The prevailing feeling I get when I speak with authors and surf the web is that book promotion is a necessary evil. Many people, myself included, are trying to take the pain out of book promotion. This morning I woke up and wanted to know if any author out there is having any fun promoting his or her book.

Personally, I like selling. Selling my business, my book and my kit, Self-Publishing in a Box is fun for me. I like having a goal and working to attain that goal. But what about authors in general? Are you having fun promoting your books? If so, let us hear what you are doing. Promoting your book should be as fun as writing your book. Is it?

Every month I attend the Utah chapter of the National Speakers Association and each month we spend about 3 hours learning how to build a solid speaking business. I’m not a public speaker by trade, but as a preferred guest I get to attend these meetings and mingle with some of my perfect profile customers. Last month we learned how to come up with titles that sell.

You may find this advice a little strange but that’s okay because most of us attendees did too. The speaker, Sarah Victory (http://www.thevictorycompany.com/index.htm) told us to buy all the tabloid magazines in our neighborhood grocery store. Tabloids like The National Enquirer, she said, are full of examples of great headlines, like this one: Read the rest of this entry »

In my last entry, I compared “Mainstream” Publishing with Self-Publishing. In this entry, I’ll be comparing Vanity or Subsidy publishing with Self-Publishing. There is quite a bit of bad press out there regarding Vanity publishing. It’s not my place to criticize the Vanity press business model and therefore I will not be mentioning names in this article.

My understanding of a Vanity press is these companies sell themselves as a publishing company to authors. As a publishing company, they own the ISBN number which means they own the rights to the book. While this may not be the case with all Vanity Publishers, who owns the ISBN is a major red flag I think the self-publishing author needs to watch out for.

The second red flag is that when you are working with a Vanity press, you, the author, are still paying the bills as you will with a self-publishing company like ZDocs. So I guess my point here is, why would you pay all the up-front costs for a book you don’t own. Many authors choose this method because they believe the Vanity press will be able to sell their book. This is why Vanity presses get the bad press.

In my earlier entry, I produced a laundry list of what the author pays for and what the “Mainstream” Publisher pays for. Below is the same type of list if you choose to use a Vanity press.

1. The Author writes the book
2. The Vanity Publisher may own the ISBN number
3. The Author pays the Vanity Publisher to design the cover and the inside pages
4. The Author pays the Vanity Publisher to edit the book
5. The Author pays the Vanity Publisher to print the book
6. The Author builds his/her own website or pays for someone else to do so
7. The Author and the Vanity Publisher jointly promotes the book
8. The Vanity publisher takes a large portion of the profit

If you compare the laundry list above to the laundry list if you decided to self-publish (reprinted below) or to publish, then you can begin to see why using a Vanity Publisher may not be a good choice. Or if you do decide to go with a Vanity Publisher, at least you should do so with your eyes wide open.

(The self-publishing laundry list reprinted from earlier entry)

1. The Author writes the book
2. The Author gets his/her own ISBN number
3. The Author designs the cover and the inside pages - or pays someone to do so
4. The Author pays someone to edit the book
5. The Author pays someone to print the book
6. The Author builds his/her own website or pays for someone else to do so
7. The Author does his/her own promotions
8. The Author takes home most of the profit

To summarize the last two entries, you have three basic ways to publish your book.

Get accepted by a “Mainstream” Publisher like Random House

Use a Vanity or Subsidy Publisher

Use a Self-Publishing company (like zdocs)

There are pros and cons to each method and my intent with these two entries is to simply layout the different options. While I would love every author to print with ZDocs, more importantly I hope authors will find the right place to publish their works and find the success they are looking for.

PS I should mention that places like Kinko’s and Alphagraphics and just about any other print shop can help you print your books and these places are not a bad choice at all. You will get the books you pay for, which is half the battle and usually a better option than the Vanity press in my opinion. The downside of working with a Kinko’s-type place is the staff will have little knowledge about self-publishing or even the best way to print your books and as far as I know these places do not offer marketing services.

The next few entries will evaluate the different options authors have to publish their books. This entry will compare “mainstream” publishing, i.e. Ballantine Books, with self-publishing. Later entries will compare the different types of self-publishing.

Mainstream publishers are like venture capitalists. These publishers are going to take on several books each year, invest money into the production and promotion of the book and in return take most of the profit from the book. That is, if the book is successful, which many are not, so the publisher is taking on a lot of risk.

For the author, going with a mainstream publisher is usually a love/hate experience. I was having dinner with an author last Friday and she showed me a book she published years ago. She seemed a little sad when she explained she had to sell her book (and all the rights to it) to a publisher because she needed the cash. Read the rest of this entry »

While there are many reasons why authors self-publish, I break down self-publishing authors into two main categories:

1. The Cultural Author, and
2. The Commercial Author

A Cultural Author is someone who has written a family history, a memoir, a collection of poems, a scrapbook, a children’s book or some other book that has significant personal and family value, but probably little commercial value. The Cultural author seeks to preserve his or her heritage, or that of a community or club in the form of a professionally printed book.

A Commercial Author is someone who has written a book with the intent to sell as many copies as possible. These authors include novelists, non-fiction writers and national public speakers who may not sell a lot of books, but the books help them sell their consulting services.

Before continuing, I should mention a third category: the Cultural author who becomes a Commercial author. To see a great example of such a writer, go to http://www.richardpaulevans.com/biography.html to read Richard Paul Evans story, one of the most successful authors who began by writing a story for his daughters and then one day he decided to self-publish 20 copies to give to friends. Eventually his book, The Christmas Box, sold over 8 million copies and Mr. Evans is now a huge commercial author with several best-sellers.

For the Cultural author, the most costly part of the self-publishing process will most likely be the printing and binding costs. Usually family and friends will help offset these expenses by buying the books or the Cultural author will present the books as gifts. Finding a trustworthy printer is critical to the Cultural author. You will want someone who can give you ideas on the proper size of the book, the type of paper, the best way to bind and so forth. As the owner of ZDocs, I can assure you you will receive this kind of consultation. But of course there are many on-demand printers and I would encourage you to look into several companies to test their prices and their approach to helping you print the best book possible.

For the Commercial author, the goal is to sell as many books as possible and make the best return on the hard work they’ve put into their book; not to mention the out-of-pocket expenses to design, edit and print the book. A Commercial author’s plan may be to find an agent and submit his/her manuscript to mainstream publishers. But only 1 to 2% of all titles are accepted by publishers and the author may spend months or years getting a publisher to accept and sell his/her book. And if the book does get accepted, the author may get a small advance and then receive a 5 to 15% royalty on the sales of the book.

Self-publishing does a few things for a Commercial author. If you plan to just self-publish, you can earn 40 to 80% of your sales price. A general rule of thumb I use is you’ll need to sell about 800 books to break-even. The actual number will depend on many variables that I walk authors through once we know more about the book’s specifications.

Now if your main goal is to get your book published by a mainstream publisher, self-publishing is still a good investment for you. First of all, you’ll have time to self-promote your book while you wait for the agents and publishers to respond to you. Second, if a publisher does show interest in your book, you will be able to negotiate a better deal if you can show the publisher you’ve already sold several thousand books on your own. By the way, a great website to visit if you are interested in mainstream publishing is www.writersmarket.com.

The primary key I stress with our authors at ZDocs is minimize your initial investment and get your book to a break-even position as quickly as possible. I’ll write more about this topic in a later blog.

When authors ask me how to copyright their material, the first three things I tell them are, 1) your work is already copyright protected, in fact, it’s protected from the moment you create it, 2) make sure you use the copyright symbol - © (in most books you will see “Copyright © 2006, by Author’s Name”) and 3) mail yourself a copy of your manuscript so you can prove the date that you wrote it. And that is really all you need to do, unless you find that someone has used your work without your permission.

If you find that someone has used your work and you decide to litigate, you’ll need to make sure your material is registered. Registration costs $35.00 online/$45 paper and you can register fairly easily by going to http://www.copyright.gov/ This website will tell you all you need to know about copyrights. One point I’ll make here is that the earlier you register, the more you can recover should you go to court. If you register after you find an infringement, you can still recover your actual damages and the infringer’s profits from your work, but if you register before someone infringes, then you can also recover “statutory damages,” which are rewarded by the court and may exceed what you actually lost and attorney fees.

So the fourth thing I tell authors is to go to www.copyright.gov and register their work. It’s inexpensive, easy to do and it’s a good, street-smart step to take.

While you do not need to register your book with the Library of Congress, it’s a good idea to get a Pre-Assigned Card Catalog Number, or PCN (http://pcn.loc.gov/), if you plan to sell your book to libraries. You will need to be a publisher to get one, but becoming a publisher is very easy. Basically, you need to name your company, have an address and register your company. ZDocs will also be happy to assist authors who do not wish to start their own publishing company.

A Library of Congress catalog card number is a unique identification number that the Library of Congress assigns to the catalog record created for each book in its cataloged collections. Librarians use it to locate a specific Library of Congress catalog record in the national databases and to order catalog cards from the Library of Congress or from commercial suppliers. The Library of Congress assigns this number while the book is being cataloged. Under certain circumstances, however, a card number can be assigned before the book is published through the Preassigned Card Number Program.

The following excerpt is from the Librarian of Congress, Mr. James H. Billington.

“The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with more than 130 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts.

The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The Office of the Librarian is tasked to set policy and to direct and support programs and activities to accomplish the Library’s mission.”

James H. Billington
The Librarian of Congress

You can get to the Library of Congress’s website by clicking here - http://lcweb.loc.gov

I’ve been talking to a lot of authors this past week on the value of editing their work. So I went to the net and searched for some good places to find editors and I came across the Editorial Freelancers Association (www.the-efa.org).

On this website, you can find the following types of freelancers:

Abstractors
Copyeditors
Designers
Desktop publishing experts
Editors
Indexers
Manuscript Evaluators
Picture researchers
Project managers
Proofreaders
Researchers
Textbook development editors
Translators
Writers

If you are a frequent reader, you will know I am a strong advocate of making your book a profitable venture. To do so, you need to carefully plan out how much money you will spend printing your book and getting your book ready to print. This is why I generally recommend authors print just 250 books and use any other funds they have to get their book professionally edited.

In my opinion, the key ingredients to selling your book, whether non-fiction or fiction, are:

A well-written book
A compelling story (or compelling concept if non-fiction)
A story (or concept) that has an audience
An attention-grabbing title
An attention-grabbing cover design
And content that is well-edited with zero spelling and grammar mistakes

This list may be overly simplistic, but these are the key ingredients to selling your book, whether you self-publish or mainstream publish.

Spending time on www.isbn.org is something I recommend to all our authors. www.isbn.org is ran by RR Bowker, the only agency I recommend authors to take care of getting ISBNs, bar codes, copyrights and other registrations. If you’re serious about publishing, spend as much time as you need to on this site. And don’t buy an ISBN from anyone else!

Okay, so what exactly is an ISBN? The acronym ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a 10-digit number that uniquely identifies books and book-like products published internationally. The ISBN identifies the owner of a published work. Read the rest of this entry »

My guess is that most published authors have received at least one rejection slip, especially when they were getting started and were still officially “unpublished.” I have yet to meet a literary agent or publisher who wants to work with an unpublished author. But at one point all published authors were unpublished. So how does an unpublished writer become a published writer if no one in the industry wants to take the risk with an unpublished author? It’s the proverbial catch 22.

Published writers are people who believe in themselves, who are persistent and who, over time, figure out their audience and learn how to write to that audience. Published writers are also people who understand that a good editor is someone who knows the target audience better than the author.

Once an author knows his audience, it is his job to do his best to write engaging stories with that audience in mind. The editor’s job is to know the audience on a more intimate level and to make changes in the spirit of helping the author’s work resonate with the audience. For example, If a writer is doing an article on restaurants in New Orleans, the writer will have a general idea of his or her audience. But the writer may not know that the readers of the magazine she is writing for may be offended at writing that is too colloquial. The editor’s job is to know the specifics about the audience and to make changes to the author’s work to help the author and the reader connect. Read the rest of this entry »