Brent Sampson: CEO of Book Publishing & Marketing Firm OutskirtsPress.com

Yesterday I posted the 2011 version of the About Us page that appeared on our self-publishing website. It contained the “About Us” story through 2010. As 2011 came to an end, we needed a new version for 2012, which continued the story of our company and our successfully published authors through 2011.  Consolidating 10 years of achievements and milestones into one page was becoming laborious (to read), so with this version, we shorted it considerably. Here’s the new version:

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…

Over the last couple of weeks our Outskirts Press blog featured two different Web 2.0 polls seeking the opinions of our social media community.  The first poll asked our community of authors, readers, and industry professionals what new option we should introduce and the final results voted for a Social Media Market Research option, which was subsequently launched a number of days later on our site.

The second poll asked our community what publishing promotion we should offer in October from among three choices: An instant 10% savings on our publishing services, $300 of “Mad Money” to spend on any pre-production option the author desires, or free Amazon Search Inside and Barnes & Noble See Inside submissions after publication.

Like the previous option poll, this survey was also a close race between 2 of the 3 options, with the Mad Money promotion squeaking out a very narrow victory.  Make it so, the $300 Mad Money promotion will be the one we offer come October 1.

For the past several weeks I have been discussing marketing tactics an author can take to secure more marketing muscle and “exposure” for his/her book on the various channels made available by his/her publisher. I’ve been using our company Outskirts Press, and specifically our free self-publishing app, as the primary example, although many of these tactics hold true for all writers, regardless of where they published.

Specifically, our app has four categories: blog, authors, videos, Twitter.  For the past two weeks I covered the six different ways our authors can get featured on the blog category of our app. Today we’ll talk about how to get featured on the “authors” category of the app, which is updated on our app three times a week and provides an excellent spotlight for the authors who appear there.  The app shares the author’s biography,  comments about publishing with Outskirts Press, the front cover image of the book, and buttons to buy the book directly either from Amazon or the author’s Outskirts Press webpage. When a new author is featured, he/she also gets a plug on our Facebook page.

When you combine limited availability of promotional channels with the publication of around 150 books each month, one needs to establish “requirements” that each book or author needs to meet in order to be considered for promotion in the various channels.  For instance, a few postings ago I introduced a new free opportunity we’re offering for our authors called the “Awesome Cover of the Week” spotlight.  The requirement in that case, obviously, is that the book has to have an “awesome” cover.  Of course, I realize that “awesome” is a relatively subjective phrase, but in our line of work, it is relatively easy to identify covers that do and do not fall into even the subjective areas of that definition.

So, how do we identify authors to feature in the “authors” section of our blog?  It’s relatively easy, also – we feature authors who have chosen to share their positive publishing experiences with us.  I started Outskirts Press to help authors (since I am one), so I love hearing from our published authors about their joys of publication.  Authors share their comments with us all the time in a variety of ways.  And with this new app feature, we can “thank” those authors for those kind words by giving them additional exposure for their books.    Authors who share their positive experiences with us are also archived on the Self Publishing Author blog at http://selfpublishingauthor.wordpress.com

Next time we’ll talk about improving your chances of getting featured in the “video” section of our iPhone app — and this is actually a guaranteed method. So stay tuned.

When we recently held a poll on our Outskirts Press blog asking our authors their opinion of a new marketing option we were thinking about introducing, the results and responses were overwhelmingly positive. In fact, the majority of feedback we receive from our authors is always positive, and that always makes all the people who work so hard on our authors’ books feel really good.  I don’t do as good of a job as I should sharing all the wonderful comments we receive from our authors on a daily basis, so in the interest of sharing, I’ve included some below.  As the CEO, it’s no surprise I think Outskirts Press is the best self publishing company, but it’s gratifying when so many of our authors tend to agree with us. Thank you, all.

“I’ve come to Outskirts Press with battle scars from [publisher], [publisher], and [publisher]. This experience with you has been almost too good to be true. I kept waiting for the problems to start and to date, everything has exceeded my wildest hopes.  I particularly like the ongoing support and daily emails about marketing because it’s been the hardest thing to figure out on my own.  How I wish, my other two books were with you. I’m deeply grateful for the patience and kindness extended to me throughout this process and I love the way the book turned out.  I’m getting many compliments on the cover.  I know three other people who will explore your site. Their decisions remain to be seen and I may never find out if they go with you or not.  But, count on the fact that I will definitely keep recommending you to anyone needing a publisher.” – Jonna-Lynn

“I will start by saying this; I am so glad I decided to go with Outskirts Press. I have done some pretty extensive research on different publishing companies and found that Outskirts Press was the best fit for me. In short, other companies seemed to be missing some key components to making my book successful. I sent my manuscript to Outskirts and it seemed to be a breeze from then on. The available options before, during, and after publication are outstanding and everyone seemed to be flexible as far as any changes that needed to be made. Let me leave you with this one final note; the success of your book largely depends on you, the author. Outskirts Press makes it ten times easier to navigate those roads.” – J. Evan Johnson

“From the minute of contact, my team at Outskirts Press helped me fulfill a dream. When I didn’t know how to send the files the right way, Rebecca was there for me. She spent hours putting it all together for me. Anytime I had questions she was there with the answers. Everyone was respectful and encouraging through the entire process, and each step was exciting. The day my author copies arrived, and I held my book in my hand, there were tears, but no words to express that feeling of completion. The book is beautiful, and the web page design is something to be proud of. I will use Outskirts Press for my next book. I could not have done this without everyone’s help. Now the Marketing COACH has been informative with tips and information. The sales sheet was a special treat and has been invaluable for advertising my book. This has been a Blessed journey from beginning to end, and I know we aren’t done yet. Thank you to everyone at Outskirts Press.” – Carolyn McBreen Gibbs

All last week and this week we’ve been discussing marketing methods to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. We have established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories from our Outskirts Press blog:

Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants

So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, bestsellers, and Virtual Book Tours.   Now we’re going to talk about winning a book award.

Winning a book award is kind of like getting on a “bestseller” list. There are so many “book awards” and so many “bestseller lists” that the sheer number of them have watered down their prestige and value.  It may be true that appearing on the New York Times bestseller list is just a wee bit more impressive than appearing on the Outskirts Press bestseller list.  No doubt.  And it may be true that winning “Gold” in the Reader’s Choice awards is less impressive than winning the Nobel Prize in literature.  No argument.

But do you know what is even less impressive than winning a “Gold” in the Reader’s Choice awards?

Not winning one.

Nothing against the Reader’s Choice awards, or the Writer’s Circle Awards, or the Ben Franklin Awards, or the Indie Awards, or the Best Book Awards, or the CIPA Awards, or the IPPY Awards, or the….. I could go on and on.  All these awards have merit and value because there are WAY more people who do not win any book awards than people who do.    And once you accomplish something that only the minority accomplish, it’s worth bragging about.  Isn’t that one of the cool things about publishing a book?

We think so, and that’s why we feature many of our award-winning authors both on our blog and in our iPhone app.  We love bragging about our authors’ successes.   We realize we’re never going to publish a Nobel Prize winner. And that’s okay.  But we do publish statistically more award-winning books than any other self-publishing firm, and as a self-publishing firm, that’s worth bragging about, too.

So, that’s another way to get featured in our iPhone app: Win a book award.    We make it easy for our authors to enter six vetted awards all at once with our Book Award Submissions package, but, as I mentioned above, there are literally hundreds of awards to pursue independently.

Speaking of which, we have our own book award (why wouldn’t we?) and authors who publish with Outskirts Press can be automatically eligible for the $1,500 grand prize, just like our 2010 Best Book of the Year award-winner Doris Kenney Marcotte.  For details about the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award, click here.

In the previous post I looked at the number or 4 or 5 star reviews received on Amazon for books published by the top 6 major online self publishing firms.  That chart is below again as a refresher.  This time the chart is in order from highest to lowest, which, admittedly, is how the previous chart should have been, too (rather than the order it was in, which was the order in which I conducted the research).

My conclusion was that Outskirts Press books and authors receive statistically more and statistically higher reviews on Amazon than our 5 competitors.  In fact, it’s not even close. 52% compared to the next highest, Publisher U at 37%.  Remember, I don’t mention our competitors by name, but it’s probably not too hard to decipher this table…

Reader reviews are all well and good — in fact, we’re proud to come out on top in this analysis —  but I was curious if there was a correlation between high book reviews on Amazon and results within a widely recognized and valued book award contest. So I browsed the results of the ForeWord Reviews BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS that were just listed in the July/August issue of ForeWord Reviews trade magazine to compare these same 6 companies:

What do you know? There is almost a direct correlation between the percentage of 4-5 star reviews on Amazon and the number of book awards won by a major book contest.

Not surprisingly, those publishers whose books received less than 25% 4-5 star reviews didn’t win any awards at all.  And this in spite of the volume/quantity advantage they have.  For instance, Publishers A and X publish approximately 2-4 times as many books as we do in a month, and Publisher L claims to publish about ten times as many.  Well, quantity doesn’t translate to quality, as you can see here.

I guess this also proves that Publisher L’s CEO was accurate when, in a 2009 New York Times article, he claimed that his company has “easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind.”

I don’t get the press that he gets (probably thankfully, because I’ve been known to put my foot in my mouth on occasion, too), so for the convenience of NY Times journalists everywhere, they are welcome to my analysis above, and this handy-dandy quote: Outskirts Press easily publishes better books, on average, than our five major competitors.

Actually, we seem to publish better books, on average, than any of our competitors. I searched the 2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Awards for all 20 of the publishers I’ve been posting about in the past and I couldn’t find any that can compete with Outskirts Press.

Just sayin’…

In my last post, when I set out to compare the “best self publishing sites” based upon four self publishing review sources, I applied a numeric value to each company based upon their relative ranking in each source. That resulted in the following average totals for the top 5 best self publishing sites, out of a possible 34 points:

Outskirts Press 30 Points
Company 3 24 Points
Company 5 19 Points
Company 2 13 Points
Company 14 13 Points

Upon looking at that data, I realized that some sources were weighted more heavily than others, since each source didn’t share the same value system. One had a 13 point value system while another had a 3 point value system. So for the purposes of this next chart, I will apply the same 10-point value system to all four self publishing review sources to give each source equal weight and therefore arrive at a more accurate total:

The way one does that is as follows:

TopTen Reviews already has a 10 point system, so the points there remain the same.

Top Consumer Reviews has an 8 point system, which means each point is worth 1.25 points to reach a 10-point system.

Top Self Publishing Firms has a 13 point value system, so to bring that into a 10-point system, each point actually is worth .77 points.

The Fine Print of Self-Publishing has a 3 point system, so each point becomes worth 3.33.

And that leaves us with this chart below, which, interestingly enough, is not significantly different from the previous chart I posted yesterday. Value is value. The best self publishing sites are the best self publishing sites:

Out of a possible perfect score of 40 points, the 5 best self publishing sites according to the combined data from four different review sources are:

Outskirts Press 33.41 Points
Company 5 23.93 Points
Company 3 22.47 Points
Company 14 16.83 Points
Company 6 12.82 Points

As stated in the last posting, I don’t name our competitors. That wouldn’t be very sporting to Company #13.  But it’s easy enough to tell who is who by reading Top Self-Publishing Firms. The order in that book determined the order I used — well, at least for the first 13.

Okay, okay, I hear some of you saying, “Yeah, yeah. You’re the president of Outskirts Press and you’re saying you’re #1. What a shocker!”  You’re right, as the CEO, I am biased toward this information.  Why shouldn’t I be?  After all,  I wouldn’t be blogging about this analysis if I was the CEO of Company 13.  But the fact that I’m involved with the #1 company doesn’t make the average scores any less valid; it just makes it easier to understand why I’m taking the time to write about it.  I’m proud of our company, our people, and our authors.

And that leaves me with this: As you are conducing your own search for the best self publishing sites, there are three things you should keep in mind as you do your research.  I’ll discuss those three things next time…

When researching the “best self publishing” options, the best course of action is often to identify a number of different sources, compile a scoring system, and then determine the average score of the self publishing companies to come up with the best company for you.  Why is looking at one source not enough? Because that one source may be unreliable for one reason or another. But when you combine multiple sources to arrive at averages, you have a much better chance of getting an accurate sense of the “best self publishing” company.

Let’s perform this analysis on 20 different self publishing companies using four different ”self publishing review” sources: Top Self Publishing Firms by Stacie Vander Pol, The Fine Print of Self Publishing by Mark Levine, TopTenReviews.com, and TopConsumerReviews.com.

Top Self Publishing Firms – There are 13 companies in the “Large and Medium” category in Stacie Vander Pol’s book, ranked from best to worse. So I applied a numeric value for each of them ranging from 13 (good) to 1 (not so good).

Fine Print of Self Publishing – There are 4 different categories in Mark Levine’s book:  ”Outstanding” companies get 3 points. “Pretty Good” companies get 2 points. “Just OK” companies get 1 point. And since “Publishers to Avoid” sounds worse than not being in the book at all, those companies lose a point.

TopTen Reviews – Ranks ten different companies so I will apply a numeric value for each one. The company they rank #1 will receive 10 points, the company they rank #2 will receive 9 points, and so on.

Top Consumer Reviews – Ranks 8 companies, I will apply a 8-1 numeric value.

Each of the 20 companies therefore receives a certain number of points from one or more of the sources. Add them up, divide by 4, and you have their AVERAGE score among all four review sources, listed in the right-most column.

And that leaves us with this analysis below (blanks indicate no presence in that particular source):

I don’t list our competitors by name in my blog, but it’s easy enough to see the companies I’m reviewing by referring to the sources I’ve mentioned above. And if you’re curious why the company names are not listed in order, it is because they are numbered in the order that they appear in Top Self Publishing Firms.

And that’s not even the point of this posting. The point is the concept of combining sources of information to arrive upon the “best self publishing” option.

Now if one were looking to find flaws in the data above, the easiest thing to say would be Top Self Publishing Firms is weighted too heavily and the Fine Print of Self Publishing is weighted not heavily enough because the former has a maximum of 13 points while the latter has a maximum of only 4 points.

Fair enough. So let’s apply a 10-point system to all four sources and see what that tells us next time…