Go to http://www.automaticbestseller.com/frank/ and listen to the story of one author who self-published his first book and made it a best-seller. It’s inspiring, and a clear idea of how we have wrong ideas about how publishing works. If you sign up, you can listen in as Linda Geyer interviews rich author Christopher and extracts from him powerful book writing and marketing tactics–eight audio files of about six minutes each. There is also a $1 for 14 days trial of his Best Seller Inner Circle group. I’m not an affiliate, but I’m willing to bet a buck that he knows something I don’t. See you there.
A major component of becoming a wise author is excellent marketing. For a perfect example, check out http://www.hochstadt.com/. This post is an entry, but I really see this as being a perfect way to joint venture and get folks to promote you and your friends products.
What’s my payback in this win/win/win? It’s simple. I’d like to win Gary Evans’ Manifest a Miracle system.
The prizes of the contest are below. click on the Banner to see how to enter. The deadline is April 30, th with Draw Day on May 1st. Check it out now.
Marcus Hochstadt from Internet Business Guide For First Class Progress gives respectively 1 of each of his 4 DVD products worth $100 each = $400 PLUS one 2-hour Multimedia Coaching Session worth $300, altogether making it to a $700!
Jason from The University Kid gives two 60 minute Blogging Consultations worth $60 each = $120!
Leisa Watkins from Dream Act Plan Believe gives 3 Robert G. Allan books that are personally signed by Robert (!), as well as 3 Richard Paul Evans books, also personally signed by Richard himself!
Karl Gechlik from Ask The Admin gives a professional technical e-mail support session worth $50!
Alexys Fairfield from Soul Meets World offers to interview her winner (about his/her product, service, Web site, life, etc) PLUS providing a link from her site to his’/hers! (She used to interview celebrities, so this one is PRICELESS!)
Ad Space
KiwiPulse from KiwiPulse gives 3 x 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $15 each = $45
Deimos Tel´Arin from ahkong.net gives a 468×60 top ad banner box for one month worth $36
Anna from My Cornerstone Trio gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $35
Turnip from Turnip of Power gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $35
Wayne from Ez DIY Electricity gives a top ad space (125×125 or 468×60) for one month worth up to $30
Caleb Hartley from environmentastic! gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $25
Kathleen from Entrepreneurs Only gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $25
Marty from Money Maker Times gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $25
Constantin Codreanu from INconstantIN gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $15
Mirjam from Me Myself and I gives a 125×125 top ad space for one month worth $10
These are contributions for 200+ winners (!) with a monetary value of more than $7,000+ (!!) and exactly 66,666ec (”ec” = Entrecard Credits)!!! This is by far the BIGGEST Party Contest in Entrecard’s History!
James Brausch knows the power of story to get the reader’s attention. The premise of The Voice Said “Obey” is that anyone can go from any situation, even being homeless with no resources, to living a life of financial reedom in a few weeks, if he or she will take action. He describes coming to awareness out of a methamphetamine blackout through grace and revelation, and then following the command of the quiet inner voice to obey the rules and suggestions those who he came to understand were God’s servants.
His is a case of Divine Intervention, which is the only reliable way for a person to get clean, sober or unaddicted to whatever drug of choice…TV, sugar, mediocrity. Much of the story is graphic and raw, which stands in contrast to the grace of his healing. He makes clear the changes in his perception and how he was able to be happy in what many of us would call dire circumstances.
The events are extremely time compressed, which makes his spiritual awakening and discovery of the Mormon path seem all the more supernatually inspired. In the non-fiction version published on his blog, it took Brausch about six months to get his obedience working in such a way to go back to the mundane work world, and then several years more to his current freedom–not two weeks. But the premise is that he could certainly do it again, and that we can too, wherever we are now. Of course, he knows the value of what he knows, and most of the rest of us do not–and that helps him leverage that knowledge online.
This book is definitely worth the read, though the plot is too time compressed to be completely believeable. In the video offered by Marcus Hochstad, Brausch says he wanted the book to be more exciting, so he made it shorter. It is, however, inspiring and a blueprint for setting up an internet business.
I shared a pre-production copy with my brother, who has had his share of experiences with methamphetamine, and now he is willing to attempt learning some computer skills to promote his music.
I highly recommend this book, for an inspiring story and a quick read. His Internet Business Books (Vol. 1 & 2) are good, too. They are based on blog entries from http://jamesbrausch.com or you can read his new blog at http://jamesbrausch.org, which has much less story content.
We need to feel that things are fair, that if we give, we get. And we need to feel that what we are getting is worth more than what we are giving.
Commitment and Consistency –
Once you make a committment, stick to it. Do what you say you will do. Social Proof –
This is the name for “but everyone else is doing it.” Make it look like your book is the hot thing, and it will sell, at least to people who want to be “the same as everyone else.” Marketing to an elite group makes your product a social marker of “the elite.”
Authority –
If you trust someone’s opinion, that person has authority for you. That’s the key to all sales is gaining the trust of people who see you as an authority in your market.
Liking –
It’s easier to buy from a likeable, friendly person than from an arrogant boor. Which are you?
Scarcity –
Supply and demand…raise one and the other goes down. the trick is to keep the demand up by controlling the supply.
Get a domain name, get a hosting account, set your dns, get an autoresponder, get HTML software, get FTP software.
Now that you have your tools, think about what you want your website to do:
1) attract buyers for your writing
2) collect names and email addresses for later sales
3) tell the world who you are and where you are appearing, speaking
4) host you blog so you can share your thoughts
5) sell your books
You will also need a paypal or paydotcom account to collect money online.
Now build your site, keeping it fairly simple–avoid music, stringy cursors, slow loading pictures. Go to paypal and make your buynow buttons for your book or seminars or other products. Put them in you site. Upload the whole thing to your host, and test it. Then set up your blog on a subdirectory. If you have a Cpanel hosting, look for Fantastico. It will manage the setup for you, if not, go to Wordpress.org, where you can get someone else to do it.
Then start blogging–post something every day, or write a bunch of posts and set the time stamp to release them one a day. Write articles abou the subject of your book, submit them to and link them back to your website. Find other people who write about the general subject of your book,a nd comment on their blogs.
Don’t spam, though. Add to their discussion, or they will delete your comment. After all, you are knowledgeable. Show it.
This is what I am working on for this site. It’s what the gurus say to do. Share your experience for the rest of us.
Amazon, the world’s bookstore has taken a step that affects everyone who is thinking about self-publishing. According to Angela Hoy, owner of Booklocker.com, Amazon has threatened to remove the convenient Buy Now buttons from all books printed on demand (POD) from printers other than their in house printer/publisher Booksurge.
She says:
It is our opinion that Amazon is creating an unfair competitive advantage for itself in two ways… possibly more.
1. Production and Printing - They force publishers to use their printer (who has a bad reputation for quality), which they profit from (cha-ching), and force publishers to give them a deeper discount (cha-ching), and force publishers to pay setup fees for new titles (cha-ching). All this is just for books being sold through Amazon directly. Amazon knows the publisher must also pay to have files formatted to different specs in order to get Ingram distribution (considered imperative for bookstore sales). In fact, all this expense and trouble could even make it more difficult and more expensive for Amazon’s other competitors (bookstores) to obtain these books for their customers.
2. Amazon also competes directly with these publishers for authors. Authors can pay Amazon/BookSurge an average publishing package fee of over $1,000 to have Amazon publish their book. So, Amazon is competing directly with its publishing customers for authors’ books and will, of course, even have access to the publishers’ customers’ (authors!) contact information. I wonder if their new contract protects publishers from Amazon going over their heads and trying to land contracts with the authors directly?
Remember, Amazon has a contract with Lightning Source (LSI), but has gone over its head and contacted LSI’s customers (the POD publishers) directly. That’s how all this trouble began!
Many small press publishers use the services of LSI to manufacture their books with POD technology because LSI printing also includes distribution through Ingram, where nearly all booksellers buy books to sell. This is a hard blow to small presses and self-publishers, who may be forced to decide between the global of Amazon and the lucrative traditional channels used by libraries and bookstores.
Anyone considering self-publishing would do well to read more here: http://www.writersweekly.com/amazon.php where Angela Hoy has collected links about this story.
Amazon.com makes the argument that a digital book can be more easily supplied to a customer if they print it in their warehouse rather than having someone else print it and ship it to their warehouse:
There is no request for exclusivity. Any publisher can use Amazon’s POD service just for those units that ship from Amazon and continue to use a different POD service provider for distribution through other channels
Clearly, it is more aggravation for an author who self-publishes to contract with two different companies to produce books. Amazon also requires the publisher of record to supply a digital copy of the book for the new Search Inside feature, so the point may be moot.
But today’s news from Amazon about Print-on-Demand is the latest move from Amazon revealing a trend toward much more aggressive explicit lock-in attempts. (Not that it’s an entirely new strategy from the folks that brought you the “one-click” patent). Amazon has effectively told publishers that if they wish to sell POD books on Amazon, they must use Amazon as the POD printer. Small/self publishers are unsurprisingly feeling bullied.
Let’s look at four levels of lock-in at play here:
Data-driven lock-in. This is the core “Web 2.0″ piece. Reviews and recommendations (and now data on S3 and EC2 usage). Again, this implicit, and in general is good for consumers.
Format lock-in. …. This one is bad for consumers (who can’t read their Kindle books on another device — oh, the irony!), but isn’t immediately much of a problem for publishers — at least until it leads to …
Pricing power lock-in. Just as Apple reset the price of music … Amazon is resetting the price of a book. For customers who feel they shouldn’t have to pay as much for something that never needed to be printed or shipped, this makes sense. It’s good for consumers, but bad for publishers. … The upshot here is that lower prices in the short term can have expensive long-term consequences.
Channel lock-in. This one raises the stakes considerably. …This is very bad for publishers, particularly because it’s really a 1-2 punch of pricing-power lock in as well. When a book intended for POD has only one route to customers, the company controlling that route is free to add whatever tolls it would like. But it’s also bad for consumers, who will soon have fewer places to find POD-only titles, and less choice is rarely a good thing.
Lock-in per se is almost always good for businesses, … but publishers will defensively respond to this by treating Amazon more like an adversary than a partner, which in the long run isn’t good for anybody.
Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore is a wonderful tool for editing, light on theory and full of technique and examples. It is easily the best book I have read on revision with specific suggestions on all aspects of fiction writing.
Lyon writes both for planners and seat-of-the-pants-ers, with thoughts on structure, style, characterization, and punctuation and syntax. I am reading an advance copy, which came just at the right time (Thanks, Universe!) to help me with the WIP.
Lyon’s style is conversational, clear and supportive. Her examples come from contemporary literature rather than from movies or television, and she assumes that the reader has a manuscript in process. Her book has many good suggestions for creating a first draft, but that is not her focus.
My favorite technique is in the first chapter, called riffing. Here’s her explanation:
It is similar to what has been called free writing or writing to a prompt–a picture or word or memory–or free association on paper. These methods fill your pages with writing, they help loosen you up and stick it to the censors, and they generate ideas for manuscripts. Riff-writing differs from these methods by being expressly applied to revising a portion of your writing….Riff writing helps you expand your imagination around a particular problem or need–to lengthen a section, to add images or to develop more characterization for example.
Starting with a sentence or paragraph that needs work, pick one aspect of craft–feeling, object, memory, attitude, setting–and develop it with whatever comes to mind: “overwriter; dont’ stop when you have the first impulseto. Keep writing; keep writing.”
Lyons goes on to tell the story of playing jazz with professional musicians, and being mortified when she played wrong notes. She was told, “There are no wrong notes. you work them and they become part of the riff.”
Each chapter has a handy summary-checklist to keep the reader on track with revision. The book is designed to be used as a reference, so that the reader is directed to the chapters which deal with specific approaches and specific difficulties. She is careful to discuss pitfalls of any approach to writing, such as advantages and disadvantages of single point of view, dual points of view, and author intrusions. She discusses the differences in structure between the hero’s journey, as described by Joseph Campbell and the heroine’s journey described by Maureen Murdock, and how each fits into a different genre and approach to storytelling.
Lyon writes from two decades experience as an independent book editor at her freelance editing company, Editing International, http://www.4-edit.com. Her other titles are The Sell Your Novel Took Kit, A Writer’s Guide to Fiction, National Directory of Editors& Writers, and Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write. She is available to speak and instruct at writers conferences and will present private custom-made workshops for groups of writers called “I’ll come to You.”
Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover from Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0399-53395-2
“Doc” Hensley is a funny, enthusiastic speaker, and he knows whereof he speaks. He is teaching the Inspirational Writing class at Southeastern Writers Association in June. I took his writing basics class last year, and it was a riot. He tells stories that keep you laughing while you are taking down everything he says. I can’t wait to see him again.
Dr. Dennis E. Hensley is a columnist and contributing editor for four magazines, including Writer’s Journal. He is the author of six novels, 39 nonfiction books, and more than 3,000 freelance newspaper and magazine articles. He has written eight textbooks on professional writing, including How to Write What You Love and Make a Living at It (Random House), Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours (Macmillan), and The Freelance Writer’s Handbook (Harper-Collins).
Dr. Hensley holds four university degrees in literature and linguistics, including a Ph.D. in English from Ball State University. He is a professor of English at Taylor University Fort Wayne, where he directs the professional writing major. Each year Dr. Hensley serves as a judge for the Christy Fiction Awards, the Gold Medallion Awards, and the Evangelical Press Association Awards. He is a recipient of numerous honors, including the Indiana University “Award for Teaching Excellence” and the “Dorothy Hamilton Memorial Writing Award.”
Dr. Hensley has been a writer in residence or guest professor at Oxford University and more than 60 other colleges. He has been an instructor three previous times at the Southeastern Writers Conference.
I met Vicki Hinze at the Southeastern Writers Association last summer. She and Marge Smith, aka Elizabeth Sinclair, did a wonderful workshop about writing. Not only did they tell about their own success, they worked with the individual writers, not only during class but at lunch and in the afternoons after class.
She and Marge are hosting a special intensive workshop for SWA this summer, and I just signed up for today. It’s a deal at $100 in addition to the conference. Read more about it here: http://southeasternwriters.com/highlight.htm
If you need resources, go to Vicki’s website: http://vickihinze.com/. She has a whole library of resources for writers. She answers writers’ questions on her yahoo group: Aids for Writers. She’s also at http://myspace.com/vickihinze That in itself can teach a wise author some techniques! She has a novelists group on myspace, and she has a list of writers blogs.
Author of twenty-one novels, three nonfiction books and hundreds of nonfiction articles, many for international publications, writing for Silhouette, Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Spilled Candy Traditional, St. Martin’s Press, and Pinnacle. She currently has an additional three books under contract. Her first published novel, a romantic suspense, was a bestseller that sold in nearly a dozen foreign countries. Since then, she’s shifted writing focus several times. After co-creating the first single-title open-ended continuity series, she turned to military life and has been is credited with a Career Achievement Award for being one of the first to write military romantic suspense, military romantic intrigue, and military romantic thrillers.
Her articles have appeared many respected publications and e-zines (Novelists, Inc., Romantic Times, Romance Writers’ Report, The Outreacher, The Rock and others) and have been extensively reprinted in as many as sixty-three foreign markets. She has coordinated and/or judged national and international writing competitions, served on various writers’ association committees, has been honored by Romance Writers of America with their National Service Award and in 2004 was named PRO Mentor of the Year.
Vicki is a charter sponsor of International Thriller Writers (ITW) and a member of The Authors Guild, Novelists Inc., Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, Published Authors Network, Emerald Coast Writers, and other writing organizations.
Her Achievements:
22 Novels published
3 Nonfiction books published
Hundreds of Articles on Writing: craft, business & life
published in as many as 63 countries
Publishers:
Bantam Dell Publishing Group
St. Martin’s Press
Medallion Press
Silhouette
Pinnacle
Spilled Candy Traditional Books
MFA Creative Writing
Ph.D. Theocentric business and ethics
Vicki is definitely a give-back writer, who is as good an instructor as she is an author. I am very excited about working with her in June.
The following is a list of the materials and services included in your WriteWise program.
3-Day intense Boot Camp*
Guided BEA (Book Expo America) Field trip*
A guaranteed introduction to an Agent and/or publisher.
Endorsement from a New York Times bestselling author.
A Foreword from a New York Times bestselling author.
Lifetime Admission to the WriteWise annual national writer´s conference.
Photograph with Robert G. Allen and/or Richard Paul Evans
WriteWise education, an intense and impressive series of tele-mentoring courses, each live and recorded for later review) and backed up with weekly tele-conference help sessionswhere you can ask WriteWise faculty individual questions.
Telecourses include:
Weekly Orientation and Book Industry Overview (Weekly)
Monthly Masters Call (Once a month call featuring some of the biggest authors, publishers and agents in the world.)
BookWriting 101 (4 week course)
Book Preparation (8 week course)
Info-Preneuring 101 (8 week course)
Getting Free Publicity (4 week course)
Getting Ready for BookExpo America (BEA)
Info-Preneuring Help Session
BookExpo America (BEA) Help Session
WriteWise Help Session
Home Study Materials:
Dian Thomas’ kit Million Dollars in Free Publicity with 5 Audio CDs, 3 DVDs and >CD-ROM
Robert G. Allen’s Info-Preneuring Binder with manual and 8 DVDs + 1 CD and 12 audio CDs.
Robert G. Allen’s Mastermind Your Millions - 4 DVDs + 1 MP3 audio CD
Tom Painter’s Wealth with Low Risk - 6 DVDs and 6 Audio CDs + CROM and PDF books
*Participants are responsible for their individual travel and hotel for events and any admission expenses.
