Tag: self-publishing

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

Guest post by D’vorah Lansky

Video is the most effective way to connect with your online audience because they can both see and hear you. This medium permits viewers to get to know you and find out more about your book. Adding video to your website and marketing campaign is one of the smartest things you can do. Video captivates your visitors, provides them with a warm welcome and keeps them on your site longer, so they are much more likely to take action.

Creating Web video might seem intimidating but the truth is that it can be easy, affordable, and even free. Creating Web video can also be a great deal of fun. You can either record your message with the camera facing you or you can create a screen capture video, using a free software program such as JingProject.com, and record something that is displayed on your computer screen. The technology has advanced to the point where it is easy to record a video, even if you are not a technology expert.

How Authors Can Use Video to Market Their Books

There are unlimited possibilities as far as what you can create videos of. Here are a few suggestions for you to draw from:

Create a video book trailer. Market your book by creating a video book trailer which you can post on YouTube and on your website. A video book trailer is a short video or multimedia presentation that helps to promote your book. Typically, it is less than two minutes, and a thirty-second to one-minute video can have even more impact, as people are more likely to watch it all the way through. The goal of your video trailer is to get people emotionally involved in your book by identifying a pain or a challenge and sharing a solution.

The simplest way to create a video trailer is through the use of images, PowerPoint slides, video clips, voiceover, music, and sound effects that paint a story that invites your viewers to get emotionally involved in your book. An extremely simple way to create a video trailer is with an online program at Animoto.com. Simply upload images, select an audio track from a wide selection available on the site, click a few buttons and upload your video to YouTube.

Read a chapter of your book aloud. This is a wonderful way to connect with your audience as authors have been doing readings in person at bookstores for decades. You are simply keeping up with these technological times to reach a much larger audience of prospective buyers. You can either face your webcam or you can narrate while displaying PowerPoint slides to create a delightful presentation.

Record a video interview. Have someone else ask you a series of questions related to your book. Create a webcam video or a PowerPoint video of you sharing an aspect of the book, why you wrote the book, and how people can benefit from the content in your book.

Create a video book. We’ve all heard of audio books. What about creating a video book? You can create an abbreviated, separate video for each chapter and take your reader on an audio-visual journey through your book. This also provides you with an upsell product and/or a special give-away for those who purchase your book during your book launch or through a special promotion. At the same time, it is a teaser opportunity to get them to buy and read the entire book.

What ideas do you have?

Hopefully these ideas have stimulated some ideas of your own. What ways can you see yourself using video to share the message of your book? 

 

About the Author

D’vorah is the bestselling author of Book Marketing Made Easy: Simple Strategies for Selling Your Nonfiction Book Online – Visit her book blog and check out the full virtual book tour schedule at: www.BookMarketingMadeEasy.com.

D’vorah offers programs for nonfiction authors interested in growing their brand and their book sales through online book marketing practices and strategies. You can purchase her book on Amazon at: www.BookMarketingMadeEasy.com/amazon

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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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