A Fit of Well-Intentioned Lunacy

25 May

As you should have gathered by now, I spend the vast majority of my days with my arse firmly affixed to a seating device of some sort, as implied by my bio line “She divides her time between her desk and the sofa.” It’s true, I do. Almost exclusively. If I came with my own tagline, it would be that wonderful Mark Twain quote, “Every time I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away.” Although I am usually already lying down when the urge occurs, or pretty much slumped, anyway. BUT… for the last few weeks, I’ve been—quite literally—drinking the Kool-Aid of this healthy shake company thing (who shall remain nameless but chances are, you’ve heard of it) and thanks to not being constantly on a sugar high or a sugar come-down, but instead actually feeling quite energetic and normal, I’ve decided to let the sofa cushion regain its original shape.

(Me getting off it, if that wasn’t clear.)

At first I was all, oh, I’m going to do the treadmill every morning. Yeah, that happened. NOT. It didn’t happen the last 4,283 times I swore I was going to start exercising every morning, so why would it happen now?

Then I got a better idea. A much better idea.

On May 26th—tomorrow—several hundred people will walk a 20k route through Cork City underneath the stars. The Cork Lunar Walk 2012  is a sponsored charity event in aid of Diabetes Ireland, and I’m taking part.

Yes, me.

Please consider sponsoring me. Every $1/£1/€1 counts, and will be much appreciated.

I promise a red-faced, make-up free pic of me at the finish line at 3 a.m. if I reach my fundraising target.

I mean, come on. Who could resist that deal? ;-D

Wait Until You Hear THIS! The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey

24 May

Well today’s the day: after sitting on my copy of the Taleist Self-Publishing Survey for the best part of a week, I can finally share some of the juiciest bits with you and we can all get on with the business of discussing them. Hooray!

The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey, if you don’t know, was conducted in February by Steven Lewis (of Taleist) and Dave Cornford, and asked more than 1,000 self-publishers (including me!) 61 questions related to their self-publishing experience. With such a sizable pool of respondents, this is the first time we can really get an accurate snapshot of what the self-publishing world is looking like in 2012—something that’s extremely difficult to do when most of us are inside our little self-pubbed bubbles, clueless as to how well (or not) our peers are doing, and why they’re doing so well if they are. As Steven and Dave say:

We designed the survey to answer what we saw as some of the most common questions self-publishers have. “How am I doing?” is probably the biggest of  these questions, but it’s not been an easy one to answer, as there is little information available about average sales and earnings. The majority of the information out there is about the outliers, whose success is inspiring, but as we can now confirm, bears scant resemblance to the experience of most authors. Our aim was to give authors outside the Kindle Million Club some data against which to benchmark themselves. 

You can read the survey results yourself by buying a copy, but here are some findings that I’ve personally found intriguing.

Who is self-publishing?

From the outside, I bet it seems that hordes of people are suddenly dropping everything to sit down and write something longer than an e-mail for the first time in their lives, in the hope that by uploading it to KDP on Monday morning, they’ll be upgrading their car by Friday afternoon. When I first self-published two years ago, there was definitely a large sub-section of the self-publishing world dedicated to doing just this—and for people like myself who had dreamed of nothing but publication their entire lives, we died a little bit inside every time we heard of another Get Rich Quick Self-Publisher who couldn’t name the last book they’d read. But as time’s gone by, I’ve been encountering fewer and fewer of these types of self-publishers—and the results of the Taleist survey suggest that the majority of self-publishers are serious about their writing. 40% of respondents said they’d been writing seriously for more than 10 years, while 60% said they’d been at it for more than 5 years. Only 1 in 10 said they’d been writing seriously for less than a year.

Is self-publishing what comes after rejection?

Here’s what’s interesting though: respondents who’d had their work rejected by traditional publishing and then opted to self-publish it were among the lowest earners. Conclusion: if traditional publishing said it was bad (as opposed to not good enough, no market, bad timing, etc.), it probably was, and self-publishing it didn’t make it any better. But here’s where it gets a tad confusing: self-publishers who went straight to publication without submitting their work to traditional publishers earned 2.5 times more than those who submitted it and got rejected. What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure. Maybe those self-publishers had been published before, or had got other feedback that led them to believe—to know—that their books were good. But surely there’s a few in there that would’ve been rejected had they been submitted, so does that mean that ignorance is bliss? (Please, say it ain’t so.) Or maybe it reflects what happens with the majority of a self-published author’s books. For example, I submitted Mousetrapped all over town, but I knew I was self-publishing Backpacked before I even started writing it. Now I have work that I intend to submit, and work I know I’ll self-publish. They’re not the same thing.

Rejection isn’t all bad though. 32% of the “Top Earners” (the respondents who said they could live off their royalties) tried and failed to get a traditional publishing deal before self-publishing, but now make a living from selling their work.

Click here for more Taleist Self-Publishing Survey videos.

Does spending money make money?

In a word, yes. This was the most interesting part of the survey results for me–and of course it’s confirmation of what I’ve been saying all along, which is that every self-publisher needs to hire professional help, especially in areas such as cover design and copyediting/proofreading. But now here is proof that in doing so, you not only help the self-publishing side as a whole, but you actually help yourself as well, because you’ll sell more books and so earn more money from them. Respondents who hired help for things like story-editing, copyediting and proofreading earned on average 13% more than those who didn’t. Hiring a professional cover designer earned them on average 18% more. But not all paid-for services equalled a significant crease in earnings. Self-publishers who hired professional e-book formatters (i.e. those who return a completed e-book in .mobi or .epub format, not a MS Word document) only saw average earnings of 1% more. This is great news for me, because hiring someone else to build my e-books–as opposed to fixing the MS Word documents myself and then uploading them to get automatically converted by KDP and Smashwords—is something I’ve so far refused to do.

The message seems to be getting through about the importance of cover design, with 41% of respondents paying for help in that area. (A shocking 49% did it themselves.) But proofreading—the bare minimum a book should get before publication—isn’t faring so well, with only 29% of self-publishers hiring someone to do it. What’s also interesting is that generally-speaking, more self-publishers were willing to pay for professional help on their next book, even if they hadn’t done so on their last. Maybe acidic Amazon customer reviews has something to do with that…?

How much money are self-publishers spending? To get their books to market, respondents said they had spent, on average, $685 on direct costs (which seems a bit low to me; I’d say you’d want a budget of $1,000, minimum). But 54% of authors had already recouped their costs and if sales continued at their present rate, 68% could be expected to be “in the black” within 12 months of publication.

How much money are they making? The average respondent said they were earning around $10,000 a year from self-publishing.

What are the most successful self-publishers doing differently?

Of 1,007 responses to the Taleist self-publishing survey, 97 self-publishers said they could live off their earnings. These became the survey’s “Top Earners” and the insights we have into what they do differently are utterly fascinating. I’ve picked two practical things they do that we can do too: spend more time writing, and make more of an effort to actively seek reviews.

This is the result that stopped me in my tracks: the average Top Earner spent 69% more time writing than the average author outside of the Top Earners group—2,047 words per day as opposed to 1,557 words. Now you might argue that (i) they can do that, because they’re already living off their earnings and (ii) with Top Earners generally having multiple titles, maybe they’re just cranking them out. But it ain’t so: Top Earners aren’t just writing more, they’re spending more time doing it. They write on average a third more words than their non-Top Earning counterparts, but they also spend an average of 24% more time on those words. 

What makes their books sell better than everyone else’s? Reviews, it seems. Top Earners had almost four times as many reviews for their most recent book than authors outside of the group, and those books were earning those Top Earners six times as much revenue—and these books had only been on the market for an average of six short months. (Jealous? Me too!) But it gets even better for the Top Earners as time goes on. Read this bit very carefully: for those who reported the figures for their second most recent book, the Top Earners still had about the same amount of reviews—about four times as many—but the revenue gap rose to fourteen times the income of other author’s second most recent books, which had been on the market for about 14 months.

The most effective single tactic, however, was the least used: submitting to popular reviewers on Amazon. Authors who used this strategy received 25% more reviews than average, and more importantly, 32% more revenue for their latest release. Clearly this is a successful strategy, but I’m not sure how I’d go about implementing it. How do you contact Amazon Top Reviewers? Wouldn’t cold-emailing them be considered spamming? What do you think?

Finally, the Top Earners group spent more time writing than they did marketing, and those in the group who spent the least time marketing were making the most money. This might be a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, as surely if you’re already selling oodles of books, you don’t need to spend as much time marketing. But overall, out of all respondents, those who spent the most time marketing earned the least. So clearly, spending more time writing better books is a fair better use of your time than trying to sell them.

The survey’s subtitle says it all: not a gold rush. The majority of self-publishers have been dreaming of publication long before the Kindle was a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’ eye, and don’t view this as a get-rich-quick scheme. The self-publishers who do best spend most of their time writing, and invest money in their self-published books. Seeking out Top Reviewers on Amazon is the most effective strategy for increasing your sales, but it’s the least popular method used by self-publishers. (If you’re an Amazon Top Reviewer, I’d recommend you brace yourself for an onslaught of new review requests over the next few days…) And it’s better, apparently, to skip submitting to agents and editors altogether—but if someone says no, you should listen to them.

All in all, a fascinating insight into the world of self-published authors—and that’s just a handful of findings I chose to highlight here. You can purchase the full survey in e-book. Visit Taleist for more information.

NB: Kindly spare me your thoughts on how all three members of your writing group loving your work is a greater achievement to you than earning money from your work. The only success this kind of survey can measure is financial.

Tags: , ,

CreateSpace in Europe

22 May

Things have been hectic around Catherine HQ over the last few days, and so when people started saying to me “Great news about CreateSpace and Europe, right?” I didn’t really have time to go and check if it was good news. I presumed it must be, because up until now, paying for CreateSpace’s expanded distribution channel upgrade did not guarantee that your book would appear on Amazon.co.uk which, for self-publishers on my side of the Atlantic, was very important indeed.

So if CreateSpace was now saying that your paperback would appear on Amazon.co.uk (and Amazon.de, and Amazon.fr, and Amazon.etc) in the same way it would on Amazon.com—automatically, and only a week or so after you published—that would be A Very Good Thing.

Which it is.

But now that I’ve had a chance to go investigate, I’ve realized that it’s even better that that.

No More EDC Lottery

Up until now, using CreateSpace only guaranteed that your POD paperback would appear for sale on Amazon.com. It might show up on Amazon.co.uk (and other international Amazons) but if it did, it could take anywhere from a couple of weeks (as it did with Mousetrapped in March 2010) to a few months (as with Self-Printed a year later), or it might never appear at all— or appear and disappear at will (as with Backpacked). If you were lucky, you got the next best thing: a third party seller flogging your book on Amazon instead. But that would mean that your book was unlikely to qualify for Super Saver Delivery, or ever be discounted. In short, it was a bad deal and the alternative, i.e. directing people to buy your book from Amazon.com, would mean higher shipping costs and a longer wait for your customers.

Now CreateSpace is saying that international Amazons are going to be just like Amazon.com: publish, and you’ll be on there. For free, as part of their publishing service. And on the same time schedule, which is 5-7 days. You don’t even have to upgrade to the EDC. (Now, that’ll just be for getting on the likes of Barnes and Noble, I presume.)

So, yay for guaranteed availability!

More Money

This is what I didn’t realize until I went onto CreateSpace to find out for myself what had changed: this means more money.

Flashback to a year ago. I’m selling Mousetrapped, a 232-page paperback in a 5.5 x 8.5 trim size, and I’ve paid a one-time fee of $39 to upgrade to CreateSpace’s “ProPlan” which gives me cheaper unit costs and enrolls me in their Expanded Distribution Channel, or EDC. If I sell a copy on Amazon.com, I pocket around $4.52. If I sell a copy through the EDC, I make around $1.53. And because every online retail site except Amazon.com falls under this EDC umbrella, I only make $1.53 from paperback sales on Amazon.co.uk.

Now that the international Amazons are on a par with Amazon.com and have been taken out of the EDC, there’s a lot more money to be made from paperback sales there—and I don’t have to pay for any ProPlan to avail of it.

More Information

There’s yet another bonus to this whole CreateSpace Europe thing: more information. Up until now, you could only find out how many books you’d sold through Amazon.com and how many books you’d sold through the EDC. You had no idea if those EDC sales were from B&N, other Amazons or a guy with a trunk full of books. (Well, you could probably guess it wasn’t the last one…) But now you’ll know—or at least know more, because your sales will be divided into Amazon.com, Amazon Europe and EDC. Furthermore, your payments will be divided into dollars (Amazon.com + the EDC), British Pounds (Amazon.co.uk) and Euro (Amazon.de, Amazon.it, Amazon.fr and Amazon.es), so it should be fairly easy to figure out where your paperback sales are coming from.

The Downsides

This leads me on to the one real downside of this I can see: separate cheques. Right now if you publish on KDP Select, you receive three different cheques: one in dollars, one in pounds and one in euro. That’s all well and good, but in order to get them, you have to reach the minimum threshold for them, which I believe is a hundred apiece. Up until now, you only ever received one cheque from CreateSpace and it was in dollars. Now, you’ll have to wait to meet that $100/£100/€100 threshold before you receive the cheques, so chances are you’ll be waiting longer to get paid.

The other sorta downside is shipping charges. According to the CS website, if I order stock of my own book, they’re still being shipped from the US and still costing me a small fortune to get to my house ($112 at economy/6 weeks speed for 100 books). That’s approximately a third of what the books themselves would be costing me. But fingers crossed, that’ll get sorted out eventually…

Come Join the Party

If you have titles already for sale through CreateSpace, they won’t be entered into the Amazon Europe channel automatically. You need to do a few things:

  1. Log on to CreateSpace and update your royalty profile information
  2. Go into each title and manually open the Amazon Europe channel
  3. Select your prices: automatic conversions (as with Kindle books) or set your own GBP and EUR prices.

I did this just after midnight yesterday, and this morning I already have a few euro and a few pounds in my CreateSpace kitty. Also yesterday, Backpacked‘s paperback was showing “out of stock” on Amazon.co.uk, but now it’s in stock and reflecting my new end-in-99p price. So the switch-over must take effect as soon as you do it on your account.

Now that’s customer service for you.

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: I LOVE CreateSpace.

(And isn’t it nice to be talking about actual books for once?!)

Thanks to Sally Clements for alerting me about this!

Tags: , , , ,

Don’t You Forget About Me

22 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. First, I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’m presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I’ve managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years. You can catch up here. 

[Apologies for the lateness of this post. I wrote it on Friday morning, lost half of it thanks to a silly mistake on my part and then didn't have a chance until now to re-do it. Still, better late than never, eh?]

Oh, happy day: you’re selling books. A few of them, at least. But now that you’ve done the whole launching your book thing and you’ve made sure that no one could possibly escape your Amazon listing without being convinced to click that “Buy” button, what’s next? Personally I think you should have two goals from here on in:

  1. To do something everyday that informs at least one more person of your existence
  2. To aim to get every reader who encounters your book first to come join your online platform afterwards. 

From Book to Blog

If we have achieved our goal of getting Amazon to practically sell our books for us (and especially if we’re using things like KDP Select), chances are that most new readers will never meet us (as in, our blog or tweets) before they read our book. But wouldn’t it be nice to have them around the next time we release a book? So encourage readers who only know your book to come visit your blog afterwards. Put a URL at the beginning and end of your book. Maybe put some extra material on your website (photos, an extra story, a story about writing the book) and link to it after “THE END” so the reader has a reason to visit. Ask them to tweet you as they’re reading the book, or to say hi to you on Goodreads (Facebook for books; join if you haven’t already) after they leave their review. The beauty of e-books is that the links can be live, so all the reader has to do is click.

From Blog to Book

We know that only a fraction of our blog readers will end up buying our book, but they can’t do it if they don’t know about it, right? So a few cover shots in the sidebar and a page dedicated to your literary offerings is a must.

Can I just say this though? STOP WITH THE POP-UPS. My pet hate is visiting a website and having a big thing (I don’t know the technical term; let’s use thing) popping up and blocking my view of it. This thing is usually an advertisement for something that I have to enter my e-mail address to get, and the only way to get rid of it is to find the tiny “x” that closes it in the top right-hand corner. I understand the theory: no one visiting the website is going to miss it. But here’s the practice: my computer is on its last legs and my broadband is slow at the best of times. This thing makes loading your website even longer, and I don’t have the patience. So I either (i) add you to Google Reader so I never visit your site again—which means I never see any of the stuff in your sidebar, etc. or (ii) I don’t bother at all, and never visit in any way, shape or form again. It’s like when hotels cover the desk space with a load of stuff: guest directory, stationery, magazines, etc. It looks nice and seems sensible in theory, but what is the guest going to have to do when they arrive? Find somewhere else to put it so they can actually use the desk. Next time you’re considering adding a “welcome” pop-up window, think of your visitors. Please.

E-mail = Cockroach

When I was a teenager, everyone I knew was on Bebo. Was on what? you say. Exactly. There was also a time when everyone was on MySpace which, with its flashing HTML LCD trip design, is probably why so many people I know of my generation are getting glasses these days, myself included. Yes, it’s hard to imagine a world where Twitter and Facebook have fallen by the wayside, but it could happen. And just like a cockroach surviving a nuclear winter, the only thing we can be certain of surviving the downfall of today’s social networks is e-mail. Regardless of what happens, I’m pretty sure that ten years from now, I’ll still have an e-mail address.

So it doesn’t hurt to have a mailing list where readers can sign up to be informed of your next release. I recommend MailChimp, which is free to use if a bit tricky to navigate. Invite people to sign up and then send out maybe 3-4 newsletters a year. To see how its done, sign up for crime writer Karin Slaughter’s newsletter. (Trust me on this.)

Bonus Material

A year and a half passed between the release of Mousetrapped and its sequel, Backpacked, as I hummed and haahed about whether or not to self-publish another book. But I didn’t want all my readers to forget about me in the meantime, so I came up with a plan: More Mousetrapped.

The idea was simple. I’d spent a year and a half in Orlando, but I hadn’t written about every last moment of it in Mousetrapped, because it would have been about 500 pages long. I had a few stories—incidents, really—that I could’ve added, but didn’t because it would’ve been too long and they in themselves wouldn’t have warranted a chapter. So instead, I started a mailing list, and once a month I’d send one of these newly-written, exclusive stories to everyone on the mailing list. I put a link at the end of the e-book so if readers wanted more, they knew where to go to get it. And of course, when Backpacked came out, I was able to tell this list about it.

I don’t do this anymore, but next month I’m going to take the More Mousetrapped stories, bundle them with some other previously unpublished Mousetrapped-related stuff and offer it as a 99c “bonus material” e-book. This will also extend my “shelf space” on Amazon, making it slightly easier for people to discover me.

Yes, that is the sound of me patting myself on the back…

Think Outside the Box (Or Off the Page)

The beauty of self-publishing (and especially self-publishing e-books) are the many different ways you can use it to your advantage—ways that publishing print books confined to a specific price range just don’t allow. Here are some ideas I’ve had, some already done and some coming soon:

  • As I mentioned above, I’m going to take the More Mousetrapped stories subscribers received last year, bundle them with some other previously unpublished Mousetrapped stuff and release it as a 99c e-book.
  • When I published Self-Printed, I took three main sections out of it—Publishing an E-book, Publishing a POD Paperback and Building an Online Platform—and released them as $1.99 e-books I called Self-Printed Shorts. (The full book was $4.99.)
  • In the next few weeks I’ll be releasing a 99c e-book of all my self-publishing themed blog posts called The Best of Catherine, Caffeinated: Caffeine-Infused Self-Publishing Advice. I’m going to do KDP Select right off that bat so readers of this blog can get it for free. After that, who knows? Having the book on Amazon might bring me blog readers and as the content in Self-Printed is also totally different, maybe even throw a few sales that way as well.

I’ve even played around with POD paperbacks although, cost-wise, I wouldn’t recommend it. I sold signed copies of Backpacked from my website when it was first released, and every pre-order also received this adorable little preview of Results Not Typical.

Paid Advertising

Other than a test run with Facebook ads that had a budget of $15, I’ve never paid to advertise my book, but I’m seriously considering doing it in the run up to next Christmas (the time of the year when the majority of books are sold). If it’s targeted paid advertising, I think it has a chance of boosting your sales.

Don’t just pay to stick a cover of your book up somewhere. Get strategic. Facebook ads, I found, were a waste of time, because people are not on Facebook because of books. But that’s the only reason why they’re on Goodreads, and Goodreads operates a similar pay-by-click advertising service. (Have you used it? Let us know in the comments how you got on.) I know a lot of authors who’ve had success with a Kindle Nation Daily sponsorship, and then there’s genre-specific blogs and book review sites who offer banner and sidebar advertisements.

Just do your research and make sure advertising is a worthwhile investment before you hand over the cash.

Be Useful

I don’t want to destroy your faith in humanity, but our number one priority is always ourselves. Subconsciously or otherwise, we’re always asking, what’s in this for me? So if you want your blog (and, by extension, our books) to be successful, make yourself useful. The most popular blog posts on this site are all instructional, all posts that help other people self-publish. I really enjoy writing them, and people enjoy finding the information they need. We’re all winners.

Perhaps you don’t have this type of blog, and you can’t—or don’t want to—write posts like that. That’s fine. But make sure what you’re writing aren’t diary entries. Make sure there’s something in there for other people. Write with the door open, as Stephen King says. Make sure you’re ticking one or more of the “Why Everyone is On The Internet” boxes: information, entertainment, connection. And make sure you’re doing it with practically every post.

Diaries are for you. Blogs are for everyone else.

Another Book

And what to do next when you’ve done all that? Write another book, of course!

So to recap, my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books (very basically) involves:

  1. Building an online platform—a blog as your hub, Twitter to make connections and drive traffic, Facebook because you might as well (and it’s a good way to rope in your friends and family)
  2. Slowly but surely—and without any spammy Jedi mind tricks—assemble a band of loyal supporters, some of whom might even buy your book just as soon as it comes out
  3. Getting these loyal supporters excited about your book by blogging about it and involving them in the process (e.g. get them to help you decide on a cover, etc.)
  4. Making all your online homes party central for the week of the book’s release.
  5. Maximizing your presence on Amazon by using Amazon Author Central to dress up your listing, etc.
  6. Continuing to produce quality content (that either provides information, entertains or makes a connection) and never forgetting about the guy or gal who’s been reading your blog since day one and will never ever ever buy a book of yours, i.e. keeping up your end of the bargain
  7. Think outside the box (or off the page)
  8. Get started on writing your next book.
Get it by e-mail by subscribing to this blog or follow me on Twitter (@cathryanhoward) for links. 

Selling Self-Published Books: The Amazing Amazon

17 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. Last week I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’m presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I’ve managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years. You can catch up here. 

In Newly Self-Published Book World, everything is going to plan. We’ve built an online platform, make some blogging and tweeting friends and launched our book in a week of virtual celebrations—and all without annoying the guy who has been reading our blog posts from day one only because he enjoys cyber-stalking us. (Although come to think of it, it might be alright to annoy him.) You’ve done an awful lot of work already, but the real slog is only just beginning. Because now you have to keep the momentum going. Now you have to make sure your book can tread water for long enough that its head always stays above the water line on Amazon, instead of sinking down into the black depths of the abyss where not even the most determined Kindle owner will ever find it.

The Amazing Amazon

Very few self-publishers manage to sell books without focusing on Amazon, and fewer still manage to sell books without relying on Amazon at all. (I can only think of one self-publisher who’s been a success on Smashwords alone.) Now some self-pubbers get their knickers all in a twist about getting into bed with such a capitalistic juggernaut of a corporation, but if you don’t like it, don’t do it. But really don’t do it. At all. If you hate Amazon and like to blame them for crushing brick-and-mortar bookstores, complain about them making oodles of cash off you, the poor writer, and believe that when the four horsemen of the Apocalypse appear, they’ll arrive packed in an Amazon-branded brown box, then don’t self-publish your book with them. It gives me a pain in my eyeballs when self-publishers moan about the company who has allowed them to sell their work on the biggest online book store on the planet, promptly sends them the proceeds by cheque once a month and, in some cases (including my own) enables them to make a living without leaving the house. Without even getting dressed, some days.

(Okay, most days.)

It’s either complain and don’t publish, or publish. This isn’t a pick ‘n’ mix. And anyway chances are those knickers you’re getting in a twist have a corporate logo’s label sewn into the back of them, unless you made them yourself.

(Ew.)

So quit your whining and let’s get to work.

All Roads Lead to Amazon

The aim is to send everyone who wants to buy your book to Amazon, because here, if a tree falls in the woods it always makes a sound. A sale increases your visibility on the site, which increases the chances of someone else discovering it, which increases the chances of another sale. A sale leads to a sale, if you’re lucky.

This is easy to do: make every link to a place where your book is for sale a link to Amazon. If you have a list of places, for instance, where you can buy the e-book versions of your books, list all the Amazon sites first. If someone wants to buy your paperback, encourage them to go to Amazon—not your CreateSpace e-store, or Lulu’s website. If you want to be really strict about it, don’t order any stock to sell to family and friends and get them to buy your book online instead. But only on Amazon, naturally.

My Amazon Author page.

Get an Author Page

Go to authorcentral.amazon.com and sign up for an Amazon Author account. Then go to authorcentral.amazon.co.uk and do the same there. An Amazon Author page is essentially a page of your own on Amazon where you have an opportunity to share some information about yourself, add a feed to your blog and Twitter account, list upcoming events and even upload videos and photos. It also gives the customer somewhere to go where they can see all your books listed together.

Which is great. But that’s not the real reason we’re signing up for Amazon Author Central.

The product listing for In the Woods by Tana French. Yes, the reviews are great, but what’s the book about? The blurb is buried towards the end. Click to see a larger image.

Maximize Your Listing

A few months ago I attended a talk by an editor of literary fiction and during it, she shared her thoughts on self-publishing. One of the things she recommended self-publishers to do is to hire a professional copywriter to prepare their “blurb text” for them, i.e. the description that goes on the back of your book and, subsequently, appears on your Amazon listing. She said that once that had been entered it couldn’t be changed, and that it went out to every catalogue, online retailers, etc. and remained the first thing the potential reader read about that book forever more. She said that as it often had to be done well in advance and sometimes even before the book was completely finished, it was the most difficult aspect of publishing a book to get exactly right.

Listening to this, I could barely keep the grin off my face. Because I knew that, on Amazon at least, you can change this information whenever you want, however often you want. And you can add stuff to it. And you can even put in some formatting. Because through your Amazon Author Central account, you can add to, subtract from and endlessly update your product listing.

This is an area where—for once!—I’m going to call out traditional publishing for getting it wrong. It’s easy to see why they get it wrong: they have hundreds if not thousands of authors to worry about, whereas the self-publisher can devote as much time as they’d like to fine-tuning all aspects of their own books. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that this, along with things like release schedule and pricing, is where you, the self-publisher, has the edge. You can make your listing stand out, and make it look better than its traditionally published peers.

My Backpacked listing, after I used Author Central to spruce it up. Click for larger.

Through Author Central, you can:

  • Edit your product description (the blurb). You have a lot of space for this, I think 4,000 characters, but don’t be tempted to use it all. Or even use half of it. A short, snappy description of no more than 300 words is ideal. You can also use italics and bold formatting, which you can’t do when you’re entering this stuff from the back end in KDP or CreateSpace. Use sparingly, but definitely use.
  • Add editorial reviews. These are extracts from reviews written by trusted sources, e.g. bestselling authors, respected individuals in their field (for non-fiction) and book review sites and book bloggers. DO NOT put quotes from Amazon customer reviews here; they mean nothing and make you look like an amateur.
  • Add an “About the Author.”
  • Add a “From the Author.” This can be a little spiel about why you wrote the book, or what makes you a good person to write it (for non-fiction).

Editorial reviews and my About the Author on Backpacked‘s listing. Click for larger.

Seeing Other People

Next week I’ll be posting about KDP Select, which enrolls your book in the Kindle Owners Lending Library and lets you promote your book as free for up to five days out of every ninety. To do this, you have to give your e-book exclusively to Amazon for the whole ninety days. You can’t even have a PDF download from your own website, and of course Smashwords is out.

It’s not a good idea to put all your eggs in Amazon’s basket, but I think doing it for a short space of time is okay and might actually be beneficial in the long run. I’m releasing my next book in November, and this is my plan for it:

  • Exclusive to Amazon for 3 months so I can enroll in KDP Select. I’m thinking I might offer it as free for the first 3 days of its life, so my blog readers, Twitter followers, newsletter subscribers, etc.—who’ll be the first to hear about it—will get a chance to read it for free in exchange for putting up with me for all this time. Also it’ll be my third travel memoir, the third in the series, so the 3 days ties in. Clever, eh?
  • It will only be available in e-book for those same three months, or until the end of January 2013-ish if I’m releasing in November. Think of the e-book like the hardback; it’s main purpose is to build momentum that will hopefully translate into sales when the paperback comes out later. Also I’ll have a few paychecks from the e-book before I have to pay for things like a full paperback cover, proof copies, etc.
  • At the end of the ninety days exclusivity with Amazon, I’ll upload the books to Smashwords for full distribution and release the paperback.

(NB: Of course on other online retailers like Barnes and Noble and iBooks, there is also an argument for sales leading to more sales. But it is much easier to do it on Amazon, where—for now, anyway—the majority of e-book readers are browsing for their next buy. And you have Amazon Author Central to help enhance your listing, which you don’t have on the other sites. And you have KDP Select. So for a starting off point on this selling books adventure, you can’t make a better friend than Bezos.)

In order to blog about KDP Select next week, I’ve been experimenting with it this week and last. Today my novel Results Not Typical, goes free on all Kindle stores for five days. Download it, tell your friends, etc. etc. It’s a satire about an evil slimming company and what happens to them when one of their prototypes goes missing. Let’s just say I’ve done plenty of research. And it comes with a Backpacked preview. Download it from Amazon.com here and from Amazon.co.uk here.

Tomorrow: things like paid advertising, bonus material and mailing lists. Basically all the things that will have you tugging on the pants leg of the person who just finished one of your books, wailing “Don’t forget about me, okay?”.

UPDATE: Due to a technical issue, by “tomorrow” I mean Saturday evening. And by “technical issue” I mean “I lost the blog post after re-instating the wrong revision and don’t have time to re-do it until I settle down to watch The Voice on Saturday evening.”

Get it by e-mail by subscribing to this blog or follow me on Twitter (@cathryanhoward) for links. 

Launching Your Book Online

16 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. Last week I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’m presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I’ve managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years. You can catch up here. 

So in Step 1 you assembled your online infrastructure—blog, Twitter, Facebook fan page—and in Step 2, hopefully found a little corner of the internet that likes you and wants to hear more of what you’ve got to say. You have built an online platform. Hooray!

Now we’re going to share news of our upcoming book with the people who visit that online platform, but we’re going to very careful to (i) not piss anyone off, (ii) not to come across like a shameless self-promoter and (iii) keep up our end of the bargain at all times, regardless of what happens with our book. It’s time to launch our book online.

This.

What’s Our Aim Here?

Yesterday we talked about starting a blog, Twitter page, etc. under the heading “Find Your First Readers.” The idea is this: to assemble a group of supporters who, when our book comes out, will be among the first to buy it. Hopefully this group will then spread the word by reviewing our book online, telling their friends, etc. They’re going to help us give our book a good start in printed (or coded) life.

We’re not talking about hundreds or thousands of people. (Although that would be nice—chance would be a fine thing.) We merely want to ensure that when we release our book, people we are not related to and have never met in real life will be waiting to buy it, and buy it because they like our writing and/or are interested in the book’s subject matter—and like our writing and/or are interested in the subject matter because we got them liking our writing (through posts, tweets, etc.) and gave them reasons to be interested (through book-related content, which we’ll get to in a sec). 

For example when I first released Mousetrapped, I sold about 100 paperback copies in the first month. (My focus wasn’t yet on e-books.) At my real-life book launch which was not attended by a single person I wasn’t related to or friends with, I sold 38 copies of my book. So who bought the other 62?

  • People who’d been reading my blog for the past few months and liked my writing style
  • People who’d been reading my blog for the past few months and thought Mousetrapped sounded interesting
  • People who’d been reading my blog for the past few months and wanted to see how my book had turned out, perhaps because they were considering self-publishing too and wanted to gauge the quality of the finished product
  • As above, but with Twitter
  • As above, but with Facebook
  • Followers of blogs whose owners had been kind enough to host me for a guest post or giveaway
  • Followers of book blogs whose owners had been kind enough to review my book.

Now let’s address three very important points before we go any further. The first one is that you have to give your blog value. A blog that exists just to advertise books is an empty shell, and not a blog at all but a mere advertisement masquerading as something else, like those stupid “advertorials” you see in magazines these days. (Do they really think we’re that stupid? Please.) It won’t succeed in either being a blog or selling books, because it doesn’t have any value of its own. So give your blog value. As I’ve said already, only do this if you want to do this, and I don’t mean self-publishing, marketing and promoting your own books. I mean the individual things, i.e. being a blogger, being a tweeter, etc. Again, create the blog you want to read. Do you want to read a blog that merely says “buy a book” over and over again with just a slight variation each time?

The next point is that you must always keep up your end of the bargain. I would estimate that something like 80-90% of people who read this blog have never and will never buy a book of mine—and that’s okay. It’s okay because I don’t just blog to sell books. I blog because I enjoy it, and I want self-publishers to have the information I wish I’d had when I first self-published. So whenever I’m using this blog to spread the word about one of my books, especially in the lead up to its release, I always ask myself, Is there enough here for the people who aren’t interested? Have I delivered the kind of posts that my loyal blog readers are expecting? Or have I turned this blog into nothing more than an annoying advertisement this month? 

In the Terminator movies, the problems start when a computer program called Skynet becomes self-aware and decides to terminate humanity. In one version of the story’s timeline, Skynet “wakes up” and starts its killing spree on April 21, 2011. Last April 21, some clever clogs started a Twitter account for Skynet, its first tweet being something like “Hello world.” It was a brilliant idea, and the tweets were pretty funny. But on April 22—and after collecting thousands of followers—instead of shutting down the account or keeping it going (perhaps as the apocalypse got into full swing…), the person behind it started advertising his friend’s album. Cue 140-character outrage—and it was justified, in my opinion. Because the tweeter hadn’t kept up his end of the deal. We’d signed up for Skynet, not the hard sell.

The third point is that this is NOT to be confused with scamming people into buying your book. As in, collecting as many pliable disciplines as possible, chaining them to a newsletter and then instructing them all to buy your book at exactly 10:01 on Monday morning in a concerted effort to—artificially—push your book into the bestseller lists. That’s called Being a Moron.

Not this.

Stranger, Meet My (Not Yet Released) Book

I think your aims when you’re preparing to release a book should be:

  • To inform the world at large that it exists
  • To get the people who know about it interested in it (i.e. find potential readers)
  • To get potential readers caring enough to say, “I’m looking forward to reading that”
  • and to do all this BEFORE the book comes out.

Let’s work backwards. Why should you do this before the book comes out? Because if you don’t, you’ve wasted so many opportunities. Someone once told me that on average, a person has to hear about something three times before they buy it. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the amount of times I’ve said to myself I must buy that book greatly outnumbers the amount of books I’ve bought. That’s partly because I can’t afford it (I actually daydream about no-budget shopping sprees in Waterstones…) and partly because I forget. I need reminding a few times before it snags.

Time and time again I’ve seen Twitter friends release books and tell me about it for the first time on the day of its release. There’s only so many times you can do the “my book is out now!” tweet before you get embarrassed and we get annoyed, so let’s say you tell me twice about your book being for sale. But what if, instead, you’d been slipping me delicious details about your book for the past eight weeks? What if you’d blogged about why you’d decided to self-publish it? (That would’ve been one time.) What if you’d put two potential covers up and asked me and your other Facebook fans which did I prefer? (That would’ve been two.) What if you’d make a fun little book trailer and shared it on YouTube? (That would’ve been three.) What if you’d had a Twitter competition that tied in with the book? (That would’ve been four, at least.) What if you’d got a book blogger to review it, and then tweeted a link to the review? (Now we’re up to five.) And then you’d told me that your book was out now, twice. Now I’d have heard about your book seven times, and I’d either be buying it for sure or blocking you. If you’re a blogger or tweeter I like—and presumably you are, because I’m following you—it’s definitely going to be the first one.

As for getting people interested and caring about your book, you do that through the content you chose to publish, post or tweet about it. Here’s some of the things I did to give some you ideas (hopefully!):

  • Shared my personal story of why I decided to self-publish it
  • Blogged about all aspects of self-publishing, including my mistakes
  • Shared things like the cover design (the stages of it), synopsis, photos of proof copies, etc.
  • Made two book trailers (you can see them here)
  • Posting pictures from my time in Florida on my Facebook page
  • Had a PDF preview that readers could download for free
  • Tagged my “shameless self-promotion” tweets on Twitter with #mousetrappedmonday and confined them to 3-5 tweets of a Monday afternoon
  • Wrote guest posts on other blogs
  • Gave copies to book bloggers and other review sites and then linked to the reviews.

Doing this online—and hopefully getting retweeted, recommended, followed, etc.—will cover the “exists” bit.

Tip: I find it really helpful to think back to the last book I heard about and then went out and bought, and examine why I did that. 

Go For Launch

Another mistake I frequently see self-publishers making is failing to have a release date. You should have one. I know that as self-publishers it’s hard to judge exactly when your book will be available and it’s even harder to get your Kindle edition to coincide with your paperback and your Barnes and Noble listing to match them both, but don’t worry about all that. We don’t have to pick a day and then, come hell or high water, ensure that all our listings go live on that exact date. For self-publishers, your release date can be any day when (i) you decide that you’re ready to launch and (ii) at least your Kindle and paperback, if you’re doing one, are available to buy.

Then turn your online spaces into party central for the week around it. Have a virtual launch party. Go on a blog tour. Give away some books. Have a contest or competition for a juicy prize. Perhaps even give your book away for free for a couple of days, or 24 hours, just to get things going. But for the love of fudge, do something. Don’t invite me to the saddest book launch in the history of the world, i.e. a single post or tweet that gives me a quick run-through every rejection you’ve ever suffered, and then says, “So I self-published it. It’s on Amazon now. $2.99. Here’s a link. Excuse me while I log off, have a nap and expect there to have been hundred of sales by the time I wake up later.” If you wrote the thing and you’re not excited about it, why the hell should I be?

Another tip: look at that list of aims again. Now think of a tweet that says “My book is out now! Just $2.99 on Amazon! Buy it! Please RT please RT please RT” and ask yourself how does that get people interested?

So you’ve written your book, decided to self-publish it, self-published it, built an online platform and got people you’re not related to excited about your book to the point when they’ve exchanged their hard earned cash for a copy of it. The hard part is over. Tomorrow: what to do next to try and keep your book from disappearing into the Most Books Abyss…

Oh, sorry—I meant the easy part is over. Oops.

While we’re on the subject…

I feel like my regular blog readers know me really well, and always know where I’m coming from. But this blog has been getting a lot of attention from new sources in the last couple of weeks, and so a lot of people are stopping by here for the first time. Some, it seems, are getting the impression that I’m only interested in making money, and that I couldn’t care less about writing as a craft or an endeavor all of its own. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m different to a lot of self-publishers (and self-published bloggers) in that I’m still pursuing traditional publication. If a publisher approached me tomorrow and offered me a €5,000 advance, I’d take it, even though I could make four times that releasing the same book myself, because getting published is my dream, and I’d love the opportunity to see how the experts do all this. But this is “How To Sell Self-Published Books Month”, so the focus is on selling. And I need to make money from self-publishing because I do it full-time, and the income it generates allows me to not have a day job but instead devote myself fully to writing the book that I hope will, one day, help me achieve my dream of traditional publication. If you don’t want to make money from writing, I can only assume you don’t love doing it as much as I do, because making money from it is the only way that you can do it all the time, unless you win the lottery. And even if you are published by someone else, you still don’t get to “just write” all the time. You have to participate in the promotion, and so you should. It’s your book, after all. Helping the people who invested in it get their investment back is the very least you could do. When you self-publish, you’ve made the investment, and so you need to get out there and sell your book for the same reason.

To receive each new post by e-mail look for the subscribe box in the sidebar or footer, or follow me on Twitter for a reminder with a link. Or just come back here if it’s not too pink for you. Teaser alert: I’ll have another FREE book for you tomorrow…

Where to Find Your First Readers

15 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. Last week I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog with 12,000 views and counting), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’ll be presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years.

You can catch up on the introduction here but today we’re going to talk about Step 2: Find first readers (presuming that Step 1—signing up for preferably a Word Press blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page—is something you can manage yourself and have already done)…

Now, not every self-publisher needs an online presence to sell books. I can name two or three who merely uploaded their book to Amazon and—ta-daa!—bestseller status and a five-digit royalty cheque was theirs without so much as a single tweet, blog post or Facebook status update. (“How nice for them,” she says, through gritted teeth.) But of all the self-publishers I know and know of who have managed to get their books selling and kept them that way, the vast majority have a home—or five—online. Since we’ve already acknowledged that we’re not going to be the next Amanda Hocking, we’re going to do what seems to be an effective strategy for most self-publishers, and leave waiting for the Magical Self-Publishing Fairies to sprinkle our book with pixie dust for another day.

Wait a Sec—Do You Want to Do This?

Not every self-publisher needs an online presence to sell books, but every self-publisher with an online presence should actually want an online presence, and should genuinely enjoy doing all the things that comes with having a blog, tweeting, etc. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Pretend for a second that you know someone who makes a living giving motivational speeches. He self-publishes a book, and it goes straight to the top of the bestseller list. You ask him how he did it, and he puts it all down to the speeches. He says he mentions the book during them and sells copies afterwards, and that the people who buy them there write reviews and tell their friends, and he’s sure that’s what’s driving his sales. You’re about to self-publish a book of your own and, hey, these motivational speeches worked for him, so you decide that you’re going to do it too. Except that you hate public speaking. The thought of standing up in front of a room full of people makes you break out in a cold, clammy sweat. But you can overcome it. Is has to be done, right? Because giving speeches helps sell books. So you decide to grin and bear it. But there’s another problem: you don’t know what to say. You fear you might have nothing to say. And the only motivation you feel is the urge not to do anything except sleep and watch TV. But speeches sell books, and you have books to sell. So you get up in front of a room of several hundred people, sweat profusely, mumble and ultimately go down like a lead balloon. So yes, speeches sell books—but will yours if you don’t actually want to do them?

Don’t do this just because someone said you should. My advice is for writers who want to be bloggers and just need a little advice on what to do once they’ve become one.

Create the Blog You Want to Read

We all know that piece of writing advice write the book you want to read. Well, I say create the blog you want to read. When I first started blogging back in autumn 2009, I had no idea what I was doing—but I knew why I was doing it, and that was just because someone had said I should. I’d just decided to self-publish in a few months’ time, and I figured I’d need a blog in order to do it well. But I didn’t know what to blog about, and my blog was on Blogger.com, dull and—nooooooooo!—featured mismatched, blinking widgets. I know: for SHAME. But after researching self-publishing online, I realized there was a gaping hole in the blogging world, and it was shaped like a self-publisher who didn’t use words like gatekeepers, didn’t keep voodoo dolls named after agents and editors and didn’t believe that one person with no knowledge of the publishing world could do better than an office building full of people with degrees in it.

(That would be me, if it wasn’t clear!)

What I’m saying is: keep it simple. There are so many people out there selling workshops and seminars and training manuals and audio tapes and books about how to blog, when to blog, what to blog, etc. (I just googled “how to blog” and got approximately 6,190,000,000 results) but don’t worry about all that. Instead just imagine the blog you’d love to read every morning with a hot cup of coffee, and then create that blog. Simples.

But What About My Book?

It was easy for me to start talking about my book on my blog, since the whole point of my blog was to chronicle my adventures in self-publishing. But then I know other self-publishers who have tried to do the same thing, and it didn’t work for them. So why did it work for me? I think it’s because I gave the blog reader something that they could use to help themselves, which in my case was straightforward, occasionally (!) helpful advice or information that sometimes generated a giggle. I think most people are on the internet to find one or more of the following things: information, connection and entertainment. When you create content, be it a blog post, a tweet or a book trailer, ask yourself: does it tick at least one of those boxes? People love to describe blogs as online journals, but they’re really not about you. They’re about us, and what we want to read. Just like your book, your blog has to have appeal. It has to give people a reason to want to read to it.

Also, almost everything you put online is something you have written. Every paragraph of text is an advertisement for your work, regardless of what it’s about. Maybe your unique voice or perspective is selling point enough.

We’ll be talking in more detail about content next week in What Selling Books and Fight Club Have in Common.

Get Somebody (Anybody?) To Read It

A blog is not like a shop window. No one will ever just happen to walk past, look in and say to themselves, “Oh, I must pop in there!” You have to send people to it. The best way to start to do this is to make blogging friends.

Being a blogger is about being part of a online community and, like life, the amount of effort you put into it dictates the amount you’ll get back out. If I was just starting out now, here are the steps I’d take to find, charm and chat with blogging friends:

  1. Find other blogs. There are billions of them. Well, millions anyway. You’ve found this blog, so we know you can do it. Blogs are a great source of more blogs. Look for recommendations in the blogger’s “blog roll” (um, don’t look for mine because I’m updating it at the moment; it’s coming soon), links in the comments and posts or browse the blogs of the people who leave comments. Then read them.
  2. Comment on other blogs. If you read something interesting, tell the blogger you thought so. If the blogger asks for your opinion, leave it. If you’ve been lurking around a blog for months and months, reading every word but never so much as squeaking out a “hi”, say hello. (Yeah, I’m talking to YOU!)
  3. Repeat as required. You find this easier to do if you collect all your favorite blogs in one place. I use Google Reader.

Drive Traffic With Twitter

I signed up for Twitter because it was the only thing that would download in the square foot of reception at the very top of the stairs that I could put my right hand into if I stood on tippytoes in the little holiday cottage where I wrote one of my books. In other words, by chance. But being on Twitter is the single best thing I’ve ever done for my writing career, and that’s something I’ll be elaborating on next week. I think it’s very, very important—but again, only if you actually want to be on there.

Twitter helps your blog because people like to click interesting links they see on Twitter and follow them to see where they go. I wouldn’t bombard people with links to your blog; I think a ratio of 1 blog post to 3 links about it is about right. I love using Buffer for tweeting links to my current and past blog posts and spreading them out over the day and through different time zones.

For a great primer in using Twitter in a way that’s both effective and enjoyable, I highly recommend Nicola Morgan’s book Tweet Right: The Sensible Person’s Guide to Twitter. 

Find Fans on Facebook

I think every author should have a Facebook page that strangers can come and “like”—and NOT a personal profile page that they’ve commandeered for that purpose. At this stage, all you need to do is:

  1. Sign up for a public Facebook page
  2. Convince 25 of your friends and family to “like” it so you can get a customized URL, e.g. www.facebook.com/mousetrappedbook
  3. Throw a few photos, links, etc. up there so when someone does “like” it, there’s something for them to see.

We’ll come back to our Facebook page later when we launch our book.

What About Everything Else?

So that’s it. Blogging, Twitter and Facebook is all we’re going to worry about for now. Yes, there’s loads of other sites you can eagerly sign up for as well (Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Vimeo, etc. etc. etc. ETC!) but don’t take on too much too soon, or you’ll get blogging burn out before you’ve even customized your header. And I believe that these three are the most important ones anyway.

Tomorrow, we’re going to launch our book online. Oooh, how exciting!

To receive each new post by e-mail look for the subscribe box in the sidebar or footer, or follow me on Twitter for a reminder with a link. Or just come back here if it’s not too pink for you…

← Older Entries