Every Outskirts Press book receives its own free author webpage. The name you give your author webpage for your book will also be your webpage’s address (or URL). One of the final pieces of required information is soliciting this information from you. There are some things to keep in mind when you get to the Webpage Naming screen in your Publishing Center:
There cannot be any weird characters or spaces in a webpage address; only use alpha-numeric characters, although underscores _ and hyphens – are also allowed.
Capitalization matters, and you don’t want to have to take the time during a radio interview to explain which letters in your address are capitalized, do you? So we recommend you make the entire address lower case.
The best choice is either the title of your book (if its not too long), or your name. In either case, it should submitted all in lower case. Your webpage name may already be taken, and if so, our website will tell you and you will need to arrive upon another choice.
Regardless of what you enter into the box, your full, total webpage address will be preceded by our domain name. So if you enter “booktitle” into the box, your webpage address once your book is published will be http://www.outskirtspress.com/booktitle
If you purchased our optional Enhanced Custom Author Website option, you will name your domain name / address for that website separately.
In the case of Fandemonium Volume 2, I submit “opcollection5” as my webpage name, making my URL http://outskirtspress.com/opcollection5 because all our anthologies share the same webpage naming convention starting with “opcollection.” The author’s webpage is launched by Outskirts Press at the same time the book is published. In most cases, it even has most of the “content” filled out automatically, because we’ve used information provided by the author during the pre-production process. But once your book is published, it’s a good idea to look at your author webpage and see if you want to make any changes/corrections to it. You can manage the content of your author webpage any time you want from within your Publishing Center after publication.
The final step prior to approving production on your book is making sure we have received your manuscript. There are several places to submit it throughout the process (including emailing it to your publishing consultant), but we make it flexible for our authors to expedite their personal steps through the pre-production process in whatever manner works best for them, independent of the status of their manuscripts. In this way, authors can complete most of the pre-production steps as they prepare for publication even before their manuscripts are 100% completed.
But ultimately, we require the final manuscript before we allow the author to approve production. So at this stage, I select my Word file for Fandemonium Volume 2 from my hard drive and upload it via the ‘Submit your manuscript electronically’ option. There is also an option to submit a hardcopy version, although that incurs an additional fee and slows the process down, so I highly recommend going the digital route.
With this final step completed, all that’s left is approving production by clicking the last box on our online check-list.
Now, in my case, Outskirts Press has already completed two steps (assigning my production team and my ISBN) and now needs to complete two more:
Accept the manuscript
AR Approve production
Since I just submitted my manuscript, Outskirts Press hasn’t reviewed and approved it yet. No surprising. Reviewing a complete manuscript can take a few days and unlike many of our competitors, we review and accept every manuscript we publish. This prevents your book from appearing alongside other, “questionable” books (which is what happens for authors publishing elsewhere). Like all self-publishing companies, however, I will be the first to admit that the subjective quality threshold for books we accept is very forgiving. But we draw hard stands on some unacceptable content: we do not accept books that are pornographic or libelous in nature, or books that obviously infringe upon copyrights (yes, taking content and/or images from the Internet without proper approval is a violation of copyright law; we don’t allow that for your protection).
Once your manuscript is reviewed, you will receive a Publisher’s Evaluation via email. This evaluation by our evaluation team sometimes makes some suggestions for ways you can improve both your manuscript and your publication. In many cases, it may even include a complimentary 1000-word “spec edit” so you can fully appreciate the value of copyediting. In other words, it’s beneficial, and more efficient, if you submit your manuscript earlier in the pre-production process than I did here. By the time you receive the evaluator’s comments, your Author Representative has probably already moved the book into the Production, in which case, you see this message in your Publishing Center:
It’s time to kick back and relax while Outskirts Press works its magic. Isn’t that a wonderful and reassuring feeling?
Yesterday I posted the 2011 version of the About Us page that appeared on our self-publishing website. It contained the “About Us” story through 2010. As 2011 came to an end, we needed a new version for 2012, which continued the story of our company and our successfully published authors through 2011. Consolidating 10 years of achievements and milestones into one page was becoming laborious (to read), so with this version, we shorted it considerably. Here’s the new version:
Ten years ago, Outskirts Press was founded by author Brent Sampson in 2002 as a result of his personal frustrations with getting published. Outskirts Press incorporated in Colorado in 2003, and through strategic partnerships with companies like Writer’s Digest, Outskirts Press quickly became the fastest-growing full-service book publishing and book marketing firm.
The years between 2004 and 2006 marked a growth rate in excess of 1,500%, an amazing accomplishment that was publicized in July 2007 by The Denver Business Journal when Outskirts Press was recognized as the 3rd fastest-growing privately held company in Colorado. By the end of 2006, Outskirts Press already had nearly 1,000 books in print, all of them available worldwide through Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble online, among others. And by the end of 2007, Outskirts Press had more than doubled its title totals again.
In 2008 The Denver Business Journal recognized Outskirts Press for the second year in a row as the fastest-growing publisher, and in fact, the fastest-growing privately held small-to-medium sized company in Colorado (in any industry), boasting growth of over 500% for the years between 2005-2007.
2009 and 2010 marked more new milestones, as well. In 2009 Outskirts Press published its 5,000th title and became the only self-publishing company to appear on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies.
And in 2010, and again in 2011, Outskirts Press repeated its appearance on the Inc. 5000 twice more, and became the only self-publishing company to appear on the list of top 5,000 fastest growing businesses in America for three years in a row.
So how does Outskirts Press remain the fastest-growing full-service publishing provider?
It begins with our Mission Statement: To exceed the expectations of every author we help publish.
It continues with our commitment to conservationism and recycling. Our most popular book sizes offer a recycled paper-stock option, featuring 30% post-consumer.
As we look toward the future, our commitment to produce high-quality books and offer high levels of support to our authors in all three phases of their journey (writing, publishing, marketing), only grows stronger.
For instance, we have embraced digital e-books with three a la carte digital publishing options:
Our company blog continually keeps our authors informed
And, we practice what we preach, publishing our own series of books to help authors navigate the sometimes tricky waters of book publishing and offering free publication in various anthologies through the year to showcase how easy, fast, and fun it can be to publish with Outskirts Press.
Through it all, Outskirts Press authors have remained our main focal point. With over 8,200 published titles, Outskirts Press continues to pour development dollars and resources into further improvements to the Outskirts Press website and its growing list of writing, publishing, and marketing services/products to further support our authors’ goals and dreams.
What does success mean to you? By any measure, you will find it here with Outskirts Press and we look forward to helping you on that journey.
Many of us, and some of our family members, took a moment during our July 4th picnic, to pose…
Every year we update the “About Us” page on our self-publishing website at Outskirts Press to tell a little bit about how we got started, what we’re all about, what we offer, and build upon the story featuring another year of successfully published authors. There’s a “version” of that information on this blog’s “About” page, too, although the order of the information is a little different. We try to make the updates to that “About Us” page during the first month of each year. So, below is the “old” version of the About Us page from our website and tomorrow, on February 1, I’ll post the new version. In addition to keeping an archive of it as it changes, posting it here also provides all the “old” information (which is still valid and helpful for authors) even as it updates to newer versions. The graph is already updated because we keep updating the same filename each year so that it updates everywhere through its hotlinks.
So, without further ado, here’s the version that existed through 2011.
How did Outskirts Press become the fastest-growing full-service publishing provider?
It begins with our Mission Statement: To exceed the expectations of every author we help publish.
It continues with our commitment to conservationism and recycling. Our most popular book sizes offer a recycled paper-stock option, featuring 30% post-consumer.
And we grow toward the future with our commitment to produce high-quality books and offer high levels of support to our authors in all three phases of their journey (writing, publishing, marketing).
Outskirts Press was incorporated in October 2003 and published seven books its first year.
In 2004, Outskirts Press published an additional 51 books and began creating an infrastructure of talented publishing artisans that would help Outskirts Press deliver maximum author flexibility, full-service support, and the highest quality books.
Through strategic partnerships with companies like Writer’s Digest, and affiliations with the Publishers Marketing Association and the Small Publishers of North America (among others), Outskirts Press built a strong foundation and positive reputation in the publishing industry. The company published 220 new books in 2005, including its own publishing guide titled Self-Publishing Simplified, available as a free e-book as well as a $5.95 paperback edition.
Now in its third edition as Outskirts Press services have improved and streamlined, Self-Publishing Simplified continues to serve as a product brochure, an example of the company’s exemplary quality, and evidence that publishing a print-on-demand book does not require an outlandish retail price. Try to find a new book by any other print-on-demand publisher on Amazon for $5.95! The power of our pricing speaks for itself.
In 2006 Outskirts Press published another 695 books, approximately matching the yearly output of some traditional New York publishers. In total, the company already had nearly 1,000 books in print, all of them available worldwide through Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble online, among others.
The years between 2004 and 2006 marked a growth rate in excess of 1,500%, an amazing accomplishment that was publicized in July 2007 by The Denver Business Journal when Outskirts Press was recognized as the 3rd fastest-growing privately held company in Colorado.
In the first quarter of 2007 Outskirts Press CEO Brent Sampson wrote and published the bestseller, Sell Your Book on Amazon, which hit # 29 on Amazon’s bestseller list in its debut month (March 2007). By the end of 2007, Outskirts Press had over 2,100 total books in print, making it the fastest-growing full-service publisher in America and one of the most prolific publishers in the world.
2008 was more exciting! For the second year in a row, The Denver Business Journal recognized Outskirts Press as the fastest-growing publisher, and in fact, the fastest-growing privately held small-to-medium sized company in Colorado (in any industry), boasting growth of over 500% for the years between 2005-2007.
Just in time for the holiday season, Outskirts Press CEO Brent Sampson wrote and published Adventures in Publishing, a unique children’s book about how to publish a children’s book. Featuring amazing full-color custom illustrations and rhyming verse, Adventures in Publishing acts as a full-color publishing guide for the Pearl publishing package and is an example of the artistry that is available to all our full-color authors.
In 2009, our authors had the most successful year since our founding, beginning with Gang Chen, who earned over $100,000 in 180 days. Our youngest author, Dalton James wrote, illustrated and published his third full-color children’s book with us at just 8 years of age. And more authors than we can count turned their publishing dreams into traditional publication realities when conventional publishers picked-up their Outskirts Press titles, including Susan R. Dolan and Audrey R. Vizzard. See their case study here.
2009 and 2010 marked a few milestones. In 2009 Outskirts Press published its 5,000th title and become the only self-publishing company to appear on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies.
And in 2010, Outskirts Press repeated its appearance on the Inc. 5000 and became the only self-publishing company to appear on the list of top 5,000 fastest growing businesses in America for two years in a row. In January 2010, CEO Brent Sampson started his blog at brentsampson.com and in the spring was a semi-finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
Speaking of awards, Outskirts Press sponsored the Student Literary Awards and Colorado Book Awards in association with our charitable donations to the Colorado Humanities. Meanwhile, Outskirts Press began establishing its social networking presence by developing its YouTube channel and surpassing 500 Facebook Fans and 500 Twitter followers. In December, Outskirts Press celebrated the holidays with its Facebook fans by giving away two free Amazon Kindles.
Through it all, Outskirts Press authors have remained our main focal point. With over 6,500 titles published, Outskirts Press continues to pour development dollars and resources into further improvements to the Outskirts Press website and its growing list of writing, publishing, and marketing services/products to further support our authors’ goals and dreams.
What does success mean to you? By any measure, you will find it here with Outskirts Press and we look forward to helping you on that journey.
Your success depends upon you. Are you ready to start your publishing journey? Click here…
Before I continue with the Google + series of posts for businesses, I’d like to take a quick moment to announce the publication of our latest anthology at Outskirts Press. This one is titled Four of a Kind and is the second in a series of anthologies we are publishing exclusively for our published authors.
BET ON GREAT ENTERTAINMENT
Over forty-five published Outskirts Press authors have contributed to this eclectic collection of anecdotes, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction.
Anecdotes
– Harley Dickson, author of All I Really Need to Know About Ministry, recalls a holiday when his Mama got lost in “Christmas at Coloridge 1951.”
– Sharon Elwell, author of Caught In the Middle, reveals a little known secret in “Everything I Need to Know I Learned Playing Wacky Jacks.”
Poetry
– Janet Hoult, author of Body Parts, illustrates the art of being a writer in “Blank Paper 4.”
– Michael H Hardy, author of H1, finds joy in fruit in “The Mystery of Pomegranates.”
Non-Fiction
– Robin Sacks, author of Get Off My Bus, offers the secrets to success in “Find Your WHY and Start to THRIVE!”
– Richard S. Pearson, author of 5 Necessary Skills to Keep Your Career on Track, comes to the rescue in “Passed Over For A Promotion? What Now?”
Fiction
– Jessica Mary Buck, author of Makeshift Christmas, draws a portrait of an imploding affair against the backdrop of 9/11 in “The Survivors.”
– Dr. Robert L. Clark, author of My Bittersweet Charlie, shares a Lieutenant’s journey for love in “Forever and Always: A Short Love Story.”
… and many more!
It’s available for discounts ranging from 10%-20% off normal retail at our direct online bookstore. Click the big green button to order it today.
For the past several weeks I have been discussing marketing tactics an author can take to secure more marketing muscle and “exposure” for his/her book on the various channels made available by his/her publisher. I’ve been using our company Outskirts Press, and specifically our free self-publishing app, as the primary example, although many of these tactics hold true for all writers, regardless of where they published.
Specifically, our app has four categories: blog, authors, videos, Twitter. For the past two weeks I covered the six different ways our authors can get featured on the blog category of our app. Today we’ll talk about how to get featured on the “authors” category of the app, which is updated on our app three times a week and provides an excellent spotlight for the authors who appear there. The app shares the author’s biography, comments about publishing with Outskirts Press, the front cover image of the book, and buttons to buy the book directly either from Amazon or the author’s Outskirts Press webpage. When a new author is featured, he/she also gets a plug on our Facebook page.
When you combine limited availability of promotional channels with the publication of around 150 books each month, one needs to establish “requirements” that each book or author needs to meet in order to be considered for promotion in the various channels. For instance, a few postings ago I introduced a new free opportunity we’re offering for our authors called the “Awesome Cover of the Week” spotlight. The requirement in that case, obviously, is that the book has to have an “awesome” cover. Of course, I realize that “awesome” is a relatively subjective phrase, but in our line of work, it is relatively easy to identify covers that do and do not fall into even the subjective areas of that definition.
So, how do we identify authors to feature in the “authors” section of our blog? It’s relatively easy, also — we feature authors who have chosen to share their positive publishing experiences with us. I started Outskirts Press to help authors (since I am one), so I love hearing from our published authors about their joys of publication. Authors share their comments with us all the time in a variety of ways. And with this new app feature, we can “thank” those authors for those kind words by giving them additional exposure for their books. Authors who share their positive experiences with us are also archived on the Self Publishing Author blog at http://selfpublishingauthor.wordpress.com
Next time we’ll talk about improving your chances of getting featured in the “video” section of our iPhone app — and this is actually a guaranteed method. So stay tuned.
A couple weeks ago I started a new series on this blog with the purpose of helping our authors get featured on our free self-publishing app for the iPhone 4 (available for free download by clicking here). While that was the specific goal of the series of postings, in more general terms, my advice (and the advice I will continue to provide this week) extends to all authors from all publishers who are interested in securing a little more “attention” from their publisher.
You see, the self-publishing industry is BIG, and there are only a handful of self-publishing firms handling the vast majority of self-published books. Now that publishing is so easy, getting exposure for your book after publication becomes one of the major hurdles self-publishing authors face. The degree to which you have an opportunity to get ANY exposure for your book depends upon the self-publishing company you choose. Some, like Outskirts Press, offer a lot of opportunities. Others don’t offer any; they’re done with you the moment your book is published.
The blog series a couple of weeks ago discussed 6 different ways our authors can receive exposure for their books on our blog, which would also result in being featured in our iPhone app. The “Blog” section is just one section of the app. There are three others: Authors, Videos, and Twitter. I will discuss those opportunities this week, beginning with the “Authors” section tomorrow.
All last week and this week we’ve been discussing marketing methods to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. We have established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories from our Outskirts Press blog:
Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants
We have already covered everything on this list except Book Fairs.
At Outskirts Press, we help our authors with the logistics involved in exhibiting their books at the four largest international book fairs: The London Book Fair, The Book Expo of America, The Beijing Book Fair, and the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since we publish so many children’s books (with our illustration packages, it’s no wonder), we also help authors exhibit their children’s books at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.
Not surprisingly, precious few authors have the resources to personally attend events in London, America, China, Germany, or Italy, respectively. But that doesn’t mean their book cannot attend and still get seen by agents, publishers, readers, and other industry insiders from those countries and around the world. That’s where our Global Book Tour and a la carte Book Fair options come in. When our authors have us facilitate their book’s exhibition at one or more of these book events, it includes a number of perks, including being listed on our blog and in our iPhone app prior to the event. Then, after the event, each author receives a “Post-Show Wrap-Up” with details about how to follow-up on any leads generated at the show, along with pictures of the event, like this one from this year’s BEA in New York.
And with that, we wrap up our topic on how to get featured in the “Blog” category on our iPhone app. Whew — that only took two weeks. Next we’ll discuss how to get featured in the other categories in our iPhone app: “Authors,” “Videos,” and “Twitter.”
All last week and this week we’ve been discussing marketing methods to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. We have established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories from our Outskirts Press blog:
Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants
So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, along with bestsellers. That leads us to Virtual Book Tours, and one of the guaranteed ways to get featured on our app.
A virtual book tour is similar to an actual book tour, although instead of physically traveling from bookstore to bookstore, or radio show to radio show, you and/or your book are making “appearances” in the blogosphere and on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This saves time and money because it is much more efficient and cost-effective to “appear” on a blog, a website, or an internet radio talk show, than it is to load up the mini-van and drive from state to state. And, unlike a physical tour, which is over the minute you leave, a virtual book tour stays archived and available for Internet
searches forever.
In addition to all the other blog “appearances”, reviews, and author interviews that can result from a Virtual Book Tour, we also make sure to get each of our author’s virtual tours off to a great start by giving them a “tour stop” at one or more of our social community channels, whether it be a link from our Twitter account, a video uploaded to our YouTube Channel, or an interview on our blog.
Author interviews that appear on our blog as a result of their participating in a Virtual Book Tour through Outskirts Press also appear on our iPhone app. All our Virtual Book Tours also include a short video, which we upload to our YouTube channel for our authors. Since our YouTube Channel is also featured on our app, ordering a Virtual Book Tour usually means the author and book can be featured in two different areas of the app – in the “Blog” category and in the “Videos” category.
Our Virtual Book Tours are so popular, we help authors from other publishers facilitate virtual book tours, too, although those authors aren’t mentioned on our blog or in our app (let’s leave that up to THEIR publishers, shall we?) Oh, wait — their publishers don’t have an app, but those other publishers will take up to 50-80% of their authors’ royalties. No wonder their authors aren’t too motivated to market their books.
Anyhoo, to schedule your own Virtual Book Tour, regardless of whether you are an Outskirts Press author or not, click here.
Last week’s topic covered tactics an author could pursue to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. This week, we continue the topic. We have already established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories:
Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants
So far we have discussed Author and Book Spotlights. Today we’ll talk about getting listed on the Monthly bestseller list.
Obviously, we love showcasing our successful books, and in most people’s eyes, ending up on a “bestseller list” is a good sign of success. There are all kinds of “bestseller lists” in the world nowadays. There is the New York Times Bestseller list, there is the Amazon Bestseller list, and there are individual bookstores’ bestseller lists. The value and “prestige” associated with all these lists vary by who you listen to and who you believe. But believe this, in a world where 1 million books are published every year, getting on ANY bestseller list is better than not getting on one. It validates your book in at least some quantifiable manner. And that’s more than most people can say. Well… most people haven’t even published a book, so you’re already ahead of the game.
Every month, we compile our own bestseller list, which are the ten books that we sold the most of, listed in alphabetical order. For example, our July bestsellers were featured on our app beginning August 16th and are still being featured. This list is impossible to predict from month to month, which means it is anyone’s game. Sure, we have our athletes (Marvin A. Russell) and doctors (Dr. Anthony Ebeigbe and Dr. Patrick Olomu) on the list in July, but we also have selections of books that prove you don’t have to play for Notre Dame, or teach in its classrooms, to have a bestseller.
And having an Outskirts Press bestseller is a sure way to get featured in our app. Tomorrow we’ll discuss Virtual Book Tours, the first of the guaranteed ways to get featured.
Now in its third edition as Outskirts Press services have improved and streamlined, Self-Publishing Simplified continues to serve as a product brochure, an example of the company’s exemplary quality, and evidence that publishing a print-on-demand book does not require an outlandish retail price. Try to find a new book by any other print-on-demand publisher on Amazon for $5.95! The power of our pricing speaks for itself.
So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, along with bestsellers. That leads us to Virtual Book Tours, and one of the guaranteed ways to get featured on our app.
President of Outskirts Press 