branding – Page 6 – President of Outskirts Press

Getting your Apple Developer Certification

Okay, it was a long time coming, but once Outskirts Press was confirmed as a company in good standing by Apple through the beginning portion of their enrollment process, we were able to continue the process of actually getting our certificate. Here are the steps:

First, log-in to either http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action or a short-cut of http://developer.apple.com/iphone (which takes you to the same place).

Along the right-hand side in a section headlined “iOS Developer Program” are four choices:

iOS Provisioning Portal
iTunes Connect
Apple Developer Forums
Developer Support Center

Click on the first one, iOS Provisioning Portal, a “title” that demonstrates by its very nature that Apple is run by a bunch of IT people. “iOS Provisioning Portal…” Really, Apple? Who named that? I’ll get into the problem with such a name (and why it happens a lot in software) tomorrow on a small aside…

branding

Apple developer certification process back on track

For those of you following our process at Outskirts Press to apply for Apple developer certification, the lesson to take away so far is to make sure that your online information you supply to Apple exactly matches the information on the official documentation you will be supplying to Apple upon their request. We omitted the “Inc.” from our name on the online form and our address had changed in the 8 years since we incorporated with the Secretary of the State. Alone they apparently would have been reason enough for Apple to either deny the certification or at least slow it down — and together the technicality caused a 6 week delay in the launch of our Outskirts Press app.

But, I’m happy to say the process is now continuing. True to their word, they expedited our approval process once we completed the online enrollment again, this time exactly matching the information on our Articles of Incorporation. Once they confirm your identity, you receive the following notification via email:

You can now continue the Apple Developer Program enrollment process by reviewing and agreeing to the Program License Agreement. You must click through this agreement in order to purchase or complete your enrollment in an Apple Developer Program(s).

Upon reviewing and approval the License Agreement, which is Apple-esque in its one-sidedness, you can “Purchase” the iOS Developer Program for $99 plus tax. Then, you receive this email notification:

Thank you for joining the iOS Developer Program. You now have access to a comprehensive set of development tools and resources to assist you in developing innovative apps.

Think we’re done? Nope, not even close. Up next…

Amazon, branding, self publishing

How to add a video to your Amazon Author Central account

If you’re a published author with a book on Amazon, you need to have an Author Central Account. And if you don’t yet have a published book on Amazon, it’s time to get published.

Here’s how to add a video to your Author Central account:

1. Sign-in or register at http://amazon.com/authors

2. Once your are signed-in click on your Profile button.

3. Along the right-hand side under “Photos” is a section headlined “Video.” Click the “Add Video” link and browse the contents of your hard drive to upload a video. It must be under 10 minutes in length and under 500 MB.

In fact, that’s a good rule of thumb for any internet video. In fact, 10 minutes is a bit too long.

If you don’t have a video to upload, you may be interested in our Book Video and Distribution option, which you can order by clicking here. It’s available to writers and professionals regardless of where you published your book (although you’ll get a substantial discount if you’ve published the book with Outskirts Press).

branding, self publishing, self publishing a book

Self publishing book awards

The finalists for the Outskirts Press 2010 Best Book of the Year Awards were announced on our Outskirts Press blog on March 31st.

They are:

The Key To Job Success In Any Career, by Frank B. Leibold, Ph.D.
Psych Consults, by Robert J. Mignone, M.D., F.A.P.A.
The Beads of Lapis Lazuli, by Doris Kenney Marcotte

All three finalists have an equal chance to win the $1,500 Grand Prize and receive the honor of publishing the Best Book of 2010 at Outskirts Press. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow on our Outskirts Press blog at http://blog.outskirtspress.com we are highlighting each author and their respective book, including any multi-media or additional marketing efforts they have put forth, in the way of extra editions (hardbacks, Kindle, Espresso, etc.), book videos, teasers, or audio recordings, etc. A successful book means a sound marketing plan.

Then, on Thursday of this week we will summarize the finalists and encourage members/readers of our social media networks to vote on their selection in an open poll that will start on Friday, April 15th. More on that process later today…

branding

YouTube Channel Branding

With Facebook branded, the next step was to brand our channel on YouTube. I’ve blogged in the past about setting up a channel on YouTube that gives you the degree of design control I will focus on now, so I won’t reiterate that part. But basically, YouTube provides much more control over the look and feel of your “page” than Facebook does. You can alter the background color, the background graphic, and even the transparency of the “borders” of your channel lay-out.

For Outskirts Press, our focus was the “write.publish.market” graphic and tagline I mentioned last time in relation to branding Facebook. Now, rather than being limited to the small, 180 pixel-wide graphic imposed by Facebook, we had the freedom to upload a graphic as wide as a computer monitor. There are two tricks to doing this correctly:

1) You have to account for different monitor resolutions. Wikipedia suggests that 76% of Internet users view at a resolution higher than 1024 x 768 and 20% see at a resolution of 1024 x 768. So by designing your YouTube background graphic (or your website, for that matter) at a resolution optimal for 1024 x 768 you are optimizing the experience for 96% of Internet users. Granted, this statistic probably doesn’t involve the growing trend of viewing websites like YouTube on mobile devices, which shoot the computer monitor trends out the window, but that’s a topic for a different day.

In our case, we created a graphic that looked good at 1024 x 768 as well as higher resolutions and then used a “gradient” to bleed out to a solid background color at the sides and bottom. That way, even if someone was looking at the background at a very, very high resolution, the graphic wouldn’t just end abruptly or, (even worse) repeat in an unaesthetic way.

2) The second concern is coping with the content. Since the background is fixed-center (unlike Twitter, which is fixed-left, and we’ll talk about that next), the YouTube background needs to be designed in three parts — the left, the right, and the top — and then “combined” together around the content table. This is because the background or “banner” portion of the background is visible above the YouTube channel content. This banner needs to be 960 pixels wide and designed to exactly match the edges of the left and right portions where it they all touch each other.

Our first design of the banner involved an animating .gif that alternated between “write anything,” “publish everything,” and “market everywhere.” Unfortunately, the banner cannot be an animating .gif image (come on, YouTube, why not?). Therefore, only the first frame of the animating graphic displayed. I briefly toyed with the idea of alternating the three “key frames” of the animating graphic every week or so, but instead opted for the shorter version of our tagline: “write.publish.market” and that’s the banner you see below, on our new YouTube channel, revealed here for the first time:

It carries over the branding message and repeats the characters of the Facebook graphic, and those from our website index page, while also taking advantage of the greater design controls afforded by YouTube.

Maybe in time Facebook will offer this degree of freedom, although perhaps not; one reason MySpace is so terrifying to visit is due to the design freedom is affords. Many MySpace pages are just plain fugly, which reminds us all that just because someone “can” do something themselves, doesn’t mean it is being done correctly, professionally, or aesthetically.

Hey, what do you know– that’s what we often say about self-publishing. Sometimes, it’s better to let the experts handle it.

branding, self publishing, Social Networking Sites

Adding Facebook Plug-ins to your Author Website

Last time I suggested that having an author website, webpage, or blog was the single most important aspect of promoting a book after it is published. This was also the consensus of the “Promote Your Book” panel I was on during the recent Writer’s Digest conference in New York. This next suggestion is admittedly further along the “promotion tactic timeline” but is worth mentioning now for a number of reasons. For one, this is also a suggestion I made while at the conference, albeit to the attendees of the other panel I was on, involving social networking. And secondly, we just recently performed this enhancement to our site at Outskirts Press.

In fact, as you surf the Internet, you may notice this specific functionality cropping up more and more, on a wide variety of sites, both informational and commercial in nature. What functionality am I talking about? The Facebook “Like” button. By adding a Facebook “Like” button to your own web presence you give your visitors an opportunity to interact with your site in a “fun” easy way that they are already accustomed to. Additionally, their act of “liking” your site is reported on their Facebook account to their friends, which theoretically helps increase your exposure.

We recently added “Like” buttons on our site for all our products and services. We haven’t yet invited our Facebook community to visit our site and tell us which services or products they like, but that is a recommended course of action once you add the “Like” functionality. After all, the benefit of adding this functionality is so that people recognize that a large number of other people “like” what you have to offer. And, of course, when you first add the functionality, the number of “Likes” is zero. So you want to take steps to increase that number.

The good news is that Facebook makes adding this functionality very easy. They offer a variety of “plug-ins” that are easy to add to your site. Just go to developers.facebook.com and see if any of their plug-ins will help you. Of course, gettting a large and growing number of people to “like” what you offer is a different challenge entirely. If only Facebook offered a plug-in for that…

branding, ceo, publicity, self publishing a book, Social Networking Sites

Cause marketing, philanthropy, and charitable donations from book royalties

In past postings I have discussed Outskirts Press’ donations to organizations like Children’s Hospital, Make a Wish Foundation, the Education & Literacy Foundation, and others. And in the last posting I discussed more specifically our specific donations to the Colorado Humanities, and the publication of their Anthology, the royalties from which go in support of Colorado Humanities and the Center for the Book.

And this brings us to another way in which Outskirts Press seeks opportunities to give back to the community. Outside of purely philanthropic pursuits, or cause marketing tactics, donating the royalties of a book can serve two purposes: good will and good marketing. In our case, we will donate the royalties of book sales that come from the sale of our first Facebook Anthology, which is a collection of short stories, poems, and excerpts from our many Facebook Fans. We have been collecting contributions and submissions to the anthology since the first of the year on our Facebook page.

Then, on January 1oth we invited all our Facebook fans and blog readers to vote on the title of the book. Then, on January 12th, we opened the voting to determine the Charity that would receive the royalties. I still don’t know who “won.” It was our hope that by giving writers the opportunity to get published for free AND give to a worthwhile cause at the same time, interest in our Facebook Anthology would be high. That philosophy turned out to be correct. Our Facebook fan base shot past 1,000 fans almost literally overnight and continues to build.

Good deeds can become good marketing, or even, in this case, good marketing can turn into good deeds. We thank all our Facebook fans for their support. And I’m sure the “winning” charity will thank them as well.

branding, ceo, publicity

Cause marketing and corporate sponsorships

Over the past two years Outskirts Press has donated $15,000 to the Colorado Humanities and Center for the Book. They hold two annual literary contests: The Student Literary Awards, and the Colorado Book Awards, both sponsored by Outskirts Press.

In fact, today marks the deadline for the River & Words Poetry and Art contest, the winners of which are recognized at the Student Literary Awards. And the deadline for the Colorado Book Awards is January 15th. Visit the Colorado Humanities website for more information, to participate, donate, or join.

And just like that we have another example of the gray area between philanthropy and cause marketing. Yes, Outskirts Press’ donations to the Colorado Humanities have been for a good cause, and tax deductable. Yes, as a Colorado-based corporation, we join Colorado Humanities in their mission to inspire the people of Colorado to appreciate their diverse cultural heritage.

And, by sponsoring the events, getting signage at the events, logos on their websites, attending the events, and in all other ways partnering with Colorado Humanities throughout the year, this is a perfect example of cause marketing — a for-profit business collaborating with a non-profit to a mutually beneficial end. These benefits are both obvious ($15,000) and more subtle (numerous mentions throughout our social networks, including suggestions for donations – above).

Such collaborations can sometimes lead to exciting by-products. In this case, for example, last year’s publication of the 2010 Student Literary Awards Anthology – the royalties for which went to the Colorado Humanities and Center for the Book.

And speaking of book royalties going to charitable organizations, that is the topic for my next posting…

branding, ceo, marketing, partnerships, publicity

The difference between “cause marketing” and “philanthropy”

Or, I guess I should really call this posting “The little gray area between cause marketing and philanthropy.”

Cause marketing, basically, refers to a mutually beneficial relationship between a for-profit business and a non-profit organization. The term more broadly encompasses any marketing endeavors involving charitable causes. Philanthropy, on the other hand, simply involves a corporate donation to a non-profit charitable organization (usually tax deductible).

I mention this because in my mind Outskirts Press has always been a philanthropic organization that is also involved in cause marketing. I’m not sure I agree that the two terms are mutually exclusive, or perhaps, if they are, that simply demonstrates a lack of effort by the P.R. department of the philanthropic organization.

For example, you can donate thousands of dollars in books to the Children’s hospital — as Outskirts Press has done in the past through its involvement with the Children’s Literacy and Education Foundation — and that can be both a philanthropic act (a pure corporate donation), and can also fall within the definition of “cause marketing” once you mention the donation on a blog or among your social networks, since ostensibly, your company is marketing the good will among your clients or customers that results from charitable donations.

In our case we would typically write and distribute a press release about the donation. And we would take (and subsequently circulate across our social networks) a photograph of the red wheelbarrow full of books in front of the Children’s Hospital logo.

You see, philanthropy AND cause marketing. I have other examples I’ll discuss next, including our donations to the Colorado Humanities, and our upcoming Facebook Anthology – the royalties for which go to a charitable organization.

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….