self publishing – Page 8 – President of Outskirts Press

Latest Outskirts Press Anthology (Four of a Kind) is published

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.

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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.

marketing, self publishing

How to market your book (or your business) on Amazon

I recently conducted a webinar for the Internet Marketing Club on the topic of using Amazon to market your book or your business. Rather than getting into the nitty-gritty or summarizing it, I’ll just provide the entire webinar here in its entirety. I hope you all find it helpful. It’s long — 60 minutes — but filled with content about how to establish your presence, your content, and your expertise on Amazon in order to promote your book or business.

Just click on the image below to watch. You’ll be taken from WordPress to MetaCafe’s website, since WordPress doesn’t support embedded MetaCafe videos and YouTube’s maximum video length is 15 minutes…

Here’s also a convenient way to purchase the two products mentioned in the video. You can save 10% on my book, Sell Your Book on Amazon, by clicking here.

And you can save 25% off a la carte pricing on three specific Amazon Marketing options (Kindle, Search Inside, Keyword Tagging) we offer with the Amazon Extreme package by clicking here (and in that case, we’ll include a free copy of Sell Your Book on Amazon).

Enjoy…

self publishing, self publishing a book

How to get featured in our app – Exhibit your book at a major book fair

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.”

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Get featured on our publishing app by winning book awards

Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants

So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, bestsellers, and Virtual Book Tours. Now we’re going to talk about winning a book award.

Winning a book award is kind of like getting on a “bestseller” list. There are so many “book awards” and so many “bestseller lists” that the sheer number of them have watered down their prestige and value. It may be true that appearing on the New York Times bestseller list is just a wee bit more impressive than appearing on the Outskirts Press bestseller list. No doubt. And it may be true that winning “Gold” in the Reader’s Choice awards is less impressive than winning the Nobel Prize in literature. No argument.

But do you know what is even less impressive than winning a “Gold” in the Reader’s Choice awards?

Not winning one.

Nothing against the Reader’s Choice awards, or the Writer’s Circle Awards, or the Ben Franklin Awards, or the Indie Awards, or the Best Book Awards, or the CIPA Awards, or the IPPY Awards, or the….. I could go on and on. All these awards have merit and value because there are WAY more people who do not win any book awards than people who do. And once you accomplish something that only the minority accomplish, it’s worth bragging about. Isn’t that one of the cool things about publishing a book?

We think so, and that’s why we feature many of our award-winning authors both on our blog and in our iPhone app. We love bragging about our authors’ successes. We realize we’re never going to publish a Nobel Prize winner. And that’s okay. But we do publish statistically more award-winning books than any other self-publishing firm, and as a self-publishing firm, that’s worth bragging about, too.

So, that’s another way to get featured in our iPhone app: Win a book award. We make it easy for our authors to enter six vetted awards all at once with our Book Award Submissions package, but, as I mentioned above, there are literally hundreds of awards to pursue independently.

Speaking of which, we have our own book award (why wouldn’t we?) and authors who publish with Outskirts Press can be automatically eligible for the $1,500 grand prize, just like our 2010 Best Book of the Year award-winner Doris Kenney Marcotte. For details about the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award, click here.

self publishing, self publishing a book

Latest Outskirts Press Anthology is Published

Last week our latest Outskirts Press anthology was published, titled Royal Flush: A Winning Collection of Poetry and Short Stories. I’ve added its cover to the right-hand side-bar.

This was the third anthology we have published. The first was a collection from five of our highly successful authors and is titled The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors. The second was a collection of submissions made by our Facebook friends titled Fandemonium. In an effort to experiment with “collaborative, social publishing” our Facebook fans were involved with certain aspects of the production process, like determining the look of the cover, the pricing, and even the charity to receive the royalties — all determined by social voting.

Royal Flush is our third anthology. Only our own published authors at Outskirts Press were invited to participate. Below are the submissions that are included:

You can order Royal Flush from Amazon by clicking on the cover to the right, or you can save 10% by ordering directly from Outskirts Press Direct by clicking here.

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Best self publisher for reviews and awards

In the previous post I looked at the number or 4 or 5 star reviews received on Amazon for books published by the top 6 major online self publishing firms. That chart is below again as a refresher. This time the chart is in order from highest to lowest, which, admittedly, is how the previous chart should have been, too (rather than the order it was in, which was the order in which I conducted the research).

Publishing Firm	Percentage of 4 or 5 star ratings
Outskirts Press	52%
Company U	37%
Company C	27%
Company A	24%
Company X	19%
Company L	13%

My conclusion was that Outskirts Press books and authors receive statistically more and statistically higher reviews on Amazon than our 5 competitors. In fact, it’s not even close. 52% compared to the next highest, Publisher U at 37%. Remember, I don’t mention our competitors by name, but it’s probably not too hard to decipher this table…

Reader reviews are all well and good — in fact, we’re proud to come out on top in this analysis — but I was curious if there was a correlation between high book reviews on Amazon and results within a widely recognized and valued book award contest. So I browsed the results of the ForeWord Reviews BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS that were just listed in the July/August issue of ForeWord Reviews trade magazine to compare these same 6 companies:

Publishing Firm	Book of the Year Awards
Outskirts Press	4
Company U	4
Company C	1
Company A	0
Company X	0
Company L	0

What do you know? There is almost a direct correlation between the percentage of 4-5 star reviews on Amazon and the number of book awards won by a major book contest.

Not surprisingly, those publishers whose books received less than 25% 4-5 star reviews didn’t win any awards at all. And this in spite of the volume/quantity advantage they have. For instance, Publishers A and X publish approximately 2-4 times as many books as we do in a month, and Publisher L claims to publish about ten times as many. Well, quantity doesn’t translate to quality, as you can see here.

I guess this also proves that Publisher L’s CEO was accurate when, in a 2009 New York Times article, he claimed that his company has “easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind.”

I don’t get the press that he gets (probably thankfully, because I’ve been known to put my foot in my mouth on occasion, too), so for the convenience of NY Times journalists everywhere, they are welcome to my analysis above, and this handy-dandy quote: Outskirts Press easily publishes better books, on average, than our five major competitors.

Actually, we seem to publish better books, on average, than any of our competitors. I searched the 2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Awards for all 20 of the publishers I’ve been posting about in the past and I couldn’t find any that can compete with Outskirts Press.

Just sayin’…

Amazon, self publishing

Amazon publishing

To continue the post from yesterday, we’re looking at this Amazon screen shot of the 7,302 books Outskirts Press currently has published and listed available for sale on Amazon for our authors:

We discussed the New Releases and Department sections yesterday. That brings us to Format, where you can see Paperback books are far and away the favorite, although Kindle Editions are catching up fast, considering the Paperback count starts in the year 2002 and the Kindle editions began in 2010 with the release of our Amazon Kindle Edition.

Since we also provide the Kindle Edition service for authors with books from other publishers, our Kindle numbers are actually much higher, but we often perform that service for authors “behind the scenes.”

We do a lot of these because authors from many of our competitors would rather pay us a small one-time fee to perform this service independently so they keep 100% of their profits as opposed to letting their current publisher do it and take up to 50% of their Kindle profits. Hmm, you’d think that same reasoning would translate to moving their books to Outskirts Press where we pay 100% profits on paperbacks and hardbacks, too. And you know what? It often does.

But I digress. “Binding” comes next and seems to be fairly redundant. Then comes mentions of specific authors and then Series, followed by “Shipping Option” and “Promotion.”

The “Average Customer Review” is interesting though, and I’ll cover that next time…

Amazon, self publishing, self publishing a book

A closer look at our self-published books on Amazon

In yesterday’s post I included a screen shot of our Outskirts Press books on Amazon.com, showcasing the 7,302 total title count (as of July 1). Let’s take a closer look at that screen shot and what it tells us about the breadth and quality of books being published by Outskirts Press:

The circled title count of 7,302 shows the number of books, in all formats, published by Outskirts Press.

The “New Releases” just to the left of the circled total title count shows 46 new Outskirts Press books were added to Amazon in June, while 298 were added over the months of April, May, and June, for an average of roughly 100 titles a month in that time period. The number of books we’ve put onto Amazon is actually much higher than that. With our Private Label publishing option, many authors and publishers use our high-quality, full-service packages “behind the scenes” and publish their books under their own publishing imprint name. Therefore, those titles don’t appear on a search for “Outskirts Press” nor contribute to any of the stats seen here.

In the “Department” column under the “New Releases” you can see Amazon’s categorical break-down of the types of books Outskirts Press has published onto Amazon. These categories are based upon the BISAC codes we and our authors assign to their books during the pre-production stage. Our two most popular categories are “Literature & Fiction (2,945)” followed by “Religion & Spirituality (1,456).” In other words, Literature & Fiction represents roughly 40% of our total output, while Religion & Spirituality represents 20%. With 60% of our business focused on these two categories, it’s no wonder we excel at both.

We’ll examine more stats next time…

best self publishing, compare self publishing companies, self publishing, self publishing a book

Best Self Publishing

When researching the “best self publishing” options, the best course of action is often to identify a number of different sources, compile a scoring system, and then determine the average score of the self publishing companies to come up with the best company for you. Why is looking at one source not enough? Because that one source may be unreliable for one reason or another. But when you combine multiple sources to arrive at averages, you have a much better chance of getting an accurate sense of the “best self publishing” company.

Let’s perform this analysis on 20 different self publishing companies using four different “self publishing review” sources: Top Self Publishing Firms by Stacie Vander Pol, The Fine Print of Self Publishing by Mark Levine, TopTenReviews.com, and TopConsumerReviews.com.

Top Self Publishing Firms – There are 13 companies in the “Large and Medium” category in Stacie Vander Pol’s book, ranked from best to worse. So I applied a numeric value for each of them ranging from 13 (good) to 1 (not so good).

Fine Print of Self Publishing – There are 4 different categories in Mark Levine’s book: “Outstanding” companies get 3 points. “Pretty Good” companies get 2 points. “Just OK” companies get 1 point. And since “Publishers to Avoid” sounds worse than not being in the book at all, those companies lose a point.

TopTen Reviews – Ranks ten different companies so I will apply a numeric value for each one. The company they rank #1 will receive 10 points, the company they rank #2 will receive 9 points, and so on.

Top Consumer Reviews – Ranks 8 companies, I will apply a 8-1 numeric value.

Each of the 20 companies therefore receives a certain number of points from one or more of the sources. Add them up, divide by 4, and you have their AVERAGE score among all four review sources, listed in the right-most column.

And that leaves us with this analysis below (blanks indicate no presence in that particular source):

	TopTen	Top Consumer	Fine Print	Top Firms	Total
Outskirts Press	8	7	2	13	30
Company 3	10	4	-1	11	24
Company 5	7		3	9	19
Company 2			1	12	13
Company 14	6	6	1		13
Company 10	9		-1	4	12
Company 4			1	10	11
Company 6			2	8	10
Company 8		3	-1	6	8
Company 9	2		1	5	8
Company 15	5	2	1		8
Company 18		8			8
Company 7			-1	7	6
Company 11	4		-1	3	6
Company 12			3	2	5
Company 19		5			5
Company 16	3		1		4
Company 17	1				1
Company 20		1			1
Company 13			-1	1	0

I don’t list our competitors by name in my blog, but it’s easy enough to see the companies I’m reviewing by referring to the sources I’ve mentioned above. And if you’re curious why the company names are not listed in order, it is because they are numbered in the order that they appear in Top Self Publishing Firms.

And that’s not even the point of this posting. The point is the concept of combining sources of information to arrive upon the “best self publishing” option.

Now if one were looking to find flaws in the data above, the easiest thing to say would be Top Self Publishing Firms is weighted too heavily and the Fine Print of Self Publishing is weighted not heavily enough because the former has a maximum of 13 points while the latter has a maximum of only 4 points.

Fair enough. So let’s apply a 10-point system to all four sources and see what that tells us next time…

Category: self publishing