Blogging as you write...

Recently I began an experiment to help in my writing endeavors. I've been writing a book about my quirky experiences working as a small town newspaper reporter, which I did for 10 years before moving to Tucson. I decided it might benefit me to see what others think about the project. So I started a blog. The idea was a little intimidating at first. I mean, did I really want the whole world reading my writing before it was edited, much less published?

But then it dawned on me. That's the best time to have them read it! When they comment on the different stories I've posted, it not only gives me a feel for what people may be interested in, but it also gives me some feedback on what needs to be fixed, changed, deleated, etc. If they like it, they may become hooked and want to read the entire book once it's published. Who knows? It may be generating a potential market for my book before the book is even completed.

Best of all, it's motivating me to stay on task and to be more dilligent in completing the project.

So far I've just been announcing the blog posts on my Facebook profile; I still need to gain followers and start linking to other blogs.

Am I afraid of losing my content to someone else who may try to steal it and publish it under their own name? Nah! Being an author is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It takes money, time, and effort to become published and successful--even when you're great. Who would want that headache?

I'll keep you posted on my progress as it unfolds. Here's my blog if you would like to read it and make comments.

Blog Content: What to write when you have nothing to say

Do you find yourself logged in to your blog account, ready to post, and all you end up doing is staring at your screen while your fingers occasionally mimic typing? Just me? Hmmm.

It can be difficult to sit down and write an entry for the sheer sake of writing an entry. However, to be blogging in an advantageous way, that's exactly what has to happen for your blog to be a useful information source and marketing tool!

Blogging a few times a week is the optimum for keeping reader traffic coming back to your site and hungry for more--leave your blog for too long and you may find that your readership wanes.

Here are some blogging tips to help get your writing juices flowing!

1. Write about your inspiration for your characters/topics. Did you base the character on someone? Did the idea come to you in a dream? Readers love to know why authors choose character traits and motivations and it is a great way to let your audience in to your book's world.
2. For nonfiction books, create a numbered tip list based on information in your book. You can always refer back to that blog and expand on any number of those topics for blogs in the future. Aim for about 5 or 10 tips.
   
3. Start your writing off with the sentence, "I don't really have anything to say because not much is going on." Then explain what the "not much going on" has been. You'll quickly find you can go back and change that initial sentence to read, "I've been really busy."
4. If you really can't think of anything to write, or, if you've mostly been reading online instead of writing offline, you can create a blog that provides links to interesting sites. Examples of this can even be seen on the Wheatmark blog where we share links to interesting topics we've come across.
5. On the days when you have TONS of ideas for blog posts, write them and either a) save them as drafts for your next dry spell or b) change your post options to date them for future release. You can do this on most blog platforms. On Blogger, the option is under the "Post Options" arrow at the bottom left of your composition window to the left of your labels for post field.
   

Remember, blogging is a great way to exercise your writing muscle and is also a great way to continue building your author platform. When in doubt, start writing some drivel. You can always delete an entry, save an entry that isn't working as a draft and come back to it later, or just write a little tidbit--not all blog entries have to be elaborate. Sometimes just a quick entry about a book signing or a photo of you opening your delivery of books (or simply a picture of your cat sleeping on your computer keyboard helping you "edit" your next manuscript) is all you need!

Why You Should Start a Blog Today

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!

Internet Domain Name for Your Book

An Internet domain name for your book is a part of some of Wheatmark's book publishing packages, and a question I often hear from authors is, What's it for?

Let me explain.

When you publish your book with Wheatmark, your book will have its web page on the Wheatmark online bookstore, as well as on most major online bookstores. Here is an example of such a bookstore page for the title, Transplanted: A Love Story:

http://www.wheatmark.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=BS&Product_Code=9781587368974

This is quite a long web address, isn't it! At this point, when you set out to market your book, you can either tell people, "Go to Amazon.com or the Wheatmark website and search for the title Transplanted," or you can email them the complete web address to click on.

It doesn't have to be this hard, however.

You see, an Internet domain name for your book can serve as a shortcut that will take your audience straight to the bookstore page selling your book. Generally, the domain name is the same as or is similar to your book's title.

Here's how it works:

Click on transplanted-alovestory.com. You will see that it takes you directly to the same page as the long address above. Now all you have to do is mention the domain name and people will no longer have to search for your book. Print this domain on your bookmarks, postcards, business cards, and add it to your email signature so that everyone you contact knows about your book.

When you get a domain name for your book, it doesn't have to be pointed to your book's page on the Wheatmark bookstore site. You can set it to go to your book's Amazon.com page, or to any other web address.

Another great destination for your domain name is your book's online press kit. When you are targeting the media, you may want to set up a domain name that takes them directly to your electronic media kit. For example, the book Rangers in Combat has an online press kit located at:

http://www.bookflash.com/press_kit/lock/rangers/

The Internet domain www.rangersincombat.com takes you directly to the book's online press kit. Now you can tell journalists: "Go to www.rangersincombat.com to view my press kit."

It's that simple!

Book Marketing & Social Networking

One of the latest Internet trends we've been following closely at Wheatmark is the use of social networking sites to market books.

Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and numerous others have been touted everywhere as The Next Big Thing for selling books.

The problem, in my opinion, is that nobody's ever figured out how to generate sales on these sites—not even the companies themselves (Facebook, which is currently valued at something like 15 billion dollars [according to a segment on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago] has never made much in the way of revenue, and every time they try, their audience revolts).

This phenomenon (social networking sites not delivering sales) reminds me a little of attending a writer's conference last year. Many independent authors purchase booths at writer's conferences and try to sell their books to conference attendees.

The problem with this approach is that pretty much all the attendees of the conference are other writers—each who's selling his/her own book and/or attending seminars about how to write and/or market books.

So if I were trying to sell a book about how to market books, a conference would be a great place to have a booth. However, if I were selling a book about tulips, a writer's conference would not be the best place for me to go. I'd be better off at a garden show, probably.

Of course, I'd love nothing more than to be proven wrong. Have you been successful using social networking sites to market a book? Please leave us a comment below telling us about your experience.

To read about the latest self-publishing service/social networking partnership in the industry, click here.

People Everywhere Shopping Online, Buying Books

Wondering just how big the market for book sales on the Web is?

A just-released Nielsen Global Online Survey reports that more than 85% of the world's online population has used the Internet to make a purchase. That's a 40% increase in just the past two years.

What are all these people buying?

You guessed it—books. According to the survey:

1. 55% of German shoppers said they had purchased books online in the previous month

2. 45% of shoppers in the U. K. had bought books online

3. 38% of American shoppers had bought books.

Worldwide, more people shop for books online than for any other product or service: a whopping 41% of people had purchased books via the internet in the last three months.

To read the Center for Media Research's report, peel your eyes away from Amazon for a few minutes and click here!

A New Era in Book Publishing

As president of the Arizona Book Publishing Association, www.azbookpub.com, for the last two and a half years, and as head of the self-publishing firm Wheatmark, www.wheatmark.com, for the last eight years, I’ve talked to hundreds of publishers and authors, and read countless articles and studies on the publishing industry. This experience has made it clear to me that a significant transition is taking place in the book publishing industry. The era of the major publisher and the bestseller is ending, and the era of the independent publisher and the micro market is beginning.

Major publishers’ titles account for an ever decreasing portion of overall book sales in the United States, while independent publishers’ titles and self-published titles account for an ever increasing portion. Similarly, bestsellers constitute an ever smaller portion of the total publishing pie, while books selling in the few thousands or hundreds account for an ever larger portion.

This shift is the result of the advent of two major new technologies: the Internet and inexpensive digital short-run printing.

The Internet contributes to this change by allowing for infinite virtual shelf space for books online. Major publishers’ business models are built around the assumption that there is a limited amount of shelf space in bookstores. Major publishers compete vigorously with one another for this finite shelf space. In their worldview the publisher that gets its books placed in the bookstores wins, the publisher that doesn’t loses. This has, over the years, resulted in publishers making major financial concessions to bookstores and bookstore chains, including low list prices, huge discounts, 100% returnability, and high prices for premium in-store placements. The result: bookstores and bookstore chains have become the least lucrative place for publishers to sell books. Happily, thanks to the Internet, independent publishers and self-publishing authors are no longer limited to the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores. Even self-publishing authors with only one title can sell directly to readers. Major online bookstores like Amazon.com can carry every title that every brick-and-mortar bookstore carries plus every title any publisher or self-publishing service publishes.

Inexpensive digital short run printing technology contributes to the change in the publishing landscape by allowing publishers to publish more titles, and by allowing more authors to self-publish. Major publishers’ business models are built around the assumption that all print runs need to be fair-sized and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Major publishers, therefore, eschew books appealing to small or micro markets for fear that they will be stuck with unsold inventory. Thanks to digital short run printing technology, publishers can now afford to publish more titles in shorter incremental runs without this risk, and more authors can afford to self-publish.

Independent publishers and self-publishing authors can profitably publish books that appeal to micro markets however small or geographically dispersed. And they’re doing it – the number of books published has skyrocketed in recent years. And, there is evidence that book buyers are changing their buying habits as a result of having a broader range of choices. The number of weeks the average bestselling novel remains on the bestseller list has declined precipitously in recent years. Just as big hits are becoming less frequent and less “big” in the film, television, and music industries, so bestsellers are taking up an ever dwindling portion of the total book publishing pie. Bad news for the major publishers. Good news for the little guy.

Look and Search Inside a Book Online (Inside Search)

Have you ever found a book online about your favorite subject, but didn’t buy it right then because you weren’t sure what was inside? You may have gotten in the car and driven to the nearest bookstore to check it out before you made your decision … and bought it online later for less.

What about the book you’ve written? Can your audience look inside it online to help them make up their minds about it? How many more people do you think would buy your book if they could look inside and make a decision to buy on the spot?

You can now have your readers browse the inside of your book. Amazon and Google have started scanning the interiors of books so that their search engines would be able to retrieve and organize information from inside printed books as well. A few days ago Microsoft launched a similar program called Live Search Books. (Wheatmark is among Microsoft’s first book publishing partners.) Here are examples of a book published by Wheatmark shown by these three vendors.

Amazon.com - click on the book's cover to see inside
Google Book Search
Live Search Books

As you can see, people can look inside and browse the book before they decide to buy it. Don’t worry, the content is secure, you can neither download it nor read all of the pages online.

The ability to look inside your book, however, is only a small part of the overall benefit of the inside search concept. Sure, it helps for readers to peek inside your book once they've found it, but what about the part of your audience that has not yet found your book? How will they find it?

Enter the real beauty of inside search. Let me explain.

Take the book mentioned above, Arizona Laws 101, as an example. You are searching for books online for information about, say, DUI laws in the state of Arizona. If all that’s available to the search engine is the title of this book, it will not show up at all in these search results, since you were not searching for the phrase in the title. But if the search engine is able to search within the book, it will see that it has a whole chapter on DUI laws in Arizona. Therefore, the book will show up in your search results.

Try it yourself: Go to books.live.com and search for the phrase “driving under the influence in Arizona.” The book will be prominently placed in the search results, and it will even show you what pages contain the words you searched for.

Is your book full of keywords and phrases that people are searching for online? Would you like to reach readers who search online for topics that your book addresses? You should definitely make your book searchable inside.