Author Tips: Five Things To Do Before Your First Book Is Released

One of the biggest questions we get from first time, and sometimes veteran, authors is, “Is there anything I need to do to prepare for the release of my book?” Of course, this is assuming your book is ready to roll and you feel like you’re sitting on your thumbs waiting for your book to drop. Here are five things any indie author can do before your release date that will help you in marketing and tracking feedback for your book.

1. Google Alerts. This lesser known functions of the all-seeing internet eye that is Google will email you alerts when certain keywords are published online. At a minimum, you should set up Google Alerts for your name and book title. When Google crawls sites that mention your name or book’s title, you’ll get an email with a short description of the page and a link to the mention. We’ve found that this service doesn’t catch 100% of keyword mentions and is limited to when Google’s algorithms crawl web pages. So don’t think that you’re getting up to the minute intelligence on when bloggers or other folks review or mention your book. However, it is a handy tool for following up on promotional opportunities and to find out what the buzz is about your book. Google Alerts is free and requires a Google account to access. You can find out more about Google Alerts at this link.

2. Secure Domain Names. Even if you’re not a web design guru, you should purchase a domain name, if available, for your name and your book’s title. (If your book title is unbearably long, consider some truncated version that anyone wanting more information about your book can easily remember.) In the best case scenario, you should design an author website and a separate website for your book. This will give you two different web platforms to promote your works which means an increased chance of potential readers finding you online. If you’re not web savvy enough to create your own website, securing these domain names will ensure no one else can should you want to create these sites in the future. There’s nothing more frustrating than deciding it’s time to make a website only to find out the domain name you want has been registered by someone else. There are plenty of drop and drag website design platforms (Yola, Wix, and Weebly all are easy to use) that make creating basic websites a simple affair. You should seriously consider spending the time to learn how create, or at very least update, sites using one of these services. One final note on websites, don’t get a free website from your hosting platform that assigns your domain name. This practice doesn’t look professional and your potential readers will think that your writing might not be professional as well.

3. Shore up your social media presence. Just like domain names, if you haven’t signed up for accounts on all the relevant social media sites, get to it. Accounts for you as an author on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn should be claimed for the same reasons you should be claiming domain names. Even if you never use these platforms, which you should, they will be there if you ever want to take advantage of them. One note on Facebook, you should create an author fan page that is separate from your personal Facebook account. Most of your friends don’t always want to hear about your writing and you might not want your fans knowing about your personal life. If you want to create a fan page for your book as well, that’s great. However, it might be difficult for you to maintain both pages with enough content attract readers to both fan pages.

4. Keep a list of websites or blogs that you frequent. The chances are that if you’re writing on a specific topic, you’re visiting websites or blogs that relate to that topic. Start keeping a list of these websites with links to the webmaster or relevant writers on that site. When your book comes out, send them a press release about your book. If that blog or website has piqued your interest as a writer, they might show you some love by passing along the word about your book. You might also drop the hint to bloggers that you’d be willing to post a guest blog about a topic relevant to their site.

5. Take the time to think about what’s next. Before you start getting reviews on Amazon or see sales figures, plan what you’re next project is going to be. Many first time authors are discouraged by the results of their first book. If you do not take the time to plan your next project now, sans the background noise of your first book’s release, you might be tempted to give up. Insert any platitude you like here: “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” “There is no try, there is only do and not do,” or “Winners never quit and quitters never win” should suffice. Trite as they are, these statements are also true. Having your next project planned out will minimize the chances of never taking to the keyboard again. You have more stories to tell, so get out there and tell them.

Follow Grave Distractions Publications on Twitter @GraveDistract, Facebook, Pintrest, or LinkedIn.

Authors, Are You Missing Out on Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari?

If you thought that writing your book was the “hard part” of creating a successful book, you haven’t really gotten involved with the process of promoting your book. In working with a wide variety of authors in both our traditional publishing and freelance efforts, one of the pervasive thoughts is that a good book will sell itself. While there is an element of truth in that statement, let’s put a little perspective on that statement. There are millions of books listed on Amazon. This estimation is not in the figurative language of Doctor Evil but is based on sales ranking data on Amazon. In looking up a book to check an author’s reference last week, I noticed that this particular text was ranked somewhere in the 2.8 millionth in Amazon’s sales rankings. With 2.8 million books selling better than this text, it’s not a stretch to make the statement there are millions of books on Amazon.

Armed with this knowledge, simply writing a good book with an attractive cover will not assure you successful sales. Aside from hiring a marketing firm that will promote your book, you have to get involved with the process of promotions. One of the easiest, and free, ways to help your book’s coverage is by making use of opportunities at Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari. If you’re not familiar with these sites, think of them as a Facebook type community for books. Each site is a social network that allows readers to catalog their books, comment on books they’re reading, and engage in group discussions on books or book topics. Each of the three sites also features author pages that will give writers different tools for promoting their works. The biggest selling point for getting involved with these sites is that your efforts are targeted at folks that love books. Unlike posting something on Facebook or Twitter, when you interact with the communities on Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari you know you’re dealing with people that are passionate about reading.

While Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari are all different in their approach to handling author accounts, any author would be well-served by claiming and working their author page. Before getting hog wild with the author account features of these sites, take a long look at their individual terms of service (TOS). You can easily get your account suspended for a violation of these site’s TOS. For example, LibraryThing doesn’t allow authors to review their own work. While this seems like a no-brainer, a rookie mistake like that can get you booted from a site.

Without going too deep into the particulars of the three sites, there are some simple steps that will help your book’s visibility on any of these sites.

1.Book data. When Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari creates a book page, that page is based on listings from Amazon and other online booksellers. A page for any book will generally only have a wireframe listing with the book’s title, description, and cover. However, each of these sites allows users to post extra data about any given book. For example both LibraryThing and Shelfari have data fields for a book’s settings, characters or important persons, and organizations mentioned in the book. If you’re a nonfiction writer, people searching for a historical figure might overlook your book if you don’t take the time to fill in this data. On the fictional end of the pool, some readers like to check out books based in their hometown or favorite vacation spot. If your book’s setting isn’t mentioned in the description, someone living in Chicago looking for Chicago-based books won’t have a chance at finding your book. You get the idea. Since the major function of Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari is that of a book database, the more information that’s in the database will increase your chances of readers finding your book.

2. Author data. Readers like to know that authors are, for lack of a better term, real. An author’s bio can intrigue a potential reader just as much as a book description. I’m not suggesting creating an exciting or false narrative about yourself to attract readers. Just be sure to mention accurate items in your bio and author data that will create a connection between you and a potential reader. What college did you attend? Are you involved in any organizations or causes? Even listing your hometown might forge a connection with a reader. Just like a book’s setting, there are readers that like to support local authors. These readers aren’t going to know you live across town if you don’t fill in the data.

3. Being social. To get the maximum benefit from being part of the Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari communities, be social. List your book catalog and being part of the community. Just like any social media platform, the more you openly and honestly engage the members of the community the more the community members will engage with you. Readers, and these sites for that matter, hate spammers so don’t be a creepy “you need to buy my book” author on any of these sites. Just get involved with topics that interest you and the rest will come. If it’s relevant to the discussion, mention your work. If you’re channeling a thread’s conversation for an opportunity to mention your book, you’re a creepy spammy kind of author that will be shunned. So check out each of these sites’ TOS for guidance on what you can and cannot do while being a part of their community.

 

4. Link to these sites. One of the features of Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari is listing a book in your catalog that you want to read. You can make use of this feature by placing links on your website or blog to each of these site’s page for your book. Let’s say Larry visits your website and thinks your book looks interesting. Chances are that if Larry doesn’t purchase your book right then and there, Larry will forget about your book. Having links to your book’s page on these three sites will give the Larrys of the world a way to remember your book. Other users that are friends with Larry will also be able to see that he would like to read you book and just might check out your book’s page.

Also keep in mind that many publishers do not have access to some of the features afforded to authors on these sites. So if you’re expecting your publisher’s marketing department to magically take care of your author account, you’re probably missing out.

So get out there and be social. You’ll be surprised at what you can learn from interacting with readers and fellow authors on these sites. Just like going to a party, just be yourself and someone will ask you to dance...

How to Embed a Google Book Preview in Your Website or Blogger Post

If you have a cool publisher that utilizes Google Book Preview, did you know that you can embed a sample of your book on just about any website? For those of you not familiar with the program, publishers can upload manuscripts to Google.  Via the power of 10,000 tiny internet elves a book page and preview is created for your title free of charge. The advantages of Google Book Preview is that Google makes the entire text of your book searchable. That means that anyone searching for keywords or phrases found in your book; there’s a chance a link to your book’s preview will come up in the search rankings. Also, within the preview readers can search the entire text of your book for keywords and phrases. Google also provides selling links to your book on the Google hosted preview page. To maximize the chances of converting a preview into a sale, you should add selling links as close to the preview as your layout allows.

Those are the upsides to the Google Book Preview program. The potential downside is that at least 20% of your book is previewed. This percentage can be adjusted up by your publisher, but you agree to a minimum of 20% of your content being shown. This isn’t as much of an issue for fiction writers as it is for their nonfiction compatriots. With fiction, readers can get enough content to see what your writing style is and if the book intrigues them enough to make a purchase. For nonfiction books, anyone doing a research paper can stumble on a relevant passage and cite your work without making a purchase. Our feeling is that if you totally lock down a book’s content, no one will ever buy it. So our evaluation is that the risk of letting content out into the world is worth the reward of finding new readers.

Now that you’re familiar with the program, it’s time to get into the nerdy aspects of embedding a preview into your website. We’re going to use one of our new releases, Hippocrates Wept by William F. Quigley, M.D., as an example piece. Click here to view Hippocrates Wept Google Book page. It should open up in another window so you can switch back and forth as needed. If you want to follow along with another book that’s part of the Google Book Preview program, enter the book’s ISBN-13 or title in the search bar and it should pop up.

The first page you’re looking at is Hippocrates Wept’s base page. If you click on the book’s cover and that will take you to the book’s preview page. On the top bar, you’ll see a number of icons. Click on the icon that looks like a chain link. We’ve circled the icon in the image below.

When you click on the link icon, you’ll see two options: “Paste link in email or IM” and “Embed.” Highlight the code in the embed box and paste it in Word or Notepad so you can work with the code itself. Here’s the code for Hippocrates Wept, it probably won’t show up in one line on your screen because of the spacing of used in code, so just know that the code is between the < and > symbols. <iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:0px" src="http://books.google.com/books?id=LgTjBwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1&output=embed" width=500 height=500></iframe>

Without getting too geeky into the coding, here’s the concept behind it. The iframe command basically says, “show the full sized contents of one web page on another.” Within the parameters of the iframe command, we can change a few of the options.

The first is frameborder. Changing the 0 to a 1, within the quotation marks will put a default border around the entire preview. The width, color, and style of your preview’s border can be changed by altering the value in the style=”border:0px” portion of the code. We’ve never seen the point in using a border with our website configuration. If you really want a border, you can find out more about the command and border values at this link.

The second is scrolling. This command will place scroll bars within the iframe. Using scroll bars is pretty handy if you don’t have a lot of vertical or horizontal space where you’re placing the preview on your website. The options for the scrolling command are: yes, no, and auto. Yes and no are pretty obvious, and auto will drop in scroll bars if they’re needed given the space you’ve allotted the iframe on your web page. You can find out more about the iframe scrolling command at this link.

Finally, we can change the size of how the preview is displayed on your web page by altering the values under width and height. With a simple iframe command, you can’t shrink the size of the target page. Think of an iframe like you’re looking at the target page through the window of your width and height values. We’ve found that a width of 500 and a height of 700 to 800 will accommodate a full page of your book’s preview. The preview flows one page into another, so you’ll have to play around with both height and width to get the sizing the way you want it.

To give you an idea of how this translates into real life, this code is associated with the preview of Hippocrates Wept on our website.

<iframe frameborder="1" scrolling="auto" style="border:15px" src="http://books.google.com/books?id=LgTjBwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1&output=embed" width=500 height=800></iframe>

Now all you have to do is to add the code into your web page. If you’re using a drop and drag elements type of web hosting site (like Yola, Squarespace, or Go Daddy’s Website Tonight) just drop and drag the HTML Code widget where you want the preview on your web page. Then copy and paste the iframe code there and you’re good to go. If you know enough code to code your own website, you didn’t need this tutorial in the first place...

If you’re using Blogger, you’ll have little more coding to deal with. Blogger doesn't really like the iframe command when using Google Book Preview. So you'll have to use the hunk of code below. You can change the height and width of the preview by altering the height and width values towards the bottom of the code. To change the book that is previewed, simple change the ISBN number to which ever book you'd like to show up on your blog. Simply go to the HTML tab on your compose screen and drop your modified code in where you want the preview to show up. The easiest way to do this if you're not very familiar with coding is to look for text within a paragraph. After the code for the paragraph terminates, hit the enter key and paste the code. We've included a couple of <br /> (single line break) codes above and below the preview code to make sure the preview doesn't overlap the text of your blog post. The code below will yield the preview you see in this blog post.

<br />
<br />
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
   
    <title>Google Books Embedded Viewer API Example</title>
    <script src="https://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      google.load("books", "0");

      function initialize() {
        var viewer = new google.books.DefaultViewer(document.getElementById('viewerCanvas'));
        viewer.load('ISBN:9780990868545');
      }

      google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize);
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="viewerCanvas" style="height: 500px; width: 600px;">
</div>
</body>
</html>
<br />
<br />


That’s about it for embedding a Google Book Preview in your website or Blogger post. The preview can be a powerful tool for promoting your book, and we hope you sell a million.