My Boo Radio Edit
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Once a novel or book is published it ought to be publicized to gain sales. (If you self publish a book of history for your prompt family, there is no problem. You just give them a copy and you are finished.) If you have a publisher like Random House®, they will handle the promotion for you. You may have to go to book signings or appear on radio and television shows to hype the book, but much of the arranging and scheduling will be handled by the publisher. If you self publish, you may be on your on. A Note on Self Publishing Finding a good literary agent to pitch your book to publishers is not easy. The good ones are too busy to mess with you. The bad ones will charge you for their services. The rule is that you never compensate a literary agent because he or she is going to get a cut of your royalties. Actually, because of rising cost, numerous ethical literary agents charge for sure specified services. Self publishing is getting more common. The reasons a writer like you may self publish are: 1. You don’t need any more rejection slips to cover your bedroom wall. 2. You would rather write books than letters to publishers. 3. You don’t know how to find a literary agent and you don’t want to learn how to find a literary agent. 4. You don’t want to wait three years to get your book in print. 5. Self publishing is very easy to do and the cost to publish a novel using a print-on-demand publisher may be as low as $100.00 of even free. A print-on-demand printer may publish your book in any amount from your PDF file. Your word processor will in all probability develop the PDF file for you. Also, if you use software like Adobe PageMaker, etc., a PDF file is effortlessly created. Lulu.com Will Publish Your Book at No Cost to You Here is one website where you may publish your book free directly from your word processing file or PDF file, etc.: http://www.lulu.com/ Self publishing companies may charge high fees so you must watch out for your interest. Lulu.com is safe and easy and, as I said, free. With print-on-demand you do not need to commence with 1000 copies of your book. The books are printed one or more at time on order. Editors Self publishers may offer editing services but some insist that you are the editor and you ought to make sure the grammar and spelling are rectify before you submit your book files. I published four novels and found that I tended to overlook errors for the duration of repeated edits exceptionally those inserted by my spell checker. That is, the spell checker overlooks or changes a word. For that reason, you may want to have a professional editor edit your book. You may find such an editor listed in Writers Digest Magazine or on the Internet. Just make sure you recognise up front incisively what the cost will be and what the edit will entail. You probably don’t want an editor to rewrite your book altering the style from yours to his or hers. An edit for grammar and spelling faults must be sufficient. Publicizing Your Book With the above digressions (to help those just starting out), how do you advertize your self-published book? If your book is nonfiction then you may effortlessly tell apart a market. If your book is Feeding Your Praying Mantis, you have restricted your audience to those who have captured a praying mantis and want to feed it to keep it alive as long as possible. I would say that the size of your audience is zip, but lets take a look with Google. I put feed a praying mantis in the search box and got 199,000 entries. If I put in the wrong spelling of praying (preying mantis), I got 221,000 entries. (In comparison when I put Taylor Jones the Hack Writer in the search box, I got over 500,000 entries.) As I look at the entries on feeding a praying mantis, I see that a lot of folks have them as pets. In the wild, a praying mantis principally eats insects. One article says that baby praying mantises just love fruit flies. So I would say you do have a market of folks who would love your book. How do you reach this market? I would think that you would want to set up a web page to pitch your book. You have to determine if the page is to focus on you, the author, or the book. I would set up a website on the praying mantis where I would have free content on the praying mantis and a description of my book. Most of us focus on ourselves such as my personal website shown at the end of this article (tjbooks.com). As I said, that may not be the best thing for your praying mantis book. You may want to have an author web internetsite and a praying mantis website. To do this, you may plainly go to GoDaddy®.com and have them give you a hand. They have the best client service I’ve came upon and the cost of getting a domainname name and having them host it is easy and inexpensive. They likewise have the software you need to design the site. I use CoffeeCup® software to design my sites. They do not charge for their software if you host with them. They likewise have outstanding client service. Their website is: http://tinyurl.com/3ag4t8 You may be competent to design your web pages right from your word processor but I don’t commend it. It puts in a lot of extraneous code. If you determine you want to push the book directly from a book internet site which concentrates on your book, make sure the domainname name has keywords in it. For example, feedprayingmantis.com is not taken and you could register it. However, prayingmantis.com and praying-mantis.com are registered domains. If you set up the internetlocation feedprayingmantis.com you would develop a internetlocation with lots of free content on the praying mantis. Then you could publicize your book on the site. It could be made available by a simple link to Lulu.com if that is the way you would want to go. If you include an ISBN number and price bar code (on your book cover), you will be competent to trade it on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s site, etc., using simple links. You may trade your book directly to clients too if you have them compensate you for the book and shipping by PayPal.com or by numerous other method. The fact is you may self publish by putting your book into a PDF file and uploading it to your site. Then using PayPal.com as your payment method, the book may be downloaded to your client while you are sipping lemonade on the beach. Once you are set up, you will need to drive traffic to your site. Since you have a narrow market you could contact galore of the other websites and have them link to your site. In fact, you would trade links. That is why you want a large total of good content on your website so that other websites will want to have their link on your site. Don’t forget to submit your website to the top ten search engines to save time. The spiders that will read your web site take their time getting to yours. Make sure you have meta files giving the name of your site, a description of your site, and keywords. Go to one of my websites and click on View on your browser then click on Page Source or Source. You will see my source code and my meta files. Once you are ready to go, blog the Internet that you have a new internet site on the praying mantis. Then blog that you have a new book out that tells how to feed them. Write articles on the praying mantis and publish them on the web. You could publish them right here at http://www.ezinearticles.com You will be capable to place your personal and business internet site links at the bottom of each article. Whenever you write a new article, blog the Internet that you have done so. To set up your blog, go to blogspot.com or other blog providers. My blog is tjbooks.blogspot.com You must send a press release to insect web pages and to any print magazines that have readers mesmerized in the praying mantis. You would describe your website and your book. There ought to be no need to spend cash for advertizing for a book such as yours. Classified ads, however, in print magazines with a very purposed audience may be profitable. You would have to test your ads for response and profit. Don’t waste your cash placing ads in newsprints or on the Internet. I wrote various western and detective novels when I retired. I have just listed four of them on mysteryloverscorner.com (http://www.sleuthedit.com/mlc.html). Dawn Dowdle runs this site. When Dawn has my details online, a mystery lover will be competent to find the books and buy them from her site. The cost to do this is minimal. The point is that mystery readers congregate at her internetlocation and buy books. (This paragraph seems like a blatant ad for Dawn’s site. But internet sites like this may help you get exposure. I have invited Dawn to become a writer for [http://www.ezinemagazines.com]) If you are creative, you may think of a good deal of ways to promote your books. The narrower the market, the having little impact it is to promote. The broader your market, the more contest and the harder it is to zero in on the buyers. Just because you have your book listed on Amazon.com does not mean it will sell. You have to do the publicity yourself if you are not tied to a publisher that promotes for you. There are galore books on publicizing your book and there are numerous internet sites on the Internet that give good ideas. You will need to study up. Just watch for greedy hands. For our example on the praying mantis, when you get your internetsite up, you may want to get started an ezine on the praying mantis. Then you may gather email addresses of humans to whom you may trade by supplying a discount or a coupon of a heap of kind. You may also put a free PDF on your website available only to those who sign up for your ezine. I’ve thought in regards to marketing my novels at fairs, etc. I don’t because my publisher does not give an adequate discount unless I buy one hundred books. I told them that was fine, I wanted 25 of each. They said that was not how it worked. I would have to buy 100 of each. Who are they attempting to kid? My doctor wont let me lift more than a gallon of milk. I will say this for my publisher. They let folks read a few chapters of each of my books before they buy them. The End copyright©2007 John T. Jones, Ph.D. (Taylor Jones the Hack Writer) |
