My wife and I are Canadian but arguably our favourite time of year is U.S. Thanksgiving, when we set our work aside to watch football and eat turkey. Okay, for me, mostly to watch football. A sport in which one must learn to absorb and toughen oneself from a hit. Just as when publishing one’s work independently, one has to accept criticism to grow.

So in the spirit of Thanksgiving and football, I advocate authors, in particular self-published ones, to take an opportunity to give thanks to their reviewers. Not for the positive reviews, and certainly not the Amazon single paragraph five-star gushers, but rather the negative ones.

Yes, the negative reviews.

Even the most bruised ego can find comfort in that:
* Something about your book enticed the reviewer to select it over dozens of others.
* Something made the reviewer spend time reading your book, foregoing reading or some other pleasurable activity, such as watching or playing football.
* After reading it, the reviewer cared enough to dedicate additional hours solely to craft a custom review just for your creation.
* The reviewer respected you enough as a professional author to be honest.

A glowing review, while nice to read and share, is useless for your craft and possibly dangerous in the way junk food is tasty but harmful to an athlete’s condition. A negative review, on the other hand, helps you grow by providing clues to what might be missing in your craft, what others may fear to tell you, what you need to hear.

People you know might willingly overlook failings and try to be kind; detached reviewers, who must maintain integrity with their readers more than relationships with authors, need to be forthcoming. The issues may lie in the writing or perhaps simply a neglectful publishing decision. Every self-published book I’ve read, save one, has fallen short in some publishing fundamental. Mostly these fall under copyediting and proofreading, predictable but preventable casualties of bypassing the traditional publishing machine.

I believe a negative review ought to be valued as a step forward, a stage in your writing career to overcome. An internal toughening most great authors experienced in one form or another. Negative reviews may have knocked the wind out of them temporarily but the good ones, perhaps after a brief period of pain, got up stronger. Following such models bodes well for any author, as well as for the future of self-publishing in general. Indeed, your negative review might illuminate a weakness for another writer, inspiring one last copyedit or one last proof to make their final product more professional. That would be a positive benefitting all of us in the self-published world, for which we all can be thankful.

And I am thankful to you authors who have submitted your books for review. However, my Thanksgiving was in October; today I’m just glad the NFL and its players’ union sorted their mess out so as not to impact an American tradition I’ve come to enjoy in Canada.

This meant if we wanted to, we could accept the changes we made after the first proof, and go right to having the book being published and available.  We still chose to order a second proof just in case.

Afterwards, CS sent an email about this and asked me to take a small survey on whether or not I liked this option.  I can see it having its advantages and disadvantages, but I gave it two thumbs up overall.

The main advantage is if you are 100% sure you are done with your changes, you can save the time and money by not having to order and wait on another proof copy…only to approve it immediately and then wait some more for the book to go live.

Disadvantages are authors rushing the publication process when more editing or changes may need to be made and a second proof might have helped.  Time and patience are the biggest factors when self-publishing, but also our biggest downfalls, right?

So, tell us what you think?  Do you think this option is good?  Bad? Why or why not?

How many proof copies have you gone through before you got it right?

And would you still consider opting out and ordering a proof copy anyway, even if you didn’t have to?

And look at how the industry itself has changed! We’ve witnessed the Amazon Kindle grow and change (which was first released in November 2007, sold out in 5 hours, and was out of stock till April 2008), and B&N hopped on board the Ereader train with the release of their Nook Ereader just last year. Even I’m reading books for review on my own Kindle now.

What’s next, you might ask?  I’m not sure.  For us or for the industry.  I think Ebooks will continue to grow, but I don’t see the paperback book going away anytime soon.  It’s a lot like the never ending search for cancer.  Think of how many people, not just bookstores, that would lose their job if the physical book went away – publishers, agents, artists, marketing, sales, editors, and printers to name a few.  It could happen one day, but I don’t think that’s anytime soon. As for LLBR, we’re going to keep doing what we do best too.  Review books!

My personal goal this year was to spend less time on the soap box and more time reading and reviewing.  I’m actually growing tired of being a cheerleader for the industry, and I’ve been on the playing field of it since 2003.  I love it that our blog has been an outstanding and constant resource to new authors who are considering self-publishing.  But often at times, I feel like a broken record.

But the information is out there, not just here on LLBR, to help you succeed.  You just have to find it.  It’s what I did as an indie author myself.  I learned from my mistakes and got better and better at it as time went on. But the reward in the end was totally worth it – having someone read and review my books and provide feedback.  That meant more to me than anything!

After all, a book is a waste of time and paper (or e-ink) if no one reads it, right?  And that’s where I’m going to devote my energy going forward.  I can’t speak for my fellow reviewers here, but you can expect more reviews from me than anything else going forward.  That doesn’t necessarily mean the number of books I review will increase, but you can expect the books I review to be of the utmost quality when it comes to indie books.

This is the LL Book Review, and I want to concentrate on that “book review” part of our name.  We’ve reached almost 200 reviews in just 3 years.  Wow!  Here’s to the next 200 or to the next 3 years!

And thanks to all of you – our readers, reviewers, and authors – who have been a part of it!

-Shannon Yarbrough

LLBR Founder

December 1st marked the end of my month long give away over at GoodReads which I discussed in my last post. 974 people entered the contest to win one of the 5 copies I was giving away.  And 159 people have added the book to their “to read” list.  After the contest ended, I even received an email through GoodReads from another reader who was sad she didn’t win, and asked politely if I could spare another copy.

I’ve sold two copies on my own to friends, with requests slowly trickling in from other friends and family members.  I also mailed complimentary copies to a few reviewers and colleagues a few weeks ago.  As of this post, I have  two reviews at Amazon.com which are both positive.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve been enjoying the advanced features they added to their Author Central program this year. I especially like the Sale Rank feature, which allows you to see where your book (hard copy or Kindle) ranked for up to one month.  Here’s an example of my own book in paperback sales the week after its release:

You can sign up for an Author Central account here.  It’s free.  I highly recommend it, especially for CreateSpace/Kindle authors whose book may only be available at Amazon.  It’s a way for you to have your own space on Amazon, especially if you have more than one book.  You can connect with readers and they can connect with you.  You can even have your outside blog connect to your Author Central page if you wish.

Besides your blog, you can also list book signing events, upload photos of yourself, check out customer reviews of your book(s), and also edit the product details of your book and upload editorial reviews if you wish.  I’ve tested the waters on most of these features and they usually show up on Amazon the following day.

As of today, Author Central added two more features.  You can now track your book’s sales by week and by Geographic location.  Big brother, anyone?  Just kidding.  The feature is actually provided by Nielsen Bookscan, which collects point of sale date from thousands of retailers each week, both online and off. They claim to report about 75% of the nation’s bookstores, so not all sales might be reported, but it’ll be enough for you to be able to at least see where your book is selling. Amazon says the data will be concentrated around large cities and the areas will not overlap.  But this feature does NOT include Kindle sales. I especially like the quick look at the bottom that shows your book and if it’s gone up or down in sales rank. But what does this feature mean for indie authors?  Well, it’s a great way to see if your books are selling in and around an area that maybe you haven’t marketed to.  It’s another way to find out where your readers are!

When you sign into your Author Central account for the first time after the 10th and click on Sales Info, you’ll be asked to take a quick tour which explains everything about these new features. Afterwards, you can click on the Help link and give Amazon feedback.  If you like the new features, tell them!  As consumers, we are always quick to point out the bad stuff that happens and we often forget that the good stuff is just as important.  So, if you like utilizing Author Central, tell them!

In other news, I received the new 3G Kindle as an early Christmas gift this month.  I’ll let you guess what book I downloaded first!  Believe it or not, it wasn’t AYSD?.  It was my 2nd book, Stealing Wishes. I did this mainly to get the reading experience that any Kindle owner has had of my book.  SW continues to sell anywhere from 5 to 10 copies per month on the Kindle, so I wanted to experience it first hand for myself.  And I must say, I’m impressed – not just with the feel of my own Ebook, but with the Kindle in general.  Now that I’ve joined the Ereader world full force, I’ll post more about it next month.

Book plates were popular gifts years ago, particularly for young readers just starting their library.  They are a small playing card sized sticker which someone can put in the front of their book to show ownership.  Most book plates read “This book belongs to…” or “From the Library of…” or “Ex Libris” which is Latin for “from the books of.”  You often find them in rummage sales or on book swapping sites in older editions of books.  You don’t find them available in the gift section of your bookstore much these days because they actually decrease a book’s value, and they seem to have fallen out of popularity around the time stationary became a dying ar tform after email came along.

But think about it!  What a novel idea for self-published authors!  You might not be able to afford giving out signed copies of your book on your blogs or investing in them to sell through the Amazon.com Marketplace, but for as little as five bucks, you could invest in book plates and offer them to your readers for a buck each (enough to cover postage and then some).  There are a variety available at Amazon.com in packages of 12 including a Van Gogh set and also Monet. There are also butterflies,  Tulips (set of 20), Fruit (set of 20), and even Fairies.  For those of you who are DIY, there’s even a clipart book and CD for under $12. With the right size Avery blank sticker label, you could even customize your own book plate with a photo of your book’s cover.

If you Google “author book plate,” you’ll discover this isn’t a new concept.  Authors have already been doing this for situations where a bookstore might have run out of their book before all customers were able to purchase one, or for extended marketing after a signing is over.  You could set up a Paypal account to collect the money from your blog readers for the postage/service or offer it as a free bonus for those who purchase your book and email you to tell you about it. Or collect SASE (self-addressed stamped envelopes) from your readers to mail bookplates to them.

Visit this blog, Signing Books by Bookplate, to learn more about the art of bookplates and to see some famous authors whose plates have popped up on Ebay.

Or visit eHow to learn more about Bookplate Etiquette.

Although a bit on the pricey side, Bookplate Ink is an awesome site for ordering customized bookplates!

Have you promoted or had success with a bookplate marketing campaign of your own?  If so, tell us about it by posted a comment.

And for those of you who always say, “I’d love to write a novel some day but I just don’t have time,”  well, I bet you have time to update you millions of FB or Twitter friends with your various shenanigans, right?  How many updates do you post a day?  A week?  A month?  Well, there’s your novel!  No one has time to read real books anymore anyway, right?

Now, an online company called Ninuku Archivist will collect your Facebook or Twitter posts for one year, clean them up, and turn them into a PDF for you!  They’ll even collect photos you’ve been tagged in!

Why, you might ask? As they say on their site: Because the truth is that even in the digital age, old fashioned paper is still the most reliable medium for storing your memories.

As I mentioned before, I began the week with an email blast to friends, family, and colleagues. This resulted in an immediate sale of my book on Kindle, and one sale from my CreateSpace EStore, the first time I’ve ever sold a book to an outsider directly through CreateSpace, believe it or not.  The following day my book went live on Amazon, despite CreateSpace telling you to allow up to 15 days for this happen.

Due to time constraints, I needed to get a copy to a book reviewer in Arizona ASAP, and I had yet to receive my own copies from CreateSpace.  I decided to order a copy directly through Amazon – thus adding to my book’s sales rank.  Amazon came through and shipped the book via an expedited method just as I had chosen, so the reviewer will have his copy even before I receive my own. If you have the money to invest in paying list price for your book, I don’t advise against this…but tread lightly.  Yes, it affects your sales rank positively, but if you let others know you are doing this it could be seen in a negative light as cheating.  Remember back in the day when people were calling up bookstores and ordering copies of their book?  So, don’t beat me up over this.  It was one copy, and the reviewer had a deadline to make.

Now, despite the expedited shipping costs for this one copy, you might think I’m stupid for paying list price for my own book.  Well, I did the math just to see what the difference would be. My book has a list price of $10.95.  Let’s say I ordered just three copies. That’s a total of $32.95, and enough to get me free shipping through Amazon.com.

Because I signed up for ProPlan through CreateSpace, I’m only paying $4.09 per copy there.  That’s $12.27 total and you do have to pay shipping.  In this case, I have a choice of $4.47 for Economy and $9.99 for Standard.  Let’s go with standard which brings my CS total to $22.26.  That’s still a $10.69 difference, in CS’s favor.

But, don’t forget this!  When you order copies directly through Amazon, you will still earn your commission from those sales.  I earn $2.48 per copy for sales made through Amazon. So, I’d make a total of $7.44 back from the 3 copies I buy. Subtract that from the $10.69 difference and you get $3.25.  Divide $3.25 by the 3 copies and you get roughly $1.08 per copy.  So, I’d really only lose out by about a dollar per copy if I bought directly through Amazon. Yes I know, that’s $3 I could have save, and even more if I chose Economy shipping (which I did for my own CS order of copies last week).   And if you are shipping multiple copies to various addresses, you could save time, shipping expenses, and packaging expenses by dropshipping your book through Amazon.  And overall, affect your sales rank positively.

But as I said before, don’t do this unless you have the money to blow or you have special circumstances where you just can’t wait to get copies in yourself, or you don’t have time to pack and ship them yourself. And if you are like me, every penny counts, especially this time of year.

So enough number crunching, right?

As I mentioned in my last post, the biggest part of marketing I’ve done thus far is offering free copies on GoodReads, which I listed even before the book had published.  This is still running as of this post and doesn’t expire till December 1st.  This also stands to give me what could be my biggest return in readers yet.  As of this post, 565 people have signed up for the 5 copy giveaway and 94 people have added the book to their to-read list. Now it’s impossible to judge just how many of those 94 people will actually get to my book, but it’s nice to think that at least my book will remain in the attention of those readers for a while after the give away has expired.  If even half of those people bought my book, I’d be a happy man. And here’s one way to make sure those people don’t forget you:

Go to your book’s page on GoodReads and scroll to the bottom.  Here you will find a list called Community Reviews, and you’ll see every person who marked your book to read. You can click on each of these people if you want and add them as a friend.  And if they add you back, they’ll be able to see your updates.  What a great way to build your fan base!  You are probably wondering if I did this, right?  Well, yes and no.  I scrolled through the names and first only clicked on those who had an avatar.  If they didn’t, I assumed maybe they don’t use GoodReads that much.  So, it was a quick way to narrow them down.  For the ones I did click on, I took a quick look at their profile to see how active they are on GoodReads – how many friends do they have, how many books have they read, etc.  Sounds picky, but I wanted to make the best out of this as I possibly could.  By friending people on GoodReads (or any other social network for that matter), you should take a sincere interest in what they are doing out there as well, and not just use the service to selfishly try to build your own readership.

By the way, have I mentioned how much I love GoodReads?  I find myself using it more than I do Facebook.  If you are on GoodReads, feel free to find me and friend me!

And speaking of Facebook, despite having deactivated my account back in September, I chose to sign back in yesterday and post a few announcements about my book.  I posted a link to Amazon, Nook, and Kindle. And guess what happened?  8 paperback sales through Amazon yesterday alone, shooting my rank up to 15K in book sales.

And that was the end of Week 1.  What’s next for me?  Well, hopefully my own copies will arrive next week, which means a trip to the post office where I’ll pack and ship most of my copies to other reviewers and colleagues.  In my next post, I’m going to talk about Author Central, a service that Amazon offers free to authors.  I’ve talked about it before, but AC recently made some changes including a neat way to track sales.  More about that in December!

And here I am, almost a year and a half later finding myself with one foot back in the marketing boat again.  My 3rd book, Are You Sitting Down?  just became available in paperback as of 11/10/10. It’s been available on the Kindle since October 3rd, and has earned 3 sales prior to the official launch with little effort on my part. Yeah!

But now that ominous and forboding blank Amazon page is looking back at me.  The product details have loaded, but the blurbs and product description have yet to come on board (as of this article).  The search inside feature is not available just yet.  Createspace says to allow at least 15 days for all of this to come into fruition.  And we aren’t seeing stars yet since there are no reviews.  Very few people have even read the book, and those really only include a handful of friends and authors who wrote blurbs for the cover.

I began my official book marketing campaign just a few days ago with a give away of 5 copies over at GoodReads which ends on December 1st when the lucky winners will be drawn.  I didn’t know about this feature until this year despite previously giving away copies of my books in other ways like on my own personal blog, so I wanted to give it a try.  So far, 526 people have entered the give away and 82 people have added the book to their to-read list (as of this article). And with 18 days left to enter the raffel, I’d say the potential here for readership is amazing.

This week I also began a small email campaign.  I composed a quick email announcement and sent it out mostly to personal and author friends and some family members. I don’t have a huge network to take advantage of here, but I do think a “mailing” list is an excellent tool to utilize if you can. I awoke the next morning to discover I had gained 1 Kindle and 1 Paperback sale as the result of my email blast. Terrific!

Today, I’m hitting the forums, particularly those available on Amazon in the various communities, which can often be found at the bottom of product pages. There are tons of these that ask for authors to “come tell us about it” if you’ve written a book privy to a particular genre.  It’s hard to judge what response you’ll get, other than from other forum posters who might reply to you.  But there are lots of people who follow these forums so you never know who might be reading.

Along with Kindle, I also loaded my book to the B&N Nook last month, which also gained 1 quick sale right away. I plan to load the book to Smashwords this weekend.  I’ve had mild success with sales there of my other books, but I’ll take what I can get.

I also have a few reviewers eagerly awaiting hard copies, and a few coworkers wishing to buy copies directly from me. So the next biggest investment will be in copies.  I’ll probably also use a few as handouts in exchange for reviews on Amazon.com. Amazon reviews and their 5 star rating system have been a great debate recently as to how successful or useful they are, but for me, as an author, I still like seeing them and outside of indie blogs, it’s the most relevant spot you are going to get reviewed.

What else?  There’s Twitter.  Yes, I tweet.  I should also probably reactivate my Facebook account, if for nothing but to shout out to all those people I went to high school with that my book is now available. 

Over the next few months I’ll dive back in the depths of my POD Diary.  Rather than concentrating on sales and $$$ like I did last time, I’m going to focus on readership this time.  My biggest investment last time was in a book cover program which quickly paid off from sales.  This time I have the book cover itself to earn back as I paid for the rights to a photographer’s artwork for this cover.  So, while behind the scenes I’ll be crunching numbers, I wanted my revisit to the POD Diary to be more about marketing this time…something that would be more useful to other indie authors out there rather than how to balance your checkbook.

So here we go…turn the page….Dear Diary,

CreateSpace will convert your trade paperback book* into an eBook format that maintains the formatting and design elements used in your trade paperback book. You will also receive a JPEG thumbnail of your book’s cover.

Both files are ready for you to upload to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) for distribution in the Kindle store. DTP also accepts html, Word .doc, .pdf, ePub, plain text, and MobiPocket files for free.

How It Works

1. Set up your book with CreateSpace, or use one of your existing CreateSpace titles.
2. We take your print-ready CreateSpace interior file and convert it to a Kindle-ready PRC file.
3. We provide you with the converted file and a JPEG of your cover.
4. You upload and distribute your book to the Kindle store at dtp.amazon.com

Typical turnaround time for this service is 2-3 weeks.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

I don’t see this as too much of an over priced service if authors don’t have time to do this themselves, or are afraid to approach it.  My only concern is would you be able to use the files they provide to also upload your ebook to PubIt! or even Smashwords, or would CreateSpace watermark them or make you sign some sort of contract to prevent use outside the Amazon DTP?

Their turnaround time is also a bit much if you take into account that you can download a free help guide from Smashwords to help you, and practically convert your own file within a few hours.

If CreateSpace really wanted to make an effort, they’d connect the DTP to your CS account allowing your book to become available on Kindle all on the same screen if you wanted it, rather than you having to sign up for DTP and upload the file yourself.

Basically, the authors just finished polishing the book back in September and wanted to get it out before Halloween.  No way a major publishing house would have achieved that, despite the numerous traditional published titles the foursome have under their belts.

Here’s some of what Konrath says about why they chose to go the self-publishing Kindle route:

First was an issue of time. We wanted “Draculas” to launch before Halloween, but we’d only finished writing and editing the novel in September. There was no possible way a major publisher could go from first draft to live within three weeks. But we did.

With Amazon’s assistance, we were able to put up a pre-order page and a free teaser last month, though we’d only written the first few chapters by that point. Like a traditionally published book, this allowed us to build buzz and accrue some advance sales.

Based on some of my experiments on Kindle, we’re pricing “Draculas” at $2.99–something no Big Publisher has done for a new release (except for AmazonEncore, who is releasing my thriller novel “Shaken” next week at that price point.) We’re also releasing it without DRM (digital rights management), which is another thing no publisher will allow (except for AmazonEncore.)

“Draculas” will be exclusive on Kindle for a year, as a favor to Amazon since they’ve been so helpful. But those with other brands of ereaders will be able to buy “Draculas” from Amazon and convert it to the format of their choice with free ebook software like Calibre or Stanza. We have instructions for doing this on our website, www.draculasthebook.com. We also plan on doing a print release later in the year, using Amazon’s CreateSpace.

Since professionalism is essential, we hired a cover artist and an ebook formatter. A publisher providing these services takes 52.5% of an ebook’s cover price, and the retailer gets 30% through the agency model. That leaves only 17.5% for the author. By absorbing these sunk costs ourselves, we’re able to earn the full 70% royalties and not have to share them with anyone. Though we’re splitting the profits four ways, we’re each earning only slightly less per copy sold (51 cents each) than we would on one of our own paperback books (64 cents each), and still only charging the reader $2.99.

And what about marketing? No problem there since between the four of them, they had a mailing list a mile long.

Publishers also do promotion and marketing, though I haven’t seen much of this for ebooks. Drawing on our fan bases, we sent out 260 advance reading copies of “Draculas.” Come October 19, if only half of them come through for us, we’ll launch our ebook with over a hundred reviews on Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, and dozens of blogs. We’re also doing some niche advertising, and our combined newsletters reach over twenty thousand readers.

And Konrath was right!  As of this post, the book has 103 reviews at Amazon and is #1 in the Horror: Occult genre! As you will read in his article, they’ve added all kinds of bonus material to the book (just like on a DVD!) – something you can’t possibly achieve in hard copy without the price going up. And at just $2.99, all four of them are still making money:

Since professionalism is essential, we hired a cover artist and an ebook formatter. A publisher providing these services takes 52.5% of an ebook’s cover price, and the retailer gets 30% through the agency model. That leaves only 17.5% for the author. By absorbing these sunk costs ourselves, we’re able to earn the full 70% royalties and not have to share them with anyone. Though we’re splitting the profits four ways, we’re each earning only slightly less per copy sold (51 cents each) than we would on one of our own paperback books (64 cents each), and still only charging the reader $2.99.