Daniel’s Comments (group member since Jan 30, 2014)

Daniel’s comments from the Digital Publishing group.

That's a lot!
But don't forget looking for venues outside of social networks on the Net.

There seems little rhyme or reason for things. Do you want to sell in Australia and NZ? Maybe target opportunities on writing blogs from Australasia?

Createspace is not the best for selling as many readers stay away from it, it still has a reputation for badly designed books.

If blogs are your thing you need to sign up to blog sites and keep writing them. I always used to keep mine short and posted 300 words every day. I got bored and rarely had any comments over three years (about 54 I think.)

There are blog aggregators and writing forums to post your link but you have to make the blog interesting. Guest posting helps I am told though I never allowed it.

Engaging here on groups and elsewhere, being helpful, makes an impression. It isn't about your skill as a writer, its about your personality.

It shouldn't be but there you are.

Sounds good :)

Giveaways here have given me the most exposure and contacts. I am also doing some school work as one should actually concentrate on the real world more than the digital.

Google your book's themes and see if any writers' circles or book clubs come up with hits.
Check the groups here.

The content of books is only a part of what this group is about. There is a long road from writing through design to marketing to be financially successful in publishing.

Let us know how you get on.

for the book launch we are doing in September a series of cards have been printed out that are half A5 and they are going to be invitations to an exhibition.

For a recent non-fiction book we actually had a section of a tent (free) in then agricultural chow here in Cornwall, for three days.

My main advice to writers is to get invited to talk, to read, to host workshops at literary festivals and in readers circles. The main consideration is cost as against exposure. Start with what you think you can cope with and work with that.

There are many places to find readers, be creative.

No, for the most part, they won't stock your books automatically. But even if you have a bestseller there are problems.
Here in the UK Waterstones, the largest bookseller on the highstreet, doesn't deal with Ingrams. Bertrams, their preferred wholesaler, will buy in from Ingrams if you sign a separate agreement with them and offer as close to 70% as you feel you are able. 70% is the figure on their website.

Individual Waterstones do local deals and you deliver the books yourself. Ok for handling a couple of shops but nationally, not even a starter.

Independent bookshops don't deal with books on 20% deal. You need to offer 50%, 40% if they are feeling generous.

My conclusion is that independent writers need to market their books outside of wholesalers and outside of bookshops except for a few close by or a few you know and can supply.

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Jeff wrote: "Digital publishing is an extension of much of what I am already doing. Beyond that, it also occurs to me that the workflows and issues I have encountered in publishing my own books could likely hav..."

Sharing is what we do. FootSteps publishes many authors and more are coming. There is a need for authors to group together and each one adds their marketing energy to all the others. Using your skills as you develop them to inform and join with others is an essential in the years ahead.

Betsy wrote: "I am part of an arts council made up of volunteers. Last year we decided to publish an anthology of writings by people in our community, many of whom had no interest in a publishing career.

Lesso..."
Depending upon your budget you can look at broader digital publishing comopanies. the brilliance for the individual author of Createspace, LS et al is they automatically farm out the title to Amazon and others through the ISBN network, something you would have to do yourself.

if you buy your own ISBN the first set you buy in the UK registers the name of your publishing house. In Canada ISBN's are free but still need a name attached.

That name and ISBN entitles you to sign up at Nielsen's in the UK and many online retailers get book data information placed there automatically.

Though it has its technicalities this part of the process is actually straightforward and easy to timeline.

The bigger question is not how to get your book online, but how to get people looking for it. That question is answered by your expectations. The different marketing avenues depends entirely on who you think you want to sell to.

My first essay was uploaded to Createspace. It had been rejected by penguin, New York on the basis it would not make them enough money so I thought it had some chance of success.

The Createspace system was very easy to use but at the time (2010) they were really only of use to USA citizens as postage to the UK was high. I also used one of their free ISBNs.

The quality did not seem at all bad to my eye and was better than the lulu version. Lulu did not have as firm covers and once opened they bent over. I recently bought a Createspace novel and their covers have now become like lulu's were.

The Lightning Source sign up process is free but has to be done as they only deal with publishers. You are assigned a named officer who deals with your account and contacts in the accounts department and in international sales if you sign up for them.

The proof process as with all of them, allows you to send proofs to only one address.at a time but unlike Createspace you can create as many proof orders as you like and send them to different addresses. Useful if your team live indifferent places, though the cost of a proof is high. £20 for a typical 200 page colour book.

Because you are a publishers it serves you to buy your own sets of ISBNs. In the Uk this cost me £160 for ten, with a one-time-only £90 registration fee. The second lot of 100 ISBNs cost me the same, so the unit price goes down markedly.

Lightning Source - as with the others I think -generates an ISBN for the cover from the number you give them.

The problem at the moment is the lack of choice with all these companies, of paper quality. The covers seem adequate, but two paper sizes and style, white or off-white. That's it. different thickness for colour and black and white books. Really we need at least six weight choices for a fuller range of books.

Upload costs at Lightning Source are not free. Cover and interior will cost you £54 and changes to each £27 a time. So know what you are doing. If you need to make a change on a book that is selling well they will wait for a break ins ales before taking it off-line and replacing the files with the new ones. You do not want that to ever happen.

Sales are all recorded but you have no idea if they are true, there are no trail from the recorded sales to the customer that you are given.

Payments by BACS start three months after the first books are sold so you will need to plan for that three months, after that as sales continue, you will receive a prompt monthly royalty but always three months in arrears.

Orders for books I have placed to go to festivals and for launches arrive swiftly (5 days) and they have opened manufacture centres in USA/UK/Germany/Australia and now in Latin America. Distributed through Ingrams their coverage is better than anyone else in the competition.

There are Book Arts courses available from many art colleges, depends where you live. here in the UK I don't know of any painter who has not made a book at some time, do you have any artist friends?

If you think about the history of books you will quickly see that everything can be made by hand from the paper to the inks. Some things do not need much equipment but other things do.

If you have a unique genre then you must know a little about your potential readers. Knowing where they are likely to be will inform your choices.

legacies are good:)

Simple.

If anyone hears your name, or hears about a book you have written, they are going to Google you. It's the modern way. it is vital you have an on-line presence and that you are in control of some of it. A domain with the name of your publishing house is also important, an address that reads www.yourpublishing house.xxx is more prestigious that www.blogspot/wordpress/whomever.yourp... and also much shorter.

Some people were against me choosing a .co domain and others thought just having footsteps and not footstepspress was confusing me with a dance company. I took the view the shorter the better. If anyone mentions us to anyone else saying its 'footsteps.co' is almost memorable enough not to have to write down.

Publishing templates.

Themeforest and a few others do templates for publishing houses. Most of these need to be populated on your own machine and synchronised online with your host. I chose Templatic's theme for books and it lasted me a good six months. It didn't have enough options for me to add links to the sites the book were on sale and only allowed one currency.

I now run a Drupal site, Drupal is hard to learn but free to use and Drupal 8 due out this year is going to easier for beginners. There are any free templates and if you get the hang of it, you have a lot more power to develop pages than in Wordpress.

That said a good many hosts now load up Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress for you and if you but a template or use a free one all you have to do is load it up and off you go.

My advice:

Artists tell me that all painting is about how you show and control light on the canvas. Designers tell me for webpages and books, it is all about how to control white-space. Less is more. Our site is minimal with some fancy elements not used. Our new site will have more options for navigation and better gallery control for the artists but the pages will never be overloaded. Readers are discerning folk, endless advertising to them puts them off. It does me.

Our first theme:

http://templatic.com/app-themes/publi...

our present site

http://www.footsteps.co

This started as an idea to write an introduction to the study of human lying. This book was considered by Penguin in New York but they felt they could not sell enough copies to make their money back.

I decided to go it alone.

Calvin Innes agreed through contact at linked-in to create eight cartoons to lift any of the deeper sections of a book about the genetics of lying, and in 2010 we put the book up at Createspace.

For six months I found reviewers were mixed but they were there, and radio shows talked to me and one in Ireland contacted me.

I could see the process worked but I didn't like the fact then that Creatspace didn't publish directly in the UK. It does now. Their covers were a little stronger than lulu, their system straightforward but people were saying that anything with lulu or createspace or any of the online digital publishers, were a turn off as far as readers were concerned because they were bywords for poor proofing.

I re-read my essay and have to say they were right.

The first lesson I learned. It isn't worth doing all this work to put before the public something that has not been fully proofed and edited. If you cannot get that done your work will flounder.

I am now preparing this essay for epub format as at £1 and downloadable it will attract more readers than the £6.50 createspace book. I sold 20 books, despite one of the radio shows in the US having two million listeners, and I am owed money by Amazon.

But it had made me work, it had shown me ways to go about publishing and it lead me to join forums, read those who were doing this and learn the ropes. For that reason alone it had been well worth doing for everything that followed was learned during that six months.