International: 1-419-281-5100
Fax: 1-419-281-0200
BookMasters, Inc.
30 Amberwood Parkway
Ashland, Ohio 44805
Volume 6, Issue 8 September 2008
The BookMark is our free monthly newsletter featuring news and information of use to publishers, authors, retailers, and others involved in the publishing industry. On the fifteenth of every month, The BookMark will deliver useful tips, helpful news, and upcoming events directly to your electronic in-box. If you would like to receive a free copy of the The BookMark in your monthly e-mail, please visit http://www.bookmasters.com/subscribe.htm and complete the subscription form.Publishing Industry News
Marketing and Distribution
11 Tips to Avoid Self-Publishing Traps
by Marilyn and Tom RossSelf-publishing used to be the Rodney Dangerfield of book publishing. It didn’t get “no respect.” Today that’s all changed. With originally self-published books like The Celestine Prophecy, Butter Busters, The Christmas Box, and What Color is Your Parachute? monopolizing bestseller lists—do-it-yourself publishing is very much in vogue.
To be successful, however, it’s mandatory that you adhere to certain guidelines. By following the tips below, you’ll avoid the pitfalls and enhance your chances of flourishing.
- Educate yourself. Self-publishing is a business. Approach it as such. There are informative books on the subject, seminars offered, and associations where you can learn the ropes and network with the more experienced. This can be very lucrative if properly approached. Conversely, you can waste thousands of dollars by blundering along without knowledge or a plan.
- Study the competition. Don’t add more to a subject that’s already glutted. Be sure the topic hasn’t been overdone. Just checking a local library or bookstore is not adequate research. Look in Books in Print Subject Guide and Forthcoming Books in Print Subject Guide. You’ll be amazed at how many books there are on the topic. Yours must be better than what’s already available. Make it shorter, longer, easier to use, more informative, funnier, richer in content, or better organized. For fiction, try to tie into a hot topic so you have a “hook” for publicity.
- Write what other people want. Catering to your personal desires often makes for lackluster books nobody buys. The fact is, few care about your life history or your deep-felt opinions. Personal journals and impassioned tirades are best saved for family and friends, not foist upon the general public.
- Think “marketing” from the very beginning. The time to generate marketing ideas is before you write the book, not after you have 3,000 copies in your garage. Identify and target your market. How can you reach them? Start folders of ideas: what catalogs might be interested, which associations reach your potential readers, what magazines and newsletters are relevant? Can you sell the book as a premium to companies that would give it away as a gift to entice new customers—or use it internally for training? Think about who else reaches your potential customer and how you can partner with them. Do you have contacts who have national name recognition and might write an advance endorsement?
- Get professional editing. No, we repeat no, author should edit or proofread his or her own work. You’ll miss the forest for the trees, overlooking things that are obvious to you, but unclear to your reader. And it’s so easy to pass by the same typo time after time.
- Create a snappy title. The right title can make a book, just like an uninspired one can be a death peal. Short is best. While clever is nice, don’t sacrifice clarity. For nonfiction, be sure to include a subtitle as it gives you extra mileage in helping readers know what the book is about.
- Include all the vital components. Just as a cake falls flat if you don’t add the right ingredients, so do books. Yours needs an ISBN, LCCN, EAN Bookland Scanning Symbol, subject categories on the back cover, etc. (If you don’t know what these are, refer back to #1!)
- Have a dynamite cover. The cover is your book’s salesperson in bookstores. Get it designed by a professional who understands cover design . . . not just somebody who does nice logos or pretty brochures. You have enormous competition—and a wonderful opportunity to stand out.
- Make the interior inviting. Go to a bookstore and study the insides of books. Find one with clean, “user-friendly” pages. Use this as your model. It may not make sense to purchase and learn typesetting software if you’re only doing one book, however. In that case, consider hiring an outside vendor.
- Use a book manufacturer for printing. Don’t expect your corner print shop to have the knowledge or technical capabilities to turn out a quality book. Book manufacturers specialize in this type of printing and can save you enormous grief and considerable money.
- Publicize, promote, publicize, promote. Eat, sleep, and talk your book. Nobody cares about it as much as you do. Ongoing, enthusiastic marketing is the real key to success. Never quit. Keep your antenna out for new review opportunities, freelancers who write articles on your topic, etc. We have books that have been in print since 1979 because we’re tireless promoters.
Marilyn and Tom Ross are the co-authors of 13 books including the best-selling Complete Guide to Self-Publishing and the award-winning Jump Start Your Book Sales. Through phone consultations and on-going coaching/mentoring, Marilyn empowers authors and self-publishers to realize their dreams. She can be reached at 719-395-8659 or Marilyn@MarilynRoss.com. Visit http://www.SelfPublishingResources.com
Marcella's Magic
(Marcella Smith, Small Press Business Manager, Barnes & Noble)One of the most difficult things we run into is people who are letting us know at the last moment about promotion that's happening with their book. It’s really difficult when you put the bookseller in a position of having to play catch up on a title. We often lose that initial sale, we lose that initial momentum, and then we're always chasing that title and we never have the right inventory. If we had known in time, we would have been able to respond appropriately, get the books on the shelf and do the right things to sell the books.
Author 101
(Excerpted - with permission - from Author 101: Bestselling Book Publicity, by Rick Frishman and Robyn Spizman;
contact Rick at FRISHMANR@PlannedTVArts.com or www.author101.com)To be successful, all books need publicity. Readers are swamped with books. Hundreds of thousands of titles are published every year, which breaks down to several new titles being issued each minute. That’s an awful lot of books competing for booksellers’ shelves and readers’ attention. Plus, books face stiff competition from movies, television, newspapers, magazines, sports, the Internet, games, and more.
Publicity is the most effective way to single out your book for recognition and to build its identity and visibility. In publishing, they refer to “breaking a book out,” which means getting it noticed so that it can emerge from a sea of competitors. Publicity is the best way to break your book out and to create name recognition, interest, and sales. Through the wonders of publicity, weak books have been built into huge successes, and great books that lacked publicity have not been widely read.
Notes From the Front Lines
(Excerpted – with permission – from the Book Publishers’ Handbook, by Eric Kampmann, President, Midpoint Trade Books ekampmann@aol.com )Marketing helps you reach the widest possible audience for your book. Through publicity, advertising, targeted mailings, in-store promotions, author appearances on the local, regional, and national level – marketing helps drive attention and interest in your book and your work. It helps creates buzz and advocates who then spread word of mouth – which is invaluable.
Marcella's Magic
(Marcella Smith, Small Press Business Manager, Barnes & Noble)In most cases, bookstore customers go to a store seeking a particular title, usually after hearing about it from the author’s promotion. It is pretty rare that customers just walk into a (non-fiction) section, see something that catches their eye, and then pick it up and buy it. There's usually some other connection that has already been made with that customer through the author.
You're On The Air
(Deborah Wetzel, morning news anchor and talk-show host on WCBS-FM, New York City)“I tell my guests just to turn their mouth away from the microphone to cough. It's not going to distract from the interview and it makes you sound more like a normal person. Everybody has to clear his or her throat at some point.”
Kremer's Korner
(Excerpted - with permission - from John Kremer’s Sixth Edition of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. Contact John at http://www.bookmarket.com)I recommend that you edit your books for promotional clout. As an example, if you were editing a gardening book, why not list specific seed and tool companies as resources in the appendix? Not only do such lists benefit the reader, but they also provide you with potential premium sales.
Marketing Strategy
(Excerpted from Brian Jud’s e-booklet, The Buck Starts Here: 635 Tips for Creating Successful Marketing Strategy; www.bookmarketing.com)You may become more successful at marketing when you stop selling your books and begin selling what they do for the people who purchase them. That is the difference between marketing a feature, an advantage and a benefit. A feature is an attribute of your product. For a book, it could be its size, binding, title or number of pages. An advantage describes the purpose or function of a feature, and a benefit is the value the reader receives in exchange for purchasing your book. People buy value, not generic products.
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************
BookMasters and AtlasBooks will be attending the Frankfurt Book Show or Frankfurter Buchmesse from October 15-19. Deb Keets, Paul Stevenson, Randy McKenzie, and Amanda Dowdy will attend the show. The booth will be located in hall 8.0, stand S970.
The team will be looking to discuss distribution and publishing services with foreign publishers as well as to strengthen relationships with international trading partners.
The Frankfurt Book Show is the largest trade show for books in the world. More than 6,600 exhibitors and more than 300,000 attendees come out for this event every year. 2008 marks the show's 60th anniversary.
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************
It is almost fall, which means the regional trade show season is about to commence. Over the next two months, AtlasBooks will have displays at several regional trade shows across the United States. Regional shows are a great way to get books noticed. These shows are attended by local independent book buyers, as well as representatives from national chains, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. For more information, please contact Kim Wertman, Marketing Coordinator at kwertman@bookmasters.com.
Pacific NW Bookseller Association Fall Trade Show
Portland, Oregon
September 15-17, 2008
Mountains & Plains Bookseller Association Fall Trade Show
Colorado Springs, Colorado
September 17-20, 2008
Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show
Oakland, California
October 3-5, 2008
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************
October 15–19, 2008
Frankfurt Book Fair, Frankfurt, Germany
www.book-fair.comNovember 9-16, 2008
Miami Book Fair International, Miami, Florida
http://www.miamibookfair.comNovember 15, 2008
Kentucky Book Fair, Frankfort, Kentucky
http://www.kybookfair.comApril 20-22, 2009
London Book Fair, Earls Court, London
http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/May 28-31, 2009
BookExpo America, New York, New York
www.bookexpoamerica.comThis calendar was up-to-date and accurate as of August 15, 2008. Information was culled from a number of sources. BookMasters cannot be held liable for the accuracy of the information within. Please visit the listed Web sites for more information.
- Recommend The BookMark to a friend.
- Click to Subscribe to The BookMark.
- If you feel you have received this newsletter in error, please click to Unsubscribe.
- Questions, comments, or content for The BookMark? Let us know.
- Suggest topics you'd like to see appear in The BookMark.
- Prefer a text only version? Subscribe.
© 2001 — 2008 BookMasters® © 2001 — 2008 The BookMark All Rights Reserved