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 »
Author Blasts is the Authors On The Net Podcast. If you are a member of AON and you have a book, we would like to interview you. Simply send us an email at info@authorsonthenet.com. We are also interested in speaking with publishers, distributors, book designers, editors and other people who have a publishing or book promotion message.
In today’s podcast, we speak with David Bowles, author of Spring House, book one of The Western Sagas. Spring House is a historical fiction based on thirty years of research by the author and has won several book awards including the National Indie Excellence 2007 Book award and the Authorisland.com Readers’ Choice Awards, both for Historical Fiction. Besides listening to the podcast, you can find out more about David’s book at westwardsagas.com Spring House is sold on Amazon and can be ordered through your local Barnes and Noble bookstore.
Note: depending on the speed of your Internet connection, this file may take a few minutes to download. You can also download the interview through itunes. To subscribe to this podcast, go to the itunes store, click on podcasts and search for “Authors On The Net.” Subscribe and you will receive our podcasts directly to your itunes.
I’ve blogged several times on strategies on giving away free copies of your book. Today’s strategy is one of the best I’ve read. It comes form Joe Wikert’s blog and if you read the comments you’ll see that many other people agree that the Thomas Nelson groups seems to have hit on something with this strategy. Here’s a quick blurb and I encourage you to click over to the full article.
Kudos to the PR team at Thomas Nelson. I thought it was a cool idea that they were offering a free copy of their new book The Faith of Barack Obama to the first 100 bloggers who promised to write a review of it. It’s a good, smart way to leverage the blogosphere…but it’s not exactly revolutionary, right? That’s not the end of the story…
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:
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.
Authors On The Net associate, Peter N. Jones, announces the release of his new book tralier. Take a look to learn about his book and to see how he put his video together. Also, yesterday one of our clients introduced me to a site that helps you send video emials and much more. The site is www.helloworld.com. All I’ve done so far is to watch their intro. video, but it looks interesting. As I learn more, I’ll be sure to share.
A big part of your author platform is your credibility and a good way to gain credibility is to win writing contests. While I’m posting an announcement for the New England Book Festival (and there’s literally hundreds of others) the caution I’ll make is to review the contest and be sure it is a good fit for your book. Obviously, winning some contests have more prestige than others, but any award you win can be used in your promotional materials.
THE 2008 NEW ENGLAND BOOK FESTIVAL - CALL FOR ENTRIES
BOSTON (August 11, 2008) _ The 2008 New England Book Festival has issued a call for entries for its annual program celebrating the best books of the holiday season. The New England Book Festival will consider non-fiction, fiction, biography/autobiography, children’s books, teenage, how-to, cookbooks, science fiction, audio/spoken word, photography, art, poetry and spiritual works published on or after Jan. 1, 2000. All entries must be in English.
Our grand prize for the 2008 New England Book Festival winner is $1500 cash and a publicity campaign during the post-holiday season spotlighting your work. The winning author will also have a choice of flights to our various awards ceremonies for our family of festivals and a free vendor table at the day events, including New York, Hollywood and London.
Genre category winners will receive a combination of books, software, cash awards and free vendor tables at our New York or Hollywood Book Festivals. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Arielle Ford, book publishing and marketing expert, announces her new book, The Soulmate Secret: Manifest the Love of Your Life with The Law of Intention. What’s really great for us at Authors On The Net is that Arielle is going to track her marketing activities on her blog. Click on the link to visit her blog and read her first entry.
One of the main ways I plan to promote this book is through a series of email blasts and I want to find 108 partners to help me with this. So far I have 61 people on this list….mostly friends and business associates…I’m looking forward to connecting with each one of them and asking them to support my book launch.
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