Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

Read:
How will we read in 50 years? Nobody really knows, and that in itself is crazy exciting. The publishing world could be a very different place in 50 (or even 10) years, and we can either run shrieking into the woods to escape it, or read too many trend pieces about it. Guess what I choose.

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The Economist jumped on the prognostication bandwagon this week with its new essay:  The Future of the Book. Every time I see one of these “What will happen to the book?” essays, I sigh. I desperately want them to have answers, or new data, or something to cling to. But nobody has answers, and I should know that by now. But I always read these essays anyway, if only because I can usually find one or two insights that are interesting. Here’s what struck my fancy in this essay:

Unbundling and crowdfunding: The essay mentioned the idea of unbundling the services that publishers provide and offering, for instance, an a la carte menu for authors. It also mentions the recent rise in crowdfunding and the efficiencies of securing sales for a book before it is even created. (We’re already close to this anyway with preorder campaigns, which seek to secure sales before the book is officially available and which are becoming more and more important each year.) The potential of both unbundling and crowdfunding fascinate me.

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8 Ways to Boost Your Amazon Author Ranking

by Maria
how to boost amazon ranking
how to boost amazon ranking

Today I’m excited to share a guest post written by the fabulous Christine Dore! Christine is an editor at a Boston-based publishing house, and she focuses her list on creative nonfiction. We’re lucky to have her on the blog today, sharing some insider tricks that can help your book shoot up the Amazon rankings. 

Amazon Tips for Authors – Or: How to Tame the Amazon Beast

In the timeline that is book publishing—and book selling—the ecommerce beast known as Amazon (some view this creature as fuzzy and loveable, others not so much) is a completely new phenomenon. Both Amazon itself and book providers are constantly learning and adjusting how we use this new retail giant to it’s fullest potential. Here are a few tips and tricks to help your title make its way up the Amazon algorithm and into your readers’ e-carts:

1. Preorders. Preorders. Preorders. If you haven’t heard this word yet from your editor, you will. Use any and all means of mass communication—social media, your blog or website, any regular writing gigs you may have—to push preorders of your book. The more people that preorder your book on Amazon, the higher the initial order Amazon will place for your book. This trend trickles down to other outlets as well, as they tend to follow suit to what Amazon is putting their money behind.

2. Encourage pageviews. The more people that look at your listing page, the higher it pops up on searches for your topic or genre. Even asking your family or blog readers to look up your book on Amazon every day for a week will affect its ranking. The Amazon system is run by a computer; it doesn’t know or care who’s looking at it–it just notices that people are and reacts accordingly.

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The Upside of the Dreaded Track Record

by Maria

Books

Ah, the track record. One of the must brutal realities of publishing.

An author’s track record is essentially their sales record—how many copies they’ve sold of their books. This number used to be completely inaccessible, and only an author, agent, and publisher would know how many copies a book had really sold. But with the launch of Bookscan in 2001, anyone who subscribes to that service can look up the sales figure for any book and any author. This is both a terrible thing and an excellent thing.

Let’s start with the excellent:
So you’ve published a book, and you worked long and hard to make it incredible, and then you worked even longer and even harder to tell the world that it exists. And hey, people bought it! Lots of people. Now you’re in a very enviable position—you have proven to publishers that you know how to make a book successful and that you’re an author worth investing in. You are golden.

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Read, Eat, Drink–Weekend Roundup

by Maria

Read:
I opened up my email this morning to see that Seth Godin is launching a new book, sans traditional publisher.

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And I really want a copy. Here’s why:

Seth is the ultimate new-wave marketing guru. I’m taking his marketing class on Skillshare, and it’s fascinating. But what got me really excited about the announcement of his new book is the approach he’s taking to marketing it. Instead of working within the traditional top-down framework of getting a book from author to publisher to retailer to reader, he’s selling direct to the readership he’s built through his blog.

And he’s doing a very smart thing—incentivizing people to buy a 3-pack of the book at a discount, so that they can share it with others. He’s calling this horizontal distribution (which is similar to word-of-mouth) and hoping that person-to-person sharing will be enough to make his ideas, and his book, go viral.

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