WRITERS. If you need an affordably priced custom cover designed for an e-book project, check out the services of book-cover designer James Junior. He can create designs for all sizes and formats, including (but not limited) to:
Kindle e-books
Any other e-reader (Nook, iPad, etc.)
Mobile screens (iPhone, etc.)
Print books
3D eBook covers and software boxes for website display
He prides himself in on offering excellent rates and is willing to work with you until you are satisfied with the design. Get a 25% discount by mentioning that you read about James Junior’s custom cover design services on Creatives at Work.
For authors who have never worked with a cover designer before, James Junior offers these tips:
Know what you are asking for. Prices vary depending on the type of format(s) you need.
Be open to the designer’s ideas. Knowing what you want is great, but give the designer some room to inject their own talent into the cover.
Be honest, not nice. If you don’t like something about your cover design, say so; after all, it is your book and your money.
Before you accept the finished cover design, make a thumbnail of it around the same size as Amazon’s thumbnails. Why? You want to make sure the text is legible at that size, and the image isn’t distorted. The thumbnail version will be the first image a reader sees. It must be clear and compelling enough to entice the reader to click on your thumbnail to see a larger version.
Ask the designer for the “layered version” or PSD version of your book cover. This will come in handy later if you want to add or change a detail on the cover and the designer isn’t available.
WRITERS. How do you price an e-book? That’s a hot topic now that more and more independent authors are competing with legacy publishers. Everyone is trying to find the correct price points for fiction and non-fiction e-books in a market that Forrester Research expects to grow from $169 million in 2009 to almost $3 billion by the middle of this decade.
Emily Hill owns A.V. Harrison Publishing. To learn more about her workshops and personalized coaching, visit www.avharrison-publishing.com
In a recent press release, self-publishing coach and advocate Emily Hill shared her thoughts about e-book pricing for fiction and non-fiction e-books.
Pricing Fiction E-Books
“Except for the insatiable demand for paranormal/action stories, the fiction market is totally and completely glutted. This includes romance, westerns, young adult, and historical fiction,” states Hill. She believes e-book pricing for fiction comes down to three factors: (1) market demand; (2) the author’s emotional comfort zone; and (3) trial and error.
As fiction authors have flooded the market, Hill notes that readers must now do the job that used to belong exclusively to agents—separate the well-written manuscripts from the ones that just aren’t very good.
To get the attention of book buyers in today’s crowded marketplace, some first-time authors have resorted to giving their e-books for free—hoping to lay the foundation for future book sales.
Hill believes offering free fiction books can be a mistake: “Authors who give away their e-books and then loudly tout their ratings are frauds in my opinion. They either lack confidence in their work, don’t want to devise a marketing plan, or haven’t made friends with their fan base.” She emphasizes that, “If you are doing commercial writing (writing to make money), you should be writing to your fan base, and writing what they want to read.”
When she recently examined how the ten best-selling fiction titles for Kindle were priced, Hill found prices ranging from $0.99 to $12.99. Six of the best-selling titles were from one of the “Big Six” legacy publishers, and four were from independent publishers. The average price of e-books published by legacy publishers was $9.09, compared to either $0.99 or $2.99 for the fiction from independent publishers.
Because this sample of ten was so small, Hill consulted authors she regards as mentors for her own publishing efforts. Dean Wesley Smith advises charging $2.99 for short novels, $4.99 for a short-story collection, and $4.99 for standard-length novels. Tony Elridge suggests pricing e-books at $2.99, then using ‘book bundling’ to sell sets of titles at a higher price.
Nathan Bransford has noticed that the price of e-books have dropped dramatically over the period from June 2010 to June 2011. He has observed that when presented with two titles in the reader’s preferred genre, a reader will hit “Buy Now!” on the cheaper title, even if that title has been written by a lesser-known author, or even an unknown author or bad writer.
Best-selling independent author John Locke prices all of his e-book fiction titles at $0.99.His non-fiction book, “How I Sold 1 Million Books in Five Months,” is priced at $4.99.
Pricing Non-Fiction Books
When Hill scanned the list of 100 best-selling non-fiction titles in the Kindle Store earlier this month, the most expensive non-fiction title was priced at $7.00 and six of the top sellers were sex-related. But the Kindle Store list changes often. The top-ten best-sellers listed today (Aug. 30) range in price from $7.16 for “Jesus Calling” by Sarah Young to $13.17 for “Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0” by Jay Conrad Levinson and David E. Perry.
While it’s important to price your e-book competitively, Hill urges authors not to overlook the other vital elements of book publishing and promotion. Success still requires good writing, a unique story, impeccable grammar and sentence structure, and sharp marketing. She advises writing the best book possible, and marketing it to a fan base you have already established.
Why Independent Publishing Is Growing
Emily Hill is an outspoken advocate of self-publishing and isn’t surprised that the IndiePub movement is exploding. Considering that less than 1% of emerging author’s manuscripts are selected for publication, she wonders “Why would those in the 99% agent-rejected category put themselves through the dreaded query process in the first place?” Hill believes the tough economy and diminished bookstore space caused by the closure of bookstores has made independent publishing the only alternative for most authors.
In addition to offering coaching and consulting services to independent authors, Emily Hill has written two e-books on self-publishing.
“All Smart Cookies Can Self Publish” details the current landscape of the publishing industry and outlines steps necessary to publish and market books on your own. Priced at $3.95, the e-book provides practical advice such as how to insert linked-live Tables of Contents in your e-books and how to push the marketing of your e-books by embedding links to your Amazon and Barnes & Noble pages.
Hill just announced a new addition to her “All Smart Cookies” series, entitled “Making Money on eBooks: Smart Promoting.” The book features insights Hill has gained from teaching self-publishing workshops over the past two years: “You’ll learn how easy—and fun—it can be to make money by self-publishing your tips, insights, memoirs, and how-to guides.”
“Making Money on eBooks: Smart Promoting” sells for $2.99 and includes tips on marketing, promoting, and connecting your titles to the correct audience.
WRITERS. Book marketing strategist Don McCauley has a clear and simple message to authors: Don’t fall prey to using tools and techniques that do not produce real world results – sales.
He urges you to take the time to create a marketing and publicity strategy that can help you determine which tactics make the most sense for your book and specific target audience.
McCauley says it’s natural to want to do what everyone else is doing. But using a “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategy to promote your book is like taking someone else’s medicine—the results will likely not be good.
Just as each and every book is unique, every target market is specific in regards to age, gender, geographic region, wants, needs and preferred approach. Thus, developing a marketing and publicity strategy for your book requires a thorough analysis of all the systems, processes, functions and procedures within the general marketing plan.
“So many people new to marketing are looking for that elusive idea that works. They all work,” says McCauley. “However, not all of them, or perhaps none of them, will work for a specific book.”
Some authors listen to all the great ideas out there and then try them out, one by one. “This is precisely the wrong approach,” McCauley emphasizes. “Using a ‘try it out’ approach will cost a great deal of money. Not only will money be wasted on experimentation, but there will also be a terrible waste of time.”
“Don’t use a tool or method because someone else said it should be used. Failure usually results from concentrating on tools like Twitter or Facebook, rather than concentrating first on the blueprint – the strategy,” says McCauley. Making a plan can help you focus on those marketing methods that are best for achieving your own very specific goals. In addition to deciding which methods to use, you should plan how, where, and when the chosen methods will be implemented.
Don McCauley is a marketing strategist with over 30 years of experience. He is the co-founder of ‘Book Marketing – The Authors Marketing Powerhouse’, facilitator of the Free Publicity Focus Group, and hosts several of ‘The Authors Show’ radio programs.
He offers book-marketing training to authors and publishers, as well as no-charge, no-obligation marketing and publicity strategy analyses. The strategy analysis reports cover specific topics relevant to marketing and publicizing books in the current Internet marketing environment. McCauley notes that marketing strategies designed to sell books in the past generally do not transfer well to Internet marketing.
On his website, you can find video training, complimentary e-books, and reports with titles such as
Using Article Submission as a Marketing Tool
Top Ten Reasons Why Your Book Isn’t Selling
Top Ten Reasons Your Internet Marketing Plan May Fail
Questions You Really Need to Ask Before Entering the Marketplace
The Fine Line Between Becoming Famous and Becoming Invisible
According to the 2010-11 Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), writers and authors held about 151,700 jobs in 2008 and editors held about 129,600 jobs. About 70% of writers and authors were self-employed, while 12% of editors were self-employed. The BLS expects the number of writing jobs to grow by 22,500 from 2008 to 2018, while the number of editors is expected to decline by 400.
Below are some of the key challenges and opportunities for writers today.
Challenges
Global competition for freelancing work.The rates paid to experienced freelance writers have fallen because buyers have more choices in how content is developed. Some writing is supplied by experts seeking exposure, part-timers seeking supplementary income, workers in developing countries, or readers themselves.
Erosion of standards. Easy-to-use blogging platforms make it easy for anyone to become a writer or publisher. Without an awareness of the fact-checking and copy-editing processes that helped ensure the quality and accuracy of print publications, bloggers
sometimes violate copyrights and publish unsubtantiated gossip or speculation as
facts.
Visual communications are on the rise. People are seeking less information from reading and more from videos and multimedia. Attention spans are getting shorter, meaning that fewer people have the time or patience to read in-depth articles or longer novels.
Immediacy and search-engine optimization matter more than style or thoroughness. The non-stop demand for fresh online content rewards less detail-conscious writers who can churn out higher volumes of content at faster speeds. Creativity is less about style, and more about how to insert the best keywords into headlines, subheads, and lead paragraphs without making the copy sound stilted.
Book publishers are accepting fewer new authors. Established writers are marketed like brands. And whether your work is published through a traditional publisher, or you choose to publish it yourself, you still must play an active role in developing and executing the marketing plan.
Opportunities
Multimedia Articles. Writers who can submit photographs, slideshows, and videos to accompany their articles will help make life easier for publishing companies that produce both print and online versions of their magazines. The demand for multimedia content
is likely to increase as the iPad, tablet computers, and e-readers become more
prevalent.
Corporate Blogging. Corporate marketing departments are becoming publishers. Instead of buying advertising in editorially independent magazines, corporations are using “content marketing” to help establish online exposure and credibility for their brands and promote two-way communications with customers. There’s so much noise from so many
different companies that some corporations are starting to recognize the need for quality content that can help set them apart.
Independent Blogging. Editorially independent bloggers are becoming more influential, because readers sometimes need and want broader coverage of a certain topic than a corporate marketing department might want to provide in their own blogs. Corporate marketing managers have different objectives than professional journalists and
editors.
Self-Publishing. It’s becoming increasingly affordable for writers to publish and promote their own e-books and small quantities of printed books and magazines. Some self-published writers who built a following for their work later signed contracts with major publishing companies.
The Gig Economy. Freelancing is becoming the new norm. A Business Week cover story noted that rather than hire full-time employees, many companies are assembling “virtual teams” of employees on a project-by-project basis. Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown (now of The Daily Beast) coined the term “The Gig Economy” to describe the growing trend. She observed that former staff journalists are now earning a decent
living by juggling a collection of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time assignments. Although full-time writing jobs are still concentrated in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, DC, advances in communications technology have made it easier for freelance writers to work anywhere they choose.
Constant demand for fresh content. Now that consumers stay constantly connected to the Internet via their smartphones, they are expecting a constant stream of fresh content, whether it’s for educational or entertainment purposes.
