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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.

Beg or bribe friends to post five-star reviews of your book. Reader reviews strongly influence buyers.
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.
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.
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.
Also on your product page, below the reviews, you can add tags that will link your book to keyword searches.
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.
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.
Amazon will host a video on your author profile. “Share a video interview, book trailer, or book signing video with your readers.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

Tags: Amazon.com
Posted in Book Marketing, Book Publishing, E-books, Self-publishing | 11 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.

Tags: custom publlshing
Posted in Book Publishing, Publishing Trends, Self-publishing | 2 Comments »

The Steps It Takes

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A new intro to publishing with Confluence Book Services

Tags: Publishing
Posted in Book Publishing, Design and Production, Self-publishing | No Comments »

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 »

Writing a Book to Grow Your Business

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Stephanie Chandler hosts the Small Business Growth Strategies blog. She is an author of several business and marketing books.

I’m reblogging (like RT on Twitter?) her blogtalkradio interview because it touches on so many points I also make about your book serving as your best business card.

“I had a fun interview this morning with Jon Hansen on his PI Window on Business radio show. We discussed how writing a book can be a powerful tool for building your brand and your business. If you want to impress clients, book speaking engagements, attract the media, charge higher rates and build credibility, a book is a wonderful way to make it all happen. You can listen to the show below…”

Sorry about the prelude of Jon Hansen’s commercial, but kudos to him for setting an excellent online radio host example.

Posted in Author Audience, Book Publishing, Leadership, Self-publishing | 1 Comment »

Databases for Professional Writers

Friday, September 18th, 2009

I suppose it is still possible to use 3 x 5 cards and file boxes. But databases built with versatile software such as FileMaker Pro are essential management tools for a professional writer today. Here are eighteen databases you might create for yourself to be more efficient, organized, and productive.

Build a powerful address book of your business contacts: editors, proofreaders, illustrators, indexers, graphic designers, book production service, tech support, drug dealers—whatever you need
Set up a prioritized list of publishers, with submission guidelines.
Keep a portfolio of your magazine articles, guest blogs, book contracts, and foreign rights editions sold.
Tie your portfolio database to bookkeeping/accounting functions, automatically recording your royalty and subsidiary rights payments. (This also follows the “If you build it, they will come” principle.)
Track your office expenses realistically. Run the reports for tax deductions.
Gather library and online references that become the bibliography of a project.
Organize your interview notes with contact info, sorted by topic, date, and project.
Keep a timesheet so you know what an insane amount of time you’ve really spent on that novel.
Keep a secure list of all your login IDs and passwords.
You don’t have to bookmark every interesting website. Capture their URLs, categorize them for quick searches. Create a button on the page that opens the web address in your browser.
Catalog your own library—books and ebooks. It does not take a Dewey Decimal System; just get the basic title page info in there so you know what you’ve got and where to find it. Add a reading wish list.
Working on a project with a co-author or contributors? Publish the projects’ resources privately to the web so your collaborators can access the same references and notes.
Far better than a clunky spreadsheet, build marketing email lists, with bulk email blast capabilities and fields for leads, clients, sales outlets, or bookstore address and phone lists. Automate invoices and letters.
Schedule and record notes about your appearances and readings.
Compile a record of reviews and publicity.
Of course, you need to keep a list of your favorite cafés with wifi in all the towns you visit. Maybe you can load it on your iPhone.
Organize notes and backstory bios of your fictional characters and locations.
Run your brainstorms into a database: make it a place to save the half-baked story ideas, with fields that may link them together over time in ways you would not have otherwise seen.

Tags: FileMaker Pro
Posted in Self-publishing, Writer Resources, Writing Craft | No 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

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?

Tags: eBooks, Ingram, Kindle
Posted in Book Business, Book Publishing, E-books, Publishing Trends, Self-publishing, Social Media | No Comments »

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 service csp 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 Empire Shelfari
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 Empire In 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.”

Tags: Amazon, Apple, Kindle
Posted in Book Business, E-books, Publishing Trends, Self-publishing | No Comments »

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