Why (and how) I just used BookBaby for digital publishing

A couple of blogs back I shared the key points of a very informative presentation I had just heard by Brian Felsen, honcho of BookBaby, where he discussed the virtues of letting others (like BookBaby) do the grunt work when you are sending your book to Kindle, Nook, , and others.

So I tried it yesterday—I submitted an older, steady-selling book now used by many college classes as a textbook. We sell a lot of the paperback What Every Superintendent and Principal Needs to Know, a $24.95 K-12 educational niche book that my firm publishes under the Education Communication Unlimited imprint. (It was written by Rosborg, McGee, and my brother, Jim Burgett). What prompted me to use BookBaby was the recent increase in sales of our .pdf digital version of the same book, at $20.

My thought: since mostly students will buy the .pdf version, why not modify that to mobi for Kindle and ePub for Nook and Smashwords (and iPad, etc.) for those wanting to have the text in and on their readers? At $19.99, the 35% (mostly) that we would earn in royalties is less income than our own versions—particularly our .pdf edition, which is kind of a goldmine. But will we sell twice as many new books, plus 28 books more to pay back (from the royalties) the BookBaby cost of $186 (the $149 package plus 74 pages over 250 at 50 cents a page)?

BookBaby doesn’t do any of the prep and promo, but here we had the book written, proofed, formatted in .doc or .pdf, and we had its original front cover all ready to go. (Alas, I had to stretch that .jpg cover to 550 pixels to meet their size requirements. I’ll discuss the quick way to get all this prep stuff together for ancillary publishers in my next newsletter, 7/10.) I also had to dig around and marry some text, but I found that pesky stuff already available too, like the author bios, a fetching description of the book, the original ISBNs, and the keywords.

So Brian’s claim that BookBaby is fast is sort of true. It took about 30 minutes to gather the info, set up an account (the usual stuff), and finish the submission form. (It’s a bit deceptive because to get this gem together took the authors, three of the top educators in Illinois, about four months to write, and a couple more months for us to get the cover and editing done, plus final formatting and proofing. At that point we had the paperback ready to print—and its digital derivative ready to sell in .pdf. So it was about six months and 30 minutes.)

But the 30 minutes for $186 to do a process we have done about 20 times for similar items sent to each of these three houses, plus LSI and sometimes Lulu. Not a whit of difference once we caught on to the internal changes needed to make mobi and ePub look civilized (but never as attractive as the paperback). You can see our process at the prep and submission stages in How to Get Your Book Published Free in Minutes and Marketed Worldwide in Days.

My reaction to BookBaby? It’s easy to figure out and complete. They ask for the very same things you must provide if you go directly to Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords—logically, since they’re filling in the same boxes. The difference is that, submitted by them, the converted text and cover have to look good when they emerge from Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords, hands-free by you. And that may be worth the $149 because getting the text properly formatted is time consuming and sometimes vexing. (My full response is still incomplete, of course, because I have no idea yet how long it will take for BookBaby to get the product to the publishers and what it will look like. If there are problems there I will let you know in a follow-up blog.)

But there was another, disappointing surprise. Originally it was to cost $99 to get the book converted, submitted, and so on… But now for $99 you must have it in final ebook format (mobi- and ePub-acceptable) and they will just do the submission. That’s not much of a bargain. The price is up to $149 to get what I first read for $99. (I don’t quite see the value of going to the $249 premium version.) I hate pocket- emptying surprises even though I heard Felsen say this was likely to happen. I guess I was thinking, or hoping, it would happen in 2025.)

And an irksome procedural problem. I had to leave the computer for a few minutes in the middle of filling in the submission form, and when I returned the page had closed without a word saved. Nor was there a save box to keep what you had completed on the screen, or somewhere accessible. That should be corrected.

That’s it. A review without many teeth. Some annoyance, but overall it wasn’t much different than filling in, say, the Nook submission page (which is the easiest and fastest) except that I expect BookBaby will make my copy clean and pretty in print. I’m not sure if it’s worth $149 (or $186), but to get the money back is mostly my responsibility to let my K-12 crowd know of the new reader wonder when it’s available so my sales push past recompense into high and long profit. However, if I had no idea how to submit my own books this would be a huge bargain. As it is, it’s a bit like betting on the race favorite to place.

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett Lightning Source, CreateSpace, royalties, POD, and profits…

Pete Masterson kindly agreed to my sharing a blog discussion response he sent (on 3/29) to the Linkedin Independent Book Publishers Association-IBPA group, to this question:

“Does Lightning Source pay royalties to independent publishers who use their print services in the same way that CreateSpace does?”

Pete is the author of a definitive guide on book design, Book Design and Production, which Dan Poynter describes as “A masterful work…. The industry has needed a book like this for years.”

Says Pete, author of the following (For more information, see www.aeonix.com):

“Lightning Source (LSI) is a with a link to Ingram Book Group for distribution. LSI does not pay royalties. Books are sold either directly from LSI or through Ingram, revenue is collected, costs are deducted along with the discount rate you select (between 20% and 55%) and you (as the publisher) are paid the difference.

”The ‘downside’ of working with Lightning Source is that you must be a publisher, not simply an author. That requires setting up a publishing entity (that is owned by the author) to handle the publishing duties. I have many clients who have done exactly this. ”CreateSpace (owned by Amazon.com) operates in dual modes. In one case, CS is a subsidy publisher and they offer the full range of author services, including typesetting, editorial work, and cover design. (These services may not be of the highest quality, so do careful research and consider your exact goals for your project. CS tends to be a lower cost subsidy publisher and may be a good choice for the “right” projects.)

“CS also operates as a printer. If an author-publisher provides an ISBN (instead of obtaining one from CS), then CS will print books at a reasonable cost. You can release CS books for sale via Amazon.com with a 40% discount from list price. If you use a CS-provided ISBN, you can get “extended distribution” (beyond Amazon) with a 60% discount from list. However, the ‘extended distribution’ is achieved by CS signing your book up with Lightning Source (with a 20% discount), so it’s very hard to justify using CS in that mode.

”Indeed, if you sign up with Lightning Source, and put your book out with a 20% discount, non returnable, you are likely to make more NET revenue than if you provided the 55% discount, fully returnable terms that are the normal trade book standard.

“Books sold with the short discount are very unlikely to ever be purchased by a physical (bricks and mortar) bookstore, but all such books are ‘automatically’ listed by Amazon and almost all other online booksellers. But guess what? For most titles, the physical bookstores are unlikely to stock a small/self- published title in any event.

“For more information on this short discount approach, see Aaron Shepherd’s POD for Profit.” 15 Publishing Tips from Published Professionals

Let me share some of the best Q-A info from the June 9 BAIPA Meeting in San Rafael, CA. (BAIPA is the Bay Area Independent Publishing Association, a first-rate monthly gathering of published folk living near San Francisco.)

1. If you want to use a famous (or even little-known) painting on your pages, find out the museum where it hangs, and get the rights (or how to license its use) from them. Sometimes it’s free.

2. Do you know aboutCreativeCommons.org ? In its words: “Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools.” Just take a look to see if it will help you, or through it you can help others.

3. If you want to sell copy or artwork to the major publishing houses, figure out to which imprint first, then the specific editor (or people) you must contact there. Do that directly.

4. CreateSpace is poor on promotion.

5. We must promote our own books: we are publishers and must do our own marketing.

6. Lightning Source and CreateSpace do about the same thing, and print POD. One person buys from Create Space, of the two, because the books are a tad cheaper and they offer cream-color paper. (LSI also has a $105 set-up fee; none at CreateSpace.)

7. Bookstores need a 40% discount to survive; distributors, 55%.

8. You don’t get rich from books (usually). They are really entre items, to get you recognition and prove your expertise. But you can get very comfortable from speaking (speeches, seminars, breakout sessions), consulting, or Web marketing — or all four, empire building!

9. One successful publisher switched his business model to niche publishing, used my book (sorry for the shameless plug), and is now the niche champ in his field, free from the usual marketing woes of general publishers.

10. Why not sell your book digitally chapter by chapter. Give away the first chapter (make it free), then maybe charge 50 cents to $1 for those chapters that follow? Dickens did it long before !

11. Sutro was recommended for creating travel apps. One such app was given away free and had 9,000 downloads (many from China). No income but those recipients can be contacted to buy updates. They will recommend the app to their friends too. You can also do stand-alone chapters on apps, through Apple.

12. If you want your book on audio, Audible acx.com( ) was recommended.

13. “How did my book end up being sold by Google?” was asked. Maybe Smashwords listed it there was the only guess.

14. Most of the questions concerned marketing: how to sell their tomes!

15. For more about BAIPA, go to baipa.org.

I hope this helps!

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett BookBaby and publishing your ebook

Half of the reason I went to hear Brian Felsen give a 2 1/2- hour program on June 9, sponsored byBAIPA (Bay Area Independent Publishing Association), was to hear what additional magic he was going to unravel about this out-of- the-woodwork e-publishing phenomenon. Just months back who had heard of BookBaby? Now, who hasn’t? It’s the world’s largest ebook distributor for Indies, like us. (Oh yes, it’s also CDBaby’s kid cousin, and Felsen runs both.)

Brian’s a short dynamo who plowed through too much jet lag and too little air conditioning (like none) to make us laugh, make huge sense about the tumultuous open publishing happening, and to drive home the fact that the big houses either didn’t believe the digital deluge or were too ossified to either get on top or jump out of the way.

I don’t want to spend our time outlining what BookBaby can do for you. Please go to their website and particularly look at “About Us” and the Q-A section. In short, they offer the full monty of services, and it seems economically wiser to let them do some of the gnarlier deeds than to waste your editorial skills doing stuff, then undoing and doing it again, like trying to get Word to look civil in mobi or epub.

I’d much rather zero in on the most important points that Felsen made, and let the services sell themselves—or not.

1. Why self-publish? Because the old ship is sinking, the publishers are consolidating (without you), and it’s time for a radical readjustment.

2. 95% of today’s published books flop.

3. The big houses really want monster books, not what you are offering. To get the monster books they are jettisoning their mid-tail authors. And since you must do your own marketing anyway, with or with big-house “support,” why take 10% of the list price (worse yet, net) when doing it yourself you can keep a third or a half? (If you niche publish, and pretest, think 40-50% every time–my how-to link here.)

4. The big houses do have virtues: marketing and editorial support, exceptional physical distribution and store contacts, they are the king of certain genres, and being published by them makes it easier to get higher-paying speaking gigs.

5. Then why do it yourself? The speed and time to market, you can dominate the smaller niches, you already bring your own platform, you get a bigger cut of the profit pie, and it’s not either-or. Do both. (Aren’t most of us still printing bound versions and letting others publish our ebooks?)

6. With POD () producing good-looking books in small quantities overnight, long gone are the opener runs of 2,500 books costing $5-6,000. They look as good as the bookstore books and can go from the press to the conference breakout room to your bank in a week.

7. Ingram’s royalty payment for ebooks is poor.

8. Covers are very important: “success leaves clues.” Make your ebook text 12-point, 14-18 point for chapter titles. Create them in Word or PDF. Keep your book in free-flow page format, a dynamic layout. The fixed format (locked) only works for children’s photo books, and not well there.

9. It now costs you a basic $99 or a premium $199 to use BookBaby, but soon it will be $99 for distribution and another $50 for set-up.

10. To survive as a self-publisher you must involve social and multimedia: website, online retail stores, blogs, speaking, YouTube. Soon you will have video and audio in the books too. 11. Marketing involves product (content and cover), pricing, placement (in ebook order, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Apple), and promotion (from your website: Twitter, Facebook, and a blog, plus Google. Also, sales direct to the reader, the metadata registered, and the basic SEO steps and lead words employed). Finally, to survive you must define your USP (unique selling proposal) and have a clear and compelling idea.

12. Identify your followers, use Stumbleupon.com, network with your heroes, ask your readers what they need to know, and help them.

13. Don’t avoid or overlook email: that’s where you get the best response. Do a newsletter, broadcast, directly engage your followers.

14. “It’s your scared duty to articulate.” Add to the conversation, express your unique voice. The time has never been better for writers because the old gatekeepers are folding. Anybody can get in, anybody can be in print.

15. Sell what you can—editions, a series, guest articles—and make money from other sources from your singular idea(s).

16. Pay attention to your time use. DIY (doing it yourself) can be very dumb: farm out what others do better and faster. Let others do the technical stuff. You write.

17. Nobody’s going to steal your words. Piracy isn’t the problem, it’s anonymity. Nobody knows who you are or that your book exists because it wasn’t shown, marketed, and sold.

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett See how an excellent website is critical in empire building

How can one double and triple their income quickly from writing, photography, speaking, consulting, teaching, or other related means?

The process is called empire building, and I focus on it in my free monthly newsletter.

Atypically, I’m going to prematurely share the key article in this month’s newsletter as this blog post because I so like Lee Foster’s website structure I want to share it with all actual and budding empire builders now.

The heart of Lee Foster’s empire is visible at www.fostertravel.com. When this award-winning photographer- writer is out capturing breathtaking views and gathering facts for his articles, his website is tending shop by showing what he has to say and sell—and collecting the fees for the purchases.

Some deserved bio accolades first. Lee Foster has published with the major houses and top travel magazines; he’s self- published as well. Four of his current books areThe Photographer’s Guide to San Francisco; The Photographer’s Guide to Washington, D.C.; Travels in American Imagination, and Northern California’s History Weekends. Enjoy some of his many-thousand photos at his website (from 250+ worldwide destinations)—plus his photos in more than 225 books from the travel publisher Lonely Planet. Finally, check his exhausting list of credits under “News” on the guide line of his website’s index page.

What I want to focus on here is Foster’s selling structure through his website so we can build our own empirical castles from stealing and using what he does so well. Fortunately, Lee wrote an excellent, detailed article that outlines his belief that you can earn income today through both the old and new travel journalism models if you move from the passive “being published” to the more active direct publishing while you create your own market for its sale. (This also applies to almost any other topic where writing, speaking, and photography are involved.) Please read Lee Foster’s “Entrepreneurial Travel Publishing” to see how all of the parts of his program support each other to create a steady and growing income flow. (This article closely parallels Lee’s first-rate, recent Bay Area Independent Publisher’s Association presentation.) The article also expands on what follows with actual prices, costs, and procedures.

I’m extracting (sometimes in Lee’s words) from that article and his talk what impressed me most—or what I’d like to know (or share) most about his website support structure.

1. Foster blends photography, articles, blogs, books, some video, and apps, and to that he offers a do-it-yourself mechanism through which one can purchase a photo-use license for anything they see through the web or an agency, for their blog, a book, or almost any other legitimate application.

2. He actively seeks ways to sell his photos and his writing to the leading book companies and major magazines in his field.

3. If someone sees a Foster photo and wants to talk purchase, the website provides a process or directions to make that happen.

4. It’s time to bypass royalty book publishers and move forward with your own “independent” print book and/or ebook. Particularly if it’s true that Amazon sells 60% of all books bought in the U.S.

5. Use print-on-demand to provide your bound book stock as needed, though it’s still too expensive for color photos.

6. Consider Portland’s BookBaby’s model for producing and selling your ebooks. Your part of the production is alarmingly simple: use Word text with places allocated for photos. (You also have to write a good book, and have proofing as good.)

7. Even at $2.99 a book, earning 70% royalty from Amazon and Apple, you will get a better net return than from a $14.95 book in the traditional royalty publishing model.

8. Get your own ISBNs from Bowker for your books. You will need them anyway for LSI/Ingram POD printing and for some Smashwords editions.

9. A good website requires substantial ongoing attention. Use a WordPress structure, get a pro to set that up, but make the daily changes yourself. Your website will have static pages, a blog capacity, plus ecommerce and subscription lists.

10. What are the income-earners atwww.fostertravel.com ? Content licensing, Google Adsense income, private ads, affiliate ads, and product sales (books, apps, photo prints or cards).

11. Set up a monetizing website first, then do social media outreach and promotion to bring newcomers to your website. He uses Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. To flourish, the site must have a steady flow of new viewers.

12. 90% of Foster’s website users come from search engines (like Google), 10% from click-through referrals.

13. The website must be attractive and enticing to visitors. Does it have a good commercial structure, with seller links and a way to pay for the purchases? Can users comment on your blog?

14. Why not license your photos? And your writing, like derivative presentations of the articles. You must check the agreement every time you sell (particularly on Internet sites and in contests) to be sure you still own all rights, free and unencumbered; remember also to license non-exclusively.

15. All used articles should be bylined and include your photo and bio.

16. Apps are hard to sell, but worth serious pursuit. Physical books hardly sell outside the U.S/Canada. but one of Foster’s apps sold in 46 foreign countries. Compare printed physical books with ebooks/apps and ask which media has the brightest future? Alas, apps aren’t static; they require ongoing attention to improve them.

17. To effectively sell photos from a website consider Photoshelter. Lee sets the selling price and gets an upfront PayPal payment. Large photo agencies are particularly important now. Consider Alamy; you must technically know how to prepare the photos for submission.

18. Travel videos will be important, particularly since YouTube is the second largest Search source. They could be narrated slide shows with voice, still photos, and video clips.

19. Says Foster, “Because of the many tools now available for independent publishing, success is more assured for content creators who adopt a trajectory to ‘take charge’ of the publishing process rather than wait to be ‘chosen’ by others to be published.”

20. Check Lee’s website for lots of useful articles about writing and publishing. He writes well, he’s a veteran, and he’s plunk in the middle of it. Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

(Also, travel writers might be particularly interested in my last post about selling second and reprint rights and other derivative presentations. That post is listed in the column to the right.)

Necessary pre-interview fact gathering

Articles (and books) are made of facts, quotes, anecdotes, and maybe artwork. Those are the basic elements of buyable text.

Interviews are almost always the life blood of articles. Read the first article you see in a magazine and newspaper and you’ll almost always find three or four people quoted, with one (the most authoritative or closest to the action or event) quoted several times.

The minimum information you need about each person quoted is their name; often their address or employer (and what they do); if they are to be a reliable information source, where that authority (or audacity) to speak comes from, and how they can be contacted. Nothing irks an editor quicker than misspelling any name. Just ask the interviewee, “ It is Brown, B-R-O-W-N?” If you don’t, it will be Browne and Braun.

Examples: …” said Elmer Ilk, marketing manager at Benny’s Pet Shop in Old River, Idaho, or …” according to witness Andi Mulk, a 23-year-old junior at Lincoln State. Editors won’t accept “unidentified source,” though they may hide the name and info if it puts anybody in danger.

The contact link is particularly important for information that needs vetting or second-checking. A phone or email address is the minimum you need and the editor may request. The more you know factually about the person, the more likely the editor will keep their words in the copy.

The best deal is knowing in advance who you will interview—and why.

If there’s a brouhaha about, say, cigar smoking during Chamber meetings, find out who the pro and con leaders are, plus the indignant, gasping citizen who is leading the objection. Here, you don’t need hours of pre-asking prep. Get the info above, and ask “Why do you object to…” or “Why is cigar smoking in the Chamber meetings a good idea?” And ask the citizen his/her complaint. If you don’t know who champions the pro position, ask the con leader–and vice versa.

But if the to-be interviewed are higher profile, try the Google search first to see what it reveals: check the protagonists, the topic, and other publications that have addressed it. If the folks work for a larger firm, an university, the military, or any other group that has a p.r. or personnel branch, they will often email you background sheets. Read anything else written about the controversy; your reference librarian can help there, sometimes plucking the less obvious copy from Nexus-Lexis or other files to which they have access. Also read anything else about the people you wish to interview.

It’s fair game, at the end of the interview, to ask who else also feels strongly about the same position, and how you might contact them. (That gives you another strong source, if needed to strengthen the article.) But get the interview first before you ask for this information or any of the earlier bio or contact material. That’s when I ask for their phone or email address should the editor wish to recheck or expand on anything said.

A final suggestion. Most new interviewers have two misconceptions: (1) that the person interviewed wants to know anything about them, other than what rag they work for, and (2) a good interview takes a lot of time.

For (1), figure out what you need, and pretty much just ask the most important question first, a follow-up question second, and maybe #3 third. That takes (2) usually far less than 15 minutes, and far more likely about five. (Several of my best interviews were one question, a succinct answer, and a follow-up “why…?” Two or three minutes, a sincere thank you, and adios.) No time to talk about me, as enchanting or illuminating as that might be. If it comes to that, I’ll just have to wait (probably a very long time) for some other interviewer to find me and ask!

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

Using social media to increase your publishing and speaking presence and income

“Webify Your Book Marketing” was the title of Karen Clark’s excellent 90-minute how-to program to about 80 book publishers at the 5/12/12 meeting of BAIPA (Bay Area Independent Publishers), in San Rafael, California.

The most pressing questions that Karen answered, with humor and clarity, were (1) what were the most effective social media for promotion, (2) how did each enhance book sale, (3) how to get the media integrated, and (4) how much time was needed per day to make this approach worth doing?

An N.S.A. (National Speakers Association) professional who has offered similar programs for several years, Clark divided her program into six segments: website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, email marketing, YouTube, and Linkedin. She also mentioned that Pinterest, while fast growing, is only marginally valuable for product promotion right now. (You can post your book covers there, with a link back to the book’s website info.)

Here are the key points in each category that I found particularly valuable.

Website: (1) Be sure to have links from your website to every marketing piece (and on every marketing piece too); (2) explore and use the mysterious (yet free) QR codes that point to your website, shopping cart, or sales page—you can even put them in every chapter, adding more specific information or resource directions. See http://www.qrstuff.com. If your buyers are Luddites or immobile, hold off. I understand the QR codes only work on mobile devices, and (3) you can create your own Website rather quickly and simply (and also use Word for direct corrections) through Web Press.

Blog: (1) Create blogs from you own book excerpts, with additional commentary; (2) write guest blogs for other bloggers in your market, and (3) Word Press is also great for creating blogs (see this blog), although Go Daddy, as a host, isn’t W-P friendly.

Facebook: Karen was particularly enthusiastic about Facebook, and suggested to (1) focus on the business (fan) segment; (2) fill in the About (profile) page fully; (3) add info every day, mostly tips and advice; (4) if you just plug products, particularly your own, even your friends will go elsewhere, (5) check into selling through Payvment at Facebook, and (6) don’t post at Twitter and have it sent to Facebook—do it the other way around.

Twitter: Clark was a booster here too, suggesting that you (1) set up daily tweets (book quotes or part of your story line) and how they can read more; (2) find folks like yourself and follow them, so they might follow you back; (3) set up a month (or a year) of posts in advance to come out three times a day, through hootsuite.com; (4) drive tweeters to your blog, and (5) check and respond to commentaries from others.

E-mail marketing: Here, (1) you create a monthly newsletter, short and full of value; (2) offer some free .pdf reports or a free chapter if they will send back your opt-in free subscription box to your auto responder; (3) put that same sign-up info box at your website, blog, and Facebook page; (4) include information in the newsletter regularly about your products and related knowledge—the purpose is to fill up a long e-list with the names of (buying) fans, and (5) draw Twitter and Facebook folk to your free newsletter.

YouTube: (1) Owned by Google, a great way to get “found,” (2) but you need your YouTube channel customized with your own info (fully fill out the description of the video, then tell how to get your products); (3) think 1-3 minute videos—a “talking head” video with you holding your book is OK; (4) be sure you add lots of info under the video: description and tags/keywords, and (5) mention your videos at Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and your webpage.

Linkedin: The most enigmatic, best used (1) by filling in your profile completely, with keywords throughout; (2) taking part in groups, and (3) answering questions. In your profile, your most recent job (or what you’re doing now) can be your most recent book! As for how much time you might have to spend for social networking to pay off, Karen Clark’s answer is 10 minutes a day. That brought a collective laugh from her listeners. But she held to it. I assume she meant 10 minutes a day after you were all linked up to the many networks and you’d filled in the profiles and formats. Karen said that she uses a timer to make sure she doesn’t exceed that time limit.

There didn’t seem to be a distinction on whether social networking worked better to sell your products or yourself, to speak. (Often when you do one you soon do the other.) Her talk was aimed at displaying you, helping you establish and share your expert knowledge (or experience), and driving the reader to a link that led to you, your e-list, or your order form. Or all three! The end result of using the social network well was to attract others sympathetic (or at least attuned) to your cause, to speak with you, to book you to speak, or to buy your product. Best yet, again, or all three!

That’s it. For direct information from Karen Clark, see www.MyBusinessPresence.com.

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

A surefire way to jump to the top of your field…

If, of course, you dare to jump to the top of your field!

What does that mean? To a grizzled old empire builder, it means that you will write the article most read each year, you will annually speak at your group’s convention, you’ll offer breakout sessions regularly, you’ll be sent new products to try and test, and you will quickly become one of the group’s top (or at least better known) leaders.

It also means that “your group” is a niche group, though it might work in broader fields too.

The surefire way? Become the person who gives the “state-of- the-art” summary every year. (To be even more effective, if not clairvoyant, you would also provide the vision of where the group will be a year from now, or two years, or even five years.)

Yet to do that you must know where the group was 50 years ago, 25, 10, five, and just two years ago. Your purpose, then, is to provide historical objectivity so your colleagues have a renewed, fact-based perspective about the niche on a regular basis, against which they can measure where they are, were, and might be. And how and why they have changed.

Is this important? It is on many levels.

For newcomers, it provides an insight (and direction) into the heart of your field or topic. A set of guidelines they can use as their own baselines and from which they can create future paths of distinction.

For veterans, a click-off list of changes in which they have participated, or seen happening. A notch stick of pride, to value their own change and growth.

For all in the field it provides a commonly understood view against which to measure and plan their actions, individually and collectively.

But how can you just do this, particularly if you are new to the field or are unknown? What are your credentials? Why would others believe you now, and ask for more later? I mentioned daring. That’s how: you just dare to do it, and you do it. You spend the needed months doing every inch of research, finding facts and earlier summaries, interviewing the founders and innovators and visionary doers, reading all of the articles and books, all with the purpose of writing a “state-of-the-art” article to be shared on X date (this year, and updated on that date in the years to come).

Where will it be read by all in your niche? I’d write a query letter to the editor of the association magazine or newsletter (the key publication) about providing this piece to them at that time. A clear, humble request for permission to write that article, weaving in some of the information you have gathered, plus a rough outline or description of what the article would contain. Don’t ask for an annual article. Either do that after the article appears and is a roaring success, or six months later so it appears at a 12-month interval.

In the meantime, you have information for perhaps another eight articles, focusing on specific elements of change or trends in the future, each supported or expanded upon by other leaders in the field, mostly through interviews and examples.

If you add to the historical theme an article about new“ products of the year,” you could pass judgment on or tell about, in depth, the most significant new tools, guides, ideas, or whatever affecting your subject during the past 12 months. That could be expanded to a presentation of how-to or step-by-step explanations comprising a breakout session at the convention (or conferences). And that too could be done every year, with you receiving an example or copy of the new products during that year for evaluation. (You might raffle them off, for a good cause, to the attendees at the gathering.

The purposes here are two-fold: (1) to bring valuable new information and perspective annually to your colleagues in the niche, and (2) to make you a new “star” in your field, the purveyor of that eagerly-awaited and indispensable new information.

In turn, that core information and you as the expert about it could be the core of your new writing, speaking, and product- creating empire.

(See more about empire building at my free monthly newsletter.)

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

To see which of your Smashwords books sold–and where!

If you are publishing by the ancillary path (Kindle, Nook, Lulu, Smashwords, or Blurb), you wonder who is buying your digital posted gems and where those distinguished yet singular souls live.

If you’re a publisher of others’ books, that buying knowledge is even more important because you have to send your authors their royalties!

Smashwords has been the most enigmatic to figure out. But I think I have it nailed, and I’ll share that with you if you too are smitten by curiosity or obligation.

Presuming you have an account there, and books to sell, you can start by completing your login and heading to the dashboard page (choices are on the top horizontal line). The dashboard gives you the list of your products for sale through Smashwords. Look in the blue box to the left for “Select and Payment Record,” and open that. Voilá: in that box are links to open the last quarter sales report and/or the quarterly earnings mapping report. Just poke around in both to get a look at current and earlier sales.

What makes it more fun to review purchases from Smashwords is that it sells through many key distributors in North America, Europe, and Australia, and more… (So does Kindle.)

The spreadsheet tells all. Who bought what and when, and whether the sale was through Smashwords, Apple, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, or Barnes and Noble. The spreadsheet is divided into columns headed by author, price, quantity, amount (that you charge, retail), coupons, three discount cuts, an affiliate cut, transFee, vat (taxes), currency, the final amount you receive is US dollars, and the recording date. If your book sells in euros or Canadian dollars, those are also converted into USD before you receive your quarterly PayPal deposit.

I was surprised to see how widely our sales were distributed, and particularly pleased that through the Premium Catalog we were selling a lot to Apple, Sony, and Kobo. I think we compete with ourselves at Barnes and Noble (since we post at Pubit!—Nook), and we have sold only four items directly by Smashwords (where all earn 85% of the royalty). I was pleased to see that the extra work you must do to get your books up- graded to make that catalog (which is free) does in fact pay off with sales.

I also like that Smashwords doesn’t list a sale until the money is actually collected. Most of the other like publishers announce a sale but often pay it a month (or two) later. Confusing. What I don’t like is that it takes several months for the most recent sales reports to be broken down into buyers and titles. I know what I will receive for the first quarter of 2012 (the global amount was just deposited in my account) but I must wait for the details before I can assign that income to the royalty charts.

Who likes this seller/currency/foreign intrigue the most? My authors, when I share the distribution with them. I suspect that some of the five are already working on an accent for when they travel, hoping to find their tomes in bookstores abroad!

Nothing profound here, just an improved reporting process by Smashwords that almost puts flesh on our book buyers. I hope this makes your hunt, for royalty designation or just curiosity, easier to do.

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

From blog to book(let): thinking through the process…

What can one do with 227 blogs that will let readers permanently share their content and help you (and me) organize the blogs into logical categories, become repackaged and revised as “blog book(let)s,” earn a few bucks, and perhaps coral some of the better updated info into full paperbacks or some kind of oral product?

I know, it sounds vain to want to recycle your own words just to read and recycle them again. But there you are. There’s a purpose to every blog I have written and posted (often it describes a currently applicable process): many are key points now updated (usually using newer technology), and others are practical how-to examples or new ways to do exactly what I propose that the reader to do, which is recombine usable information into components of an empire that one wants to establish and grow.

So I tediously extracted all 227 blogs, marching backward through the Word Press files, saving the digital blog and printing it out at the same time. The search for: ____ function doesn’t work very well and while it’s easy to find the 10 newest blogs (they are listed on the right side of the top blog, as “recent posts”), to dig out an earlier blog pretty much entails going to the “older” link at the bottom of those 10 current blogs and doing that repeatedly until you found the batch of 10 you are seeking. Buried brilliance. (If you knew on which page your sought blog was hiding, you could get there much faster by typing in the blog’s general address and the page, like, in my case: blog.gordonburgett.com/page/6 (or the actual page number).

I then took the pile of 227 blogs and put them into piles by a general topic that the blog addressed. That gave me 13 piles. The least likely to see print again were the 18 “odd blogs” in the “not worth resharing” pile.

Some of the blogs were a complete surprise. I had no memory writing a word of them—and I have a tenacious memory about my writing!

Yet I knew in the piles were two topics on which I had dwelt at great length, even including a numbered series of about 15 blogs each. All along I had in mind rewriting and upgrading one book, my best seller to date. It concerns freelance writing. The second series addressed niche product pretesting before one actually writes a book or creates a product, to see if there are enough (easily accessible) buyers willing to pay enough money to justify the research, writing, and marketing. So in these two piles is the heart of two books I will write in the next year or two, major books with fancy paperback covers and the usual professional layout and the rest.

That leaves 10 more piles of blogs from which I will probably compose about six or seven “blog booklets.” I envision each of them including the earlier blogs (updated when possible) and a running, italicized text that integrates or explains how each blog fits into that booklet’s general theme. (I may write a few new blogs that fill in key gaps in the booklets.) I see these as ebooks, maybe 20-50 pages long, costing about $2.95 each. I’ll probably publish each booklet simultaneously through Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords. I will have a bright front cover designed where I can simply change the title. At some point I will create a wee catalog of all of the blog titles, or a listing by booklet, so a buyer will know where the items sought can be found (and bought).

What are the themes of the other booklets?Ancillary publishing, blogging, manuscript evaluation, querying and interviewing for articles, empire building, niche publishing, publishing one’s own book (self-publishing, paperbacks, and/or ebooks), paid speaking, finding ideas for articles books, empire building, and travel articles.

Why wouldn’t a bright soul just find and pluck out what they wanted, free, from the blog contents at my website? Go to it! My time would be worth more than the cost of digging into the earlier pages. And, heavens forfend, they wouldn’t be mesmerized by having their own copy of my magic new ebook covers.

Why am I poking along here explaining my plans in more detail than all of this deserves? Because many of you probably also have a trove of glittering blogs that you also want to resurrect and actually sell! So you’ll be wandering along this compilation trail and asking the same questions I more or less answer here.

So if this blog helps you make latter-day sense about what you might do with your own blogs, the price is right—nada! Then if you want to see how the converted blogs look in a booklet, pop for $2.95 and they will be there, again.

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett