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Getting reviews for your self-published book

December 30, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager There's a great article up by Self-Publishing Review: How to Get Self-Published Book Reviews. If you have a book in print, are getting a book into print, or are thinking about getting a book into print, you need to read this.

Among the tips:

• Make sure the book is professionally designed. Reviewers who have reservations about dealing with self-published books may not notice how the book got published if it looks professional.
  
  
• Include a press pack with your book.
  
  
• Choose reviewers who are more likely to be receptive. There are a number of sites that happily review books from small and self-publishers, and newspapers often like to write about local authors.
  
  
• Try to get Amazon reviews. Don't underestimate the impact of an ordinary reader's opinion.

Again, read the whole article for specific and very useful details. One good book review doesn't guarantee massive sales, but it can lend a whole lot of credibility to your own marketing efforts.

Why You Should Start a Blog Today

December 29, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager

One of the essential ingredients to a successful book marketing plan is a blog.

A blog will allow you to post “journal” entries about your process during the book writing stage, to post entries about your publishing timeline, to write about your published book, and to write about everything else you are interested in in between.

On the Wheatmark web site we have a blog post that includes step-by-step instructions on how to start a blog using Blogger – one of the free blogging sites available.

How does blogging for book marketing work?

It works by establishing a home base for your marketing efforts. As you read other people’s blogs, you can comment from your blog identity allowing them to follow back to your blog. When you use Twitter, you can put up tweets about new blog posts and also put the link to your blog in your profile so Twitter users can read more about you. This will drive traffic to your blog site.

On your blog site, make sure to add a link to where prospective readers can buy your book.

Why does blogging for book marketing work?

It works because it creates a virtual world where you can be the expert on your book’s topic and allows people with similar interests to interact with you. The more you gain readers to your blog, the more readers you are likely to gain for your book! By allowing readers to be a part of your journey as an author, from first inspiration to the exciting book launch, you can form a community of people invested in your project and your success!

It can be difficult getting going. So here is a list of topic types to get you started

List of 5 ideas or thoughts – numbered lists are always winners. It helps the blog reader understand what they are going to be reading and helps them get to the end. This works in a blog about business very easily. You can write about one of your chapters, offer tips, etc. But it could also work for fiction! Say you are writing a young adult fiction book about a battling a demon. Your numbered list could be “Things You Need to Battle a Demon.” It’s entertaining and it brings people into your book.

Publish a list of links – Can’t think of anything to write? Someone else has written it already and better? Post a link to the articles on your blog. They’ll appreciate the favor and also your blog readers won’t feel like you’ve abandoned your blog for the day!

Take a recent experience and share it – Maybe it is obvious, but writing about something that made you have an emotion is always good fodder for a blog. It lets other people into your world and also allows them to share their own experiences in the comments forum. It may even inspire you!

5 Tips for the Short Story Writer

December 23, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager

• Know what constitutes a short story. A short story is about 10,000 words. Much longer and it becomes a different animal. You may be asking, “How many page is that?” The answer is, use your word count. When your story goes to layout, it could be just about any amount of page numbers depending on the interior layout style.
  
  
• Limit your scope of time or character. A short story is not a lazy novel. In fact, a short story is often harder to write because it is a small package that must remain within its own confines. You shouldn’t try to tell someone’s life story in a short story unless it is about a fruitfly.
  
  
• Try to keep your short story time frame as a snippet. Need some back story? Great! But make sure it doesn’t go on and on and on. Another way to limit your scope is through character selection. If you have too many characters actively involved in the story, you may want to reconsider whether you are writing a short story or a novel written in character sections that intertwine.
  
  
• Cut the fat. Again. A short story is not a lazy novel. It requires a deliberateness and sparity of language. Make sure you ruthlessly edit your sentences to distill them down to the most important of words that still grab the essence of the character. This doesn’t mean you need to write simplistic sentences fit for a young reader. It means you need to be selective. Ask yourself, “Does this sentence further the story or give some sense of character or plot?” Because if the answer is no, then cut it. If you find yourself explaining every gesture and action of your character, your writing needs tightening up. Recently I read a story that involved tons of dialogue. In each phrase the speaking character said the name of the character they were talking to. It read something like this (names have been changed):

“Jeffrey, will you take the garbage under the sink in the kitchen up to the Dumpster at the top of the hill?”

“Yes, Kathryn, I will take the garbage under the sink in the kitchen up to the Dumpster at the top of the hill?"

Snore! Not only does it take up a ton of space, it is really boring and makes your characters sound like they have been taken over by an alien robot race that has become self-aware.

• Point of view. Authors often try to switch voices within novels. It doesn’t work well there. It definitely won’t work in a short story. Keep your point of view (or POV for the cool kids) limited to one. Either a narrator or a character. It keeps the story clean, the reader focused, and the story easier to tell.

• Is it a short story? As you write, you may find out that your short story is kind of long. With potential to be even longer. Revisit points 1-4 and if you find that your writing is tight, your time frame is fair, and you’ve written excellent deliberate sentences then what you have on your hands is not a short story. It’s a novel. So you the writer needs to make a decision. Fish or cut bait. If you are committed to the short form, rework the story so that it is an excerpt that can stand alone as a short story. You can always expand on it later. Or, go for it. Write that blasted novel you’ve been thinking about!

Sales for an Average Author

December 22, 2008 by Grael Norton, Acquisitions Manager Who are the big traditional publishing companies anyway?

Picador.
TOR.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Henry Holt and Company.

These are a few of the companies that authors dream of breaking into. Or so they say. But the real question is why? Why do authors long so much to have their books published with traditional companies when according to Tom Dark, a literary agent with Heacock Literary, the "overall industry profits last year were .03% and the average author sold 500 books at a 7% royalty." (He also states that "returns are unprecedented and alarming.")

How many authors at Wheatmark have sold 500 books ? Twelve percent! A good question, then, for any author choosing an independent publisher would be this: "What percentage of your clients have sold over five hundred books?" Most of them will dodge the question or try to distract you with the number of clients they've signed up over the years, but what does it matter if a company has signed up fifty-thousand authors or eighty-thousand authors if less than 1% of those authors haven't even sold five hundred books? In other words, why would an author sign up with a company that had a poor history of sales?

Be wary of a self-publishing company that boasts quantity while ignoring the issue quality.

Twitter: You Have an Account, Now What?

December 17, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager You've figured out how to tweet. You've found some people to follow. And maybe, if you are interesting, they'll follow you back.

How on Earth are you supposed to want to sit at your desk always refreshing your browser window to see the updated tweets?

It isn't fun. I went looking for some other solutions. And looking through the pages on Google, there are a lot of options.

This particular blog offers a great synopsis of several options of applications to choose from to better use Twitter.

I personally prefer Twhirl. A free downloadable app, it puts the tweets in a feeder form so that the most recent one is on top and as tweets come in, it automatically refreshes the feed. I have mine set to refresh every 30 seconds. It floats on my desktop instead of having a cumbersome browser window open. I also like that I can change the color scheme to separate out my direct messages, my @replies and my basic feed.



After exploring a bit more (there really aren't viable manuals for most of these things that I know of. You just click the button and hope for success!) I found that I could click on a Twitter ID and decide to follow (or remove) them, see their feeds, reply to them and some other handy buttons.

Another that I am poking around at is TweetDeck. Some may prefer the wider layout and the column style separations of @replies, tweets, and direct messages.



Frankly it gives me a headache.

For anything you might want to do, there is a way on Twitter. You just have to investigate.

For example, I didn't understand "hashtags" which look like this: #

What these do is allow twitter users to find others talking about a topic. They act like a search marker for twitter users. So, for example, if I wanted to talk to a group of twitter friends about my love of the movie "Legally Blonde," I could put a tweet up that looked like this:

WheatmarkBooks: Hey, anybody want to talk about #legallyblonde?

And anyone who wanted to would add the #legallyblond in their response. I could then search on search.twitter.com for people who have used that "hashtag" to follow the conversation.

The response might look like this:

@KatMeyer: ZOMG! I love #legallyblonde.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Twitter has a wide variety of uses that can go from simply reaching out to others, to defining entire "cults" as our author, Michael Druxman, put it.

Keep at it and if you have questions, you can DM me at Twitter ID WheatmarkBooks.

Price Your Book to Make a Profit

December 15, 2008 by Sam Henrie, President

Recently there has been a lot of a discussion about the retail pricing of independently published books, most of it centered on self publishing book companies setting list prices too high. I get frustrated when publishing and self-publishing industry “experts” write that these higher prices are a problem, without offering any evidence that this is the case. In the absence of price sensitivity studies, or of testing book sales at different price points, the “experts” are simply offering a guess based on their experience. I suspect that their experience comes from pricing books for the brick-and-mortar bookstore market. What a company like Barnes and Noble suggests for list prices for their stores, isn’t necessarily right for a self-published books that will primarily be sold through online bookstores.

  » Continue Reading This Article...

Self-Publishing Success Stories

December 15, 2008 by Grael Norton, Acquisitions Manager Think you can't be successful self-publishing a book? Think again. An article posted today on Publishers Weekly runs down a list of about a dozen self-published authors that have recently found trade publishing success.

Of particular interest to me was the following quote from the article:

"Chanda says that it takes 'a special kind of drive' for a self-published author to put in the work needed to see the results Kingsley did. 'To be a successful author, self-published or otherwise, you need to know a little, if not a lot, about the market.' "

It's the last part of the quote that caught my eye. Writers "need to know a lot about the market" for their books.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as we finish up the Beta test of Wheatmark's new marketing analysis for books. What do we do for the writers in this program?

Basically, we look at the different distribution channels independent authors have access to and provide a "grade" for their likelihood of success in those arenas. We also do some research on their books' competitive networks.

Put another way, we're exploring potential sales channels to gauge the size of their books' markets and their likelihood of success at being able to reach those markets.

I've still got a limited number of slots left in this Beta test. If you're interested in being a part of the program, please send me an email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Marketing for Fun: 1:1

December 11, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager Personally, I get a little run down with the same old online marketing techniques. You check your Facebook account, scan your Twitter feed, read your Amazon reviews (can you hear the droning in my head?) which are all excellent and, I'd say, necessary ways to market your book.

The Internet channel is the most open one for self-published authors. However, taking full advantage of it can be work though, sometimes, not fun work.

So why not liven it up a bit?

Today I was toying with alternate ideas, silly ones, that would help engage readers and potential readers into your book world.

Let's just consider this the first installment of:
Kat's Krazy Kool Stuff She Found for You to Market Your Book with Online

Quiblo.com
Register at quiblo.com and you can create quizzes, surveys, polls, and their ilk. While it may seem like a time waster (and believe me, it is) it is also a brilliant, fun way to engage your audience in a truly active way. Create surveys about your book, quizzes about your characters, polls about your title, even personality quizzes based on how people felt about your work.

It's silly, it's fun, it's interactive, and it can include your book cover image. You can make as many as you want after registering.

They are easy to create, fun to play with, and, best of all, still a marketing tool.

Check it out!

Because books can be fun!

The Reason for Writing

December 10, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager
I recently read a post by Cliff Burns entitled "The Ever-evolving World of Indie."

The points made in the post were excellent about the future of independent publishing and some of the realities of it.

One of the points he makes is that you are not likely to get rich as an independent author, but by not going with a "trad" you get to keep your integrity.

Do we need or care about the integrity? The short answer is yes. The long answer follows below.

In the last several weeks, talking to some of our authors, I kept hearing a recurring theme, "The book isn't making any money and I'm disappointed. So for my next book I'm going to try to find a traditional publisher."

I thought of this theme while reading Burns' blog post. Why do we write? I think it is a point to reflect on seriously before embarking on your next project.

Are you writing to support your claim of expertise in an area such as business, science, or some other niche area? Are you writing to tell a story to share with your family and friends? Are you writing to share a personal outlook? Are you writing because you simply cannot not write? Or are you hoping to quit your day job based on the income from your written work?

Often, the goal is the latter. (Even if the author hastily demures, "Oh, no. I'll probably only have my friends and family read this." Often the disappointment of only selling their book to family and friends is when they finally are honest about the actual goal.)

The real truth is that even most traditionally published books don't make the author money. Often, after purchasing an author's work, trads change and tweak the project until, sometimes, it isn't even recognizable. Then, when produced you still have to do a lot of the marketing. You are not excused from that part of the book selling fun.

So why do it at all?

Because humans are communicators. We have information and stories to share and a need to express ourselves. We write because we need to write. Some of us have the desire to share these ideas with others through books, blogs, or other virtual avenues.

The published book in recent times has been used as a widget. A piece produced by a company to generate income. The writer was simply the factory worker who churned out the widget. (Now a lot of the big boy publishers are feeling the pinch for this m.o. because really, books are not really a super excellent way to buy your own island.)

The great thing about independent publishing (shameless plug: with Wheatmark) is that you, the author, is the focus. Sure, indie pubbers are in business to make money, but we want you, the author, to also benefit from the process.

Indie publishing makes it possible for your message to be heard. It is a level playing field. There are no big payouts based on treatments. But, aside from some really hateful or potentially illegal topics, we're not going to slow your desire to paper the universe with your ideas.

Yes, in order to sell your book, you're going to need to do some (actually, a lot) of marketing. As more and more people find open channels to speak their mind, it becomes more and more difficult to leap above the crowd. You have to get your flag high and wave it mightily.

It is the passion you bring to the project (and eventually your dedication to the promotion of your project) that will make you a successful author. Maybe not always financially, but (queue the violins) your soulful experience of getting your message, your story out is one reward that has no monetary guarantee.

Write because you need to share. Because you are passionate. (Not because you need to put a kid through college or want a Lexus.) And that passion and need to share will hopefully lead you to strong marketing campaign and returns on your investment. Or not. But you wrote a book. And that is pretty amazing stuff.

Outstanding Author Support

December 09, 2008 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager
I've been working on the revisions to the author guide for next year. It's our information piece that we send out to our prospective authors that are thinking about publishing their book with us.

Under our Basic Publishing Services, our baseline for all our publishing packages, we list all of the things you get by signing with Wheatmark. We start it out by saying we offer Outstanding Personal Author Support.

This, of course, makes me giggle because it sounds rather silly, like we offer a hotline or free hugs for our authors. (Actually, I have personally hugged several of our authors that have come by the office. Wheatmark authors are some of the best people!)

But what does it really mean to offer "outstanding personal author support?" What it means is always having someone willing to listen to your ideas, help you solve your book-related problems, and to guide you to the best possible version of your book--whether it means suggesting more editing, different cover photos, or just high-fiving you on your accomplishment. We are here to assist our authors through the publishing process.

Most independently published authors are coming into the process as newbies. There is a vocabulary to book publishing--trim size, front matter, etc. -- that is just the tip of the iceberg of things that may not be understood. (Trust me! When I started working at Wheatmark my background was in newspaper design. It was liking listening to a foreign language being spoken around the office!)

That's where our amazing staff comes in (you can read about them on our website). They are here to help authors navigate the process. They aren't here to judge your work, review your book, or make decisions for you. They are here to support you throughout the process to get the end result that you have worked towards.

And we will find someone to give you a hug, if you really need it. Remote authors, as one of the editors pointed out, can get virtual hand-holding if required.

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