This is the last day to save 20% on either your Diamond or full-color Pearl publishing service with Outskirts Press. With Monday being a holiday, today represents the first time most people will actually see our promotion at all, and we want to give everyone a great chance at taking advantage of it.
The promotion code is: JULY42011
The Diamond package ordering page is available by clicking here.
The full-color Pearl package ordering page is available by clicking here.
When I was reading the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Boston Review article “Books After Amazon: Publishing’s Race to the Bottom” by Onnesha Roychoudhuri, I was reminded of the period of time way back in 2008 when Amazon threatened to remove all the “buy buttons” from books published by print-on-demand publishers who didn’t print their books through Amazon’s own company. That attempt at an anti-trust monopoly ultimately failed, which was good news for authors and publishers alike, but this article referred to similar tactics Amazon has been employing with traditional publishers for even longer, which I found interesting. Here’s an excerpt, and I encourage you to read the article in its entirety by clicking here:
Buy-button disappearances are just one of the tensions that have emerged between publishers and Amazon. Publishers accustomed to the more bibliophilic operators of independent stores and even Barnes & Noble find it jarring to deal with Amazon’s lawyers. Wood’s frustration at Amazon’s lack of “gentlemanliness” is echoed by many other publishers who wonder why Amazon keeps putting the screws to them. (The majority of publishers contacted for this article chose not to speak on the record, citing their fear of retribution for divulging Amazon’s tactics, which one publisher described as a “You do this, or we’ll fuck you over” approach.)
I mentioned in a previous post that our most vocal critics are other publishers and, therefore, hardly credible sources. In fact, 99% of our authors love us, and we post many of their comments on our website here.
Perhaps you have even stumbled across an “outskirts press complaints” topic or thread yourself, even if you weren’t trying to, given Google’s own tendency to highlight negative results with their so-called “Google Suggest” functionality combined with humankind’s morbid curiosity for controversy. I have discussed Google’s controversial functionality at some length in previous posts. According to Google, everyone on the Internet complains about everything.
So, congratulations! If you’ve stumbled upon this postings, you’re more than likely a victim of Google’s own manipulation — you didn’t even know you were looking for complaints until Google suggested it. But, if you take the time to read further into nearly any of the “Google Suggestion” results Google presents for any company (whether it be for bottled water or shoes), you soon discover that you haven’t really discovered much controversy at all.
In our case, the top “Outskirts Press complaints” postings involves our Better Business Bureau information, which is not surprising since the BBB is all about consumer complaints. I’ll state frankly that I’m not a big fan of the BBB. Let me give you one reason why: One of our foreign authors registered 5 different complaints to the BBB because we take U.S. income tax out of his royalties (it’s a legal requirement). Same author, same issue, five different “Outskirts Press complaints” according to the statistics reported by the BBB. Another author registered multiple complaints because she was upset that her book, which featured 100 pages of 50-pound paper (the type of paper she requested), was “thinner” than my Self-Publishing book, which features 108 pages of 55-pound cream paper.
I believe in the case of the former, the author somehow believed the BBB would force us to break U.S. tax laws if he kept complaining to them. And in the case of the latter, I suppose she thought the BBB might be able to make her 512 PPI (pages-per-inch) paper as thick as my 441 PPI paper. Of course, the BBB isn’t able to force companies to break laws, and isn’t able to magically make paper “thicker.” So even with the involvement of the BBB, the customers were left unsatisfied and we were left unsatisfied, not only because we had 8 registered complaints instead of 2, but because we would have liked to have satisfied both of those authors if we could have.
It’s interesting, actually. Of the first page postings, a third of the “Outskirts Press complaints” results are from individuals who have started their own small presses. They discuss Outskirts Press in order to attract customers to their own business or products. It’s easy to understand why: More people search for “Outskirts Press” than for their company. It’s the same reason The National Enquirer writes more about Tom Cruise than Tom Arnold. People care about Tom Cruise; Tom Arnold — not as much.
And if you check the dates of the posts, they hold even less weight. One comes from 2008 (over 2 years ago) and another comes from April Fool’s Day.
“April Fool’s Day” has earned its namesake in the Internet age, with desperate individuals using the date as justification for posting false, fraudulent, and libelous claims. A competitor of Outskirts Press, for example, once distributed a press release on April Fool’s Day claiming that the Library of Congress needed to add another wing to accommodate the vast quantity of books being published by said competitor. Another company in our industry (this one not so much a competitor of Outskirts Press) claimed to have reached a deal with J.K. Rowling for the ebook rights to Harry Potter. Were both these press releases clever? Of course they were. But they muddy the waters in an already confusing industry and ultimately add to the confusion of the end customer/consumer/client (or author in this case), who may not realize that such a press release is a “joke.” Separating fact from fiction is hard enough on the Internet; companies don’t have to make it even harder one day out of the year.
And all this goes back to support my previous posting, which is… do your homework when conducting research online.
If you’re the founder of a small business, or an entrepreneur, or even in charge of marketing for any type of business, then you already know the type of opportunities that presents themselves around the holidays. Marketing staples like “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” have set sky-high customer expectations and defined the roles you need to play in terms of promotion. Customers and potential new clients expect “big things” during this time of year. Those companies that deliver have a better chance of earning new business.
During Black Friday this year, for instance, we offered a 25% discount on our full-color children’s illustration packages. It was the first time we ever offered such a deep discount on all our artistic styles across the board. But we had just introduced over 20 new styles to our offerings and we wanted to announce them in a big way. Mission accomplished!
We always offer a “fun” or “big” promotion during the month of December, too. Before last year’s “Best book of the Month” contest, our December promotion was typically the awarding of a free publishing package. In fact, if I’m remember correctly, there was one year when we awarded 3 free publishing packages during the month of December. Last year, of course, we held a “Best Book of the Month” contest during which we reviewed all the manuscripts submitted for publication during December to select the one we determined to be the “best.” The author of said manuscript received not only a credit of his publishing package, but an additional 10%, in an effort to “mimic” traditional free publication and an advance.
Nowadays if you want attention, you do something with one of Apple’s products (iPhone, iPad, etc). So this December, we are giving away a free Apple iPad to the author of the best manuscript we receive at the Diamond or Pearl publishing levels. See all the details here.
Not only is this a fun incentive to new authors to publish with their best work, but it also “wets the whistle” for the iPad Edition option we will be announcing in early 2011. You heard it here first.
Happy Thanksgiving. For those of you interested in e-books, we have some e-book related giveaways scheduled for December in recognition of the holiday season. They’ll be announced on our Outskirts Press blog at http://blog.outskirtspress.com in the first week of December. Just a little teaser as thanks for reading my blog. Enjoy Turkey day.
President of Outskirts Press 