'Amazon Connect' allows authors to post directly to readers

Authors can now post messages about their book on its product page at Amazon.com and even host a blog on Amazon's site.

Signing up for Amazon Connect also enables authors to post a bibliography on their Amazon profile page. Messages show up on the book's detail page and the author's profile page.

This is a good step for Amazon, but so far the move appears tentative. For example, there's no direct link from a book's product page to the blog. The blogs have no RSS feeds, and if you search for "blogs" on Amazon, you won't find anything except books about blogging. A directory of blogs would be useful.

Nevetheless, Connect could be a powerful new way for authors to build relationships with new readers who stumble onto their book's Amazon page.

Many authors are skeptical of the program: "Why should I write a blog on Amazon, when I have my own blog? Why give free content to Amazon instead of putting it on my own domain?" Good question. My answer is, you should explore all avenues for wider exposure to readers. Some author-published blogs (even the good ones) have very little traffic. One reason is that their blog doesn't get indexed by Google very well -- or if it does, it's not assigned a decent Google Page Rank. And so these blogs aren't returned in the top search results, even when there's an exact keyword match. That cripples search-engine traffic.

Amazon's Connect program could lift your blog out of the Web's backwaters. Since the author posts on Amazon are crawled by all the major search engines *and* is hosted on a major Web site (Amazon is the 12th most popular Web destination), authors and their blogs could get tons more exposure.

And you don't necessarily have to give away all your good stuff on your Amazon blog. Amazon doesn't want you to simply repost content that's already on your blog. But you could post summaries to your best blog posts, along with a link directly to your site.

For more information, see this post on Slashdot.

2005: It was a very good year, by the books

For years now, the doom-and-gloom pundits have been warning, "the book is dead." But every year, more books are authored, printed and purchased than ever before. And we're not talking e-books, we're talking regular books printed on paper. The one new wrinkle in the past decade is that lots of folks have been buying used books online: see this summary at Cork University Press.

Sales were up an extremely healthy 9.3 percent in 2005. Sales of new books apparently haven't been hampered by the growth of online used book sales, which were also up substantially.

Online sellers of used and rare books are ringing in the new year with great expectations. At ABE.com, 19 of the 20 bestselling books in 2005 were published before 2005.

-- Steve Weber

Marketing your self-published book on eBay

The challenge for every self-publishing author is to get their book in front of as many eyeballs as possible without breaking the bank. I've found that one of the most effective ways for creating buzz for my self-published book was to auction copies on eBay.

Here's the drill: You list one copy of your book at auction on eBay. Browsers see your book and either bid on the book at eBay, or order a copy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I've noticed that in most cases, my eBay listings for my book not only sell for more than the list price of the book, but immediately after a listing closes, I get sales on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, bumping up my sales there. Then I start over again, listing another copy on eBay.

For the same $20 you might pay for a dozen click-throughs using Google Adwords, it's possible to get 200 to 400 pairs of eyeballs on eBay.

Here's some tips for getting the maximum number of lookers:

-- Start your auction at 1 cent. That will attract early and frequent bidding, which in turn generates more interest. Some eBay users scan listings only for those items with a certain number of bids, on the assumption that more bids means value. You could list your book at a fixed price instead, but an auction will get more looks.

-- Pay the extra 40-cent fee for a 10-day listing instead of the standard seven-day auction. You'll be getting an extra three days of lookers for chump change.

-- Mention the ISBN at least twice in your auction description so that losing bidders will be ready to snap up a copy on Amazon or B&N.

-- Try a "Featured Plus" listing. The total auction fee will be around $20. But again, think of the exposure you're getting -- your book will be sitting atop category lists and search results. Not only will more people reading your title, checking its price on Amazon and other sites, but some will also be e-mailing the auction to friends and family.

-- If you haven't designed your cover yet, be sure to add your Web site name somewhere on the front cover so browsers will see it on your eBay cover picture, and have ready access to your blog. (You do have a blog to support your book, don't you?)

-- Think of multiple categories on eBay to list your book under. For example, say your book is on making dolls. You can list it under "nonfiction books," "collectibles," "toys," "hobbies," and perhaps five other tangential categories. This will draw hundreds of more potential readers who would never have heard of your book or considered searching for something like it.

This strategy is particularly effective with a new book that isn't available in the used marketplace at bargain prices. eBay is populated primarily by bargain hunters, but if you can catch the attention of a sufficient number of them, you can convert some of them into retail buyers of your book too.

Marketing your book with a press release

In the old days (before the Web), marketing a book with a press release was the total opposite of grass-roots marketing. Today it's different. If you do it well, you can market your book directly to potential readers by using low-cost press releases distributed over the Internet.

It used to be that press releases were terribly expensive since they had to be snail-mailed (or faxed or wire-delivered) to traditional media outlets like newspapers. Then your release would be filtered by editors and writers, and if it got picked up at all, the resulting article could be totally different than your original message -- and your book might not be mentioned at all!.

Now, a host of inexpensive (and some free) press-release services can distribute your announcement. Your pitch can be seen by tens of thousands of Web surfers through Google News and other sites. Smart use of keywords and hyperlinks to your book's Web site can provide one of the cheapest marketing vehicles you'll find.

But even with this new tool, most press releases announcing a book are still god-awful, and generate no interest. They focus on the author, the publisher, or argue why they book is important. What a press release should do is explain what the book can do for the reader. Limit your release to one page, and don't include hype and puffery. Stick to facts that other people might find useful.

If you've never written a press release, you might want to read this free e-book: The new rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly.

If you're ready to get started, here's a link to Yahoo's directory of press release outlets.

A new competitor for Amazon.com?

One of the overlooked bits of news to come out of last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was Google's suggestion that it would get into the online bookselling business.

The search company's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said inclusion in the store would depend on permission from copyright owners. Apparently the new initiative would be a premium version of Google Book Search, in which users would pay for downloading part or all of the books that publishers have approved for inclusion in Google's index.

Google has gotten lots of bad publicity from the Book Search initiative, but publishers interested in selling their content online haven't been shy about signing onto the program. And Google maintains that the program is all about preserving knowledge.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com has said it's already working on a similar program it calls "Amazon Pages."

Book reviews can establish credibility for your self-published book

It's a no-brainer, and it's right there in black-and-white in all the popular self-publishing books: Get your book reviewed, and sales will follow.

And by golly, it's true: book reviews will get you sales. Only problem is, there's a new way of getting reviews for your book, and none of the self-publishing books tell you how to do it. Keep reading, and I'll tell how it's worked out for me.

First, let's review the conventional wisdom on how to get reviews, the advice repeated in all the well-known self-publishing guides. They instruct you to get a few hundred review copies of your book printed, prepare a press release packet, and mail it to every newspaper reviewer in the country. And if your book is specialized, you should also rent lists of the names and snail-mail addresses of the appropriate magazines and journals in your field, sending them the same packet.

All this would be fine if it really worked, but I don't think it's the most practical way today. Consider the way I solicited reviews of my first self-published book, "The Home-Based Bookstore".

I published my book directly through Lightning Source/Ingram in November 2005. I was concerned that mailing hundreds of complimentary review copies of my book would result in very few newspaper reviews, given the specialized topic of my book. Also, it would be expensive, and I worried that many of those free books would show up for sale on Amazon Marketplace.

And let's face it, newspaper reviewers are getting bombarded with thousands of self-published books these days begging for publicity. Most of those books are going straight into the trash can. It's no secret that most self-published books aren't worth reading, and so they don't get to first base with traditional media outlets, who have less space than ever for offbeat coverage.

Still, I knew my book would have no credibility unless someone besides me was making the case that it was worth reading. I've been burned buying self-published books and e-books that weren't worth the money, and I figure lots of other people have too.

So here's what I did: I went on Amazon.com and looked up a previous title that had been published covering my book's topic. That book was published a few years ago by a small independent press, had sold resonably well, and received about 45 customer reviews on Amazon, mostly favorable. I contacted the people who reviewed that earlier book, sending them this message:

Dear XXXX:

I got your name from the Amazon book review you wrote about the 2002 book "Selling Used Books Online" by Windwalker.

I recently self-published a book on the same topic, "The Home-Based Bookstore." If you think you might be interested in reviewing it (no obligation of course), I'd be happy to send a complimentary copy if you'll reply with your snail mail address.

Best Regards,
Steve Weber

How did I make contact with these people? Clicking on an Amazon book reviewer's name takes you to their Amazon "profile page." There, you can click the link "Invite as an Amazon Friend." A pop-up form appears, where you can enter a message similar to the one I've described above. You don't see the person's e-mail address, but Amazon forwards your message to that person's registered e-mail address.

I was a bit selective on the people who I asked for reviews. For example, a few customers gave negative reviews to the previously published book, some of them simply stating they were unhappy that a book on the topic had been published. Most likely these folks never even read the book. Needless to say, I left them off my list.

Of the 40 people I did contact, I received three quick replies, and within a couple of weeks my book received positive reviews from each. Immediately, I noticed a dramtic uptick in sales of my book. Earlier, when my book had no reviews, it sold at the rate of one or two copies every few days. But after receiving those positive reviews, my book began selling five to 8 copies per day. Clearly, those positive reviews had given confidence to shoppers who were considering my book on Amazon. At the same time, I noticed that my sales picked up on Barnes & Noble's Web site, and people began placing special orders for my book through brick-and-mortar bookstores.

My success with these first efforts gave me another idea: What if I contacted a whole lot more people who might review my book? In exploring Amazon's book-review system, I had noticed that a list of "top reviewers" was maintained on Amazon's site. The top reviewers are ranked according to how many "helpful votes" they receive from other shoppers who read their book reviews on Amazon. I began contacting these Amazon "top reviewers," using the same method described above. Again, I was a bit selective on who I contacted. I scanned the recent reviews, and if a person tended to give negative, harsh reviews most of the time, I left them off my list. I didn't need anybody to trash my book simply because they relished dishing out criticism. And many of the Amazon top reviewers weren't appropriate for my book (nonfiction how-to) because they reviewed only fiction, movies or music.

So of the top 500 Amazon reviewers, I contacted about 300 where I believed there was a chance they might be interested in reading and reviewing my book. I received a response from about 40 of those folks, and it's resulted in about 25 positive reviews on Amazon's site so far.

This effort involved about three days of very tedious work, plus the expense of mailing complimentary copies to the people who responded. Was it worth it? You betcha. It got me the best kind of advertising for a book: free advertising. Two months after publication, my book is in the top few thousand in Amazon sales rank. It's the number-two bestseller in its category, Business & Investing > Small Business & Entrepreneurship > Home Based.

That's pretty darned good for a self-published book with no marketing money behind it. It just goes to show that word-of-mouth is the best advertising for books. With my book particularly, which appeals to online shoppers, online reviews are very influential. But I suspect that a lot of shoppers in brick-and-mortar bookstores also make some of their buying decisions based on Amazon book reviews.

Everything I've mentioned above is very anecdotal, but there has been a rigorous academic study on this topic. It found that book reviews on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble have a definite impact on sales on those sites -- positive reviews led to bigger sales, and negative reviews hurt sales. You can read the full text of the report here, thanks to the Yale School of Management.

Good luck with your publishing efforts. If you have a story of your own, I'd enjoy hearing about it: Write to me here.

New ISBN system may cause headaches next year

The introduction of the 13-digit ISBN won't happen until Janurary 2007, but it will be a challenge to pull off the transition. The existing 10-digit ISBN has been in place for more than 30 years, serving to identify books and their editions.

But the 10-digit system is almost full, prompting a change to the 13-digit system next year. More books than ever are being introduced, so the ISBN system is nearly full. In 2007, ISBNs will come with an added prefix of 978 or 979. Old books with 10-digit ISBNs must be converted to the 13-digit format. A publishing trade group has a free "Dummies" guide on the topic here..

And This web site will automatically convert a 10-digit ISBNs to 13 digits.

For bookstores that must change to the new format, more resources are provided by the U.S. ISBN Agency. On Amazon.com, most products are uniquely identified by an "ASIN" (Amazon Standard Identification Number), and in the case of most books, it's the same number as the ISBN.

Marketing self-published books on the Web

There's a saying that book advertising doesn't work. Another way of saying it is that money spent on advertising books is wasted money. Why? The theory is that a consumer's decision to buy a book is such a personal one, that advertising can't influence this behavior. Word-of-mouth (free advertising) is the only kind of advertising that moves books, or so the theory goes.

What about Internet advertising? If you have a Web site with traffic, through a blog audience or valuable content, you have a built-in free advertising machine for showcasing your book.

If you don't have the Web traffic already, pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google Adwords could provide a way to build awareness for your book. But generally, even this advertising doesn't work well for selling books.

The problem is that clicks for the keywords to drive traffic to your book's Web page may cost around $1 apiece. Let's assume your profit margin on the book is $5, and you're willing to give up that whole margin to kick-start your sales. You'll need one of every five clickers -- a conversion rate of 20 percent -- to buy your book to break even. Not very likely.

I tried marketing my book initially through Adwords keywords. I used every word and phrase in my book's index, but didn't notice any sales from that, despite spending a couple thousand dollars (ouch!). I tried limiting my ads to Google's search network (no content network ads) and that didn't help either.

However, recently Google allowed you to specify which sites on its content network your ad will run. So I've had much better results by limiting my ads to the very few sites dedicated to my book's topic that show Google content ads. They call it a "site targeted" campaign. It probably hasn't been cost-effective for me in itself, but I believe it has sparked some word-of-mouth to get sales going.

Also, a couple weeks after the book was available, I sent review copies of the book to some of the "top reviewers" on Amazon, about the top 75 who review nonfiction books. I've gotten about 25 positive reviews from that effort, and I noticed that sales picked up noticeably after the positive reviews began appearing.