March 2010 – President of Outskirts Press

Logo creation

Speaking of our logo and graphic treatment, there are a wide variety of considerations. For example, our first logo (immediately below) has some good elements and some bad elements. I like that the “P” forms the spine and page curl of a book, but I dislike the “fine lines” that make up the “pages” and the “curve” of the book along the left side of the “spine.” These lines don’t make for a very flexible logo because they “lose resolution” depending upon their application.

For instance, we were never able to successfully embroider this logo because it just… didn’t work. Also, some lines of the logo are so thin that at 300 dpi (the standard print resolution for digital printing), they don’t retain their sharpness. Always working with a vector graphic may have prevented or limited some of these problems but the fact of the matter is that graphics turn into rasterized images so quickly when they go from person to person or department to department that it seems to be impossible to use a vector graphic for almost anything. Again, just an example of the realities of business getting in the way of the ideals of business.

So while we plan on retaining this logo, we also wanted a treatment for our company name that was standardized, consistent, and removed some of the technical hurdles imposed by the logo above.

When creating a logo or name treatment style guide, there are other considerations to keep in mind, like the size of the image itself. Our whole name, Outskirts Press, is a little long. It’s not 4 characters, like NIKE, where you don’t have to worry about the horizontal footprint. There are some applications where a horizontal placement is preferred, but there are other applications where a vertical (or, more appropriately, a “stacked”) treatment works better. So we needed both a horizontal and a stacked treatment:

Then you have to define colors (the hex, RGB, and CMYK valuations) of the colors of the logo. This leads you to the realization that you may need two color versions, depending upon whether your logo is on a “white” background (above) or a “dark” background (not shown).

Even these two graphics above don’t look exactly right (they’ve been rasterized into .jpegs; not sure if the RGB equivalent was used rather than just a quick conversion to RGB from CMYK, etc.). So the colors look a little “off” and even the height/width ratio looks off, perhaps so they would both fit side by side within the parameters of this blog template. Hey, I’m not the designer. But it just goes to show, everything is always just a little more complicated than it first appears…

self publishing

Self Publishing EVVY Award Winners from Outskirts Press

I’ve just returned from the EVVY Awards and it is late Saturday night, but I wanted to report on this evening’s festivities by scheduling this blog posting for publication early Sunday morning. I mentioned some details about the EVVY Awards in a previous posting, and even more details can be found on the Self Publishing News blog by clicking here.

Since it’s so late, I’m just going to mention the title, author, category and “place” (1st, 2nd, or 3rd) and then a more detailed blog posting will follow later this week, along with a press release, both of which will probably appear on the Self Publishing News blog rather than here. That future blog posting will include cover images of the winners along with links to their respective author webpages at Outskirts Press.

But for those of you reading this blog, you receive the news as early as possible. The only way to get it faster would have been to join us for the event in Denver, Colorado, March 27th, 2010. Seven of my OP colleagues joined me, including Jeanine, Karl, Shirley, Trinity, Debra, Caroline, and Ellen. A photograph of us will most likely accompany the future posting, as well, so you can see the awards themselves.

Without further ado…

Spirituality/Religion – 1st Place – The Gate of Beautiful, by Gerald Rasmussen

Business/Finance – 1st Place – Harness the Power of Exceptional Customer Service, by Gaylyn Williams

Fiction – 1st Place – The Bethlehem Scroll, by Bill Thompson

Inspirational – 1st Place – The Messy Buddha, by Kate McLennan

Juvenile – 2nd Place – Tirissa and the Necklace of Nulidor, by Willow

Parenting/Family – 2nd Place – Charlie, by Vassiliki Plomaritou

Legacy – 2nd Place – Let Your Innate Sing, by Dr. William A. Kriva

Workbooks – 2nd Place – Mr. Emotions & Friends, by Glenna S. Edwards & Karen Henriques

Fiction – 3rd Place – Khan in Rasputin’s Shadow, by Chad Huskins

How To – 3rd Place – Harness the Power of Exceptional Customer Service, by Gaylyn Williams

Juvenile – 3rd Place – Virginia’s Travel Basket, by Sharon M. Harvey

Spirituality/Religion – 3rd Place – Emerge, by Ken Jibben

Legacy – 3rd Place – Life Against All Odds, by Alfred Cave

We have some Merit Awards winners as well, but to keep things exciting, we’ll announce those with the more detailed summary of the CIPA EVVY Awards in a future post. Congratulations to our award-winning self-publishing authors, all of whom will also be notified personally. Framed award plaques will be mailed to the winners listed above within the week along with some promotional materials to market their award-winning books.

self publishing

Colorado Independent Publishers Association EVVY Awards

Tomorrow are the CIPA EVVY Awards. Acronym alert. CIPA stands for the Colorado Independent Publishers Association and EVVY, contrary to popular belief, is not an acronym, but rather serves as recognition for CIPA’s founder, Evelyn Kaye. As a Colorado independent publisher, we are members of CIPA and therefore eligible to submit our books to this annual award contest, along with other CIPA publishers/members.

We select a small percentage of the total number of books we publish every year for Official Outskirts Press EVVY Nominations. The authors of those books are notified in the fall prior to the Awards Banquet. If they agree to accept their nomination, those books become Official Outskirts Press EVVY Nominees and we submit those books to the CIPA EVVY awards on the authors’ behalf.

Last year we won 16 awards, leading all CIPA publishers. Tomorrow will tell how we do this year…

branding, ceo, marketing

New graphic treatment for Outskirts Press

Speaking of Version 4 of our new website, tentatively launching this summer, Version 4 will also mark the “official” appearance of our new graphic treatment.

I say “official appearance” because the new “Outskirts Press” graphic already appears on our Twitter account, and by the time Version 4 launches, it will have also appeared in a number of advertisements, both offline and on. Recently we made the change to the masthead of our newsletter to feature it, as well.

And I call it a “graphic treatment” rather than a logo because we’re not ready to completely abandon our current logo:

This logo appears on the spines of too many books to erradicate it entirely.

But, we are interested in conforming to a more precise usage of our company name. Up until this “version 4 graphic treatment” our design style sheet as it relates to our company name has been… well… empty. In other words, we didn’t have a “style” for it, per se. Our name appears in one font on our publishing brochure, another in our guide, probably still another on our marketing brochure, and yet a different one on our website.

I may be exaggerating, but not by much. The point is, we were too busy growing by 850.5% to worry about things like “style sheets” for our name and logo. Is that the proper way to do things? Hard to say — one can’t argue with success. But it certainly isn’t the “common” way of doing things. When most businesses start, one of the first thing business owners or entrepreneurs do is invest time, resources, and money(none of which they have a surplus of) on “fun” things like logos, business cards, letterhead, shirts, hats, etc. And I don’t blame them. Doing all that stuff is a lot more fun than, you know… working.

Outskirts Press started in 2002 and only now, 8 years later, have we started to produce shirts, hats, pens and other promotional items featuring our company name. And yes, the creation of material products like that required the creation of a style sheet for our name, which I will get into more with a future post, but which I will also reveal here now…

branding, search engine optimization

Version 4 of OutskirtsPress.com self publishing

When I write this blog, I make every effort to avoid falling back on a topic involving my “day to day grind” because, frankly, the day-to-day grind isn’t all that interesting. Instead, I prefer for these blog postings to stay a little more strategic. But when I’m involved in large, time-consuming and complex projects every minute of every day, it becomes difficult to shift gears and talk about something else.

And currently, all my time and effort has been devoted to one of a number of large, complex projects. One being: Version 4.

Hey, look at this! Here’s another “insider” tidbit I can share… revealing some details about Version 4 of our website.

Last summer we launched Version 3, which was largely devoted to streamlining the pre-production and production process for authors self publishing their books through the services of Outskirts Press. Among the improvements were the online proofing process and the dynamic recommendations that help authors create custom packages that benefit from the experience of our previous authors.

Version 4 is tentatively scheduled to launch this summer and will piggy-back on many of the aesthetic and graphical improvements introduced in Version 3. With Version 4 will also come the “Wider” website. Up until now, our website has been designed for one of the lower native monitor resolutions of 800×600. Nearly no one uses that resolution anymore and as a result, our website sacrifices “real estate” that we could otherwise use to improve our author’s online experience.

Everyone has a theory about what the most common resolution is nowadays (it often depends upon the demographics of the website compiling the statistic or asking the survey question) since, in general, Mac users tend to use higher resolutions than PC users while “younger” users tend to have higher resolutions than “older” users.

But a common belief, also supported by our own personal user statistics, indicate that the vast majority of Internet users can receive website widths of 1000 pixels or wider. I’m not positive of the precise increase, but I think the width of our website will increase by roughly 200 pixels with the release of Version 4, and this gives us an opportunity to improve the pages “outside” of the Author’s Center also, something we didn’t do much of with Version 3.

There are some other exciting elements to Version 4 but it’s too early to reveal those…

Amazon, self publishing

Amazon Kindle demos

Speaking of Amazon, sales statistics of their Kindle device indicate that “boomers” represent the largest group of Kindle purchasers. Theories for this range from “disposable income on the slightly expensive device” to “weakening eyesight that benefits from the flexibility Kindle affords in terms of font-size.”

While creating a Kindle edition of a hardcopy book represents a growing segment in the publishing and self-publishing industries, this second theory represents an equally appealing opportunity that, thus far, has not proven as popular — large print editions.

The median age of America (in fact, the world) is increasing. And with an increase in age often comes a decrease in one’s ability to read small print. Large print editions represent a great opportunity for already-published authors to “write it once, use it twice,” which is a motto I repeat during my speeches and presentations. One manuscript, two books, two different target markets….

self publishing

Best of December promotion

Last December Outskirts Press ran a promotion looking for the “Best Manuscript of December” where the winning author will receive not only a full credit of their publishing package cost, but an additional 10% as well.

According to our manuscript evaluation department and author services team (the front-end folks), it was very successful and resulted in a LOT of manuscript submissions. I always say a discount or a promotion is never the ONLY reason to use a company, but it can sometimes help those “on the fence” take action. The idea, of course, is to combine the benefits of your business or company, overall, with the urgency of the promotion.

Our manuscript evaluation team then narrowed down ALL the manuscripts we received in December from authors who began their publishing package during the promotion dates and from that list provided me with 12 very high-quality manuscripts to review. Yes, from ALL the manuscripts that were submitted, 12 made it to the second round, and let me tell you, these were 12 excellent manuscripts!

The idea of this process was not only to identify and reward a very talented author, but to also imitate the selection process of traditional publishers, as harsh as it is. These 12 manuscripts from among all the submissions represents a much larger “statistical likelihood” than an unsolicited manuscript finding success with being sent to a traditional publisher or agent.

The next step was very closely reviewing these 12 manuscripts to narrow them down even further. The 12 “second round” manuscripts literally came from all four corners of America — ranging from California to Connecticut, New York to Texas — and the globe.

It was challenging narrowing down the 12 to a more manageable 6. They were all very, very good. Now we have arrived at 6 “finalists.”

3 fiction and 3 non-fiction.

Since they were all submitted in December, some of them are already published, but until all 6 finalists are published, we cannot move forward with the judging. Here’s why… While there’s no doubt the strength of the writing is very important, other factors contribute to an overall successful book — not the least of which is being a professional author who has a “platform” on which to jump-start marketing efforts after publication. But we also want to view the published book “as a whole” including its cover, the back copy text, the author’s webpage, marketing tactics being put forth, etc.

This also imitates the process of a conventional publishing process, where the publisher or agent is almost always as equally interested in the author as the manuscript. “How easy is this author going to be to work with? How professional is she? How much marketing muscle can he bring to the table?” Etc.

Once all 6 books are published, I’ll touch upon this again.

self publishing

Find the pot of gold

One of the promises I made to myself when I started this blog at the first of the year was that I was going to try to “reveal” some inside stuff since that is probably an expectation when reading a blog from a CEO. When I discussed this topic in a previous posting, I mentioned the dilemma such a goal produces: revealing interesting enough stuff without jeopardizing either the interests of our company or our authors. It’s a hard line to walk.

But today presents me with a perfect opportunity! On St. Patrick’s Day we’re offering a 1-day promotion and I’m announcing it here first. Authors who order their book publishing package during St. Patrick’s Day and include the following promotion code at the time of check-out, will receive a 20% instant discount on either the Diamond or Pearl full-color publishing packages.

PROMO CODE: PADDY2010

Talk about finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! An instant discount worth either $199 if you publish with the Diamond, or $219 if you publish with the Pearl.

Click here to publish your book

Amazon

Amazon and affiliates

Amazon recently announced that it is no longer going to compensate Colorado-based affiliates due to tax complications. An Amazon affiliate is an individual or business that refers book buyers to Amazon in exchange for a small percentage of the sale if that referred customer buys anything during that “session.”

Unlike other affiliate programs that support longer term affiliate cookies, Amazon’s affiliate code is pretty stingy – last I checked it only rewards “same-session” purchases. In other words, if you send a customer to Amazon through your affiliate code on a Tuesday, and they buy a product from Amazon right then, you earn your commission. However, if the customer follows your affiliate link to Amazon on a Tuesday but decides instead to buy the book on Wednesday, and browses several other websites in the meantime, you do not receive that affiliate commission at all.

As if you needed another reason not to be an Amazon affiliate, Amazon is now starting to bow to the government’s taxation whims by abandoning certain state-based affiliates.

It seems that anything Amazon does nowadays causes undo concern for many authors, so I’d like to take this moment to clarify for all authors reading this who are thinking about self-publishing, or already have:

This Affiliate situation has nothing whatsoever to do with the publication, distribution and availability of POD or self-published books on Amazon.

Specifically, Outskirts Press books with ISBNs are distributed via Amazon.com and always have been, the majority featuring much more author-advantageous discounting than can be achieved with many other publishers. But those publishers are not being affected either, at least not as it relates to books being listed and sold from Amazon’s sites. The only way a publisher or company might be affected by this would be if that publisher was directly referring readers (not writers) to Amazon for the purposes of buying something. Affiliates advertise Amazon’s services and in exchange for that advertising, Amazon pays affiliates a commission of session-based sales. This is not related to the practice of distributing books at all, which for most self-publishing companies, including Outskirts Press, occurs through Ingram.

The fact that Amazon is having to adjust part of its affiliate business model just goes to show that taxes represent one of the largest complications of running a growing business. The larger you get, the more complicated the taxes become — just look at Amazon. Rather than dealing with the extra complication imposed by the new state law, Amazon decided to opt-out of that complication altogether. In fact, if one were to read between the lines of the letter Amazon sent to all its Colorado-based affiliates, they are clearly trying to ‘strong-arm’ Colorado legislature into repealing this.

branding, marketing, search engine optimization

Press Release Happy

Speaking of press releases, Outskirts Press was recently complimented when it was referred to as “press release happy.” That’s true! We are press release happy, and we are happy with the results of press releases. In fact, we have a systemized “Press Release System” to try to make the process of creating and distributing press releases as effective and efficient for both us as a company and all our authors as possible.

We send out three different types of press releases:

1. Standard Publication Announcement Press Releases

These press releases follow a very standardized formula of composition to ensure they contain all the necessary elements to announce the publication of a book, be optimized with keywords, and contain enough content to serve the author’s purpose. When you release as many of these types of press releases as we do (between 50-100 each month), it becomes necessary to standardize them both for consistency and quality control. Each of our Diamond authors receive one of these standard press releases included with the package; and therefore, the majority of the standard press releases we distribute are for our Diamond authors. Press releases help these authors draw attention to the publication of their book and also get their feet wet with the process of promotion by starting with a common initial tactic.

2. Custom Press Releases

These press releases are also exclusively for our authors and can be used either to announce the publication of the book itself, or any other special occurrence the author wishes to promote. They are custom drafted by one of our press release writers according to the wishes of the author. Unlike our standard press releases, the sole purpose of which are to announce the publication of the book, the custom press release can be used multiple times by the same author, to highlight author events, the winning of an award, or any number of other accomplishments.

I am always looking for ways we can improve our services for our authors and I feel one of those ways is in further educating authors that press releases are not ONLY for the publication of a book. Yes, the publication of a book is a good “excuse” to send out a custom press release, but the goal of any good press release should be to make the release news worthy; and in this day and age, the simple publication of a book is rarely news worthy on its own. The responsibility lies with the author and press release writer to come up with something more news worthy. On the other hand, when a book wins an award, or multiple awards, that makes better content for a compelling release, particularly at the local level. I am of the opinion that a Standard Press Release should be used to annouce the publication of a book and a Custom Press Release should be used multiple times to announce the accomplishments of the book.

The quantity of Custom Press Releases for authors that we send out every month varies, but is almost always less than the number of standard press releases we distribute (not surprising, really, since one is free with the Diamond package and the other has a cost to it).

3. Company Press Releases

The third type of press release Outskirts Press distributes are custom-drafted press releases focused on a new service or product or feature of Outskirts Press. We try to distribute one of these every Tuesday. Like all of our press releases, we have made efforts to systemize this PR schedule for the sake of efficiency, so there is a method to the madness. The first Tuesday of every month we will typically distribute a press release about our monthly promotion. The last Tuesday of every month we will typically distribute a press release about our bestselling books of the previous month. That leaves two or three remaining press releases that require a topic for each month.

This requirement, in turn, compels us to meet website enhancement milestones or introduce a number of new products and/or services each month. In other words, our press release schedule prevents us from becoming complacent and motivates us to constantly improve and grow. Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, press releases that are distributed throughout the Internet are good for optimization purposes. SEO and consistent service improvements? Who says you can’t kill two birds with one stone?

So, whether you’re an author or a business owner, if you’re not press release happy, maybe you should be….