Monthly Archives: January 2014

Using Fivrr

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They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover, yet at first glance, a book cover is all people will know about your e-book. If you create an e-book cover yourself without any graphic design knowledge, chances are good you’ll create an amateurish cover that won’t look as appealing to others. The solution is to get a graphics designer to create an e-book cover for you.

If you browse the Internet, you can find graphic designers willing to create great e-book covers for $200 or more. While their work is probably excellent, the cost may be prohibitive. After all, if you’re selling novels for 99 cents, spending $200 up front can be a huge expense. Will a $200+ expense for a professionally designed book cover help increase sales so you earn back the cost of the book cover design? maybe, maybe not.

Here’s another solution. On a site called Fivrr, people offer their services for $5 or more. So you can get a basic e-book cover designed for just $5, which will likely be better than anything you could do yourself if you’re not a graphics designer. For a little more, you can add pictures or other fancy graphics designs, but the total cost will be far less than $200.

An e-book cover designed by someone on Fivrr will likely be good enough to get you started. Then if your e-books start selling, consider paying more for a better designed e-book cover if you’re not completely happy with your current one. The goal is to spend a s little as possible upfront.

The usual temptation is to spend a lot of money upfront by thinking “it takes money to make money.” That’s wrong. It takes creativity to make money. Just spending money wildly won’t guarantee you’ll make money. You could take out a million dollar Super Bowl ad to promote your e-book and that would spend money, but would it translate into a million dollars worth of sales that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise? Maybe, maybe not.

If you’re just getting started selling e-books, keep your costs to a minimum until you figure out how well your particular e-books sell. Then gradually use your profits to pay for more marketing such as paying for a better designed e-book. Ideally, you should be creating e-books that support each other and target the same audience, so you’ll likely want to create the same look of your covers for all your e-books.

That means if you find a good graphic designer on Fivrr, you may want to stick with that person to create other e-book covers for you inexpensively. Spend as little as possible upfront so you can learn more about e-book marketing. Start with Fivrr to get someone to design your e-book covers and if you start making money, then reinvest in a better cover if you think that will increase sales. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to find out.

To see a sample of graphic designers on Fivrr, click here.

Affiliate Marketing

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If you have a web site, you should be promoting other products. The two simplest way to do that is to set up a free Google AdSense account and a free Amazon Associates account. That way you can display Google ads on your website and create links to various products that Amazon sells. Since Amazon sells practically everything, you can put Amazon Associate links in your web site so when people click on that link and buy something, you get a commission.

Beyond Google AdSense and Amazon Associates, there are plenty of other affiliate marketing companies out there with names like LinkConnector, LinkShare, and Commission Junction. All of these affiliate marketing companies work alike. You sign up with a free account and browse through their list of companies. When you find a company selling products related to your web site, you request to advertise that company’s products.

Big name companies use affiliate marketing to boost sales including Microsoft, PetSmart, and Dell Computers. Like Amazon Associate links, affiliate marketing links only pay you if someone clicks on the link and buys something from that link. So the more visitors you get to your web site, the greater the odds someone will click on your affiliate marketing link and buy something, giving you a commission.

It’s possible to get wealthy just through affiliate marketing links alone. However, you need to build an audience first, and that begins with providing useful content to keep attracting people to find your web site and keep coming back afterwards.

If you’re a fiction writer, you can post excerpts of your novels. That way people will likely get hooked on your writing and want to read more. If you’re a nonfiction writer, post interesting information related to your specialized topic. Then when people learn to trust your information, they’ll be more likely to buy your e-book.

Since there are so many different affiliate marketing companies out there and they all work the same, the goal is to find the affiliate marketing company that has partnered with the company best suited for your web site. If your web site focuses on providing tips for car repair, then you’ll want to find the most popular car repair and auto parts companies first. Then find out which affiliate marketing company they belong to so you can start advertising their products.

The two biggest mistakes with affiliate marketing is that people will sign up for as many as possible and start putting links all over their website for products that have little or nothing to do with their web site content. If you do that, you’ll likely just annoy your visitors and make nothing for your effort.

A better approach is to zero in on just one company that sells products or services that most closely matches your web site’s content. Then promote that company’s products exclusively on your web site. When you start getting success from marketing one company’s products, then start branching out to other similar companies.

The key is to start slowly and build your audience and your sales. Of course, remember that your whole goal of writing e-books is to sell and make money from your e-books, not necessarily to make money from affiliate marketing links. Any money you make from affiliate marketing links are a bonus.

Also keep in mind that many people read e-books on iPads and other tablets  that let you embed links directly in your e-books. That way if someone taps on a link in your e-book, that loads their tablet browser. By embedding affiliate marketing links in your e-books, you can provide another way to boost your income through your e-books.

Affiliate marketing is a way to supplement your income and help pay for the cost of your web site. While some people can actually make a full-time living off affiliate marketing, you probably don’t want to do that unless you find affiliate marketing more exciting than writing e-books. In most cases, think of affiliate marketing as just another way to make money from your web site along with Google AdSense and Amazon Associates. If your advertising can pay for your web site or even earn you a profit, that’s just a bonus to writing and selling e-books.

TigerDirect StoreFront

Partnering with a Big Company

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Suppose you’re writing a nonfiction book. Chances are good you’ll need to market it yourself and hope people will find and buy your e-book. While there’s nothing wrong with writing a nonfiction book and marketing it yourself, that’s the hard way. Here’s the easy way.

Partner with a big company. This partnership doesn’t even have to be official. In my own case, I just finished writing a screenwriting tutorial that explains how to use a popular screenwriting program called Final Draft. Even though I have no official relationship with the company that makes Final Draft, my e-book will get more attention solely because it’s about a popular program that many screenwriters know about. Anyone looking for a screenwriting e-book has plenty of choices. Anyone looking for a tutorial on Final Draft only has my e-book, which means I have the market all to myself (at least until someone else writes an e-book about Final Draft).

Best of all, the name of Final Draft alone will help draw attention to my e-book. Someone looking to buy Final Draft will likely stumble across a web page describing my Final Draft e-book, which means I’ll likely pick up sales from that activity alone, all with no extra effort on my part.

Let’s say you were writing a cookbook. Instead of just using any ingredients, what about specifically mentioning ingredients from a company like Kraft? Rather than try to sell a generic cookbook, what about a cookbook called “The Ultimate Cookbook Using Kraft Products”? Just using the name Kraft will likely attract far more attention to your cookbook than just another generic cookbook title. By linking your e-book to a popular product or name, you can instantly get greater public recognition, which will likely translate into greater sales.

This is the same principle that explains why franchise restaurants are so popular. When you travel to a strange town, there could be the greatest restaurant in the world right in front of you, but you’d never know it. However, if you saw a McDonald’s or Subway restaurant nearby, you’d likely go there just because of the name recognition alone.

If you partner with a big company, officially or unofficially, you can piggyback on their name by promoting their products. It’s highly unlikely that any company will be upset if you’re promoting the use of their products, so they might even turn around and promote your e-book as an indirect way to promote their product. From a company’s point of view, promoting your e-book costs nothing and further promotes their product at the same time. It’s a win-win situation for you and whatever big company you decide to support.

Partnering with a big company takes part of the marketing burden off you and puts it in the hands of a big company that attracts attention everyday. Leech off the good name of a big company and make them look good. In return, their product name will draw attention to your e-book, and that’s good for you.

The Netflix of Books

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Almost everyone has heard of Netflix where you pay a monthly fee and can watch all the movies you want as streaming video. Now there’s a new service called Oyster, which lets you pay $10 a month to read all the books you want. Even big publishers like HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt make their titles available through Oyster.

Each time someone reads a particular book, Oyster tracks this information and pays the publisher, which in turn pays the author. So the more people who read a particular book, the more the author gets paid from the publisher. As more books go digital, reading e-books through Oyster on any device (such as an iPhone, an iPad, or a computer) gives people greater flexibility and choices.

Oyster even reports that once people start reading a book, they’re more likely to read another four more. Without the world of e-books, a service like Oyster could never have been possible, so you can see where the future is heading.

As Oyster grows, you can expect similar services to pop up, but book rental services like Oyster represent a large part of the future of e-books. Not only can you sell e-books, but you can soon make money renting them to readers. For readers, Oyster lets them sample books without the high cost of buying them. For authors, Oyster provides a huge audience willing to try different types of books at no risk beyond time.

Think of Oyster like an electronic library. Once a library makes your printed book available, there’s no reason for anyone to buy it. However, libraries make it possible for readers to sample books at no risk. If they like a particular author, they’ll likely buy books from that author.

Oyster works the same way. Once people like an e-book by a particular author, they’ll be more likely to buy an e-book from that author in the future. Unlike a library that provides no additional revenue to the author once they buy the book, Oyster continues to generate revenue for the author each time someone reads it.

E-book rental services are part of the future. To read more about Oyster, click here.

The 2014 Guide to Self Publishing

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The 2014 Guide to Self-Publishing is out and specifically focuses on helping writers find self-publishing companies, freelance editors, freelance designers, and more. The listings include contact information, rates, services, and specialties along with editorial content to help writers navigate the social media landscape, design professional-looking books (in print and digitally), create products and services that go beyond the book, and track various conferences geared towards writers and self-publishing.

This book is proof that self-publishing is fast becoming a valid and respected option for writers. Now the big question is should you buy this book?

Yes and no. The book will undoubtedly help you find contacts and conferences geared towards self-publishing. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that buying a book will help you all by itself. After you buy the book, you’ll still need to read it, take action, and follow any advice in its pages.

Self-publishing is a growing market and you should learn all you can about it so you don’t make mistakes that could be easily avoided. On the other hand, don’t fall into the trap thinking that buying something will help you achieve success. Spending money may be necessary, but it’s never the sole factor in determining someone’s success. That takes hard work, persistence, and dedication, which no book can teach you.

If you look at the 2014 Guide to Self-Publishing as an investment that you can use, then go ahead and buy it. If you look at this book as a magic bullet that will instantly turn you into a success, then don’t buy the book or spend any money until you first get clear that spending money alone won’t bring you closer to success.

Every resource can be valuable in teaching you something new. Just spend your money wisely so you get the maximum benefit from everything you buy to advance your writing career.

 

Dealing with Spam on Your Website

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As soon as you put up a website and allow people to leave comments, you’re going to be flooded with spam. To identify most spam, first look to see if they include a URL or domain address. Spammers want to put links to their sites all over the Internet so if a comment includes a URL embedded in it, there’s a big chance it’s going to be spam.

Also check to make sure the comment actually references something on your blog. Spammers often write general compliments such as “Wow! Found your site on Google and it’s been exactly what I’m looking for. You guys are doing a great job! Keep up the good work.” Then buried in their comment will be a link to the spammer’s own web site, which is really all the spammer wanted to put on your website in the first place.

So the two keys to look out for are any comments including a link and any comment that’s so generic that it looks like a compliment but really isn’t.

One way to reduce spam is to use something called a CAPTCHA, which means your blog won’t let anyone type a comment unless they type in a series of letters or numbers first. This prevents automated programs (called bots) from sending you spam, but does nothing to stop actual people hired to spam the Internet with useless comments. The best way to stop these human spammers is to keep screening your comments before you allow them to be posted, and then keep eliminating the spammers’ comments so nobody but you ever sees them. Eventually when the spammers realize you can’t be tricked into posting one of their useless comments on your site, they’ll go away.

Just realize that the whole purpose of spammers is to get their website address on as many sites as possible, so if you can stop them from achieving their goal with your blog, most of them will go away. Unfortunately, you’ll never get rid of all spam, so be ready to screen and stop spam at all times. That’s just the nature of running a website that allows others to leave comments.

Pew Poll Shows People Reading More E-Books

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The latest Pew Poll results say that the number of Americans reading e-books has steadily grown from 17 percent in 2011, 23 percent in 2012, and 28 percent in 2014. At the same time, the number of Americans reading print books has remained constant.

The Pew Poll also notes that even though more people are reading e-books, they’re still reading print books as well. What would be especially interesting would be knowing what people are reading as e-books. For example, do more people reading fiction as e-books since fiction is less likely to be kept afterwards? If you buy a print book, would you be more likely to keep it after you’ve read it for reference?

Whatever the case, the Pew Poll demonstrates that people aren’t choosing either e-books or printed books, but both. However, e-book reading is growing in popularity since it’s far easier to take an e-reader anywhere you go than to take a book with you. An e-reader also gives you greater choices so you can carry dozens of books with you and read each one at your convenience. If you take a printed book with you, you’re far less likely to take a dozen of them at a time.

The steady growth of e-books means more people will find them acceptable, which means a growing market for self-published authors. If you want to create a printed version of your book, just use a print-on-demand service (POD). Such POD services are free because they only take a cut of the profits each time you make a sale.

Now you have to wonder if Americans are reading just as much as before and switching back and forth between e-books and printed books, why are so many book publishers in financial trouble? Most likely the answer is that there’s no reason to have a middleman any more.

In the old days, printing and selling a book was expensive, so publishers could only print a fixed number that they thought had the best chance for selling each year. Individuals couldn’t print and distribute their own books without a huge expense in time and money. Now with e-books, anyone can reach a global market at no cost. That eliminates the need for book publishers to make judgements on what they think is worth publishing because publishers have been notoriously wrong in the past. Just think, dozens of publishers turned down J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book because they didn’t think it would sell. That tells you the ineffectiveness of traditional publishers in gauging the market.

With e-books eliminating the middleman, book stores and book publishers suffer. This means that smart authors whom promote themselves can thrive in ways not possible in the old way of book publishing. Today is a great time for authors to control their own destiny by self-publishing their works.

In the old days, book publishers acted as gatekeepers, blocking most books form being published and extracting a high toll for those books they allowed into the market. Today, the path to success is to self-publish, then wait for the publishers to come to you once they see the success you’re having with self-publishing. Book publishers can’t afford to publish anything but sure-fire sellers, and they do that by looking for the most popular self-published e-books.

The future of self-publishing is clear. It’s the future path for determining your own success as well as getting the attention of a traditional book publisher. As more people continue reading e-books as well as print books, the market for readers will shift. As the cost of print books goes up and the cost of e-books remains much lower, more people will switch to e-books for convenience and price. Printed books may have more aesthetic appeal, but when you just want to read a fun fiction novel that you’ll likely never read again, low price and convenience are more important than the higher cost of printed books.

The Pew Poll shows that Americans are still reading just as much as before, but e-books represent a growing percentage of their reading. You can’t go wrong targeting the e-book market. Next year, the Pew Poll will likely tell us even more Americans are reading e-books along with printed books, so there’s still a thriving reader market out there. All you have to do is get your e-book out to market now.

Read more about the Pew Poll results here.

A Curious Observation

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My best selling self-published e-book is my screenwriting book called “The 15-Minute Movie Method” available through Amazon and iBookstore. After some people started asking for a printed copy of the book, I looked at two print-on-demand services: CreateSpace and Lightning Source. Ultimately I chose CreateSpace because they’re part of Amazon so it would be easy to promote the book through Amazon, but I assume Lightning Source is just as reliable as CreateSpace.

I didn’t expect to sell any print-on-demand books, but in the past two months I’ve sold four with three of the sales coming from Europe. While it’s far too soon to tell whether this is a trend or not, I suspect that e-books might be more popular in North America and printed books are more popular in Europe.

A friend from Germany once told me that Europeans generally prefer printed books compared to reading e-books on a tablet. Printed books are still selling well in Europe with many bookstores still open, unlike in America where Borders Books disappeared and Barnes & Noble keeps facing dwindling sales every year. If you view this gallery of the twenty best bookstores in the world, you’ll find that only two bookstores are in America.

So if you want to reach the European market, consider a print-on-demand service to supplement your e-book sales. You’ll have to charge more for a printed book, but if people want a printed copy, then you might as well offer it to them, especially since print-on-demand services don’t cost you anything. Every time you make a sale, they make a profit. Until you make a sale, the print-on-demand service won’t cost you a thing other than time formatting your manuscript.

Printed books are still popular around the world, but if America is any indication, printed books will soon become a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. When that happens in Europe, even print-on-demand books won’t save the printed book market. The future is definitely not printed books but e-books, so focus your energy on the future, but keep your eye on the past. After all, you don’t want to miss sales simply because you ignored the option of print-on-demand book services.

Riches in Niches

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There’s a saying that there’s riches in niches. What that means is that rather than try to appeal to everyone, target a small segment of the market. By catering exclusively to this small segment, you give them exactly what they want and likely have no competition because everyone else is trying to appeal to everyone.

When Facebook first started, they only targeted Harvard University students. Then they expanded to cater to students at other Ivy League schools. Then they expanded further to any college student. Finally, they reached out to everyone.

When you start with a niche and exclusively target that niche, you automatically eliminate most of your competition because there likely will be no competitors. That gives you a chance to thrive and grow. Compare Facebook to Friendster, another social network that actually had a head start on Facebook. Friendster tried to appeal to everyone, so they really didn’t appeal specifically to anyone. Since social networks grow depending on where everyone is heading, that meant that Friendster grew far slower than Facebook until Facebook eventually took the lead for good.

In fiction, you can see authors targeting niches by writing monster porn romance novels where women have sex with BigFoot, space aliens, and werewolves. If that’s what you want to read, you have no choice but to read a monster porn e-book. In the nonfiction realm, focus on a narrow target market.

In my case, I used to write general purpose computer books to appeal to everyone such as books about Microsoft Office. Book publishers made lots of money catering to the big, popular programs but almost always avoided much smaller niche markets. For example, in the screenwriting community, there’s a special screenplay word processor called Final Draft that James Cameron used to write “Titanic” and “Avatar.”

Because Final Draft appeals to such a small niche, ordinary book publishers won’t write a book about the program because the market is too small. However, that’s exactly why I’m writing an e-book about Final Draft because I have no competition. When I finish my Final Draft e-book, I’ll modify it slightly to cover the second most popular screenwriting word processor used in Hollywood called Movie Magic, which was used to write the screenplay for movies like “Shrek” and “The Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Look in your own industry and there will be plenty of topics that the big, traditional publishers won’t tackle. Maybe there’s a special program that tax accountants use. There’s a book topic right there. Perhaps construction contractors have special needs for dealing with government regulations. There’s another book topic that big publishers are ignoring. Maybe you’re an avid fan of drawing caricatures of celebrities. You could probably write a self-published e-book on that topic.

Rather than think big, think small. The smaller the market, the more opportunities you’ll have to break in and make sales. Then just grow from there. In the fiction market, lots of people were writing action thrillers, but only Tom Clancy thought about focusing strictly on military technology. John Grisham focused on legal thrillers. There’s probably a market out there for a blind detective or a Russian immigrant trying to adjust to life in America while hunting ghosts and monsters in his spare time.

Find your niche and you’ve solved most of your problems for how to find success in the self-publishing e-book market. There really are riches in niches, so you just have to find your niche and mine it for all it’s worth.

Blogging Your Book (Again)

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When many people have an idea for a book, they often feel overwhelmed at the idea of writing so many words. The trick is to realize that even the best writers can’t write an entire novel in one sitting. Instead, they write it one chapter at a time. Besides writing a massive amount of text to create a book, aspiring authors also feel confused by not knowing what they should include in a book. The trick to solving both problems is to blog your book.

When you write parts of your book as a blog, you’re simply writing it one section at a time. If you discipline yourself to contribute to your blog regularly, such as every third day, you’ll force yourself to keep writing and gradually accumulate enough text to make you realize that you may have already written more than half of your book already.

However, the greatest advantage of blogging your book is to free you from worrying about what to write about. Just write about anything. Then once you’ve written it, you can go through all your blog posts at a later date and determine what you can use, what you can toss, and what might need to be modified heavily to be useful.

The whole point of blogging your book is to make it easy on yourself to write your book a little art a time in any order you wish. If you notice on this site I’ll bounce around from technical details to writing (how to create a table of contents) to marketing information to tips for making money on your website that promotes your e-book. Whatever I feel like writing about in any order, that’s what goes into this blog.

Later, I’ll go through these blog posts, pick out the best ones, and put the whole thing together as an e-book. I’ll likely need to dump a lot of blog posts, heavily rewrite others, and write new material to fill in the gaps that my existing blog posts don’t cover, but that’s far easier than staring at a blank screen, trying to visualize an entire book, getting discouraged, and never even trying.

Blogging your book gives you a reason to write, an audience to get feedback, and a place to store your thoughts so you can find them again later.

While you always want to strive for perfection, don’t let the quest for perfection paralyze you from not writing anything at all. It’s better to have a poorly written blog post than nothing at all since you can edit a poorly written blog post but you can’t do anything with nothing. Think of your blog as a testing ground for your ideas that you can mine later for nuggets of wisdom.

Writing a book will take time and will be a long endeavor, but blogging it in small chunks can simplify the task and help clarify your ideas at the same time. If you just keep moving a little bit forward each day towards your goal, you’ll eventually get there. In the end, that’s your ultimate goal anyway.

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