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Guy Kawasaki Goes APE over Self-Publishing

February 28, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment

Frances Caballo and Guy Kawasaki

By Frances Caballo

I recently met Guy Kawasaki, the social media ninja and author of 12 books, at the San Francisco Writers Conference. I’ve known about Guy for years, followed him on Twitter, read his book What the Plus!: Google+ for the Rest of Us, and regularly use his Alltop.com website to curate content for clients. Naturally, I wondered what this guy would be like in person.

Guy is the epitome of social media: he’s accessible, authentic, knowledgeable, generous and hilarious. He’s also amazingly unpretentious despite his incredible success and formidable talents and at every turn spews great content.

He was at the conference to promote his book, deliver a keynote address (for free) and talk with indie authors. For his first 10 books, he turned to traditional publishing houses but he self-published his most recent books, What the Plus! and his newest tome, APE: Author Publisher Entrepreneur, How to Publish a Book.

Artisanal Publishing

Don’t call Guy a self-publisher; he eschews the term. Why? He made this point during his keynote address: We don’t linguistically downgrade craft beers or artisan breads as “self-made.” Instead, we consider these specialty items – beer, wine, cheese and bread – to be carefully crafted by skilled artisans.

Guy encourages us to drop the term self-publishing to better describe what Indie authors are: artisanal publishers. That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Guy Kawasaki’s 9 Tips for Indie Authors

His Number One Tip for authors is simply to write for the right reasons. Produce great content. In fact, while you’re at it, go all the way and produce a piece of art.
Don’t write a book to make money or to increase your consulting practice. Write to enrich the lives of others, to further a worthy cause, or to meet an intellectual challenge.
Use the right tools when you embark on a book. These include Microsoft Word for word processing, Adobe InDesign, Evernote to keep your notes from disappearing, DropBox to keep your manuscript in the cloud, and YouSendIt to send large files to your editors.
Write every single day. We already know this as writers but sometimes it’s difficult to find the time, right? Well, get up an hour early every morning or use your lunch hour to draft a story. As Nike says, Just Do It!
Create an outline of your book and then distribute it to your friends as a Google Doc to solicit their input.
Build your marketing platform nine months before you publish your next book. You can accomplish this by: curating and disseminating great content on your blog and social media networks, attaining 5,000 followers, tapping your audience for their skills as beta readers and content readers.
Ask your copyeditors, content editors and friends to write reviews on Amazon as soon as your book becomes available.
Hire the best copy editor and cover designer you can afford.
Never give up!

APE Author Publisher Entrepreneur is available on Amazon and Kindle. This is a must-read for all writers pursuing artisanal publishing. Visit Guy Kawasaki’s blog, “How to Change the World: A Practical Blog for Impractical People.”

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Frances Caballo is a social media trainer, blogger and author of Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books. She helps writers and businesses attain their social media marketing and public relations goals. Presently, she is the Social Media Editor for the Women’s National Book Association-SF Chapter and the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Social Media Just for Writers is available on Amazon and at Copperfield’s Bookstore in Santa Rosa.

Filed Under: Featured Article Homepage, Helpful Tips for Writers, Publishing - Agents, Acquisition Editors, Publishers, Publicists, Booksellers, Self Publishing, WNBA-Writers, Women's National Book Association Tagged With: Frances Caballo, Guy Kawasaki, San Francisco Chapter

Sales are Sweet, But Readers are Golden

October 31, 2012 By admin 2 Comments

by Robert Digitale

As a storyteller, you want as many people as possible to read your book. As a business person, you want them to pay for it. And as a new author, you want to find ways for more readers to take note of your work.

So do you ever give it away for free?

I’ve watched the newspaper business grapple with this sort of question for years. If you think you’ve had trouble knowing what to do about free material, consider the plight of my fellow old media pros. Here were people working for established brands, most of which had dominated their markets in print for years. But when they entered the digital age, editors and publishers found how difficult it is to strike the right balance between attracting new readers and getting them to pay for online content.

Most papers quickly decided that while they could demand money from their print readers, they had to give a free pass to their web sites and hope to still survive with online ads. However, since the industry is half of what it was roughly five years ago, the wisdom of that strategy remains open to debate. And some papers, including the venerable New York Times, are now charging readers or limiting the number of free stories they can view each month.

So newspapers demonstrate that there may not be easy answers in such matters. Even so, I still think the question is worth asking new authors: Are there times when it makes sense to focus on connecting with readers rather than selling books?

Let me share two recent examples when I answered “Yes” to this question.

The first came last spring when I ran a murder mystery serial on a blog that I host for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, www.digitalestories.com. What made the story different was that I collaborated with 15 other journalists and local authors. Each of us wrote a chapter for a thriller set in our home turf of Sonoma County. The executive editor liked it so much that she ran the “Sonoma Squares Murder Mystery” in the print edition as well. We went on to put it out as an ebook.

Nobody made any money on this story, so why did we do it? We all had fun, certainly, but it also was a chance to connect with new readers. In doing so, I hope we introduced some talented writers to readers who might otherwise never hear of them. It was a small step, but it was well received and I hope we’ll do it again.

The second occasion was this summer when I learned that our Sonoma County public library was creating a site for local authors, a place where patrons could read a brief bio and discover their books. As part of this effort, the library was exploring the possibility of also hosting local authors’ ebooks. I contacted the library’s collections manager and became the first author to provide them ebook files, offering up my fantasy novel HORSE STALKER.

I did this even though ebooks downloaded from this site would never expire on reading devices. Instead, local patrons would be able to freely download the ebook, just as if they had paid for it on Smashwords. I know that many authors would steer clear of this. I don’t pretend that this makes sense for everyone, but I’m glad I tried it. And the collections manager since has placed my novel into the library checkout system for OverDrive, which means the ebook is eligible for library patrons at plenty of locales around the U.S. (On OverDrive, the ebook does expire from the reading device at the end of the lending period.)

I wish I could tell you that these steps have made an incredible difference in the bottom line. They haven’t yet, but I think they’re still worth trying. I remain convinced that the biggest challenge for new authors isn’t selling books. It’s connecting with readers. And what I like about these two examples is that they both involve collections of local writers. The newspaper serial and the library’s local authors site offer readers a chance to discover groups of writers, not just a single author.

I’m looking for more such opportunities to join forces with other writers. And I’m going to keep looking for ways to connect with readers, even if it doesn’t make a cash register ring.

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Robert Digitale has been a newspaper reporter for three decades at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. He hosts the paper’s online blog, Digitale Stories, and is the author of the fantasy novel HORSE STALKER, book one in the series, THE ROOT OF GLORY, www.horsestalker.com.

Filed Under: Featured Article Homepage, Helpful Tips for Writers, Self Publishing, Success, WNBA-Writers Tagged With: Overdrive, Robert Digitale, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Smashwords, Women's National Book Association-SF

Self-Publishing? Desperate for Reviews?

September 27, 2012 By admin 1 Comment

By Cathy Robbins

For self-publishing authors, a recent article offers a “think again” moment.
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a stunning story about the practice and business of buying reviews for your self-published books. It was exceptionally long (more than 3000 words) piece that started on the front page of Business Section and consumed an entire page inside.

Even if you do not plan to self-publish, the article’s insights into the publishing business are invaluable. Factoid: In 2006, before Kindle, 51,237 self-published titles appeared as physical books; last year, more than 300,000 self published titles were issued in either physical or digital form and by 2015, that number will probably double. So authors are desperate to get attention―any attention―for their work. So they turn to reviews-for-hire―mostly positive reviews.

David Streitfeld pegs the story on Todd Rutherford, who started a successful business when he rounded up freelance writers to write positive reviews for authors who had signed up for the service. With a track record of some success for his authors, Rutherford proved that attention draws more attention, even when it’s contrived. Rutherford had a stable of freelancers producing reviews and was on his way to a multi-million dollar business with his web site GettingBookReviews.com.

The article takes us into “a vast but hidden corner of the Internet, where Potemkin villages, bursting with ardor arise overnight. For instance, not all of Rutherford’s freelancers were conscientious. One rarely read the books through, because she had to produce enough content to make a decent living. Her solution was to look up material about the book’s subject matter on the Internet and write the review from that.

The story shows how the book world is being transformed by the surging popularity of electronic self-publishing.” We see the money and effort that writers put into marketing. One writer who used Rutherford’s service paid for 300 reviews, when the cost was 50 reviews for $1,000. Another, a computer programmer, spent $20,000 on review services.

The beginning of the end for GettingBookReviews.com came when a customer posted a complaint about the service on several online sites. Then Google suspended Rutherford’s advertising account. Finally, Amazon took down most of his reviews. The business collapsed in 2011, and now Rutherford sells RVs in Oklahoma and is working on a new service where he writes the reviews and blurbs himself. His Twitter account has 33,000 followers.

As a sad commentary, Rutherford now suspects all online reviews — of books or anything else. “When there are 20 positive and one negative, I’m going to go with the negative,” he said. “I’m jaded.”

The original article’s subtitle is “The Best Reviews Money Can Buy.” Here is a link to it: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/business/book-reviewers-for-hire-meet-a-demand-for-online-raves.html?_r=1&ref=business