Month: October 2011

Indie Inbreeding and the Gene Pool of Diminishing Readers – Part One

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This post, by Mark Williams, originally appeared on The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing on 10/2/11.

D.D. was here yesterday talking about the new Kindle Fire and the other e-reader devices Amazon have coincidentally brought out just in time for Christmas and the launch of Pottermore. Those guys at Amazon are just so lucky with their timing!

Come to that, they’ve been pretty lucky all round. What an incredible coincidence Amazon launched their Kindle just when ebooks started to take off.

What an incredible coincidence Amazon opened a Kindle store just to sell ebooks.

What an incredible coincidence Amazon invested in the digital future and took a risk on letting indies sell their own work.

What an incredible coincidence Amazon is now a publisher as well as a distributor of books and ebooks.

Of course, none of it is coincidental. Amazon have a clear strategy. That’s not to say Amazon planned in advance every last  nut and bolt. What they do is respond proactively to changing conditions.  That’s why they are a huge successful business.

As writers we can learn a lot from Amazon. Because in the new publishing world successful writers are also successful business men and women. Like it or not, it’s a fact. We produce goods, package them, and go out and sell them.

Some of us do better than others, obviously. In part that’s down to product. The writers with best-sellers on their hands obviously have something people want to buy.  But the most successful writers are those that sell outside their personal blogosphere.

That is, they reach a readership that doesn’t just consist of friends, family, fellow writers and the odd passerby.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These are your core supporters that get you through the bad times. But the good times only come when you reach the wider market – complete strangers.

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Read the rest of the post on The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing, and be sure to bookmark the site or subscribe (subscription box available on the site) to catch part two when it’s posted.

Roofman the Spy's New Blog

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I’ve recently published my first blog to help get the word out about my memoir, ROOFMAN: A True Story of Cold war Espionage.

http://roofmanthespy.wordpress.com/

It’s so hard to get the word out there as an independent publisher, but I’m on the right track. So far I have three prestigious book reviews and will soon be adding a forth.

Any feedback about my blog will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance,

John Pansini

Writing a One-Page Business Plan: 5 Questions A Self-Publisher Must Ask

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This week, we’re pleased to promote another post from member Joseph C. Kunz Jr.‘s Publetariat blog to the front page.

Whether you are about to self-publish your first book, or start a micro-niche publishing company, you need to have business plan in place. A business plan will give you a basic road map for your new business. An easy and quick way to do this is to create a one-page business plan. This will let you quickly clarify your own thinking about your new business. This short, one-page plan can also be used as an outline for a longer more in-depth plan. With some research, you should be able to complete this one-page plan in under one week. Here is a list of five questions that you must include in your simplified, one-page business plan.

 

1. WHY do you want to self-publish?
Your answer cannot be only about the money. It needs something more than that. It also needs to be short, very specific, and very personal.

Examples:
a. “I want to write a book that will help new nurses be more productive, more effective, and more marketable in today’s tight job market.”

b. “I want to write small-business management books so that I can share my knowledge and expertise with others that would like to start their own small-business. I gained this knowledge and experience over the last 35 years while starting and managing my own successful small-business.”

c. “I want to write and self-publish a book to give myself more credibility in the eyes of my peers.”

2. WHAT will you write about?
Explain it in one sentence, in very specific detail. You must understand what you writing niche, or specialty, will be.

Examples:
a. “I will write and publish books about all aspects of self-publishing for people who have not written a book before.”

b. “I will write a how-to book for experienced nurses who want to advance to become part of nursing management in a hospital.”

c. “I will write a how-to guide for new parents who are raising a deaf child.”

3. WHO is your market?
You must narrow this down to a very specific group of people. Your answer cannot be “everybody and anybody”. You must know exactly who buys your type of book. You only have a limited amount of time and money for marketing and promotion. You must target your best efforts at those who are most likely to buy your book. Keep your answer down to a few tight sentences.

a. “The market for my book is American nursing students that are in nursing school, or have just graduated as RN’s with an AS or BS degree in nursing and are searching for their first job. They are generally females between 20 and 26 years of age. Half of them like to read a hard-copy of a book; the other half like to read the ebook version. They are very worried about getting a job after graduation, because the nursing shortage has ended.”

4. HOW do you define success?
You might spend the next twelve months writing your first book. And then a year later you are selling less than 8 copies a month on Amazon. Therefore, you must come to terms with what success means to you. Does success mean seeing your name on the cover of a book? Does it mean being able to give each of your customers a copy of your book so that they will have more admiration and respect for you? Does success mean getting letters and emails from people who read your book – telling you that your book has helped them in some positive way? We all can agree that making a lot of money is great – and is possible as a self-publisher – but it cannot be your only motivation for writing a book. Therefore, you should write a paragraph here about how you define success for your book.

5. HOW hard are you willing to work at it?
How much time and hard work are you willing to put into your self-publishing venture? This is probably the step that you must put the most honest thinking and most thought into. Are you willing to spend most of your time marketing and selling your book? Your book might take 6 to 12 months to write. But you will spend the next several years marketing and promoting it. Are you willing to put yourself out there and market and promote yourself, your name, and your book, the for next several years?  Are you willing to keep writing and building your next book? The more time and effort that you put into your self-publishing venture, the more success you will have. It will be much easier to go the distance if you love your subject matter. And the more you love your subject matter, the more successful you will be at self-publishing. It is as simple as that.

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

My Book Ate My Blog

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I ran across an excerpt of this interesting post entitled “My Book Ate my Blog” by Sophie Perinot on the Passive Voice blog (which if you haven’t discovered the Passive Guy yet, run right over and check him out!), about the difficulties of balancing the demands of maintaining a blog while trying to write. The comments on her site, and on the Passive Voice, were filled by people who agreed that blogging was taking them away from writing or how hard it was to maintain a balance.

As I thought about my own history of blogging, I found an interesting pattern had emerged.  First of all, I am not a prolific blogger. For the whole time I have been blogging (21 months) I have produced only 40 blog posts-counting this one (which means an average of 1.9 posts a month). My blog posts tend to be long, detailed, and they often take me 1-2 days to write. According to perceived wisdom on the subject of social media and marketing, this infrequent blogging pace, and my hopeless inability to use Twitter effectively, probably explains my small number of subscribers (40), and my low number of views (7000 views total in the 21 months I have been blogging–an average 333 a month).

Nevertheless, I have been very fortunate that most of my posts have been cross-posted in Publetariat, providing with me a much larger readership than these statistics suggest, and generally my statistics have shown growth, with 2011 showing 5 times the number of hits than 2010-and the ratio of growth should be even higher by the end of the year.

However, when I examined it, my pattern of blogging did not seem to suggest that my blogging had any negative effects on my writing. I started blogging in December of 2009 (the same month I self-published my first historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune. Between Dec 2009 and the end of Dec 2010, I published on average 1.7 posts per month. I was marketing, not writing, during those 13 months—so there was no conflict at all.

I started working on my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, in January 2011 and completed the first draft at the end of June 2011. In that 6 months period I averaged 2.3 blog posts per month. Obviously writing did not interfere with my blogging, nor vice versa, since in that 6 months I produced a draft that was over 140,000 words long.

However, as I rushed to complete the draft in June and then began the process of getting feedback, rewriting, getting more feedback, editing, and then proof-reading the manuscript to get it ready for publication by October 15 (my self-imposed deadline), my blogging rate went down considerably. I not only didn’t post anything in Jun, but I only produced one post for July, August, and by the skin of my teeth (since this post is coming out Sept 28th) one in September.

One could conclude that blogging had not interfered with my writing (since I was more productive as a blogger when I was writing full-time.) However, once the book was a real entity, and I moved into high gear to get it published, it completely consumed me. In other words, it was my book that ate my blog.

My conclusion? When I was marketing my first book, blogging was a natural extension of that process, no conflict. When writing the book, blogging was actually a nice break from the fiction, and my blogging benefited. But when the first draft was done, and I knew I had a book, and I created a deadline for myself (I was committed to getting the book out in October, in time to garner reviews by the Christmas holidays), then doing everything that was necessary to get that book out there to readers began to consume me. Everything became secondary.

But today I am currently waiting for the print proofs, I am confident I am not only going to meet my deadline, but the book may actually be out there a week earlier, so watch out world, this blogger’s back!

So has your blog eaten your book, or has your book eaten your blog?

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s Front Parlor blog.