March 2010 – Page 2 – President of Outskirts Press

marketing, publicity, search engine optimization

Distribute press releases

Once you have an award or some form of “recognition” to promote, either about your book or your service/product/company, you should distribute a press release electronically through the Internet. Not only do distributed press releases that contain links back to your author or company website often appear high in organic search results in their own right, but they also help with optimizing your author or company website, too.

There are a number of ways to distribute press releases, ranging in cost from $0 -$800 or more. As with everything, you get what you pay for. The free press release distribution services are appealing for self-published authors on a budget because they increase the exposure of your book, although not to the extent of a paid-for service like prweb.com.

The free press release services may also be appealing for your company PR distribution needs, although you may find yourself shying away from the free services due to an extreme case of Adsensiphobia (TM).

Adsensiphobia is experienced by marketing people when they are faced with the dilemma of directing potential customers to a website on which some of their competitors may be advertising (either via banner ads or contextual text ads in a Google AdSense box). Free PR distribution services are notorious for this, as are MySpace, YouTube, and many other “Web 2.0” websites. I fear a day will come when Twitter decides it needs to monetize its traffic via AdSense, as well.

Ultimately, however, altering your marketing initiatives due to adsensiphobia is self-defeating and, in the long run, pointless. Thanks to XML, even distributing your press release through paid distribution services like PRWeb doesn’t protect you, since some AdSense-specific websites exist solely to pick-up the XML feed from PRWeb AND display contextual AdSense links (which probably include links to your competitors). If your book or company has proven to be profitable for AdSense advertisers, there is no getting around it; and by refraining from distributing to every possible outlet solely because of adsensiphobia, you are really only shooting yourself in the foot.

If you are marketing a company and experiencing adsensiphobia, ask yourself this… is it realistic to believe that your potential customers have never heard of your competitors? People don’t drink Perrier because they are unaware of tap water. They drink Perrier because Perrier has established its value to its customers.

self publishing

2010 Inc 500 Applications

Speaking of awards, Outskirts Press has completed its application for the 2010 Inc. Magazine Fast 500 Awards. Last year we placed #268 on the list with a three-year revenue growth of 850.5%. The Inc. Fast 500 recognizes the 500 fastest-growing private companies in America.

As you consider whether or not your company should apply, there are some eligibility requirements: In order for companies to be eligible, your 2006 revenue needed to be at least $100,000 and your 2009 revenue needed to be at least $2 million. There is a $100 application fee, and the application (including revenue verification) takes a little bit of time. You can apply at the Inc. website.

It’s unclear whether your customers will truly consider your Inc. 500 standing very important because, like most things, importance is connected with awareness, and the Inc. 500 list is marketed to — in other words, “in front of” — other business owners and entrepreneurs more so than it is “in front of” your customers — unless your customers ARE entrepreneurs, of course.

I mentioned in a previous post that writing and publishing a book is a great way for business owners or entrepreneurs to establish expertise and market a company, so in that respect, our specific Inc. 500 ranking among other fast-growing companies might be important to some potential new writers. But like all awards you might win, what becomes more important is what you do with the recognition once you achieve it — how you market that success to your potential customers. And I will discuss that more as we continue the examination of how marketing a book is similar in many ways to marketing a company…

publicity, self publishing

Seek awards and/or recognition for your book or company

Another tactic both the book promoter and company marketer can do is seek awards. “Contests and Awards” are an industry onto itself, and there are awards and contests for just about everything under the sun, like “happiest employees,” “best places to work,” “best benefits,” “most profitable,” “minority-owned,” “largest headcount increase,” “best website design,” “CEO of the year,” “entrepreneur of the year,” “best invention,” “best product,” etc., etc… The list goes on and on.

The options are just as endless for published writers seeking book awards. From widely recognized and established contests like the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards to local contests being held for members of small writing groups, published authors have a daunting list of contests and awards to consider pursuing.

Adding insult to injury, most of the contests have entry fees, so not only is it a matter of time, there is also a financial investment one is making when choosing to pursue these recognition programs. For companies, the fee is often nominal, but for an author faced with thousands of contests each costing between $10 – $400 each, it becomes important to separate the wheat from the chaff.

For example, in an effort to help our authors successfully and conveniently pursue valuable awards and contests, Outskirts Press offers an optional Book Award Submission Marketing package that includes all the details associated with submitting books to 6 widely recognized and established book awards, including the Writer’s Digest award mentioned above, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year award, and 4 more. As I often say, this isn’t something an author can’t do himself — double negative alert! — but it matters not whether published authors take advantage of marketing services offered by their respective publishers, or seek award entry independently; the important point is that authors do it, one way or the other.

For a convenient way to search for awards or contests to enter, visit www.awardsync.com

Winning an award gives you “something to say” and when it comes to marketing a book or a company, having “something to say” is worth its weight in gold, as we’ll discuss next time…

Amazon, marketing, self publishing

Give incentive for people to buy your product or service

Whether you are promoting a book or promoting a company, you need to give people incentive to buy. Just making it easy isn’t quite enough (although it is an important component). Not only must the purchase process be easy, it must be urgent. You create urgency through the use of promotions, discounts, or other incentives.

One of our competitors does this very well. They inflate their prices to $13,000 so they can offer a $7000 discount. Do authors fall for this? Of course. It looks great on a Flash banner; and it is a savvy person who can look past the flash — pun intended — and identify the true value, or lack thereof.

Books sell better with incentive, too. The most typical incentive is a discount or a “sales price” and in the majority of the cases, this type of promotion is handled by the retailer rather than the author herself. Amazon does discounting very well. They discount books in a variety of ways. Not only will they often discount a single book by eating into their own margin, but they also pair similar books together and then offer discounts if the customer orders BOTH books. My book Sell Your Book on Amazon discusses how authors can use this functionality of Amazon to their advantage.

marketing, self publishing

Make it easy for people to buy your product or service

In continuing our current discussion about how book promotion is similar to company marketing we arrive upon a step that can oftentimes single-handedly mean the difference between success and failure. It’s a proven fact. If something is too hard, most people won’t do it.

Amazon.com is a perfect example of this. They have “perfected” the process of online product sales. It is almost TOO easy to buy things on Amazon. How many of us have gone to Amazon to make a single purchase and by the time we’re “checking out” we’ve added one or two additional items? Amazon is the ultimate product sales “person.” This is actually the cornerstone to my book Sell Your Book on Amazon, but you can see examples of “good” selling processes and “bad” selling processes all over the Internet.

I recently saw an article in Entrepreneur discussing a new technology/service company. I recognized the potential it might hold for published authors and so, to experiment with it on our author’s behalf — I have said in the past that I often use myself as a guinea pig for tactics I feel our authors should pursue — I signed myself up to the tune of $29 each month.

Sure, giving them that initial $29 was relatively smooth, but the instant the “credit card cleared” their site seemed to break and I couldn’t log-in to their customer center. A day later I received an email that I could log-in. Apparently they were handling payments manually. Not ideal, but okay. Once I logged-in, however, I was confronted with a non-intuitive “dashboard” that, I’m sorry to say, gave me WAY more credit than I deserved. It made assumptions about my depth of knowledge and asked me questions that I didn’t know the answers to regarding the service they were offering. What’s more, there wasn’t a “help button” or instruction manual or “contact us” link to be found.

In short, they were not making it easy to buy their product or service… Almost impossible, I’d say.

As a company that conducts 100% of our business through our website, we have considerations like this all the time at Outskirts Press. We spend “scads of dough” on website design, optimization, usability, etc., in an effort to make the process as enjoyable as possible for our authors. We’ve come a long way. And we have a long way to go. Our site has tons of information but here’s an interesting fact — people don’t “read” websites, per se. They skim. They browse. The trick is communicating information visually.

Amazon does this very well nowadays. I recently saw a “running example” of what Amazon.com looked like in the 90s. As they say: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

It’s a fine line between improving the customer experience, and constantly changing the website to improve the website, which, ironically, customers don’t like, either. Very few people “like” change.

So how does this consideration translate to book promotion and book sales? It’s a changing world, and people are “using” books in different ways, now. It used to be that there were just “paperbacks” and “hardbacks.” Then, “ebooks” became another format to consider. Nowadays, simply calling something an “ebook” isn’t specific enough, as there are multiple formats and multiple platforms to consider — Kindle books, Sony Reader books, Nook books, iPad books, Stanza books, Espresso Book machine books… the list goes on and on.

“Make it easy for people to buy your product or service.” At Outskirts Press, one of the ways we do that as a company is by making it easy for readers to buy our authors’ books, in as many different platform choices as possible. To that end, we offer options for paperbacks, hardbacks, general ebooks, Kindle editions, and Espresso Book machine editions. Thanks to the Kindle app, our Kindle books are also available on the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad; and we’re working on optional methods for our authors to get their books in front of the Sony, Stanza, and Nook crowds, too.

When an author’s book is available in whatever manner a customer wants it, that is the definition of “making it easy for people to buy your product.”