self publishing

Version 4 Website Bookstore

With my June 30th post, I wrote this:  “The final reason for the bookstore changes is probably the most important — the integration of the retail and wholesale bookstores into one single store — and I’ll discuss that next.”

And then I got side-tracked with the publication and subsequent book marketing of The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors.  As a result, I didn’t touch upon the topic introduced in my June 30th post – that is, the integration of the retail and wholesale bookstores with our Version 4.0 website launch.

First a little background. Outskirts Press is one of the only (if not the only) self-publishing service company that offers its books at wholesale discounts to anybody (not just its own authors).  Additionally, this wholesale bookstore allows our authors the opportunity to offer their books at the full, trade-discounted prices to niche markets, smaller retailers, or specialty stores that might not otherwise have an account with Ingram or Baker & Taylor.    In fact, retailers or customers who order through the Outskirts Press wholesale bookstore actually save MORE money and get a better margin than if they were to order the same book wholesale through Ingram (that’s what happens when you cut out the middle man).  All the while our authors still receive their full royalty, 100% of the profit of the book.

Cool, yes?  In fact, this wholesale bookstore is one of our competitive advantages and is one of the reasons more savvy authors elect to publish with Outskirts Press — a publisher, marketing company, and wholesaler all in one.   Up until Version 4 of the website redesign, this wholesale bookstore was located at its own specific URL on our site, independent of our retail bookstore.

And that was the problem. Not enough people were learning about it. Sure, we informed all our authors about its availability and its advantages. But, admittedly, when an author is experiencing the jubilance of publication combined with facing the task of book marketing, such a subject as “wholesale bookstore” might rank a little lower on their radar.

So we had this great wholesale bookstore that relatively few of our authors (and book buying customers) were taking advantage of.

The solution…. ? We’ll discuss that next time.

Amazon, branding, marketing

Altering the Amazon cover graphic

Yet another posting referring to the screen shot I took of an Amazon search results page which displays two larger graphics for my most recent book, The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors.   Already we’ve discussed the importance of adding a Kindle edition to secure two such listings, and the importance of not having a white cover, lest it get “lost” among all the Amazon screen clutter. 

But what do you do if you have a white cover? Or what do you do if you want to increase the size of your book cover on Amazon (as I have done with many of my books). You change your cover graphic on Amazon…

I wrote on this topic a while ago, where I detailed the advantages of increasing the size of (and/or changing the color of) the Amazon cover. 

Take a look over to the right and see the cover of the second edition of SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON (it’s right below Self-Publishing Simplified).

That’s how the cover looks of the actual book. But, strangely, that’s not how I want the cover image to look on Amazon.  And this has to do with online marketing in the new millennium, combined with the aspect ratio of books in relationship to the aspect ratio of the graphic footprint Amazon uses on its sales pages.  In other words, a 6×9 rectangular book cover is not OPTIMAL for use within a 260 x 260 square space, which is the graphic footprint Amazon allocates for product images on its detail pages.   Showcasing portrait-shaped books results in a graphic that is 260 pixels HIGH, but only uses 50% of the available WIDTH.  In other words, most book covers on Amazon sacrifice some of the space Amazon is giving to them.  And let me tell you, with the number of shoppers on Amazon, that is some expensive square-footage going to waste.

So, the solution is to provide Amazon with a different graphic other than the “actual” graphic of the book cover – one that is square rather than rectangular.  Of course, most books are rectangular (portrait) so this means you must ”change” the appearance of the cover.  You can either “squash it” so that the entire cover fits in a space that is 33% shorter. Or you crop off a portion of the cover in preference of greater online sales.  I opted for choice number 2.  

So when SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON was first published in its first edition, I manually uploaded an alternate “square” cover image (doing anything “different” through Ingram or Amazon requires some manual intervention).  By “square” I don’t mean boring — rather I mean that it utilizes ALL the space Amazon allocates for the image, thereby making the cover image “bigger” than other cover images within search results, or even within Listmania or Guide listings (see the image of Sell Your Book on Amazon along the left-hand side of our screen shot for an example).

Of course, the more observant readers may also notice another difference between the Amazon version of the graphic above and the “real” version to the right — other than the shape.  Yes, the Amazon version is a nice garish YELLOW.  And this brings me to one of the most wonderful things about marketing on the Internet — you can have your cake and eat it, too.

What do I mean by that?  I would never design an actual cover of a book to look like the image above. It’s too… well, “ugly” for lack of a better word.  I don’t want ugly babies, because I submit my babies to contests and awards and I want them to have a chance to win.   But sadly, what makes an effective cover “in person” is not always the same as what makes an effective cover online.  That yellow sure is ugly, but when you’re scrolling through 25 books about self-publishing on Amazon’s search page, guess which image your eye is going to see first?  The big ugly yellow one… 

In other words, yes, you can have a great actual cover that wins lots of awards and you can have an image on Amazon that attracts lots of attention. Having your cake and eating it, too.

This marketing tactic isn’t just reserved for authors of “Amazon books” either — Outskirts Press is going to soon launch a new a la carte marketing service to help any author perform this function, regardless of where you decided to publish your book.

Previously on this blog I’ve provided other examples of this, and here’s a good link to one of those…

Amazon, self publishing

Amazon search results and cover colors

 Now let’s discuss the color of the covers in this screen shot below:

 This exemplifies the importance of cover design, and specifically, the importance of planning ahead when designing your cover, or working with a cover designer.  You want your book to STAND OUT on search results pages like this, which means you want to avoid having a white cover.   After all, let’s look closely at the screen shot above. The only cover that is harder to see and pay attention to than the 6th cover is the 8th one, and that’s because the 8th cover is missing!

Does this mean you should never design a white book cover?  Well…. maybe.  I would challenge book cover designers to rise to the occasion in the “Amazon world” and create covers that are specifically designed to be seen on visual search results pages like the one above.  That means, no white covers.  But, even if the book cover for the physical book itself is white, that doesn’t mean your Amazon cover has to be.

Gasp! Change the cover image just for Amazon?  Yes – and in past posts I’ve given specific examples of how I’ve personally done that with my Sell Your Book on Amazon listing.  The actual cover is 2/3 orange and 1/3 white. That’s too much white for me, so for the Amazon cover image, I replaced the white with an obnoxious bright yellow.  You know what? It works.   In fact, if you look at the screen shot above, there’s a chance the most noticeable book cover among ALL the books on that page is that big bright yellow cover along the left, which, not coincidentally is for SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON.  I say “not coincidentally” because that is actually the result of quite a bit of planning and effort on my part, but as you can see on this Amazon search page, it pays off.

And we can talk about that more in the future, along with why you would want to create a cover image specifically for Amazon (and how you do that).

Amazon, branding, marketing, self publishing

The Amazon Kindle and Search Results

In the last posting I began analyzing this screen shot, which is the first page of the Amazon search results for a particular phrase. 

I’m using my latest book as an example to demonstrate the actual positive effects of completing some basic Amazon promotion tactics.  Let’s specifically look at three elements of this screen shot:

  •  there are two of the same graphics in the top 10 (thank you Kindle edition)- repetition matters
  • the cover graphic isn’t white – see how book #1 and #6 get completely lost?
  •  the cover graphic is significantly bigger than all the other covers on the page

Let’s discuss the duplication effect, seeing two covers of the same book.  Relatively easily, my book is garnering twice the exposure and therefore, hopefully, receiving twice the attention from Amazon shoppers browsing this list.  In other words, my book has twice as much potential to be “clicked on” because the cover is appearing twice.   Getting two cover images of your book to appear on an applicable search term phrase on Amazon is as easy as adding an Amazon Kindle edition of your book (the money you make from sales of your Kindle Edition may even be more icing on the cake — in fact, it may even start to be the cake itself. Three of our top 5 selling books in any given month are often the Kindle editions, and they’re all fiction.) Any fiction author looking for a way to level the book marketing playing field shouldn’t do anything before adding a Kindle edition to his book.

We’ll talk about the other two points from this screen shot next…

Amazon, self publishing

Kindle and Amazon Search Results

Over the next few postings I’m going to examine the following screen shot that I took on Amazon when I entered the phrase “successful authors self publishing” into the Amazon search box on August 11.  Sorry the graphic is so small; I had to make sure it could fit in this narrow column on this blog template.  Basically, this is showing the first nine results of the search phrase.   The 8th book is missing its cover image. There is an advertisement in the lower left-hand corner. And directly above the advertisement is an Amazon “promotion” for listmania lists.

Since we’re currently on the topic of the Highly Effective Kindle edition, I first want to draw your attention to the double exposure my book, The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors, is receiving on the first page of this search results screen.  I mentioned in a previous post that the $0.35 I make every time the Kindle edition sells is merely icing on the cake, and not particularly important to me.  What is important is that when applicable search terms are typed into the Amazon search engine, my book cover appears TWICE.  This, I feel, is one of the true benefits of the Kindle edition and is a concept I discuss to some degree in my book Sell Your Book on Amazon.

Getting a book to place on Page One of any Amazon search is an art onto itself, and there are many techniques and tactics an author can employ to reach such objectives.  The value, therefore, of having a similarly-titled Kindle edition is that once you reach that objective on the search page, you are receiving “two bangs for your buck” through the visual repetition of your book cover and book title.

It’s hard to say whether The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors is the very FIRST thing your eye gravitates to on the screen shot above.  After all, it’s fighting for attention from the red ad in the bottom left corner, which has the advantage of being the single largest graphic image on the page.  It’s also fighting for attention from those two obnoxiously bright yellow cover images along the left-hand side (and more on that in a future post).   But among the actual results themselves, it might be fair to say my book attracts the most attention.  Certainly it’s competing with the bright red Self-Publishing Confidential cover (which is an effective color AND an effective title); but my book has three things going for it that my “competitors” don’t – and by competitors, I mean the other books listed in this particular search, all of which are vying equally for the customer’s attention and dollars. Those 3 advantages are:

  •  there are two of the same graphics in the top 10 (thank you Kindle edition)- repetition matters
  • the cover graphic isn’t white – see how book #1 and #6 get completely lost?
  •  the cover graphic is significantly bigger than all the other covers on the page

So we’ll discuss each of these elements of this screen shot in future posts…

Amazon, self publishing

The Highly Ineffective Habits of Barnes & Noble

I like Barnes & Noble. In fact, as a writer myself, it probably doesn’t come as a shock to learn that I love all bookstores. But times haven’t been kind to the traditional bookstore since about 1995 or so. That is when Amazon.com came into existence and slowly (quickly) began changing book buying habits. Now, the physical locations of Barnes & Noble bookstores are becoming more of a liability than an advantage; and much like Blockbuster was forced to examine its business model in the wake of NetFlix, so too is Barnes & Noble starting to recognize the forward-thinking of Amazon from behind the 8-ball.   In fact, at the beginning of August, Barnes & Noble announced that it was “on the block” and looking for a buyer. Read the interesting article in Fast Company here.

Interestingly, even such news comes with a silver lining. Barnes & Noble’s digital business (its website at bn.com and its Nook) continues to grow and, along with Amazon.com’s growing market share, further supports the notion that distribution-on-demand with self-publishing companies like Outskirts Press is not only a viable solution but is on its way toward becoming the de facto standard for how books are distributed and sold.  And with both Nook and Kindle versions of e-books up sharply, authors are well advised to offer not only paperback/hardback editions of every book they publish, but electronic versions as well.  

To support this changing landscape, Outskirts Press recently introduced its Amazon Kindle edition on an a la carte basis to authors seeking this electronic solution regardless of where they published their hardcopy book.  And in the coming months, Nook and iPad services should follow suit.   I could take a moment here to vent about Apple and its monopolistic aggregation agreement briefly (not to mention their cencorship habits) but …. I think I’ll wait until a different post to open that can of worms.  After all, I’m still in the middle of discussing the Highly Effective Kindle edition, and will continue with that topic in more logistic detail next time…

Amazon, self publishing

The Highly Effective Kindle Edition

How clever. The title of this blog posting has a double meaning. For one, I’m announcing the Amazon Kindle edition of our new Outskirts Press book The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors.  And two, the Kindle Edition IS a highly effective tool for book marketing, and I’ll discuss why and how in the next post.

But first thing’s first.  Within 72 hours of ordering our own Amazon Kindle Edition option from our Outskirts Press website, my Kindle edition was up on Amazon and available for purchase on all the Amazon Kindle devices worldwide.  Not bad for $99.  And I had the option of earning either 30% of the retail price, or 70% of the retail price, as defined by Amazon.  

The benefit of ordering this service through Outskirts Press rather than… say… any other publisher… is that Outskirts Press does not take ANY of the split.  Amazon pays you directly, so you are getting whatever Amazon sends to your bank without any skimming from us. You see (and this is one of the secrets to our publishing success) we pay 100% author royalties, and in the case of e-books, there isn’t a production cost. So Amazon takes their share and the author takes the rest.   No wonder so many authors, regardless of where they published, are using our new a la carte Amazon Kindle Edition service from the new Outskirts Press store. Click here for more details.

Since I wanted as many readers as possible to read this latest book, I set my Kindle retail price at the minimum of $0.99 and as a result, the 30% royalty option was selected for me.  You see, Amazon requires a retail price between $2.99 – $9.99 to receive a 70% royalty. In most cases, I would encourage authors to set their Kindle price at $2.99 and receive 70% (roughly $2 for every sale).   At 30% of $0.99 I’m receiving a whopping thirty-five cents with every sale, but in my opinion, Kindle sales are currently just icing on the cake.  The real motivation is to drive Paperback sales, and I’ll talk about that in a future post.  

Heck, for a limited time, for my blog readers, I’ll GIVE the e-book of The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors away.  Click here to read the e-book for free  (and in a way cooler method than on the Kindle, too!).   Or if you prefer the Kindle edition, click here to get it from Amazon for $0.99. In return, just do me a small favor and compose a positive review for it on Amazon.    See, soliciting reviews is an important component of any book marketing strategies and often times you may find that you have to “give the book away” to get reviews.  That’s the beauty of e-books – they’re inexpensive to give away and yet they still (hopefully) prompt participation in the review department.

There is more to discuss about the Highly Effective Kindle edition, and I’ll cover more next time…

self publishing

Two posts on August 5th

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I write many of these blog postings weeks in advance. In fact, in some cases, there are postings appearing that I’ve written months ago. Such was the posting about the query letter that appeared a few days ago on August 5th… I’ve been “pushing that into the future” via WordPress toward a more appropriate time when I have more to report about my own query process. But, other responsibilities and concerns got in the way and my attention wasn’t focused on this blog for the past few days and it posted, along with another posting purposefully scheduled to appear on August 5th about the Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors book.  So… the long and short of it is that August 5th had 2 postings, so August 8th has this non-posting.

ceo, self publishing

The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors

I’ve added a new book along the right-hand column of my blog, which is where I highlight my personal books.  This book is titled The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors: How They Beat the Self-Publishing Odds (and how you can, too).  It was just published late last month and is a collaboration between me and 5 of our successful Outskirts Press authors. I wrote the foreword and acted as the “Author Rep” in a manner by coordinating the production of the book with the five authors being highlighted, all of whom have demonstrated noteworthy levels of success as a result of publishing their books with Outskirts Press.  Each author contributed to their respective section of the book, which also includes a “Case Study” that highlights their success (all with their permission, naturally). 

  • Gang Chen’s impressive quarterly revenue is revealed
  • Sally Shields shares the story behind her two-time appearance on Amazon’s bestselling list
  • Andrew Rafkin tells of the origin of his two-time award winning debut novel Red Sky Morning and how it led to 3 more award-winning novels
  • Ronnie Lee explains how self-publishing saved his life and how he has found the motivation to publish over 5,500 pages of text in 4 years
  • Charlotte Endorf shares her cathartic tale of overcoming adversity through book publishing and marketing

In addition to delivering motivating and inspirational stories of self-publishing success, the book serves as an example of some highly effective production habits as well: a custom cover, a custom interior, copyediting, and a search optimized title.  This also marks the first of many Outskirts Press anthologies yet to come.  I probably won’t be as involved in the remaining anthologies as I was with the first, but they’ll also be produced with the same level of care and attention and, we hope, create a new outlet in which our authors, both published and new, can share their voices with the world.

In the meantime, just click on the cover image of the new book there to the right to visit the Amazon page.

self publishing, writing tips

The query letter process – part 1

One of the most important elements of writing a query letter is addressing it to the proper publisher.  Your query letter must demonstrate that you understand their business and that you’re going to be not just professional, but an absolute JOY to work with.   I feel my next book will be a good candidate for Wiley & Sons, for a number of reasons.  One of their imprints is the “For Dummies” series of books, and while my book doesn’t necessarily fall into that niche, it is of a similar-level reference type. 

If you’re in the mood to write a query letter, the first step is finding the appropriate publisher for your book.  Amazon can help you do this.  Locate a book that is of similar subject matter. Look up the book on Amazon.  Find where it lists the publisher — in the product information section.  Next, go to the sub-menu bar at the top and click Advanced Search.  Enter that publisher’s name into the “publisher” field, and choose “bestselling” from the criteria drop-down.  Your search results will then show all the books from that publisher in order of their sales, top to bottom.   Not only does this give you the power to discuss other books this publisher has published from a knowledgeable position, but it prevents you from drawing comparisons to poor selling titles. You want to draw similarities between your book and other books by that publisher that have sold well!

If you don’t like the title selections from this publisher, locate another book and start the process over again.  The point is that you are able to reference titles by name in your query letter, and comment intelligently on those title’s sales numbers, at least as Amazon is concerned.  In general, you can assume that if a traditionally published book is selling well on Amazon, it is probably selling relatively well offline also.