Merge and be Damned: Penguin and Random House

Apologies to Pingu and Spongebob SquarePants

News today that the Penguin and Random House merger is definitely on. If reports are accurate, the Owners of Random House (The international media group based in Germany, Bertelsmann) will own 53%, with Pearson (the US owner of Penguin) left with 47%.

In the month of Microsoft's launch of their Surface tablet and Apple's new iPad Mini, for the self-publisher the merger is worth noting because it shows the power of internet retail, and the strength of the world beyond the traditional publisher. This merger is a straightforward attempt to survive in a tough High Street climate where the legacy publishing houses struggle with strategies and structures built for a bricks and mortar age. 

In the world of print, change is slow because although, at its best, the industry carefully curates its output, in the end, business is business so Pearson and Bertelsmann need to make a profit in an environment that is changing more rapidly than at any time over the last 100 years. The last two years alone have seen astonishing growth in digital sales, reflecting the swift change in consumer habits represented by ipads, tablets and smartphones. It’s hard for the bigger publishers to keep up but the figures tell the story (information from The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch and Bloomberg Business Week):

• The new merged entity, Penguin Random, will turnover 3 billion USD
• Pearson annual net sales in 2011 were 5.88 billion up from  5.14 billion in 2009
• For Barnes and Noble (the largest book chain in the world) turnover was 7 bn in 2011, up from 5.1 bn in 2009.

These appear to be significant numbers, and in the contained world of publishing, they are the biggest fish in the pond. But compare them to the broader, modern phenomenon that is the Internet, and they don't look so mighty:

• Amazon annual sales in 2011 were 48 billion, up from 24 billion in 2009
• Google achieved 37 billion in 2011, 23 billion in 2009

This is the market that controls access to the hallowed consumer.

Even more extreme, are two manufacturers on whose mobile devices the internet retailers rely:

• Samsung Electronics sales were 150 billion in 2011, 124 billion in 2009
• Apple reached 108 billion in 2011, up from 42 billion in 2009

For the self-publisher this is good news: as the market grows online so the opportunities grow. Promoting single titles into Amazon, Nook and Apple has never been easier (this is the liberated world of self-publishing). Quality matters, good editing matters, but ultimately the role of the bigger traditional publisher (whatever their size), so reliant on big sales to cover the big advances for the big celebrity authors, is rapidly diminishing for a great many authors trying to maximise their own impact online. 

Coming Next: Amazon Direct or Traditional Publisher?

eBay Fees

Once you have an account with eBay, selling items through the website is very straightforward. However, some careful planning is required to help ensure you get the right price and keep any fees as low as possible. This post outlines the different approaches to selling through eBay and, roughly, how much it will cost. I met someone recently who sells between approx. £4,000 ($6200) every month on eBay, with total costs of less than 30%. Now that's a decent living!

Auction, Buy Now, Make Offer 

There are a number of ways of selling an item through eBay, all of which can help to sell it for a reasonable price. These include the following:

1. Auction: This is one of the most popular methods of selling an item. It allows interested buyers to bid for a limited period of time. The highest bidder wins the auction when it ends and buys the item. 
2. Auction with reserve: A reserve price can be set. This incurs a small additional fee, (generally between 10 pence and £1.30 (20 cents and $1.75) but prevents your item from being sold too cheaply. In some countries, there is a minimum reserve price, whereas others have no such rules. 
3. Auction with ‘Buy it now’: A ‘Buy it now’ button can be displayed alongside your item, which often tempts people who really want to secure the item and would rather not take the gamble of losing out in an auction.
4. Classified ad: Items can be sold on eBay with a fixed price. This is popular for high-value items such as a car or property. A fixed fee is payable, depending on what is being sold. 
5. Make offer: This is often available with items that are listed for sale in a classified ad. It allows interested buyers to suggest a price to pay and wait for the seller to accept or decline the offer.  

Calculate Your Fees

It’s important to be aware of the costs incurred when selling an item through eBay. In some cases these can easily escalate and the final costs can be more than the profit you had hoped to gain from the sale. The fees depend on what you are selling and how you want to sell it. Here are the fees that may be incurred:

1. Insertion fee: General items (not cars, holidays or property) incur an insertion fee ranging from free to around £1.30 or $2 (or whatever the equivalent currency of your country), depending on the starting price. Large items such as a car or property have a higher fee (in the UK, a car currently costs £10–14.99 and property costs £35).
2. Buy it now: Can be included in an item for auction and usually costs 20–40 pence or, in some cases, is free. Exceptions include large items such as a car where a ‘Buy it now’ price costs roughly the same as an insertion fee.
3. Reserve price: eBay charges 1–3% of the reserve price, although in some countries this is free up to a specific amount. If a reserve price is included, the insertion fee is based upon this value, not the starting price. In some countries, a maximum fee for the reserve price is applied.
4. Sale price (final value): eBay charges 9–10% of the final value up to a specific maximum, depending on the country. High value items such as cars are charged at a particular amount. 
5. PayPal: If your buyer pays via PayPal, then PayPal will charge a fee for handling the transaction. It charges roughly 20p or $0.30 per transaction, then between 1.4% and 3.4% of the sale price (final value), depending on the amount. In some countries, a fixed percentage is charged for each transaction. 

The Cost of Selling on eBay in the UK
Selling a collectible book through eBay with a starting price of £15 will incur an insertion fee of 50p. If the auction ends at £35, then eBay will charge 10%, which comes to £3.50. If the buyer pays via PayPal, then PayPal will charge 20p plus 3.4% of £35, which is £1.19. So although the book sold for £35, you will be paid £29.61 because the fees amount to £5.39. There are also further additional (optional) fees if you include more than one photograph when selling an item and use other selling tools. These are covered later in a forthcoming post.

Watch Those Fees 
Sometimes it’s easy to get carried away with all the bells and whistles of selling on eBay, which can help to tempt buyers into purchasing. However, it can become expensive, especially for low-value goods. Add together the cost of an insertion fee, reserve price, extra photographs, a colourful theme, the commission fee for postage and the 9–10% charged on the final price, and you can easily see the total fees exceeding 20% of the value of the sale.

Hot Tips

• Carefully calculate the total fees for a number of different ways of selling an item on eBay before deciding which one is best.
• eBay occasionally holds promotional offers where insertion fees are free or other fees are reduced.

There are So Many Ways to Sell Online!

Text is from How to Make Money on the Internet by Rob Hawkins (Flame Tree Publishing 2012). Available at all good bookshops, Amazon, and direct from the Publisher.

Coming Next:  eBay Planning

Setting up to Sell on eBay

eBay is one of the internet’s most successful websites for selling unwanted, second-hand and new items, ranging from toys and computer equipment to bicycles and cars. If you want to sell your own items on eBay, there are a few things you must do before you begin selling, including registering and choosing a payment method.

Register with eBay 

You have to create an account with eBay before you can start selling items through it. Depending on where you live in the world, eBay has a website relative to your country. For example, if you live in the UK, then visit www.ebay.co.uk, whereas if you live in the USA, visit www.ebay.com, and if you live in Australia, visit www.ebay.com.au. Some of these websites are slightly different, but in all cases there will be a ‘register’ button near the centre of the screen. Click on this to create an account with eBay.

Enter Your Personal Details 

It’s important to enter your details accurately and avoid any false information. You will need an email address that doesn’t have an eBay account connected to it. Choose a suitable user ID for yourself, which is at least six characters long, but be prepared to try a few variations as someone may have already taken the name you want to use.  Don’t forget to read through any user agreements and privacy policies to make sure you are happy to register with eBay. According to the registration web page, eBay does not rent or sell your personal information to third parties without your consent.

User ID Don’ts

An eBay user ID cannot include spaces or tabs, special characters or symbols (for example, £ or &), but can include asterisks, underscores, full stops and dashes. Your first or last name cannot be used along with email or website addresses. 

Password Pointers  

You will need to think of a suitable password to go with your eBay account. This will enable you to log in to your eBay account and sell items. eBay has some rules and helpful advice concerning passwords, which are as follows:

1. Password length: Your password must contain at least six characters.
2. Symbols and letters: The password should contain at least two of the following – upper-case or lower-case letters, numbers or special characters such as a question/exclamation mark, underscore or @ symbol.
3. ID or email: Do not use your email address or eBay user ID as the password.
4. Obvious words: Avoid using obvious passwords, such as ‘abc123’ or ‘Password’.
5. Personal stuff: Don’t use personal information that can easily be guessed, such as your name, phone number, or date of birth.

Identity Confirmation

After entering your personal details and clicking on the ‘Continue’ button, the next screen to appear may inform you that eBay needs to confirm your identity. This can be completed by either asking eBay to telephone you, or by entering details of your bank, credit or debit card. If you choose to request eBay to telephone you, an automatic phone call will be made to you (landline only) and a four-digit verification code will be read out. You will need to enter this code on eBay’s website to complete registration. If you choose to enter your credit or debit card details, complete the relevant fields. eBay states that it does not use these details for any other purpose than confirming your identity.

Paying for eBay Fees

eBay requires a method of payment to be set up to enable you to pay for advertising items and to pay any commission and other fees when an item has been sold. There are a number of different methods of payment, which are explained as follows:

1. PayPal: This has become a popular method of payment with a reputation for reliable and secure transactions. You have to create a PayPal account and either enter your bank, credit or debit card details. This will be used to extract payments or credit funds when you sell something through eBay. For further details, visit www.paypal.com. 
2. Direct Debit: Bank or Building Society account details need to be supplied to eBay and eBay will automatically send a request to your financial institution to deduct any fees for selling items. This type of payment takes roughly 19 days to set up.
3. Credit card: Enter your Visa or MasterCard credit card details online via eBay and payments will be taken each month for any fees incurred when selling items. 
4. Cheque or postal order: eBay can issue an invoice and payment can be made via a cheque or postal order. Once eBay receives the cheque or postal order, allow seven to 10 business days for the payment to clear. 

Receiving Payments

Items you sell through eBay need to be paid for and there are a number of methods of receiving payments. These include the following:

1. PayPal: All eBay sellers must offer PayPal as a payment method. This is a secure online payment method, which allows you to get paid quickly without sharing any of your financial information with the buyer. As a seller, the disadvantage of being paid using PayPal is that it incurs a fee  
2. Cheque or postal order: This is one of the lengthiest methods of payment as it is best to wait until the cheque or postal order has cleared before posting or releasing the sold item. However, this method avoids fees incurred with PayPal.
3. Credit or debit card: If you operate a business that can take credit or debit card payments, then this method can be used to receive payment for an item sold through eBay. However, this type of sale incurs a fee, just like PayPal.
4. Pay on collection: Most sellers prefer this method of payment, especially where the buyer collects or the seller delivers in person. No fees are incurred via eBay for this type of payment. 

Hot Tips

Your User ID for your eBay account is displayed when you sell items, so choose one that is relevant and certainly not offensive.

Replace letters for numbers in a password. For instance, a password such as ‘London’ could replace the ‘o’ for a zero to become ‘L0nd0n’.

There are So Many Ways to Sell Online!

Text is from How to Make Money on the Internet by Rob Hawkins (Flame Tree Publishing 2012). Available at all good bookshops, Amazon, and direct from the Publisher.

Coming Next:  Sell on eBay Fees

Planning to Sell Online

One of the simplest ways of making money on the internet is to advertise and sell unwanted items. But how much should you sell them for, when should you sell, how will the items be delivered or collected and who will buy them? This and the posts that follow will provide the answers. 

What Have You Got to Sell?

Before the internet, unwanted items were usually sold by placing an advertisement in the classified-ads section of the local paper, or by sticking a postcard-sized notice in the window of the post office or newsagent, or on the noticeboard of the local community centre. The internet has opened up a whole new market (a global one in some cases) and created a potentially vast audience of buyers. However, the first concern before you start thinking about selling, is listing the goods that you want to sell. If you’ve raided the shed or attic and found a wide assortment of unwanted items, note down their exact details and don’t sell them yet. First, it’s important to determine their potential value and work out the best way of selling them, giving thought to whether they can be delivered or collected.

Research

The starting point for selling items is to arm yourself with plenty of information and knowledge about the best ways and best times to sell. Speak to any experienced market trader or shop owner and they will know what type of stock sells well at particular times of the year, who their customers are, and what prices these customers are willing to pay.

Pricing 

Deciding on the price you want to sell an item for isn’t always easy. You may have paid a reasonable price for a bicycle five years ago, but it may only be worth a tenth of its value now. The easiest way to fix on a price is to look for similar items that have sold and find out how much they sold for. Websites such as eBay allow you to search for items that have been sold by selecting ‘Completed listings’ down the left side of the screen. It’s also helpful to look for similar items that are currently for sale to help determine whether you should sell on the same website at a cheaper price.

New to Old

Sometimes, second-hand prices of equivalents may not be available, so it might prove difficult to ascertain a reasonable selling price. If this is the case, find out if the item is still available to purchase brand new and how much it sells for. In many situations, sellers calculate the second-hand price as around 50% of the brand new price, but check for versions, editions and updates, which may affect the value of your item. For instance, a first edition of a book is usually worth more than a later edition.

Valuable and Collectible

Where an item is of collectible interest or appreciating value, it’s important to arm yourself with as much information about it to ensure potential buyers are assured they are buying a genuine product. If possible, look at the same items for sale elsewhere and find the features that are highlighted in the description. Does it help to have the original packaging or specific accessories? Are there any serial numbers or manufacturer’s markings that signify a genuine item? Can you obtain any information from a collector or auction house to confirm a product is genuine and collectible?

Auction Behaviour 

If you can find items already selling that are similar to what you have to sell, it’s worth spending a few days watching the auctions. Look at the history of the bidding to see whether all the bids are placed at the very end of the auction. See how many different bids are made and, although you won’t be able to see who bids, you can see the number of people bidding. 

Timing

Selling an artificial Christmas tree during summer isn’t going to be as easy as selling it during the weeks leading up to 25 December. Whilst some goods are in greater demand according to the season and weather, it may be less easy to determine the best time to sell others. Expensive items that are not obvious gifts may be easier to sell if you avoid times of the year when most people have large expenditure to outlay, such as around and after Christmas and during July and August, when many people are on holiday. 

Timing and Competition

If the marketplace in which you want to sell your product or products is already flooded with similar goods, this might not represent a good opportunity. That said, you may be able to turn this to your advantage, if, for instance, you sell at a cheaper price than the competition and offer more features or accessories to gain a competitive advantage. For instance, if you are selling an electronic toy, but don’t want to offer a cheaper price than the rest of the similar toys for sale, include extras such as batteries and accessories.

Delivery or Collection 

It’s essential to decide whether you want to deliver an item you are selling or insist that the buyer collects. In the case of delivery, you may want to use a courier service or a similar service with a traceable delivery. This will help ensure the item is delivered, minimizing the risk of the buyer claiming they have not received their goods (which can affect your ratings on eBay and other selling sites). However, it’s important to calculate the cost of delivery and state this when selling the item, so you don’t lose out on postage costs.

Collection Capers 

If an item you are selling is simply too large, difficult, heavy or fragile to post, then it’s important to stress that collection in person is the only method. However, be prepared for buyers to insist that a bicycle, for example, can be dismantled and boxed for collection by a courier. Even if the buyer arranges the collection, you will still have to source the packaging and box the item. 

Hot Tips

• Don’t try to make a profit on postage. Some buyers are dissuaded by high delivery costs.
• An item can be watched on eBay by selecting it from the results listing, then click on the button labelled ‘Add to Watch list’.
• Honesty pays. If you are trying to sell something that is defective, such as a bike with a broken chain, make sure potential buyers are aware of this.

There are So Many Ways to Sell Online.

Text is from How to Make Money on the Internet by Rob Hawkins (Flame Tree Publishing 2012). Available at all good bookshops, Amazon, and direct from the Publisher.

Coming Next:  Setting up to Sell on eBay

How to Publish eBooks: Twitter and Linkedin. The Personal vs the Professional

Last week Twitter announced an end to a significant part of its near three year relationship with Linkedin (many news links on this include http://mashable.com/2012/06/29/twitter-drops-linkedin-partnership/ and http://allthingsd.com/20120629/twitter-cuts-off-linkedin-whos-next/). Some of these stories are pretty technical and for self-publishers might seem rather abstruse, but they reveal an essential truth: the need to think carefully about how you use social media to develop your self-publishing brand. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest can all be employed for different facets of your life and control the interaction between these different services.

On the basis that both self and traditionally published authors use social media to promote their work, at least for some of the time, it is important to think it through:

1. All forms of social media are instant. You can post a blog and receive an instant reply, you can see an interesting tweet and immediately respond. No waiting for the post office to open, no irritation over early closing, weekend shutdowns, or 1970s style communications. BUT, keeping control is the key to making social media work for you, not the other way round.
2. Personal contacts with true friends are different to even the most subtle forms of promotion for your ebook, or writing projects. Being true to your personaility and writing heartfelt social media posts are not the same as telling a friend what you had for breakfast, or whether your children are ill, or what your 5K running time was this afternoon. Real friends are forgiving and affectionate so you can be relaxed with them. 
3. Professional contacts can be addressed in a relaxed way as well, but some caution is required. A visit to the bank manager requires a little preparation, slightly smarter clothes perhaps, carefully formulated sentences in discussion. Online, even a chance encounter with any professional contact can be loaded with significance.
4. Twitter is used for both personal and professional reasons by millions of people. Generally though it's a swift form of interaction, reaching out to a global community of like-minded individuals. You can choose how to make it work best for you and mold it  accordingly. Some people have two accounts, one for their work, one for personal contact. The distinction forces you to be clear about what you say, when and to whom.
5. Some also make a distinction between their use of different social media: Facebook feels more personal for instance, Linkedin is clearly professional, Google+ can be both, Twitter can be both. It is worth having a view about this. Once you’ve posted online your words live forever as part of your slowly accumulating digital identity. 

So, the separation of Twitter and Linked in interesting because Linkedin is a dedicated professional network, while Twitter is used for both the personal and the professional. Twitter will have their own commercial reasons for their recent action but it highlights the need to be clear about the nature of your posts. Twitter feeds will no longer be sent automatically onto Linkedin, but you can send your Linkedin status to Twitter. For self-publishers this can be used as part of the build for your author brand, because when you use Linkedin as the starting point, there is no confusion in your mind about how to approach what to say - it’ll be focused and professional, clear-headed and targeted to your market. 

By the way, you do have a Linked in account don’t you?

Coming Soon: More Twitter Hints and Tips and Why I chose Indie Publishing.

Writers on Writing: Ray Bradbury RIP

To start a series of instructive and inspirational posts about writers on writing I decided to begin with the pugilistic titan that was Ray Bradbury who passed away in the last couple of weeks. He was a massive personal inspiration and will be much missed by generations of readers. His classic Fahrenheit 451 still resonanates today as society shifts its focus from printed forms of learning and culture, to electronic mobile technologies. Enjoy this terrific video.

Coming Soon: Writers on Writing: Amanda Hocking and Marketing Advice for Self-Publishers

How to Self-Publish: Quality Matters!

Just found a blog by Dionne Lister, a self-publishing fantasy writer in Australia. The particular post that caught my eye (here) started by relating the (positive) real world experience of selling her own book to a Sydney independent bookshop. And it worked! Some chutzpah to add to her writing skills! But her real point was the need for quality in self-publishers because the shop owner was automatically dismissive of the poor quality of many self-published books.

And of course, we know that's true in many cases. The benefit of self-publishing is also the problem: anyone can do it! But I have a sense that the message is getting through. There is so much advice online, in blogs, forums, on Twitter, Facebook etc, that it's hard to write without bumping in to a blizzard of specific advice, all of which says it loud and clear: make sure your book is edited by someone who is not your affectionate mother/auntie/cousin.

I happen to be writing as fiction book. I won't bore you with the details because I'm not ready to market it yet, but it's 162,000 words long and I'm on the fifth and final edit (I've already cut back 10,000 words and deleted most of those nasty adverbs). It's been read by two literate friends/heavy readers and I've gone about as far as I can. Now I have to find an appropriate editor and suffer the humiliation of allowing an objective professional correct my grammar, sense and (probably) spelling. I have a degree in English Literature, I've worked in publishing for 28 years, I've written nearly 40 non-fiction books under various nom-de-plumes, so you'd think I would know what I'm doing! Well I do, that's why I'll find a decent editor to pull my text apart where necessary and improve it! By the time the book makes it to market it'll be as well edited as any traditionally published title. And yes, I am going to self-publish, either through KDP or Smashwords because the author experience through these thoroughly modern, quick-thinking, author-curating facilitators (ie not publishers), is excellent.

As a final mention for Smashwords, their style guide is fantastically helpful for all writers, especially those looking at ebook publication for the first time.

Coming Soon: How to Survive a Book Launch and Finding a Good Editor
Image courtesy of ima/Shutterstock.com

How to Self-Publish: Madison McGraw

Have just come back from Bookexpo in New York and am writing a blogpost about how slick and swift Amazon Kindle Publishing is, just after a post about greedy publishers. Well, here's Madison McGraw, a voice from today's world, please take a few moments to listen. It made me laugh at the pomposity of my own industry!

Coming Soon: How to Publish: Amazon KDP and How to Publish on the Nook

How to Self-Publish: Greedy Publishers?!

Have consumed a large amount of bile and invective over the holiday period (mainly at the BookExpo in New York)! Actually, have been looking at the blogs and web sites of successful self-publishers to see what they do, how they do it, why, how and what advice they have to pass on to others. Almost all of them are generous to a fault, but quite a few are also voraciously anti-publisher. If you check the sites of successful self-publishers (such as the mighty J A Konrath and the industrious Kristine Katherine Rusch) you’ll find they really do hate the bricks and mortar publishers, regarding them as greedy, self-serving, crooked and above all, anti-author.

I’ve worked in the industry as a writer, publisher and marketeer for a long time and I think there needs to be a clearer understanding about what’s going on.

It’s true that publishers do not give enough to the authors, it’s also true that authors can now go direct to market in a way that was impossible even five years ago. But that doesn’t mean that publishers are instrinsically bad, but they are slow, out-of date, stuck in their ways and too reliant on the ‘old boy’ network! That makes them an easy target for those who can now break free from the old thinking.

What’s really going on here, is the creation of a fairer system, because there are genuine choices to be made, informed choices for both readers and writers, a new system and quickly evolving system.

The key word here is informed.

A traditional publisher is basically a business that has made its own choice to create or distribute products which happen to be books. Some people within publishing love what they do, others perform straightforward business functions such as administration, accounting, sales, marketing or straightforward management tasks. That’s a long list of job functions: the bigger the publisher, the larger its infrastructure. It has to make money from its activites to pay this long list of staff. It also has to satisfy investors, owners and bankers. It has to make a profit to do this. Within this structure the author plays as important, but not necessarily defining part. Of course, without the author the traditional trade publisher would not exist, but up to a few years ago, an author could not be successfully published, without a publisher. For over two hundred years an ecosystem of publishers and literary agents has developed both to feed itself and its authors, a sympathetic parasitic structure which has achieved an uneasy truce within itself for the sake of long term self-interest.

One part of this uneasy truce was the author contract. 

It may not be obvious now, but the hit rate of published books is very low. When I first entered publishing (an embarrassingly long time ago) I worked for a while at a large conglomerate. Only one in twenty books made its advance back. The imperfect process of commissioning new books, picking the "gems from the dirt", was an art at best, guesswork for much of the time. So while many books were left in the slushpile, even those that did make it onto the Publisher's list rarely made any money for publisher or author.

In such circumstances the author contract was designed to give the publisher all rights in case something could be made from a book: TV, book club, electronic, audiovisual, serial rights all would be considered if not tried, but again, only a small percentage would be successful. Part of the problem was the volume of books published each year by each publisher.

But along came Amazon, then ebook formats, then the iPad and a revolution fuelled by smartphones and tablets. The old model really is, suddenly, out of date and turned on its head. And the entire structure of the traditional publishers is being forced into a complete rethink. Technology has overwhelmed the book industry, it's a Great Deluge and just as potent.

So, the traditional publishers are engaging in a massive landgrab. As businesses, they are complicated systems of vested interests and will try everything they can to survive, including the aggressive chase of electronic rights in old contracts. At their best, the publishers are also trying to assert their historical skills in editing and marketing (although spread very thinly, more on this in forthcoming post), to allow an author to focus on what traditionally they are good at, writing. But you’ll notice that the most successful authors are also very good at marketing. J K Rowling, James Patterson, George R R Martin – these people know their market, they keep in touch with the different facets of it, they engage in many different ways, through videos, films, magazine articles. The top authors are top marketeers, whoever publishers them.

But now, back to the choice. 

A self-publisher too must be good at marketing, in fact you must be a good business(wo)man. The big difference between you and a traditional publisher is that you only have yourself to feed (perhaps a family, or two!), but a publisher still maintains its structure of staff and buildings. It's an unequal battle which is begining to make the publishers seem more like the dinosaurs wiped out by the comets that struck the earth 65 million years ago. The insects and the mammals survived because they were more adapable. Publishers are beginning to walk the Dinosaur Road.

Self-publishers need to understand that the traditional publishers are trying to find their place in this new world, and that in order to survive, keep employing people and buildings they make different choices than motivated individuals. Understanding this doesn't make it acceptable for you, but it does help make a credible choice because now you can self-publish, do the marketing yourself and reap the full rewards of your hard work.

Coming soon: New Markets for Short Stories and Take Your Time.
image courtesy of imageegami/Shutterstock

How to Self-Publish: Review Other Writers!

In the modern world, with social media networks, online retailers, ereader devices, smartphones and tablets the job of a writer, any writer, is more rewarding than ever before. Your work can be published more quickly, you can engage directly with readers and the community of writers is vocal and supportive.

In the last week or so I’ve been taking a good look at online reviews, particularly those of writers on writers (take a look at this site by Jade Varden (author of the Deck of Lies series), for instance which has both a terrific post on this subject and a range of useful comments from many different writers). 

With the explosion of self-publishing the competition between authors to gain those rare places in lists of the traditional trade houses is greatly reduced, because anyone can, and many are, doing it for themselves! The number of indie publishing houses, author co-operatives and self-publishing blogs has blossomed into a huge eco-system. The liberating effect of the internet and the obvious need for all writers to seek advice has created a supportive framework that celebrates the fact that the community of writers is part of the greater community of readers, participating and engaging with each other –  helping, commenting, critiquing.

This is considerably more healthy that the competing network of professional reviewers whose views we all seek for the kudos and authenticity, but whose job it is to entertain, often by taking a negative or deliberately contrary view. 

On the whole, writers are cultured people, with considered (often wildly differing) views, who work hard and juggle their daily lives with the joy and pain of writing. Anyone who writes often or regularly, understands the efforts of another writer. We might dislike the subject, the story, the angle or the characters, but we take a fundamentally empathetic view of the effort. And that leads to a degree of compassion that can turn constructive criticism into a powerful force of good.

So, if you read a book and have something to say about it, go to Amazon or your blog, or the author’s blog, and say it. It doesn’t have to be long, but make it constructive, useful, think about how you would respond to a comment, how you might use it to make your next book better. Dictatorial comments are not required, but genuine responses are very helpful to an honest writer and the mirrorball of comment in the form of multiple reviews can be the most helpful teacher for all of us.

Perhaps this is the great liberation, the great release of the Internet, not just that anyone can publish, but that anyone can comment on anything that’s published. Of course, we have to write well, submit ourselves to editing, to market ourselves and our books well, but ultimately we can now listen to the wide range of comments of our fellow writers and our readers. It's a virtuous circle that benefits us both as readers and as self-publishers.

Coming Soon: Audiobooks for Promotion and Podcasting for Fun!

How to Self-Publish an eBook: Pre-Launch Marketing

Gathering Momentum

Promotion and publicity in the weeks, months even years before actual publication is critical to the success of your ebook. A common criticism of traditional print publishers is that they take so long to put the book out (somewhere between 12 and 24 months). Some of this is to do with the structure of the industry and the demands of wholesalers such as Ingrams, B&T and Gardners, but, in fact, it also gives a focal point for the essential pre-launch marketing, the momentum for successful publication.

This blog is about self-publishing ebooks, but the the lessons are the same. As I’ve mentioned before, there are some basic assumptions that you’ve done or are doing the following:

• researched your market, studied the authors and publishers you admire
• joined as many social networks as you feel comfortable posting in regularly.
• included your Twitter, blog and/or Facebook links in all your contacts
• sent your ms to an editor and proof reader
• created, or briefed the best cover you can
• you intend to published through a widely-distributed route, such as Smashwords, BookBaby or Amazon Kindle.

There’s a big difference between writing and publishing (or successful self-publishing), and you can write it as an equation:

Publishing – Writing = Marketing

Or to put it more positively:

Writing + Marketing = Publishing

The pre-launch phase of self-publishing your book can take many, many months, but every second of this is worthwhile to achieve the momentum necessary to create a successful self-publication:

1. Use your market research to create key words and themes based on your book
2. Release a planned stream of content based on the key-words and themes. This should include blogposts, recommends of others blogs, interesting news items and websites on your themes.
3. Create a blog which is the focus of this stream of content. Make it snappy, consciously offering items of interest to others, not just promoting your own work.
4. Invent ways of adding video to your blog. You can open a YouTube account, upload files to your YouTube channel, then embed them in your blog. The video content could be as simple as you describing where you write and why, with shots of view from your window.
5. Make sure your blog includes links to other sites and blogs on your subject area, so that your potential reader begins to trust your blog as source of genuine interest.
6. Create a Facebook page for your book and ask people to Like it. Interact with them as you write the book, giving them insights into the characters and landscape, and the process of writing itself.
7. Consider guest posting. Google for blogs which cover your area of interest, comment frequently and productively, then offer yourself as a guest post. This is a good way of building a reviewer list, so that you can request their help. When you’re ready, consider sending them privileged access to a pre-publication offer. Be open with them and ask for a review, either on their blog or, preferably on Amazon.
8. Use your email contact list. If you have someone’s email address, this is much more powerful than any of the social network techniques, although needs to be used with great care. Over a period of months, send just three or four emails, without a hard sell, to keep people you know, in touch with what yu are doing. Again, when you’re ready, consider sending them priviledged access to a pre-publication offer.
9. Offer potential book covers for comment on your blog and use this as a genuine way of engaging with your audience. People will be more committed to your book if they feel they’ve been involved in some way or other.
10. Just before publication offer a limited time, limited edition offer, and give yourself a whole month to promote it.

These are just a few ideas for pre-launch Marketing. There are plenty of other good resources and case studies out there to help you with this, such as Victorine Writes, and Scott Rauber's marketing Your Own Ebook.

Coming Soon: Help with Facebook and How to Write a Review

How to Self-Publish: Basic Styling Rules

The popular Amazon Kindle

Can you guarantee what your ebook will look like on your audience's ereaders? Ebook reading devices come in so many shapes and sizes it can be bewildering but a few simple rules will help you prepare your own text for every eventuality.

After you’ve written your text (spell-checked it, re-read it three times and asked a proof reader to check through it, of course) there are some basic issues to sort out when preparing your text for ebook publication. That’s because the formatting requirements for the Nook, Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Kobo and the rest, are all be slightly different.

It’s important to bear in mind that an ebook is really a computer file and therefore very different from a physical book. In traditional publishing, apart from the editing and proof-reading, the fonts and line spaces are chosen, the pagination is fixed, the cover designed, and somewhere along the line, an ISBN is assigned so that booksellers worldwide can identify the book. This can take 12 months.

Although the route to epublication is much shorter (two months at most), some of these processes apply to the ebook route too, but the differences lie in the need for text to adapt to a hardware device, that is, any device that can read ebooks: computers, tablets, ereaders, smartphones. For instance, there are variations in the default font choices between similar devices and between operating systems on similar phones. It's worth noting that the ereading software on a device is designed to give consumers the power to consume in a manner that suits them: font sizes can be changed, typefaces can be changed, orientation of the screen can be changed.

So, to give your book the best chance to be readable on all of these devices you need to follow some basic rules:

1. Use the most basic software writing tool you are comfortable with: beware of Ms Word which creates hidden styles.
2. I prefer to type in plain text, underline italics and headers, then, when I'm happy with the writing itself, transfer the text into Ms Word or Apple’s Pages for the final styling.
3. Every space and word must be given a style so choose a basic text style and apply it to the whole text. 
4. Methodically work through your text and exception style headings and italics.
5. Try to keep the number of styles down - a basic indented text style, a paragraph starting non-indent style, plus headers (A, B and C), a bold character style and italic character style will cover most fiction needs. Adding a list or bullet point style is useful for non-fiction.
6. Use a standard typeface, i.e. the one’s you see on every computer, so Times, Times New Roman, Helvetica or Courier New. 
7. Use 12pt for the main body of your text, 16-18pt for the headings. Most ereaders look at the proportional differences in font sizes to work out what do with your text, not the absolute size.
8. Don’t use soft returns 
9. Don’t use page breaks within chapters.
10. Don’t use tables, sidebars.

These are really simple to follow. Once you've mastered them you'll find it's all quite liberating. I spend a great deal of my own time planning and styling books for print publication and it's a great joy to hit a simple manuscript which requires basic ebook styling.

Coming soon: More Editors for eBooks; Software Choices

How to Self Publish: Enjoy it!

Cartoon © David Gifford 2012

There’s one major advantage to self-publishing: anyone can do it. There’s also one major disadvantage: anyone can do it! For two centuries publishers have vetted and controlled the market, with Literary agents mediating between authors and publishers. But now, anyone can write a book, submit an MS word document and through various, inexpensive means, publish their book to the world, online and through print on demand, if they think it’s worth it. Traditional publishers are up in arms because suddenly their slush pile is being self-published, vanity publishers are fast becoming irrelevant and literary agents are finally having to work for their fee.

So, surely this is all good news for the budding self-publisher. Well, yes, but the ease of access means there’s a massive increase in competition. The bigger publishers used to worry about the marketing campaigns of their equally large competitors, but now they have to think about an army of marketing-savvy 17 year olds who have no respect for tradition and live/breathe social media.

So, the advantage of self-publishing is that anyone can do it.

That’s still true. You can write your book, control its look, decide to publish immediately, determine the price and benefit from a greater share of the sale price of the ebook. And competition is good. It makes you think harder, plan more carefully and work harder at making your book a success.

But there’s one more ingredient: enjoy writing the book. Some people love the physical process of writing itself, others revel in the thinking and the planning, some even enjoy the marketing afterwards! Most writers though, use the writing as a form of expression or escape from their daily lives.

I have a nom de plum, Jake Jackson. I write practical music books on reading music, guitar and keyboard chords and a Songwriters Rhyming Dictionary. The books have sold many thousand physical copies throughout the world. Now I’m writing a fiction trilogy. I’ve been writing it for three years, just fours hours a week, mainly at weekends, and I’ve loved every single second. My everyday job is as a publisher of illustrated non-fiction, so I know the industry, I know the disappointment that would-be authors succumb to, but even so, I have kept writing because I love the process. If, eventually, 10 people buy the books I’ll celebrate.

Writing is a mission, it’s a vocation. Of course we all want success, but ultimately, we have to enjoy what we do. There’s a great article from the Guardian newspaper, with interviews of a range of interesting writers, from P.D James to Roddy Doyle. In it, Neil Gaiman says: ‘The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like... So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can...’

How true.

Coming soon: Proofreaders or friends? and How to Blog to promote your Book.
For the cartoon at the top of this post, many thanks to Kingston University and David Gifford at inscript design.

Marketing: Successful eBook Covers

A great cover will sell your ebook. A great story and a well-edited book will sell a second copy, and a third, but without that terrific cover nothing will follow. It is true that ‘you can’t tell a book by its cover'. Every sensible author, publisher, self-publisher, agent, marketeer and/or designer knows this and will agonize over the design for a very long time, whatever the nature of the manuscript. The Penguins and HarperCollins of this world spend 1,500–3,000 USD (or 1,000–2,000 GBP) on a cover, because they know how true this is.

Now, self-publishers don’t need to spend that much to achieve a great result, certainly with some good bartering, negotiation and a bucket full of charm you can achieve a fantastic cover for between 100–400 USD (that's 80–250 GBP). Here are some basic pointers:

1. Know your audience. If you’re a romance writer your readers will respond to different colours, photographic effects and compositional shapes to SF or adventure/thriller writers. Check out the websites of top publisher and run your eye down their categories to see how their covers are working. For instance, have a look at Simon and Schuster (US) and Headline (UK).
2. Look at the bestsellers in your local bookshop, you’ll find authors categorized into sections on the shelves, but also crowded onto a front table with other books. Think carefully about your own reactions. What covers do you respond to? And why?
3.  Check out the top sellers online on at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, the Apple iBookstore. Which covers work when they’re tiny thumbnails?
4. Check out communities of readers, such as Goodreads. Their categories are a fantastic starting point.
5. No author writes in isolation. Books are simply one ghetto in this big landscape of info-entertainment. Look at the magazine shelves in your local store, at WHS. Look at DVD covers for the films and TV series in the same subject area as your own.
6. Authors are readers too. Look at your own bookshelves, or your Kindle or iPad and see which covers jump out at you. Try to disassociate yourself from your feelings about the book itself, and focus on the cover, the package alone.
7. When you have a strong idea about style, think further about the emphasis and order of the author name and title. The bestselling authors’ names are large and at the top. The author’s name is the brand (not the publisher, who is really a distributor or agent for the author) so you need to think about establishing your own name in the same way. Don’t be shy, you have to market yourself.
8. Think about a selling line. If you don’t have great reviews yet, find an 8 to 10 word line that encapsulates and sells your book. Think about placing this at the very top of the cover.
9. Think about the font. You don’t have to be an expert to have a view about the difference between a modern feeling san serif font or a more classic serif, or a stylish, curling script. Once you start to a designer you can let them give you suggestions based on your starting idea.
10. The image is critical. It can be an illustration, a painting or a photo. It needs to be adaptable for other marketing uses, such as email signatures, Facebook ads, indie bookshop posters. Is the image striking enough? Are the colours memorable and appropriate for your subject matter?
11. Image sources. You can surf through iStock, Shutterstock, Stock.XCHNGhttp://www.sxc.hu/ for ideas. Download costs range from free to a few dollars so it’s best to set up lightboxes as you sift through the thousands of images. Google can images is a good place to seek around for inspiration, as long as you're aware of the copyright dangers.
12. Find a sympathetic designer. There are tons of freelance designers on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. Ask your social media friends for recommendations, ask other writers and bloggers. Send a short enquiry to them and ask for samples of their work
13. Once you've settled on two or three designers, start with the first and see how it goes. Give them a brief based on your research (it doesn't have to be long, designers are famous for not reading. No disrespect intended!) then let them do their job and give you some choices. 
14. Be ruthless. Don’t agree to a design that you don’t really like, because you will have to live with the cover for a very long time, promote with it on Facebook, Amazon and all the forums and blogs that will no doubt receive your press release and interesting/informative/arresting marketing stings.

This post could have been twice as long, so I’ll return to the subject another time.

The covers at the top of this page were selected to show how different a jacket can be depending on its marketplace: the sophisticated poetry of a well known author (Seamus Heaney/Farrar Straus Giroux, US) the romantic mystery of Rachel Hore (Simon & Schuster, UK), the bestelling fantasy of George R. R. Martin (HarperCollins/Voyager UK), Amanda Quick’s paranormal romance (Penguin USA), Matthew Lewis’ gothic masterpiece (Flame Tree 451, world) and, finally, Felix Dennis’ Get Rich Quick (Ebury Press, UK).

Finally, if you'd like to see some incredible, if not bestselling, covers take a look at this selection of top 50 cover designs on the delicious Stock logos' website.

Coming soon: Exclusivity with Amazon and Using free chapters for Marketing

10 ideas for Successful Promotion

So you’ve made your ebook, it has a great cover, it’s well edited and your friends are busy helping you out with recommendations and reviews. The first few days of sales on Amazon, the Nook and the iBookstore have been great, better than you dared hope, and you go to bed each night smiling at your good fortune, patting yourself on the back for a job well done. But then, you watch the sales reports and figures are slowly dropping away, dwindling into single figures.  So what’s next? More hard work I'm afraid. Here are some ideas:

1. Write a short story and give it away free, but promote your main book at the end, and in the short story description, and in your biography.
2. Give your book away for 1 week. Promote the pants off it on Twitter, Facebook, Google plus and Pinterest.
3. Collect your best reviews together and make a website out of them. Buy a cheap domain based on the name of your book, use the cover image as the landing page, then set up a click through to a single page with all the great reviews and a link to the Amazon, B&N and iBookstore page with your book.
4. Write thirty marketing stings of 120 character descriptions of your main characters, plots, themes and locations. Use the last 20 characters to link to the Facebook page of your book (you do have one of these don’t you?). Spend one month tweeting with these stings.
5. With your smartphone (or your children’s, or friends!) make a short video of your workplace, room, study. Pan around the room describing the books, paintings, computers and other detritus, connecting everything to the writing of your book. Post this on your Youtube channel (you do have one don’t you?) and link to it on Facebook, Twitter etc.
6. Set up a blog and write it in the style of one of your characters. Wordpress or Blogger are both free. Pretend to be your main character and commentate on news and trending events. Facebook and Tweet about this.
7. Depending on your subject matter, set up a blog or forum on the subject of your book. Make sure you think this through and give real advice or links, or help so that readers can gain something genuinely useful.
8. Find an extract from your book which is self-contained, perhaps 2000-4000 words and send it to the editor of online magazines which feature your sort of writing. When you’ve identified the magazines, makes sure you follow all the subscribers and followers of the magazine and focus on the content of the extract in your tweets.
9. Use emails. You have friends and work colleagues. Send them an apologetic but simple email asking for their support in promoting and selling your book. Include a small jpg, png or gif file of the cover as visual stimulus. Make the email creative and interesting, don't just beg!
10. Use Pinterest. Create a board which shows the places in your book. Find images on Google (with proper credits to the original website) and your own photographs. Use short snappy captions. Add a link to each image, leading either to your Facebook page or directly to your Amazon book page.

So, it's all about social media engagement: be creative and give ‘em something free. 

Coming soon: Print on Demand: a Useful Complement to eBooks?

Successful eBook Marketing: Pinterest

I love Pinterest. It allows you to express yourself in a completely different way to Facebook (FB), Twitter (TW), Google+ or any of the other social media outlets. But the best thing is it complements rather than competes all of the other forms of social engagement.

So, for writers this is a big benefit. If you self-publish, setting up a virtuous circle of links between Pinterest, FB, TW, your own blog, and the various places where you books is being sold, you can watch your audience grow and engage with your readers. 

Pinterest is almost entirely visual. Its immediate impact is completely different from FB and TW, because it focuses on images. Using the concept of boards (the sort you might have in your writing room/space/study/understairs cupboard) you pin images of your own, or clips from web pages.

At first I was slightly disenchanted with it because the various feeds and boards they highlighted showed so many shiny, perfect photographs that I wasn’t sure that any normal person could match up. However, as the weeks have gone by I’ve realised that its the interface that’s shiny and perfect! Almost everything I’ve put up has looked good. And it’s adaptable to mobile devices so still manages to look good on iPods and Android phones. You can follow and like others, and they can reciprocate.

So how can you use it to promote your writing?

1. Create a mood board with images that represent themes of your book. Obviously if the book’s about Rome, then let’s see some images of Rome, but also, if your book is romantic, you might find some beautiful places around the world that give the reader a sense of how you’re thinking.
2. Created a board for each main character in your book. Using Google searches you can find so many fabulous shots. Your main character might be a knife-toting zombie from New York. Well, find some shots of New York at night time, a spooky cemetery, and some sharp hunting blades. You might write a recipe journal, so you can find some ingredients shots, some victorian kitchen parlours.
3. If you have some cover ideas, sketches, or images you’ve created for the book, put them in here too. If you multiple books, put all the covers on a board.
4. Readers are often fascinated by a writer's inspirations. Give them a board with the places, peoples, buildings, colours or shapes that have influenced you.
5. Each image can be linked to another page, so you can link it to your Amazon  page, or the iTunes link for your book, or your blog.
6. Pin responsibly! The copyright dangers are obvious. Always give a full credit to the source of the image. Always give generous praise to the source. 

One major criticism of ebooks is that we lose the touch and feel of books. Pinterest gives us a new way of extending the look and atmosphere of what we write, so try it out and see what you think.

Some great people to try on Pinterest include Sarah Dessen, Kaitlin Ward both included on a longer list of recommended Young Adult authors on Pinterest on the YA Highway blog. Of course, I have my own which you could look at too!

Coming soon: Using a Facebook Page for your Book and Going Exclusive with Amazon.

Successful eBook Marketing: Twitter

I read an interesting article the other day about how Twitter is dealing with spammers by suing some of the software sites that generate automated spam and phishing activity and it reminded me of some basics for Twitter. I have two accounts, one as an author (a pen name) and the other as a publisher. They have very different dynamics, because one is promoting a single product (on a long, slow burn), the other has a multitude of agendas and this leads to some very different interactions. But there are some common lessons:

1. Engage. Above all engage. Join in conversations, politely, but have something interesting to say.
2. Your main purpose might be to promote your ebook but don’t do it all the time, it will put people off. And find interesting ways of promoting in 140 characters: some writers take quotes from their books, others link to their own blogs with teasing questions, some will write about their characters. Variety and mystery are essential factors in gaining and keeping an audience on Twitter.
3. Identify people who are interested in the same things as you - music, art, cupcakes, gardening. It doesn’t matter what. If you’re genuinely interested in the subject(s) then you’ll have more natural interchanges with your fellow tweeps.
4. Retweet tweets that you think are useful, or which complement the subject matter of your writing. If you can, add a comment to say why you've retweeted. Over time this will make you more helpful to others who will begin to retweet you back.
5. If someone follows you, don’t automatically follow them back. Check them out, see if they’re real, see if they have interests that chime with yours. Ask yourself if you’d be happy to see a tweet from them, even if it’s just once every ten days.
6. If someone follows you, follow them straight back. Yes I know that contradicts what I’ve said above, but this is a valid method for building followers and that’s how some people have several thousand of them. Personally I worry that of the 12K followers for some tweeps I've seen, only a few hundred must be fellow travellers, the rest being marketeers, evangelists and spammers who will never engage.
7. Be clear about your goals. Having fun and exploring is just as valid as being heavily focused on your own ebooks. Some people tweet in order to find friends from other parts of the world, or connect with new ideas. It doesn't matter what, just do it with conviction!
8. Be patient. Quality is definitely more important than quantity. It takes time to build genuine groups of like-minded people. Watch how others talk about their work, see how effective they are, read the blogs they read, join the forums they discuss.
9. Be persistent. Whenever you tweet, always look for new tweeps to follow, chase down the bloggers and online mags in your areas of interest and see who is following them.
10. Deal with spam. Personally I report any spam I find. I’ve had hundreds of follows from so many innocent sounding porn stars from a every US State. A quick look at their web-address usually gives it away, or the randomness of their three tweets. A follow can also qualify as spam if its unwelcome attention from marketing companies promoting a product which is of no interest to you. So, block it. You don’t have to clutter your news feeds with stuff you don’t want to read.

Some people like to tweet all the time and scan all the tweets that come into their feed. Others allocate a small amount of time every day or week and so restrict their activity. Whatever you do, be consistent and try to integrate the activity into your daily/weekly routine. In time you'll find you have an audience that will respond to your requests for downloading that free chapter of yours on the Kindle, enjoy it so much that they'll buy the full ebook!

So, even with the ever-present dangers of spam, there are so many ways to promote your ebook through Twitter. It's fantastic.

Coming soon: Nook vs iBookstore vs Kindle and Yes, Size Matters, Even for ePubs.

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2

Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #1

Teenage Vampire Fiction

Just a short post to highlight a couple of good blogs/articles elsewhere. One from the Economist called 'The Death of chick lit' in the Prospero blog and a follow-on from Mercy Pilkington at Good eReader. They both focus on the often ignored phenomenon within traditional print publishing which is the attempt to follow fads, flog them to death, then abandon them when sales have slowed. New writers often don't appreciate that book publishers are businesses that have to make money to survive and one of their methods is to find something that sells, or copy something else and ride on the success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series spawned a mini industry of teen vampire novels (and TV series) that's lasted for three or four years. Now the peak of the wave is over, the market appears to have moved on for some publishers but there is still a good following for authors in this genre. Self-publishing through Barnes and Noble's PubIt, or through Amazon, or into the Apple iBookstore is a perfectly good route for such authors.

More to come on this... In the meantime, I need to embed the number 2UFQWYKWWMPN which a my Technorati claim token and should allow this blog to be published by a wider audience.

Coming soon: Go Local and The Pinterest Challenge.

Editors for eBooks

One of the main purposes of this blog is to encourage the proper use of freelance editors and proofreaders. The problem is, there are plenty of good ones around. If you're just starting to write, and have no connections within the industry, a simple Google search will report thousands of editors, from different continents, all brilliant, all available.

So, to help with this, I've just set up a Facebook group called Editors for eBooks. It will take a while but with some heavy networking it will become a useful resource for those who need to be put in touch with a good editor or proofreader. To join the group you have to become a friend of Nick Wells and then Editors for eBooks. This allows me genuinely to recommend the services of a professional. I'll tie it up to twitter lists too (@flametreetweet), and Linkedin.

Coming soon: Good Reasons to Self-Publish 1; Marketing Lessons from the Music Industry.