self publishing – Page 3 – President of Outskirts Press

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 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.

ceo, self publishing

Fastest Growth Among Self Publishing Services

In July, the Denver Business Journal held its annual Fastest Growing Private Companies awards banquet, and for the 4th year in a row, Outskirts Press was recognized.

The fastest-growing companies are determined by examining the gross revenue increase over the previous three years (2007 – 2009 in this case). Companies are separated into 5 “flights” based upon their overall annual revenue in the most current tax year (2009). Flight V designates small companies, Flight IV designates small-to-medium sized companies, Flight III designates medium companies, and so on. This is the 3rd year in a row Outskirts Press has been in Flight IV and we held the #10 spot overall. Last year we were #7. The year before that we were #1.

In an economy where “flat is the new up,” appearing on any “fastest-growing list” for multiple years in a row is a feat onto itself. After all, the majority of the companies appearing in the top 10 weren’t on the previous year’s list at all. So to say I am proud of our company and our authors would be an understatement.

I think this post also supports a previous blog posting I wrote recently, which centered on pursuing awards. Whether for a book or a company, winning an award helps establish some prestige and PR, and those are valuable commodities in this day and age.

Speaking of which, the annual Inc. Magazine Fast 500 list is announced at the end of this month. This is the national version of the fastest-growing private companies. We placed #268 last year among all private companies and #1 among participating self-publishing services. We’ll see where we are this year when they’re announced later this month…

self publishing

The content is the thing

As discussed previously, pricing is one of the reasons we introduced a direct bookstore with the launch of Version 4.

Another reason is so that our authors would have the same level of control they have over their bookstore listing that they have over their author webpage. Outskirts Press is one of the few self-publishing companies that offers each of its authors a free author webpage over which the author can control, to some degree, the color, design, layout, and content at any time after publication. Those same content changes are now reflected in the direct bookstore as well. With the authors directly in control of their own sales copy, they are directly responsible for affecting the positive sales growth of their books. We wanted to extend that power and flexibility to the new channel.

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.

self publishing

Outskirts Press bookstore Version 4

As a self-publishing and book marketing company, Outskirts Press primarily helps authors publish and market books. Up until Version 4 of our new and improved website, we really left the “selling” of books to retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, etc. After all, they’ve invested huge amounts of money and time into making the shopping experiences on their sites extraordinary. There’s no viable way to compete with them.

I still believe that. I also believe that given the choice between an author selling a copy of her book from her own website and selling a copy of her book from Amazon.com, she’s better off in the long run selling that book from Amazon — even if she makes slightly more money in the short run from her own website. I have written a whole book about why I believe that, so I won’t dive into that here.

So, if I believe Amazon sells books better than publishers, and if I believe authors benefit more if books are purchased from Amazon, why would Version 4 of Outskirts Press introduce a direct bookstore for readers?

There are a number of reasons.

The first reason is because our own bookstore gives us greater control over the sale price of our books. Amazon’s sales pricing policies are up to them and there is very little control over it. You can try to prohibit Amazon from discounting a book by passing along a “short discount” to Amazon (in the neighborhood of a 25-30% trade discount), but I’ve seen Amazon discount books with 20% trade discounts during the holiday season. Naturally, the higher the trade discount, the more apt Amazon is to discount the book (they have more margin to play with). Most authors don’t mind so much — with Outskirts Press they make the same royalty regardless of Amazon’s sales price, so why not let Amazon dip into its profit to invoke more sales for the author?

But some other authors prefer to set large trade discounts to pursue offline distribution and would prefer to keep the retail discounts to a minimum (or none at all) so they can maintain a certain value ratio for their book. Perhaps they are selling it from their own website for the full retail price, for example… Amazon’s discounting procedures make such an objective difficult.

So by offering another direct sales channel, we have attempted to satisfy two conflicting objectives, which is never an easy task. One, we have controlled the sales price and the discounting since books purchased in quantities of 1-9 at a time are discounted only by 10%, regardless of if the author has a 55% trade discount. Two, we’ve created a customer incentive by creating possible scenarios whereby the customer can get a better price through us than through Amazon. We’ve done this in exactly the same way we satisfied objective number one–by offering a sales price 10% lower than the retail price, regardless of the trade discount, even if that trade discount is set to the absolute minimums. Amazon often won’t discount such a book, but Outskirts Press direct does.

And of course, just like Amazon sales, the author receives their full royalty, 100% of the profit, regardless of the purchase price. It’s a win for everyone. And our author webpages still behave as they always have, sending customers to either Amazon or Barnes & Noble for their purchase, so our authors have the ultimate in flexibility.

And that brings us to the other reasons for the changes to the Outskirts Press bookstore, which I’ll discuss next time.

self publishing

Self publishing services with Version 4

Over the past few posts I have been summarizing some of the differences between previous versions of our Outskirts Press website and the new Version 4 website that launched over Memorial Day weekend. Of course, the core difference has been the availability of a la carte options and services for writers regardless of where or how they publish. This hasn’t really affected the “Publishing Packages” portion of Version 4, however, since publishing packages have always been the core service of Outskirts Press since its inception. Very little changed here and changes that were made here were minor.

For instance, we tried to make it clearer that authors could order the entire package if they wanted to OR, if they preferred, they could start with just a $35 deposit to assign their production team members. We also made our free e-book publishing guides an “item” that could be added to the shopping cart without cost. The other changes were mostly aesthetic, trying to make the details for each package more comprehensive in their descriptions, with more images and visual cues to highlight the advantages. In general Version 4 is embracing video and Web 2.0 a little bit more, so we created a video to highlight the Diamond publishing package and it plays from the Diamond page. More videos like this will be forthcoming.

Next I’ll discuss changes to our bookstore, which were relatively major.

self publishing

Picking the Best Book of the Year Award winner

From among the three Best Book of the Year finalists – which I blogged about last time – the winner is determined. Here’s the fun part: It’s up to you who wins. Well, more accurately, it’s up to everyone. And it is especially up to the three finalists themselves.

Each finalist will be showcased in our newsletter and throughout our social networks. Then an open vote will take place to determine the ultimate winner of the Best Book of the Year Award and the $1,500 prize. Everyone can vote, and everyone can see how the votes are falling. The authors themselves have a great amount of control over their own destiny since they can call upon their marketing prowess to get friends, family members, and associates and all members of their social network circles on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn to vote. You know, these are the same people authors often contact about buying their books. So, in essence, we have tried to establish an Award that not only rewards a talented writer, but recognizes a talented marketer as well.

We would like to continue to hold this award each year. Only time will tell. Just like any Hollywood executive will tell you, green lighting the sequel always depends upon the success of the first one.