Now that's *really* plugging your book!

Tech pundit Lawrence Lessig not only offers free downloads of his books, he makes sure the downloads are really fast. His new one, Codev2, is stored on an Amazon EC2 server, ensuring that just about any bandwidth requirement can be met.

Codev2 was written in part through a collaborative wiki, available here. The text was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License, and all royalties are dedicated to Creative Commons.

You can download the book as a PDF here. Of course you can also buy the physical book, which Lessig points out is cheaper than printing it on your laser printer.

Lessig is a law professor at Stanford and founded its Center for Internet and Society. He advocates reduced legal restrictions on copyright and trademark, especially with technology applications.

Should the New York Times review self-published books?

For the most part, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus did a fine job answering reader questions in the recent "Talk to the Newsroom" feature.

I was impressed with his response when asked about the mission of the Book Review:

[T]o publish lively, informed, provocative criticism on the widest-possible range of books and also to provide a kind of snapshot of the literary culture as it exists in our particular moment through profiles, essays and reported articles.

I was a lot less impressed when Tanenhaus was asked why the Times excludes self-published books from review consideration. Here's his rationale:

Our thinking, which may be old-fashioned, is that with so great a volume of books being published each year by traditional publishers, and with so many imprints available, every book of merit is almost certain to find a home at one or another of those presses.

Excuse me, that's not old-fashioned thinking; it's brain-dead thinking. It's just patently false, today more than ever. So many authors are self-publishing by choice, not because they couldn't sell the book to a publisher.

Why couldn't he just say what everyone knows is the truth: "We'd rather not go to the trouble of reading any self-published books. We might miss the next great American novel, but that's OK with us."

I'm not arguing that the Times is obligated to read every damned piece of slush that comes over the transom. They can exclude anything they want. Just be honest about it, that's all I'm asking. If you don't have the staff, just say it. If you only review books from publishers who advertise in the Times, just say it.

But don't perpetuate this fiction, that a book is only worthwhile if it's been sold to a corporation. The average Times reader is a lot smarter than that.

The budget book junket: Blog tours

Most online book marketing campaigns focus on bringing readers to your site. The other side of the coin, and one that can yield bigger results faster, is an outreach campaign -- going where part of your potential readership already congregates.

You can introduce your book to more readers with a series of appearances on other blogs, known as a "blog tour," sometimes called "guest blogging" or a "virtual book tour."

Blog tours are especially valuable for authors unable to travel, uncomfortable with public speaking, or whose small audience makes touring impractical. Blog tours can expose your book to a far larger audience than a traditional bookstore tour, and requires much less time and money.

Blog tours are a win-win for the host blogger, who gets free content for his blog plus affiliate commissions from book sales.

Here are the essential elements of a blog tour:

• A short book excerpt displayed on the host blog previewing the tour appearance.
• A one-day appearance where you submit an opening statement – a short essay or commentary on the topic of your book, opening the floor for discussion.
• Follow-up visits for the next four to seven days to answer questions and comments from the blog audience.

Targeting host blogs

Your first step in arranging a blog tour is selecting your target blogs: the most popular, influential blogs read by your book’s target audience. You’re probably already aware of some likely candidates. But since blogs can gain readership quickly, it’s worthwhile to survey the field periodically, so you don’t overlook a big opportunity.

Unfortunately, there is no complete, current resource that ranks blogs by subject matter, popularity, authority, or quality. You need to reach your own conclusions by the sampling content yourself.

Start your search here:

• Technorati.com. This blog tracking site lists the top 100 most popular blogs at Technorati.com/pop/blogs. To find relevant niche content, consult its search engine at Technorati.com/Discover, where you can search by keywords.
• Blogsearch.Google.com. Type in keywords related to your book. You’ll need to screen out the results you get from personal blogs which focus on the blog author and get little traffic.

Q&A: Are Amazon Sales Ranks stuck again?

QUESTION: Have you noticed a problem with Amazon Sales Ranks? In the past week I've watched "in stock" inventory levels drop without seeing my Amazon Sales Rank rise.

ANSWER: Amazon has definitely been having a problem calculating sales ranks since Thanksgiving time.

So far, I have one title available on Amazon supplied through Lightning Source. It's been available for 13 months, and over that time the sales rank averages about 5,200.

Like clockwork, the book sells about 10 copies a day, and I'm assuming at least 90 percent of the sales are on Amazon -- it's a short-discount book not carried in
brick-and-mortar stores. Around Thanksgiving, my sales rank plummeted as low as 65,000 and right now it's in a holding pattern around 25,000.

Meanwhile, the book has continued selling 10 copies a day, according to iPage, just as normal. So something at Amazon is out whack. I also track the sales ranks of about a dozen other titles in my niche, and they all look screwed up too. Usually the ranks jump around in response to sales, but they're in a holding pattern.

One more curious thing I noticed this morning: My detail page on Amazon now says: "Only 5 left in stock--order soon (more on the way)." I've never seen that notation since my book was first listed 13 months ago (before Amazon began stocking it).

Also new today on my detail page is the notation "Want it delivered Thursday, December 14? Order it in the next 4 hours and 48 minutes, and choose One-Day Shipping ..." I see that offer on most detail pages, but my impression was that it doesn't appear on the detail pages of LSI books. Here's the page.

Here's hoping that this is simply a temporary glitch at Amazon and not some policy change that undermines short-discount books.

Selling your own book on Amazon Marketplace

Most small publishers these days use a distributor to get books into the hands of retailers. Today this is easy to arrange thanks to print-on-demand firms such as Lightning Source, which can wholesale your book through Ingram Books. But some self-publishing authors prefer to handle sales fulfillment themselves, for a variety of reasons.

Handling the shipping chores provides access to buyer information, giving publishers who sell a line of related books the ability to upsell and pitch new titles directly to those buyers.

A third option favored by many authors today is to allow retailers to handle most sales, while reserving the option to ship books in times of emergencies – like when a major outlet like Amazon unexpectedly goes out of stock on your title.

Authors have several options for making their book available for sale on the Internet:

Amazon Marketplace

Anyone with a U.S. bank account can open an Amazon seller account to list copies of books for sale in exchange for a 15 percent commission and certain other fees. Aside from being the Internet's main destination for book shoppers, selling on Amazon allows you to start selling without devising your own billing and marketing system.

Amazon will deposit funds from your sales to the bank account you designate. You'll also receive a shipping credit that will cover most of your shipping costs.
Amazon charges a 15-percent commission on Marketplace sales and separate fees of $1.23 and 99 cents per transaction. The 99-cent fee on each sale is waived, however, if you become an Amazon Pro-Merchant subscriber. If you sell more than 40 books per month on Amazon Marketplace, the subscription will pay for itself.

Having a Pro-Merchant subscription also provides access to bulk sales and inventory tools that can help automate your bookkeeping. A Pro-Merchant subscription also enables you to enter your book into Amazon's catalog by creating a product detail page, a handy option if you are the sole distributor of your book.

If I sold it

Some lucky booksellers must have made a bundle by getting their hands on a few copies of the orphaned O.J. Simpson book, If I Did It. According to this GalleyCat article, about 100 copies were sold last week, many of them on Amazon.

Looks like they're all gone now, and Amazon even deleted the cover image.

Someone has a copy on ABE for $4,200. Give me a break!

I have a prediction, though: In two years this book will be selling for 1 cent on Marketplace. This inventory is going to be sold to another publisher who's not afraid of a PR backlash. I'm not defending it, I'm just predicting that these books will be sold eventually, and once the public gets their fill, the books will be worth about as much as the other O.J. trial books, like this one and this one.

Here's a fascinating article about how HarperCollins got bookstores to order the new O.J. book in the first place, it's called "blind" selling.

Media Library: Amazon's social-networking answer to LibraryThing?

Amazon users can tag books within a personalized section of the site called Your Media Library.

Here you can view all your previous purchases and buy online access to eligible hard-copy books you've already bought from Amazon. You can organize your Media Library by tagging individual books this way:

-- Click on the book to select it, and bibliographic information will be displayed at the top of the screen.

-- Any currently used tags for the book will be displayed just below.

-- Click the Add button to enter tags. If you’ve created other tags previously, a list of similar tags is shown below the edit box.

-- Type in a new tag or click a suggested tag and click OK to save the tag.

Once you're using tags, it's best to try to reuse tags to designate the same association. For example, don't use "art deco" and "artdec" for the same things. Consult the list of your most frequently used tags, which pops up when you're tagging.

Although it's used by a relatively small portion of Amazon users today, Media Library could become the hub of Amazon's social-networking strategy -— an avenue for customers to connect with others who have common interests, and building networks of like-minded book lovers.

Tagging: A new way of organizing and marketing books

A growing number of book lovers are using tags to provide their own way of classifying books. Amazon and some library online catalogs now allow users to use tags as a supplement to the hierarchical category system.

Book tagging allows people to assign trendy, granular labels to books -— nuances beyond the world's hippest, brainiest librarians. For example, there's no library category or Amazon tab for steampunk, a subgenre of speculative fiction. But using labels, aficionados can dissect it into all its subsubgenres, including timepunk, bronzepunk, stonepunk and clockpunk —- all terms that are deadly serious to steampunkers.

Likewise, there's all kinds of books that are lumped into "queer fiction," but there's no official book classifications for any of it. Traditional subject headings aren't relevant to personal identity, but tags fill the gap.

Tagging is an individual activity with global utility. Each of the 3.5 million books in Amazon's catalogue could be assigned its own unique "category" yet reside in thousands of other categories at the same time.

Amazon tags

Amazon added its tagging feature in 2005, and made it more prominent -— higher on book detail pages —- than its regular categories lists. Amazon tags are publicly viewable unless users designate them as private. You can manage your tags through a "Your Tags" field at the bottom of every Amazon page.

On Amazon, tags are another pathway for readers to discover your book. Authors and publishers can increase their visibility by adding the obvious keywords appropriate to their book. Amazon tags are indexed by Google and other search engines.

As more book readers begin tagging, finding niche content will become easier than ever. Tags assigned to obscure books will be rare. A few common tags will be used by huge numbers of users (book, read, buy, interesting) and are visible to everyone. But most tags, including the more useful ones, will be used by just a few users (bizarre apocalpytacism). Many tags may be used by just a few people, and assigned to just one or two books, enabling a niche of one.

On Amazon, you can view all your tags here.


Here you can add or delete tags, and designate them public or private. You can also edit or remove tag you've created by clicking on Edit from the book's product page.

You can view the tags for any Amazon customer who's made at least one purchase, unless they've chosen to keep their tags private.

Sell more books by giving them away

Great article in Forbes by author Cory Doctorow. He posted the entire text of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, for free downloading on his Web site. That was three years ago, and the book is in its sixth printing. More than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded.

Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience.