President of Outskirts Press

Apple developer program – continued – part 4

A few weeks ago I started discussing our process of enrolling Outskirts Press into the Apple Developer Certification program so we could start offering “apps” to our authors (and so we could provide our own Outskirts Press apps for marketing purposes).

The posts detailed the first few steps involved in enrolling in the program, and ended with us waiting…. and waiting… for Apple approval. In the meantime, we’ve re-faxed the documents they requested several more times, contacted their support forms online, and tried emailing them. In one such online correspondence we even sunk so low as to plead with them to have an actual human being contact us (up until then, their responses had all been automated versions of the “find the answer yourself on our FAQ” variety.)

Finally, we tried enrolling again from scratch. This resulted in them providing us with a new enrollment number, and then requesting the documentation again. Once again, we faxed them our Articles of Incorporation, along with our corporate phone number and our Enrollment ID number, all as requested.

Finally, I received an email from an actual human being which helped me understand what has been causing this delay (we started this process over a month ago, and all my previous research led me to believe it wouldn’t take any longer than a week). What his email said, and my reply, will be the subject of the next post(s)…

self publishing, self publishing a book

How many votes did the Best Book of the Year winner receive?

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.

self publishing, self publishing a book

Best Book of the Year analysis

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…

self publishing

Book of the Year analysis

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…

blogging

Blogging statistics

Yesterday I introduced this graphic, which is a graph of the unique visitors to this blog since its inception on January 2010.

Contrary to my hope, April’s numbers weren’t higher, even though I was trying a new tactic of mulitple blog postings per day. So in May, I will be posting once a day again, but multiple days in a row. Basically, I’ll take the same concept of shorter blogs more frequently that the “social scientist” suggested, and just spread them across multiple days. We’ll see if that results in a “Jump” similar to the one you see in March of 2010 and again in November of 2010.

We do a lot of “Management by Statistics” here at Outskirts Press, which means we track just about everything we can, and then analyze the results to determine tactics to continue and tactics to cease. It’s really not that hard of a concept, but you’d be surprised how many businesses don’t do this. Analyzing the results of this graph above tells us that two particular events occurred which lifted the overall viewers of this blog to new levels each time. One occurred in March of 2010 and another occurred in November of 2010. I’ll discuss more about statistical management in the future…

Amazon, self publishing

How to link to your book on Amazon

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!

Amazon

How to add a Twitter Feed to your Amazon Author Central Account

If you’re a published author with a book on Amazon, you need to have an Author Central Account. This is pivotal advice I share in my book Sell Your Book on Amazon. And if you’re a business person, manager, entrepreneur or CEO and you don’t have a published book on Amazon, what are you waiting for?

Amazon’s Author Central functionality gives you some tools to establish your presence on Amazon. They recently added the ability to pick up your Twitter feed. Here’s how:

1. Sign-in to your Author Central account (or create one) at http://amazon.com/authors

2. Once you are signed-in click on your Profile button.

3. Along the right-hand side under “Photos” and “Videos” is a section headlined “Twitter.” Click the “Add account” link and provide your twitter username. It will start picking up the RSS feed immediately.

Amazon, branding, self publishing

How to add a video to your Amazon Author Central account

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).