Small Press Blog

The Single-Greatest Publishing App

Yes, I know that it sounds rather odd to think about an app when you talk about writing or publishing, but I can tell you that this app has changed the way that I do all of this.

What is it?

It's DropBox.  What does DropBox do? It allows you to sync information across devices. So, for example, I am currently working on a book that makes great use of a database. In my DropBox folder, I have deposited both the front matter (the text) and the database. I have DropBox loaded on my iPad 2, on my netbook, on my Android phone, on my computer at home, and on my computer at the office.

From any of those devices, I can access my files for the book. Any changes I make on any of those devices syncs out to all of them as soon as I log on to that particular device.

In addition, it's an easy way to create a back-up. Once you have dropped your files into the DropBox folder, those files actually live in the cloud.

One thing to remember, though, is that when you are working on your book, make sure you are using the version in the DropBox.  It does not sync to your desktop. You want to make sure that you are using the most-up-date version.

Should you write for free?

I am not a big fan of writing for free. You certainly see many opportunities out there for you to do so. These nice folks are going to "help" you build up writing credits by writing for free. Usually, this is not a great idea. Beter to spend your time writing things that will sell.

That being said, I just wrote an article for free. Why did I do it? Simple. The website asked me to write an article and so I did. However, first I checked to see the site's Alexa and Google ranks. This is a big-time site.

You can see my article, How to Choose an Online High School, by going over to the About.com site. About.com is owned by the New York Times. As part of the deal, I get a bio page where I can set up inbound links to my online high schools website.

Those inbound links are anchor text (like you see above in those hyperlinks). That is exactly what you want if you are hoping to increase your page rank. Page rank means more money.

I guess what I am saying is that, if opportunity comes knocking, you may want to consider the ramifications.

Dan Poynter on getting manuscript help from experts

Get Manuscript Help from Experts

by Dan Poynter

Savvy nonfiction author-publishers take each chapter of their nearly complete manuscript and send it off to at least four experts on that particular chapter's subject. This step in book writing is called "peer review."

Some experts might get two or three chapters but most will get only one. Do not overwhelm them. If you send the whole manuscript, most experts will put it on their desk with the best of intentions and never get back to it.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

--Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Danish physicist and Nobel Laureate

Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One-Minute Manager Library, says "I don't write my books, my friends write them for me." He explains that he josts down soe good ideas and sends them off to friends for comment. They send back lots of good ideas that he puts into his manuscript. Ken is being very generous, of course, and what he is describing is "peer review."

What you get back from your peer reviewers is extremely valuable: They may add two more items to your list; they sometimes delete whole paragraphs where the practice has changed; they occasionally cross out that comment you thought was cute but was potentially embarrassingly stupid, and they sometimes even correct punctuation, grammar and style.

Also send copies of the complete manuscript off to friends, family, literate objective readers, potential buyers and even a Devil's Advocate or two. The more feedback you get the better.

When your book comes out, you will receive far less adverse-reader reaction because the book will be bulletproof. After all, it has be reviewed and accepted by the best.

And, there is another valuable reason for peer review: You have more than two-dozen opinion molders telling everyone about your book -- and how they helped you with it.

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Dan Poynter, the Voice of Self-Publishing, has written more than 100 books since 1969 including Writing Nonfiction and the The Self-Publishing Manual. Dan is a past vice-president of the Publishers Marketing Association. For more help on book publishing and promoting, see http://ParaPub.com. (C) 2003

Fern Reiss on the 5 Best Ways to Get Media Attention for your Business

The 5 Best Ways to Get Media Attention for Your Business
by Fern Reiss, CEO, PublishingGame.com/Expertizing.com

How do you get journalists to write articles about you?  In the past year, I’ve been featured in over 100 magazines and newspapers worldwide (including many of the biggies, from The New York Times to Fortune Magazine).  How do you get that kind of attention for your book or business?  Here are my top techniques.  (See my special report, www.PublishingGame.com/mediareport.htm for an even deeper look at how to maximize your media attention.)

Be media worthy
This should be obvious, but even experienced publicists seem to overlook it. Journalists are looking for news, for trends, for cutting-edge story ideas.  They’re not looking for “I published a new book” or “I hired a new employee” or “I have a great new business idea!”  Even though those sentences have the word ‘new’ in them, that’s not sufficient for most journalists, whose first reaction is, “Who cares?”  If you can satisfactorily answer the “Who cares?” then you’re well on your way to nailing down a story.

Learn to coin juicy soundbites
Besides having a newsy story to tell, it’s also helpful if you can present it in a juicy, clever way.  Most of the stories that are covered by today’s media profile people who can tell a good story in an interesting way.  Get some consulting or take a class with someone whose expertise is coining soundbites in order to maximize your ability to be quoted.  (I offer this consulting, as do others.)  What do I mean by a soundbite?  Take, for example, the time I was featured in a major wire service syndicated news story, in a story on the bankruptcy of WonderBread.  My quote—which appeared first in an article that also quoted the CEOs of Krispy Kreme and Bruegger’s Bagels—was “America’s donut days are dead.”  (If you don’t understand why that was a desirable quote, quickly run out and get some training!)

Send out publicity releases regularly
On a consistent basis, send out press releases on whatever you’re doing.  Depending on your business objectives, you might want to send out releases monthly or weekly, but try to develop a regular pattern that reporters can rely on.  Barbara Corcoran, whose company became famous as New York City’s biggest residential real estate group, attributes much of her tremendous media success to the regular publicity release of “The Corcoran Report,” where she quantified the average condo and co-op sale in the city.  Use one of the low-cost or free press release services for your frequent communications, and a more upscale press release service infrequently for your particularly important communications.
 
But do targeted publicity too
Don’t just send generic press releases to publications randomly; do targeted publicity as well.  When you speak to most publicists, their idea of targeted releases is sending to 500 publications instead of 10,000.  When I say targeted publicity, I mean zeroing in on one publication, and one editor or journalist at that publication, to whom to address your story.  A few years ago, when I wanted some major international publicity for Expertizing, I sat down with all the business magazines and decided which one was most appropriate; then I read back stories by everyone on the masthead until I’d zeroed in on the journalist who was most likely to appreciate my story.  I sent him a press release—just one press release, just to him.  Two days later he phoned, and a few weeks later he attended my all-day Expertizing Workshop in Boston.  The result?  A full page story in Fortune Magazine.  (More on how to target publications most effectively in the Expertizing Publicity Forum—   www.Expertizing.com/forum.htm)

Sign up for the Expertizing Publicity Forum
If you’re promoting a nonfiction book or general –interest business, consider my new Expertizing Publicity Forum, where each week you can tell top journalists about your business—and hear their personalized tips on how you can best promote it, and whether they’re interested in writing an article about it for their publication.  Participants have gotten placement in everything from The New York Times to USA Today, and two participants got literary agents and big publishing deals!  For more information, check out www.Expertizing.com/forum.htm.

If you’d like to get the top 18 tips on getting more media attention for your book and business, get Fern’s $11, 7-page special report “Get Media Attention for Your Business: 18 Techniques to Attract Journalists to Write About You”  at www.PublishingGame.com/mediareport.htm. Or join the Expertizing Publicity Forum where you can pitch your book or business to journalists from national publications each week; spaces are going fast at www.Expertizing.com/forum.htm.

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Fern Reiss is CEO of PublishingGame.com (www.PublishingGame.com) and Expertizing.com (www.Expertizing.com) and the author of the books, The Publishing Game: Find an Agent in 30 Days, The Publishing Game: Bestseller in 30 Days, and The Publishing Game: Publish a Book in 30 Days as well as several other award-winning books.  She is also the Director of the International Association of Writers (http://www.AssociationofWriters.com) providing publicity vehicles to writers worldwide. She also runs The Expertizing® Publicity Forum where you can pitch your book or business directly to journalists; more information at www.Expertizing.com/forum.htm.  Sign up for her complimentary newsletter at www.PublishingGame.com/signup.htm.  And definitely sign up for her Facebook Writing and Publishing group at harvard.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6138914001.

Copyright © 2009 Fern Reiss

Dan Poynter on giving your book the right look.

Fashion Your Book to Match the Others in its Field

by Dan Poynter

As you survey the shelves in the booksore, you will note that each genre or category has its own unique look. For example, business books usually have a hard cover and a dust jacket. Books for professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants are hardcover without a dust jacket. Children's books have a larger trim size, are four color and have 32 pages. Cookbooks are wider than they are tall so they will open and lie flat. Travel books are lightweight, slim and may have rounded corners to make them easy to slip in to a pocket or a pack.

Milt Strong writes and publishes books on square dancing. All his books measure about 4 1/2 x 8 inches. He explains that dancers want a tall, skinny book so they can read the steps -- and then slip the book into a back pocket.

Your book must look like the rest on its shelf. It must have the same dimensions, type of cover, a common typepace and so on. Do not break out of the mold on your first attempts. If your book is different, it will lose credibility. Potential buyers will think you are an amateur and not ready to be a serious author-publisher. In book design, different risks avoidance.

If you want your book to sell like a book, it has to look like a book.

Give your buyer what he or she expects, wants and deserves -- and you will sell more books. Respect your category.

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Dan Poynter does not want you to die with a book still inside you. You have the ingredients and he has your recipe. Dan has written more than 100 books since 1969 including Writing Nonfiction and The Self-Publishing Manual. For more help on book writing, see http://ParaPub.com.

Dan Poynter on Working Titles

Beware of Working Titles

Dan Poynter

 

Be careful what you make permanent. Working titles are dangerous. they can become too familiar to us while being misleading or meaningless to potential customers.

Choices, a Teen Woman's Journal for Self-awareness and Personal Planning was a hot seller and spawned a publishing company as a subsidiary for the Girls Club of Santa Barbara. The company thrived but soon found that Choices could not be used in schools unless there was a version for the boys. So the authors, Mindy Bingham, Sandy Stryker and Judy Edmonson wrote a matching masculine edition.

Working titles ranged from Choices II, to Choices Too, and even Son of Choices. What sounded ridiculous or humorous in the beginning became familiar and sounded pretty good.

finally the three female authors settle on Changes but found that men did not like the proposed title. After discussions with a number of men (including Mindy's father), they agreed to change the title to Challenges, a Teen Man's Journal for Self-awareness and Personal Planning. The female authors discovered that while many women want a change, most men do not like change. Men prefer challenges. http://www.AcademicInnovations.com

The title must be easy to remember and easy to say. It has to grab the attention of the potential buyer and it must project an image the buy can relate to. Authors and publishers often argue over titles. Authors may be closer to the subject matter and publishers may be closer to the buyers.

 

Authors, as a rule, are poor judges of titles and often go for the cute or clever rather than the practical.

--Nat Bodian, The Joy of Publishing 

So far Choices has sold over one million copies and Challenges over a half million. They are used side-by-side in many schools.

A "working title" is for the manuscript, not necessarily for the book.

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Dan Poynter does not want you to die with a book still inside you. You have the ingredients and he has your recipe. Dan has written more than 100 books since 1969 including Writing Nonfiction and The Self-Publishing Manual. For more help on book writing, see http://ParaPub.com.

 

Do you have a blog or articles on your website?

I am creating a new resource for independent and self publishers. If you have an RSS feed on your site, send me a link in the Comments section to this post.

What qualifies: book publishing, book marketing, book design, and so on. It's a good opportunity for you to increase traffic to your site.

Questions? Post them in the Comments section on this post as well.

Dan Poynter on Fact Checking

Nonfiction writers have long realized that they have a responsibility to their readers, to their own credibility and to history to check all the facts they repeat in their books. The challenge increases today due to the fast growth in our knowledge base and the quick changes in our technology. An interesting recent example will encourage us to add one more item to our checklist before we go to press.

At Para Publishing, we produce several publishing-industry books, reports, mailing lists and other databases. More important, we “maintain” them. This maintenance is becoming increasingly time-consuming.

 We recently returned to press with The Self-Publishing Manual. Just prior to sending the revised pages off for typesetting, we spot checked some of the addresses. Alarmed, we asked the editor Karen Stedman to contact each supplier listed in the 62-page Resource Section. She discovered an astounding 85% of the addresses had changed in just 13 months!

 

 

 

 

Most changes were area codes. We all know that after a few months, the telephone companies replace the “change” recording with “That number is no longer in service.” Most people assume the company is out of business. It takes some detective work to find the new code and test it. Next to area codes, email addresses change often too. We found that many more companies have web sites to list. We even found some companies had new street addresses and some had gone out of business.

The lesson? Do not copy resources out of other books and directories and assume they are current. You must call to check every one.

If you do not verify addresses, you will receive calls (to your toll-free number) asking for new addresses. Now we all like to hear from our readers but we do not need "non-revenue calls".

Mailing to them for verification will not work. Over 50% will not get around to replying. Use the telephone but you will save time and money letting someone else do it. People love to talk to authors so fact checking often turns into some long conversations. The caller may also ask for additional information about products, services and anticipated area code changes. That will make your new book or revision even better.

This sudden realization about fact checking could be called “the bad news” but “the good news” is that the small press is winning out over the big publishers once again. It takes a large (New York) publisher 18 months to turn a manuscript into a book. In a year-and-a-half, the references are hopelessly out of date. Secondly, larger publishers rarely issue a revision of a book. They may reprint but they usually avoid the cost of new typesetting. Smaller publishers keep their books alive for years by revising each printing. We invest the time and money in revising because we want our readers to have the latest information and because we want the best for our offspring (a book in this case.)

In your final editing and proofing, just before going to press, call every person and company listed in the text. If the project is delayed more than 30 days between calling and going to press, call again.

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Dan Poynter

does not want you to die with a book still inside you. You have the ingredients and he has your recipe. Dan has written more than 100 books since 1969 including Writing Nonfiction and The Self- Publishing Manual. For more help on book writing, see http://ParaPub.com.

Fern Reiss on The Future of Publishing

Self-publishing guru Fern Reiss offers yet another looking at our rather small world and what we can predict for the future. Worth a read.

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The Future of Publishing
by Fern Reiss, CEO, PublishingGame.com/Expertizing.com

In the same way that it’s always easier to parent other people’s children perfectly, it’s easier to criticize the publishing industry from the outside and see what needs to be done.  Still, as an ‘outsider’ who’s been in various segments of the publishing industry for over 25 years, here’s my top five list of changes the publishing world needs to implement in order to survive the current economic downturn--if the industry is to emerge at the other end intact.

Give up on returns
It’s ironic that the policy of bookstore returns started during the last economic Depression, when Simon & Schuster decided it was a great way to allow bookstores to take chances on books because there was no downside.  Today, however, the cost of allowing returns is strangling the entire publishing industry.  Now’s the time to introduce economic incentives for booksellers who are willing to forego returns—or just eliminate the option unilaterally, across the industry.  Like gravitating away from hardcovers to soft, eliminating returns will bring book prices way, way down—and change the economics of the entire business.

Put galleys online
Distributing hard copies of advance galleys four months before official publication date is a practice that should have died out with the advent of instant printing several years ago.  Why should publishers do headstands to get advance galley copies of books (books that are already in final form, mind you) into the hands of opinion makers four months before the books are officially released? It’s time to put galleys online where they belong.  Not only will this save mega bucks and mega time, it will eliminate the fake ‘four month window’ during which you have to sit on your books, as well as the plethora of galleys available for sale on Amazon.  Done correctly, it might even generate advance buzz amongst readers.

Market the books, dammit!
When McDonalds introduces a new burger, they do a PR campaign.  When the Hilton introduces new amenities, they do a PR campaign. It’s hard to even think of an industry where products for the general public are not marketed.  But usually the publishing industry only markets books that seem to be taking off already. As an industry pundit once said, publishers would wait to see whether the infant survives before bothering to feed it…

And market the books online, too
The publishing industry hasn’t evolved most of its practices in decades, but the rest of the world has changed.  Most particularly, where potential readers congregate and buy has changed.  Newspapers are dying; magazines are going out of business; and it’s not just the independents, but all the brick and mortar bookstores too that are in trouble in this economy.  For publishers to really thrive and compete, they need to be where the readers are.  And that means Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs.  Hire some literate college kids and let them loose, but do something with social media and and Web 2.0 and do it fast!  With bookstores dwindling and without an online fan base, it’s hard to see how even the biggest publishers will survive the decade.

Rethink the whole book model
It’s not only the publishing industry that needs to change.  Books have to, and can, change in several fundamental ways.  One hundred years ago, a book had a beginning, middle and end.  Today, books can be sold in smaller increments profitably (think: cell phones).  Books can be tailored to specific niches, or even specific individuals (think: Michelin Guide replaced by three page guide to restaurants near my business meeting in the North End; or 200-page tome on knitting replaced by a single-page summary reminding me just how to cast-off.)  Also, consumers today, perhaps sadly, watch and listen more and read less.  They crave interactivity.  Smart publishers will find ways to deliver that.  Supplement your books with audio, video and new media.  Think out of the proverbial box.

There’ll always be writers and (I hope) there’ll always be readers.  The smart writers and publishers will figure out some way to propel their stuff into the world.  But if large publishers don’t start making some radical changes, the publishing landscape may have to continue without them. And that would be a shame.

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Fern Reiss is Director of the International Association of Writers (http://www.AssociationofWriters.com) providing publicity vehicles to writers worldwide. She’s also CEO of PublishingGame.com (www.PublishingGame.com) and Expertizing.com (www.Expertizing.com) and the author of The Publishing Game: Find an Agent in 30 Days, The Publishing Game: Bestseller in 30 Days, and The Publishing Game: Publish a Book in 30 Days. She consults on branding and positioning to small publishers and businesses. Her Expertizing® Publicity Forum enables businesses to pitch directly to journalists; more information at www.Expertizing.com/forum.htm. Sign up for her free email newsletter at http://www.AssociationofWriters.com.

How to fail in self-publishing, Part 2

As I mentioned earlier, failing in self-publishing is easier than you think. In the first installment of this thread, I talked about how one should get really good at publishing your own books before you spend the time publishing the books of others. Also and importantly, it is much easier to control your actions than the actions of others..

The second easy way to fail at self-publishing is to spend way too much time on your website and not enough time on the book(s). I readily admit that I spent far too much time worrying about the vehicle for sales. I had a website designed using a web developer from Elance.com. I have used that site before (where people bid on jobs) and will likely use them again, but this ended horribly. Twice.

Part of my problem was in using developers where there was a language barrier. While the person who conducted the initial arrangements spoke English well, his workers typically did not. Also, I allowed the process to go on much longer than I should have, thus taking time away from the book process.

However, part of the problem was me. I wanted to have a website that was capable of selling many products when I only had two available for sale. Yes, you want to plan for the future, but the more bells and whistles you require, the more time is invested in the process.

Guess what? At this point, I don't even have a publishing website. I sell my goods from the website linked to below and on Amazon. This has worked out quite well for me. Will I eventually have a publisher's website for Degree Press? It certainly is possible, but only when it makes sense in terms of sales and in terms of the number of products.

What did I learn from all this? You absolutely do not need to mirror what the big boys do in order to be successful. Quite the opposite, I believe.

By the way, I should mention that the third time is the charm. I have found an excellent website designer, Simply Brilliant Solutions. The owner, Catherine MacDonald, is an American living in Europe. They are competitively priced, but, importantly, listen to what you need, want, and desire, and they do it. I have had them design two websites for me, plus I have gone back a couple of times for upgrades.

If you would like to see what they created for me, it is here.