The Hummingbird That Protects You From Amazon Going South

Because you never know when things will go to hell. Being prepared is a good option to keep open.

You’ve probably heard this pharse or some version:

“Plan your work, work your plan and always carry a spare.”

Another one you should also know is:

“Never build your house on rented land.”

These both describe the problem that authors have when selling on Amazon, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo. These four sellers cover about 96% of all ebook sales internationally. But is that fair?

You are trusting that they won’t go south on you or cancel your account overnight. And meanwhile, the trolls at Kindle threaten to do it for you with almost every email. My KDP account was suspended a month or so ago (for a few hours) for nothing I had done wrong, but because someone needed to be blamed. It was all that stupid DMCA law they passed a few years ago. It allows a person to bully others without recourse.

That brought to mind that my own backups weren’t in place.

GooglePlay already has shut out most Indie authors from publishing there. Google needed a solution to their self-created problem of allowed mass uploading. Pirates became whack-a-mole, as they could set up again within hours. So Google shut everyone out, and closed down a lot of regular folks as collateral damage. (Corporations don’t have to care, do they?)

Similarly, Amazon’s biggest problem is that they are the butt end of lawsuits. It doesn’t matter if you are right as a self-publisher. Certain titles won’t be published in the U.S. And some won’t be accepted at all. (Go ahead and try to publish something with “Think and Grow Rich” in the title.) And then there are the DMCA bullies…

Worse, someone published a click-bait piece this week saying that Amazon could shut down its book publishing branch and would do just fine without it. And what about those six-figure authors who sell exclusively there? Sorry, guys. Should have seen this coming. Rented land and all that.

Amazon owns the land many people are building their business on. They tell you how high to jump and when.

I’ve been telling people for years that they are probably losing more sales than they are making through the promotions that KDP offers. It’s doubly true now since Kindle Unlimited started up. The horror stories about how self-publishing authors have lost a third or more of their income keep showing up. In some cases, it has gone as high as 70%. Meanwhile, scammers are making more money on the Unlimited program than legitimate authors.

What if you lost the ability to publish on Amazon at all? Then what?

Another point I’ve pushed is to have a domain and site of your own, to capture the emails of readers and develop relationships with them. Additionally, you need to be able to sell your own books from that domain. Yes, of course it’s in case of disaster, but also to give an extra reward to your fans.

How to do this is another question entirely.

As I see it, you can and should build your own storefront on your own hosting. It should be simple to set up and maintain. And you can offer anything you want for prices (as long as it’s private between your and your list and the Kindle Trolls can’t send their ‘bots out to spy.) There are a few solutions in this area.

The other approach is to find a distributor who will help you set up your own storefront and push your books for you. This hasn’t existed until just this last year. Let’s take up this last one first.

How to “Democratize” Your Self-Publishing

“Imagine a world in which anyone can sell ebooks and compete successfully with Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. That’s the world Hummingbird Digital Media hopes to make a reality.” [http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2016/how-one-company-is-democratizing-ebook-retailing/]

In the most recent Digitial Publishing World Expo, Hummingbird Digital Media announced they were ready to take on all bookstores and self-publishing authors who wanted a way to sell their books online in addition to everywhere else. The biggest problem independent bookstores have had was in trying to sell ebooks. Kobo had one option, but it depended on selling Kobo ereaders, and the profit margins were a bit smallish.

Self-publishing authors have a similar problem, of being discovered by readers among themillions of other books on Amazon Kindle. If you build your own storefront to sell your own books, you get crickets for customers. You want marketplaces offering your book to others, and put your books right up there with the big-name authors with all the respectability that comes with it

HummingbirdDM allows you to build your own bookstore and stock it with your own books, as well as those of other famous authors. You are essentially being treated as a Big Publisher, since your books go across their network, and you get what any of the Big 5 get when one of their books sell.

On the site they provide for you, you can rearrange the shelves to feature your books when your customers come in that virtual front door. Plus, you can run ads for your books and feature a series or a certain book whenever you want. And if those customers want to browse for other authors, you get a cut of whatever they buy. Again, we’re talking having your books right up there with big name authors who are signed with the Big 5 publishing houses. You get a cut on everything people buy from your site, as well as any of your books selling somewhere else.

Brilliant, really. Treating indie self-publishing authors as real publishers. What a concept.

This new operation is a partnership between an established wholesale book distributor American West Books (http://americanwestbooks.com/ ) and an 15 year-old Indian company Papertrell (https://www.papertrell.com/ ) This enabled a new arrangement, where 2700 publishers could put their books up and get them being sold by anyone who wanted to set up their own bookstore online. HummingbirdDM has been testing and tweaking this arrangement over the last year to find out what they had to do to make it work. (You can see a list of the 2700 publishers at: http://hummingbirddm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Publishers-list.pdf

The great part for self-publishing authors is as I said – you can operate your own virtual bookstore and feature your own books in it right at the top. Any sales you make are yours to profit from (somewhere around 12-23% depending on the publisher’s agreement.) This is because the standard agreement has the book publishers taking the first 50%, with you and HummingbirdDM splitting the rest, after creditcard fees and taxes are paid. The same thing happens in reverse – when your book is sold on HummingbirdDM bookstore, then you get that 50%. Of course, when you sell on your own bookstore, you usually get around 70%, just like Amazon (except you can charge whatever you like.)

The trick is that there aren’t a lot of other indie bookstores and indie authors on board right now. It just got announced in March at that Expo. The predictions by HummingbirdDM is to have about 2000 merchant storefronts by the first quarter of 2017. So it’s very much an early adopter scene right now.

However, it does give you a free option to get your books on an upcoming market place where you only have 200,000 books to compete with, opposed to nearly 2 million on Kindle. The more storefronts they get going, the more exposure your books will have. So it’s a good idea to get in now and also sell through this distributor.

Here’s a silent movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bic9iKYQV7Y

Their whole catalog of videos is available athttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtWjNwpv5rOkGZ5t0D41_cQ

How this works:

You have to buy books via a browser. And then you download their app to your phone or tablet to view the books. It’s another ereader application. You have that book forever, but you have to read it on that app. All books have DRM built-in, which is apparently some sort of javascript file. (Too new to have anyone cracking it at this point.) You also can’t sideload other books you have bought elsewhere. This means that it’s going to be another universe-on-its-own for now. But another plus is that it will run on any device that runs IOS or Android.

Where you are going to get customers are from supporters of independent bookstores and fans of individual authors. Like an exclusive club. Getting your readers to buy in will give you the ability to alert them to changes on your site so they can go there directly – which will happen every time they open the app.

The point is convenience and having your book secure from pirating. So right now 4 out of the Big 5 are on board and are porting all their books and audiobooks to that platform. Hummingbird is even in talks with Smashwords to get their books to show up there. This is how big these boys are thinking.

Another key advantage is in list building and customer relationships – you get the emails of all the buyers from your own site. Uploading these to an email service (like AWeber, MailChimp, or others) then gives you a way to build audience – something iTunes, Amazon, Nook, and Kobo don’t give you. You still don’t have the emails of customers buying from other sites, but that’s considerably better than what you’ve been getting. You could use those emails to build and distribute a newsletter, for instance.

What’s the Press Saying?

Let’s quote from some of the press on this (links in the show notes):

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2016/how-hummingbird-is-democratizing-ebook-retailing

“Hummingbird’s solution was to create a platform on which anyone can set up an online ebook storefront for free. Potential merchants can range from independent bookstores to nonprofit organizations and professional groups. Merchants get a branded storefront where they can sell digital books, and a branded app that allows their consumers to download ebooks and listen to audiobooks.

“When it came to getting publishers on board with Hummingbird, [Steven] Mettee [President of HDM] says, each publisher responded differently.

“‘Nothing is easy in this world. Some publishers immediately said, ‘Yes, we want to be involved,’ and others—for one reason or another—were a little tougher to convince,” explains Mettee. “Some of the small publishers needed some explanation. But, overall, we had a really good experience. Today we have more than 2,700 publishers’ titles in our catalog, and many of the publishers who were looking ways for sell direct to consumers are coming on board as merchants.’

Throughout the last year, Mettee and his team have been taking steps to make sure their platform is a seamless experience, fine-tuning it to make setting up a storefront as easy as possible.

Or as Mettee puts it, ‘as easy as setting up a Facebook page.'”

From Shelf-awareness.com –

http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2574#m29476

“The program includes an app for reading and listening and a web-based storefront for the discovery, purchasing and downloading of digital media. The app is operating-system agnostic, meaning it works on iPhone, iPad, Android devices such as Nook and Samsung, and the Kindle Fire. Both the app and the storefront carry the brand identity of the organization or individual.”

From MisprintedPages.com –

https://misprintedpages.com/2016/04/04/hummingbird-is-an-e-book-marketplace-for-self-published-authors-bloggers-and-everyone-else/

“So what are the primary advantages to Hummingbird? ‘Authors (and publishers) get to dilute the control the three large retailers have over them; they actually make more when they sell a book from their own storefront; they make money for each sale from their storefront even if it isn’t their own book; and they get the reader’s e-mail address’ — a convenient way to build a ‘tribe’ of fans and stay connected with them.

“Mettee recommends that authors keep publishing their books to Kindle, iBooks, and Nook — “wide distribution is important for sales,” he said — but that they also apply to be a vendor on HDM and send readers to their storefront, essentially their main hub.

“‘Since whatever you put on your storefront shows up in your app each time the consumer goes back to continue reading,’ Mettee said, ‘they are again reminded of you and exposed to any changes you’ve made on your storefront.'”

That author (Stephanie Carmichael) tried it out and had her own customised storefront up without having to do any special training.

Other sites to gander at can be found at http://mymustreads.com/merchant-list/

My own efforts – still a work in progress.

Check out http://midwestjournalpress.papertrell.com – and you can see that I have some work to do.

On those banners, you can link directly out with them. I’ve done a banner at the top which is lead magnet for my membership-library. I could also send people to my self-hosted bookstore (while we’ll explore in a few minutes.)

Next are the collections. You can create a collection of just about anything. (This is handy for me, since I’ve got a couple hundred books up which can be collected in a dozen dozen ways.) Of course, you then can have the whole page with your own collections if you want. The other thing you can do is to move the categories out of the sidebar. This doesn’t eliminate them, it just makes them harder to find as categories.

The search bar starts working instantly. It relies on the meta-data supplied by the publisher for the book. This means that like iTunes and others, your own book will be referred by author and series. There are no reviews or ways for trolls to affect your sales (feel somewhat better now?)

Go visit some of these sites and play around with the search and categories. You can amuse yourself for hours. (Did you know there was Steampunk Science Fiction?)

How You Load Your Books.

First the FAQ’s: http://hummingbirddm.com/frequent-questions-for-vendors/

While there is an overview at http://hummingbirddm.com/for-authors/ you have to sign up as a merchant at http://hummingbirddm.com/merchant-form/

Then you get a five page agreement to sign (lots of boilerplate in it.) Once that’s approved, then you’ll get an FTP account to upload.

You use a simple FTP program and rename the files like this: ISBN.epub, ISBN.jpg

The Excel spreadsheet is pretty straight forward. It follows the type of operation that OverDrive and e-Sensical use to upload books (and GooglePlay used to.)

So it’s pretty simple. Great to batch upload a set of books you’ve already published. Just export from Calibre and then rename according to ISBN. Then copy/paste your metadata into your Excel spreadsheet and upload.

Self-Hosted Sites – Simpler and Safer than Ever

The obvious solution for author-publishers is to have their own site, based on WordPress.

Over the last few years, WordPress has become much, much easier to maintain. Now the updates are pretty much automatic. WordPress is a free install for most web-hosts. Simple to set up.

Once you are there, the trick for a self-published author is to install WooCommerce (free) and a template that supports it. What this will do is to set up your site to run your own shopping cart and enable you to list your books. It’s pretty generic. Your books are referred to as “products” and you host your own digital files for download. There are a few bells and whistles you can turn on and off, but the setup mostly leaves you with what you need to get going. Set up your merchant account and your good to go.

One note is that you’re going to have to .zip your epub and mobi files to get them uploaded.

If you aren’t familar with WordPress, then there are plenty of helpful tutorials online.

My own site is a little different as I had earlier purchased a template from StudioPress (part of Rainmaker Platform now) and installed it, as it was WooCommerce ready.

So, go visit http://midwestjournalpress.com/bookstore/ and see how you like it. Obviously a work in progress. I’ll have to find time to get all my books up there, but you can see it’s pretty simple and direct.

It came with two options for selling because I didn’t use a straight WooCommerce theme. As I got more used to it, and started integrating Gumroad for a “pay what you want” (PWYW) option, then I saw I didn’t need to do both. The site is really designed to help people find out about my books and the various series they are in. At the bottom of each book page are buy links. One will be for Amazon, the next for Lulu, and the third for Gumroad’s PWYW option. The third sales option I have is to send them to Lulu for discounts.

The chief advantage of WooCommerce is to have an easily administered storefront of your own. Otherwise, you could set up pages on a Blogger blog and sell them there. That would make you manually edit every change. But it could be done.

For now, at least you have an example of how to get it done.

Now, note that with a simple StudioPress template, you don’t need to host your own files to sell them. Essentially, you are sending them out to Amazon, Lulu, and Gumroad. Of course, that means you aren’t stuck to any one seller. It also means that these places host your books, so your bandwidth will be smaller.

Gumroad’s “pay what you want” pricing, often results in a higher payment and overall revenue than setting (and guessing at) a fixed price. It is one way around Amazon’s “race to the bottom” scheme.

Your Cost of Doing Business and Your Return on Investment

Since you install WordPress for free, and WooCommerce plus it’s template for free, this still fits into the idea of getting started using what you already have to expand and leverage your income even higher.

By now, you’ve invested:

• your own Internet connection and computer.
• autoresponder service (MailChimp is free)
• domain + hosting (can be gotten for under $200 per year, total)
• and maybe a podcasting microphone (about $100)

The trick is to get all of this stuff making income for you.

Since you have the domain and webhost, you can simply install WordPress and start sending fans to it. There’s a little more theory of marketing involved, but the main point is that you can add your self-hosted website to your workflow while publishing and then devote some time playing catch up to get all your earlier books posted everywhere.

Your HummingbirdDM site will be easier to play catch up with, since it can be just a few upload sessions to get your books there. (Do a test run first with just a few to make sure it’s fine, then do some bigger and bigger batches until you catch them all up.)

You’ll then have added two more places your books can be found. All in addition to the main book distributors you already have.

The point is to make your life more free by increasing your passive income and leveraging your resources.

Luck to us all.

Until next time…

Originally published at: http://livesensical.com/podcast/selling-books-online/hummingbird-protects-amazon-going-south/

The Rainmaker Solution: An Expensive Date That Turns Out to Be a Priceless BFF

The Rainmaker Solution - a BFF which starts as an expensive date.

Have you ever been in this situation? Having a significant other who is costing you a mint in maintenance - only to find out they are actually so priceless, that you could never let them go?

The biggest problem is that I already know how to publish a book for little or nothing. And here I am with a very powerful tool which is costing me money every month and is just sitting there.

I'm frugal by upbringing. If I'm paying for something it should be earning its keep.

The easiest thing to do would be to cut my losses and go back to what I already know.

But the old saying, "begin with the end in mind" tells me if I'm ever going to turn over this business, it has to be a great success, not just a very profitable hobby. Putting what I already have onto a system would leverage it into something that will take my income into a "comfortably well-off" range.

The main problem is that Rainmaker comes off as just too damned complicated. Everything has multiple parts to it. It's incredibly powerful (like I said already) and can do just about everything except brush your teeth for you after it woke you up on time and has your coffee ready.

I thought it was because I'm too used to Blogger, and not used enough to Wordpress.

In my current model: I simply create a blog post, upload an image, tweak the text, add in the Ganxy script for that product, tweak the meta-data to fit - and then publish.

But I can't do memberships. I can't do discounts (much less offer 50% off of everything I sell.) If I want to do discounts, I should put in a Sellfy link - which is essentially uploading a complete new set of ebook files and descriptions, etc.

And while I dither, all the link-love I'm accumulating for livesensical.com is just piddling away - while I pay another monthly fee for a site which isn't ready. All that I've been building up for months would be for nothing at this point.

Some things you have to see through, no matter what.

It's the learning curve which is killing me. Because I needed all this done yesterday.

Too many products as a problem.

Right now on GooglePlay, I have about 215 books. On Lulu, I have over 400 various versions of books - in different formats. On Amazon, I have about 70 or so. Itunes, Kobo, and Nook are somewhere in between.

Out of these, somewhere around 70 books sell regularly, so these are the ones I need to get up and running on my site - selling these directly in order to get higher royalties and also to build an audience. All of these have been extracted from sales data, and are on a spreadsheet.

All the old pages have been transferred (uploaded from backups) and very few have to be created - all the data for these is already on Calibre, so that's really just copy/paste.

And that's the rub - should I cut/paste to Ganxy to get these books posted on Rainmaker fastest - or figure out how to get it built using Rainmaker itself? Going with what is familiar would be faster - but it would cost me more.

In the end, my frugal side won out. I need to make Rainmaker pay for itself - so I invested some more time figuring out how to get things done.

Enter: Setup Wizards.

Now, if you are happy with Ganxy, this isn't a section that may thrill you. On the other hand, it's how to get your stuff on a site which will enable you to scale your existing content into 7 or 8-digit income - by all reports.

Because what we need to be doing is building an audience with the existing content we already have. At least, that's my problem - and has been for years. Getting sales through ebook distributors only disguised the problem by throwing money at me.

Rainmaker has simply opened up paid hosting for a tool they are themselves using. And they are useing to make 8-figures currently.

Set up wizards - these are for single products and also libraries. We'll do the single products to catch up with the existing (selling) pages we already have.

And it's quite simple, actually. It integrates with AWeber (my autoresponder service, but will also do MailChimp and others) and also is tied directly into the memberships. So the two targets here - of building an audience and having a free membership to host my content - are both integrated every time I post a new product.

When I've done it once, the settings are the same. At this point, I'll only need to copy/paste from Calibre to get everything posted. (Yes, if I ever leave Rainmaker, I'll have to do this all over. So I'm committed even more to getting this to pay for itself.)

Starting a free download library

This has always impressed me with Copyblogger - all those great ebooks available for nothing. (No, I haven't had time to read them all as yet.)

How I'm going to use this is simple: give away the PDF's and sell the other versions. Seems counter-intuitive. But it's also a way to see where the demand is. I'll also be able to email those people directly to give them a special offer on epub/mobi/hardcopy versions and the bundles I can make with podcasts. These same viewers might be interested in courses to help them study the book - and special books which accompany the course.

The point is - this will help me sell more books. And Amazon can't access these prices with their search bots, so it won't affect any price I have on their site. This gives me exclusive value to offer members - a great way to build audience and where I've been headed for some time.

This is also the key to leveraging material and escaping the glass ceiling which the distributors enforce.

But can't you just do all this for free?

Well yes - and no. Ganxy and Sellfy - no. Gumroad comes closest to handling memberships.

Technically, you can make a membership with nothing but an autoresponder and Paypal. You don't need anything in between. Just get them to pay, and AWeber (the one I'm most familiar with) will send them their first download. Then password protect part of your Blogger site (or the whole thing - a great description of how to do this is at BlogsByHeather.com )

The drawback is that once a year or sooner, you'll need to change the password for the site, since everyone gets the same one. But it's free, so...

Note: Free means you spend your time. Paid means you pay someone to take care of the backend so that you have more time to be creative. It's called leverage.

The deal is: start frugal and get your publishing to pay it's own way. Reinvest your profits back into the business. Once your self-publishing business is paying it's own way, as well all your living expenses - Congratulations! You're now financially independent. Probably somewhere in the middle, you'll either need to cut back on living expenses (like debt) and invest in some services to free up your time to be more creative.

Along the line, your passive income does start paying everything and you can start socking away reserves as well.

This is the goal. At that point, you can play the game of getting as rich as you want.

Rainmaker is our new BFF.

Well, as long as they keep improving it and it keeps having more bells and whistles than I can use.

I'm into the "getting rich" mode now - which essentially means leveraging my time to improve my income.

It can be done. And that's why I'm telling you that when someone living in the farm belt can do it (or even someone in India) then you can, too.

With today's breakthrough, I'm back to hopeful again. Even though this summer has been mostly overcast and rainy, it seems that there's some bright sunshine breaking through all around.

I hope that yours is going as well.

See you next time.

- - - -

And thanks for listening to another installment of "Selling Your Books Online."

Make sure you're subscribed by email or RSS. You won't want to miss a single white-knuckled, hair-raising, cliff-hanging installment in this adventure in self-publishing.

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Related articles

• An Author's Guide to Memberships - How to Sell Books Online
• How to Build Your Own Membership like a Bum Marketer
• How to Sell Your Books Online, Old or New.
• What Begins Well, Goes Well - and You Can Always Start Over
• Getting Your Book Discovered, Finding More Sales, Having More Fun

Reverse Book Marketing - Audience First, then Book

The guide to reverse book marketing exists.

I found this great talk between Robert Bruce and Brian Clark which has a reverse take on how authors should start out. Of course, there's no transcript, only a podcasted MP3. And we don't know the original date of this, other than a single comment which dates this as before July 2, 2013.

What this podcast is about is answering submitted questions.

One question was simply along the lines of "if you were to start a book today with no audience, how would you start out?"

Clark's interesting response (about 19:20):

"I would create in essence a video-book trailer. I'd write a script about the most fascinating elements in that book - if it's fiction, it would be the story, if it were a Malcolm-Gladwell-type book, it would be about the most fascinating elements I could display. I would make that [video].

"I'd promote it to try to get it to go viral to a certain degree. I would have an opt-in that says, 'Get the next installment in this video series' - I wouldn't even mention the book.

"It wouldn't be a typical trailer as the trailer sells the book. It would be an extended video serial, where there would be installments where people would want to see the next of. It's an art form in itself. Maybe have 5 episodes and then sell the book.

"The other strategy is to do the hard work of finding [and curating other's] great videos with emotional appeal...

"One way or another you've got to get them to opt-in and follow you, whether your making these videos or curating the videos that tell a story about the ultimate book you're going to sell.

"You've got to get an audience. They've got to look forward to hearing from you each time. When you do announce that book, if you do it correctly, it's a no-brainer - they're buying it.

"...It's all wide open. Just don't do what everyone else is doing - do something fantastic, and get people to sign up to get the next fantastic thing. That's content marketing - right there.

...If you do that, you're just getting started with the book. The book sales are a foundation for an entire brand. Of course, it depends on what the topic is - whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I always think very big from the beginning, and if all you end up doing is selling the book - hey, 'mission accomplished' - that was your goal. But if you do it the right way, you'll often find there are boundless other opportunities from what you've done - because you were doing something incredibly remarkable while building a direct audience."

This tosses out ALL conventional wisdom

You can see that this is logical and a very lean, kickstarter approach to bootstrapping your scene together.

Brian Clark built Copyblogger into a multi-million-dollar business and brand with just that same audience-first approach.

Of course, our problem is that this means you digress from your writing in order to script, edit, and polish a video series.

This also changes your job-description into something greater - an authorpreneur.

The book is no longer anything except a container for ideas that need to be said, need to be given voice, that need to see the light of day (and quit shouting in your head so much...)

But the formats the book comes out in is no longer limited to print, or even an ebook. It now spreads to every format you can find and publish into.

This is again, that multiple-eyeballs theorem: 

Write once -
publish as many ways,
to as many formats,
through as many distribution points
as possible.

You aren't dependent on traditional publishing to get your selling job done. (They've always required the author to do their marketing, anyway - which just cuts into your writing/production time.)

As an authorpreneur, you're no longer limiting yourself to someone else's suit-tailor and their ideas of style and fit. You cut your own suit from your own whole cloth and it can be Elvis Presley wild, or perhaps something that looks like a Hobbit outfit. 

While you're producing your content, it's in multiple medias - and you're thinking all the time about the visuals and keeping careful track of your cutting room floor scraps which people would love to see and hear and read (and would go great on your DVD as bonus extras. 

Because your production is now:

• a series of blog posts,
• an ebook,
• a trade paperback,
• a premium special edition hardback,
• a podcast series, 
• a series of PDF transcripts,
• a video series.
• a DVD...

This also doesn't include guest blog appearances, guest podcast appearances, guest Hangout appearances, and so on. (You'll have to make that decision based on how much time you want to spend away from your authorpreneur media production.)

The reason you want to do this "multiple eyeball" approach is to get in front of as many searching audiences as possible. Every distribution point you use has a different audience.

Marketing before Book Writing

This changes our marketing to be out in front, instead of after the book is written. Because you are building the audience so they can tell you how to write your book and what they want in it. 

This finally gives you a reason to be on social media. But in our case, you are not there to make friends. You are their to syndicate your great content so they can opt-in to your mailing list and earn the right to your friendship. 

Yea, that's a funny point. I have a lot of work to do. And a lot is an understatement. I don't have time to read about people's cats and great sunsets and cute animated GIF's about cats playing in the sunset. Much less people's children and who got sick from eating what last week.

I have no time for "news" media or politics. I have no time for organized religion. 

I have time for getting all these inspired ideas out to the world. And I will talk to anyone about these ideas. But the mundane and trivial just take time away from getting those ideas out so they can help people improve their lives.

My job has now expanded to becoming an authorpreneur and learning to effectively and efficiently operate a media-production-machine.

There are no companies which do this right now. (There should be, and maybe they are, but in a different category from where I'm searching.) 

Until that point - it's up to you and I to follow the Copyblogger pattern and build up a paying audience which will enable us to afford managing a business which will do those things for us.

You can do this.

All I'm saying here is that right here and right now, with no more than the computer and Internet connection (plus a decent microphone) you can get started getting that book in your head out to the world at large. In all the many and fascinating formats it richly deserves.

And the faster you do, the better income and lifestyle you'll be able to earn for yourself. 

- - - -

Make sure you're opted-in so you don't miss a single episode of white-knuckled excitement in our cliff-hanger series on Selling Your Book Online.

See you next time...

(photo: Nevit Dilman)

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The Curse of Printed Art Books - and How to Remove it (Case Study 09)

I can hear my Art Teachers "tut-tutting" in my head now.

They were all very good at being constructive in their criticism. You knew you hit the high-level of their approval when they asked if they could keep your class assignment. (Rare.)

Otherwise, it was either technical points or some comment along the line of "Nicely Done!" And when most students around you were getting that same comment and no one got below a "C" if they turned in the homework at all - you kinda noticed that anything except an "A" was merely an "attaboy"

Once you start working for yourself, and publishing just exactly what you want, the world changes. Then you start hearing those voices again. Until you finally shut them up with something so excellent, so beyond comparison - you know that criticism can't touch you.

Art books give you that problem, and those voices in your head.

You can't do real justice to these books in trying to get them re-published. Well, you could, but you'll never get a decent return for the extreme amount of time you'd have to invest.

Time vs. Money - the perpetual prize-fight.

Publishing (especially public domain re-publishing) always has that fight: Time vs. Money. A very prolific, high-speed author can crank out maybe 6 books a year. Some more, most less. If they invest all their time writing, they do very little marketing. And that is why they value a traditional contract with one of the Big 5 publishing companies - so someone else can take that work off their hands. (Dream on - it's a percentage of 1 percent of all authors who get these - and who can count on having such a contract renewed.)

I know of some authors who write a single book and then do nothing but market that book for the following two years. Usually non-fiction, their income comes more from coaching and consulting, rather than writing. (Look up John Jantsch and his "Duct-Tape Marketing")

This case study may seem out of sequence, but has been being worked on for some time, so the numbering itself is right. (See my last post on handling the "Evil of Distraction" for why it's only coming out now.)

Art books and their curse

I had these two books which couldn't be published without a lot more work. I finally got one of them finished today, and have another nearly complete - just some niggly, nit-picky editing to finish.

In both cases, the problem has been images. They are both illustrated within an inch of their book-lives.

But the images don't just down-size to epubs and then re-upsize when you want them to.  You have to start with good images to begin with - full-size images which make an ebook a huge size.  Unless you are OCRing a print book, you won't have that quality of image (and usually, not even then.)

Ebooks (epubs, mobi's, even some PDF's) don't rise to that level of quality. Having a 10MB file on your ereader will often make them choke. The current crop of smartphones have the chips and memories to deal with them - just in time. The tradition is to make these ebooks small and easy-to-download. That has traditionally meant: text only.

Since I'm often trying to work backwards from an existing epub, this gives quality issues on all those originally wonderful diagrams and photos. (So maybe the curse of artbooks is mostly a public domain problem? No. Why do you think art books have always been high-priced? The cost of printing in any decent quality.)

Neither of the books I've been working on will be distributed as print books through the major distributors - because  I simply don't have the time to invest in re-creating the wonderful line drawings by carefully doing scans and editing on every photo and diagram in the book. So the images rely on someone else having done that in their epub file - which is the source for the print versions. (You can hear that "tut-tut" starting now...)

The solution to quality problems.

Lulu gave this to me recently. They have a very nice (if mis-titled) e-booklet called "Author's Guide to Success - A Complete Plan for Publishing and Selling Your Book". (You can get your own copy by opting-in to their mailing list.)

If your book doesn't meet muster for print, then you can simply produce it as an ebook, then offer a nicely-discounted economy print version as a direct purchase.

I've often recommended Lulu over any and all other self-publishing outlets. The reasons are three: first, they have high quality hardcopy in addition to ebooks, second, they are less expensive than any other POD (print on demand) company, and third - they'll distribute to anywhere you want to go.

That last is a caveat - you have to be printing original work. (And they started doing that after they expanded their distribution to Amazon and Kobo.) Otherwise, they will print and sell for you just about anything you can legally claim copyright to.

In Lulu's ebooklet, they follow the progress of a "Bess Seller" (yea - corny, I know) who is a local barista at a coffeshop down the street from their offices. She wants to publish her masterpiece, but is unsure of how to go.

The solution and trick is to do an all-of-the above.

1. Convert and publish your work as an ebook and distribute it everywhere.
2. Convert your work to PDF and publish in a standard format (like trade paperback) which will go to all the big booksellers via Ingram's catalog.
3. More interesting is that you create a version without ISBN that you can offer  as a discount or premium paperback with direct sales by it's link.
4. While you can finally offer a hardback casewrap version that's available via Ingram, you can also create a premium version with a dust jacket that's available as a reward for special clients on a limited basis.

They point out that getting an ISBN automatically adds a retail markup.

The graphic I scraped goes like this:

When you are doing your own marketing, you don't need the added markup from Lulu. Practically, being able to offer a special edition which isn't available anywhere else (like that dustjacketed hardback) is quite a bonus.

Picture Book Series Update

The proofs I ordered came in. As mentioned, one book didn't make the midnight deadline, and the other two will now come as proofs, but not make the Global Reach scene - just low-cost private editions.

There is something to having a copy of your printed book in your hands - nice dramatic cover and everything. Satisfying - and for very little cost. Some people say CreateSpace is so great for giving you a digital proof. Lulu gives you that proof, but also requires you physically review that book to make sure everything turned out just right. Without doing that, you have to buy a copy yourself from CreateSpace to make sure it actually did turn out OK. So your cost (slightly higher from CS, than Lulu, interestingly) is still needful either way.

I did find another book by Walter Crane on Design - a bookend to his Lines and Form, which came later. Titled "The Bases of Design." It was simple to convert it to an ebook, and I won't be making a hardcopy version of this anytime soon - as I'm way behind on my editing already, and this book has a lot of graphics as well.

The point to not doing an artisanal recovery project for old books is above, as I covered. I have to earn my keep. To do that, I need to find and publish and market more books. This is the Indie Publisher (or publishpreneur) at work. Deeper backbench means earning more income monthly. Simple math.

Time is worth more than money, as it's linear. Money can be leveraged. And then you can hire people to do those jobs which take all your time. Meanwhile, you run lean, invest sweat equity, build audience. Until you can leverage that income, then you guard your time carefully.

What's next?

After I finish up these last few editing jobs, it's getting the ebooks through their paces (I have to get the bit.ly links into their back-pages and double-check everything) - after that will be getting them ported through Lulu to Google Books/Play, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo.

With the proofs in hand, I'll create book trailers for all of them, along with podcasts out of that audio. The book trailers will be scripted, not done off-hand, so that text will go onto the landing page. While this could replace the description (and probably should) I'm not at that point with these books. It's just another revision to the spreadsheet-action-sequence. Noted.

After that, update and make live all the landing pages. As I do that,  I'll create the downloadable PDF's and post these to Slideshare while embedding that into the landing page.

Amazon won't be included as I have to research and create special editions for them.

We're also, regrettably, going to pause the marketing spreadsheet at that point.

The buck then stops.

Because we're getting right back into memberships again - and making that go live.

Reviewing all this data to this point shows that we should be doing this on Rainmaker to get the most bang for my buck. It's a lot more efficient than what I've been doing up to this point - and I've been paying that bill for months now with no returns.

I'll still do a sidebar of doing a membership via Gumroad and Insta-member, with Rainmaker going first for the comparision.

- - - -

There is another scene happening, which revolutionizes how to approach book marketing. I talk a bit about this in our next installment.

- - - -

So make sure you're opted-in for all the white-knuckled excitement from this cliff-hanging adventure in modern ebook marketing.

See you next time.

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The Greatest Evil in Self-Publishing - and 4 Methods to Fight It

• The world's greatest writers and composers have died because of it.
  
  
• It's caused Wars to be lost and Nations defeated.
  
  
• It's present in most people's lives - and keeps them broke and lonely.
  
  
• Most business self-help books deal mostly or only with this and it's ramifications.
  
  
• Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" had fighting this one element as key to any success.
  
  
• You won't believe this evil - it's simple, it's well known.
  
  
• Worse than Cancer, it's reached epidemic proportions, yet there is no cure.
  

Distraction

Yes, that's it. Distraction. But look through your own life and you can see that this was present in every failure you had - to one degree or another. Look through the lives of politicians and celebrities. Trace back both their successes and failures and you'll find the ones who won their campaigns, who became top stars - they all got their Life Distractions under control.

Napoleon Hill specified that people had to develop a Burning Desire to succeed at anything.

Yet it is all too simple, and that one fact keeps people overlooking how evil Distraction is.

This is the nature of social media, of hours spent in surfing the Internet with no real result to your well-intentioned and very necessary research. The term "rabbit hole" was developed to tell about Internet distractions people would fall down into.

And this post is written after I found another afternoon spent doing all these actions instead of just getting my next books published.

It's not that I didn't have more work to do, it wasn't that it was difficult. It wasn't that it was going to cost me money - except by not doing it.

How this Evil reared its ugly head - again.

I was distracted from what I'd listened to on the radio as I drove around on other necessary chores.

I was listening to the radio only because I'd run out of Rainmaker podcasts to listen to on the ride.

What came on was one of my few really favorite radio hosts - and I had another half-hour on the road before I could get back to my desk and real work.

That was the problem: it was a "favorite".  I found the host stimulating - even too stimulating.

Favorite as in: more than anything else. It became a distraction from anything else.

And what happened next was that the host said something so controversial that I started mentally riffing off on my own.  Kinda like watching a good movie and then you're thinking about that movie or humming the theme song for the next week.

I knew I was sunk at that point - I wasn't going to get much done that day. My mental riff took over everything.

In my long personal history, I've never met anyone who has conquered this completely.

You may have experienced something like this in your own life. Going along, having plans for the day, all that - and then you find yourself doing something completely not on your to-do list: distracted.

After a couple of decades distilling self-help and personal improvement books, I've found some solutions.

Yes, there are simple ways to get this under control. Would you like to know them?

How to Fight Distraction and Win

1. "Plan your work, work your plan." 

That is probably too obvious. Make a simple to-do list, set it up in a logical sequence, work it from the top down. If you find out you are doing something else, then drop that and get back to whatever it was you were doing.

That solves minor distractions. How about chronic ones?

2. Clean your room.

This is that Feng Shui stuff - if your work space has anything - anything - in it which isn't conducive to what you should be doing, get rid of it.  Like Thoreau and his cabin at Walden Pond, I've read of writers who got a remote cabin with nothing in it except a table and his laptop. And that laptop had the USB and network ports filled and glued shut. Nothing else in that cabin. He could only sit there and write.

That's a bit extreme. But you can see that it's one way to get work done.

Another writer started when she got back from sending her kids to school and ended when they came home. She worked when she was least distracted.

What about those inspired moments when you have something creative to do, but it's not what you should be doing?

3. Have a Plan B.

This is what I had to do today. That radio show was on politics - a subject I've had to learn to avoid after several recent disappointing election cycles in a row.

Politics doesn't make me money. It costs me time. When I publish books, I earn more income. Editing and publishing Political books aren't worth the angst.

But there I was. I had to do something with this motivation and inspiration.

That's what my alter-ego blog is for. It only gets posts to it when I get irritated with the illogical nonsense coming out of government and the echo-chamber of Main-scream Media.

The blog is called The President Bob Report. It's a future-history memoir of a fictitious guy who everyone liked and winds up being President through a series of near-comic episodes. Of course this "President Bob" character solves the current problems of the Beltway with Midwestern and common-sense solutions.

Blogging like that gave me an outlet for that distraction and everyone was happy. Mostly me, myself, and I.

Sure, I get next to no visitors to that blog, which is fine. It's a vent blog. Might turn out to be something, might not. Doesn't matter. For me - it's a way to get back on topic, to get back on what I am supposed to be focused on. Focus. Which brings up...

4. Find and develop your Burning Desire.

Napoleon Hill had it mostly right. We'll never know how many people who successfully Thought and Got Rich. We do know that a lot of people liked and bought the book - and it's still sells regularly for those who've sold even public domain versions of it. (There is one sequel I've found - and re-published - of a guy who studied Hill and actually made millionaires, but that's a bit beyond this conversation.)

You have your own Bliss, as Joseph Campbell phrased it - something which you are entirely fascinated with, that brings you peace, that fills and fulfills your life-dreams.

Once you stoke this fire to a steady blue flame, then you simply follow where this points. It will take some study, probably. Once you know it, then you simply start throwing away, giving away, selling, or ignoring anything and everything else you possibly can.

You have a single answer to multiple questions - another question, actually:

"Will this make my life simpler, bring me more peace, or fulfill my bliss?

If it's yes to any of those, then you keep it in or go that route. If it's no in all categories, then you don't.

- - - -

I know those solutions may be too simple. Those solutions are just as direct as "Distraction is Evil."

If you ever wonder why you aren't or haven't been successful, look to your distractions.

Solve them, and you are one in a million - even one in a billion. And the world's riches become open to you. Seriously.

Or - think of it this way: How much actual work did you get done when you were distracted? How much profitable work do you think you could get done if you stayed focused?

Up to you.

Have fun with this.

- - - -

Opt-in above and keep updated so you don't miss our next step in this self-publishing journey.

If you've reached this by iTunes or somewhere else, please leave a comment or review. 

- - - - 

(Photo: John Snape)

Downloadable Transcript:

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