TomBritt.com Online Marketing Blog

Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter has filed a lawsuit against book publisher and promoter Airleaf, LLC (formerly Bookman Publishing) for taking money without providing the promised services in return. The lawsuit is seeking consumer restitution for at least 120 customers.

“More than 120 people are named in the lawsuit, including many from Indiana who lost thousands of dollars,” said Carter. “In fact, hundreds more may have lost money. They paid for services. Airleaf did not deliver, and now, those consumers deserve refunds.”

Its companies like this that give publishing a bad name. Writers Weekly had to ban Airleaf from posting on their forums they were abusing them so badly. Late in 2006, they organized a “Book Fair” at Franklin College and sold table space to a hand-full of authors that were promised a huge book conference at the college’s basketball arena. Only 5 authors and a custodian wondering why there were 5 authors in the gym showed up.

Disguised as “faster shipping and fulfillment”, Amazon announced this week that all print on demand book titles sold by Amazon MUST be printed by them (BookSurge.com). They claim:

If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers — including in those cases where the POD book needs to be married together with another item. If a customer orders a POD item together with an item that we’re holding in inventory — a common case — we can quickly print and bind the POD item, pick the inventoried item, and ship the two together in one box, and we can do so quickly. If the POD item were to be printed at a third party, we’d have to wait for it to be transhipped to our fulfillment center before it could be married together with the inventoried item.

Hmm, I wonder how many orders are “transhipped” (is that a word by the way?) with other items in their fulfillment center? Lighting Source, owned by Ingram which is the United State’s largest retail book distributor, has been printing and “transhipping” books for Amazon for years. Each book is put into an Amazon box, Amazon packing slip, and shipped on Amazon’s account. I guess Amazon isn’t making enough money on shipping and handling fees, their 35%+ commission, and cross-selling (or “trans-selling”) their CreateSpace.com or other publishing services.

The result of their strong-arm, take-it-or-leave-it tactics will be simple: Smaller, stubborn, or defiant self-publishing companies will die and Amazon will feed them to BookSurge.com. PublishAmerica might be the first to go, their executives claim:

PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon’s ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica’s books, and at what conditions.

Xlibris is reported to have not signed an agreement with Amazon yet, either. The first self-publishing company could be the last if they don’t wise up and work something out. Business is business, fall in line to the 800 lb. gorilla or be fed to the BookSurge giant.

It’s rumored that AuthorHouse/iUniverse has reached a deal with Amazon. The market leader understands how the publishing industry is changing and is looking out for the best interests of their authors.

Be defiant all you want. Custer was defiant. Charles Manson is still defiant. Look at what it got them. Bad news PublishAmerica: You and your authors need Amazon more than they need you. As of the writing of this blog post, your 23,000+ books are basically turned “off” on Amazon. Unfortunately, no one has challenged Amazon for years in book sales because they were:

1. An online market leader, and
2. They worked well in their ecosystem of book sales and distribution

Now, they have gotten a little greedy and believe that they alone can provide anything and everything that a self-published author would want, including the printing. Amazon could be cutting off their own nose in an industry that has become more and more fragmented over the last 10 years. By turning on their own in an economic ecosystem that seemed to work for everyone, Amazon could and should see some publishers ally to form online bookstores that rival their catalog of books.

If Amazon is so concerned with the customers’ “speed of shipping experience,” why remove the “buy now” button and decrease the speed of buying a book? They have prided themselves on the “one click” purchase experience and spent millions of dollars to protect it legally. Why play hardball in a stadium full of publishers that used to support you and make it harder for them to sell books through your store?

In closing, I have two recommendations:

1. AuthorHouse/iUniverse and company needs to develop a new and improved e-bookstore and go head to head with Amazon on book sales. Charge them a premium and force them to join some hokey advantage program to sell BookSurge books through your new portal. Your own authors and the industry at large will thank you for it.
2. Amazon needs to stick to selling books and leave the distribution, printing, and fulfillment to willing partners like Lightning Source. You aren’t kidding anyone with this “speed of shipping experience” and “transhipping” speak.

1.    Pick a target date for holding the first copy of your book in your hands – Staying focused on this date will help you remain productive and avoid procrastinating. Many first-time authors pick dates that have special personal significance, like their 50th birthday or their wedding anniversary.

2.    Figure out the best time and place for you to write productively – Not everyone works best at the same time or place. Once you’ve figured out where and when you do your best writing everyday, commit to it. One author, for example, stated that he could write more, and better, between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., than he could in the afternoon between 2 and 5 p.m.

3.    Form a schedule and stick to it – Now that you’ve figured out where and when you work best, make writing a part of your daily routine. This will help you progress steadily and finish your book much more quickly.

4.    Make yourself accountable to someone for finishing your book – Choose someone who will check in periodically and make sure you’re staying focused. It can be a friend or family member; or someone familiar with the process. For example, Author Services Representatives at AuthorHouse have served in this role for thousands of authors. A firm but gentle hand can be all the encouragement you need to finish your book.

5.    Create a plan for marketing your finished book – The retail success of a book is often directly tied to a successful marketing program. Put together a plan for how you’ll get the word out about your fantastic new book. Publishers like AuthorHouse provide marketing tools that will make marketing much easier

6.    Plan an event to celebrate the book’s completion –Writing a book is one of the greatest accomplishments of your life. Celebrate this achievement by throwing a launch party at your home for friends and family. This is more than a book, its part of your legacy. Take a few moments to pat yourself on the back and enjoy your achievement.

To get more information, visit AuthorHouse.com.

Until a few years ago, the term self-publishing usually entailed the likes of AuthorHouse, iUniverse, or Infinity Publishing taking a raw manuscript and converting it into a printed book via print on demand. Nowadays, self-publishing is being redefined as a “do-it-yourself publishing” process where you go online, upload your manuscript, format it, and then use print on demand to print and fulfill book orders.

One of the first in this space was Lulu.com who boasts over 10,000 new accounts per week. Unfortunately, the process was either deemed too hard or too confusing for most users with only a handfull of the 10,000 actually completing their book online. Beyond the printing, Lulu doesn’t offer too many other services beyond an ISBN and distribution at a cost.

Amazon even threw their hat in the ring with the debut of CreateSpace.com. Like Lulu.com, they provide an online process whereby a user can create their own book and sell it through Amazon.com. Again, the wheels fall off when an aspiring author realizes that designing their own cover or text pages is a little more difficult than what they thought. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea, but it’s the devil in the details that cause many authors heartburn when it comes to this new self-publishing model.

In my opinion, AuthorSolutions‘ Wordclay.com has a leg up on both of these established brands. AuthorHouse and iUniverse are well-versed in helping people along the process to becoming published. Besides, AuthorHouse has more marketing services to offer than anyone in this space which is always the lynchpin in any successful book. Like CreateSpace.com, Wordclay.com can give you Amazon.com distribution as well as visibility to any of the 25,000 retailers in the United States that subscribe to Ingram’s feed.

If you are publishing a wedding book, a reunion scrapbook, or other book where distribution is not a factor AND you are pretty tech savvy, it will come down to ease of use and pricing. If you are doing this new self-publishing model for the first time and you are willing to admit that you are a better writer than you are marketer and layout artist, then Wordclay.com might just be for you.

Join me at theNextBigWriter.com’s Brown Bag Lunch where I’m hosting a question and answer forum on the topics of self publishing and internet marketing. They do charge a fee to join, but for all you writers, they have a lot of online support and contests to help you in your writing journey. I spent two hours answering questions this morning, most of which were around self publishing.

I was reading an interesting article today in Time Magazine entitled “One Day in America.” A few interesting stats are quoted in the article:

At some point today you will say a prayer, not floss, take a shower for 10 minutes but not sing in it, drive an eight-year-old car to work, spend 95% of the day indoors and 2 1⁄2 hours online, consume 20 teaspoons of added sugar and not save any money. On weekends, people over 75 spend 1 1⁄2 hours reading, while those from 15 to 19 spend seven minutes.

True, kids are spending less time reading newspapers and books, but 1-1/2 hours vs. 15-19 minutes? I would have to imagine that these stats don’t include the time kids spend reading profiles and posts on myspace.com or facebook.com.

Another interesting parallel, people are spending on average 2-1/2 hours per day online, almost double the time that 75 year-olds spend reading on weekends.

The wild wild west of self-publishing has a new marshall in town: AuthorHouse and iUniverse.

According to Publishers Weekly, there are an estimated 86,000 self-publishing companies in the United States. With over 200,000 new titles per year flooding the book market, primarily because of self-publishing, consolidation of the space is a good thing for everyone.

As I travel around the country talking to aspiring and published authors, I hear horror stories about various publisher dealings. One guy self-published with a company, paid his fees, and never saw a galley: the business went bankrupt before they could finish his book. Another author published with a company, the company closed its doors, and now he can’t even get his files from the publisher to keep it active at Lightning Source. Another company in Indiana sold an “authorfest” book show to their authors at Franklin College, only to have four people show up (three of them were authors that paid to exhibit).

AuthorHouse has been the 500 lb. gorilla in the self-publishing space for several years now. With nearly 30,000 active titles in Amazon, their closest competitor has been iUniverse with just over 17,000 active titles. Everyone else is a distant third in size, which doesn’t mean they can’t help you get published, they just don’t have the experience and breadth of services that an AuthorHouse or iUniverse has.

I’ve had a few people comment that AuthorHouse and iUniverse merged to run everybody out of business. Not necessarily. I think both parties felt that the industry can benefit from having an undisputed market leader in a space that has less than stellar reviews over the last 10 years. Lifting the visibility, reputation, quality, distribution, and overall perception of self-publishing will help everyone, including their competitors.

To take AuthorHouse’s position as a market leader a step further, they launched WordClay.com quietly a few months ago. True “self-publishing” has really taken hold at Lulu.com and AuthorHouse wants to extend into that online “do-it-yourself” space. Thousands of free accounts are started on Lulu.com each week with a small percentage of those actually finishing their book’s design, layout, and cover design. People find out that laying out a book isn’t as easy as they thought. Lulu.com is a pure online play, meaning all their services are available online with no or little offline support.

In comes AuthorHouse with a headquarters in Bloomington, Indiana with nearly 180 employees that are eagerly waiting for someone to raise a white flag in WordClay.com to help them finish their book. Need your manuscript edited? How about a fancier cover design? Or maybe you need some illustrations for your children’s book? AuthorHouse/iUniverse can help you fill in the gaps of your “do-it-yourself” publishing experience.

Keep an eye on the self-publishing industry in the coming months and years. As the smaller shops either close their doors or align themselves with printers, we’ll look back at the moves AuthorHouse has made in the last 6 months as a good thing for the entire industry: most importantly the authors themselves.

I had the pleasure of spending a few days in Manitou Springs, Colorado at the “AuthorHouse Author Fest of the Rockies” writers conference hosted at the historic Cliff House. For a second-year conference, the volunteers from the Manitou Springs Public Library did an exceptional job.

One of the highlights of the trip was introducing and meeting author Joanne Greenberg. She’s most known for her 1970’s novel “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” which was adapted to a film and a play. Her husband Albert joined her for the weekend and I had the pleasure of sitting across from them both at dinner with the conference organizers. She might be 75 years-old, but she has the mind and wit of a 30 year-old. I found out that she liked jokes, even off-colored ones, so we shared a few of our favorites.

I met so many authors, all at various stages in their writing. Roz Monette has written a few young adult fiction books and we had a good time chatting during breakfast. I sat in a marketing session by Ken Guentert, a Manitou Springs publishing expert that helps authors through the process of being published. Blogging expert Michelle Vandepas hosted a session on blogging (as much as she can cover in :45 minutes anyway).

My session on the “Economics of Publishing: Show Me the Money” was well attended in the “tent” outside the Cliff House. It was an eye-opening experience for a few of the attendees, a few of which were already traditionally published and seen self-publishing through AuthorHouse as a great avenue for them to consider. One attendee asked at the end if I could do another session on Saturday about Internet marketing. Voila, I hosted a session on Saturday afternoon called “Internet Marketing 101” inside the big top again.

At the end of the conference, organizers hosted an author book signing party, complete with live music, drinks, and cookies. By my guestimate, there were at least 50 authors selling, signing, and pitching their books to attendees and locals. I know the Black Cat Bookstore did well, they were just about out of books by the end of the conference.

Overall, I give the conference a 9 out of 10. If you live in the Colorado Springs or Denver area and you want to further your writing either professionally or personally, put this conference on your schedule for next October, 2008.

The best web stats software on the market today is Google Analytics. Why? Because it’s good, doesn’t reside on your server, doesn’t require a licensing agreement, and it’s free!

That’s right, free.

And to help you get started with Google Analytics, they have posted several instructional videos on YouTube.com to help you understand conversions, the role of conversions on non-ecommerce sites, bounce-rates, advanced techniques, and much more.

View entire playlist!

If you attended the WriteStuff Writers’ Boot Camp in Lyndhurst, Ohio on Friday or the Midwest Writers Conference in Muncie, Indiana on Saturday, here is a download of my presentation entitled “How to Leverage the Internet to Market Your Book.” I suggest you read through this blog for more detailed information on pay per click, search engines, how to pick a domain name, and other topics of interest. Thanks for coming!

Tom Britt Internet Book Marketing Presentation

Watch the presentation online without downloads