President of Outskirts Press

Getting the most out of your ABOUT BOX on Facebook Pages

With the Timeline theme on Facebook pages, the “About” box is more important than ever. Yes, the “cover graphic” allows you to brand your page, but according to Facebook parameters, your cover graphic is not allowed to contain a URL. Fortunately, the About Box allows them, so be sure to take advantage of that. And, the good news is, FB automatically turns any URL that you include there into an active link that actually goes to your company website. It’s a valuable piece of real estate that you don’t want to waste, so word your “About” box in such a way to leave room for your URL to appear (rather than being truncated). This means your About text needs to be approximately 20 words long, since you have a maximum of 3 lines to include both your About text and your URL. In the case of Outskirts Press, our About language is the following, which fits exactly into the allocated space in the About box:

Outskirts Press offers full-service, high-quality, custom book publishing and marketing services. Keep 100% of your rights & royalties at www.OutskirtsPress.com.

What we offer, our benefits, and our URL. Short, sweet, effective.

To the right of the About box are the 4 app navigational boxes. I call them navigational boxes because if you manage them effectively, you can treat them like website navigation, taking your Facebook users to other pages of your Facebook presence, where each page can then be customized to accomplish tasks the main timeline page can’t do very well (ie, sell or market your stuff). We’ll discuss that next time…

branding, facebook

Facebook Timeline Cover Graphics

In yesterday’s post I mentioned the three things to consider when creating your “Cover” graphic for your company FB page now that the Timeline theme has removed the ability to have “Welcome Pages.” Those three considerations are

1) Identify your company’s core benefits 2) Incentive ”Likes” in a similar manner to the previous Welcome pages 3) Aesthetically design around the FB elements that are super-imposed over the cover graphic

As a result of these three goals, here is the cover graphic we created for Outskirt Press (it might be a little “squashed” since the optimal width for this graphic is 851, which exceeds the amount of space available on this blog. Nevertheless it gives you the idea, and you can see the “real” cover graphic on our Facebook page by clicking here.

In our case, our core benefits are that we help authors write anything, publish everything, and market everywhere. So those benefit statements are a part of the design.

We incentivize links by highlighting the current months “perk” or “topic” along with the next month’s upcoming topic, and then we graphically point in the general vicinity of the “like” button of FB, as well-designed “Welcome” pages did in the past. By referring to both the current and up-coming months, we give incentive for friends to “stay with us” even if the current month’s event/promotion is nearing the end. And finally, we designed this graphic to aesthetically accommodate the FB lay-overs. The “white space” underneath the couple is where Facebook overlays the avatar graphic, so we matched the treatment of that graphic, even down the 3 pixel border separating the gray lines from the image. So it actually looks like this on Facebook:

And that brings us to the rest of the header space: the “About box, the photos, and the other three “navigational” graphics FB allows. We’ll discuss more of that next time…

facebook

Creating a cover graphic for Facebook Timeline

The “Survivor Graphic” I discussed last week was a stop-gap, a temporary solution to get something, anything, into the “Cover” spot when Facebook launched the Timeline lay-outs. But it wasn’t optimal. For one, it failed to say what Outskirts Press does – what its benefits are to its users/clients/authors. And it didn’t compensate for the loss of “Welcome pages.”

Welcome pages, as many FB marketers know, were specific app-pages that could be created to incentivize likes, by promoting upcoming perks, drawings, promotions, etc. I discussed how to create a Welcome page in a previous series of posts toward the beginning of this year when Outskirts Press was putting its own Welcome Page into use. One of the nice things about the old Welcome pages was that by manipulating a setting in Facebook, you could direct new users to your Welcome Page rather than your wall, theoretically increasing the odds of them “linking” you. Actually, this practice wasn’t theoretical at all — it was statistically proven to be successful.

The new Timeline theme removes the ability to set any other page as the landing page. Everyone comes to the same page when they visit Outskirts Press on Facebook, and we can’t send them anywhere else, not even to an alternate app-page.

So, then, with the Cover Graphic, the question becomes, “How can I use the Cover Graphic to: 1) Identify my company’s core benefits and 2) incentive “Likes” in a similar manner to my previous ‘Welcome page’ while 3) aesthetically designing around the FB elements that are super-imposed over my cover graphic?”

That’s a tall order, but with some creativity and a talented designer, you can pull it off, and I’ll share how we did it for Outskirts Press tomorrow….

branding, facebook

Creating a Cover image for Facebook pages

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that these were the 4 “requirements” when creating a new “Cover” image for the Facebook profile pages within the Timeline framework:

It should be at least 399 pixels wide, but 851 pixels wide is better and 315 pixels tall is recommended.
It cannot feature pricing or discount/promotional information.
It cannot contain contact information or website addresses.
It cannot contain call-to-action statements.

When creating your 815 x 315 pixel graphic, there are some other considerations. For one, your avatar is going to appear as an overlay in the lower left hand corner of the graphic, starting approximately 20 pixels from the left edge and 75 pixels from the bottom edge. The box that superimposes over your graphic is 135 pixels wide. So in other words, you shouldn’t put anything important (definitely not any words) in the lower left corner of your graphic, which is defined by a space of at least 160 pixels wide by 90 pixels high. In fact, if at all possible, you should try to “incorporate” this avatar graphic within the design aesthetics of your Cover, in order to give the impression that both elements are a part of the same graphic.

The other area to consider is the upper right hand corner. For users who are not signed-in to their Facebook account (or don’t have one yet, if there are any of those people left), Facebook overlays a “Sign-up box” over your Cover graphic. The simplest thing to do, of course, is to not worry about this (and given the spacing variables that arise, depending upon whether this pop-up box appears on a mobile phone, tablet, or monitor, that’s also perhaps the most realistic option). The second easiest thing to do is refrain from putting any content in this area of your cover graphic. But considering the size of Facebook’s Sign-up Box, that’s a lot of real estate to “give-up” just for those people who aren’t signed in.

A trickier, but ultimately, perhaps, more successful approach, is to design some content to fit within the designated space, so that your cover graphic looks complete both with and without Facebook’s overlay. Trickier still, Facebook’s overlay is somewhat transparent, so you cannot have anything BOLD and BRIGHT under it.

In our first attempt at a cover graphic, we added a testimonial in that space. The graphic (let’s call it our “Survivor graphic” for the sake of identifying it among other graphics) stands on its own when Facebook’s overlay covers our testimonial, and when the overlay is gone, the testimonial supports and further enhances the graphic.

So, given those considerations, and our first opportunity to deal with this new branding opportunity, our first attempt at a cover graphic featured one of our authors holding his book alongside his friend (and subject matter), Benjamin “Coach” Wade from the CBS reality show “Survivor.”

If it helps, below is a graphic representation of the two “trouble spots” I described above, so you can keep them in mind as you design your own compelling cover graphic. The top-right black box is approximately where Facebook overlays their own “Sign-up/log-in graphic” and the bottom-right is where Facebook overlays the “Avatar graphic.”

As we began enhancing other elements of the new Timeline masthead, this Survivor graphic was replaced with something else, and we’ll discuss that next…

facebook

How to create a “Cover” for the new Facebook pages

Now that the new Facebook Pages and its timeline motif have been thrust upon all of us recently (and don’t think you’re exempt if you don’t have a Company page; personal profile pages will be forced into the Timeline on April 15th), we were faced with the task of branding Outskirts Press within the new look.

As you may or may not recall from a Facebook series of posts I wrote a while ago, in which I shared the process of branding your Facebook presence, our Facebook page at Outskirts Press has looked like this for a while:

And then suddenly, it looked like this:

No branding to speak of, really. Fortunately, with the new Facebook timelines, you have the option of creating a “cover” to your Facebook profile page. Here are some rules to keep in mind when designing your own cover (which is just FB’s fancy way of referring to a main graphic).

It should be at least 399 pixels wide, but 851 pixels wide is better and 315 pixels tall is recommended.
It cannot feature pricing or discount/promotional information.
It cannot contain contact information or website addresses.
It cannot contain call-t0-action statements.

In other words, it can’t contain any of the elements normal marketers use to, you know… sell stuff. But it can be designed to brand your page, and then through various tweaks to the timeline itself, you can move some of those promotional tactics elsewhere. I’ll tell you how as we continue this series of posts…

branding, facebook

Customizing new Facebook pages

Since it could have easily been confused for an April Fool’s Day joke, Facebook decided to change all the Company Pages to the “Timeline” motif at the end of March, but certainly the close proximity to April 1st is not just a happy coincidence. For entrepreneurs or companies that have spent a lot of time tweaking their Facebook profile and company pages to get them just right, having to start again from scratch is a little annoying. Note to Zuckerberg: Your hobby doesn’t have to become our hobby. In all fairness, this change seemed inevitable because I’m sure the “old” way was overloading their servers. The “Timeline” presentation of data is much more efficient in terms of server access for its approximately 500 million daily users.

Okay, so now that the change is upon us, in the coming days I’ll share some tips and tricks to help you change your page from looking like this (which is what ours at Outskirts Press looked like on April 1 – April Fools indeed)…

… to looking like this…

self publishing a book

Welcome to your galley review process at Outskirts Press

The 3-step galley review process at Outskirts Press begins with the following screen:

There are three important pieces of information to take away from this screen:

1) You have 14 days to complete your review (if you need longer, notify your rep). This is to keep your project moving along so we can get your book published. Some authors breeze through this process; others, inexplicably, take months. But we’ve found that giving a 14-day requirement is a good way to curtail procrastination.

2) You are reviewing your print-ready files. It’s your responsibility to thoroughly check them for any and all corrections you wish to make. Anything you don’t bring to our attention during this process will be in your final book.

3) And any corrections you bring to our attention after submitting your edit forms will incur additional fees for us to fix.

Authors acknowledge all this “fine print” by clicking the “Start Reviewing My Proofs” button….

self publishing a book

Self publishing a book with Outskirts Press – Cover galley review

The first step of the online galley review process is reviewing your cover, which begins with this screen of the proofing process:

Clicking on the thumbnail image of the cover will open up a larger .jpg version for close review. This is your chance to review everything very, very closely. It’s important to note that two elements of the cover won’t be finalized at this point — the barcode and the price. That’s because, you, the author, haven’t officially finalized your pricing yet, and the final price plays a part in the price-embedded barcodes we include on the covers as part of our services. So the barcode box will be blank and the price on the back will be place-held with Xs.

But otherwise, what you’re seeing is what you’re going to get. So, read the title word for word. Read the sub-title word for word. Read the back cover word for word. Read the spine word for word. Don’t assume that just because the title is spelled correctly on the front that it will be spelled correctly on the spine. Yes, 999 times out of 1,000 it will be. You don’t want to be that .01%

Any errors that have cropped up, either through human error on the book designer’s fault, or human error on yours when you supplied the information to us originally, should be fixed at this time. We give you 10 free edits to make those corrections. Make them count.

So, if you see anything that needs fixing, you would click the first box on the screen: I have some changes I would like made to the cover.

Alternatively, if everything is absolutely perfect (and that happens for covers more often than not), you would click the second box on the screen: This proof is perfect. Go to print!

Let’s assume for the sake of this walk-thru, that I have some corrections to make to my Fandemonium Volume 2 cover. I click the first box and receive a pop-up message reminding me once again that I am responsible for catching all the errors I want corrected. We often notify our authors of their responsibility because we have to overcome the assumption authors have that “self-publishing” is similar to “publishing” in this regard. A “publisher” will correct things; a “self-publisher” will expect the author to correct things. You might actually be surprised to learn the degree to which authors get mad at us for making corrections without their approval. We prefer to leave it entirely up to the author. That’s where the “100% of the control” comes from in our marketing materials.

So I proceed to the nitty-gritty of my cover edits by clicking the “Proceed to Cover Edits” button that appears along with the pop-up box….

self publishing

Submitting cover galley edits with Outskirts Press

Requesting edits to your cover file is simply a matter of entering two pieces of information into our online form: the “error” and the “correction.” Additional information and help is available from this screen by clicking the little question mark icon.

This process is admittedly a little cumbersome, because the .jpg image of your cover doesn’t allow you to “cut” text and then “paste” it into the form, so one has to enter both the “error” and the “correction” manually into the applicable boxes (which of course, opens the door for NEW errors — so be VERY careful when completing this process that you do not introduce a new error when fixing one).

The good news is that most covers only require 1-2 changes, if that, so this process is usually painless. Along with indicating the error and the correction, we also need the “location” of the issue, which for the cover could be the “back” or the “spine” or the “front.”

We provide 10 free fixes, so 10 rows are presented on the screen. If for some inexplicable reason, you have more changes than 10, you can order more edits in blocks of 10 for a nominal fee (which is why that “Galley Edit Balance” is shown in red, to keep you abreast of your galley fees, if any). 90% of our authors have no changes to the cover and 99% of those have less than 10, so very rarely do any additional fees ever apply here.

Once you’re done entering all your edits (double and triple check your work, please!), you will then click on the “I’m all done with cover edits!” button on the bottom of the screen.

Two more pop-up message appear, one after the other, verifying that you are indeed done, and that if you change your mind about making any further changes to your cover at a later date, additional revision fees will apply. Fair enough; after all, you get lots of free chances to get it right this first time, so make them count.

Click “Yes” and “I accept” respectively to move on to the next step…

self publishing a book

Submitting your free cover edits

Upon submitting all your cover edits you’re taken to your shopping cart to check-out. Unless you added MORE than 10 free edits, you will have a zero balance, like this:

Simply go through the check-out steps to complete your submission. You must complete this check-out procedure, even with a zero balance, to submit your edits to us for correction. We won’t know when you’re done with your cover review, or whether you had more than 10 edits, until AFTER you check-out of your cart.

And then, the next step…