August 5, 2010 – President of Outskirts Press

I’ve added a new book along the right-hand column of my blog, which is where I highlight my personal books. This book is titled The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors: How They Beat the Self-Publishing Odds (and how you can, too). It was just published late last month and is a collaboration between me and 5 of our successful Outskirts Press authors. I wrote the foreword and acted as the “Author Rep” in a manner by coordinating the production of the book with the five authors being highlighted, all of whom have demonstrated noteworthy levels of success as a result of publishing their books with Outskirts Press. Each author contributed to their respective section of the book, which also includes a “Case Study” that highlights their success (all with their permission, naturally).

Gang Chen’s impressive quarterly revenue is revealed
Sally Shields shares the story behind her two-time appearance on Amazon’s bestselling list
Andrew Rafkin tells of the origin of his two-time award winning debut novel Red Sky Morning and how it led to 3 more award-winning novels
Ronnie Lee explains how self-publishing saved his life and how he has found the motivation to publish over 5,500 pages of text in 4 years
Charlotte Endorf shares her cathartic tale of overcoming adversity through book publishing and marketing

In addition to delivering motivating and inspirational stories of self-publishing success, the book serves as an example of some highly effective production habits as well: a custom cover, a custom interior, copyediting, and a search optimized title. This also marks the first of many Outskirts Press anthologies yet to come. I probably won’t be as involved in the remaining anthologies as I was with the first, but they’ll also be produced with the same level of care and attention and, we hope, create a new outlet in which our authors, both published and new, can share their voices with the world.

In the meantime, just click on the cover image of the new book there to the right to visit the Amazon page.

One of the most important elements of writing a query letter is addressing it to the proper publisher. Your query letter must demonstrate that you understand their business and that you’re going to be not just professional, but an absolute JOY to work with. I feel my next book will be a good candidate for Wiley & Sons, for a number of reasons. One of their imprints is the “For Dummies” series of books, and while my book doesn’t necessarily fall into that niche, it is of a similar-level reference type.

If you’re in the mood to write a query letter, the first step is finding the appropriate publisher for your book. Amazon can help you do this. Locate a book that is of similar subject matter. Look up the book on Amazon. Find where it lists the publisher — in the product information section. Next, go to the sub-menu bar at the top and click Advanced Search. Enter that publisher’s name into the “publisher” field, and choose “bestselling” from the criteria drop-down. Your search results will then show all the books from that publisher in order of their sales, top to bottom. Not only does this give you the power to discuss other books this publisher has published from a knowledgeable position, but it prevents you from drawing comparisons to poor selling titles. You want to draw similarities between your book and other books by that publisher that have sold well!

If you don’t like the title selections from this publisher, locate another book and start the process over again. The point is that you are able to reference titles by name in your query letter, and comment intelligently on those title’s sales numbers, at least as Amazon is concerned. In general, you can assume that if a traditionally published book is selling well on Amazon, it is probably selling relatively well offline also.