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Old 03-14-2011, 01:32 PM   #16
davidnpauly
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All great suggestions. While Amazon is the single larget electronic book reader format available it by no means covers everyone. I would recommend publishing a few different formats in order to get the widest possible customer base. Are you going to use DRM? If so you will need to publish a sony, nook and epub formats. If you are not going to use any form of DRM then a simple epub format will do the job. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management is the means by which author can protect themselves from unauthorized re-distribution of their work, but is often abused by restricting where people can read your book and when they can do so. Troubble with DRM is it is easily removed.
Thanks jbcohen. I published the ebooks in various formats (except Mobi) on Smashwords. My wife suggested me NOT to use DRM since any hacker can remove DRM easily. What do you think?
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Old 03-14-2011, 02:09 PM   #17
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DRM stands for Digital Rights Management is the means by which author can protect themselves from unauthorized re-distribution of their work...
Except it doesn't allow authors to protect themselves from unauthorized re-distribution of their work. It doesn't slow down the pirates for a moment. The example I always use is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- it has never been officially available as an ebook, but it was on the darknets before the dead-trees edition hit the stores. Yeah, it was an inside job, but the point is that if people want to distribute an illicit ebook, they will, and not only will Digital Restrictions Management (rights? DRM manages rights like prisons manage freedom) not slow them down, not having the book in electronic format at all won't slow them down if they want it enough. And if people don't want it enough, your problem isn't people not wanting to give you money; it's people not wanting to read your book.

DRM hurts the honest and legal readers by enforcing device lock-in, re-buying of existing content, etc. It annoys the honest but questionably legal readers who buy books and strip off the DRM. And it doesn't even cramp the style of the people who download torrents of hundreds of books at a time (usually to get the two books in there that they actually want to read). It can be argued that DRM actually helps the bad guys by teaching people to pirate books -- how to download books off the darknet so they can get the book they want for the device they have, or the book they already own for the device they just bought instead of the one their dog chewed on -- when they would otherwise have been content to just buy the book. Once they find they can get it free with fewer hassles than buying it, especially given that we have a society that values wealth over honor, they are likely to continue with that course. All thanks to DRM.
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Old 03-14-2011, 02:45 PM   #18
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Your own website/blog is a good way forward, with a free download of part of the book - or even all of it in pdf format, which looks good on a PC but isn't all that convenient to use on some readers. [Actually I see you're doing this already - sorry]

If you then spend a little time getting links from other websites and blogs which promote (legitimate) free downloads you may be surprised at how much attention you get. As somebody or other said (the name slips my mind - senior monent) the real problem for self-published authors is obscurity.

Don't forget the rest of the world. My own novel has been downloaded 8,000 plus times and I was a bit taken aback to find that about a third of those went to India. There's a lot of interest in Australia too. You need to hunt around for local sites that will link to you.

Once you've done all that you can open the other can of worms, which is converting free downloads into sales.

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Old 03-14-2011, 03:03 PM   #19
davidnpauly
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If you then spend a little time getting links from other websites and blogs which promote (legitimate) free downloads you may be surprised at how much attention you get.
Can you suggest some of those sites?

Thanks
David Pauly

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Old 03-14-2011, 04:46 PM   #20
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My book is published by Black Rose Writing. It's a hybrid of Printing on Demand and Traditional ones.
I'm looking at their website right now (and wincing in pain) and trying to figure out how it's a hybrid. It looks like a straightforward vanity press to me so far. One with a hideously awful website. Could you please give me a link to their explanation, so I can just look at that and not have their bad writing and worse Geocities-level layout hurt my brain?

Writer Beware, Preditors & Editors, and Absolute Write seem to consider them a vanity publisher as well. If I were looking for a publisher, a bit of googling would lead me to cross Black Rose off my list. So would a look at their website -- I don't want a publisher whose representatives' writing looks like the material for one of those "find ten mistakes in this paragraph" tests, or whose website looks like a bad example from Web Pages That Suck (yes, that's a real website ).

Yeah, I know I keep going on about the website ... but seriously, it's any business's public face, and this one is ugly and its designer dresses it funny. I've ragged on Baen for being really bad, but at least it doesn't hurt my brain.

A real publisher pays you money for specified rights to your book. They perform specified services. They do specified things to promote it, not "within our budget" which seems to be what Black Rose offers*. It's all in their contract. And most important, their goal is selling books, not selling printing services to authors. In fact, that's a good definition of a vanity press: a company which considers authors an asset rather than a liability, in a financial sense. That is, one for which the authors, rather than sales of their books, are a revenue source. Selling books to their authors does not, by the way, count as sales of books, and that seems to be Black Rose's biggest money maker.

Also, legitimate publishers have nothing to hide. They don't make flowery promises with nothing but more flowery (or just florid) language behind them. They don't get all butthurt when people ask them questions about their products or services, or accuse questioners of trying to sabotage their ideals. Vanity publishers do.

There are uses for vanity presses. I'm working on something I'll probably pay to get printed because it's not marketable, and I know it's not marketable; it's just stuck in my head and needs to come out, and it would be fun to have it with covers on. So when it's done, I'll try to find an honest vanity press or POD place to print me up some, cash on the barrelhead. But I won't pretend that's "publishing" or anything else but, well, vanity. There are also obscure niche books that an author might be able to sell better than any publisher -- things that appeal to a specific market, often a segment of a profession, where the author is known and respected and knows most of the people personally. Plus, of course, there are things like my grandmother-in-law's cookbook ... nothing that matters to anyone outside the family, and pure gold to all of us. That's not commercially marketable either (who wants someone else's grandma's recipes?) but one of the relatives shelled out to a cookbook-printing place to get one for each of us. Those situations, though -- my vanity, the obscure specialty, the family cookbook, etc. -- are few and far between. Most people who "can't" get published are either trying the wrong places, or are trying the wrong thing (i.e., your manuscript isn't "too good" for them; your manuscript sucks). The answer is to do more research, be more selective about your targets, write better queries, and fix your bleedin' manuscript, not pay good money to someone who sees you, not your readers, as their primary revenue source.

*I'll promote your book to the limit of what's in my budget too. Of course, that happens to be $0.00, but I haven't seen any proof that Black Rose can do any better.
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Old 03-15-2011, 09:22 AM   #21
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I'm looking at their website right now (and wincing in pain)
After a comment like that, I had to look up the website. Oh. My. Gawd. It looks like a bad early 90s website if you bring it up in IE, but it's unreadable in Firefox. I can't believe you compared that to Geocities. How dare you!
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Old 03-15-2011, 11:07 AM   #22
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I would like them to promote my books as much as I would like these guys to take my wedding photos:

http://www.photographertoronto.com
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Old 03-15-2011, 11:34 AM   #23
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Well, what can I say? It is done, and it's too late to do anything. Well, at least, the owner of Black Rose did a good job of editing & formating the book & he is very helpful in responding to my questions and requests.

My question now, let's forget about the publisher, is how to promote it as a self-published book.

These are what I have done so far:
1- build my own website with a blog, a Q & A, & other stuffs
2- self-publish the ebook on PubIt (Barnes & Noble) & Smashwords (and have two copies sold, :-D)
3- post free excerpt, free giveaway of the whole ebook (weird! not as many requests as I would expect)
4- sign up for 4-5 book conventions/shows locally and nationally
5- Sign up on goodreads.com (free), facebook(free), twitter (free)
6. Setup amazon.com author's page

And what I am going to do:
1- Hire the experienced publicist from Chicago
2- Continue to join as many bookclubs/book sites/social network as my time allows (LOL! I'm glad that I still have my day job)

Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks
David Pauly

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Old 03-15-2011, 11:42 AM   #24
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I would like them to promote my books as much as I would like these guys to take my wedding photos:

http://www.photographertoronto.com
Oh, holy mother of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's third cousin twice removed.

I endured it long enough to see this part: "Among World Finest & Best Weddings Studios!"
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Old 03-16-2011, 06:19 AM   #25
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One interesting thing about this thread is that nobody has mentioned the most basic thing of all... You have to write a good book in the first place. Perhaps that was in the post that Dr Drib removed. (Not a personal comment, David - I tried to download your excerpt this morning but got timed out - I'll have another go later.)

It's pretty important, though. A good book pushes the marketing forward on oiled wheels. A bad one fights back. Writing good books is what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?
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Old 03-16-2011, 01:09 PM   #26
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Well, what can I say? It is done, and it's too late to do anything. Well, at least, the owner of Black Rose did a good job of editing & formating the book & he is very helpful in responding to my questions and requests.

My question now, let's forget about the publisher, is how to promote it as a self-published book.

These are what I have done so far:
1- build my own website with a blog, a Q & A, & other stuffs
snip
6. Setup amazon.com author's page

Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks
David Pauly
Is any of that stuff actually promoting it? I mean just in looking at this thread, your profile and your website I don't see links to any of those things. How hard/easy are you making it for people to find out about you?

I know I've beat the podcast drum about to death. If you don't want to do a podcast (understandable) then consider appearing on some. No idea what your book is about, but do a google search for podcasts in your genre and ask if you can go on their show. Find other indies and network with them. If you're actively tweeting/facebooking make sure that you come across as much a person as a person selling a book, maybe moreso.

Just some thoughts.

Message me if you want to talk more.

Cheers.
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Old 03-16-2011, 10:30 PM   #27
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One interesting thing about this thread is that nobody has mentioned the most basic thing of all... You have to write a good book in the first place. Perhaps that was in the post that Dr Drib removed. (Not a personal comment, David - I tried to download your excerpt this morning but got timed out - I'll have another go later.)

It's pretty important, though. A good book pushes the marketing forward on oiled wheels. A bad one fights back. Writing good books is what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?
I kind of have to disagree a bit with this... You can write an amazing, literary, brilliant book, but if there is no audience to even give it a try, then it will remain obscure and unread.

Notice how ebooks are selling, but most of the high sellers are all in genre fiction (paranormal romance, horror, thrillers, etc)...
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Old 03-16-2011, 10:44 PM   #28
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I kind of have to disagree a bit with this... You can write an amazing, literary, brilliant book, but if there is no audience to even give it a try, then it will remain obscure and unread.
True, but if you write a literary book that sucks, it doesn't even have a chance. He didn't say that good books will be successful -- he said that bad books won't.

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Notice how ebooks are selling, but most of the high sellers are all in genre fiction (paranormal romance, horror, thrillers, etc)...
Um ... genre books are not bad.
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Old 03-17-2011, 08:56 AM   #29
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Um ... genre books are not bad.
Wait, you didn't get the memo? Real Readers (TM) only read Literary Fiction.
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Old 03-17-2011, 09:13 AM   #30
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Ah, so that's why I feel like an integer....
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