Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Do not believe in the trap of scarcity

Scarcity is an interesting trap. If somebody makes something "scarce", it can appear more valuable than it actually is. Your attention becomes riveted on the "scarcity" rather than looking for available alternatives.

(This was written a few years ago and it is even more true today. With the current state of the Internet, the barriers to self-publishing or starting a business are significantly reduced.)

When there is the prospect of getting your CD or book published, an artificially created scarcity can keep one fixated on something that is unlikely to happen. There are saner ways to proceed.

Look at the role of scarcity in maintaining control of traditional publishing. There are millions of people who write and only a handful of publishers who have figured out the keys to getting their books in bookstores.

Well, traditional publishers used to be the only real outlets for a writer, but that is no longer the case.  There is no shortage of publishers who can print an excellent quality book and ship it to customers on demand.

With a little work, you can see your work in print and on Amazon.com. You can generate sales without having to rely on traditional publishers or bookstores.

Bookstores are another example of scarcity. There is only so much room and they must stock what their customers will buy. As an unknown, your books will only appear in a bookstore if you or your friends bring books to the store.

If you sell online and offer free shipping, why would anyone need to find your book in a bookstore?

Today there are tens of thousands of writers who write well enough to command a following of readers. The vast majority of them seem to be caught up in the maddening hamster wheel activity of writing, submission, and rejection by companies that have no way of profitably publishing their work.

I've been following the literary efforts of some dear and talented friends for some time and have wanted to whack them gently alongside their heads to get them to wake up and see the possibilities they are ignoring. Some are online, some are not, but they all are transfixed by the traditional dream of being "published".

There are some incredibly persuasive reasons to look outside the resource-limited world of traditional publishing, if your writing is more interesting and thought-provoking than most of the material you read in "mainstream" publications:

1. When you publish your own work, you gain an immense amount of real experience as to what your market is. You also get honest feedback that helps you determine what to do to get more people reading your work.

2. Blogging is the first step in becoming a self-publisher. The feedback you get in your comments and from watching website visitor logs is instant and brutally or refreshingly honest.

You can use this to good advantage in developing a public awareness of your work and a community of people who are interested in seeing that you succeed. They will buy your book and, more importantly, they will tell others about your writing because it is interesting information that they are the first to hear about.

3. There is nothing so psychologically destructive as inviting unnecessary rejection.

Applying for a job when the company cannot pay what you are worth is ludicrous. Submitting manuscripts to companies that are frantically searching for a viable business model is worse.

If a publisher is doing well, it is because it has found a customer base for whatever it is currently publishing. The only works that will interest them are clones of what they are already publishing.

4. THERE IS NO SCARCITY OF OUTLETS FOR YOUR WORK!

Get over the idea that your piece is only valuable if it appears in a traditional magazine, collection or whatever. The only value of appearing in a well-known publication is the immediate visibility. Once it is published, it becomes old news by next month. 

Traditional publishing is a zero-sum game (If someone else gets published, you don't get published). If a known author with a track record of sales has something to release, a traditional publishing house would be crazy to publish something by an unknown instead.

If you were publishing, you would do the same. With limited production capability, you would choose the popular "brand" to sell, not the "unknown" brand.

As a self-publisher, you can publish your work in small quantities as I did, or you can use a POD publisher. Either way, your work will be available for people to buy it and you will do the same promotional actions as if you had published through a main-stream publishing house. There are unlimited outlets for your writing, all you have to do is use them.

There is unbelievable satisfaction in having people say, "I heard about your new book!"

Sometimes they even say, "Where can I get one?"

If you really want people to read your work, please take a hard look at self-publishing. You owe it to yourself to do so. There is no justification for a good piece of writing to remain unpublished. I have also proved to my own satisfaction that self-publishing caused a traditional publisher to license my work after I proved that a market existed for it.

This article applies to almost every form of publishing including music on CDs or MP3 files and artistic works of all kinds. You can reach customers all over the world if you use the Internet wisely.

Beyond Books - the future of self-publishing?

What if you could give away your ideas and still derive income from them?  What if this unconventional form of distribution could expose readers to your books who would otherwise never see them?

I am not quite there yet, but I think that day is fast coming, due to the power of context-sensitive advertising.

I was busy building an online book reader when I discovered that Google has already provided this service and my book is available on it now through the power of Google Book Search.  If you go to that site and enter "advice for whistleblowers", you will see this:

Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day - Page 82 by David St Lawrence Whistleblowers are people who tell it like it is, even if they suspect that they will lose their jobs and be attacked by people they consider to be friends. ... Full view - Table of Contents - About this book

You can scroll through the table of contents or to search the book using the "Search in this book window" for hot topics like "nepotism" and "why your manager lies".

You can amuse yourself by entering these unlikely search terms: sex, interviews, fear, integrity, seduced, seduction, and job satisfaction. You will be amazed at what you will find.

If you bookmark this site, you have an instant desktop reference to use in everyday work situations.

In the meantime, my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, is available as a free download until further notice. This is the complete book in PDF format.

I am offering this data as a public service to all who are in danger of receiving a termination as a corporate Christmas present.

It is, after all, the end of another quarter and companies jettison employees at this time in hopes of surviving. I hope you are not in that unhappy situation, but if you know of someone who is, send them a link to this article.

Beyond Journalism

YouTube Video has become the premier launching pad for new movies, new ideas, and propaganda. From brash, raunchy, and sometimes touching amateur efforts, YouTube has become the arena for sophisticated efforts at communicating the news that networks seem unable to handle.

This YouTube Video: Flight Club: Being Naughty on a Plane is a musical documentary which shows you the rules for "manufacturing" a security incident. It is worth watching for the music alone.

For a text treatment see this article in The Washington DC Examiner.  Which presentation conveys the situation more effectively to you?

The second YouTube Video you might want to check out is Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Regardless of what you feel now about these two disparate issues, you will find it hard to forget these videos after watching them.

Every side of every story is now available on YouTube. No longer do we wait for pundits to explain the news to us. We can check several different sources of information and decide for ourselves.

Many times I watch mainstream media fumble with a story for several days before dealing with the realities of a situation. Some, like CBS and AP end up using blogger articles without any attribution. They plagarize and it is catching up to them every day.

Perhaps the new future of journalism is sending out reporters with digital video cameras so they don't get scooped by bloggers. Meanwhile, if you have an idea you want to promote, think about how it might be presented on YouTube.

Beyond Books

I'm fascinated by the increasingly widespread transition from printed media to online, on-demand media and am trying to pick an entry point where I can get a little of this action for myself.

I think there is another twist to this self-publishing game and it may further lower the barriers to getting the word out and making money at the same time.

I proved to my own satisfaction that the traditional publishing arena had little to offer a beginning author that self-publishing could not accomplish faster and more efficiently.

Any new work that lies outside a formulaic genre (mystery, romance, how-to, etc.) has a hard time getting the attention of a traditional publisher, and for good reason! Publishers need product that is readily salable, which means they favor commodity writing by name brand authors (Cussler, Crichton, King...)

Up to now, the most satisfying way to get your ideas into other's hands is to control the entire publishing and distribution process with sales help from online giants like Amazon.com.

Fred First's lyrical discussion of life in a quiet valley in the mountains (Slow Road Home) has an enormous amount of charm for those who long for simpler days and quiet pleasures, but no traditional publishing houses recognized the long-term potential in this book. I think they will eventually, but by then he may have decided that he likes being in control of his book and its future.

My book on surviving corporate employment (Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day) is still attracting readers from all over the world as they recognize that corporate life and corporate careers are increasingly short-term propositions.

However, this is a niche book targeted at those who are losing or have lost their jobs and while the market is more universal than I expected, it is not a bookstore item and never will be.

It is a reference work that one should read and reread as needed and it should ideally be available at no cost to help the people who need it most. More than 45,000 free copies have already been downloaded since the book came out in June 2005 and they are still being downloaded so I know the demand for it continues.

This brings me to present time where I see the ubiquity and usefulness of unobtrusive Google text ads becoming the possible opening to a new future for online publishing.

A book might be published online in chapter-sized chunks with a discreet advertising sidebar that provides context sensitive ads which might provide an income stream for the author. Cory Doctorow did this with his novel Themepunks on Salon.com, but the advertising was overpowering and offensive.

More recently, Tom Evslin serialized his Internet bubble novel hackoff.com and distributed it chapter by chapter via emails through Feedburner. He didn't put ads in his email, but I read his chapters on gmail with a running accompaniment of context sensitive ads and it was not distracting at all.

Non-fiction books might fare quite well with this model. In fact, I could see authors writing works specifically tailored to generate maximum ad revenue, because the ads might serve as additional reference material for the reader.

In celebration of this eventual possibility, I am once again making my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, available as a FREE DOWNLOAD until further notice. This is the full book in PDF format. 

When I come up with a version that provides bite-sized reference information in a more easily downloaded format, you will be the first to know.

Talent Developer Jane Chin and I had an early discussion about sharing ideas instead of hoarding them which you might find interesting. We both tend to share first and sort out the financial aspects later.

There is always a price for striking out in a new direction

One of the first things you learn about doing something new is that there are some people who will disapprove of the way you are doing it. These are "yesterday's experts" who are threatened by the changes that you represent.

My good friend Fred First, bemoans the fact that a literary magazine and a book fair have recently turned him down because his excellent book was not produced by a "reputable publisher".

It makes me want to whack him up the side of his head because he still doesn't get the fact that his work is valuable because of what he has written, not because of his publisher.

He seems to think that a "reputable" publisher's name on a book is an imprimatur that means something to prospective book buyers. It only matters to literary critics and they don't buy books!

Publishing houses do not set standards. They are desperately trying to defend their existing markets from incursions by self-published upstarts.

Another argument for self-publishing

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. wrote The Long Tail, a brilliant article which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and will become a book, published by Hyperion, on July 11, 2006.

The concept was elegantly captured by this graphic:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. ...In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Chris has been developing the concept on his blog and now is ready to publish his work as a book.

Because the publisher feels that the above long tail graphic will be off-putting to prospective readers, they have come up with a cover graphic which is non-offensive, non-challenging, and non-informative!

Does anyone else feel that the use of an enter button is trite, banal, and utterly clueless?

I question what this publisher adds to the project except for possible distribution assistance. I think this cover will not attract any new readers and will make the book a much harder sell than one with the original graphic.

Read the whole story of the cover with comments from readers who have been following the long tail story from the beginning.

Those of you who are self-publishing can add this to your list of questions to ask yourself. Does the cover communicate my ideas to the people I want to reach?

Look at this cover and judge for yourself. The text is fine, but the graphic is aimed at a knee-high culture which probably thinks the long tail is something you order to go.

Tag: The Long tail

Setting expectations correctly is harder than it seems

After all that I have written about the vital necessity of setting expectations correctly, I belatedly realized that I have missed the mark in terms of preparing readers for what they would find in my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day!

Many readers have been trying to tell me about this, but it took recruiter Jim Durbin to put it into words that I could clearly understand.

Jim Durbin: The first three chapters define conditions where a person's career starts to head the wrong direction.  They represent accurate descriptions of dysfunctional workplaces, not a harangue against former employers and co-workers.

DUH! I knew that the first three chapters are very painful reading for many hard-working professionals, because they bring up experiences which were major setbacks in their careers!

I tried to prepare them in the book, but I failed to set expectations properly in my ad copy and on my Danger Quicksand website.

People who were ready for the grim realities of employment scarfed up the information and gave me rave reviews. These people had been chewed up and spit out by corporations and they were tickled pink to find out they weren't crazy, they weren't alone, and there was something they could do to put it all behind them and get on with life!

On the other hand, people looking for an amusing book on surviving corporate employment, but with no real idea of what a dysfunctional workplace is, found my descriptions disturbing. This was true of the book reviewers who had not been exposed to a career-threatening workplace.

By setting reader expectations properly, I would have warned off the casual browsers and would have attracted those with serious career difficulties. I am addressing this now by saying that this book contains graphic data unsuitable for young impressionable minds.

The money quote is:

If you are a typical hard-working professional, the first three chapters are going to be painful because they deal with some of the worst experiences you have ever had.

The payoff comes when you realize that what happened was not your fault, and that there is a brighter future ahead if you can put this behind you.

We'll see how potential readers respond. I think it will be interesting.

Have any of you writers experienced any difficulty in matching your book promotion to the reader's experience in reading your book?

Tag: self-publishing

Self-publishing is a continual learning experience

The most interesting thing about self-publishing is that each book is like a virtual micro-business. Everything I have written about micro-businesses applies to self-publishing almost without exception.

For example, micro-business success on a limited budget usually requires identifying a niche market in which people communicate about products which they find useful or entertaining. In this kind of a market, a valuable product or service at the right price will benefit greatly from word-of-mouth advertising.

Successful self-published books generally begin in a niche market, although they can spill over to a general mass market if enough word-of-mouth buzz gets generated and there is enough entertainment value to appeal to a broader market. The Harry Potter books are the best-known example of this.

Until you find that niche market, you spend a lot of time and money promoting your book to people who are interested, but don't recommend it to others. The ideal niche market would be people for whom your book is a solution to a problem. Reaching them may take a little doing and may involve finding other people who deem your book useful.

I self-published Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day almost a year ago to help level the playing field for hardworking people who were trying to support their families and maintain their sanity in a troubling and uncertain working environment.

The gritty, no-nonsense advice appealed to those who had been blindsided by career-shattering discoveries, but it turned out to be a quick test of a person's willingness to confront unpleasantness. This statement I made about HR was a typical example:

Page 83: ...Human Resources, contrary to your expectations, is not your friend. HR is there to protect the company and its executives against employees like you.

Some of my book reviewers were incredulous that I would make such a statement. On the other hand, I got rave reviews and thanks from people who were driven to the point of doubting their own sanity because of insane work situations and lack of support from HR.

Thanks to word of mouth, people kept on buying the book, but I did not feel I was reaching opinion leaders for the target market I was trying to reach.

Recently, I have gotten my book in the hands of people in the career management/recruiting/outplacement fields and book sales are trending up.

It appears that my book may help these professional recruiters when they deal with candidates who have not been job hunting recently and have unrealistic expectations.

I felt especially validated when I saw this review by Jim Durbin, of the Durbin Media Group. 

My takeaway from this experience is to find those who my target audience pays attention to and get my book into their hands. I will send a free review copy of Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day to any professional in the recruiting, headhunting, outplacement, and career counseling field. Just send me an email and I will send you a copy within 24 hours.

I have also been helped in great measure by my good friends in the blogosphere who reviewed my book on their weblogs and by friends who have continued to promote my book through ads on their sites. You can see their names listed on my left sidebar.

Tag: self-publishing

Download Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day

Free download available now!

Too many times I see people struggling with non-optimum work situations that are thoroughly covered in my book. If I could get my book into the hands of more people, I feel it might give them the edge they need to achieve a brighter future. I would like to make that happen.

I want to give more people a chance to read this unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment so they can find out what is REALLY going on at work and DO something about it.

In order to do that, I've set up another round of free downloads for those who would like to get some helpful career advice, but are financially strapped or live where books are prohibitively expensive.

If you are experiencing employment distress, why not download Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day and get your creative juices flowing again.  .

You will need high-speed internet and an Adobe reader for this 1.4mb pdf document, but you will find it to be well worth the effort.

Give the paperback version as a gift this Christmas

There are many people you know who are half-expecting to be laid off this Christmas. Instead of empty words of sympathy after they are jettisoned, why not buy them a paperback version of Danger Quicksand and send it to them now, when they can still do something to lessen the blow.

If you find yourself working out of a difficult situation at work, you might want to get yourself a paperback version of my book so you can make notes in the margins as you work your way along. A number of people have found that Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day makes for great occasional reading, because you can open it anywhere and find something worthwhile that you can read in five minutes. Keep this book at hand so you can read it over and over until you can think with the material and use it as your own.

Keep the book in your desk at work and read it when you take a coffee break. Sometimes all you need is a nudge to get you unstuck from a frustrating series of events. Try reading Danger Quicksand in small snatches. Read until you feel a sense of relief, then put the book down and get on with your day.

Do any of you read books in short takes?
Or, does everyone read a book from cover to cover?
I would like to know as I am looking at different book formats for the others in this series.

Themepunks - a fascinating view of a post-corporate world

Salon is serializing a new science fiction novella, Themepunks, by Cory Doctorow.  The story takes place in the very near future and features blogger Andrea Fleeks as the narrator and major agent of change in a riveting story that I could not stop reading. Cory knows his subject. He makes this story so real that it is like experiencing virtual reality. He hold your attention even in the presence of an overwhelming barrage of embedded advertisements, (See Disclaimer at end.)

The book is about a post-dotcom boom and bust, built on the ready availability of commodity hardware and open source code. It concerns itself with the lives of a blogger working for the San Jose Mercury, a team of visionary tech entrepreneurs, the CEO of Kodak/Duracell, a shanty town of Florida squatters, and a large cast of media people and other sharks.

Salon magazine has begun to serialize the book, and they will publish a section every Monday for ten weeks.  When the whole thing is done, Tor will publish it between covers, but Cory took the opportunity to do what Dickens did -- write a novel in serial form just a few weeks ahead of his readers.

His choice of an abandoned mall in Hollywood, Florida, as the location of an unlikely industrial renaissance is perfect.

When I read his novella, it was like deja vu all over again. In the Seventies, I was part of a startup which took over a partially abandoned shopping center a half-hour north of Hollywood, Florida.

We eventually we had  a hundred people and three Gardner-Denver wiring machines turning out computer systems before we moved to larger quarters.

Cory's use of a journalist/blogger as the narrator is a master stroke. I am hooked. Cory has my attention for the rest of the series.

Disclaimer:

The only downside to reading the Salon serialization is the crude and intrusive use of advertisements. To get to the story in the first place, you may have to wade through one of the lamest surveys I have ever taken. You can bypass much of it by clicking on the skip button, but you are deluged by multiple ads on every page of the story.

Savvy marketing people will be using this expensive and embarrassing effort by Salon and Marriott as a classic example of how to alienate prospects. Obviously no one at either company bothered to read the novella and see what the ad frequency looked like.

Removing 75-80% of the ads would make for a more normal content/ad balance.

I would be interested in your comments, because I think this could be a viable model for generating revenue, if the advertisers weren't so greedy as they are here.

The writer/publisher - part 38

The dark side of self-publishing

Yvonne Divita cares about authors and she has a lot to say in her recent post Changing Trends in Book Publishing .

Yvonne runs an an author services company, Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC  which helps authors self-publish and get their book in front of the right audience, via the right medium, all over the world, both online and offline.

Yvonne warns new writers of the pitfalls in the brave new world of POD (print-on-demand) technology and suggests some ways to beat the odds. New authors definitely need help if her summary is correct. She writes:

Think about this: the average first-time, print-on-demand author sells about 75 books. Not even enough to cover the print costs. If you're serious about your work, and you should be, get serious about producing a professional book that your publisher can help you sell.

I self-published the old-fashioned way, which Yvonne describes in this fashion:

Let's look at the details. First, the author would have to find a reputable printer, she would have to produce a manuscript with the exact specs the printer needed, and then, she would have to be prepared to pay the printer for all of the books at once. After receiving her books, she would then have to sell them -- herself.

To contrast with this, Yvonne makes the point that much of the POD advertising is misleading. Authors sign away their rights, get locked into seven year contracts, the printing is often inferior, Barnes & Noble refuses to handle POD books, etc., etc.

Well, Bunky! It sounds kind of bleak, doesn't it?  The aspiring author has to pay and pay and then has to do all the work herself anyway!

I say, write your book anyway! Publish it somehow, POD or short run printer, and then figure out how to market it to buyers outside your immediate circle of friends. Get the damn book out of your system and push it out into the marketplace!

You will learn more about your writing in a hurry than you will in years of classes and research. You will learn what readers consider valuable as opposed to what professors and literary types consider valuable. Just don't give up your day job until you start earning real income.

Some people want to write perfect prose before publishing their book. Fair enough, but don't let that get in the way of your story-telling. Your writing skill has only to be good enough so that your errors don't get in the way of your message.

Content should be your first concern, delivery is your second. All of the writing skill in the world will not make a recital of banal homilies into an inspiring story. A gripping and original story written from the heart wins hands down over polished platitudes.

Now, if you really don't want to expose your work to the light of prying eyes, keep on sending your manuscripts to the overworked underlings at traditional publishing houses. It will keep you busy for years and you will never lack for conversational fodder at family gatherings. Like playing the lottery, manuscript submission is a harmless pastime, as long as you don't spend too much money on it.

On the other hand, those of you who really have something to say and want people to buy and read your book should look at self-publishing as a coming-of-age step for an author. It is not as scary as it seems and it gets easier with practice!

Finally, make sure that you learn how to promote YOUR book. You can read all of the expert advice you want, but you need to find promotional techniques that work for YOU. This is where an author services company like Yvonne's can make the difference between breaking even and breaking out into a higher range of book sales.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer/publisher - part 37

Feedback - what a writer lives for

I appreciate the feedback I receive, and it inspires me to keep writing.  Sometimes the feedback helps me to focus on topics I haven't been covering in depth and sometimes the feedback makes me redouble my efforts to get my books out into the hands of more readers.

I write to help others and I use humor when possible to lighten the seriousness of the topics I deal with. The underlying message I try to deliver is that you can handle almost any situation if you take responsibility for it and if you have enough information to make the correct decisions.

I often write about employment, which is one of the biggest challenges we face. I try to entertain while educating readers about this often depressing part of life. I don't believe that education has to be a bloody serious activity. It should be more of an adventure, possibly scary, but eventually inspiring. On the whole, I feel that my writing has helped people.

Sometimes I miss the mark, as revealed in a phone call with a reader yesterday. She hadn't bought my book because she thought it would be like a Dilbert book. She wanted real advice on changing jobs. After talking with me she said, "I can see that you really are serious about helping people. Maybe I should read your book."

On the other hand, I received a comment recently that makes all of the work on my first book worthwhile. This is the kind of result I worked to achieve.

Melinda wrote:

I purchased this book last week for my husband who has lived most of this book. He is like a different person after having read it.

I am extremely thankful and grateful for this book and to IowaHawk for advertising it. Most of all I am grateful to Mr. St. Lawrence for taking the time to write it.

Melinda and other readers have given me feedback that will help me to communicate more effectively in my books and in my online articles. If you have thoughts you would like me to hear, please fire away. This blog is the result of a lot of earlier feedback. Yours can only help to make it more useful.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher - part 36

Your blog-based book could earn a "Blook" prize

The world’s first literary prize for books based on blogs, or “blooks,” is being launched today by its sponsor, Lulu (www.lulu.com). According to Lulu, “blooks” are the fastest growing new kind of book – and the hottest new publishing and online trend.

I've already entered Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day in the non-fiction competition for “The Blooker Prize."

The competition runs for several months and offers cash prizes for the winners. Read about it here.

Cory Doctorow -- noted author, speaker, and activist who co-edits BoingBoing, the world’s most linked-to blog.--will chair a team of three prominent Internet figures who will judge the inaugural prize. 

If you don't already have a book based on your blogging, then get busy and write one! This should be the beginning of some very interesting activity.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing blooker prize blook

The writer-publisher - part 35

Why you should self-publish - an open letter to my blogging friends

I've been following your posts for some time and would like you to consider the spiritually liberating activity of self-publishing. There are a couple of incredibly persuasive reasons to look outside the resource-limited world of traditional publishing.

1. I find your writing, in general, to be more interesting and thought-provoking than much of the material I read in dead tree media. If you can get your writing into the hands of more readers, they would benefit and so would you.

2. When you publish your own work, you gain an immense amount of real experience as to what your market is. You also get honest feedback that helps you determine what to do to get more people reading your work.

3. Blogging is a good first step in becoming a self-publisher. The feedback you get in your comments is instant, and can be brutally or refreshingly honest. You can use this to good advantage in developing a public awareness of your work and a community of people who are interested in seeing that you succeed.

They will buy your book and, more importantly, they will tell others about your writing because it is interesting information that they are the first to hear about.

Watching your visitor logs gives you information on who is interested enough in your writing to make repeat visits to your site. You will quickly learn how different topics change your visitor volume.

4. The most compelling reason to self-publish is to avoid unnecessary rejection. There is nothing so emotionally damaging as inviting rejection and that is built into the traditional publishing model by economic factors they cannot control.

Applying for a job where the employer cannot pay what you are worth is ludicrous. Submitting manuscripts to companies that are frantically searching for a viable business model is worse! If you do not have a personal connection to a publisher, you will waste valuable time and money when you could be developing an audience of readers.

If a publisher is doing well, it is because they have somehow found a customer base for whatever they are currently publishing. The only works that are interesting to them are clones of what they are already publishing.

Traditional publishing is a zero-sum game. If a known author with a track record of sales has something to release, a traditional publishing house would be crazy to publish something by an unknown instead. If you were publishing, you would do the same, in a heartbeat!

5. FINALLY - THERE IS NO SCARCITY OF OUTLETS FOR YOUR WORK!

Get over the idea that your writing is only valuable if it appears in a traditional magazine, collection or whatever. If it is published, it becomes old news by next month. The value of appearing in a well-known publication is rapidly disappearing, especially if the publication cannot be accessed by an Internet search. Your article in the New Yorker or the NY Times becomes birdcage liner in months while your online articles and your searchable books are available to readers for years.

It takes time to develop a market for your work. When you are the publisher, you can make sure the book is available for as long as it takes.

Sell your books on your own website, through Amazon.com, or from the trunk of your car like John Grisham did. Do whatever feels right to you, but don't spend years waiting for some publisher to recognize the value of your writing. Write and get your work into reader's hands. Then get working on your next book!

You can publish your work in small quantities as I did, or you can use a POD publisher. Either way, your work will be available for people to buy in a few months and you will do the same promotional actions as if you had published through a main-stream publishing house.

There is unbelievable satisfaction in having people say, "I heard about your new book!"

Sometimes they even say, "Where can I get one?"

Please take a hard look at self-publishing. You owe it to yourself to do so.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher - part 34

Blog advertising is taking off - make your reservations now!

For the past three months, I have been advertising my book on Chris Muir's Day By Day cartoon strip. This generated thousands of hits for my Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day site at a price I could afford.

I recently went to renew my ad placement for another three months and found that the 3-month ad rates had increased from $270 to $2000. Outside of a brief moment of sticker shock, the primary reaction was regret that I had not purchased a longer term contract when I started.

Chris has every right to set ad rates based on the traffic and visibility afforded by his increasingly popular website. If he sells ad space on his site at this new rate, he will be reaping the rewards for his unique ability to capture important issues in a 3-cell daily comic strip.

He will never again worry about getting his comic strip syndicated in the newspapers of the world. The newspapers are no longer able to afford him!

He is also setting an example for other cartoonists, political and otherwise. If you can create traffic by capturing the imagination of readers or by amusing them, you can generate income by selling ad space on your site. In essence, you can create your own one-page newspaper with highly focused content and advertisers.

Day By Day is not the only weblog-type site to raise prices.   Overheard in the Office has almost doubled their ad rates in the last few months. I have not seen many popular sites where the rates have remained unchanged. This means that advertisers need to make long term commitments when they find a site that works for them.

We used to say that Internet time was 3 times faster than normal time. I think that time in the blogosphere has been kicked up even further. We see changes occur in months that used to take years. It forces a whole new way of thinking and requires a new strategy for placing ads.

I will continue advertising on blogs, but I am going to have to stay flexible in order to get my messages out in a cost-effective manner. There are a lot more advertisers competing for scarce blog space and the prices will only go higher.

The increasing viability of blog ads means that upscale bloggers with real content are more likely to generate income as bloggers. Imagine that, respectability!

"What do you do for a living?"
"I blog!"
"Really?"
"Yes, I used to write for magazines, but I make a better living as a blogger."

The future's so bright - gotta wear shades...  :)

UPDATE:

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine has moved into advertising in a big way. He notes:

Sometime today (when my webmaster gets off the school bus), a big-ass ad will likely appear atop this page. It’s for a Warner Brothers movie and they came to me, which is cool. More on that later. I’m trying lots of ad things to try to learn: BlogAds, Burst, Google, Yahoo, Feedburner RSS. And today at Web 2.0 I’ll be leading a discussion on advertising in this  distributed world.

If you act fast, you can get a three month Blogad on Jeff's Buzzmachine for only $1500. Next month, the rate will be anyone's guess.

I understand that some of the heavy hitters in the advertising world are switching from old-time media ads to Internet advertising for high returns at a fraction of the usual cost. Stay tuned for more exciting developments.

Danger Quicksand is now on Amazon.com!

Thanks to Dwayne Melancon, I learned that my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, is now listed on Amazon.com!

I did not list it, but now that it is available through Amazon, I am happy to take advantage of this fortunate occurrence and to share any benefits with my readers.

You can follow this link and be among the first to review this book on Amazon. For those of you who are authors or bloggers, reviewing this book is an opportunity to get free publicity for your book or your blog.

You are also invited to share in any financial fallout from this listing. Those of you who use the Amazon referral system to recommend books to your readers can now refer people to Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice day and get a commission for doing so.

I am selling the book at the usual $19.95 price on Amazon and am actually doing the fulfillment directly, so I can sign and inscribe books as usual. This gives me the best of both worlds: exposure on Amazon.com and the ability to peresonally sign every book sold.

Thanks to whoever took the time to list my book on Amazon and write the editorial review. I am still amazed at the help I get from my friends!

Dwayne has recently switched his Genuine Curiosity site to Typepad. Drop in for his blogwarming and admire his new layout! He produces consistently interesting posts and is worth visiting often.

The writer-publisher - part 33

Simpler is better

I write books to express things I want to share. Once I started getting positive feedback from my writing, I realized that I could derive income from this activity as well as incredible satisfaction.

All I had to do was to figure out how to print, promote, sell and distribute my books in a cost-effective manner while keeping up with my other lives.

People have written to say that they would like to self-publish if they had more information about it. Let me say here and now that lack of information on book writing and self-publishing is NOT a problem. In fact, it is more like trying to drink from a fire hose! There is so much information about this area that you can easily drown in data overload.

I believe that success comes when we choose a path that offers information that we can easily evaluate and digest. Too often the advice I see is out of date or is based on hearsay.

Take the matter of fulfillment. Much of the advice I read suggests that book fulfillment is expensive and time-consuming. I say that depends on whether you are trying to play the traditional publishing game of selling to bookstores and distributors instead of selling directly to customers. The short answer is that beginning authors should sell directly to book buyers.

When you sell through the traditional book channels, you get to deal with all of the fun things like discount structures, returns, slow paying customers and low margins. For a beginning author with no connections to major publishers that is sheer nonsense!

When you sell directly to customers using PayPal, you get an email telling you that customer Marge Bookbuyer has paid for a book. You sign the book if you want to make the customer feel special, put it in a padded envelope and send it out by whatever mail service the customer has paid for. This takes five minutes if you have books, labels, media mail stamps and padded envelopes stacked up where you can easily get your hands on them.

PayPal has a simple interface to send the customer an invoice, but you can simply use a copy of your email as an invoice/packing document instead. Write a friendly note on it if you wish.

You get the satisfaction of knowing that someone thinks enough of your writing to pay some of their hard-earned money for your book. You get additional satisfaction knowing that you are shipping the goods promptly. Finally, you get a sizeable portion of the price of each book.

Keep it simple. Make the customer pay first and make it simple to order. I use BUY NOW buttons with shipping charges bundled into the book price. I could have made it even simpler by using only two BUY NOW buttons. One would be free shipping in the US by Media Mail. The other would be fast shipping by Global Priority Mail - anywhere on the planet.

Make it very simple at first. Sell from your own website. Use PayPal. Make each buying trasaction so satisfying that your word of mouth advertising spreads. Then find ways to leverage the feedback from your readers to start a conversation with more prospective readers. Treat each transaction as a new moment in time. Each new customer is an opportunity to make a new friend.

We can never have too many friends.

When your sales increase to the point where you can no longer handle fulfillment by yourself, find a way to increase the scale of your operation without losing the personal touch. That is a great problem to have!

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher - part 32

Date coincidence - a handy tool for the self-published author

You have at least two choices when you self-publish:

1. You can spend years reading all of the books written on self-publishing and you can go to seminars, classes and so forth in order to gain the knowledge that will allow you to self-publish successfully.

2. You can skim through a few good books and decide to make the rest up as you go along.

The only problem with approach number one is that the self-publishing game is evolving almost faster than you can read about it. Seminars and classes can be helpful if you select carefully, but you will have to know what is actually going on in order to decide. You learn what is going on by experiencing it yourself.

Approach number two is what I have done in almost any field I have entered, and it has worked well in areas as diverse as computer design, product marketing, and consulting. Naturally, I chose this path when attempting to write and to self-publish. I have written most of this down in the earlier posts in this series, but I failed to mention the underlying element that allows you to be successful when you charge out on your own.

If you are creating a new activity, you may not know everything necessary to be successful at first, but you can adjust your efforts and course of action to achieve success by keeping an eye on date coincidence of actions and results.

This is not the beginning of a long treatise on managing your life, but it is an observable fact that bad and good results don't just happen, they are caused. If you look carefully at any change in statistics, you will find that some change occurred previously which caused the change. By date coincidence, I mean that an earlier act caused a later result. The communication lag is between the cause and the result tends to remain constant for any given communication medium, so once you determine the lag you can monitor results and track back to whatever caused the change.

Here are some examples of how this can work:

Recently, I revised a blogad by adding quotes that made the ad more interesting. The traffic to my book site increased within 24 hours. This was obviously a good thing, so I let the change stand.

Encouraged, I "improved" the text on the book site to make it more interesting and the order rate dropped.

Looking over the site, I found the text to be more readable and more interesting, at least to me, but I realized I was no longer "asking for the order". This is a classic error. My attention was on capturing the customer's interest, but the copy did not call for action. I corrected the copy and the order rate increased that day.

In a dead tree medium, this process might have taken weeks or months, because of the time it takes to get something into print and then distributed. On the internet, this took only one day. On a really high traffic site, this might have taken less than an hour because the results of a change show up immediately.

This works as well in almost any field. Date coincidence is a handy tool for the self-published author, but it is vital for the entrepreneur. Here is a suggestion on applying it.

Instead of having to know "everything" before you start a new venture, learn enough so that you can make some intelligent choices and can recognize good indicators vs bad indicators.

There is little chance that you can learn all of the causes of good and bad results, so concentrate on producing the best quality product or service you can manage and take notice of changes in your vital statistics like sales, money collected, and customer complaints. Track down the source of these changes by date coincidence and reinforce the good actions and eliminate the bad.

If you are alert enough, and quick to respond, you will find yourself in a better condition as time goes by. You will also learn what really makes your business results improve and this will give you much needed certainty in a challenging world.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher -part 31

Promoting a book through blog advertising

Blog advertising is not for everyone, but if you are looking for intelligent readers who are comfortable with technology and have a wide range of interests, you could do a lot worse than look at blog readers.

Blogs come in all flavors and address almost every niche of life that you can imagine. Not all blogs carry advertising but I feel that this situation will gradually change over time as blog advertising become more sophisticated and better at matching the mood of the host site.

Just as TV ads became almost as entertaining as the shows that carried them, blog ads may become useful and entertaining to readers. We are not there yet, but progress is being made.

To promote my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, I placed simple graphic ads on weblogs of several friends. These friends, who are listed on the left sidebar, as "Bloggers who support my self-publishing efforts" did me the incredible kindness of running these ads as a favor. I wrote a post about these people titled, I get by with a little help from my friends...

With their help, I came to see that every weblog had a characteristic ability to deliver traffic to the site where I sold my book online. Since many of these friends wrote a few words recomending the book to others, I was able to see that a single mention of the book in a post generated more traffic than the ads I placed on that site.

After a while, I could see that some of these weblogs kept sending traffic to my book site for month upon month, while others generated much less traffic. The difference was not due to the volume of traffic on the originating site, it appeared to be related to the type of traffic on the originating site.

Over time, the responses to my simple graphic ads started to fall off and Jennifer at DrinkThis created a new ad for me with quotes and this ad caused booksales to increase again.

I discovered Henry Copeland's BlogAds and used the new ad created by Jennifer to advertise on high traffic sites which carried Blogads. My book site traffic climbed steadily and I could almost envision getting a real income from the sale of this book.

That's when I discovered that the free downloads were taking off because of my advertising and visitors were choosing the free download instead of buying the book. (This is a real problem when your potential buyers are technically astute and don't mind reading lots and lots of text on a screen) As I explained in my previous post, I stopped competing with myself and shut off the free download of the entire book.

My book site traffic has jumped markedly and my book sales have gotten back on track since the ChangeThis link was killed.

Success comes at a price and the same is true for blogads. The host sites set the price for the ads on their site. The prices do not necessarily relate to the traffic on the site. Some seem to be set arbitrarily high as a matter of prestige. Furthermore, as sites get discovered and become more popular, the ad rates can skyrocket.

I had one ad contract which was ready for renewal and found that the ad price had gone from $100/mo to $180/mo although the traffic volume had grown only modestly. (That site now has only one ad instead of the three that used to be there.)

But in the blogging world, technology always seems to come to the rescue. BlogAds are graphic images with text and take up a fair amount of valuable real estate. There is text-based advertising by AdBrite which seems to pull as well as my earlier graphic ads on the same site. For $25/mo vs $100/mo, I have no problem investing in text-based ads.

The catch, and you knew there had to be a catch, didn't you, is that BlogAds are screened by the company and by the host and are generally tasteful and are placed on sites where they will do well for the advertisers. AdBrite is in the volume ad business and they run ads on whatever sites will make space for them.

As I sorted through the sites that carry AdBrite ads, I found many that I did not want my ad to appear on. I did find some legitimate employment-related sites and I placed ads that read as follows:

Anxious about your job?
Don't sit frozen in your cubicle until your name is called - act!

They are already generating some traffic, so I will keep my eye on them and let you know how it goes. I expect to run a mix of graphic and text-only ads and will keep tuning to get the best return for my money and time. I am also going to replace all of my existing ads with smaller, less intrusive ads with better graphics.

Another thing I discovered was that small changes in the book site text produced changes in book order volume. I'll try to capture that in the next post in this series under the topic of "date coincidence".

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher - part 30

Promoting and selling your book in a changing world

When I started this series, it was to be an account of my journey into the unknown realm of self-publishing rather than an authoritative discourse on "How Things Are To Be Done". This was a fortunate choice because I am finding that the rules and tools keep changing. As fast as I discover and make use of something, another resource appears, or my solution has limitations which I did not fully understand.

Here is the first problem I was faced with and the evolving decisions that have been required:

Problem #1 - being an unknown self-published author with a first book in an undefined genre

The standard solution is to throw money at the problem. Money will buy excellent advice, competent PR people, and will support advertising and promotional activities until your name and your book appears in all the right places. If  you are already famous and the book isn't too badly written, you will probably cover your expenses. If you are an unknown self-published author with a first book, etc., etc., you will probably not cover your expenses.

My solution to get visibility was to find a way to get free copies of the book into the hands of interested readers at no cost to myself. I was able to put my entire book manuscript on changethis.com as a freely downloadable manifesto. I made the decision to post the book rather than an excerpt in order to create the maximum impact. More than 20,000 copies of the book were downloaded in a six month period and I gained the valuable exposure that I hoped for. I am still getting emails from people who were told about my book by someone who had downloaded it.

In the beginning, book sales appeared to track the pattern of downloads. What I didn't expect was that the downloads would begin increasing while the sales leveled off. I had a few people write and say that they had enjoyed the download so much that they bought a copy of the book, but an increasing number of people went for the download and it satisfied their needs.

Unfortunately for me, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day is a reasonably quick read. Some readers reported that once they started reading, they had not been able to put it down until they had read it through.

On that basis alone, I should have realized that a download which can delivers the entire message in one fell swoop offers little incentive for purchasing that which has already been assimilated.

If my book had been more ponderous, or difficult to assimilate, a full download would have been difficult to read and would have prompted more book sales.

I would have been better off offering a download that drew the reader in and required purchasing the book to get the crucial information needed to solve the reader's problem. Live and learn.

The other alternative would have been to specify that the full book would be available for only a limited time. Other manifestos on ChangeThis have done this and a link was established at the end of the free download period to show where the book could be purchased. I saw no reason to limit availability as I proposed to let the manifesto remain indefinitely.

I finally came to my senses and requested that my manifesto downloads be discontinued, I suggested that a note be left telling where the book could be purchased. The manifesto was removed and no forwarding link was provided, so I need to go to the sites that link to this missing document and give them a forwarding link.

I have no complaints, because I received the benefit of advice from Seth Godin and incredibly valuable exposure on ChangeThis. I also learned something about promotional offers that had never entered my mind before. A promotional offer is only good if it prompts someone to buy something.

If the value that you are selling can be gleaned from your promotional offer, you need to change something quickly.

I achieved much of what I was after by giving away free copies of my book in electronic form. Now that I have realized that my promotion is unfair competition for my product offer, I have made the necessary changes. I am offering only a partial download of the book and the downloads are now turning into sales.

The next post will discuss some interesting changes in blog advertising. Stay tuned.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher - part 29

In publishing, you get what you pay for

The goal of becoming a writer is to get your ideas into other people's heads and you hope that eventually you will make enough money that you can write for a living.

The goal of traditional publishers is to make money selling books and that means signing up authors with reputations for selling tons of books. Can you begin to see a disconnect between these goals? This is why new authors collect rejection slips for years and years with little possibility of getting published.

The POD publishers have a slightly different business model. They will take on unpublished authors, help them design a book, design a cover and provide various amounts of advice and support for the new author. The books these authors write rarely sell many copies, so POD companies make money by charging the author substantial fees for all of the support and advice they provide. Most of these companies provide the ISBN number for the author, which means that they, not the author, own the rights to the book.

There are also some relatively new companies that help new authors through the hurdles of getting a book completed and designed and published. These companies position themselves as author advocates and they often use POD companies to print the books. For the new author who wants someone else to take care of all the nitty-gritty details of producing a book and has the money to pay for it, this may be the optimum solution. These author advocates appear to do a lot of handholding for the inexperienced writer which is good, but they are probably the most expensive solution of all because the author has to pay for the handholding she or he gets. The upside is that the new author gets more support from this approach than from any other.

If you become a publisher, you have total control of your book and its distribution. You can get your book to market in 90 days or less at a cost that is entirely under your control. It is a course of action that places the greatest demands on your creativity and determination. I happen to feel that it is incredibly satisfying to self-publish, but it is not for everyone.

I took this direction and chose to do everything myself, which meant I became a book designer and a publisher and paid a printer to  print my book. It meant I was exposed to the risks of doing enough things wrong that I might not have a book that would sell. It made me scramble to learn the ins and outs of today's publishing and forced me to learn enough about printing to create a book that could be printed and would look right. It was also the least expensive way I could go as a new author.

Selling your book once it is published

Whether you are published by a big New York publisher, by a POD company, or publish your own book, as a new author you will be creating most of the book sales yourself.

Once a book is accepted by a publisher, the author's work really begins. In almost all cases, the author is responsible for generating book sales, and this means not only book signings but finding channels which will carry and sell books.

As a new author, if you are not a blogger, you are essentially invisible. You can hire a PR firm and run ads in all of the right places, but it takes an enormous amount of money and effort before a distributor will be carrying your new book into Barnes & Noble or any other book store. You will have a much better chance of getting your book into Amazon.com than into national chain bookstores. You can get your books into local independent bookstores, but you will be carrying them there yourself.

You will need hundreds, perhaps thousands of copies of your book to give away to reviewers. If you are dealing with a POD firm, you will have to purchase these giveaway books at 40% - 85% of the retail price. As a self publisher, I figured these books into my business plan. I have given away more than a hundred books and may eventually give away a thousand. This is in addition to the tens of thousands of free downloads of the book in ebook format.

None of this is rocket science and Dan Poynter lays this all out in his book, The Self-Publishing Manual, which I am going to finish some day. There is so much data in the book that it takes forever to read. I find myself reading a few pages and getting enough information to keep me busy for weeks. The time to read books like this is before your book is published. Once your book hits the streets, you will have you hands full promoting it.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer/publisher - part 28

Frank Martin, asks a serious question about self publishing. Is it worth the effort? If it is, what is the effort in man hours?

The Short Answer

Let's see if I can capture what I've found in a way that you can use to guide your own decisions about self-publishing. The short answer is yes, getting my first book published was worth every minute and every dollar spent.

Have I met my financial expectations? Again, the short answer is yes because I have recouped almost all of my printing costs. I am now positioned to fund additional marketing and printing efforts through sales of the book. It has become a self-supporting activity. More importantly , I am enjoying life as a published author and local celebrity. :)

I get such simple pleasure out of being accosted in my favorite coffee shop, Cafe Del Sol, by someone I don't know and hearing them say. "You're the guy who wrote that book!" This generally prompts a discussion of their past work experiences. My day is made if I hear that someone has been helped by reading my book or this blog.

A More Complete Answer

If spreading your ideas is important to you, self-publishing gives you the ability to do that in a way that is most cost-effective. This is a critical issue to consider because self-publishing is not a short or certain route to financial independence. Until you figure out how to get your books sold, you will be working at less-than-minimum wage while you are writing.

The best justification I have found for self-publishing is this:

Writing and self-publishing gives you full control over the dissemination of your ideas.

If you pursue writing and self-publishing with this objective in mind, you are most likely to be satisfied with your results. If you are very skilled at writing and at marketing, you can break even on expenses and may even make a little money after awhile.

The BIG payoff is that being a published author changes your life in ways that you never expect. People spread your ideas and get involved in getting others to read your book. If you can manage this appropriately, you will find yourself with a following and a future as an "expert" on the subject you are writing about.

As far as time involved, I spent at least 1000 hours writing, editing, designing the book and more designing the marketing campaigns. It was a labor of love and it will be a long while before it pays off financially. On the other hand, being an author/publisher has already paid incredible dividends in terms of increasing my exposure as a new voice in the field of job/career self-help. It has brought me in contact with people from all over the world and has given me a new perspective on how employment instability has become a global phenomenon.

What About You?

I think that most of you have more than one book in you that I would like to read. Frank Martin probably has several. I am looking forward to hearing that he has taken steps to becoming a self-publisher. You might consider doing the same. Let me know when I can write a review for you.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing

The writer-publisher - part 27

Blog reciprocity is your secret ingredient for publishing success

One of the biggest discoveries I made as a blogger is that blogging is not a zero-sum game!

Blogging, unlike traditional publishing, is not a zero-sum game. it is vital that you understand what this means.

The traffic for each participant increases as more people are involved in discussing a given topic.

Thus several bloggers discussing a topic will generate many more hits and relationships than they could possibly do alone.

We bloggers have an incredible advantage over almost any other communication medium when it comes to generating interest in a topic. Each of us who participates in the discussion draws interest to ourselves as well as the topic. The only proviso is that for maximum effect, we need to be linked to the discussion in every possible way.

A real-life example

When I started writing my Employees Handbook for Surviving Corporate Employment, I blogged the process and you readers made comments and suggestions which generated enough interest that I had to step up my production.

I displayed early versions of the cover and received more comments which prompted me to rename the book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day.

Bloggers thought the title was catchy and appropriate and started writing posts about it. My traffic grew and those who left comments and trackbacks shared in the increased traffic volume.

Other bloggers asked about self-publishing and that prompted a series of posts on the subject which is still running and will eventually become a book in its own right. My traffic continued to grow to the point where I began offering free downloads of the entire book for my readers so they wouldn't have to wait for the printing of the paperback. Bloggers passed the word around and a thousand copies were downloaded in a very short time.

One of my readers, Avi Solomon, was instrumental in getting my book submitted to ChangeThis, which resulted in tens of thousands of free downloads. According to ChangeThis, with pass-along copies my readership of the free book has climbed to around 50,000 viewers. I now have a link to a ChangeThis site counter which shows the spreading influence of this book.

We are still very early in the game

When the book was at the printer, I began advertising on weblogs of my blogging friends. (You can see their names listed on the left sidebar.) I started getting pre-orders and a backlog of orders on the day the books arrived. My blogging friends discussed this and my traffic built further with book sales following suit.

With some help from Tallglassofmilk at Drink this..., I began using Blogads with quotes from other bloggers. My book sales took a noticeable jump and the traffic on Ripples and Bent Crow Press started climbing in earnest.

I was a little slow off the mark and didn't realize that the quotes did not have links to the bloggers who so graciously provided them. Once I installed the proper links, Dwayne Melancon and Wayne Allen started getting traffic from the people who saw their names while visiting daybyday from Chris Muir, Overheard in the Office, and Iowahawk.

I know that more of you have written comments about Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day and I would like to put your comments and links in the Blogads I will be running in the future. This has an incredible 4-way payoff:

1. It is a huge benefit to me, because my ideas are spreading more rapidly.
2. Readers who see the ads get to see new and different comments.
3. You get more publicity, notoriety and traffic as a result of your exposure on several high-traffic weblogs.
4. More people are reading my book and getting the tools they need to deal with some very difficult working situations.

If you have written or would like to write a review or comment about my book, send me an email and I'll get you the exposure you so richly deserve. Blogging is not a zero-sum game, it is a game that benefits every participant. Join me and get your share of the action.

Tag: self publishing self-publishing