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Facebook Production Achievement Awards for Self-Publishing

Last month I discussed the first category of our Facebook Self Publishing Achievements with Outskirts Press, which began with this posting in which I revealed all five categories, all 20 awards, and some planned awards for the future.

The first category are the Production Milestones. The second category are the Production Achievements.

Unlike Production Milestones, it is possible to completely publish a book without receiving one single Production Achievement Award; although, since both the highly recommended custom cover and professional copyediting options earn Production Achievement Awards, it’s not recommended.

In fact, quite the contrary. It would be in almost every author’s best interest for his or her book to earn EVERY Production Achievement Award with each publication, since these achievements help identify the specific production options that can literally make or break a professional, high-quality publication.

The exception to this is the Achievement Award for custom illustrations, since many books don’t require that particular service. But otherwise, every author would be well-served to sweep the Production Achievement Awards category by getting the awards for Custom Cover, Copyediting, and Enhanced/Custom interior.

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Self Publishing Achievement Awards – Publishing Service Awards

On July 26th I revealed our Facebook Achievement Awards, the Outskirts Press “gamification” functionality we are currently rolling out to incentivize our authors to publish their books and have fun at the same time. There are 5 categories within our self-publishing achievement programs, and over the next couple weeks/months I’m focusing on each award in each category.

I’ve discussed three of the achievements in this category already. The remaining awards are specific to publishing services, and are relatively self-explanatory. Authors publishing under the Diamond package receive the Diamond achievement and authors publishing under the full-color Pearl package receive the Pearl achievement.

Once we have fully rolled-out these achievements and determine they are adding value and a “fun factor” for our authors, we will add an additional award to this category for authors publishing with one of our One-Click packages. Currently we have two separate One-Click packages, one designed specifically for coaches & speakers, and another designed specifically for children’s book authors.

Since an author cannot receive two package awards with the same book, this category requires publishing at least two books to “sweep” the category (and more once we added the One-Click award). But, by simply following the path the majority of our authors follow anyway, an author can earn 4/5 of the Production Milestones with one single book. Here’s how:

1. Register for a free Publishing Center and once inside your publishing center, complete the form to receive your complimentary brochure in the mail. That earns your Publishing Guide Award.
2. Order your down payment to be assigned your Publishing Consultant, receive your manuscript evaluation, and receive your Custom Publishing Profile. That earns your Down Payment Award.
3. Order your Diamond or Pearl publishing service. That earns your Publishing Service Award.
4. Complete the pre-production steps and approve Production to begin on your book. That earns your Approved Production Award (every Outskirts Press author will achievement this milestone, since approving production is a requirement for publication).

Next up, examining the next Category, the Production Achievement Awards…

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Production Milestones for Self Publishing Achievement Awards – Down Payment Award

The third award I will discuss in the first Production Milestones Category is the achievement earned for starting your book publishing process with a down payment. Like the first two milestone awards I have already discussed in this category, this is a very easy milestone to reach; and, in fact, the majority of our first time authors will earn this award since the majority of our authors choose to begin their publishing process with the $35 down payment. In addition to being applied to the publishing service fee, this down payment assigns the author’s personal Publishing Consultant and entitles the author to a manuscript evaluation (which often includes a free 1000-word spec edit). These features are among the benefits of publishing with Outskirts Press and, unlike many other publishers in our industry, it does not require much in the way of a financial investment to receive.

As such, the Down Payment Award is an easy achievement to earn. In fact, it might seem like EVERY author would receive this award, but not necessarily. More and more authors are skipping this step and choosing to order their full Publishing Service directly (since that speeds up their publishing process a little bit by skipping this Down Payment step — ). In either case, they still receive the manuscript evaluation and personal assistance of their Publishing Consultant. Authors who elect to pass on the Down Payment won’t win this achievement, but instead can win one of the Publishing Service awards, and I’ll discuss the Publishing Service awards within the Production Milestone Category next.

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Self Publishing Production Milestone Achievement Awards – Self Publishing Simplified

Another award in the first Production Milestones Category is the award our authors win when they register for a free Publishing Account and get their three free e-books, including our guide, Self-Publishing Simplified, and choose to receive our brochure through the mail. This is the easiest achievement to earn since all it requires is providing your email address so we can deliver your ebooks to you, and your mailing address so we can mail your brochure to you. In this manner, you also provide your user name to access your free Publishing Center, which we make available to all authors without obligation.

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Facebook increases avatar graphic size

Figures. Gotta love Mark Zuckerberg and his tendency to “change” things on Facebook at the drop of a hat. I had just finished sharing suggestions for optimizing your cover graphic for the new Facebook Timeline when Facebook decides to increase the size of the “logo” that is superimposed over the Cover graphic. If your cover graphic isn’t/wasn’t precisely optimized in accordance with some of my recommendations, this size difference probably wasn’t even noticeable. However, if you had created your cover graphic down to the pixel, as we had at Outskirts Press, this new avatar size resulted in overlapping actual content on the underlying cover graphic, as circled in the sample image below. See how some of the words in our “Calendar” for April were covered by the increased size of the Avatar box? Not great…

The size of the logo/avatar box increased from 133 pixels wide to 168 pixels wide. Naturally, you would want to make alterations to your cover graphic as a result, as we did with this new graphic that we launched on May 1st. We actually plan to upload a new cover graphic on the first day of every month, anyway, since our two “Calendar” boxes draw attention to the current month’s activities/events/promotions on Facebook as well as “tease” the upcoming month’s. For instance, in June we will be crowning the author of our 2011 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year. And I’ll be discussing that in more depth soon, but in the meantime, here’s the next cover graphic for Facebook, with the new avatar size accounted for, and the update to the Calendar. Of course, it had to be “shrunk” since the optimal size for the cover graphic is wider than the space allowed by this blog template, and you’ll notice that we simply leave the portion of the graphic unfinished where Facebook superimposes the Avatar (details, details), but you can see how it looks for real on our Facebook page at http://facebook.com/OutskirtsPress.

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Facebook Timeline Apps Navigation

For the last several posts I have been discussing tricks to get the most out of the timeline layout on Facebook. This has involved designing an effect cover graphic and writing an effective “About Box.” To the right of the “About Box” are four app boxes (which only show up if you actually have apps installed.) If you don’t have any apps, you might only have two boxes appearing to the left of your About box, one for Photos and one for your number of “Likes.” When/if you install new Apps to your Facebook page, those Apps will appear in this space. You can install up to 12 Apps. You can organize the order in which APPS appear on your page by hovering your mouse over them, clicking on the resulting “pencil icon” and then rearranging their order by selecting a choice from among the “Swap positions with…” list in the pop-up menu that appears.

Photos always remains directly to the right of the About box, and you cannot adjust its position. But you CAN adjust the Position of the “Likes” box but uploading more helpful apps. There are literally thousands of choices (50,000+ actually) , and the closest thing Facebook offers to a directory of its available apps is this “Apps & Games Dashboard” which is available by clicking here.

Install at least three Apps, so you have four navigation boxes to the right of your “About Box.” Then, edit the thumbnail image so that each App features an eye-catching, attention-grabbing graphic that will encourage your visitors to actually click on it. By combining all these tactics together, you and/or your company will have a Timeline-optimized Facebook presence, just like Outskirts Press. Have fun!

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Getting the most out of your ABOUT BOX on Facebook Pages

With the Timeline theme on Facebook pages, the “About” box is more important than ever. Yes, the “cover graphic” allows you to brand your page, but according to Facebook parameters, your cover graphic is not allowed to contain a URL. Fortunately, the About Box allows them, so be sure to take advantage of that. And, the good news is, FB automatically turns any URL that you include there into an active link that actually goes to your company website. It’s a valuable piece of real estate that you don’t want to waste, so word your “About” box in such a way to leave room for your URL to appear (rather than being truncated). This means your About text needs to be approximately 20 words long, since you have a maximum of 3 lines to include both your About text and your URL. In the case of Outskirts Press, our About language is the following, which fits exactly into the allocated space in the About box:

Outskirts Press offers full-service, high-quality, custom book publishing and marketing services. Keep 100% of your rights & royalties at www.OutskirtsPress.com.

What we offer, our benefits, and our URL. Short, sweet, effective.

To the right of the About box are the 4 app navigational boxes. I call them navigational boxes because if you manage them effectively, you can treat them like website navigation, taking your Facebook users to other pages of your Facebook presence, where each page can then be customized to accomplish tasks the main timeline page can’t do very well (ie, sell or market your stuff). We’ll discuss that next time…

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Facebook Timeline Cover Graphics

In yesterday’s post I mentioned the three things to consider when creating your “Cover” graphic for your company FB page now that the Timeline theme has removed the ability to have “Welcome Pages.” Those three considerations are

1) Identify your company’s core benefits 2) Incentive ”Likes” in a similar manner to the previous Welcome pages 3) Aesthetically design around the FB elements that are super-imposed over the cover graphic

As a result of these three goals, here is the cover graphic we created for Outskirt Press (it might be a little “squashed” since the optimal width for this graphic is 851, which exceeds the amount of space available on this blog. Nevertheless it gives you the idea, and you can see the “real” cover graphic on our Facebook page by clicking here.

In our case, our core benefits are that we help authors write anything, publish everything, and market everywhere. So those benefit statements are a part of the design.

We incentivize links by highlighting the current months “perk” or “topic” along with the next month’s upcoming topic, and then we graphically point in the general vicinity of the “like” button of FB, as well-designed “Welcome” pages did in the past. By referring to both the current and up-coming months, we give incentive for friends to “stay with us” even if the current month’s event/promotion is nearing the end. And finally, we designed this graphic to aesthetically accommodate the FB lay-overs. The “white space” underneath the couple is where Facebook overlays the avatar graphic, so we matched the treatment of that graphic, even down the 3 pixel border separating the gray lines from the image. So it actually looks like this on Facebook:

And that brings us to the rest of the header space: the “About box, the photos, and the other three “navigational” graphics FB allows. We’ll discuss more of that next time…

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Creating a cover graphic for Facebook Timeline

The “Survivor Graphic” I discussed last week was a stop-gap, a temporary solution to get something, anything, into the “Cover” spot when Facebook launched the Timeline lay-outs. But it wasn’t optimal. For one, it failed to say what Outskirts Press does – what its benefits are to its users/clients/authors. And it didn’t compensate for the loss of “Welcome pages.”

Welcome pages, as many FB marketers know, were specific app-pages that could be created to incentivize likes, by promoting upcoming perks, drawings, promotions, etc. I discussed how to create a Welcome page in a previous series of posts toward the beginning of this year when Outskirts Press was putting its own Welcome Page into use. One of the nice things about the old Welcome pages was that by manipulating a setting in Facebook, you could direct new users to your Welcome Page rather than your wall, theoretically increasing the odds of them “linking” you. Actually, this practice wasn’t theoretical at all — it was statistically proven to be successful.

The new Timeline theme removes the ability to set any other page as the landing page. Everyone comes to the same page when they visit Outskirts Press on Facebook, and we can’t send them anywhere else, not even to an alternate app-page.

So, then, with the Cover Graphic, the question becomes, “How can I use the Cover Graphic to: 1) Identify my company’s core benefits and 2) incentive “Likes” in a similar manner to my previous ‘Welcome page’ while 3) aesthetically designing around the FB elements that are super-imposed over my cover graphic?”

That’s a tall order, but with some creativity and a talented designer, you can pull it off, and I’ll share how we did it for Outskirts Press tomorrow….