And that brings us to another major benefit of publishing with Outskirts Press. Authors get to set their own retail price,  author copy discount, and profit.  Our online calculator makes it easy,  and the first thing you’ll see is that we also provide you with an initial pricing recommendation:

In my case, for Fandemonium Volume 2, where I’ve already set a Price Plan of 25 and estimated my page count to be 140 pages at 6 x 9, Outskirts Press recommends a retail price of $9.95 (compare that with other online publishing firms, where they’ll recommend–or force!– retail prices in the $17-$20 range).

This screen allows you to increase or decrease the recommended price we suggest for your book. To increase your pricing, hit the “PLUS” button. To decrease your pricing, hit the “MINUS” button. No other publisher grants you this dynamic level of pricing flexibility for your book, so enjoy it. It’s one of the major benefits to publishing with Outskirts Press.

Since we know that we are matching the pricing of Fandemonium Volume 1, which had a retail price of $16.95. So we hit the “PLUS INCREASE” button 7 times, and with each increase, the numbers on the calculator change until we’re left with this:

You will notice that as your retail price increases, so does your royalty and your author discount (your price off retail). If you were to decrease your pricing from our recommended price (also an option), you would notice that as your retail price decreases, so does your royalty and your author discount. You can set your pricing to whatever you want, as long as your retail price is above the wholesale price. The calculator will prevent you from setting a retail price that is below your wholesale price. In that case, the pricing becomes “grayed” out.

You will also notice pricing displayed for the other packages we offer. This allows you to compare your pricing with what you would get with a different package. Ruby books earn more than Sapphire books and they cost less for you to buy. Diamond books earn more than Ruby books and the cost less for you to buy. So if there was ever a question about the long term financial advantages of the Diamond package, this answers them clearly in black/white.

Our Fandemonium Volume 2 package is the Diamond, so now we know that with our retail price of $16.95, we are making approximately $7.51 every time it sells everywhere (from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, through Ingram, etc.  –  compare that with our competitors where they offer a good price from their own site, but not very good pricing elsewhere.)  I say approximately $7.51 because this number is only as accurate as the 140 page count estimate I entered, but it should be fairly close upon publication.

At $16.95, the calculator also tells us that I get a 69% discount on my author copy prices for Fandemonium.   Most other publishers offer author discounts between 10% – 50%.

Once you are happy with your pricing, click the “Select” button.

If you have multiple formats (a paperback and hardback for instance) you will perform this exercise twice, once for each format.

And then we move on to the production approval stage…

Once you have completed your book pricing, it is time to approve production. Your Publishing Center will display a check-list of tasks you as the author may still need to complete in order for production to begin on your book. You will most likely have completed most of the steps already by the time you reach this screen:

We also show you recommended options based upon your previous selections.  Of the three shown here, copyediting is the most highly recommended, and I added it, but it’s sitting unpaid in my cart (which is also the reason the “pay your balance” check box needs completing).

Let’s discuss the two side-by-check check lists.  In my case for Fandemonium Volume 2, according to the check-list, I have already completed the following:

• Selecting my format and trim size
• Completing cover details
• Providing my interior details
• Finalizing my option selections
• Setting my pricing

There are three check-boxes left for me to complete:

• Provide required information
• Pay balance (I added copyediting, but haven’t checked-out of my shopping cart with it yet, so I’ll need to do that)
• Approve production

And Outskirts Press must complete two steps:

• Accept the manuscript
• AR Approve production

More on all of these final elements next…

Among the “required information” still necessary is the distributor’s annotation. This is the information about your book that we will submit to Ingram which, in turn is provided to Baker & Taylor, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and every other sales channel for your book.  For example,  on Amazon, your annotation appears as a “Product Description” under the “Editorial Reviews” section.

In many cases, this can be exactly the same as your back cover synopsis (see why we suggest you keep your back cover copy handy in a Word document), but in some cases, you may have reason for it to be different. People who shop for books online will see this information about your book long before they see your back cover text. In fact, in many online cases, this will be the ONLY information they read about your book when deciding whether to buy it.

This information should be compelling and complete, without any spelling errors or typographical errors. Double-check your work! We submit to Ingram exactly what you provide to us. In fact, it’s a good idea to write this text and include it in your manuscript prior to submitting your manuscript for copyediting, so that it gets edited, too (just a little hint, there).

A recommended length for this information is approximately 3000-3400 characters (including spaces). Yes, that is long — but years of statistics support the claim that MORE information here statistically increases the chances of selling more books, especially if it is well written and persuasive. Remember, people buy non-fiction books to solve problems, so focus on benefits to the reader. People buy fiction books to “escape” so focus on the entertainment value.

Once you’re happy with the content, Click to Submit. For Fandemonium, I’m using almost the same exact copy as the back cover copy, so I cut and paste that from my Word document I saved from the Custom Cover stage, make very small changes to this version for distribution, and click submit.

What’s next…?

Every Outskirts Press book receives its own free author webpage. The name you give your author webpage for your book will also be your webpage’s address (or URL).  One of the final pieces of required information is soliciting this information from  you. There are some things to keep in mind when you get to the Webpage Naming screen in your Publishing Center:

1. There cannot be any weird characters or spaces in a webpage address; only use alpha-numeric characters, although underscores _ and hyphens – are also allowed.
2. Capitalization matters, and you don’t want to have to take the time during a radio interview to explain which letters in your address are capitalized, do you? So we recommend you make the entire address lower case.

The best choice is either the title of your book (if its not too long), or your name. In either case, it should submitted all in lower case.  Your webpage name may already be taken, and if so, our website will tell you and you will need to arrive upon another choice.

Regardless of what you enter into the box, your full, total webpage address will be preceded by our domain name. So if you enter “booktitle” into the box, your webpage address once your book is published will be www.outskirtspress.com/booktitle

If you purchased our optional Enhanced Custom Author Website option, you will name your domain name / address for that website separately.

In the case of Fandemonium Volume 2, I submit “opcollection5″ as my webpage name, making my URL http://outskirtspress.com/opcollection5 because all our anthologies share the same webpage naming convention starting with “opcollection.”  The author’s webpage is launched by Outskirts Press at the same time the book is published. In most cases, it even has most of the “content” filled out automatically, because we’ve used information provided by the author during the pre-production process.  But once your book is published, it’s a good idea to look at your author webpage and see if you want to make any changes/corrections to it.  You can manage the content of your author webpage any time you want from within your Publishing Center after publication.

The final step prior to approving production on your book is making sure we have received your manuscript.  There are several places to submit it throughout the process (including emailing it to your publishing consultant), but we make it flexible for our authors to expedite their personal steps through the pre-production process in whatever manner works best for them, independent of the status of their manuscripts.  In this way, authors can complete most of the pre-production steps as they prepare for publication even before their manuscripts are 100% completed.

But ultimately, we require the final manuscript before we allow the author to approve production.  So at this stage, I select my Word file for Fandemonium Volume 2 from my hard drive and upload it via the ‘Submit your manuscript electronically’option. There is also an option to submit a hardcopy version, although that incurs an additional fee and slows the process down, so I highly recommend going the digital route.

With this final step completed, all that’s left is approving production by clicking the last box on our online check-list.

Now, in my case, Outskirts Press has already completed two steps (assigning my production team and my ISBN) and now needs to complete two more:

• Accept the manuscript
• AR Approve production

Since I just submitted my manuscript, Outskirts Press hasn’t reviewed and approved it yet. No surprising. Reviewing a complete manuscript can take a few days and unlike many of our competitors, we review and accept every manuscript we publish.  This prevents your book from appearing alongside other, “questionable” books (which is what happens for authors publishing elsewhere).  Like all self-publishing companies, however, I will be the first to admit that the subjective quality threshold for books we accept is very forgiving. But we draw hard stands on some unacceptable content:  we do not accept books that are pornographic or libelous in nature, or books that obviously infringe upon copyrights (yes, taking content and/or images from the Internet without proper approval is a violation of copyright law; we don’t allow that for your protection).

Once your manuscript is reviewed, you will receive a Publisher’s Evaluation via email. This evaluation by our evaluation team sometimes makes some suggestions for ways you can improve both your manuscript and your publication. In many cases, it may even include a complimentary 1000-word “spec edit” so you can fully appreciate the value of copyediting. In other words, it’s beneficial, and more efficient, if you submit your manuscript earlier in the pre-production process than I did here. By the time you receive the evaluator’s comments, your Author Representative has probably already moved the book into the Production, in which case, you see this message in your Publishing Center:

 It’s time to kick back and relax while Outskirts Press works its magic.  Isn’t that a wonderful and reassuring feeling?

]]> http://brentsampson.com/2012/02/06/outskirts-press-book-publishing-approving-production/feed/ 0 Outskirts Press http://brentsampson.com/2012/02/03/a-backwards-blog-experiment/ http://brentsampson.com/2012/02/03/a-backwards-blog-experiment/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:46:52 +0000 Outskirts Press http://brentsampson.com/?p=1948 ]]> When I first started this blog in 2010 I posted a series of blogs about what I found problematic about blogging.  One of those problematic elements is the fact that blogs are only presented in chronological order for the people who are subscribed to them, and for the rest of the readership, they’re presented in reverse chronological order, because blog postings appear with the most recent postings at the “top.”

This makes series, such as the ones I often do, a little off-putting to readers who are coming into the blog/series from an external location like a search engine because they’re either forced to read the series “backwards” or they’re forced to scroll down the postings for the “start” of the blog and then read up.

So for the next month or so, I’m going to try an experiment as I post a series of detailed blogs about completing the pre-production book publishing process with Outskirts Press.  I’m going to post the series in reverse chronological order (starting with the last step and going backwards).  That way, I’ll end with Step 1 being the most recent posting of the series. In this manner, when new visitors come to this blog/series from elsewhere (as opposed to subscribing to my blog), they’ll be able to read the series conveniently in the proper order, starting with step 1.

So for those of you subscribing to the blog, it may seem a little weird reading an informative series of blog postings from the end to the beginning.  But for the vast majority who come to my blog/series from search engine searches in the future, the series of postings will be straight-forward.  And since I’m going to give this upcoming series a specific “tag” for the purposes of making it very easy to link to from our instructional emails and FAQs at Outskirts Press, (not to mention the archival benefits of blogs on the Internet in general), a straight-forward presentation is what I’m shooting for.

We’ll begin this little experiment next week…

Ten years ago, Outskirts Press was founded by author Brent Sampson in 2002 as a result of his personal frustrations with getting published. Outskirts Press incorporated in Colorado in 2003, and through strategic partnerships with companies like Writer’s Digest, Outskirts Press quickly became the fastest-growing full-service book publishing and book marketing firm.

The years between 2004 and 2006 marked a growth rate in excess of 1,500%, an amazing accomplishment that was publicized in July 2007 by The Denver Business Journal when Outskirts Press was recognized as the 3rd fastest-growing privately held company in Colorado.  By the end of 2006, Outskirts Press already had nearly 1,000 books in print,  all of them available worldwide through Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble online, among others. And by the end of 2007, Outskirts Press had more than doubled its title totals again.

In 2008 The Denver Business Journal recognized Outskirts Press for the second year in a row as the fastest-growing publisher, and in fact, the fastest-growing privately held small-to-medium sized company in Colorado (in any industry), boasting growth of over 500% for the years between 2005-2007.

2009 and 2010 marked more new milestones, as well. In 2009 Outskirts Press published its 5,000th title and became the only self-publishing company to appear on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies.

And in 2010, and again in 2011, Outskirts Press repeated its appearance on the Inc. 5000 twice more, and became the only self-publishing company to appear on the list of top 5,000 fastest growing businesses in America for three years in a row.

So how does Outskirts Press remain the fastest-growing full-service publishing provider?

• It begins with our Mission Statement: To exceed the expectations of every author we help publish.
• It continues with our commitment to conservationism and recycling. Our most popular book sizes offer a recycled paper-stock option, featuring 30% post-consumer.
• It grows with our authors.  Just ask Gang Chen, who earned over $100,000 in 180 days; or Sally Shields, the stay-at-home mom-turned-2-time Amazon.com bestseller; or Ronnie Lee, who has become one of the most prolific published authors of our generation with the assistance of Outskirts Press.

As we look toward the future, our commitment to produce high-quality books and offer high levels of support to our authors in all three phases of their journey (writing, publishing, marketing), only grows stronger.

For instance, we have embraced digital e-books with three a la carte digital publishing options:

• The Amazon Kindle
• The Barnes & Noble NOOK
• The Apple iPad

 We have embraced social media to help our authors further promote their books:

• Our author community on Facebook grew ten-fold in the past year
• Our author videos on YouTube number in the hundreds
• Our company blog continually keeps our authors informed

And, we practice what we preach, publishing our own series of books to help authors navigate the sometimes tricky waters of book publishing and offering free publication in various anthologies through the year to showcase how easy, fast, and fun it can be to publish with Outskirts Press.

• Self-Publishing Simplified
• The Highly Effective Habits of Five Successful Authors
• Fandemonium, the Facebook Anthology

Through it all, Outskirts Press authors have remained our main focal point. With over 8,200 published titles, Outskirts Press continues to pour development dollars and resources into further improvements to the Outskirts Press website and its growing list of writing, publishing, and marketing services/products to further support our authors’goals and dreams.

What does success mean to you? By any measure, you will find it here with Outskirts Press and we look forward to helping you on that journey.

Many of us, and some of our family members, took a moment during our July 4th picnic, to pose…

So, without further ado, here’s the version that existed through 2011.

How did Outskirts Press become the fastest-growing full-service publishing provider?

• It begins with our Mission Statement: To exceed the expectations of every author we help publish.
• It continues with our commitment to conservationism and recycling. Our most popular book sizes offer a recycled paper-stock option, featuring 30% post-consumer.
• And we grow toward the future with our commitment to produce high-quality books and offer high levels of support to our authors in all three phases of their journey (writing, publishing, marketing).

Outskirts Press was incorporated in October 2003 and published seven books its first year.

In 2004, Outskirts Press published an additional 51 books and began creating an infrastructure of talented publishing artisans that would help Outskirts Press deliver maximum author flexibility, full-service support, and the highest quality books.

Through strategic partnerships with companies like Writer’s Digest, and affiliations with the Publishers Marketing Association and the Small Publishers of North America (among others), Outskirts Press built a strong foundation and positive reputation in the publishing industry. The company published 220 new books in 2005, including its own publishing guide titled Self-Publishing Simplified, available as a free e-book as well as a $5.95 paperback edition.

Now in its third edition as Outskirts Press services have improved and streamlined, Self-Publishing Simplified continues to serve as a product brochure, an example of the company’s exemplary quality, and evidence that publishing a print-on-demand book does not require an outlandish retail price. Try to find a new book by any other print-on-demand publisher on Amazon for $5.95! The power of our pricing speaks for itself.

In 2006 Outskirts Press published another 695 books, approximately matching the yearly output of some traditional New York publishers. In total, the company already had nearly 1,000 books in print, all of them available worldwide through Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble online, among others.

The years between 2004 and 2006 marked a growth rate in excess of 1,500%, an amazing accomplishment that was publicized in July 2007 by The Denver Business Journal when Outskirts Press was recognized as the 3rd fastest-growing privately held company in Colorado.

In the first quarter of 2007 Outskirts Press CEO Brent Sampson wrote and published the bestseller, Sell Your Book on Amazon, which hit # 29 on Amazon’s bestseller list in its debut month (March 2007). By the end of 2007, Outskirts Press had over 2,100 total books in print, making it the fastest-growing full-service publisher in America and one of the most prolific publishers in the world.

2008 was more exciting! For the second year in a row, The Denver Business Journal recognized Outskirts Press as the fastest-growing publisher, and in fact, the fastest-growing privately held small-to-medium sized company in Colorado (in any industry), boasting growth of over 500% for the years between 2005-2007.

Just in time for the holiday season, Outskirts Press CEO Brent Sampson wrote and published Adventures in Publishing, a unique children’s book about how to publish a children’s book. Featuring amazing full-color custom illustrations and rhyming verse, Adventures in Publishing acts as a full-color publishing guide for the Pearl publishing package and is an example of the artistry that is available to all our full-color authors.

In 2009, our authors had the most successful year since our founding, beginning with Gang Chen, who earned over $100,000 in 180 days. Our youngest author, Dalton James wrote, illustrated and published his third full-color children’s book with us at just 8 years of age. And more authors than we can count turned their publishing dreams into traditional publication realities when conventional publishers picked-up their Outskirts Press titles, including Susan R. Dolan and Audrey R. Vizzard. See their case study here.

2009 and 2010 marked a few milestones. In 2009 Outskirts Press published its 5,000th title and become the only self-publishing company to appear on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies.

And in 2010, Outskirts Press repeated its appearance on the Inc. 5000 and became the only self-publishing company to appear on the list of top 5,000 fastest growing businesses in America for two years in a row. In January 2010, CEO Brent Sampson started his blog at brentsampson.com and in the spring was a semi-finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.

Speaking of awards, Outskirts Press sponsored the Student Literary Awards and Colorado Book Awards in association with our charitable donations to the Colorado Humanities. Meanwhile, Outskirts Press began establishing its social networking presence by developing its YouTube channel and surpassing 500 Facebook Fans and 500 Twitter followers. In December, Outskirts Press celebrated the holidays with its Facebook fans by giving away two free Amazon Kindles.

Through it all, Outskirts Press authors have remained our main focal point. With over 6,500 titles published, Outskirts Press continues to pour development dollars and resources into further improvements to the Outskirts Press website and its growing list of writing, publishing, and marketing services/products to further support our authors’goals and dreams.

What does success mean to you? By any measure, you will find it here with Outskirts Press and we look forward to helping you on that journey.

Your success depends upon you. Are you ready to start your publishing journey? Click here…

1. Make sure you’re logged-in to your Facebook account as the administrator of your page.
2. Click on “Edit Page” in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Along the left-hand menu choices, click on “Manage Permissions”
4. You’ll see a number of fields and settings on the resulting screen. One of them says “Default Landing Tab.”
5. Set the “Default Landing Tab” to “Welcome.”
6. Click “Save Changes.”

That’s it! You know have a welcome page incentivizing people to “like” your Page. Depending upon the strength of your incentive, you’ll watch your friends numbers grow.  Our Facebook friends for Outskirts Press have more than doubled in less than 2 months, from about 2,000 fans at the beginning of December to 4,456 as of today.  When we reach 5000, we’re going to hold a drawing for a free Barnes & Noble NOOK, and in January, all our FB Friends were invited to submit material for our 2nd Annual Facebook Anthology – Fandemonium Volume 2!

See you next time…