But I’m feeling fine. So I decided to get back on the horse and continue with the promotional campaign for Angela’s book.

In the last installment, I said this time I’d get into the inner workings of Feedburner, a great service for maximizing the RSS feed of a blog. But the subject is a bit complicated, so I thought I’d instead tackle something a little more straightforward for this installment – listing a blog with all the blog-specific directories and search engines.

One of the reasons I recommend blogs to authors is because there are many directories and search engines specifically for blogs. And, by definition, you can’t list standard web sites in them. So the fact of just having a blog, rather than a standard web site, increases the number of venues for exposure.

Registering with the blog directories and search engines really isn’t that much different than registering a standard web site. You need these pieces of information:

+ your email address (use one that you don’t mind giving out to the public)

+ your blog URL

+ 20-word description of the blog (not necessary for every site you submit to, but asked for by some)

+ Keyword phrases describing the blog

Remember, this is for the blog, not the book. So the above information should be relevant to the blog.

In Angela’s case, the relevant info is:

+ richard@booklocker.com

+ http://vbac.angelahoy.com/

+ A diary of one expecting family’s struggle over the local medical community’s refusal to perform VBACs (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

+ vbac, vaginal birth after cesarean, cesarean section, c-section

Some blog directories and search engines ask for more extensive personal information, like your name, age, gender, or physical location. The reason they ask for that is to be able to present the search results in more interesting ways (all the blogs in Bangor, Maine, for example). My personal feeling is if you aren’t comfortable giving it out, don’t. If they require information you don’t want to give out, skip the site and go to the next one.

Also, some of these sites require you create a free account with them, and provide a link to them from your blog.

Here is the master list I keep for BookLocker authors. I built this list over time from various sources:

http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
http://globeofblogs.com/register.php
http://www.getblogs.com/lma/guidelines.html
http://www.blogrankings.com/addblog.php
http://www.bloghub.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
http://www.bloggernity.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
http://swoogle.umbc.edu/index.php?option=com_swoogle_service&service=submit
http://www.blurtit.com/
http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
http://www.blogoriffic.com/add_blog.php
http://www.feedbomb.com/
http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html
http://www.wilsdomain.com/add-url.html
http://www.yourwebloghere.com/add_url.php
http://www.all-blogs.net/submit.php
http://www.blogtopsites.com/register
http://www.thevital.net/
http://www.blogion.com/?p=submit
http://www.photarium.com/add-site.php
http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
http://www.blogbib.com/submit.php
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
http://www.bulletize.com/submit.php
http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm
http://www.lsblogs.com/howtosubmit.php

I try to keep this list current, but bad links still pop up. If you run across a bad link, let me know.

By participation, I mean contributing worthwhile information to the discussion, not blabbing about the greatness of your book. The information you share needs to help the reader in some way. Otherwise, it isn’t worth posting. Fortunately, there are many ways to find discussion opportunities. Here is how I went about it with Angie’s new book.

First stop – Technorati, a searching engine for searching blog posts. You can manually search for specific terms, or do what I did – set up an RSS feed for a specific search term (in this case “VBAC”). Now, every morning when my feed reading software starts up, it runs the search on Technorati automatically and displays the results for me. I sort through them and forward on ones of interest to Angela.

Next stop, I set up a Google Alert for the term “VBAC”. With this service, Google notifies you by email whenever new instances of your term appear on the web, in the news, on the Usenet, or on blogs Google monitors.

I go into more detail on finding general discussions of a topic here.

Next time I’ll go into how I’m using Feedburner to get the most bang out of the RSS feed for Angela’s blog.

In order to write material that’s effective, as well as helpful to others, you need to understand the phrases people are entering into the search engines. There is an easy and cheap way to figure this out. Use the tools available from the search engines themselves.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

As I explained awhile back in this article, search engines offer these tools to advertisers to help them determine what keywords to buy.

In our case, I entered the terms “VBAC” and “cesarean”. I whittled the resulting list down to these phrases, which are subjects to which I thought we could contribute information:

“VBAC statistics”
“Cesarean section risk versus VBAC risk”
“Finding VBAC friendly hospitals”
“10 steps to VBAC success”

I got Angela to work writing articles on those topics. The first one she wrote,  “10 Steps to VBAC Success”, is here.

In addition, I pulled these phrases for use in Amazon’s Search Suggestion program:

“vaginal birth after caesarean”
“vbac delivery”
“vbac birth”
“vbac risk”
“vbac”

The Amazon’s Search Suggestion program allows you to give Amazon search phrases for particular books. The link to the form you submit to Amazon with your suggestions is in the section of the book page, about halfway down, titled “Help others find this item”. You need an Amazon account to suggest terms.

In then next post, I’ll talk about finding, and participating in, online discussions.

The book is especially strong in covering promotional opportunities using the new social networking tools like MySpace, del.icio.us, LibraryThing and Digg.

His chapters on Amazon, and in particular the one on Amazon reviews, made me think in new directions. And that is saying something coming from me – a guy who’s been in the online marketing game since the beginning in 1995 and has seen it all.

But what finally sealed the deal was the endorsement from Steve O’Keefe, who is a good friend and someone whose promotional genius with books I was fortunate to witness firsthand as we worked together during the heyday of the Dotcom boom. Steve, quite literally, invented the field of online book promotion.

Every author needs a copy of this book.

Plug Your Book: Online Book Marketing For Authors
by Steve Weber

Steve’s blog: http://www.weberbooks.com/publish.htm

Lesson 3 – The Online Press Kit

Sounds fancy, but all an online press kit consists of is a web page with links to all the information a third-party would need to announce the book. You can find the one for this book here. Once we get other sites and publications interested in doing interviews or running excerpts, we’ll send them here for promotional material.

Lesson 4 – Amazon

When you list a book on Amazon, it’s usually accompanied by a minimal description. You can go back in later and enhance that description by submitting a request here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/content-form/?ie=UTF8&product=books

You’ll need to know the following details about the publisher, if it isn’t you:

Publisher
Contact person
Contact e-mail
Mailing address
City
State
Country
ZIP/postal code
Phone
ISBN (no hyphens in between the numbers)

Once you get in, you can add the following extra information:

Description (up to 300 words or 2,400 characters)
Publisher’s comments (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Author comments (up to 250 words or 2,000 characters)
Author(s) bio(s) (up to 500 words or 4,000 characters)
Table of contents (Up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Inside-flap copy (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Backcover copy (up to 1,000 words or 8,000 characters)
Reviews
Excerpt/first chapter (not to exceed one chapter)

Once you submit the above info, an email goes to the publisher confirming that you are authorized to update the book information. When your publisher responds, the information goes live on the book page.

Lesson 5 – Squidoo

There is a new site/service called Squidoo. It’s build on the same concept as About.com – experts maintaining pages on specific topics. But unlike About.com where they pick the experts, with Squidoo you can claim any topic as your own and become the Squidoo expert for that topic. In Squidoo lingo it is known as “creating a lens” (lens – magnifying a subject – get it?).

I went ahead and built a Squidoo Lens on the subject of VBACs using the VBAC book marketing material. Plus, Squidoo has some nice tools for pulling info on a subject from Google News and the blogsphere.

This is more of an experiment to see what happens, rather than a proven marketing strategy.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about adding keywords to Amazon to help the book come up better in the searches, and how to find out the hot topics to write articles about for Angela’s VBAC blog.

Cory claims within the article that he’s received 30,000 downloads of the free ebook in a single day, and up to 700,000 downloads over three years. It is not clear from the article if he has adjusted his download numbers to account for non-human programs (robots and search engine spiders) downloading the files. (ABC Interactive, the major organization that audits web site traffic for advertisers estimates as much as 25% of all web site activity is from non-human sources. One private consultant I know who processes logs for some major sites puts the number as high as 50%.) Even if we take the worst-case scenario, however, it is still a large number of real people.

But let’s take a deeper look at this…

Cory admits later on in the article that he has no way of knowing if it is helping book sales or not. He apparently has no system in place to tie free downloads to sales. In addition, he’s the editor of a very popular blog aimed at people who are likely to be sci-fi readers. So who is to say the popularity of his books are due to the act of giving the books away or the promotion of the fact on the blog, or, for that matter, any other promotion he or his publisher are doing? Hard to say without proper campaign tracking.

Cory argues in the article that by doing this he’s “building an audience”, but an audience for what? People who don’t think enough of his writing to pay him? That is, by his own admission, the bulk of the people who download the ebook.

I guess the part I’m struggling with intellectually is how do you create value for a book in the eyes of potential buyers if the author places no value on it by giving it away for free? Cory’s approach is the shotgun approach – let everyone see it and a small percentage will buy my book. It is the “fire hose” method of marketing. If you spray everyone in a room with a fire hose, you’ll eventually hit the few people you want to hit. However, I’m not convinced giving it all away for free is behind Cory’s success. And, he offers no direct evidence to prove it. Something is definitely happening in Cory’s case – his books are selling, but I don’t believe he has a handle on the dynamics of the situation yet.

A good analogy for this might be the shareware model of software – try it for free, and pay if you like it. But I think it has been well-proven that most people won’t pay for something if there is no incentive to pay for it.

So how do you let people try your book, but still encourage them to eventually pay you for it? One way is in the packaging of the information.

The software industry does it by packaging products as trialware – giving you a fully-functional version of the program, but putting a time limit on how long it works without paying a fee.

If information is available online, it’s often easier to buy the printed book than to find and read all the text on a web site for free. One BookLocker author discovered this firsthand. His web site contained most of the information in his book, but not in a very organized manner. When he did organize the site, his book sales actually dropped. So he went back to a somewhat disorganized site and his book sales went back up. It was easier for people to just buy the book, rather than spend the time picking through the site to find the info they needed.

That was for a non-fiction book, though. So what is the equivalent exercise for a novel?

Doug Clegg, a well-known horror author, wrote some of his books in installments that he then emailed to a group of readers each week. In essence, he serializes each chapter through email over many weeks. People buy the books at the end (nice, hardcover editions, too) because they were part of its creation process. And readers who weren’t there for the novel’s creation buy the finished book because they don’t want to spend the time reading through each weekly email installment – the only way they can get it for free.

For the new fiction author, perhaps giving away the first novel or two is a viable way to build an audience. But you need some sort of mechanism to reach those people later, when it is time to sell them novel number three.

The book not only covers our experiences, but those of several other women seeking what is know in medical parlance as a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

Among my many duties, I’m charged with developing and executing the promotional plan for this book.

I’ve written extensively about how to promote online, and often offer free advice privately to BookLocker authors. But I thought it would be useful if I walked through all the steps I go through when promoting, using a real world example. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to explain how I’m tackling the project of promoting Angela’s new book.

Lesson 1 – What We’re Selling

The first thing you need to do is understand what you are selling and why it is unique. Otherwise, you have no foundation from which to explain it to other people.

So in the case of our book, the issue is repeat cesarean sections (or c-sections). It is common practice in many hospitals to automatically give a woman a c-section if she’s had one before. While there are sound medical reasons why a woman might need a c-section, cutting a woman open just because that was the way her previous delivery was done is not a legitimate one. In fact, it can be significantly more dangerous for mother and baby – due to the risks of surgery – to have a c-section versus a vaginal birth, assuming the pregnancy has no complications (the situation with most pregnancies).

Angela’s book discusses all this from the perspective of 22 different mothers, almost all of whom met resistance from their respective doctors when raising the question as to the need for a repeat c-section. It is these real life stories that make the book unique.

Now that we have a good handle on what we are selling, it is time to pull together the material we’ll need to sell the book to the public.

Lesson 2 – Marketing Material

Here is the list of stuff I have in my notes to create and/or gather for Angela’s book:

+ Descriptive copy for the book page on BookLocker.com
+ Chapter excerpt (in PDF)
+ Cover graphic
+ Bio of Angela
+ Picture of Angela
+ Angela’s chapter in the book (in text format)
+ 25 copies of the book for reviewers
+ Extra editorial info to add to the Amazon and Barnes and Noble book pages
+ Blog

A side note here on the blog. I’ve already laid out my rational for a blog versus a web site here, in case you are curious as to why I went that route. We were fortunate that we created a blog a year ago to chronicle our own experiences with this issue – making it easy to convert over as a site for the book. (The blog is here: http://vbac.angelahoy.com/). Where we made a mistake is in not keeping the blog going after Mason was born last June. It would be a much more powerful promotional tool had we kept posting as Angela wrote the book.

In the next installment I’ll discuss how to use this material.

Among the things he felt were worth it:

+ built a website
+ wrote background articles on the world discussed in his novel
+ started a blog 8 months before the book’s release.
+ contributed to group-run scifi blogs
+ attended and spoke at scifi conventions
+ posted drafts of the novel’s chapters on his blog
+ sought out interviews on other web sites
+ created a MySpace profile

Read the whole post here:
How I Promoted My Book

When we heard that she had the receipts, our collective gut sank – Amazon Bestseller Scam, we thought.

We drew a lot of fire for coming out against this practice a few years back. Here is how it works:

You find several dozen email newsletter lists with large subscription bases. You convince the list owners to run an ad at no cost for your book. You get them to do it at the same exact time and direct all the buyers to Amazon.com to purchase the book. (Oh, and don’t forget to tell your family and friends to all buy your book at that specified time, too.) As a further incentive for buyers, you offer some free giveaway. But they can only get the giveaway if they send you the email receipt from Amazon.com – proving they bought the book.

Now, if you are successful in getting all these people to buy the book at roughly the same time, the book will pop up at the top of one of the Amazon.com bestsellers lists. Then you can claim from that time forward that your book is an “Amazon.com Bestseller”. And you’ll get the contact information for all the people who bought your book through Amazon.com to boot.

The scam works by taking advantage of a loop-hole in the way Amazon.com calculates its bestseller lists. Amazon.com recalculates the sales rankings on an hourly basis for books with a ranking of #1 to #10,000. Amazon.com takes into account the sales rate of the book as well. If you manipulate the results of this calculation by selling a large number of books on Amazon.com in a very short period of time, you will rank as a bestseller for at least an hour.

We find the practice unethical because the book rises to the top from gaming the system, not because of the book’s own merits. Others just think it is a worthless effort. And furthermore, there are “book marketing gurus” out there charging upwards of $2,500 to teach unsuspecting authors the “sophisticated” technique I just described to you using the three above paragraphs.

But it turns out the Amazon Bestseller Scam is not what this author did. She did a twist on the idea, which I think is actually a pretty good marketing method. She simply agreed to donate a percentage of each sale to charity if people bought her book on a particular day. A win for everyone – books get sold, the charity gets money, nothing’s being manipulated, and the author gets the contact info. for her customers to which she can pitch future offers.

Here is where she went wrong, though. She should have sent them to BookLocker.com to buy the book. It’s more money in her pocket to do it that way because Amazon.com doesn’t sell your books for free. They take a hefty chunk of the sale price for the privilege of using their store. Plus, they pay Ingram, who then pays the publisher. This process takes four months – meaning if the book gets sold today, the author and the publisher won’t see the money for that sale until around June. (This is why the commissions were not in her account yet.)

And if she’d been a little more savvy, she could have used our sales tracking system (which BookLocker authors get to use for free) to track the source of the sales. We have a system that lets authors generate a URL with a unique code at the end. That code gets carried forward on all sales and appears in the author’s account, next to each sale.

So, for example, say you wanted to track the people who bought the book as a result of clicking on a link on your web site. You’d put a special URL on your site with the code “website” on the end of it. When a potential customer clicks on that link and comes to the BookLocker.com site, that code gets stripped off and attached to anything the customer buys. And while authors cannot see a customer’s personal information (due to our strict privacy policy), they can see order numbers and any tracking codes associated with those orders in their commission report.

All she needed to do was take the order numbers from the receipts customers sent to her and, using her commission report, match up who came from where. Very handy if you are trying to figure out what promotions led to the most book sales.

“How about using Google AdWords to direct traffic to your website? Do you think that is a worthwhile proposition? From their info, you only pay per click, so if nobody clicks on your ad, it doesn’t cost you anything. You can also set a maximum per day amount you want to spend and the ad will supposedly disappear once that maximum is reached (if you should be so lucky!).”

Actually, I wrote a rather lengthly response on our WriterWeekly Forum about this subject. I’m reprinting it here:

There are two major pay-per-click systems – Yahoo’s Overture and Google’s Adwords. There are lots of minor ones too, but they probably won’t get you much in the way of results. Between Overture and Adwords, you are covering about 95% of the searches done online.

The idea behind pay-per-click, for those who don’t know, is that you bid on keyword phrases in the search engines. When someone searches on a keyword phrase you’ve bid on, your ad pops up along with the search results. If you bid the most, your ad is listed first; bid the second most, your ad is listed second; third most, listed third, etc…

Google’s Adwords is a complicated system. Lots of variables and things happening behind the scenes are what determines the amount you’re ultimately charged. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone with no experience in pay-per-click advertising.

Conversely, Yahoo’s Overture is pretty straightforward. I’d recommend starting on that system.

The major difference is that with Overture it is clear what you are spending at any one moment. If the top spot is going for 15 cents and you bid 16 cents, you are now in the top spot. And you continue to pay 16 cents per click until someone outbids you – very straightforward.

With Google, though, the top spot is determined by the click through rate of the ad, as well as the maximum you are willing to bid. So it is actually possible in Google’s system to pay less than the competition, but get the top spot anyway. It is driven primarily by how good your ad is. But the downside of that system is the actual price you pay per click is dynamically generated moment to moment. So essentially you don’t know what you are paying until you’ve paid it. Plus, if your ad doesn’t get minimum click through rate (I think it is half a percent), it drops off the system completely.

Google is so complicated, in my opinion, that you really need to read up on it before running any campaigns. Otherwise, you’ll blow through a lot of money quick (I did, and I’ve bought and sold online advertising for 10 years). The best book on the market is Andrew Goodman’s “Winning Results with Google AdWords“.

Here are some other observations about pay-per-click advertising:

1.) It works best with high-dollar products and services. I’ll run some numbers to show you what I mean.

If you have a book you are selling for $8.95, and buy a keyword for 10 cents a click (the cheapest you can pay), and for every 100 people that click, one person buys the book, you are losing money.

100 clicks x 10 cents = $10.00 to get a buyer, who you sell an $8.95 product to. Gross loss: $8.95 – $10.00 = -$1.05

If you can get more than 1 in 100 to buy, then the numbers start to look better, but it is still tough.

Now, say the product is $100, with the same conversion rate. Now the numbers are:

100 clicks x 10 cents = $10.00 to get a buyer, who you sell an $100.00 product to. Gross profit: $100.00 – $10.00 = $90.00

See? The numbers are much better in this case.

2.) You want to be in position number 1, 2, or 3. Both Yahoo and Google syndicate their search results, and the advertising that goes with it, to other sites. But many of those sites only run the top 3 advertisers. Some go down to the top 5, but being in the top 3 will assure you appear in most places.

3.) Be sure the ad is descriptive. Use the search term in the ad itself. And make sure the keywords you pick are narrowly defined (”abusive relationships” is better than “relationships”. “how to get out of an abusive relationship” is even better than both those.) If you aren’t specific, you’ll get a lot of “tire kickers” who click on your ad just to get more info, only to find out it wasn’t what they were looking for. If they click, you pay – regardless of how unqualified they are.

While the concept is nothing new (the whole search engine optimization industry is based on doing just what Tom describes), he’s right in that you should start this type of work before the book comes out. However, Tom makes it sound simpler than it is by glossing over a swath of things necessary for it to work.

First, just building a site is no guarantee Google will even index it. Google discovers new sites primarily by finding links to them on other sites already in Google’s index. The idea behind this is that sites considered to be good resources only link to other sites if they are also good resources. So, before you go near Google, you need to spend time getting links to your site from other sites considered authorities on a particular topic. You can identify the authoritative sites by using Technorati, a search engine that indexes blog posts. Just plug the search term you are looking for into Technorati and sort the results by authority (using the option at the top of the page).

Second, you need to refine the phrases for which you are optimizing. By one recent estimate, Google has about 25 billion pages in its index. There is no way to come up within the first couple of pages of results for common phrases. So you need to write content for narrowly-defined subjects, preferably ones that aren’t covered adequately on other sites. (I’ve written about how to align your content with what people are searching for in previous articles.)

And finally, because Google has 25 billion pages of content (with more coming in each day), you may be able to get to the top of the search results list for a while, but it won’t last. Someone will unseat you. Remember Google is just one source of traffic. You want to do all you can to optimize your content for Google, but don’t fret over it. The better strategy is to diversify your sources of traffic.

Focus on producing good content, the rest will follow.

Basically, that list is missing all the mass market outlets (Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club), plus all the Christian bookstores. So it isn’t necessarily an accurate count of what everyone is buying.

Though not as easy to manipulate as Amazon’s Bestseller list, it is certainly possible, if you have a lot of buying power, to manipulate the New York Times Bestseller list. Reportedly, this is what The Church of Scientology did with the “bestseller” Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

I think authors, especially new authors, pay way too much attention to these lists. The lists simply don’t capture the breadth of book-buying behavior. There are a lot of niches that can yield good money-making opportunities if authors would just look for them.

Raves For Sale

It is about how BookSurge, a competing POD publisher bought out by Amazon last year, sells a service where for $399 a New York Times bestselling author will write a custom review.

This sort of “marketing” service makes me ill, as it is an unbelievable waste of money. Author advocate MJ Rose explained why this is so a few years back.

But I shouldn’t criticize without offering alternatives, so here is what I’d do if I had $399 earmarked for book marketing.

#1 – Set up a blog on Wordpress.com (or, if you are a BookLocker author, ask for a free one – like this author did).
Cost: $0

#2 – Fill the blog with content aimed at attracting the target audience for the book. I’d get at least 10 posts up on the blog before I started publicizing it. I’d try to post once a day, but not less than once a week.
Cost: $0

#3 – Register the blog in as many blog-specific search engines and directories as possible.
Cost: $0

#4 – I’d register the blog in subject-specific search engines and directories.
Cost: $0

#5 – I’d work on getting links from related sites.
Cost: $0

#6 – I’d buy 20 copies of my book at the author discount, then find 20 bloggers willing to review the book.
Cost: about $250 (including cost of book and shipping costs to each reviewer)

#7 – I’d open an account on Overture and Google Adsense, buy $50 worth of advertising on each, and run test campaigns.
Cost: $100

#8 – I’d do a WebRelease through WebWire, after I wrote a press release with a good PR hook.
Cost: $49

I can’t guarantee doing these things will get you book sales, but I can guarantee you’ll have more to show for your $399.