IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 |
Hi, I'm David Wogahn and welcome to
Distributing and Marketing eBooks.
| | 00:07 |
In this course, I'll walk you through
every step of the process necessary to
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get your eBook into the major online
eBook stores as well as some other ways
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you could leverage your eBook investment.
First I'll help you understand the
| | 00:21 |
current state of eBooks.
Then we'll look at each of the planning
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considerations, including Pricing, DRM,
Metadata, Copyrights, and Royalties.
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We'll also talk about basic marketing
tactics that you can use to launch any
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eBook such as press releases, reviews and
networking.
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I'll walk you through the pros and cons
of distributing through aggregators like
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SmashWords and BookBaby.
We'll also take a deep look at Amazon's
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family of services for authors, such as
KDP Select, Create Space, Good Reads, and
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Author Central.
We'll cover all this plus plenty of other
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tips and techniques.
So let's get started.
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(MUSIC).
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 |
I've included a couple exercise files for
all lynda.com members.
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In the exercise files, you'll find an
questionnaire that'll help you inventory
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all the information you'll need to
quickly add your eBook to each online
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store, as well as a checklist to help you
manage the publishing process.
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1. Understanding EbooksWhat is an ebook and how do you read one?| 00:00 |
And Ebook is used to refer to any
document you would read on a display.
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In fact, in some professions, especially
in business to business marketing, the
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term, Ebook, often refers to a PDF that
is designed to look like an Ebook.
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But that is not what we're gonna be
talking about in this course series.
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We're gonna be talking about Kindle files
and EPUB files.
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Kindle files are actually three different
file formats, mobi, prc and azw .
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Most people are going to be familiar with
the mobi file format.
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The other two formats are created
internally with Amazon, and we won't see
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those in common use.
So, the file that you have that you'll be
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uploading to a store or using as an Ebook
to send to people will most likely be a
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mobi file.
The second file format is EPUB, EPUB is
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used by virtually every other store that
sells Ebooks.
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The second point I wanna talk about is,
what is an eReader?
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An eReader is both a device or it can be
software.
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So in a device, it might be an Amazon
Kindle or Barnes and Noble Nook or it
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could be an Apple iPad.
It could also be software.
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The software you would download on any of
those devices or PC or use it on the Web.
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And this software's used to read that
e-book file whether it is the Kindle file
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or the EPUB file.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the
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software, and hardware, doesn't have to
come from someone like Amazon or Apple,
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it can be a third party.
And I'm showing you an example here Blue Fire.
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Blue Fire is one of many companies that
provide Ebook reading software.
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And the last point I'll make is that an
Ebook file is something that you can sell
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or that you can give away or that you can
put into your own store.
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Most of us are familiar with Amazon or
Barnes and Noble or the iTunes iBooks
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store from Apple.
But you can also take these Ebooks and
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email them to someone, or but it on your
own website and sell it or give it away.
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So the best way to think about Ebooks is
to think of them as computer files.
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And just like any other computer file,
you need a program to open it and use it.
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Sometimes the software is built into a
special purpose device, like a Kindle or
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a Nook.
Other times, it's a program you need to install.
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| Getting ebook files onto devices for reading| 00:00 |
If you buy an eBook from an eBook store
like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
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It's a simple matter to get that eBook
onto your device.
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The retailer that sold it to you in this
case simply puts the book on your device
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for you.
Or allows you to manage the process from
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your account.
But what if you're creating an eBook for
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a client or a friend emailed you an eBook
file.
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Now what?
A couple caveats before we begin.
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One if you have a file that's protected
with DRM, or Digital Rights Management,
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it will most likely have problems getting
it to work.
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Two it may be illegal to share the file
depending upon the copyright.
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We will be covering DRM in a later
chapter and this lesson assumes that the
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files you wanna move around are shared do
not have DRM protection.
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The word that's commonly used when moving
a file onto a device is called Sideloading.
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There's really 4 different ways that you
can move that file onto your device.
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One is with the cable, the second way is
Email.
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You do wirelessly, over the USB drive in
some cases if your reader has that kind
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of a drive.
But if you're connecting your Kindle or
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your Nook to your PC you'll see a window
pop up, with the file manager and you'll
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be able to drag that file over to your
e-reading device.
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Or if its the software that's on your PC
you'll be able to drag that into the
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directory where your eBooks are stored.
If you have an apple device its a little
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bit different.
First you wanna make sure that you have
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the iBooks software installed on your
iPad or other Apple device.
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That's going to allow you to open and
download files that you're transferring
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over via the sideload method.
Once you connect your iPad to your
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software, you'll be able to drag the file
over to your iTunes accounts on your
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iPad, and be able to open the book there.
If you're using WiFi, it works the same
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way, of course you won't have a cable in
that case.
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So it's impossible to cover every
potential way to transfer an eBook file
| | 02:05 |
to your eReader.
And even if I could, it would be out of
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date, within a few weeks.
But I can give you four place to turn.
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Every device manufacturer has a
description of how to do this.
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The online book stores that you buy from
will also have help screens and tell you
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how to do it and then there is always the
eReader software vendor.
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In a lot of cases with libraries, they
are lending out eBooks today and they
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have excellent tutorials available on the
website that walk you through the side
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loading process.
If one of these doesn't work for you, you
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can always search on Google.
If you do, use appropriate key words in
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your search like the name of your device
or reading software, and look for the
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most current result you can find.
When you find it, bookmark it.
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| Ebook trends and what they mean to publishers| 00:00 |
The printing and sale of print books has
been with us for about 500 years, while
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ebooks have been with us for a mere five
years.
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In that short time frame, coupled with a
rapid change in technology, it's creating
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new habits.
Many of these are still evolving, but it
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is possible to highlight a few publishers
should be paying attention to.
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In this segment, I wanna talk about the
five trends of impulse buying,
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collecting, grazing, multi-format buying,
and nontraditional publishing.
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And most importantly I wanna talk about
what they mean to us as publishers and authors.
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The first one impulse buying, I think is
interesting because, unless you're
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shopping at a garage sale, books have
never been lower price than this.
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If you go to Costco, books are still
going to be in the $15 to $20 range for a
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hardcover book.
With ebooks, it's not uncommon to see a
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book priced between zero and $4.99.
There's an incentive for publishers to
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price between $3 and $10, because Amazon
and Barnes & Noble actually pay a higher
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commission within that narrow band of
pricing.
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So what happens is, is that you see a lot
of readers impulse buying a book.
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Maybe it's a dollar, or $2, I'm gonna buy
this and read it later.
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So you as an author or a publisher, need
to keep that in mind, because the higher
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the price book, the more you're competing
with major publishers.
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And the lower price, you're actually
encouraging sales, because it's so easy
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for people to do that impulse buy for
$1.99 or $2.99.
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Now due to these such low prices, you
have another trend, what I call collecting.
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You look at a price and you see $1.99,
I'll go ahead and buy it, and I'll put it
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on my digital bookshelf.
But you may not get to it.
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So, the good news is, as an author or
publisher, you've sold a book.
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But the bad news is, it may never get
read.
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So, if you're writing something that's
intended to promote your expertise or
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your business, or you have several of
your own titles and are trying to
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promote, not getting read is not exactly
a good thing.
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Grazing is the third trend I wanna talk
about, and it's what readers do when they
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have lots of books and they have no guilt
about finishing them.
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Being conscious of grazing will help you
see the importance of hooking your
| | 02:14 |
readers' interest early in your book.
We're finding that people will read
| | 02:19 |
nonfiction books in different fits and
starts, while novels are generally read
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straight through.
And if it doesn't hold someone's
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interest, they actually stop reading it.
So it's really important to hook your
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readers' interest in the book early.
Early on with e-books, publishers were
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concerned that e-books would be a
replacement for the print book.
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But one trend we're seeing is what I call
multi-format buying.
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It's when the reader finishes a book and
decides that they enjoyed it so much that
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they would like to have that book on
their book shelf.
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Or it was a nonfiction book, and they
would like to have that book available
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because it's so much more simple to flip
through the book, or to hold several
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places open at once.
It's also nice to be able to share a book
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that you loved.
And it's really difficult to do that with
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an ebook.
So for these reasons, we're seeing that
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publishers are coming out with a print
book when they also come out with an ebook.
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That way when someone finishes the book,
if they like it, they can order the print book.
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It's also easy to do that because they
use a technology called print on demand,
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where they don't have to print up extra
copies of the book, just in case somebody
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wants to buy it.
The book is produced each time someone
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places an order.
This last trend, I'll talk about is
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called non traditional publishing.
You're beginning to see people utilize
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the ebook platform as a way to expose
information to readers that they wouldn't
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normally see.
So, in the examples I'm showing you here,
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NBC has actually created a new ebook
division that is creating books based
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upon television series.
Showing plot lines, characters,
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photographs, information that if you
really enjoyed that show you can follow
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along or learn more about it as
background material with an ebook.
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Or you'll see ebooks based upon news
events, or as companions.
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In this case, I'm showing you the example
of a book that was produced when a game
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came out, and it was called LA Noire.
And it's a collection of short stories
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written by authors, and it was used to
promote that game to a broader audience.
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Organizations are developing these ebooks
really as promotional tools.
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And if they generate incremental revenue,
that's a win for them.
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Take some time to think about how these
trends may or may not impact your book.
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Every publishers goal is to have their
books read, using this understanding to
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your advantage will help you sell more
books.
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2. Measurement, Tracking, and Analysis Tools for Authors and PublishersPutting the Google Adwords Keyword tool to use when publishing| 00:00 |
You may be familiar with the terms SEO or
SEM, which stand for search engine
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optimization and search engine marketing.
Basically this refers to making your
| | 00:10 |
information findable on the internet.
These techniques and tools that one uses
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to manage a website can also be applied
to managing information about your ebook,
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in helping to make it more findable.
So you want to think about using these
| | 00:27 |
tools, to help find words and phrases
that your prospect use.
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How do you do that?
One of the tools that I'm going to show
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you today, is the Google Adwords Keyword
Tool.
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Now the reason I'm showing you the Google
Adwords Keyword Tool is because the eBook
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re-sellers like Amazon, and Apple and
Barnes and Noble.
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They don't have a tool like this on their
site.
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So you don't know what people are
searching for in terms of books when
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they're on that site.
But Google is about 65 to 75% of the
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search market, so you can get very close
to understanding what people are
| | 01:02 |
searching for.
What terms they're using by using this tool.
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It's a free tool, there's no account sign
up required.
| | 01:12 |
You can actually just answer a Captcha
question, or if you have an account, you
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just sign in and put in your phrases.
This is the Google AdWords account screen
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and I've already signed in.
If you don't have an account, as I said,
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that's okay.
You would just simply answer a Captcha
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question after you press the Search
button.
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So in this example, my book is about film
reviews, and I wanna see how people are
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searching for that term using Google.
So I'm going to type in film reviews, and
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I'm gonna click the Search button.
And I'll see here that there were 450,000
| | 01:50 |
searches for that, and I look down and I
see there's video, movies, film, cinema,
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I didn't think about these other terms.
I'll go back up to the top.
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Let me add those terms and see what the
search results are.
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Movie reviews.
Video reviews.
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I want to pick the term that a lot of
people are looking for that's also
| | 02:18 |
consistent with what I'm trying to
describe or the title of the book I'm
| | 02:21 |
trying to write.
And now, as I go down and look at those
| | 02:26 |
results, I see that far more people are
looking for movie reviews.
| | 02:31 |
In fact, cinema reviews are above film
reviews.
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I wouldn't have considered that had I not
used this tool.
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I see that's almost twice as many,
823,000 searches.
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What Google Adwords does is that it will
tell you these words or phrases.
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It could be two words or three words,
that people are using to look things up.
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If you can incorporate these newly
discovered phrases into their
| | 02:57 |
descriptions or title, your subtitle,
perhaps into your press release and blog
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posts These other areas, then chances are
you're going to get more visitors or more
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people finding your information.
There's always a tradeoff between how
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much time you spend working on this and
trying to analyze specific terms.
| | 03:19 |
But if you have something that's really
important like a title, or subtitle, or
| | 03:23 |
description, that'll be reused over and
over again, this is gonna be time well spent.
| | 03:28 |
It's not gonna be the definitive word of
how people search on Amazon, but it's the
| | 03:32 |
next best thing.
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| How publishers use Google Alerts| 00:00 |
If you spent any time in public
relations, you've no doubt heard the term
| | 00:03 |
clipping file.
Companies used to hire agencies to read
| | 00:07 |
scads of newspapers, magazines or watch
TV to find mentions of a company, a
| | 00:11 |
product or an individual.
Today this activity is called listening
| | 00:16 |
and we do it using software that
constantly scans web sites looking for keywords.
| | 00:22 |
One of the best known and free tools is
again from Google and is called Alerts.
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With Alerts you can monitor specific
words or terms and have that information
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sent to you on a periodic basis.
So, in publishing you might put in your
| | 00:38 |
name as the author or the title of a book
or perhaps, there's concepts or terms, or
| | 00:43 |
competitive book names that you might
wanna enter.
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This last year, for example, I had a
situation where I was listening for my
| | 00:52 |
company name.
And I discovered that a company in Poland
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was actually using it as a trade name for
their service business.
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I would have never found that had I not
been listening for it using Google Alerts.
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As I said, you can do it daily or weekly.
You can use quotes around words to make
| | 01:12 |
it look for a specific term.
And you can also show different kinds of
| | 01:17 |
results, such as the web, or the video,
or news.
| | 01:22 |
I'm gonna show you a few of those
examples now.
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With Google alerts, you actually have to
have an account and sign up with Google.
| | 01:29 |
So it's free, but you need that account
to begin, and here we're looking at the
| | 01:34 |
main screen.
Before I show you a search query, I wanna
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show you the different things you can do
with each one.
| | 01:41 |
You can show just the results for news or
blogs, video, discussions or everything.
| | 01:48 |
You can show frequency, you can show just
the best results.
| | 01:53 |
There are so many times that you'll have
a website that'll be republishing another
| | 01:57 |
website's information.
And Google knows this, and they'll show
| | 02:01 |
you not every single thing unless you ask
for it, but just the best results.
| | 02:06 |
And then you have your email address
where it can be delivered to.
| | 02:10 |
So, let's look for the term Amazon
Kindle.
| | 02:14 |
On the right side, you see there's four
results for that search term.
| | 02:19 |
If I was to put quotes around this, it
actually eliminated one of those results,
| | 02:23 |
because those two words were not together
in that fourth result.
| | 02:29 |
But for now I'm going to take this out,
and now we're just going to look and see
| | 02:33 |
what are the results just for video.
Here you have six results for video.
| | 02:39 |
You can go over here and look at what
those are.
| | 02:44 |
You could look and just see if there's
that term that's found in a book, and
| | 02:47 |
here's a book billed and income by
publishing on Amazon Kindle that showed up.
| | 02:53 |
You can create all sorts of alerts and
have them in your account as you see here.
| | 02:57 |
I have advertising in Ebooks, Ebook
agency services.
| | 03:02 |
It shows the volume, I want all results
for those, I want those once a day.
| | 03:06 |
They're very specialized terms, and I
know I'm not gonna get a lot of results
| | 03:10 |
from those.
And I want it emailed to me.
| | 03:15 |
The trick with Google Alerts is setting
them up in such a way that you get the
| | 03:18 |
results that you need.
The best results, you don't want to get
| | 03:22 |
too many and you don't want to get too
few.
| | 03:25 |
So you have to be careful with this
scope.
| | 03:27 |
It will take a little fine tuning as you
go, but you just keep logging in and
| | 03:31 |
changing it until you get the right mix.
Its one of those tools that's super
| | 03:36 |
simple and fast to set up.
It works in the background with no effort
| | 03:40 |
on your part at all.
As I said the trick is finding that
| | 03:44 |
balance between too much listening and
too little.
| | 03:47 |
But whatever you do you should listen for
something.
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| Evaluating your online presence| 00:00 |
Like any marketing program, you wanna get
your Ebook in front of as many people as possible.
| | 00:06 |
The challenge on the internet is sifting
through all the potential opportunities.
| | 00:11 |
Sometimes, this is easy, it doesn't take
much research to know that Oprah.com or
| | 00:16 |
Cnn.com or NYTImes.com, for the New York
Times.
| | 00:21 |
Would provide a lot of exposure, but what
if you have a long list of book review
| | 00:25 |
blogs that you've never heard of before?
Which ones are more important than others?
| | 00:30 |
Or what if you're about to spend money on
advertising, where should you spend it?
| | 00:36 |
Some of the things that you want to
evaluate is how large of an audience a
| | 00:40 |
blog might have, or a page on Facebook
might have.
| | 00:44 |
What kind of people does it attract, how
popular is it?
| | 00:48 |
And a popular word for that is authority.
If you're familiar with Twitter and
| | 00:53 |
Facebook and LinkedIn, you know that you
can see those statistics pretty easily.
| | 00:58 |
On LinkedIn, you might see the number of
connections someone has on Pinterest, and
| | 01:02 |
Twitter, you have followers.
So, the larger number the more authority
| | 01:07 |
or importance that person might have.
Facebook there's likes and there's fans,
| | 01:11 |
those are all very obvious things and you
can evaluate that potential blog article
| | 01:16 |
writer by looking at that information.
To determine whether or not you want to
| | 01:23 |
invest your time.
One of my favorite tools is called Alexa.
| | 01:28 |
Alexa will tell you the relative ranking
of a website both in the world and in the
| | 01:32 |
United States, in different countries
actually.
| | 01:36 |
So, number one in the world would be
Google and everybody else is behind that.
| | 01:41 |
So, you might have someone that's
blogging about their doll collection that
| | 01:44 |
might not even be ranked or it could be
twenty million.
| | 01:48 |
But you might have other ones that are in
that top one thousand, top hundred thousand.
| | 01:53 |
It's difficult to get into that high
level.
| | 01:55 |
So the lower the number, the more popular
that website is.
| | 01:59 |
Let's take a look at Alexa.
Alexa is a free tool, there's actually a
| | 02:06 |
number of other tools that will pull its
data and show it to you from another web site.
| | 02:11 |
But we're just going to look at it on
Alexa.
| | 02:13 |
What I like about Alexa is that the
rankings that it provides are objective.
| | 02:19 |
And they're also relative and by relative
I mean that only one company can occupy a
| | 02:23 |
particular place in the rankings.
So, the perennial number one in Alexa
| | 02:29 |
rankings is Google.com.
Everybody else goes up from there.
| | 02:34 |
So, you might have someone that's
blogging about their doll collection and
| | 02:37 |
that might not even have a rank.
There could be so little traffic or it
| | 02:41 |
could be a very popular site within that
community and it might have a ranking of
| | 02:45 |
15 million or 12 million.
But as the site becomes more popular, it
| | 02:50 |
goes down in the rankings to, as I said,
the number one position.
| | 02:55 |
Let's look at lynda.com.
So, what you see here is a traffic rank
| | 03:03 |
in the world of 1,740.
And then depending on what country you
| | 03:08 |
are in, you'll see a rank for that
country.
| | 03:12 |
So, the United States, this website is
the 1058th most active or traffic ranked
| | 03:17 |
website according to Alexa.
It may change this week, it might change
| | 03:22 |
next week and next month.
These rankings go up or down and no one
| | 03:26 |
company is going to occupy a position the
same as another company at any point in time.
| | 03:32 |
But it's a good way to evaluate the
popularity of a site.
| | 03:35 |
It's also a site that's used by others as
a way to benchmark sites.
| | 03:41 |
But as I said, I think it's important to
keep in mind that stats are only part of
| | 03:44 |
the story.
But when you're faced with the choice of
| | 03:47 |
where you invest your time, they can help
you prioritize your focus.
| | 03:51 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Author rankings and book monitoring| 00:00 |
It's only natural to be interested in how
your book is selling.
| | 00:03 |
On the other hand, you don't want that
interest to turn into an obsession.
| | 00:07 |
All the ebook vendors have sales reports.
They can tell you the numbers and the
| | 00:11 |
dollars that you're making on your books.
That's a requirement of giving you your
| | 00:15 |
royalty reports.
So, what you really want is to tie these
| | 00:19 |
results back to the marketing activities
that gave you the results in the first place.
| | 00:24 |
That's where book ranking and monitoring
software comes in.
| | 00:28 |
I divide the book ranking and monitoring
software into three categories.
| | 00:32 |
That which is available through Amazon's
Author Central, then you have data that
| | 00:37 |
is available through Amazon via their
API, or Application Programming Interface.
| | 00:44 |
This is information that they collect and
they share with other vendors who will
| | 00:47 |
write software to pull it out of the
Amazon systems.
| | 00:52 |
The third category, I call book sales
tracking software.
| | 00:56 |
And that you might use yourself through
an Excel spreadsheet, or there's tools
| | 01:01 |
from companies such as Storybox Software,
that will take this spreadsheet from a
| | 01:06 |
vendor and suck that into a system.
And allow you to compare that to other
| | 01:12 |
sales and to report it in an aggregated
manner.
| | 01:18 |
I've logged into the Amazon Author
Central account.
| | 01:21 |
And even though we're gonna cover this in
more detail in another video, I wanted to
| | 01:25 |
show you two places in this account where
you can track the sales activity of your books.
| | 01:32 |
One is Rank, and that's the Author Rank,
and the other one is Sales Info.
| | 01:35 |
So Author Rank, I've selected all books
within that.
| | 01:39 |
So that's all the books from this author,
and how they rank relative to all other
| | 01:43 |
books for sale on Amazon.
So there's millions of books for sale.
| | 01:48 |
And in this case this author's books, all
of them in composite, shows a ranking
| | 01:54 |
from early in October to the present
time, in about the top 250,000 books in Amazon.
| | 02:03 |
This is how they're performing on an
hourly basis.
| | 02:06 |
You can change the scale to look at it on
a monthly basis, and you can look at it
| | 02:09 |
even more frequently on a two week basis.
Which is gonna be a much more up an down
| | 02:14 |
look to it.
The second set of information that Amazon
| | 02:19 |
makes available to authors throughout
Author Central, is the sales information
| | 02:22 |
from BookScan.
BookScan is an independent business that
| | 02:26 |
reports their data to subscribers, and
Amazon provides this free in your account.
| | 02:33 |
What it is is a report of the sales of
books through physical bookstores.
| | 02:39 |
They estimate that they represent about
75% of those that are reporting, so it
| | 02:42 |
may not be all of your sales.
But what Amazon is done is to be able to
| | 02:46 |
show you not only what you're selling on
Amazon, which is the biggest part of the
| | 02:50 |
market, but also what you are selling
outside of Amazon through the physical bookstores.
| | 02:56 |
And together between those two pieces,
that's gonna represent the bulk of the
| | 02:59 |
book sales and give you a much stronger
picture of what you are doing as an author.
| | 03:05 |
I also mentioned that Amazon makes their
data available to third parties for free,
| | 03:09 |
and this is significant because in Author
Central, you're only gonna be able to see
| | 03:13 |
your books.
You can't see competitive books or books
| | 03:18 |
from other sources that you may wanna
track relative to your book.
| | 03:23 |
What these other businesses do is form
around taking that data and doing
| | 03:27 |
something useful with it.
The most interesting thing, I think, is
| | 03:31 |
that unlike Author Central, you can
subscribe to one of these and you can
| | 03:35 |
track books that are not yours.
So this way you can see how competitive
| | 03:39 |
books are doing.
If there's a new book on the market that
| | 03:42 |
has a lot of marketing activity, you can
actually use that as a case study.
| | 03:47 |
There also do other interesting things,
like make it available on mobile devices,
| | 03:51 |
or send you a notification via text or
email.
| | 03:54 |
That would be helpful in the event that
maybe you executed a marketing program,
| | 03:58 |
and you wanted to know when sales reached
a certain level.
| | 04:03 |
You could go and tell Twitter followers,
"Hey, I've reached the No 100 status,
| | 04:08 |
help me get down to No 50".
And with that kind of notification and
| | 04:13 |
sort of the instantness of the social
media, you're able to actually drive
| | 04:17 |
sales that much further.
So with your book, you will definitely
| | 04:23 |
have an Author Central account.
And you should have that completed, and
| | 04:26 |
you'll be able to track things there.
But my advice is to choose one of these
| | 04:30 |
other third party tools and begin
tracking other books in your category, so
| | 04:34 |
you can begin to develop that sales
history.
| | 04:39 |
Amazon and Barnes and Noble book pages
can provide current snapshots, but the
| | 04:43 |
real value happens when you can compare
sales to a past marketing event.
| | 04:48 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| How publishers use Google Trends| 00:00 |
One thing all of us can agree on is that
we are different.
| | 00:04 |
Google Trends helps you identify and
quantify those differences.
| | 00:08 |
Where the Google AdWords Keyword tool
will tell you what people are searching
| | 00:11 |
for now.
Google Trends gives you similar insights,
| | 00:15 |
but over a longer period of time.
So, how can we use it with book marketing?
| | 00:20 |
I think there's two ways, one is to help
you decide where you might invest, where
| | 00:24 |
you're selling.
And the second way is to give you ideas
| | 00:28 |
for books.
Book subjects, blog topics, that type of research.
| | 00:35 |
Google Trends is another free tool from
Google, and you do not have to have an account.
| | 00:40 |
You don't have to register.
Simply type in the terms that you're
| | 00:45 |
looking for and let's compare kindle,
iPad, and Nook.
| | 00:50 |
They'd be the three big names in Ebook
reading, click the explore button.
| | 00:56 |
Now, what this is going to show is how
each of these terms are trending over
| | 01:01 |
several years.
So Kindle be in blue, iPad in red, and
| | 01:06 |
then Nook is in gold.
The Apple iPad is very popular, and the
| | 01:10 |
Kindle a little less so, and then the
Nook even less.
| | 01:16 |
This box up here is checked for news
headlines.
| | 01:19 |
When I float the cursor over one of the
letters, you can see what news item may
| | 01:24 |
have caused that peak in the popularity
of that search term.
| | 01:29 |
If you go a little further down the
screen, you can see that there's regional interests.
| | 01:34 |
They show a world map, and here's the
word Kindle, and it's popularity around
| | 01:38 |
the world.
If you click on iPad, you can see that
| | 01:42 |
it's quite popular throughout the world.
On the far right, you see the related terms.
| | 01:47 |
With nook, it's popular in the United
States.
| | 01:51 |
The reason why you see the nook is in the
United States is because that's where
| | 01:54 |
most of the books are sold.
Only recently have they expanded their
| | 01:58 |
business to the UK.
Now you can drill down further here.
| | 02:02 |
Let's say we click on the United States,
and now we see a map of the US.
| | 02:08 |
Here again it's blue because that was the
color for the first search term, that was kindle.
| | 02:13 |
And, you see these numbers off to the
right side.
| | 02:16 |
That represents the search volume
relative to 100.
| | 02:21 |
And it's interesting to see where that
search volume is occurring.
| | 02:26 |
Kindle is very popular in Washington.
But it's also very popular in Tennessee,
| | 02:30 |
reaching 100 in West Virginia.
If you click iPad.
| | 02:35 |
California's a 94, but look over at
Florida.
| | 02:39 |
That's at 100.
In New York, it's a 94.
| | 02:43 |
And the lighter colors there is less
search volume.
| | 02:47 |
And finally looking at the Nook, this one
is very interesting that is that
| | 02:51 |
Minnesota has volume of 100.
What that tells me is that if I'm going
| | 02:56 |
to try to sell a Nook book, I might go on
Facebook and look for advertising at a
| | 03:00 |
specific or zone.
To people that are in Minnesota because I
| | 03:06 |
know they're doing a lot of searches in
Minnesota.
| | 03:10 |
So, you can overlay your marketing effort
by looking at this search intelligence
| | 03:14 |
about where people are looking for these
products.
| | 03:19 |
Good Trends is one of those tools you
won't use every week, and maybe not every month.
| | 03:23 |
But when you're planning a new book or
marketing campaign, it is an invaluable resource.
| | 03:28 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Launching Ebooks: The BasicsIntroduction and categorizing your addressable audience| 00:00 |
Book marketing is an entire subject unto
itself.
| | 00:04 |
Marketing efforts often depend on the
type of book being marketed, how
| | 00:07 |
established the author is, available
resources like cash and relationships,
| | 00:11 |
and certain market conditions such as
holidays or current events.
| | 00:17 |
It's a broad subject that is also
sensitive to advanced planning, so rather
| | 00:21 |
than try to cover all the potentialities,
we're going to focus on basic marketing
| | 00:25 |
tactics that anyone can use for just
about any book launch.
| | 00:31 |
Things such as review, press releases,
networking with other authors and
| | 00:35 |
publishers, and creating marketing
handouts.
| | 00:39 |
But before we get into those, I wanna
talk about what I call, your addressable audience.
| | 00:45 |
These are people like media outlets and
editors that you may know, or know of,
| | 00:49 |
people you have in your email contact
list, or you might have a mailing list,
| | 00:53 |
or subscribers to a newsletter.
Hopefully you have a large social media
| | 00:59 |
following in one of these areas:
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and then
| | 01:02 |
maybe you're a member of different
associations.
| | 01:06 |
And there might be a meet-up group in
your area that you've been attending,
| | 01:09 |
perhaps that's supportive of authors.
And then, last, is website visitors or
| | 01:15 |
your RSS subscribers, YouTube viewers.
These are maybe not quite as addressable.
| | 01:21 |
But if you put information on your
website, or post a YouTube video, they're
| | 01:25 |
going to see it.
So I would still call them addressable in
| | 01:28 |
that regard.
What you're gonna wanna do is make a list
| | 01:32 |
of these.
It could be the list of the individuals,
| | 01:35 |
and you would prioritize them according
to key influencers and reviewers.
| | 01:41 |
That's really what you're looking for
here.
| | 01:43 |
So when your launching the book, it could
be someone that could help introduce you
| | 01:47 |
to someone else or to a media outlet,
that you could then leverage into a
| | 01:50 |
broader awareness of your book or people
that you might ask to review a copy of
| | 01:54 |
your book in return for you giving them a
copy of the book.
| | 02:01 |
So this is very important to begin the
book launch with this kind of a list of
| | 02:05 |
individuals that'll help it get off to a
faster start.
| | 02:11 |
That's not to say the other people on
your list would not be key influencers or
| | 02:14 |
potential reviewers.
But you do wanna start here.
| | 02:18 |
And as you announce your book to those
individuals, they may in fact be great
| | 02:23 |
opportunities for you to meet other
people and to get reviews.
| | 02:28 |
So with your list categorized this way,
you're better able to prioritize and
| | 02:32 |
target your marketing efforts.
This is going to come in handy when you
| | 02:36 |
begin distributing your press release and
requesting book reviews.
| | 02:40 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting reviews| 00:00 |
I consider getting reviews, one of the
most important goals an author should
| | 00:04 |
have when launching their book.
In addition, early reviews seem to matter
| | 00:08 |
a great deal on Amazon.
When you put your book up if you wait
| | 00:12 |
around for people to review it, you're
really not taking control and being
| | 00:15 |
proactive of the situation.
If you can get an early review that's
| | 00:20 |
positive, then there's a greater chance,
it's just human nature, that other people
| | 00:24 |
are going to like that review.
And that's going to keep that review
| | 00:29 |
higher when people go to that page to
look at your book.
| | 00:33 |
It becomes self-sustaining.
Let me give you a few pointers on reviews.
| | 00:39 |
They are useful for blurbs.
You can actually pull out information
| | 00:42 |
from these and use them in the marketing
of your book and that's what blurbs are.
| | 00:46 |
Normally you would have the book reviewed
ahead of time by someone and the more
| | 00:50 |
famous the better, of course, where they
make a very positive comment about your book.
| | 00:56 |
So, reviews can be used to help future
marketing of your book.
| | 01:00 |
Also with reviews, at least on Amazon,
they have something called the Amazon
| | 01:04 |
Verified Purchase.
And there's a perception that if somebody
| | 01:08 |
actually bought the book, that their
review has more value and is more relevant.
| | 01:14 |
There's also other ways to have a review
besides just a written review and that's
| | 01:18 |
giving it stars.
So, say on good reads which is an Amazon
| | 01:22 |
property you can give something a star
review without actually writing about it
| | 01:27 |
and also you can like it.
You have a little like button up there on
| | 01:33 |
Amazon and some other sites where you can
click that and it gives a thumbs up.
| | 01:38 |
It's not clear exactly how that might or
if it might improve the find ability of
| | 01:42 |
your book.
But it doesn't hurt.
| | 01:45 |
So you should always encourage people to
click that Like button.
| | 01:50 |
Positive reviews make a big difference.
They should also be honest if you are
| | 01:54 |
inviting someone to write a review and
it's specific.
| | 01:57 |
Another thing to be mindful of is that
Amazon particular watches those reviews
| | 02:02 |
very closely.
And there's been some controversy that
| | 02:06 |
Amazon has removed reviews that they
thought might not be legitimate.
| | 02:12 |
And I experienced this myself.
I didn't ask someone to do it, but I had
| | 02:15 |
one of my clients review my book and gave
it a nice five star review with some very
| | 02:19 |
specific comments and recommended it to
her designer.
| | 02:24 |
And I went back and looked and the review
was taken down.
| | 02:27 |
And I'm assuming that the review was
taken down because it was a fellow author
| | 02:31 |
reviewing a book.
So when you're asking people to help you,
| | 02:35 |
I think you'll probably have better
success by asking people who are not authors.
| | 02:41 |
There's a lot of author clubs and groups
that get together and they will write
| | 02:44 |
reviews for each other.
And that's what Amazon was reacting against.
| | 02:50 |
So, how do you get reviews?
One of the best ways is to go back to
| | 02:53 |
your personal contacts.
We talked about that as your addressable audience.
| | 02:57 |
And you've identified people within your
network who you feel would be willing to
| | 03:01 |
put their name on the line, if you will,
by getting a copy of your book and
| | 03:04 |
reading it and offering a review.
The main thing is to be proactive rather
| | 03:10 |
than just to sit back and be hopeful that
somebody is gonna take that action.
| | 03:17 |
You might be asking 20 people in your
close personal network, people you've
| | 03:20 |
known for a long time to give you a
review.
| | 03:24 |
And you'll get maybe 10 to 15, maybe 20%
of those people actually going in and
| | 03:27 |
taking the action to do this.
Because they have to do that.
| | 03:31 |
They have to get the book to read it, or
at least be willing to put their name out there.
| | 03:36 |
And it's one of those situations that
you're gonna have to evaluate on a case
| | 03:39 |
by case basis.
A great source of reviews are actually
| | 03:43 |
ones that you pay for.
And this is a very legitimate area, and
| | 03:47 |
something that some of the larger
publishers will even do.
| | 03:51 |
I wanna talk about a few of these and
first of all say that, it is a legitimate
| | 03:55 |
way for you to get reviews.
These are actually very positive.
| | 04:00 |
They're gonna cost more money to do this,
but they're gonna be promoted in
| | 04:04 |
different publications and then
syndicated out to, for example, librarians.
| | 04:10 |
And so, depending on your book and the
subject matter, it may be a great way to
| | 04:13 |
get your book marketed to a lot more
people.
| | 04:17 |
It's also branded recognition.
One of the things that's unique about
| | 04:22 |
them is for example Kirkus Reviews,
they'll review books and they charge
| | 04:27 |
between $425 to $575.
And you can choose whether or not you
| | 04:33 |
actually use that review.
So you get an honest feedback from a
| | 04:37 |
professional reviewer.
And if it's great, you can use it.
| | 04:41 |
If you don't like it, then don't use it.
And they'll include that on their website
| | 04:45 |
if you want them to.
Another one is ForeWord Reviews.
| | 04:49 |
They have a number of different review
services, one of them for self published
| | 04:54 |
authors is called the Clarion review and
it runs about $335.
| | 04:59 |
They have ways to promote that as well.
Another one is Publisher's Weekly.
| | 05:03 |
It's a trade magazine within the
industry.
| | 05:05 |
It's been around a long time.
There's something called PW Select.
| | 05:10 |
And this is a group of reviews that they
run on a periodic basis.
| | 05:14 |
They will include a whole collection of
paid reviews and they're gonna charge
| | 05:20 |
between 149 and $199 for this.
One important thing, in fact this is true
| | 05:26 |
of all of these, is that there are lead
times.
| | 05:29 |
You might have to have your book
submitted two to three or more months in advance.
| | 05:34 |
You need to allow time for somebody to
read that review.
| | 05:37 |
May be the professionals that do this,
they just don't read it in a day or two.
| | 05:41 |
They may wanna have that book for a few
weeks cuz they're reading other books.
| | 05:45 |
So you have to keep that in mind when
planning out your marketing calendar.
| | 05:49 |
The last one I wanna mention is called
NetGalley.
| | 05:52 |
This is relatively new and it's a great
service that creates a market, between
| | 05:56 |
publishers and between readers.
It used to be in the print world that you
| | 06:00 |
might create a bunch of books and send it
out to different librarians.
| | 06:05 |
They might go to book shows and pick it
up and write a review for the publisher.
| | 06:10 |
What NetGalley does, is it allows the
publishers to upload e-books in different
| | 06:15 |
formats that are copy protected and
managed by NetGalley who then solicits
| | 06:19 |
reviews from a number of professional
reviewers.
| | 06:25 |
To be a reviewer you have to submit an
application to be listed on this in order
| | 06:29 |
to get these free books.
So they control that.
| | 06:33 |
It's also a cost to have your book
reviewed if you are a publisher there
| | 06:37 |
your likely a subscriber to their
service.
| | 06:40 |
And if you are a self publisher you would
go through the independent book
| | 06:43 |
publishers association.
It's gonna cost you $350 for you to have
| | 06:49 |
your book submitted.
It doesn't necessarily guarantee a
| | 06:53 |
review, but what happens is that
NetGalley will send out an email blast to
| | 06:56 |
all of the readers that are in their
network, asking if they would like to
| | 07:00 |
look at the book.
So in this case you're not actually
| | 07:05 |
buying a review per say, you're buying an
opportunity to put your book in front of
| | 07:08 |
a number of prospective reviewers.
Another source of reviews are book
| | 07:15 |
bloggers, and there's literally hundreds
of book bloggers out there.
| | 07:19 |
There's a few good sources for those.
One is called bookblogs.ning.com.
| | 07:23 |
And this is good because there's actually
menu items where you can click and see
| | 07:27 |
that there's authors needing reviews.
And there's ways to do book promotion,
| | 07:33 |
and you're requesting help from a
community, so it's a large community of
| | 07:37 |
people who are marketing book or wanna
help people market books.
| | 07:42 |
A couple other ones are fsbmedia.com and
bookbloggerdirectory.wordpress.com.
| | 07:49 |
Both of these are directories of
bloggers.
| | 07:53 |
I happen to like fsbmedia.com.
I find it a little bit easier to work with.
| | 07:57 |
But in both cases, what you can do is
look for a reviewer in the genre that you
| | 08:02 |
are writing in.
We're gonna talk about some of those
| | 08:06 |
rules in just a moment.
I also wanna talk about Goodreads, which
| | 08:09 |
is now an Amazon company.
There's a couple things that I think are
| | 08:13 |
really attractive to a self-published
author, or a published author, there's a
| | 08:17 |
lot of publishers that use Goodreads, as
well.
| | 08:22 |
First, you're gonna wanna make sure you
ebook is listed and has a cover, and
| | 08:25 |
librarians can help you with that.
So you wanna sign up on Goodreads and
| | 08:29 |
make sure the book is there.
It could be there all ready.
| | 08:32 |
The group that you wanna look for there
is called Making Connections.
| | 08:38 |
This one in particular is great for
authors who are looking to get reviews.
| | 08:43 |
So it's okay to join this group and to
request that book is reviewed.
| | 08:49 |
You're willing to give your book away for
free.
| | 08:51 |
And you're gonna look down towards the
bottom of the page towards Authors
| | 08:55 |
Requesting Reviews.
So they have these special initials ARR
| | 08:59 |
for Authors Requesting Reviews on the
making connections group within Goodreads.
| | 09:06 |
Now, there is one group that you
definitely want to avoid and that group
| | 09:10 |
is called Badly Behaving Authors.
Like any community, Goodreads is really
| | 09:15 |
there for readers and that's why and how
you should join it first and foremost, is
| | 09:19 |
as a reader.
And you should participate as a reader
| | 09:23 |
and you should be careful about promoting
your book.
| | 09:26 |
Cuz if you're joining Goodreads just to
promote your book and you begin to
| | 09:30 |
request that in an unsolicited fashion
from people, you might find yourself
| | 09:34 |
mentioned on Badly Behaving Authors.
So you wanna be careful and not do
| | 09:39 |
something that's gonna get you listed
into that group.
| | 09:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Distributing ebooks for reviews| 00:00 |
Now I wanna take a moment and talk about
how to get review copies to reviewers,
| | 00:03 |
because with e-books it's a little more
tricky.
| | 00:07 |
First of all, the question that you wanna
ask is, what is the format that the
| | 00:09 |
reviewer prefers?
Clearly, people like print books, but
| | 00:13 |
some actually prefer e-books, and you
wanna find out, do they want a PDF?
| | 00:18 |
Do they want a Kindle version?
Do they want an e-pub version?
| | 00:21 |
if you don't protect your book, if you're
concerned about digital rights management
| | 00:25 |
or copy protection.
This gets a little bit more tricky
| | 00:28 |
because you're gonna want to have
something like netgally there for you
| | 00:31 |
that will actually help protect the book.
And control who it's being distributed to.
| | 00:37 |
Now, Apple, they do have the coupons.
If you're the publisher through the Apple
| | 00:39 |
ibookstore, you can get those free 50
coupons.
| | 00:42 |
If you've gone to Apple through a
aggregator, like a Book Baby, then you
| | 00:47 |
will not be able to get those coupons.
So, you have to be distributing your book
| | 00:54 |
directly through Apple.
Smash words also has coupons, and you can
| | 00:58 |
also get the coupons there and hand those
out to people or email them to people.
| | 01:04 |
Gifting on Amazon is another opportunity,
you basically are buying the book for the
| | 01:08 |
person that's going to review it.
And that case is not as expensive as it
| | 01:13 |
seems because if your book is priced
between 2.99 and 9.99 you're gonna make
| | 01:16 |
70% of that anyway.
So, you're really just paying about a 30%
| | 01:22 |
charge to get them the book plus the
delivery fee, of course.
| | 01:26 |
And I've mentioned Net Galley is
something that people would use to manage
| | 01:30 |
that process of getting books that are
more protected.
| | 01:33 |
Than into hands of people who were more
likely to give them reviews.
| | 01:38 |
And then finally there's always email.
Chances are you have that e-pub file or
| | 01:41 |
the Mobi file from the developer or you
developed it yourself.
| | 01:45 |
And you can simply just email that, or
maybe it's a PDF, to the person doing the review.
| | 01:51 |
So, I want to give you nine tips to
improve the odds of a good review.
| | 01:55 |
And this isn't going to be a guarantee.
Obviously it depends on your book.
| | 01:58 |
But, number one, plan ahead.
You can't expect people to drop
| | 02:02 |
everything and read your book, especially
if you're paying the larger, professional
| | 02:06 |
reviewers to do that.
You want to make sure if you're going out
| | 02:11 |
to a book blogger that you're matching
the book to the reviewers interests.
| | 02:14 |
Don't waste your time on trying to pitch
them the wrong type of book or one that
| | 02:19 |
they're not interested in.
You're gonna want to be respectful, they
| | 02:23 |
don't owe you anything, they're taking
their time to do the review.
| | 02:27 |
You're going to want to submit the final
version.
| | 02:29 |
There's a lot of people that will produce
eBooks and be partially done, maybe not
| | 02:33 |
fully edited.
And they'll send it off and they'll get
| | 02:36 |
either a horrible review or the person
will just not review it.
| | 02:40 |
Because they don't want to review
something that hasn't been proofed or
| | 02:43 |
isn't the final copy.
We talked about sending the preferred format.
| | 02:49 |
That would be whatever that reviewer
wants, whether that's the PDF or perhaps print.
| | 02:53 |
Some will only review print.
I think another good idea is to send a synopsis.
| | 02:59 |
This is going to help that reader really
understand what your book is about.
| | 03:03 |
And when it comes time to review the book
there going to be able to rely on that
| | 03:07 |
and perhaps even use parts of it in the
review.
| | 03:11 |
So, its a chance for you to sort of prime
the pump as to what it is that is great
| | 03:14 |
about your book and give them a full
picture of it.
| | 03:18 |
You obviously wanna make it free, you
never wanna charge a reviewer for this.
| | 03:22 |
It's just a big turnoff and they're not
gonna review it.
| | 03:26 |
And you're gonna wanna accept the
outcome.
| | 03:28 |
This may be tough, but sometimes we need
to hear really what other people think of
| | 03:32 |
the book and it may not be what you're
expecting.
| | 03:35 |
So, that outcome is something you just
wanna say thank you to, and move on to
| | 03:39 |
the next reviewer.
When books were sold primarily through
| | 03:43 |
book stores, reviews were used to send
buyers shopping for books.
| | 03:47 |
And reader reviews were essentially
non-existent.
| | 03:50 |
Today, the situation is reversed.
Shoppers use reader ratings to sort
| | 03:55 |
potential purchases.
So, it's imperative that you A, have
| | 03:59 |
reviews, and B, have several.
And C, that they're honest and helpful.
| | 04:04 |
Do everything that you can to help
influence this.
| | 04:07 |
Don't wait for it to happen on its own.
| | 04:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Writing and distributing an ebook press release| 00:00 |
Whether you're publishing your first book
or your fifth book, a press release is an
| | 00:04 |
important element of your book launch.
There's really three uses.
| | 00:09 |
One is that you can share with your key
contacts.
| | 00:13 |
This single page summary of your book is
ideal for people who want to get a feel
| | 00:16 |
for the subject and how to contact you
very quickly.
| | 00:21 |
You can distribute it via newswires.
This goes out over the Internet, and
| | 00:25 |
appears in a lot of different other sites
that are looking for content.
| | 00:29 |
And perhaps, most significantly, the
traditional views is to pitch relevant
| | 00:33 |
media outlets.
And, I wanna stress the word relevant
| | 00:36 |
there, because they're gonna be much more
likely to wanna speak to you if your book
| | 00:40 |
is relevant to their audience.
Of course, the ultimate here is to engage
| | 00:46 |
a publicist.
If you have a budget to do that, that's
| | 00:50 |
gonna be 3 to $500 per month and up
depending on the publicist and the market
| | 00:53 |
you're trying to reach.
And the length of that engagement.
| | 00:57 |
But they're gonna know the media outlets
that are most ideal for your subject.
| | 01:03 |
And they're gonna know the people there
to contact.
| | 01:07 |
The media outlets know the publicists and
are much more likely to listen to them
| | 01:11 |
then they are to you.
There's really four parts to a press
| | 01:15 |
release and I've added a fifth one
because this seems more relevant in a lot
| | 01:18 |
a sites that I visit.
That offer to take your release and set
| | 01:22 |
it out over the internet and that's the
summary.
| | 01:26 |
To get some ideas about how to write a
release I have two resources that I can
| | 01:30 |
reccommend that you review.
WikiHow has a great write a press release
| | 01:35 |
article and PublicityInsider has been
doing this for several years.
| | 01:40 |
And they go through a real analysis of a
press release and what it should contain.
| | 01:46 |
But creating a keyword-rich heading is
number one.
| | 01:49 |
That headline that is going to capture
the attention of a person looking for a
| | 01:54 |
news item.
And, sometimes you might wanna use the
| | 01:58 |
Google AdWords keyword tool, in order to
identify keywords that are very popular.
| | 02:04 |
The second part of that is the actual
body.
| | 02:07 |
Who, what, when, where, why, and how.
So, answering those questions, maybe even
| | 02:13 |
having to quote within the body of your
press release.
| | 02:17 |
Followed by the boilerplate, which is
about the book or about the author, and
| | 02:21 |
then finally the contact information.
Now, I also encourage you to write a
| | 02:26 |
summary when you do this, and it's plus
or minus 300 characters.
| | 02:31 |
But a lot of sites that will take a free
press release and distribute it for you,
| | 02:34 |
are gonna ask you to prepare a summary.
So, I suggest doing that in advance, and
| | 02:40 |
each site will have a different size
restriction.
| | 02:44 |
But it's roughly a paragraph, so that the
editor could read that one paragraph, and
| | 02:48 |
determine whether or not they're gonna
read the entire release.
| | 02:53 |
Now, once you have your release ready,
and it's been proofed, you can distribute
| | 02:56 |
it to a lot of different places.
I'm just gonna suggest three places right now.
| | 03:02 |
One is PR Web.
PR Web has been in this business quite a while.
| | 03:08 |
They have a number of different packages.
And, as you see, the prices will range
| | 03:13 |
all the way from $99.00 to 499.
Depending on how it's released, how much
| | 03:19 |
media is part of that package, like video
and other attachments.
| | 03:24 |
It's something to really decide whether
or not your release merits that kind of
| | 03:28 |
an investment.
Bostick Communications is another press
| | 03:32 |
release service that's been around for
quite a while.
| | 03:35 |
And I've heard from several people that
they get good results from this.
| | 03:40 |
And the hard thing, of course, is always
trying to find the right.
| | 03:43 |
Editors to receive book releases, and
they seem to do a good job with this.
| | 03:50 |
You can see that they specialize in both,
religious press releases, as well as
| | 03:53 |
general press releases.
Their cost is $175.00.
| | 03:59 |
They have a database of over twenty
thousand book reviewers in all different
| | 04:03 |
types of media.
And they get your release out to that
| | 04:06 |
whole list which is a lot easier than you
having to do that yourself or hire
| | 04:10 |
publicists to do that.
Now if you're on a budget there's a
| | 04:15 |
number of other press release services
available.
| | 04:19 |
You could actually go to Google and type
in free press release service and you'll
| | 04:23 |
see pages and companies that will offer
this.
| | 04:27 |
I've used 24_ 7 press release for several
years and I see they're mentioned in some
| | 04:31 |
other write ups by book marketers.
And they also offer a number of paid services.
| | 04:39 |
But if you go all the way to the bottom,
and you click on, a tab called publishers.
| | 04:44 |
And then you'll see pricing and
distribution plans.
| | 04:49 |
They too have prices but at the very
bottom, is, they will do a press release
| | 04:53 |
for free, a limit of one per day.
So, they have the guidelines.
| | 04:59 |
You can't control really when it's gonna
go out, and they don't necessarily
| | 05:02 |
guarantee it's going to be posted, but
you will get it out for free.
| | 05:07 |
I've had good results from using them,
and other people recommend them as well.
| | 05:12 |
So as you see, press releases are not
just for sending to the media.
| | 05:16 |
The format and the style serves a useful
purpose, in and of itself.
| | 05:19 |
It's a way for the publisher or author to
distill the essence of the book into a
| | 05:23 |
single page of information.
It's a useful exercise for every
| | 05:28 |
publisher, and doing so will help you
prepare your metadata.
| | 05:32 |
Which is used when setting up
distribution for your book.
| | 05:35 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Networking with authors and publishers| 00:00 |
Finding and getting to know other authors
is not only healthy for your soul and sanity.
| | 00:05 |
It often contributes to discovering new
marketing opportunities.
| | 00:09 |
Publishing, and marketing specifically,
is an ongoing learning experience.
| | 00:13 |
And authors are often on the cutting edge
of eBook marketing techniques.
| | 00:17 |
So I encourage authors to join publishing
organizations or at a minimum participate
| | 00:22 |
in online firms.
In this chapter, I wanna highlight
| | 00:26 |
several the leading organizations that
cater to self publishers and small presses.
| | 00:31 |
And suggest other resources to find
groups in your own area.
| | 00:35 |
One of the oldest organizations in
independent publishing is IBPA,
| | 00:39 |
Independent Book Publishers Association.
This caters to people who have published
| | 00:45 |
one book to actually dozens per month.
What I think is relevant to small
| | 00:50 |
publishers, is their resources and
affiliate organizations.
| | 00:55 |
There's a number of regional affiliates
all around the United States, over 20 of them.
| | 01:01 |
By joining one of these, you actually get
a discount in IBPA.
| | 01:05 |
Each one of these organizations have
different meetings throughout the month.
| | 01:09 |
They have other resources of their own.
And other membership arrangements that
| | 01:14 |
you can make.
So check out this page and learn about
| | 01:17 |
organizations that might be in your area.
Another organization in some ways
| | 01:23 |
competitive with IBTA and some with the
regional affiliates is called SPAN.
| | 01:29 |
This is the Publishers Association of
North America.
| | 01:33 |
They have both a free SPANnet version as
well as a pro version.
| | 01:38 |
And usually what this is it will give you
access to forums and other resources.
| | 01:44 |
They might have discounts on different
programs and what both organizations do
| | 01:48 |
is they actually help us small publisher
with getting their book in to wider
| | 01:52 |
distribution or getting discounts to book
trade fares.
| | 01:58 |
And other catalogs that are produced in
the industry.
| | 02:02 |
So if those things are important to you
than I suggest you investigate that.
| | 02:07 |
I also wanna show you a couple more that
are more oriented to online support.
| | 02:13 |
This one is called Kboards.
What it is, is an online forum that
| | 02:17 |
anyone can join that has a lot of active
discussion on different techniques on
| | 02:22 |
marketing or formatting books and
conversion and distribution.
| | 02:27 |
And a lot of other inside knowledge that
you're not going to get through some of
| | 02:31 |
the associations.
Because with eBooks what I see is that
| | 02:35 |
authors are often the ones that are
discovering new marketing techniques.
| | 02:41 |
And they're the ones on that front line,
as I said, that really are discovering
| | 02:45 |
new ways to market.
The other thing is that you can meet
| | 02:49 |
authors this way, for example you might
have a large twitter following.
| | 02:54 |
And you might need an author who has a
large Facebook following.
| | 02:58 |
And together you might want to market
each others books.
| | 03:02 |
I look at these as a way to, reach out to
a broader audience and, get some
| | 03:06 |
insights, as to what's working and what's
not working.
| | 03:12 |
World literary cafe is another one
similar to kboards.
| | 03:17 |
I've used this before to help me announce
my free days with KDP select.
| | 03:22 |
There's a feature to do that, and you can
announce the book several days in
| | 03:25 |
advance, that it's gonna be free, and it
shows up.
| | 03:29 |
It didn't cost anything for me to do that
we have got a lot of activity, lot of
| | 03:32 |
traffic from this side.
Its great opportunity again to meet other
| | 03:37 |
authors and to get your questions
answered.
| | 03:40 |
If you haven't used meetup.com before
this is an another good tool to meet
| | 03:44 |
people in a more face to face setting if
that's more of your style for learning.
| | 03:51 |
There's all sorts of groups that are
available on all sorts of different topics.
| | 03:57 |
What you see when you go to the site is
your own city and you can put in any zip
| | 04:01 |
code that you want or the name of a city
and you can search within a certain
| | 04:05 |
radius of that location.
What we're gonna do is look at the number
| | 04:11 |
of types of meetups that are here.
And we're gonna select Literature & Writing.
| | 04:16 |
And within 25 miles of Los Angeles, you
can see there's all sorts of different
| | 04:21 |
writing groups that get together.
Now some of these don't meet on a regular basis.
| | 04:27 |
Some of them might meet on a weekly
basis.
| | 04:30 |
Some of them charge, some of them don't
charge.
| | 04:32 |
But what it is, is it gives you the
chance, as I said, to kind of narrow down
| | 04:35 |
the kinds of people that you would like
to meet.
| | 04:39 |
Perhaps if you're writing a book, then
that's a group that you might wanna join
| | 04:42 |
is a writer's group.
You can also go up and type in some keywords.
| | 04:47 |
And we're gonna type in eBooks, we'll
look at it in a date view this time.
| | 04:52 |
So, here's a number of different book
groups that meet on these days and you
| | 04:56 |
can see how active they are with
different people involved.
| | 05:02 |
Here's one with manuscript formatting, so
some of that you have to pick through to
| | 05:05 |
see what it is.
The more specific you are with your
| | 05:09 |
qualifying then the more chance you have.
Like I say you can go visit their page
| | 05:14 |
and see what sort of activity they have
and how often they meet.
| | 05:19 |
You can email the organizer of the group
too and ask specific questions.
| | 05:24 |
The point is that book marketing changes
quickly.
| | 05:27 |
The specially the techniques that relate
to eBooks.
| | 05:30 |
And by getting involved in one or more
these groups you got to stay motivated
| | 05:34 |
and no doubt discover the new methods
that you can use to market your eBook.
| | 05:40 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using ebook marketing handouts| 00:00 |
Print book authors learned long ago that
handouts like postcards, bookmarks and
| | 00:04 |
business cards were essential for book
promotion.
| | 00:08 |
It's an inexpensive way to provide
information about your book, and it helps
| | 00:12 |
people remember you.
The same is true for e-books, and perhaps
| | 00:15 |
more so.
Let's look at some of the more common
| | 00:18 |
ways to promote books using paper
collateral.
| | 00:22 |
Bookmarks are ideal because they're
obviously relevant to books.
| | 00:26 |
My suggestion is that you make it useful
by including information that someone
| | 00:30 |
would wanna keep handy.
You can also use postcards, postcards are
| | 00:34 |
great because it's the standard size.
And because it's standard, they're gonna
| | 00:40 |
be less expensive to print.
So put a big bold image on the cover with
| | 00:45 |
details on the reverse.
Business cards are another opportunity.
| | 00:51 |
And usually the back of your business
card is a good place for the cover of
| | 00:55 |
your book, or you can actually treat that
size as a small postcard.
| | 01:00 |
For many of the same reasons, because it
is so inexpensive to print, you can put a
| | 01:05 |
cover on one side and the ordering
information details on the back side and
| | 01:09 |
just use that.
Author signature cards are another
| | 01:14 |
opportunity to spread information about
your book, and it also gives them a
| | 01:19 |
chance to have your autograph.
So, you could leave space below the
| | 01:24 |
author's picture to sign your name, and
on the back of it, there's details about
| | 01:29 |
your book.
Really, any object will do, and the more
| | 01:34 |
clever, the better.
The real gating factor is this is going
| | 01:37 |
to be your budget.
The most important piece of information
| | 01:42 |
to include is how to find or order your
book.
| | 01:45 |
After that, you wanna include a cover and
if you can book information and of course
| | 01:50 |
author information as well.
The important thing is that you have
| | 01:55 |
something to have to someone when you
tell them that you have a book.
| | 01:58 |
At a minimum it can be a reference on a
business card.
| | 02:01 |
Beyond this it really depends on your
budget and the types of settings where
| | 02:04 |
you'll be promoting your book.
| | 02:07 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Ebook Launch Fundamentals: Predistribution Planning and TasksBeginning with a quality file| 00:00 |
Whether you created the e-book files
yourself, or paid someone to create them
| | 00:04 |
for you, performing quality control at
this stage will save time and reduce
| | 00:08 |
frustration when it comes time to add
your files to each online store.
| | 00:13 |
The Apple iBook Store is particularly
finicky when it comes to submitting an
| | 00:17 |
e-book file.
But even if the store accepts your book,
| | 00:21 |
it doesn't mean you're home free.
Each store reserves the right to remove
| | 00:25 |
your book from their e-shelves, and I've
heard cases where it happened due to poor quality.
| | 00:31 |
More often than not, it has to do with
something like tables or formatting or
| | 00:35 |
reading your book with a black
background.
| | 00:39 |
Tables are something that's a little
newer, and some of the older devices have
| | 00:43 |
trouble supporting that.
You'll see some e-books will use an image
| | 00:47 |
instead of the actual formal table
command in order to organize the information.
| | 00:53 |
Reading on black backgrounds is a
relatively new issue.
| | 00:57 |
Each of the e-readers will allow some
change be the user to read on, say, a
| | 01:00 |
black background, or a white background,
or sepia.
| | 01:05 |
And if the book was programmed with black
letters, and the reader wants to read it
| | 01:09 |
on a black background, they can't read
any letters obviously.
| | 01:14 |
Checking an ePub to make sure it is valid
is as simple as visiting this website.
| | 01:21 |
You click Browse, the name of the file
that you're going to validate, and then
| | 01:25 |
the validation button.
Takes a few moments, depending on the
| | 01:31 |
size of the file.
It does have to be less than ten
| | 01:34 |
megabytes for you to validate it.
So this validated fine, but let's say
| | 01:39 |
that it didn't.
The one resource I can point you to is on
| | 01:43 |
Google, and they have a number of error
messages and the probable fixes, and a
| | 01:48 |
second resource is on Smashwords.
They talk about how to fix ePub errors
| | 01:54 |
and all the different details that go
into that including common reasons for
| | 01:57 |
the ePub check failure.
You have to decide how much time you're
| | 02:02 |
willing to invest in validating a file.
Since you can't bypass this step, you can
| | 02:07 |
either fix it if you're technically
inclined, reconvert the file, send it
| | 02:10 |
back to who created it for you or skip
the Apple iBook store, because you're not
| | 02:14 |
gonna get it in there without having it
validated.
| | 02:19 |
The file will probably be fine for other
ePub stores like BNN and Kobo.
| | 02:24 |
Again, fixing any errors now will help
reduce the chance of getting a bad review
| | 02:28 |
due to quality and just as importantly
it'll make the account setup process go
| | 02:31 |
that much more smoothly.
| | 02:35 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| ISBN requirements for ebooks| 00:01 |
An ISBN number is a unique identifier for
a specific book in a specific format from
| | 00:05 |
a specific publisher.
Every country in the world has a single
| | 00:10 |
supplier of numbers.
And in the United States, that company is
| | 00:15 |
RR Bowker.
Let's look at the key facts and then talk
| | 00:19 |
about how they apply to ebooks.
So with ebooks in the United States,
| | 00:23 |
there's really only two major vendors
that require an ISBN or ISBN number and
| | 00:27 |
that's Sony and Apple.
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Cobo, Google do
| | 00:34 |
not require an ISBN number.
It also cannot be reused once it's assigned.
| | 00:41 |
So, even if you used it a few years ago
for a print book and you're no longer
| | 00:44 |
publishing that book, you cannot use it
again.
| | 00:48 |
That's because you need one ISBN number
for each medium.
| | 00:52 |
So, if you produce an audio book, a print
book, an ebook, and maybe a video based
| | 00:57 |
upon that book, each one of them require
an ISBN number.
| | 01:02 |
That makes it easy for stores to order
the right book in the right format.
| | 01:08 |
You also have to get a new ISBN number if
you do any kind of major changes to the book.
| | 01:14 |
And major is anything besides a spelling
correction or punctuation correction.
| | 01:19 |
And finally, as I said, Bowker is the
sole source of ISBN numbers.
| | 01:25 |
If you don't buy it from Bowker, you are
not listed as the publisher.
| | 01:30 |
That doesn't mean much legally, because
there's a number of stores that you
| | 01:34 |
distribute through, or you can print a
book with.
| | 01:39 |
And they will supply an ISBN number.
In some systems, it'll show them as the publisher.
| | 01:45 |
And that's meaningless from a legal
standpoint.
| | 01:48 |
But as far as Bowker is concerned they're
listed as the publisher.
| | 01:52 |
So, if that's important to you, then you
need to buy those ISBN numbers from Bowker.
| | 01:58 |
So a lot of people will say "What's the
benefit of an ISBN number?".
| | 02:01 |
As I just said, if you want to be listed
as the publisher, than you really need to
| | 02:05 |
buy them.
There is a certain amount of professional
| | 02:08 |
status that goes with having your
publishing name associated with an ISBN number.
| | 02:14 |
If you have an ISBN number, then stores
who sell books or libraries or academic
| | 02:18 |
institutions will know about it.
It will show up in a catalog.
| | 02:23 |
As I said, that's the only way to get
into the Sony and Apple stores, and
| | 02:26 |
there's really no downside other than the
cost.
| | 02:30 |
So, let's say you've made a decision
that's you're going to buy ISBN numbers.
| | 02:35 |
You're going to want to visit
MyIdentifiers.com that's the Bowker service.
| | 02:39 |
It's set up to sell the ISBNs.
And as you can see, the pricing's kind of interesting.
| | 02:44 |
You can buy one for $125, or if you're
willing to buy 1,000 of them, you can get
| | 02:48 |
them for $1 a piece.
That's why you see so many companies that
| | 02:53 |
are willing to resell them.
Or to make them part of a purchase.
| | 02:56 |
'Cuz they really want to make money from
printing your book, or helping you
| | 03:00 |
distribute your ebook.
After setting up an account, then you'll
| | 03:05 |
purchase your ISBN numbers.
And you'll come over to the My Account
| | 03:08 |
section, and you'll go to Manage your
ISBN numbers.
| | 03:13 |
This is going to be a two-step process.
In step one, you're going to get the ISBN
| | 03:19 |
number, and you see it here, ISBN 13.
And you'll want to take that number,
| | 03:24 |
either put it in your eBook or you'll
make a note of it, and use it as part of
| | 03:27 |
your metadata.
At this stage you probably want to assign
| | 03:32 |
a title to it as well.
You might put in the name of your book.
| | 03:37 |
But the important thing is after you
selected the number and assigned it to a book.
| | 03:42 |
You're gonna want to return here and
complete all the information once the
| | 03:46 |
book is published.
So, after you've purchased your ISBN
| | 03:51 |
numbers, one or several, you'll come over
to your account and you'll assign a title
| | 03:55 |
to that.
Making note, as I said, of the ISBN number.
| | 04:01 |
And here's where you will fill in all the
information that it's asking.
| | 04:04 |
The title, sub-title, descriptions.
You'll upload a cover image.
| | 04:09 |
Basic things you would expect.
If you put in full text of your book,
| | 04:13 |
it'll also be indexed and used in search
engines.
| | 04:18 |
That's not the kinda search engines that
you and I think of.
| | 04:21 |
But as people are looking for books, this
helps in what's called the discovery
| | 04:24 |
process for your book.
There's a contributor section where
| | 04:29 |
you'll add all the different contributers
to your book, such as the photographer, a
| | 04:33 |
narrator, an editor.
I think one of the more important things
| | 04:37 |
I want to point out is your format and
size.
| | 04:40 |
So the medium, you have your Audio,
Digital and E-Books, you're gonna select
| | 04:44 |
an E-Book here and you're going to select
Electronic book text and you're gonna
| | 04:49 |
come down to File Type.
Technically, you need an ISPN number for
| | 04:54 |
every file format.
As you see here, there's an ePub listed.
| | 04:59 |
you go a little further down and you'll
see Moby Pocket, which is the full name
| | 05:04 |
of the Moby file used by Kindle.
Oddly enough, there is also a Kindle name
| | 05:09 |
up here.
My suggestion is to select multiple formats.
| | 05:15 |
So that you'll have one ISBN number for
your ebook, regardless of what store it's
| | 05:19 |
sold in.
Then, complete the rest of the items on
| | 05:22 |
this as well before proceeding to the
sales and pricing information.
| | 05:28 |
If you plan to produce several books in
different formats, you should give
| | 05:32 |
serious consideration to buying a supply
of ISBNs.
| | 05:35 |
This is another example of a metadata
element that will help bring recognition
| | 05:39 |
to your company and to your books.
| | 05:41 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Securing copyright and why it's important| 00:00 |
You may have heard that your book is
automatically covered by copyright as
| | 00:03 |
soon as it's published, or that you could
do what's called the poor man's
| | 00:06 |
copyright, and mail a copy of your book
to yourself.
| | 00:10 |
Both of these statements are true.
Just try protecting your rights if
| | 00:12 |
someone starts selling it on their own.
Here's three reasons why you should register.
| | 00:18 |
One, is as a deterrent.
If people know it's registered, they're
| | 00:21 |
less likely to use it.
The second reason is to stop
| | 00:25 |
infringement, this is a legal issue, and
we'll get into that in just a moment.
| | 00:29 |
In the third reason, this is sometimes
overlooked, is it creates an asset.
| | 00:33 |
So, if it's copyrighted, that is an asset
of your business or of your profession.
| | 00:38 |
In the basics of copyright, as we said,
if a book has been published, it is
| | 00:42 |
automatically protected.
But the key is if you're going to claim
| | 00:47 |
infringement, in order to collect damages
and attorney fees for your book, it has
| | 00:51 |
to be registered.
And there's a period of time that you
| | 00:56 |
must have it registered before you take
that action.
| | 01:00 |
If you file it electronically, it's $35,
or in writing, $65.
| | 01:05 |
The expensive part of this comes into
play, is when you have to expedite that,
| | 01:09 |
because there has been a perceived
copyright infringement.
| | 01:13 |
Then you pay far higher fees in order to
get registered quickly.
| | 01:17 |
To register your book, you wanna visit
copyright.gov.
| | 01:22 |
Copyright.gov really applies to any
intellectual property, be it a written
| | 01:28 |
work, music or video files, if your are
film maker.
| | 01:33 |
This information is important, but as
authors what we want to do is visit the
| | 01:36 |
part that's called Copyright Basics.
It's a 12 page PDF that you can download
| | 01:41 |
and read, and it explains the whole
copyright process in a lot more detail.
| | 01:49 |
Once you've read that document and
explored the site a little, you'll wanna
| | 01:53 |
go over to the registration Click on
this, and this will explain it in current terms.
| | 01:59 |
It is important to understand how long it
takes in order to get this information
| | 02:03 |
back, if you haven't registered and
you're having to take legal action.
| | 02:08 |
And down here, it does have a note about
current processing times.
| | 02:12 |
Another place to click here is called eCO
acceptable file types.
| | 02:16 |
This will explain what are the acceptable
file types that you could submit for
| | 02:21 |
copyright, if you're not submitting a
paper copy.
| | 02:25 |
And if you go down the page, you'll see
under text, that they will accept a
| | 02:29 |
Microsoft Word document, and there's two
formats, doc and docx, as well as a PDF format.
| | 02:38 |
And Rich Text document format, is another
one that's a universal file type, and of
| | 02:41 |
course there's Word Perfect, and
Microsoft Works, and Text Files.
| | 02:46 |
So there's several formats here that you
could submit.
| | 02:48 |
You cannot submit an ePub file or a Mobi
file.
| | 02:51 |
So you'll have to go back to the source
document that was used to create your eBook.
| | 02:57 |
So, once you have your file type that
you're going to submit, you're gonna want
| | 03:00 |
to return to the main screen and click on
eCO login.
| | 03:03 |
It'll explain some security and some
privacy information, and continue on to eCO.
| | 03:10 |
And this is the screen that you will
register for a free account with the
| | 03:14 |
copyright office, or use an existing
account if you have one, and continue on
| | 03:18 |
to fill out the information to register
your work.
| | 03:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cataloging in print| 00:00 |
The purpose of the CIP, or Cataloging In
Publication Number, is to inform U.S.,
| | 00:05 |
libraries of the future availability of a
book.
| | 00:09 |
In the days when books took years to
produce, this helped libraries plan their
| | 00:13 |
collection activities.
But are they relevant to today's eBook publishers?
| | 00:18 |
Here's three questions you wanna ask
yourself.
| | 00:21 |
Has your book been published?
If it has, then it's not eligible for a
| | 00:25 |
CIP number.
Is it self-published?
| | 00:28 |
In other words, was it paid for or
subsidized by individual authors?
| | 00:33 |
These are not eligible for a Catalog in
Publication number.
| | 00:36 |
And finally, perhaps most importantly,
is, do your books have an established
| | 00:40 |
history of being acquired by libraries,
since that's the main audience?
| | 00:45 |
Let's visit their website, and look at a
few more details.
| | 00:49 |
Before you apply for a free cataloging
and publication program number, I suggest
| | 00:54 |
visiting their website and clicking this
link, learn more about the program.
| | 01:00 |
Here, you'll learn about the purpose of
it and, more importantly, what is
| | 01:04 |
eligible for the program and, clicking
this link here, what is ineligible for
| | 01:09 |
the program.
And this will show you categories of
| | 01:14 |
material that are ineligible for a CIP.
If you go down the page, you'll see a
| | 01:20 |
section called Formats.
You'll notice that eBooks are not
| | 01:26 |
eligible, unless your eBook has an ISBN
that is included as part of the printed book.
| | 01:33 |
So if you're doing a print book, and
there's an eBook equivalent of that, that
| | 01:37 |
has an ISBN, then it would be eligible
for the CIP program.
| | 01:42 |
If you're producing only Ebooks, you
probably don't need to be concerned about this.
| | 01:47 |
But if you have a long lead time print
edition that you plan to market to
| | 01:50 |
libraries, you may wanna look into
getting this number in advance of your
| | 01:54 |
publishing date.
| | 01:56 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Is digital rights management (DRM) and copy protection right for you?| 00:00 |
Deciding whether or not to try to prevent
your book from being shared with others
| | 00:04 |
is a subjective decision.
DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is
| | 00:09 |
copy protection, and with e-books it's a
controversial attempt to limit sharing.
| | 00:15 |
There's pros and cons worth considering.
Its important to understand that DRM is
| | 00:21 |
not 100% effective.
It can be broken.
| | 00:24 |
It also limits what people can do with
your book.
| | 00:27 |
Publishers like it because it protects
their work but readers really don't like
| | 00:32 |
it because they can't take that ebook
that they bought from Barnes & Noble And
| | 00:37 |
change it into a format that can be read
on a Kindle if they decide to buy a
| | 00:41 |
Kindle or later move it to an Apple iPad.
If you do decide to use DRM for your
| | 00:49 |
books, you should know that the DRM
application works on a store-by-store basis.
| | 00:56 |
After you've submitted your book to the
store they apply a special rapper around
| | 01:01 |
it that has it worked with only their
store and its on the store by store basis
| | 01:06 |
so you will have one type of security
protection on Apple iBook store Versus
| | 01:10 |
the Kindle store versus Barnes and Noble.
And then there's other stores like
| | 01:18 |
smashwords and then private stores like
O'Reilly who won't apply DRM at all.
| | 01:24 |
So if you want to distribute your book
through one of those stores, you can't
| | 01:27 |
put DRM on it.
Also, it can't be reversed.
| | 01:32 |
So once you've applied it, then you can't
later take it off of your book without
| | 01:36 |
republishing the book.
Another key point is that if you're going
| | 01:41 |
to sell your e-book from your website,
whether that's free or for sale You'll
| | 01:45 |
never be able to apply a copy protection
scheme to a Kindle mobi file, you have to
| | 01:50 |
send those books to Amazon in order to
have DRM applied.
| | 01:57 |
It is possible to sell or distribute an
e-book that's an E-pub file from your
| | 02:01 |
website, but you'll have to have special
software in order to do that.
| | 02:07 |
There is no a right or wrong answer, but
you do wanna be intntional about your choice.
| | 02:13 |
Changing your mind later is an option,
but you'll have to go through that
| | 02:15 |
publishing process a second time in order
to reverse your decision.
| | 02:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Ebook cover formatting| 00:00 |
Formatting an eBook cover is simply a
matter of producing a file that meets the
| | 00:04 |
size specifications of each store.
This video won't help you design an ebook cover.
| | 00:10 |
But it will identify the sizing
instructions and key differences between
| | 00:13 |
each retailer.
First let's look at what they have in common.
| | 00:18 |
Every store is going to have a
requirement that the file you submit has
| | 00:23 |
a color mode of RGB.
That means red, green, blue.
| | 00:28 |
The other color mode is CMYK, which is
used for printing.
| | 00:31 |
So, anything that's going to display on a
computer terminal is gonna be RGB.
| | 00:37 |
The second thing you need to know is what
type of files you need to submit.
| | 00:42 |
They all accept a JPEG file.
It'll work with all of the stores.
| | 00:45 |
I recommend you stay with JPEG.
And where they all differ slightly is in
| | 00:50 |
the dimensions.
When I prepare an eBook cover file, I
| | 00:53 |
actually create two files because there
are some differences between what you can
| | 00:58 |
do with a Kindle and an Apple and a Nook
file.
| | 01:03 |
So, I make one that has a cover between
750 pixels and 2,000 pixels.
| | 01:09 |
And another one that is the smallest axis
measuring 1,400 pixels.
| | 01:15 |
Let's go through each of the four major
stores.
| | 01:18 |
And I'll show you where to find this
information and what it currently says,
| | 01:22 |
because this information can change over
time.
| | 01:26 |
The measurement you see here are for the
Amazon Kindle.
| | 01:29 |
And as I said, these are the current
measurements.
| | 01:32 |
And they accept both a TIF and a JPEG
with the best quality of that 1563 pixels
| | 01:37 |
on the shortest side and 2500 pixels on
the longest side.
| | 01:42 |
You can have less than that.
But you always want your cover to look as
| | 01:46 |
good as it can possibly look on the
screen.
| | 01:49 |
Because that's what's gonna attract
people to your book.
| | 01:52 |
So to find this information on your own,
what you wanna do is already have a
| | 01:55 |
Kindle direct publishing account set up.
And then, when you're set up in that
| | 02:01 |
account, you could come over to the Help
screen.
| | 02:04 |
And when you're in Help, you have all
these different help topics.
| | 02:08 |
One of them is called Creating a Catalog
Cover image.
| | 02:12 |
And here's where you're going to find the
specific information and current
| | 02:16 |
information for the Amazon Kindle cover.
The Barnes and Noble's Nook cover
| | 02:22 |
formatting is slightly different.
They ask that your file size stay between
| | 02:27 |
5 kilobytes and 2 megabytes.
And that you have to have at least 750
| | 02:32 |
pixels on both height and width but they
recommand 1,400 pixels.
| | 02:37 |
Let's find this information on nookpress
now incase it changes in the future you
| | 02:40 |
will know where to find it.
After logging in into nookpress your
| | 02:44 |
desktop will look something like this.
You wanna go to the support section and
| | 02:50 |
go down to where it says adding a cover
image.
| | 02:55 |
Here they explain it a little more fully
and if there's any changes that's where
| | 02:58 |
you would find it.
I'm going to be showing you where this
| | 03:03 |
lives in the pubit platform and keeping
in mind it may say nookpress as well as
| | 03:07 |
they go through a transition to a
different brand.
| | 03:12 |
You're gonna want to go down to the FAQ
section, and here you're gonna want to
| | 03:16 |
click on Add Edit a Title.
And then you're gonna want to go down to
| | 03:21 |
the are there any restrictions on the
cover image.
| | 03:25 |
And you click that, and you can see that
the file has to be a JPEG between 5 and 2
| | 03:30 |
megabytes and between 750 pixels and
2,000 pixels.
| | 03:37 |
Apple iBooks has a slightly different
requirement.
| | 03:40 |
They suggest PNG or JPEG file with at
least 1400 pixels on the smaller axis.
| | 03:47 |
So the other one they don't have a
specification for, nor do they specify as
| | 03:50 |
a size limit.
For the Apple information, it's currently
| | 03:54 |
contained in a pdf file, which we see
here.
| | 03:57 |
It's a 58-page file.
And if you'll go to page 38, you'll see
| | 04:02 |
there's a section called Specifying Cover
Art Assets.
| | 04:07 |
And as you page down the screen, you'll
see, number 2 here has the specific
| | 04:11 |
information in regards to the number of
pixels on the smaller axis.
| | 04:17 |
And they add a little bit more
information about the dimensions, and
| | 04:21 |
they want the largest pixel pixel
dimension possible with the highest resolution.
| | 04:27 |
There is no file size limitation.
Kobo Books is the last store I wanna talk about.
| | 04:34 |
The only thing mentioned by Kobo that's
different than the other stores is they
| | 04:38 |
wanna have you keep your file to one
megabyte or less.
| | 04:42 |
I suggest using the Kindle cover if it
would be accepted, or possibly the Apple cover.
| | 04:48 |
And you'll know that when you go to
upload the file, it'll reject it if
| | 04:51 |
there's a problem with the cover.
Let's take a look at their user guide to
| | 04:54 |
see what they say specifically and that
you'll know where to find it if that
| | 04:58 |
information changes in the future.
The Kobo writing life user guide is 40
| | 05:04 |
pages in length.
It's a PDF file, and currently on page 19
| | 05:08 |
they have information about the cover
images.
| | 05:13 |
And you see here they also accept a PNG
file as well as a JPEG and specify the
| | 05:17 |
size limitation.
Like the other topics in this chapter,
| | 05:23 |
sizing your cover correctly should be
done before you begin the store setup process.
| | 05:29 |
Saving each cover with the name of the
store will allow you to take advantage of
| | 05:33 |
each store's maximum cover dimensions and
help speed the process of uploading your book.
| | 05:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Ebook royalties| 00:00 |
Understanding royalties will help you
price your book for maximum profit.
| | 00:05 |
Unfortunately, each store has a slightly
different structure, which must also be understood.
| | 00:11 |
And keep in mind that the price you
charge must be the same for each store.
| | 00:15 |
If one store finds out that you're
pricing your book lower in another, they
| | 00:19 |
have the right to match that price.
So what are royalties based on?
| | 00:25 |
They're based on the price of your book,
where it's sold and sometimes the size of
| | 00:29 |
your ebook file.
Let's take a look at each store
| | 00:33 |
individually, because they all differ
slightly.
| | 00:36 |
Amazon has two pricing structures.
As you see here, looking at the help page
| | 00:41 |
in your Kindle direct publishing account,
their list price requirements are 35% and
| | 00:47 |
70% royalties based upon minimum list
prices.
| | 00:53 |
The 35% royalty is for books that are
priced between 99 cents and $2.99.
| | 01:00 |
And it depends on the size of your file.
So less than three megabytes, 99 cents is
| | 01:07 |
gonna be the lowest price.
And then $1.99 for three to 10MB.
| | 01:13 |
And if you have a file that's larger than
ten, you have to price it at $2.99.
| | 01:18 |
The 70% royalty is for books that are
priced between $2.99 and $9.99.
| | 01:27 |
These royalties can also vary by the
country that the book has been sold in.
| | 01:32 |
The list you see here shows what those
royalties are on a country by country basis.
| | 01:37 |
Another area in the help section that you
would find useful, is also under legal
| | 01:42 |
and its down here and its called the
pricing page.
| | 01:46 |
The most important difference between
Amazon and all other stores, is that
| | 01:50 |
Amazon will charge a delivery fee for a
royalty paid in the 70% range.
| | 01:56 |
So, a book that is priced between $2.99
and $9.99, and sold in the United States
| | 02:03 |
with a 70% royalty is subject to a
download fee of $0.15 per MB.
| | 02:11 |
So if your book is 3 MB in size, they're
going to subtract 45 cents from your royalty.
| | 02:20 |
Amazon is unique in all the stores.
They're the only one that charges this
| | 02:24 |
and, as you see here, their delivery cost
is spelled out on a country by country
| | 02:28 |
basis, with the currency of that country
used to define what that charge is per MB.
| | 02:35 |
There won't be a charge for delivery if
your book is priced below $2.99 or above $9.99.
| | 02:44 |
Fortunately Barnes and Noble royalty
rates are more straightforward.
| | 02:49 |
After logging into your account, it'll
look something like this.
| | 02:52 |
You'll find the support Option up above,
and right here is pricing and payment terms.
| | 02:58 |
With Barnes & Noble Nook books, these are
sold in two markets, United States and
| | 03:03 |
Great Britain.
And you can price your book between 99
| | 03:08 |
cents and a 199.99, and there's the two
royalty options, 65% and 40.
| | 03:15 |
So like Amazon, it is between 2.99 and
9.99 that you get 65%.
| | 03:21 |
There is no charge for delivery, and you
have a higher royalty at the band that's
| | 03:27 |
below 2.99 and above 9.99.
So you get 40% there.
| | 03:32 |
And a little further down, you can see
they have some other examples as well as
| | 03:37 |
requirements in terms of how you have to
price your ebook.
| | 03:42 |
Apple approaches the royalty question a
little differently.
| | 03:45 |
In fact they call it a commission.
When you sell on the Apple site, you have
| | 03:50 |
to have an account called iTunes Connect.
And in your iTunes Connect account, in
| | 03:55 |
your contracts, tax and banking section,
you'll have your own version of a contract.
| | 04:02 |
My version may be different than your
version, so what you'll wanna do after
| | 04:05 |
you sign up and get your account, is to
go in and actually read this contract.
| | 04:12 |
What you'll see is that they will specify
out what that commission is paid for each
| | 04:16 |
sale depending on the country where that
occurs.
| | 04:21 |
For one thing, they take a 30% commission
on all sales.
| | 04:25 |
So you receive 70% of the sale price.
They also have other requirements.
| | 04:31 |
Like, if you have a print book, then your
ebook has to be priced within a certain range.
| | 04:36 |
That's spelled out in exhibit C in my
contract.
| | 04:41 |
Also when you price your book, it has to
end in dot nine nine.
| | 04:45 |
So ninety nine sense.
Again, that's in mine.
| | 04:48 |
And each country has a little different
rule.
| | 04:51 |
Like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Kobo also has a split royalty rate at 45%
| | 04:57 |
and 70%.
But it also depends on how you price it.
| | 05:02 |
When you look at their manual, they'll
explain that, when you put the list price
| | 05:05 |
in, they will set the royalty rate for
you.
| | 05:08 |
While they don't specify the price that
you have to charge in order to get the
| | 05:12 |
70% royalty.
I can tell you that as of now, that price
| | 05:17 |
is $1.99 to $12.99 to get a 70% royalty.
$1.98 and below and $13.00 and above is a
| | 05:24 |
45% royalty, and you also set that on a
store by store basis.
| | 05:31 |
After Amazon and Apple, Kobo is the
largest international retailer of eBooks.
| | 05:38 |
The important thing to remember is that
royalties depend on the price of your book.
| | 05:42 |
Be sure to fully understand Amazon's
policies, and if you're selling in the
| | 05:46 |
Apple store read your contract terms.
After that once you pick a price you must
| | 05:51 |
use that price in all stores
| | 05:53 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The art of pricing ebooks| 00:00 |
Like DRM or choosing a cover, pricing
your eBook is one of those decisions that
| | 00:04 |
everyone will have an opinion about.
But I'd be wary of taking those opinions
| | 00:09 |
too seriously, if the person offering it
didn't ask me a few questions first.
| | 00:14 |
The first question I ask someone when
they say how much should I charge, is
| | 00:17 |
what their goal is.
Is their goal to make money?
| | 00:20 |
Is it to enhance their career or
authority?
| | 00:23 |
Is it for their family, for posterity's
sake?
| | 00:26 |
Are they really trying to get a message
that they have, out into a broader
| | 00:29 |
audience to make a difference.
Because if you wanna do that, you're
| | 00:33 |
probably not gonna charge that much.
The more you charge, the more friction
| | 00:37 |
there is.
The more the people have to think, do I
| | 00:39 |
really want this?
Can I afford it?
| | 00:42 |
Am I gonna read it?
A second question I ask is, are you a
| | 00:45 |
first time author or an established
author?
| | 00:48 |
If you're an established author, then
pricing at least one of your books very
| | 00:53 |
low or free, especially if it's a series,
will introduce new readers to your other books.
| | 00:59 |
If you're a first time author, and you're
charging over $5, maybe $10, I have no
| | 01:03 |
idea if you're going to be any good.
It's not just how much I'm gonna spend,
| | 01:09 |
it's the time I'm gonna take reading your
book, to decide whether or not I'm wanna
| | 01:13 |
finish it.
And finally a third question is, what do
| | 01:17 |
competitive books cost?
If you right a book that's, say, very
| | 01:21 |
short, you should be comparing that book
to other books that are short.
| | 01:26 |
There is some thinking that you might
price a book based upon the size of the book.
| | 01:31 |
Its not scientific, its so an art, but
you should compare your book to books of
| | 01:35 |
similar size, and maybe authors of
similar notoriety.
| | 01:39 |
That's a good gauge.
Another consideration is the royalty.
| | 01:44 |
This is very important.
A lot of people will base their price on
| | 01:47 |
what Amazon pays in royalties.
They know that $2.98 and below, they're
| | 01:52 |
going to get 35%, and then from $2.99 to
$9.99, they're going to get 70%.
| | 01:59 |
There is some evidence that the lower the
price, especially 0, that's going to
| | 02:03 |
introduce people to a new author, or to
the work of an established author that
| | 02:08 |
they may have not seen before.
There's a lot of search engines out there
| | 02:15 |
that specialize in identifying, low or
free books on Amazon, and then presenting
| | 02:19 |
those in mailing lists or on Facebook or
Twitter.
| | 02:24 |
If you get your price into that low
range, you have a greater chance of
| | 02:27 |
exposing your work to a much larger
audience.
| | 02:32 |
That's the logic of KDP Select, which is
the subject of another video.
| | 02:37 |
But the idea there is, that if you can
offer your book, for free, or at a very
| | 02:40 |
low price, for two or three days, and
expose it to a lot of people.
| | 02:45 |
It gives you a greater opportunity to get
more reviews for your book, as well as
| | 02:49 |
sell more books after it comes off of
sale.
| | 02:53 |
The final point I want to make, is that
your book price does not need to be static.
| | 02:58 |
With eBooks it can change, as often as
you want it to change.
| | 03:02 |
Now you don't want to have it change
every few days or even every week.
| | 03:05 |
You might want to let it sit for three
weeks, and then increase the price.
| | 03:09 |
I experienced this myself, where I had a
book I was selling for $2.99, and I
| | 03:13 |
thought I would increase it by a dollar
every three weeks, to see if it would
| | 03:16 |
have an impact on sales.
And what I found is, that the price that
| | 03:22 |
I'm charging now, which is $5.99, is the
price that people are willing to pay for
| | 03:26 |
that book.
If I took it to $6.99, the sales really
| | 03:29 |
dropped off.
And it didn't really increase if I
| | 03:33 |
charged $4.99 or $3.99.
So I've left it at $5.99, and I've
| | 03:38 |
received royalty on that amount.
So get yourself out of the traditional
| | 03:44 |
pricing mindset that you have to pick a
price and live with it.
| | 03:47 |
You don't.
Change it, experiment.
| | 03:50 |
It's not like a print book.
Price is really a merchandising tool, as
| | 03:53 |
far as eBooks are concerned.
| | 03:56 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing your metadata in advance| 00:00 |
Metadata is often described as
information about information.
| | 00:04 |
You and I know it as the title of your
book, the price, description, categories, etcetera.
| | 00:10 |
Everything that describes your book.
It's actually very similar to SEO, or
| | 00:14 |
Search Engine Optimization for websites.
Some of this information you'll see in a
| | 00:19 |
book description on Amazon or Barnes and
Noble.
| | 00:23 |
Other times, it'll be behind the scenes,
so to speak.
| | 00:26 |
You really won't notice it.
Things like DRM or territory selling rights.
| | 00:33 |
Whether the customer sees the
information, or it's invisible to them,
| | 00:36 |
it's still metadata and it's very
important to your book, and its ability
| | 00:40 |
to be sold.
With Metadata there's several best practices.
| | 00:46 |
First I recommend that you research and
prepare ahead of time.
| | 00:50 |
Don't just pull up the sales page on
Amazon to enter your books information,
| | 00:54 |
and make it up as you go.
You really want to be consistent across
| | 00:58 |
all the different stores with that
information.
| | 01:02 |
So, that means that you research it, you
write it down and your are consistent.
| | 01:07 |
You don't have different descriptions for
different stores.
| | 01:11 |
Also keep in mind that some stores have
slightly different requirements.
| | 01:14 |
For example, on Amazon you can identify
two categories.
| | 01:19 |
On Barnes & Noble, there's five
categories.
| | 01:21 |
You wanna have that prepared ahead of
time, and in priority order.
| | 01:26 |
Two elements of metadata are very
important, I think, that you research
| | 01:30 |
ahead of time.
One are keywords, and the other one is descriptions.
| | 01:34 |
As we talked about in the video on the
Google Keyword Tool, you have an
| | 01:38 |
opportunity to look up words and find how
other people are using them, and if
| | 01:42 |
there's alternatives for those.
In each of the stores' cases, you have a
| | 01:48 |
set number of keywords that you can use
or phrases.
| | 01:52 |
Again this varies.
Barnes and Noble, it's 100 characters,
| | 01:56 |
and on Amazon, it is seven words or
phrases, separated by commas.
| | 02:01 |
So you want to have that researched.
Descriptions you want to use the words in
| | 02:06 |
the description, that people are
searching for most frequently for a book
| | 02:09 |
like yours.
Again, this is where that Keyword Tool
| | 02:13 |
will really help you identify words that
maybe a bit more popular than what you're
| | 02:18 |
thinking about.
Metadata isn't just used in where you're
| | 02:22 |
listing your book for sale either.
You use it in other online book stores,
| | 02:27 |
perhaps in your own website.
Use it in your marketing materials and
| | 02:31 |
marketing programs.
You're press releases for example, at the
| | 02:34 |
bottom, you might say about the book,
that's actually information that should
| | 02:38 |
be the same as or very similar to, what
you're using to describe your book in the
| | 02:42 |
online stores.
Or the selling page on your website, for
| | 02:47 |
the description tags on those pages, they
should reflect the same wording that
| | 02:52 |
you're using.
And then last, something called books in print.
| | 02:57 |
We've talked about your ISBN number, and
when you purchase and ISBN number from
| | 03:01 |
Bowker, you should return to your
MyIdentifers.com account ,and enter that
| | 03:05 |
information into Books in Print.
If you didn't buy an ISBN number, because
| | 03:12 |
it's not required for Amazon, Barnes and
Noble or Kobo, then this is something you
| | 03:17 |
don't need to worry about.
But if you did buy one, it's important
| | 03:22 |
that you go back there, because this is
how librarians and bookstores search for
| | 03:26 |
other books.
So fill that information out, with the
| | 03:30 |
same information that you entered into
your template.
| | 03:34 |
This is arguably one of the most
important marketing exercises you can
| | 03:37 |
complete, prior to making your book
available for sale.
| | 03:41 |
Download my free questionnaire to help
you prepare the key elements, before you
| | 03:45 |
begin the videos in chapter five.
| | 03:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Direct DistributionIntroduction to direct distribution| 00:00 |
When it comes to selling print books, the
goal for every publisher is to have their
| | 00:04 |
book for sale in 100% of the available
stores.
| | 00:09 |
That means using companies that
specialize in distributing books to
| | 00:12 |
thousands of bookstores.
Distributing ebooks is totally different
| | 00:16 |
than distributing print books.
For one thing, there are far fewer
| | 00:20 |
ebookstores than bookstores.
Another reason is that just a handful of
| | 00:25 |
stores sell the vast majority of all
e-books.
| | 00:29 |
There are two ways to get your ebook into
an ebookstore.
| | 00:33 |
One is through an aggregator, sometimes
called a third-party distributor.
| | 00:37 |
We're gonna talk about them in Chapter 6.
In this chapter, we're going to talk
| | 00:41 |
about direct to retailer distribution.
Direct distribution is when a publisher
| | 00:46 |
or author have a ebook to a specific
store.
| | 00:50 |
They either do this themselves or they
may hire someone to do it for them on
| | 00:53 |
their behalf.
It's a two-party relationship between the
| | 00:58 |
publisher and the retailer.
It's important to remember that it
| | 01:02 |
doesn't have to be either/or.
You can choose, for example, to
| | 01:05 |
distribute direct to Amazon, Kobo, Apple,
and Barnes and Noble and use an
| | 01:09 |
aggregator to reach all other stores.
The point is that you have a choice.
| | 01:16 |
And with direct distribution, you're not
locked into long-term commitments.
| | 01:20 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) from Amazon| 00:00 |
Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP is a
portal where you will make your book
| | 00:05 |
available to Kindle devices and free for
Kindle reading apps.
| | 00:10 |
Anyone can set up an account and there is
no charge.
| | 00:14 |
Your account can be an extension of your
regular Amazon shopping account or it can
| | 00:18 |
be a new email and password.
Now I've logged into my account and the
| | 00:22 |
first thing I wanna do is show you a few
key areas that are gonna be helpful as
| | 00:25 |
you go forward.
One is gonna be this Help button over here.
| | 00:30 |
This can take you to specific help on
every aspect of Kindle publishing.
| | 00:37 |
As you see here, there's a number of help
topics down the left side of the screen.
| | 00:42 |
And you can return here at any time by
just clicking that Help button.
| | 00:45 |
Back at our bookshelf, right now you
don't have books on your shelf, but
| | 00:50 |
you'll see tabs for Reports.
There's a place to turn to if you wanna
| | 00:55 |
work with other publishers, that'd be the
Community.
| | 00:58 |
And KDP is a program for publishers to
take advantage of exclusive Amazon
| | 01:03 |
marketing offers, such as, offering your
book for free for up to five days during
| | 01:09 |
the 90-day period.
We're gonna talk about this in more
| | 01:14 |
specific terms a little bit later.
The first thing you wanna do is go to
| | 01:19 |
your account and get this completed.
This is all the information about your
| | 01:23 |
business or it could be your personal
information that's in here.
| | 01:27 |
You have your tax reporting, so they can
pay you commissions.
| | 01:31 |
You have the business type, your tax
identification number, and your bank accounts.
| | 01:37 |
This information is entered one time and
then replicated through the other stores.
| | 01:42 |
Amazon has different accounting for
different parts of the world, for tax
| | 01:46 |
purposes and otherwise.
And so, when you get your royalty
| | 01:51 |
statements, you'll actually see that
you're being paid out of a US account or
| | 01:55 |
a European account, et cetera.
Once you enter this information no one
| | 02:01 |
can see all of your account information
any longer.
| | 02:04 |
It's just a start out except for the last
4 digits of your account.
| | 02:09 |
So you wanna complete that before you put
a book on sale.
| | 02:13 |
Going back to the bookshelf, the next
step you wanna do is add a new title.
| | 02:18 |
So we're gonna click here, and it's going
to bring up a screen.
| | 02:23 |
There's actually quite a bit of help with
this screen as well.
| | 02:25 |
And over on the right side, you see the
frequently asked questions.
| | 02:31 |
So we're actually not going to be typing
this information in as we think about it.
| | 02:35 |
We're gonna go to the questionnaire that
we completed prior to beginning this
| | 02:39 |
process because, again, we wanna use the
same information for all the stores that
| | 02:42 |
we're selling our book in.
So the book that we're gonna be working
| | 02:48 |
with today is Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland.
| | 02:52 |
As you see in the questionnaire, I've
completed part of this information, not
| | 02:55 |
the entire thing.
But this questionnaire asks all the
| | 02:59 |
questions that need answers to put your
book into all stores.
| | 03:04 |
The thing that I wanna stress is that not
every store is gonna need the same amount
| | 03:08 |
of information.
But this form is designed to collect all
| | 03:13 |
that you need for all the stores, so you
don't have to keep going back and forth.
| | 03:18 |
So I have all the contributors, (SOUND) I
have category information.
| | 03:23 |
(SOUND) I haven't placed it here but I
have all the keywords all defined.
| | 03:28 |
I looked them up in Google.
I've decided on a price.
| | 03:33 |
(SOUND).
I've answered my question regarding DRM.
| | 03:36 |
I have a brief description today.
This would be a much longer description
| | 03:40 |
if I was going to be publishing a
different book.
| | 03:43 |
But in this one, I just have a paragraph
and I always recommend you prepare at
| | 03:47 |
least a long and a short description.
Some vendors will allow you to enter in
| | 03:52 |
both of those.
And your long one, obviously, can be much
| | 03:56 |
more involved and perhaps even including
a table of contents.
| | 04:01 |
It's really a terrific selling tool and
you want to really take advantage of that.
| | 04:05 |
And then author information.
In some cases, the author information's
| | 04:10 |
entered into the form that's used to sell
your book.
| | 04:13 |
In other cases, like Amazon, that
information is in Author Central.
| | 04:17 |
So now we'll return to the KDP portal,
and I've already copied the title of the
| | 04:22 |
book, and I'm gonna replace what's there
by pasting that in.
| | 04:29 |
If your book is part of a series, you
would click this.
| | 04:32 |
They also have these helpful little
pop-ups here to help you answer these questions.
| | 04:37 |
You might have a series title.
If you click this, you're able to put
| | 04:40 |
that in.
You have your edition number.
| | 04:42 |
The publisher, your name or your business
name, the name of the publisher that
| | 04:46 |
you're using.
In Amazon's case, they only have a single
| | 04:50 |
description field, so we're gonna paste
our description in there.
| | 04:55 |
We're gonna click on Add contributors.
Again, this is another one that is a
| | 04:59 |
little different for each vendor.
So our author in this case is Lewis Carroll.
| | 05:09 |
(SOUND) We're gonna select Author.
Now you'll notice over here that you
| | 05:13 |
could also put in the Editor, Foreword,
Illustrator, and so on.
| | 05:17 |
There's a second author you can do that.
One thing to point out is there is no
| | 05:22 |
room for a middle initial or if someone
is a doctor or they have some other
| | 05:25 |
qualifier with their name.
It's just first and last name for the KDP platform.
| | 05:34 |
So, we're gonna remove this for now.
And we're going to save it.
| | 05:38 |
Going down the screen, it's gonna be
English.
| | 05:42 |
If there's a foreign language, you would
list it here.
| | 05:44 |
If we've secured an ISBN number, we would
type it in this space.
| | 05:49 |
If we haven't and it's not required for
Kindle, you can leave it blank.
| | 05:54 |
The publication date is optional.
If you don't put it in, it'll use the
| | 05:57 |
date that it goes live in the store.
They ask that you verify your publishing rights.
| | 06:03 |
Now, this is important.
You're going to click one of these two boxes.
| | 06:07 |
And keep in mind that if you decide to
publish a public domain work, and Alice
| | 06:10 |
in Wonderland is a public domain work, it
doesn't mean that it will automatically
| | 06:13 |
go into the store.
The Amazon team watches what is being published.
| | 06:19 |
And you may get an email if they have
questions about whether or not you have
| | 06:22 |
the right to publish something.
And they also don't wanna have everyone
| | 06:26 |
publishing a public domain work.
In most cases, you're gonna be clicking
| | 06:30 |
the radio button that says, This is not a
public domain work and I hold the
| | 06:33 |
necessary publishing rights.
Amazon allows you to choose up to two categories.
| | 06:40 |
So in this one, it's a Fiction book.
It's a Classic, so I'm gonna select that.
| | 06:45 |
(SOUND) And we can call it a Fairy Tale.
Watch, if I try to add a third one, I get
| | 06:50 |
an error message that says you can only
do two.
| | 06:54 |
So you wanna put your top two in there.
And this is where you'll see in the Sales
| | 06:59 |
area, that your book is a bestseller in a
particular category.
| | 07:05 |
If it's possible and if it makes sense,
you might wanna put your book into a
| | 07:08 |
category where there's less competition,
as long as it fits that category, because
| | 07:12 |
you could become a bestseller in that
category more easily.
| | 07:17 |
So we're gonna save this and then we're
gonna put in our search keywords which
| | 07:20 |
we've already researched.
As you see I've already pasted in six
| | 07:25 |
keywords and there's a seventh one that
I'm allowed to add.
| | 07:30 |
The message down here says I have one
left so I'm gonna say rabbit hole.
| | 07:38 |
And now I have zero left.
The next thing you wanna do is to browse
| | 07:43 |
for an image and add your book cover.
Again, this is something that you've
| | 07:47 |
already created and you saved it.
So I'm going to click to browse for that image.
| | 07:54 |
(SOUND).
And I see it here.
| | 07:55 |
(SOUND).
Open that (SOUND) and I'll upload the image.
| | 08:00 |
There's a reminder about what size is
preferred.
| | 08:02 |
So it's uploaded successfully.
I close that.
| | 08:07 |
It may not show up immediately but in a
few minutes it'll be there.
| | 08:10 |
We talked about DRM and I've decided that
I am not going to enable digital rights management.
| | 08:18 |
I've decided that ahead of time.
Now it's time to upload the ebook.
| | 08:22 |
Our ebook is a MOBI file, so we're going
to browse for that.
| | 08:25 |
And we're going to look here for the
MOBI.
| | 08:28 |
Open that and upload the book.
Now, depending on the size of your book,
| | 08:35 |
this could take from a few seconds to
several minutes.
| | 08:40 |
If there's a lot of images, if it's a
very long book, it takes a longer period
| | 08:44 |
of time.
When it's done, you'll see a green
| | 08:47 |
message that says upload and conversion
successful.
| | 08:50 |
Now what you can do, if you haven't done
quality control on the book, using one of
| | 08:54 |
the other Amazon tools, you can preview
the book by clicking this button.
| | 08:59 |
Let's do that.
Brings up an image of a Kindle Fire and
| | 09:03 |
it shows you what that book would look
like.
| | 09:07 |
You can actually page through and look at
the text and images that are in the book.
| | 09:11 |
You could go all the way through the book
or just check out the beginning part of it.
| | 09:17 |
You can also change the type of device
that you're viewing it on.
| | 09:20 |
You wanna see what this looks like on an
iPhone.
| | 09:24 |
It'll reformat it and show you what it
looks like on an iPhone.
| | 09:27 |
Ideally, you've already done this or your
developer did this for you.
| | 09:31 |
And you know that it looks fine.
You really don't wanna get to this point
| | 09:35 |
and discover that your ebook needs to be
reformatted because you have to go back
| | 09:38 |
and start the process over again.
So now you're gonna close that.
| | 09:44 |
You're satisfied with the way it looks.
And you're going to Save and Continue.
| | 09:49 |
There's two screens to the KDP process.
The first one is all about the book and
| | 09:53 |
the second one has to do with your
publishing territories and your pricing
| | 09:57 |
and royalties.
In this case we're gonna go with
| | 10:01 |
Worldwide rights.
If you wanted to do individual
| | 10:04 |
territories, you would select those
individually from this list.
| | 10:10 |
You've also decided ahead of time that
you know what price you're gonna charge
| | 10:13 |
and you know what the royalty is going to
be.
| | 10:16 |
Let's say that we're going to go with a
70% royalty.
| | 10:21 |
And here, it tells you that it must be
between $2.99 and $9.99.
| | 10:26 |
So we'll say it's going to be $2.99.
It automatically calculates the price.
| | 10:32 |
It shows you the delivery cost and,
remember, the delivery cost for them is
| | 10:35 |
on there.
The only one that charges this is $0.15
| | 10:39 |
per megabyte.
So, for every book that is sold, it's
| | 10:44 |
going to be 70% of the 2.99 number, less
78 cents, and give you a return of $1.55
| | 10:49 |
in this case.
If you click these boxes, it's going to
| | 10:55 |
set the price for each one of these
stores, based upon the US price.
| | 11:02 |
You can charge different prices in
different markets.
| | 11:05 |
We're not going to do that.
We're just going to click each one of these.
| | 11:10 |
Here's the size of the book, 5.18
megatbytes.
| | 11:12 |
Now, you'll notice that this box is
already checked for you.
| | 11:17 |
This is selected because, if you're going
to be a 70% royalty, you have to allow
| | 11:21 |
the lending of that book.
And what lending means is that the person
| | 11:25 |
that purchased your book, the reader, can
lend that book to a friend of theirs for
| | 11:29 |
up to a 14 day period.
And they can do that one time.
| | 11:34 |
They can't keep doing that.
So you don't have a choice, but it's
| | 11:38 |
actually a very good thing because it
allows your book to be read by other
| | 11:41 |
people and hopefully someone will like it
and purchase it themselves.
| | 11:46 |
Now, the final checkbox is this one.
And I'm not going to publish today.
| | 11:52 |
But you would click this box and go over
here and click Save and Publish.
| | 11:56 |
So when you're all done entering this
information, that's it.
| | 12:00 |
But let's say that you've decided that
you wanna think about it a little bit more.
| | 12:03 |
Perhaps you wanna reconsider the price or
go back and review your information a
| | 12:06 |
second time for accuracy.
Or, what I do sometimes, is I'll get
| | 12:10 |
everything ready with all the stores that
I'm gonna publish in.
| | 12:15 |
And then, I'll hit the Save and Publish
button.
| | 12:18 |
So that you wanna get them time to
publish at about the same period.
| | 12:22 |
So, in this case, I'm gonna click the
Save as Draft.
| | 12:26 |
It saves it.
And if I go back to my Bookshelf, you'll
| | 12:28 |
see that I have Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland.
| | 12:33 |
It's also in the Drafts Status mode.
And I can enter into that book again and
| | 12:37 |
go through and I can check my entries,
make sure everything is spelled correctly
| | 12:41 |
and complete the way I want it.
You're going to spend a lot of time on
| | 12:47 |
this website, so you might wanna bookmark
it.
| | 12:50 |
When you come back, these are the key
tabs you wanna be looking at, which is reports.
| | 12:55 |
And that'll be showing you what your
royalties would be on a month-to-date
| | 12:58 |
basis or prior six weeks' royalties.
And then, you can go back and look at
| | 13:03 |
royalties over the last year and save
these as an Excel spreadsheet.
| | 13:07 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Barnes & Noble NOOK Press| 00:00 |
Nook Press is to Barnes & Noble as KDP is
to Amazon.
| | 00:04 |
It's simply Barnes & Noble's brand for
their self-publishing portal, and it
| | 00:07 |
replaces Barnes & Noble's previous
self-publishing portal called Puppet.
| | 00:12 |
Nook Press is a big improvement over
Puppet and in several ways exceeds the
| | 00:15 |
features offered by Amazon's KDP.
For example with Nook Press, you can
| | 00:20 |
actually write your ebook using Nook
Press just as if you were using word.
| | 00:25 |
In this case there's no need to go
through the conversion process.
| | 00:29 |
There's also live support via chat, and
there's a collaboration feature.
| | 00:33 |
You can invite someone to review and
comment on your ebook.
| | 00:36 |
They won't be able to edit it and this is
available on a book by book basis.
| | 00:41 |
Let's log into our demonstration account.
Now, I have already set up my account.
| | 00:46 |
But the first thing you wanna do when you
log in is to go over and fill out your
| | 00:50 |
vendor account information.
If you're gonna sell an e-book on Barnes
| | 00:55 |
and Noble, you're gonna be referred to as
a vendor, and you need to complete three
| | 00:59 |
pieces of information.
One is the contact information.
| | 01:05 |
The second is your publisher information,
which can be a name of your business or
| | 01:09 |
could be your name.
And the third set of information is your
| | 01:13 |
payment and tax information.
Once that's complete, you're gonna wanna
| | 01:17 |
initiate a project is what they call it.
So you go over here, and click the
| | 01:23 |
Project tab and we're going to create a
new project.
| | 01:28 |
It's Alice in Wonderland.
Nook press shows you all the steps
| | 01:31 |
necessary to publish your book.
So the first thing we're gonna do is
| | 01:36 |
upload our manuscript file.
They take several different formats.
| | 01:40 |
We have an EPUB file and we are gonna
select Alice in the Wonderland, and
| | 01:46 |
upload it.
Depending on the size of your file, this
| | 01:51 |
could take from a few seconds to several
minutes.
| | 01:55 |
Now, if you like to preview the book, you
can click the preview button and it will
| | 01:59 |
open another screen for you.
And we see that it converted, and we can
| | 02:05 |
proceed to the next step.
In the next step we're going to upload
| | 02:11 |
the cover image.
Now, we've already prepared this, so
| | 02:15 |
we'll click Alice in Wonderland.
One unique feature with Nook press, is
| | 02:23 |
that you can actually crop the original
image.
| | 02:26 |
So if we uploaded a file that had an
image, maybe we only wanted part of it,
| | 02:30 |
we could actually crop this to the size
that we are looking for.
| | 02:36 |
Now, we proceed to the book details.
So, clicking book details, we see a
| | 02:41 |
summary of all the information that's
part of the file right now.
| | 02:46 |
Of course, we haven't entered anything,
so we'll wanna enter in the title and description.
| | 02:51 |
Now, the title that you see there is the
name that I gave this project, which
| | 02:53 |
could be anything.
But of course we wanna replace that with
| | 02:57 |
the exact title of the book.
So I'm going to highlight that and paste
| | 03:01 |
in the information that I have in my
questionnaire that I completed prior to
| | 03:05 |
beginning the process.
As a publication date, and for now we'll
| | 03:11 |
list my company as the publisher.
And of course I'm not the author of this.
| | 03:18 |
And the role of Lewis Carrol was the
author.
| | 03:21 |
And for description, I simply went to my
questionnaire sheet and I copied the
| | 03:25 |
description that I had saved there, and I
pasted it into here.
| | 03:30 |
So now this matches the books that are
for sale in the other stores.
| | 03:34 |
And you'd have information about the
author and also about whether or not you
| | 03:39 |
have a specific ISBN number for this
ebook.
| | 03:44 |
And again like Amazon and Cobo, you do
not have to have an ISBN number for your ebook.
| | 03:51 |
If you do you can click yes and then
enter in that number.
| | 03:54 |
So we're going to save an continue, and
now we're going to complete the categories.
| | 04:01 |
With categories, Nook allows you to
choose up to five.
| | 04:05 |
So with this book, we're going to go down
to Fiction.
| | 04:09 |
And that's further classified here and
we're going to select Classics, and we
| | 04:14 |
see its added here.
We'll add a second one called Children's
| | 04:22 |
Fiction and Classics.
We'll add another category, Fiction,
| | 04:28 |
Fairy Tales and I noticed that there was
another one called literary that we've
| | 04:34 |
used in other stores, so we'll select
that.
| | 04:40 |
And that's four, you don't have to select
the full five.
| | 04:44 |
With keywords, you would use the same
keywords that you would use in the other stores.
| | 04:49 |
I have these already prepared, and I'm
going to paste them in here.
| | 04:53 |
Now, one thing to note right up front is
that, you have a maximum of a hundred characters.
| | 04:58 |
With Amazon, you can pick seven keywords
and there's no limitation on characters.
| | 05:02 |
So I'm simply gonna paste in my list.
Continue down and select the Audience.
| | 05:09 |
So, Nook is one of those that will ask
you, who is this generally for?
| | 05:13 |
And, I'm gonna select General Adult, in
this case.
| | 05:18 |
And it's written in English and save, and
continue.
| | 05:21 |
The next place it takes you, is sales
territory rights.
| | 05:26 |
With Barnes and Noble, there's two
territories.
| | 05:28 |
The United States and the United Kingdom.
In this case, we're going to put a list
| | 05:33 |
price here of $2.99.
And it shows you what the royalty is over
| | 05:37 |
to the right, 65%.
Had I made that price 298 it would be a
| | 05:42 |
40% royalty.
It automatically sets the price based
| | 05:47 |
upon the US sale price.
I could unclick this button and I can
| | 05:52 |
manually overwrite this, and say that I
wanna sell it for Five British Pounds instead.
| | 05:59 |
But I'm not gonna do that.
I'm gonna keep it at 2.99.
| | 06:04 |
And now it gives me the estimated
royalties in dollars and pounds over here.
| | 06:08 |
Here's this question about DRM, or
digital rights management, do I wanna
| | 06:12 |
protect it or not?
And I'm gonna say no.
| | 06:15 |
It's a public book, anyway.
Save and Continue.
| | 06:21 |
And the final screen is, it asks you is
this a public domain book.
| | 06:25 |
Which it is.
Is it part of a series?
| | 06:28 |
It's not.
And is it available in print.
| | 06:30 |
It is, but it's not available from me, so
I'm just gonna select no for right now.
| | 06:34 |
Just Save and Continue.
One thing that's different with Nook is
| | 06:39 |
that it doesn't allow you to add
editorial reviews.
| | 06:43 |
This is unique.
So you can put in the name of the
| | 06:45 |
reviewer, first and last name and where
it was published, and a review excerpt.
| | 06:51 |
Then you can add that.
That becomes part of your sales material.
| | 06:55 |
These are reviewed by Barnes & Noble.
And if you have someone that's reviewed
| | 06:59 |
it, I suggest you go ahead and add that
and you might get them to disallow it,
| | 07:04 |
because they are generally looking for
reviews from noted media outlets.
| | 07:10 |
But it doesn't hurt to try.
So that completes the entry of your book
| | 07:15 |
and you can return to your project page.
I wanna show you two other items.
| | 07:20 |
One is your sales tab.
This is where you would go to understand
| | 07:24 |
what your daily and weekly monthly sales
are.
| | 07:27 |
They have a lot of graphing capabilities
in this new Nook Press.
| | 07:30 |
And over on the support tab, it's very
nicely organized into different categories.
| | 07:35 |
And on the right, you see chat with a
representative.
| | 07:39 |
It's available Monday through Friday.
This is a great feature if you're in the
| | 07:42 |
middle of producing a book and you have a
question, you can click on that and be
| | 07:45 |
connected directly to a Nook specialist.
So Barnes & Noble's a credible retailer
| | 07:50 |
to sell your ebooks.
It isn't as large as Amazon, but the name
| | 07:54 |
is synonymous with books.
And they have sold millions of Nook devices.
| | 07:59 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using iTunes Connect for the iBookstore| 00:00 |
If you spent any time using Apple
products and services, you know that they
| | 00:03 |
have their own way of doing things.
Publishing to the Apple iBookstore is no
| | 00:08 |
different in this regard.
First of all, you need an Apple Mac, and
| | 00:13 |
it needs to have a operating system of
OSX version 10.6 or later.
| | 00:20 |
There's really two parts to the process.
You have iTunes connect, which is
| | 00:23 |
available through any web browser, and
that's used to manage your account.
| | 00:28 |
And you have software called iTunes
producer.
| | 00:31 |
And this is something that you download
onto your Mac and you use this to
| | 00:34 |
actually publish your book.
You also need an Apple ID.
| | 00:39 |
And if you have an Apple ID and it's
already been used with iTunes Connect for
| | 00:43 |
not the Bookstore, then you need one
specifically for the Bookstore.
| | 00:48 |
So let's go through the process.
There's two types of accounts to set up.
| | 00:53 |
One is a free book account, this might be
for an educational institution.
| | 00:59 |
And the other one is a paid books
account.
| | 01:02 |
The difference between the two is that
with a paid books account you can both
| | 01:05 |
give a book away for free and charge for
it.
| | 01:09 |
It's gonna require that you enter in a
valid bank account and your Tax
| | 01:12 |
Identification Numbers.
We're going to create a paid books account.
| | 01:17 |
With Apple, you have to apply to be able
to sell in the iBookstore, and you need
| | 01:22 |
to get approved obviously.
So, that takes anywhere from a couple of
| | 01:28 |
days to as long as two or three weeks is
my experience.
| | 01:32 |
And if they don't allow you to do this,
then you can't sell in the store.
| | 01:38 |
And once you have a book that you upload
to the store, they may or may not allow
| | 01:41 |
that as well.
So you begin by entering in your Apple ID
| | 01:45 |
, and your first and last name, and a
password.
| | 01:48 |
And after clicking on continue, you will
get an email confirmation that you have
| | 01:52 |
applied and then you'll be able to come
back to this in a few days, and begin the
| | 01:56 |
process of uploading your book.
After you've received your email from
| | 02:02 |
Apple approving you application to sell
in the iBookstore you'll be directed to
| | 02:06 |
the Sign In page and you'll put in your
email address associated with your Apple
| | 02:11 |
ID and your password.
This you can do from any computer with a
| | 02:18 |
browser you don't require a Mac for this.
And what you have is the way that you
| | 02:29 |
would manage your iTunes Connect account.
Now I'll show you a couple of things that
| | 02:33 |
are important on this page.
First, you need to fill out your tax or
| | 02:37 |
banking information so that you can get
paid.
| | 02:40 |
Another thing that you might wanna review
is under contracts, and to take a look at
| | 02:44 |
the contract that governs your account.
This has information in regards to how
| | 02:50 |
you price your book and some of the other
requirements for selling in the store.
| | 02:56 |
So it really is worth your time to read
through this agreement to make sure you
| | 03:00 |
understand Apple's terms and conditions.
A few other areas on the screen are also important.
| | 03:08 |
One is the ticket history and if you
submitted a ticket or there's a problem
| | 03:12 |
with the upload of your book.
You would click Ticket History and be
| | 03:17 |
able to see any kind of issues that Apple
found with your book and come back here
| | 03:20 |
and make those corrections before you
proceed to publishing.
| | 03:25 |
Another area that's important is managing
users.
| | 03:29 |
In managing users, you can add other
people that would assist you with
| | 03:32 |
managing the books on iBookstore.
And then a very important menu item is
| | 03:38 |
Deliver Your Content.
So as I mentioned earlier, you need to
| | 03:43 |
use iTunes Producer on a Mac in order to
upload your eBook.
| | 03:47 |
And this is where you would download the
softare that you use on your Mac to do that.
| | 03:53 |
So here it is, iTunes Producer, currently
2.9.
| | 03:57 |
And you click the Download button.
It's a couple 100 megabyte file, do this
| | 04:02 |
from your Macintosh and then install that
and you'll be ready to upload books.
| | 04:08 |
Apple's the only major vendor that
requires that the ePub files be validated
| | 04:12 |
before they're uploaded to be sold.
You can actually upload files that
| | 04:17 |
haven't been validated on Kobo and Barnes
and Noble.
| | 04:19 |
So now we return to the Main Screen.
So now that you've downloaded and
| | 04:24 |
installed your iTunes Producer we're
going to open up that program and
| | 04:28 |
demonstrate how to upload your ePub file
into the iBook Store.
| | 04:35 |
Once iTunes Producer's installed, you
double-click the Icon, Open it up and
| | 04:39 |
you'll be presented with the Login
screen.
| | 04:42 |
You'll put in your Apple ID, that is for
the iBookstore, and your password and
| | 04:47 |
click Next and it loads iTunes producer.
You could wanna create a new package.
| | 04:54 |
And it's going to be a new book.
And on this screen, this is everything
| | 05:01 |
that you're going to have to enter in
order to submit your book package to
| | 05:04 |
Apple for approval.
And again Apple is the only major vendor
| | 05:09 |
that requires an ISBN number.
And we are not gonna enter this ISBN
| | 05:12 |
number today in the demonstration but
this is where you would put it.
| | 05:17 |
If it's a United States ISBN it will
start with 978 and that's the ISBN 13
| | 05:21 |
number that you need.
You'll leave this book unless you're
| | 05:26 |
doing text books.
You wanna select you Language.
| | 05:30 |
We would select English.
By the way you can go and mouse over any
| | 05:33 |
of these fields and it will give you the
Help screen for that.
| | 05:38 |
We're going to put in from our
Questionnaire, where we already have
| | 05:42 |
everything prepared before we begin.
We're going to paste that information
| | 05:47 |
into the Title.
We don't have a Subtitle.
| | 05:50 |
I'm just gonna type in the word
Publisher.
| | 05:55 |
You have the Publication Date, Series
Name etcetera.
| | 05:58 |
A number of these are not required to be
validated before they are submitted but
| | 06:04 |
some are.
Title, Publication Date, Language.
| | 06:09 |
There will be an online validation check
before you submit your book.
| | 06:15 |
If you're blogging your book before it is
available for sale, you can authorize
| | 06:20 |
pre-order samples.
Then you're gonna wanna type in your book description.
| | 06:25 |
We're gonna go back to our questionnaire,
where we already have that prepared.
| | 06:30 |
And simply copy and paste it in here.
And click the Next button.
| | 06:37 |
Apple allows you to put in up to 5
categories, the same as Barnes and Noble
| | 06:40 |
and they follow an industry standard
convention that's what BISAC is.
| | 06:45 |
And in this book it is a fiction book and
we're going to select Classics.
| | 06:53 |
And we're gonna add another category.
And you notice up here that the first one
| | 06:57 |
that you enter is listed as the primary.
You could enter them in a random, but
| | 07:01 |
then just change that you would prefer.
I'll give an example of doing fiction,
| | 07:07 |
and saying this is fairy tale.
And no, maybe we wanna make that the
| | 07:14 |
primary category.
We're gonna add another one that is
| | 07:18 |
Juvenile Fiction and also call that a
classic.
| | 07:25 |
So that's how you do your categories.
You can enter up to five.
| | 07:27 |
You don't have to do all five, but you
need to do at least one.
| | 07:31 |
Click the next, and here's where you
would add your author.
| | 07:36 |
With Apple, you can see that they
actually accept a whole bunch of
| | 07:40 |
different type of contributors and it's
actually the most number of contributors
| | 07:44 |
that you can have in the major eBook
stores.
| | 07:49 |
Of course our author is Lewis Carroll.
And he's the primary author.
| | 07:54 |
We're just gonna enter in one right now
and we sort name is Carroll.
| | 08:00 |
Clicking next, we identified the audience
for our book and the interest age in
| | 08:06 |
years and we're gonna call 13 and up.
If you had the print equivalent of this.
| | 08:13 |
Then you could actually put it in as a
related product, so this would help link
| | 08:16 |
the eBook to a product that's related to
it in the store.
| | 08:21 |
So, it could be a different type of
format.
| | 08:23 |
Maybe it's an audio product.
Most cases it's going to be print.
| | 08:27 |
And you would select this, print
equivalent, maybe it's one of these in a
| | 08:30 |
different language.
But we are gonna remove that for this
| | 08:34 |
demonstration purpose.
And by the way you would put in the ISBN
| | 08:38 |
number of the print product that would
relate to your eBook.
| | 08:42 |
Click Next and now we have the territory
set up so clearly apple sells eBooks in
| | 08:47 |
51 different territories.
And you can identify price by territory,
| | 08:52 |
or even whether or not you want copy
protection with DRM in a territory by
| | 08:57 |
territory basis.
Most of the time, we're probably going to
| | 09:02 |
be selecting mass territory set-up, in
which case we're going to fill out the
| | 09:05 |
mass screen here, if you will.
And we're gonna make this book DRM free,
| | 09:09 |
so we're not going to copy protect it.
And we're gonna state that the sales date
| | 09:16 |
for all countries is July 1, 2013.
And we're gonna have a base currency,
| | 09:23 |
keep it simple and say it's the United
States.
| | 09:27 |
And the publication type is a Digital
only.
| | 09:31 |
We're gonna charge $2.99 and we're gonna
suggest that we sell it in the bookstore
| | 09:35 |
for $2.99.
This information is actually governed by
| | 09:39 |
your contract agreement as to what price
you can offer for your eBook, relative
| | 09:44 |
to, say, if you had a print book.
So you wanna read that contract
| | 09:49 |
carefully, if you have print books that
you're selling eBooks for.
| | 09:53 |
And then we're going to do this on a
territory by territory basis and say most
| | 09:58 |
but not all.
We would come over here and use one of
| | 10:01 |
these buttons but because we're going to
do all territories we're just gonna click
| | 10:05 |
the Select all.
And now we're going to apply that and
| | 10:09 |
that information is brought over into our
main template area here.
| | 10:14 |
And you get a little helpful message
about the pricing tiers.
| | 10:19 |
And you see that the physical list price,
is listed as $3, and we're in a tier
| | 10:23 |
three which is 299, and it's cleared for
sale.
| | 10:27 |
Now we're gonna want to add our
publication this is the ePub file that
| | 10:31 |
you've prepared.
In other major eBookstores, Amazon,
| | 10:36 |
Barnes & Noble, Kobo, you can upload a
Word file and several other formats.
| | 10:41 |
But with Apple, you're only gonna be able
to upload an ePub file that has been verified.
| | 10:47 |
So we're going to click the Choose button
and go over and select our ePub file.
| | 10:52 |
If you had a publication sample that you
wanted to add, you can create that
| | 10:56 |
separately and add it here, under
publication sample.
| | 11:01 |
Otherwise, Apple's going to take about
the first 10% of your book and include
| | 11:05 |
that as a sample file.
Similar to what the other stores do but
| | 11:09 |
they do give you the option of creating a
specifically designed file for your
| | 11:13 |
particular work.
So, maybe there is different photographs
| | 11:18 |
that are later in the book that wouldn't
show up in that first 10% that you'd want
| | 11:21 |
to include to incite the person to order
your book.
| | 11:26 |
We're gonna click the next screen and
you're gonna go to the Cover Art.
| | 11:29 |
This is where we're gonna put in our
cover.
| | 11:31 |
And you can actually upload screen shots
of your product as well.
| | 11:36 |
Maybe it's a multimedia file and you
wanna upload different screen shots of
| | 11:39 |
what the user would experience, if they
purchased the book.
| | 11:43 |
We'll click Next, and you'll see it's
validation is complete and it's ready to
| | 11:47 |
be submitted.
Now, similar to other ones, you'll submit
| | 11:51 |
this and you might receive an error
report immediately.
| | 11:54 |
You could get an error report emailed to
you.
| | 11:57 |
Which would show up in your iTunes
connect account, where I show you before.
| | 12:01 |
But this is the steps that you need to go
through to upload your book and Apple
| | 12:05 |
reviews all of those and within a few
days or 2 or 3 weeks, your book will be
| | 12:09 |
approved and you'll find it in the iTunes
store.
| | 12:15 |
As a retailer of e-books, Apple has been
expanding their iBook store over the last
| | 12:19 |
couple of years.
They're actually catching up to the
| | 12:23 |
Barnes & Noble market share, and they are
becoming an important retailer.
| | 12:29 |
With some patience and a Mac there's no
reason to think that you can't get your
| | 12:32 |
book into the Apple store.
Just plan on it taking a little more time
| | 12:36 |
than the other stores and be patient.
| | 12:38 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Kobo Writing Life| 00:00 |
Kobo is still relatively unknown in the
United States, but I think that's changing.
| | 00:05 |
It has a major international presence and
for that reason alone, I think it's worth
| | 00:09 |
getting familiar with their online
publishing tool called Writing Life.
| | 00:14 |
Like with the other portals, you'll wanna
go down and create an account.
| | 00:19 |
On Kobo when you create an account, it'll
ask you for the normal contact information.
| | 00:25 |
And it'll send you a confirmation email,
which you'll click, and then it'll take
| | 00:29 |
you back into Kobo and it'll ask you to
complete your banking information.
| | 00:35 |
Now I'm already logged into kobo and at
the very top you'll see the my account
| | 00:39 |
button, and you can click on payment
information.
| | 00:44 |
To enter in information about your tax
and account numbers.
| | 00:48 |
Your currency to be paid in, the city,
all that stuff that you're going to need
| | 00:52 |
to collect your royalty payments.
Once you've completed that you'll will to
| | 00:57 |
return to your dashboard.
And we're going to create a new e-book.
| | 01:04 |
Each of the e-book vendors has a little
different feel to their store.
| | 01:08 |
With Kobo, you'll see a summary of the
major steps over here on the right.
| | 01:13 |
Describing the book and adding content,
choosing your rights and then setting the price.
| | 01:19 |
Now I've already saved the ebook title,
and I'm gonna paste it in here.
| | 01:24 |
And it's Alice in Wonderland.
There's not gonna be a subtitle or a
| | 01:28 |
series name.
It doesn't have a lot of prompts in this
| | 01:31 |
one, but it should be pretty obvious
after you've gone through the Amazon experience.
| | 01:37 |
The author in this case is obviously not
me and so we're going to type in Lewis Carroll.
| | 01:44 |
And if there is other contributors and
other authors you can add that over here.
| | 01:48 |
Right now you don't have other
contributors listed like you do in Amazon.
| | 01:56 |
But my company is a publishing name for
now.
| | 01:59 |
You do have an opportunity to put in an
imprint, the publishing date defaults to
| | 02:03 |
today's date.
You have the EISBN number.
| | 02:08 |
That's a term that they've invented, but
I think a lot of people understand that
| | 02:12 |
as an associate it with an ebook.
Like the other major stores is optional.
| | 02:17 |
You can put into print by ISBN, if you
have one.
| | 02:21 |
And they ask the same question that
others do, is this part of public domain,
| | 02:29 |
we're gonna say yes.
Further down the page, you have an
| | 02:34 |
opportunity to put in the synopsis or
description of your book.
| | 02:35 |
I'm gonna paste in the same description
that we used before; this came off of the
| | 02:39 |
questionnaire form.
This is brief, but it does the trick
| | 02:43 |
here, categories, we're gonna click this.
And with Amazon, we have two categories,
| | 02:50 |
Kobo is three categories.
Barnes and Noble, by the way, allows you
| | 02:55 |
to put in five categories.
So, we're gonna go down and, look for
| | 02:58 |
fiction and literature.
And there's a further classification
| | 03:03 |
where we can find classics.
It's definitely a classic.
| | 03:07 |
There's also a literary.
We'll pick that one.
| | 03:10 |
But we notice this fiction young adult in
Kobo.
| | 03:14 |
This isn't available in Amazon.
And in this one, we're going to select fantasy.
| | 03:20 |
That might get it in front of a few
different readers.
| | 03:23 |
Gonna confirm that for all three.
So, we've completed that part but before
| | 03:28 |
we go, let's remember to upload our book
cover.
| | 03:32 |
So, we just click on this image.
We find the book cover, open that, there
| | 03:40 |
it is.
And very important, we're gonna save this
| | 03:44 |
and proceed in the next step in the
process.
| | 03:48 |
Now we're gonna be uploading the book.
The book that we can upload is gonna be a
| | 03:51 |
e-pub file.
We'll look for that, here's the ePub.
| | 03:57 |
Open that and upload.
And when it's done you'll get a message
| | 04:03 |
that the upload is complete and that
you're done.
| | 04:06 |
And that you have the option to download
and preview the ebook if you want to do that.
| | 04:11 |
We're not going to do that though, we're
going to continue on and choose our
| | 04:14 |
content rights.
Now, this is the DRM question, and these
| | 04:19 |
are Slider buttons.
Just click one or the other.
| | 04:24 |
And we're not going to apply DRM, and we
have worldwide rights.
| | 04:29 |
If you had rights just to specific
countries, you would click that box.
| | 04:33 |
And then you would be able to click the
ones where you do or you don't have rights.
| | 04:39 |
But we're gonna say we have worldwide
rights.
| | 04:42 |
And finally, we're going to set the
price.
| | 04:44 |
Now one thing to keep in mind is you're
not going to see this page until you've
| | 04:48 |
entered your banking information.
And as a reminder, Kobo has two royalty levels.
| | 04:55 |
One at 70 percent and one at 45.
The 70 percent is payable on books priced
| | 05:01 |
between $1.99 and $12.99.
We're going to price this book at $2.99.
| | 05:08 |
It automatically selects 70% with a
royalty of $2.09.
| | 05:13 |
It also computes that price of all these
other currencies.
| | 05:18 |
If you want to manually override it, you
can do that.
| | 05:20 |
You click the button, then you can change
the price here.
| | 05:24 |
We're not gonna do that though, we're
gonna keep the price the same, or at
| | 05:26 |
least based on the US price, around the
world.
| | 05:30 |
When you're done, click Save and Next.
At this point, you can choose to publish
| | 05:34 |
your book or you can go back and review
each one of the steps to make sure it's
| | 05:38 |
the way you want it.
You might also wanna wait until you have
| | 05:43 |
your book entered into the other stores
before you publish it.
| | 05:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Aggregators/Third-Party Distribution OptionsConsiderations when selecting an aggregator| 00:00 |
With an aggregator, or third party
distributor, you set up a set up a single
| | 00:03 |
account, enter your ebook.
And the aggregator sends your ebook to
| | 00:08 |
many stores at one time.
Contrast this with the direct to retailer
| | 00:12 |
distribution, where you have to set up an
account with each individual store.
| | 00:17 |
This can be a real time saver, but it's
important to understand all the pros and
| | 00:21 |
cons before you make a decision.
Here's five key questions you wanna have
| | 00:26 |
answers to before you begin.
How much am I willing to pay?
| | 00:30 |
Because there is a cost.
There is no cost to distribute directly
| | 00:34 |
to Amazon, Kobo/g, Apple, or Barnes and
Noble.
| | 00:37 |
But you will have to pay one way or the
other.
| | 00:40 |
You might pay a commission, or you might
play a flat rate or for a service package.
| | 00:46 |
You also give up some control.
You're dealing with a single point of
| | 00:50 |
contact, who has contact with many
different stores.
| | 00:53 |
Some of those stores you can't get into
directly, like you can with Amazon.
| | 00:57 |
So, it might be an attractive opportunity
for you.
| | 01:01 |
Another question is how active do you
wanna manage all these stores?
| | 01:05 |
If you have lots and lots of books, it
may be easier to use an aggregator to
| | 01:08 |
distribute those books to all the stores.
At the same time, keep in mind that the
| | 01:15 |
aggregator is collecting information
that's going to work with most of the
| | 01:19 |
book's specifications in other words.
As we've seen with the direct
| | 01:25 |
relationships, taking categories as an
example.
| | 01:29 |
Amazon will allow you to enter in two
categories, Kobo three, Barnes and Noble
| | 01:33 |
five and Apple five.
So, if you use an aggregator, they're
| | 01:37 |
going to limit the amount of information
that goes to each one of these stores.
| | 01:42 |
For kind of the least common denominator
if you will.
| | 01:46 |
As I mentioned, the aggregators operate
with different business models.
| | 01:50 |
Some you'll pay a flat fee and keep any
of the royalties to yourself.
| | 01:55 |
Others will charge a sales commission.
And you might wanna model these.
| | 01:59 |
Because if you sell lots and lots of
books, that sales commission can add up.
| | 02:04 |
On the other hand, if you don't sell any
books, then the fee based business model
| | 02:08 |
is quite expensive.
If they have a store, and some of them
| | 02:12 |
do, for example, Smash Words has a very
popular store, you want to learn about
| | 02:16 |
its sales effectiveness.
A number of aggregators are implementing
| | 02:21 |
stores because it makes you, as the
publisher or author, feel like you have
| | 02:24 |
your book in another store.
That may or may not be popular and so you
| | 02:28 |
have to decide whether or not it makes
sense to go with that aggregator just to
| | 02:32 |
be able to get into their store.
Some require additional service, for
| | 02:37 |
example, you might be charge a package
price to do a print book along with an e-book.
| | 02:43 |
So, it may seem like it's free but you
have to buy a very expensive package in
| | 02:47 |
order to take advantage of it and to get
into all of these extra stores.
| | 02:54 |
Another thing is that reporting and
payments will take longer than direct
| | 02:57 |
store relationships.
So when you're distributing through that
| | 03:01 |
aggregator, they send it to, for example,
Amazon.
| | 03:04 |
So, Amazon has to pay the aggregator, and
then the aggregator has to do the
| | 03:08 |
accounting and pay you.
And that can take several weeks.
| | 03:13 |
This is one time where it really pays to
read the fine print.
| | 03:16 |
Make sure you understand what control you
have over your book, how to make changes.
| | 03:21 |
Are they going to charge you to make
changes?
| | 03:24 |
And how long does it take to receive
payment and make those changes.
| | 03:28 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Evaluating commission-based aggregators and a detailed look at using Smashwords| 00:00 |
Commission based aggregators services
allow you to offer your book for sale
| | 00:03 |
without making a cash investment.
Instead you pay for the service only when
| | 00:09 |
you sell E-books.
If you sell a lot of E-books, it might be
| | 00:12 |
better to consider a fee-based
arrangement the allows you to keep 100%
| | 00:16 |
of the royalties.
Book Tango and Smashwords are 2 examples
| | 00:21 |
of commission based aggregators and on
this video we're going to concentrate on Smashwords.
| | 00:27 |
Smashwords has the advantage of not
charging for the distribution of your ebook.
| | 00:33 |
You can also pick and choose the stores.
For example, if you wanted to distribute
| | 00:37 |
directly to Barnes and Noble and Apple
you can do that And then use SmashWords
| | 00:41 |
to distribute to other stores.
It's very popular with people that have
| | 00:47 |
other devices that don't read Kindle
e-books or Nook e-books, for example the
| | 00:51 |
Palm Pilot.
It's also only one of two suppliers to
| | 00:56 |
Apple that's authorized to distribute to
them e-books.
| | 01:02 |
They have a number of selling and
merchandising tools.
| | 01:05 |
For example, you have coupons, and you
could send a coupon to someone so they
| | 01:08 |
could get your book for free.
Maybe they're doing a review.
| | 01:11 |
You can also list your book for free.
That unusual with online bookstores.
| | 01:17 |
They distribute e-books in a number of
different formats, and we'll look at that
| | 01:20 |
in a moment.
And they have an affiliate program so you
| | 01:24 |
can offer other books in their cataloge
on your website and receive a commission
| | 01:28 |
when someone buys that book.
Another thing is that they distribute to libraries.
| | 01:34 |
That's very important.
A few of the cons why you might now want
| | 01:37 |
to use someone like smashwords, a
commission based seller Is that a
| | 01:40 |
successful book is gonna cost you more.
So they take a commission on this, and if
| | 01:46 |
you sell lots and lots of books, it could
exceed the cost of paying someone to
| | 01:49 |
distribute those books for you.
Also, if you have a large book, say
| | 01:54 |
larger than 7.5 megabytes, they're not
going to distribute that book for you.
| | 01:59 |
Now, they recently increased that size,
so it could be that they'll be increasing
| | 02:03 |
it in the future, they may become a
non-issue.
| | 02:06 |
Also, for people that are interested in
copy protection or adding DRM to their
| | 02:11 |
e-books, it's not a good choice because
they don't apply DRM to your e-book.
| | 02:18 |
Looking at the royalties structure, they
pay us 60% of list price.
| | 02:23 |
Now what this means is that if you're
selling your book on Barnes and Noble
| | 02:27 |
between $2.99 and $9.99, if you sell
there directly you're going to get 70%.
| | 02:34 |
If you distribute to Barnes and Noble
using Smashwords, you're going to get
| | 02:38 |
60%, not 70%.
So 10% of that is for Smashwords.
| | 02:43 |
Again they don't charge you to
distribute, so that's their payment for
| | 02:46 |
handling this for you.
And you receive 85 percent of net sales
| | 02:51 |
from that store.
When you visit the Smashwords homepage,
| | 02:55 |
you wanna click on How To Publish On
Smashwords.
| | 03:00 |
Here you'll see the logos of a number of
the stores that they distribute to.
| | 03:04 |
A lot of popular ones.
And most importantly, they distribute to
| | 03:09 |
the Apple iBook store.
This page will actually describe all the
| | 03:13 |
terms and give you some highlights of how
their publishing process works.
| | 03:19 |
Smashwords in the commission based
distribution model may not work for every
| | 03:23 |
author, but you can't beat the price.
Free conversion, free distribution, and a
| | 03:29 |
store that is popular with loyal and avid
readers.
| | 03:32 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Evaluating fee-based aggregators and a detailed look at using BookBaby| 00:00 |
If you know you wanna use an aggregator
and you think you'll be selling enough
| | 00:04 |
ebooks to cover the cost of managing
distribution, a fee-based aggregator is a
| | 00:07 |
better investment than paying a
commission.
| | 00:11 |
In this video, we'll look at BookBaby who
offers such an arrangement.
| | 00:15 |
Here's some of the pros and cons.
It's a fixed cost to distribute your book.
| | 00:20 |
The ebook conversion is included in the
price.
| | 00:24 |
And you have additional services and a
single point of contact, which can be
| | 00:27 |
very attractive for some people who don't
wanna manage all the different details
| | 00:31 |
associated with publishing.
And of course, you get a single stop
| | 00:35 |
distribution to many stores at one time.
But you have to keep in mind that there's
| | 00:40 |
a cost to this even if you sell only one
book or one book a year.
| | 00:45 |
And you're also limited on the listing
information.
| | 00:49 |
For example, while Amazon will allow two
categories per book and Apple, five
| | 00:53 |
categories, you'll only be able to enter
one category on BookBaby.
| | 00:59 |
This could be significant distribution is
at least two steps removed, which slows
| | 01:04 |
down changes and reporting.
So if you wanna a make a change to the
| | 01:08 |
price of your book, it takes a while that
it have that implemented and then, to get
| | 01:13 |
the reports back from BookBaby, they will
have to go from the vendor to BookBaby to you.
| | 01:20 |
See, look at the prices of this.
What's attractive on BookBaby, you can
| | 01:24 |
have your book converted as well as
listed and distributed to these other stores.
| | 01:30 |
And currently, their prices range from 99
to 249 and they have a lot of specials
| | 01:33 |
that they run.
There is also an annual book cost that
| | 01:37 |
can add up, if you have several books.
And again, depending on what your sales are.
| | 01:43 |
And you'll pay a change cost, so you can
make a change to your book once a year.
| | 01:49 |
For example, if you need to update the
description or category or price, which
| | 01:53 |
is a very common thing that you would
change, you'll pay $50 after that first change.
| | 02:00 |
So this is the homepage of BookBaby and
as you see here, there's a number of
| | 02:03 |
different stores that they support.
Quite a few.
| | 02:06 |
And we're gonna log in.
Now, I don't currently have a book listed
| | 02:12 |
on BookBaby but we can take a look at
what the process looks like to add a book
| | 02:16 |
to book baby.
The first thing you're going to decide is
| | 02:20 |
what type of the service you want.
If you have an EPUB file, then you'll be
| | 02:25 |
able to take the basic service.
If you want conversion, it's either gonna
| | 02:29 |
be standard or premium, and there's some
differences here that you can read, like
| | 02:32 |
all of their services.
You'll enter in your author name and your
| | 02:36 |
author filing name.
You'll also notice that you don't have an
| | 02:40 |
opportunity to enter in other
contributors to the book.
| | 02:44 |
This information is the same as other
distributors.
| | 02:48 |
The answers to all these questions should
be in your questionnaire, already completed.
| | 02:53 |
And you come down here to the number 4,
which is, you're going to be listing the category.
| | 02:59 |
This is very important.
With BookBaby, as I said, you only have
| | 03:03 |
the opportunity to enter in a single
category, so you might choose the fiction category.
| | 03:10 |
And then you'll be able to
choose,Classics.
| | 03:13 |
But you see, you can only enter in that
single category.
| | 03:18 |
And you can enter in five keywords.
Some stores will allow to enter in more
| | 03:22 |
keywords or more letters associated with
it.
| | 03:26 |
And pricing is another category where you
need to select one of the prices that
| | 03:29 |
they have pre-filled out.
So some stores will allow you to list it
| | 03:33 |
at any price.
And BookBaby will only give it to you in
| | 03:36 |
dollar increments that end in 99.
And then, you have an opportunity to add
| | 03:41 |
DRM, so that when they distribute the
book, it'll go out to all the vendors.
| | 03:47 |
And if you have the DRM indicated, those
vendors would apply it to your book in
| | 03:51 |
that case.
Like Smashwords, you don't have to
| | 03:55 |
distribute to every store.
You can pick and choose the stores you
| | 03:58 |
wanna send your ebook to and set up
direct distribution arrangements with
| | 04:01 |
other stores.
If you're looking for a solution to
| | 04:05 |
manage the administration burden and
you're certain you have enough sales to
| | 04:08 |
justify it and it's important to be in
numerous stores, BookBaby may be a good solution.
| | 04:15 |
Otherwise, the costs can add up quickly,
especially if you plan to actively manage
| | 04:18 |
your books.
| | 04:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Amazon Tools for PublishersIntroduction to Amazon Services| 00:00 |
Amazon offers a comprehensive set of
tools and services to help authors
| | 00:04 |
publish and market their ebooks.
Amazon is also the largest online
| | 00:09 |
retailer of books and ebooks.
That's why it makes sense to spend extra
| | 00:13 |
time getting to know how to use their
tools to not only promote a book but to
| | 00:17 |
promote the author.
But before we delve into the tools, let's
| | 00:22 |
look at how to manage your public
profile, because everyone has a profile
| | 00:25 |
regardless of whether or not you are an
author.
| | 00:29 |
To find your public profile, log in to
your Amazon account and then go to Your Account.
| | 00:36 |
Towards the bottom, you're gonna see a
page called Personalization.
| | 00:42 |
You wanna click Your Public Profile.
On this page, you have an opportunity to
| | 00:48 |
change the information that Amazon is
showing other people about you.
| | 00:53 |
You're gonna wanna edit your profile.
On the left side of this screen, as we
| | 00:57 |
page down, you can see that there is a
whole selection of things that you can
| | 01:01 |
use to describe yourself.
Some of these you can make private.
| | 01:08 |
You can add a birth date, and keep it
private or show it to everyone.
| | 01:12 |
In my case, I only show the month and the
date.
| | 01:14 |
The anniversary.
Your email address.
| | 01:17 |
You can keep it private, or show it to
everyone.
| | 01:20 |
Web page, you can describe yourself.
I've just selected to put in interest.
| | 01:25 |
I don't have anything for in my own
words.
| | 01:28 |
I do have what's called a Signature.
I show that that I was the author of a
| | 01:31 |
book and that appears below my name.
I also have the location.
| | 01:36 |
If you're an author this kind of
information will help your readers
| | 01:39 |
connect with you but only share what you
feel comfortable sharing.
| | 01:44 |
I think one of the more interesting
things is how it shows your name.
| | 01:47 |
Amazon has something called Real Name.
It's a tag that they can put underneath
| | 01:52 |
your name to indicate that that is who
you say you are.
| | 01:56 |
This is actually pulled from your credit
card information.
| | 02:00 |
And the name that you show has to match
your credit card.
| | 02:04 |
If it doesn't you can go over here and
change that information.
| | 02:09 |
Mine actually shows my real name, David
Logan.
| | 02:13 |
I can click this button it will show a
number of selections that I have on file
| | 02:17 |
with my name.
Some of them I just used my first
| | 02:21 |
initial, middle initial.
This one I've selected a card that has my
| | 02:24 |
full name, 'cuz I think that's more
descriptive of me.
| | 02:27 |
If you don't have a card or you don't
wanna display your name, let's say, you
| | 02:32 |
can click Create a Pen Name.
The examples they have is a rather famous
| | 02:37 |
one, you have Mark Twain.
And I could edit that pen name to be
| | 02:41 |
whatever I want.
And change the other information that
| | 02:45 |
goes with it.
If I do provide my name I receive a real
| | 02:48 |
name badge.
Which actually just makes it that much
| | 02:52 |
more personal to other people who might
be reviewing your reviews, or looking you
| | 02:56 |
up as an author.
Another option is to add a photo and a caption.
| | 03:03 |
I've done that here.
So, when people click through this
| | 03:06 |
information that they see is consistent
with my author profile.
| | 03:10 |
I have a photograph there as well and
information that helps me identify with
| | 03:14 |
my readers.
The other information on this page that
| | 03:18 |
you can choose to show or not show to
people are reviews, lists that you've
| | 03:21 |
created, guides.
These are all Amazon type items that
| | 03:26 |
allow us to personalize our presence on
the site.
| | 03:30 |
And in many ways market ourselves more
effectively to others that are also using Amazon.
| | 03:37 |
One more thing I want to show before we
move in to some of the tools.
| | 03:41 |
Is, I'm gonna go back to account and go
to the bottom again in Personalization,
| | 03:45 |
and show Social Settings.
Social settings are connections between
| | 03:51 |
your activity on Amazon and Facebook or
Twitter.
| | 03:55 |
In my case, I have connected both my
accounts.
| | 03:59 |
And I can chose as a user on Amazon what
I am going to share or not share with my
| | 04:03 |
social media connections.
On the right side of the page you can see
| | 04:09 |
here what are the benefits of connecting
to Amazon.
| | 04:13 |
And what activity from Amazon products
and services will be shared on Facebook,
| | 04:17 |
so it's important to read those.
Make sure you're comfortable with it
| | 04:22 |
before you make a connection.
One thing that I find helpful is as
| | 04:25 |
you're reading books, you can underline
that in your Kindle edition, and actually
| | 04:30 |
send that information out to your social
network.
| | 04:34 |
Share it with other people.
Really as a marketing tool for us to
| | 04:38 |
connect with our audiences.
Showing Twitter settings here, same thing.
| | 04:43 |
On the right side, they have social FAQ.
And they talk about the benefits of
| | 04:47 |
connecting to Twitter and what activity
will be shared.
| | 04:51 |
Again you wouldn't want to connect this
if you don't want to share activity but
| | 04:53 |
keep in mind you can decide what you do
share or don't share.
| | 04:58 |
So now that we know how to present our
personal brand on Amazon.
| | 05:01 |
Let's continue by learning more about the
tools and services that can help us sell
| | 05:04 |
more books.
| | 05:06 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using KDP Select| 00:00 |
Late in 2011 Amazon, announced the Kindle
owners' lending library.
| | 00:06 |
If you own a Kindle and you are a member
of Amazon Prime, you can borrow up to one
| | 00:10 |
book per month with no due date for free.
You can choose from over 300,000 books
| | 00:16 |
that are currently part of this program,
including a number of New York Times
| | 00:20 |
bestsellers and all of the Harry Potter
series.
| | 00:26 |
As a way of increasing the number of
ebooks available for borrowing, Amazon
| | 00:30 |
created the KDP Select program at that
same time.
| | 00:34 |
KDP Select is a marketing tool that helps
publishers promote their books to Amazon shoppers.
| | 00:41 |
Is somewhat controversial because Amazon
requires sales exclusivity.
| | 00:45 |
Let's take a look at their requirements
and the benefits.
| | 00:49 |
On requirements, you need to commit to
keep your book on Amazon exclusively for
| | 00:54 |
a 90 day period.
It's only one book.
| | 00:58 |
If you have several books, it doesn't
have to be the entire group.
| | 01:02 |
It's free to Amazon members at that time.
You can't even sell it on your own website.
| | 01:07 |
In return, you have a number of benefits.
One is that you can offer your book for
| | 01:13 |
free for up to five 24 hours periods.
And we'll talk about some of these
| | 01:17 |
strategies in just a minute.
This really increases the visibility of
| | 01:22 |
your book.
You're also paid a certain amount of
| | 01:25 |
money everytime someone borrows it.
And the way that works, is that each
| | 01:30 |
month Amazon commits a sum of money into
a fund, for example $1,000,000.
| | 01:36 |
They then look at how many times books
were borrowed during the month and divide
| | 01:41 |
total borrows into that sum of money, and
then multiply that unit rate times the
| | 01:46 |
number of times your book was borrowed.
Usually that comes out to about $2 in
| | 01:54 |
change per book borrow.
So, for people who are selling their book
| | 01:58 |
for $3 or $4, this can actually be quite
attractive it's almost like selling a book.
| | 02:05 |
Another thing Amazon does is they launch
stores recently Japan, India and Brazil,
| | 02:12 |
and they only pay 70% royalty option if
you are member of KDP Select.
| | 02:19 |
Two other benefits I think are important,
when you do offer your book for free for
| | 02:23 |
a period of time, your sales will
automatically increase and of course
| | 02:26 |
you're selling it for free.
As that goes up the Amazon algorithms
| | 02:31 |
will have a way of promoting it to a
wider audience and it shows up higher in searches.
| | 02:36 |
When your book comes off sale, it stays
at that level for a period of time.
| | 02:43 |
People see the book for sale, and now
there is a cost associated with it.
| | 02:47 |
But they believe that it is very popular,
so they purchase it.
| | 02:52 |
I know some authors who have made
hundreds of dollars after their book came
| | 02:55 |
off the zero cost sale.
So it can be very effective.
| | 03:00 |
I've also seen that with the book being
in wider distribution, there's a greater
| | 03:03 |
chance that you can receive book reviews,
which are very difficult to get.
| | 03:08 |
So, those are several of the benefits of
being part of KDP Select.
| | 03:13 |
Let's look at how you set that up.
After logging into your Kindle Direct
| | 03:18 |
Publishing account, or your KDP account,
on your bookshelf, the far right side,
| | 03:22 |
you'll see a column called KDP Select.
Click on the enroll, and you'll receive a
| | 03:28 |
confirmation about whether or not you
wanna enroll in the program.
| | 03:33 |
They're very clear in stating that you
need to be following the terms and
| | 03:36 |
conditions, which is that 90-day period
that it cannot be available on any other site.
| | 03:42 |
What you wanna do before you do this is
actually take your book off sale at Apple
| | 03:46 |
or Barnes and Noble or any other sites
that you have before you enroll it in
| | 03:50 |
this program.
Once it's enrolled in a program, you can
| | 03:55 |
manage that.
We're gonna take a look at one of my
| | 03:59 |
books that's in the program.
You click over here on the left side
| | 04:03 |
under actions and you see KDP Select
details, and manage promotions.
| | 04:10 |
So in manage promotions, you would click
that button.
| | 04:13 |
And you would see a screen where you'd be
entering in your campaign information.
| | 04:18 |
So, this is how you would schedule one of
those free promotional days.
| | 04:22 |
Right now I have all of my free days
available.
| | 04:25 |
I did run five free days in the first 90
day period, and if I wanna select a new
| | 04:29 |
sale period, I click New.
I can give it a name of my choice
| | 04:33 |
whatever it is, then I have a start date.
And let's say that I wanna start that
| | 04:40 |
sale and end it here, by putting in the
dates.
| | 04:45 |
And then I would give it a name, and it
would appear down here under campaign.
| | 04:51 |
Actually I did do that with this book.
I gave it a name and the promotion period
| | 04:57 |
and the dates, and one day completed.
Another thing you should check is, you
| | 05:03 |
wanna see what the details are at any
point in time.
| | 05:07 |
You can see when a term began and when it
ended.
| | 05:11 |
One thing you wanna watch for and you may
wanna set a separate calendar item for,
| | 05:15 |
is that the book will automatically renew
for another 90 days, unless you uncheck
| | 05:18 |
this box.
So, it's important to keep track of that,
| | 05:23 |
if you wanna take it off sale after that
subsequent 90 day period.
| | 05:27 |
So, that's all you have to do, in order
to register your book in the KDP Select program.
| | 05:32 |
Now, let's take a look at some ways, that
you can really use those free days to
| | 05:35 |
your advantage.
I think what you want to avoid is to just
| | 05:41 |
make it free for the heck of making it
free.
| | 05:44 |
You don't wanna do that.
These are really valuable days, so you
| | 05:47 |
wanna give this some real thought.
And there is no real official way of
| | 05:51 |
maximizing those five days, but I can
give you my experience and what I've
| | 05:55 |
learned from other people.
First of all, I think its helpful to have
| | 06:01 |
several reviews before you begin running
a promotion.
| | 06:04 |
There are a number of sites that can help
you promote your ebook, and some of them
| | 06:09 |
won't help you unless you have reviews.
Plus, when someone is deciding whether or
| | 06:14 |
not they're gonna download your book,
believe it or not even if its free, they
| | 06:18 |
may not wanna download it if it doesn't
have some fair reviews or a number of
| | 06:22 |
reviews that they can read.
Because again they'd be investing their
| | 06:28 |
time in reading your book.
I'd suggest five if you can do it, and
| | 06:32 |
above a 3.0 on your review before you
actually launch it.
| | 06:38 |
Secondly is, don't go for a 24 hour
period.
| | 06:41 |
Go for 48 or 72 hours.
There are so many books now, that if you
| | 06:46 |
just go for that one day, you're not
gonna get the visibility that you maybe
| | 06:50 |
hope to get.
If you go for three days, then that
| | 06:54 |
second day can build on the first day,
and the third day on the second day.
| | 07:01 |
This third bullet is really important.
And this is to promote like crazy.
| | 07:05 |
There's a number of websites that
specialize in promoting free days.
| | 07:10 |
I suggest put a search term in of promote
KDP Select free days, see what kind of
| | 07:14 |
results come up from that, and then
explore those.
| | 07:18 |
Because the sites that do this seem to
come and go and they have different effectiveness.
| | 07:23 |
Some of them will actually charge
advertising, and it could be worth it.
| | 07:27 |
This is where you may wanna go back and
evaluate that site ranking using Alexa,
| | 07:31 |
to determine whether or not they have a
lot of traffic.
| | 07:36 |
One that I know is very popular and
effective is kindle nation daily?
| | 07:40 |
And they charge.
And it's one of the more expensive ones,
| | 07:43 |
but you get results.
Another thing to do is to use your social
| | 07:47 |
media, access your friends.
So, these are just some of the ways that
| | 07:51 |
you can take advantage of those free
days.
| | 07:54 |
As I said, really focus on building a
marketing program around those days to
| | 07:59 |
drive as much download activity as
possible, that's how you're going to see
| | 08:04 |
results at the end of it.
KDP Select is really about experimenting
| | 08:11 |
with a new kind of marketing.
Don't expect to flip a switch and see a
| | 08:16 |
lot of downloads.
You also need to be comfortable with
| | 08:19 |
giving away lots of books.
In the end, I think it's worth it.
| | 08:23 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating an Author Central profile| 00:00 |
Every author needs to complete their
Author Central Profile.
| | 00:04 |
Considering that it should take you all
of 15 minutes, it's one of the best time
| | 00:07 |
investments you can make.
Let's take a look at why that is, by
| | 00:11 |
looking at it from the perspective of a
reader.
| | 00:14 |
Let's say I'm gonna look up books by the
popular self published author Amanda Hocking.
| | 00:22 |
Here is she, her wake book, you'll notice
that her name is hyper linked and when I
| | 00:27 |
mouse over it, I see a picture of Amanda
with some basic information.
| | 00:33 |
If I click her name to learn more, I see
a photograph, I see a biography, and I
| | 00:38 |
see some tweets that are here, I see some
blog posts, but I also see every book
| | 00:44 |
that Amanda has written.
So this is very powerful, if you're an
| | 00:51 |
author you can promote your other books
through author central, and help readers
| | 00:56 |
form a closer connection with you.
Now, let's take a look at Author Central,
| | 01:02 |
and how to log in and add your
information.
| | 01:07 |
You can find Author Central by simply
typing in authorcentral.com, and I'm
| | 01:12 |
gonna log in to my account.
You can use any password and e-mail that
| | 01:17 |
you want.
My suggestion is to keep it the same as
| | 01:20 |
your KDP account and your regular Amazon
account.
| | 01:24 |
Just makes it a little bit easier to stay
organized.
| | 01:27 |
So after I sign in, we see the Menu items
here of books that I've published.
| | 01:34 |
You have your Profile, and then you have
some information on Sales and Rank.
| | 01:38 |
We've covered these in another video, and
we can look at them again briefly.
| | 01:42 |
You can look at your Customer Reviews,
and of course, there's the Help button.
| | 01:46 |
They also put news down here, Amazon
recently acquired Goodreads, so that's
| | 01:52 |
the most relevant new news.
First, we can look at Books.
| | 01:57 |
And when you first sign up, they're going
to try to find the books for you.
| | 02:01 |
You might have to Add books, or ask them
to look up books if it's under a
| | 02:04 |
different name.
The real heart of the system, though, is
| | 02:08 |
your Profile.
And this is where you would want to enter
| | 02:11 |
your biography.
You can edit it here, and you can add a
| | 02:15 |
blog, so if you have a blog feed through
an RSS feed you would enter that information.
| | 02:21 |
And then, that appears on the right side
over here as you saw in Amanda Hocking's blog.
| | 02:27 |
That happens automatically, so that's the
great benefit, you don't do anything at
| | 02:32 |
all after you enter this in, and if your
blogger is gonna pull that information
| | 02:36 |
through a syndication feed, directly into
your Amazon Author Central profile.
| | 02:43 |
You can also add events.
So when you add events, you might have a
| | 02:46 |
book signing, or be giving a lecture.
You can describe it, give a venue name,
| | 02:51 |
and address, and the dates when that's
going to happen.
| | 02:56 |
You can choose an author page URL.
This is kinda nice.
| | 03:00 |
This is like having your own little mini
webpage within Amazon.
| | 03:04 |
And in my case I use my last name, so
I've reserved amazon.com/author/logan.
| | 03:12 |
Then below that, you have an opportunity
to add photos, so I've added several in here.
| | 03:16 |
You can add videos.
Unfortunately, you can not link to a
| | 03:20 |
YouTube video.
Amazon has their own system that you need
| | 03:24 |
to adhere to, but you can upload video in
one of the file formats that are
| | 03:28 |
highlighted here.
Then you can connect your Twitter account.
| | 03:35 |
So, all those together make up your
Amazon Author Central profile.
| | 03:40 |
Exploring the other tabs, all of your
reviews are listed here under your Review tab.
| | 03:46 |
And you can see what people are saying
for better or for worse.
| | 03:49 |
You can take a look at your author rank,
and we covered this in another video, but
| | 03:54 |
this is a way to look at what your
ranking is among all authors.
| | 04:01 |
And you can look at it over the course of
different periods of time.
| | 04:06 |
So, out of the millions of eBooks that
are there, this would be the rank for my eBooks.
| | 04:11 |
And then again, this was covered as well,
but this is BookScan information, a
| | 04:16 |
third-party provider of sales information
to Amazon.
| | 04:21 |
And it can show you where your sales are
occurring in the United States in
| | 04:24 |
physical bookstores.
AuthorCentral really serves two purposes.
| | 04:31 |
It's your Author book dashboard, because
you have all your important information
| | 04:35 |
in one place.
And for readers it's a window to you as
| | 04:39 |
an author, which helps you sell more
books and form a more lasting connection
| | 04:43 |
with readers.
| | 04:45 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Amazon Associates| 00:00 |
Amazon's associate program is one of the
earliest and most successful affiliate
| | 00:04 |
programs on the internet.
An affiliate is someone that sends buyers
| | 00:08 |
to Amazon in the hopes that they buy
something.
| | 00:11 |
If they do, the affiliate gets a
commission.
| | 00:14 |
How much do they get?
It really depends on the product.
| | 00:18 |
Here on the home screen for the program,
you can click advertising fees.
| | 00:22 |
And you can see that they really have two
levels.
| | 00:25 |
One is a percentage based upon the type
of product, and the other one is an
| | 00:29 |
incentive, where the more products you
sell, the higher the advertising fee rates.
| | 00:36 |
Who uses Amazon Associates?
Well, of course you have authors and
| | 00:40 |
publishers, but also book bloggers.
Basically, anyone that wants to monetize
| | 00:45 |
the traffic that they're attracting to
their website.
| | 00:49 |
Before going further, I suggest that you
actually page down and look over the
| | 00:53 |
operating agreement.
This is important because there're
| | 00:58 |
several states that are excluded from the
program, and you need to be aware of some
| | 01:01 |
other requirements such as being accurate
in a way that you present the products.
| | 01:08 |
You will go through an approval process
to be a member of the program and they do
| | 01:12 |
monitor it.
I'm going to login to my account and
| | 01:16 |
we'll take a quick tour of some of the
different ways that you can use the
| | 01:19 |
Associates program.
Every Associate is assigned a special code.
| | 01:25 |
It always ends in dash 20.
And across the top of the page, you see
| | 01:30 |
several tabs, links and banners are very
popular.
| | 01:34 |
And that's where you would actually link
to a product.
| | 01:38 |
The widgits, aStore, and then the
different affiliate programs.
| | 01:42 |
I'll mouse over that and you can see that
there are several within Amazon.
| | 01:46 |
But let's take a closer look at links and
banners.
| | 01:49 |
We're going to go to product links.
And we'll search for books.
| | 01:54 |
And rather than a specific book, let's
just click "go," And we'll see a list of
| | 01:58 |
books presented.
Here's The Fast Diet, and over on the
| | 02:02 |
right side, you see a yellow button
called Get Link.
| | 02:06 |
So you would click that link, and it
would give you four ways that you could
| | 02:09 |
present this book on your website that
people might want to buy.
| | 02:15 |
On this side you have a way to customize
it to help it look more integrated in
| | 02:19 |
with your site so you can change this
background color, the text color, as well
| | 02:23 |
as the link colors.
You can remove that border and you can
| | 02:29 |
use that larger image Or smaller image,
by clicking these boxes.
| | 02:34 |
Down below here, you have the HTML code
that will change based upon what you're clicking.
| | 02:43 |
You would highlight this and then you
would paste it into your site.
| | 02:46 |
You have to have some basic understanding
of HTML in order to use this effectively.
| | 02:53 |
You could also put in just text, like you
see the preview here, or image only, and
| | 02:58 |
you can add a book to a widget.
So a widget is a style of presentation of
| | 03:07 |
a group of books.
You have the button up here called
| | 03:12 |
Widgets, and you can see there are
several different kinds of widgets.
| | 03:16 |
The slideshow, the carousel widget, etc.
You can link to products, you can link to
| | 03:22 |
a banner ad, you can link to the entire
pages and categories of books or other
| | 03:26 |
products within those pages.
You can even use what they call aStore to
| | 03:33 |
create an entire e-commerce store of a
collection of books.
| | 03:39 |
So when someone visits your website and
they see your book or another book that
| | 03:42 |
you've featured on your site, they may
click on it.
| | 03:47 |
When they go to Amazon, they may buy it
or they may put it on their wish list.
| | 03:52 |
And the basic operating terms will
explain how long the period that they can
| | 03:56 |
stay in that state before you get credit
for commission when they buy it.
| | 04:02 |
For example, right now, if they buy it
within 24 hours you'd receive a
| | 04:06 |
commission or if they put it into the
cart and not purchase it immediately but
| | 04:10 |
do purchase it within 90 days.
You would get credit.
| | 04:15 |
So, it's important to keep in mind that
even if the person doesn't buy the
| | 04:18 |
product you've featured, you still get a
commission if they buy other products.
| | 04:24 |
And for some people, depending on their
site traffic, this could add up to
| | 04:27 |
significant dollars.
| | 04:28 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| How ebook publishers can leverage CreateSpace| 00:00 |
In this video, I'm going to give you an
overview of Create Space.
| | 00:04 |
It's an Amazon subsidiary.
And they specialize in producing books,
| | 00:08 |
music, and film on demand.
That means that if you order one of those
| | 00:12 |
products that's in their catalog.
That they will produce it.
| | 00:17 |
That is, manufacture it and put it in the
mail to you, and if you order one day
| | 00:20 |
shipping, you would have it the next day.
There is no inventory, everything is
| | 00:27 |
saved as an individual digital file and
created when someone orders it.
| | 00:33 |
After setting up and logging into your
account.
| | 00:35 |
Amazon Create Space has a load of
information available for you as support
| | 00:39 |
and also services to help you get your
book done.
| | 00:44 |
But really, all you need is a formatted
book in Word or PDF and a formatted
| | 00:48 |
cover, both to their specifications.
It actually doesn't cost anything, and
| | 00:53 |
I'm going to take you through some of the
key requirements, and where to find the
| | 00:57 |
information that you need, in order to
get your book printed.
| | 01:02 |
The screen you're looking at, is found by
actually going up to Books and clicking
| | 01:06 |
on Publish a Trade Paperback.
I'm going to start here on the left, and
| | 01:10 |
first show you the cover.
They do offer professional cover design
| | 01:16 |
services, but if you have a graphic
designer or the skills, you could
| | 01:20 |
actually create your own cover to the
specifications.
| | 01:25 |
They lay that out here and actually go
and download cover templates.
| | 01:30 |
You would pick the trim size that you
want, and let's say we were gonna do a 6
| | 01:34 |
by 9, that's 200 pages.
They have white and cream paper interior
| | 01:39 |
and the other limitations are and you
cannot print on the inside, front and
| | 01:44 |
back covers.
You can print on the outside, obviously,
| | 01:48 |
in the spine if it's more than a hundred
pages, but interior is limited to black
| | 01:53 |
and white and color of the paper.
You would build a template, and then you
| | 02:00 |
could download this and use it or give it
to your designer to use.
| | 02:05 |
Going back up to where we were, we're now
going to go to the interior.
| | 02:11 |
So, just like the cover template they
have a number of interior templates as well.
| | 02:16 |
And what you want to do is click on the
PDF to match their specifications and
| | 02:20 |
here they have all of the information you
need to set up their document.
| | 02:26 |
There's inside margins that are required
depending upon your page count The
| | 02:31 |
easiest thing to do is just to page down
here, look for the size of the book that
| | 02:36 |
you want, and then download the template.
Now one thing I do recommend is to think
| | 02:43 |
about where you want to sell your book
before you choose the size of the book,
| | 02:47 |
because certain distribution channels
will accept certain size books.
| | 02:53 |
Fortunately there's a number of those
that are standard and let's take a look
| | 02:58 |
at those real quick.
The place to find what different sizes
| | 03:02 |
are accepted by different distribution
channels is here in the next tab called
| | 03:06 |
"printing options." And as you page down
you can see over here on the right side
| | 03:11 |
with the green check marks those trim
sizes are what's called industry standard
| | 03:15 |
so my recommendation is to pick one of
those.
| | 03:22 |
The next tab is distribution.
In distribution you can see that they do
| | 03:27 |
distribute obviously to amazon.
In fact, I consider this to be probably
| | 03:31 |
the primary reason why you're going to go
with Create Space is because as soon as
| | 03:35 |
you're doe with the book, it's going to
appear on the Amazon site and be able for
| | 03:38 |
all their other selling opportunities,
including super savers shipping and
| | 03:42 |
one-click ordering, etc.
That's not available for books that you
| | 03:48 |
might print of the outside unless you pay
extra for that.
| | 03:52 |
They also sell in a number of other
stores such as their Amazon Europe store
| | 03:55 |
and their crate space store.
I've had some mixed results with
| | 04:00 |
distributing my print books as Kindle
ebooks.
| | 04:04 |
I don't find the conversion process works
quite the way that it should work.
| | 04:09 |
So that one you may want to look at on a
case-by-case basis.
| | 04:12 |
They have another thing called expanded
distribution.
| | 04:15 |
This is an extra cost of $25.
It's a one-time cost.
| | 04:19 |
And what it does is it puts your book
into a catalogue, that these other
| | 04:23 |
institutions can order from.
One thing that's not noted here, that you
| | 04:28 |
would learn about when you go to purchase
your ISBN number, and by the way, you
| | 04:32 |
have to have an ISBN number.
There's several options.
| | 04:36 |
They have a free ISBN number.
They also have one where they charge $10
| | 04:41 |
and there's a $99 option or you can have
your own ISBN number.
| | 04:47 |
But if you want to get your book into the
catalog for libraries and academic
| | 04:51 |
institutions, you have to use a create
space ISBN number.
| | 04:58 |
One question that everyone likes to ask
of course is how much money am I going to
| | 05:01 |
make on the royalties from my book?
The way that they do it here is they
| | 05:06 |
actually give you a little calculator.
So lets take our 200 page book example
| | 05:10 |
and lets say we're going to do a six by
nine book and we're going to charge 14.99
| | 05:15 |
for that.
We click calculate and these numbers are
| | 05:20 |
automatically computed based upon the US
dollar rate.
| | 05:25 |
And you see that the royalty that you'd
be paid on a $14.99 book is $5.74.
| | 05:29 |
It's not gonna cost you anything to print
it.
| | 05:32 |
So, between $14.99 and $5.74 That money
goes to printing and the sales commission
| | 05:39 |
to Amazon.
The other most frequently asked question
| | 05:43 |
is what is it gonna cost me to buy copies
from myself?
| | 05:47 |
Because perhaps you're doing this and
you're gonna be giving talks and you want
| | 05:50 |
to be able to take books with you and
sell them in the back of the room when
| | 05:53 |
you're done speaking.
Or you may want to purchase them for
| | 05:57 |
family members.
They have a calculator for this as well.
| | 06:01 |
And we'll use the same trim size of six
by nine inches, with a 200 page count.
| | 06:09 |
And we'll say, we're going to buy one
copy.
| | 06:12 |
Calculate that, and you see the per book
price is $3.25 cents.
| | 06:18 |
Watch what happens when I do a thousand
copies.
| | 06:21 |
It's the same price.
You go down to shipping, this is where it
| | 06:25 |
really makes a difference.
We'll change this back to one, just so we
| | 06:29 |
won't be scared by the shipping
calculator.
| | 06:32 |
We'll calculate one for the United States
shipping and you see the standard,
| | 06:36 |
expedited, and priority rates.
One thing I've learned about this is
| | 06:42 |
these are rates for the number of days
but when you go into order book don't
| | 06:46 |
assume that you can order it today and
get it in five days, or two days, or one day.
| | 06:53 |
They will quote the date that they will
deliver it when you place the order.
| | 06:58 |
So it may not be five days.
And often times it's two to three weeks out.
| | 07:03 |
So you might keep that in mind and try it
yourself.
| | 07:07 |
I wanted to take you through the
publishing process briefly here, but
| | 07:10 |
basically this is a test book that I set
up to show what would take place.
| | 07:16 |
You have the usual information for title,
and where you would upload the interior,
| | 07:21 |
choose the ISBN number.
So this is the book itself.
| | 07:25 |
You then go through a review process.
When you upload the book, it is
| | 07:29 |
automatically checked based upon certain
criteria.
| | 07:33 |
And you'll receive immediate feedback.
If it meets the criteria or if there's
| | 07:37 |
errors that come out, usually its a low
resolution image that you're using, or
| | 07:41 |
maybe you're into the margins on
something, that might not be printable.
| | 07:46 |
And they identify those things so you can
fix it, because after you've fixed it,
| | 07:50 |
you can submit it, for the final
approval.
| | 07:54 |
And then you'll recive it bakc and be
able to do a proff process.
| | 07:58 |
So the proof process is, you will order a
book, or they have an online proofing tool.
| | 08:03 |
So, again, you could do the whole thing
without paying any money whatsoever, if
| | 08:08 |
you're comfortable proofing with an
online proofing tool.
| | 08:12 |
One thing I think I'll show you while
we're here is the ISBN.
| | 08:15 |
Because that's always a question mark for
folks.
| | 08:17 |
Is that, here, you have the free create
space assigned, ISBN.
| | 08:22 |
There's the custom that would list your
name and you get another one that's the
| | 08:27 |
universal ISBN number.
They say keep your distribution and
| | 08:31 |
publishing options open, or your own
number.
| | 08:34 |
If you went to Bowker where you would
visit myidentifiers.com and purchase your
| | 08:39 |
own ISBN number, you would enter that
number here.
| | 08:44 |
And as I said a minute ago you can not
get certain distribution options without
| | 08:48 |
using the create space assigned ISBN
which is free.
| | 08:54 |
So those are the basics on create space.
Not everyone reads e-books, so having a
| | 08:58 |
print edition opens up a whole new
market.
| | 09:01 |
It also makes a different impression when
you can hand someone a printed book.
| | 09:05 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Goodreads and Shelfari| 00:00 |
Goodreads and Shelfari are social
cataloging applications that enable
| | 00:03 |
readers to share their virtual bookshelf
in an online public setting, and interact
| | 00:08 |
with other readers.
This community of readers can also
| | 00:13 |
improve the catalog of information about
those books by identifying similar books.
| | 00:18 |
Highlighting facts and trivia, and adding
tags, ratings, and reviews.
| | 00:24 |
Here's a few of the benefits.
It's a great source of reviews for
| | 00:27 |
someone's book.
It's a chance for authors to meet other authors.
| | 00:32 |
You can engage and support your fans, so
the readers are there.
| | 00:35 |
They're looking for the authors to engage
with them.
| | 00:39 |
And you can announce promotions and
events.
| | 00:41 |
What I wanted to highlight were Goodreads
and Shelfari, and some of the unique
| | 00:45 |
features of those two social cataloging
applications.
| | 00:50 |
With Shelfari, it is integrated in with
the Book Extras and the X-Ray feature on Amazon.
| | 00:56 |
What that means is, when you're reading
an eBook on a Kindle, if you click the
| | 01:00 |
button for menu, you'll see an item
called Book Extras.
| | 01:06 |
This will actually link to information
that is powered or supplied by Shelfari.
| | 01:11 |
I'll have an example of that in just a
moment.
| | 01:13 |
X-Ray is another feature recently
announced where you can tap the screen of
| | 01:16 |
one of the devices, and see a lot of
detailed information about characters, or
| | 01:20 |
geography, or plot, that might be
associated with the page that you're viewing.
| | 01:26 |
Shelfari also allows you to automatically
import books that you've purchased from Amazon.
| | 01:33 |
So, this is quite handy as a reader, you
don't have to reenter all that
| | 01:37 |
information like you do today on
GoodReads.
| | 01:40 |
Being recently acquired by Amazon, it's
hard to say which of these features will
| | 01:44 |
continue to grow or which will be
subsumed by Amazon.
| | 01:49 |
But one thing they do offer is a free
giveaway promotion for authors and
| | 01:52 |
they're also syndicate their reviews.
I want to show one of the neat features
| | 01:57 |
that's implemented on Shelfari through
the book extras link in your Kindle.
| | 02:03 |
If you go to the Shelfari home page here
and click on a popular book.
| | 02:07 |
We're gonna click on Pride and Prejudice.
What you see here are what's called the
| | 02:12 |
book extras.
You can see that the community has filled
| | 02:15 |
out quite a bit of information about the
different characters that are in the
| | 02:19 |
story, different covers that were used on
the book throughout the years, famous
| | 02:23 |
quotes, settings and locations.
If you enjoyed this book, you'd want to
| | 02:30 |
go and read a lot of this and get more
information.
| | 02:34 |
Other ways that book extras are used is
if an author's published a series of
| | 02:37 |
books, you'd get access to what are the
other books in that series, which is what
| | 02:41 |
a lot of people want after they finish a
book they really enjoy.
| | 02:47 |
On Goodreads, I want to show you a couple
other things that have to do more with promotion.
| | 02:52 |
If you go towards the bottom of the page
you see a question are you an author or a publisher?
| | 02:56 |
If you click the author program good
reads will tell you that they have a
| | 03:00 |
special page just for authors that you
can take control of and it gives you an
| | 03:04 |
opporitunity to promote your books.
They're much more book promotion friendly.
| | 03:11 |
On Goodreads.
And then one last thing I wanna show is
| | 03:15 |
groups that are dedicated to helping
authors.
| | 03:18 |
And we'll go to one here called Making
Connections and this one is really for
| | 03:23 |
authors to help them connect with
readers.
| | 03:28 |
In a more controlled way, if you will,
rather than having an author join a group
| | 03:32 |
that maybe they've written a novel in
that genre and then approaching the
| | 03:36 |
readers, you can come here and learn
about other ways to get your book into
| | 03:40 |
the hands of those readers.
So if you go towards the bottom You're
| | 03:46 |
going to see something ARR.
And ARR stands for Authors Requesting Reviews.
| | 03:53 |
And this is pages and pages of people who
have posted books that they're willing to
| | 03:58 |
give to a read for free in return for
getting a review on GoodReads So how do
| | 04:04 |
you engage in the social cataloging
applications like Goodreads and Shelfari?
| | 04:13 |
I've come up with three steps to have
effective engagement.
| | 04:18 |
And really it begins with being a reader
with a willingness to contribute to the community.
| | 04:24 |
Noone wants you to come to their party
and just eat the food.
| | 04:27 |
So what you want to do is get involved,
add books to your shelf, review and rate
| | 04:31 |
books, and wait for other people to
discover you in that regard.
| | 04:37 |
The second thing is to join groups.
All different groups.
| | 04:40 |
Groups especially in your genre but
groups that specialize in books that you
| | 04:44 |
enjoy reading because you have an
opporitunity there to study their edicate
| | 04:47 |
and what they talk about and how they
talk about it and the idea is to really
| | 04:51 |
listen before you jump in and start
participating because all of these online
| | 04:54 |
groups have a certain Protocol or a
certain way that they work with each other.
| | 05:02 |
And than lastly complete your author
profile and this is great because you can
| | 05:06 |
fill in some of those details.
And each one of those two are separate by
| | 05:10 |
the way.
As in so far you might have a little more
| | 05:12 |
latitude in filling things in.
Then you do on good reads.
| | 05:17 |
And, that's what you're gonna really have
to study and look at each one of these
| | 05:21 |
individually before you start to promote
yourself as an author.
| | 05:26 |
All authors should be devoting some time
to gaining an understanding of how these
| | 05:30 |
work so that they're perpared as the
software communities evolve.
| | 05:34 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Leverage Your Book Investment: What Else Can You Do with Your Ebook Files?Selling directly| 00:00 |
Who wouldn't wanna make more money by
selling their ebooks direct to readers?
| | 00:05 |
If you already have an audience, this can
be much more lucrative than selling on
| | 00:08 |
Amazon on one of the other retailers.
Of course, the operative word here is
| | 00:13 |
audience, because the commission these
high traffic online stores receive from
| | 00:17 |
the sale of your ebooks is comprised in 2
parts.
| | 00:21 |
The credit card fees which you still need
to pay, regardless of where you sell it,
| | 00:25 |
and number two a sales commission.
Let's take a look at the pros and cons of
| | 00:31 |
selling direct.
On the pros side you definiately get
| | 00:35 |
better margins.
Instead of giving Amazon or Barnes and
| | 00:39 |
Noble 30%, you're gonna pay a processing
fee of maybe 5% or less and keep that
| | 00:44 |
other 25% for yourself.
You can also charge any price you like,
| | 00:50 |
you get to capture an email address.
So if you have additional products or
| | 00:55 |
services that you can sell, having an
email address could be very important.
| | 01:00 |
And you get to control how your book is
sold and marketed.
| | 01:04 |
You don't have competitive products
around the book that you're selling when
| | 01:07 |
you're selling it on your site all by
itself.
| | 01:11 |
On the con side, you're gonna have to
provide the customer support.
| | 01:14 |
So someone tries to download the book and
can't get it onto their device.
| | 01:20 |
You're gonna have to help them.
There's also the time investment and the
| | 01:24 |
cost to get it set up and this is
non-trivial because it requires some
| | 01:28 |
technical skills.
Also keep in mind that at least for
| | 01:33 |
Amazon books you cannot apply DRM or copy
protection to your book.
| | 01:39 |
The only way to get DRM on a Kindle file
is to sell it on Amazon.
| | 01:45 |
You can get protection, or DRM, for the
epub files, but you're gonna pay someone
| | 01:50 |
for that service.
And I have a few examples of how you can
| | 01:54 |
go about doing that.
Perhaps the biggest con of all is that if
| | 01:57 |
you don't have an audience, then you're
not gonna sell any books.
| | 02:01 |
So you really need an audience of people
who are interested in what you're selling.
| | 02:07 |
When you go shopping for a way to sell
e-books from your website.
| | 02:10 |
There's three basic things that you need.
One, you need something that's going to
| | 02:16 |
merchandise your e-book.
That is, to present it in a sales-y sort
| | 02:20 |
of way.
Picture of the book, a description.
| | 02:24 |
Perhaps author information.
It might have links to other stores, but
| | 02:28 |
really you want to sell your book.
The second thing is to accept and process
| | 02:33 |
payment, and the third is to deliver that
ebook file to the customer.
| | 02:39 |
Ideally all this happens without any
interaction by you, so that it can go on 24/7.
| | 02:46 |
I'm gonna share with you 3 basic types of
services or products that do these 3 things.
| | 02:53 |
The first I'll talk about is Gumroad.
Gumroad sells digital products, so it's
| | 02:57 |
pretty simple to install, it's a piece of
software code that you put on your website.
| | 03:03 |
And you upload the files and then someone
can go and order that and pay you and
| | 03:08 |
download the file.
Another one is called Ganxy, and this is
| | 03:13 |
very specific to eBooks in that it allows
other merchandising and that links to
| | 03:17 |
different stores that you might want to
link to that you're also selling in so
| | 03:21 |
you give the customer a choice in this
case.
| | 03:27 |
They don't have to buy it from you.
If they're more comfortable or they have
| | 03:30 |
accounts at the other stores, they could
click through and purchase it from Barnes
| | 03:34 |
and Noble or Amazon or Apple.
They also have several other features
| | 03:39 |
worth investigating.
Another one that's been around quite
| | 03:42 |
awhile is called E-Junkie and E-Junkie is
a scripting tool.
| | 03:46 |
It's very inexpensive.
They have a great store as well.
| | 03:50 |
E-Junkie has a lot of different options.
You can sell physical as well as digital products.
| | 03:57 |
Then you move into products and services
that actually can deliver your book with
| | 04:02 |
DRM protection.
And all of these really build off of a
| | 04:07 |
special industrial strength Adobe server.
That supports a number of other stores
| | 04:13 |
out there like Google and Barnes & Noble,
Sony, Cobo, they use the Adobe digital
| | 04:18 |
rights management software.
One of them is called Edition Guard, and
| | 04:24 |
what they do is they've purchased this
special software and set it up so that
| | 04:28 |
you as a publisher can use it in a sort
of a piece meal basis.
| | 04:34 |
So their business model is to charge a
smaller amount of money for a few books,
| | 04:38 |
and allow you to distribute ePub files
with that protection in place.
| | 04:44 |
And then the last one that I'll mention
is Cyber Wolf.
| | 04:48 |
Cyber Wolf has a system called the Cyber
Wolf download service.
| | 04:52 |
And it's more of a custom design where
they would go into a large publisher that
| | 04:56 |
wants to make a big investment in a
library, and they'll configure this for
| | 05:00 |
that publisher or that retailer to offer
a whole bunch of books.
| | 05:07 |
My final thought on this topic is that
you should this only if you have a
| | 05:10 |
sufficiently large audience Or the
ability to market your products, or
| | 05:14 |
because you sell items other than eBooks.
Otherwise it can be a distraction.
| | 05:21 |
In the meantime, focus on building sales
through the larger eBook stores, and once
| | 05:25 |
you're successful you can set up a direct
sales channel.
| | 05:29 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tools for selling one or a few ebook titles at a time| 00:00 |
Mobile Apps are a familiar concept as are
the robust market places that have
| | 00:05 |
evolved to offer them such as Apple
iTunes, Google Play and the Amazon App Store.
| | 00:12 |
As it turns out mobile apps are also good
way to deliver certain types of eBooks.
| | 00:17 |
The challenges are that unlike eBooks,
apps are device specific and consequently
| | 00:22 |
more expensive to develop because you
have to develop one for each type of
| | 00:27 |
operating system, whether that's the
Apple or Android or Microsoft.
| | 00:34 |
Where an eBook may cost a few hundred
dollars to develop, and work on a lot of
| | 00:37 |
different devices.
An app can cost a few thousand dollars to
| | 00:42 |
develop and only work on one.
There is one possible opportunity that
| | 00:48 |
you might wanna look at, if you've
developed an e-book already; and would
| | 00:51 |
like to experiment in getting your eBook
into the app stores.
| | 00:57 |
Bowker offers such a service on the My
Identifier site.
| | 01:01 |
If you go down, you'll find an area
called, book as an Android app.
| | 01:06 |
I'm gonna click there.
What it is is, they are partnering with
| | 01:10 |
another company to take your e-book, and
turn it into an app.
| | 01:16 |
And then put it into the Google Play and
the Amazon apps stores.
| | 01:21 |
They charge $299 dollars which is a great
deal and then have an annual maintenance
| | 01:26 |
fee of $50 starting in the second year.
Now you get a 50% royalty on the sales
| | 01:31 |
they split the sales on the balance of
that.
| | 01:36 |
And they do all the work.
So if you've developed in particular
| | 01:40 |
children's books, these seem to be the
ones that parents are downloading for
| | 01:44 |
their kids to use, because they are full
screen, they're simple to use and the
| | 01:49 |
kids can page forward and get the full
experience like you might get With a
| | 01:53 |
picture book.
Now I can't speak to this service
| | 02:01 |
directly, but I can tell you that for the
price that they charge and for the
| | 02:05 |
opportunity to get it into those 2
stores, it is an interesting thing that I
| | 02:09 |
would investigate if I was doing
children's books.
| | 02:15 |
If you already have your eBook done, the
Bowker Book as an app program is an
| | 02:19 |
affordable way to evaluate the sales
potential of your eBook in this format.
| | 02:25 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Giving your ebook away for free: Why and how| 00:00 |
There are two sides to the free coin.
On one hand, people don't always value
| | 00:04 |
free the same way that they do when they
pay for something.
| | 00:08 |
On the other hand, charging anything
establishes a barrier.
| | 00:12 |
If your goal is promotion, or customer
support, or public service, then free is
| | 00:16 |
usually the right price.
Obviously, you can e-mail it to someone.
| | 00:22 |
The other ways you can do it off the
online retailing sites, smashwords has a
| | 00:26 |
great coupons system.
So you could add your book to smashwords
| | 00:30 |
and then create a coupon that offers the
book for free while charging something on
| | 00:34 |
the site.
Of course, you can also offer books on
| | 00:38 |
Amazon for free.
Amazon doesn't allow self-publishers to
| | 00:43 |
list their book for free outside of the
KDP select program, and then it's only
| | 00:47 |
for five days during a 90 day period.
Now, you might see some books there that
| | 00:52 |
are free and they're free for a couple of
reasons.
| | 00:55 |
One is there's a special relationship
between the publisher and Amazon, or
| | 00:59 |
Amazon's search bots have discovered the
book for free elsewhere and have marked
| | 01:03 |
the book free on Amazon.
Apple actually has a coupon program that
| | 01:10 |
they offer to eBook publishers.
You're able to get about up to 53 copies
| | 01:15 |
of your book, I just wanna share a couple
of examples of how businesses are doing
| | 01:20 |
it on the internet.
One of them is MailChimp.
| | 01:25 |
MailChimp offers a whole selection of
resources on their resource page as you
| | 01:29 |
see here, they offer a number of guides.
How to manage your list MailChimp mobile,
| | 01:36 |
international, et cetera.
Click on any one of these, and you are
| | 01:40 |
taken to a page that describes that
eBook, and you're allowed to download
| | 01:45 |
that in a PDF, an ePub, or a mobi format
for free.
| | 01:51 |
In my last example, I wanna talk about
actually offering the eBook for free
| | 01:56 |
while using Amazon as a way to promote
your information as a marketing tool.
| | 02:03 |
So here, we have an example of McKinsey &
Company, who's published an e-book
| | 02:07 |
called, Investing in Growth, Europe's
Next Challenge.
| | 02:11 |
And you see here that they have the full
report available in PDF.
| | 02:15 |
You can get the Kindle or the eBook
version, and they're all available for free.
| | 02:23 |
When you type that same exact title into
Amazon, you find out that they have a
| | 02:27 |
Kindle price of $3.99, there's entirely
different market that is shopping on
| | 02:32 |
Amazon versus a McKinsey customer.
So, in this way they're using the Amazon
| | 02:39 |
search engine if you will to help connect
people that they wouldn't normally reach
| | 02:44 |
with McKinsey information.
These are just a few ways you can give
| | 02:50 |
your e-book away, regardless of your
underlying objectives.
| | 02:54 |
But no matter what your reasoning, free
does not have to be permanent, nor must
| | 02:58 |
it be free everywhere.
I think the key is to think of free as a
| | 03:02 |
marketing tactic.
| | 03:04 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
