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Big Bad Weekly Tip: Amazon Announces New Video Feature on Author Pages
December 22, 2009
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by GreenleafBookGroup
We often hear from authors who would like to add video—book trailers, interviews, etc.—to their Amazon product pages. While Amazon currently does not allow most publishers to add video content to product pages, they announced last week that authors may now upload video directly to their Amazon Author Page.
If you don’t have an Author Page already, now is a great time to get one by signing up at Author Central. Author Pages gives customers a summary of you and your work, and the new video content makes the pages an even richer way to make yourself visible to readers. If you already have an Author Page, uploading video is simple—just sign in, click the new “Videos” tab at the top of the screen, and upload the file. Videos must be less than 10 minutes and under 500 MB. See additional video content guidelines here.
Along with video, Amazon announced an updated Events section, which you can use to post upcoming signings and other appearances (like this author); they also announced more links to Author Pages, which will now be linked in search results. Read more about what you can do with Author Central here.
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BBBB Weekly Tip: BookTour.com Now Partnered with Amazon.com
July 16, 2009
by GreenleafBookGroup
BookTour.com, the world's largest, 100% free directory of author events, recently announced that they have partnered with Amazon.com. Authors who list their tour dates on BookTour.com will now see those dates automatically appear on their corresponding Amazon Author Page. Check out author Daniel Silva’s Amazon page to see this in action. It's a great way to get even more exposure for your upcoming bookstore events. If you haven’t already signed up for a free BookTour.com account, now is the time! Click here to sign up.
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The IndieBound iPhone App
April 30, 2009
by Aaron Hierholzer
Over at a new blog called Follow the Reader, Bookish Dilettante Kat Meyer discusses the new IndieBound iPhone app, which, by the way, is very, very cool. Seems that everyone's been buzzing about it all week, but if you haven't caught Kat's interview with the ABA's Matt Supko, the guy who developed it, we recommend you do. Supko taught himself Objective-C and had the app rolled in nearly four months!
The free app from IndieBound allows users to browse indie bestsellers, search IndieBound's title database, and locate independent retailers—not just of books, but of bikes, coffee, etc.
In other books-on-the-iPhone news this week, Amazon.com bought up Lexcycle, developer of the popular Stanza e-reading app.
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Submit and Get Noticed: Advice from Greenleaf's Review Desk
January 20, 2009
by Katie Steigman
Tip #1: Tweak Cover Design Conventions—But Don't Discard Them Entirely
Business books don’t look like self-help books don’t look like fiction. This may seem obvious to some, but it is a common problem I see when we're evaluating new books for publication or distribution. When consumers want to buy a business book, for example, they expect certain imagery, fonts, colors, and layout styles, whether they realize it or not. The best-selling business books often use large, simple fonts and bright colors to keep the focus on the title (like this or this).
If your book cover or layout doesn’t make sense for its genre, it could hurt your sales.
That means that it might be a better idea not to make the cover of a book about investing neon pink with pictures of your dog, no matter what your artistic sensibilities are. Now that’s not to discourage innovation—there is always a new and better way to do things. The mold can be broken, but for new authors this can pose a risk (although sometimes ugly covers work). Whatever the case, choosing a genre-appropriate cover will signal credibility and familiarity to customers, which can translate into more sales.
A quick way to get some ideas is to go to Amazon or your local bookstore to check out titles similar to yours that are selling well. Notice the styling of other books, what imagery they use, and what that conveys to you as the reader. If you like what you see, figure out a way to adapt those principles to your cause. A book can stand out to buyers by employing creative cover art and a well-thought-out interior while staying within the bounds of the genre.
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Katie Steigman reviews Greenleaf’s submissions for market viability and helps determine what books to take on as projects at GBG. She reads everything—the good, the bad, the ugly, and all genres from personal finance to cookbooks.
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Become Even More Obsessed with Amazon Sales Ranks: Use Them for Market Analysis!
June 18, 2008
by Aaron Hierholzer
We've told you about sites devoted to tracking Amazon.com sales ranks before, but here's a new one: Ranktracer.com. Tracking only books that have been added by users, the service offers several appealing features, including slick flash graphics, estimates of Amazon's highly guarded sales numbers, and tracking of ranks on international Amazon sites.
Ranktracer also offers promotions on its own site and Amazon's, which you may or may not find useful. Size it up with the other Amazon tracking sites and let us know which one you find most functional. (Ranktracer does charge a small fee, which is, hint, waiveable if you have a blog.)
Ranktracer tells visitors all about Amazon sales ranks and what can be done with them on the front page of its site, and—while much of the information is eerily familiar—it brings up a good point: The rank, although visible to any Joe Schmoe lurking the web, can be a powerful market research tool. The ranks of your niche competitors are available at any time to help feel out what's happening in your genre. It's a good idea to request that a rank-tracking site add competitors to its database early; none of the sites can retrieve data from before tracking on that item was initiated.
Also, if you don't have access to BookScan, but want an idea of whether that promotion did anything at all, check for drops in your rank after marketing or publicity activity. Not incredibly accurate, but it might help you gauge what works and what doesn't.
Alternatively, you could distribute defamatory pamphlets about a close competitor and check their graph for spikes. Either way, comprehensive sales rank data can be very helpful.
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Random House Ditches DRM
February 26, 2008
by Aaron Hierholzer
Author Cory Doctorow has good reason to be wary of digital rights management. After switching from Mac to a Linux OS, he tells of the months-long task of laboriously converting his extensive DRM-controlled audiobook collection to the universal MP3 format. Ouch.
Digital rights management has long had its critics, who argue that piracy prevention efforts are more of a burden on honest consumers than on illegal sharers, who will find a way to "crack" the content—DRM or no DRM.
Random House has joined the many music labels who have decided to abandon what some characterize as draconian protection measures on content sold online in favor of—they hope—more sales. The publisher announced last week that it will now sell audiobooks on eMusic.com in MP3 format, which has no restrictions on where it is played. That means customers will be able to buy the product and listen to it however they like, whether that be on an iPod, Zune, burned CD, etc.
Compare that to Audible.com and iTunes, who refuse to sell non-DRM audiobooks, even if the author doesn't want such protection. (Random House will still use rights management for those publishers who feel it will prevent illegal distribution.) Amazon.com, new owner of Audible, has said it will stop encoding audiobooks if the public complains. So if you're for universal file formats, barrage them with annoying emails and phone calls!
In its refreshingly down-to-earth announcement (PDF link), Random House acknowledges piracy as a "fact of life," and shares the results of an experiment it conducted with eMusic that bolstered their decision to discontinue mandatory DRM. They watermarked MP3 versions of a variety of titles, sold them through eMusic, and hired a company to watch for them to show up on filesharing networks. Not one has yet appeared, according to Random House.
A big step has been taken by a publishing giant, opening the door for further changes in audiobook distribution—and many thinkers in the book industry are hoping this development will soon extend to e-books.
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Big Bad Book Blog: Facebook the Future
November 12, 2007
by Ryan Wheeler
Have you started Facebooking yet? If not, now might be a good time to start. This week Facebook announced the launch of a groundbreaking new social advertising system.
A key feature of the system is that it allows Facebook users to notify their network of friends whenever they make purchases and recommendations on other participating websites. According to Advertising Age, users will be able to let their network know when they post an item on eBay, rent a movie on Blockbuster.com, or, most importantly, rate a book on Amazon.com.
Another new feature lets businesses and artists build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences. As I've mentioned before, social networks are great for spreading word of mouth and creating online buzz for your book. Go here to set up a book or author page and start networking with fans and friends. Then you can encourage your network to post an Amazon review of your book and broadcast it to their own Facebook friends with the Amazon Book Reviews application.
With this revolutionary social advertising system and its existing partnership with Shelfari (the largest social media site for book lovers), Facebook may soon become the social network of choice for authors.
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Beltway Books: CIA to Plame: Don't Publicize Public Record
August 8, 2007
by Aaron Hierholzer
A federal judge ruled last week that Valerie Plame cannot reveal the dates of her employ at the CIA in her upcoming autobiography Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Plame and Simon & Schuster filed suit against the agency when the CIA Publications Review Board decided that the memoir was fine--except for those dates. Thing is, the dates had already been widely reported and published in the Congressional Record (and are on Wikipedia). Judge Barbara Jones says, however, she was swayed to bar the dates from the book by a letter from the CIA. What did it say? Even S&S and Plame don't know, since that letter was classified.
The publisher hasn't said whether it will appeal the ruling, but the book seems to still be on track. You can already order it on Amazon! (Current user tags: "neocon garbage" (4), "glorified excrement" (5), and the succinct "Evil" (3).) Plame's looking fetching on the cover, but the lack of classic spy imagery is disappointing.
Related books:
- Plame's less hot husband Joseph Wilson wrote a door stopping account of the leak (The Politics of Truth, Carroll & Graf, $16.95) that was well-reviewed, but failed to reach sales of hotcake proportions,
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E-Books: What's the Deal?
May 31, 2007
by Aaron Hierholzer
At the turn of the century, many in the book industry excitedly anticipated the advent of the electronic book. With titles like "The Future of Cyberpublishing Is Now!", articles breathlessly told of the undiscovered world of e-book publishing and all its implications for authors, publishers, and the reading public. Paperless books would surely revolutionize the stodgy old book industry. So now, almost a decade later, why do most consumers react to the term "e-book" with a blank stare or casual head-scratch? Should the pronouncements of the e-book future seem as ridiculous to us now as the Y2K scare? [Unrelated fact: The author of doomsday classics The Y2K Personal Survival Guide and Millennium Bug seems to have overcome his embarrassment, becoming the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson, the nation's largest Christian publisher, in 2005.]
Some cite a general wariness with the format as the major reason the e-book fizzled so anticlimactically. Aren't most people who buy books the types who savor sipping coffee in a bookstore, smelling the fresh paper of a printed book? Don't avid readers enjoy coming home and curling up on the couch by the crackling hearth, a bound copy of their favorite novel nestled in their palm? And who wants to look at a fluorescent screen in their free time after they've done so at work for eight hours?
A more concrete answer for the sluggish e-book takeoff can be found in the mind-boggling abundance of formats in which e-books are available and the multiple platforms for accessing them. Pair that abundance with a scarcity of actual e-book content, and you have a situation in which the public won't show interest until there is more material available, but publishers won't put out more material until they see more consumer demand. So all we need for the e-book revolution to take place is, theoretically, an affordable, user-friendly reading device and a large enough pool of similarly formatted e-books to justify purchase of the device.
And the presence of e-books is increasing. HarperCollins, Random House, and (to a smaller extent) Penguin all offer a wide selection on their Web sites. Barnes & Noble entirely dropped e-books in 2003, but Amazon.com's Mobipocket site continues to build an electronic catalog that includes fiction, non-fiction, and reference books, mainly for use on handheld devices. They now have over 40,000 full texts available for purchase. Independent booksellers are jumping on the bandwagon, too. BookSense, a marketing consortium for independent bookstores, just launched a program that allows consumers to purchase e-books through independent booksellers' BookSense-templated sites. And although the American Association of Publishers estimated an overall .03% drop in book sales for 2006, e-books showed the largest gain of any sector, rising 24.1% to 54.4 million. An unimpressive number in sales, perhaps, and certainly not in line with the old dotcom projections, but the significant growth bodes well.
No matter how slowly they're taking hold, electronic books can still be useful to authors and publishers, and may yet play a significant role in the future of the industry. Let's take a look at the good things about e-books:
They sell books: It's widely believed that distribution of free e-books actually boosts traditional sales. Avant-Guide, publishers of a well known series of city guides, have adopted this strategy in hopes that they can increase brand awareness and reach potential customers. Confident that users will be impressed with quality content and head to the bookstore, they offer a selection of their most popular titles in digital form for free. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow is also known for his forward-thinking e-book practices; he's been giving away free copies online for years as a way to sell more in brick-and-mortar stores. In a 2006 article for Forbes, he writes:
Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.
In this scenario the argument that people are, in Doctorow's words, "pervy for paper" becomes an argument for e-book distribution: People will download the e-book (or sample chapters) and decide that they'd like to read the entire thing in print format. Of course, your book has to be good for that to happen. But your book is good, right?
They provide extra content: Many e-book editions offers special features, such as author interviews or excerpts from the author's other work, giving them an edge over their printed counterparts.
They have cool features: Advanced reading devices now have excellent resolution that mimics the printed page. In addition, users can highlight passages, make marginal notes (either through keypad entry or stylus), change font size, and read in the dark. E-books also provide a great level of portability, enabling readers to carry the equivalent of a shelf of books around in a device that's usually well under a pound. And you can read them all with one hand. Again, the success of the e-book is contingent on the development of an attractive, functional reader and a critical mass of available titles, and we're getting close.
They can earn you a bit of extra revenue: WOWIO is trying out a new model which consists of offering free e-books for download in exchange for viewing of a few ads. Full-page advertisements are inserted in the e-book documents. The ads can be quickly skipped over and are tailored to the reader's interests based on questions answered during initial registration. Publishers are paid a small amount per download, making the site a great way for publishers and authors to expose their work and make a little money. Visit www.wowio.com for more information.
So don't write off the e-book just yet. Stay tuned for more; in an upcoming article, we'll attempt to unboggle your mind to all those different e-book formats and let you know who's closest in the race for a viable e-book reader.
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The Deckle Edge: Affectation or Style?
May 23, 2007
by Lisa Woods
I recently ran across this post on one of Amazon’s Customer Discussions forums:
DemonsDanceAlone writes: "Both my mother and I received [Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris] as a Christmas gift, and I was quite disappointed to find that the edge of the book was not smooth, but an uneven zigzag shape. When I went to return it, hoping for a better copy, I found that all the books at my local Target and Barnes and Noble had the same uneven edges. Is this a flaw in the book's production, is it just a bad batch, or is this a new style that this publisher is using for some stupid reason?"
This post brought two questions to my mind: One, who in the heck gives Hannibal Rising as a Christmas gift?! (Cannibalism and candy canes—hmmm.) And two, what is up with those cool irregular edges?
After a bit of Googling, I discovered that rough, untrimmed page edges are called "deckle edges" or just simply "rough trimmed." A deckle is a wood frame resting on or hinged to the edges of the mold that defines the edges of the sheet in handmade paper process. According to history.com, the rough edges are created by the fibrous pulp flowing between the frame and the deckle of the mold. When books were predominantly composed of handmade paper, deckle edges were considered a defect and were trimmed off. In the late 1800s, however, rough trimmed pages became fashionable. During this time, many books were left untrimmed on one or three sides for purely aesthetic reasons.
The industrialization of printing and the commercial manufacture of paper has sidelined naturally deckled handmade paper to the hobbyist, artist, and neo-Luddite. Modern sheets are machine made, mass-produced, and precisely trimmed ("cut solid") to pre-determined sizes for letters, magazines, forms, catalogs, laser printer, copying machine output, and, yes, books.
Like the pre-faded and frayed jeans on display at Diesel; the faux crackle, hiss, and skipping of vinyl records on hip hop tracks; or the peeling dingy white paint of shabby chic furniture—it seems what’s old is new again. Today’s deckle edges are artificially created to give a book a more historical or sophisticated look. Examples include the aforementioned Hannibal Rising, as well as Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints, John Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama, and Lemony Snicket's The Hostile Hospital.
Affectation? DemonsDanceAlone thinks so, but I don’t. Rough trimmed pages are just another way to let a book’s packaging communicate a mood and hopefully entice—not confound—readers.
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