Self-Publishing Resources

Posted By Sue Collier on March 19, 2012

Here’s some of the latest in industry news and views:

From Jane Friedman: Your Homepage Is Not As Important As You Think
Author platform is about more than your homepage. Perhaps you hope your homepage embodies the essence of your writing, that it is the gateway into the world you are creating.  But oftentimes, it isn’t.

From eBookNewser: 28% Of U.S. Adults Read On eReader Or Tablet
Twenty-eight percent of adults in the United States use an eReader or a tablet to read books, according to a new poll by Harris Interactive. The poll, which was conducted in February, showed an increase from Harris’ previous poll done in July in which only 15% of U.S. adults reporting reading on eReaders and tablets.

From The Savvy Book Marketer: 5 Strategies for Marketing Children’s Books on Facebook
In today’s guest post, Jo Ann Kairys shares some terrific tips for using Facebook to promote children’s books. This post is part of the virtual book tour for her book, Sunbelievable.  I resisted Facebook (FB) for too long. But, the sudden shift from children’s book author to entrepreneur/marketer forced me to pay attention. Now, FB is my favorite marketing tool! I love the opportunity to share my commitment to children’s reading and literacy, connect with other authors, and maximize exposure to my book’s target audience.

From GalleyCat: Encyclopaedia Britannica Ends Print Edition
After printing the hardback reference guide for 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica will stop publishing its 32-volume print edition. The digital edition will continue, and the publisher is offering free access to the subscription service for the next week.

From bookbaby: How to Set Up Facebook Timeline for Authors
As we mentioned in a recent post called “UHow to Promote Your Book Using the New Facebook Timeline Features,” Facebook did it again—they’ve switched it all around on us practically overnight (well, maybe it was more like a fortnight). And, just like that, whether we like it or not, all Facebook Pages (including brand, author, and company Pages) will be updated to Facebook Timeline on March 30^th.

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Posted By Sue Collier on March 14, 2012

My team and I come across so many useful websites, I thought it would handy to put them together in a regular blog series. So a couple times a month, I’ll be listing a few of them in a new series called “Webtips for Authors and Self-Publishers.”

If you have or know of a website that would be of interest to my blog readers, please email it to me along with a description; don’t forget to include appropriate links.

Enjoy!

Working on your ebook cover can be child’s play. Wordle is website that conjures up works of art, called “word clouds,” from the words you provide. To emphasize a word, mention it more often in your text. Manipulate the colors, fonts, and layout to your heart’s content. Even create an ebook cover to be proud of. The images are yours to use however you like. Just be sure you don’t save anything to the very public Wordle gallery that you would want to keep exclusive rights to as your intellectual property. If you’d like more information, How to Wordle into an E-book Cover Generator is bursting with great tips on utilizing Wordle to the max.

So, you have writing talent—then what? We all crave approval. But after your mom, your professors, and your Aunt Minnie tell you that you have a rare and wonderful gift, you still have to do the work. How do you sustain your motivation while holding down a 9-to-5 job? What do you do to stay positive in the face of a less-than-glowing review?At Writer Unboxed, Jane Friedman suggests there are 5 Things More Important Than Talent and she counts them off for you. How good are you at transforming rejection into growth? Do you blame, or do you look for another point of entry? Courage, positivity, adaptability, self-examination, and support. These old-fashioned qualities could be the keys to your future success.

“Good writing is essentially rewriting.” So said Roald Dahl—and John Brandon (Citrus County) would agree. In a post titled Speed: Writing Fiction That Reads Fast, author/blogger/workshop director Susan Cushman outlines some tips Brandon shared with authors at the Summer Writers Workshop in Oxford, Mississippi, back in June 2011. It’s no small feat to fashion rich text that challenges readers and hooks their interest. Brandon’s general recommendation is, “Write your first draft. Wait a month, then start cutting.…Think of your readers as gifted third graders—if you bore them, they’ll start burning ants. If you challenge them, they’ll follow you anywhere.” Cushman also lists Brandon’s “7 Rules for Writing Dialogue,” which include, “Resist using adverbs in dialogue tags, e.g., she said uncertainly.” For further help with tightening your prose, read more here. After all, Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied.

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Posted By Sue Collier on March 12, 2012

Here’s some of the latest in industry news and views:

From Book Making: “Free” publishing usually costs money
In Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” Some publishing companies tout free publishing programs that are not really free.

From Smart Money: 10 Things E-Books Won’t Tell You
When her Sony Reader’s battery stopped holding a charge, Kelly (last name withheld for privacy) decided to replace it with a Kindle Touch. But she says she had to use illegal cracking software to transfer her e-books, which had been formatted so that they could only be accessed on Sony products. “They’re my books,” Kelly says. “I bought them. I don’t see why I shouldn’t keep them.”

From Publishers Weekly: Home Depot To Stop Selling Books
In a letter sent to publishers on Friday, nationwide retailer The Home Depot announced it will no longer be selling books. The letter, signed by associate merchant Sarah Moffat, states that, after considering “over a year of intense analytical information both internally and with our book suppliers,” as well as “customer insight surveys,” the home improvement superstore is going to discontinue the “book subclass” in order to “better optimize the space in the front end of the store.”

From Jonathan Fields: How to Pick Up a Stranger (or Produce Brilliant Work)
Today’s guest contributor is writer, coach, violinist, filmmaker, law school graduate, and web designer, Emilie Wapnick, who works with multipotentialites to help them build lives and businesses around ALL their interests. She’s the author of Renaissance Business and the troublemaker behind Puttylike.com.

From Librarian by Day: Should Libraries Get Out of the eBook Business?
Or get out at least until there is a better system? I know what you are going to say, I can hear it already – “We can’t! Our patrons demand ebooks!” Except the truth is our patrons want a lot of things we can’t give them – to always be first on the waiting list for the new James Patterson, to not pay fines when their books are late, for the library to be open earlier or later, or to have a system besides Dewey because despite using it their entire lives they still cannot figure it out.

From Sylviane Nuccio: What Is Quora And Why Bloggers And Marketers Should Use It?
I have been introduced to Quora a few months ago as a way to find clients for my freelance writing business.  However, I never took the time to fully investigate Quora to learn more about all its potentials.  This is why I wanted to finally hop over there and not only check it out for myself, but tell my readers about it as well, so you could decide if you wanted to use this tool for your online business or not.

From the Authors Guild: Letter from Scott Turow: Grim News
Dear member, Yesterday’s report that the Justice Department may be near filing an antitrust lawsuit against five large trade book publishers and Apple is grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture.

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Posted By Sue Collier on March 8, 2012

My team and I come across so many useful websites, I thought it would handy to put them together in a regular blog series. So a couple times a month, I’ll be listing a few of them in a new series called “Webtips for Authors and Self-Publishers.”

If you have or know of a website that would be of interest to my blog readers, please email it to me along with a description; don’t forget to include appropriate links.

Enjoy!

Navigate the cyber highway with ease. Melissa S. Barker runs social media marketing campaigns. She also teaches and blogs about her specialty. Additionally, her paper, “Top 10 Internet Search Tips,” can provide anyone with greater success in locating all sorts of information online. Are you familiar with Boolean operators? Do you know what a metasearch engine is? Melissa explains these and other strategies along with supplemental links to smooth the way. The next time you need to hunt around in cyberspace, check this out first.

Get in on the ground floor with iDoLVine. Long-distance autographing has arrived. In May 2011, nine bestselling authors graced BookExpo America by demonstrating a new technology that virtualizes the book tour online for authors and their readers. The list was stellar: Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Neil Gaiman (Coraline), Erica Jong (Fear of Flying), Mark Jeffery (Max Quick: The Pocket and the Pendant), Peter Meyers (Best iPad Apps), Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgram’s Precious Little Life), Gena Showalter (Lord of the Vampires), and Svetlana Chmakova (Nightschool). Last fall, iDoLVine launched what they term “the world’s only authentic, verifiable, personalized autograph and live face-to-face author/reader experience online.” With LiveSign technology and a RealPen robot printer, writers are now able to sign paper and other objects from the comfort of their own homes.

Free and fabulous for ebooks authors. Don’t miss Jane Friedman’s post, 5 Free E-Books Every Writer Needs, at the There Are No Rules website. Common writing mistakes, how to become a full-time writer, query letters, targeting publishers, and marketing for free are all covered. Now Friedman has added a sixth freebie: Cory Doctorow’s The Problem Isn’t Piracy. The Problem Is Obscurity, a compilation of essays that originally appeared as introductions to his other books plus some material from his thoughtful work titled Content. This Doctorow document argues that traditional copyright is an antiquated idea, explaining why it is beneficial for authors to give away their work for free and foster a community of readers. You may not agree, but this is stimulating food for thought.

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Posted By Sue Collier on March 5, 2012

Here’s some of the latest in industry news and views:

From The Washington Post: Jan Berenstain, co-creator of Berenstain Bears children’s books with husband Stan, dies at 88
Jan Berenstain, who with her husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed preschoolers and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88.

From Publishers Lunch: Two Distributors Do Sign with Kindle–And Pay eBook Coop
While IPG remains in what could be a long-standing contractual disagreement with Amazon over wholesale terms for their clients–and their approximately 4,500 ebooks remain unavailable for sale on Kindle–two other independent distributors of scale did both come to terms with Amazon in the past week or so. Both the Perseus Books Group and National Book Network (NBN) reported to their respective clients on the new terms arrived for ebooks.

From Rachelle Gardner: Your Email Might Be Somebody’s Last Straw
Have you noticed that email volume is reaching crisis proportions? It’s true for many people regardless of the business they’re in. The ease of email causes people to be careless about how they use it. It’s just SO easy to dash off an email to someone the moment you think of it. And then three hours later when you think of something else… email them again!

From Author Marketing Experts: The Eightfold Way: The 8 Basic Don’ts for Novel Writers
The media has become fixated on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs boson (the so-called “God particle,” a name that would surely make Mr. Higgs cringe).  The Higgs mechanism (i.e. the spontaneous symmetry breaking) is necessary to give mass to some of the vector bosons in the electroweak or weak and electromagnetic interaction theory.  Forgotten in all this media hoopla is the theory that led to the idea of quarks and gluons, the Eightfold Way of symmetries popularized by Mr. Gell-Mann.

From WebProNews: Exclusive Interview: Self-Published Author Kerry Wilkinson Outsold Patterson, Stieg Larsson
Kerry Wilkinson was the best-selling ebook author on Amazon for the last quarter of 2011. And, Kerry Wilkinson does not have a publisher. Let’s take a moment to let that process. Kerry Wilkinson is a self-published author. And, in the last quarter of 2011 – that includes Christmas – his digital book downloads outsold James Patterson, Stieg Larsson and Stephen King.

From Time News Feed: Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss! 9 Facts to Know About the Famed Author
Beloved children’s book author Dr. Seuss would have turned 108 today, and he would surely have been proud to see that his works are still relevant as ever, resonating with children—and adults—of all ages. Born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904, the writer produced more than 60 children’s books before his death in 1991.

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Posted By Sue Collier on March 3, 2012

I just got off the phone with a potential client. We discussed the proposal I had sent him about the production process for his book, as well as possibilities for promotion and marketing. He is an elderly man and this is first foray into the world of publishing. Our conversation was going quite well—until we started talking about distribution for his book.

He told me he expected us to find him a distributor that would enlist a sales force to sell his book—much like the distribution process works in the traditional publishing world wherein large publishers may have their own sales reps or commissioned sales reps to present their books to buyers across the country. Regrettably, it doesn’t usually work that way for the small press with one or even a few titles.

I told him that as a one-title publisher of a book with a very small niche market, his distribution options would be limited. I also broke the bad news that it would be extremely difficult for him to find a distributor that would actively “sell” his book. I told him the best he can probably expect is to get “distribution” for his book—by that I mean basically making the book available to the trade—and working himself to create demand for the book. After a track record of steady sales, I explained that he might have a chance to sign on with a distributor. And even then, he may have to have a number of titles with steady sales before a distributor would take him on. He told me flat out that was unacceptable.

This is a conversation I have had many times before, and authors are always disappointed—and surprised—by what I tell them. Unfortunately, it’s a reality self-publishers need to face. Does it mean they are doomed for failure? No. What it means is that self-publishers should focus their efforts on marketing and promotions, creating demand for their books and boosting their sales numbers.

And lucky for self-publishers, ebooks are changing the way books are distributed. I predict that in the years to come, the (antiquated) way books are currently distributed will be dramatically different. Maybe distributors as we currently know them won’t exist at all.

The bottom line? There is no distributor out there that will magically take the sales burden off self-publishers. Self-publishers need to make sure their books are available in the trade—usually via a wholesaler—and then focus their time on special sales and online sales.

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Posted By Sue Collier on February 28, 2012

I read a tweet this morning that was something about “why self-published writers need editors”—and my first thought was when was there ever a question about self-published writers needing editors? As it becomes easier and easier to publish your own work, it is also becoming easier for writers to get caught up in the excitement of being published. In their eagerness, editing is often skipped. If our industry is to prosper, every author must take personal responsibility for presenting a quality product.

Editing is a special skill most authors don’t perform all that well, particularly on their own material. A poorly edited book is harder to read, harder to believe, and less likely to be reviewed—or reviewed negatively. It is shameful to see a good book cut to ribbons by a reviewer because of poor grammar or spelling.

Because authors know their subjects so well, they are usually too close to their material to edit it; all objectivity is lost. A professional editor can help detect passages that are unclear, poorly organized, or overwritten. This is called content or creative editing. During a second reading your editor will copyedit, whisking out grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation errors. And for those authors who are concerned their “voice” will be taken out of their writing, a good editor will hone and polish your work, not impose his or her own style on it.

Debbi Mack, blogger at My Life on the Mid-List, put it perfectly. She wrote:

Here’s the thing. Writers can get so close to their writing that they fail to see the problems with it. A true professional writer, much like a scientist seeking a peer review of a study, will want an editor to take a look with fresh and unbiased eyes at his or her work in progress before publishing it.

Allow me to demonstrate my point with an analogy.

I was talking to my acupuncturist. He asked me about the pain I was experiencing lately due to my dystonia. I told him it was about the same as usual, but then I’d adjusted to having a certain amount of pain over the years.

He said (essentially), “Pain is like odor. When you walk into a stinky room, you notice it right away. But after you’re there for a few hours, you don’t smell anything.”

Now, that’s why writers need editors.

And if you don’t get that analogy, you have no business being a writer.

‘Nuf said.

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Posted By Sue Collier on February 27, 2012

Here’s some of the latest in industry news and views:

From Book Making: Believe it or not, Bookpal is even sleazier and stupider than Outskirts Press
Pay-to-publish company Outskirts Press is a frequent target for my wrath because of its dishonesty, incompetence and overall sleaziness. I’ve just found that a competitor has descended to an even lower level of hell.

From Shelf Awareness: Rereading Books Good for Mental Health
Reading a book more than once can offer , according to a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research under a title that we had to read several times, and not for mental health benefits: “The Temporal and Focal Dynamics of Volitional Reconsumption: A Phenomenological Investigation of Repeated Hedonic Experiences.”

From Publishers Weekly: How To Cure Reading Forgetfulness
“To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.” – Philip Roth

From eBook Newser: 10 Pinterest Boards For eBook Fans
The new social networking site Pinterest may still be closed to the general public, but that’s not stopping you from using the site as a resource for free eBooks.

From Rachel Gardner: How to Make Your Own Book Trailer
Guest Blogger: Julie Cantrell, author of the bestselling Into the Free You’ve all seen book trailers – the brief videos used to market books. Like a trailer for a motion picture, book trailers can make your title stand out among the masses. Many professionals will produce trailers for a hefty fee, but why not do it yourself?

From TeleRead: B&N launches cheaper Nook tablet and lowers price on Nook color
Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today expanded its portfolio of bestselling NOOK^® devices with the introduction of NOOK Tablet with 8GB of memory, a tremendous value for the company’s fastest and lightest tablet at just $199. NOOK Tablet 8GB version offers reading and mobile entertainment enthusiasts another great option in the NOOK family of devices. In addition, the company’s highly popular NOOK Color just became an even greater value at $169.

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Posted By Sue Collier on February 19, 2012

Here’s some of the latest in industry news and views:

From Publishing Perspectives: Why Foreign Rights are a Big Deal for Small Publishers
SAN FRANCISCO: As Director of Subsidiary Rights at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, one of the most common questions that I get from other independent houses is: “Are translation rights worth the effort?” My answer is always a resounding “Yes!”

A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Amazon Will Destroy You
I’ve been hearing a lot of whiny bitching on the interwebs over the past year. “Amazon is going to put Big 6 publishers out of business!” “Amazon is a bully!” “Amazon is going to destroy bookstores!”

From Publishers Weekly: Books Invade the Cable Networks
The tagline “It’s not TV. It’s HBO” is something many will remember from the late 1990s, back when the cable network was in the vanguard for airing critically acclaimed series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City. Today there’s hardly a cable network in the game that isn’t trying to capture the audience HBO once had all to itself. The upside of all this, aside from better TV, is that more books are being optioned for series adaptation than ever.

From Publishers Weekly: Bookstore Sales Plunged in December, Slipped for Year
Many booksellers reported that the past holiday season was the best in a number of years, but whatever gains surviving stores enjoyed appear to have been the result of the collapse of Borders since preliminary figures released this morning by the U.S. Census Bureau show a large decline in bookstore sales for December. According to the Census, December bookstore sales fell 15.6% in the month, to $1.67 billion, by far the largest decline in 2011. Despite the December plunge, bookstore sales for the full year were down 0.8%, to $15.53 billion. The Census Bureau estimates are from stores that generate at least 50% of their sales through books.

From Writer Beware Blogs: BookTango: Author Solutions Rolls Out Ebook Distribution Services
Just introduced from self-publishing conglomerate Author Solutions (owner of the iUniverse, Xlibris, AuthorHouse, and Trafford brands, and the power behind the outsourced self-publishing divisions of Harlequin and Thomas Nelson, among others): BookTango, an ebook aggregator for self-published authors.

From FutureBook: I am proof that publishers love authors
It’s easy to assume that Joseph Konrath is angry at publishers not because he has a legitimate concern with the way they do business but because he suffers from a serious case of a broken heart and hurt pride. It’s easy to assume this because he makes it easy.

From GalleyCat: Amanda Knox Inks HarperCollins Book Deal
Amanda Knox will write a memoir for HarperCollins. According to the New York Times‘ sources, the deal was “for close $4 million.” The Seattle student was charged in the 2007 death of her former roommate Meredith Kercher while studying abroad in Italy, but was exonerated by the Italian court system last year.

From Bloomberg: Why Book Publishing Can Survive Digital Age: Echoes
Word on the street is that the publishing industry is under attack by technology. Amazon.com Inc. has launched a bare-knuckled assault against independent bookstores. Print-on-demand firms make it possible for anyone to get his work on the market, and thus threaten to render agents and editors obsolete. And with e-books priced so low, how can authors and booksellers earn a decent living?

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Posted By Sue Collier on February 14, 2012

Here’s some of the latest in industry news and views:

From Mashable Business: Amazon to Open Retail Store [RUMOR]
In what may be a sign that 2012 really is the year of the apocalypse, revered online retailer Amazon is rumored to be opening a brick-and-mortar retail store.

From Publishing Perspectives: Are We Verging on a Digital Rights War?
Today’s feature story on Dzanc Books’s rEprint series, which publishes backlist from notable authors as e-books, notes: It was a simple idea, and yet one that apparently nobody else in publishing had thought of — Gillis kept expecting other firms to start competing with Dzanc for e-book rights but for about two years [Dzanc's co-founder Steven Gillis] had the field largely to himself: “Finally other publishers are getting involved. I see this as a sign that our idea was proven correct.”

From The Book Seller: Self-published author claims Kindle top spot
Self-published crime writer Kerry Wilkinson claimed the top spot in the UK Kindle bestseller chart for the last quarter of 2011, Amazon has revealed, as speculation mounts that the online retailer is planning to open its own physical store to push its exclusive book sales.

From Writers Beware Blogs: Publishers’ Desk: Display or Misplay?
Over the past few months, I’ve gotten a number of questions from writers who’ve received spam–excuse me, invitations from a website called Publishers’ Desk. Its motto is “Bringing Authors and Publishers Together,”

From Taleist: Announcing the Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey
There are self-publishing authors like JA Konrath, Amanda Hocking,  John Locke and (on a smaller but perfectly formed scale) Joanna Penn who are generous with their figures but they’re selling books from the tens of thousands to the millions. So does that mean you’re a failure if your figures are more modest? Or are you actually doing better than most? What is the average royalty earning for self-publishing authors? How long does it take for a self-published book to reach peak sales?

From Publishers Weekly: Read With Caution! 9 Books That Cause Irrational Phobias
One of the many benefits of books is that they provide catharsis. They have the rare power of purging stress and bad emotions through the experiences we find in them. But some books can have the exact opposite effect, producing the howling fantods in a reader. For those phobic victims, we’ll wait for your screaming to die down and nod in appreciation of the power of these nine books.

From GalleyCat: Librarians Respond to Penguin’s Decision to End Library eBook Lending
Yesterday Penguin revealed that they will no longer offer eBooks to libraries through OverDrive, “due to new concerns about the security of our digital editions.” Meanwhile, librarians around the country have debated the issue. San Rafael Public Library acting director Sarah Houghton posted a free sign in Google Docs for librarians to share with patrons. We’ve embedded the pointed sign above–what do you think?

From Publishers Weekly: ABA’s IndieCommerce Site Dropping Amazon Publishing Titles
On Wednesday the American Booksellers Association’s for-profit subsidiary, IndieCommerce, began removing all Amazon titles from its database. The actions followed decisions by Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Indigo to not carry Amazon Publishing titles.

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