Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

37 Reasons Why You Should Write A Book

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This post by John Kremer originally appeared on his Book Marketing Bestsellers site.

The sooner your write a book, the better (for you and your business). You can certainly write a book within the next 60 days!

Here are 37 reasons why you should write a book.

 

Make money. You can make money not only by selling your book, but also by selling all the ancillary products and services you can offer.

Money is often the key motivator for many authors, but it certainly isn’t the only reason why you should write a book.

 

Change lives. Books can enlighten, educate, inspire, inform, and entertain. They can and do change lives.

Everyone has at least one story of a book that changed their lives. What book changed your life? Now, write one to change other people’s lives.

 

Sell a product. Use your book to help promote another product, whether a real world product or an online information product. Books can help you sell all your other products and services. Seed your book with the stories of your other products and services. Include case studies, success stories, examples of failure and success.

Books can sell your products and services faster and easier than anything else. Books allow you to showcase what you do, how well you do it, and how your customers benefit from what you offer.

 

Build a career. There’s no better way to build a career than to start by writing a book. Books open doors. Books get respect. Books get you promotions. And books get you job offers, again and again.

 

Boost your credibility. Nothing establishes your authority better than a book. Your book instantly boosts your credibility as a doer, as an expert, as a celebrity, as an authority. Of course, it has to be a good book, a great book, an extraordinary book. The more extraordinary, the more your credibility will grow!

 

Read the full post on Book Marketing Bestsellers.

 

Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 10/27/14.

Almost everything being said about publishing today is predicated on two facts that are dead wrong. The first is that publishers are somehow being hurt by ebook sales. The second is that independent bookstores are being crushed. The opposite is true in both cases, and without understanding this, most of what everyone says about publishing is complete bollocks.

Let’s take the health of publishers first. Below you will see that profit margins at the major publishers are either flat or improving. For three of the top publishers, margins have improved quite a bit:

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous infographics and much further analysis, on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Why Don’t Men Read Romance Novels?

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This post by Noah Berlatsky originally appeared on Pacific Standard on 10/23/14.

A lot of men just don’t read fiction, and if they do, structural misogyny drives them away from the genre.

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Why do women read romance novels? It’s a question that’s often been asked, explicitly or implicitly. Two groundbreaking 1980s studies, Janice Radway’s anthropological Reading the Romance and Tania Modleski’s more theoretical Loving With a Vengeance, suggested that romance novels provided women with compensatory fantasies. Patriarchy is depressing and oppressive for women, and romance novels understand that and provide a salve.

Other commenters have been more vicious. William Giraldi declared: “Romance novels—parochial by definition, ecumenical in ambition—teach a scurvy lesson: enslavement to the passions is a ticket to happiness.” He concluded that the success of 50 Shades of Grey shows that, “We’re an infirm, ineffectual tribe still stuck in some sort of larval stage.” Since the main readers of 50 Shades have been women, the conclusion seems to be that women read this sort of book because they are stunted. If reading romance is seen as deviant or pathological, then the attitude toward romance readers is either condescension or contempt: Romance readers are either poor souls who need help, or they’re debased fools who should be scorned.

 

Read the full post on Pacific Standard.

 

How to Create an Audiobook with ACX

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This post by JD Smith originally appeared on Words With Jam on 9/23/14.

ACX is a service provided by Amazon where authors can hook up with narrators and turn their book into an audio book for distribution through Audible, Amazon and iTunes. Up until this year the service was only available in the US, but now it’s available in the UK. Over the last few months I’ve been working with narrator Paul Hodgson on by book The Rise of Zenobia. You can listen to a sample here.

 

What does ACX actually do?

ACX is basically the interface you use to meet narrators, and deal with all the contractual information once you’ve found a narrator you want to work with. They check the recording quality of audio submitted before it’s put through for distribution. And they also provide a dashboard to keep track of sales and payments.

 

How do I start?

You log in using your Amazon account and the set up is fairly minimal. ACX pulls most of the information of your book from Amazon and you then add a bit more information, to make your book enticing, such as review quotes and possibly sales figures.

 

Read the full post on Words With Jam.

 

How to Write an Author Bio When You Don't Feel Like an Author…Yet

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This post by Anne R. Allen originally appeared on her blog on 9/9/12.

Maybe you’ve got a novel finished and you’ve been sending out queries. Lots. And you’re getting rejections. Lots. Or worse, that slow disappointment of no response at all.

Or maybe you write short fiction and poetry and you’ve got a bunch of pieces you’ve been sending out to contests and literary journals. You’ve won a few local contests, but so far you haven’t had much luck getting into print.

You may still be afraid to tell more than a handful of people you’re a writer. You’d feel pretentious calling yourself an “author.”

But it might be time to start—at least privately.

Because one day, in the not too distant future, you’ll open your email and there it will be:

The response from an editor: “You’re the winner of our October ‘Bad Witch’ short story contest. We’d like to publish your story, Glinda: Heartbreaker of Oz in our next issue. Please send us your Author Bio.”
Or just when you were giving up hope, you get that reply from your dream agent: “I’m intrigued by your novel Down and Out on the Yellow Brick Road. Please send the first fifty pages, and an Author Bio.”

You’re so excited you’re jumping out of your skin, so you dash something off in five minutes and hit “send.” Wow. You’re going to be in print! Or maybe get an agent. Let’s get this career on the road!

Whoa. You do NOT want to dash off an author bio in five minutes. Every word you send out there is a writing sample, not just those well-honed pages or stories.

 

Read the full post, which includes a 10-step guide to writing an author bio, on Anne R. Allen’s blog.

 

No Author Is Too Good for Her Amazon Critics

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This post by Jennifer Weiner originally appeared on New Republic on 10/19/14.

Dear readers, the commoners have reviewed Margo Howard’s book … and Ms. Howard is not pleased.

A bit of background: long-time advice columnist Howard wrote a memoir called Eat, Drink, and Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife. Publisher’s Weekly called it a “touching” memoir by a “pampered princess” that relied heavily on name-dropping for its draw.

Amazon’s critics were less impressed—specifically, Amazon’s “most trusted” reviewers who, Howard says, are given “freebies…cold cream, sneakers, pots and pans, and…books!” and allowed to review them in advance of their publication date. She is not a fan. These reviewers—“the freebie people,” Howard calls them—are “dim bulbs,” they are “evangelical, unworldly,” “barely literate, and “deluded.”

The irony, of course, is that in trying to show that she’s not, as the “freebie people” say, a coddled, name-dropping, well-connected rich lady, Howard comes across as a well-connected rich lady. Everything from her name-dropping (both a MacArthur genius and a long-time Vanity Fair staff writer loved her book!) to her solution to the problem (it turns out that Howard knows two members of Amazon’s board of directors!) smacks of barely-examined privilege.

Still, I can feel Howard’s pain. Show me a writer who hasn’t felt savaged, misunderstood, unfairly attacked, or completely misread by an Amazon reviewer, and I’ll show you a writer whose books live in shoeboxes under her bed. I suspect that there are, indeed, reviewers who skim books looking for references of stuff they don’t have—a nanny here, a remodeled kitchen there—so their review can scream RICH LADY PROBLEMS in all caps.

 

Read the full post on New Republic.

 

'Am I being catfished?' An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic

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This post by Kathleen Hale originally appeared on The Guardian on 10/17/14. Note that it contains strong language.

When a bad review of her first novel appeared online, Kathleen Hale was warned not to respond. But she soon found herself wading in

In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.

“No,” she said firmly, taking the pen away. “Kathleen, you understand we can’t make any more changes, right?”

“I was just kidding,” I lied. Eventually she had to physically prise the book from my hands.

A lot of authors call this “the post-partum stage”, as if the book is a baby they struggle to feel happy about. But for me, it felt more like one of my body parts was about to be showcased.

“Are you excited about your novel?” my mom asked, repeatedly, often in singsong.

“I’m scared,” I said. Anxious and inexperienced, I began checking goodreads.com, a social reviewing site owned by Amazon. My publisher HarperTeen had sent advance copies of my book to bloggers and I wanted to see what they thought. Other authors warned me not to do this, but I didn’t listen. Soon, my daily visits tallied somewhere between “slightly-more-than-is-attractive-to-admit-here” and “infinity”.

For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. “Well, it’s a weird book,” I reminded myself. “It’s about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to fight crime.” Mostly I was relieved they weren’t all one-star reviews.

One day, while deleting and rewriting the same tweet over and over (my editors had urged me to build a “web presence”), a tiny avatar popped up on my screen. She was young, tanned and attractive, with dark hair and a bright smile. Her Twitter profile said she was a book blogger who tweeted nonstop between 6pm and midnight, usually about the TV show Gossip Girl. According to her blogger profile, she was a 10th-grade teacher, wife and mother of two. Her name was Blythe Harris. She had tweeted me saying she had some ideas for my next book.

“Cool, Blythe, thanks!” I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I’d been asking Twitter for ideas – “The weirdest thing you can think of!” – promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.

Curious to see if Blythe had read my book, I clicked from her Twitter through her blog and her Goodreads page. She had given it one star. “Meh,” I thought. I scrolled down her review.

“Fuck this,” it said. “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.”

 

Read the full, lengthy post on The Guardian.

 

The Do's And Don'ts Of Writing A Blurb For Your Novel

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This post by Milena originally appeared on blurb on 10/9/14.

When writing a novel, there are few selling tools as important as writing a solidly written blurb. Sure, the cover design creates intrigue, but, if you have caught a potential reader’s attention, the blurb is what will sell your book—and convert readers. A “blurb” can refer to both a “description blurb” that you write for the back cover of your book and a “review blurb.” For the purposes of this post, we’ll be focusing on the former, and how you, the writer, can craft the best possible blurb.

 

Dos
-Reference the genre and central theme
-Create intrigue around the main conflict
-Dive right in and introduce your protagonist
-Keep it short and punchy
-Reference your book-writing or professional status, if it relates to your book.

 

Read the full post on blurb.

 

So You're Going To Pitch Your Book – A Guide

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This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 9/19/14.

It seems that lately there have been more opportunities than ever before for writers to pitch their as-yet-unpublished manuscript to industry professionals. At writers conventions, festivals and so on, more agents, editors and publishers are making themselves available to hear about your magnum opus. It really is a superb opportunity and these things usually get booked out. But man, I’ve heard some horror stories! It’s a hell of a thing, trying to sell yourself and your work with nerves making your guts into an ice storm. So I thought I’d ask a few key people in the industry for some tips to help you formulate your pitch should you get the chance.

Firstly, I’ll throw a tip or two of my own at you, then we’re going to hear from a small press publisher, a literary agent and a big press editor.

My tips are simple: Know what your book is about so you can formulate a killer elevator pitch. This is so named because it’s based on the premise that you meet a publisher in an elevator and have a few seconds before they reach their floor to sell them on the idea of your book. Here’s the elevator pitch for BOUND, as an example:

Underground cage fighter, Alex Caine, is drawn into a world he didn’t know existed – a world he wishes he’d never found. The harder he tries to get out, the deeper he’s dragged in. It’s magic, monsters, mayhem and martial arts in a fast-paced dark urban fantasy thriller.

 

Read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

 

Amazon and Booktrope Announce New Business Relationship

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This post by Rachel Thompson originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 10/9/14.

Booktrope announces a new business relationship beginning with a mutual licensing deal that deepens ties with Amazon.com to a much more significant degree.

Booktrope is a Seattle startup that says it’s reinventing publishing by providing efficient, online services to creative teams – authors, editors, designers and others involved in producing books — in order to produce high quality titles for readers at reasonable prices. By all outward appearances, Amazon and Booktrope share a strong commitment to keeping ebook prices substantially lower than print, allowing consumers to benefit from new technology, while still affording authors deserved compensation.

The relationship kicks off with a licensing agreement which includes fifteen titles to be reissued under Amazon Publishing as e-books and audio books. Booktrope will continue to publish print versions of these titles and to manage development and publication of future books by the authors.

I sat down (virtually) with Katherine Sears, CMO and co-founder of Booktrope to get the nitty-gritty on the deal.

 

Rachel Thompson: Help me understand this, did Amazon just take over Booktrope’s digital book business?

Katherine Sears: No – not at all! Initially this agreement covers ebooks and some audio books for only fifteen of our nearly 300 titles. However, this is the beginning of what is intended to be a longer term business arrangement, so we hope to announce many more titles being licensed in this same way over the coming months. And, of course, we are always exploring other ways for our two companies to work together.

 

RT: What led you to this relationship with Amazon?

 

Read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

Future Bright For Children’s Books As Industry Names Plot Next Chapter

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This post by Imogen Russell Williams originally appeared on The Guardian Books Blog on 9/26/14.

A mood of optimism marked the Bookseller Children’s Conference, with sales up 10% and editors pronouncing themselves keen to experiment and push the digital envelope

The Purcell Room on London’s South Bank was awash with positivity on Thursday, as the Bookseller Children’s Conference celebrated a section of the books industry where everything is rosy. If current trends continue, said the magazine’s charts and data analyst, John Lewis, this year is set to become the best year for children’s books since records began. Sales in children’s and YA publishing are up 10% in 2014 – an extraordinary performance against the backdrop of a market that is down 2% overall. And it’s not just about new titles. The backlist is making a particularly strong showing in both picture books and children’s fiction, with five of the current top 10 bestselling picture books dating from pre-2011 – including Judith Kerr’s 46-year-old classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Adding to the sense of celebration, Bookseller children’s editor Charlotte Eyre and publisher Nigel Roby also announced the launch of the Bookseller YA book prize, for which any young adult titles by authors living in the UK or Ireland and published in 2014 will be eligible. (Full disclosure: I’ve been asked to be one of the judges, and have been emitting a thin, gleeful squeal ever since.)

 

Read the full post on The Guardian Books Blog.

 

Why Is Typography So Important To Content Marketing?

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This post by Erika Schneider originally appeared on the Outbrain blog on 9/16/14. Note that while it is aimed at small businesses, the information here is just as applicable to author websites and blogs, and even book cover design.

Content marketing has become one the primary ways of retaining customers, attracting new clients, and generating leads, sales, and profit for a company. While the content itself on a website is incredibly important, another crucial aspect of content marketing is typography. Typography isn’t often given a lot of consideration, but there is no doubt it plays a role in strengthening your brand, creating interest in your product, and highlighting your central message.

 

What is typography?

Typography is actually a pretty basic concept, and simply refers to the way that text is arranged on a page or document. Often times, typography is referred to as an art, as typography can be incredibly creative and innovative. Typography is great for enhancing a theme, adding personality, increasing emphasis of an idea or reinforcing a thought, demonstrating emotion, creating interest, and crafting aesthetic appeal.

While straightforward black-colored text such as this is appropriate for some forums, colorful and artistic text can be a great advertising tool. Notice how that sentence caught your attention and drew you in based on its font and color scheme alone? That’s the whole point of great typography.

 

Elements of Typography

You might think that typography is limited to font and color, but typography is actually much more than that. Here are the elements of typography that you should familiarize yourself with:

 

Read the full post on Outbrain.

 

What the Editor Sees (That the Writer Does Not)

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This post by Savannah Thorne originally appeared on The Review Review.

When you submit to a literary magazine, do you ever wonder what is happening to your work on the other end? Has it disappeared into an editorial netherworld? What exactly is taking so darn long for them to get back to you? And is it true that the longer the editors take with your work, the better they like it?

I was delighted to be published in Conclave: A Journal of Character‘s inaugural issue, and when I heard the magazine was at risk of not continuing, I took over as managing editor and have kept it going for years, incorporating e-books into the equation. When I stepped in, I found myself with a huge, year-long backlog of submissions to wade through, and as I learned the ropes, I realized I was in the unique position of being an editor and a writer at the same time. It gave me insight into both sides of the desk. What I’ve collected here is the behind-the-scenes truth about what happens to your work after it’s been submitted and some dos and don’ts to get your work noticed.

So, what happens to your work after you’ve hit “submit?”

At Conclave, like many literary magazines, your work appears in our online submission manager and sits there with a status of “received.” It will stay “received” even after a real human being opens it and glances at it. If they know it’s way off for the magazine’s needs, it may be quickly rejected. If it has a hook, is well-written, and seems to draw the reader in (and, in our specific case, if it’s based around a strong character), then the first reader forwards the file to another reader. The status switches to “forwards.” Editors can vote on it, and if they choose to they can also write notes about it

The longer an editor takes with my work, the better…right?

I’m sorry to have to answer that with: Not necessarily. In actuality, submissions come in, and although they are arranged by date, then author’s name, title, and genre, I can assure you that these things get little attention. It is the quality of the work alone that determines whether a writer is accepted—whether it’s their first time being published, or their thirtieth. The very first thing we do is open the file itself, and read it. It doesn’t matter who you are—it matters what your story says.

 

Read the full post on The Review Review.

 

Should You Publish Indie or Traditional? A Hybrid Author Busts the Myths

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This post by Holly Robins originally appeared on her site on 8/17/14.

Yesterday, I gathered with a group of area writers at the Haverhill Public Library Authors Fair. My table was situated between Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, an author who publishes traditionally, and Connie Johnson Hambley, a self-published mystery writer. This was the perfect place for me: I’m a hybrid author who has jumped from a traditional publisher (Random House) to indie publishing and back to a traditional house again. As I start my fourth novel to be published by New American Library/Penguin Random House, I have no contract for the next one. This means that I’m revisiting the all-important question for many writers: do I want to go solo when I publish my next book, or stay where I am?
This is a good time to roundup what I’ve learned about publishing. In the process, I want to dismantle four common myths:

1. Publishers are Out to Screw Authors
MYTH. Publishing companies are businesses that compete in a global marketplace. Their job is to make money—and, in so doing, they will make money for you.

With a traditional publisher, you will get royalties from your books—typically about 25 percent of ebook sales. This is much less than the percentage of royalties you’ll get if you self publish. Rates vary, but with self publishing, you’ll reap about 65 percent of a book sale as your royalty rate.

On the other hand, with a traditional publishing deal, you will get an advance against royalties—anywhere from $5K to $45K for most first-time novelists, though of course there are some pie-in-the-sky whopper deals. You will also get—for free!–an editor, publicist, marketing team, designers, sales people, etc. Your team at a traditional publisher will help you whip your book into shape and get it into the hands of readers.

 

Click here to read the full post on Holly Robins’ site.

 

What Seth Godin Can Teach Us About Book Publishing

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This post by Jennifer Tribe originally appeared on clearprose communications on 5/14/14.

If you’ve ever read anything by Seth Godin, you know he’s not a man who’s content to just go with the flow. He’s been questioning and analyzing the business world — “poking the box,” as he calls it — for decades.

He applies that same inquisitive nature to publishing, too. Godin is the author of 17 bestselling books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s worked with a traditional publisher and he’s experimented with self-publishing. In other words, he’s been around the book block quite a few times.

Godin’s commentary on the book publishing industry is some of the sharpest I’ve read, and his techniques for crafting and promoting a book are often ingenious.

If you’re a non-fiction author, you’d do well to tear a page from Godin’s playbook — here’s how.

 

1] Understand that the idea is the thing

In Godin’s world, a book is a vehicle for an idea — the idea is the product — which means that right now, the traditional publishing industry is focused on the wrong thing.

[Publishers] will only thrive if they understand that an entirely new business model will have to be built and understood. And it will have nothing whatsoever to do with paper. It will be about ideas.Which is what book publishing was supposed to be about all along, right?

 

Click here to read the full post on clearprose communications.