Keywords are King

Keywords are how your readers find you. On the digitals, limit the number of keywords you select to 10… Kindle and Nook limit for you, Smashwords doesn’t tell you until after you’ve chosen too many. This is important: Kindle has two sets of keywords and it’s vital to make certain the second set is activated. The first set is implanted into the application page you fill out when uploading your book, cover and publishing information during you’re posting process. Once the book is posted, go to Amazon.com and type in your name and the book title. THEN click on the cover picture which will bring up the sales page. THEN scroll down to “tags customers associate with this product.” Type in a keyword. Start with the genre. You should see the number of people looking for books in this genre appear. If you don’t you’re not in a specific genre and you’ll have to redefine what you’re looking for. To do that look at the keywords your competition has selected. Put in ten or so keywords. If you’ve discovered that you don’t have the right keywords in the back end because you're getting better choice selections during this process – go back and fix it. The great thing about the digitals is nothing is written in cement.

Smashwords Insists On A Table Of Contents Even For Short Stories

That actually turns to your advantage. However, the first time Smashwords refused to publish a short story of mine (3,102 words) because it didn’t have a Table of Contents I threw a temper tantrum. Then I realized it was a blessing. I only need one link to my story, but I could then link to my author page and each of my sample chapters. This accomplishes two things. First, it makes all your marketing material really easy for the reader top navigate. Second it informs the reader right at the beginning that there’s more in this short story than just the short story - that you are giving away free samples. It informs them of the additional material right in their sample package before they even buy the story. The Table of Contents on the digitals does not link to pages (you don’t paginate on the digitals because that shifts according to font size, table size and other factors) it links to chapter headings and titles. Then, as an added benefit, you can link directly to sales pages for your samples. Finally, since Smashwords makes a Table of Contents for you anyway – something along the lines of “beginning, middle and end” if you have posted one short story, you might as well take charge of the process and make a really good Table of Contents that you use as a marketing tool.

Back Of The Book Cross Marketing Is Very Important.

On the digitals after you write “The End,” refer readers to your author page which will take the reader directly to everything you’ve written. Kindle, Pubit and Smashwords all have author pages. I don’t have a sufficient number of stories up on Kobo to figure out the author page yet but I’m sure it’s there. Follow your author page link with your sale page blurbs and 200 word samples for a select number of your good sellers – or stories you want to be good sellers. You can get live links because you’re on the digitals. Make certain that your links are specific - Kindle to Amazon, Nook to Barnes & Noble and Smashwords to Smashwords. It’s a great thing to put up 200 tantalizing words because Kindle only allows 10% display of your story which (a) might not be juicy and (b) includes all your introductory information so it’s a teeny sample and giving away more is better. I keep all my individual links on separate word documents for easy cut and paste access. Notice that in the paperbacks you read they very often have the first few chapters of the next book that’s coming out in the back of the book. Same idea here. Don’t be afraid to give stuff away, lots and lots of stuff. You want to give enough to get people interested in what you have written.

Series Sell Better Than Isolated novels

...which holds true in non-fiction as well. For example people who write diet books, follow the diet book with cook books, and exercise books, and smart shopping books. The same holds true for produc ts and how they build on each other. I see buying series in my own purchasing patterns - if I like a series, I’ll snap up every book in that series because I want to find out what happens next. Every novel has an arc that takes it from beginning to resolution. Series have longer arcs. Sometimes each story is complete within itself. Sometimes a novel is actually a bridge to the next novel – same for movies. An example in a familiar movie series “The Return of the Jedi” is one of those bridge stories that gets us from the first to the third movie – a good story but not nearly as satisfying or stand alone complete as the first and third. Almost every third book in the Harry Potter series is a bridge book although JK Rowling pulls them off better than many series authors. Lee Child with his Reacher series really writes stand alone stories that are not at all dependent on each other and you can see the character evolve through the series. Always think in terms of how you can use what you’re writing in a series right from the beginning – whether you’re working in fiction or non-fiction.

Self-Publishing and Distribution Houses.

If you self publish paper books Baker and Taylor (which for some reason is also on Smashwords) is probably the easiest distribution house to work with - although there are different distribution ho uses for different purposes. I have them list in my “How To Write A Book That Positions You As An Expert In Your Field.” Distribution through the distribution houses is a bear. The big distribution houses expect that if you are going to work through them that you have a national program in place. Even if you tell them that you are only going to work the California market they do not listen and then they get annoyed when you don’t make New York sales. You have to decide early in the game of writing exactly what you are going to use your books for and realistically how you’re going to market them. And most importantly how many you really need. You have to decide how much of your time you’re going to spend marketing, how you’re going to market and where. If you only need a few dozen books for back of the room sales you can go the print-on-demand route. You make less profit but you still make profit. You can make your books available on the digitals and you can make your paperback books available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Be very realistic about how much time you are going to spend marketing and what you project the results of your efforts are going to be. If you order 2,000 books that is going to mean that you have boxes and boxes of books that have to be stored somewhere. If your business pops and you suddenly need 2,000 books you can get them in a matter of weeks from your on demand printer. My advice – be very, very conservative in the beginning. Read over Create Space for print on demand. It’s an Amazon company – and I’ve had good luck with Amazon so far. Keep in mind that the bookstores don’t like Amazon – BUT the bookstores particularly the big chains like Barnes and Noble are not Indie writer friendly any way.

Why Borders Failed

An interesting side note. This week’s Smashwords informed us that five of their authors are on the New York Times Best Seller’s List. That doesn’t mean that Smashwords put them there all by itself, but it does signify the significance of the digitals in the publishing industry. If you don’t know the story – Borders went out of business because it failed to see the new digital trend. By the time Borders realized the power of the digitals, Amazon was already making 50% of its sales on their Kindle platform. Barnes and Noble had introduced Nook and was well on its way to the 50% point. Borders woke up and found that the world had changed and that didn’t have either a digital reader or a digital platform. It simply could not compete. As someone from South Africa told me – back in the paper book days they would first have to figure a way to send dollars and then they’d have to wait six weeks for a book to arrive. Now they pay in whatever currency they pay in and they get the book they want in ten seconds. The book world has been placed on it’s head. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.

“Writeordie.com” (that’s write or die) - a marvelous program for people with writer's block

Writeordie.com is a program into which you type the number of words you want to write in a given time frame. Then you start to write. If you stop f or any reason, the computer starts turning colors and then it starts yelling at you. You’re allowed one bathroom break. It’s a phenomenal way to get started when you’re not in the mood to write. I use it a lot during the Write A Novel In a Month competition. Last year I got pushed by the program (and myself) so hard that instead of writing 50,000 words in the month I wrote 93,000 and now I have to unscramble all the overwriting. Generally I use it to start myself and then I copy what I’ve written and carry it back to a Microsoft page and continue without the bells and whistles. I don’t need that kind of stimulus for too many hours. It’s a brilliant program and for those who get writer’s block because it doesn’t give your internal judgmental editor time to stop you.