Business End

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

Twitter 10,000

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This post, by Joel Friedlander, originally appeared on The Book Designer on 3/26/12.

When I checked my Twitter account this morning (@JFBookman) I had 9,951 followers. Over the next day or two I expect this number to click over, like the odometer in your car, to 10,000. This comes with a variety of responses:

  • Surprise: What took so long?
  • Incredulity: You mean you really like me?
  • Malaise: Does anyone care?
  • Humility: That’s a lot of people to answer to!

Does having a lot of people listening influence me? A little bit, but I’ve been pretty focused on curating my Twitter stream, keeping it on the topics I write about. In that sense, I do think a lot about readers, and what’s most useful that I can provide.

Maybe because of that care, Twitter is my most important social media investment, the place I enjoy spending time and where I’ve put in the most work to establish a robust “outpost,” made the most new friends, created the most connections.

But here’s what’s really interesting to me. It took me two years of almost daily work to reach this milestone. Does this seem like a good thing? You could get 10,000 Twitter followers today:

twitter followers

So what’s the difference? Why spend all that time and energy if you could just spend a couple of hundred dollars and be done with it?

The Difference, Explained

What makes a community of interest? That’s the question that has guided me on Twitter over the last couple of years.

Sure, I enjoy Facebook once in a while, there’s no better way to find that cute girl who sat behind you in American History class all those years ago. That’s fun.

But for me at least, it doesn’t equate to business, and there’s no community of interest in that kind of connection.

You can also find community on Google+, a service that allows for longer text and lots of other goodies, but that isn’t where I’ve spent my time.

Twitter seems to attract certain types. As a long-time word buff and writer, the 140-character limit to your posts on Twitter seemed more like a delightful challenge than a restriction. It reminded me of the strict rules certain kinds of poetry require and the fun of working your words into a form.

A Little History, Please

Although I signed up for Twitter early in 2009, I never used my account until later that year. The stimulus was starting my blog in the fall of that year.

At the time, the people who had massive followings amazed me. How did they get all those people to listen to what they had to say?

Now, celebrities of all kinds are on Twitter, and tweets appear every day on cable news shows and at presidential debates. Twitter continues to make news as the communication medium of choice for social upheavals as well as for companies who want to use social media to influence buyers’ behavior.

But for bloggers (and authors who blog), Twitter has two blockbuster attributes that make it a desirable destination:

  1. There’s no better way to connect to influencers and thought leaders in your niche, whatever it is
  2. There’s no easier way to find that community of interest that can multiply your communication efforts

How to Find 10,000 People Who Want to Follow You

Compared to the really big Twitter followings, 10,000 isn’t much. Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian 14,214,322 followers) probably gains or loses 10,000 followers in a typical day.

In book publishing, Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman 149,080 followers) towers over most of us. Michael Hyatt, blogger and head of Thomas Nelson, is doing well (@MichaelHyatt 115,988).

In the indie publishing niche, my pal Joanna Penn (@TheCreativePenn) makes me look rather mouselike, with her 25,721 followers.

But here’s the thing: 10,000 is a heck of a lot of people. The biggest group I’ve ever spoken live to was about 400 people, and that filled a pretty good-sized room.

So, how do you get all those followers? Here’s my simple 3-step formula:

  1. Find people who are interested in the same topics you’re passionate about
  2. Follow those people
  3. Post useful, amusing or educational content with links to resources, mostly not your own

That’s not too hard, is it? Just rinse and repeat for a couple of years.

This is slow, by the way, unless you’re willing to spend hours at it each day. Most of us have other things to do.

A lot of this regular day-to-day posting can be handled through nifty software like HootSuite, which allows you to schedule a bunch of posts at one time that will then be delivered at specific times.

What I like about this slow growth is this: I know that virtually every follower on my list is involved in writing, publishing, design or a related field. That’s what I was looking for when I began the search for that community of interest.

And it works! Twitter is the second-largest source of traffic to my blog, and I consider the people behind all those accounts part of the community here.

In the End, Gratitude

More than anything else, I’m left with a feeling of gratitude to all the people who’ve helped me along the way. People who re-tweeted my posts when I first got started, people who posted great content themselves that was ready to pass along to others.

And the people who served as models of how to engage on social media in general, and Twitter specifically. You can’t help but learn when you follow great people, the ones who care about helping other people to succeed.

And also to my assistant, Shelley Sturgeon of E-Vantage Business Services, who attends to all those things I seem to forget about.

Looking Forward

When authors ask about diving into social media, I always tell them that they’ll be most successful with the service that they enjoy the most.

Long term, you’ve got to be getting something more from a social media site than drudgery. Try them all to find the one that feels most comfortable to you.

I believe Twitter will eventually grow to “utility” status, like gas, electricity or telephone service. It’s such a neutral communication medium that it can be used in lots of different ways.

Apple seemed to be moving in the same direction since integrating Twitter functions into the operating system for its mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Maybe someday soon we’ll all be connected to each other seamlessly, and everyone will have their “@” address issued at birth. But by then, the whole concept of “followers” will have faded into history.

Since that day isn’t here quite yet, I’m going to go raise a glass and toast the power of social media. I think there’s no place else you can see so clearly the wisdom of marketer and motivational guru, Zig Zigler:

“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

 

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

What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter

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This post, by Mathew Ingram, originally appeared on GigaOm on 3/27/12.

After months of anticipation, the e-book versions of author J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter series are now available through Rowling’s Pottermore online unit, and as my PaidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted in her post on the launch, Rowling has chosen to do a number of interesting things with her e-books, including releasing them without digital-rights management restrictions. Obviously, the success of the Potter series has given Rowling the ability to effectively dictate terms to just about anyone, even a powerhouse like Amazon, but there are still lessons that other book publishers should take from what she is doing.

 

One of the encouraging things about the Pottermore launch is that the books will be available on virtually every platform simultaneously, including the Sony Reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the Kindle and Google’s e-book service (which is part of Google Play). And in keeping with Pottermore’s status as a standalone digital bookstore in its own right, users will be able to buy the books from the Rowling site and then send them to whichever platform they wish. As Laura points out, even Amazon has bowed to the power of the series and done what would previously have seemed unthinkable: it sends users who come to the titles on Amazon to Pottermore to finish the transaction.

As we’ve pointed out before at GigaOM, one of the problems for users when it comes to the e-book landscape is the clash between competing platforms — with Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble all trying to create their own walled gardens, where users can only access titles from publishers that have deals with the platform they happen to be using. Amazon and Apple in particular both seem to see books and other media content primarily as loss leaders that can help them lock users into their proprietary platforms, and recent skirmishes have seen Apple reject books that have links to Amazon’s store, and Barnes & Noble block Amazon titles from its store.

 

Read the rest of the post on GigaOm.

Why the Harry Potter E-books Are and Aren't a Really Big Deal

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This post, by Nathan Bransford, originally appeared on his site on 3/29/12.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the last tome of a hardcover that I lugged around on vacation. It took up seemingly half my suitcase and weighed a ton, but because it wasn’t available in e-book form and because I don’t believe in piracy, I carried that thing across the country.

Now I’m thrilled to have the entire Harry Potter series resting weightlessly within my iPad.

As you have likely heard, Harry Potter is available in e-book form. And not just in e-book form, but available only through Pottermore, the digital extension of the Harry Potter brand. No other e-book vendor has it for sale, including the e-book behemoths like Amazon, B&N and iBooks. And the e-books are published by Rowling herself.

Yeah, wow.

Why This is a Big Deal

J.K. Rowling just did an entire end-around on the entire publishing world in many, many ways.

Most of the focus has been on how these are for sale only from the author, and rightly so. Even Amazon is playing ball, listing the books for sale but referring people to Pottermore to make the purchase.

And the manner in which these e-books are being distributed is revolutionary.  They’re being sold without DRM but with digital watermarks to guard against piracy. Each purchaser has 8 digital copies they can download in various formats, and it’s very easy to convert to the most popular devices. I had the e-books on my iPad within minutes.

The approach to DRM is, ironically enough, extremely similar to my earlier post on what good a good approach to DRM would look like – you can convert the files to any device and you have a sufficient number of copies for yourself and others… Only there’s no DRM. Ha! 10 points for Gryffindor.

So let’s talk about this. No publisher. The author as e-distributor. No DRM.

 

Read the rest of the post on Nathan Bransford‘s site.

Tips for Picking up the Pace in Your Fiction

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This post, by freelancer editor Jodie Renner, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 3/25/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Readers of fiction often complain that a book didn’t keep their interest because “it dragged,” or “the story meandered,” or “it was slow going,” or “it was boring in parts.” Today’s readers have shorter attention spans. Most of them/us don’t have the patience for the lengthy descriptive passages, the long, convoluted “literary” sentences, nor the leisurely, painstaking pacing of fiction of a century or two ago. Besides, with TV and the internet, we don’t need most of the detailed descriptions of locations anymore, unlike early readers who’d perhaps never left their village, and had very few visual images of other locales to draw on.

While you don’t want your story barreling along at a break-neck pace all the way through – that would be exhausting for the reader – you do want the pace to be generally brisk enough to keep the readers’ interest. As Elmore Leonard said, “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”

Condense those set-up, backstory and descriptive passages.

To increase the pace and overall tension of your story, start by cutting back on setup and backstory. Here’s what Donald Maass has to say about setup: “‘Setup’ is, by definition, not story. It always drags. Always. Leave it out. Find another way.” Some backstory can be essential, but marble it in on an “as-needed” basis, rather than interrupting the story for paragraphs or pages of explanation of character background.

Also, to pick up the pace, keep your descriptive passages short and vivid, and concentrate instead on scenes with action, dialogue, and lots of tension. Show, don’t tell – use vivid, sensory imagery, and just leave out the boring bits. 

In general, develop a more direct, lean writing style.

That way your message and the impact of your story won’t get lost in all the clutter of superfluous words and repetitive sentences. I cover specific techniques for cutting down on wordiness in my upcoming article, “Streamline Your Writing.”

Of course, the best novels do vary the pace to allow the reader brief respites to catch his breath, but generally, your story needs to move along at a good clip to keep the readers interested.

TIPS FOR THOSE FAST-PACED SCENES:

Here are a few easy techniques for picking up the pace at strategic spots in your novel, to create those tense, action-packed, nail-biting scenes. 

Write shorter sentences and paragraphs.

For a fast-paced scene, use short, clipped sentences, as opposed to long, meandering, leisurely ones. Even sentence fragments. Like this. Use short paragraphs and frequent paragraphing, too. This creates more white space. The eye moves faster, so the mind does, too. This also increases the tension, which is always a good thing in fiction. 

As Sol Stein points out, “In fiction, a quick exchange of adversarial dialogue often proves to be an ideal way of picking up the pace.”

Here’s an example from The Watchman by Robert Crais, one of my favorite authors. My favorite hero, Joe Pike (Jack Reacher is a close second), is protecting a spoiled young heiress from enemies who are closing in. Pike starts out.

 “Pack your things. We’re going to see Bud.”

She lowered the coffeepot, staring at him as if she were fully dressed.

“I thought we were safe here.”

“We are. But if something happens, we’ll want our things.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Every time we leave the house, we’ll take our things. That’s the way it is.”

“I don’t want to ride around all day scrunched in your car. Can’t I stay here?”

“Get dressed. We have to hurry.”

“But you told him noon. Universal is only twenty minutes away.”

“Let’s go. We have to hurry.”

She stomped back into the kitchen and threw the pot into the sink.

“Your coffee sucks!”

“We’ll get Starbucks.”

She didn’t seem so wild, even when she threw things.

We get the undercurrent of tension in Joe, who’s trying to hustle her out without alarming her. 

It isn’t necessary to use dialogue to pick up the pace – short sentences and frequent paragraphing can have that effect even without dialogue.

Lee Child, another one of my favorite writers, is a master at lean writing and short sentences. Here’s a short excerpt from Worth Dying For. Our laconic hero, Jack Reacher, has a very painful broken nose that’s bent way to the side. He has to reset it, and he knows that when he does the pain will be so excruciating he’ll pass out from it, so he has to do it right, and fast, before he passes out:

He closed his eyes.

He opened them again.

He knew what he had to do.

He had to reset the break. He knew that. He knew the costs and benefits. The pain would lessen and he would end up with a normal-looking nose. Almost. But he would pass out again. No question about that. …

 And it goes on like that.

Skip ahead for effect.
 
Skip past all the humdrum details and transition info, like getting from one place to another, and jump straight to the next action scene. Delete any scenes that drag, or condense them to a paragraph or two, or even just a few sentences.

Jump-cutting is a more extreme version of skipping ahead. This is used a lot in movies. You jump straight from one scene to another, with no transitioning at all in between. Your protagonist leaves her house. Add an extra space or * * *, then show her at her workplace office having a conversation with a colleague. Or in a restaurant with her gal pals or a date. Or jogging through the park, or wherever. The reader can easily fill in the gaps. No need to show her getting into her car, driving to her destination, etc.

Some other techniques for increasing the pace:

– Use shorter, more direct words – mostly powerful verbs and nouns.

– Cut way back on adjectives and adverbs.

– Avoid unfamiliar words the reader may have to look up.

– Use active voice instead of passive: “The bank robber shot the teller,” rather than “The teller was shot by the bank robber.”

– Use cliff-hangers at the ends of scenes and chapters.

– Start each scene as late as possible, without all the warm-up, and end each scene as early as possible, without rehashing what went on. (Thanks to Peg Brantley for the reminder about this one!)

  Do you have any techniques to add, to keep the readers turning the pages?

  © Copyright Jodie Renner, March 2012

Resources:
Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel
Sol Stein, Stein on Writing
Robert Crais, The Watchman
Lee Child, Worth Dying For

If You're An Indie Author, You're An Entrepreneur: How To Maintain Focus and Discipline

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Over on Business Insider, Alexander Levin posts on the challenges of maintaining momentum and drive as an entrepreneur, and takes as his example his own experience building a freelance editing business with indie authors as his primary clientele.

When reading the following quote from the post, just substitute the word "reader" for "client", because to an indie author, the reader IS the customer. Where Levin’s ‘product’ is freelance editorial services, yours is your book. And, being every bit as much entrepreneurs as freelancers of every stripe, indie authors must keep their eyes on the ball and hustle, just as Levin does:

No one is granted endless prosperity merely because they started with a strong lead. Those who take their early success for granted are quickly dismayed by clients who don’t return and dwindling leads. Entrepreneurs who mange to avoid this quagmire share one behavior in common: they never relax their discipline.

My freelance business (as a progressive editor for indie authors) is a telltale case study of this phenomenon in action.

I enjoyed a hot start with freelance editing. My decisive and unambiguous style and breakout indie author focus helped garner some great projects and solid prospects. The initial half-year was full. Success was streaming. Clients were pleased.

Life was good…until it wasn’t. Somewhere along the line my sense of urgency waned. My outreach efforts slowed. My opportunity research faded. Predictable results followed: diminished leads, stalled growth in quality projects and mounting frustration. The bottom line to my burdens was a dangerously relaxed discipline.

Thankfully, all is not lost if you momentarily loosen your grip on discipline. But you must act fast before your business stalls and it’s too late to recover. Courses of action are many. The following worked best for me when I needed to reclaim fully my iron will of self-control.

Read the full article, which includes Levin’s five key tips for reigniting your entrepreneurial focus and discipline, on Business Insider, and take its advice to heart.

 

The Economics of [Self-Published] e-Books

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This post, by Dan Arnzen, originally appeared on Writely Done on 12/2/11.

“The times they are a-changin’ [sic]” – Bob Dylan

A quick Google search on “economics of ebooks” will result in a mix of articles either espousing gloom and doom for the book publishing industry, or discussing the unfairness of e-book pricing. Most of the discussion focuses on comparing e-books to printed books. This is not a valid comparison because the economics are completely different.

 The music industry has gone through several transitions in the past. There are two transitions I want to focus on: the transition from cassette (analog) to CD (digital), and the transition from CD (physical) to MP3 (virtual). When music went from being distributed in analog format to digital there was fear that the ability to make perfect copies would kill the industry. This didn’t happen; however, the transition to MP3 and down-loadable music has been very disruptive. This is because the industry had been optimized over many years for the economics of the physical distribution of recorded music. The technology resulted in large changes in the behavior of consumers, which changes everything. Years later, the music industry continues to adapt to these changes.

Most analysis of e-books are looking at the transition like the move from cassette tapes to CD. The focus is on the lowering cost of production and consumers demanding lower prices, or how DRM is needed to prevent piracy, or how authors will starve as they receive a percentage of a smaller revenue stream.

Book publishing is making a bigger transition. Digitization and virtualization are occurring simultaneously. It is more like going from cassettes (or even LP’s) to MP3’s directly. This results in a lot of turmoil. No one knows how this will change the behavior of the consumer, and the existing infrastructure is trying to maintain the status quo on how business is done.

Supply and Demand

 

Read the rest of the post on Writely Done.

Konrath vs. Turow, RE: Amazon

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On March 9, Authors Guild President Scott Turow posted an open letter on the Authors Guild site, calling the announcement that the U.S. Justice Department was near to filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five large publishers (often referred to as The Agency 5, as these are the publishers who immediately signed on for Apple’s agency pricing scheme) "grim news". 

Author J.A. Konrath offered a fairly scathing blog post in counterpoint on March 16, calling Turow out for supporting publishers over the interests of authors—even the very authors whose interests Turow is supposed to be protecting and furthering in his role as President of the AG.

Here’s just one thread of Konrath’s post, in which he addresses Turow’s contention that allowing Amazon to become the dominant player in the ebook market would be somehow disastrous:

——————————————————————————————–

Scott said: "Look, if what they’re into is maximizing profits, then if they were to have a monopoly there’d be no rationale not to use the monopoly power to increase prices to consumers. That is historically what monopolies do. There is plenty of precedent for that. It’s only rational to fear what they’re going to do with this accumulation of power."

That’s historically what monopolies do? Okay, so show me the precedent.

Microsoft has pretty much dominated the market with Windows. Has Windows become more expensive since it first launched because MS has a monopoly on operating systems?

It launched in 1985 for $99.00. In today’s dollars that equals $212.00

The latest version of Windows is $179.00.

But Amazon must have a track record for doing this, right?

When the Kindle was released in 2007, it was $399. Now that is has an overwhelming market share, how much did Amazon jack up the price?

The Kindle Fire is $199. The bare-bones Kindle is $79.

Hmm…

I’m old enough to remember Ma Bell having a true monopoly on telephones. You had no choice. You couldn’t even own your own phone–you had to rent from them.

Am I off base, or did prices seem to get higher once the Department of Justice broke them up?

Monsanto owns 98% of the US soybean market, and 79% of the corn market. Last I checked, both corn and soy were still pretty cheap.

Where is all this precedent? Can’t Turow offer a single example? Just one to show the bad things that happen when a single company controls an industry?

Certainly OPEC is an example, but that’s a cartel, not a single company. They all agree on the price of oil, and we’ve seen how crazy oil prices have become. We’re hitting $4.00 for a gallon of gas in Chicago right now. All because they collude to fix prices.

I mean, four bucks for gas is outrageous. It’s almost as bad as paying $14.99 for an ebook.

Hmm. That’s sort of ironic, isn’t it? Because the Big 6 also fit the definition of a cartel, and they’re being investigated for collusion.

Seems like cartels want to keep prices high, when Amazon wants to lower them. That’s the reason the Big 6 colluded, remember? Amazon was selling ebooks for less than the cartel wanted them to be sold for. So the Big 6 forced Amazon to take the agency deal, resulting in LESS MONEY FOR AUTHORS.

I put that in caps because Turow and the Authors Guild support the agency model, when authors make less money from the agency model. And the rationale behind it is so funny it hurts:

The Big 6 wanted to control ebook pricing so they could keep the prices high, because they were afraid of Amazon becoming a monopoly which might raise the price of ebooks.
 
 
Read the full post on JA Konrath’s blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Seriously, read the whole thing, and then make up your own mind as to whether or not Turow is on the right side of this argument.
 

The Rise of Indie Authors and How This Helps Publishing

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Despite being an introvert, I love public speaking, especially when I get to share the positivity I genuinely feel about publishing and being a writer in these amazing times.

On March 8, I was one of the keynote speakers at the Publishing Innovation conference and spoke on ‘The Rise of Indie Authors and How This Helps Publishing” (more info below).

 

I also stayed for the two debates that followed as well as a diametrically opposed keynote to mine where the speaker basically said the internet would destroy everything creative, Amazon was annihilating everything and publishing and authors were doomed. I don’t believe that and don’t want to repeat it on this blog, so you can go find doom & gloom elsewhere if you want it :) But I have included some of the positive key points from other speakers below.

The Rise of Indie Authors and How This Helps Publishing

You can view or download my slides here => PublishingInnovationJoannaPenn

I acknowledged the ‘tsunami of crap’ that people expect with self-publishing and pointed out that we don’t really see it. It sinks into the depths of Amazon with rankings of hundreds of thousands. Customers are now the gatekeepers with book reviews and stars being the way Amazon shuffles content.

I then went into the difference between self-publishing and independent publishing, pointing out that most of us use professional editors and cover designers, acknowledging that publishing is a collaborative activity if it is to be a quality product.

I outlined the positives of being an indie that make it worthwhile:

  • 35% or 70% royalty, payment by check/ bank transfer 60 days later
  • Reconcilable reporting to the sales figures we can see daily on the back end (vs the late and enigmatic royalty statements traditional publishers provide)
  • Transparency in reporting which enables agile marketing and response as well as tracking of results in real time
  • Direct relationships with readers and the ability to respond to them with sales
  • Experimentation in genres with readers as gatekeepers
  • Speed of publishing, instant changes and speed of income
  • Global sales in an increasing ebook market

I also outlined my sales figures to 2 March 2012 – 33,734 books. 75% sold to the US, 25% UK. 99% ebooks. Bestseller on Action Adventure and Religious Fiction lists.

Finally, I outlined how indie authors could benefit traditional publishing in terms of new models, a form of slush pile and working in collaboration/ hybrid models.

Pan Macmillan MD on why indies take traditional deals

I was impressed by Anthony Forbes Watson, MD of Pan Macmillan. He spoke coherently and without vitriol on self publishing. It is important to remember that there are some very smart, passionate people in publishing, and that traditional publishing is still a very attractive prospect to many.

Here are some of his points, my notes only so not verbatim.

  • Amanda Hocking & Kerry Wilkinson (UK indie author) both accepted traditional deals because (a) they didn’t want to be publishers (b) they didn’t understand how they became successful and were worried they would disappear just as fast unless they solidified their careers with a trad deal (c) publishers develop the author as a brand over time (d) global distribution in print as well as ebook (e) protection from piracy (f) publishers can make ‘pretty stuff’ (quality print product) (g) books can be sold at a higher price. This represents the value add that a publisher can provide.

***Update: As per comment below, Kerry Wilkinson has responded that these are not the reasons he went with traditional publishing. I shall endeavor to find out more***

  • Publishers will survive if they generate emotion in an author’s work that touches an audience. [I thought this was more the author’s job in terms of writing something that touches an audience.]
  • The model used to be that the grad students sifted through the slush pile. They didn’t have the experience to choose great books. This is how Harry Potter got missed. But this has been changed now so more experienced people look at new authors.
  • Publishing and self-publishing can be a symbiotic relationship, so indie can act as a form of slush pile. It can also show publishers the way to experiment with digital and other models.
  • We are finding the things that don’t work and we’re trying to fix them, albeit slowly. The slush pile didn’t work but now we are fixing that. Pricing is being experimented with. There is some alchemy in getting a reader to pay more than £5 for an ebook. The bookshop is also not working right now, so we need to fix that.
  • No one knows how these breakout books work. The magic happens but we can’t recreate it. It’s about listening for an echo when we pitch books. Self-publishing is almost the chance to listen for an echo.
  • The object quality of print books is still important. Only 20% of sales are ebooks right now and publishers still do print better.
  • The challenge is to verticalise the business and get the right book to the right audience.

In general, this was a positive conference with some great people. I know my glass is always half full but I genuinely believe there is a great future for publishing of all kinds as well as for authors who treat this as a business and connect with their readers.

What are your thoughts about how indie authors relate to traditional publishing these days? Please do leave a comment below.

I am available for speaking on all things writing, digital publishing and marketing. More information here about my live events as well as testimonials from happy customers. Please do contact me if you need a speaker, either live or via Skype.

 

 

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

Goodreads’ CEO on Winning the Battle of Book Discovery

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This article, by Otis Chandler, founder and CEO of Goodreads, originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 3/12/12.

After analyzing 5,750,000 books on Goodreads, Otis Chandler shares his insights on the evolving nature of book discovery. The short version: once isn’t enough.

“In many ways it is the struggle to get your books seen, heard about, talked about – in short, made visible in an increasingly crowded and noisy marketplace – that is where the real battle in publishing is taking place today.”  — Merchants of Culture, John B Thompson

John B. Thompson sums up the challenge facing publishers and authors today: abundance has irrevocably changed the publishing industry, and it has made discovery the central problem facing the book business.

At Goodreads, our passion and mission is helping readers discover and share books they love. In our work with publishers and authors, we see several book discovery trends developing. Some of these trends I shared in a speech at Tools of Change in New York last month. We analyzed a staggering 5,750,000 books that Goodreads members discovered (added to their to-read shelf) in January 2012, and broke them down by how the members found them. The readers adding those books lived in hundreds of different countries (though the US is our largest market), and represent both avid bookworms and casual readers.

Understandably, the findings only talk about book discovery on Goodreads but, with the world’s largest community of readers (more than seven million members), much of what we’ve found is relevant to book discovery overall.

Word of Mouth Gains New Power Online

We’ve all known for a while that the most valuable commodity for the sustained promotion of a book is word-of-mouth buzz. Goodreads was founded on the belief that a recommendation from a friend is the best way to find a book, more powerful than a glowing review in the New York Times or a mention on a TV show. There’s something about that trusted friend handing you the book and saying, “You must read this!”

And it has worked. According to a recent survey of Goodreads members, 79% of them report discovering books from friends offline, and 64% find books from their Goodreads friends.

Interestingly, the power of a friend’s recommendation has grown. Today, the recommendation doesn’t even have to be explicit, it can be as simple as seeing a friend reading a book. When you see what a friend is reading – whether on Goodreads, through an update on our Facebook Timeline app, or in person – it automatically triggers your interest.  It becomes a new form of a recommendation, social validation.

It’s All About the Pre-Launch Buzz

Read the rest of the post on Publishing Perspectives.

What Photos ARE You Allowed To Pin On Pinterest? Apparently, None.

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Corporate lawyer and Pinterest enthusiast Kirsten Kowalski discovered a peculiar contradiction in the site’s terms of use that appear to make it a violation to pin either a member’s own photos or photos not belonging to the member. In other words, posting any photo would seem to be a violation.

From TechCrunch, as reported on 3/20/12:

As Kowalski explains in the interview embedded [here], the main issue is this: Pinterest’s community standards, or “Pin Etiquette,” explicitly discourages users from self-promoting by “pinning” photos they have taken themselves. But at the same time, Pinterest’s Terms of Use actually forbids users from pinning any photo that does not belong to him or her, and states that users are subject to any legal action that is taken from the copyright or trademark holder.

Once she looked deeper into this contradiction, Kowalski made the difficult decision to delete all the Pinterest boards she had made that used photos taken by other people. “A site can’t put out something like that and say, ‘If you use it like we intend you to use it, you’re liable, not us,’” she said.

The issue struck such a chord that Kowalski soon received a phone call from Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann that turned into an hour-long conversation. According to her, he acknowledged that Pinterest was “having some growing pains” and vowed that “changes are coming” to the Terms of Use that will make the site better for photographers and users alike. Over the past few weeks, Kowalski has communicated more with Silbermann and others at Pinterest about what those changes could be — and according to what they’ve told her, they are almost certainly on the way.

Read the full article on TechCrunch, and also see Kowalski’s blog post on the issue.

 

How to Get Traffic to Your Author Website

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The author website (or blog) is an essential book marketing tool, and authors often ask how they can get more traffic to their website. To answer that question, let’s first take a look at the ways that people land on websites.

In the graph below, you can see the sources of traffic (visitors) to my website last month, according to Google Analytics.

 

GoogleAnalytics
Search Traffic:  About 47% of visitors found my site through a search engine like Google. Most of those people searched for keywords such as book marketing or book promotion, although some searched for my name or brand name. The process of making your site attractive to search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Referral Traffic: About 18% of visitors landed on my site by clicking a link on another website. Generating incoming links from other sites, including social networks, is a valuable way to get people to your site and it’s also helpful in SEO.

Direct Traffic: About 24% of visitors came directly to my site, either by typing my website address into their browser or clicking a link in an email (my newsletter). This also includes people who bookmarked my site in their browser and visited by clicking on the bookmark.

Campaigns: In this category, Google includes people who have subscribed to my RSS feed and clicked a link in the feed.  If I were running any online ads on Google or another site, those visitors would also show up in this category.  

I am writing a series of articles with more details on how to generate more traffic to author websites through search engines, incoming links and direct traffic. Stay tuned for the next installment coming next week. To make sure you don’t miss any posts on The Savvy Book Marketer, I invite you to sign up for the blog feed. 

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer. Also see Part 2 in this series.

If the Government Makes Agency Go Away

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 3/8/12.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department has notified the Agency Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) and Apple that it plans to sue them for colluding to raise the price of electronic books. I have no standing to comment on the law here. But if this does mean the end of the agency model, it would seem to be a cause for celebrating at Amazon and a catalyst for some deep contemplation by all the other big players in the book business.

Agency pricing, for those who have not been following the most important development in the growth of the book market, enabled the publishers to enforce a uniform price for each ebook title across all retail outlets. This was Apple’s desired way to do business, and it addressed deep concerns the big publishers had about the effect of Amazon’s loss-leader discounting.

Although the WSJ article and Michael Cader’s follow up in Publishers Lunch make no “agency is dead” declaration and there are quotes from publishers and others indicating that there are a range of possible outcomes, including a version of agency that is modified to allow some discounting, everybody in the industry now has to contemplate what it would mean if the agency model is legally upended.

To Amazon, it would mean they would be free to set prices on all books again, including the most high-profile and attractive ones that come from the big trade houses. That is an opportunity they are likely to seize with loss-leader discounting of the biggest marquee titles.

To Barnes & Noble, it would mean they have to devote cash resources to ebook discounting that they might have preferred to dedicate to further development of the Nook platform, maintaining the most robust possible brick-and-mortar presence, and improving the user experience at BN.com. Unconfirmed stories abound that B&N is about to announce an international expansion. Whether that will produce cash flow immediately or require it for a while is not yet known. For B&N’s sake, it would always better if it were the former, but if they’re about to fight discounting wars, it might be critical.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes commentary on possible impacts to authors and others, on The Shatzkin Files.

The Business Rusch: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

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This post, by Kathryn Rusch, originally appeared on her site on 3/7/12.

The quote in my title comes from Mark Twain’s autobiography.  Twain said:

“Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

 

The problem with Twain’s attribution, however, is that no scholar can find anything in Disraeli’s papers that even resembles it. (Yes, scholars have that kind of time on their hands.) The website twainquotes.com cites an 1895 article by Leonard H. Courtney in which the quote first appeared—or so everyone thinks.

I find it hilarious that the source of this quote about statistics is almost impossible to track down. I also find it funny that Twain’s preface to the quote has gotten lost in the pithiness of the “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

“Figures often beguile me,” he wrote, “particularly when I have the arranging of them myself.”

And thus, Mark Twain, who died in 1910, has poked at the heart of modern publishing. We all love statistics – or figures, as he calls them – but they prove nothing. In fact, this year, statistical analysis is harder than ever.

You’d think it would be easier. We have computers, after all. We have incredible processing speeds and more information at our fingertips than ever before. We can “crunch” the numbers quickly and easily.

The problem is in which numbers we crunch.

Let’s take, for example, the number of e-book sales versus the number of print book sales. We’re seeing a lot of statistics about the percentage of e-books in the marketplace. And those statistics come from reputable organizations.

I felt uncomfortable about those statistics at the end of 2011, and I feel even more uncomfortable about them now. These statistics purport to examine all books sold, and I know that’s not true. I also know that there are equations that supposedly take a statistical sample, and apply them over information not yet gathered (or information that’s impossible to gather). And even though I know the mathematical model is accepted, I’m still uncomfortable.

You see the mathematical model in polling all the time. Pollsters contact 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 sufficiently diverse people, poll them, and then use them as a statistical sample that supposedly represents the entire population. This same technique takes place in medical studies. Studies gather information from 50 to 500 to 5,000 people, gauge their reactions to, say, a medication over a period of time, and then use those as a basis for the result.

People who watch medical studies, for example, generally ignore the ones with less than 100 participants, and really believe the ones with tens of thousands of participants. And if those tens of thousands were studied over years, then the medical study is considered even more accurate than the one that follows someone’s reaction to a treatment or a medication over a few hours.

See why Mark Twain insisted that he liked figures if he arranged them himself? Or to put it in 2012 language: he liked statistics if he manipulated the information himself.

One of the first things I learned as a journalist, back in high school of all places, was how to look for statistical manipulation. “Four out of five dentists surveyed” might mean that five dentists were surveyed, and four of them (the ones who worked for the company) liked the product. Or it might mean that four out of five dentists in a survey that contacted 10,000 dentists (none of whom worked for the company) liked the product.

Both statements would be true. Four out of five dentists liked the product. But only one statement might be information that a consumer might benefit from.

As the past year has continued, it has become clear to me that e-book sales are rising. Anyone who watches numbers knows that. Every day there’s a new tablet hitting the market, or some new version of an e-reader. Just this week, Apple unveiled iPad 3.  At the same time that Apple announced the New HD iPad (which is what they’re calling it), Google announced Google Play which it claims will rival iTunes. We’ll see.

 

Read the rest of the post on Kathryn Rusch’s site.

Best and Worst of the Digital Writing Life

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This post, by C.J. West, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog and is reprinted here with that site’s permission.

When my last physical was over, my doctor asked, “You still writing suspense novels?”

“Absolutely.” I smiled.

“But what do you do to make a living?” he asked.

If I sold a book for every time I heard that one…

Then yesterday someone asked about my schedule and was surprised that I usually work well past midnight. That’s if you call what I do work. I love writing and if I’m not sleeping, spending time with my kids, or doing chores, I’m working.

My boss is a slave driver!

Work for me can be anything from researching a subject for a new book, writing and editing a novel, to spending time online connecting with friends in the writing community.

Since the writing life is such a mystery to non-writers, I thought I’d shine a light on what my little corner of the universe is like.

The top 10 great things about being a writer in the digital world:

10. Writing connects me with thousands of great people all over the globe.

9. My commute consists of pulling back the covers and stretching to power on my laptop.

8. The digital store is open 365 days a year (366 this year) and I can see exactly what I’m earning minute to minute.

7. Tweeting and Facebooking are important job skills.

6. Blogging about my addiction to chocolate or my attempts to diet earn me readers.

5. My office fits in a carry-on with room to spare. I can work on a beach or plane.

4. When I’m looking out the window and dreaming, I’m doing my best work.

3. My imaginary coworkers can’t sue for sexual harassment and they don’t complain about working conditions or low pay.

2. People write to tell me my writing has changed their lives.

1. The digital explosion has allowed me to reach tens of thousands and earn a living doing what I love.

Ten worst things about being a writer in the digital world:

10. Mediating squabbles on the digital playground.

9. There is no excuse for being late to work.

8. I can check my earnings minute to minute, but sometimes it’s better not knowing.

7. My family and friends think I should have a real job.

6. Everyone thinks I’m available to help them 24/7. See # 7.

5. Marketing. I love writing. I’m not fond of selling. (But I do like giving stuff away.)

4. Thousands of people think I can write a bestselling book about their great idea, give them half the royalties, and we’ll both be rich. It’s funny until they ask the third time.

3. If something good happens in the book business it’s always luck.

2. If something bad happens, it’s my fault.

1. My imaginary coworkers don’t do what they’re told even though I created them.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my writing life.

 

QR Codes and Tomorrow’s Blog

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Have you ever wondered, when you’re out interacting with people on your fan page on Facebook, whether your author platform was actually growing?

Or questioned whether you should be doing some serious Tweeting, like a lot of other authors do, to gather a big following?

 

Well, good news. Dan Blank from We Grow Media will be here tomorrow with a content-rich article about exactly how to get started answering questions just like these.

I know you don’t want to miss it. Dan’s gathered some great resources and uses his vast experience helping authors to show you how it all works.

Using QR Codes for Book Promotion

There have been a number of publishing-related events nearby recently, and that got me thinking about promotion.

From past experience I knew that most event-goers get weighed down with freebies from vendors, and everyone ends up with plastic totes stuffed with promotional literature that might get seen, but might not.

A few weeks ago I created some new business cards at Moo.com. They print on Mohawk Superfine, probably my favorite printing paper of all time, and other similar stock. The cards are twice as thick as normal business cards and larger, too.

So I went back to Moo.com and made this one:

book marketing

In this case, the book I’m promoting is the free PDF I give away on the blog (top [of the right column on my blog]).

I reasoned that, rather than try to sell somebody I had just met something they might or might not want, content marketing could make my job a lot easier.

After all, I would be in groups of writers and indie publishers, the exact people who are likely to be interested in the articles here and in the free PDF.

By giving them the card, they would have the option of downloading the PDF. If they take the trouble to get it, I can assume that they are going to be interested in the other things I do.

Here’s the back of the card:

book marketing

My hope is that the promise of the PDF and the novelty of the QR codes will intrigue people enough to get their smartphone out and scan them. Of course, I’ve included a “human readable” web address as well.

After this, my next experiment with QR codes will include analytics, since I just ran across a very clever way to track QR codes with Google Analytics.

Of course, this is more metrics, more analysis to look at.

Authors as Marketers

Hate it, huh? But let’s face it. The more book discovery and purchase happen online, the more adept self-publishers have to become at understanding how this stuff works.

That’s exactly the reason I’m doing the analytics I do here on the blog and in my other projects, and why I’m excited to bring you Dan’s article tomorrow.

 

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.