marketing – Page 8 – President of Outskirts Press

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.

ceo, marketing, self publishing

Self Publishing Version 4

My recent posts have briefly touched upon the new website Outskirts Press launched over Memorial Day weekend, which we are lovingly referring to as Version 4. Is this the 4th “version” of the site we’ve had? No; we’ve had more than that.

Version 4 comes from a convoluted history of enhancement-naming conventions. When I was single-handedly programming the first few versions of the Outskirts Press website in CGI and Perl (way back in 2002, 2003 and 2004), it went through a number of different “looks.” As the number of books we published exploded from 51 in 2004 to 220 in 2005, it started to become apparent that the site I had programmed was not sufficient for all the books we were publishing. In other words, it was bending under the quantity and demands we were putting on it.

So, the IT department was taxed with rebuilding the site from the ground up. This involved a migration of the programming and data to SQL. They started calling that first SQL version of the website SQL 1. Very little changed aesthetically with that first migration. It was a daunting enough task simply migrating all the author records and data into the SQL databases.

Once the foundation was in place to handle our growth, and once SQL 1 was working, we immediately began working on some aesthetic improvements that leveraged the new, faster advantages resulting from the SQL databases. These improvements became known internally as SQL 2.

Last year we launched SQL 3, which was a combination of some database improvements and aesthetic improvements, mostly involving the internal Author’s Center portions of our website. In other words, we were using resources to improve the experience for our core group of customers.

Even before SQL 3 was launched, I was already working (at least in my mind) on the next leap forward for our website and our company. This fundamental change was known as SQL 4 by our IT team, but since “SQL” has very little resonance outside of the IT world, we decided from a marketing & branding perspective to call it “Version 4” instead, more akin to software releases and operating systems.

So that’s the genesis of the name. With the next posts we’ll talk about the fundamental differences and improvements with Version 4 of the new and improved Outskirts Press, along with some hiccups along the way.

ceo, marketing, self publishing

Migrating a website

Any entrepreneur, business owner, CEO, or manager knows that running a successful business is hard. People with conflicting personalities push and pull, motivated by their department’s agendas. Fortunately, most of these internal struggles remain where they belong–inside, away from the microscope of the customer/client’s eyes. The goal is to keep these struggles internal even when the product instigating the struggle is for “public consumption” like a new consumer product, or a piece of software, or a new website.

The world is filled with examples of these internal struggles if you look hard enough. You might periodically notice a movie poster or advertisement announcing the date the movie opens, only to discover later that it was moved to a different date altogether. Or you might be waiting anxiously for a new computer game based upon its release date and then become frustrated when the game is postponed another six months.

The two opposing forces in all these cases are usually the same: the marketing (creative) people VS the business (financial) people.

They are each motivated by their own agendas, albeit for the overall betterment of the company. They just have different perspectives. Creative people want to broadcast their accomplishments with marketing and PR. After all, what’s the point of working so hard on something if no one knows about it?

On the other hand, business people want to manage risk (what’s the point of bringing a whole bunch of people to something if it “doesn’t work?”). There are a variety of different definitions of something not working. In the case of the movie example above, the definition of “doesn’t work” usually falls into one of two camps to motivate a release date reschedule. Either the movie is literally not completed yet, or a different, potentially better, movie is “getting in the way” – which might dampen box office receipts.

In the case of the computer game example, the definition of “doesn’t work” is typically quite literal. The release date might be moved simply because the game does not run– or does not run properly. Ironically, in many cases, the business (financial) people can be responsible for releasing a piece of software like a computer game too early, even if it doesn’t work properly. After all, they are also motivated by quarterly revenue projections and stockholder expectations, etc.

We have four main departments at Outskirts Press, and the launch of the Version 4 website involved all of them. We have two “creative” sides, i.e. the sales/marketing side and the book production side. We also have two “business” sides, i.e. the technical (website) side and the accounting side. Sure, there are technicalities involved in properly producing a book, but when compared with the technicalities involved in creating a dynamic, database-driven e-commerce website, producing a book falls squarely into the “creative.”

The creative sides wanted to start announcing the new website a while ago, to build excitement for new authors as well as inform current authors of the functionality and navigation changes. The business sides wanted to wait until 4-6 weeks after it was live, to put it through its paces and make sure everything was working flawlessly.

Like all business relationships, and most relationships of any sort, a compromise was reached. We let our current authors know about the changes over Memorial Day weekend, but are holding out any big announcements for a few days, not withstanding some brief mentions of it on my blog — this one and a few early mentions of it in the past (I just couldn’t help myself; it is all I’ve been working on for months).

So why do we feel Version 4 of Outskirts Press is so special? We’ll get to that in an upcoming posting…

Amazon, marketing, self publishing

Sell Your Book on Amazon – cover tactic

Previously I discussed some of the cover issues to consider when publishing a book and marketing it on the internet, particularly Amazon. I encouraged authors to consider altering the cover image they submit to Amazon to utilize a greater percentage of the “space” Amazon allocates for the image.

Let’s look at an actual example, using my book SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON…

Most people won’t search for your book by title or by your name. They will search on Amazon for a keyword or phrase that captures their interest. One of the very popular keyword phrases I optimize for is “book marketing.” When conducting that search on Amazon today, my book appeared number 10 in the listings on the first page, as shown below:

It comes in directly below The Frugal Book Promoter and two places above Jump Start Your Book Sales. But I’ll bet your eyes naturally gravitated to THOSE two books first, prior to mine in the image above. Well, that’s not good — at least, not for me. The white in my cover gets lost within the white of the webpage, while both those covers are bright. In fact, they’re yellow… hmmm, I wonder why that is…

Granted, The Frugal Book Promoter and Jump Start Your Book Sales are both very good online covers because, surprise surprise, they’re about book marketing, too! The authors are experts in doing exactly what they’re doing for their own books. My point is, in all likelihood, your book won’t be competing with marketing experts. If your book is about bank financing, your competition may not be online marketing savvy, but that’s all the MORE reason to take steps to make YOUR book about bank financing outshine the others, right?

But which image does your eye gravitate toward in this next screen shot? It’s the same search for “book marketing” on Amazon. The titles are all in the same order… I’ve simply adjusted the image that comes up for my book cover:

My image is almost twice as big, which makes the title stand out more, and I’ve replaced the white with a bright, obnoxious yellow to attract attention. I’m not trying to win any design contests here on Amazon — I’m trying to sell books!

This is an Amazon marketing option we’re considering offering to our authors, so we’re in the process of guinea pigging it — yes, I’ve made that an active verb again — with all my books and then keeping an eye on the Amazon Sales Ranking to see if it makes a statistical difference…

There are two problematic elements to this that we’re currently ironing out. The first is that the “larger” image gets degraded a little bit if Amazon adds the “Look Inside” graphic for Search Inside the Book books. The second is that the Kindle edition graphic, in my opinion, looks too similar to the paperback and hardback editions on Amazon. Sure, Amazon adds that little “kindle graphic” on the detail page. But I don’t think that’s good enough. For example, due to the “look inside” graphic outlined above, you will notice on the screen shot below, that the Kindle edition of my book actually looks MORE appealing than the paperback. There might be some situations where that’s preferable, but this isn’t one of them.

Hint: the first book is the paperback edition and the 3rd book is the Kindle edition.

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, 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….

marketing, publicity, search engine optimization

Distribute press releases

Once you have an award or some form of “recognition” to promote, either about your book or your service/product/company, you should distribute a press release electronically through the Internet. Not only do distributed press releases that contain links back to your author or company website often appear high in organic search results in their own right, but they also help with optimizing your author or company website, too.

There are a number of ways to distribute press releases, ranging in cost from $0 -$800 or more. As with everything, you get what you pay for. The free press release distribution services are appealing for self-published authors on a budget because they increase the exposure of your book, although not to the extent of a paid-for service like prweb.com.

The free press release services may also be appealing for your company PR distribution needs, although you may find yourself shying away from the free services due to an extreme case of Adsensiphobia (TM).

Adsensiphobia is experienced by marketing people when they are faced with the dilemma of directing potential customers to a website on which some of their competitors may be advertising (either via banner ads or contextual text ads in a Google AdSense box). Free PR distribution services are notorious for this, as are MySpace, YouTube, and many other “Web 2.0” websites. I fear a day will come when Twitter decides it needs to monetize its traffic via AdSense, as well.

Ultimately, however, altering your marketing initiatives due to adsensiphobia is self-defeating and, in the long run, pointless. Thanks to XML, even distributing your press release through paid distribution services like PRWeb doesn’t protect you, since some AdSense-specific websites exist solely to pick-up the XML feed from PRWeb AND display contextual AdSense links (which probably include links to your competitors). If your book or company has proven to be profitable for AdSense advertisers, there is no getting around it; and by refraining from distributing to every possible outlet solely because of adsensiphobia, you are really only shooting yourself in the foot.

If you are marketing a company and experiencing adsensiphobia, ask yourself this… is it realistic to believe that your potential customers have never heard of your competitors? People don’t drink Perrier because they are unaware of tap water. They drink Perrier because Perrier has established its value to its customers.

Amazon, marketing, self publishing

Give incentive for people to buy your product or service

Whether you are promoting a book or promoting a company, you need to give people incentive to buy. Just making it easy isn’t quite enough (although it is an important component). Not only must the purchase process be easy, it must be urgent. You create urgency through the use of promotions, discounts, or other incentives.

One of our competitors does this very well. They inflate their prices to $13,000 so they can offer a $7000 discount. Do authors fall for this? Of course. It looks great on a Flash banner; and it is a savvy person who can look past the flash — pun intended — and identify the true value, or lack thereof.

Books sell better with incentive, too. The most typical incentive is a discount or a “sales price” and in the majority of the cases, this type of promotion is handled by the retailer rather than the author herself. Amazon does discounting very well. They discount books in a variety of ways. Not only will they often discount a single book by eating into their own margin, but they also pair similar books together and then offer discounts if the customer orders BOTH books. My book Sell Your Book on Amazon discusses how authors can use this functionality of Amazon to their advantage.

marketing, self publishing

Make it easy for people to buy your product or service

In continuing our current discussion about how book promotion is similar to company marketing we arrive upon a step that can oftentimes single-handedly mean the difference between success and failure. It’s a proven fact. If something is too hard, most people won’t do it.

Amazon.com is a perfect example of this. They have “perfected” the process of online product sales. It is almost TOO easy to buy things on Amazon. How many of us have gone to Amazon to make a single purchase and by the time we’re “checking out” we’ve added one or two additional items? Amazon is the ultimate product sales “person.” This is actually the cornerstone to my book Sell Your Book on Amazon, but you can see examples of “good” selling processes and “bad” selling processes all over the Internet.

I recently saw an article in Entrepreneur discussing a new technology/service company. I recognized the potential it might hold for published authors and so, to experiment with it on our author’s behalf — I have said in the past that I often use myself as a guinea pig for tactics I feel our authors should pursue — I signed myself up to the tune of $29 each month.

Sure, giving them that initial $29 was relatively smooth, but the instant the “credit card cleared” their site seemed to break and I couldn’t log-in to their customer center. A day later I received an email that I could log-in. Apparently they were handling payments manually. Not ideal, but okay. Once I logged-in, however, I was confronted with a non-intuitive “dashboard” that, I’m sorry to say, gave me WAY more credit than I deserved. It made assumptions about my depth of knowledge and asked me questions that I didn’t know the answers to regarding the service they were offering. What’s more, there wasn’t a “help button” or instruction manual or “contact us” link to be found.

In short, they were not making it easy to buy their product or service… Almost impossible, I’d say.

As a company that conducts 100% of our business through our website, we have considerations like this all the time at Outskirts Press. We spend “scads of dough” on website design, optimization, usability, etc., in an effort to make the process as enjoyable as possible for our authors. We’ve come a long way. And we have a long way to go. Our site has tons of information but here’s an interesting fact — people don’t “read” websites, per se. They skim. They browse. The trick is communicating information visually.

Amazon does this very well nowadays. I recently saw a “running example” of what Amazon.com looked like in the 90s. As they say: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

It’s a fine line between improving the customer experience, and constantly changing the website to improve the website, which, ironically, customers don’t like, either. Very few people “like” change.

So how does this consideration translate to book promotion and book sales? It’s a changing world, and people are “using” books in different ways, now. It used to be that there were just “paperbacks” and “hardbacks.” Then, “ebooks” became another format to consider. Nowadays, simply calling something an “ebook” isn’t specific enough, as there are multiple formats and multiple platforms to consider — Kindle books, Sony Reader books, Nook books, iPad books, Stanza books, Espresso Book machine books… the list goes on and on.

“Make it easy for people to buy your product or service.” At Outskirts Press, one of the ways we do that as a company is by making it easy for readers to buy our authors’ books, in as many different platform choices as possible. To that end, we offer options for paperbacks, hardbacks, general ebooks, Kindle editions, and Espresso Book machine editions. Thanks to the Kindle app, our Kindle books are also available on the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad; and we’re working on optional methods for our authors to get their books in front of the Sony, Stanza, and Nook crowds, too.

When an author’s book is available in whatever manner a customer wants it, that is the definition of “making it easy for people to buy your product.”