My main markets, as my book is written in English, are naturally going to be the UK and the USA. I am looking to achieve sales of printed versions of the book by offering free downloads: I figure if people like hooked by the first few chapters of the download that will be willing to purchase a hard copy. Obviously there are no tax implications for the download, but I find I have overlooked the Sterling/Dollar exchange rate when selling hard copies to America. A paperback book price of £5.99 translates into something like $12.00, plus P&P – too expensive I believe for my younger US target audience.
The answer, I believe, is to also self-publish the book via a US based Print On Demand publisher. For cheapness, and because I may later want to attempt and assault on their best seller list, I have chose Amazon. Publishing via their subsidiary Createspace.com produces a book listed on Amazon US at a cost price of under $8.00 + p&p. A price more acceptable, I believe, to my US target audience.
Now the tax bit. As a UK citizen I could end up paying double tax on any potential profits by publishing direct in the US: Tax deducted on the sales by the IRS and UK income tax to the Revenue. To avoid this issue, if I ever decide to sell for a profit, I will need to complete a form W8 and possibly W7 for the IRS so I become exempt from US tax.
CreateSpace.com have a good explanation
here.
I now find that to cover all angles I have published the book in three different places: Lulu.com (PDF download and Sterling hard-copy), Smashwords.com (all e-reader file formats), and Amazon (Dollar hard-copy).
You may well ask why I’m bothering with the US market. The answer is that I have good reason to believe Helium3 might be more suited to the US market than the UK market. Also, there are far more US readers online and as I have chosen to market via the Internet I would be foolish to ignore this vast potential audience.
If you are wondering what sort of website to build it will depend very much on the type of information you want to present, how you want to interact with your readers, and how you intend to make use of the website. There are currently four different types of website:
Information only: this is simply an extension of your business card. It allows you to show off what skills you have and what you have produced to date.
A collaborative or social site: you invite people to join in and contribute, either to showcase their own work or produce a collective work. WritersInTouch.com is a good example of such a site.
A blog: offering news, reviews, and general gossip.
A marketing tool: this sort of site is used to directly market your book. To do so you need to offer more than just information about your book/work and a blog, you need to offer some quality content/articles that people want. This is the sort of site I have opted to develop. I have decided to offer articles on novel writing in Nick Travers Writing Tips, articles on e-promotion for your book in How To Promote My Book On The Internet, and this blog under Nick Travers On Writing, as well as offering articles and background on my book, Helium3. All for offerings are tied together with the NickTravers.com website as a front door. Any ‘sales’ (free download) of the book will be achieved on the back of those offerings. Later, once I have built up an audience, I hope also to offer some sort of collaborative/social element to help coach young writers.
What sort of site you decide to build will depend on how you wish to use the site and the amount of day-by-day effort you intend to devote to running it. This is worth spending some time thinking about as it may well influence where you build your site, who hosts it, and how much you should pay for it.
In order for e-books to breakthrough into the mainstream one of the criteria I stated the other day was a well respected site where the best seller list offered better reads than traditional retailer’s lists. I don’t think that site exists at the moment, though, Amazon US deciding to only allow self-publishing through its subsidiaries is, I believe, a recognition of this fact. Any-road-up, I have found two sites that are worth a look:
First off:
Smashwords.com. The beta for this print-on-demand site, launched on the 6 May 08, offers to translate the word file of your manuscript into all available e-book formats. This potentially makes it a one-stop-shop for anyone with an e-reader. All Smashwords.com needs now is decent e-readers (e-books) to take the market by storm. If they can successfully establish themselves with a reputation for having quality books and a respected best seller list they will be on their way.
I have already published Helium3 on the site (as a free download) so can I tell you that it is easy and straightforward to use. Not yet as sophisticated as Lulu.com, and with some obvious missing functions but I’m sure it will improve. The owners seem keen, professional, and business-like. One promising part of the set up is that the owners have their own PR company. The PR team have their work cut out, but if they can persuade big name publishers/authors to sell their e-books through their site I’m sure they will make their mark.
If anyone would like to leave a review of Helium3 on Smashwords, feel free to do so
here.
Secondly, I was directed to the
PanMacmillan.com/new writing site. This intriguing site promises to publish one submission per month as a Print On Demand hardcover book. You can buy the books via PanMacmillan.com. The aim is to publish material that PanMacMillan like but do not consider commercial enough to publish via their retail channels. If, however, the book proves popular with readers then MacMillan might well purchase if for their more traditional publishing routes. No advance is offered, authors receive 20% of net profits and their manuscripts are ‘lightly edited’ by a MacMillan editor. Is this a sign of things to come?
I can’t help thinking that right now
Smashwords.com ought to be talking to PanMacMillan because this is exactly the sort of material they need to be offering.
Should my website promote me as a writer or should it promote my book?
The short answer is you should seek to promote both. You are seeking to promote something different in each case. Your readers and your agent or potential agent will want you to promote yourself. Remember, your name or your pen name is a brand. If you use more than one pen name you will need a web presence for each pen name (brand). If you have more than one book I would suggest you need a web presence for each book or series.
If you are an unpublished author then look upon your website as a tool to help you land an agent/publisher. Your website should concentrate on you as a writer and what you have to offer by way of promotional talents. I would recommend that your main web presence should be YourName or YourPenName.
However, you should also tie your main site into one of the free sites named after your book MyBookTitle.FreeSiteName.com. Why a free site? Because a publisher may well want to change the title of your book before publication so don’t waste your money on buying a domain name just yet. This site should concentrate on promoting your book. If you have more than one book/series you will need a separate web presence for each title.
If you are a published author, I would recommend you follow the same strategy, but invest some money in purchasing a domain name for each of you book/series titles as well as one in your own name/pen names(s). If you are worried about what should be in each page I’ll tackle that in other blogs.
Nick
NickTraversOnWriting.Blogger.com
Koren illustrator Jae-Hong Kim has won the 2007 Children’s Jury Prize in the prestigious Biennial of Illustration Bratislava, announced on Oct 8th. Easy to see why, judging by these lovely images (scrool down a little to see all three images): which child doesn’t like the idea of playing with umbrellas in the rain, after all? To read about how an illustration from his book Children of the East River – only available in Korean, as far as I know – has turned some heads and gone on to become an urban myth, click here. Oh the power of art!…
Jae-Hong Kim’s simphony of umbrellas reminded me of the work of another award-winning Korean illustrator, Jae Soo Liu. Yellow Umbrella, a wordless picture book accompanied by a CD of music by composer Dong II Sheen (published in the US by Kane/Miller) provides fun, geometric overviews of these whimsical objects:
“With each page, the yellow umbrella continues its journey through the neighborhood and city blocks to be joined by other multi-colored umbrellas.”
More Korean books here, for your enjoyment. Rain not included.
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