Self published author help II

Helpful Info for the Self-Publisher

The following contains information accumulated throughout my publishing career. Hope this helps. If you need clarification on certain aspects, or if time has made some of the info inaccurate, feel free to email me.

Information provided by fantasy author, Brian S. Pratt
self-published since Dec 2006 with over 9000 books sold

When you begin your search for a publisher or agent, make sure to stop by Preditors and Editors.
this place rates them all and warns away from scammers.

Other sites that provide useful info on agents, publishers, and how to deal with them:

For Fantasy and Sci-fi. Expect up to a six month wait for review to appear.

If anyone knows of others, email me and let me know.

Here's some advice another author sent me. I don't understand some of it, my computer technical savvy isn't the greatest but might be beneficial to you too:

Thanks for getting back to me and for the information. I checked out
your website, and it looks good, but I think we can get you some more
traffic. First and foremost, get yourself listed on www.scifimatter.com.
It's a free, human edited, SciFi and Fantasy directory. I am currently
getting 200+ hits a month just from that listing, which is almost equal
to the clicks I am getting for $60/month in AdWords. I need to work on
my Amazon profile and connect blog. I'm looking at yours for
inspiration. AuthorsDen has also brought some traffic, but not as much
as scifimatter. I use Facebook for social networking, which has also
yielded some sales. I'm also happy with the results I'm seeing on
Mobipocket--that's where I found you. I noticed that people who are
buying The Dawning of Power are also buying your books.

Here are some things you can do to improve your search engine
optimization on your website:

Your pages have names like: briansprattshomepage_031.htm. If you
changed that to something like
brian-s-pratt-warrior-priest-of-dmon-li.htm, search engines will give
all those keywords weight.
Your pages have titles like: Book Three Description. Pretty much the
same as above, use the your desired keywords in the page title and
search engines will weight them heavily.
You have duplicate META tags on pages. Never use a word more than once
in your tags on a single page. For example: "fantasy series,series" is
bad mojo and search engines may penalize you for it. Just use
"fantasy,series" instead
On your front page, where you list your books, consider including the
title as "text". Web crawlers can't read the book title from the
picture, so they have no way to know that "Book One" is The Unsuspecting
Mage.

Your alternate text for your pictures is blank. This is another place
you want your book titles and / or keywords.
Sign up for Google Webmaster tools, and you can see some of the things
Google doesn't like about your site so you can fix them. This helped me
a lot.

You're traffic rating on Alexa is currently: 7,730,207

After some work, I've climbed to 4,074,846

Do you use webalizer or Google Analytics to keep track of your web
traffic and keywords?

(Not sure about these. That's why I posted them at the end. Proceed with caution.)

A Pay-per-click advertising company. Minimum $0.20 per click with a daily cap of no less than $5.00. Claims to put your info before millions/ month. They do have other advertising options besides the pay-per-click.

Comprehensive info on the eBook Publishing Industry

Happy Birthday to me :)

First of all, and this may sound rather dumb, but did you know there were more sites than the Amazon you are using? Believe it or not, I didn't until a year after I initially published The Unsuspecting Mage. I happened to glanced at the very bottom of an Amazon web page and saw the other Amazons listed. They are:

United States - Canada - United Kingdom - Germany - France - Japan - China

I wouldn't worry too much about China, as to get your book listed there takes some doing and the government has to give their okay for it to be sold in their country (It can't be subversive or defame China in any way or so I understand). At the others, however, you should search out your book's listing and see how it looks. Quite often, descriptions will be missing, and some of the info could be wrong.

First thing you should do is to update every bit of information on every site that they allow. Here are links where you can add info on the various sites:

France and Japan, as far as I know, need to be contacted directly.

DE is in German, but if you use the forms from another site as a guide, you'll be fine.

Most Amazons now have discussions. One thing I did was to post excerpts of my book in the book's discussion area. You can check how I did it here:

At Amazon.com, create your Bibli- or Discography so you can begin posting messages to prospective readers. And for goodness sakes, ensure your website address, or better yet, an email address is available. Nothing puts a customer off more than to have to hunt for something. Assume everyone going to your site is the laziest person in the world. If you do make your email address available, turn off your spam filter or you're going to lose a lot of emails from potential customers. Again, I discovered this months after I posted that I always responded. I happened, by chance, to check out my spam depository and found a reader's email sitting there. To this day, I wonder how many I actually missed out on. You can use the above link to The Unsuspecting Mage to see some of the ones I use if you like.

When you post messages, be sure to create links. If you mention your book, put a link to that book. If you mention your website, make it a link, etc. Think that if it meant enough for you to mention it, link it.

Tags. Make sure to utilize the tag features. If you have multiple version, do not assume tagging one tags them all, it doesn't. Go in and tag your Kindle version, paperback, eBook, hardback, whatever you happen to have. If you aren't sure what tags to use, go to a well known book similar to yours and see what tags are being used there.

Aside from tags, there are Searches that you can assign for your book. These are helpful in that you are allowed to type in a message that comes up when your search appears on a customer's screen. You can find it below the Tag area.

Now, let's talk reviews. I'm sure you have friends and family who are anxious to help out and would post a review for you. Most of the time when they do, they give it five stars, a sentence or two saying "It's Great" or "You got to try this." Take it from me, these are worthless. If you rack up too many, everyone will think they are from you. If you don't believe me, check out some of the older discussions on the Fantasy board at Amazon.com. It can get pretty nasty.

No, if people want to help, then they have to write reviews that are going to be "helpful" to the prospective buyer that happened by. Have them put some meat in them. If they liked it, have them explain why. Give examples, nothing too plot sensitive of course. Also, there had to be something they didn't like about the book. Have them include that too. Reviews that address the good and bad are more likely to be taken to heart than one that can only gush one-liner positives. Up to you on this one, just my philosophy.

And don't harangue the Discussion boards with "Buy my book" posts. Mention it only if the reader is requesting titles, or if mentioning it actually adds to the discussion. You'll get a much more favorable response if you sprinkle "suggestions to buy" rather than pour it on.

Don't expect a lot of sales at first. It takes time. Some never take off, some do.

One of the things you might try, is publish your book on Smashwords(Most PODS will not frown too heavily on this. Check yours to make sure). On there, you can create coupon codes. Make one that will reduce the price to $0.00, create a discussion advertising a free eBook, and make the promotion for a single day. Just enough to hopefully start the word spreading.

One author suggested putting a web address or email in the signature that shows on the discussion. Something like "Brian S. Pratt-fantasy author-www.briansprattbooks.com" that way, every post is an automatic advertisement that isn't in-your-face.

As always, if you have any question or other useful tidbits that could be added, let me know.

Self-Publishing
What to expect:

In a nutshell-POD books sell less than 200 copies, one company averages 54 copies per book. Unless you sell 50,000 copies, most traditional publishers won't touch your book.
-Generalization only, there are always exceptions.

For those who don't know, Piers Anthony has been publishing for Decades and has sold multi-million copies. Author of the Bestselling Xanth series.