You are here: Home / Archives for publishing
February 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The secret to a successful book

There are more books being published now than ever before. UNESCO (via Wikipedia) says:

  1. United States (2009) 288,355 (“new titles and editions”) [3]
  2. United Kingdom (2005) 206,000 [2]
  3. China (2007) 136,226 [4]
  4. Russian Federation (2008) 123,336 [5]
  5. Germany (2009) 93,124 (new titles) [6]
  6. Spain (2008) 86,300 [7]
  7. India (2004) 82,537 (21,370 in Hindi and 18,752 in English) [8][9]
  8. Japan (2009) 78,555 [10]
  9. France (2010) 67,278 [11] (63,690 new titles)
  10. Iran (2010) 65,000 [12][13]

How many of these sell more than 50 copies? I haven’t found exact figures, but my guess is that the percentage is below 10.

Why? And how can you get your book into the 10%?

“Why” is the secret: Most authors write from their own need or desire to do so. They have a vague idea about who will buy their book or want to read it. But they are focused on their message.

That is a mistake. A HUGE mistake.

If you want your book to be read by more than your mom and your close friends, you must view the book as a product, and its publication as a business. Even if you plan to give it away for free.

So the first question you must answer is: Who is the audience for my book? Who will want to read it? And you must study that audience and refine your understanding of who is in it, so that you can be sure that your book is something they will want.

(Notice that I said “want,” not “need.” People buy what they want, what they desire. Their desire may or may not stem from need.)

Does this sound backwards? Shouldn’t you focus first on your message? Not if you want to reach an audience.

You must first pick your audience. Define it narrowly, as narrowly as possible–age, gender, family situation, profession, and so on. If you address the wants of a highly targeted group of people, those who share some of their attributes will also be interested. But if you attempt to address everyone, your content will not attract anyone.

Who is your audience? Dentists who have just opened a practice? Stay-home moms with 2-3 kids under 10? Harried executives in large corporations who have been at it for 10 to 12 years, and are thinking about entrepreneurship? Owners of Golden Retrievers? Once you define your audience, you can figure out what problem your book should address. You’ll know what title will capture their interest. And you’ll know where to find your readers, and how to help them find you.

What are your thoughts about audience? Please comment.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, publishing Tagged With: , ,
January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Seth Godin: The single biggest change in book publishing

Seth Godin is amazing, and you should follow his Domino Project. In this brief article, he summarizes a key point about publishing books that is overlooked by most authors and many publishers. Go there and read the whole thing.

The single biggest change in book publishing is this:

The industry was built around finding readers for its writers.
And new technologies and business models now mean that the most successful publishers and authors find writers for their readers instead.

Go here to read the whole short piece.

 

Filed Under: book love, marketing, publishing Tagged With: , , , ,
January 23, 2012 By 8 Comments

Can this new publishing model work?

Unglue.it is not even in beta yet, but it is raising a lot of eyebrows: Can you use a pledge campaign to raise money to induce a copyright owner to put their publication into the public domain? The owner gives up future royalties in exchange for a one-time payment, raised from a crowd of interested people in small amounts. (Compare Kickstarter.com)  It’s an intriguing thought, and I will be very interested to see if it flies. Here’s a brief video in which Unglue.it founder Eric Hellman is interviewed by my friend David Weinberger.

Filed Under: book love, marketing, people & ideas, publishing Tagged With: , ,
November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Paper vs. ebook

It’s not really a dichotomy; you can, and probably should, have both. Thanks to print-on-demand machinery, you can get your book out there for very little money (consider Lulu.com if you can handle terrible customer support; otherwise my favorite is Booklocker.com). And you can simultaneously publish your work as an ebook, getting it formatted for the different readers, as well as offering it for computer reading.

A paper book can be a “big business card,” as Dona Kozik puts it; it’s a physical presence in your prospect’s hands, and then in their home or office, that constantly reminds them of you. It’s authoritative, and establishes you as an author–hence, an authority.

An ebook has very low production costs and is almost free to distribute. If you sell it, it’s almost pure profit; if you employ it as a bonus or giveaway, your marginal cost per copy is essentially zero.

One poorly exploited aspect of ebooks: Media richness. Your ebook can contain color, audio, video, and links–all of which are expensive, impossible, or cumbersome to put in a paper book. Yet they are easy and inexpensive to have in an ebook.

But why invest the additional work? Here are some reasons:

  • Reach readers with different learning styles
  • Rich more media-jaded younger readers
  • Enable a reader to reach you with a single click
  • Build a broader-bandwidth relationship with your reader
Why not?
  • Good media can be expensive or difficult to produce
  • The results may not be worth the investment
  • Your audience doesn’t respond well to media
Writing a book is something you need to do, to establish yourself as an expert. But having a media-rich ebook is something that may or may not enhance your business. Don’t decide by default; think about it and do what makes sense.
Filed Under: book love, book printing, publishing, steps to write a book, write a book
December 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

2010: The Year Self-Publishing Became Respectable

A powerful piece on the PBS site; worth reading.

Filed Under: book love, publishing, steps to write a book
September 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

After the book

Read this from Bob Stein, of the Institute for the Future of the Book:

the future of the appPost date 08.02.2010, 10:37 AM

posted by bob stein

Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called “a book,” people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it’s true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called “a book,” since we don’t have that word yet, “book” works better than “institute for the future of discourse” or “institute for thinking about what comes after the book.” I end my answer by suggesting that one day we’ll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book.

I’ve always assumed that day would be years or even decades off. But recently, while listening to the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman’s First Quartet on a gently swaying barge in the east river, i suddenly recognized our first candidate — “app.” It’s not the pretty or expressive word I was hoping for, but it feels right.

The aha moment went like this . . . . while zoning in and out of the Feldman piece I started to think about the iPad that I’d been using for the past six weeks — not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.

The distinction between media types was a lot more important during the analog era of the mid-twentieth cenury. In 1950 no one would confuse a novel with a movie or a song with a TV show. But today we have e-books with video sequences, and movies published with extensive text-based supplements. Is Lady Gaga a music star or video star? More

What do you think? And if you’re in the neighborhood on September 13, come to my Meetup here in Mountain View, CA, to discuss it.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, inspiration, publishing, tech, write a book Tagged With: , , , ,
August 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Presented at SF Coach meeting last night

I spoke to the San Francisco Coach Federation monthly meeting last night, at the beautiful Handlery Hotel on Geary in San Francisco. It was a well-organized meeting, and well-attended–I think there were more than 25 in the room. I shared how I came up with my BookProgram method for writing good books quickly.

SF Coach

SF Coach meeting at Handlery in SF

There were lots of excellent questions. People seemed to “get” the idea that structure must precede content, and that content is actually the easy part of writing a book. I spoke about “the diamond is your friend,” mangling a baseball metaphor, but to good effect.

Several people said they’d like to talk about their book with me, so I sent them–and I send you–to http://joelorr.setster.com to make an appointment with me for a free strategy call. (By the way, if you’re tired of having to exchange 4 emails in order to set a phone appointment, I recommend checking Setster.com out. It publishes your calendar, sync’d from Outlook, Gmail, or whatever, showing just blocked periods for your appointments. People can choose from your available slots; you get an email and a text message, and can approve or deny the appointment.)

If you’d like to hear what I said, just click here, fill in the form, and I’ll give you immediate access to the recording. (Click on “continue shopping” after the cart thanks you, and you’ll go directly to the page with the recording.)

Would you like me to speak to your group? Click here to make an appointment to discuss it with me.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, publishing, steps to write a book, write a book Tagged With: , , ,
July 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What’s your platform?

As a result of a teleseminar I gave yesterday, my calendar has been full of strategy calls with people who want to write or market a book and need questions answered or help. (If you want to book such a free call with me, click here.)

I’ve been amazed how many of the people I’ve spoken with have a well-established platform for marketing their book and other products. What’s a platform? It is a collection of ways in which you already have contact with a significant audience–frequent presentations; a newsletter; on-line or newspaper or magazine columns; and so on. If you contact a literary agent or a publisher, they are sure to ask about your platform. Do you have one? What is it?

A solid and broad platform is the key to immediate volume sales of your book. One person I spoke with has a continuous stream of corporate presentations on the very topic about which he is writing. I pointed out to him that most of his corporate clients are likely to want a copy of his book for each member of the audience; this could double his revenue from a single engagement! He agreed.

If you already have an established platform, think how you might take advantage of it to promote your book. If you don’t yet have one, consider investing time and energy into the creation of an appropriate one; it will both greatly increase the volume of your book sales, and enhance your market presence for your professional services.

Arielle Ford says in the Huffington Post:

“I don’t buy authors, I don’t buy books, I buy platforms.” – #1 Self-Help Publisher in the world

One of the biggest mistakes authors make is thinking that they have to first write a book or the book proposal and then go out and look for a publisher. In reality, the biggest thing you need to do before you approach a publisher is to build your platform.

You want to be able to say to any publisher, “I have 3,000 names in my e-mail database. I’ve have been a guest speaker on 10 radio shows. I have done 20 paid speeches, and I am scheduled for four weekend workshops. Here is my list of upcoming speeches, the interviews I have done and my press kit.”

The reason you want to be able to tell a publisher all of this is because the only question they really have for you is, “Who is going to buy your book?” If you have something important to say and you are on to something that’s really great, you still aren’t ready to be an author until you have a platform.

Pay attention.

Filed Under: marketing, planning, publishing, steps to write a book Tagged With: , , , , ,
July 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Promotion: It’s up to you

If you want people to buy your book, you have to let them know of its existence, and where to order it. To do this, you need to know who they are, and where to reach them. And much to the surprise of many new authors, this is not only the case for self-publishers; it’s true for authors whose works are published by major publishers, too.

Most major publishers put promotion dollars behind winners, not newbies. So if promotion was a reason for you to seek a publisher rather than publishing yourself, strike it off the list.

For most non-fiction authors, the very best way to sell your books is through speaking engagements. For corporate gigs, you can often offer your book at a discounted price to the client, so that they can buy a copy for each attendee. I’ve sold thousands of books this way, and so have many other speakers.

In other speaking environments, you can sell them in the back of the room after your talk, if the venue allows it. (Although I would suggest having a higher-priced product at the back of the room, such as a CD series, a DVD series, or a course, and throw in the book as a free bonus. But if you do this, do not offer the book for sale as well; most people will just buy the book.)

One of the best investments an author can make is to buy “1001 Ways to Market Your Books,” by John Kremer. Then read it, and start implementing just a few of the hundreds of excellent ideas in its 700+ pages.

Here are a few starting places:
  • Find out what your most important keywords are. Search on “keyword research” to learn this important skill. Then begin to identify your book’s audience with precision, and the words that they would enter into search engines that ought to lead them to your book.
  • Find blogs read by your reading audience, and find a way to participate in them. Offer to write guest articles. Comment on the entries. Include your book’s website (you have one, right?) in your signature.
  • Create a Facebook page around your book and its topic.
  • Blog about your topic and your book on your own blog, at least 3 times a week.
  • Find out how to get on radio talk shows. They need people to interview, and will allow you to promote your book. Make a special offer–a low price or bonus if they mention the radio show. (Search for Alex Carroll; he offers help along this line.)
Filed Under: book love, marketing, publishing, steps to write a book Tagged With: , , ,
July 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Self-publishing and POD (publish on demand)

My buddy Bill Quain and I are doing a podcast series on behalf of FastPencil.com. It’s called FastPencil Pointers, and you can get it on iTunes or here. As we were preparing next week’s issue, I realized that many people do not know what self-publishing and publish-on-demand are.

Definitions:

Self-publishing: The publishing of a book or books where the author is also the publisher.

Publish-on-demand: The use of print-on-demand equipment to produce books in as small a quantity as one.

Thanks to the Internet and modern printing and binding technologies, it is possible for an author to publish his or her own book without having to invest heavily in large quantities of printed copies and the attendant logistics.

A self-publisher can use a publish-on-demand company for producing the book, or simply have it printed by a traditional book printer.

POD companies often offer additional services to the author, such as ISBN codes; cover design; connection to distributors, like Ingram (who supply bookstores, like Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.); editing; and more.

The initial POD vendors were not always transparent about the specifics of their service offerings, and sometimes left customers unsatisfied with the value of the “packages” they had bought. Today, competition has forced these firms to be more open about precisely what they do and do not provide. It’s easier for an author to make comparisons than ever before.

I recommend self-publishing to all my authors. If you publish your book yourself, and sell a few thousand copies–and then pitch a major publisher–you will be in a FAR better position to bargain for royalty rates, promotional budgets, intellectual property rights, and more. But frankly, at that point you may ask yourself whether the imprimatur of the major publisher is worth what you may have to give up.

As an author, you will make out better financially if you get a cover designed; get your book printed; and control your own promotion. Now, you may not have the time or the inclination to do those things, and there are plenty of people who will gladly undertake to do them for you; but whichever way you go, you should study the process so that you will understand what you are buying.

Filed Under: book love, book printing, marketing, publishing, steps to write a book Tagged With: , , , , ,
« Older Posts