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Size Does Matter! (But Not the Way You Think)

July 31, 2009 by Susan Wenger, Designer KatG recently shared a few excellent tips on what you should think about when creating your book’s title. I’d like to follow up on one of her points: the title’s length can have a big impact on the quality of the cover.

Many authors try to pack as much information as possible into these babies. It’s an understandable instinct. The cover is the first thing potential readers will see, so you want to tell them exactly what wonders await them if they take a peek inside. Also, the more words you use, the wittier you can be. Right?

Right?

Well, here's the problem. Say you’ve written a detailed historical record about keyboards -- the kind you find on typewriters and laptops. You’ve decided to call it The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over the Lazy Dog: A History of Keyboard Interface from QWERTY to DVORAK. You’re very proud of this title. It’s cute and clever and gets your general concept across.

It’s also unlikely to draw the eye when crammed into a relatively small space.


Think it’s not that bad? Try it as an Amazon.com-sized thumbnail.


If you’re selling your book primarily or exclusively online, THAT is the first glimpse your readers will get. A little crowded, yes?

As much as you like your original idea, maybe you should think of scaling back. Simplifying.


Ta da!

Again, you can really see what a difference this makes for the thumbnail version.


When the elements on the tiny image have room to breathe, the image as a whole becomes more accessible. Without knowing why, your potential readers will feel more inclined to click on it and take a closer look.

Which is exactly what you want them to do.

Thinking about Book Titles

July 24, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager Over the years at Wheatmark, we've had a few titles come through that were either a mouthful that no one would be able to hold in mind long enough to order the book, confusing (careful about serial commas ... sometimes they don't read as a series), or just plain excellent.

I imagine titling a book is about as difficult as naming a child. You go through different iterations, bounce the names off of friends and family, and maybe even see how they look in print.

There are several things to think about when deciding on your book's title:

1. Does it make sense
2. Can buyers find it when browsing
3. Can it be read more than one way? Will it be OK if they read it the wrong way?
4. Can it be designed easily for a cover

Does it make sense?
This one seems fairly obvious, but let's talk about it anyway. Your title should be evocative of the content inside. If your book is about parent-child relationships and your book is entitled, "From a Great Height," that's great, but you might want to use a subtitle to help clarify what you will be talking about in the book.

Can buyers find it when browsing?
This is important. More important for independent authors because you'll be doing the bulk of your business online. OK. Here's the skinny: Unless someone knows your book title or author name and looks it up directly, you need a book title that can be found by keyword search.

If a potential reader is looking for a book, but they don't have one in particular in mind, they'll enter a search word on a site like Amazon. For example, if a reader is looking for a book on self-help, they will have a particular theme of self-help in mind. They aren't likely to enter in the term self-help. Maybe "get rich," "make money," or even "wealthy." If your book is about personal finance and has a title that includes those main words - rich, money, and wealth - you are more likely to have your book show up as an option for that search!

When titling your book, make sure the title, the subtitle, or a combination of both includes some easy to navigate key words to help potential readers find you!

Can it be read more than one way? Will it be OK if they read it the wrong way?
We have a Wheatmark title that can be read with two different inflections and results in two different meanings. Either way, it makes sense and pertains to the book.

However, that isn't always true. There are also times when a title may mean something but taken out of context is just plain wrong. This problem shows up a lot on Headlines with Jay Leno ... the unintended meanings can be a sticky problem. So have a few people read over it and make sure you aren't making an obscene joke by accident! (A memorable one from my newspaper days was "Military Gives YPG a Hummer." If you don't see the unfortunate joke, you definitely want to get someone else to check your title!

Can it be designed easily for a cover
I have been known to suggest changing a title simply because it would look better on the cover design. The look of your book cover is your most important marketing tool. The old saying goes, "You can't judge a book by its cover." However, most people do, even if it is unintentional.

Too many words, too long of words or long words that sandwich little tiny ones are all difficult to design around. Your cover needs to be easily readable on the "thumbnail" that is displayed on web pages. Either the image or the title needs to grab a potential reader's attention. If your title is too long, it will limit the size of your font and of your image.

If you are a Wheatmark author and are unsure of your title, check with your account manager and they'll help you brainstorm some ideas to help you have the strongest title from day one!

Not a Wheatmark author but want to be? Fill out our Project Assessment Form to get started! You can also enroll in our free minicourse: 7 Steps to Self-Publishing Success on our home page!

New How-To Blog Tutorials

July 21, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager Struggling to get your blog site started? Read the instructions sent to you by email several times and still can't picture what we're instructing you to do?

We now have a video tutorial on our site that takes you through the Blogger.com process from very start to end. Screen by screen, click by click!

It's done in a handy four-part series so you can choose the section where you are getting stuck!

Check it out.

How to Manage Book Sales

July 16, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager One of the questions we try to help authors answer is whether they should direct their book buying traffic to the Wheatmark bookstore or to an online retailer such as Amazon.

My short, possibly not that helpful, answer to this is: Both.

The long answer to this is still both, but with some added explanation!

The Wheatmark bookstore, for Wheatmark authors, is where the book is available for the full retail price and offers a higher royalty to the author.

On the surface, this seems like a great way to earn back the publishing investment. Which it is, particularly if you are selling your book to only a few people or to a one buyer who is buying a LOT of copies, like a textbook being purchased by a school.

Many authors find that they sell more books on Amazon and are concerned that the traffic driven there is buying the book at a discount and thus the author isn't seeing as much royalty cash from each sale. Although that is true, there are are advantages to selling on Amazon.

I argue that if you are going to try to sell your book to a greater population, you should focus a lot of your effort on your Amazon sales. The reason is pretty simple: People (and I mean just about everyone at some point) buy books on Amazon. As consumers, they are familiar with the format, probably have a gift card from the CoinStar machine at the grocery store or an aunt that they have a few pennies left on, and it is part of their buying pattern. Not to mention the fact that the price on Amazon is lower.

The reduced price may cut into royalties, but, if you can sell more books on Amazon at the discounted price, then you'll be making more money in the end than if you only sold books on Wheatmark's store for full price and sold a third of what you did on Amazon. Right?

There is another element that makes Amazon a great place to sell your book: Functionality.

You can have a Kindle version for sale there, you can have multiple titles that pull together to boost your sales rank, people can leave reviews, and the tagging function also assists with visibility. These are things that are great for marketing.

What the Amazon site can't do is offer bulk discounts, which Wheatmark can. Our bulk author discounts are a great advantage. For example, if you are going to market to book clubs, you could drive the sales to yourself, buy bulk copies through us with your author discount and then sell them directly to the book club and make profit!

You could, of course, only sell through yourself all the time to make the highest profit per copy of book, but then you'd also have to handle the shipping. Trust me, as someone who has to do a lot of shipping, you want to try to skirt that responsibility whenever possible!

Also, we offer discounts on large book orders, like when a university buys a textbook or a book store buys a lot of them, so buying through Wheatmark is a better deal over Amazon or BarnesandNoble.com.

There are many ways to begin making money on your book. The bottom line is to know your goals as an author and to work towards those goals with your marketing. In the end, when you are selling copies of books, it won't make much of a difference where people buy them.

Just sell more copies this month than you did last month and you'll be on the track to success!

eBook Sales Climbing

July 16, 2009 by Sam Henrie, President

The American Association of Publishers (AAP) recently reported some astounding statistics about book sales in the U.S. While book sales overall are down 4 percent in 2009, eBook sales are up 154.8 percent .

Every year since 2000, we in the publishing industry have been told by one pundit or another that “next year will be the year of the eBook,” only to be disappointed when the next year rolled around.

No more!

2009 is the year of the eBook—the numbers don’t lie!

Here’s why it’s finally here:

  * Independent authors now publish more books than the rest of the publishing industry, and independent authors are quick to take advantage of the higher royalties and increased sales eBooks give them.
  * Marketers of eBooks are (finally!) getting good at it—independent authors and publishers are aggressively and effectively marketing eBooks using blogs, Twitter, and more.
  * The digital generation is coming of purchasing age, and they are using electronic devices to do everything, including reading books.
  * The bad economy makes inexpensive eBooks an attractive alternative to more expensive printed books.
  * Amazon is aggressively marketing its eBook reader, Kindle.

Wheatmark is now recommending that all of its authors publish their books both for print and for the Amazon Kindle. If you’ve published a book with Wheatmark and want to find out how to get started with your book’s electronic version for the Kindle, contact your Wheatmark account manager.

Editing for Redundancy: Twice Isn’t As Nice

July 16, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager

A pitfall to watch out for when drafting your manuscript is redundancy. It’s easy to fall into the redundancy trap. Here are a couple of ways it can manifest itself and how to fix the problem.

You overexplain a concept

This common problem generally shows up more often in nonfiction. Wanting to make sure readers understand a concept, the author attacks the idea from different angles in various places in the text. What’s wrong with this? At best, the technique probably won’t enhance your readers’ understanding. At worst, you’ll bore them by telling them the same thing over and over again.

One way to address this is to work on your editing skills. Read your text out loud or ask someone unfamiliar with the subject to read it; you’ll likely find ways to tighten your language and explain yourself without repeating yourself. Another option is to provide examples, charts, and other elements that help illustrate your point without rehashing the concept in the main text.

You reorganize your book

Many authors get so involved with the process of reorganizing their books, they forget the small details—like whether they’ve already said something. This, again, is an editing problem. It can also be a structuring problem. Before beginning your book, create an outline or road map of your content’s progress. If you’re writing fiction, this is a great way to keep track of characters, plot points, and the rules of your book’s universe. For example, if you’ve introduced a character named Von in the third chapter who is the cousin of Van and they can both see through walls, don’t reintroduce Von in the 10th chapter and have him unable to see the murderer behind the door. This is a form of redundancy with a dash of careless mistake. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix these as long as you pay attention and enlist another pair of eyes. There are even computer programs available to help authors track these issues!

With nonfiction the problem rears its ugly head when cut-and-paste goes unchecked. This is why editing is so important. If you have elected to have your book copyedited fairly heavily, someone will catch these mistakes and will happily flag them or fix them. And if you take care to edit your own work before submission, the professional copyeditor will be able to turn the job around significantly faster.

Editorial Analysis: Find Your Book’s Weak Spots

July 15, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager

What is an Editorial Analysis and why do you need one?

An Editorial Analysis, or EA, helps determine the likely usability of an author’s book, in its current form, by identifying its strengths and weaknesses.

The EA is designed to determine if a book is written in a way that will speak to its intended readership, if the book is written with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and if it is written in an organized manner.

It also looks at how well the book follows Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) formatting. The CMS provides guidelines for many aspects of style, including how commas are used and where the preface goes.

Getting an Editorial Analysis for your manuscript makes it easy to determine how much more work should be done before it goes to layout. The EA will tell you what level of copyediting you should have. Whether the book needs a light edit or a more intensive developmental edit, the editing should be done before your book designer begins styling your pages for print.

Why You Should Listen

The first step to becoming a successful author is having an excellent book. It’s important not to let hubris get in the way of this-and quite often it does.
Here are the most frequent excuses we hear for not getting an EA, and for not listening and acting on the results:

  * I’ve already edited my book. It’s fine.
  * I had my friend, who is an English teacher, proofread it already.
  * No one cares if the commas conform to CMS.
  * Readers will know what I mean.
  * I don’t want to spend the money.

First of all, an EA comes with nearly every package that Wheatmark offers, and if you have one done before committing to a package, that cost will be deducted from your final sign-up fee. The cost of copyediting is more, but the final product will be worth it. It would be a shame to spend money on publishing a book, only to have it not perform because of elements that could easily have been fixed for a few dollars more.

Two, you and your friend the English teacher are not professional book editors. This isn’t a reflection on your skills, it’s a reflection on how well trained professional book editors are. They read tons of pages a year and know what to look for, how to look for it, and how to expertly make the correction.

And thirdly, your readers do care about the commas. They may not be fully aware of what’s putting them off when such details are wrong, but it will bother them nonetheless. Book readers have been trained for decades to expect certain guidelines to be followed and when you ignore that expectation, you frustrate them. You slow them down. Slow them down too much and they’ll stop reading entirely.

You’ve taken the time and energy to write a book you believe people will want to buy and read. Don’t sell it short. Use the resources that will help it be as excellent as it can be!

Amazon Rankings Explained

July 08, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager For many authors, checking their Amazon ranking is an addictive daily activity.

For others, it's a confusing statistic they don't understand (which is probably why they have time to do things like shower. When you understand it, it can become an obsessive hobby that causes you to forsake all other daily activities).

So here it is, the meaning of your Amazon rank, plain and simple:

Your rank is how many books on Amazon are selling more copies than yours.

Let's break what this means down a bit.

Your book is ranked 14,000.
This means that there are 14,000 other titles on Amazon that have sold more copies than you.

But is that a good number?
Absolutely. There are a bajillion titles on Amazon and there are more and more listings added every day. If there are only 14,000 titles selling more copies than you, that's a gold star for you!

How can other books have the same rank as my book?
Because there are ALSO 14,000 more titles selling more copies than it. It isn't like class rank where there are 300 students and you are ranked 20th in your class because 19 other students have better grades than you. This is where many authors get confused. Amazon calling your position in the "how many titles are selling more than yours" platform a RANK is misleading a bit. I'm guessing they just couldn't think of a better term (or Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is just trying to confuse us all and make us write blogs about it).

Why does my rank fluctuate?
To drive you crazy of course! OK, not really. The rank is generated by a system that is constantly calculating it. However, your rank is reported to you by a system that is not constantly updating you with information that is usable. One minute your book rank is 1,000,000 the next 500,000. So it will change and it won't make much sense.

How do I know what my rank is then?
Try not to be too fanatical about checking your rank. Think of it like you would a diet where you track weight loss: you want to take an average of a few days because the constant fluctuations can give you a misread of the reality.

If my rank jumps by 100,000, does this mean I've sold a bunch of books in a spurt?
No. Sorry. What it means is that you maybe sold 2 books and the 50,000 titles you were behind sold none. There are really a supermillion amount of titles on Amazon. Many of those titles don't sell. Not a copy. So when you just get started, your one book sale can skyrocket your ranking far and away from those duds. Try not to get too excited about the rank. Focus on the amazingness that you sold a book despite all the competition on Amazon!

So, if I can't really use rank as an indicator, how can I determine success?
Rank is a good thing to watch because it gives you something you can see to help you determine if your marketing efforts are working ... over time. What should you really look at? Book sales. You should be selling more books this month than you did last month. And so on and so on so that you are always making progress ... even if it just one book at a time!

What Is an Editorial Analysis and Why Do You Need One?

July 01, 2009 by Kat Gautreaux, Account Manager
One of the first steps many of our author manuscripts go through is an Editorial Analysis (for those who want to geek out Wheatmark-style, we call it an EA around the office).

What is an Editorial Analysis and why do you need one?

An Editorial Analysis helps determine what the likely usability of an author's book, in its current form, will be by identifying its strengths and weaknesses.

The EA is designed to determine if the book is written in a way that will speak to its intended readership, if the book is written with excellent English usage, proper grammar, punctuation, and if it is written in an organized manner. It also looks at how well the book follows Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) formatting. Successful, correctly done books are formatted to a particular style that dictates how parts of the book are formatted, including even how commas are used and where the preface goes.

By having an Editorial Analysis done on your manuscript, it is easy to determine how much more work should be done on the book before it goes to layout. The EA will tell the author what level of copyediting they should have: if they need a light copy edit or maybe a more intensive developmental edit. All which should be done before your book designer begins styling your pages for print.

The Reason You Need An EA and Why You Should Listen
Successful authors have several things going for them. The first step to being a successful author is having an excellent book. This is an area to not let hubris get in the way (and quite often it does). Here are the most frequent excuses we hear for not having a completed EA done and for not listening and acting on the results:

• I've already edited my book, it's fine.
• I had my friend, who is an English teacher, proofread it already.
• No one cares if the commas are CMS formatted.
• Readers will know what I mean. They aren't stupid.
• I don't want to spend the money.

First of all, an EA comes with nearly every package that Wheatmark offers, and, if you have one done before committing to a package, that cost will be deducted from your final sign-up fee. The cost of copyediting is more, but the final product will be worth it. It would be a shame to spend money on publishing a book, only to have it not perform because of some elements that could easily have been fixed for a few dollars more.

Two, you and your friend the English teacher are not professional book editors. It isn't a reflection on your skills, it's a reflection on how well-trained professional book editors are. They read tons of pages a year and are trained to know what to look for, how to look for it, and how to expertly make the correction.

And thirdly, your readers do actually care about the commas. They may not be fully aware of it, but it will bother them as they scan lines if they have been done incorrectly. Book readers have been trained for decades to expect certain guidelines to be followed and when you ignore that expectation, you frustrate them. It slows them down. Which is also why, just because you think your readers will understand a muddled concept in your book, it will be a hindrance. It will slow your readers down. Slow them down too much and they'll stop reading the book entirely.

You've taken the time and energy to write a book you would like to be a success. Don't sell it short by not using the resources available to help it be the most excellent book possible!

Shameless Plug: Want to know more about the steps to success? Sign up for our free 7 Steps to Publishing Success minicourse!