Category: Brent Sampson

Brent Sampson, facebook, Social Networking Sites

Brent Sampson explains the Production Milestones Achievement Awards – The Approved Production Award

Now that we have unveiled our Facebook Self Publishing Achievement awards, the five categories, and the specific awards that are within each category, I will focus on each award over the next couple of months.   The categories are arranged in rough chronological order — it’s most likely an author will achieve an award within the first category (Production Milestones) prior to achieving an award in any other category. Likewise, an award in the second category is more likely to be achieved before an award in the third category, and so forth.

The first category, the Production Milestones, is currently comprised of five awards, with a sixth on the way.  Every author will win at least one award in the Production Milestones category for publishing with Outskirts Press (provided they “connect” their Facebook Account to their Outskirts Press account when prompted during the publishing process).  The Approved Production Award is achieved upon completion of a major Production Milestone, and one that is met by every publishing author. This is the stage at which all the pre-production steps have been completed, and the manuscript and all its customization is passed to our production department so the book can be designed, formatted, and completed in accordance with the author’s wishes.

Upon reaching and completing this important publishing milestone, our authors participating in our Facebook Achievements will be able to automatically notify their Facebook friends/fans/followers of their achievement, and they will receive the Approved Production Award from Outskirts Press.

We’ll talk about more Production Milestones next time.

Brent Sampson, self publishing

Brent Sampson analyzes the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Finalists and Public Poll Results

It’s been a number of weeks since Susan Mercer won the 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award with her workbook, Pathway to Math Proficiency: Mastering Equivalent Fractions, Decimals and Percents…with Ease. She was up against two other Outskirts Press finalists: Bolko Zimmer, author of Angelic Warfare: The Stones of Fire; and Glenn Skinner, author of The Keya Quests: The Battle for Shivenridge.

Since part of winning the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award requires the author’s tenacious book marketing efforts, it was interesting to watch the behind-the-scenes efforts these three authors employed in order to win, including email campaigns, Facebook “calls to action,” tweets galore, and professional urging within their career- and hobbyist-circles.  While both Susan and Glenn had published previous books with Outskirts Press before, this was Bolko’s first.  As a result, both Susan and Glenn had already established their “author platform” for their first books while Bolko had a lot of work to do to catch up — book marketing is not an overnight ordeal; it takes time to build your promotional platform so you can successfully call upon it when necessary. Yes, it’s true that self-publishing can appeal to the “instant gratification” seekers, because submitting a manuscript and hitting “publish” is so fast and easy nowadays.  But successful self-publishing takes time, perseverance, and professionalism.

Knowing that makes it easier to see why the public polls between the three finalists turned out the way they did, and demonstrates the importance of establishing an author platform and social media presence as soon as possible in your writing career.     Both Susan and Glenn’s previous books with Outskirts Press were also EVVY nominees and award-winners with various contests and those successes became building blocks toward a strong, foundational online presence, as well as a strong presence in their fields (education/math and fantasy fiction, respectively).  Our third finalist, Bolko, has already taken very important steps to establish his author platform.  He started immediately upon notification that he was one of the finalists.  Yes, perhaps a little too late in this particular case, but his book demonstrates all the characteristics of a talented writer – I’m confident he will be back in the running in the near future; and then, with his marketing prowess flexing its muscles, he will be prepared to shine. Congrats to them all!

Brent Sampson

Author’s message to Brent Sampson

I’m easy to reach. In fact, I reach out to all our new authors who haven’t selected their publishing service within 4 days of starting with us, since that typically indicates they’re either still writing or still researching their publishing options — and in either case I can help.  The result of communicating directly with our authors is that I often receive wonderful feedback from them, such as this email from Mike Sullivan:

“As my book enters the final stages, here is my view of the process. First, your staff was exemplary in responding to any questions I sent and I would highly recommend Outskirts to anyone.

Two suggestions: One, on the page with the trim selections, add a note that if your text is typed on 8 and 1/2 by 11, then the corresponding trim size is _____. Or instruct the writer to go into the documents, click size and convert to the desired trim size.  I was really confused by this but Stephen was very good at guiding me thru the steps.

Secondly, note that the Author ID#is also the Title ID#. Here’s why: I elected to buy the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook packages. Kindle wanted to know my Title ID#. It took several emails to Outskirts to find out the Title ID# is the Author ID#. The emphasis on email correspondence, not actually person-person, could be a little intimidating unless, like myself, I had thoroughly looked in all the options and knew exactly what I wanted. But that was a small point of concern.  On a scale of 1-10, you are an 11!!!!.

Thanks again, Mike Sullivan”

Mike’s right, there is sometimes a point of confusion for new authors when the “size” of their manuscript changes in physical size from the original word processor trim size of 8.5 x 11 to the more common book size of 8×5 or 6×9, and this change in size results in a greater number of pages for the final book (which affects the book’s pricing).  His suggestion is a good one and we do have a table that provides some of the most common page count ranges and their corresponding trim sizes to make that conversion easier (although, ultimately, we perform this conversion for our authors’ convenience).

His second point gives some indication of just how logistic the publishing steps can be (and why it is a good idea to go into it with a self publishing partner like Outskirts Press in your corner). The number Amazon was most likely seeking for his Kindle edition was probably either the book’s ISBN or AISN (the latter being Amazon’s own internal identification number);  since our Author ID and Title ID numbers are our proprietary internal numbers, external channels won’t require them (and with our services, we deal with all those technical details with Kindle and Nook anyway, although we help authors understand these processes if they so desire).  The Author ID is simply a 5 or 6 digit numeric number representing the order in which authors start their publishing process with us (it reached 6 digits when we passed 100,000 registered authors). The Title ID is that number with a corresponding letter (representing a specific book from that specific author). So, for instance, the Author ID for our Facebook Anthologies is 43646.  The Title ID for Fandemonium Volume 1 is 43646A and the Title ID for Fandemonium Volume 2 is 43646B.

Thank you for the great email and feedback, Mike.

Brent Sampson, ceo

Brent Sampson interview on LA Talk Radio

Before I get back to updating everyone on the recent happenings at Outskirts Press (Facebook Achievements, Book Your Trip to Hollywood options, the 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year contenders and winner, our new full-color illustrations, etc.), I wanted to provide a link to my recent appearance on LA Talk Radio, where Max Tucci (of Max & Friends) interviews me about self-publishing.

I even got a chance to put out some props to our Best Book of the Year winners (Doris from 2010 and Susan from 2011), which I always enjoy doing when possible.

Anyway, give a listen at this streaming audio link:  http://www.latalkradio.com/Players/Max-062412.shtml

blogging, Brent Sampson

Brent Sampson updates: Facebook Achievements

In an effort to catch up on my blog postings from the nearly two week hiatus I took due to other priorities and responsibilities, I’m providing brief summaries of some of the recent events and “goings-on” at Outskirts Press. One of the major initiatives we are launching this summer to help self publishing authors gain more exposure for their own writing, publishing, and marketing accomplishments is our FACEBOOK ACHIEVEMENTS.

For those who haven’t heard of the term “gamification,” this is the concept of motivating “action” in a user-base by providing awards and public recognition for accomplishing certain tasks — in essence, making a “game” out of something that is typically seen as more “mundane.”   Of course, the most common examples of “gamification” are seen in video games themselves, when you “level up” or pass a certain stage or build a certain character to a certain level of “experience points.”  These are gamification elements because they provide an award for accomplishing a task or passing a milestone.

Relatively recently, businesses have started applying the same concept to motivate clients and customers to take certain actions. Four Square recognizes its users with Major badges, for instance, when said users visit certain local businesses with enough frequency.

Our own gamification functionality has been in development for a while now and is going to launch live within the coming months. Yesterday we posted an invitation on our Facebook page for Outskirts Press published authors to volunteer for an open Beta Test of the awards program.  We’re looking for 20-40 volunteers to receive their first Beta Award in recognition and thanks for helping us test this new feature.  They will be provided with instructions on how to notify us if something doesn’t work quite right.  Then, when it launches, Outskirts Press will be connected automatically with a user’s Facebook account and will broadcast the author’s major publishing & marketing accomplishments to all his or her friends.  Of course, an author can easily opt-out of the program at any time.  Based upon preliminary feedback, our authors are excited about the new feature and we are excited to be launching it for them soon.

Brent Sampson

Brent Sampson blog updates

It’s been a while since my last post. June has been busy at Outskirts Press, with a lot going on, so priorities have not allowed the volume of updates to my blog that I would like. When I last posted, we were hosting our free social media webinar, which was our highest attended free webinar yet. Thank you to Elise in our Marketing Support group for putting that together for our authors and those from our social communities who registered.

Two days after that the polls closed on our Best Book of the Year contest and Susan Mercer was recognized as the 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award-winner. Congratulations, Susan!

That following Monday we opened up a “sneak peek” for our authors to our new Book Your Trip to Hollywood suite of services designed to help authors turn their books into movies or a television series. And the following Friday we launched those first two Hollywood services officially.

And yesterday we announced additional styles to our growing suite of custom, full-color illustration packages.  Yes, a lot has been going on as Outskirts Press continues to help authors write, publish, and market the book of their dreams. I’ll discuss all of these events in more detail in the coming days/weeks.