Author Publisher Entrepreneur

book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch: APE Author Publisher Entrepreneur - How To Publish A Book ISBN:0988523108 (Self Publishing)

http://apethebook.com/

=== Excerpts === * We recommend including blurbs in the front matter of your book for two reasons: first, they reinforce the wisdom of purchasing your book. You can never reduce cognitive dissonance too much—even for a $0.99 purchase. Second, bloggers will often grab blurbs and use them in their review. We recommend putting blurbs on page i or ii to ensure that people see them. This requires pushing everything else back a page, but page count in ebooks is irrelevant, so it isn’t a problem. Blurbs on the thumbnail of the

This chapter helps you obtain an attractive and effective cover for your book (Book Cover).

Here are guidelines for a cover that will make people want to click on it:

Use crowdsourcing. I used a site called Crowdspring to design the cover of Enchantment, and I was overjoyed with the result.

Take a look at the Book Cover Archive; it’s a collection of more than 1,200 book covers. Seeing row upon row

We want to ensure that you completely understand Kindle Direct Publishing’s royalty deals.

There are two types of EBook-s in the iBookstore: First, the traditional ebook that we know and love; second, Multi-Touch ebooks that only work on iPads.

To make your book available to Nook owners, you use a service called PubIt. Nook offers a simplified path that lets you upload a Word document with Word styles and a cover.

The look and feel of GooglePlay’s web pages for authors and publishers is rapidly evolving.

Shawn and I believe that Adobe In Design is the best way for you to convert your Word document to the formats ebook resellers require.

You can also create a single EPub file, load it into CaLibre, and export MOBI and PDF formats. (However, Calibre may change the appearance of your document while converting it.)

Going from EPUB to MOBI with Calibre (or any other tool) is like creating a compressed image from another compressed image. Both formats simplify the book’s structure and layout, and each time you go between these simplified layouts you are

Calibre offers an in-app testing environment for various formats, but if a reseller offers a separate testing app (Kindle Direct Publishing and iBookstore both do),

You need to check the final version of your file under real-world conditions on a host of devices,

E P U B Check. This free tool enables you to check EPUB files.

Previewer. Amazon provides this free tool to help you ensure that your ebook looks good on Kindle devices and in Kindle apps.

files are HTML files compressed into a special ZIP file.

repackage your EPUB using ePub Zip. You’ll

Use a 12-point main body font for Kindle (MOBI).

an ebook that you sell via Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo are considered the same entity and require only one ISBN. The

The cost of ISBNs in the United States is $125 for one, $250 for ten,

To buy your ISBN, go to the MyIdentifiers site of Bowker.

marketing program called Kdp Select. This is a program that involves a ninety-day exclusive that enables people to borrow your book. In return, Amazon compensates you for loaning the book and enables you to give your book away for five days. (More about KDP Select in the next chapter.)

The book description is one of the most important pieces of writing you’ll do for your book. Here are the three C’s of optimal book descriptions:

Step 4: Upload your Book Cover. The recommended size is 2,500 pixels by 1,563 pixels. Kindle Direct Publishing accepts JPEG and TIFF files.

Upload your file in Word, HTML, MOBI, EPUB, plain text, RTF, or PDF format. We recommend that you upload a MOBI file to minimize the chances of wonky conversion.

Our friends at Kindle Direct Publishing offer another kind of pricing paradigm. It’s a program we mentioned in the previous chapter called KDP Select.

He decided to give the book away for two days,

All writers think of what they do as an art. Smart writers understand that writing is also a business. Really smart writers see themselves also as entrepreneurs. Barry Eisler

Here are guerrilla-marketing ways to make this sequence of events work for you.

offer the PDF version of your book to anyone who promises to review it.

I’ve reviewed many books, and one of the pain-in-the-ass parts of the process is to find background material such as the author’s bio, picture, cover, book specifications (page count, ISBN, price), blurbs, and foreign-rights holders. I put all this stuff in one place to make reviewing Enchantment as easy

All you need to do is sign up at the HARO website. Then you’ll get three e-mails a day with a list of requests. When you see one that matches your expertise, you contact the journalist with a pitch. If you’re selected, you may get extensive free publicity.

Another way to find Amazon’s best reviewers is to examine the reviews of books in your genre to find reviewers with “Hall of Fame,” “Top 50 Reviewer,” or “Vine Voice” badges.

try publishing a shorter work, such as a Kindle Single (thirty to eighty pages). Reviewers are much more likely to take a look at your work if it is not a significant time commitment.

better to get a meaningful review from someone who appreciates your book than to get a vacuous review from a top reviewer.

Break the ice by mentioning specific reviews you liked by the reviewer. And don’t mention a specific review that you liked without marking the review as “helpful.” These votes are the only tangible compensation that reviewers get for their effort.

My last recommendation is that you post a thank-you comment on the review. Do this even if the review is negative.

Your book’s title and subtitle must contain the keywords people search for.

A great way to optimize your title and subtitle is to use the Google Adwords keyword tool

Optimize Amazon’s Author Central Author Central provides services to Kindle Direct Publishing authors, and it is a key component of your marketing efforts to Amazon customers.

This chapter explains how to create an enchanting personal brand. In the next chapter, we’ll examine the tools to spread your brand. The goal of these two steps is to build a “platform” for your book.

The three pillars of a personal brand are trustworthiness, likeability, and competence:

Here are five ways to build likeability:

Competence is the third pillar of a platform. The goal is to establish yourself as a trusted source of information, insight, and assistance.

Own a niche.

Let go of niches you can’t/don’t own.

This chapter explains the tools for building a platform.

We’ve presented six social-media networks you can use to build a platform. Now we’d like to narrow them down, because you don’t have enough time to use all six. If we were starting to build a platform today, we would focus on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter because of their widespread popularity. As we mentioned, we recommend spending at least one to two hours on them every day for at least six months, starting from the moment you’re thinking of writing a book.

This chapter helps you create an enchanting social-media profile.

information is not the place to show your sense of humor or uniqueness. Go

good test is whether you would like and trust a person with your biographical information. An even better test is whether you’d want your son or daughter to date someone with your biographical information.

Eclecticism is also good, so after you establish a reputation for a particular expertise, you should include posts about your other passions. This will make you more enchanting

repeat my tweets four times, eight hours apart.

This chapter explains how to successfully pitch your book to bloggers, reviewers, and thought leaders.

In addition to your e-mail pitch, you should enclose a Press Release about your book. The purpose of a press release is to provide all the basic information about your book in one or two pages.

Jackie Morse Kessler, author of young-adult books, reinvented the book tour and turned it into a “blog tour.”

Second, you act as an author using the Good Reads Author Program.

First, there’s Halley Suitt Tucker, without whom I might not have started self-publishing at all. *