Publetariat

My “Irish Story”: On Launching an Online Community and Micropublisher from Scratch

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This article, by Eoin Purcell, originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 10/27/10.

• A lot of people talk about taking the power of “community” and leveraging that into a publishing brand, but few do it.

• Eoin Purcell of Dublin, Ireland discusses his achievements in launching “The Irish Story,” a community web site about Irish History and publishing John Dorney’s The Story of the Easter Rising 1916.

Eoin PurcellDUBLIN: This is the story of trying to build a community of interested readers, in a small niche, with little or no money. It’s not a fairy tale, but it’s not a horror story either.

I’ve often talked about the need for publishers to foster community and to build attention through their content. I wanted to the test the theory I’ve discussed for some time and to show that for a small publisher, a smart community strategy could be effective and even profitable. The secondary goals were practical wishes for the project. I wanted to create attention. I wanted to recruit community leaders. I wanted to sell books (in some form).

Having decided on the project, I had to select a niche to build my community in. I’ve commissioned Irish history since I first became involved in publishing, so it seemed a natural fit, and in October 2009, I commissioned five short histories on key events in Irish history and set about building a community in the space called “The Irish Story.”

How did I get on?

I launched in early 2010. The site was built on WordPress and I avoided anything with an expense attached, using off-the-shelf plugins and themes with only the barest of HTML/PHP/CSS coding required. The result has been, I think, an easily navigated site that displays the content relatively well.

The site itself has proved modestly successful. Several of my authors and their colleagues have submitted content, other have challenged articles and agreed while several academics have taken part in audio podcasts and submitted book reviews.

The overall traffic puts The Irish Story at about one third the traffic of the established Irish History magazine’s website, HistoryIreland.com. We are already rivaling several established Irish history publishers. Our search traffic is good because although we don’t rank highly yet for general terms like Irish History, we score very well for specific search like “Irish civil war” and “Irish war of independence.”

The five books have now been delivered and the first, The Story Of The Easter Rising, 1916 by John Dorney, has been published in a variety of formats –- from PDF to POD -– with the others to follow in the next month or so. Sales have been slow, but not totally disappointing, especially in directly downloaded PDFs which are, in any case, the most profitable form for The Irish Story. So money making, of the three is the least advanced.

What do I know now, that I didn’t know then?

 

Read the rest of the article on Publishing Perspectives.

How To Write Character Emotions

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The secret to a well received novel and a strong opportunity to succeed as a writer lies within your ability to engage your readers on an emotional level. One way to do this is to bring out the emotions your characters feel. Today I’ll offer some tips on how to write effective character emotions.

Listen to a PODCAST of this article.

It may be of use to realize the words we use to show emotion rarely hold enough power to display that emotion. Take the word, “love,” for example. Can a single word possibly portray the myriad of sensations that flutter across a person when they’re in love? Can four simple letters depict the powerful tug on one’s heart or the overpowering sensation of selflessness when someone is in love? Hardly. This fact encourages us as writers to find a better method to display a character’s emotions.

The first secret to writing character emotions is found in your characters themselves. If you don’t have characters your reader want to know, all the emotion in the world will not engage your reader one bit. First and foremost, ensure you have likable characters. Read more about CHARACTERS in this article.

Next, it’s helpful to know our old friend and writing rule, “show, don’t tell,” holds true when writing about emotions, too. Consider the following examples. In the first I “tell” and in the second I “show.” Despite the simplicity of the examples, it’s obvious the second will have a stronger tendency to engage your reader.

     He was scared.
     He jumped back and yelped.

An easy way to display emotion in your writing is with dialogue, both external and internal. Consider how a character might speak if he’s in love with or hates another character. Might the dialogue in these two situations differ? You bet it would. (For more on DIALOGUE, read this article.)

Here’s one effective technique to use when writing about a character’s emotions. Visualize how the character looks when he experiences a situation that calls for some sort of emotional response. Then describe his physical reactions. (He jumped back and yelped.) If you do nothing other than this, you’ll do okay.

However, to hone this skill to a more professional level, make an attempt to include their involuntary reactions and their state of mind. Not only does he jump back and yelp, but his heart beats like the proverbial drum and he feels a tingle race up his spine. He also might be so consumed by the event, he can think of nothing else. The more actions and reactions you include, to a point of course, the more your reader will become involved with your character.

When you write a scene where your character is stirred on an emotional level, make an attempt to focus on the seven universal emotions. They are hatred, disgust, fear, happiness, anger, grief and surprise. These will tend to relate to a wider audience.

You may wish to keep in mind your character’s emotional responses must be believable. Constant over-reaction or under-reaction will simply test your reader’s ability to suspend belief and most likely test their faith in your character, too.

Do you still remember your first kiss? That’s because emotionally charged events can prove powerful in life and are something people remember. This holds true with your readers, too. They are more likely to remember the emotionally charged events in your characters lives and it is these situations that sway your reader to talk up your novel. Which in turn, leads to what I wish for you, only best-sellers.
 

 

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze‘s Author of Born to Be Brothers blog.

A New Resource For Indie Authors: The Indie Author Guide Companion Website

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As many of you already know, I wrote and self-published The Indie Author Guide in 2008. Last year, I contracted with Writer’s Digest Books to release the book in a revised and updated edition. I also decided to build a companion website for the book, to contain all the links and resources referenced in the book, along with some supplemental material.

The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can UseCompanion websites are a good fit for any book containing information that is subject to change, such as hyperlinks or references to specific websites. Since The Indie Author Guide was first published, for example, its chapters on POD publishing through Createspace and Kindle publishing have been rendered inaccurate due to site and procedural changes on the Createspace and Amazon DTP sites. I wanted to include an author guide to Facebook in the revised edition too, but as anyone who uses Facebook knows, that site is subject to sudden and dramatic changes at any time, with no advance notice, so that’s another area that’s fairly pointless to cover in a hard copy book.

Enter The Indie Author Guide companion website. On it, I’ve included a page for each of the book’s twelve chapters. Each page contains resources, links, errata and addenda for its respective chapter. The site’s layout will make the most sense to people who go there after having bought and perused the book, but it’s fairly bursting at the virtual seams with links and resources of interest to any indie author, so it’s worth a visit whether you’ve bought the book or not. 

In addition to what’s already there, two more features are in the works.

First, I’ll be adding a free, downloadable pdf containing tracking and number-crunching worksheets which are contained in an Appendix of the book as soon as the pdf is released to me from the publisher.

Second, when the book starts shipping I’ll be inviting anyone who buys a copy to send me a digital picture of my book side-by-side with their own book (or in the case of an ebook, a printed image of the ebook’s cover), along with a link to be embedded in the image (e.g., a link to the author’s website or book product page on Amazon). I’ll be setting up a rotating gallery of these images with embedded links to run on the front page of the site, with the aim of getting those authors some extra exposure for their books. 

For the time being, just feel free to peruse the links and resources. Be sure to check the page for Chapter 11; it’s the most jam-packed of the entire site!

And if you’ve pre-ordered The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can Use, or intend to buy it when it comes out, once you have it be sure to take a picture of your book and mine together, then return to the site to get the email address (I’ll be posting the address when the book comes out) for sending in your link and photo. 

The Dysfunctional Workshop

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For the purposes of this post I’m going to break the universe of fiction workshops into three categories. First, there are helpful workshops that teach you something useful. Second, there are boring workshops where you learn little or nothing, but nothing bad happens. Third, there are dysfunctional workshops where you risk damage to your writing soul.

Careful readers will have deduced that this post is about the third category. What it’s not about, however, is legitimizing the self-centered writer — a malady considerably more prevalent in the writing universe than the dysfunctional workshop. There is a ton to learn about writing fiction, and some of the lessons you learn will be hell on you. There will be times when you will be so sure you’re right you’ll bet your life and still be flat-out wrong.

Nothing that follows excuses authorial narcissism. Fiction writing requires an author to constantly debate their own weaknesses and biases, even if only for reasons of self-preservation. Because if you can’t police your own nonsense, others will be happy to do it for you.  

The Dysfunction Tell
In general a fiction workshop is a communal organization. The weight of responsibility is borne equally by all involved. Still, in most settings there is a leader or teacher or moderator who assumes the responsibility of facilitating the workshop process.

As another general rule, workshops exist to help you become the writer you want to be. Some workshops have prohibitions about different kinds of fiction — no sci-fi, say, or no fan fiction, or no fantasy — but such requirements are generally stated up front. If you want to write literary fiction set in a particular region, that’s your business. If you want to write genre fiction set in a particular era, that’s also your business. The only relevant question in a healthy workshop, always, is whether you are hitting what you’re aiming at.

It stands to reason, then, that anyone who uses a workshop to dictate their own views about fiction writing probably has an agenda other than helping you become the writer you want to be. Dogmatic beliefs about anything from form to subject matter are not simply inappropriate, they are demonstrably wrong. Plasticity in the language of fiction is an inherent part of the craft of fiction, and anyone who says otherwise has lashed themselves to a great white whale.

Another aspect of this tell is that most people who lead healthy (or boring) workshops don’t care if you pay attention or not. They’re there for the people who are eager and willing to listen and learn. They’re not looking for a fight, and they have more important things to do than get you to pay attention or to care about your own work. As in any social dynamic, people who assert or demand leadership are quite often more interested in acquiring followers than in teaching others how to be self-reliant. As a writer you need to be as self-reliant as possible, because you’re going to be doing the vast bulk of the work all by your lonesome.

Types of Dysfunction
You would think in this day and age that the teaching of a workshop would be pretty straightforward. It’s been done to death, and done at a high level for decades at various institutions, so it’s not like there’s a lot of mystery in the process.

The problem, of course, is that human beings are involved. And if there’s one thing we know about human beings it’s that ego never seems to be in short supply, and particularly so in people who aspire to leadership. Since the leader of a workshop has considerable influence in determining the character, spirit and utility of a workshop, it stands to reason that you want to avoid people who are in it for themselves — or out to lunch. To wit, here are five types of workshop leaders to watch out for:

  • The Dictator
    This workshop leader believes there are rules that must never, ever be broken. Since it’s already established beyond any doubt* that this is not true, you might wonder how someone like this can end up leading a workshop. The usual answer is that they’re an academic first and a writer second. Nobody who is a writer first would ever knowingly give up the right to do whatever they need to do in the service of their craft. But because an academic’s job is to stake out positions on criticism and literature (meaning the work of other writers), they may also project those career-sustaining views onto you and your work.

     

    For example, I recently learned of a workshop leader insisting that g’s are “no longer dropped in literary fiction” as a means of representing regional dialogue. It’s true that endless truncations and contractions can make reading impossible, but that’s an argument about maintaining suspension of disbelief and keeping the reader in the story. To solve that problem the trend is to drop g’s or otherwise alter language sparingly, so as to impart the flavor of the dialect without requiring the reader to learn a new language. Flatly stating that g’s are “never dropped in contemporary literature” is pomposity masquerading as knowledge. If you’re writing a story about people who live in a region that doesn’t speak Ivy-League English, that needs to come through in your story. If dropping a few g’s does that, then you do that.

  • The Boss
    This workshop leader wants you to do what you’re told. Usually found in workshops where a grade is on the line, the Boss often appears during revisions, making it clear that if you don’t acquiesce to their personal notes you’re going to suffer consequences. Forget the fact that workshops should be pass/fail, or that the criteria for failing or getting a letter grade should be output and effort. Bosses are only interested in compliance. If you’re a good little monkey, you get an A.

     

    The problem with a workshop leader telling you how to fix your story is that that’s not their job. There’s no ward full of sick children who will be cured by the fiction you’re writing; no rocket waiting for your prose to fuel a mission to Mars. A workshop leader’s goal is not to manage your output for the welfare of others, but to help you become the best writer you can be. Writing your stories for you doesn’t accomplish that, and it may impede your development.

  • The Purist
    Purists believe there’s one valid way to write fiction and everything else is crap. Some purists are traditionalists, favoring familiar forms and dismissing experimentation. Others are prophets, determined to lead the flock to the promised land of a new experimental style. The common bond between them is that they’re not interested in helping you become the writer you want to be, they’re interested in turning you into the kind of writer they revere.

     

    Not surprisingly, Purists, like Bosses, tend to show up in academic settings. If the Purist has enough pull an entire MFA program can become populated with selected or self-selecting writers who follow the Purist’s lead. While it might be legitimate to see such programs as a ‘school’ of fiction, in the sense that everyone is exploring similar craft ideas, the responsibility of a workshop leader is always to help writers discover themselves. The likelihood that a workshop full of writers would follow the same path if a Purist had not been leading the way is small. (I can think of one MFA program that has been driven so far into the experimental wilds that it seems to have lost touch with reality.)

  • The Vessel
    This type of workshop leader borders on the occult. Convinced that writing comes from a muse, and that it can only be accessed by supernatural or spiritual means, the Vessel spends a great deal of time talking about process, and very little time talking about craft. To the extent that learning how one writes is half the battle this approach might seem to have some utility, but it doesn’t precisely because it promotes dependency on the part of the writer.

     

    In college my first playwriting workshop began with ten minutes spent listening to soothing music, followed by a period of unprompted freewriting. The idea was that we needed to loosen up creative muscles that — apparently — were badly cramped from disuse. As soon as the class was over I went to the teacher of another playwriting section and asked if I could change, and thankfully the answer was yes. (While I’m on the subject, I never had to deal with any of these dysfunctional types at Iowa. All of my workshop leaders were properly supportive and focused on craft.)

    The point here is not that soothing music doesn’t help, or that we don’t all need ways to access our creativity. Rather, it’s that those concerns are properly outside the realm of writing instruction, and more closely allied with writing as a religion. If that’s the way you want to approach the craft, I can’t argue with you. What I can tell you is that you’re going to be hard-pressed to solve your writing problems with faith. Writing techniques and craft knowledge are to fiction writing what hoses, axes and ladders are to putting out fires. And you don’t see firepersons standing around a fire waiting for a muse to show up.

  • The Absentee
    This workshop leader is phoning it in. Maybe they’ve given up, maybe they don’t care, maybe they’re just doing it for the money. In any case, Absentees create a power vacuum at the top, which will immediately be filled by the biggest loudmouth or know-it-all in the workshop. Needless to say, long-winded stories, theoretical explanations and arguments tend to increase, while craft knowledge and reader feedback decreases — in large part because everyone else also ends up sitting on their hands.

     

    And that’s really the tragedy of letting the inmates run the asylum. So many people in workshops are afraid, intimidated, or just plain lost that a steady hand is required. Abdication of the moderating function in a workshop turns most of the members into implicit competitors, who are in turn dominated by those few members eager to make the competition explicit.

There are other issues you might run into — sexual harassment, bullying, belittling or other such abuses of power — but those would probably be apparent to anyone. As a general rule, workshops should be safe, supportive environments. If yours isn’t, at a minimum you should consider withdrawing, and if so moved you should report the abuse.

Surviving Workshop Dysfunction
If you find yourself in a workshop that looks dysfunctional, you have a couple of choices. If you identify the problem in short order you can change to another section or drop the workshop and hope there is no penalty. (Just because you signed up it doesn’t mean you’re morally obligated to accept someone else’s literary religion, particularly if those views were not made clear up front.)

If the dysfunction only becomes apparent when the workshop is underway, the question is one of survival. Protecting yourself as a writer can at times be as important as revealing or risking yourself, and all the more so for writers who are just learning the craft — who are, unfortunately, the least likely to understand the danger. In situations where a power dynamic is unequal — whether you’re a lowly student or worker, or some poor bastard at the end of a gun — I generally think whatever you can do to survive is okay. If humoring a dysfunctional workshop leader gets you a good grade I’m fine with that, as long as the goal is protecting yourself and your work. Slacking or sucking up simply to get by is lame, but more than that it only hurts your own development.

If you run into a Dictator you can simply follow their ‘rules’ until you’re free of their tyranny. Bosses can easily be defeated by demonstrating compliance until the grade is recorded, after which you can burn the draft they insisted on. Purists are insufferable in the way that all snobs are insufferable, and just as easily manipulated. Vessels are usually benign, and overwhelmed with their own suffering. A deft mix of sympathy and commiseration will probably do the trick. As for Absentees, they present an opportunity to practice your group-dynamic skills, provided you can keep your own ego in check.

The goal in all of this is protecting yourself against people who are trying to take control of your writing. Nobody — nobody – who has your best interest at heart as a writer will ever tell you what to do, let alone make you do it.

* Yes, there are general and specific rules about fiction writing. But there aren’t any rules that can’t be broken if it’s critical to the effect you’re trying to achieve. So when people say ‘there are no rules’, what they really mean is ‘there are no inviolate rules that apply in all instances throughout the universe’.

If that’s too abstract, consider this. A red light is a rule. It means stop and wait for a green light. But if it’s two in the morning and you’re trying to get your child to the emergency room, and there’s no traffic, and you slow down and clear the intersection, are you really, really, really going to wait for the green? No. You’re going to put the welfare of your child ahead of that particular traffic law, because doing anything else would be a crime.

In writing you can break any rule. You just better have a damn good reason.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Painful DRMs and Ebook Pricing

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I am not an early adopter. I love gadgets, but I like to wait until most of the bugs have been worked out. Then I wait a little longer until I’m sure it’s a tool I’m really going to use and not a toy I’ll toss aside in a couple of months. So I was really excited about finally buying an eReader last month.

Alas, my excitement was short lived upon discovering my new gadget couldn’t read several of my previously downloaded books. No problem, I thought. I’d just convert them with this nifty software I’d read about.

Wrong! Until that moment I had little understanding just how DRMs affected me personally. Suddenly I’m faced with undesirable choices: a) pay for yet another eBook version, b) read it on my laptop only, c) learn to strip the DRMs from my eBooks, d) forget the whole thing. While b and d are the simplest solutions, I am actually hovering between paying what I considerate an exorbitant amount for an eBook and learning how to “pirate” my own books for my own personal use, which brings me to my topic: eBook pricing.

Traditional publishers have missed the boat when it comes to eBook pricing. In fact, many aren’t even on the loading dock. As JA Konrath points out in his post “Ebook Pricing,” customers want to pay less for eBooks than they would for a hard copy. It’s always made sense to me as a customer, but as a business person/Independent Author I wondered if it was wise to price an eBook low. If Konrath’s numbers are to be believed, however, the lower the price, the better the sales, the more money you can pocket.

With so many eBook avenues opening up to Independent Authors from Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s new PubIt! pricing for high sale volume seems the better choice on The Road to Writing.

Author generated links:
April Hamilton’s post “Avast Ye Lubbers and Hear Ye Me Pirates” on eBook piracy tells of an honest woman pushed into piracy.

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

Basic Author Websites

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Providing up-to-date information about an author is essential to his or her book marketing efforts. The best way to do this is with a basic, easy to navigate, and easy to find website. You have a choice: pay someone to do it for you or do it yourself.

Paying someone else to do it may ensure it has a professional look, but you run a risk of a website designer putting far too much into it. Doing it yourself is not that difficult these days. You don’t need to be an HTML programmer anymore. It is very important to keep it simple and not use too many bells and whistles. Speed of loading and navigating is critically important. There are a number of excellent alternatives to website construction. Some are fill-in-the-blanks, generic sites (many major publishers provide these, as well as author support sites). Others allow you to build it from scratch or base it on an excellent template.

First, let me provide some resources for these and then I’ll discuss what needs to be included on your site. The following resources are ones with which I’m familiar. A simple search of the internet will provide even more possibilities.

Building Your Own Author Site

http://www.homestead.com

This is the web host I use. I’m not saying it’s the best, but it fills my needs just fine. The important thing is that it provides a free copy of Intuit’s “Sitebuilder” software, which includes some excellent templates and very easy to use website construction tools. They have a number of different programs for different levels of support.

http://www.authorsguild.net/?gclid=CLWT25LTu6QCFRBrgwodWH_Ozw

This is an author specialty web host with a version of Sitebuilder. They have three different versions of support, ranging from $3 to $6 to $9.

http://www.smartauthorsites.com/authors_landing.html?gclid=COKL8KfTu6QCFSIxiQodHT_f0g

Smart Author Sites is an author web design company.

http://www.bookbuzzr.com/

If you go to http://www.spearsminteditions.com/books.html , you will see my books opening and riffeling thru pages. Book Buzzer provides the aps which make this happen. It’s a good book support company.

Author Support Sites

http://authors.novelhelp.com

This is an excellent author support site (free) which provides a page to each member.

https://www.smashwords.com/about/how_to_publish_on_smashwords

This is the ebook service I personally use and recommend. They translate your book into all the different ebook formats, sell it for you, and provide each user their own author pages.

http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_websites/

Has hundreds of official author sites.

http://www.authorbytes.com/

This is a paid author book marketing support service.

http://www.eyeonbooks.com/authorwebsites.php

This is a free author website directory.

http://www.filedby.com/service/

Provides free to premium levels of author supports, including websites.

The Importance of Getting Found: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Whole books and seminars exist on this topic. It’s imperative that your website comes up on the first page of the results of a search. I’m unusual in that I am willing to go down 5 or 6 pages of search results for something I’m interested in. Most searchers are not, which is why you have to optimize your website for the internet search engines like Google and Yahoo. They send out software routines, called spiders, throughout the internet to find and categorize wites by their key words. The two best ways to do this is through the use of:

  • Metatags: keywords most likely to be important to the people you want coming to your site
  • Links: Links to your site from other sites

 

What to include on author websites

Author Contact information: every contact info you want others to have to be able to get a hold of you for commercial purposes.

Publishing house and Distributors

Bookstores and libraries need this info to buy your books.

Contact information for a publicist and / or lecture agent

If you have someone setting up book tours for you, be sure to include their info.

Contact information for your literary agent

This is for folks seeking rights to your book, such as movie makers and foreign publishers and distributors.

A media room

This is to provide to the press and reviewers downloadable materials they need to talk about you:

  • Bio
  • 300 dpi author pictures & book cover
  • Synopsis
  • Press releases

Books

  • A Bookbuzzr picture of the cover with a short downloadable teaser
  • Powerful short synopsis
  • Trailer (optional)
  • Buy / shopping cart link

About the Author

An interesting background that explains why you were the guy to write this book.

Page Links (Permalinks)

Usually on the left or top of each page that allows you to navigate around the site easily.

Buy Links

Usually called a shopping cart. This provides the site visitor the means to purchase your books.

Author Appearances

A schedule or calendar of where you will be appearing and when.

A community / discussion function / Blog

If you are able to create a significant book buzz, this is a discussion page for your fans to talk about you. It’s an excellent way to get interesting feedback. An on-site blog or a convenient link to one is an excellent way to tell fans what you think.

What not to have on your book website

Flash may be neat, but it slows down page loading and automatically knocks off fans with older computers and operating systems.

There are no permalinks: That’s just crazy. If visitors can’t readily see what they want to look at, they’ll leave immediately. Make your site ultra easy to navigate.

The blog lacks an RSS feed: Allow your blog readers to be automatically alerted whenever you post a new article. That is the function of an RSS.

Failure to include a contact email address: If you are concerned about your privacy, create a separate email address that’s only used for your writing efforts. Don’t give out the ones that go directly to your family.

Dark backgrounds and small / multiple fonts: you know how I feel about these aspects when it comes to book covers. The same goes for websites.

Unused features: Don’t put up a feature like a blog or a touring schedule and then never update it. That’s a big turn-off.

Forgetting to post downloadable hi-resolution images of / from / about the book: As a bookstore owner, I put out ad flyers, emails, and website postings advertising upcoming author signings, for which I need the info in authors’ media rooms.

Book trailers that play automatically: When I click on a home page link to a site, I do not expect to have to wait while a book trailer plays or a cutesy teaser door promises glorious mysteries if you just click on. DON’T DO THAT!!! I hate having my time wasted. It really agggravates me. If I want to watch a book trailer, give me the option to click on it. Your synopsis better be really good for me to want to do that.

Sample Author Sites

http://www.nancypickard.com/

Nancy is a beloved Kansas mystery writer who is a major force in the Sisters in Crime, an international mystery writers’ organization. She’s a national level author, so her site is more complex than some.

http://www.harpercollins.com/author/websites.aspx

This is how a major publisher handles author sites.

Important Book Marketing Blog Posts

The following book marketing posts from the Bookbuzzr folks’ blog will help you understand that you need to know your target segments when designing a site or a campaign.

http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/your-book-marketing-plan-who-should-you-be-promoting-your-book-to/

http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/cheap-and-free-book-marketing-strategies/

http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/tools-to-help-you-create-videos-for-your-blogwebsite/

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends.

Ebook Madness: Don't Confuse Ebook Conversion With Ebook Formatting!

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I’m getting a lot of emails from authors who tell me this or that company or person is offering to convert their manuscripts into ebooks for some ridiculously low fee, like $50. What the authors don’t know is that conversion of a manuscript to an ebook format takes fifteen minutes or less, is mostly an automated process, and will only deliver a quality ebook at the back end if the file being converted has already been properly formatted for the target ebook format. $50 doesn’t seem like such a bargain when you realize how little work is actually being done for that fee, and when you know it doesn’t include the most time-intensive, labor-intensive, and important part of the ebook creation process: formatting.

The conversion step is no big deal. You open a conversion program, click a button to import the (pre-formatted) manuscript, fill in a form with details about the book (e.g., title, author name, suggested retail price, etc.), click another button to add any required companion files to the project, then click one last button to output the ebook in your desired file format. If the manuscript file you’ve imported was formatted properly ahead of time, your ebook will look and perform great. If not, not.

The majority of time and effort that goes into creating an ebook is spent on preparing the manuscript for conversion, and creating any required companion files (e.g., Amazon’s required active table of contents file for Kindle books). Where the conversion step is mostly automated, the formatting part is mostly manual. This is because every manuscript is different, and the process of formatting a manuscript for ebook publication is primarily a process of minimizing and standardizing formatting. Here’s my Kindle book formatting to-do list, to give you some idea of what’s involved:

* “Save As” to create Kindle file copy
* Insert cover image on first page
* Remove blank pages
* Remove headers
* Remove footers
* Set margins to 1” all around, remove gutter
* Replace section breaks with page breaks
* Set two carriage returns before each pg break and one after each
* Insert page breaks before each chapter heading, if necessary
* Replace double spaces with single space between sentences
* Standardize body text style
* Turn off auto-hyphenate (Tools > Language > Hyphenation)
* Remove any tab or space bar indents, replace w/ ruler indents as needed
* Set line spacing to 1.5, max 6pt spacing after paragraphs
* Standardize chapter headings
* Standardize section headings
* Remove/replace special characters
* Reformat graphics as needed to 300dpi resolution & optimal size (4×6” or smaller)
* Verify images are “in line” with text
* Insert page breaks before and after full-page images
* Modify copyright page to reflect Kindle edition verbiage
* Add correct ISBN to copyright page
* Insert hyperlinked TOC

I have a different to-do list for each different ebook format, since the requirements vary from one to the other. Obviously, if the author provides a file that already meets most of the requirements above, the job will take much less time and effort than it will with a file for which I must complete all of the items on my formatting checklist.

Just as obviously, it’s impossible to know how much work is involved without actually seeing an excerpt from the manuscript. Anyone who’s offering to do the job on the cheap without seeing any part of the manuscript is either not intending to do any formatting, or so new to the author services game that he doesn’t realize the time and effort demands in creating ebooks are highly variable.

If you can find someone who will do the formatting AND the conversion for $50, and the resulting ebook looks great and functions properly, by all means HIRE HIM NOW! Otherwise, when you’re comparison shopping among author service providers, be sure to ask if the price quoted for the provider’s ebook conversion service includes formatting and creation of any required companion files.

 

This is a reprint from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

E-Book Self-Publishing Roundup

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For the second week in a row, Publetariat member L.J. Sellers garners a featured article spot for a post from her member blog. This week, L.J. offers a survey of ebook self-publishing options.

With Borders getting into the act, there will soon be four platforms on which authors can self-publish e-books directly to readers. I summarized them for comparison and thought I would share my findings.

Amazon: Digital Text Platform
This venture has been around the longest, has a reported 76% of e-book sales, and publishes content directly to the Kindle bookstore. Authors can upload a Word, html, or PDF file, which Amazon reformats as mobi file. Or authors can create their own mobi files to upload. The book’s cover must be included in the file.

For books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, Amazon pays a 70% royalty. For everything else, it pays 35% of the list price. Authors can price their books however they want, but Amazon reserves the right to discount the book. To keep the 70% royalty, authors can’t sell their e-book cheaper anywhere else. Amazon pays monthly and deposits royalties directly into the author’s bank account.

Most DTP e-books are purchased by people who own and read on Kindles, but Amazon has released applications that let iPad and mobile phone users buy Kindle books to read on other devices (except those of its competitors: B&N’s Nook and Borders’ Kobo). Authors can track real-time sales through their DTP bookshelf, and no start-up fee is required.

Smashwords
This publishing platform was founded by an individual, and it distributes content to many e-readers (Kindle, Sony, Nook, Kobo, etc.) and other devices (iPad, iPhone). Files must be uploaded as Word documents that must be properly formatted. Authors have complained about the difficulty of getting the Word formatting right and about the “ugliness” of the e-books produced by Smashwords’ software.

Authors can price their book (or short story) however they want, including offering it for free. For content sold directly from its site, Smashwords pays an 85% royalty—minus discounts and processing fees. It pays 70.5% for sales through its affiliates. Smashwords pays on a quarterly basis, 40 days after the close of each quarter. Authors can track their real-time sales on the Smashwords’ dashboard. Most authors report their Smashword sales to be only about 10% of their Kindle sales, but it is a way to reach the most distributors through one publisher.

Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!
The retail bookseller opened this platform recently and publishes an author’s work directly to its PubIt! bookstore, which supplies the Nook e-reader. PubIt! pays a 65% royalty on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 and 40% on everything else. Authors can set the list price, but B&N reserves the right to change it.

Imitating Amazon’s structure, B&N also pays monthly to the author’s bank account, but a full 60 days after the end of the month. For some reason, PubIt! also requires authors to supply a credit card number. Most of these venues require authors to provide social security numbers so they can report earnings to the IRS. There is no set-up fee.

Borders: Get Published
Trying to get in on the action, Borders has announced an e-book self-publishing platform, scheduled to launch Oct. 25. The venture is a collaboration with BookBrewer, which lets authors copy and paste almost any word content, including blogs (RSS feeds), into its software to create epub files. This venue looks like it will be the easiest for authors who have few technical skills.

Like Smashwords, Borders plans to publish its content to various devices, such as its own Kobo as well as the iPhone, iPad, and Android powered tablets (but not to its competitors: Kindle and Nook). Unlike any others mentioned here, Borders charges a set-up fee of $89.99 to distribute the books. Or it will sell you the e-book file it creates for $199 and you can do whatever you like with it. This makes the venture both a vanity press and an e-book creation service. But keep in mind there are several other e-book creators that offer this service for a lot less money. (Booknook is my personal favorite.) Borders has yet to announce royalty or payment terms.

INgrooves
This is a distribution company, rather than a publishing company. Authors have to supply both mobi and epub files to INgrooves, which then distributes the books to various e-readers and e-books stores, including Amazon, B&N, Sony, and Borders. For authors who want a one-stop experience, this could be the best choice.

Authors set their own prices and choose where they want their book sold. As a distributor with hundreds of books, INgrooves can negotiate higher royalties than an individual author may be offered. INgrooves charges a $50 set-up fee per book and keeps 5% of sales. It pays authors once a month, unless they have less than $200 in sales, then it waits until the author has accumulated $200.

It will be interesting to watch these ventures and see which ones thrive in a market dominated by Amazon.

Authors: What platforms have you used and what has been your experience?

 

Tweets For Indie Authors

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Today, a new widget was added to the Publetariat site. It’s called Self Publishing Twitter Chats, and it’s visible in the right-hand column of every page of the site. Don’t worry if you don’t have a Twitter account: you don’t need one to take advantage of this cool little device.

This widget provides a convenient, tabbed collection of Twitter searches which automatically updates in real time. The tabs provided are based on the following hashtags: #selfpub, #indieauthor, #platform, #publishing, #books, #pubtip and #writetip. Anytime someone on Twitter posts a message which includes one of these hashtags, it is added to the respective tab in the widget.

These tweets, for the most part, include links to valuable articles and resources for writers in general, and for indie authors and small imprints in particular. Click on the drop-down arrow at the top right of the widget to view a complete list of tabs and click on the one you’d like to view. You can also just click on any visible tab to open it.

The next time you’ve got a few minutes to spare, check out some of the tweets and links provided; you’re sure to find something of use or value.

Many thanks go out to Nathan Grimm, Program Manager of the SR Education Group for the Guide to Online Schools site, who built and maintains this widget.

Is There A Point Of Critical Mass In Marketing A Book When It Begins To Sell Itself?

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At the beginning of September I made a pledge to myself to cut back on marketing, step up my writing, and see what effect this had on my sales. So how did I do?

 

Well, I wasn’t completely successful in terms of writing. A trip, a cold, several sets of papers to grade became useful excuses not to write, but I did write 2,000 more words, and have 5 chapters of Uneasy Spirits, my sequel to Maids of Misfortune, completed. More importantly, I am much more engaged in the process of writing. For those of you who have read my earlier posts, you know that I wrote the first draft of Maids of Misfortune 20 years before I actually published it.

 

Well, I also outlined the plot of Uneasy Spirits many years ago, so it has taken me awhile to reacquaint myself with that plot. (This is a good point for outlines-without that outline I suspect much of the plot would have been lost to me in those intervening years.) While I haven’t written a lot this month, I have spent hours each day fleshing out existing characters, creating new ones, researching historical details, deciding where in the San Francisco of 1879 everyone was living, and getting excited about  being back in that world, creating again. Time well spent.

 

Time I now had because I stuck to my plan to limit the amount of time I spent marketing. I only checked my list of updated blog postings on GoogleReads in the early mornings and late evenings. I still commented on posts occasionally-finding that particularly early in the morning I might find a posting that had been made over night where I could be one of the first commentators. I also wrote to a few bookstores in San Francisco about selling my book, and I now have an offer from a San Francisco store, M is for Mystery, to sell Maids of Misfortune on consignment at their booth at the Bouchercon conference this month, which I will be attending.

 

However, what I didn’t do this past month was obsessively check all the reader sites (like GoodReads and Kindle Boards) and writer sites (like Absolute Write) every day, looking for a reason to comment. I rarely tweeted or updated facebook, and I didn’t post on my blog, The Front Parlor, at all. And yet my sales numbers went up.

 

In August, I sold on average 11 books a day, for a total of 332 books sold. In September, when I limited my marketing endeavors, I sold on average 13 books a day, with a total of 441 books sold.

 

Why do I think this happened (less marketing, more sales?) Well, one reason is that 75% of the books I sold, were sold on Kindle, and this has kept me continuously at number one in the historical mystery best-seller list on Kindle. So, if a person is looking for an historical mystery on Kindle, they can’t help but discover my book. In addition, since I continue to have a 85-90 % sell through rate (ie if a customer clicks on my product page they go on to buy the book), finding my book seems to mean they will buy it, which keeps it at the top of the list of best sellers. Which means that it continues to be found-without me doing any additional marketing. The question becomes, does this mean the book now will simply sell itself?

 

If the market for my book was limited, the answer would be no. For example, if all the people who liked historical mysteries, and owned Kindles, were a finite number, eventually that market would be saturated, and my sales would begin to drop. However, since by most accounts, ebooks are the fastest growing sector of books (see for example http://bit.ly/9QyPre), and Kindle still has about 90% of ebook sales (see http://bit.ly/aUtG1t), then the potential market for my book should continue to rise as well. If so, the answer to my question should be yes. My sales should at least remain steady, and perhaps actually rise, without any additional marketing on my behalf.

 

Does this mean I am going to abandon all marketing? Of course not. For example, Amazon ended the discount on my print book this month (heaven only knows why), and my print sales dipped. So, I will continue work to keep my name and my book out there on the internet, and I will accelerate my foray into bookstores, albeit in a very targeted manner. (Once again I am struck by the benefits of being a self-published author. If traditionally published, with the book having been out for over ten months, unsold copies of my book would have been sent back to the publisher, and it would be way too late for me to try to enter the bookstore market.)

 

But more importantly, I now have the confidence to focus the bulk of my energies on completing the next book and writing some additional short stories, and one of the clear lessons I have learned from authors like JA Konrath, is that the most successful marketing strategy is expanded content. Besides, despite the constant refrain that to be a successful author you need to be a successful marketer, writing stories is why I became involved in this endeavor in the first place.

 

So what do you think? Can a ebook and pod book, by a self-published author, get to the point where it sells itself? 

 

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

E-Book Self-Publishing Roundup

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With Borders getting into the act, there will soon be four platforms on which authors can self-publish e-books directly to readers. I summarized them for comparison and thought I would share my findings.

Amazon: Digital Text Platform
This venture has been around the longest, has a reported 76% of e-book sales, and publishes content directly to the Kindle bookstore. Authors can upload a Word, html, or PDF file, which Amazon reformats as mobi file. Or authors can create their own mobi files to upload. The book’s cover must be included in the file.

For books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, Amazon pays a 70% royalty. For everything else, it pays 35% of the list price. Authors can price their books however they want, but Amazon reserves the right to discount the book. To keep the 70% royalty, authors can’t sell their e-book cheaper anywhere else. Amazon pays monthly and deposits royalties directly into the author’s bank account.

Most DTP e-books are purchased by people who own and read on Kindles, but Amazon has released applications that let iPad and mobile phone users buy Kindle books to read on other devices (except those of its competitors: B&N’s Nook and Borders’ Kobo). Authors can track real-time sales through their DTP bookshelf, and no start-up fee is required.

Smashwords
This publishing platform was founded by an individual, and it distributes content to many e-readers (Kindle, Sony, Nook, Kobo, etc.) and other devices (iPad, iPhone). Files must be uploaded as Word documents that must be properly formatted. Authors have complained about the difficulty of getting the Word formatting right and about the “ugliness” of the e-books produced by Smashwords’ software.

Authors can price their book (or short story) however they want, including offering it for free. For content sold directly from its site, Smashwords pays an 85% royalty—minus discounts and processing fees. It pays 70.5% for sales through its affiliates. Smashwords pays on a quarterly basis, 40 days after the close of each quarter. Authors can track their real-time sales on the Smashwords’ dashboard. Most authors report their Smashword sales to be only about 10% of their Kindle sales, but it is a way to reach the most distributors through one publisher.

Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!
The retail bookseller opened this platform recently and publishes an author’s work directly to its PubIt! bookstore, which supplies the Nook e-reader. PubIt! pays a 65% royalty on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 and 40% on everything else. Authors can set the list price, but B&N reserves the right to change it.

Imitating Amazon’s structure, B&N also pays monthly to the author’s bank account, but a full 60 days after the end of the month. For some reason, PubIt! also requires authors to supply a credit card number. Most of these venues require authors to provide social security numbers so they can report earnings to the IRS. There is no set-up fee.

Borders: Get Published
Trying to get in on the action, Borders has announced an e-book self-publishing platform, scheduled to launch Oct. 25. The venture is a collaboration with BookBrewer, which lets authors copy and paste almost any word content, including blogs (RSS feeds), into its software to create epub files. This venue looks like it will be the easiest for authors who have few technical skills.

Like Smashwords, Borders plans to publish its content to various devices, such as its own Kobo as well as the iPhone, iPad, and Android powered tablets (but not to its competitors: Kindle and Nook). Unlike any others mentioned here, Borders charges a set-up fee of $89.99 to distribute the books. Or it will sell you the e-book file it creates for $199 and you can do whatever you like with it. This makes the venture both a vanity press and an e-book creation service. But keep in mind there are several other e-book creators that offer this service for a lot less money. (Booknook is my personal favorite.) Borders has yet to announce royalty or payment terms.

INgrooves
This is a distribution company, rather than a publishing company. Authors have to supply both mobi and epub files to INgrooves, which then distributes the books to various e-readers and e-books stores, including Amazon, B&N, Sony, and Borders. For authors who want a one-stop experience, this could be the best choice.

Authors set their own prices and choose where they want their book sold. As a distributor with hundreds of books, INgrooves can negotiate higher royalties than an individual author may be offered. INgrooves charges a $50 set-up fee per book and keeps 5% of sales. It pays authors once a month, unless they have less than $200 in sales, then it waits until the author has accumulated $200.

It will be interesting to watch these ventures and see which ones thrive in a market dominated by Amazon.

Authors: What platforms have you used and what has been your experience?

5 Reasons You Should Do NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

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November is fast approaching so you need to know about NaNoWriMo!

National Novel Writing Month is November every year and the aim is to write 50,000 words in 30 days on a new piece of work. Basically, it’s a novel in a month. But don’t be afraid – no one gets to read your “novel” so it is basically a first draft piece of work. Here’s Nanowrimo in a nutshell.

You should do this because:

  • You have always said you wanted to write a novel, so let this be your first step. I felt like this last year (Sept 2009) and last week (Sept 2010) my thriller novel ‘Pentecost’ came back from my editor. Yes, I started ‘Pentecost’ in NaNoWriMo last year and now it is a 70,000 word novel ready for rewrites. Woohoo! I only managed just over 21,000 words in November and most of that was cut out but the idea sprung from Nano as well as a lot of the key ideas and plot. It catapulted me into a novel in 2010.
  • You need to understand how to write a first draft fast. I didn’t know how to write fast last year. I hadn’t learned about separating the creator and editor in my mind and so I agonized over my writing. I felt I had to create a perfectly crafted sentence before writing fiction. Then I was introduced to “Write or Die” and word count goals, and behold, a novel began (the first of many!) Nanowrimo is about quantity of writing, not quality so you are forced to get the words out. There are no blocks here!
  • You will learn a lot in 30 days of writing. Check out my NaNoWriMo posts from last year including videos of my progress and lessons learned. It is an amazing way to get into the nuts and bolts of writing a novel. I was stunned by how much I learned through the process of writing itself and then investigating as I went.
  • You will be part of a global community. Join in the hashtag #nanowrimo on Twitter or the blog posts from writers around the world. Check in at NaNoWriMo.org to see what other people are up to. Receive the brilliant encouraging emails that help you along every week. You can even join in live or online writing events. Thousands of people do this, it is a community writing month!
  • You can clean the novel up later, it’s just a first draft! The aim is to write, not to be perfect. So get the ideas flowing and you will discover that actually writing encourages the muse. You don’t need to sit around thinking – just write! Editing the novel comes later and that is a much more extensive process, but no one can edit a blank page.

NaNoWriMo 2009 changed my life. I can say that hand on heart. It gave me the courage to write badly and to start writing fiction, to put words on the page and to let the ideas flow. I have spent most of this year reworking those ideas, but that month started the process. Without it I may still be saying “I wish I could write a novel” or “I only write non-fiction”. If you have a dream to write a novel, I urge you to register for NaNoWriMo and get started on Nov 1st! (Click here for information)

PS. After saying all that, I have to admit that I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year as I have rewrites to do for Pentecost in order to have it ready to enter the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards in Jan 2010. I did want to be ready but I am not pro enough to be able to complete a novel in 1 year yet! I hope you are still encouraged to join in.

Will you be joining NaNoWriMo this year?

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Promote Your Book on the Goodreads Network

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With more than 3 million members, Goodreads is the largest social network for readers. The site is a terrific way for authors (especially fiction authors) to interact with their target audiences through the Goodreads Author Program.

Like other social networks, members join and set up a profile. But the emphasis of this site is on discussing books and sharing book recommendations with others. Members can create a catalog of the books they have read, are currently reading, and plan to read in the future; post reviews; create lists of books; start a book club; join a discussion group; or even contact an author.

To sign up for this free reader network, just enter your name, email, and a password on this page. I recommend setting up your own profile and book catalog and becoming familiar with the site before you get started with the author program.
See this page for details on how to upgrade your account to "author" status. Here are some of the things you can do to promote yourself and your books on Goodreads:

• Post a picture and bio.

• Share your list of favorite books and recent reads with your fans.

• Start a blog or import a feed of your existing blog.

• Publicize upcoming events, such as book signings and speaking engagements.

• Share book excerpts and other writing.

• Write a quiz about your book or a related topic.

• Post videos.

The Goodreads Author Program offers these promotional tools to authors:

• List a book giveaway to generate pre-launch buzz.

• Lead a Q&A discussion group for readers.

• Participate in discussions on your profile, in groups and in the discussion forums for your books.

• Add the Goodreads Author widget to your personal website or blog to show off reviews of your books.

• Advertise your book to the Goodreads Community.

The key to getting good results on Goodreads is to join in the conversation on the site and share with others.  One of the best ways to make friends on Goodreads is to be active in groups related to your genre or topic and to send friend requests to selected folks in those groups. But don’t overdo it – as with all social networks it’s important to observe proper etiquette. Read the guidelines for authors and be careful not to engage in activities that are considered spamming, such as contacting or friending everyone who has read your book or similar books.

Many authors find reader communities such as Goodreads to be more beneficial than general networking sites like Facebook. I recommend starting with Goodreads because it’s the largest, but there are a number of similar sites and some are geared to specific types of books, such as children’s books. See this list of virtual reader communities for additional networks to consider.

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Keosauqua, Iowa Road Trip

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Last Thursday was the day I spoke at the Van Buren County Hospital Women’s Health Fair at Keosauqua, Iowa. Wow! Did I get more out of the day than just speaking and selling books. Although being there did give me a chance to meet a lot of friendly people and spread the word about my books.

That morning, the sun shone brightly on Iowa fields filled with combines and tractors. The farther south we drove, the more leaves colored. The hundred and twelve miles was fairly flat land. We drove through smaller villages except for Fairfield, a college town. The two hours flew by as we enjoyed looking at the scenic countryside.

The visitors guide 2010 says "Keosauqua, the county seat, (pop. 1066) is the largest village in Van Buren County. It is located in the center of the county within the horseshoe bend of the Des Moines River. Keosauqua is a community of friendly neighbors with small town hospitality." I couldn’t have said that better myself.

The courthouse is the oldest in Iowa and on the National Register of Historic Places. Second oldest in the country. In 1846, the courthouse was the scene of the first legal death sentencing and hanging in Iowa. Don’t know when the town was founded but that statement tells me some time around 1846.

Van Buren Hospital is a much needed medical benefit to everyone as all our county hospitals are. The building was filled with friendly staff, and volunteers manned a table to greet the visitors at the door. The grounds were neatly groomed with trees and flowers beds. Stones had the name of people on them that the spots were dedicated to.

The health fair tables were spread out from one end of the building to the other down the maze of halls. Women came, interested in information about diseases that will or have affected them. Plus, there were other businesses doing therapy, massages, selling children books, nutrition drinks and much more. I had a drawing for one of my books. The addresses on the papers in my basket proved women were willing to drive some distance to attended this annual event.

Now step out of this modern hospital and tour the town. I loved that Keosauqua has preserved buildings that must have been some of the first built when the town was settled in the 1800’s. By now a lot of small towns historic buildings have been torn down to make way for progress. This is a town that would make a good back drop for the type of movies I’d like to watch.

We drove down a street headed east and watched a fisherman unload his boat into the Des Moines River’s fast currant right in front of us. We turned the corner. That street ran between the river and century or better old Riverbend hotel with a porch on the end that was built around the front of the building as well. If the long modern bridge hadn’t been in view, I might have expected a riverboat to slowly round the bend and trappers in canoes gliding over to dock. They’d be coming to town to sell their bundle of furs in the back of the boat. Perhaps, women, in their finery, holding onto a parasol and paper fan sat on the porch, waiting to go up the gang plank of that riverboat for a ride back home. No, the ladies sitting there was just enjoying the view while they ate their sack lunch.

We turned back west and drove along the front of the hotel. The long porch is held up with porch posts from back in the day. A picture flashed through my head of elderly bearded gents sitting on benches. Some smoking a pipe and others spitting amber in the dirt street (that used to be there) from the chewing tobacco in their jaws as they watched the younger generations move about town energetically.

Another neat sight was a church that looked like it should have been in Little House On The Prairie. The tower on the side of the church held a bell, rusted from all the years it tolled in inclement elements. Another building was the Farmers Creamery, long closed and perhaps part of the extension office built on the back. A reminder that this was a farming community then and now. At one time all over the country, farmers separated the cream from the milk and brought the cream to the Creamery to sell. Downtown still has that fifties look. Nothing wrong with that for a person like me that likes the familiar small town feel.

We were too early for the health fair, because we hadn’t expected to get to Keosauqua so quickly. By the time, we set up our table it was lunch time. I asked for a place to eat. Several choices of restaurants were suggested, but all of those had much the same menus that we can choose from at home. The one that interested me was Billy Ray’s Smokehouse just because I love fried catfish.

We’d quietly entered Billy Ray’s behind another couple. They sat on one side the room and we sat in a booth on the other. In a minute or two, the two waitresses spotted they had customers. We barely glanced at the menu since we knew what we wanted. Fried CATFISH. The waitress suggested the smoked barbecued chicken was good. We turned that down, because that wasn’t what we came in to eat.

And what a treat. The catfish was golden, large fillets. Taken from larger catfish than I’ve ever caught and tastier than how the ones I fry turn out. French fries were just right, too. The waitress even tore the top off our tarter sauce packets for us. I appreciated that small courtesy, because I can never get those stubborn packets open.

By the time we finished eating we were stuffed but already planning our return to Billy Ray’s before we headed for home. We wanted to try another meal on the menu. I asked what time the restaurant closed. The answer was 8 p.m. "We would be ready to box up my books by 5:30," I said, thinking out loud. The waitress said, "Are you telling me you’re coming back tonight?" Why not. We have to try that smoked chicken.

The two waitresses were watching for us this time. We enjoyed visiting with them almost as much as we liked eating their good meal. We said no need to hand us the menu. We were back for the smoked chicken which turned out just as delicious as the catfish. We eat out quite a bit, but we couldn’t order smoked barbecued food around us, and though we love the walleye we eat in our area, if that restaurant’s fried catfish was on the same menu, I’d have to flip a coin to decided. As a side, we had the special for the night – fried potatoes and onions which was perfect with the chicken.

We promised to come back sometime soon. With all the interesting sights to see that I read about in the visitors guide the waitress gave me, we can spend a day going from one small town to the next. Just so we’re close enough to end up at Billy Ray’s for meals.

Making Print Choices

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Navigating the journey to publication is all about making choices. The many decisions you make as a self-publisher influence other decisions down the road.

One of the earliest decisions you need to make is the kind of print production you’ll be using for your book. Of all the printing and reproduction methods available to you, which will you choose? How can you decide what’s right for your book—and your budget?

Should you use digital printing with print-on-demand distribution? Is your book more suitable to offset printing and physical fulfillment? Who is the market for your book?

And what are the different ways to get a book into print? That would be good to know.

Understanding these options is key to making good decisions. Here are some articles that address reproduction and the choices you’ll be making.

Book Printing Choices

First you’ll need to understand the various ways books are printed, and how to determine the best method for each kind of book. You can start with a quick introduction to printing processes.
Self-Publisher’s 5-Minute Guide to Printing Processes

Once you decide how to print and distribute your book, you’ll face the choice of picking an offset or print on demand printer. And for specialty books, sometimes you need specialty printers.
Working With Blurb.com For Color Books
Book Running Late? Working With 48hrbooks.com
[Watch for more articles to come on making this choice!]

Digital Printing and Print on Demand

Every self-publisher needs to understand digital printing and print-on-demand distribution, because it’s becoming the favorite method of printing for people who want to limit their investment in inventory.

This form of distribution also makes the publishing, distribution and fulfillment process labor-free for the publisher. This one change in book printing has been the catalyst for the explosive growth of self-publishing, and for finally enabling books to continue “in print” indefinitely.
Self-Publishing Basics: Print on Demand: What Is It?
How Print-on-Demand Works

How Much Does Self-Publishing Cost?

One of the first questions from new self-publishers is “How much is this going to cost me?” The answer from most professionals is “Well, that depends . . .” In an attempt to give you a range of figures, I’ve broken down self publishers into three different kinds, and looked at a range of prices in nine categories for each. Studying these articles may help you decide which is the right route for you.
What Does Self-Publishing Cost? A Preview
What Does Self-Publishing Cost? DIY Self-Publisher
What Does Self-Publishing Cost? Online Self-Publisher
What Does Self-Publishing Cost? Competitive Self-Publisher

By this time you’ve done your research and picked a printer for your book. In that decision you’ve also chosen how you’ll distribute and fulfill the orders for your book.

All these decisions are influenced by the early work you did on figuring out the market for your book. Fine art books will need one type of production, self-help books need quite a different kind. Publishing for the online market imposes different requirements than publishing for national bookstore chains, or for back-of-the-room sales.

Your publishing venture stands the best chance of success if you address these questions from the start.

And now part of our planning is for the growing field of Ebooks and Ebook readers. That’s where we’re headed next.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.