When Book Marketing Becomes Just Another J.O.B.

Ever get fed up with stuff - when something you used to like to do has become just another chore?

No, I'm not quite there yet with book publishing.

But podcasting was taking me to the brink.

You see, "conventional wisdom" has it that you need to publish on a schedule in order to serve your audience best.

I've come to disagree with this idea.

That's not the way I listen to podcasts, and I bet you don't either. I can fall behind on keeping up with various podcasts. My iTunes will actually quit downloading them after awhile, which is fine with me. That means they are putting out too much stuff too often.

I listen and work in batches, best. When I find several books I want to publish in a certain format, then I'll get them all through to the point I can publish them. Marketing after publishing has been my sore point. Apparently, I wasn't through finding stuff to publish.

Right now, I've pretty much found all the stuff I need to - for now.

I want to get all these things I've published already selling better. 

Like I've been telling you for some months now. In fact, we started podcasting (me talking, you listening) right in the middle of some marketing work.

However, when I "had" to get a podcast out, I started resenting that work - because it was interrupting some line of work I was doing otherwise.

Right now, I've been trying to get this new livesensical.com site up on Rainmaker for months. One thing after another interrupted it. Some interruptions were good and needful, others were annoyances.

Over the past couple of days, I got four blog posts out, on two different blogs. Some of this was research based on what I'd discovered in revising the Living Sensical manifesto. When archive.org then shut down all my podcasts, this prompted research and so - I blogged about the raw reactions which prompted solving their problem.

You saw these two blog posts recently - but I don't know if I'll ever podcast them. Because I already took a day away from getting that book wrapped up.

The research work was was inspired was welcome. The research work caused by inane algorithms instantly dumping all my content was not welcome and was frustrating.

Which do you think I'd rather be working on?

Podcasting as a schedule is not always inspiring. I feel it's drudgery to have to do things which are not creative, not inspired, not calming.

I fired my last boss a year ago last May. 

Not that I'd been doing much work for his company for several months earlier. I'd been making enough through booksales to more than cover my expenses - so I didn't need to "work" at anything after that. He'd lined up others to do the menial copy work he needed - and discounted the breakthroughs I'd brought him in SEO techniques.

If the work you are doing isn't rewarding, if you aren't looking forward to it - then it's just another job. The phrase comes to mind, "I work just as hard as I don't get fired, they pay me just enough so I don't quit."

SEO had turned to content, which his clients either didn't understand or couldn't afford. The "content" he needed from me was to quickly set up a minimum number of pages on a website for his proprietary backend. Real content now means using a website to build your audience. "SEO" as we had been doing it up to that point was mostly a bag of tricks with a hole in it - the tricks had run out.

I've become "unemployable" as Brian Clark podcasts now.

Like I care.

As I said, I work on whatever the hell I want to these days.

Fortunately for you, this is an entertaining journey.

The conventional wisdom I'm exposing as false is that you have to stick to a schedule to podcast.

Any author will tell you that the book is done when it's done. Some authors can crank out 2-4 books a year. Others will crank out a single book.

The great books will generate millions.

The vast number of authors never quit their day job as they can't afford to.

My tests have shown that there are sufficient numbers of public domain and PLR books out there ready for re-publishing, that anyone can make a decent living from this alone. Not rich - yet - but plenty of time to get there.

And this is using a fraction of what real marketing consists of.

I do like my freedom of schedule however. And being able to post whenever (and whatever) I feel like - useful stuff that no one else is covering.

Keeping a schedule means having a job - to me, anyway. So "having" to podcast is just putting on the wage-slave shackles again.

Book marketing isn't what it used to be. 

Some of my more recent posts have pointed this out.

The Book-As-An-Idea-Container is closer to what we should be doing. And freely repurposing content into any and all formats to encourage discovery.

So "book publishing" is a smallish part of everything we can and should be doing.

Here's an example:

• LinkedIn is bigger than Twitter and allows long-form content posts.
• 8 images per 1000 word LinkedIn post was found to be optimal. 
• LinkedIn won't accept audio, but will accept video.
• Meanwhile, Google considers 2,000 words to be best for their uses.
• Some LinkedIn authors put a 1K post on LinkedIn, then link to their much longer original post over on their blog.
• If you take that article (or the long post) and podcast it, you'll get more traffic to your blog.
• Take that podcast and 8 images and create a video for LinkedIn - but also for YouTube and everywhere else.
• Each of these posts, podcasts, and videos contain a call to action to opt-in to your site as a member.
• Take 5 such posts and make them into an ebook on Amazon, and everywhere else - again, with that CTA.
• On your site and BitTorrent, offer a bundle which has the ebook, podcasts, and videos.
• Members get a discount on the bundle, or an exclusive version.
• Oh - and you post a hardcopy version as well, which members can buy at a discount also.
• IFTTT is meanwhile sending out status updates consistently on all your new posts, articles, videos, podcasts through Twitter, G+, Facebook, etc.

Sure, this type of marketing is a lot of work. Booksales get all this promotion, but so does your membership. And members get treated best of all - they can access your material anyway they want it.

Now, you can monetize a lot more than just ebooks.

5 articles, 5 podcasts, 5 videos - 1 ebook, 1 "Spoken Word Album", 1 hardcopy - all on Amazon and everywhere you can port them to. You can even make a DVD of the video's if you want.

Your members are encouraged to leave reviews on Amazon to put it up on top with their algorithms.

That is marketing. And I didn't mention Synnd in the above, which is more social signals through network syndication.

We're evolving this podcast and blog.

I'm actually going to have yet another podcast over at livesensical.com, which is really "book" reviews. These will be done by series, and then marketedNew name,  new look coming. as above - resulting in multiple formats, which in turn push the original books at the same time (most of which are already on Amazon.)

This blog will continue to simply describe the process, and give you a chance to participate.

The other will be aligned to telling people about the "secrets hidden in plain sight" - which I've republished - and how they relate to improving your life.

But I'm not going to burden you with having to listen to these. As I go through that process, I'm sure to find more material and breakthroughs about media production. That's what this blog is for.

(I may even start up a third podcast, which will simply be repurposing an existing audiobook to promote that book - since there are 50 essays in that book, it will run for most of a year - all on automatic.)

The work on these promotions may mean that I don't blog here as regularly. Or post in spurts (like this week) when I have something to say.

More than likely, I'll work in batches and then review what I learned from that as I refine my techniques. You'll then hear about that discussion as I do.

There's a new name,  new look coming.

This blog will ultimately move over to livesensical.com as I've got better tools to create with over there. You'll only notice an improved format, if I do it right. All the oldest posts are already over there - just the new ones need to be updated. This blog will still stay here, though. Because Google likes old blogs.

And that will happen right after livesensical.com goes live.

Yes, I have a whole blog post crying out in my head to get posted - but I'm still working out the details. (The sneak peak is that you're publishing work should revolve around a theme, not just a genre.)

Right now, it's late and I'm to bed. Tomorrow, I'll spruce this up a bit and probably even podcast it.

You win, either way.

Have a nice weekend.

See you on the other side of it.

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Is it Time for Authors to Speak Up and Sell More?

The more authors get their content out to more people, the better chance they have of discovery. 

The more discovery, the better the book sales.

I've long said that any author could and every author should "write once, publish to as many places, in as many formats as possible." This is known as the "multiple eyeballs" theorem. It's been applied to the mundane action of publishing to every distributor out there - which can double your sales almost overnight.

It also applies to getting into other formats, such as the three types of ebooks (epub, mobi, PDF) as well as several formats of print (two sizes of paperbacks, and hardback) - as well as audiobooks and even video. Not to mention people actually want to see your covers everywhere as well...

A recent re-discovery of podcasting seems poised to make discovery even more possible for authors.

The homework on this shows that it's becoming more and more mainstream - and (see links at the bottom) is becoming a key way to build an audience of your own through even more channels than regular ebooks allow.

 It's just so easy to do that I'm poised to dive off into the deep end of this pool myself.

How to do Podcasting - Quick and Low-Cost.

All you need to invest in is a decent microphone to get started (about $100 or so.) I've got a USB Blue Snowball mic, myself. Just Google "best podcasting usb microphones" and you'll see several brands that keep coming up. (You want USB so it records right into your computer without needing other cables and boards and whatnot.)

Here's the simple sequence and the lean approach to getting it done:

1. Write your blog post like you would talk to someone.
2. Record this to your computer and edit it on Audacity (that's a free download.)
3. Find some royalty-free intro (beginning) and outro (ending) music and add it if you want.
4. Upload the result to Archive.org for hosting.
5. Embed their player on your blog post.
6. Add that Archive.org MP3 link to your blog post as an "enclosure" link.
7. Burn the RSS feed for that blog through Feedburner - which will give you all the meta-data slots you need to fill in terms of cover art, descriptions, etc.
8. Then take that feed and post it to iTunes, Sticher, Mrio, DoubleTwist, Blubrry, and Libsyn (which are all the heavy-hitters in this field.)

And you're done. You've just added the top 6 podcasting directories to your list of distributors. All by just recording what you've been writing about on your blog all along.

Just keep podcasting every blog post from there on out. 

That series of links at the bottom of this blog post will tell you most of the above (and why authors should be podcasting). They also give you real examples of how expanding into podcasting brings you far more traffic in most cases.

What I'm doing with this blog

It's getting podcasts added for every blog post from here on out. (You can count on me to "eat the dog food" I make.)

Because it turned out to be so easy. A couple-thousand word blog post (which Google and LinkedIn like) turns out to be about 5-6 minutes of audio. Which is about a 5MB file - no stretch for anyone to post something like that. (A video I produced recently from the audio and a presentation went over 100MB, so I have to sort that out a bit, as my 'boonie-based-broadband has it's budget...)

Every blog post can have a soundtrack, and also simply get a PDF as well.  So the link-love from Archive.org and Slideshare.net will be a nice addition.

That also means that now I'm into the potential audience of people at those two sites to find what I write about - and so find my books.

How a fiction writer could use this

Ever hear of audio books? This is a perfect way to get them started (just save all your original recordings for later editing.

Charles Dickens use to publish like this - it's called serializing. 

Everyone loves to hear the author themselves read their book.  (If you have a membership, then you can give the first few minutes for free members, and the full chapter to the paid members - just like you don't let free members read the whole chapter on the blog.)

Paid memberships pay your bills so you can write full time. Paid members are able to contribute to the stories you write - like an avid fan base they are. (I think I've already covered this somewhat...)

For non-fiction writers, this is a godsend. By the time you've finished blogging all your research, you've also created an audio version. Even if you edit your book severely, just the audio files along with your other "cutting room floor" material can go onto a BitTorrent Bundle for promotion (and even sales, now)  and can also be sold as bonus materials via Sellfy, Payhip, and/or Ganxy for direct sales on your site - or inside your membership.

All this media production means discovery is easier, social signals are simpler to get, and your booksales should take off (if not audiobook sales.)

Next to crack would obviously be video, but that's another blog post and another day...

Good luck with this. I'll keep you posted on how it does for me.

- - - -

Make sure you've opted-in so you can get notices of new blog posts as they happen. Don't miss a blow-by-blow account of modern book-marketing in all it's white-knuckle, cliff-hanging excitement. (News Reader subscription is good, too...)

PS. Stay-tuned for iTunes and other podcast directories as I get this ramped up...

- - - -

Show Links for Reference:

http://socialmediaimpact.com/untapped-power-social-podcast-virality-podcasting/#
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243860
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/proof-that-podcasting-will-benefit-your-business/
http://tylerbasu.com/top-10-reasons-to-start-a-podcast/
http://www.bookmarket.com/podcasts.htm
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/peak-podcasting-sponsored/126934/

Transcript PDF Available for download:

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What's the difference between professional self-publishing digital products and everything else?

(photocredit: Sudden Fiction)

There's a gulf between pro and amateur audiobook distributors - to succeed, you have to prove you're one and not the other.

(Fourth in a series about audiobook publishing.)

A review of iAmplify and OverDrive for audiobook distribution.

While these are both money-making business opportunities for audiobook and other digital product marketing, there is a complete difference in approach.

Amateur productions are fine - and I know of several millionaires who have made their money based on products which you couldn't really get away with putting on Barnes and Noble or any major retailer. I mean there were some serious goofs in there. Over and over.

But people bought them. Made them "overnight" millionaires. And you have to start somewhere.

iAmplify will take whatever you have. Sure, they can ditch it if they want, but when you look at the products up there, you can see the general quality which is acceptable. Mainly, on this site, it's apparent you are going to have to do your own promotion to get your products moving. Not impossible, but it just means more work.

They also have a built-in affiliate system, so you can promote that your fans can get paid for their promoting your work. See their how-to's here - quite involved. There is ample potiential for Search Engine Marketing here, as well as recurring payments, installment plans. This will give you an alternate to having to have a full-blown membership site. Being able to embed their widget ("eCommerce Media Player") to your own site would be a time-saver and conversion-maker. This would be where you distinguish your professional product from the also-rans.

OverDrive has a series of hoops to jump through, so that they only wind up with extremely high-quality, professionals using their network. You have to either have the quality or get it. Audible sets the bar, so does OverDrive.

Look over this excerpt from Overdrive's "guardian page":

Overview of the Content Reserve Publisher Account Application Process Click here to read general publisher terms. Click here to review posted ‘Guidelines and Criteria’. If you have not yet applied, complete the Content Reserve Publisher Application to begin the process. Once your application has been evaluated, you will be sent (via email) a summary of terms, additional instructions, and an email address to which to send sample metadata and unencrypted file(s). Upon evaluation of your files and final approval of your application, you will receive an email with instructions on electronically signing the Content Reserve Publisher Agreement.

You see the hurdles you have to jump to get in?

I'm not completing my application, because I simply don't have the utterly pro products, especially my brand-new audiobooks (which are still being created.)

What I have is several PLR products which have audio and video pieces which can be submitted. While I'll have to search on iAmplify for each product and change it up as needed, my fall-back is to offer these on Leanpub with packages - and then create bundles with the packages. This doesn't mean I will be just dumping any PLR MP3/MP4 there. Some are pretty raw. Anything you or I put up will reflect on your reputation. OverDrive just shows how much a professional reputation is valued.

The alternative is to push digital products on the various Clickbank-alternative affiliate sites. Nothing wrong with that. Plenty of money in it, actually. Takes knowing Internet Marketing - list building, JV's, all that sort of thing. Not as easy as submitting your ebook to all the distributors and watching their lines do the selling for you - provided your work is any good.

Again, working with iAmplify and Leanpub will get me going. Sure, I've got products up on every ebook distributor out there. All selling nicely - or not. Ebooks are much, much easier to produce than audiobooks. The bar doesn't have to be high - crappy covers, descriptions, and previews will pretty much make sure the poor ones are weeded out. As well, the sheer numbers are against success. Algorithms ensure that the poor ones stay off any "also-bought" list.

Audiobooks haven't reached that tipping point as yet. Your files can be listened to once and get rejected right off. So you have to do these right. 

For the self-publishing author who wants to also self-publish your own audiobook, it means going the podiobook route to get your quality up.

Meanwhile, you have Leanpub and iAmplify to make some income while you ramp up the quality. And get enough volume of product to ensure your status as a publisher so OverDrive will accept you.

Only then do you have a real alternative to the Amazon/Audible/iTunes money throttle.

- - - - 

My new audiobooks? They'll be exclusively on Audible for now. As the royalties for non-exclusive properties is something like half their already intimidating scale. Once I have a series of 5 products and see how they are selling, we'll evaluate it from there.

Meanwhile, I polish my chops and test these other lines with the decent-quality PLR I've uncovered.

Next in this series will be awhile before it shows up. I have to run these tests, you see. But stay tuned, subscribe to this feed. I'll keep you updated if you do...

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How to Publish an Ebook, Audiobook, Video Ecourse at the Same Time

(photocredit: andrewmalone)

You may feel like a one-man-band, but it's always better for an indie author to work smarter, not harder. (Pays better, too.)

In researching podcasting, I came across some resources you should know about. This gives a slightly different workflow, but will earn you more income over the long haul.

While you are writing  your book, you also record the audio book and create the video series for a later ecourse. (Applies more to non-fiction books.)

It goes somewhat like this:

1) You blog your book. Every chapter or sub-chapter starts out as a blog post. (When you start a new book, set out a new Blogger blog or equivalent.

2) Once you have it the way you like it, then use the age-old editing method of reading it out loud - fix anything that doesn't read easily, as it's not the way you'd speak it. And similarly, old advice says to write like you talk.

3) When it reads well, then post it live.

4) Now, as you've practiced this a few times by now, go ahead and record it. Fix it up with Audacity. Now - after taking advantage of Podiobook's Mentorship program - submit it there .

5)  Come back with the hosting link and then include it as an enclosure link on your blog post so people can pick it up from your blog's RSS feed.

6) You go to Lean Pub and give them the RSS link, so they will auto-create your ebook from that blog. (Yet another learning curve, but a nice one.) [Update: best method is to scrape the individual pages and assemble in LibreOffice. Import to Leanpub if you are writing an original (for PD or PLR you should export with Writer2Epub plugin and proof in Sigil.) Preview it and put it up for sale on Leanpub (see notes on Leanpub below).

7) Since you have the audio and text, go ahead and make a slideshow/powerpoint of your post. You can make a slidecast on Slideshare.net, or simply create images out of the slides and use Camtasia or other program to make a video from the slides and audio. Post that to YouTube or similar if you want, linking back to the blog and Leanpub.

Time for your next inspired post.

What have you accomplished with all this?

If you're doing long blog posts (like my unfortunate habit) you'll have a chapter of your book ready, plus the audio chapter, plus a video for an ecourse.

As you continue to build your book, you are creating quality content in multiple formats.

When your book is ready, you then have an ebook already created by Leanpub, a collection of audio ready for uploading to ACX for Audible, and a series of videos which you can offer on an exclusive subscription basis to your readers - meaning you just created three potential income streams from one set of work.

What this saves you is having to drop everything to record the audio, or pay someone to do it for you. Same for videos, which can get tedious - so neither gets done. Most authors just publish the ebook and skip the rest. But readers like different formats - and all those digital versions can cross-link with each other, making it possible for you to Search Engine Market your book easily.

Every review of the data will make the book tighter (creating an outline before you start, particularly if you make the outline into a powerpoint can speed your writing as well.)

The feedback from your Leanpub audience will also help you improve the book as you go.

This assembly-line scene helps you work much smarter, instead of going back to rehash the old stuff once more. Again, you wind up with products which can be utilized on multiple platforms, each bringing you a separate income stream.

- - - -

I'm actually planning to use this line to revise a book I published last year. I'm going to add some chapters to the start of it, and clean up the content right through.

So it will go:
a. Set up a new Blogger blog.
b. Post the existing content in the order it currently is in. You could work at setting arbitrary dates for it such that there are two or three days in between in case I want to add more material, but this is probably unnecessary. Go ahead an publish it via Leanpub, putting it up for sale.
c. Start writing the new beginning material and use the assembly-line approach above:

1. Outline
2. Text
3. Audio
4. Video

d. Once the new material is complete, then take up each earlier blog post/chapter and put it through 1-4 above, which will tighten the prose.
e. When the book is complete,  you get it re-imported into Leanpub and they'll create your epub and mobi files. With the epub file, you can then publish anywhere.

Of course, you could get a Markdown editor (until you know enough to use a straight text editor) and so you could publish to LeanPub as you go - but the RSS feed arrangement is probably the simplest.

This is all simple theory at this point, but come back in a couple of months and I'll have put it to the test (and updated this blog post.)

The scene I'm working on here is to add value and publish to multiple formats with the least possible number of steps.

Note: you can also scrape your Firefox-viewed blog-posts, then cut/paste into Libre/OpenOffice to export to PDF. But Leanpub say's you'll also have that PDF file. I like my PDFs in trade paperback size (6x9) as they are closer to what most ereaders see, and will display better. Meanwhile, that 6x9 format makes your book ready for hardcopy publishing via Lulu...

Work smarter, always. Multiple streams of income from one set of writing.

Sounds like it should work.

If you have other ideas, leave a comment.

[Update: Notes on LeanPub -

Overall, a very, very nice site which is maybe 4 years old (started sometime in 2010.) However, it uses Markdown, which is a simple markup language to learn. Different from having a full GUI in front of you like LibreOffice.

Right now, it's easier for me to scrape each page and paste into Libre Office than it is to import and tweak the result in LeanPub. Doesn't mean it will always be that way. I've got a Markdown editor now, and the wrapping has just come off, yet. (Still has that "new app smell.")

The reason I'm sticking with this is to be able to bundle my books. Probably sole and only reason. I know that as I keep at this, I'll work out a decent speed on re-publishing these books through this distributor. Still, this is far more straightforward than Smashwords and the arcane rejects which iTunes and B&N hand down.

My advice would be for someone to start here, particularly if they are using a text editor anyway. Markdown is simple to learn, and this gives you a very fast route to getting published. You wind up with a pdf, epub, and mobi file - all can be readily used with various distributors.

It's just another learning curve.

If the other distributors would enable bundling, this wouldn't be necessary. However, LeanPub is improving daily (shortly to have an affiliate function) so this is well worth the effort.

The other thing, like Wattpad, it's a way to write with reader input. So they have a say in what the book ends up like. That may really be the most invaluable part of this.]

[Update 2: Leanpub doesn't do public domain books. Gets you canned.]

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