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Readability and Book Sales |
If your book is part of the Search Inside feature on Amazon.com, you might be able to get some incredible statistics about your book, including its reading level, word count, average words per sentence, % of complex words, and words per dollar (based on the retail price of your book).
If you'd like to read an interesting post comparing books by Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and a few other authors, go here: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2007/10/ this-may-be-old.html?cid=87592892#comment-87592892.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the above post is how books with fewer average words per sentence and a smaller % of complex words sell better. In other words, if you write shorter sentences and use less complex words, you have a greater chance of becoming a bestselling author. Interesting.Labels: Amazon.com, Malcolm Gladwell. bestselling author, readability, reading level, search inside, Seth Godin, word counts |
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Book Authors: Squidwho for You |
In a post today, Seth Godin reminded book authors that they should be promoting themselves on Squidwho. Here are the basics of his message:
Authors are brands. Some are billion-dollar brands, some are tiny ones. The web is custom made for authors, but so far, it's largely going unused.
Which brings us to Squidwho. Since we launched it a month ago, people have added more than 7,000 biographies. And most of them, alas, aren't authors. We've got movie stars and politicians and yes, JK Rowling. I wish I had been surprised and had discovered scores of my fellow authors there, but alas, no.
Books aren't the universal medium they used to be, but the industry still ought to be selling more books than we are today. I'm afraid that publishers and authors have embraced a broken system, even though there are tools out there ready to help.
When I set out to build my page on Philip Roth, I discovered some very cool interviews, videos and entries about him. But no one had pulled it all together. No one made it easy to figure out what to buy and why. Forgive me for promoting my own project, but Squidwho just feels right to me. Useful and profitable and easy.
So, here's the challenge. If you're an editor, an agent, a publisher, an author or a fan, go build a page about an author you like. Or yourself. The worst thing that will happen is you'll sell a ton of books and raise some money for charity.
For the rest of his post see his blog at: http://sethgodin. typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/who-is-philip-r.html.Labels: book authors, book marketing, Seth Godin, SquidWho |
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Be a Ball Bearing, Not a Beach Ball |
In his blog, Seth Godin pointed out the following statements from Michael Brooke, editor of Concrete Wave, the magazine for skateboarders. I think what Michael has to say applies as well to most book authors. Check it out:
I am not publishing a magazine – I am helping to document and foster change within skateboarding. The magazine is part of a greater movement within skateboarding. Concrete Wave exists to spread specific ideas. The more people we can spread these ideas too, the more success we achieve.
I am not merely building readers or subscribers – I am building a cult of supporters, each of whom will further support the cause and bring in more readers and subscribers.
I build marketing INTO the product and distribution. By limiting the kinds of advertisers I allow, by keeping the editorial strictly focused and by carefully distributing the magazine, my readers and advertisers trust the magazine to deliver on its promise of 100% skateboarding. I will never betray that trust.
Concrete Wave wishes to remain a ball bearing – small, hard to find and continually in the state of being polished. Our goal is to provide readers with a deep impression when they get hit with it. Conversely, we do not aim to be a beach ball – big, seen all over the place, colorful and yet leaving very little impression when it hits. A beach ball is very fragile indeed and must avoid challenging environments, because it requires so much air to keep it afloat. A weighty ball bearing can withstand both challenging environments along with the pin pricks of adversity.
Most authors would be better served becoming small solid ball bearings than over-inflated beach balls. Focus on your core audience rather than trying to convince the world that you are the fulfillment of the masses.Labels: book authors, book marketing, Concrete Wave, Michael Brooke, self-publishing, Seth Godin |
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Less Money, More Story |
Seth Godin always has interesting points to make. In his post today at his blog, he made the following point, one that I've been trying to get through to people for a very long time:
"The art of marketing is not finding more money to do more marketing. It's figuring out how to tell a story that spreads with the resources you've got."
So many self-publishers and new authors want to throw money at marketing or hire someone else to do the marketing for them when they should be spending the time creating great stories. By great stories, I mean, marketing messages that move people, get people talking, get people telling others about your story, etc.
Before you do anything else to market your book, decide what your story is -- what message will move people to act.Labels: book marketing, self-publishing, Seth Godin, telling stories |
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Newspaper Book Review Sections |
In recent days, again, many book publishing commentators are lamenting the paring down or elimination of newspaper book review sections. Well, I'm not one of them. Most of these sections have been doing such a poor job that they don't deserve to continue to exist.
Too many of them review the same, same books (all from New York publishers) when they should be reviewing books that would truly interest their local and regional readers. Far too many of them ignore books from local and regional publishers, books that would truly interest their readers.
As I've traveled around the country, I've noticed that most book review sections review the same books, write about them the same way, etc. It has been a long, long time since newspaper have served their local readers with reviews of local books. Once in a while, they throw in a review of a local book, but most newspaper book review editors review, as many have told me, "only major novels, major memoirs, and major nonfiction," which, of course means, no local or regional books for us.
No wonder no one reads the book review sections anymore. No wonder newspapers are dropping them like flies or paring them down to nothing. No wonder so many major newspapers now feature reviews syndicated from other newspapers. They might as well. If they had written their own review, it would have sounded the same anyway.
Seth Godin, my favorite business blogger and the only one I read regularly, wrote a post about the demise of newspaper book review sections (and other mass media options). You should read it. Check it out here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/05/ reaching_the_un.html.Labels: book reviews, mass media, newspapers, Seth Godin |
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Need a Website? Here's a Simple Way |
If you're an author and you need a down-and-dirty website fast, then follow Seth Godin's strategy for creating a website in a few hours by linking a blog, a Squidoo lens, and a Flickr collection of photos. He says you can do it all for $60 per year. You can read his blog post at: Seth's post.
But that's by paying Typepad.com $5.00 per month to host your blog. Alternatively, you can host your blog here at Blogger.com. You go to Blogger.com to set up a blog, which is then actually hosted here at blogspot.com. Same company, just different URLs.
You can easily set up a blog here with your name or your book name so it reads something like: http://yourname.blogspot.com. Then go over to Squidoo.com to set up a lens (a web page) about you and/or your book. You could actually set up one lens (page) about you and another about your book. Read Seth's post to find out some of the things you can do with a Squidoo lens.
Finally, go over to Fickr to post some photos of you, your book, you at a booksigning, etc. With a Squidoo lens, you can have your blog syndicated on the page along with your Flickr photos, plus whatever else you want to post to the page.
Again, read Seth's post to get a good idea how to go about all this.Labels: author websites, Blogger, blogging, Flickr, Seth Godin, Squidoo.com, website |
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In Praise of a Blank Cover |
Yesterday in his blog, Seth Godin wrote In praise of a blank page. Here is what he had to say about book covers:
"A friend just sent me a book he worked on. It's a terrific book, but it has an astonishingly mediocre (if that's possible) cover. I can just see how the cover came to be. There were proposals and meetings and compromises and a deadline. As the deadline loomed, the compromises came more often, until they ended up with a cover that didn't match the power of the book.
"They should have just shipped a cover that was blank.
"Knowing that you need to ship a blank cover if you can't come up with something great focuses the mind and takes the edge of the conversations about compromise. If 'good enough' isn't good enough, and if the alternative is certain failure, people will dig in and come up with something better."
I think if publishers published more books with blank covers, we'd eventually end up with more great covers. Read Seth's post. He has more to say than what I quoted here.
In fact, while you're there, read his post from today as well: The most important rule.
In today's post he cites the following rule: By a factor of three, what you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel.
That's a rule I have to practice more. Sometimes, in the hustle of day-to-day details, I forget the larger picture -- which in my case is this: Why I'm doing what I'm doing. In short, I'm doing what I'm doing because I want to help people. Everything else is secondary.
What is your big picture? Why are you writing books? Why are you doing what you are doing? Answer that. And, if somewhere in your answer, there are no people, put some people in. People matter. Blank pages are great!Labels: blank pages, book covers, importance of people, Seth Godin, what really matters |
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