Joerg Investigates Self Published Books

Joerg Colberg has a good article on his experience and comments from visitors on their encounter with, on demand printing of digital photography books (listed here).

“… the images inside the book resemble crap. They look like something printed on an incredibly inexpensive printer …”.

“What I do wish to point out is that while publishing books on demand could sound like an excellent tip, it is inevitably up to the photographer to perform quality control. And getting books published on need could in fact reduced the limit of the quality of photography books to a recognizable level …”.

“… I find it slightly shocking that while lots of professional photographers– especially those that grew up before the supposed electronic reformation– understand the names of specialist analog ink-jet printers, there does not seem a corresponding swimming pool of experienced digital printers.”.

If anyone knows of any top quality on demand digital photography publication authors it would certainly be good to become aware of it (or email Joerg so he may add to his article). The first books I started seeing with profiles came from. mac and I remember the photographer informing me she tried them all and. mac was the a single where the color was consistent. Uncertain exactly what occurred to them already I only find out about blurb, although I’ve just in fact seen a couple and they seemed fine however then again, I’m made use of to magazine printing.

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Grow a Dedicated Fanbase

Would you like to have the kind of followers that the Twilight saga has? Or how about the Harry Potter books? Sure, who wouldn’t right? Here are some thoughts on how create the fanbase you need to sell books.

There are several things you can do to build your fanbase and sell more books. All it takes in a lot of time, effort and dedication. Did I mention it takes a lot of hard work?

The most important thing you need to have the right kind of attitude. If you aren’t completely sold on your book and believe it is the best work ever produced, then how do you expect others to feel the same way. It’s natural to have doubts about your book, but if you’ve taken the time and effort to write, edit, design and publish it then you have a winner on your hands so you need to show people that confidence. Confidence is contagious.

Another major way to earn readers is to offer them something of value. You can give away free copies, write helpful and informative blog articles or give readers free excerpts from your book. When people see your generosity and realize that you want to provide them with knowledge or entertainment above making a sale, then you’ve got them on your side.

People don’t want to just make someone rich they want something in return to better themselves and when they see that you aren’t out to only make a buck but want to give them what they are looking for, they will buy your book.

The Joys and Hazards of Self-Publishing on the Web

Not long ago, an aspiring book writer rejected by traditional publishing houses had only one alternative: vanity publishing. For $5,000 or $10,000, or sometimes much more, he could have his manuscript edited and published, provided that he agreed to buy many copies himself, often a few thousand or more. They typically ended up in the garage.

Digital technology has changed all that. A writer turned down by traditional publishers — or even avoiding them — now has a range of options. Among them are self-publishing a manuscript as an e-book; self-publishing through myriad companies that print on demand, in which a paperback or hardcover book is printed each time it is purchased; and buying an array of services, from editing and design to marketing and publicity, from what are known as assisted self-publishing companies.

“It’s the Wild West in a lot of ways — people who are innovators can do remarkable things,” said Mark Levine, whose own self-published book, “The Fine Print of Self-Publishing,” is now in its fourth edition.

Digital publishing and print on demand have significantly reduced the cost of producing a book. The phenomenal growth of e-readers and tablets has vastly expanded the market for e-books, which can be self-published at little or no cost. Writers who self-publish are more likely to be able to control the rights to their books, set their books’ sale price and keep a larger proportion of the sales.

But one thing has not changed: most self-published books sell fewer than 100 or 150 copies, many authors and self-publishing company executives say. There are breakout successes, to be sure, and some writers can make money simply by selling their e-books at low prices. Some self-published books attract so much attention that a traditional publishing house eventually picks them up. (Perhaps you’ve heard of the novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which began its life as a self-published work?)

Still, a huge majority of self-published books “don’t sell a lot of copies,” said Mark Coker, the founder and chief executive of Smashwords, a no-frills operation that concentrates on self-published e-books. “We make it clear to our authors.”

Some people have no problem with that; they want only to print 50 or 100 copies of a memoir or a family history at a relatively low cost. But others continue to dream big.

There are two basic kinds of self-publishing companies, both Web-based:

ASSISTED SELF-PUBLISHING These companies focus primarily on producing hardcover and paperback books. They offer many services, separately and in packages, including editing, copy editing, proofing, marketing, public relations, access to social media and even strategies for drawing search engines to a book.

With the rise of e-books, virtually all of these also will publish a manuscript digitally, and many have their own online bookstores.

At Lulu, for example, you pay nothing upfront. Each time a print book is sold, you receive 80 percent of the proceeds, beyond the cost of manufacturing the book. For $450, Lulu offers an editing package for books longer than 7,500 words (which is most books). Lulu will have a designer create a book cover for $130, and it provides groups of services like editing, design and formatting, starting at $729 and going as high as $4,949.

At CreateSpace, a division of Amazon, the process for producing a print book is similar. You go to the Web site, sign up for an account and follow the steps to prepare a print book for publication. If you sell your book through Amazon, you receive 60 percent of the proceeds, minus the cost of printing. Optional services include copy editing, which starts at $120, and converting a print file to an e-book for Kindle, $69.

Half a dozen packages, the most expensive of which costs $4,853, provide services like comprehensive editing, cover and interior design, promotion and publicity assistance and a video book trailer.

Relatively similar services can be found at many other Web sites, including Aventine Press; Self Publishing Inc.; Hillcrest Media; and iUniverse, Xlibris and AuthorHouse, which are among the imprints owned by Author Solutions, a company purchased last month by Penguin, a traditional publishing house, for $116 million.

Be sure to carefully compare prices since they can vary considerably, especially on printing and sharing in the sales.

E-BOOKS AND NO-FRILLS WEB SITES Smashwords is one of the low-cost Web sites that publish only e-books. As with similar sites, you can publish a digital book free, and then put it on sale at many online retailers, including Smashwords’s store, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony.

Proceeds are split this way: You get 60 percent of the book’s sales price, Smashwords receives 10 percent and the retailer gets 30 percent. (If you sell through Smashwords instead of a big retailer, you retain 85 percent.) Mr. Coker, the site’s founder, said it did not offer any services because he wanted to encourage do-it-yourself e-book publishing. Instead, the Web site provides lists of inexpensive independent contractors who can help with formatting an e-book or designing a cover.

Scribd got its start as a sharing site, where people distribute writing of all kinds free. The site now has an online store, where you can follow instructions to publish a manuscript as an e-book; when it is purchased at Scribd’s store, you get 80 percent of the proceeds.

Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo also provide platforms for publishing an e-book and selling it at their stores. The details vary. Apple, for instance, gives you 70 percent of the proceeds for sales at its iBookstore; Barnes & Noble provides 65 percent of the list price of e-books priced from $2.99 to $9.99 that are sold on its online store. Although Google does not have a self-publishing platform, its store is open to self-publishers, with 52 percent of the proceeds going to the writers.

You can usually, though not always, put an e-book up for sale at many online stores, not just at the one owned by the company through which you published the e-book.

Some self-publishers strongly recommend spending money on help with formatting both print and e-books; this process can be complicated, time-consuming and frustrating to do yourself, though by no means impossible if you are patient and technologically adept.

They also say you need to study carefully the details of each company’s contracts; some charge very high markups for printing hardcover and paperback books, offer a lower share of the sales or make it difficult and expensive to leave a self-publishing company if you become dissatisfied.

“It really is buyer beware out there,” said Ron Pramschufer, president of Self Publishing Inc. “Don’t get into the publishing business without learning something about publishing.”

A number of blogs and books on self-publishing can help you understand the business’s many complexities and distinguish transparent, well-run companies from those that benefit themselves far more than their authors.

The single toughest part of self-publishing is getting attention for your book. Nearly 350,000 new print titles were published in 2011, and 150,000 to 200,000 of them were produced by self-publishing companies, said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of Bowker Market Research, which conducts an annual survey of new books.

The quality of self-published books varies widely, “and people don’t know what’s good and what’s not,” said David Carnoy, an executive editor of CNET.com, which provides news and reviews of new technology.

Mr. Carnoy self-published a novel, “Knife Music,” in 2008. It sold enough copies that a traditional publisher eventually bought it. Among his suggestions for selling your book: devise a creative marketing campaign, try one new tactic a day, and study the strategies used by successful self-publishers and imitate them.

“The biggest thing you have against you in trying to sell your book is that people don’t know about it,” he said.

Source: The New York Times

7 Causes Behind Unsatisfactory Selling of Your Book

When your book isn’t selling as well as you hoped it might, it can be easy to get bogged down in complicated reasons and technical details– however commonly the reasons are a lot easier, a lot more obvious, than you may think.

  • Poor cover design. This is probably among the most typical things that put readers off books, and it’s something that particularly has an effect on individual publishers. If you’re going to take the time to create a cover in the first place, make certain you put in the time to do it correctly. And, if you cannot do it yourself, get an expert to do it for you. Your book’s cover is an essential marketing device, and it’s one location where it’s certainly worth spending a bit of money if you have to.
  • Not marketing your book in the proper categories. At its most severe, this takes the kind of marketing your book as a genre it definitively is not. Many of the time however, it takes the type of not exploiting all the avenues readily available to you. On Amazon, for instance, you can select exactly what categories your book falls under– consider all the different groups you can use to guarantee it reaches as lots of people as possible.
  • Advertising your book in the wrong place. Attempting to advertise your criminal offense novel on a romance novel blog site or not targeting your advertising at all? That could be a big reason behind your absence of sales.
  • Not making your book offered in as lots of places as feasible. Amazon might be the big one, but do not forget to make your book offered elsewhere too.
  • Not utilizing prices offers. If you’ve priced your book too high, people won’t buy it, especially if you’re a new author they’ve never ever heard of in the past. It can be worth pricing your book lower than you ‘d initially meant to develop interest. Pricing your first book lower than your others to lure people in is another option you could possibly attempt.
  • Not enough testimonials. Testimonials aren’t always easy to get, but it’s worth putting in the time to obtain some from readers, as a positive testimonial could inspire others to attempt your book.
  • Not putting sufficient time and effort in. We wish to think that we’re doing all we can to make our books a success, but is this truly always the case? Typically, the truth of the matter is that our books aren’t selling particularly well since there’s more we could be doing to help them along the way. Spending as much time as possible doing everything you could to improve your sales is important; don’t leave any choice unexplored.

Penguin Increases Self-Publishing Business into India

You could keep in mind a couple of months ago Penguin bought out the preferred self-publishing business, Author Solutions. The move was viewed as highly significant at the time– typical authors beginning to see the benefits of self-publishing along with the ability pool to be discovered within it.

Now we have a brand-new development in Penguin’s self-publishing enterprise, as they have actually taken the decision to open a brand-new imprint of Author Solutions in India. The new imprint is called Partridge, and it highlights the reality that self-publishing is a worldwide market, along with a significantly traditional one.

Penguin has stated that it hopes the brand-new imprint will raise the number of authors in India, and will be keeping track of Partridge titles for skill that can possibly be signed to Penguin’s very own lists. This is a vital point; it reveals that standard authors are significantly seeing self-publishing as a prospective recruiting ground, something that independent authors thinking about traditional or hybrid bargains must absolutely take note of.

6 reasons independent publishers should love e-books

If you are an individual author who is continuously concentrate solely on print and overlook e-books, well, why? Unless, perhaps, you are self-publishing books that have to be published as opposed to made available electronically (youngster’s picture publications, for instance), e-books are definitely something to be welcomed.

That doesn’t suggest you can not utilize print publications as a self-publisher, yet it does imply that e-books are vital, and should not be dismissed. Right here are some of the very best factors all individual publishers ought to release their deal with e-books, and why they must love them.

On-the-spot access for readers

There is no avoiding the fact that purchasing books online, instead of in a bookshop, is becoming the standard. When you consider this, it makes sense to self-publish your work as an e-book. After all, if you get a print manual online, it takes time to arrive, and visitors don’t always want to wait. By comparison, if you order an e-book, it will be on your e-reader within secs. In an extremely competitive sector, that instant accessibility to manuals for readers counts for a lot

Accessibility to visitors who check out a ton

Additionally, several readers who read e-books check out a ton. That means that they get a lot. You don’t wish to miss out on potential revenues due to the fact that you chose not to release your job as an e-book.

Quantity free of cost examples

One more advantage of selling e-books on websites such as Amazon is that it provides visitors the opportunity to download and install a cost-free sample of the job prior to they get the rest. It’s typically stated that the best marketing device you have for your publication is guide itself. With this in thoughts, making e-book examples readily available can be really favorable. Simply ensure the example is as good as you could possibly make it in order that individuals wish to carry on reading.

Benefit from spontaneity buys

The various other big aspect of e-books is that they are very for impulse buying. That might sound a little bit frank, but authors need to believe carefully regarding where their sales are arising from. If someone could purchase your publication in a solitary click online and know it on their e-reader a moment later, that’s a set benefit for you.

Size doesn’t matter

A large plus for e-books is that length doesn’t matter. This can be particularly good for independent publishers that publish job of differing sizes. While a handful of readers may be put off getting a print manual if it seemed also long or as well short, this isn’t such an issue with e-books. You could make your work as long or brief as you such as– as long as it is just the ideal length for you.

Obtain everything in one location

There is one more perk to be had with e-books. If you search for print manuals in bookshops or libraries, as wonderful as they both definitely are, there’s no guarantee that they’ll have every little thing in stock. Your e-book, by contrast, will always join stock. And so will all of your various other e-books, with all them offered to be purchased from the very same location, which can be incredibly beneficial if you’re hoping readers will proceed to your back brochure too.

Independent publishing is easy. Right?

There is a certain school of thought that recommends independent publishing is the simple choice, made use of by people who either cannot get a standard author or those who want to get their book out there with just the tiniest amount of effort.

To some extent, independent publishing isn’t that difficult. Striking the ‘publish’ button is simple. Some aspects of the publishing process might be brand-new, however they’re not all tough. They’re frequently something you could learn.

However whether certain skills and procedures are thought about to be ‘hard’ to find out and understand, what we can’t deny is that independent publishing includes effort.

Independent publishing may look similar to a simple course to some, but if you are actually serious about an occupation as an author– as many of us independent publishers are– it absolutely is not the easy option.

Initially, there’s the job of composing an actually good book that individuals actually wish to check out. Then there’s the job of learning how to self-publish a book. There’s the modifying and the proofreading and the formatting and the cover design and the rates and the advertising. There’s the challenge of discovering the best ways to deal with freelancers and companies on numerous elements of your work, of finding out ways to be a project supervisor and creative director, of budgeting both money and time to make every little thing work.

Then, it’s the simple bit. You press publish and guide is out there.

However then the simple bit ends. Then comes the advertising, the social networks management, the online reviews, the blog sites, the relentless quest to find readers, hoping that they’ll such as the book and worried that they will not. There’s the problem of ironing out finances and working out what to do if sales aren’t as wonderful as first hoped.

There’s the whole problem of writing another book.

Don’t get me wrong, none of this is a grievance. Independent publishing might be effort, however it’s still excellent. It’s excellent enjoyable and it’s worth every second of effort. The benefits can be exceptional and there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of achieving a goal and understanding that it’s all because of your own hard work. It’s fantastic.

However it’s not a simple choice.

The benefits of keeping control of publishing

It is often stated that one of the perks of independent publishing is that fact you get to keep control of the entire procedure. But what does that control really mean, and why is it such an advantage? Let’s take a look.

Decide what gets published

Among the greatest advantages of controlling everything about your publishing experience is that you decide what gets published in the first place. There’s no need to feel under pressure to produce a book a year– unless you wish to, obviously. Equally, you don’t need to worry about anybody else’s viewpoints or demands when publishing your own work. You make all of the creative decisions.

Control and shape your image

It additionally means that you make each of the decisions over your image and your brand name as an author. This may seem evident, but it’s certainly an important point. For example, let’s say you’ve written a book that falls into the rather generally defined category of “women’s fiction.” The tendency of some traditional publishers might be to put it in a girly jacket, even if that’s truly not what you desire, or what the content of guide would lead you to imagine. With the control of self-publishing you can produce exactly the image you desire for you book, and for yourself.

The cash thing

It’s not massively British to discuss money, so we’ll keep this one brief. Despite the fact that self-publishing does not by any means suggest that you’ll absolutely earn money, it does imply that what you make, you usually get to keep, or at least choose what to do with. That matters.

Commission only what you want

It additionally indicates that you just need to commission the services that you desire. You could possibly decide to work with somebody to manage the whole publishing procedure for you, while still maintaining creative control, or you might just want them to care for a couple of things, such as cover design. Whatever you determine, you’ll still have the best control over the task.

Exactly what do you like finest about the control that independent publishing gives you?

7 things to do when self-publishing your book

There are whole lots and lots of things you need to do when self-publishing a book, from composing it in the first place to ironing out the financial side of things. The list below is by no suggests an exhaustive representation of exactly what you need to do when self-publishing a book, however hopefully it provides a little idea into getting started as an independent author …

Learn the basics

Think you comprehend publishing? Nevertheless, it never ever harms to go right back to the start and see to it you have all the understanding you need to publish your work. Pretend you’re a total beginner when it pertains to publishing. Discover the fundamentals, from exactly how e-book prices works to ways to format your book. No independent author can get very far without them.

Set targets

Giving yourself targets to work towards can help you to establish some sort of structure or plan for what you wish to attain. Your first target, for example, might be to obtain your book ready for publication. You may want to understand more about aristocracies. In the future in the process, you may have advertising and sales targets. Breaking it down like this can make the procedure more manageable and give you concrete things to work to– in addition to clear achievements.

Question, question, question

Do not be pleased with the initial draft of your book. Question it and edit it till you’re happy. Don’t be satisfied with any old editing/proofreading/cover design/formatting service. Question the abilities and qualifications of the people offering their services and ensure you get a good deal and a professional service. Believe in yourself, by all means, however always remember that along the way you should question your knowledge and take steps to fill in the gaps where necessary.

Try not to think too hard about the odds

Whether you opt for independent publishing or traditional publishing, the probabilities are stacked against brand-new authors. Attempt not to think too much about it; just focus on what you’re doing. There are a lot of individuals who’ll state that self-publishing will never ever get you anywhere, however you never ever know. If you write a good book and market it well, it could get you someplace. You can beat the chances.

Look for the very best sites and services

The internet is a fantastic place to learn about self-publishing and discover services that could help you in the process of publishing your book. Do your research and ensure you find out about the very best resources. Their help could be important.

Network

If you desire your book to sell, individuals should know about it. Network with as many individuals as you can, from readers to market specialists, all whom could help you along the way.

Keep up with developments

Finally, never forget that independent publishing is a fast-moving sector that changes and develops all the time. Brush up on the most up to date information so you could maintain to date with what’s going on and ensure that you have the ability to respond where essential when it pertains to your very own work.

What do you think are the most crucial things you need to do when self-publishing a book?
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