branding – Page 8 – President of Outskirts Press

Outskirts Press Sponsors Colorado Humanities Colorado Book Awards

My last two posts have mentioned our recent “Best Book” winner, Irv Sternberg, and this post is no exception. The December promotion in which we sought one amazing manuscript to publish for free provided a wonderful opportunity to reward a talented author. And Mr. Sternberg provides a nice segue of sorts to this posting’s topic – which is about the Colorado Humanities and their annual Colorado Book Awards. You see, Irv’s prior book, Neptune’s Chariot, was a Colorado Book Awards finalist last year.

Tomorrow, the Colorado Book Awards are being awarded at the Doerr-Hosier Center in Aspen on June 25th, the last day of the week-long Aspen Literary Festival. Outskirts Press is a premiere sponsor of the Colorado Center for the Book and its Colorado Book Awards and I will be on-hand at the event to assist with the distribution of the awards. For a full list of the finalists, please visit the Colorado Humanities website here. Congratulations to them all!

branding, marketing, self publishing

Best Book announced

Waaaaay back in December, we ran a promotion looking for the best book submitted to us for publication in that month. The idea behind the promotion was to imitate a traditional publishing submission and publishing process — that is, to identify one single manuscript from among all the submissions we received and “accept it” for free publication and grant it an “advance” of sorts. I wrote about this in a previous blog posting in March.

Two days ago we announced the best book and the talented author in our most recent newsletter: The Persian Project, by Mark Irving.

Mark Irving is the pen name for Irv Sternberg, who has published two previous books with Outskirts Press, both of them regional bestsellers. And for those of you who fear I might be “letting the cat out of the bag” by revealing the author’s nom de plume, you can relax; Mr. Sternberg is open about his double-identity.

Congratulations, Irv!

Now we’re putting the finishing touches on a larger and more exciting “Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year” recognition program for 2010. We will hopefully announce it in July. The good news is that (unlike last year) this program will apply to all the Diamond or Pearl books we have published or will publish in 2010, not just those that come in after–or as a result of–this announcement.

branding, ceo

Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist

I found out last week that I am a regional semi-finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. I met with two folks from Ernst & Young along with one of the sponsors at the E&Y offices in downtown Denver last Monday for a one hour formal interview. I was asked to bring some marketing materials, some financial statements, and anything else I wanted to “show off” that best represented Outskirts Press. So, of course, I brought along some of our books.

After I summarized our history, our 5-year plan, and our most recent 3-year 850.5% revenue growth that was recognized by Inc. Magazine for their Fast 500 list, one of the Ernst & Young representatives told me that even before he knew I was a semi-finalist he had learned that a close friend of his was publishing her children’s book with Outskirts Press and enjoying the process immensely. What a nice surprise; and what a small world!

Ernst & Young are not judges of the EOY Award. That responsibility falls to another group of individuals who I will have the pleasure of meeting at a Thursday night reception at the Cherry Hills Country Club on the 29th.

branding, self publishing

Does self-publishing mix with the AWP Conference?

Last week the AWP Conference took place in Denver, Colorado. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and their annual conference is one of the largest of its kind in the country. An estimated 5000-7500 guests and exhibitors flock to the conference each year, which is held in various venues across the country. Last year it took place in Chicago and next year it takes place in Washington D.C.

The Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado was the venue for the 2010 conference, which is just a stone’s throw from Outskirts Press, on the outskirts of Denver in Parker. I attended the conference personally and Outskirts Press donated 5,000 copies of one of my books, Self-Publishing Simplified, for the AWP Conference goodie bags.

After all, if the exhibitors are any indication, this is a great place to reach writers. For example, the publishers for Writer’s Digest and The Writer were both there in person and I was pleased to finally meet them in person, considering our 5-year sponsorship of the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition Collection and the on-going advertising we place in The Writer magazine. All wonderful people. Some of my associates and friends from CIPA and SPAN were there as well.

Since I had never been to the conference before, I went somewhat incognito, to get a sense of the conference, the seminars, the speakers, and the attendees. The idea of sponsoring, exhibiting, or speaking — or a combination thereof — at a future conference has been suggested to me several times. Attending this one in Denver provided an opportunity to see if that would make sense.

And the verdict? It will depend upon results of the tracking code we put in the pages of the 5,000 free books we supplied.

And I’ll end this post with a related suggestion – if you give away free copies of your book or service or product for the purposes of marketing, always be sure there is a mechanism in place to track the results.

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.

branding, marketing

Logo creation

Speaking of our logo and graphic treatment, there are a wide variety of considerations. For example, our first logo (immediately below) has some good elements and some bad elements. I like that the “P” forms the spine and page curl of a book, but I dislike the “fine lines” that make up the “pages” and the “curve” of the book along the left side of the “spine.” These lines don’t make for a very flexible logo because they “lose resolution” depending upon their application.

For instance, we were never able to successfully embroider this logo because it just… didn’t work. Also, some lines of the logo are so thin that at 300 dpi (the standard print resolution for digital printing), they don’t retain their sharpness. Always working with a vector graphic may have prevented or limited some of these problems but the fact of the matter is that graphics turn into rasterized images so quickly when they go from person to person or department to department that it seems to be impossible to use a vector graphic for almost anything. Again, just an example of the realities of business getting in the way of the ideals of business.

So while we plan on retaining this logo, we also wanted a treatment for our company name that was standardized, consistent, and removed some of the technical hurdles imposed by the logo above.

When creating a logo or name treatment style guide, there are other considerations to keep in mind, like the size of the image itself. Our whole name, Outskirts Press, is a little long. It’s not 4 characters, like NIKE, where you don’t have to worry about the horizontal footprint. There are some applications where a horizontal placement is preferred, but there are other applications where a vertical (or, more appropriately, a “stacked”) treatment works better. So we needed both a horizontal and a stacked treatment:

Then you have to define colors (the hex, RGB, and CMYK valuations) of the colors of the logo. This leads you to the realization that you may need two color versions, depending upon whether your logo is on a “white” background (above) or a “dark” background (not shown).

Even these two graphics above don’t look exactly right (they’ve been rasterized into .jpegs; not sure if the RGB equivalent was used rather than just a quick conversion to RGB from CMYK, etc.). So the colors look a little “off” and even the height/width ratio looks off, perhaps so they would both fit side by side within the parameters of this blog template. Hey, I’m not the designer. But it just goes to show, everything is always just a little more complicated than it first appears…

branding, ceo, marketing

New graphic treatment for Outskirts Press

Speaking of Version 4 of our new website, tentatively launching this summer, Version 4 will also mark the “official” appearance of our new graphic treatment.

I say “official appearance” because the new “Outskirts Press” graphic already appears on our Twitter account, and by the time Version 4 launches, it will have also appeared in a number of advertisements, both offline and on. Recently we made the change to the masthead of our newsletter to feature it, as well.

And I call it a “graphic treatment” rather than a logo because we’re not ready to completely abandon our current logo:

This logo appears on the spines of too many books to erradicate it entirely.

But, we are interested in conforming to a more precise usage of our company name. Up until this “version 4 graphic treatment” our design style sheet as it relates to our company name has been… well… empty. In other words, we didn’t have a “style” for it, per se. Our name appears in one font on our publishing brochure, another in our guide, probably still another on our marketing brochure, and yet a different one on our website.

I may be exaggerating, but not by much. The point is, we were too busy growing by 850.5% to worry about things like “style sheets” for our name and logo. Is that the proper way to do things? Hard to say — one can’t argue with success. But it certainly isn’t the “common” way of doing things. When most businesses start, one of the first thing business owners or entrepreneurs do is invest time, resources, and money(none of which they have a surplus of) on “fun” things like logos, business cards, letterhead, shirts, hats, etc. And I don’t blame them. Doing all that stuff is a lot more fun than, you know… working.

Outskirts Press started in 2002 and only now, 8 years later, have we started to produce shirts, hats, pens and other promotional items featuring our company name. And yes, the creation of material products like that required the creation of a style sheet for our name, which I will get into more with a future post, but which I will also reveal here now…

branding, search engine optimization

Version 4 of OutskirtsPress.com self publishing

When I write this blog, I make every effort to avoid falling back on a topic involving my “day to day grind” because, frankly, the day-to-day grind isn’t all that interesting. Instead, I prefer for these blog postings to stay a little more strategic. But when I’m involved in large, time-consuming and complex projects every minute of every day, it becomes difficult to shift gears and talk about something else.

And currently, all my time and effort has been devoted to one of a number of large, complex projects. One being: Version 4.

Hey, look at this! Here’s another “insider” tidbit I can share… revealing some details about Version 4 of our website.

Last summer we launched Version 3, which was largely devoted to streamlining the pre-production and production process for authors self publishing their books through the services of Outskirts Press. Among the improvements were the online proofing process and the dynamic recommendations that help authors create custom packages that benefit from the experience of our previous authors.

Version 4 is tentatively scheduled to launch this summer and will piggy-back on many of the aesthetic and graphical improvements introduced in Version 3. With Version 4 will also come the “Wider” website. Up until now, our website has been designed for one of the lower native monitor resolutions of 800×600. Nearly no one uses that resolution anymore and as a result, our website sacrifices “real estate” that we could otherwise use to improve our author’s online experience.

Everyone has a theory about what the most common resolution is nowadays (it often depends upon the demographics of the website compiling the statistic or asking the survey question) since, in general, Mac users tend to use higher resolutions than PC users while “younger” users tend to have higher resolutions than “older” users.

But a common belief, also supported by our own personal user statistics, indicate that the vast majority of Internet users can receive website widths of 1000 pixels or wider. I’m not positive of the precise increase, but I think the width of our website will increase by roughly 200 pixels with the release of Version 4, and this gives us an opportunity to improve the pages “outside” of the Author’s Center also, something we didn’t do much of with Version 3.

There are some other exciting elements to Version 4 but it’s too early to reveal those…

branding, marketing, search engine optimization

Press Release Happy

Speaking of press releases, Outskirts Press was recently complimented when it was referred to as “press release happy.” That’s true! We are press release happy, and we are happy with the results of press releases. In fact, we have a systemized “Press Release System” to try to make the process of creating and distributing press releases as effective and efficient for both us as a company and all our authors as possible.

We send out three different types of press releases:

1. Standard Publication Announcement Press Releases

These press releases follow a very standardized formula of composition to ensure they contain all the necessary elements to announce the publication of a book, be optimized with keywords, and contain enough content to serve the author’s purpose. When you release as many of these types of press releases as we do (between 50-100 each month), it becomes necessary to standardize them both for consistency and quality control. Each of our Diamond authors receive one of these standard press releases included with the package; and therefore, the majority of the standard press releases we distribute are for our Diamond authors. Press releases help these authors draw attention to the publication of their book and also get their feet wet with the process of promotion by starting with a common initial tactic.

2. Custom Press Releases

These press releases are also exclusively for our authors and can be used either to announce the publication of the book itself, or any other special occurrence the author wishes to promote. They are custom drafted by one of our press release writers according to the wishes of the author. Unlike our standard press releases, the sole purpose of which are to announce the publication of the book, the custom press release can be used multiple times by the same author, to highlight author events, the winning of an award, or any number of other accomplishments.

I am always looking for ways we can improve our services for our authors and I feel one of those ways is in further educating authors that press releases are not ONLY for the publication of a book. Yes, the publication of a book is a good “excuse” to send out a custom press release, but the goal of any good press release should be to make the release news worthy; and in this day and age, the simple publication of a book is rarely news worthy on its own. The responsibility lies with the author and press release writer to come up with something more news worthy. On the other hand, when a book wins an award, or multiple awards, that makes better content for a compelling release, particularly at the local level. I am of the opinion that a Standard Press Release should be used to annouce the publication of a book and a Custom Press Release should be used multiple times to announce the accomplishments of the book.

The quantity of Custom Press Releases for authors that we send out every month varies, but is almost always less than the number of standard press releases we distribute (not surprising, really, since one is free with the Diamond package and the other has a cost to it).

3. Company Press Releases

The third type of press release Outskirts Press distributes are custom-drafted press releases focused on a new service or product or feature of Outskirts Press. We try to distribute one of these every Tuesday. Like all of our press releases, we have made efforts to systemize this PR schedule for the sake of efficiency, so there is a method to the madness. The first Tuesday of every month we will typically distribute a press release about our monthly promotion. The last Tuesday of every month we will typically distribute a press release about our bestselling books of the previous month. That leaves two or three remaining press releases that require a topic for each month.

This requirement, in turn, compels us to meet website enhancement milestones or introduce a number of new products and/or services each month. In other words, our press release schedule prevents us from becoming complacent and motivates us to constantly improve and grow. Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, press releases that are distributed throughout the Internet are good for optimization purposes. SEO and consistent service improvements? Who says you can’t kill two birds with one stone?

So, whether you’re an author or a business owner, if you’re not press release happy, maybe you should be….

branding, marketing

What’s in a name?

In a previous post I discussed the importance of naming your book, product or company in such a way as to optimize it for search engines on the Internet. You do this by infusing the name or title with keywords. Case in point: While I was in a grocery store the other day, I decided to test this hypothesis by examining the names of products. The majority of packaging demonstrate this tendency. I started to look a little ridiculous texting product names into my iPhone standing in the personal hygiene aisle, but here’s just one example of a product that has a keyword-infused name:

Right Guard Xtreme Fresh Blast Ultra Gel Anti-Perspirant Deodorant

That’s a mouth full, but I bet it comes up on an Internet search. Hey, if it works for Gillette, it can work for you…