Tag: Brent Sampson

brent sampson, Brent Speaks, Uncategorized

Guest Post: Ingram Puts Publishing on Notice

On April 27, 2020 Ingram Book Wholesalers began removing books from wholesale distribution that they determined to lack integrity and therefore negatively affect the reputations of publishers, libraries, and retailers, and, let’s face it, Ingram.

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Ingram sent all the publishers for whom they distribute books worldwide a “Service Alert” beginning with an initial paragraph containing the sentence: “To align with our industry’s needs for content integrity, we will actively remove print content from our catalog that does harm to buyers and affects the reputations of our publishers and retail and library partners.”

That is a pretty broad statement, so what does it mean? In the most general sense, it means if you paid to independently publish yourself, if you published traditionally, or if you published through a full-service self-publishing company for a service fee, your book is most likely safe since most of them vet manuscripts in advance of acceptance (with the help of an actual human being).  

On the other hand, for authors who have published books through Amazon’s CreateSpace or Kindle Publishing Platform, where the whole thing is done by lunchtime, you may have a greater concern since there was no human vetting process. Amazon publishes just about anything because their product isn’t your book, you are.  Ingram knows this, so books published via CreateSpace and KDP are also likely to undergrow harsher scrutiny simply because of how the books themselves were published.

And that’s the problem. Automated, “free” online publishing platforms like KDP are making it possible for nefarious or unscrupulous individuals or companies to profit from publishing what Ingram identifies as content lacking integrity. To that end, Ingram finds itself forced to become the gatekeeper, a role once held by The Big Five publishers (and their various subsidiaries) but a role that has been sorely lacking in the publishing industry since the advent of automated online publishing platforms.  

First Amendment pundits may be inclined to cry “foul” and wave their free speech cards, but Ingram’s use of “harm to buyers and affects the reputation of…” is not a subjective matter of opinion or free speech, but an empirical definition of value and quality. This is an important distinction that few humans have trouble making, but one that even fewer computers can make accurately.  For instance, no legitimate publishing company would accept 200 blank pages titled “Scrapbook” and publish it as a book. A computer, on the other hand, might consider 200 blank pages to be perfect. After all, there would be no mistakes, no copyright violations, and no libelous content!

To support that point, Ingram’s notification to its publishers listed some examples of content lacking integrity:

  1. Content containing 90-100% blank pages like notepads, scratchpads, journals, or similar type content.
  2. Summaries, workbooks, abbreviations, insights, or similar type content without permission from the original author. For example: A Summary of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
  3. Content that mirrors/mimics popular titles, including without limiting, similar covers, cover design, title, author names, or similar type content.
  4. Content that is misleading or likely to cause confusion by the buyer, including without limiting, inaccurate descriptions and cover art. For example: A book with a cover design that does not match the interior content; a cover that appears to be for a product other than a physical book. 
  5. Content listed at prices not reflective of its market value. For example: a blank journal listed at $99.99.
  6. Content scanned from original versions where all or parts contain illegible content to the detriment of the buyer.
  7. Content created using automated means or mass-produced processes.

These are all examples of books commonly accepted through automated online publishing platforms, but are rarely accepted by full-service self-publishing companies with a human vetting process, which is in place for precisely this reason – to protect writers and readers.

Therefore, the question professional authors who use Amazon’s automated publishing platforms may want to ask themselves is this:  Is that the company I want to keep?

brent sampson

In 2002, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist Brent Sampson founded Outskirts Press, a custom book publishing solution that provides a cost-effective, fast, and powerful way to help authors publish, distribute, and market their books worldwide while leaving 100% of the rights and 100% of the profits with the author. Outskirts Press was incorporated in Colorado in October, 2003.
In his capacity as the President and Chief Marketing Officer, Brent is an expert in the field of book publishing and book marketing. He is also the author of several books on both subjects, including The Book Marketing COACH, Self-Publishing Questions Asked & Answered, and Sell Your Book on Amazon.
amazon, brent sampson, Brent Speaks, Uncategorized

Does Your Book Have a Book Video on Amazon?

Shopping and watching videos are among the most common activities people engage in on the internet. So it stands to reason that if you can combine those two activities, your chances for increasing engagement improve. Amazon has made that relatively simple by providing a number of different ways to add videos to help people shop for (and buy) your book.

The first way you can add videos to your products (or books) on Amazon is in a section on your Product Details Page called “Related Video Shorts.” This section appears directly below the “Product details” section. Next to the bold heading that says “Related Video Shorts” is a blue link that says “Upload your video”. When you click on that link you are taken to a category selection screen where you must choose the most appropriate category for your video.  

If you’re reading this blog, presumably your “product” is a book, so in most cases, the appropriate choice is probably “other” although if you have a non-fiction book and a “how to” video related to your subject (which you should), then the “how to” selection may be the most appropriate.

Once you select your category, a pop-up screen will appear showing a directory of your computer’s hard drive.  While not instantly obvious, this is where Amazon is expecting you to select your video file for upload, which it accepts in a variety of formats, although .mp4 is probably the best.  If your Amazon account is in good standing, your video will appear in the “Related Video Shorts” section of your product details page relatively quickly. Potential customers who are considering buying your book will then be able to see your video, which may help close the sale.

The next way to add a video is on your Author Profile Page. In the “Author Updates” section you will see the link.  This method doesn’t require you to select a category and appears to be less “restrictive” on the type and length of videos that are allowed.

The third way is using your blog and then setting up your RSS feed through your Author Profile Page. This is the least restrictive method, and you can upload any video you want this way, since Amazon doesn’t censor blog postings from 3rd party RSS fees. Of course, if you update your blog constantly, the video posting will quickly disappear from your Amazon Author Profile Page in preference to your newer posts.  A trick around that is to set-up a free blog (on WordPress for example) that is specifically meant for your Amazon Author Profile Page. Simply upload one posting of the video you wish to display on Amazon and don’t post anything else to that blog. Your video will reside permanently on your Author Profile Page because of the RSS feed setting.

Of course, all of this presumes you have a video (or videos) about your book to upload. There are a lot of methods to create those, but that’s a topic for a different blog posting.  Good luck!

youtube video illustration

brent sampson
In 2002, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist Brent Sampson founded Outskirts Press, a custom book publishing solution that provides a cost-effective, fast, and powerful way to help authors publish, distribute, and market their books worldwide while leaving 100% of the rights and 100% of the profits with the author. Outskirts Press was incorporated in Colorado in October, 2003.
In his capacity as the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Marketing Officer, Brent is an expert in the field of book publishing and book marketing. He is also the author of several books on both subjects, including the bestseller Sell Your Book on Amazon, which debuted at #29 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
amazon, brent sampson, Brent Speaks, Kindle, Publishing Trends, Self-Publishing, Uncategorized

Copyright Infringement Rampant on CreateSpace

piracy

I don’t think it’s any secret that Amazon owns CreateSpace. I also don’t believe it’s any secret—especially after the author uproar that occurred in April—that CreateSpace no longer offers “creative services” such as interior book formatting, cover design, editing, or the like. When they ceased offering those services, they severed the one last component that identified them as a “publisher” instead of a “content curator,” which is the role CreateSpace now plays, and is a far cry from meeting the goals of writers who dream of publication.

A perfect example appears in a recent article on the Publishers Weekly website, written by Kenny Brechner and titled “Pirating on CreateSpace,” in which he identifies very specific examples of flagrant copyright infringement by individuals (I wouldn’t call them writers) sharing (I wouldn’t call it publishing) content through the CreateSpace platform.  One objective of a publisher is to protect their authors, and also prevent circumstances like the ones reported by Mr. Brechner. Unfortunately, the exact opposite objective is true for a content curator like CreateSpace.  Since it’s “free” to “publish” content there, CreateSpace and Amazon value neither the content nor the authors who created it. Instead, their goal is to compile as much content as possible for the purposes of offering it—usually by giving it away or encouraging their authors to give it away through thinly-veiled “marketing promotions”—to lure new Amazon members into its Prime, Prime Video Streaming, and KindleUnlimited memberships (all of which require monthly/yearly dues, and none of which reward the content creators for their contribution).  

Since CreateSpace/Amazon uses content and its creators as loss-leaders for subscriptions, they are hardly compelled to prevent copyright infringement or acts of piracy. In fact, as you can see from Brechner’s Publishers Weekly article, it was only after the article appeared on a highly respected industry website that Amazon bothered to do anything about it … and the author himself was unable to get CreateSpace to take any action at all, though not from lack of trying.  And as you’ll see from the comments already piling up below the article, this wasn’t an isolated case, nor is it something that authors are willing to tolerate. Comments include phrases like:

“I’d say, Createspace should be embarrassed – beyond measure.” – GISELA HAUSMANN

“…this article is a wise word of caution to us writers.” – Carol Johnson

“Same thing happened to me. I discovered one of its CreateSpace books had pirated both some text and several of my photos from my website that included those texts and those photos selected from my traditionally published book.” – Mark Mathew Braunstein

In fact, the same thing happened with one of my own books, too: Publishing Gems. I discovered that it had been copied in its entirety through the CreateSpace platform without my knowledge or consent. Not only was CreateSpace selling the pirated version, but so were a vast number of Amazon Marketplace booksellers. When I contacted Amazon about the infringement, they were quick to remove it. When I asked them the name of the individual who was responsible for this act of piracy, they ignored me entirely. Then I started receiving emailed requests from all the Marketplace booksellers, notifying me that they had removed the stolen book from their virtual shelves, and asking me to “approve them” for continued business under the threat of cancellation from Amazon.  Here’s the interesting part – all their emails were nearly identical, as if someone from Amazon’s legal department provided them with the exact verbiage to use to request forgiveness.

Do you know what that tells me? It tells me that copyright infringement happens so frequently through CreateSpace that Amazon’s legal department has come up with an actual procedure to cope with it.

Is that the kind of publ—er, algorithm, you want handling your books?

computer piracy

brent sampson
In 2002, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist Brent Sampson founded Outskirts Press, a custom book publishing solution that provides a cost-effective, fast, and powerful way to help authors publish, distribute, and market their books worldwide while leaving 100% of the rights and 100% of the profits with the author. Outskirts Press was incorporated in Colorado in October, 2003.
In his capacity as the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Marketing Officer, Brent is an expert in the field of book publishing and book marketing. He is also the author of several books on both subjects, including the bestseller Sell Your Book on Amazon, which debuted at #29 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
brent sampson, Brent Speaks, Uncategorized

Using Book Videos to Market Your Books

youtube video illustration

Everyone knows Google is the #1 search engine. Any guesses for #2?

YouTube.  

Video is quickly become the de facto way in which people interact with the Internet, which means you are missing out on a world of opportunity if you don’t have at least one book video (and preferably more). The good news is that it is easier than ever to make videos.  In fact, you probably have everything you need in your pocket right now.

Every major social media site (SnapChat, Instagram, and Facebook included) is jumping on the video bandwagon and most of them are following in the shadow of the one that popularized it all: YouTube.

Youtube is for authors, too.

The YouTube app makes it easy to record videos on your mobile phone and then upload them to a channel that you can create exclusively for your book. If you write multiple books, you may be better off creating a channel about you as the author and then include videos about all your books in one place, rather than uploading them across multiple channels, since managing multiple YouTube channels is more trouble than it’s worth.  And besides, you’ll already be busy uploading the same videos to Instagram and Facebook and other video sites, like Vimeo.

You can easily download the YouTube app from the iTunes App Store, but if you prefer not to use the YouTube App, it’s still easy to record videos on your phone and then upload them directly. Another alternative is a webcam. Nearly all laptops and tablets come with video cameras nowadays.  Just aim and shoot and upload. Of course, you can always go “higher-end” with a GoPro camera or something even higher-definition, although the price and the complexity makes it less worthwhile. Start small, start cheap, and as your experience with shooting videos grows, so too can your budget and quality.

The technical aspect is actually the easy part.  More difficult is deciding WHAT your video is going to accomplish, or what it is going to say.  While it is certainly simple to record yourself reading passages from your book, that may not make for the most exciting video to watch.  

Entertaining and/or educational videos are the way to go.

How-to videos, for instance, are very popular. This means authors of non-fiction how-to books have a large pool of content from which to draw.  Every chapter could be its own video; heck, perhaps even every page if you wish to make a series of shorter videos (which are more popular than longer ones, and drive more subscriptions to your channel to boot).  

Children are almost as popular as cats in videos, so children’s book authors … rejoice!  Let the little ones be your stars and reap the rewards for their cuteness. If you’ve written a cookbook, you’re golden. Film yourself cooking some of your recipes.  The point is, no matter what kind of book you have written, you can create a book video to market it. If all else fails, use stock photography sites to pull some still images down and edit them in with memes or quote cards and tell the story of your book or summarize its plot or message.  With the right selection of music, even these can be effective. Slide.ly and Animoto are two third-party video sites that make this process relatively simple and relatively inexpensive.

Once you make one video and upload it, make another one, and make it unique. Then, track the views and comments to see which type of videos are most popular with your audience.

brent sampson
In 2002, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist Brent Sampson founded Outskirts Press, a custom book publishing solution that provides a cost-effective, fast, and powerful way to help authors publish, distribute, and market their books worldwide while leaving 100% of the rights and 100% of the profits with the author. Outskirts Press was incorporated in Colorado in October, 2003.
In his capacity as the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Marketing Officer, Brent is an expert in the field of book publishing and book marketing. He is also the author of several books on both subjects, including the bestseller Sell Your Book on Amazon, which debuted at #29 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
Book Design, brent sampson, Brent Speaks, Uncategorized

The Importance of Interior Design for Self-Published Books

ebooks

The self-publishing industry has come a long way since the early 2000’s. Back then, self-publishing a book carried a huge stigma, but today, more books are self-published than traditionally published, and more self-published books are purchased than traditionally published books.  Yet, in many readers’ minds, the stigma still exists because self-published books are so often inferior to traditionally published books.

What can a professional self-published author do to overcome this mindset?

  1. Don’t worry about your publisher.  The vast majority of readers do not care who your publisher is. They won’t look at who published your book when deciding whether or not to buy it. So any fear you have about a stigma that is associated with your self-publisher of choice is unwarranted.  
  2. Invest in a custom cover design.  The first thing a potential buyer will see is your book cover. And the book cover is the single easiest way to tell if a book is self-published or not.  If asked, most people might not even be able to describe why a cover looks amateurish; but it doesn’t matter – an amateur cover will scream “self-published” to potential buyers and due to that stigma, they may shy away.
  3. Invest in professional interior formatting. The vast majority of self-published books are purchased from Amazon, and most of them feature the “look inside” element, which allows shoppers to view pages from within the book.  The interior of your book is the second way potential customers recognize self-published books. Interiors that are formatted by computers look like they were formatted by computers, and that makes them look like amateur, self-published books. Even worse, it looks like the author doesn’t care about what the book looks like.  If the author doesn’t even care what the book looks like, why should a potential reader buy it?

good-vs-bad-book-design_new

After the cover design, the interior design of your book is what separates most professional self-published books from “free” self-published books. Professional self-published books, like those published by full-service self-publishing providers, feature interior designs formatted by human beings.  “Free” self-published books, on the other hand, feature interior designs formatted by computers. The difference, when compared side by side, is staggering. Don’t allow your book to look amateurish and cheap by allowing a computer algorithm to format it for you. Your potential buyers will notice. They may not care who published it; they may think the cover looks great; but without a professional interior, they’re still going to know your book is self-published with just a glance. And, as a result, they’re going to think twice about ordering it.

Fortunately, it’s easy to make your book interior look professional.  Nearly all full-service self-publishing providers will professionally format your interior as a part of their publishing package fees.  And most will offer you the opportunity of “enhanced” or “custom” interior designs. Don’t pass on this opportunity lightly. While the standard interior formatting offered by most full-service providers is certainly better than anything a computer can do at those “free” places, enhanced or upgraded interior designs typically go one or two steps further – by integrating design elements, unique styles, and customizations to truly make your book one-of-a-kind. The improvement is usually worth the cost of admission.

Page-by-page custom interior designs are best suited for children’s books, or complex literature where the book itself is a work of art, like with some poetry or coffee table books. Rarely does a page-by-page custom design suit a typical black/white fiction or non-fiction work of average length (100-300 pages).  The result just doesn’t justify the cost.

When it comes to selecting a standard, included interior, do some research. Look at similar books in your genre and choose a similar style for your book.  While a cover should be unique and eye-catching, you don’t want your interior to rock the boat. Give the reader what they expect.

If you choose to enhance or upgrade your interior for a professional format that is more customized to your book and vision, work with your designer closely, and heed his/her advice. After all, this is what they do for a living; they know what they’re doing and their recommendations are worth their weight in gold. If you have a particular vision that contradicts your designer’s recommendations, have a strong, valid reason for going against conventions.  

If you choose to publish with a “free” publishing service, format your book in advance and save it as a PDF file. Do not allow their computers to “format” your book for you. That’s a sure way to make your book look self-published and, worse of all, cheap.  While formatting a book in Word is acceptable, and certainly preferable to computers, the better alternative is to use design software like inDesign. This is what professional designers use and this is what professional publishers use. Yes, your book’s interior design is that important. Most writers do not know how to design a book in inDesign, which, of course, is why most professional self-published authors use full-service publishing providers.

brent sampson
In 2002, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Semi-Finalist Brent Sampson founded Outskirts Press, a custom book publishing solution that provides a cost-effective, fast, and powerful way to help authors publish, distribute, and market their books worldwide while leaving 100% of the rights and 100% of the profits with the author. Outskirts Press was incorporated in Colorado in October, 2003.
In his capacity as the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Marketing Officer, Brent is an expert in the field of book publishing and book marketing. He is also the author of several books on both subjects, including the bestseller Sell Your Book on Amazon, which debuted at #29 on Amazon’s bestseller list.