Happy 4th of July from a small sampling of our sun-soaked family (and many of their respective family members) at the Outskirts Press summer picnic. From our family to yours, have a wonderful and safe 4th of July holiday. See more pictures from the picnic on our blog.
It’s Sunday, July 3rd. Talk about a day when next to no one is thinking about publishing a book. The July 4th weekend is a time when families and friends get together and enjoy BBQs, trips to the mountains, bike rides, swimming, car trips, fireworks, county fairs, festivals, concerts…. just about anything other than working on your goals toward becoming a published author. So, of course, it’s always the time we at Outskirts Press like to offer our biggest “self publishing deal” of the year — a 20% savings on our two top-of-the-line publishing services – the Diamond and the full-color Pearl.
Interestingly, we find that our biggest competitor is ourselves. After all, if you want to keep 100% of your rights, 100% of your royalties, and 100% of the control, there aren’t a lot of choices for high-quality, full-service self-publishing firms. So many authors choose Outskirts Press for a variety of different reasons. But then they are left with the real choice – deciding what service level to select. Our full-color Pearl package is an easy decision. If your book requires color on the inside, it’s the only choice.
But when it comes to black/white interior books, there are four other choices and for most of our authors, that choice really comes down to two: the Diamond or the Ruby. The Diamond service is $999 and the Ruby service is $699. That is a $300 difference that, for many of our authors, is often made up for by the $300 of options included with the Diamond (free e-book, free Spring Arbor distribution, free audio excerpt). But for other authors, the choice isn’t always that easy, especially during this economy when every penny has to count.
And that’s why I like the 20% discount when we offer it (which isn’t very often). It brings the Diamond package down to $800, a mere $100 more than the Ruby, and when you factor in all the other advantages of the Diamond, it makes the decision easy.
This “self-publishing deal” of 20% off our Diamond or Pearl packages goes through July 5th. Here’s the necessary promotion code to use: JULY42011
Order your Diamond package conveniently by clicking here.
Or your full-color Pearl package conveniently by clicking here.
Needless to say, our winner of the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award was beside herself when she received the official news. It was a well earned victory. After all, another finalist was leading the way with the votes through the final days.
But thanks to an 11th-hour campaign, this tenacious promoter pulled back into the lead just before the polls closed at midnight on April 30th.
It was close! Kudos go out to all three of our finalists. They all have something to be very proud of. Doris’ book The Beads of Lapis Lazuli garnered 1,379 total unique votes, while The Key to Job Success in Any Career was a close second with 1,269 total unique votes.
Here’s how Doris did it, in her own words:
“The first call for votes went to everyone in my address book with two requests: please vote, and please ask relatives, friends, and friends of friends to vote. A large number of enthusiasts really got into the voting and launched individual campaigns. I posted a notice about the competition on Facebook with the request to involve friends and friends of friends and a few special people worked very hard: one at university, two in retirement homes, and two medical professionals. Without networking the voting would have been very different. Persistence, begging, pleading, and follow-up were what pushed the vote over the top to a nail-biting end.”
Congratulations, Doris Kenney Marcotte, author of our 2010 Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year award-winner, The Beads of Lapis Lazuli.
Yesterday I showed this graphic, which is the stat of unique visitors to the Outskirts Press blog by month:
April was the month in which we opened up the voting for the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year awards. Part of publishing a “best book” should depend upon the author’s own marketing prowess, so once we determine the three finalists, we put their destiny in their own hands. The finalist with the marketing moxie to generate the most votes for his/her own book is declared the winner. After all, publishing success isn’t ONLY about publishing a beautiful, well-written and well-edited work. It’s also about promoting that book after publication.
The 3 finalists rose to the occasion. In fact, it was neck and neck between two of them throughout most of the voting period, which was April 15 – April 30. And April 30th marked the single highest visitation day to our blog since its inception. The two finalists each received in excess of 1000 votes and when the polls closed, a mere 110 votes separated them.
So, who won? We’ll talk about that tomorrow…
Here’s another blogging site graphic. This one graphs the number of unique visitors to our Outskirts Press blog since January 2010. Since that blog is entirely different from this one, this graphic bears no resemblance to the previous graphs I showed. But you can see a massive jump in April 2011.
This was due to the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year voting that took place April 15 – April 30th on the Outskirts Press Blog. More about this tomorrow…
If you don’t yet have a published book on Amazon, it’s time to get published. And if you have a book on Amazon, you probably spend a lot of time trying different online marketing tactics to send people to your book’s sales detail page. If you don’t you should – -they’re not going to know about your book unless you tell them. And don’t just tell them about the book, send them to it.
So how do you “send” a link to a specific book on Amazon? I often see people include long, unwieldy links that are filled with superfluous Amazon code. Sometimes they even work. And often, those links contain information like affiliate codes, or cookie codes that could result in the link working for you, but NOT working for someone else. It’s best to use as clean and short of a URL (webpage address) as possible.
Amazon makes this easy. Just follow this convention:
domain name/program name/10-digit ISBN
Amazon’s “program name” for its forwarding function is called “dp,” perhaps short for “direct point.” So, for instance, to aim directly to Self Publishing Simplified on Amazon, which is our sample book and publishing guide, you would go to: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1598000810
That’s pretty short, and much better than the longer URLs you might be using, especially if you’ve ever wanted to TWEET the location of your book on Twitter or Facebook.
Here’s an even shorter path: http://www.amzn.com/1598000810 — When you only have 140 characters, every character counts. Here, Amazon has taken the “dp” program and put it within its own domain name “Amzn.com” which shortens the URL by 5 characters. Brilliant!
If you’re a published author with a book on Amazon, you need to have an Author Central Account. And if you don’t yet have a published book on Amazon, it’s time to get published.
Here’s how to add a video to your Author Central account:
1. Sign-in or register at http://amazon.com/authors
2. Once your are signed-in click on your Profile button.
3. Along the right-hand side under “Photos” is a section headlined “Video.” Click the “Add Video” link and browse the contents of your hard drive to upload a video. It must be under 10 minutes in length and under 500 MB.
In fact, that’s a good rule of thumb for any internet video. In fact, 10 minutes is a bit too long.
If you don’t have a video to upload, you may be interested in our Book Video and Distribution option, which you can order by clicking here. It’s available to writers and professionals regardless of where you published your book (although you’ll get a substantial discount if you’ve published the book with Outskirts Press).
When comparing the finalists in the ForeWord Book of the Year Awards (not to be confused with our own BEST Book of the Year Award — I know, it’s confusing), Publishers A, U, and X are a little more competitive – but not by much when you consider that jointly, these three competitors (all operating in one office with the same personnel) publish roughly 1,000 books a month or more. Publisher X has one finalist and Publisher A has 5. Publisher U has 21. But then again, Publisher U published over 3 times the number of books we did at Outskirts Press, so from a statistical standpoint (and that’s really all success is, a matter of statistics), Outskirts Press stands out as the most award-winning publisher among the five major self-publishing firms. Yes, yes, there are three other companies that could be considered “major” based solely upon the number of books they publish a year, but not one of them has a single Book of the Year finalist. And all that is a long preamble to congratulating our own ForeWord Book of the Year finalists from Outskirts Press, who are:
I always enjoy comparing the success of our authors with the success of authors from our competitors. And fortunately, ForeWord Reviews makes that pretty easy with the announcement of their Book of the Year Finalists for 2010 at http://www.bookoftheyearawards.com/finalists/2010/ – You can search for any publisher and see how they perform.
Competitive analysis is something I don’t spend an enormous amount of time on, but I do try to keep up with other self-publishing firms as much as I can. In general, I only bother to keep a close eye on our five major competitors and they are, respectively, Publisher A, Publisher C, Publisher L, Publisher U, and Publisher X.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t mention other publishers by name in my blog, but it’s not difficult to unravel my super secret naming convention. Of course, if you were to agree with one rather vocal member of our Board, we don’t actually compete with Publisher C or L. To paraphrase: “That’s like saying Perrier competes with swamp water.” Meow.
But he has a point. Publisher C has a grand total of 3 finalists and if you are to believe their marketing claims, they publish roughly 1 trillion books a day (slight hyperbole), making for an award-winning percentage of approximately 0%. Similarly, Publisher L publishes so many books the Library of Congress had to open a whole another wing just to accommodate their volume (if you’re to believe a press release from April 1 that they distributed a few years back), and yet they published exactly zero ForeWord Book of the Year finalists in 2010. Their April Fool’s day release notwithstanding, that’s not a very high winning percentage. Perhaps this goes to show that publishing with one of those cheapo do-it-yourself outfits isn’t exactly the route to an award-winning book…. And interestingly, if you actually look at the “services” they’re starting to offer, they’re becoming pretty expensive, which is basically like adding insult TO injury.
More on the Book of the Year finalists and our other 3 competitors in a few hours…
Last time I mentioned I would discuss some of our award-winners. First and foremost is the current poll for the Outskirts Press 2010 Best Book of the Year award. The polls are open through the end of this month and then we’ll crown the winner. It’s a close race! As I write this, Frank and Doris are dead-even with 48.43% each. That’s impressive, and speaks directly to each of their respective marketing efforts. Doris started strong out of the gate, capturing in excess of 60% of the votes when the polls first opened on the 15th. In the days that followed, however, Frank launched what appeared to be an effective marketing campaign of his own and brought his total percentage above Doris’ for a few days. Now they’re neck and neck. What would be really interesting would be to ask them what marketing tactics they are pursuing. Hmm… we might do that, at least for the winner once the polls closed. It might shed some valuable information on “platform building” for other writers. Following in the footsteps of successfully published authors is part of what we embrace at Outskirts Press.
Watch the polls and vote for your favorite here (yes, WordPress allows you to share polls across multiple blogs — cool, huh?) For details about the three finalists, visit the Outskirts Press Blog.
President of Outskirts Press 