Archive for the ‘E-books’ Category

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 | 11 Comments »

Attributor Study Finds Pervasive Online Book Piracy

Thursday, January 14th, 2010
This news item from Publishers Weekly certainly is worrisome for everyone turning to eBooks. Hmmm.

By Jim Milliot
Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked. Although Attributor needs to make some projections to arrive at total numbers, the hard figures the survey uncovered are disturbing to any publisher worried about the possible impact of piracy of e-books.

Attributor Study Finds Pervasive Online Book Piracy

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Postcard from Pandora

Friday, January 8th, 2010

I have never smiled through an entire film, reveling in the eye-candy, the characters, the convincing fantasy world, the 3D effect, total invisibility of any line between live action and CGI, the implications of it on future cinema, and the sheer pleasure of the wow-factor. Yes, Avatar blew my socks off. And I’m a sci-fi junkie.AVATAR IMAXposterblog2 Postcard from Pandora

One of the most endearing features of this fantasy world to me is the meticulous detail built into the natural world, in most ways scientifically plausible (with a dose of suspended disbelief regarding the laws of physics and such, but that’s okay). Importantly, in this sci-fantasy the scientists are the good guys again. Grace (Sigourney Weaver) literally wrote the book. (Who is her publisher?) Flaming Liberal Hollywood rarely manages to link disciplined, ethical scientific process to what’s true and right in the world. How refreshing.

I’m being sarcastic about Liberal Hollywood because the blogosphere is ripe with criticism that the plotline of Avatar is “out of touch” with the Conservative heartland of America with a story that is anti-military and anti-development. Sorry, but I stubbornly do not believe genocide and scorched-earth strip-mining are Conservative ideals, but these evils appear in our nonfiction daily news and still need to be battled. And the heroes in Avatar are soldiers of conscience. There’s a great American tradition in that. Sure, Neytiri is an insurgent. So was Paul Revere, but he didn’t get to ride a banshee.avatarmoviephotos2 Postcard from Pandora

There is also a common argument out there that people are only going to the movie for the visual spectacle and ignoring the story. That’s quite a stretch for a film that’s already grossed over $1 billion. It is transparently the old Nature vs The Machine and white-guy-going-native story, but realized with eye-popping visual magic. (See also the anime epic Princess Mononoke for a similar theme but with an Asian ambivalence.) My only criticism is that the bad-guys in Avatar are two-dimensionally bad to the bone. It’s a three-hour movie, for heavensake: isn’t that enough time to develop some Shakespearean complexity to the antagonists?

Obviously, I come in squarely on the side of the Na’vi. Syncing with the trees does not seem far-fetched to me at all—though I don’t have the ponytail linkup. But we must not be too sanguine; one resolution for this year is to be sure Confluence Book Services participates actively in sustainable printing and publishing programs and services. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of a leonopteryx.

avatarmain22 Postcard from PandoraThe familiar storylines will always be with us, but the new storytellers are using emerging media and technologies with astounding potency. Cameron’s latest leads us to expectations of still richer feasts of imagination on screen. The $500 million in technology developed for Avatar will be readily available to other producers (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Peter Jackson have already had a chance to play with it.) and perhaps all tech-savvy mortals in a few years. Now a live actor can become anything. And even the tie-in toys are 3D and downloads. What does that mean for books in competition with multimedia? What might it lead to in eReaders and eBooks? Where will it drive reader expectations?

Well, I expect to go see Avatar in 3D again this week.

from Wikipedia:

Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, a 224-page book in the form of a field guide to the film’s fictional setting of the planet of Pandora, was released by Harper Entertainment on November 24, 2009.[95] It is presented as a compilation of data collected by the humans about Pandora and the life on it, written by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison. HarperFestival also released Wilhelm’s 48-page James Cameron’s Avatar: The Reusable Scrapbook for children.[96] The Art of Avatar: James Cameron’s Epic Adventure was released on November 30, 2009 by Abrams Books.[97] The book features detailed production artwork from the film, including production sketches, illustrations by Lisa Fitzpatrick, and film stills. Producer John Landau wrote the foreword, Cameron wrote the epilogue, and director Peter Jackson wrote the preface.

In a 2009 interview, Cameron said that he planned to write a novel version of Avatar some time after the film released.

PPS Isn’t it worth it just for the chance to use “leonopteryx” as a post tag?

Posted in E-books, Publishing Trends, Storytelling, inspiration | 1 Comment »

What Do People Want from E-readers?

Monday, October 12th, 2009

As of 2009, 15 e-reader devices have been released, and eight more have been announced. Each has distinct benefits and features. It appears the proprietary or open-source content formats are distilling into standards, or will soon. I am concerned, however, the publishing industry is still asking, “What’s possible?” with ebooks. We are still at a stage of discovering what the technology can be and do. With everyone waiting for an Apple tablet and sexy products like Microsoft’s recently leaked Courier around the corner, the tools are still like Christmas toys—more exciting before they are unwrapped.

O’Reilly Media hosted an excellent Tools of Change for Publishing Online Conference on October 8, 2009. A key question addressed was a very old one revisited: What do the customers really want?

“All too often our understanding of what readers want is based on what we want ourselves, or outdated assumptions, or even worse—guesses.”

What is possible may not be what is wanted or needed. We have to finesse an understanding of needs for each audience and diverse genres.

Panelists argued strongly that their readers just want … books. The  enhanced features and multimedia are not the attraction. There is a warning here for publishers, that multimedia is something else, a difference sales model and a different business. I should note the panelists included Malle Vallik of Harlequin. Not surprisingly, her audience wants an e-reader with a price-point under $100 that looks stylish and fits inside a purse.

I have to start with my possibly outdated assumptions, as well. So what would I want?

I often watch the special features and interviews on a DVD—after I watch the movie. So, supplementary material bundled with a fiction ebook may have added value I would pay for. I also watch movie trailers, so I enjoy a good book trailer, if it is honest.

But don’t you dare embed a video of what you think the villain in the novel looks like. I want to imagine her for myself.  Otherwise I’ll just wait for the movie to come out. As I’m tracking comments about multimedia options in e-readers, I’m seeing some consensus that visual elements built into a fiction presentation are considered distractions from the essential (as in “essence”) experience of getting lost in a story.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, by all means give me a fully functional ebook do-it-yourself manual. Suppose I want to build a greenhouse. You can provide me text, diagrams, video, inspiring images of my greenhouse stuffed with tropical plants in winter, links to supplemental online resources, built-into-the-reader access to the greenhouse fanatics forum, the works. (Hey, that sounds like fun! Any greenhouse manufacturers reading this are welcome to contact me for a bid.)

Therefore, the features that publishers build into their ebooks to best exploit e-reader functions will have to be developed for each genre, or even each  title. What is technologically possible will be refined in the furnace of reader’s needs. This is uncharted, yet somehow familiar, alchemy.

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Some Looks at Vooks

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

There are serious contenders today staking out turf in the multimedia book battlefield. We are elbowing closer to the killer app that seamlessly merges text, sound, and video. All we need now is digital scratch and sniff.

An intriguing challenger comes from entrepreneur Bradley J. Inman of Vook. You may have seen the recent announcement of their partnership with Simon & Schuster.

In their own words, “a vook blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story. You can read your book, watch videos that enhance the story and connect with authors and your friends through social media all on one screen, without switching between platforms.”

The premiering vooks are available via a web-based application or  a mobile application through the Apple iTunes store that syncs to an Apple mobile device. (Hmm, Apple is in here again, what a surprise.)

I have some White Cloud Press titles I would sure like to see in this format, combining great text with collaborative video and music.

As once blog commenter said, it may be that “Video + book = EBook Trailer.” Or it may be that this platform will be ideal for certain genre’s, especially how-to books, because you will want to take the how-to with you wherever you are doing what you are learning to do.

To give you the spectrum of opinions on where this is heading, here is a collection of reviews and articles about the vook.

Early skepticism on iReader Review

A good impression of the founder, by Greg Sterling

Publishers Weekly provided a good overview

Entertainment Weekly’s review at EW.com

A Baltimore Sun review “… moving in the right direction.”

Eli James on Novelr, a blog for Internet fiction.

Testing Vook, by Tameka Kee on paidContent.org

The LA Times warns us (Hollywood knows!) of a major issue for publishers going this route. “It takes a lot of people — and money — to make a good film.”

Curling Up With Hybrid Books, Videos Included, from the NYT by Motoko Rich on Sept. 30, 2009, tries to come to grips with the evolution of ebooks and the reading experience.

The New York Times also gave us a profile last April. it closes with a question from skeptics and Mr. Inman’s reply:

And they are sure to ask: Would we have classics like The Great Gatsby if F. Scott Fitzgerald was distracted by the need to give Gatsby a Twitter account? (Blogger’s note: there are currently six F . Scott Fitzgeralds on Twitter)

“I don’t think we are compromising the written word,” says Mr. Inman at Vook. “People will to continue to read, just in new ways. Books are finally coming online but they are very one-dimensional. I think we can experiment and do this better.”

The company is on Twitter under their banner vooktv

Vook’s very crisp introduction: http://www.vook.com/

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Posted in Book Business, E-books, Publishing Trends, White Cloud Press | 2 Comments »

Either/And: The Digital Threat

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Pity the traditional publishers (I include myself here). They follow a craft and compete in an industry steeped in tradition based on technology going back before the Protestant Reformation. Yet, in just a few flying years, ink on paper is “quaint” and the forms, scope, and reach of their products are all new. The entire structure of publishers’ markets has shifted. And no one knows what publishing will look like tomorrow.

wittenburg press Either/And: The Digital Threat

The printing technology that drove the Protestant Reformation. (© G. Kliewer)

Publishers used to just focus on releasing good books. Now they have to be dot-com wizards and social media gurus, too. Now they must not only guide the content into quality form, but also get that content into multiple formats, not knowing which medium will be viable or popular.

“Publishers are really quite busy just managing the traditional business they’ve had,” says John Ingram, chairman, Ingram Content Group (PW 6/29/2009), “and not too many of them have got a bunch of extra capital to come up with their own proprietary digital solutions. All of them need to be looking at digital as a threat and an opportunity.”

Customers want our titles in digital form, or do they? What assumptions? Is it really true you are more likely to buy the paperback if you got the digital version for free? Will you want  to only take a Kindle in your backpack for the summer walkabout? Will that how-to book work for you as an e-book?

Ingram continues, “We live in a world that we call an either/and world, not either/or. Customers want physical goods in some circumstances, digital in others. It’s a daunting task to figure out how to provide that, when your core business is trying to figure out how to shepherd the creation of content.”

The only comfort is that content is still king. The audience is larger than ever—and perhaps more appreciative than ever of great work as it sifts through all the noise. Get the story right, and it matters little if you print it or sing it.

“There is no friend as loyal as a book,” said Ernest Hemingway. When most of our friends are on Facebook, maybe that can still be true?

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Shared eBooks

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

As what we call a “book” takes new forms, so does reading. And like publishing and writing, reading is becoming more collaborative and communal. After all, how can books be left out of “social media?’

Easy prediction: e-readers that follow the Kindle generation will be plugged into the web, so you can click through to in-depth links, search words from within the text, and, most importantly, share the experience of the book with others — in real time.

In an earlier post I mentioned Shelfari, part of the Amazon Empire. When eBook readers are fully integrated into the Web, such social network sites will have “rooms” for avatars to discuss popular titles.

Bookglutton.com is ahead of this curve; what they are doing will whet your appetite for borderless (pun intended) reader groups, with applications for beyond-classroom-walls interaction, too. Starting with a smallish public domain collection, they offer an online reader with integrated chat and comment features that can be shared with a group.

All fine and fun to trade notes as you are reading with a friend across the country or with the rest of your English class. But these shared in-text notes could get very exciting for a reader when she realizes that the author himself is in the group and replying to her comments. This platform becomes a new way for authors to attend your reading group discussions “in person.” This is what I mean when I declare that writers and teachers are able to reconnect directly with their audience again, like storytellers around the campfire.

More on Bookglutton.com: Chat While Reading: The Future Of Books? On NPR


(Confluence Book Services is not affiliated with Bookglutton.com in any way, nor does White Cloud Press have any titles available on their site – yet.)

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A Tour of the Amazon Empire

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been appearing in feature articles that inevitably place him beside Apple’s Steve Jobs for introducing game-changing technologies and for visionary tenacity. It is a fair comparison. But should we also be comparing Amazon.com’s hunger to the market-domination strategies of Microsoft?

Most self-publishing authors and small presses are not yet aware of the full breadth of Amazon’s reach into the content-publishing world. Let me offer a quick tour:

Amazon.com (but you have it bookmarked, no doubt)
Books, music, and anything else for sale online
The site went live in July 1995. “They’re the dominant online retailer. Publishers really aren’t in the position to argue. Or to fight back,” says Jim Milliot, business and new director at Publishers Weekly (Time, June 22, 2009)

The Kindle has been on the market only eighteen months, but 275,000 titles are available. The Kindle brought us to a tipping point of e-reader acceptance in the market.

BookSurge
Print-on-Demand (POD) service
“BookSurge offers complete publishing, inventory-free fulfillment and online distribution services for independent publishing.” Naturally, they emphasize that titles published through BookSurge are offered with in-stock availability on Amazon.com. Because of its direct pipeline to online retail, all other POD services have to jockey for market share against the prime position BookSurge holds on the field. Booksurge was acquired by Amazon in April 2005.

CreateSpace
Self publishing multimedia servicecsp logo medium1 A Tour of the Amazon Empire
CreateSpace is a shopping-cart service that offers an avenue to keep books, CDs, and DVDs available on demand to Amazon.com and other sales channels. It would be easy for me, the owner of a custom book production service, to scoff at the “free Cover Creator” and question whether a shiny label allows an amateur to produce and market a “retail-ready” DVD. However, CreatSpace knows that the customer base believes it is important for the homebrew CDs to come in “high-grade jewel cases.” After all, to make it possible for anyone to publish works in multiple media formats, a simple process and quick makeovers are not to be mocked or shunned. It’s a brilliantly layered system. These services are essential to the new ecosystem of publishing, which also generates tens of thousands of worthless YouTube videos but a good percentage of artful ones.

Audible.com
audiobooks
With more than 60,000 titles available, Audible.com is a leader among audiobook companies. From iPod to Blackberry to a long list of audio listening devices you’ve never heard of, they make sure files can be streamed from whatever toy you have. The AudibleAir allows content downloads to a mobile phone. Amazon acquired Audible Inc. in Jan 2008.

AbeBooks
Used books retailer
Like a massive clearinghouse, the site offers avenues to fined rare books and collector’s editions, or any title, with international reach. A section is devoted to moving textbooks. They claim, “More than 110 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books are offered for sale through the AbeBooks websites from thousands of booksellers around the world.” Always dreamed of running your own bookstore but knew a brick-and-mortar store would not survive? Launch your own online store through this system. Amazon.com acquired Abebooks in August 2008.

pt ag684 pk dow 20071019164824 A Tour of the Amazon EmpireShelfari
A social network for book lovers
Using the popular community-building tools familiar to Facebook users, Shelfari offers group discussions, book ratings, subject searches and a blog. This is a reader group on social-media steroids. Shelfari was launched in October 2006 and was acquired by Amazon.com in August 2008.

Stanza for iPhone
iPhone app
Stanza is a free application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Developed by Lexcycle, it does indeed put an entire library in your pocket. In December 2008, the company announced more than one million users had downloaded Stanza in six months. Tracking this technology gets really interesting when you see the iPhone competing with the Kindle as an e-reader. What’s next? Amazon.com acquired Lexcycle in April 2009.

Amazon Encore
Print publishing service
Amazon will use its unparalleled market data from customer reviews to select overlooked titles then re-introduce the books through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats through the services listed above. Authors take note: those customer reviews may be even more important than you thought. Encore was introduced in May 2009.

A Tour of the Amazon EmpireIn the cover story for the July/August issue of Fast Company magazine, Adam L. Penenberg describes how Amazon is dominating this publishing ecosystem and speculates on the future morphology of books. He points out the growing threat to traditional publishers, noting, “Amazon could phase them out completely, treating them as the ultimate middlemen orphaned by a new technology.”

Joe Wikert at O’Reilly Media reviewed the article and replies, “Forget about Amazon. Any publisher that isn’t already worried about this in general is asleep at the wheel. With all the great self-publishing services out there and the ever-growing importance of social media and author platforms it’s crucial for all publishers to determine the value they add to the ecosystem.”

Obviously, I’m not the only one watching the industry from the perspective of social ecology and evolution. Survival has always been about defining and defending a niche. Adapt, or go extinct. Traditional publishing models look so Carboniferous now.

“What’s very dangerous,” said Bezos, “is not to evolve.”

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