You’re the primary person responsible for the marketing of your book. Publishers don’t use marketing to cause books to sell well—they help books that are already selling well to sell even better. To use a pyromaniac analogy, publishers are accelerants, not sparks.
However, there are some publishers who are embracing the new electronic realities of publishing. O’Reilly Media is one example. Let’s take a look at its approach to publishing: Direct sales. O’Reilly sells books directly to people from its website. It doesn’t try to preserve a multi-tiered distribution model that doesn’t necessarily serve customers better. Multiple formats. O’Reilly provides ebooks in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, DAISY, and Android APK formats as well as printed-on-paper. DRM-free. O’Reilly publishes ebooks that are free of digital rights management (DRM). (More about DRM in chapter 20: “Self-Publishing Issues.”) Easy access. Customers can download their O’Reilly books in as many formats as many times for as many devices as they want. Syncing. People can sync their O’Reilly books to Dropbox (a cloud-based storage service) accounts. (More about Dropbox in chapter 5: “Tools for Writers.”) Online subscription. O’Reilly created the Safari Books Online brand, which provides online subscription access to books, videos, and interactive learning tools. Community. There is a question-and-answer forum as well as a community forum for O’Reilly customers. Conferences. O’Reilly conducts conferences around the world about the topics in its books. Multimedia. O’Reilly offers webcasts by authors as well as online educational courses and certification. O’Reilly is the way of the future: multiple formats, DRM-free, and expanding the definition of publishing to include multimedia learning, community forums, and face-to-face conferences. APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki, Shawn Welch Category-dominating sites are difficult to create and there’s little doubt why. Creating a formidable entity not only takes time, energy, and resources, but it also takes an in-depth understanding of oneself. There are seven crucial factors for success that must be mastered in order to establish front-runner position. Most would-be industry leaders find it nearly impossible to master one of these areas, let alone all seven. The requisite success factors—in no particular order—are:
• Specific Area of Focus: Identify your core interests and desired target market. In other words, what do you have innate love for and whom do you want to serve? From forensic accountants and third grade teachers to underwater welders and golf coaches, exhaustively providing relevant information and continuously adding beneficial, focused content to one specific subset of the population often equates to long-term success. This is not to say that expansion to other products and services is forever removed from the equation; however, this should only happen after market dominance has been established (think Amazon). • Professional Website Design: Clearly a no-brainer, but there are so many poorly designed sites it bears repeating. Model competitive and other category-leading sites that receive significant traffic. Customers flock there for a reason. • Visibility to Target Market: Where do potential customers gather and how can they be reached? One can have the best products and services in the world, but if no one knows about them, their business is irrelevant. Identifying high-return opportunities to spread the word is crucial. • Expert, Valuable Content: Nothing breeds credibility and stickiness (the amount of time a visitor stays on the site) as will pertinent, well crafted content from both contributors the clientele knows and up-and-coming game changers. To establish authority, combine cutting-edge, exciting ideas and information with proven industry products and services. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher • Interactive/Social Visitor Experience: Leading sites encourage visitors to contribute content, comment on articles and products, and share thoughts via social networks with their tribe. From Facebook and Twitter to StumbleUpon and LinkedIn, today’s customers insist upon leveraging social media to disseminate positive and negative feedback while cutting the learning curve down for fellow surfers. • Free High-Value Products: Like it or not, free is mandatory. To drive traffic, one must offer something of inherent value that pushes beyond articles, helpful resources, and videos. Doing so not only enables site owners to capture leads as the customer typically opts in to receive the free product, it also fulfills the unwritten obligation they have to connect with their audience in a deeper manner than simply posting relevant content. • Products/Services for Sale: Without products and services to sell, the rest of the equation is moot. Even not-for-profits ask for donations. Why? Because hosting, updating, and maintaining even the simplest of sites has related expenses. Creating for-sale products and services is a necessary part of doing business. the recommended manner for establishing authority is to first gain credibility within one specific aspect of the industry and then, if desired, seek to expand. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the more narrow your focus, the wider a net you can cast. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher Stephen King writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30. Some days he finishes up as early as 11:30, but more often it takes him until about 1:30 to meet his goal. Then he has the afternoons and evenings free for naps, letters, reading, family, and Red Sox games on TV. In his memoir On Writing, King compares fiction writing to “creative sleep,” and his writing routine to getting ready for bed each night: Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.
Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods. This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.”
Writing it, I often thought of a line from a letter Kafka sent to his beloved Felice Bauer in 1912. Frustrated by his cramped living situation and his deadening day job, he complained, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” Poor Kafka! But then who among us can expect to live a pleasant, straightforward life? “A modern stoic,” he observed, “knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Early on, Mike did everything in his power to build wealth while freeing up time to enjoy it. He developed a powerful mantra upon which he bases his career and lifestyle choices. In a word, his philosophy can be summed up as F.A.S.T.:
• F = Fun: Without fun and excitement, work quickly becomes stale. People tend to spend more time at work than anywhere else. Mike insists on creating not only profitable endeavors, but also an environment where both he and his employees relish working because it gives them satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment, and happiness. • A = Automation: Technology has made it much easier to create products and deliver them to customers. Mike is a huge proponent of taking full advantage of available tools, ranging from automated webinars and teleseminars to pre-loaded social media messages and press releases. If your business isn’t structured to churn cash while you sleep, you’re doing yourself and your company a disservice. • S = Scalability: You want to create products and services that have the ability to serve the masses without needing to engage in customization. Mike develops each new offer with this in mind. Doing so enables him to sell the same item to thousands of people. This is one of the key tenets the successful use to create wealth. • T = Time-Freeing Ability: One of the tremendous strengths of the Internet is its ability to make things happen in the blink of an eye. If a product is downloadable, it can be provided within seconds of a customer ordering it. And if the product is physical, the confirmation and details of the order can be delivered to the customer within moments…and the automated process of fulfilling an order may begin just as quickly. Luck is the byproduct of preparedness, execution, and fruitful timing: History has repeatedly shown that initiative combined with incentive begets undeniable results and driving traffic requires significant creativity. Look to create your own mechanism when necessary. Leverage, and apply, available technology to your business. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher The model goes like this:
You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills now at our disposal. You see what kind of work suits you and what you want to avoid at all cost. You move by trial and error. This is how you pass your twenties. You are the programmer of this wide-ranging apprenticeship, within the loose constraints of your personal interests. You are not wandering about because you are afraid of commitment, but because you are expanding your skill base and your possibilities. At a certain point, when you are ready to settle on something, ideas and opportunities will inevitably present themselves to you. When that happens, all of the skills you have accumulated will prove invaluable. You will be the Master at combining them in ways that are unique and suited to your individuality. You may settle on this one place or idea for several years, accumulating in the process even more skills, then move in a slightly different direction when the time is appropriate. In this new age, those who follow a rigid, singular path in their youth often find themselves in a career dead end in their forties, or overwhelmed with boredom. The wide-ranging apprenticeship of your twenties will yield the opposite—expanding possibilities as you get older. Mastery by Robert Greene The game you want to play is different: to instead find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate. It is never a simple process to find such a niche. It requires patience and a particular strategy. In the beginning you choose a field that roughly corresponds to your interests (medicine, electrical engineering). From there you can go in one of two directions.
The first is the Ramachandran path. From within your chosen field, you look for side paths that particularly attract you (in his case the science of perception and optics). When it is possible, you make a move to this narrower field. You continue this process until you eventually hit upon a totally unoccupied niche, the narrower the better. In some ways, this niche corresponds to your uniqueness, much as Ramachandran’s particular form of neurology corresponds to his own primal sense of feeling like an exception. The second is the Matsuoka path. Once you have mastered your first field (robotics), you look for other subjects or skills that you can conquer (neuroscience), on your own time if necessary. You can now combine this added field of knowledge to the original one, perhaps creating a new field, or at least making novel connections between them. Mastery by Robert Greene Usually, companies ...fall into the trap described in Clayton Christensten’s The Innovator’s Dilemma:
they are very good at creating incremental improvements to existing products and serving existing customers, which Christensen called sustaining innovation, but struggle to create breakthrough new products—disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth. Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed. The amount of time a company can count on holding on to market leadership to exploit its earlier innovations is shrinking, and this creates an imperative for even the most entrenched companies to invest in innovation. A company’s only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to build an “innovation factory” that uses Lean Startup techniques to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis. I explained the theory of the Lean Startup, repeating my definition: an organization designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business. In the Lean Startup model, we are rehabilitating learning with a concept I call validated learning. Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning. It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli Why self-publish, then? The answer is that self-publishing enables you to determine your own fate. There’s no need to endure the frustration of finding and working with a publisher. You can maintain control over your book and its marketing, receive a greater percentage of revenues, and retain all rights and ownership. A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE The first good reason to write a book is to add value to people’s lives. Will your book add value to people’s lives? This is a severe test, but if your answer is affirmative, there’s no doubt that you should write a book. The second good reason to write a book is the same reason I play hockey: to master a new skill, not to make money. In my book (pun intended), a book should be an end, not a means to an end. Even if no one reads your book, you can write it for the sake of writing it. Memoirs, for example, fit in this category. And the number of people who want to read a book of such a pure origin may surprise you. Good Reason. The third good reason to write a book is to evangelize a cause. A cause seeks to either end something bad (pollution, abuse, bigotry) or perpetuate something good (beauty, peace, affection). Silent Spring by Rachel Carson is an example. Her cause was the environment, and her book resulted in the ban of DDT and catalyzed the start of the environmental movement. (The fourth readon is that ) Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face. APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki, Shawn Welch |
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Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |