In Favour of Book Launches

Jack Hoadley, author of Antarctica to Footscray: Arch Hoadley A Man of Inspiration and Courage found book launches to be a useful strategy: 

Since the book launches (which I found particularly successful) I have concentrated on sending copies for Review in relevant journals and getting some summary paragraphs into newsletters which I thought would have an interested audience. I tried to tailor the paragraph to the relevant niche. Mixed success but I have received several requests from the Antarctic community.

Selling Your Books Face to Face

Barry Wilks, author of Come in Spinner has this to say about selling his own book:

1. I have found selling Come in Spinner at local markets successful
2. I have sold 300 books in 3 months door to door in Armidale - cold canvas - and when I receive copies of Dolores I shall be making similar arrangements. I find personal contact with the customer at the door more successful than any other outlet.
3. The postcard idea was unsuccessful — a complete loss. I didn't get one sale or even an enquiry. I sent out over 200.

Book Promotional Tips in One Place

We have collated all of the promotional ideas received from authors and put them here. Please let us know if you have anything to add to the list.

Selling Your Books to Libraries

Besides being one of the most positive and useful institutions in Australia, public libraries are also major book purchasers (in this time of bookstore bloodbaths), so authors should pay attention to them. Jerry Bell, author of Lighting Up Australia had this to say:

I found that librarians rarely responded to the written word. It seems that those doing the ordering are young, and live on the email, so once I began to email the librarian responsible for the ordering  at libraries all over Australia, I got very positive responses. It also helps to stress if a bit of Australian history is involved, as that is seen as desirable. 

Three colours from two colours — working with Pantone

Working with two colours can be a challenge, but it is an interesting one. By combining the two chosen spot colours in a duotone, the designer can effectively generate a third colour. The third colour is tied to the other two and creates a harmonious overall effect. This job was designed to promote a lecture series staged by a local Library Corporation.

Edit photographs in your browser

If you are accumulating large numbers of digital photographs, then this simple browser-based photo editor might be a valuable tool. Part of the vast empire of Google services, Picknik is very easy to use but quite powerful. It integrates particularly well with online image repositories such as Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and MySpace.

Vaudeville in Australia

Harry Rickards was a nineteenth century show business entrepreneur and performer who made a risky move from Britain to Australia. His business doings were colourful to the point of criminality and he died a rich man. We wanted to convey something of the swagger of the man and the constant chatter of the material produced to promote his shows. We used typefaces appropriate to the time.

Why Ebooks are Bad Value

An old-school paper-and-ink book is yours upon purchase. You can annotate it, crease it, tear out pages, sell it and copy sections. An ebook, however, confers far fewer rights — in many cases it cannot be printed out, read on another device, loaned or sold. Rob Pegoraro, writing for the Washington Post, takes aim at shortsighted Digital Rights Management policies, arguing that publishers need to follow the lead of the music industry and remove DRM entirely. I would go one further step, and argue that the industry needs a universal file format that allows a book to be read on any device. The idea that a book can only be read on one kind of device is surely going to seem ludicrous in retrospect.

Is Facebook a book selling platform?

Agata Mrva-Montoya of Sydney University Press is investigating the use of Facebook and Twitter to promote books. Given the newness of these two platforms, their efficacy in book promotion is a big unknown. Radio has long been a rich resource for authors promoting their work, so there is no inherent reason that one medium cannot be used to promote/popularise another.

Cloud Storage Systems

Thinking about storing some of your files online? Perhaps you want to access certain files while travelling, or share photographs with family or colleagues, or just have an online backup. Here's a short list of online storage providers (all of them have a free account)

• Dropbox
• Rackspace (consumer solution also branded as Jungle Disk)
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• ADrive
• SugarSync

Other options include Google's Picasa albums and their Google Docs service. Microsoft also have a fairly generous offering. The constant reduction in the price of storage (Moore's Law, anyone?) has made possible this impressive expansion in low cost online file storage.

Simply Selling Your Book

Here's a great example of a simple, focussed book promotional website. It has a clear navigational menu, the book is the hero of the page, the purchase option immediately catches your eye, and looks easy to update and to add events. There are plenty of photographs for PR people to download, and finally, the URL is mercifully short.

One Keyboard to Rule Them All

If you are running multiple computers at home or in your business, you might like this idea: operating your other machines with the same keyboard and mouse. No shifting to other workstations — just float your cursor over to the other PC's screen and off you go. 

Paper Scissors Rock On

And if you are really stuck for stimulation, try competing with our new overlords in a few rounds of Paper Scissors Rock. It is intended to illustrate the difficulty humans have in generating a random series of choices.

Ebook quality issues

An interesting/alarming article at the Australian Society of Authors website documents a possible decline in quality control in the rush to get books into the various ebook formats. Hopefully just teething problems for a new industry rather than a general decline in book standards.

Hard Boiled Books

Murder, mayhem, and mystery — our client wanted a noirish glimpse of a world of the law, leathers and bloodshed. We supplied a splash of blood, a femme fatale on a bike and spidery type that echoed the title.

Vale Letraset

Although I came to graphic design in the digital era, I still got to see a few unused packets of Letraset rub-on letters gathering dust in drawers. At one point, Letraset was a major force in the graphic design world, but when the computerised tipping point arrived, their management made a few bad choices and now they are a small company of mainly historical interest. There are no doubt plenty of contemporary software and hardware companies who are currrently making the wrong moves. The pace of technological and social change is ferocious and the landscape of tomorrow remains completely opaque. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the book industry are all being chewed and remade up by the Internet, and even the Internet itself is under internal attack via the app revolution initiated by Steve Jobs. All individuals can do is try and stay on the wave.