Tag Archives: aaron shepard

Bye-Bye Bookshops: Aiming at Amazon by Aaron Shepard

21 Jul

Last time on my Self-Printing Bookclub – which, I should point out, isn’t really a bookclub; it just sounds nice – I didn’t glean anything but frustration from Dan Poytner’s Self-Publishing Manual. This week we’re at the other end of the moral scale with the very ethical Aaron Shepard and his popular self-publishing book, Aiming at Amazon: How to Publish Your Books with Print on Demand and Online Book Marketing on Amazon.com, and hoping for something a little more useful than a rant about agents, publishers and bookstores.

Things are off to a good start with the author’s CV. Shepard is an award-winning children’s author who has written several books about this ‘new business’ of self-publishing, he created that god-awful obsession for published authors, Sales Rank Express, and most importantly, he makes a living from selling his self-published books, many of which are about self-publishing. He’s even been in The New York Times. Shepard’s ideal student is about to produce their non-fiction book using a Print on Demand service like Lulu or CreateSpace, is computer literate and willing to focus solely on online sales. Shepard has nothing against bookshops, per se – he simply points out that it’s far, far easier to shift copies of your book from a free listing on Amazon.com. (more…)

Self-Printing Promotion: Amazon Adventures

16 Jun

One of the most exciting things about this whole self-printing business is seeing your book appear on Amazon for the first time. There follows much squealing, gazing at it adoringly and emailing a link to it to all your friends. (And some enemies. Maybe.) But before Amazonitis can truly take hold – before you enter into a dark world where you obsessively track your sales ranking, become enraged by your ‘Frequently Bought Together’ partner and dispute that anyone who read your book would also read something like sTORI Telling by Tori Spelling – you need to do some work. Amazon is an enormous beast, complicated and churning and disorganized, but it’s one you’re going to have to tame if you want to sell books because, as a self-publisher (and especially as a POD-ing one), Amazon’s global bookstore is your biggest opportunity to do so.

Things You Should Have Thought About Before Now

Remember back when we made our little baby? The information you carefully typed into CreateSpace (or whoever you used) under ‘Title Information’ has now become your Amazon listing under the heading of ‘Editorial Reviews,’ word for word and exclamation mark for exclamation mark. Let’s hope you described your book in an appealing way (I used the exact text that’s on my back cover) and posted an ‘About the Author’ paragraph that includes your blog URL or the book’s official site.

As a POD-er, you determine to some extent what categories your book is listed under. I chose ‘Travel -> United States’ and Amazon, somewhere along the line, further categorized me into ‘States -> Florida -> Orlando’, ‘Regions -> South Atlantic’ and ‘Florida -> Disney World.’ But be careful. One of my main competitors in the I-worked-in-Walt-Disney-World genre is a book that was released by a former Cast Member only a few weeks before mine – a book that was traditionally published, has an author with a platform and a review by A.J. Jacobs. He doesn’t know how much he’s helped my sales ranks (which are all relative) by categorizing his better-selling book – for a reason that perplexes me – as a biography of Walt Disney.

Once Your Listing Goes Live (more…)