Tag: ARCs

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , ,

Guest post by Michelle Drucker, manager of marketing, BookPal (www.book-pal.com)

When was the last time you bought a book because you saw it in the window of a bookstore? Now, when was the last time you purchased a book because you read about it online? I’m guessing it was more recent than the last time you even stepped foot in a bookstore!

As stated by marketer David Meerman Scott, “The old rules of marketing and PR are ineffective in an online world” (The New Rules of Marketing & PR, p. 15). The Internet has transformed the world of book marketing just as it has for many other industries. Traditional book-marketing strategies, such as bookstore window placement and book signings, are dead. Sure, these strategies will result in a few small sales, but they are not nearly as cost-effective and efficient as online marketing.

Here are a few simple tricks to get your book noticed and boost sales without breaking the bank:

Create visuals and produce dynamic content.

Forget about the cover! Now people are judging a book by its trailer. The only type of media that outperforms images online is video. Visualize the reading experience by creating a compelling video. Book trailers don’t need to have high production value, but make sure they are professional and straightforward. Post them to YouTube and Vimeo — these sites allow others to share your video content all over the web.

In order to stay top-of-mind, dynamic content is key. Hundreds of thousands of books are published every year. What makes your book stand out? What information does your book contain that people need to know? This is content you should be sharing online.

A blog is a great place to share tidbits of content and direct consumers to buy the book. On a blog, you can share unique information that will help you connect with potential readers on a personal level. Consistent, focused blogging also helps improve keyword rankings if you optimize your blog for search engines.

Establish a strong social media presence.

Does your book have a Facebook page? Does it have a Twitter handle? Its own hashtag? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, then you have your work cut out for you. The best way to spread awareness for a new book is through word-of-mouth. In today’s modern era, social media is the perfect medium for spreading the word.

Now that you’ve created all this amazing content for your blog, use social media as a sharing tool. Link your posts back to your blog in order to boost traffic. With the right targeting and use of keywords, millions of people can potentially see your content.

Leverage industry influencers.

If you are a new author, you probably don’t have a gigantic following on social media or thousands of people viewing your blog every day. The good news is that there are plenty of people that do.

Before you start sending an advance reading copy (ARC) of your book to every blogger on the planet, identify influencers with followers who you can convert into readers. For example, if you are writing a book on leadership, you should send an ARC to business leaders with a significant online presence. Once you’ve found the right influencers, encourage them to review your book and provide their honest feedback. If they like your book, the word will spread like wildfire.

About Michelle Drucker: Michelle manages the Marketing department at BookPal, an e-commerce company that sells books to corporations, school districts, nonprofits and government agencies. Michelle brings strategic focus to the firm’s email, social media and lead generation campaigns. She also oversees paid advertising and website development initiatives.

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By Posted on Posted in Publishing Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

I posted this to a LinkedIn discussion group yesterday, and publishing consultant Carol White told me I should make it a blog, as a public service. So here we go:

 

It doesn’t sound like it would be a big deal, but the organization that assigns the ISBN to the book is the publisher. When your publisher is a subsidy house (such as Trafford, AuthorHouse, XLibris, iUniverse—all owned by the same company, incidentally—or Outskirts, Infinity and their hundreds of competitors), anyone in the industry can tell by the ISBN that you went with a publisher that does no vetting, that will take anyone who can pay the fee (other than hate speech or smut), that doesn’t give a flying f about whether the book has been proofread, let alone edited—and that in most cases will have a very generic cover and interior design. The industry, having seen vast quantities of junk coming out of these presses, assumes that anything with one of those labels is junk.

And the unfortunate reality is that 90 percent of the books coming out of these presses should never have been published. There’s certainly a lot of junk coming out of true self-publishing, too—but the percentage of good stuff is much, much higher.

Now there are a few reasons why in some cases it makes sense to go this route, as long as you know what you’re getting into and have good reasons. For example:

  • A client of mine whose book was good enough to publish traditionally told me he was in his late 80s and didn’t want to wait two years to find a publisher and have the book come out, and likewise he didn’t want the hassle of being his own publisher. He went with iUniverse, and probably sold a lot fewer books, but got it done very quickly at relatively low expense.
  • Infinity (my favorite of this ilk) got wind of my Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and begged me to let them publish it. I let them do their own edition for the book trade. If a bookstore wants to order, I let them order Infinity’s edition. If an individual orders, I fill the order from the books I printed under my own ISBN (which cost me half as much per copy as Infinity’s). What I got out of it was outsourcing all the hassles of dealing with bookstores, as well as “street cred” with subsidy-published authors who might hire me for book consulting or marketing consulting/copywriting.
  • Professional speakers often use these companies because they don’t want the hassles, and because they have a built-in market that doesn’t care that their books are ugly and overpriced. In that market, they can pay the $9 per book to get them printed, because they sell them direct for maybe $25. In a bookstore, where comparable books might be $18 and the bookstore takes 40 percent, the numbers don’t work.
  • Finally, when I get a client with a crappy book that has a sharply limited life expectancy, I recommend these companies. If you’re going to sell 100 or fewer books during the life of a title, there’s no point setting up a publishing company, choosing printing and design vendors, etc., or paying someone like me or Carol or Judy to do it for you.

In true self-publishing, you buy your ISBN block and you choose your vendors for all the services you need (such as editing, design, indexing). And you set the price of the book. Some subsidy houses will allow you to supply your own cover and interior. Some will even let you set your own price. And some subsidy houses also offer on-demand printing services where they don’t assign an ISBN; in this case, you are buying short-run printing from a company that happens to also offer subsidy publishing services, but you are not subsidy publishing. Many people use companies like Lulu and the printing arm associated with Infinity to do Advance Reader Copies (ARCs). I used Lulu to do a relative’s vanity project in  run of 6 copies. I didn’t ask for ISBN and I didn’t use one of mine. I was simply using them as a printer.

But ultimately, there’s only one test that makes the determination whether a book is self- or subsidy published: who obtained the ISBN from the official ISBN agency (Bowker, in the US).

 

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