publicity, self publishing

Speaking of HARO and Haiti

In my last post I praised an online service called Help a Reporter, and no sooner had I pushed the “Publish” button on that post when I was contacted by a New York reporter for my comments on the self-publishing industry who also found me — or I found her — thanks to HARO.

Naturally, I have a lot of things to say on the topic of self-publishing, and was only too happy to provide her with some publishing success stories when she asked.  Like, most recently, Mr. Craig Juntunen, author of Both Ends Burning: My Story of Adopting Three Children from Haiti. 

In the wake of the catastrophe in Haiti, Mr. Juntunen’s book has led to numerous radio and television interviews, increasing awareness of not only his book, but also his noble efforts at Chances for Children where Mr. Juntunen is the Chairman.

I called Craig yesterday to ask how Outskirts Press could help him.  We weren’t alone.  The NBA basketball team Phoenix Suns were already parterning with Craig and Chances for Children, and Craig alluded to some preliminary interest from both the Oprah and Larry King camps.

Mr. Juntunen published a book with Outskirts Press to share an inspiring message with the world.  He is well on his way and his royalties go toward his cause.   Let’s all support his efforts and the on-going relief efforts by making a donation either at the American Red Cross or through the Chances for Children website.

publicity

Help a Reporter Out

Help a Reporter Out at www.helpareporter.com is precisely the kind of site all business-people and authors should know about. Last week I had a great interview with the editor of Celebrity Parent magazine about Adventures in Publishing and Outskirts Press. This lead came entirely from HARO.  In fact, it came from a HARO request I replied to in February of 2009.  Yes,  nearly a year later the editor contacted me for an interview! And what a wonderful and gracious person she was.

What’s the moral of that story? The Internet provides you with the means to cast as many fishing lines as possible into the virtual sea.  You never know when you’re going to get a bite. But, to paraphrase Gretzky’s great quote — one of my favorites in case you can’t tell — you are guaranteed to miss 100% of the fish you don’t go after.

blogging

Back to the blog theme drawing board

This isn’t rocket science! But choosing an appropriate blog “theme” for the look and feel of my blog is proving more time-consuming than I would have anticipated.  I stopped liking the “Journalist” theme when I began adding other widgets to the right-hand column, beginning with our twitter feed.

Note: Whenever you mention your twitter feed, you should link that twitter feed link to your twitter feed.

Sidebar: Did you know twitter isn’t profitable?  They haven’t figured out a way to monetize their traffic and all that bandwidth is costing someone something…. so, twitter-people, listen-up:  The same thing happened when the Internet first launched. No one could figure out how to “make money” with it.  Then, this company called Google came along and figured that it would make money with the Internet the same way companies have been making money for decades — through advertising.  Twitter,  add contextual advertising tweets through applicable accounts and posts and you’ll have figured out a way to monetize your business.

Anyway, back to the story.  The twitter feed widget for the “Journalist” theme is horrible. The CSS doesn’t highlight the linkable words.  Translation: “CSS” stands for Cascading Style Sheet — the aesthetic architecture for dynamic webpages.

So, now I’m trying INove — I think that is the name of it — and it already has a few more advantages over Journalist. For one, it’s not QUITE as black/white stark, but still keeps that as the basic color scheme. Hey, WordPress, what’s with all the pink-colored font choices in your theme selection?

Another advantage is that the widgets “look” a little better.  And the right-hand column width is wider, which allows me to use the actual width settings for the graphics.  With “Journalist” I had to force a width of 160 to my photo and the book covers, which required HTML to ‘shrink’ the image dynamically from 200 pixels wide to 160.  It still looked okay, but sometimes when you do that, the image looks horrible, so why not keep the native width settings if I can?

Well, one reason is that now my photograph along the right is enormous… it’s a little TOO big, I think… but I’ll stick with it for now and see how I feel about it in the future.  I like having the cover images 200 pixels wide, and I’m afraid if they stayed at the same size and my photograph was smaller than the overall aesthetic of the page might suffer.

I also realized another criteria I’ve had in the selection of my themes since the beginning that I may have failed to recognize.  The “main content” section/column needs to be white.  I realized this fully today as I was looking for a substitute to “Journalist” and selected a number of possibilities that had alternate colors other than white in this big “text space.”    In my opinion, that’s a no-no, for two reasons.

1)  It’s “easiest” to read black type on white spaces, so why mess with people’s eyes?

2) When/if I ever get around to adding graphics to these postings, I don’t want a big ugly “box” around the image AND I don’t want to have to worry about background color matching  the color.  White just makes everything easier in this regard.  Life is hard enough; take the gimmees.

Another advantage to this new theme is that the RSS Subscription button and the Search functionality is included in the actual theme, rather than my having to add those features as widgets.  This was one thing I liked about the “Blix” theme, which is what we are currently using for SelfPublishingNews.com – so I’m happy I found another blog that shares those advantages.

Amazon, self publishing

Self Publishing Simplified – Kindle Edition

We are relaunching our Kindle Edition option this month. Actually, we are “relaunching” a number of our author services options this month, because we’ve added more benefits to each of them while retaining the same retail price.  The CD Media Kit and Enhanced Audio Excerpt each come with an included 30 minute phone consultation with a Marketing Assistant, while the relaunched Book Video Trailers are now cooler than ever, and feature improved social distribution, including links on twitter and Facebook.

One of these relaunched options is the Kindle, and this is a perfect time to announce it, with the release of the new Amazon Kindle app version 1.3  for the Iphone and Ipod Touch.  This new app makes all Kindle books available for download and reading on the iPhone! This is big news for self-publishing authors, so while we announce this new benefit (and incentive to create a Kindle edition) we will also emphasize our improvements in formatting Kindle editions that actually look — you know — good.  Forums and blogs are filled to the brim with this topic — the complexity and “pain” associated with converting a heavily formatted document — particularly one designed in inDesign, as nearly all Outskirts Press books are– into a Kindle edition that is aesthetically pleasing.

And to kick it all off, the Kindle edition of Self-Publishing Simplified was made available this week, at the lowest price I could set it, 99 cents.   The whole point of this book (both the paperback and now the Kindle) is to demonstrate the pricing flexibility available to Outskirts Press authors.  I would have sold the paperback edition on Amazon for less than $5.95 if I could, but that price represents not only the true power of the pricing we offer — where else can you find a 108 page paperback on Amazon, new, for $5.95?– but also an accurate representation of what IS possible. There’s no wizard behind the curtain — that price IS the price listed on Amazon for a 108 page book.   Our authors have the exact same pricing flexibility I do. Granted, I’m only making 7 cents each time it sells, but that’s not the point. My goal was to demonstrate that POD books don’t have to have astronomical retail prices — at least, not if you publish with us. <smile>

The 99 cent Kindle edition doesn’t exhibit that pricing flexibility to the same degree, because it appears that Amazon allows authors to set a 99 cent price whenever they want. I couldn’t set a price lower than 99 cents, though — I tried to make it free, but Amazon wouldn’t let me.

Amazon, self publishing

Sell Your Book on Amazon – Second Edition

In March of 2007 I published Sell Your Book on Amazon, which reached #29 on Amazon.com in its debut month.  In a strategically-planned effort, I first recorded a series of podcasts on the same subject matter, and distributed them through RSS and Podcast feeds (including iTunes) in the late fall of 2006. I then transcribed those podcasts into a first draft (an exercise which resulted in a rapid writing process–a process I highly recommend).

In the nearly-three years since that book’s publication, Amazon has changed a lot!  Some of the tactics I recommended in the book have changed or have been removed entirely.  Some of the reviews (175 at last count, with an average of 4.5 stars — nothing to sneeze at!)  even started to imply these were short-comings in my book, rather than recognizing that Amazon’s policies, offerings, or guidelines had changed.  What was a short-coming is that a second edition was long overdue!  I admit it. Sorry — I’m kinda busy.

 Nevertheless, over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the Second Edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon, and I’m pleased to report it is done.  The “newly revised for 2010” edition is being proof-read one last time and a new subject index is being created (one of the services we offer for authors of non-fiction books). Once these steps are completed, the revised edition will be sent to Ingram, for distribution via EDI to all the locations Sell Your Book on Amazon is available, like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, etc.  

We will also update the Kindle edition with the Second Edition at the same time, and that will drastically improve the Kindle edition, too. You see, Sell Your Book on Amazon was the first Kindle edition Outskirts Press released — I use my books as “guinea pigs” for all our author services, because if our services work for me, they can work for our authors, too — and it’s no small secret that Kindle isn’t the best when it comes to converting  specially-formatted books.  But our Kindle option now excels at providing Kindle with versions that compensate for that platform’s formatting short-comings.

I will also upload the Second Edition to Amazon’s  Search Inside, and I’m looking forward to that change, because I’m making what basically amounts to an aesthetic change to the Table of Contents which actually should improve the overall sales of the book by giving the impression of a greater degree of content.  Let me explain:

With the first edition, I was purposefully sparse with the Table of Contents, forcing it entirely on one page, even though each chapter of the book was divided into sections defined by sections on the various Amazon pages I was describing.

When looking at the book via Search Inside, the table of contents makes the book appear to be lacking information because the Table of Contents is so short.

So, when writing the Second Edition, I’ve changed my philosophy with the Table of Contents to include all the various sub-sections included within each chapter.  This didn’t take any additional skill, or even much more time, but it makes the book appear to be filled with way more content.

The presentation of information is often just as important as the information itself. These are the kinds of things it is important for self-publishing authors to consider…

blogging, branding

Fine tuning the blogging platform

Well, I think I’ve settled on the “Journalist” theme for the blog. One could argue it’s pretty boring (and one would be right) so my hope is that the scintillating prose I splash across the page brings all the interest the blog needs. Oh, and the covers of my books “pop” the most against this stark black/white landscape, which itself is rather appropriate for a blog that covers “publishing,” among other things.

This theme also doesn’t have that annoying “tag line” to the blog name which says something like “Just another WordPress.com blog” and which I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of except by selecting a theme that didn’t say that. It must be me, because I can’t imagine a platform that prides itself on its flexibility doesn’t allow the blogger to remove that from their heading. But I couldn’t figure it out in the 2 minutes I devoted to the task, so choosing a theme without that tagline seems to work. The downside is that there isn’t a graphic heading at all. Or maybe that’s an upside — it prevents me from having to design something. Besides, this blog is supposed to be branded by yours truly, so my photograph there hopefully provides all the branding this blog platform needs.

I also can’t figure out how to change the “Name” of my blog, in spite of the promise WordPress made when I first named it that I could change it whenever I wanted.  The lack of the word “of” is bothering me.  When I initially named it, I just strung some keywords together, but now it’s TOO close to an actual, grammatically-correct sentence, that the absence of the word “of” looks like a mistake. <sigh>  I’ll keep trying to figure it out.

This photograph I’m using along the right-hand side is the same one I use everywhere else, so it appears on the backs of my books, it appears on my book web pages, it appears on Amazon, etc. The image you choose for yourself when establishing your brand is important, so take the time to do it right. Have it professionally taken, and then acquire the rights from the photographer to use it however you want (yes, you have to acquire those rights — just having a picture taken of you doesn’t entitle you to use that image; it belongs to the photographer).

By now I’ve also added a few “widgets” to the side column of my blog, specifically three image widgets that allow me to add a photograph of myself (for blog branding purposes) and the covers to some of my books. A nice thing is that when I write and publish future books — this blog will cover that process in great detail — it will be an easy matter to add those cover images to the column, too.

blogging, search engine optimization

Titling your blog postings

The third titling opportunity for optimizing your blog is the headline used for each specific blog posting. This one is a tight-rope act. You want to optimize your posting headline for search engines, but you also want it to serve the purpose of accurately identifying the content/topic of the specific post.

For one of our other blogs, at Self Publishing News, one of my requirements for the headline titles is that they contain either “self publishing” or “self published.” One of my purposes with that blog is to establish it within the circle of “self publishing” sites that appear from that specific keyword search. The downside, of course, is that having such a mandate prevents the headline from being as applicable as it otherwise could be. Which is better? Who knows… So I’ll do an A/B test with that blog and this one to learn the answer to that question. These posting headlines, at least so far, have been more subject-applicable than search engine optimized.

Do you see how I linked “self publishing” up there to Outskirts Press?  “Self Publishing” is the most valuable keyword term for our self-publishing book company, and Google’s search engines particularly like to see applicable search terms that are linked to the applicable website.  Blogging is all well and good for creating a platform for your career, but the blog, in and of itself, probably isn’t your (or your company’s) sole presence on the Internet, so it is important to “link” the two, and when doing that, you might as well link them in a way that is most conducive to search engine optimization.

When mousing-over the link, without clicking on it, you may also notice in the information bar (at the very bottom of your browser) that I’m using a tracking code with a tag. In this case, the tag is “BrentBlog” – and when I aim links from this blog to Outskirts Press, I try to remember to add that tracking code, which will allow us to analyze the quality and quantity of the traffic we receive on Outskirts Press that originates here.  Ultimately, those statistics allow me to justify my time-expenditure on this endeavor (or prevent me from being able to justify it) to our Board of Directors.  If links originating from this blog are following to Outskirts Press, and registering for free publishing information, and then, ultimately, quality book publishing, I’ll be able to establish that this blog has a true value, rather than simply a perceived one. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to engage in activities that only have perceived values.

Isn’t that nice? I’ve just established my “exit strategy” to this blog, so if it “stops” in the future, I can blame it on my Board of Directors.   “Blaming the Board” is a CEO’s most valued– albeit least publicized — prerogative.

Amazon, blogging

Amazon Blog and Embedded Videos

So here’s summary of the results of our little Amazon blog test from yesterday. I have my Amazon blog picking up my RSS feed from my WordPress blog at www.brentsampson.com – and yesterday I embedded a video from YouTube into the blog, which always appears fine in WordPress — I love you, WordPress — but as we saw in yesterday’s blog, it was handled a little differently by Amazon. Instead of embedding the actual video which streams from YouTube, Amazon places a thumbnail image representing the video along with a link to the original blog source. From there, you can watch the actual video.

I guess that’s not SO bad, in the overall scheme of things. I would rather people read my brentsampson.com version of the blog anyway, because it contains other elements not present in the RSS version, like the images along the right, the additional SEO tactics, and the menu bar along the top.  I’m only “using” Amazon to try to attract traffic, so if Amazon would prefer to send that traffic to the original source so nice and kindly, that’s fine with me.

For those of you paying attention, you will also notice that WordPress automatically linked to my domain name when I added the www in front of it, but failed to automatically include a link when I just entered brentsampson.com — so while referring to the “www” in today’s Internet nomenclature has become passé, there is still a cause for it in some places.

Thank you, Amazon.

Amazon, self publishing

Adding your blog to Amazon

Yesterday’s blog posting was the first one I scheduled to appear on my Amazon Author Page, and I’m happy to report it appeared their automatically via RSS without a hitch, so now I’m going to test whether or not I can embed a video into this WordPress blog from YouTube — which I know works fine on WordPress — to see if the Amazon blog accepts the video. I’m doing this for a number of reasons:

1) If it works, I’ll want to advise our authors how to “get around” the one-video limitation imposed by Amazon’s own Author Central functionality.

2) Not only do they limit the video uploads through their “Video” tab to one, but they prohibit .mp4 files entirely, which is the high-quality, high-def format that we use to provide our book video trailers and teasers to our authors. I guess it’s our fault for being MORE high-quality than Amazon allows. But if our authors can embed their videos into their blog, and then feed their blog into their Amazon Author Page via RSS, there’s the perfect solution. So, let’s see if it works…

So when this posting appears on my Amazon Author Page, we can see if the video appears.

I’m also doing this — and in such detail — because I’m nearly done with the Second Edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon – Newly Revised for 2010!  My current Kindle edition has some formatting editions (Kindles don’t take too kindly to drop caps, sidebars, and the like), so rather than reformat the first edition, which was somewhat out of date, given that it was published in 2007, I just decided to crack out the new edition and then correct the Kindle edition all at the same time.

So, if you’re looking for instructions about HOW to create a blog post on Amazon, or how to pick up an RSS Feed from elsewhere so that is appears on Amazon, or how to upload a video, or book video trailer to your Amazon Author Page, the Second Edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon reveals it all.  But here’s a hint: It all begins at http://amazon.com/authors

 

blogging, branding, search engine optimization

Naming your blog

The username or domain name you use for your blog  is the most heavily weighted in terms of search engine optimization, so the URL is the single most imporant part of branding your blog.  The second opportunity comes in the form of titling or naming your blog. Currently as I’m writing this (in December 2009), the name of this blog is “CEO Self Publishing Start-Up OutskirtsPress.com” which is not so much a title as a string of keywords I’m hoping will result in my blog being found in relevant search engines. An ideal blog name would be a combination of two things — an accurate, grammatically correct description of the blog’s benefits or purpose AND an infusion of relevant, highly-applicable search words or keyword terms.

My current name misses out on the “grammatically correct” portion of that criteria. Of course, I’m composing this blog posting in December of 2009 so perhaps by the time this blog launches in January 2010, I will have had time to arrive upon a better name. Like the headline of a press release, or the subject heading of an important email, or the title of a book, the name of your blog is vital, and it’s mandatory that you spend time getting it exactly right. Fortunately, WordPress allows you to change the name of your blog at any time, and then that new name propagates through previous posts. In essence, that means you can deliberately change your blog name from time to time to massage your SEO position/tactics. And, frankly, that’s probably what I’m going to do, so even though I’m writing this in December 2009, you may be reading it years later (isn’t the archival power of the Internet great?) and as a result, it is anybody’s guess what the “name” of this blog may be in the future…