Blogging, Writing, and Publishing

Learn to Self-Publish and Market While the internet marketing are great options for publishers to promote their books, ethical and legal lines can seem blurred. This is especially true for posted images and materials and how they are actually used. As an author, publisher, marketer or other web entrepreneur, you have access to several free metrics sources to track your products' sales performance and clue you into where and how to market.   Google Analytics, Blogger.com and other resource can help you track your books’ online presence and include information such as who is viewing, where they are viewing from, what they viewed, how long they viewed, and how they got there. It can also give insight into how many page views it takes before someone makes a purchase.   However, there is not much available (that I'm aware of) by way of technology to track the use of your proprietary information or intellectual data. Most of that stuff is protected by existing laws su...

Self-publishing can be very rewarding, but success can be hard to measure. In a niche industry it is important to keep expectations in perspective. There is really no need to market, advertise or brand unless you have a genuine way to discover how many people are buying your product and they are coming from. The following are two great ways to measure your marketing and sales success. 1.  www.google.com/analytics-Create or sign into your Google account. You already have one if you have Gmail or use blogger.com/blogspot.com. If at all possible, try to use the same account for Gmail, blogger, analytics, adwords and all Google applications. I did not do so and now have to log into several different accounts to get all of my data. There’s no way to change it once you do. Analytics provides great traffic data. It reports audience detail, advertising information (if you use advertising), traffic sources, what folks are viewing, how they found your sight, what keywords they searched...

While preparing to go on vacation I was concerned about how to handle my publishing and book selling business. Sure, I'm online and so are my book sales, but I will still have to advertise and fulfill sales while gone. I can't afford to hang a sign on my website saying, "Gone fishing, be back in two weeks". I don't think potential customers would understand. I don't think you can afford to do so either. So, what is a niche publisher to do? Use the tools available. Here are some tools that every niche publisher and author should have. They are affordable and will help returning customers build confidence in your products and services. First and foremost, make your primary point of sale at digital bookstores such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. That way when customers buy, you are not in the middle of the sale. I use LightningSource.com and Createspace.com to upload digital and hardcopy books to myriad online stores. Once I set up titles, I don't h...

Recently a friend shared her dream to get into “publishing”. I listened intently as she described her desire to write articles and becoming a published author. I’ve read her work in some of our locally published magazines and have no doubt that she would make a great writer. I also recognized that she was where I found myself a few years back; full of ideas, but nowhere to publish them. The first inclination is to do what many budding authors have done; purchase a copy of the bestselling writer’s reference book. The book is a great place to develop ideas and sell articles. It also provides a good service with great details on which publisher is purchasing which articles and for how much. However, the reference cannot guarantee that you will have the platform to actually sell an article. After a few years of buying these books, I recognized the growing trend of many magazines not taking on new authors and paying less than ever before if they did buy an article. Why? Because of the cha...

There are already a few strikes against paying to advertise your book through an email campaign to libraries and bookstores. The first is that books are distributed through a process that self-published and print on demands are excluded from. Librarians and bookstores receive a book’s information from the Library of Congress and distributors. If your book is not in the CIP process as described in Get Rich in a Niche , chances are great that it will not be picked up by librarians and traditional books stores. Others take advantage of your hopes and dreams by claiming to have connections and inroads with major buyers. In fact, they collect your money, add your book information to a database with several hundred others and email it to their points of contact. The points of contact may not even be a result of a personal relationship, but simply a collection of email addresses. You then are tied to the hope that somehow the recipient of t...