best self publishing

Proper book pricing for self publishing books

Reviewing your current pricing is the next step in the galley review process. Remember back in the pre-production process when you set your book’s pricing based upon an estimated page count?  Well, now you get to do it based upon the actual page count of your fully formatted book.    There could be a difference, depending upon how close your estimate is to the final page count.  Formatting often makes a book much longer than some authors anticipate (smaller trim sizes combined with chapter drops can add a significant number of pages).

But the Outskirts Press benefits still continue. Even now you can still modify your retail price by clicking the “plus” or “minus” button to either make your retail price (and therefore your royalty) higher or lower. You’ll see the effects of your changes instantly.  Click the Update button to make any changes take effect. If you have both a paperback and a hardback, you’ll do this twice.

Once you’re happy with your price(s), click the Save and Continue button to proceed to your interior.  Keep in mind that if you make any changes to your interior at the proofing stage which increases or reduces your page count, your pricing may need to be reviewed and set again…

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Outskirts Press self publishing – Reviewing your interior galley proofs

Reviewing your interior proof works much the same as reviewing your cover. It begins with this screen in your Publishing Center during the galley review process:

Just like with the cover, the first step is opening up the file, which in this case is accomplished by clicking the “Interior Proof” Adobe graphic.  Your interior proof will open in Adobe Reader (if you don’t have the latest edition of Adobe Reader, you can get it free from Adobe’s website at www.adobe.com.

The biggest difference between reviewing your cover and reviewing your interior is that your interior is much longer, obviously, and therefore requires a greater degree of concentration and thoroughness.   This will also be your chance to get your first glimpse of the interior of your book, and the nature of that “presentation” is going to depend upon whether you selected the standard interior, the enhanced interior, or the custom interior.   All three interior choices will result in a great looking book, albeit perhaps somewhat different from how it looked on your Word for Windows word processor or in your head.  This difference is a GOOD thing — after all, Word is called a word processor for a reason. If it was meant to be used for book design, it would be called… inDesign, which is the industry standard book design and formatting software we use from Adobe. Our books look like industry standard, high-quality professional books.

If/when you see something in your interior file that you wish to correct, you will then  select the first box: I have some changes I would like made to the interior.

If, after thoroughly reviewing the ENTIRE manuscript, you find nothing you want to fix, look over it again. Perhaps have someone else look over it. Then, and only then, click the second box: This proof is perfect – Go to Print!

Hmm, on second thought, look your file over one more time anyway.  Since we provide up to 25 free interior corrections, we get a little nervous (i.e., suspicious) when we receive initial galley proofs for the interior without any corrections at all.  This usually tells us the author didn’t look the file over at all (and, inevitably, they’ll see  something only after the book is published that they’ll wish they had fixed).  At that point, revising your publication costs money; so please do everyone a favor and thoroughly review your book now, when 25 fixes are completely free.

When you click on the first box indicating that you have some corrections, you will receive a pop-up asking you to acknowledge the fact that you understand your responsibility in finding and bringing to our attention everything you want fixed.  Clicking the button to proceed indicates your acceptance, and then the  interior edit form appears, just like with the cover….

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Book publishing with Outskirts Press – Submitting your galley review edits

Submitting edits to your interior file takes place on this screen of your Publishing Center:

Rather than “front” or “back” or “spine” which were the only location choices for your cover, the location choices for any corrections you want made to your interior are a little more specific, and involve the PDF page # and the line #.  We ask for the PDF page number and not the document page number because most books have fore-matter and back-matter that rarely have page numbers.  But the PDF proof will always have a page number, and that is the numbering scheme to use when reporting errors and corrections.

The process is largely the same as indicating corrections to your cover, with one noticeable advantage. You can cut and paste directly from the PDF file and directly into the “Error” box, making this process quicker and less prone to errors.  You also get 25 corrections instead of 10 and in our experience, the majority of our authors use the majority of those free edits.   They often just see a word here, or a period there, or a question mark over there that they want to change.  This is not the time for massive re-writes, but it IS the time to catch spelling errors, punctuation errors, and the misuse of words.  And even if you require more than 25 free edits to correct everything, now is the most cost-effective time to make every necessary correction.   Additional blocks of 25 edits are available for a very nominal fee. Purchase all you need to make your book perfect.

Alternatively, we offer a flat reformatting fee for $99 which allows you to make all your corrections onto your own word processor file and then resubmit it to us for formatting again from scratch.  This is often a preferable course of action if you have a LOT of corrections or if you find the online cut-n-paste edit forms too cumbersome.  Different strokes for different folks and we try to accommodate all preferred styles of submitting corrections to us.

When you’re done entering all your edits (make sure you are truly done to avoid any unnecessary fees), click the “I’m all done with interior edits” button, and accept the following pop-up language about finalization of your proofs and the fees that could apply if you want to make more corrections later. If we do ever hear complaints about “hidden fees” from one author in a hundred, it’s here — but the reality is that these fees are not hidden. We tell you about them up-front and in advance, multiple times; and we give you ample opportunities to avoid them.  Please take advantage of that by making sure you catch all your errors during this galley review stage. That’s what it’s here for.

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Self publishing with Outskirts Press – Free interior galley edits

Submitting your interior edits requires a quick check-out process through your shopping cart. If all you had were 25 edits or less, your revisions are completely free:

And then, just like when you first began the production process, your Publishing Center returns to the Production Phase screen, which means we have received your edits and are correcting your book according to what you provided to us:

This period of time depends upon the number of corrections you’ve submitted, obviously, and ends when you receive another email notifying you that your Proofs are again ready to review. At this point, the Review Process begins all over again. And hopefully you caught everything the first time so now you can just “Go to Print!” on your files.

Once you have approved both your cover file and interior file, we initiate our own internal QC and Pre-Media review. This is not a subjective review of your book to make sure you didn’t miss any spelling mistakes; that’s your responsibility and we trust you reviewed your proofs thoroughly before telling us to “Go to Print.” No, our review is a technical one to make sure your book is going to meet our high standards from a technical standpoint. Once it passes both our QC and Pre-Flight tests, we submit all your information for print-on-demand printing and distribution-on-demand wholesale & online distribution…. And what happens next? You receive an exciting email notifying you of publication…

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Congratulations! Your book is published!

And then one of the most exciting moments happens, your book is published! Congratulations!

Now, your Publishing Center looks like this with YOUR book cover, just like we see our new Fandemonium Volume 2 on our dashboard.  You’ll notice that I can still manage my Volume 1 by choosing it from among my “Active Titles” along the left-hand side.

And that takes us full circle…. Now it’s time to start self-publishing ANOTHER book, isn’t it?

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Facebook fan leader boards and “Fan of the Week” kudos

I know I should be discussing the proofing process at Outskirts Press, and I will get back to that next week, but in celebration of our passing 5,000 fans on our Outskirts Press Facebook Page, I wanted to mention some of the new apps we added to not only encourage more participation from our FB friends, but to give them recognition for that participation, as well.  Of course, anything that I discuss regarding Facebook is a little up in the air, since apparently, the Fan Pages on Facebook will be changing to a new design on March 30.   But if the “Preview” is to be believed, this new design will incorporate the oft-debated “Timeline” design that Facebook unveiled for the Personal pages a little while ago.  This re-design shouldn’t affect what we’re doing with our Fan Recognition Programs, which I’ll discuss now:

The first is a “Fan of the Week” award, which will publicly recognize a random fan of our Facebook page for participation on our wall — which gives public kudos to fans who have actively engaged in liking something, commenting on something, or posting something.  Each week, a new Fan will be chosen, recognized on our wall, and will be featured on a new Fan of the Week page on our Facebook Page, with his/her user profile “up in lights.”  The purpose, of course, is to encourage other fans/friends to participate, so they will become the next Fan of the Week. The more you participate, the greater your chances to be chosen as the Fan of the Week.

To that end, we also launched a Top Fans app, which goes one step further.  Every Sunday we will recognize the top weekly fans who are responsible for the most likes, the most comments, and the most posts.  The top 5 fans in each category will be listed on a new Top Fans leader-board page, along with a 4th category, recognizing the fans who have accumulated the most “points” overall (with certain engagements — likes, comments, posts — earning a certain number of points).

And in the coming months we will be launching our Facebook Publishing Awards, where certain milestones our authors reach in the publishing and marketing process are automatically broadcast to all their Facebook friends.   People closely watching my personal FB page may have noticed the first such Award come across my newsfeed a couple of weeks ago.  This will be a great way for us to help our authors better establish and earn the public recognition they deserve for their impressive accomplishment — successfully publishing and marketing a great looking, high-quality book!

And if there’s any doubt that all this “stuff” I’m talking about in regard to Facebook (including the tactics I covered yesterday) contribute to significant increases in social media “reach,” one need only look at this recent graphic generated by Facebook Insights for our Facebook Page:

 

 

 

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How to Increase Facebook Fans (Likes)

Before I proceed with the production/proofing process series of posts, I’d like to take a moment to congratulate David Olson of Albuquerque, NM, who was the winner of a free Barnes & Noble NOOK in our random drawing on the Outskirts Press blog.   This was the way we celebrated reaching 5,000 fans on our self publishing Facebook page. And that gives me a reason to really quickly offer 3 steps on increasing YOUR Facebook fan base.

1. Create a Welcome Page that motivates visitors to your page to “Like” you by offering exclusive deals, promotions, events, information, etc. I’ve posted about how to do that here.

2. Engage your community with quotes, quizzes, polls, information, content, and rapid, helpful answers to their questions.  Yes, this is the time consuming part, and usually the step that either makes or breaks this 3-step plan.  In the case of Outskirts Press, we are fortunate to have a LOT of content to share on Facebook, so it’s more a matter of logistically and efficiently sharing it, rather than having to create it.  In our case we share writing and inspirational quotes twice a week (Monday and Friday), “Awesome Covers of the Week” on Wednesday and Saturday, “In Author’s Words” (inspiring and motivational comments and testimonials from our published authors) on Tuesday and Thursday.  This is in addition to the daily doses of information about publishing, “self publishing and book marketing” that is shared via RSS from our blog and the periodic polls and quizzes we hold to further engage our community.  Plus, with nearly every comment or question, we attempt to respond informatively, helpfully, positively, and with encouragement and professionalism.  I.e., this step isn’t “easy.”

3. Give things away.  This is actually a combination of #1 and #2 in addition to its own step.  You can promote what you’re giving away on your Welcome Page that you create; you can constantly mention it among the tactics you are taking in step #2 (particularly when you have a winner); and you can create a poll for what should be the next prize that is given away, which, in theory, should prevent those who joined solely for the award from “unliking” you once they realize they didn’t win.  And that takes us to our NOOK winner, which we announced this morning on our Outskirts Press blog.

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Self Publishing Production Files

What happens during the Production phase at Outskirts Press?  A lot, but ultimately, printing comes down to the creation of two documents, the interior file and the cover file. Granted, creating these files properly is where our skill and expertise comes into play, and is also what separates us from so many of the other online “self publishing” companies, many of which use computer programs to automatically generate the production files.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel comfortable having my book generated by a machine. And if you’ve seen the “output” of those machines at those places, you’ll have a better understanding as to why the “stigma” of self-publishing persists.

While production files are necessary for printing, it is important to realize that when an author purchases publishing services, they are purchasing publication and distribution of a book; they are not purchasing the means by which you get there. If we included these files into the prices of our publishing services, our most affordable package would cost over $1000 (instead of $199).  And if you look around at other self-publishing companies who make a “big deal” out of giving away their production files, you will notice that their least expensive packages are all in excess of $1000!  In other words, they’re charging you for the files whether or not you want them (and most authors don’t).   Creating these production files properly requires the expertise of publishing professionals — and expertise is expensive, but since the vast majority of all authors (theirs and ours) do not need or request these files (99% in our case), we decided it was unethical to charge 100% of our clients such high prices when only 1% would benefit.

On the other side of the extreme are self-publishing companies offering prices under $1000, like we do, and in those cases, their production files are either extremely expensive (particularly if you request them within 1 year of publication) or not available at all.

For authors who do want the production files, Outskirts Press offers the option of purchasing them separately.  That offers choice and value for authors who want them, without universally charging (and penalizing) the vast majority of authors who don’t. When you do the comparative math, the files still cost about 50% of what they would cost elsewhere. Either way, it all comes down to the Outskirts Press niche — navigating the middle of two extremes for the ultimate in flexibility and value for our authors.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to discuss the next phases of the publishing process at Outskirts Press, now that we have thoroughly covered the pre-production process. And as I did with that information, I will present the next section in reverse chronological order, too. To see why, click here.

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Self Publishing Reviews

In my last post I set out to compare self publishing companies based upon 4 of the top 5 self publishing reviews. I applied a numeric value to each company based upon their relative ranking in each source, and that resulted in the following result totals for the top 5 self publishing companies ranked side by side (out of a possible 34 points):

Outskirts Press 30 Points
Company 3 24 Points
Company 5 19 Points
Company 2 13 Points
Company 14 13 Points

Upon looking at that data, I realized that some sources were weighted more heavily than others, since each source didn’t share the same value system. One had a 13 point value system while another had a 4 point value system. So for the purposes of this next chart, I will apply a 10-point value system to each of the four sources to give each source equal weight and therefore arrive at a more accurate total:

The way one does that is as follows:

TopTen Reviews already has a 10 point system, so the points there remain the same.

Top Consumer Reviews has an 8 point system, which means each point is worth 1.25 points to reach a 10-point system.

Top Self Publishing Firms has a 13 point value system, so to bring that into a 10-point system, each point actually is worth .77 points.

Previously I applied a 4 point value system to the categories in The Fine Print of Self-Publishing, but since one of those values was a negative number for the “publishers to avoid” category, in reality it was a 3 point system with an exception so now each point in that book really becomes worth 3.33.

And that leaves us with this chart below, which, interestingly enough, is not significantly different from the previous chart. Value is value. Good self publishing companies are good self publishing companies.

TopTen Top Consumer Fine Print Top Firms Total
Outskirts Press 8 8.75 6.66 10 33.41
Company 2 3.33 9.24 12.57
Company 3 10 5 -1 8.47 22.47
Company 4 3.33 7.7 11.03
Company 5 7 10 6.93 23.93
Company 6 6.66 6.16 12.82
Company 7 -1 5.39 4.39
Company 8 3.75 -1 4.62 7.37
Company 9 2 3.33 3.85 9.18
Company 10 9 -1 3.08 11.08
Company 11 4 -1 2.31 5.31
Company 12 10 1.54 11.54
Company 13 -1 0.77 -0.23
Company 14 6 7.5 3.33 16.83
Company 15 5 2.5 3.33 10.83
Company 16 3 3.33 6.33
Company 17 1 1
Company 18 10 10
Company 19 6.25 6.25
Company 20 1.25 1.25

Out of a possible perfect score of 40 points, the top 5 self publishing companies according to the combined data from these self publishing reviews are:

Outskirts Press 33.41 Points
Company 5 23.93 Points
Company 3 22.47 Points
Company 14 16.83 Points
Company 6 12.82 Points

As stated in the last posting, I don’t name competitors. Even so, this analysis seems somewhat indicative of the value we offer at Outskirts Press, according to the combined views of four 3rd-party self publishing review sources.

As you compare publishing companies when it comes time to make your publishing decision, keep these 3 tips in mind:

1. Consider the source. How biased is it? How rational? How knowledgeable? Does it seem like a rant, or a legitimate, valuable piece of information that you can apply your own, personal viewpoint to?

2. Consider the date of the information. Is it out of date? Years old? No longer applicable? Since people are becoming accustomed to the immediacy of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, they forget that information is available “forever” on the Internet. As a result, they assume information they read today was written today, when in reality, you may be viewing information that is years old, was written on April Fool’s day, or in some other way is no longer informative or important. You can typically find a date for all information if you look hard enough.

3. Investigate multiple sources. As you can see from the combined scores of the 4 sources above, no company is absolutely perfect. That’s because they’re run by human beings. Some sources you uncover will love one company and hate another. And a different source will have exactly the opposite opinion. That’s because sources are run by human beings, too, and everyone has an opinion. So find multiple sources of information and apply the statistical analysis method suggested above.

best self publishing

Best Self Publishing Companies

With so much competition in self-publishing nowadays, how are writers supposed to determine the “best self publishing companies” for their books?  It comes down to statistical analysis of multiple sources and reviews. This beats relying upon any one source (whether it be positive or negative) since it’s important to realize that single sources may lack knowledge, integrity, or applicability. Now that the Internet is replacing newspapers, we are bombarded with more information than ever before, but unfortunately, most of the Internet lacks one component that made newspapers and journalism valuable — the vetting process. You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet; you must do your homework, and that involves researching numerous sources and then combining that data into a value system you can actually use.

And that brings us to the process of statistically analyzing at least five sources when making a decision. In the past I have introduced 5 such sources to help you compare the “best self publishing companies” in a logical, mathematical way. Whenever you look at any source for any information, you should consider the date of the information and that source’s vested interest. So by combining the sources together to arrive upon a “sum total” you are better equipped to see an accurate “average score” of the best self publishing companies you are examining.

Let’s compare the best self publishing companies now by performing this analysis on 20 different companies. We will put those 20 publishers in a chart along the left in the order they appear in Top Self Publishing Firms, which lists 13 companies in it’s “Large & Medium” chapter. The remaining seven companies will appear underneath. We will place four self publishing review sources along the top of the chart. Then we will apply a numeric value in the following manner:

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).

TopTen Reviews – Since there are ten companies ranked, 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 – Since they rank 8 companies, I will apply a 8-1 numeric value.

Fine Print of Self Publishing – Rather than charting all 45 companies that are analyzed here, we will stick with the 20 best self publishing companies included in either the “Large and Medium” category of Top Self Publishing Firms, TopTen Reviews, or Top Consumer Reviews. Comparing 20 of anything is enough analysis. Of those, we will apply a numeric value based upon the book’s categories in the following manner: “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.

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 2 1 12 13
Company 3 10 4 -1 11 24
Company 4 1 10 11
Company 5 7 3 9 19
Company 6 2 8 10
Company 7 -1 7 6
Company 8 3 -1 6 8
Company 9 2 1 5 8
Company 10 9 -1 4 12
Company 11 4 -1 3 6
Company 12 3 2 5
Company 13 -1 1 0
Company 14 6 6 1 13
Company 15 5 2 1 8
Company 16 3 1 4
Company 17 1 1
Company 18 8 8
Company 19 5 5
Company 20 1 1

As I have mentioned in the past, I don’t mention other self publishing companies by name in my blog. After all, that wouldn’t be very sporting to “Company #20” and certainly not to Company #13– hmm, I guess it’s unlucky after all.

And that’s not even the point of this posting. The point is the concept of combining sources of information to arrive upon a general consensus of data. 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 because that value system goes to 13 while the others go to 10, 8, and 4, respectively.

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