self publishing – Page 4 – President of Outskirts Press

The Best Book of the Year Award selection process

When it comes to awards, our authors are already pretty prolific. From the Benjamin Franklin Awards to ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards and the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards, Outskirts Press is often represented with talented winners and finalists. Since we understand the value of our authors being recognized by these contests, we do our best to encourage them to submit their book(s) for as many awards as they can. Winning an award or being recognized as a finalist is a great reason to send out another press release, initiate another PR Publicist Campaign, create another book video and upload it to YouTube, etc. In fact, being a finalist or winner in a book contest can breathe new life into all book marketing efforts. And it should. Depending upon which source you believe, there are upwards of 500,000 books published every year in America. A statistical handful win awards. That’s the true quality gatekeeper; not the publisher and not the reader.

Our close relationship with the Colorado Independent Publishers Association also means that many of our authors are familiar with the CIPA EVVY Book Awards, which recognizes excellence in independently published books. Each year we officially nominate approximately 5% of our published titles for submission to the EVVY Book Awards. To help us narrow down the manuscripts, only books published with the Diamond and full-color Pearl packages are considered for nomination. It’s also an unwritten rule — there, I just wrote it — that the books should feature a custom cover design and be professionally edited. After all, we want our official EVVY nominated books to shine, and shine they do: Since beginning our participation in the EVVY Awards, Outskirts Press has been the winningest publisher each year among all participating publishers. Each year we win approximately 10-15 EVVY Awards.

So, in other words, we already have an established method for determining the top 1% of the books we publish each year at Outskirts Press — our EVVY Award winners. The Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year Award goes a few steps further. From among all the EVVY-winning books Outskirts Press will select three finalists, in much the same manner we determined the winner of our December Best Book Promotion, Irv Sternberg and his book The Persian Project.

From among those finalists, a winner is determined. How? That’s the next blog topic…

Outskirts Press Book of the Year Award

This month our self-publishing company Outskirts Press announced our “Book of the Year Award.” The talented author of the winning publication will receive a $1500 credit to his or her Outskirts Press shopping cart. In essence, the author is getting published for free (since none of our packages cost as much as $1,500).

As the self-publishing industry continues to grow, book awards and contests will become more important. After all, it used to be that publishing a book was, in itself, a testament to the book’s quality. Times have changed with technology. Now that POD publishing makes the act of publishing a book so fast, easy, and affordable, readers need another method for determining if a book is worth their time and money. And writers seeking validation need another method for determining if their writing “has what it takes.”

There are those in the self-publishing industry who have said that POD publishing “opens the gates” and allows customers to determine quality rather than the publishers. More democratic certainly, but the problem with that philosophy is that it asks customers to take a leap of faith on the quality of a book, often times sight unseen. Many readers are hesitant to do that, and an otherwise stellar self-published book can have low sales volume as a result.

Book contests and awards help high-quality self-published books stand out from the crowd. With the launch of our own Award, we wanted to present our authors with an exclusive opportunity to state without reservation, “My book is the best book published by my publisher this year.” So our Best Book of the Year Award was born.

The trick to any book award is making the selection process fair, balanced, accurate, and democratic, and I’ll talk about that next time.

branding, ceo, partnerships

Outskirts Press Sponsors Colorado Humanities Colorado Book Awards

My last two posts have mentioned our recent “Best Book” winner, Irv Sternberg, and this post is no exception. The December promotion in which we sought one amazing manuscript to publish for free provided a wonderful opportunity to reward a talented author. And Mr. Sternberg provides a nice segue of sorts to this posting’s topic – which is about the Colorado Humanities and their annual Colorado Book Awards. You see, Irv’s prior book, Neptune’s Chariot, was a Colorado Book Awards finalist last year.

Tomorrow, the Colorado Book Awards are being awarded at the Doerr-Hosier Center in Aspen on June 25th, the last day of the week-long Aspen Literary Festival. Outskirts Press is a premiere sponsor of the Colorado Center for the Book and its Colorado Book Awards and I will be on-hand at the event to assist with the distribution of the awards. For a full list of the finalists, please visit the Colorado Humanities website here. Congratulations to them all!

branding, marketing, self publishing

Best Book announced

Waaaaay back in December, we ran a promotion looking for the best book submitted to us for publication in that month. The idea behind the promotion was to imitate a traditional publishing submission and publishing process — that is, to identify one single manuscript from among all the submissions we received and “accept it” for free publication and grant it an “advance” of sorts. I wrote about this in a previous blog posting in March.

Two days ago we announced the best book and the talented author in our most recent newsletter: The Persian Project, by Mark Irving.

Mark Irving is the pen name for Irv Sternberg, who has published two previous books with Outskirts Press, both of them regional bestsellers. And for those of you who fear I might be “letting the cat out of the bag” by revealing the author’s nom de plume, you can relax; Mr. Sternberg is open about his double-identity.

Congratulations, Irv!

Now we’re putting the finishing touches on a larger and more exciting “Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year” recognition program for 2010. We will hopefully announce it in July. The good news is that (unlike last year) this program will apply to all the Diamond or Pearl books we have published or will publish in 2010, not just those that come in after–or as a result of–this announcement.

partnerships, self publishing

Colorado Humanities publishes with Outskirts Press

Our first book for Colorado Humanities was published at the end of April. The title is 2010 Student Literary Awards Anthology: Winning Art, Poems and Letters by Colorado Students.

As the title suggests, it is an anthology of the winning entries in this year’s Student Literary and Art awards, held by the Colorado Humanities and sponsored by Outskirts Press.

It is a beautiful full-color publication at the 5.5″ x 8.5″ trim size, which we made available earlier this year. Proceeds from the sale of the book support the literacy and art programs of Colorado Center for the Book.

You can read the full press release by clicking here and you can purchase the book on Amazon by clicking here.

Amazon, self publishing

Sell Your Book on Amazon – Second Edition updates

For those of you who purchased the first edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon and are wondering whether it is worth buying the second edition, here is a quick rundown of the major changes. I already discussed in a previous post the cover changes, table of contents changes, and indexing changes — although none of those changes apply to the actual content of the book.

The first major change was Amazon’s migration from AmazonConnect to Author Central and how that affects methods for updating your bibliography, your author profile, your blog, and other features on Amazon. Some of those features previously existed in your Amazon account profile and others previously existed on the product sales page for your book, like the blog, for instance. With Author Central, much of the specific functionality geared toward authors was consolidated in one place. Does this mean you can focus solely on Author Central now, instead of your Author account profile? No, because Listmania, Guides, Reviews, your signature header, and other important elements of Amazon promotion still exist in your Amazon account profile. Author Central just means that now you have to keep two different accounts updated. Isn’t that nice?

The second major change involved Amazon’s launch of the Kindle and Amazon’s subsequent migration from their previous ebook system to their current Digital Text Platform system. Do I recommend a Kindle edition for every book? You betch’a.

Other smaller changes were made to bring the second edition in line with current Amazon guidelines and functionality. These include:

minor alterations to the recommendations I make regarding reviews in light of Amazon’s guidelines changes
minor alterations to the process for creating a Listmania list in light of Amazon’s guideline changes
minor alterations to the process for creating an Amazon Guide in light of Amazon’s guideline changes
several minor alterations to the Book Detail Page chapter in light of moderate changes Amazon made to the sales detail pages — mostly involving analytic information available for the book after it undergoes Search Inside scanning
minor alterations to the procedure for using tagging and “search submissions” for promotion since Amazon has since migrated all manual search submissions into their tagging engine
alterations to the BXGY promotion since Amazon no longer offers that to non-Advantage members
minor alterations to the Publisher’s and Book Sellers Guide analysis since that page is largely out of date even on Amazon’s own site

That’s about it. So if you want to purchase the second edition of SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON, click here.

branding, self publishing

Does self-publishing mix with the AWP Conference?

Last week the AWP Conference took place in Denver, Colorado. AWP is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and their annual conference is one of the largest of its kind in the country. An estimated 5000-7500 guests and exhibitors flock to the conference each year, which is held in various venues across the country. Last year it took place in Chicago and next year it takes place in Washington D.C.

The Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado was the venue for the 2010 conference, which is just a stone’s throw from Outskirts Press, on the outskirts of Denver in Parker. I attended the conference personally and Outskirts Press donated 5,000 copies of one of my books, Self-Publishing Simplified, for the AWP Conference goodie bags.

After all, if the exhibitors are any indication, this is a great place to reach writers. For example, the publishers for Writer’s Digest and The Writer were both there in person and I was pleased to finally meet them in person, considering our 5-year sponsorship of the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition Collection and the on-going advertising we place in The Writer magazine. All wonderful people. Some of my associates and friends from CIPA and SPAN were there as well.

Since I had never been to the conference before, I went somewhat incognito, to get a sense of the conference, the seminars, the speakers, and the attendees. The idea of sponsoring, exhibiting, or speaking — or a combination thereof — at a future conference has been suggested to me several times. Attending this one in Denver provided an opportunity to see if that would make sense.

And the verdict? It will depend upon results of the tracking code we put in the pages of the 5,000 free books we supplied.

And I’ll end this post with a related suggestion – if you give away free copies of your book or service or product for the purposes of marketing, always be sure there is a mechanism in place to track the results.

blogging, branding, search engine optimization, self publishing

Self Publishing on the Apple iPad

I made a mistake with my last posting. Part of the topic of my last blog involved the Apple iPad and yet the title I chose for the blog was something about killing birds. This is what is known as “missing an opportunity.” As I have mentioned previously, blogs are wonderful for improving organic search engine optimization and one of the most important elements of a blog for SEO is the title.

But even though I was writing about a very popular and “trending” topic like the iPad, I mistakenly didn’t enter any of those valuable keyword opportunities into the title of my post. Instead, I chose a title that, to a human being means one thing, but to a computer means something entirely different — and as a result, my title, “Killing two birds with one stone” won’t attract the readers I’m trying to attract. It might attract some hunters, though.

So with today’s blog posting I have created a title better suited for the SEO I’m shooting for, based upon the popularity of the iPad. Our full-color conversion of Adventures in Publishing to ePub 1.0.5 should be done this week as should the indexing for Sell Your Book on Amazon 2nd Edition, which will allow us to also convert that for the iPad in our effort to introduce this new option for our authors.

I will also summarize my thoughts on the recent AWP conference I attended that took place in Denver last week, and the preliminary steps I’m taking as one of the E&Y EOY regional semi-finalists. And if those acronyms aren’t clear enough, they’ll be revealed in the near future… It is going to be another productive week at Outskirts Press.

Amazon, self publishing

How long everything takes

I’m sure other entrepreneurs can relate to this. Doesn’t it seem like everything takes a really long time? And the “bigger” you get — I’m not talking about weight — the more time everything takes. A previous post talked about the complexities of creating a logo, for example. So here I am officially recognizing that my re-write of Sell Your Book on Amazon is taking longer than I expected. I’m partly to blame, of course. But we also wanted to use my book to test a new indexing process.

I believe that all non-fiction books should include an index. Of course, indexing a book is a time consuming process and, unfortunately, our price for this option has reflected that effort. As a result, not as many of our self-publishing authors have added an index to their books as we would like, due to the additional cost.

My first edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon had an index so of course we needed to index it again with the second edition. Once the new edition was done and edited, we decided to explore alternate methods of indexing it in order to bring the price down for our authors. I’m happy to report that I think we succeeded. So in the coming days — or more likely weeks, since, as I mentioned above, everything takes longer than it should — we’ll be able to lower our indexing price. In a day and age when it seems like all other self-publishing companies are increasing their pricing, it’s a pleasure to be able to lower ours for our authors.

So, to make a long story short, that is why the second edition is taking so long.

self publishing

Self-publishing CEO makes startling announcement

I have been writing my whole life. When I was six I wrote my first short story on an old Remington typewriter, which was sprinkled with dots of White-Out. I have lots of unpublished manuscripts either sitting in drawers somewhere, or archived on old 3.5 inch floppy disks. Some are even stored only on 5.25 inch disks, if you can believe that! I also have a lot of rejection letters and rejection slips from “traditional” publishers.

So here’s my startling announcement. I rarely suggest that authors start with a self-publishing company. That might be a surprising thing for the CEO of one to say, but it’s true. We all harbor dreams of being New York Times bestsellers and appearing on Oprah, and not only is that statistically unlikely if you self-publish, it’s statistically unlikely no matter HOW you publish.

Nevertheless, I often recommend that authors seek traditional publication first. Because if they do, one of three things will happen:

1. The traditional publisher will say no. You may try again elsewhere. They’ll probably say “no” also. After a while, instead of throwing that manuscript in a drawer, or giving up on writing or publishing entirely, that’s when I say give self-publishing a try.

2. Perhaps the traditional publisher will say yes, and then 2-3 years later you will wish they had said no. This happens more than you might think. Your book may never actually get published, or if it does, it might receive a fleeting print-run, and that will be that. Maybe you will reacquire the rights; maybe you won’t. But rather than giving up on writing or publishing entirely, that is the time to give self-publishing a try.

3. Perhaps the traditional publisher will say yes and you will never look back and we will all be hearing about you and 20th Century Fox will be releasing the movie soon. If that happens, good for you! You deserve your success.

Many authors try to get traditionally published and then, when that doesn’t pan out for whatever reason, they give up entirely. Now, self-publishing is a great alternative to throwing in the towel.

And, a lot of writers who have actually had success in one form or another with traditional publication now prefer self-publishing for its many benefits. These are usually knowledgeable, savvy professionals who are making a business decision. Self-publishing companies like Outskirts Press help them reach their goals in a convenient, efficient manner.

On the other hand, I think there a lot of writers who tirelessly seek traditional publication no matter what. They either massage their manuscript over and over without actually submitting it anywhere, or they submit it constantly, and then react to the rejection notice by polishing and rewriting the manuscript over again in an effort to improve it. Writers in this category fall into one of two camps. 1) They don’t know “self-publishing” exists, and if they knew, it would be a dream come true to them. Or, 2) They know “self publishing” exists, and choose to continue their traditional pursuits nonetheless.

Personally, by the time I self-published my first book, I just wanted to see something in print for my own well-being. I published it for myself. We help a lot of authors professionally publish books just for themselves, or their families. And we also help authors self-publish books in their on-going efforts to attract traditional publishers’ or agents’ attention. The more books they publish, the more of a “platform” they create, and the more attractive they become to traditional publishers.

That’s a theory, at any rate, and in the coming months, I’m going to test it. I think I’ve said in the past that I use myself and my books as “guinea pigs” for our authors, so here is another example: I have been working on a new book and I’m going to submit it to traditional publishers first, just to see what happens. This blog will detail the steps I take to prepare my proposal, and the results. Join me in the coming weeks and months as I share that process…