blogging – Page 5 – President of Outskirts Press

What is the most important thing an author should do to promote a book?

Sorry for the delay in updating. I had a bit of a medical situation when I was in New York.

Speaking of New York, I participated in two panels for writers last weekend. One was on all things “social networking” related and another one covered the topic of book promotion. On both panels, we (me and the other panelists) had the opportunity to answer questions from the audience. To benefit those who were unable to attend, I’ll report on some of the information that was shared on the panels along with some of the questions we fielded (and the answers, of course).

At the book promotion panel, the first question we received was this – perhaps a bit paraphrased: “You’ve thrown a lot of information at us. It’s all a little overwhelming. If we only had the time/money/resources/interest in doing ONE of the things you suggested, what would you recommend doing first?”

All three of the panelists and the moderator agreed upon the answer: You should have a website or a blog, not unlike this one. Most blogs can effectively act as an author website as long as you’ve added a widget or some other form of functionality to sell your book from it. Outside of that, as long as your book is sold on Amazon, your Amazon “sales page” can act as your website and accept book sales for you. Amazon’s sales page also posts reviews of your book and can broadcast your blog if you have one — by setting that up through your Author Central account, which I’m positive I’ve blogged about in the past.

The good news is, between your Amazon sales page and WordPress.com or Blogger.com, it is relatively easy and free to get started on the right path toward book promotion. The only cost is time. Blogging takes commitment. But it is also the one thing all the panelists agreed upon was the first most important thing you should do to promote a published book. Blog consistently, professionally, and respectfully. After all, you’re building your author platform, here.

I’ll talk about other things we covered on the panels in New York in future posts, along with more Facebook stuff as I promised.

blogging, branding, marketing, self publishing, Social Networking Sites

Social Networking Sites

Outskirts Press has its sights set on social network publishing this January as we launch our first ever “Facebook Anthology” set for publication this quarter. This is an opportunity for our Facebook Fans to submit material for free publication, just for being an Outskirts Press Facebook Fan. In my last posting I referred to this as an “experiment” and it is one. In fact, any social networking initiative or engagement is something of an experiment because it evolves in real time, with real participation by real people. It’s impossible to duplicate that in advance within a “testing environment.”

Engaging in social networking sites was one of my New Year’s Resolutions last year and it continues to be equally important this year.

So we are launching our Facebook Anthology experiment this month and we don’t know how successful it will be, or how engaged we can get our Facebook Fans to be. But it looks promising so far. Since announcing the Anthology on January 1, our Facebook Fan base has increased by 10%. Now it remains to be seen how many fans actually submit material for the anthology. Of course, it doesn’t help that Facebook makes the submission process somewhat convoluted. You see, in an effort to engage the “social” part of this anthology, we wanted to encourage our fans to submit their material directly through Facebook (as opposed to submitting it to us via email, for example). But, as a result, submissions are victimized by Facebook’s character limitations:

A “Wall Posting” has a character limitation of 1,000 while a “Status Posting” has a character limitation of 420. Since our fans are only allowed to post “Status Updates” on our wall, that means their submission is limited to 420 characters — not very many at all.

So the solution to this was to encourage them to Post a “Status Update” announcing their submission, and then Comment on their own Status Update to submit their actual creative content. You see, for some reason, Facebook allows 8,000 characters in the comments section, even though the status posts are limited to 420. Why? That’s a question for Mark Zuckerberg. While this is relatively easy to do in practice, it sounds overly complicated when just reading about it on a blog posting. It’s my hope we can encourage our fans to participate by stressing the “free publication” part and the fun social aspects of this anthology. It’s a fun, free, fast way to get published by Outskirts Press — and perhaps will allow new authors the chance to “dip their toe” into the self-publishing pool to see how it feels.

It is also my hope that many of our Facebook fans will appreciate the opportunity to donate to a worthwhile charity. You see, the royalties of this Facebook Anthology are going toward a charity that our Facebook fans themselves will vote on. And more on that next time….

blogging, branding, ceo, marketing

“How-To” Videos on YouTube for Self Publishing Authors

Over the past several posts I’ve been discussing different methods a writer — or anybody, really — can use to add video content to a YouTube channel for the purposes of self promotion, book promotion, company promotion, and/or search engine optimization. We have already discussed television commercials, book videos, book teasers, and platform videos.

The final method I’m going to discuss is the creation of “how-to” videos. These are typically low-budget, self-made, videos you shoot in the comfort of your own home using a home video camera, such as the affordable $200 “flip camera.” Set-up the camera on a mini-tripod aiming at your mug, add a main light source and a secondary light source (so both sides of your face are illuminated), and then record away.

So then the question becomes, what do you record? It depends upon the content of your book, or the purpose of your video channel. Non-fiction authors have an advantage here, since the content of their books are more conducive to “how-to” videos. But even fiction and poetry authors can create how-to videos by drawing a connection between the content in their books and a self-help concept. For example, an author of romantic fiction or poetry could record a series of “how-to” videos about how to behave on a first date, or how to dress for a fancy dinner, etc.

The point is, how-to videos are relatively popular on YouTube and do not need to feature expensive production values. In other words, the value is high in relation to the entry-barrier, which is low. Another good idea is to feature the work or ideas of someone else, and then provide the appropriate attribution. This serves two purposes: 1) it gives your videos some credibility and 2) it may even persuade that other individual or company to promote your video to THEIR marketing lists, increasing your video exposure tremendously.

Lisa Orrell, a marketing coach, did just that with her “how-to” video that discusses methods for increasing book sales on Amazon. Her video highlights ten of the tips I explain at length in my book Sell Your Book on Amazon. Instead of canniblizing my ideas, she plugs my book very nicely in her video, in such a positive manner, I’m likely to promote her video (and therefore her company) to my lists. Kinda like I’m doing now. The result? She creates a great video and gets further exposure for her business. In fact, the very nature of the way in which she leveraged these exact marketing concepts in her video impressed me so much that we partnered with her to offer a Social Networking Webinar to our authors. It’s coming up on November 2nd, and the details are in our blog here.

Here’s her “how-to” video:

blogging

The blog time vortex

One unfortunate aspect of writing so many blog entries at once and then scheduling them out into the future is that a lot of “new” stuff happens on a daily basis, and by the time there is a “break” in the blog schedule to discuss the new topic, a month has gone by, and what seemed “new” or “important” then just doesn’t hold the same weight later.

One example is the publication of the second edition of SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON, which has been available for a couple weeks now, but we were in the middle of the Entrepreneur blogs, which occupied about three weeks of blog entries. So it doesn’t seem so important to “announce” its availability now. But I probably will make a specific blog posting about it, just to highlight some of the differences between the first edition and the second edition.

And this brings me to the duration between my blog postings. I’ve done this pretty deliberately. I started this blog on January 1, 2010 and blogged every day. Then I moved to every other day. Now I’m at every 3rd day, which is where I plan to stay. One reason for this, obviously, is controlling the amount of time I devote to blogging. But another is that by blogging every 3 days and showing the ten most recent blogs on the screen at a time, it is easy to get a one-month snapshot of what’s happening in the world of self-publishing, entrepreneurism, and Outskirts Press.

Of course, in the 3-week span of time that we have been covering the Entrepreneur of the Year blogs, other things have happened, and some deserve their own blogging, too.

So, with that said, in the coming blog posts I’ll cover:

– SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON, second edition
– The semi-finalist reception for the Entrepreneur of the Year awards
– The publication of the Colorado Humanities Anthology
– The presentation of the Student Literary Awards
– A winner at the Student Literary Awards interviews me

Hmm, that’s good enough. That covers another half month, and by then, a whole new crop of things to blog about will come up.

blogging, branding, search engine optimization, self publishing

Self Publishing on the Apple iPad

I made a mistake with my last posting. Part of the topic of my last blog involved the Apple iPad and yet the title I chose for the blog was something about killing birds. This is what is known as “missing an opportunity.” As I have mentioned previously, blogs are wonderful for improving organic search engine optimization and one of the most important elements of a blog for SEO is the title.

But even though I was writing about a very popular and “trending” topic like the iPad, I mistakenly didn’t enter any of those valuable keyword opportunities into the title of my post. Instead, I chose a title that, to a human being means one thing, but to a computer means something entirely different — and as a result, my title, “Killing two birds with one stone” won’t attract the readers I’m trying to attract. It might attract some hunters, though.

So with today’s blog posting I have created a title better suited for the SEO I’m shooting for, based upon the popularity of the iPad. Our full-color conversion of Adventures in Publishing to ePub 1.0.5 should be done this week as should the indexing for Sell Your Book on Amazon 2nd Edition, which will allow us to also convert that for the iPad in our effort to introduce this new option for our authors.

I will also summarize my thoughts on the recent AWP conference I attended that took place in Denver last week, and the preliminary steps I’m taking as one of the E&Y EOY regional semi-finalists. And if those acronyms aren’t clear enough, they’ll be revealed in the near future… It is going to be another productive week at Outskirts Press.

blogging, branding

Branding your Twitter page

Let’s first take a look at the NFL’s Twitter page so you can see an example of what I discussed previously. Depending upon your monitor’s resolution, you will either see the NFL logo clearly visible and non-obstructed along the left-hand side of the “conversation” box. Or, if your monitor has a lower resolution, you may see part of the NFL logo “covered up” by portions of the Twitter page itself. Or, I guess a 3rd alternative is, now that the Super Bowl is over, the NFL people may remove or alter the logo entirely, and naturally, I don’t have any control over that.

Now that you’re looking at an example, the goal is to put something of YOURS on your Twitter page that will help you brand yourself on Twitter. With the example of the NFL fresh in our mind, we added our company’s name to our Twitter page on its side. Obviously, we would prefer for it to be “right-side-up” but then one runs into the issue the NFL experienced, with the graphic being obstructed or partly-obstructed by the Twitter box and/or Twitter logo. We have two versions of our “company graphic treatment” — a horizontal version and a “stacked vertical” version — but after experimenting with different lay-outs and sizes, this was what we settled on because it was the only one that looked consistently the same, regardless of monitor resolution.

And now this opens up a number of different topics for me to blog about in upcoming posts… 1) the creation and considerations involved in creating a graphic treatment for your company name by using ours as an example and 2) the details of adding a non-scrolling graphic to the background of your Twitter page.

I could cover some of that now, but I read in a recent Entrepreneur article — about “ghost blogging,” interestingly enough — that business/corporate blog postings are ideally supposed to be under 300 words in length. So, with that sage advice in mind, until next time….

blogging

Changing the name of your blog

At some point during my previous blog postings I was discussing the process of picking a template for this blog and placing some of the widgets along the side. In doing so, I think I’ve arrived upon the WordPress blog template that I like the most, although the one element I don’t like so much about it is the “Leave a comment” link at the top. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could actually leave a comment, but as I referred to in a previous post, I’m not positive I have time to do comments justice, so they are turned “off.” My Board of Directors keeps telling me I don’t even have time to do a blog justice, and they’re probably right.

As a result, the “Leave a comment” link that is so inviting up there at the top but doesn’t actually do anything is kind of annoying. As George Castanza said on Seinfeld, “Why must there always be a problem?”

I also referred to the fact that, when “naming” my blog, WordPress advised me I could change it any time I wanted. Of course, I further detailed my inability to find the procedure by which one changes the name and came to the conclusion that I was simply stuck with my original blog name, which, when I registered this blog with WordPress was: CEO Self Publishing Start-Up OutskirtsPress.com

Lots of keywords? Yes. Grammatically correct? No.

Well, by browsing the “help” and forums of WordPress (hence my stumbling upon that “Write a Book” link” which I mentioned in a previous post), I was able to learn about the General>Settings page, although I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to find it on the screen even when I knew precisely what I was looking for.

But I digress. The short story is that I simply added the word “of” to the name and now the name of my blog, at least today as I’m writing this, is a more grammatically-correct, and still keyword-filled: CEO of Self Publishing Start-Up OutskirtsPress.com.

What does “keyword-filled” mean? It means those are the keywords I envision the intended target audience of this blog typing into a search engine and then finding my blog as a result.

For instance: CEOs and executives may be interested in some of the things I write because I’ll touch upon things like social media confidentiality, trade secrets, M&As, recession-proofing your business, and the like.

And people searching for “self publishing” may be interested in some of the things I write because there is a lot of confusion and misunderstandings about the term; savvy authors exploring all their publishing options are wise to get as many different perspectives as possible to make an informed decision.

And people searching for the phrase “start-up” may be interested in some of the things I write about because I’ll talk about running a company with a 3-year growth percentages of 1000%+, balancing work and a personal life – what personal life? – and managing the obstacles that presents themselves – and the solutions that are required – when you outgrow your credit card processor and your website hosting company all in the same quarter, for example.

Although, on one hand, Outskirts Press was never in “start-up” mode, per se, because that implies angel investors, securing VC rounds, losing control and board seats, etc – and none of that applied to us, which makes us relatively unique and is also something, perhaps, people searching for “CEO” and “start-up” might find interesting. On the other hand, EVERY company should always view themselves in “start-up” mode to some extent — because every day should be an agressive struggle to improve and thrive. On the first hand again, it may be selling ourselves “short” to refer to Outskirts Press as a “start-up,” because… well, for all those reasons I mentioned above. I think maybe I will replace it with a reference to our Inc. 500 placement, which has the potential to attract the same keyword searches– and therefore the same audience– as “start-up” anyway, and is more accurate. And cooler, too.

Now that I think of it, I may want to add “Best-selling author” to the name of my blog, too, but that presents a whole host of considerations, which I’ll get into later…