When Does It Make Sense to Self-Publish?

I was commenting in a professional publishers Linked-In group and decided to republish here.

Think of self-publishing as just another entrepreneurial endeavor. Some businesses can (and must) start out with mounds of start-up cash. But many, many businesses start out in garages or dorm rooms. Think: Dell, Amazon, FaceBook, and thousands of other businesses that started off baking cookies in their kitchens or making yogurt on their farms. They didn't have live audiences to entertain or a huge industry to start them off - just a visionary product that could start local and build.

So let's think of a self-published book as an entrepreneurial effort to create and sell a product.

What made this entrepreneurial effort difficult in the past was the amount of money required for an individual to publish her own book. Although authors still have to pay for good editing, etc., two revolutions have made it easier to "entrepreneur" with a book:

1) Radically less up-front risk because of print-on-demand. (I just received an e-mail that Lightning Source is offering to print your first POD book, if you submit it in digital format, for $199. Imagine telling someone 20 years ago that you'd get their book on the market in a month for $199. You'd have been indited for fraud!)

2) New ways to market books outside of traditional bookstores. (Amazon, social networking, etc.)

So, when does it make sense to self-publish?

(One publisher suggested the first four reasons; I chimed in with the rest.)

#1 - You're a great salesperson.

#2 - You can work with a good team of sales people.

#3 - You teach and use the book as a text.

#4 - You don't plan to sell many copies. Print-on-demand makes sense for those publishing a family history that only relatives and family friends are likely to buy. Also, some publish highly technical books that a few hundred people might pay large sums to purchase.

#5 - No traditional publishers accept your book, but you still believe in it. (We could build a large list of self-published books that ended up becoming best-sellers.)

#6 - A non-fiction book fits in a niche category that would likely come up to the top in an Amazon search. (I've not marketed my book on Christian music in 15 years, but it continues to sell steadily on Amazon. A search for "Contemporary Christian Music" brings it close to the top of a search.)

#7 - The author thinks the book will be a steady, slow seller, but never sell a lot in any given year. I know of a successful author who writes books for other writers, such as "Late-18th-Century American Terminology and Culture" (I made the name up, having forgotten the actual title) to be used by people writing historical fiction. It wouldn't make sense to print 5,000 copies and store most of them for 10 years. But the author might sell 500 copies per year forever on Amazon. If you write 20 books like this, you're making some decent money.

Other ideas of when it's best to self-publish? Please comment!

J. Steve Miller
Author of Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It
www.enjoyyourmoney.org

Posting Video Interviews for Book Marketing

Interested in posting a video to promote your book? I've heard people say that posting to places like YouTube.com can generate a lot of interest in your books and bring in a lot of Web traffic to view your books. Since it's free, I'm all for it. Here's how I went about it. I'll tell later what impact, if any, I think it had on book sales.

1) Get a decent video together. One person who works with video recommended doing something unprofessional, like with a home video set. He said that young people particularly like the realness of it. In under five minutes, tell something about your book or have someone interview you about the book.

I went the professional route, but paid only $40 per video. I was fortunate that my publicist set me up on CBS News and Fox 5 News. The interviews were under five minutes each and looked very professional. All I had to do was to pay a service (ask at the TV station who records and sells rights) to get the rights so that they could e-mail me a digital copy. I'm told that getting it this way gives a better copy than trying to download it from the TV station and putting it directly on youtube. Here are my three videos:

Fox 5 News on young people and finances

CBS News on financial management for teens and college students

CBS News Followup on personal finances for young people and Generation Y

I'd recommend giving viewers unique, useful information. I doubt they'd come just to see you talk about your book, unless you're Steven King. Each of my videos are on something specific, like how young graduates can land jobs and succeed with their finances. (It's graduation season as I write.) Those are topics that people might search for information on in Google. My book and Web address are mentioned unabnoxiously by the interviewers.

2) Brainstorm search terms and phrases that people might use in searching for your video. Put some of them in Google Adword's Key Words Tool to find more terms and to find out how many times different terms/phrases are searched. (Example: do people search more for "personal finance" or "personal finances." To decide which term to use, find out how many times each is searched.) You'll use these terms in the fourth step.

3) Sign up for a YouTube acount at www.youtube.com. (Click "SignUp" on top right menu. Just follow their instructions. My video typically failed to upload all the way the first time or two, then succeeded on the second or third try.)

4) Use the search terms you came up with in my second step. In your YouTube account, on the page where you're uploading your video, use key words in your title, description, and in the box where you can add descriptive words and phrases.

5) Include a link in your description to your author site, media page of your publisher site, blog, or to your book on Amazon.

6) Ask friends and family to watch it on their computers. If they like it, have them rate it on YouTube and tell why they liked it. (If they don't like it, tell them skip the rating process and instead take a film course so that next time around they can recognize real quality when they see it.) The higher it's rated (and the more people who rate it), the better your chances of being found.

7) Link to the video from all your blogs and sites. The more incoming links, the more important search engines think you are. Thus, more people will likely find you in a search.

8) Don't expect immediate results. Google only "dances" once a month, when it updates its algorythms and data.

9) Let me know any of your good or bad experiences. If this doesn't help authors to sell books, we could all save time by not fooling with it!

Using News Releases to Promote Books

Today I start my news release campaign for my book, so I'm reviewing David Meerman Scott's recommendations for press releases in his book, "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" (pp. 167-177).

In the past, news releases were sent to the media to try to get articles in newspapers and magazines and spots on radio. Today, there are added benefits:

• anyone searching the web for key phrases contained in your release might find you.
  
• people who requested alerts to these phrases may automatically receive notice of your release.
• "Each time your news release is posted on another site, such as an online news site, the inbound link from the online news site to your Web site helps to increase the search engine ranking of your site, because the search engines use inbound links as one of the important criteria for their page-ranking algorithms."
• Having multiple press releases out there lets journalists know that you're active - things are happening with you and your book.
  

Here are some tips I consolidated from Scott:

1) Send them regularly - not just when you have big news.
2) Make good use of key words that people would use to search for your topic/book.
3) Appeal to buyers - their problems and needs - not just journalists.
4) Encourage them to respond in some way.
5) Include links to appropriate landing pages on your site or blog.
6) Add social media tags (e.g., Technorati, DIGG, del.icio.us) to help people find it.
7) Post it simultaneously on your website (e.g., in the "media room" or press section of your author or publisher site). Keep it there as long as it's still appropriate.
8) Send it via a news release distribution service so that you reach hundreds of Websites (including news services like Yahoo!, Google and Lycos) with each release.
9) Topics to write releases about: new takes on old problems, interesting information, award received, speaking at an event, product feature added, white paper published, etc.

Recommended (by Scott) news release distribution services:

• Business Wire: www.businesswire.com
  
• Market Wire: www.marketwire.com
• PrimeNewswire: www.primezone.com
• PR Newswire: www.prnewswire.com
• PRWeb: www.prweb.com
  

I believe that all of these are paid services, where you might pay a couple of hundred bucks to send a release to a certain geographic area (like Atlanta).

I've decided to send the first press release of my book to only free press release services, since I don't think the release of a book is something that the media is interested in (unless it was the latest Harry Potter book). As a guerilla marketer, I don't want to spend money that I'm not reasonably sure will have a pay-off. Thus, I'm primarily doing it for the other reasons listed above, which might not require paid releases.

For free press releases, my publicist, Stephanie Richards, recommends sending each release to all of the following:

• www.i-newswire.com/submit.php

Offers a free and paid ($25 per release) option. Free press release contains ads. Paid has premium distribution and claims to increase your website traffic (I assume this means that the release will be posted on sites with a live link back to my site.)

• www.dbusinessnews.com
  

Quotes from their site: "the Nations leading Internet provider of local business intelligence, including news, e-commerce services, business tools, and investment and research resources for small businesses.... "...the nation's only comprehensive business resource tool for large, medium and small businesses."

"dBusinessNews is delivered by email every business morning to a large and affluent readership base made up of over 700,000 subscribers. It has rapidly become the news source of choice for professionals, executives, managers, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, government officials, and an extensive network of reporters and news outlets.

dBusinessNews' XML newsfeeds is carried by major news distribution services including the Associated Press, Yahoo, Google, Altavista Moreover.com and 2000+ business web sites."

• www.24-7pressrelease.com

Their free press releases "receive limited distribution and are not guaranteed to be posted. Links may not be used." The $49 option is recommended for search engine optimization and visibility, distributing to popular newswires like Google News.

• http://liswire.com/

The Librarian's News Wire targets librarians.

• http://www.newswiretoday.com/

News Wire Today - "a free press releases & news wire distribution service to corporations, PR agencies, market research, business journalists, freelance writers, news content providers."

I have to sign up for a free subscription to use most of them. I'll post another blog with more specifics, including a link to the press release itself.

[Update: within 3 days of sending the press releases, I've sold 7 books on Amazon. But it's getting hard to know if these sales are due to my latest initiative, or to past initiatives starting to pay off. Last week I also put up three videos on YouTube from my TV appearances and linked them to my book. Perhaps that's paying off as well. Or, perhaps a review came out that I haven't found yet. Harder to say now, as opposed to just after the initial publication three months ago, what's contributing to sales.]

What is your experience with press releases? Any suggestions?

Optimize Your Blog to Increase Book Sales

Today I want to better optimize my blogs, so that more people can find them. Why?

• The more people who interact on your blog, the more comments (read: knowledge) you get.

• The more people who interact on your blog, the more people find out about your products and services.
  
  
• The more people who interact on your blog, the more people can find you on search engines (Google favors site that have more traffic and more incoming links and syndications.)

So how can you get more traffic to your site? My blog is hosted by Google Blogger. Here are their suggestions, which I'm trying to implement today: (The links might not work if you're not a member of blogger.com.)

Promoting Your Blog

This is in no way a science or guarantee; it's simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success.

Set your blog to Send Pings. When this setting is activated, your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.

Activate Your Navbar. Do this and you might start to see the effects right away! One of the features on the Blogger Navbar is a button called NextBlog - click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog.

Install Email This Post. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you.

Turn on Post Pages. By publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages, you ensure that your entries are way more link-able and more attractive to search engines.

Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, they're very likely going to read your post.

Add your blog to Blogger's listings. When you add your blog to our listings it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic.

Write quality content and do it well. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to achieve mass appeal, so fix yourself up a bit.

Publish regular updates. Simple: the more you blog, the more traffic you'll get.

Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors.

Keep search engines in mind. There are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search.

Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

Put your blog URL in your email signature. Think of how many forwarded emails you've seen in your day, and just imagine the possibilities.

Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across. (jsm note: this list of blogs may be dated. I can't even find daypop today. Perhaps the list of blog search engines in this wikipedia article "search engines" will keep updated.

Link to other blogs. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking.

Install a blogroll. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.

Be an active commenter. This is in the same vein as linking. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.

Enable Following on your blog. Following a is a great way to keep your friends updated on the latest activity on your blog. New blogs will have this blog feature enabled by default, but for older blogs you will have to enable it from the Layout | Page Elements tab.

Other suggestions on optimizing your blogs for more traffic?

On Getting Distribution

Seeking distribution? Small, independent publishers (like us) have a rough time getting distribution into bookstores. Here's why.

Imagine that you own a bookstore. You love books and you'd love to be able to order any book you want. But you don't have time to establish relationships with each of the 85,000 American publishers (Publishers Weekly stat. from 2004). (Can you imagine learning 85,000 different ways to order books?) If that's not overwhelming enough, c. 10,000 new publishing companies pop up each year (www.ISBN.org). If you're a bookstore owner, that's about 30 new publisher's you'd have to sign up with each day. Kind of takes the fun out of book selling.

That's why the publishing industry established middle men. Ingram and Baker & Taylor are the two main wholesalers that mainstream bookstores work with. Most bookstores have a relationship with both of them, allowing them to order regularly through those two systems. (Christian bookstores have their own middle men.)

But as you can imagine, Ingram and Baker & Taylor don't have time to establish relationships with 85,000 publishers and this year's 10,000 new publishers. They'll work directly with larger publishers, but otherwise they'll work with another set of middle men - the distributors.

So small publishers must establish a relationship with a distributor by filling out an application, paying a sign-up fee (some don't have a fee like this), and agreeing to give the distributor a cut in your profits (or both). This distributor in turn supplies the big wholesalers with your book.

This arrangement of four middle men (publisher, distributor, wholesaler, bookstore) between an author and a book-buyer shows why an author will get maybe 8% of a bookstore sale (80 cents of a $10.00 book). And, from what I read, none of these four middle men are getting rich.

What does this mean for a small publisher or self-published author? If you've printed your 2,000 or 5,000 copies, if you want to have a shot at getting into bookstores, you'll have to convince one of the distributors that your book will sell and establish a relationship. If you went print on demand through Lightning Source or Booksurge, bookstores and libraries can purchase through either Ingram (Lightning Source) or Baker & Taylor (Booksurge). But I don't think that either wholesaler is set up with a return policy with these print on demand books. Thus, only in rare situations will a bookstore stock your book. It's too much of a risk on their part to stock a book that they can't return if it doesn't sell. They can put through a special order if a customer wants it, but they won't stock it in hopes that someone will purchase it.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when I received this rejection letter from Baker & Taylor:

Dear Publisher,

Thank you for sending in your materials for consideration as a new vendor to Baker & Taylor, Inc. After careful review of your application and supporting materials, we have decided not to establish a business relationship with your company at this time.

Our decision was based upon the following factor(s):

Inadequate marketing and/or promotion plan

As a courtesy, they included a list of distributors I could work through to get to them.

Hmmm. I sent them three copies of my 45-page marketing plan. One publisher had called my plan "over the top." I must assume that since I'm not a major publisher with catalogues going to bookstores and marketing through the traditional bookstore channels, that they fear that bookstores wouldn't buy it.

And you know what? They're probably right. While I've been on TV twice and had an excellent review from a major financial columnist, I doubt people are flooding the bookstores looking for my book. I think that my primary sales will come through Amazon and non-traditional channels. Why waste time and money trying to establish distribution into bookstores if bookstores aren't likely to carry it?

My decision, at this point, is to only distribute through Premium Book Company. I took out a $400 ad that they will use to try to distribute through alternative channels (libraries, to businesses as incentives, etc.) I'll let you know how it goes. I'm getting healthy sales through Amazon.com and through my own efforts to sell in bulk. For now, this seems like the best course to stay on.

One publishing adviser had counseled me against seeking a return policy with a wholesaler. If bookstores ordered 200 copies and they didn't sell, they'd get returned (some of them damaged), and I'd be out some money. Glad this phase is behind me. One less thing to worry about.

Is Your Book Marketing Working? Maybe It's Just a Matter of Time

Two marketing books I was re-reading this week (with nonfiction books, I initially read do a thorough read, underlining extensively. Later, I tend to re-read just my underlinings for review.) urged readers to give marketing time - a lot of time. I didn't remember this from my first read of each book, but it came at a good time for me.

Some of my marketing for Enjoy Your Money has paid off immediately (like the nice review in the Oakland Tribune), but other things I've done seem to go nowhere (like adding all those search terms to my Amazon page.) I suppose I expected that most of my marketing efforts would have some kind of immediate payoff. Bad expectation. Marketing takes time. Here's what some experts are saying:

• "When you aim at Amazon, you need a certain amount of patience. Though a well-written and well-published book should start selling almost at once, it will generally take about a year to reach its full potential. That's because, as the book begins to succeed, its success feeds more success. Amazon's sales mechanisms and dynamics gradually lift a winner toward the top. It just takes a while." (Aiming At Amazon, by Aaron Shepard, p. 135)

• "Generally, your book's rise on lists and in other Amazon features is very gradual, and that's why reaching full potential takes a book about a year. So, take a deep breath, sit tight, and enjoy the very...slow...ride." (Shepard, p. 141)

• "Patience is another way of saying commitment. My advice to you is to create a sensible plan, then stick with it until it proves itself to you. How long might that take? Maybe three months, if you're lucky. Probably six months. And maybe even as long as a year. But you will never, never, never know whether the plan is working within the first sixty days. Commitment is directly related to time." (Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson, p. 17)

I'm about at the three-month mark for my book being available on Amazon. I'd pretty much concluded that nobody would ever be able to find my book on Amazon by searching general terms like Personal Money Management. After all, thousands of books on that topic are on Amazon, with many of the authors being household names like Dave Ramsey and high profile authors with television shows. Why would Amazon's search algorithm allow my book to the forefront of such a general Amazon search?

But today I searched Amazon under the popular search phrase Personal Money Management and was shocked to find my book coming up #4 of over 3,000 results! How could it be? Perhaps Amazon prioritizes books that

• sell consistently, even if it averages just about one per day.
  
• get lots of 5-star reviews.
  
• have people who've taken the time to type in search terms for the book on Amazon.
• have a blog connected to the Amazon page.
  
• have several sites and blogs linking to the Amazon book page.
  

These would all be consistent with my book. But I'm still amazed that I'm coming up #4 in a search result. I also think it's interesting that many of these things (reviews, adding search terms, etc.) were up and going the first couple of weeks that I had the book on Amazon. I'm not sure why they're seeming to take effect now, after three months. Perhaps it just takes that much time for Amazon to realize that the book is a consistent seller. Or perhaps its search engine doesn't update with new information except once a month or so.

As Levinson urges, great marketing isn't in the huge things (like hoping for a spot on Oprah); it's simply doing the little things right, consistently over time.

So if you get easily discouraged, don't give up! Some things don't make a difference immediately. Give them time.

Do you have experience with failure over the short-haul but success over time? Please let us know!

A Solution to the "Need More Time to Market" Issue

Publishing consultant John Mark Schuster just gave me an idea I thought was worthy to pass on. I'll print it here in its entirety:

"I recently spoke to an author who "hired" a college student to do
marketing/promotions for his book project.

He approached the Marketing Department at a local university and asked about
hiring a student to assist with his book promotional efforts. He was
surprised how much the college embraced him and shared that a student could
actually earn "credit hours" through an Internship program if set up
properly.

Benefits for the author:

-Having a college student assist with your book's marketing plan is a great
option for authors that do not have a lot of time or money to spare.
-You can interview a suitable candidate and pick a marketing student who is
well-suited for your needs.
-A college student knows how to effectively utilize the internet for both
marketing and research.

Perks for the student:

-College credit is earned and real world experience is a resume builder for
the student in this tough job market.
-They build a relationship with an author who may be able to help them
further develop in their professional life.

It is important to note that it will be your responsibility to provide the
student with your publishing or marketing goals. You will probably need to
complete a course credit form and outline your project in great detail to
the college's standards but in the end it could be a big payoff.

It will be your responsibility to further explore this option and complete
necessary forms/work but I hope this proves to be effective."

I might add that occasionally marketing classes like to take real businesses and suggest marketing plans for them. We did it last year with our not for profit and gleaned some great ideas.