I am under contract to my publisher for fifteen books. It’s like being blessed and cursed at the same time. Sweet and sour. Every author’s dream and every author’s nightmare.

The contracts are for twelve books in my Odelia Grey mystery series and three in my Ghost of Granny Apples mystery series. The manuscripts are due approximately six months apart. That means I write, deliver, edit, deliver, read the author proofs, deliver, launch, market, and promote two books a year.

Oh, and by the way, did I mention that I also work 40+ hours a week as a paralegal in a law firm?

I am not afraid. I am not afraid. [Taking a deep breath.] I am not afraid.

Maybe if I keep saying it over and over, I’ll believe it.

Most newbie authors think the hard part is writing the book. That once The End is typed, the vacation begins, preferably on a warm beach with a mai tai in each hand, while awaiting the hoards of offers he or she is sure will come. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that an offer does come in from a publisher and you, the author, accepts it. Now is the time to put down the drink with the little umbrella and gird your loins for the fight ahead. Because, take it from me, the really difficult work begins as soon as your manuscript is accepted by a publisher.

From the moment you affix your signature to that publishing contract, your time is not your own. You become a brand. A property. An author in search of a reader base. You will spend time traveling to conferences and book festivals. Time on library panels and courting book clubs. Time thinking about, preparing and sending mailers and press kits. Time with online social networks. Time answering mail from readers. And, yes, even time blogging. All this in addition to the aforesaid writing, editing, and delivering of manuscripts.

And you will spend money. A lot of it. And it will be your own cash, not your publisher’s. You will become a master juggler of time, money, family, and even a day job. Oh, and if you think you will be able to quit that day job any time soon, think again. Unless you grab a six figure advance right out of the gate, or end up on the New York Times Best Seller List, or become Oprah’s new BFF, you might want to keep punching that time clock.

You will fear bad reviews, writer’s block, computer crashes, family emergencies, and even head colds. All of which get in the way of your creativity and deadlines. Most of all, you will fear low sales and being dropped by your publisher.

Such is the life of an author, especially in today’s uncertain publishing environment. Sure you want to be one? Think about it. Think long and hard. Take off the rose-colored glasses and take a good look at what’s ahead. Learn from those of us who have gone before you.

Being an author is the toughest job I have ever had. At times, it has leveled me to a sniffling bag of mucous and/or a screaming banshee. I’ve even suffered from unproductive inertia for days at a time. But while it saps my strength and often leaves me gasping for breath, it also revitalizes me in ways nothing else has never done.

So far, of the fifteen books under contract, I have delivered five Odelia Grey novels and one Granny Apples novel. I have a very long way to go.

No, I am not afraid. I’m scared spitless.

Posted by: Sue Ann Jaffarian

Posted by: C.M. Mayo

Last week we saw that every direct sale from a publisher's own website is worth two or three sales from other methods. But many publishers complain that they don't see enough traffic from their websites for such sales to add up to much.

With a little creativity and effort most of these publishers could increase their direct sales substantially. But to do this they need to stop thinking in traditional book marketing terms and learn to understand the web as a new and different medium.

One technique that can drive traffic in some circumstances is blogging. But you can't just slap up a blog on your website and expect the visits to coming rolling in like magic. Nonetheless, this is exactly what many publishers do. As an industry, publishing remains backward with respect to capitalizing on the web's potential.

Let's look at a few publisher's blogs. The blogs I chose were David R. Godine, University of California Press, Soft Skull Press, and Penguin Books UK . I chose these presses partly because they are all excellent publishers, with consistently first-rate products to offer. While I may be critical of some of these blogs, I do not intend a criticism of the presses themselves. Independent presses are often stretched thin and have to apportion their resources carefully. Still, some are clearly missing opportunities. In the chart below, I look at the five most recent blog posts from each press. How recent is the post? Is it about one of the publisher's own books? And how many comments has the post provoked from visitors?

A few things jump out from this chart. At one extreme, Godine's blog is clearly a desultory effort. (This is ironic, because Godine employee Daniel Pritchard maintains an excellent personal blog, called The Wooden Spoon.) How much traffic can you hope to generate if it takes you more than three months (through today) to produce five small posts?

At the other extreme, the Penguin blog is updated regularly (its five most recent posts appeared over a span of 12 days). It comments on other topics than just its own books. And it produces a lively interaction with visitors, with one post producing a remarkable 23 comments.

The other two blogs lie somewhere between those extremes. UCP's blog includes images (if only book covers) and is updated regularly, which is good, but its posts often have the quality of press releases, which is a great tactic if your goal is to drive away visitors. Soft Skull's blog is better than it appears from this chart. Although the posts do tend to be about the publisher's own books (which I think is a mistake), they have a lively, informal tone that conveys an individual personality. This is critical for hooking readers and encouraging return visits -- no one goes out of the way to read corporate news. Of the four blogs, Soft Skull and Penguin are the two that I subscribe to in my RSS feeds (I also subscribe to the personal blog of Godine's Dan Pritchard).

To build traffic to their websites, book publishers need to recognize its value and make a real commitment of time and energy. Following are four general principles to keep in mind.

1. Stop thinking like the PR department

Publishing is a business tied to tradition. After all, it has operated in broadly the same way ever since the early Renaissance. Publishers are accustomed to producing press releases about new titles and their breaking news. The press releases are sent to media outlets, such as magazines and newspapers, who (often minimally) repackage the information and present it to the public. So when publishers go online they tend to think of the web as a place to post press releases.

But if they would give a little thought to what they are doing they would realize the mechanism of the web is different from the traditional press release model. On the web, you have to give visitors a reason to come to your site. If all you are doing is releasing news about your own titles, readers may feel that if there is anything of interest to them they will find it elsewhere. A person with an interest in one title is not necessarily interested in all the others. This kind of blog becomes in effect an insider's newsletter, perhaps useful for making authors feel the publisher is paying attention to their titles, but useless for generating sales.

Paradoxically, to sell books online, you have to stop selling them. If you are going to blog, most of your posts should not be about your own books. The best blogs, like Penguin's, don't focus on promoting or selling product directly. Instead, they try to attract readers, analogous not to a PR department but to the magazines and newspapers to which press releases were sent. Sales will follow readership.

2. Focus on content

To attract visitors to your website you have to offer them something they can't resist. In the jargon of search engine marketing, this is called "linkbait," because it encourage links from other sites, which help you to climb the search engine result pages. (Here's an example: On my website I have a little tutorial on how to get a book published, which drives a lot of traffic to my site. I don't have any product I'm selling directly, but the site does serve in a way as personal promotion. If I didn't have that tutorial to increase the prominence of my site and raise its rank in the search engine result pages, it might not have been visible enough for ForeWord's managing editor Whitney Hallberg to notice it and invite me to participate in this Publishing Insider gig.)

Say you have a book about the Obama presidential campaign. The key is to think like a content provider, not a sales person. Make sure your content is excellent, and then give it away. Put a chapter online. Giving content away is more effective than hoarding it. You would probably sell more print books by making the entire content of the book available for free online than by not putting anything up. Or post an interview with the author. Or put up interesting charts and graphs showing where swing voters were located and what issues swayed them one way or the other (these could be good for getting image search traffic). Post images from your book to flickr and link them to your site; do the same with YouTube videos.

3. Don't neglect the search engines

But even putting up good content is not enough. You also have to get out the word about the content. On the web, that means ranking in the search engines. Search engines account for 68 percent of my traffic at my Right Reading site, and 64 percent of the traffic at the Asian Art Museum, where I manage the web as well as print publications. I don't mean you should submit your site directly to the search engines -- this accomplishes little. Instead, search for phrases like "search marketing" or "search engine optimization" and listen to what the professionals say. (But be careful -- there are a lot of snake oil salesmen posing as SEO experts.)

Figure out where there are opportunities for ranking in search engine results. That means identifying what search marketers call your "keywords." There are various online tools to help you identify potential keywords (do a search). Say you want to promote your great book on the Obama campaign that I talked about above. Would your top target keyword be "Obama"? Not likely. That would be a very competitive word, and you would be going up against CNN, the New York Times, the federal government, and other established authority sites. Instead you probably want to try to rank for something more specific, perhaps a combination of words like "Obama caucuses finances," depending on your content.

Most searchers click on one of the top three search results, and very few go beyond the first page, that is, the first ten results. So unless you can be one of the top-ranking results for a search you will not see much traffic from it. Study your web logs and analytics to see where you are breaking through and then develop those areas.

Work to get links to your site from authoritative websites, using variations of your keywords in the anchor text (the text that contains the link). Participating in communities of people with shared interests in your topic is a good way to get links. If you are really determined, you can launch a big link-soliciting campaign, but be careful not to produce a sudden flood of links, which will look "unnatural" to search engines and may raise a red flag suggesting a possible spam site. I don't work too hard at link-building for my site because I'm patient and looking long term instead of for immediate results. I want my site to appear trustworthy and not manipulative, and I get links naturally. But a book campaign might not offer the luxury of a relaxed timeline, so some judicious link-building (.gov and .edu domains are said to be the most authoritative) might be just the ticket to jump start things.

4. Start early

Whatever you do, don't delay. I recommend putting something up related to the content of each book as soon as it's conceived or acquired, even if what you put up is at first minimal (remember, this will not be about the book itself but about a topic that readers of the book would find interesting). The reason for this is that it takes a long time to build up trust and authority with search engines and the public. Especially if your site is new, it can take several months before your begin to rank well in the search results pages. If you have established some degree of claim on your book's topic prior to its publication you will have an easier time attracting readers once it is out.

I hope more publishers -- especially small and independent publishers who could benefit the most -- will get serious about building popular websites rather than just producing digital press releases and online sales catalogues. More and more the web is the primary medium of information for many people, and there are great books that are failing to find the audience they deserve because print publishers are not competing effectively in this medium.

Posted by: Tom Christensen

Have you ever got in the middle of one of those Mac versus PC arguments, where fierce partisans of each platform express contempt and loathing for the other? You can get stuck in that argument and lose sight of the fact that it's not the computer that matters, it's what you do with it.

Some people are the same way about print and electronic media. At one extreme, print partisans say they they would never read anything on a screen, and may even pride themselves on their ignorance of electronic media. At the other extreme, some new-media advocates contend print is archaic and useless, and will soon become extinct.

The reality is that there is a place for both traditional and new media. Just because a publisher is working in print doesn't mean it can afford to neglect the Internet. All print publishers should master the basics of Internet marketing, because it offers potentially higher returns than can be obtained from traditional methods. Let's look at why that is and how to make it work.

The first and most obvious factor in favor of online marketing is the sheer numbers it offers. I maintain several blogs on different subjects. The one that gets the most traffic is a blog that is generally devoted to publishing issues. Together with its associated html site, it gets around 150,000 visits in a year—a relatively small number compared to the most popular blogs. According to eBizMBA, the blog Gizmodo receives several million visitors a year—probably 20 times or more than I get.

Now compare those numbers to print publishing. When I was at North Point Press, we made the New York Times national best-seller list with a title that had only 30,000 copies in print—about the number of readers my site gets in a few months. (Granted, I'm comparing book sales to web visits, which are not directly equivalent, but the different order of magnitude is still staggering.) A book that I co-translated, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, ranks as one of the twentieth century's best-selling titles. But its initial printing was said to be 11,500 copies (publishers commonly inflate these numbers)—fewer than the readers my blog gets in a month—and even its peak annual sales of perhaps 675,000 copies could not compete with the top online numbers.

Okay, so there are a lot of people online. But how can they be turned into customers?

Before answering that question, let's take a broad look (omitting all but the largest factors) at some of the different ways books can be sold. We'll compare traditional bookstore distribution with sales through online retailers such as Amazon or Powell's and with direct sales through a publisher's own website.

Sales to bookstores through a distributor

Let's assume we have a book that retails for $20. Traditionally, a network of sales reps would be employed to present the publisher's list (along with those of many other publishers) to buyers at key bookstores around the country (maintaining sales reps who actively sell to stores is what distinguishes a distributor from a wholesaler or fulfillment service). At each store the rep might devote 20 or 30 seconds to those of your main titles that seem the best match for the store. In exchange, the distributor will probably charge the publisher somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of net sales. How good a deal the publisher can cut with the distributor might be affected by the prestige its list brings, its growth potential, the desirability of its niche to the distributor, or other factors, but mainly it's a function of volume of sales (the greater the volume the better the publisher's percentage is likely to be). For our analysis we'll figure the distributor takes 40 percent.

Bookstores buy the book at a significant discount off the retail price. The exact discount is supposed to depend on the size of the order, but the store can probably gang your titles with those of other publishers represented by your distributor to get a better discount. We'll figure the bookstore discount averages 48 percent.

So, for a $20 retail book sold through traditional bookstore channels—leaving aside shipping and other fees —the bookstore will pay $10.40, of which the distributor will take $4.16, leaving the publisher $6.24. (The real world number would be smaller, because I am leaving several expenses out of consideration here.)

A further complicating factor is that books are sold to stores on a returnable basis. Selling into the stores is called the "sell-in." Those books still have to be purchased by a reader—that's called the "sell-through." Industry-wide, sell-through is probably around 65 percent of sell-in. That means that in order to sell 65 books you have to print and get 100 into stores, only to see 35 of them come back to you as returns. In 2002, 37 percent of all bookstore sales were returned, and some 80 percent of returned books ended up being destroyed. This is a significant factor that new publishers sometimes forget to figure into their calculations.

Sales through online retailers

Online retailers offer a bewildering number of publishing arrangements. Basically, however, their business is built on underpricing brick and mortar stores by offering books at a discount. I haven't been able to find an authoritative source for Amazon's average book discount, but I would guess it's about 25-30 percent off retail. In order to offer prices like these, they buy from publishers or wholesalers at steep discounts, perhaps 60 percent.

That means if the publisher can sell direct to Amazon it would keep $8 dollars on a $20 book—better than the $6.24 it would see through a distributor/bookstore sale. Moreover, I don't think you are likely to see many returns from Amazon, and these, as we have seen, are a significant factor on the publisher's bottom line. So, while there are many compelling reasons to support independent booksellers, on a pure short-term profit-and-loss basis online retailers offer a better return than traditional bookstore sales through a distributor.

Direct sales from publisher to reader

But why routinely give that big discount to Amazon? You're still going to be paying shipping costs. If a publisher could sell direct from its own website it would see a much better margin. What would this require? In my opinion, it requires two things: an e-commerce function and an effective web marketing program that will bring consumers to your site where they can make the purchase.

Without an e-commerce function the publisher is reduced to asking the consumer to call or fax orders, which are then fulfilled manually. In today's online world, many consumers are reluctant to initiate this comparatively cumbersome process. They want a secure website where they can make an immediate purchase with a credit card or a paypal account. There are several e-commerce options for small publishers. One of the simplest is Yahoo Store (I offer Yahoo not as an endorsement, but as an example). The publisher pays a small ($50) one-time set-up fee and then a monthly fee of $39.95 or more depending on volume, as well as a 1.5 percent transaction fee. The Yahoo name is reassuring to consumers, and the secure sale is handled through its site and then forwarded to the publisher for fulfillment.

That means that the publisher retains $19.70 out of the $20 retail price. That's $13.46 more per book than with the distributor/bookstore model and $11.70 better than with the Amazon model. Therefore (leaving aside the initial set-up fee), to come out even with the other methods of selling you would only have to sell three or four books books a month. At that point you've covered your monthly fee, and thereafter one direct sale is worth two or three sales made through the other channels. All three approaches might be worth doing, but clearly direct sales are gold if you can get them. So it would be logical to try to maximize such sales as a percentage of the total.

But can you bring enough visitors to your website for it to produce a meaningful volume of sales? That's the subject for my next post. Stay tuned!

Posted by: Tom Christensen

In contrast, the goal behind the brand of networking I’m advocating is to blend so fully into the fabric of the network itself that somehow you’re everywhere that people look.

The contrarian rationale for this approach was provided in last week’s post. For those of you entering the theater a few minutes into the movie, we’re not talking about the stealthy infiltration of publishing’s VIP Room, but rather the natural, low-stress, and meaningful growth of your career over the long term. It’s not about you being the hub of the universe, or wearing a sandwich board with your résumé on it. It’s more like you’re a really good server—always on, reliable, and yet as anonymous and ego-free as a piece of hardware.

How to turn such theory into practice? Well, here are some rules of thumb I’ve found helpful….

Network with the Person, Not the Company

At the risk of stating the obvious, that contact of yours at the bookstore chain, publisher, or press outlet could switch employers at some point, yes? When that happens, you can then extend your network accordingly—provided you’ve built the relationship with the person. That means not just treating him or her as a flesh-and-blood extension of the corporate monolith. Chances are, there’s human being under there, one who—guess what?—would probably welcome the chance to network with you as well.

Be a Source of Intelligence

If you know a reporter is covering a given beat, or that an editor is developing a line in a certain area, keep your antennae alert. When you come across a news story that might be of interest, send an e-mail saying. “Did you notice this?” It will take about thirty seconds and fewer characters than a Twitter post. The idea is not for us to run around like altruists with our heads cut off, helping everyone else out while blowing our own deadlines. Rather, the trick is to see oneself always as part of a professional field, a cause, an area of expertise, and so on. Then everyone else who also operates in that sphere is either an ally or a potential ally—not “contacts” to be milked for all they’re worth. So if you freely offer intelligence as you gather it, then before you know it, you won’t have to—folks will come to you asking for it.

Use “Strategy” Strategically

In other words, don’t overthink things. Sometimes you’ll want to go tactical, but sometimes you’ll want to opt for a more Taoist go-with-the-flow approach. So try not to consider networking as a grid-based board game where you’ve always got to decide to where to place your pieces with the utmost care and precision. First of all, in real life you have an unlimited number of pieces. So think of networking as a board game if you like, but just be aware that its rules allow you to pour yourself all over the board.

Offer to Help Informally

The adverb “informally” is wonderful device for taking the pressure off. The parties you’re trying to build relationships with will sense that you’re not just another player requesting something from them—a paying gig, media coverage, an introduction to a mover-and-shaker. Instead, you’re saying it would be absolutely no problem for you to help them out in an advisory way, no strings attached. Maybe that means sharing contacts. Maybe that means a brief meeting where you provide some brainstorming over coffee before getting back to the daily grind. At the very least, this kind of “volunteer” approach to doing business puts you more in the know. And while of course you’ve got to respect confidentiality, the great thing about becoming an informal partner is that it gives you that inside edge... which is why you’re reading a blog called “Publishing Insider” in the first place, isn’t it? Just checking.

Don’t Connect Yourself, Connect Others

If you put “A” and “B” together consistently, and without an overt agenda for yourself, then you’re automatically connecting yourself more substantially to both A and B. In fact, the current economic downturn is the perfect time to make this practice a part of your networking repertoire. For example, know any folks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who have been laid off? Could their experience really benefit an indie publisher, either as an employee or as a consultant until they land their next job? Don’t get deeply involved in the matchmaking process—you’re not a recruiter, after all. I’ve found that a simple e-mail recommending someone, and copying that person, works wonders.

Revisit Your Base

This point may be too obvious too include. But the reason I’m doing so is to mitigate the tendency I've noticed where networking is thought of solely as meeting brand new people and then rushing back to one’s office to stuff and mount their business cards. Sure, that’s part of the fun. Yet effective networking also means keeping the lights blinking steadily regarding those with whom you’ve established relationships over the years. The temptation to be complacent, at least for me, is sometimes very hard to resist. So bring yourself back to reality if you find yourself thinking, "Hey, so-and-so recommended my company [or reviewed my work favorably, etc.] back in ’05— I’m sure they’ll let me know if a great opportunity for me crosses their radar screen." The key, though, in keeping one’s existing network vital is to keep using all of the above techniques, not take things for granted.

There’s definitely a lot more to say on this topic, but I’ve run out of space. Want to continue the conversation, or tell me how to refine some of these pointers? Great, here’s my e-mail address: fiifgutierrez@gmail.com. Consider us networked.

Posted by: Peter Gutiérrez

Posted by: Peter Gutiérrez

Of course there’s no law that says you absolutely must make public speaking part of your game plan. After all, if you’re in small press or indie publishing, there’s no rule that says you have to do anything, including sell books or make money.

Some of you, I’m sure, are already putting yourself (or your authors) out there through panel appearances, workshops or, most common of all, readings. If that sounds like you, you may want skip to the half dozen points below that I’ve picked up (sometimes the hard way) from two decades of sitting behind the long table.

But for the rest of you, I’m not going to berate you with that thorny old stick of “Stop typing and start promoting.” Not only have you heard that refrain countless times before, but I also understand where you’re coming from all too well. That’s because if you’re in publishing like me, most of your day-to-day communications involve your existing contacts via e-mail and maybe margin notes. Or, on those occasions when we deal with words that aren’t in print, it’s usually because we’re on the phone with someone we already know.

These practices are a far cry from pressing the flesh with random strangers—oops, I meant potential readers and industry insiders—following a Q&A session. Granted, that sort of thing may not be in your comfort zone, but keep in mind one thing. You know all those authors and editors who seem so mysteriously well connected? Well, this is one of the big reasons that they are. In short, they show up. They open their mouths. People hear them and they become real, not just names on mastheads.

And the value of such face-to-face networking and relationship-building can’t really be underestimated. Yet at the same time it’s very difficult to quantify because the hidden risks of not doing so takes the form of opportunity costs: things that might have happened to your career, press coverage you might have garnered if only you’d been at the right place at the right time. (Which in practice can look like your local YMCA on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.)

So if you’re sold on the idea that speaking on the topic of your expertise, or organizing such a talk by one of your authors, is worthwhile, let’s take a look at some pointers that have worked for me. They should make this process as harmless as possible and possibly, heaven forbid, fun.

1. Don’t Constantly Gauge Audience Reaction

Stay on point instead. Remember, silence isn’t necessarily bad. Don’t freak out if your pre-planned punch lines aren’t getting the laughs you expected—people could be smiling quietly, which is much harder to notice from up on stage. (Besides, stop micro-planning your comedic bits in the first place as it can come across as phony.) Assume your audience is with you and just plow ahead. Please don’t do what I saw at a conference a couple of weeks ago—self-consciously mumble, “Wow, tough crowd” repeatedly. This might draw some grins the first time you say it, but by the third or fourth time, the audience will be glancing at their watches.

2. Keep the Context in Mind

In a sense, this is really just a fancy way of saying “Know your audience.” Yet it’s more than that, too. It means treating your appearance not as the center attraction, but as one piece in a much bigger picture. Who’s listening to you and why? What common ground do you share with these listeners implicitly, apart from the content of your talk? Are you members of the same organization? Or are they where you were a few years ago? On a practical level, this means getting to know your fellow panelists or the chair well before the event—or vice versa, if you’re the facilitator. That way you’ll be able to respond in a more nuanced and comfortable way during every interaction… and you’ll never worry about mispronouncing anyone’s name.

3. Forget About the Size of the Crowd

This is a tricky one to pull off. If the gathering is small, it’s easy to get in your head: “I must be a loser—only losers attract audiences this small.” First off, a cognitive correction: losers actually don’t attract any crowds. Secondly, your mission is to do the best job you can for those in attendance, no matter how few these number. Not only is that fair to them, but it’s self-serving, too; you never know what can happen if you impress even a single key person. As for a big crowd, that’s of course a nice problem to have. And if you start getting nervous as result, just give yourself the same advice you’d give a child before a recital or school play—some butterflies are okay and natural, so don’t waste energy trying to fight them. Instead, spend your time revisiting some of the other points listed here.

4. Relax and Summarize

Don’t feel you need to give verbal expression to all your great ideas—after all, that’s what your book or other publication is for, isn’t it? You’re not delivering an oral report the way you did in fourth grade, basically presenting every last fact and idea on a given subject that you could find. The audience understands that there’s a print text or Web site that’s informing your talk, so it doesn’t expect you to function like a living, breathing audio book. Feel free to reference outside sources if further elaboration is needed. “There are more details about this on the handout” goes a long way. So does, “If you want to know more about this subject, talk to me afterwards.”

5. Treat Speaking Like Publishing

I don’t mean in terms of presentation or content, but rather how you hold your talk professionally. And that isn’t just a matter of wearing dress shoes instead of sneakers. The idea is to take care of yourself and prep as you would for a deadline. Speaking at a comic convention last year, I felt I was half-awake during my panel and I probably was—because I’d also been up late the night before covering the con as a reporter. Bad mistake. Don’t treat speaking gigs as afterthoughts that you can fit in around your real work: when you’re doing them, they are your real work.

6. Arrive Early and Stay Late

If you don’t, your presentation may not suffer, but you’re missing the full benefits of getting the gig in the first place. The idea is to connect with people, right? So you probably don’t want to fly in the door and then fly out again. With that in mind, don’t even schedule any public speaking during deadline crunch times; that way you can be fully “present” to the engagement itself. Also, the other plus about getting to an event early is that then you’re able to do a tech run-through if that’s a consideration.

7. Err on the Side of Presenting Less Material

This point may seem counterintuitive—after all, shouldn’t one over-plan and then cut material as the clock dictates? Well, unless you’re a master of on-your-feet triage (as many classroom teachers are), such a strategy may lead to disarray on the battlefield. It’s actually easier to pull open the accordion and expand on a handful of points—or let the audience take you somewhere new—then it is to try to cover everything and end up speed-talking. With five minutes left, you really don’t want to be in the position of not having addressed one of your major points. But if you finish five minutes early, you can always start the Q&A that much sooner. Trust me, no one will complain.

In the end, these are tips ‘n techniques that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. They are rules of thumb that both big shots and little shots alike can follow—in fact, following them can help turn the latter into the former.

Posted by: Peter Gutiérrez

Posted by: Lynne Scanlon

Posted by: Lynne Scanlon

Posted by: Sara Dobie

Posted by: Sara Dobie

Posted by: Sara Megibow

Posted by: Sara Megibow

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Posted by: Rudy Shur

Posted by: Victoria Blake

    They say that starting a business takes twice as long as you think it will, and costs twice as much. When I heard this-on NPR, the week before I was going to leave my good, solid editorial job to start Underland Press-I thought, Nah. Not me. I have a plan.
    What was that plan? To start a publishing house with between five to seven titles in the first year. To be distributed by one of the industry heavies. To develop my web site beyond industry boundaries. To only publish what I love, and to love what I am sure I can sell. 
    I love stories that scare me. I like weird things-monsters and magic and characters with nothing to lose. More than anything, I like to be intrigued and entertained. I started Underland Press to bring the best of the world's weird, scary, odd, unsettling and strange stories to life and to light.
    So how's it coming? I left my editorial job in October. In the last five months, I've been to Frankfurt and back, found a lawyer and fired a lawyer, negotiated for five books, read eleven manuscripts, taught myself QuickBooks, opened two bank accounts, designed one cover and three different business cards, had in-depth discussions about the definition of "weird," been yelled at by one agent, and been reduced to tears exactly twice.
Also: I signed a distribution contract with PGW. I bought the rights to three of my five books. My web site is coming along, and I'm about ready to announce something big.
    I might be four months behind where I wanted, but my launch won't take twice as long.
    I might be spending more on my web site than I wanted, but the business won't cost twice as much.
    Plus, I am having a blast.

ForeWord has asked me to blog about my experience starting a genre press. If there's something you're interested in, please ask. Next week, I'm planning to write about the creative vision behind Underland, and what my definition of genre is. I wish I had a web site up for you to go to, but it's taking a little longer than I hoped… Maybe by the time I next post…

Posted by: Victoria Blake

Posted by: Derek Armstrong

Posted by: Derek Armstrong

Book industry numbers are cold-sweat terrifying for publishers and authors alike. According to Nielsen Bookscan, 3,000 books are published per day in the United States alone (as reported on www.deadlyprose.com). ForeWord can review at most a few thousand per year. Publishers report an average of 2,100 submissions per year, totaling 132 million submissions. Just under one percent are accepted for publication.

In the face of these staggering odds, is there any hope for authors and publishers?

The Majority of Books Sell Fewer than 99 Copies
Of the 1.2 million titles tracked by Bookscan in 2006, only 2.1% sold more than 5,000 books, 16.6% sold fewer than 1,000, and a terrifying 79.6% sold fewer than 99 copies. The 99 copies are no doubt the reason only one percent of authors’ submissions make it through the arduous publisher-review process.

This is all the stuff of wake-in-a-sweat nightmares: 63,000 publishers vie for readers with their wonderful author lists (according to Dan Poynter’s ParaPublishing.com).

The terror is no less for authors: only six conglomerate publishers publish fewer and fewer debut authors and less and less fiction. Then the real horror story commences as a book makes it into distribution. The bestseller dreams of authors and publishers are splashed with the cold water of real numbers.

Negative or Naïve?
Am I being negative or naïve? Perhaps both. The naïve part of the equation is my firm belief there are ways to break through these barriers to success. Kunati  was founded with this goal in mind, and has proven it can work.

Heather Shaw touched on one important element of the success formula in her insightful Blog on book covers. When competing with 1.2 million titles, first impressions (impact) and credibility are vital. These are the twin functions of a cover.

What Works for Selling Books?
Websites, book videos and novel trailers, author critique groups, social marketing, author Blog tours, old-fashioned but still-important book signings, and publicity are the proven methods for marketing. I hope to focus on these in future Publisher Insider Blogs in a more how-to format.

Innovation begins with a study of what works. Read every Blog in the ForeWord archive and every article in the magazine. Visit the sites of successful publishers—the innovative publishers who lead with new ideas such as novel trailers, Blog touring, online publicity. (hint, hint, Kunati). Read every page on sites from innovative publishers.

Getting Noticed is the Primary Goal
My message is simple. With these horrifying numbers, being noticed is almost the only thing that matters—for both authors and publishers. Many authors are creative, even brilliant, yet if they can’t market their “author brand” no publisher is interested.

The publisher faces an epic battle analogous to a Tolkien quest to get attention in the marketplace. The publisher must build the authors’ brands, edit the manuscripts for the market, arrange distribution, obtain reviews from magazines (which choose from millions), then sell to wholesalers, retailers and finally readers.

The Retailer
How does a retailer choose which titles to carry? The average retailer chooses to stock a few thousand copies per year, far less than 1% of the titles available—similar in numbers to the reviews published annually by ForeWord. That’s not a coincidence.

Publisher and author success relies on buzz, which is a combination of review exposure, social networking, book cover designs, author activities such as Blogs and signings (the two types of touring, virtual and tangible). The last part of the equation is wonderful content.

Innovative Authors Look Beyond Good Prose
With the knowledge that more than 80% of books published are going to fail, how can a publisher risk taking on new, unproven property? How can an author convince a publisher to take them on?

There are certain musts in an author presentation, and in our evaluation of the author:
• Is the query well-written? An author who doesn’t polish a query until it becomes the choicest morsel of prose ever written has no chance at all.
• Is the idea compelling? Yes, tell us the comparables (claims of being the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter are overused though!), but what’s the UNIQUE aspect—the high concept. No matter how small, there must be one.
• The sample chapters? Same story. If those three chapters aren’t pure masterpiece, the editor will tend to move on.
• Did they read the submission guidelines on the website? One mistake here disqualifies most authors. Take the time to study your prospective publisher.

Innovative Publishers Look Beyond Agents
Unlike many publishers, Kunati accepts un-agented submissions by email. How can we do this, given the awful odds against a new author’s success?

We certainly acquire agented manuscripts, but the creative-process required for an author to pitch a manuscript is clearest sign of ambition, drive and creativity. We believe in the un-agented submission. It allows the author to prove they can develop their author “brand.” Other things we look for:
• Is the author realistic about his/her prospects?
• Is the author able to work with the publisher at making the book as marketable as possible? Considering the numbers, this might be the most important of all.
• These days, we also look for authors who are savvy about online marketing, blogging, MySpace and social marketing, and who are not shy about public appearances. Some writers are notoriously shy, preferring to hide behind their keyboard.

Successfully Marketing Books Require a Publisher-Author Partnership.
The truth is, only bestselling authors receive major publishing support in marketing. A publisher’s first duty is to market to the trade. That’s a big job. Stores stock thousands out of the millions of titles. Just getting the books into distribution is monumental. Trade ads, reviews, advance reading copies, publicity, great book covers, strong web presence, book trailers—these all help. Even the big conglomerate publishers typically stop there. There’s not much in the way of marketing dollars left for end-reader marketing for 90% of authors. Hand-selling from retailers and buzz becomes the key to success.

Hand-selling and Buzz
Book selling is still very much a word-of-mouth business. Readers don’t always respond to what we think they will. Social marketing, in all its aspects, it the true secret of any book’s success. Books can become bestsellers when just one influential person finds it and starts buzzing (Oprah will do.)  Social marketing involves building a broad network of friends.

Ultimately, the true secret to publishing success is a strong partnership between authors and publishers, working together to create buzz. This is a big topic, and the subject of next week’s Blog.

Posted by: Derek Armstrong

So we’re used to it, right? We know what is, and what to expect from, a “NY Times Bestseller” (which is not the same as the NY Times bestseller lists).

A rock critic in my ill-spent youth (East Village Other to NY Times), I am now grooving on the spate of new books about rock icons like Dylan, Clapton, and even Patty Boyd, a beautiful young Brit, born of a dysfunctional family, who grew up to be a model and wife of George Harrison and then Eric Clapton. Wonderful Tonight by Ms. Boyd, is actually a whole lot better than Clapton’s Eric, which is an interminable set of acknowledgments of all the cool people he knew. (hence my title.) However, at a crucial point in Patty’s account of her break-up with George she describes the tension as being the same as “a chop stick about to come apart. Something had to give,” she writes.

Help! Did an editor ever read this? Not that Patty should be treated like Raymond Carver, but shouldn’t someone have asked for a better metaphor?

Of course, it is completely unfair to tar all editors with this brush. And I recommend, if you can, being a fly on the wall at an editorial meeting. It’s a fascinating dynamic to watch.

But, it does beg the question: what is a publisher? A few years ago, Peter Jovanovich, scion of Jovanich Publishers, told me that a publishing house is “a bank with an editorial department attached.” After all publishers haven’t printed, manufactured, distributed or sold books for nigh on to a long time. And if they are no longer really editing them, then what are they? Just a bank?

Enter the Internet, which is changing the equation quite fundamentally. As other publishing blogs have been feverishly discussing, and as I will attempt to demonstrate at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference next month in NYC, bringing content to customers is essentially a “service” in which an increasingly customized and customizable product (often self-published by the author) is embedded.

Two examples of the dawn of this service function are author sites, for example:
http://www.harpercollins.com/author/index.aspx?authorID=17367 and http://www.oreilly.com/authors/

But then Tim O’Reilly foresaw this direction in a 1995 paper.  

Which just goes to show that things that appear to be suddenly “right on the brink of change,” were probably there for a while. They were just hard to see.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg