many more years of debate and tension. But certainly, as we start building genomes from scratch, it is essential that we write unambiguous “watermarks” into the code that identify it as engineered.

That’s where bioengineering just met publishing. The Venter team encoded all the letters of the alphabet using the A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s. This bit of cryptology allowed them to insert words and phrases into the genome.

The watermarks included:

  • The key to the alphanumeric code
  • The names of the research team (and their boss, J. Craig Venter)
  • A website address “where those who have solved the code can go to gloat”
  • And, delightfully, a quote from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fail, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Confluence Book Services strives to keep up with new publishing formats for eBooks, print on demand options, and mobile apps. But no, we won’t be offering genetic encoding of your memoir any time soon, sorry!

The work was reported on the May 20 online issue of Science, and I’m drawing from Laura Sanders’ story in the June 19, 2010 issue of Science News. Visit www.sciencenews.org/ventercode.

“To live, to err, to fail, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

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Posted in Book Publishing, Humor, Publishing Trends | 7 Comments »

Product of Revolution

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

I am personally a product of an earlier publishing revolution.

Propheten1 Product of RevolutionMy family’s most precious heirloom represents the pinnacle of the publishing revolution in the mid 1500s that fueled a shift in the Zeitgeist of Europe. And I am personally a direct product of that larger revolution. Now I am participating in the next publishing revolution, coming full circle.

The heirloom is a Bible published in Wittenburg in 1584. It is Martin Luther’s translation from Latin. This is no pocket edition, though they become popular about that time. This is the congregation’s Bible, roughly the size of an unabridged dictionary. It features marvelous hand-colored woodcuts with colors as vivid as the day they were inked.

Undeniably, the thriving publishing industry, based in Wittenburg (Lutherstadt), fueled the Protestant Reformation. My ancestors in Holland and Austria embraced the Protestant ideals, only to be severely persecuted for it.

On my father’s side, my people settled along the Vistula River in Prussia for 250 years. Then, again because of religious persecution, in 1803 our family, together with the entire church congregation, migrated to Russia.

Altar1 Product of RevolutionAs my father described it in a 1963 newspaper article, “Among the possession of my great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Kliewer, on this journey, would have been this Bible.”

In 1874, my paternal grandfather, as a youth of 14, arrived with the congregation in Philadelphia. Among his few possessions as he got off the ship was the family Bible.

One of the first things my future mom and dad discovered when they met in California was this common heritage. Thus, it is hardly a stretch to say my DNA—indeed my existence—is directly tied to that technology-driven publishing surge.

A few years ago, I had digital photos taken of some of our Bible’s vibrant plates. Recently, I used excerpts of these as chapter frontispieces for a novel with a medieval setting published by RiverWood Books. And I plan to compile the art for an eBook and gift cards. Plagues Product of RevolutionThus, this icon of an earlier revolution is playing a small role in shifting today’s Zeitgeist. Who can say where our publishing revolution will take us?

Product of Revolution

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The Steps It Takes

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A new intro to publishing with Confluence Book Services


The Steps It Takes

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End of Publishing?

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Follow this brilliant bit down and back again – thank you, DK (UK)

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The Rusty Nail

Monday, February 1st, 2010

rusty nails 1 The Rusty Nail

I have a new metaphor and code name for the high prices often paid for seemingly small mistakes. Last weekend, I stepped on a rusty nail. A big, very old, very rusty nail. Yes, I knew the area around the collapsed barn was dangerous; I wore my new boots and good gloves. I was watching my step as I took care of the rattling sheet metal. As I left, however, I did not see the board buried in the grass with the nails straight up. A step three inches to either side and it would not have been a blog topic—or a week of doctor visits, the tetanus booster, and industrial-strength antibiotics.

We all hit rusty nails in life and business. How do we avoid them? What is the best protection against them? And how do you respond when you hit them anyway? Your answer to this last question can be life or death and success or failure.

You can assess most situations. Though by definition emergencies arise unexpectedly, we can know the terrain and have a guide who has been around the field. Turn to business leaders in your niche; most willingly point out the nearly fatal spots they hit before you arrived on the scene. If you are producing a book in support of your business, you can work with a design firm that is aligned with your values and tracks the current technological evolution of the market.

You take reasonable precautions. Safe sex, safe hiking, safe business practices. In business, you can “nail down” good contracts and reliable vendors, though nothing but old fashioned experience will train you to know the best from the marginal. Focus on protecting your efforts with ongoing education, cultivating mentors, gathering collaborators, and building diverse networks.

But you cannot avoid every risk. You can’t always move forward as if crossing a minefield. As an business leader, the only way to be safe is to stop moving—but for an entrepreneur, that’s the most dangerous choice of all. And when you are working to address a social or environmental issue, standing still is just not an option.

With rusty nails, it is only the ones you don’t see that are dangerous. So the key question is, how will you respond when one leaps out of the grass and through your Vibram sole? When that backer backs out, that vendor flakes out, and your budget gives out, do you die, or quit, or run for a nine-to-five job? Do your panic, overreact, and make the situation worse? Or do you administer first aid, consider a measured response, and ask for help?

The publishing field is full of rusty nails for entrepreneurs. I can tell you from painful experience quite a number of them lurk in the grass. The old ones are still out there, like printing too many books in the first run or choosing a distributor that goes bankrupt right after you’ve consigned all your inventory to it. Watch out for that most common misstep: wasted money thrown at an elaborate marketing launch before you have identified your real audience.

Newer dangers surround you, but they may be harder to detect and avoid. Here the most common pitfall may be “saving money” by going with the standard self-publishing route that gets you a book that looks and performs like an amateur self-published job. Keep a weather eye out for unrealistic expectations for eBook editions and time lost on social media without a well-defined strategy to follow.

A week later, it looks like the infection in my foot won’t kill me; in an earlier generation, it may very well have been my inglorious end. To follow the metaphor into business, survival requires reasonable precautions, measured response to emergencies, and knowledge of available technologies. A little extra sleep and time to think with your feet up are both highly recommended, too.

Posted in Book Business, Book Publishing, Self-publishing | No Comments »

Multimedia Vook

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Could be great, could be terribly annoying. What do you think?

Vook Launches Direct Publishing Platform
By Rachel Deahl, Publishers Weekly
Vook, the multimedia company that creates e-books which meld print and video, has unveiled a new platform that will allow publishers to independently create their own multimedia versions of their books. Through a new service called MotherVook publishers can upload content independently to a software platform to make media-enhanced digital editions of their titles. When asked how publishers would pay to use the software–whether there would be a one-time purchase fee or houses would pay per book–a rep at Vook said the company is “currently formalizing the licensing agreements.” Read on »

Posted in Book Publishing, Publishing Trends, Self-publishing | No Comments »

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