A new take on book clubs: Bookwise

I'm surprised nobody else has tried this yet. Bookwise, an Internet-based book club that also gives members a financial incentive to join. If you sign up more members, you can make a percentage of their book purchases.

On the first day of every month, BookWise posts its monthly catalog on the Web site. Members, or "associates," can order books from these categories:

Fiction, Nonfiction, Religious Fiction, Business, Advice and How-To, Cookbooks, Children's Books, Juvenile, Audio Fiction, Audio Nonfiction, Sci-Fi Fantasy, Classics, Business Building Tools and Self Published.

Associates have until midnight of the seventh day to make their selection. If a selection hasn't been made by that time, the system automatically selects a book from the Associate's default category.

The fee is $35, and for that you get:

1. A best selling book of your choice

2. A free ebook

3. A free audio book

4. 40 percent to 50 percent off on extra books

5. The BookWise newsletter

6. Free speed reading lessons each month

7. A Bestseller Webcast: live monthly interactive online interviews with bestselling authors

8. TaxWise Training: live monthly conference with tax experts

9. WealthWise Training: live weekly coaching on secrets of wealth

10. Bestseller Seminar: How to Write and Sell a Bestselling Book.
Live two-day seminar with five authors

How to become a LibraryThing author

LibraryThing is the leading social-networking site for bibliophiles, and it offers authors an opportunity to enhance their profile. You can build a special author page on LibraryThing to show members what's in your personal book collection.

To become a LibraryThing author, you need to be a member who has at least one book listed on Amazon or the Library of Congress, and the book has been entered onto LibraryThing by you or someone else. You also need to catalog at least 50 books. You’ll need a public account that allows comments on your profile. Get more details from Abby@LibraryThing.com.

So far about 300 authors have signed on at LibraryThing.

Like other social networks that have mushroomed recently, LibraryThing has grown purely on word of mouth, not advertising. Like other social sites, part of the fun of LibraryThing is belonging to a big club that lets you display how eclectic and singular your interests are, while offering the possibility you’ll find a one-in-a-million soulmate.

Spending time on LibraryThing is addictive because of all the interesting connections you turn up, especially among obscure books. Members enter their book collection simply by punching in the ISBNs, then can compare their whole collection—or individual rarities—against the collections of other members. Ever wonder who else in the world has read that oddball book you love? On LibraryThing you’ll find out.

LibraryThing also has a book-recommendation system that can be more accurate than Amazon's because LibraryThing members pay more attention to the raw data it uses. By contrast, Amazon recommendations can be corrupted with gift purchases and most users don’t go to the bother of fine-tuning it.

Another important feature of LibraryThing is anonymity. Unlike a commerce site like Amazon, which must identify users to collect payments, LibraryThing knows only a person’s user ID, unless the user adds more information and makes it public. This gives members the freedom to list material and provide information they might not want to be associated with publicly.

How to buy ineffective advertising for your book

Great post today in Slate on paid book reviews.

Seems that Amazon's BookSurge isn't content merely to overcharge self-publishing authors for the privilege of printing their books. Now they want to charge hopeful authors a big wad of cash for fake book reviews.

Aspiring authors are being led to believe that a paid review from someone who wrote some bestsellers a few decades ago will make a difference.

Paid reviews aren't criticism, they're advertising.

The most interesting add-on BookSurge offers is, for $399, a personally crafted review written by "New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh." (Ellen Tanner Marsh's bodice-rippers Reap the Savage Wind and Wrap Me in Splendor graced the New York Times trade- paperback bestseller list in 1982 and 1983.) Not surprisingly, many BookSurge titles boast enthusiastic reviews by Marsh.

Geez, where is BookSurge getting its authors? High school detention hall?

Q&A: How long will Amazon take to add my title to Search Inside the Book?

QUESTION: Amazon approved my self-published book for its Search Inside the Book program six weeks ago. They received the package containing my book more than a month ago, according to the tracking. How long does it normally take for Amazon to add a new title to its Search Inside program?

ANSWER: It usually takes about a month. However, in my experience, Amazon sometimes drags its feet on including self-published books into the Search Inside the Book program. I suppose the reason is that the program is costly, and self-published books are the last priority. The folks at Amazon ought to know better, but there is prejudice against self-published books, no matter how good an individual book might be.

And honestly, self-published books sell very poorly on average. Perhaps that's why many people have speculated that Amazon may begin charging a fee for including books in Search Inside the Book.

For the time being, the best way to ensure your book is included is for you to become a very squeaky wheel. That's how I got my first self-published book added to Search Inside. After my book had been approved, I waited patiently for about six months. Then, when I didn't get a satisfactory answer from the Search Inside staff as to why my book hadn't appeared, I wrote to Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos. My book was promptly added to Search Inside the Book.

For now, I think it would be sufficient for you to inquire by replying to the e-mail you received from Amazon approving your title for Search Inside.

You're right to be concerned about this, I think Search Inside is a powerful sales tool, especially for nonfiction books. After all, if you walked into a brick-and-mortar bookstore and all the books were shrink-wrapped shut, would you spend much time shopping? Probably not.

Search Inside enables full-text searching and gives people millions more ways to find your book. For example, when a buyer searches for Eleanor Rigby, the top three results are books containing “Eleanor Rigby” in the title. Then comes the 600-odd other books that mention “Eleanor Rigby” somewhere on one of their pages.

Like nearly every Amazon innovation, Search Inside was resisted at first by many publishers, who insisted it would hurt book sales. Why, they argued, would someone buy a cookbook or travel guide if the pages could be viewed free? But after Amazon reported sales boosts of 9 per-cent for participating books, most publishers enrolled.

Search Inside the Book doesn’t convert everyone into a buyer. People use it as a research tool without buying, but these folks weren’t likely buyers anyway. But it's much easier to sell your book on Amazon if shoppers can browse your table of contents, introduction, and some sample pages.

Allowing the full display of text gives some publishers pause, but I think most agree the benefits far outweigh the risks. Amazon builds safeguards into Search Inside to prevent customers from reading large portions of a book without buying it. Users must register with a credit card first, and can view no more than 20 percent of any particular book. The text displayed on the screen is a low-resolution image, and can’t be copied into a word processor.

Search Inside also provides authors with an opportunity to hook Amazon browsers with the first sentence of a book. Because Amazon displays your initial sentence hyperlinked, buyers can click right through to your introduction.

Here's where to enroll in Search Inside the Book. Participation must be initiated by the publisher.

Release your book on BookCrossing and ignite word of mouth

Book clubs have always been a great word-of-mouth generator, and the Internet has given them global reach. BookCrossing.com is a virtual book club whose members pass along books they’ve enjoyed. Members can recommend books at the Web site and ask to receive books via postal mail. Another pass-along technique is for members to “accidentally” leave books at bus stops, dentist offices and other places, along with a sticker inviting whoever finds the book to join BookCrossing—a practice members call “releasing books into the wild.”

Launched in 2001, BookCrossing now has about 520,000 members circulating 3.5 million books. Membership is free, and the group has grown primarily from word of mouth, not advertising. At first, founder Ron Hornbaker feared authors would oppose BookCrossing and brand it the book world’s “Napster,” referring to the online music-sharing service accused of copyright infringement. But hundreds of authors have discovered that BookCrossing can generate strong word of mouth for their book, Hornbaker says. Active members discover many new authors and purchase lots of books based on member recommendations.

BookCrossing remains unpopular with some authors, who argue that access to free copies of books deprives them of income. Perhaps these are the same authors who would rather not see their work on the shelves of public libraries—another strong word-of-mouth generator, in the opinion of many successful authors.

Many authors say exposure through BookCrossing generates more buzz and sales compared to mailing review copies to magazines and newspapers. Although there is nothing wrong with authors donating their own books to BookCrossing, Hornbaker cautions that authors should be transparent about their activities, and identify themselves as a book’s author. In no circumstance should authors post a message on BookCrossing’s discussion boards or send a private message promoting the author’s book.

Tips for using MySpace to plug your book

Many up-and-coming authors are using MySpace to promote their books. Here are several rules of thumb for using MySpace as a publicity tool:

• Try to keep your MySpace pages streamlined and clutter-free. Make sure that anyone who sees it can easily discover your book and, if interested, buy it quickly. Put “buy this book” links so they’ll appear on each page.

• Keep your name in front of people by posting frequently to your MySpace blog and by sending a bulletin of the blog entry to all your Friends. But don’t abuse the privilege – if you post too frequently without something of value, your Friends will quickly decide to ignore you – or delete you from their list of Friends.

• Ignore folks on MySpace who try to sell you something you’re uninterested in, or those who try to hook up for a date. Unless you’re interested in this, it’s best to focus on the Friends who find value in your ideas and books. When you set up your MySpace page, it’s easy to make clear you’re not there for dat-ing – that way you’ll eliminate a lot of spam from unwanted “Friends.”

• Don’t feel obligated to accept every Friend who zaps an invitation your way. It’s best to concentrate on having 50 friends who truly connect with, rather than having thousands of Friends you quickly forget about.

• To leverage MySpace as a professional asset, it must look professional. Your potential Friends will check out your existing Friends, so your MySpace utility will be undermined by having too many friends who have no connection to your niche. It’s find to have some oddballs in there, but be certain you have a clear connection with your Top 8 Friends.

• To keep the hits coming, you’ve got to maintain MySpace. Throwing together a page and never visiting or tweaking it will do little good.

• Don’t promote your MySpace profile at the expense of your own domain. MySpace is a great networking tool, but you don’t want to depend on it exclusively. Perhaps someday MySpace will go out of business, or begin charging high fees, or you may decide it no longer fits the image you want to project. Even if MySpace is currently your primary online tool, you can purchase an important in-surance policy for only $9 a year by registering your own domain name—www.MyName.com or www.MyBookTitle.com and pointing the traffic to your MySpace URL (your domain registrar can handle this for you). You can always point the traffic elsewhere if you quit using MySpace. This way, you won’t have to start over.

Q&A: How can I change my Top 8 MySpace friends?

QUESTION: I've noticed that some author pages on MySpace have a a long list of featured friends, while most have only eight. How can I change my Top 8 on MySpace?

ANSWER: Under each member’s “About Me” section are pictures of eight friends, then a link to all the other friends of that member. By default, the eight pictures are the first eight Friends added by that member, known in MySpace parlance as Top 8.

You're absolutely right, youi can customize your Top 8 to add zing to your profile page. Take your most influential or well-known Friends and move them to your Top 8, by scrolling down to the box labeled “My Friend Space” and clicking Change my Top Friends.

Seek out more top authors or experts in your field, and request they add you as a Friend. Then move them into your Top 8. This is a valuable cross-promotion tool because it will boost your exposure among readers who are in your target audience.

If you’re really popular on MySpace, there’s no need to limit yourself to eight top friends. After clicking Change my Top Friends, on the top left corner of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu where you can change the number of Top Friends to as many as 24, or as few as four.

Avoiding the dulicate content penalty

An increasingly popular way to get exposure for your book is by syndicating articles through online article banks. One of the most popular, EzineArticles.com, has more than 40,000 participating authors. Contributors aren’t paid, but they figure the added exposure is worth the effort of article syndication.

If your articles are accepted, they’re featured on EzineArticles.com and made available for reuse on other Web sites, blogs and e-mail newsletters. Each article includes a “resource box” with links back to your site. Here's an example, look for the resource box at the bottom.

Although article syndication can provide great exposure, be selective about the content you contribute. Don’t offer any content that appears on your site without first rewriting it. Search engines such as Google constantly filter out “duplicate content” from search results. If an article from your site appears elsewhere on the Internet, one of the Web pages probably will be deleted from search results, and chances are it will be yours. Search-engine experts call this the duplicate content penalty.

How duplicate content backfires

Let’s imagine you’ve written a book about pottery, and to promote it, you publish a pottery blog. Last year on your blog, you wrote a nifty tutorial on fixing broken pottery. Word has gotten around, and now every pottery site on the Internet links to your pottery-repair page. Because of all these links, your page is the top Google result for “repairing pottery,” “fixing pottery,” and several related queries. That single page is your Web site’s crown jewel, accounting for half your new visitors and a good portion of your book sales.

Now let’s imagine you try to squeeze even more traffic from your pottery-repair article. You post it to EzineArticles.com, without changing much except to add the links back to your site. Meanwhile, you upload the same article to other syndication sites like GoArticles.com and IdeaMarketers.com.

Now you sit back and wait for the extra traffic, but the exact opposite happens—you see less traffic, not more. Now that your article appears on a bigger, more popular site, it’s likely that Google will send searchers there instead of sending them to your site. Google has made a quick calculation of which site is more authoritative, and because EzineArticles.com has more links than your site, it wins. Google doesn’t care that you wrote the article and have the Internet’s best pottery site.

The lesson is, keep your most valuable content on your site exclusively. And if you’re going to syndicate existing content, rewrite it substantially so the search engines don’t penalize you for it.

Google’s Adam Lasnik, the company’s “search evangelist,” offers two tips for avoiding the duplicate content penalty:

• If you syndicate an article containing the same or very similar language that appears somewhere on your site, ensure the syndicated article includes a link back to the original article on your site. Don’t include only a link to your home page or some other page.

• Minimize boilerplate language on all your content. For example, instead of including lengthy copyright notices at the bottom of all your Web pages, include a brief summary with a link to a page containing your full copyright notice.

None of these safeguards, however, are foolproof. The only sure way to avoid the duplicate content penalty is by syndicating original material only, and keeping your best material exclusive to your site.

Finding host blogs for your author blog tour

A blog tour is a great way to generate word of mouth for your book. The first step is to comb the Web for blogs where you'd like to appear.

Once you’ve identified a list of relevant, potential blog hosts, prioritize your list by three main criteria: activity level, reader involvement and traffic volume.

• Activity level. How frequently do new posts appear on the blog? Bloggers usually must post at least a few times week to sustain a loyal readership. Examine the past few months of blog archives to determine the posting frequency.

• Reader involvement. How often do readers chime in with thoughtful comments? This indicates whether a blog has loyal readership. Successful blogs have a core audience that posts frequent follow-up commentary and questions.

• Traffic volume. Traffic is the natural result of blog activity and reader involvement and it’s an objective measure of a blog’s impact. A handy yardstick for measuring blog traffic is Alexa.com, which provides estimated traffic reports on many Web sites.

At Alexa.com’s top navigation bar, click Traffic Rankings. Enter the address of the blog you want to evaluate and click Get Traffic Details. For blogs with very low traffic, the result will be: “No data.” For blogs that have been publishing for a while and have considerable traffic, you’ll see an Alexa ranking ranging from 1 (the most-visited site on the Web) to about 5 million, meaning very low readership.

Alexa provides detailed traffic estimates and more details about the top 100,000 sites. Under the heading “Explore this site,” you’ll see links for Traffic Details, Related Links, and Sites linking in.

Alexa’s Traffic Details gives estimates of the blog’s relative reach and number of page views, and whether the site’s popularity is trending up or down. Clicking on Related Links shows other sites visited frequently by the same audience. Sites Linking In shows which sites, ranked by authority, have incoming links to the blog.

Although there are millions of blogs, a relative few have substantial readership. Depending on how narrowly focused your book is, you may find only a few relevant top-tier blogs. For a narrowly focused topic, you might find some potential blog hosts below the 100,000-rank threshold where Alexa provides detailed reports. A small well-qualified audience who cares about your book’s topic will provide better results than a larger, general audience.
Alexa’s reports aren’t foolproof, they’re drawn from a small sample of Web users who use an Alexa browser toolbar. Rankings for high-traffic sites are more statistically accurate than reports for niche sites. In any case, Alexa is a handy, free source of objective information about Web traffic, and is more accurate than anecdotal reporting. Bloggers and Webmasters usually overestimate their traffic by a wide margin.

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. For a backup check on relative traffic levels, you can consult MetricsMarket.com.