Wednesday 23 May 2012

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

Monday 21 May 2012

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

Thursday 17 May 2012

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.



Tuesday 15 May 2012

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

Thursday 10 May 2012

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?

Sunday 6 May 2012

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 soonUsing a Facebook Page for your Book and Going Exclusive with Amazon.

Tuesday 1 May 2012

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.