Tips from Self-Publishing Authors: Part 3

Steve Jovanoski, author of The Brotherhood:

The reality is, it's up to you to promote your own work. After all, no one cares more about it than you. How well it sells will depend on how hard you're willing to work at promoting it. The first couple of months are the most crucial before the buzz inevitably wears out. Here are some low budget options I used - some worked better than others, some don't work at all. But I think you should try anything you can think of (within reason and with respect in your integrity as a writer in mind). 
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Self-Publishing — the flip side

This from a rather discouraged author:

Going from book shop to book shop offering to put free books on their shelves, if they’d replace the ones actually sold, is quite humiliating, and not at all rewarding. The net is also rather hit and miss since you need to drive traffic to the site somehow. My own web site disappeared into cyberspace, along with a number of discounted products which obviously did nothing to sell the book (or the products erk).

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Tips from Self-Publishing Authors: Part 2

From Elise Ackers, author of Rhodon and several other works. See here for Part 1 of self-publishing tips.

I found the following websites helpful re: self-promoting books. A lot of them have great tips, but one of the best things I've done is make myself the top handful of results on search engines i.e. Google and Bing, by carefully placing tag words, maintaining a website and utilising social media like Facebook and Twitter. When I meet people they tend to forget my book name but remember my name, so they search for me on the internet.

Self Publishing Hints

Although the US book trade is enduring difficult times, self-publishing is more popular than ever. Perhaps that is actually a causal link — declines in traditional publishing lead to increases in non-traditional options. Many self-published books are intended only for a limited audience — the author's family, or a specific group. The Book Designer blogs about options for more ambitious self-publishers. Much of it is US-specific, but there are plenty of ideas that Australian authors can apply to their own promotional campaigns. For a bit of no-nonsense advice from Australia, try this from an established Science Fiction author.

File types that play well with InDesign ... and those that don't

InDesign is generally a very stable layout package. However, importing some file types can give it digital indigestion. Designers like to keep their import diet fairly simple:

Text: Rich text format is ideal, but Word is acceptable, provided changes have been accepted. Text documents should not contain embedded images

Tables: Excel is OK, provided the user has set the file up properly

Layout: InDesign will not import Microsoft Publisher at all, but can open most flavours of Quark.

Raster Images: tiffs are ideal, jpegs saved at high quality are acceptable. PNG, GIF and BMP are not ideal.

Vector images: Illustrator, PDF and EPS files work well with InDesign. Care should be taken that the colours used in these files match up with those intended for use within the InDesign document. InDesign will not open CorelDRAW, but can import EPS files exported from CorelDRAW.

Presentation: Microsoft Powerpoint does not work with InDesign.

Making Word for Windows Work (sort of)

Designers love to hate Word for Windows. They are accustomed to layout packages that do as they are told. Word is packed with features that are rarely used and hides those which should be front and centre. It tries to think for the user (applying styles automatically, for example) and loads documents with unwanted character and paragraph level styles. Precise placement of an element on a page is often difficult, if not impossible. When imported into layout packages such as InDesign, a designer's first task is to clean out all of the crud. This includes removing unused styles, special effects, embedded objects and images and more, while taking care not to disturb necessary items such as footnoting, italicisation, bolding and indents.

In short, the best Word document is one constructed with simplicity in mind. Just the essentials and nothing more. For the daring, Google's stripped down cloud based word processor might be a good alternative way of achieving this end. For those utilising Track Changes, Indexing and Footnoting, perhaps Open Office might be another option.

Classical Design

Australian Violin Makers CalendarThe Australian Violin Makers Association wanted a calendar that would showcase the work of their members. They wanted a design that was calm, balanced and did not compete with the instruments on show.

Catalogue versions

We design three catalogues per year for Vision Australia. Each edition is released by three different distributors. By running the distributor information in black only at the base of page one, we are able to swap the black plates only during the run, keeping printing costs to a minimum.

Higher Resolution Maps

Users of Google maps or Bing's map service usually check out their own house. Many notice that the image is years out of date and rarely updated. Now there is a map service that is sharper and much more frequently updated. A recent check of my own house showed an image taken only 30 days ago. Other dates along a timeline are also available. Objects identified included a sandpit, umbrella and flowerbed — obviously aerial rather than satellite photography. Unfortunately, the high resolution coverage seems to be limited to major cities. Nor does NearMap offer streetview or any three dimensional features.

A Trove of Images

TroveBesides being a serious historical resource, the National Library of Australia's Trove Australia is a fabulous destination for writers, designers and the merely curious. The site brings together digitised journals, photo and newspaper archives, diaries, maps and even archived websites. Many of the archived newspapers have been converted into text automatically, leading occasionally to gibberish. That aside, the idea of having such a range of resources in the one place is a noble one.

Buying space in the Cloud

If you are a particularly heavy user of Google documents and/or Picasa, Google is now offering additional storage space. Prices seem quite reasonable. 20Gb will set you back USD$5 per year, while 16Tb for $4096 per year might be useful if you are planning to model the heat death of the universe.

On Preparing Material

A few guidelines to assist our clients in supplying material to us. 

  • detailed instructions are essential, including design directions, preferred typefaces, corporate style guides if relevant
  • dimensions of the job and preferred page extent
  • text supplied in finalised form where possible
  • image files as large as possible (anything under 200Kb is likely to be too small)
  • image files supplied separately, not embedded in a Word document. Instead, place a tag in the text eg. <image no.7 here> and number the image filename to match
  • text files supplied clean and using styles (particularly important with long documents). If styles are not used, then make sure the heading and text hierarchies are very clear
  • If files for the project are too large to email, try www.yousendit.com or upload directly to our site (and notify us you have done so). Failing all else, snail mail to PO 72, Eltham Vic 3095

Lucky Number 7

After 20 years using Windows platforms from 3.1 through to Vista, I have to admit that Microsoft have finally achieved the impossible: an attractive, speedy and usable interface. Search is fast, features are easy to find, customisation is simple, font installation is intuitive and it generally looks good. Microsoft is generally depicted as sclerotic giant, left behind as the cloud/google/facebook/twitter wave rolls on, but perhaps there is life in the old dog.

Google Site Analysis

Google offers a (free) way to gather sophisticated statistics about your website -- Google Analytics. By pasting a small section of code into your own site, google bots are able to gather information about your visitors, including their country of origin, time they spend on your site, the pages they visit, the route they followed to arrive on your site, and so on. Very useful if you are looking to optimise your site to improve traffic.

Self-Publishing Author hints: Part 1

Self publishing or small press publishing does not have to be a royal road to obscurity and crates of unsold books. Active, savvy authors can drive healthy book sales. Here are a couple of tips from a multi-thousand selling Australian author:

Jacqueline Dinan, author of "A Woman's War", a work of fiction dealing with World War One, has focussed on giving talks about her book to interested groups. She says that:

  • The book came about because I married a history buff and realised that other than watching ‘The Sullivans’, my knowledge of Australia’s war history, was very limited. So, we set out to write a book for women like me.
  • Writing the book was the history lesson that I never received at either girls’ school that I attended.
  • I present to groups – Rotary, Probus, View, U3A, Legacy, War Widows, Educational, Shrine, RACV Club (they are all keen for speakers)
  • The power point presentation is about the research I did into Women on the Home Front & Men on The Western Front

In addition, Jacqueline was very active in soliciting reviews for her book prior to print publication. Reviewers included the Herald Sun, the Weekly Times and Dame Elisabeth Murdoch.

Stay tuned for further practical tips for authors.

Books in Motion

Watching people spend money is usually not much of a sport, but when that money is being spent on books, it is strangely compelling. The fast-growing UK Internet bookstore The Book Depository has a google map page that tracks 'live' purchases of their books from around the world. Someone in Israel buys a book on civil governance, another in Finland buys a murder mystery, a Lithuanian picks up "The Housewife's Tarot" and an Irish reader purchases "Fine Motor Fun". There's something touching about seeing all those books flying over the globe, defying predictions of their impending obsolescence.

It's all about.me

The latest entrant into the solipsistic magnificence that is the modern Internet -- a page that is solely and wholly about ... you. Just in case someone is searching the virtual wilds for some (any) mention of your good self, about.me allows you to set the record straight. One supposes that this might be useful for people who appear in many places on the Internet and wish to have one canonical record that will show up in searches. An interesting sidebar to the phenomenon of people buying urls with their own (or their children's) name.

Password Blues

People are not very good at remembering sequences of numbers. We can store thousands of faces and memorise long poems, but numbers are hard. Unfortunately, long sequences of numbers or alphanumeric sequences are best suited for use as passwords. A writer at Lifehacker explains why it is potentially a very bad idea to use 'easy' passwords. Easy for you to remember also means easy for a hacker to guess, crack and exploit.