I’ve read a lot about ebooks and I’ve blogged many times on how well they work or don’t work etc, etc. Today I found this blog post (see below) and I thought, why worry whether it works or doesn’t work, we should all just be doing it. The post gives detailed information on how to get your ebook out and then there are multiple comments from other people offering great insight. Here are two things that impressed me. First of all, the author sold 30 copies in 20 days. That’s great. Sure, he had some problems and he returned some, but 30 copies in 20 days, that’s over $300 in sales with no variable printing and shipping costs. The second thing that impressed me was that half of his ebook sales were by customers outside of the US. He attributes this to a better acceptance of ebooks overseas. I’ve spent a lot of time outside the US and this author may be on to something. To read his article, click on the link.

http://www.fonerbooks.com/2008/05/new-pdf-ebook-sales-data-and-problems.html

While I am often asked about using Ghost Writers to help authors complete a project, the purpose is usually just to get help with writing. However, according to today’s article, a good Ghost Writer may be able to help you find the right agent or publisher as well. Here’s the article:

Self- Publishing is Easier With an Experienced GhostWriter on Your Side
September 28, 2008

The hardest part of writing a book isn’t always the writing. After your ghostwriter has completed the final revision, the real work begins. Now you have to get the book published.

Most beginning writers are completely unprepared for this part of the process. They figure when the time comes, they can submit their manuscript to a publishing house and wait for the praise to start rolling in. Unfortunately, that’s not usually how the story ends. Most publishing houses will not accept submissions from just any writer; manuscripts must pass through a literary agent first. Even then, the chances of your manuscript being selected for publication are slim. Editors receive thousands of completed manuscripts each week. With so many submissions, even books written by the best ghostwriters fall through the cracks.

So what’s an author to do? If you have already worked with a ghostwriter, you have a valuable resource. Great ghostwriters are experienced authors, and know quite a lot about the publishing world. They can help you publish your work in a variety of ways, but this article will focus on the two most important advantages.

To read the entire article, click here:

http://ghostwriterpress.com/2008/09/28/self-publishing-is-easier-with-an-experienced-ghostwriter-on-your-side/#comment-25

Interesting article here by Gregory A. Kompes titled Writerpreneur: Electronic Self-Publishing. In his article, Mr. Kompes talks about using blogs, articles, ebooks, audio and video to build an electonic footprint on the web to improve your author platform.

I’d like to add the importance of building a strategic plan to promote your book. Authors have hundreds of tactics they can use to promote themselves, but without a clear plan in place, many authors simply dabble in these tactics and do not pursue them vigorously. If you are a blogger, then you understand the importance of blogging regularly and interacting with other blogs. This activitiy may take several hours a week. If you use Facebook, you’ll be spending several hours a week building your author platform there as well.

As you perform these electonic publishing activities, you will see your following grow. It is usually a long and arduous task, but without a platform, you have very little chance taking your book to the next level so the work is worth it if you stick to it.

I was on the phone today talking to a prospective ZDocs author and she told me she had decided not to print her book but to sell her book first as an ebook. Ebooks were all the rage years ago, but sales have not been very robust and the enthusiasm has waned somewhat. But ebooks are a great concept whose time will probably come once consumer trends change to accommodate them.

For example, push advertising on the Internet failed in the early days when most consumers were using dial-up connections. Now that most of the world has a broadband connection, push advertising is coming back through the form of RSS feeds. I think that once enough consumers (called “critical mass”) are carrying their PDAs and using them to read books, then ebook sales will start to pick up. I also think that producers of information - publishers and self-publishers alike - will need to format their information for the new consumer.

Why I’m talking about ebooks today is that a recent visitor to this blog led me to an incredible article titled Quest for bestseller means lots of returned books, by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal on how expensive book returns are to publishers. If you’ve tried to sell your books in a book store, I’m sure you’ve been told by the bookstore owner that any books that do not sell will be returned to you. This article explains why the book industry is hampered by this system and just how much it costs publishers, the book industry and ultimately the book buyer. The article is fairly lengthy, but I found it very enlightening and worth the read.

Ebooks seems to be a perfect solution to the book-returns problem. Suppliers would move to this new distribution model overnight if the consumer would demand more ebooks. So the problem to me appears to be on the demand side (the book reader), not the supply side.

I told my potential customer that trying to sell her book in ebook format was a great idea despite the overall sluggish sales at this time. To me, the self-publishing business is all about minimizing your risk, which means minimizing your initial investment.

Times are changing. My prediction is that ebooks will be in higher demand in the near future and Amazon’s Kindle is a strong move in the right direction.

I was listening to an audio book by Earl Nightingale the other day and in his book he said that the top 5% of wealthy people have a strong command of language. He said these people tend to read many books each year and to have a strong vocabulary. He went on to say that if we find ourselves in the 95% of people not independently wealthy, one tactic we can use to better our position is to read more books. He said that if a person were to read just 15 minutes a day, he or she could finish 10 books a year.

This reading 15 minutes a day, by the way, is what I do and he’s right. I generally read 10 to 15 books a year, mostly fiction. I like to read fiction prior to sleeping and I can usually only get through a few pages each day, but I get through a lot of books. Last night I finished Ernest Hemingway’s, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Lately I’ve also been getting through one to two audio books a month just listening while driving around. When I’m driving, I prefer non-fiction audio books. But while I’m getting through a lot of books, I’m not in the upper 5% of wealthy people yet so I’m not sure if Mr. Nightingale’s correlation works yet. But I’m going to keep reading just the same.

Why I’m writing about Mr. Nightingale’s assertion that to get wealthy people need to read books is to refute the arguments lately that people are not reading, or if they are reading, they might be getting through only one book a year. While this statistic may be true, it may also be misleading. As authors, we need to look at the market carefully and not be discouraged by statistical polls. Here’s one way to look at it:

We have 280,000,000 million adults in the United States. 5% of 280 million is 14 million readers. Now, how many of the 95% of non-wealthy Americans are reading books to improve their position? Let’s say it’s 10%. There’s another 28 million people. If these people read 10 books a year, that’s 420 million books they will read. And my guess is that this number is probably double.

The point is that a significant portion of the population does read, despite the doom and gloom reports you might read in the news. The key for authors is knowing who reads and how to find them. In this post, we’ve identified two demographics, the already wealthy and people who know that to get wealthy they must read. Another strong demographic is the pre-teen and teen market. If you don’t believe me, just ask Stephanie Meyers, author of the Twilight series, and of course JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. These authors have found plenty of readers.

What’s interesting in Lance’s article (see below) regarding ebook publishing and the industry it is becoming is how people are using ebooks to market their services. If you could, like Lance does, write 10 ebooks a year and offer either low-cost products or free lead-in products, these ebooks would help you build your database of customers, your website page rank and maybe even provide some income. One strategy when building your author platform is to write and publish multiple books. This endeavor requires a lot of effort. On the other hand, you can also build your platform writing a number of smaller ebooks. Something to think about. Here’s Lance’s article:

2008 EBook Trends - It’s Official - It’s Now an Industry
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow]Lance Winslow

The number of eBooks available on the Internet now has grown to enormous proportions. Why, well, it is simple really, folks desire to share their knowledge and express themselves. Of course, there is another huge factor to this trend and that is the ease at which one can put their experience, observations and knowledge into the eBook format. Read the rest of this entry »

Lance makes some very good points in his article below. I am not a big believer in the POD model for authors serious about building a business around their book. POD publishing is a good service for authors who have a dream of publishing a book, but for authors who want to get published or who want to earn an income from their books and related products, then they need to take a serious approach to their business.

A proven model for getting published is to build your platform and demonstrate sales from your book. If an authors can sell 5,000 copies of their book, they have a much better chance of catching the eye of an agent or publisher. In addition to getting to that coveted “published” position, these authors will earn income from their product.

The key is to focus on building your platform - your credibility and your audience. When you create a 3 to 5 year plan for your book you will build this platform and be positioned to take your book to the next level. Here’s Lance’s article:

2008 Trends in Book Publishing
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow]Lance Winslow

The book publishing industry has surely changed over the years. Many self publishing schemes that were thought to revolutionize the industry failed to materialize. There have also been several controversial issues with the Internet and copyrights where Google and Microsoft were scanning out of print books to place online. Google also took flak for posting parts of books online, but not the entire book for folks to get an idea of what the work was about. Read the rest of this entry »

This is probably one of the best blogs I’ve found in a long time. I haven’t looked at the other writer’s digest blogs, but they are all problably worth subscribing to. Here’s the blog on literary agents:

http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/

Not sure if you spend much time on the Writer’s Digest website. I know I wish I spent more time there. I did find some time to visit this evening and I found an interesting interview about the need for self-publishers to hire professional marketers to help them. I couldn’t agree more. To watch the video, click on the link below.

Writer and marketing expert M.J. Rose (The Reincarnationist) chats with Writer’s Digest editor Maria Schneider about her early days of self-publishing and why she thinks you should consider hiring professionals to market your work.

http://writersdigest.com/article/wdlive-mj-rose/

While podcasting author David Bowles this morning, I asked him how he published his book, Spring House. He said he started his own publishing company and decided on offset printing rather than POD publishing. When I asked him why, he said, “Because you can’t sell fish from an empty wheelbarrow.”

What a great way to explain the difference between self-publishing and POD publishing. (Don’t get me wrong here, POD publishing is a good model for some authors, but the purpose of this post is to explain the difference between POD publishing and self-publishing.) Essentially, POD publishing and Self-Publishing are the same “fish,” but the big difference is that when you POD publish, books are not printed until you sell a book. That’s why it is called Print-On-Demand. This is what Mr. Bowles meant when he said you can’t sell fish from an empty wheelbarrow.

David has a fifth-wheel trailer he pulls behind his pick-up and he has his book title and phone number and other information advertised on the outside. When he pulls into a RV park, people often come up to him and ask to buy his book. If he didn’t have a ready inventory, he would lose sales.

The great advantage of POD publishing is that the author does not need to spend a lot of money on inventory. This is why you can find many ads on Google prompting you to “Self-Publish for Free!” While I strongly believe in having a small inventory of books so authors can focus their limited dollars on book promotion, I’m not a big fan of POD publishing for the simple fact that a lot of an author’s sales will come by the author selling his or her book directly and when you have a fish on the hook, you need to close the sale.

The three basic ways to print books is to use a POD publisher like LuLu, to print large quantities with an offset printer or to use a digital printer like ZDocs to print smaller quantities. For the most part, offset printed books and digitally printed books are similar in quality. The main difference is price. For quantities of 150 to 2,000, digital printing is usually the most cost-effective. For quantities over 2,000, offset printing is usually cheaper. Offset printing, by the way, refers to traditional presses that use ink and digital printing refers to large copy machines that use toner.

How you should print all depends on your sales strategy. When you go through the Authors On The Net system and create your strategy, deciding the best way for you to print will become clear. If you’re not a member already, be sure to join today. Membership is free. We’ll help you keep your wheelbarrow full of fish, I mean books.