C-Net's David Carnoy on how to self-publish an e-book

I recently came across this excellent, concise explanation of how to break into e-publishing. Carnoy covers all the basics. One of the most popular routes, as he discusses, is to upload a Word file of your work to Amazon.com's digital publishing platform, create an arresting, professional-looking cover, and price the book low, in the range of 99 cents to $4.99. Amazon will pay a royalty of 70 per cent of the sales price on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99. The royalty drops sharply if the book is priced above or below that range. Carnoy reminds us that, despite the winds of technological change blowing through publishing, one bedrock principle still remains constant: The book must be good.

Here is the link:

http://reviews.cnet.com/how-to-self-publish-an-e-book

New Spanish edition released of author John Ronner’s longtime best-seller on the subject of angels

MURFREESBORO -- More than 50,000 copies of Murfreesboro author John Ronner’s book Know Your Angels: The Angel Almanac are in print in English and 48,000-plus in Japanese. Now, these paper editions are joined by a new Spanish language e-book edition downloadable to Amazon’s Kindle readers, smart phones and other devices (La Enciclopedia de los Ángeles).

“As the book market in Latin America continues to explode, I wanted to aim for new readers in that direction,” said Ronner, whose first book, Do You Have a Guardian Angel?, appeared in 1985.

Currently, Ronner has more than 140,000 copies of his books in print in English, Japanese and Portuguese, but is now converting to digital publishing.

“The traditional publishing model is far less appealing to writers, in my opinion,” Ronner said. “Publishing e-books eliminates the many middlemen of traditional publishing and enables experienced writers to go directly to their readers without spending months or years coaxing publishing houses to issue them contracts. J. K. Rowling recently announced that she will be self-publishing Harry Potter e-books. Meanwhile, thriller writer Barry Eisler has turned down a $500,000 advance from a traditional publisher so that he can independently publish his next two books.

“Of course, some things don’t change. You still need strong content and to get the word out to your readers. The digital wave notwithstanding, books still only very rarely sell themselves,” Ronner said.

Know Your Angels, and its Spanish edition, list biographies of 100 prominent angels drawn from scripture, legend, folklore and mythology. There are also many entries for angel-related topics like the legendary war in heaven, the different opinions about how angels fell, the seven heavens, and Moses’s visit to heaven, among many other topics.

Ronner spent three years’ researching the original English edition.

Seven tips for producing and promoting a best-seller as massive change rocks the publishing industry

Radical changes are sweeping the publishing industry that bring huge advantages to writers, but authors still must turn out an excellent product -- and promote it vigorously.  Here are seven tips for producing and promoting a best-seller:

(1) Books don't sell themselves, as most writers sooner or later figure out, often too late.

(2) You need an excellent product aimed at a (preferably narrow and identifiable) target audience that is already predisposed to want to read what you're writing. They just have to hear about it. Chess books to chess players. Civil War books to Civil War buffs, and so on.

(3) You have to find media, forums or other places where the target audience congregates and plant yourself in front of them. Consider talks to specialized groups, articles in specialized magazines or newsletters or blogs, forum postings, as well as radio and TV interviews, particularly on special-theme shows.

(4) The most expensive and best marketing campaign in the world will not move a badly conceived or poorly done book.

(5) If you have a non-fiction book, take your specialized subject and be sure to give that topic a new twist, so there is (temporarily) no real competition in the marketplace, even though your overall genre is filled with titles. Be the first book collection of "angel letters" from experiencers. Not the second one.

(6) The traditional publishing model is rapidly disintegrating. Massive book returns from the stores, once the plague of writers and publishers, is disappearing along with the old system. In Amazon's Kindle e-book program, there are virtually no returns. Also on the way out is the secondary market undercutting, often fatally, your print sales. With e-books locked to individual Kindles, there is no pass-along readership. Books don't end up in the used markets that then piggyback on your publicity and promotion efforts and reduce your sales. Lastly, e-publishing writers now have a way around the traditional gatekeepers at the editorial houses. No longer does an editorial bottleneck stand between writers and their audiences. It's a Brave New World, infinitely friendlier to the long suffering and struggling author.

(7) In-depth research is critical, whether you're writing fiction or non-fiction. I recall one best-selling author in the 1970s who spent three years on each novel. One year for research. One for plotting. One for writing. Before the writing starts, organize your material in file folders, with a folder for each section of an individual chapter. In short, good research not only leads to better books but to much better interviews promoting those books. And, therefore, more sales. What's more, research is a great tonic for writer's block: What you're going to say is already there in your notes.

Speciality blog gives Kindle authors a chance to sound off, promote their books, and help one another

A speciality blog by a California screenwriter, novelist and producer is now giving e-book publishers with Amazon’s game-changing Kindle program a new voice.

The blog Kindle Author (Kindle-Author.blogspot.com) is the brainstorm of David Wisehart, himself a Kindle writer of such imaginative titles as Devil’s Lair, about a medieval knight who leads a quest through hell to recover the Holy Grail from the Devil and The Vatican Dagger, where Dracula meets the historic Borgia family in Renaissance Italy.

David’s site allows authors to discuss their adventures with Kindle publishing and provide tips and other information to readers who want to emulate them.

Author interviews are linked back to their Kindle book pages on Amazon as well as the writers’ Web sites.

This week, I made a guest appearance on this innovative and useful blog, which you can read here:
http://kindle-author.blogspot.com/2011/06/kindle-author-interview-john-ronner.html

In the interview, David and I covered the tsunami of change that is currently sweeping over the traditional publishing world, as it moves from being a print-based to a Web-based medium. And we discussed my belief that this is probably the greatest leap forward for entrepreneurial writers since the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s.

Kindle authors interested in requesting an interview with David should e-mail him at: David_Wisehart@hotmail.com. Write "Kindle Author" in the subject line.

Publicity and Promotion: The Golden Key to Getting Published

Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion. Galileo realized the earth is not the center of the universe. The budding author must likewise discover a world-changing Immutable Eternal Truth concerning publishing: Sadly, with only rare, lottery-like exceptions, books DO NOT SELL THEMSELVES!


They must be promoted aggressively  -- through talks before groups, social networking sites, blogs, radio and TV interviews, newspaper columns or articles. And a hundred other ways. In fact, as many ways as the mind can dream up, from publicity stunts to booths at book fairs.


The cold hard truth is that it is almost never enough to pick a powerful subject, research it masterfully, condense it concisely to 200 pages, and package it colorfully and with flair. Without publicity, your tome will be a needle in a book superstore's 100,000-title haystack. If it even gets that far, since sales determine your distribution, and without publicity, there will be no sales, hence no distribution.


Luckily, the media have a huge appetite for articulate authors with compelling subjects who have honed their presentations and piggybacked them onto a news peg. That news peg could be a holiday that fits the book's theme, or a current news event that is relevant to the title's subject matter.


Getting the interviews, though, is a tricky matter. First, you craft a powerful media kit about you and your book to be e-mailed to pre-identified decision makers. You try to time the submission to coincide with a news peg. You follow up continually, knowing that most e-mails are "lost in space" in the newsroom because of the flood of publicity aspirants bombarding media people. Then, having landed the interview, you prepare thoroughly, because the quality of your performance, not the quality of your book, will of course determine sales. This is, after all, the only thing your audience has to go on in deciding whether to buy.


The art of promoting a book is critical for self-publishers but just as important for commercially published authors, since most companies do comparatively little promotional work on mid-list titles (titles that are not designated by the publisher to become "big books." With "lesser" titles, which is the great majority of books, the publisher leaves most of the promotional work to the author. And usually, by the time the author of an also-ran title figures this out, it's too late. The book is being taken out of print for "lack of public demand." Of course, the public may never have demanded it, because it never heard about the title in the first place.


Remember: If you have a business or hobby, promoting a book also promotes what you do and can bring you clients or simply new friends to add to your network. And remember this, too: Publishers are always on the lookout for authors who know how to promote themselves and their work.


For a detailed report on how to get publicity and to promote your book or your work, see my detailed report: A 25-year Publicist's Guide to Promoting Your Book -- available for download for $3.95 at Amazon.com. Happy publishing.