Social media… yes I know those are dirty words… has allowed fans access into the personal lives of their favorite authors. It’s allowed them to “follow” their idols and publicly “like” the work they do. There’s always been the belief, half-jokingly, that tools like twitter and facebook are socially acceptable methods of stalking for fans. It’s absolutely true. Twitter allows me to stalk my favorite authors. (*cough* Neil Gaiman and Patrick Rothfuss *cough*)

The really interesting thing about it, though, is they didn’t used to be my favorite authors…

If you’d asked me five years ago who my favorite author was, I’d have started with some lame “but I like so many” excuse, then said it would have to be either Walter Wangerin, Jr or Edgar Allan Poe. Why? Because I cry every time I read The Book of Sorrows, and because Poe is so delightfully angsty. Authors were only one thing… they wrote books that I liked to read. Books that changed my life. I liked the books.

Now, things are different because I follow a few authors on twitter. (Namely the above and a couple more.) I chose which authors to follow based on whether I enjoyed their feeds. Amazingly, those authors quickly became my favorites. I mean, yes they are wonderful writers, but I feel like I know them. Both of those gentlemen are avid users of twitter, and they interact with their followers. They’re real people, not names on the covers of books.

I believe it’s something like reading your friend’s work. You’re already a little slanted toward liking it because they’re your friend. It could be shit, but you’re at least going to give it a chance, and you’re going to want to like it.

So authors putting themselves out there on social media… it’s stacking the deck in their favor. Plus, I’m more likely to go out and buy their books because… hell, I want them to be able to do cool stuff for me to read about on twitter.

But how does this help you? Haven’t you figured that part out by now? In a world that’s becoming smaller and smaller, and yet bigger than any previous generation has ever known, you need to speak out. How are readers supposed to find your books in a vast sea of self-publishing and heavy-handed marketing? They find YOU. You need to be there, making it personal. Use social media to make yourself more than just a name on the cover of a book.

Create yourself, and your image can be your most powerful marketing tool.

If they ever read it.

How can you get readers to pick up your book?

There are obviously many factors that go into successfully marketing a book, and many camps of thought. Pricing is a huge variable, targeting your audience is essential, and using things like social media to your advantage can make all the difference. Whether you hire a marketer, pay a publishing house to do it, or try your hand at it yourself, you need to do something to get readers to pick up your book out of the millions that are sold every year.

One thing that many authors overlook, is the “first impression” their book makes. Let’s use our own experience as an example. You are browsing the online store for books, no particular idea about what you want. What do you look at? Do you read the first few pages of every book they list? Do you scroll through descriptions or teaser paragraphs?

I’m willing to bet the first thing you look at is the cover of the book. I can picture them spread across your screen, a parade of tiny images. One catches your eye and you glance at the title of the book. So far, so good. Looks interesting. You click on it and read the description. The cover is the worm dangling in front of you. The title is the little bobbing that makes it look even more appealing. You bite, and the description sets the hook.

Case in point:

That book cover is very important. When I first released my book Hylsbrith Falls I had a cover that looked like the blue of a waterfall at close range. It was easy, it was made in photoshop and didn’t cost me anything. After all, it was the story that was the real value there, right? I only sold a handful of them.

A few years later I decided to have the cover professionally done. It was a hard-learned lesson about artist-author relationships, but eventually I partnered with a lovely artist that valued my work as much as I valued hers. I had only sold a few books before, but I invested $300 in a beautiful personalized cover that I loved. In the next months I sold over 600 copies of the book.

The nature of the Consumer.

Today’s society is very much an “on demand” mentality. You want everything at your fingertips, provided to you in the easiest, simplest way possible. You want to gloss over everything until something catches your interest. Your time is too valuable to spend it any other way. Why wade through things you don’t care for, when you can scroll right to what you want?

You have to catch the eye of your audience. You have to make them think: “That’s interesting… I wonder what it’s about?” Most of the time a stock cover image won’t do this. You can try to make a title that’s snappy enough to pull them in, but that’s like fishing without a worm on the hook.

Do right by your book.

Most new authors are self-published, writing part-time while they work to make the bills. Getting a good book cover done can cost a lot of money, especially with no promise of sales to make up for it. It’s a risk. It’s an investment.

It can mean the difference between a handful of sales, and hundreds of sales.

So think about your book. Think about your audience. Ask yourself if you’d look twice at your book when you scrolled past it in the bookstore. If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to invest more than just blood, sweat, and tears in your work. Maybe it’s time to bring a cover artist on board.

The road once taken.

Now for the reality of working with a cover artist. They’re just as much of an artist as you are. Your book is your baby, you slaved away at it and pulled it from your mind, carefully pruned it into a masterpiece. The cover artist feels the same about their work. That has to be acknowledged.

It is very important to get all the cards on the table right from the beginning. Make it clear what is expected of both parties, and who owns what at the end of it all. Most cover artists have worked through this process before, and have an idea of the way they like to do things. Sometimes they have options for you, with corresponding price variations on what you get from the deal. Owning full and exclusive rights to the work will cost you. Coming to an agreement somewhere in the middle, where the artist retains copyright with limited use, can be cheaper.

Do your homework. Ask artists for examples of their work or for testimonials from previous clients. Make damn sure they’re a reliable and honest professional. There’s nothing worse than partnering with an artist that’s willing to swap work, then getting screwed when they don’t follow through with their end of the deal. No contract, no cover, no way to do anything about it.

Use a contract, even if it’s an emailed agreement written out and replied to. Make sure it outlines everything from the price, to the delivery date, to the copyrights. No surprises. A true professional won’t be offended if you ask for a contract, because it will show that you value their rights as well as your own.

Remember that their time is valuable. They are creating something unique for you, and you will pay for that. But in the end, it’s worth it.

Happy writing!

Resources for writers come in many forms. It takes a lot of sorting to find the information you’re looking for on the internet, as it contains more information in one “place” than has ever been collected before. I’m going to break down a few of my favorite sources for you.

For Writers

The website forwriters.com is a collection of all sorts of resources. They link to a broad range of writer groups, associations, conventions and forums that you can join, and even have their own writer forum. They also link to various sites that help with the process of writing. My favorite part of this site is the links to sites that provide real information on things a writer would write about, like space or crime or science. If you want to research medical treatments, they link to that. If you want to research warp drive, they link to that. It’s great for learning more about your subject matter.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine has an article with 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills, and there are some gems in it. It includes links on grammar and punctuation, as well as general writing tips. It puts out some blogs on copywriting and editing. It links to a few articles on writing practices and tips from the pros. There are even a few applications that are mentioned to help with a writer’s workflow.

Open Education Database

This article is another great source for all types of links. 150 Resources to Help You Write Better, Faster, and More Persuasively will take you from grammar and style to helpful blogs, to writing tools, to organizations. They’re all listed in helpful categories, so scroll down through the list to find out what interests you.

These are, of course, just a few of the places you can go to find resources. There are thousands of places online to find help, and browsing them all could turn into a full time job. Just remember not to let the research stop you from writing!

There are many factors that go into pricing an ebook, as I stated above. Some authors will want to go for sales, some for a fan base. There are sweet spots in the pricing game that will help you a little in choosing a price, but it’s really a personal choice. You also take things into account like royalties and programs that certain price ranges qualify for in the digital marketplaces where you host your book. If you want to see some hard numbers, check out these graphs and factoids from TechCrunch: Ten Things You May Not Know About Ebook Prices.

Publisher’s Weekly posted a great article called DIY: How to Price a Self-Published Ebook on the steps to take and thoughts behind pricing your ebook. They talk a little about an author’s goals, and go deeper into the long-term success of your book. Sometimes more than one road leads to the same place, and there’s more than one way to go about selling your work.

Finally, there’s another perspective on selling your work: that your work is valuable, and you should price it accordingly. The Launch Coach talks a little bit about selling yourself short in his article called How to Price an Ebook So People Will Buy It. It’s a great reminder that a lot of hard work and long nights went into the creation that you’re about to sell, and you should keep that in mind. With the right marketing, your audience will believe the same, and you can sell your book competitively.

We hope that the pricing question is a little simpler to answer after these informative posts, and wish you all the best of luck in your journey to successfully publishing your book!

Why the sudden increase in self-publishing? In past years an author would write their masterpiece, then search out an agent; or cold contact a publishing house, praying to get someone to notice their work and want to buy it from them. A very small percentage of authors ever made it past the submission stage. Rejection letters would pile up over the years while waiting on a publisher to take notice.

What changed?

Then along came companies that offered print on demand (PoD) publishing. For no cost to the author, they would accept manuscripts and print them as their customers ordered them. They accepted anything that fit within their standards of “good taste”. If it didn’t sell, it was no problem to them. Sure the books cost a little bit extra so these companies could skim off the top, but you could publish it yourself at no cost to you.

Then, to make things even easier, along came the e-reader, and digital libraries hungry for content to offer their customers. Amazon and the iBookstore, and even Barnes and Noble, all opened their digital warehouse to independent publishers. Ebooks were even cheaper to produce on demand, and with a typical 30% cut taken off the top, they were even more profitable for authors as well.

Now anyone can be an author with very little cost to themselves.

What does this mean for publishing?

Setting aside the extensive debate about whether ebooks are going to make printed books obsolete, and the belief that self-publishing is driving up the price of books coming out of traditional publishing houses, there are two huge consequences. One of them is primarily positive, and one is very potentially negative.

First, the bright side. Because self-publishing is now viable, there are thousands of new authors who can get their voices heard. There are thousands of stories that can be told. Genres have expanded and are bursting at the seams. There is something out there for everyone’s taste, no matter how obscure. No longer is the reader subject to popular marketing and what the publishing house thinks they want. Opportunity is spread out wide before every writer, waiting for them to grab hold of their dreams.

But with every bright side, there’s a shadow. It used to be that for every successful author there were a thousand that were rejected. Some of these may have been brilliant works, but many were just not good enough. With self-publishing, anyone can be an author. There is no quality assurance process for ebook creation. There is no editor sitting behind a desk dropping manuscripts in the trash. It’s up to the reader to sort out what is quality and what is crap. It’s given rise to the review system, bringing an entirely new barrier into publishing that doesn’t happen during printing… but during marketing.

So what does this mean for you, as a potential author or independent publisher?

It means that instead of worrying about getting your book created, you have to worry about selling it. You can print (or digitize) anything, but your success depends on being able to get people to read and like it.

Self-publishing is putting responsibility for an author’s success directly in the hands of the author. There are opportunities popping up like never before, and they are more slippery than ever before. Make sure, when you make the choice to self-publish, that you go in with your eyes open.

For more info on self-publishing and what it entails, you can visit www.selfpublishedauthor.com, a site created by Bowker to help the independent author. There is great information there and a list of other useful links so you can do your own research into the world of publishing.

Happy publishing!