23

Jul

You market yourself. . .how? (Part 2)

My literary friends and I debate over whether or not Kindle Direct Publishing’s Select Program is “worth it.” Actually, they think I’m a little cray cray for considering anything besides Select, but I’ve been called worse.

Amazon’s Select program allows you to set 5 days (per book) where your book can be downloaded for free and Amazon promotes for you. In addition, if your book is “borrowed” by Kindle Prime account holders (they’ll get it free, too), you get a small cut of an unspecified pool of money per borrow. All of this is in exchange for a 90-day period of exclusivity.

Is it worth it?

As my accountant adviser loves to say, “it depends.”

If you are writing or publishing to make money, the answer is a resounding “yes” from my perspective.

Of course, Barnes and Noble has its Pub It platform, which essentially does the same thing as KDP Select, except its not as user-friendly for reviews, doesn’t demand exclusivity, and doesn’t have the book lending/profit sharing mechanism that KDP Select has.

But, by not enrolling in the Select part of the program (and just having your book available on Kindle), you can publish to B&N, Smashwords, the Apple iBookstore, Kobo, etc. That’s five different streams of income in comparison to one.

KDP Select, however, is easier to manage and maintain if you’re starting out and building your audience. Marketing yourself is hard enough without having to do it for five different places on a rapidly multiplying, infinite bookshelf.

Even if you hire someone to manage your marketing for you, would you want them laser focused on one channel guaranteed to make you money, or five that MIGHT make you more money in the long run?

Here’s my advice: with one title, stick with KDP Select. With two or more in your backlist, mix it up (I’m actually doing this now). Spend 90 days with Select, and during that time, try to establish a way to maintain those other publishing sites. Then, shift from Select to those and see what happens. Let me know how it works out for you!

331 days ago Short URL Comments

DIY Publishing

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09

Jul

You market yourself. . .how? (Part 1)

Recently, a friend asked me, “How do you market yourself [as an indie/self-publisher]?”

Aye, there’s the rub.

Indie and self-pubbed authors want to sell books, but don’t necessarily know how. Witness almost any self-publishing outfit that will offer you bookmarks, business cards, placards, postcards, and the like as marketing collateral (don’t fall for it — do it at Vistaprint for less). To date, I’ve never bought a book because I received one of those things alone. Have you?

So then, we go to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other free forums to promote ourselves. I’ve unfriended/unfollowed quite a few people, due to the “Check out my book/buy my book/like my status/watch my trailer” flurry of automated tweets.

I can’t speak for you, but ad nauseum sales pitching turns me off. Be doubly-concerned with your consumers and what they want, not always just what your bottom line demands. It’s my belief that investing in the former will take care of the latter.

So, how do you market yourself? Honestly, without investing time or money, you can’t do it effectively. Trust me, I’ve tried. Pumping out a book a year is a lot more difficult to do when you’re learning how to market, actively marketing, and putting it into practice. Either your sales or your writing will suffer.

Here are two tried and true tips that worked for me.

  1. Come up with a marketing plan (with achievable goals) and follow it. You don’t have a marketing plan? Why not? I found a template online and then asked Stacey Shearer (here’s a link to her Facebook) over at Shearer Message  to help me polish it. Convince yourself that you don’t need a marketing plan. Then, try to get your books into Barnes and Noble, or Lifeway, or just your average, run-of-the-mill bookstore. They’ll all want to know how you plan to sell books before they shelve you. A plan on how to sell books sounds awfully like a marketing plan to me.
  2. Run a contest. Fine, you have a “limited budget.” Do what I did for The Anarchists. Run a “Name a Character Contest,” where you receive entries via your Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, however you want to do it. Promote it on your social networks. Use a randomizer to select the winners and promise them a free book and a mention in your book as long as they sign over the rights to the character (a.k.a. they promise not to sue you if it’s the next Hunger Games). In the end, you have created people who will promote your brand. They have a connection to you and your work. So, they got a free copy. You don’t think they’ll tell other people about their character in your book? That’s word-of-mouth advertising, and anybody in marketing worth their salt will tell you that’s worth its weight in gold — if you can generate it.

Hope this helps! Stay tuned for my take on Kindle Direct Publishing and whether it’s worth it (or not).

345 days ago Short URL Comments

DIY Publishing/Small Business Strategies

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30

Nov

How to plan a book wedding

I wanted to help plan my wedding. OK, not the flowers or colors. I didn’t pick the bridesmaid dresses. With some things, I asked “how much?” and passed off to my future bride. But I had a hand in the important things.

Planning your book release is a similar process. Start with choosing a relevant date. For example, I donate a portion of the proceeds from my first book to Relay for Life, which occurs in April. That enables me to push it in September (Prostate Awareness month — which is when I released it), October (Breast Cancer Awareness month), and April.

If your novel is a beach read or page-turning romance, release it prior to summer. Coffee table book? How about the holiday season? Coffee table books fit in stockings and taste better than fruitcake.

Next, have a launch party coincide with your release. You can do something as small as an intimate gathering at a library with small refreshments, or rent out a facility and cater it. Invite the media, book club members, and those who will support you.

With those in place, plan your deadlines backwards. According to Michelle Johnson at Lightning Source (the printing company for indies like me and about 30 POD publishing companies), books take up to six weeks to trickle down through online distribution channels (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc.) Give yourself an extra week, just in case.

You will need a proof (an example of what your book will look like when it’s finished) to examine for errors. This is like the final fitting of a wedding dress — something you don’t want to skip. Take a week for this, which gives you time to receive it in the mail, read it, and correct errors, if necessary.

Unless you design book covers for yourself, lead times for cover design are a month, adding four weeks to your timeline. You can do this simultaneously with your editing, which takes a month as well. Interior design takes two weeks; when it’s finished, the spine of your cover will have to be adjusted.

Interior design (2 weeks) + editing and book cover design (4 weeks) + proofing (1 week) + distribution (7 weeks) = 14 weeks total. If you have a finished manuscript in hand that you intend to self-publish or indie publish, you’re looking at April.

Maybe you’re like a relative of mine who does not want to wait 14 weeks to get married (he’s wedding a woman, not a paperback). A shorter timeline means he will have to pay out the nose to do things quickly. You have the same options; most vendors and some self-publishing companies offer expedited services, but they’ll cost you. 

Hope this helps!

Brian Thompson’s passion is motivating and encouraging others to write and to pursue Do-It-Yourself publishing. He is also author of acclaimed Christian fiction thrillers The Lost Testament, and The Revelation Gate. You can read more about Brian by visiting his author site.

567 days ago Short URL Comments

DIY Publishing

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14

Nov

Don’t take it personal: Damaging the brand

FYI: I said “personal” not “personally” on purpose :)

I have strong opinions on many political and social issues, but you’ll never see them on my social media pages. There will not be rampant misspelled postings or off-the-cuff comments warranting a “sorry-if-that-offended-some-people” disclaimer either.

Learn a little lesson called “social media policy.”

But Brian, I’m a solopreneur! Can’t I police myself without a social media policy?

Honestly? No. Not if you sell yourself, instead of your company, as your brand.

Brian Thompson is my brand; Great Nation Publishing is my company. If Great Nation Publishing ceases to exist in 2012, (hopefully) Brian Thompson will be standing. You will find me to be personable, honest, and very much what-you-see-is-what-you-get. My business ventures follow suit. So should yours.

You have an opinion on the Penn State scandal, Occupy Wall Street, or the GOP debates — there’s nothing wrong with that. I do too, but I don’t express them online. Why? They’re irrelevant to my brand. Inflammatory comments pigeonhole your audience, and it’s difficult to distance yourself from offending people in a digital age where offenses live forever.

Someone I follow on social media recently made an offensive comment regarding a topic I take to heart. I almost stopped following him because the worth of his product was outweighed by the ignorance of the statement. You better believe your customers will do the same.

Now, I do post about life and my marriage, but I do it to build a relationship with my followers, not to vent. Besides, my wife reads my blog (hi baby!)

Think about your post before you post it. Think about it again. Consider it a third time. Remember: if you have a sudden stroke of conscience and delete it, it’s still out there. Don’t take your posts so personal.

Brian Thompson’s passion is motivating and encouraging others to write and to pursue Do-It-Yourself publishing. He is also author of the Christian fiction thrillers The Lost Testament, and The Revelation Gate. You can read more about Brian by visiting his author site.

583 days ago Short URL Comments

Small Business Strategies

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21

Oct

3 Key tips on marketing your book

The following guest blog post is by Kemya Scott. Scott (or “Miss Kemya” across the web) is the self-titled “solopreneur” of Phisco Marketing: a stratetegic marketing consultant agency that specializes in helping small business. Scott, a 15-year marketing consultant veteran and MBA grad, believes small businesses are “the lifeblood of our economy.” She is an “open-book,” funny, personable, and looks at problems as challenges. For more information, see the Phisco Marketing website.

Are you a self-published author struggling to do your own marketing? Are you one of the millions of people wanting to write your first best-seller? Have you already been published, yet your sales are lackluster and you’re not quite sure what to do about it? With all the competition in the marketplace, how are you supposed to catch the attention of today’s reader and entice them to purchase your book?

Let’s be honest, you can write a book and get it published, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make any money. So here are 3 significant tips to help you promote your book and begin building a buzz to drive sales. It doesn’t matter if you’re an independent self published author or you have a publisher, you need to build the buzz. Why? Because the marketing of your book is typically your responsibility, whether or not you have a publisher. If you’re still writing your first book, there’s plenty of work you should be doing right now to create a buzz. Let’s get started with these 3 Key Tips to Build the Buzz for Your Book:

Know Your Audience

To sell books, you have to know who you’re selling to. This is not as easy as it sounds. Let’s use an example: I’m writing a coffee table book about shoe design, including images and sketches of shoes from around the world over the last 50 years. Who would you consider as the audience I’m targeting to buy this book? Are you thinking this book would appeal to all women over the age of 18, since women love shoes? Well…you’d be missing the mark, because all women over the age of 18 is not a target audience. Women like buying shoes, but that doesn’t automatically translate into buying a book about shoes. You can’t wear a book can you?

Think about this audience: a boutique might like to have this book in their sitting area, a hair salon might like to have this book in their lobby, and I might give this book as a gift to a fashion design student. This is the beginning of a targeted list of prospective book buyers. Understand the importance of knowing your audience, and you can promote your book accordingly. *Note: Don’t get excited, I’m not writing this book, it’s just an example.

Pitch Yourself to The Media

The media will become your best friend! First, create a web page specifically for the book. Ideally you want to create a separate website with an address that features the book title. If you have a website dedicated to your speaking engagements, you could add a separate page devoted to the book. With a dedicated web page, you can exchange links and drive traffic to the site with comments, blogs, quotes and extracts of the book. Be sure to show people exactly how they can buy the book. Encourage user feedback, comments and reviews to build a community around your book.

Next, use social media and traditional media to create the hype! Here’s a key element many people forget – everyone is not on social media, and those that are on social media aren’t all buying from tweets and Facebook posts. Hence, a series of Facebook posts about your book will most likely leave you hungry. There are plenty of people who use radio, tv, and print as a vehicle for peer influence. Therefore, you must integrate a combination of traditional and social media into your marketing plan to catch your entire prospective audience. Pitch yourself as guest on appropriate radio and tv stations. Pitch yourself as a featured story in your local community newspaper. Develop social media profiles to reflect your book’s content and your speaking ability and promote your heart out! Develop your own brand ambassadors to leverage cross-promotional opportunities where appropriate. By appropriate, I mean as it relates to your audience. When you blanket the market with your promotional activity, you are ensuring your audience sees your book, which builds a buzz. Remember, we talk about things we see and things we buy? Just be sure to always tell people exactly where they can buy your book – if online the exact link – and spell it out if necessary.

Use Reviews and Testimonials to Build the Hype!

Ask your friends, family, and colleagues to provide reviews and testimonials. Send excerpts to influential media persons and ask them for reviews and testimonials for the book. Use your social media networking community and ask for the same. These reviews will demonstrate the quality of your content, as the reviews form a cross-section of the population. This will create a buzz that makes people want to find out about your book. Post these reviews and testimonials everywhere possible. You can include a testimonial on a bookmark (for print books) or on the back of your business card. You can even post a testimonial as a tweet or Facebook post, linking to your website. Get creative in the use of these reviews and testimonials. This also builds the buzz in a way you may not anticipate – the person writing a review or testimonial will tell people about the book! They become part of your brand ambassador tribe!

Ideally, the marketing of your book begins before the book is finished. Whether you do your own marketing, or hire a marketing company to market your book, the success of your sales will be largely determined by your tenacity. So take ownership of your work and your brand, and build the buzz about your book!

Ciao,

Miss Kemya

607 days ago Short URL Comments

Small Business Strategies

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23

Sep

How to market your books on the cheap

Marketing-Mix

Image via Wikipedia

The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing by Tom and Marilyn Ross, advises that you send out up to 200 copies of your book to gain buzz. Sorry, but the majority of reviewers still prefer trade paperback books (tpbs).

Quick math: if your tpb is 250 pages, it costs $4.65 to print (are you paying more?). Media mail is the least expensive way to ship books; it’s not timely, but it will get there. It costs $2.70 to send a book that weighs about a pound. $4.65 + $2.70 = $7.35 X 200 = $1,470.

Not only is that inexpensive, for the small, indie guy doing it all by his lonesome, it’s ineffective. Suffice it to say, not EVERYONE is going to review your book.

Do it on a smaller scale with bigger, slower, surefire targets. Let’s say your budget for a particular month is $200. Here are two effective ways to spend your cash:

  1. Use Facebook to find book clubs. It’s the Gen-X way to cold call, and Facebook makes it REALLY easy. Type “book” or “book club” in the search box at the top of the screen and watch the book clubs pop up. Start small with a group of ten established clubs that review, and ask for their submission guidelines. I’ve done this and it works. Cost: your time + $73.50 in printing and shipping costs.
  2. Solicit independent bookstores in your area. Tom Feltenstein’s book, The 10-minute Marketer, talks about seeing the forest but missing the trees — in other words, thinking big picture all of the time instead of little details. Indie bookstores LOVE the little guy, especially ones with local connections that draw crowds. The worst they may do is offer you consignment: offering to sell you book but keep half of the retail (which Amazon does too!). One bookstore in Michigan carries five copies of one of my novels. Let’s assume that’s true for you: Cost: your time + cost of printing and shipping.
Hope this helps! Be blessed.
Brian Thompson’s passion is motivating and encouraging others to write and to pursue Do-It-Yourself publishing. He is also author of the Christian fiction thrillers The Lost Testament, and The Revelation Gate. You can read more about Brian by visiting his author site.
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635 days ago Short URL Comments

DIY Publishing

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13

May

Tips for broadening your marketing prowess

Are you in need of marketing tips? If so, I have a couple HOT, FREE websites for you.

is a website that specializes in “inbound marketing.” Traditional marketing is “outbound marketing” — flyers, brochures, posters, and the like. “Inbound marketing” is using non-traditional techniques to bring the leads and traffic to you — websites, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media advertising, etc. You get a 30-day free trial where they evaluate your website. After that trial expires, the info doesn’t stop. FREE webinars, FREE PDFs of useful material, including the one I got today on how to pimp out your SEO. Go! Sign up!

Also, try . Social Media Expert put me on to this one. How do you gain respectability in your field, get your name out there? Get quoted. I’m a big proponent of conquering your surrounding area and reaching out, kind of like a mushroom cloud of publicity. But, what if you can reach an audience WAY outside of your target area without spending a dime?

HARO is a website where reporters ask for quotes regarding specific stories. You submit a quote, and you get notified if they use it. Then, you can add it to your portfolio. BAM! You’ve built up your presence and you didn’t even have to leave your house.

Hope this helps. Be blessed!

B

Author Brian L. Thompson is the president of Great Nation Publishing and author of the Christian fiction thriller The Lost Testament, and The Revelation Gate, due for release on June 7, 2011. You can read more about Brian by visiting his

768 days ago Short URL Comments

Small Business Strategies

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04

Feb

Well-kept secrets about marketing and technology

In six months of business as a independent publisher, I’ve learned quite a few valuable lessons. I’d like to share TWO of them today. If you’ve been in the game for a while, you might already be familiar with them, but they bear repeating.

1. If you refuse to build an online media presence, you’re missing out on a powerful, FREE publicity tool. Publicists are EXPENSIVE and a lot of them won’t or can’t place a ROI (Return On Investement) for their services. One publicity firm I interviewed wanted to charge me almost $400 to write ONE press release (sending it out was extra). That charge did not include follow-up with the media outlets they intended to mail the press release to. It’s possible that some of them might have hit. It’s more likely that not a lot of them would have.

What if you created your own press release, called it a “media release,” and interested the local media in you by pitching yourself as a story idea? What if you used a website like this one to build relationships with tweeting media instead? Cost? $0 and instead of shooting randomly, you now have several targeted messages to very specific people who will recognize you instead of put you in a slush pile. (Big ups to Starr Hall for the tip)

There are people I know who aren’t on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, you name it. If they own a business, I hear them talk about getting their name “out there.” I found my favorite place for pizza through word-of-mouth. When I wanted to check out their menu, I didn’t call, and I didn’t drive over there. I googled them. You can market your business without the internet. You can also climb Mount Everest with a fork. Why do it the extra hard way?

2. Selling yourself is selling yourself short. My wife and I used to be in an MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) business (if you’re in one, no offense!). To be successful at an MLM — at least the one we were in — you always have to be in selling mode. You’re advised to go to your “warm market” (friends, relatives, associates, coworkers) first. Then, once you’ve gotten them on your team, you help them get people they know (but you don’t) on their team, thereby building yours. The problem is that if you’re selling and no one’s buying, you may become known as the “guy/girl who’s hawking that [insert product or service]” and people you swear you were tight with may end up avoiding your calls. This happened to both me and my wife.

I know people who sell their stuff nonstop. They’re annoying. I block them from my feed on Facebook. I don’t click on their Twitter links when I do see them. The truth is that, to a lot of companies, you’re nothing but a number with a dollar sign behind it. But nobody likes to feel or be treated that way. My philosophy is in line with that I’ve heard from a number of successful professionals, including the blueprint for how to live a successful life (the teachings of Jesus Christ): Make it a point to give more than what you get. You’ll be surprised at your ROI :)

Be blessed,

B

866 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Small Business Strategies

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