Are you using Amazon Author Central? If not, why? It’s an excellent author-friendly tool that can be used to promote your book and your platform that only takes minutes to setup. If you have more than one book, it’s a central location where an Amazon shopper can find your entire bibliography in one place. How’s that for an easy way to cross-promote your work?

Amazon Author Central allows authors to create a custom profile that customers then use to learn about the author and make purchases. The content you can place on your Author Central page includes:

• A bio—Tell readers a little bit about yourself so they'll connect with you as a person.
• Photos—Include your author photo and any other images your readers may like to see, perhaps your workspace or things that inspired your writing.
• Video—Want to get that trailer up on Amazon? Uploading it here only takes a few minutes!
• Events—Want to drive traffic to your speaking engagements and readings?  Advert them here.
• Blog feed—Linking your blog to your Author Central page is just another way to grow your list of blog followers and give readers more of what they want: a connection to you as an author!
• Twitter feed—Extend your social media outreach even further by displaying your tweets on your author page.

Recently, Author Central began providing weekly sales data from Nielsen BookScan (a service that tracks sales of print books in stores across the country) for free to authors who sell their books on Amazon. You can view your sales data in a variety of ways.  Amazon gives you a basic total from BookScan and shows how many units more or less you sold compared with the previous week. They also visually display your most recent four to eight weeks of sales data on a map of the United States. Alongside that display you will find a list of geographic areas from New York to Los Angeles and the number of books you sold in each. 

Access to BookScan data can help you determine whether your publicity efforts are paying off, and tells you what markets you have the most demand in so you can amp up your promotion accordingly.

Finally, for those who like to keep tabs on their Amazon sales rank, the sales data tab displays a line graph of your book’s sales rank history on Amazon and tells you what your current rank is. As with all sales rankings on Amazon, the data is updated hourly. 

You can also use Author Central to modify the description of your book listing on Amazon or write a message directly to your readers. 

We encourage all of our authors to create an Amazon Author Central page. Even William Shakespeare has an Author Central page. It has to be cool.

In this series we will address one of the biggest questions facing authors today: how will I publish my book? As little as ten or fifteen years ago, this answer would have been simple: get an agent, who will then pitch the book to major publishers on your behalf. Now, with the wide variety of options available, it can be hard to decide what route to take. This is why, one post at a time, we’ll dissect each of the options in an effort to help authors better answer that question.

In our last post, we talked about how traditional publishers work. Today we will discuss the burgeoning business of self-publishing. Self-publishing (not to be confused with vanity publishing, which we’ll discuss next time) is basically the process of contracting with a variety of professionals to create a book. That might include editors, graphic designers, book compositors, printers, and distributors. So, for example, if you have a complete manuscript, you’ll have to find and pay an editor to work on the content; then a compositor to do the interior layout; then a cover designer to create the cover, back cover, spine, and flaps; and so on. You can also hire book shepherds or packagers, who have a stable of contractors and who will coordinate the work on your book.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Well, there are some good reasons to do it yourself, and we’ll share some of the downsides as well.

Pros:

Ownership. Since you created the book, you own the publication rights to all versions of the book (ebooks, foreign editions, film adaptations, etc.)—unless you sell them to a traditional publisher. Retaining your rights is especially useful if your brand or business is tied to the book and if you’ll want to incorporate parts of the content from the book into your website, seminars, materials, and the like. When you self-publish, you pay the upfront cost, but you also keep a much larger percentage of the profits (to the tune of 35 to 45 percent of the retail price versus 2 to 10 percent with traditional publishers).

Creative control. Since you’re calling the shots, you get to decide exactly how you want your book to look. You have final say on everything—from how the editor approaches the content, to what colors the designer uses in the cover, to the printing specifications and technology.

Speed to market. Having control of the project also gives you the ability to get your content to the market faster than a traditional publisher would be able to. If you have something timely you want out in six to twelve months rather than two or three years, self-publishing is the way to go.

Cons:

Quality. Even when working with purported “experts” you should always be wary of the experience an editor or designer brings to your project. There are plenty of contractors out there with little experience creating a commercially viable book, and it can be a hard pill to swallow if you get stuck paying for low-quality work. Additionally, a self-published book can lack the unity of having one team working on it, as well as the polish a seasoned publisher can provide. Even if you’re working with highly skilled professionals, unless they are receiving the kind of feedback from national retail buyers that major publishers are getting, they will never have the same insight and therefore won’t be able to provide the same level of quality. Many self-published books unfortunately possess a few major missteps that keep them off the shelves of major retailer.

Distribution. Since anyone can self-publish a book, there is no guarantee of quality and self-published books are often viewed poorly by the media and retailers. And because self-publishers generally do not receive feedback from retail, they lack the ability to adapt to the market the same way publishers can. Since retailers can be squeamish about self-published books, getting into retail channels, even with the help of a distributor, can be difficult.

Distinction. For the reasons we’ve discussed (quality control, lack of retail feedback) self-published books can sometimes carry a stigma. Since they generally lack solid retail distribution, their sales histories are usually weak, which makes them a riskier bet for retail buyers. For buyers, it’s a question of choosing something untested with no track record (a self-published book) over a product that has a record of excellence (a traditionally published book).

So what now? There is a wide variety of resources and articles out there for self-publishers (like this one from Nathan Bransford on self-published millionaires). Here are a few websites and books to check out:

• Dan Poynter’s website on publishing, complete with everything from writing and editing advice to information on how to typeset your book and find a printer. Poynter also has quite a few books out on self-publishing.
• John Kremer’s site focuses on book marketing and also offers all kinds of resources for self-publishers.
• Self-Publishing for Dummies by Jason Rich: This book is a simple introduction to the business of self-publishing, complete with the traditional For Dummies graphics.
• The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing by Tom and Marilyn Ross: This book surveys the entire process from writing to printing to promoting.

If your goals as an author are aligned with the pros above and the cons are something you can stomach, it’s probably a good idea to dig a little deeper into self-publishing as an option for your book. Once you’ve done your research, the next step is identifying vendors. The resources above should point you in the right direction and help you find qualified professionals who can provide the services you need to create your book.

Amazon sells a boatload of books, and a shipload of other stuff. In their quest to become the Walmart of the Internet, they offer a huge range of products and often discount them steeply to get your shopping cart started—and books in particular seem to frequently become loss leaders. This sometimes alarms authors just entering the world of retail book distribution, who suddenly realize that the customer who once bought on the author’s website can now buy the same book faster and cheaper on Amazon.

The discount Amazon places on titles does not affect what an author is paid through his or her publisher, of course, but it can impact how effectively that author can sell product on his or her website.  It’s important to remember, however, that there are at least two types of buyers—those who will just buy the book, and those who are looking for a deeper experience. The buyer who just wants the book will probably not buy it from your author website if it is also available on Amazon. It is definitely difficult to compete with Amazon (or BN.com) for this customer—one-click purchasing, free shipping, and familiarity stack the cards in favor of the online retailers.

Frustrated by Amazon’s dominance, some authors eschew Amazon, trying to keep a product monopoly limited to their website. This is a mistake—you’ll never be able to attract the volume of users or offer the ease of purchase that Amazon does. As the saying goes, it’s better to have 10% of the gold than 100% of the shaft.

However, the buyer seeking a more immersive experience is another story. It’s for this type of buyer that you should sell product on your website—product that offers a deeper experience than just a cheap copy of the book. For example, bundle the book with an audio supplement. Offer a self-assessment or workbook to accompany the book. Consider offering coaching or, better yet, a community where your readers can collaborate and support one another. Use access to assets like podcasts, sample chapters, and exclusive supplementary content as an incentive for newsletter signups. And by all means, put a mention of these available website features at the back of your book. Ultimately, the goal is to capture and stay in front of your reader in a way that enhances their connection with you (read: no spam!) and builds allegiance. Successfully doing so will help you compete not just with Amazon but also with every other author vying for attention (a far more formidable opponent!).

If you’re taking the reins on how your book is being printed, you’ve probably already come to face-to-face with the many available options. We’ve talked before on the Big Bad Book Blog about print-on-demand versus traditional printing, but we thought it might also be helpful to discuss binding style. Paperback, hardcover, mass market—everyone has seen these formats in bookstores, but how do you decide which is right for your book?

Let’s start by clarifying a few terms:

Paperback (also called soft cover or perfect-bound) books usually have a cover made from paperboard or a very thick stock, and the pages are attached to the binding with glue. When we talk about paperback books, we typically mean trade paperbacks, which are the typical 6 x 9 or 5.5 x 8.5–sized books you see in bookstores. Mass-market is a type of paperback you often see used for romance novels or thrillers. Mass-market books are usually smaller in trim size and fatter with a thinner, lower-quality stock and cover.

Hardcover (also called casebound or hardbound) books have covers that are sturdier, usually made from thick cardboard wrapped in cloth. Here the pages can be glued or sewn into the spine, making the spine more flexible so that the book can lay flat when opened. The book title and author's name are often stamped onto the cloth binding, and hardcover books typically come with printed dust jacket with artwork.

So if you’re making arrangements to have your book printed, how do you decide which format is best for your book? Here are the three main determiners.

Cost to Consumer

The retail price a consumer will pay for a book is largely dictated by the format, and retail buyers have strict guidelines about how a book can be priced. A paperback book is often significantly cheaper than a hardcover book (for more on price, see this post). Because hardcover is more expensive to the consumer, you could encounter readers who just don’t want to pay $21.95 for a book they could otherwise get in paperback for at $16.95. This bears repeating—if you print in hardcover and subsequently price your book higher, you risk losing sales because of the high price point. This consumer choice in price is also important considering the rise in ebook sales, which cannibalized hardcover sales in the last quarter of 2010, according to Bowker. That said, there are many reasons a consumer might prefer a hardcover book, including durability, style, and longevity.

Genre

Genre is one of the biggest indicators for format. Books that can be found in hardcover are frequently in the genres of business, coffee table/art, first-edition fiction, or collector’s editions of classics. Traditionally, fiction comes out first in hardcover and later in paperback. This is changing due to the economic climate, and to stay competitive many fiction titles, especially from newer authors, are coming out in paperback to entice readers with a lower price point. Penguin recently released a beautiful set of hardcover editions for people looking for that classic aesthetic that only hardcover brings. Topics with rapidly changing information, like health, technology, science, and politics, are usually released in paperback (or ebook) formats, so that new editions can be released and consumed more quickly. Of course, these are broad generalizations meant to provide a little guidance, and doing research on comparable titles can help inform your decision on the proper binding for your book.

Printing Cost

Printing hardcover is more expensive than printing paperback, so if you’re on a tight budget, you might get more books for your buck by printing paperback. The margins for hardcover books are usually better than for paperbacks because the cost to consumers is significantly higher than the cost difference in printing—it only costs a little more to print hardcover than paperback and you can charge a lot more in retail. If you do have a strong platform or fan base, or if you have direct sales opportunities, hardcover may be a good way to go. Your clients and fans may be more likely to buy your book even at the higher price point that hardcover commands since they are already interested in your content.

Other Considerations...

One other point to consider is the sale of paperback rights. If your goal is to be picked up by a traditional publisher, you may want to release first in hardcover (again, depending on the genre). If your hardcover sales catch a traditional publisher’s eye, they may inquire about the rights to your paperback version. It doesn’t really work the other way around, though, so if this is important to you, hardcover may be a good choice.

There is no magic formula for deciding what format to print your book in, and there are a lot of factors to consider. The first step is establishing what your price point will be for any format you are considering. Making sure you have an appropriate price point is imperative for accurately running the numbers on your margins. Once you have looked at printing cost versus retail cost, taking a close look at your genre and comparable titles is a good next step to making a decision on format.

Have Questions? Thoughts? Let us know!