Self Published Author | Category | Marketing & Publicity

WH Smith and Bad Categorization

by Laura Dawson
Bowker | Mon Oct 21, 2013

As the publishing world knows in altogether too much detail, WH Smith (the UK bookseller) has closed its website because it has discovered some self-published erotica books that were classified as children's books.

There's no word on when Smith estimates re-opening. As it is, they are losing millions of dollars in lost sales. But it turns out the problem runs even deeper than one of bad metadata. It seems that many of these self-published authors were deliberately mis-categorizing their books.

Marketing & Publicity

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Opportunity Is Knocking: Why Authors Should Go Print

by Allison Horton
Bowker | Thu Sep 19, 2013

Once upon a time, self publishing print books was a costly and risky endeavor. Minimum orders, inventory risks, and lengthy lead times were not self-publisher friendly. Then, print on demand came along. POD creates one-off and entire print runs of bookstore-worthy hard copies from a “print-ready PDF” hours after an order is placed (i.e. when you place an order with the printer or when a customer purchases a copy on Amazon).

The ease and affordability of digital publishing makes for a great starting point for self publishers, but there are plenty of reasons to go print as well. To name a few...

Not everyone has an e-reader

Inside Publishing

Design & Production

Marketing & Publicity

Distribution

Getting Started

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The Value of Subject Codes

by Bowker Publishe...
Bowker | Tue Sep 3, 2013

Are subjects important? Will incorrect subjects on an ISBN have a big impact on its distribution? This is a very broad question that can either be answered with a word ("yes") or a dissertation. We will try for something in between.

Just as providing correct title, author, publisher, and pricing information is important, correct subjects are important if you want your book to be properly represented in the marketplace. They are an integral part of providing well-formed metadata about an ISBN. Leaving book discovery to keyword searching and title scanning alone is not enough because keywords often retrieve "false positives" and because the subject of a book is not always self-evident from the title: "Orange is the New Black" is not about fruit or color theory, and "The Glass Castle" is not about architecture.

Marketing & Publicity

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How to Create Visibility through Your ISBN Metadata

by Laura Shabott
Bowker | Tue Aug 27, 2013

Your ISBN, or International Standard Book Number, is a key tool to getting discovered by the people who buy eBooks. What is it really? This 13 digit number is used by the publishing industry to organize all printed, audio and digital books worldwide. The specific facts that a self-publishing author provides to register a title’s ISBN with Bowker are its Metadata.

Let’s look carefully at the information required for Section One of an ISBN registration using different published works as examples.

Section One: Title and Cover

1. Title: Confessions of an eBook Virgin

2. Subtitle: What Everyone Should Know Before They Publish on the Internet

Make sure these fields are EXACTLY the same, including upper and lower case, as what is seen on your cover and cover page.

Marketing & Publicity

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ISNI: A New Identifier for People (and Organizations)

by Laura Dawson
Bowker | Thu Aug 15, 2013

In addition to being a registration agent for ISBNs, Bowker is also a registration agent for ISNI. This is a new identifier - the standard was published in 2012 - for people and organizations. The mission of ISNI is (from the ISNI website):

Assign to the public name of a writer, artist, performer, researcher, publisher, etc. a persistent unique identifying number in order to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery.

Diffuse each assigned ISNI across all repertoires in the global supply chain so that every creative work is unambiguously attributed to its creator or publisher wherever that work is described.

By achieving these goals the ISNI will act as a bridge identifier across multiple domains and become a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications.

Inside Publishing

Marketing & Publicity

Rights

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How To Fill Out All Those Metadata Forms: Titles

by Suzanne P. Franks
Bowker | Mon Aug 12, 2013

Congratulations! You have written your book! That was a major achievement. Your next step will no doubt be to list your title with various website services to increase its exposure. You will be filling out forms with questions you may have never thought about before. Some guidelines about what to include would be beneficial about now. Here’s a list of best practices for formatting your title on the web:

1. Use mixed case for capitalizing your title, unless there is an acronym involved. For example, The Ocean at the End of the Lane would have mixed case but SEAL Team Six would have the acronym in all capital letters.

Marketing & Publicity

Distribution

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Top 5 Apps for Authors

by Carla King
Bowker | Wed Aug 7, 2013

Authors these days are more than authors. Our days are fragmented with tasks that more resemble those of publishers and marketers, journalists and speakers. We must not only write, but edit, organize, blog, friend, tweet, connect, converse, advise, recripocate, share and share again.

These five apps (and I mean “apps” beyond the mobile-only kind) help me streamline these tasks so that I can spend more time actually writing and sell more books.

1. BIT.LY: EFFICIENCY AND ANALYTICS

Editing

Marketing & Publicity

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Self Publishing Your Book: Where's the Money?

by Carla King
Bowker | Tue Aug 6, 2013

There are many ways to sell your self-published print books and e-books, and the associated fees and royalties vary wildly. The highest margins come when you sell from your own online store. You can employ an e-book aggregator/distributor, or upload the e-books yourself to each online retailer. Don’t forget to get into the new (for self-publishers) library market. It’s easy to collect the money. You can get paid automatically by direct deposit into your bank account.

Marketing & Publicity

Distribution

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Blog Commenting: the new SEO strategy

by Penny C. Sansevieri
Bowker | Thu Aug 1, 2013

For the past five or so years, we’ve organized teams to support a client’s efforts to increase the SEO of his or her website. We’ve done this a number of ways, but the biggest and most powerful was - and is - blog commenting.

When we first launched teams to offer blog commenting, most people didn’t have a clue how powerful this type of marketing was. Most Internet people did and have been doing it ever since. Now it’s become more mainstream, and everyone seems to want to jump on the blog commenting bandwagon. But let me caution you, because there’s a right way and a very wrong way to do this. I’ll explain both.

Creating a Blog Commenting Plan

The first step in blog commenting is creating a plan and, of course, knowing who you’ll be engaging with. Here are a few ways you can get started:

Marketing & Publicity

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Five Simple Ways to Improve your Ranking on Google Search

by Penny Sansevier...
Bowker | Wed Jul 17, 2013

In fact, Google is too smart for most black hat marketers. On average, Google changes their algorithms over 500 times a year. Why do they do this? Well, mostly to make sure that websites that are focused on content farming and other black hat SEO tactics don’t climb up the search engine ranking.

Inside Publishing

Marketing & Publicity

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