Today, August 1st marks an exciting new chapter for Outskirts Press, with the launch of our new RWD website. Over the past year I have been blogging periodically about our transition to Responsive Web Design, which, according to Wikipedia, is “an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).”
But, more important than a cosmetic change are all the new enhancements and improvements that have been made to our client services and publishing services, as well. Gone are the “old” publishing packages known as the Pearl, Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald. Now we have all-new packages with all-new names — names that more clearly communicate their hierarchy to one another: Ultimate, Basic, Economy, and Full-Color. Over the coming days I will be discussing these new custom, a la carte publishing packages in more detail.
Our One-Click Publishing Suites remain largely unchanged, with one notable exception — the introduction of the One-Click Publishing for Non-Fiction Suite, which is (as its name implies) the perfect bundle of professional services for all non-fiction books.
In recognition of this exciting new One-Click package, Outskirts Press is offering an introductory price savings of $500 for this first week of August only. The details for all our monthly promotional features can be found on the rotating image header on the front page of our site (which is also a new feature in itself).
When you’ve been in the self-publishing business as long as we have, a lot of things change — including website conventions (hence the RWD site) and client needs. When I founded Outskirts Press in 2002, one of our primary jobs was explaining what we did. Back then, the notion that we could take anyone’s manuscript and publish it and get it up onto Amazon seemed like magic to a lot of people. So our “old” website and marketing out-reach did a lot of explaining of that concept.
Nowadays, nearly everyone is aware of their opportunities to self-publish a book. They no longer need us to explain what self-publishing is, but rather, they need us to demonstrate why self-publishing with Outskirts Press is a better value for them than self-publishing elsewhere. Fortunately, this is a relatively easy thing to demonstrate in many ways, not the least of which is simply showing potential clients our hundreds and hundreds of testimonials.
In any event, this change to our basic approach affects not only the overall design of the new website, but the publishing services we now provide to our clients, as well.
In our 14 years of experience, we have learned first-hand that informed authors lead to successful books. So our new publishing packages all include Book Publishing Tip Sheets, which are a collection of various articles, lists, and whitepapers filled with best practices about everything from better book titles to taking the perfect author photograph.
When Outskirts Press makes publishing a book so easy, it becomes easy for authors to forget an equally-important part of the self-publishing journey: book marketing. Our famous and exclusive Marketing COACH is in the process of being improved as we speak (improving 2+ years of information is a daunting task). And to complement the COACH emails, our new publishing packages all include The Book Marketing RoadMap, an informative series of articles and whitepapers focused on providing complimentary marketing advice to our valued clients after their book has been published.
This blog posting of what’s new is already becoming longer than I planned (because so much is new), so let me just quickly rattle off some additional new features:
- additional proofing rounds
- additional image insertions
- new cover themes (plus new covers designed specifically for children’s books)
- new author webpages with social media integration
The list of what’s new and improved goes on and on. So, what’s new at the New Outskirts Press? A whole lot, as it turns out, and I’ll get into the details of all these new improvements in the coming days and weeks.
President of Outskirts Press 