May 2012 – President of Outskirts Press

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Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Finalists

All this week our Outskirts Press publishing blog has been featuring the three finalists for our 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award. Here are the three finalists:

Congratulations to Susan, Bolko, and Glenn. For more details about all three of these books and their authors, visit our Outskirts Press blog. Beginning tomorrow, June 1, our blog will open the public polls so our social community of readers and writers can vote on the finalist best deserving of the award of the 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year. Good luck to them!

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How the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year finalists are determined

In the past week we have posted the results of the 18th Annual EVVY Awards, which is the contest held by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Outskirts Press won 15 awards, the most among all participating Colorado publishers. Winning an EVVY is a pre-requisite to winning our own Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award, now in its 3rd year. In 2010 we published a book called The Beads of Lapis Lazuli, by Doris Kenney Marcotte, which went on to win a 2011 EVVY Award for Fiction and become a finalist for our contest. In the weeks following the finalist announcements, Doris engaged in some aggressive “author platform” leveraging and social media marketing efforts, which paid off — her book was named the 2010 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year, recognizing the best book we published in 2010. Her interview is here.

We’re at it again. From among the 15 EVVY winners announced last Thursday at the CIPA ceremony, Outskirts Press selects three finalists. Those finalists will be announced next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And then the public poll (open to everyone) will be posted on Friday, June 1st at SelfPublishingNews.com where everyone will vote upon the winner.

So how are the Best Book of the Year finalists determined from among the EVVY winners? Since they’ve won an EVVY Award, a lot of the technical and artistic components have already been taken into consideration and recognized, so the three finalists are admittedly a more subjective decision making process. We do not simply go in order of EVVY prizes awards (First, Second, Third) for two main reasons. 1) Each category of the EVVY awards are judged separately and independently, meaning a book that receives a 3rd place in one category is not automatically “worse” than a book receiving a 1st Place in an alternate category; the first category could have simply had a collection of a much higher caliber of entries. 2) Unlike the EVVY judges, we have more context to apply to our decision for the Best Book of the Year finalists. We know the authors. We are more familiar with their writing career and talents and aspirations. We know if they have published previous books and, if so, how THOSE books have performed in various contests. The CIPA judges take none of these factors into account when judging individual EVVY Awards (nor should they) but we do when choosing finalists from among all the EVVY winners.

So with all those factors in mind, we first seek the opinions of various people at Outskirts Press in regard to the EVVY Winners. “From among this list, who do YOU think should be the Finalists, and why?” We collect those answers and add those variables to our consideration. Next, we look at the EVVY Winners in order of placement (I realize I just said the decision doesn’t simply depend upon the order of the prizes, and it doesn’t, but the order of the EVVY awards are taken into consideration), and from that order we basically ask ourselves, “Is there a reason this book should NOT be a finalist?” For example, the 1st place EVVY winner, Opting In, is not eligible for a 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award because that book was published in 2012 (which is also the reason we didn’t nominate it specifically and instead the author nominated it herself since she was personally a member of CIPA, also). It’s a great accomplishment and we love to see authors take their destiny in their own hands. Congratulations, Molly.

So that leaves us with the 2nd, 3rd, and Merit award winners to consider. Using the parameters and considerations outlined above, we arrive upon the three finalists. And those finalists will be announced next week in preparation for the voting to begin on June 1. Stay tuned…

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Outskirts Press 2012 EVVY Award Winners

Last Thursday I attended the 18th annual EVVY Awards, held annually by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association and this year introduced by Jake Jabs of American Furniture Warehouse fame. Of the nominees we announced last December, and the finalists we announced last week, here are the results of the awards ceremony. Congratulations to all the winners. In the coming weeks, this list of winners will be narrowed down to three finalists for the Outskirts Press 2011 Best Book of the Year Award. In the next post, I’ll go into more detail about how those three finalists are selected.

But in the meantime, here are the EVVY winners, including the Outskirts Press sweep of the Autobiography/Memoir category:

1st Place
Autobiography/Memoirs

2nd Place
Autobiography/Memoirs

3rd Place
Autobiography/Memoirs

2nd Place
Workbooks

2nd Place
Religion

2nd Place
Fiction

3rd Place
Fiction

Merit Award
Fiction

2nd Place
Juvenile/Young Adult

3rd Place
Juvenile/Young Adult

Merit Award
Juvenile/Young Adult

Merit Award
Inspirational/Spiritual

Merit Award
Parenting/Family

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How the EVVY Awards are Judged

Toward the end of each calendar year, Outskirts Press specifically nominates a certain percentage of our published titles for that year to submit to the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Not only is winning an EVVY Award an honor it its own right, but one EVVY Winner then goes on to be named the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year. We have thirteen finalists from among all the books we officially nominated for EVVY consideration. And I just heard from CIPA that Outskirts Press actually published two additional EVVY Finalists, where the authors submitted their books directly, since they resided in Colorado and were members of CIPA personally. Congratulations to them, as well.

Tomorrow evening, Jake Jabs of American Furniture Warehouse fame will be hosting the 18th Annual EVVY Awards where 1st, 2nd, 3rd Place, and Merit Awards will be handed out to all the EVVY finalists from all the participating self-publishers. So, just how are the EVVY Awards judged?

1. Each EVVY judge answers 30 questions for each book they judge. 25 are general questions that are non-category specific and 5 are category-specific questions. The non-category specific questions involve both technical and creative elements about the books, like for instance, does the book have a barcode, does it have an ISBN, does it have a copyright page, etc. 10 questions are true or false and 20 are scored on a scale of 1 (bad) through 100 (perfect)

2. The first round of judging is scored and all books with first phase scores under 50 are eliminated from consideration. The remaining entries are then judged by a different judge answering the same questions and the scores are taken again. All entries that attain a score of 70 or above from the average of both judge’s scores are deemed finalists. These are the 13 (+2) books that represent our EVVY finalists this year.

3. The finalists are then judged a third time. The order of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Merit awards are determined by a combination of high score, judge’s determination, and overall comparison of other books within the category. This “Category comparison” means that the average scores can be the same across all categories.

4. 1st Place winners score 81 points or above. Books scoring between 74 – 80 are awarded second place.

Stay tuned for the Outskirts Press EVVY winners….

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How Outskirts Press EVVY Nominees are determined

A week from today we will know the results of the 18th Annual EVVY Awards, which are taking place May 17th in Denver, Colorado (well, Lone Tree, actually, which is a sub-division just south of downtown Denver) at the Lone Tree Arts Center. The EVVY Awards are an annual event put together and hosted by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. I will be on hand to receive the awards Outskirts Press authors win on their behalf. Of course, those authors are welcome to attend themselves, although historically I have accepted the vast majority of our EVVY Awards myself since most of the finalists are rarely within travelling distance of Denver. Of the thirteen EVVY finalists that were published by Outskirts Press last year (the most among all participating publishers), just one of them lives in Colorado.

The EVVY Awards are a big deal for us at Outskirts Press for two reasons. For one, it’s nice to have such a longstanding event so close to home. And two, winning an EVVY Award is a prerequisite to winning our own contest, the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award. After winning a First Place EVVY Award in the Fiction category last year, Doris Kenney Marcotte went on to win the 2010 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award for her novel The Beads of Lapis Lazuli: A Greek Mystery. Her road to this accomplishment and its $1,500 Grand Prize began when she accepted our official EVVY Award nomination in the fall of 2010.

Well, actually, it started long before that, which brings us to the subject of today’s post: How our official Outskirts Press EVVY Nominees are determined.

At Outskirts Press, we publish approximately 1,500 new books a year. Sometimes it’s more (and with the recent addition of the Kindle, Nook, and iPad editions, it is promising to be way more heading into the future – although those editions are not eligible for our EVVY nomination), but 1,500 is a good average. Our goal in any given year is to send less than 100 titles to the EVVY Awards as official Outskirts Press nominees. Therefore, the quickest, least subjective way we limit EVVY contenders right off the bat is via the publishing package the authors choose. Only Diamond and full-color Pearl books are eligible for consideration.

So, let’s perform a little math. Approximately 60% of the books we publish are Diamonds and approximately 10% are Pearls. S0 70% of the 1,500 books we publish each year, on average, are automatically eligible for EVVY Award consideration. That’s 1050. Let’s round it down to an even 1,000. Out of 1,000 books published each year, we are looking to officially nominate less than 100 to send to the CIPA EVVY Awards. That’s 10%. It gets interesting when you examine how 1000 eligible books become 100…

Throughout the year, the production department is “on the look-out” for contenders. Our consultants remember particularly promising books at the beginning of the process; our book designers remember particularly beautiful books during formatting; our cover designers remember the custom covers they, personally, are most proud of; our copyeditors remember particularly important or entertaining works; and our author representatives remember particularly impressive books throughout the entire process. When it comes time to determine the Outskirts Press official EVVY nominees toward the end of each year, we solicit that feedback from the consultants, formatters, designers, editors, and representatives.

Sometimes these decisions are subjective (as all book contests ultimately are), but there are some logistic steps a savvy author can take to significantly increase the odds of receiving an official EVVY Award nomination at the end of the year, and when one looks at the process (and the statistical likelihood in general), these steps start to make more sense:

1. Get a custom cover design – We offer a wide variety of cover choices for our authors, from free pre-designed themes, to custom covers, to the flexibility allowing an author to submit her own cover. And while there are exceptions to every rule, almost without fail, our official EVVY Nominees are comprised almost exclusively of books featuring custom cover designs by Outskirts Press designers. I discussed a little bit about that reality a few posts ago. Also, remember, our cover designers are asked their opinions of ALL the books they work on. Which is more likely? That they’ll remember/recommend a free, pre-designed style, or that they’ll remember/recommend a custom cover they poured their heart into?

2. Get an enhanced or custom interior – Even our standard, free interiors are excellent, and sufficient to garner an EVVY Nomination. In fact, I cannot remember an instance where a standard interior, on its own, was the reason for dismissal, but the fact remains that an enhanced or custom interior is never going to “hurt” the author’s chances, and it could even help.

3. Have your book professionally copyedited – This shouldn’t just be a requirement for EVVY Award consideration, this should be a requirement for publication. Of course, in this day and age of POD printing, ebooks, and self-publishing, it’s not a requirement for publication, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be. So, book contests and awards are the industry’s way of REWARDING authors who take this very important step. We only nominate books that have been professionally edited. Otherwise, what’s the point? Our nominees are personally and manually selected because we want to sweep the EVVY Awards, and we know the CIPA EVVY judges are not going to recognize a book littered with mistakes. While it can be argued that the “strength” of specific covers and interior designs are subjective, most typographical errors are not.

Final considerations to bring the total number of nominations down to a reasonable number are much more subjective, I’ll admit, and they involve things like reasonable retail price for the genre, marketability, and the author’s own professionalism. After all, we know that one of the EVVY Nominees is going to be our Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award-winner, and we want that author to be ahead of the game when it comes time to sell the book, market the book, and work with other people.

4. Accept our nomination – This is an easy step to complete but some authors still miss this one even after they successfully accomplish the other ones. There is a belief among a few writers that book contests shouldn’t cost money to enter. Let me set that misconception to rest: Most book contests cost money to enter (and if they don’t, you have to ask yourself what the catch is). Our official EVVY Nomination requires the submission fee to the EVVY Awards, along with the cost of printing the necessary copies for the EVVY judges and shipping them, and completing all the entry forms, etc. Simply put, entering book contests is kind of a pain in the butt (and so is administering/judging them, which is why book contests cost money). It’s true just being nominated is an honor (less than 10% of our books are), but in order to be an Outskirts Press official EVVY Award nominee, you have to accept our invitation and agree to let us submit your book to the CIPA EVVY Awards on your behalf, just as our most recent official nominees did late last year. And from that list, we’re down to our thirteen finalists.

So how do EVVY Finalists become EVVY Winners? I’ll discuss that next time…

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How to successfully work from home

Time magazine recently ran an informative and instructional article about the “remote worker.” Whether you are an employee working remotely (or wanting to) for a large business, or you are an independent contractor working remotely for a family-owned business, or whether you are a published writer building your author platform in your spare time, Time magazine’s suggestions here are worth making note of (and incorporating into your routine). More and more companies are embracing the notion of telecommuting; workers are happier and have the opportunity to be more productive if they work smarter, and not just harder. After all, they’re gaining the time they might otherwise lose to a daily commute (say good-bye to rush hour traffic). They can save money on work clothes and day care and, let’s face it, it’s just plain “cooler” to be able to work from home.

But working from home can have its disadvantages and downsides, so the productive, savvy worker recognizes these and overcompensates for them. From the article: “Some telecommuters do, in fact, turn into slackers, take advantage of their situations and… don’t form strong emotional bonds with co-workers (no chance for after work cocktails, obviously), and they don’t get the all-necessary ‘face time’ with senior management. Even so, there are ways to win over your boss and be a successful, wonderfully productive remote worker…”

Here are the top 5 tips from Time magazine’s article:

1. Get organized – demonstrate outstanding organization and attention to detail, along with the ability to prioritize and consistently meet goals while exhibiting an overall sense of professionalism.

2. Check in frequently – In the corporate world, if you aren’t seen or heard frequently, you are often not thought of for new opportunities. Telecommuters can overcome this disadvantage by checking in on a consistent, scheduled basis. That way you stay “top of mind” and demonstrate your work ethic. Email, use instant messaging, and don’t be afraid to use the telephone.

3. Push yourself to network – Direct from Time’s article: “Just doing your job isn’t enough to be successful as a remote worker. You need to build your soft skills by networking in person and via social media with co-workers and other people in your industry. If possible, [attend] training programs and holiday parties, and participate in as many networking events and conferences as you can. Building strong relationships can be a challenge for a telecommuter, but it is often just as important as being a good worker.”

4. Take breaks and get fresh air – Without formal meetings and lunch breaks, it becomes important to devise your own productive schedule; and productivity can depend upon a sustainable pattern. Mimic working at a office by starting work at a consistent time every day (8am works), taking a break or two, an hour for lunch, and stopping at a consistent time every evening. If “work” were fun it would be called “play” so it’s important to train your body and mind to perform as if you were in an office.

5. Respond to emails quickly – Direct from Time’s article: “This is a simple tip — and an important one. Make replying to… e-mails a high priority. Get back to them promptly so that they trust you’re working, not sleeping or playing video games. And when you respond, be clear and concise. Cover all of your bases to avoid unnecessary back and forth.” If multiple e-mails are required to take care of an issue that could be covered in a 30-second conversation, pick up the phone. If it takes you 2 business days to respond to emails, there’s naturally going to be someone, somewhere, questioning your commitment. And once confidence is lost, it’s hard to gain back, especially remotely…

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Contenders for the 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Awards

Last year we crowned the author of our first Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award. Doris Kenney Marcotte published The Beads of Lapis Lazuli with Outskirts Press in 2010. That fall she was personally nominated for the Colorado Independent Publishers EVVY Awards along with approximately 5% of our published authors, all representing the very best from Outskirts Press. When the EVVY Awards were presented the following spring (March 2011), Doris won first place in the Fiction category. She went on to become a finalist for the 2010 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year awards along with finalsts Frank B. Leibold, Ph.D., and Robert J. Mignone, M.D., F.A.P.A.

Once the three finalists for our Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award are determined (based upon them winning a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place EVVY Award), they must each collect enough votes to be crowed our Best Book of the Year award winner in a public poll held on the Outskirts Press blog. You can see the poll that determined Doris’s win by clicking here. It was a close race between her and Frank.

Well, we’re closing in on the exciting conclusion to determine the 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award. Last December we nominated approximately 2% of our published books for submission to the Colorado Independent Publishers Association EVVY Awards. Winning an EVVY Award is required to become a finalist for the Best Book of the Year award. The EVVY Finalists have now been announced and those award winners will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony next Thursday, May 17th.

Among all the EVVY Finalists are these thirteen Outskirts Press books. One of these will be our 2011 Best Book of the Year winner. Who will it be? Stay tuned to this blog or our Outskirts Press blog for the next several weeks to find out… Let’s wish them luck!

Are you the next award-winning author from Outskirts Press. Start publishing today…

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A self-publishing author’s experience with Outskirts Press

Last week I shared an email I received from one of our authors in relation to the custom covers we designed for her. I’d like to share another email I received, this more a more general reaction to the entire self publishing experience as a whole. All of us at Outskirts Press work hard to make sure all our authors have wonderful experiences (and we get it right 99% of the time), so it’s always gratifying to receive emails like this from one of our recently-published authors (I recevied this roughly around Easter).

“Dear Anna, Brent, and Jodee:

I really wasn’t expecting my free copies of A Guide to the Psalms of David when it arrived earlier today, since there was no entry under shipping and I assumed “processed” under orders simply meant my entry on the website was accepted and my book was now in the queue to be printed. Unprepared, I can only relate that when I opened up the package and saw my book, I was stunned; elated, on the one hand, because of the gorgeous cover–in which credit goes, as you know, to my wife Audrey–terrified, on the other hand, with the realization I now have to rev up to a significantly higher standard if I expect to go out into the world and inspire people with, in the words of John Adams, poetry “superior to all odes, hymns, and songs, in any language.”

But regardless of what the future brings, I cannot thank each and every one of you enough for helping me bring this creation–because it is more than just a book–into the world. And I dare say, the cover alone, is healing: the colors and the representation of David contemplating his harp. (You might recall from the Bible when King Saul had attacks of melancholy, David’s harp playing soothed him.)

All the best, and whatever holiday you are celebrating at this time of year, may it be with much Joy!!!

Sincerely,

Steve Rosner

P.S. Please thank the elf who corrected the interior cover by removing a superfluous ‘the’ in the title. Although it was discovered at the last minute and corrected on the cover itself, I opted the leave the interior as is, not wanting to delay the book any longer.”

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Facebook increases avatar graphic size

Figures. Gotta love Mark Zuckerberg and his tendency to “change” things on Facebook at the drop of a hat. I had just finished sharing suggestions for optimizing your cover graphic for the new Facebook Timeline when Facebook decides to increase the size of the “logo” that is superimposed over the Cover graphic. If your cover graphic isn’t/wasn’t precisely optimized in accordance with some of my recommendations, this size difference probably wasn’t even noticeable. However, if you had created your cover graphic down to the pixel, as we had at Outskirts Press, this new avatar size resulted in overlapping actual content on the underlying cover graphic, as circled in the sample image below. See how some of the words in our “Calendar” for April were covered by the increased size of the Avatar box? Not great…

The size of the logo/avatar box increased from 133 pixels wide to 168 pixels wide. Naturally, you would want to make alterations to your cover graphic as a result, as we did with this new graphic that we launched on May 1st. We actually plan to upload a new cover graphic on the first day of every month, anyway, since our two “Calendar” boxes draw attention to the current month’s activities/events/promotions on Facebook as well as “tease” the upcoming month’s. For instance, in June we will be crowning the author of our 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year. And I’ll be discussing that in more depth soon, but in the meantime, here’s the next cover graphic for Facebook, with the new avatar size accounted for, and the update to the Calendar. Of course, it had to be “shrunk” since the optimal size for the cover graphic is wider than the space allowed by this blog template, and you’ll notice that we simply leave the portion of the graphic unfinished where Facebook superimposes the Avatar (details, details), but you can see how it looks for real on our Facebook page at http://facebook.com/OutskirtsPress.