By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Penguin, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and other publishing powerhouses were among the winners at the second annual Publishing Innovation Awards, announced tonight in New York City at the Digital Book World Conference and Expo. Rapper and producer Jazy-Z won an award, too.

The awards highlight the best in e-books, enhanced e-books and book applications in 12 categories, including best children’s e-book, best non-fiction app and best enhanced e-book. The awards are in response to a need to create best-in-class designations. Members of publishing’s elite mingled with cocktails at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in New York to commemorate the honors.

“When publishers surprise and delight their readers, they gain advocates who will talk about, recommend, and discover more of their quality work,” said Matt Mullin, community relations manager for Digital Book World. (Disclosure: the Publishing Innovation Awards are owned and operated by Digital Book World, parent to this site.)

The 2012 winners of the Publishing Innovation Awards are:

Digital First Ebook Winner: Desserts (Allrecipes.com)
Finalists: I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Six’s Legacy (HarperCollins), L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories (Little Brown & Company), Mooon USA Travel Planner (Avalon Travel)

Ebook – Children’s Winner: Five Little Pumpkins (Harper Festival / Zuuka)
Finalists: Splat the Cat and the Duck with No Quack (HarperCollins), Why Do Puppies Do That? Enhanced Edition (Seymour Simon in partnership with Franklin Jr.)

Ebook – Fiction Winner: The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer and Cabinet of Curiosities by Preston & Child (Grand Central Publishing)
Finalists: The Rose Garden (Sourcebooks), The Virtuoso (Sourcebooks), Over Easy (Wouldya Publishing), Central Reservation (Xelsion Publishing)

Ebook – Non-Fiction Winner: AAA Las Vegas eTourBook Guide (AAA)
Finalists: Excellence Now (New Word City), Marathon: You Can Do It! (Shelter Publications), Cook For Your Life (Hardie Grant Publishing), Complete Gay And Lesbian Manners (Workman Publishing)

Ebook – Reference/Academic Winner: Meggs’ History of Graphic Design 5th Edition (John Wiley & Sons)
Finalists: Discover France (Lonely Planet), Using WordPress: Enhanced Edition (Que Publishing), Beginning Guitar Lessons – Progressive (Learntoplaymusic.com), Sao Paolo’s Atlantic Forest (WWF-Brazil and Sao Paolo State Forestry Foundation)

Enhanced Ebook Winner: Eva Scrivo On Beauty (Atria Books)
Finalists: Count, Dagmar! (Chronicle Books), Chaos: Enhanced Edition (Open Road Integrated Media), David Roberts’ Egypt (Atria Books), Debortees Islands & Streams (Telegram Forlag)

Transmedia Project Winner: Decoded by Jay-Z (Random House)
Finalists: Dark Eden (Katherine Tegen Books), One Child (EnThrill Entertainment), Cathy’s Book Part 3 (Running Press), Living Language Platinum (Random House)

App – Comics Winner: The Wormworld Saga (Robot Media)

App – Juvenile Winner: Cinderella (Nosy Crow)
Finalists: Millie & The Lost Key (Megapops), When I Grow Up (HarperCollins), Don’t Let the Pigeon Run this App! (Disney Publishing), The Monster at the End of this Book (Sesame Workshop)

App – Reference / Academic Winner: British Library 19th Century Historical Collection (Bibliolabs)
Finalists: DK Quick Cook (DK Publishing), DK The Human Body (DK Publishing), Gems and Jewels for iPad (The University of Chicago Press), Martha Stewart Cookies (Callaway Digital Arts Inc. and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia)

App – Fiction Winner: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (Penguin USA)
Finalists: Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: The Interactive Ebook (Quirk Books and PadWorx Digital Media), ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (Chuck Fischer Studio), Apocalepsy 911: the First Chapter (Unit 5 Entertainment), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Penguin USA)

App – Non-Fiction Winner: The Magic of Reality for iPad (Random House)
Finalists: Wreck this App (Penguin USA), Lights, Camera, Capture (John Wiley & Sons), Our Choice (Rodale)

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Charlotte Abbott, DBW contributor, @charabbott

A novel approach for publishers interested in building their brands: Give away content for free.

Book publishers, imprints and brands should market themselves by using new media and social media channels to talk to their audiences about relevant areas of interest, according to a panel today at the Digital Book World Marketing Summit in New York.

Essentially, “content marketing,” as popularized in part by the efforts of the Content Marketing Institute, a Cleveland-based firm that helps marketers build their own media channels, is marketing that uses storytelling to help sell a brand. The Content Marketing Institute has built a community of companies that have revised their marketing strategies to focus on sharing content online – and substantially increased their marketing budgets in this area.

The strategy is to turn engaged readers into paying customers.

Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi spoke at the Digital Book World Marketing Summit in a session called Capturing and Dominating Your Market with Content Marketing. Pulizzi recommends that savvy marketers cede the territory of big niches to big companies – like Proctor and Gamble’s websites targeting adult women (HomeMadeSimple.com); adolescent girls (BeingGirl.com) and men between the ages of 25 and 50 (ManoftheHouse.com). Better to talk to people with a less popular topic of interested: Get “super niche” – like Workshifting.com, a site with information and blog posts for people who want to work from anywhere, created by remote work software companies GoToMeeting and Citrix.

One way to determine popular but underserved niches is to use the Google Keyword Tool, which allows users to research popular keywords and find ones with low and medium numbers of search results. Google Trends can also show which keywords are trending up.

E-books are also a key part of Pulizzi’s content development and distribution strategy. He developed his CMI Content Marketing Playbook over six months, involving more than 50 influencers in his community. While writing and producing the book, he repackaged parts of it as blog posts, and for sharing on sites like Slideshare, Facebook, and Linked In. Pulizzi generated high interest with a teaser for the e-book, Predictions: Social Media and Content Marketing – Predictions for 2012, when it was featured as the “slide of the day” on Slideshare.com. Including an excerpt from the book, contributor spotlights and embedded links, Predictions generated thousands of downloads and brought in several pieces of consulting work to CMI.

For publishers, who have long been in the paid content business, the trick is getting people to pay for something once they’ve been given a taste for free.

Write to Charlotte Abbott

By Christina Katz, author of three books from Writer’s Digest:

Writing rules. Self-promotion drools. Isn’t this how most writers think?

But as long as you view your writing as art and your self-promotion efforts as the furthest thing from art, your chances of ramping up a successful 21st-century writing career are going to remain slim to none.

These days, there’s an art to writing and an art to self-promotion. From the moment you start putting words to the page, it’s never too early to start thinking about how you’re going to share them. And once you begin to see your writing and promotional efforts as equally artful, something wonderful starts to happen: You find readers.

Books aren’t written overnight — they’re developed one day at a time. And it’s the same with our platforms, which comprise all the ways we make ourselves visible to our readers. The idea that you need a platform might seem overwhelming at first. But if you consistently take small steps to put yourself out there, before you know it, you’ll have built a strong, sturdy foundation for your work.

So, if you’re the kind of writer who prefers being read to being unknown (who doesn’t?), here are 50 quick, simple ways to launch your platform into action. Think of each small step as a giant leap toward finding readers — and a fun, rewarding opportunity to share your hard-wrought words with others.

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This article originally appeared in Writer’s Digest. Read on below for the first 25 tips. Click the here for the remaining 25 at WritersDigest.com.

Related: Is Seth Godin Right About Book Publishing?

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Listen & Learn

1. Find Your Keepers. Clarify the kinds of readers you want to connect with now, and you’ll be glad you did later. First, jot down a quick list of all the types of readers you’ve ever had. Now, decide which groups you want to stay connected with for the long haul, and make them your keepers.

2. Start Surveillance. Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) can help you become practically omnipresent in only a few clicks. Take five to set up alerts to notify you when your name, articles, book(s), Twitter handle, site URL and/or specialty topics pop up online. When you’re alerted to people promoting your name, supporting your work or sharing your ideas, stick out your virtual hand and say, “Hey, thanks! I appreciate that.”

3. Poll for Solutions. Ask questions. You’ll get answers. If you’re wondering which online photo hosting service to use, or if others are having the same server problems that you are, try posting the question on Facebook and Twitter. I do this often, and love coming back and reading what others have said. If it’s a decision you’re making, share which advice you followed.

4. Show Respect. On social networks, follow and friend folks in your field whom you admire. Steer clear of anyone shifty, clingy or shilling stuff all the time. A good rule of thumb: Don’t promote or forward the causes of anyone online who you wouldn’t in regular life. It takes time to get to know people, but it’s worth it when your reputation is on the line.

5. Study the Competition. Jump on a search engine and type in the keywords that describe what you write about. See who pops up on your radar. Don’t be afraid of the competition; study your competitors. What are they doing better than you? Add what you learn to your to-do list.

Create Context

6. Introduce Yourself. Take a few minutes to write a brief bio you can use wherever your name appears online. Include your URL, relevant professional credentials, recent publications (online or off), significant self-published efforts and professional partnerships.

7. Show Yourself in Action. I’m willing to bet you have a whole bunch of photos of yourself out and about doing what you do. If some are shots of you writing, great. But even better if you have some decent-quality photos of you speaking, teaching a workshop, signing books or the like. Collect them, and use them to accompany your posts online.

8. Post Ads and Affiliate Links. You need to make money to invest money in your platform, so why not make the most of the resources and tools you already like? You won’t get rich from affiliate revenue, but it can add up over the course of a year and cover some of your ongoing platform expenses. It takes minutes to post an ad or affiliate link on your website or blog.

9. Hold an Event. Have an event with a time limit (like one week only, or 30 days). Create whatever type of environment is appropriate for what you write—perhaps an activity where something has to be completed in a certain amount of time so there is a ticking-clock factor (think NaNoWriMo). Create an environment that draws your tribe in, helps people interact and get to know one another, and converts folks into loyal fans who will keep coming back for more. Dream something up.

10. Grade Yourself. HubSpot makes free graders (grader.com) that can gauge the effectiveness of your website, blog, Google Alerts, Facebook page, Twitter account and more. Each grader takes less than five minutes to run. Do so periodically, and add its suggestions to your to-do list.

Contribute Content

11. Give It Away. Spread the word across your social networks for everyone to come and get whatever you can give for free. If you already wrote an article that you don’t plan to sell, why not give it away? Maybe you created something inspirational or uplifting. Give it away. People love free.

12. Brainstorm 20 Ideas. If you don’t constantly ask yourself what new ideas you have, half of them will get away. And then you’ll have to read your idea on someone else’s blog, or in a magazine or newspaper with someone else’s byline. That’s how the zeitgeist works. So get in the habit of writing down your ideas, perhaps in a special idea journal. Drain your brain into it five minutes at a time.

13. Put Your Best Forward. Make sure people who are just discovering your offerings can go straight to some of your best online writing that has passed the test of time. Otherwise it’s just going to get buried under your latest efforts. Most blogs have widgets that will do the rounding up for you. Create a way to send fans and followers straight to your best posts.

14. Recycle. Take a few minutes to pitch content you’ve already written to a new outlet. Can you find a blog, forum or association newsletter that might be interested in your topic? Put some of your old writing to work all over again for fresh eyes.

15. Review Worthy Writers. Inquiring readers want to know what books you like and why. Briefly review books as you read them and post your insights on review sites (like GoodReads, Amazon.com and Red Room). For good karma, sing the praises of your all-time favorites, too.

Cultivate Community

16. Prompt a Response. A prompt is a suggestive word or theme that cues an interactive response from others. It can be as simple as a photo, symbol or word, or as complicated as a riddle. When hosting an annual book giveaway, I asked a question each day for a month, and everyone who answered was entered in the drawing. Participants loved the prompt more than the free books. It’s a fun way to interact with your growing online community.

17. Take Five to Interact. Reply to commenters on your blog. Thank people who used your free content. Think of three people to appreciate for any reason at all. Spend a little bit of time with those who’ve gone out of their way to care about you.

18. Make an Engaging Offer. If you’re working on a project and you need people to get involved, offer something—say, a discount or kickback—to the first 50 who express interest. Create excitement for those who are willing to work with you.

19. Form Strategic Partnerships. Who do you want to partner with? Being friendly and helpful should have no strings attached—but true partnerships are mutually beneficial, formal agreements in which each party is hoping to gain something specific. List three likely partners and reach out to them.

20. Create a Quickie Blogroll. Make a quick list of writers you admire. Then search for links to their blogs or sites to create your blogroll. Position your blog as an inspiring resource by going for quality, not quantity.

Be Authentic

21. Be Yourself. Advice that tells authors to act like brands encourages us to forget to act like regular people. But social media is made for people, not robots. The fact that you’re a writer and a parent or an uncle and a Packers fan or a vegetarian makes you interesting. Your readers and fans want you to be personable, not a one-topic ever-plugging broken record. Spend five minutes making a profile more you.

22. Put Passion Into Action. Let’s say you write literary fiction. Isn’t that harder to build a platform around? Nope. Take your passion online and put it to work. Don’t assume no one cares. Assume there are a million people out there like you, and start connecting with them. Take five to write a quickie mission statement about why you’re on fire about your topic. Reread it every time you get online. It will help focus your efforts.

23. Get Together. Let folks know that you’ll be speaking or signing or teaching (or whatever else you do) near them when you travel. Make yourself accessible.

24. Spark Conversations. Other people are just as passionate about your topic as you are. So get on Google, do a Twitter search, visit forums where your topic is trending and spend five minutes participating in a chat. If nothing is happening, strike up your own conversation.

25. Share the Journey. I bet you have a lot going on right now. Surely some of it is interesting. Or perhaps you have a fresh take on what you have on your plate that others would find humorous or refreshing. Update others on what’s happening right now. Don’t try to keep your ups and downs a secret. Curious fans love to be treated like insiders.

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To read 25 more ways to build an author platform, click over to Writer’s Digest, where this article originally appeared.

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

A year after launch, The Domino Project, Seth Godin’s publishing venture with Amazon, is ending – but not without imparting on the publishing industry lessons gleaned from twelve months in the business.

Chief among those lessons were the necessity for the publishing industry to engage in “permission” marketing and that publishing companies that don’t do this will not be able to “add the value they’re used to adding when it comes to marketing ebooks,” he wrote.

“In five years, every successful publisher is going to be radically transformed from the way they are today,” the marketing guru and best-selling author told Digital Book World in an interview today.

According to Godin, “permission” doesn’t mean “might be interested;” it means that “if you didn’t show up, they would want to know where you were.”

He offered the example of The New Yorker magazine as something that has his “permission.” If it doesn’t show up in his mailbox early in the week, he wonders where it is.

Outside of Oprah, The New Yorker and the Dallas Cowboys, few brands in the marketplace today command such loyalty from their customers – perhaps least of all publishing companies, which have only in the past decade had to turn their businesses to face consumers and have only recently embarked on the type of brand-building projects Godin suggests.

“It’s not the way to market in the future; it’s a way to market in the future,” said Mike Shatzkin, a long-time book-industry expert (and, full disclosure, partner with Digital Book World on the upcoming Digital Book World Conference and Expo in January 2012).

Book publicity and retailer promotions were just two of the many other marketing methods publishing industry experts, some of whom have had decades of experience in the industry, mentioned to us today.

“No single program works for every book or every type of book. No matter what you say, nothing works for all books,” said Thad McIlroy, a Vancouver-based electronic publishing analyst who runs the site TheFutureofPublishing.com.

First-time authors, little-known writers of historical narratives and academic writers are just a few of those who would likely not be served by “permission” marketing. That’s not a problem that publishing companies should worry about, Godin suggested.

“It’s going to be harder than ever for a first-time novelist to break through,” he said. “I didn’t decide that young people who would be this next generation’s readers are spending all their time playing video games and searching Twitter, but they are.”

The New Yorker, Godin argued, does not find readers for its writers; it finds writers for its readers. And if all readers are interested in is Twitter and video games, the publishers will not succeed trying to sell them certain kinds of books.

“For novels and for narrative non-fiction, there is clearly a role for a third party to aggregate readers who are interested in the kinds of books that those authors write,” said Simon Lipskar a partner and chief operating officer of Writers House, a New York-based literary agency and a member of the Digital Book World Conference Council. “There is a substantive and real role for publishers to find readers.”

Most authors don’t have the kind of following that Godin has and likely do not have the wherewithal to develop that kind of following. (A good novelist may not make a good blogger.) Even most commercial brands, with sophisticated marketing machines and public relations handlers, also lack the strength of Godin’s “tribes.”

“Are there any emails that you get from any vendor where if you don’t get it you’re upset and wonder where it is?” said David Nussbaum, CEO of F+W Media, a New York-based book publisher (and, full disclosure, parent to Digital Book World).

“A first-time author is not going to have 50,000 ‘tribe’ members as he [Godin] calls them,” Nussbaum said. “It takes a long time to build that and to build that reliability. First-time authors want to get published and want to get sales.”

What Should Publishers Do?

Should the publishing industry stop trying to sell content to the next generation of Twitter-only consumers?

Likely, the future of book publishing and book marketing involves hybrid models that make use of a number of marketing methods. Some book publishers are already moving in this direction.

“When we published Grace Bonney’s Design Sponge, Grace’s special relationship with her online audience drove pre-orders, which in turn drove store orders, which in turn were sold through with a 30-city tour, which was in turn promoted with a combination of social networking and national television appearances, etc.,” said Bob Miller, group publisher at New York-based Workman Publishing. “We need to add new techniques but they shouldn’t simply replace the old ones.”

Many of the books published at Workman and other publishing companies would benefit from several types of support, according to Miller.

Godin’s advice?

“If you can’t find 100 readers who want to hear from you, you got nothing. If you can find 100, you can probably get 1,000. You should find writers for your readers. What’s astonishing to me is that it’s the people in the book business who should be leading this charge,” he said.

The book business, for its part, is listening to Godin. The many industry experts we spoke with today read what Godin has written and followed The Domino Project closely in its short life. They praised him for his insights and agreed with many of his ideas – or, at least the general gist. In addition to building their own “tribes” and gathering “permission,” the book business still has other ways of selling books.

“An incredibly smart bookseller I met 32 years ago told me then that ‘if anybody walks up to my cash register with five books, I can sell them a sixth. By seeing what they like and knowing my stock, I can always come up with a suggestion they’ll accept,’” said Shatzkin, who, in addition to organizing the Digital Book World Conference, runs a book-consulting business, The Idea Logical Co. “That’s true in a physical world and a virtual world and it has nothing to do with permissions.”

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

On December 25, millions of consumers will unwrap new Kindles, iPads and Nooks – and that means millions more customers for e-books this holiday season.

Sales of Kindle products were up 300% this Black Friday over Black Friday 2010. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney predicted that Amazon will sell five million Kindle Fires in the fourth quarter of 2011 and will have sold 12 million by the end of 2012.

Nooks, iPads and e-book-ready cell phones are reportedly also hot holiday items.

With consumers and retailers engaged in a commercial frenzy over the next five weeks, it’s a great time for publishers, book-sellers and authors to boost e-book sales.

It’s also a good time to lay the groundwork for the all-important week after the holidays. Last year, e-book sales out-stripped print book sales the week after the holidays as many new tablet- and e-reader-owners loaded up on new books to read.

Digital Book World spoke with publishers, authors and experts for tips on how to take advantage of the holidays to sell more e-books.

Cut Through the Clutter

Everyone is running holiday specials, so how do you cut through the white noise of all the other sales?

“During the season, everyone is trying to sell a book, so if you’re like ‘buy my book,’ it’s not going to carry over well,” says Carolyn McCray, an e-book sales specialist and author of Dollars & Sense: 
The Definitive Guide to Self-publishing Success.

Book advertising and social media should seek to enlighten and entertain first, sell second. Write several Tweets about the holidays and then work in a link to the book-sale page, says McCray.

Work With Amazon

During the holidays, people buy a lot more than books and spend a lot of time on Amazon.com doing so. Following the flow of consumers, publishers and authors should send prospective buyers over to their book page on Amazon, says McCray.

“They already are probably going to Amazon” for their holiday shopping, she says. “This is a sales platform they’re familiar with – it’s just one-click for them to buy your book.”

Related: Best Practices for Amazon E-Book Sales

Use Your Blog

Writing content that might attract readers to your blog is a known strategy for selling books all-year-round. During the holidays, more readers will be attracted by content related to the season, says Doug Klostermann, author of The E-Book Handbook, a book about creating and marketing e-books.

“I do holiday lists,” says Klostermann, who also writes books about using digital cameras. “Like, ‘Top Ten Accessories for Your New Canon DSLR.’”

The Straight Holiday Sale

For the first time, Hachette Book Group USA will combine consumer advertising with holiday promotion: Online ads that will drive users to a holiday Web page that will point consumers to online retailers. The company is also offering several separate holiday specials.

The campaign is designed to reach consumers during the holidays and after when they will be unwrapping new e-readers, according to Sophie Cottrell, a spokesperson for Hachette Book Group USA.

The holiday specials include “Eight Nights of Light Reading,” an eight-day program from December 19 through December 25 where Hachette will be promoting eight romance and eight mystery titles, two genres that sell particularly well in e-book format for Hachette, according to Cottrell.

Cross-Promotion

Readers who enjoy one holiday book may enjoy another.

During the holidays, readers of children’s book apps made by Encinitas, Calif.-based Oceanhouse Media will see banner ads pointing to holiday books sold by Oceanhouse.

“If you’re on a Cat in the Hat title, you get banner advertising focused on holiday titles” as opposed to the usual banner ads readers would see in that app during non-holiday times, says Michel Kripalani, president of Oceanhouse, which publishes Dr. Seuss and Berenstain Bears apps, among others.

Kripalani called the increase in sales from the same tactic last year “significant.”

Hachette is running a similar program throughout the holidays, offering an e-book sampler of excerpts from some of Hachette’s best-selling e-books along with a story by David Sedaris from his collection, Holidays on Ice.

Related: Using ‘Sales Nodes’ to Increase E-Book Sales

Adjust Pricing

This may seem obvious, but dropping prices on Black Friday, “Cyber Monday” and other key dates throughout the holidays – like the day after Christmas – can help boost sales.

Remain in Light, a new mystery novel from Vanilla Heart Publishing, dropped its price to $2.99 from $4.99 for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, for instance. Another price drop is planned before the print release in January, according to the book’s author, Collin Kelley.

New York-based E-book publisher Open Road Media is having a widespread price promotion for the holidays starting on Cyber Monday, where about 900 of its titles are 60% off list price. After the holidays, Open Road will continue its promotion but re-frame it as “starter packs” for those with new e-readers, according to Josh Raffel, a spokesperson for Open Road.

Create the Holiday Mood

With social media and advertising, book promotion should put buyers into the holiday mood – even if you’re not selling holiday books.

Selling a medieval romance during the holidays may sound tough, but using words like “solstice” and “yuletide” in holiday-related promotion through advertising and social media can help you do that, according to McCray, the e-book sales specialist.

“If you want to sell something that harks back to the days of yore, you’ve got to get them in the mood for the days of yore,” she says.

Match Product Description to the Mood

If you’re going to alter your marketing, alter your product description to match.

“If I’m in the mood for whatever you put out on social media or in paid advertising, I need to feel that mood in the product description,” says McCray.

Freshen up your product description with the same words you used to promote your books for the holidays so that when readers arrive at the book page, they are presented with the same mood that attracted them to the page to begin with.

Involve Authors

Readers want to connect with authors during the holidays just like every other time of year. Authors who are involved in marketing their own books should tailor their promotional behavior for the holiday season.

Through social media and blogs, book authors should offer up personal holiday information that will help readers establish a personal connection during this time of year, like their favorite gifts, what they do during the holidays and favorite holiday drinks, for instance.

Readers will respond well to this type of content and be more receptive to buying the authors’ books, says McCray.

A ‘Dark’ Secret: Counterprogramming

What if you don’t have any books that should sell well during the holidays? What if when most people want holiday cheer you only sell dark romances or bloody detective novels?

Then use this time of year to promote those “dark” alternatives to the cheer of the season, says McCray.

“Some people aren’t in the mood for Rudolph and want something different. You’ll want to appeal to those people,” she says.

So, in your Twitter feed, Facebook page and other promotion and advertising for those books, emphasize the dark side of Christmas: the long nights and the cold days. To be sure, it’s a smaller audience than those who want holly and mistletoe, but it’s one that shouldn’t be ignored – even during this time of year.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Rich Fahle, Founder, Astral Road Media | @richfahle

In this exclusive interview with Kathleen Schmidt, president of KMSPR, a Ridgewood, NJ-based public relations firm specializing in books and authors, discusses book marketing, writing careers and Twitter.

From the interview:

I always tell my authors that it’s about the long tail, really. Books now take longer to sell a lot of copies – if they sell a lot of copies. It’s not out of the gate, unless it’s a celebrity book, usually. It’s about their career as a whole. If they’re doing another book, especially. You have the hardcover, the paperback, if you’re writing another book. You have to look at all of those things and plan accordingly.

When people come to me, I get a little bit of everything. I have people who absolutely have no idea how to use Twitter. My philosophy is I’m going to give you all the information you need to know about it and then you can make a decision as whether or not you want to be on there. I don’t think every author has to be on Facebook, Twitter or any other kind of social media if they don’t want to. There are other ways to promote books.

I get people who are reluctant at first maybe to go on Twitter and then you show them a little bit of what it can do and then they get on. Or you have people who are like, “I am not going on, and that is that.” And then you find other things to help promote their books.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

By Carolyn McCray, Author

Once a reader has bought and read your book, then what? Back to the well for another title?

Not so fast, reader!

Publishers and authors can use “sales nodes” to make additional sales to each reader.

Related: Gaining Traction in the Amazon Ebook Marketplace | The Benefits of Dynamic Price Pulsing | Best Practices for Amazon Ebook Sales

What Are “Sales Nodes”?

Sales nodes are groupings of books that are likely to be purchased by the same reader, often similar in style and genre, sometimes even by the same author. Nodes of five or six books are most effective. Any more, and the marketing becomes unwieldy; any fewer, and promotion and sales opportunities could be lost.

If the reader is looking for action, all the books within the node need to kick some booty. If the reader is looking for romance, the sales node better bring the heat.

For example, a paranormal romance would go well in a node with vampire novels or werewolf/shifter novels. The simplest nodes to create are those that are extremely similar based on their sub-genre.

Sales nodes don’t always have to be books in the same genre, however. What if you only have one or two paranormal titles? Books in similar sub-genres or that have similar threads can be grouped together in nodes. For example, one reader might enjoy the romance of a vampire novel while another might enjoy the gore – both romance and gory books can be featured in the sales node.

How Do Sales Nodes Create Sales?

Simply, cross-promotion.

Place promos in the back-matter of each book in the node promoting the other books. Promos should also be placed at the bottom of each book’s Amazon product page.

The rules for promos in the case of sales nodes are the same as always: great cover art, exciting quotes, and a brief overview. This kind of marketing has been shown by Amazon research to be far more effective at generating sales than prose in the back matter, which turns off readers.

Each promo should drive the reader to the book’s Amazon product page. Let the reader sample or buy there rather than muddling through long sections of prose in your back matter.

Sales Nodes in Action

Let’s look at a proposed paranormal sales node:

(A) Vampire Series: Book No. 1 by Author No. 1

Back matter includes:

(B) Vampire Series: Book No. 2 by Author No. 1

(C) Vampire Book by Author No. 2

(D) Werewolf Series: Book No. 1 by Author No. 3

(E) Werewolf Series: Book No. 2 by Author No. 3

(F) Ghost Story by Author No. 4

(G) Demon Romance by Author No. 5

Book (A) is the book for sale.

Its back-matter includes books (B) through (G).

Most often (B), the second book in the series, will get the overwhelming majority of interest because it is second in the series and the first promo. But what if (C), the Vampire Book from another author, received fewer clicks than (D), the first book in  Werewolf Series?

The publisher should look at (C)’s cover and promo copy. What about (A), (B) and (D) resonates that (C) just doesn’t have? Is it danger? Romance? New Orleans?

If (C) continues to under-perform, pull it and replace it with another vampire-based novel or move the entire promo queue up and add a new book at the end to see how it fares.

Sales nodes should be dynamic and fluid. Under-performing titles should be replaced and new titles that need promotion can be inserted as needed.

Price Pulsing to Increase Sales Node Efficacy

Within each sales node, there should be at least one $0.99 title. This is your “dime-bag,” your loss-leader. The theory is that the $0.99 title will drive readers and unit sales and will then up-sell into the higher-priced titles.

As noted previously, publishers should be price-pulsing at all times. Using our example from above, this means that if book (C) is $0.99 next week, the following week it should be returned to its normal price and book (D) should be $0.99. In this way, no one book or author needs to suffer constantly low royalties. Within the node, everyone shares the burden (and benefit), of price pulsing.

Sales Nodes Tips

– An author with only one book may partner with other authors or publishers and form a node with similar titles.

– If an author has a large number of books in a series, it does not necessarily help to include all five or six books in the series in the node. Readers will often buy the next book in a series, but not the next several.

– Track your clicks. Use a shortening service like bit.ly to monitor click-through activity for each promo. Is one book under-performing? Take it out and replace it with another. Is one book over-performing in the 4th slot? Move it up.

– Sales nodes should move together through online and in-person promotions. The books should work together as a unit, cross-pollinating readership and growing royalties.

Author’s Note:

Hopefully this article helped you understand what a powerful tool sales nodes can be when looking at creating long-term royalties growth.

As always, I will be monitoring the comments, so feel free to leave any questions below and I will do my best to answer them within 24 hours. I also strongly recommend that you subscribe to the comments because many times a significant amount of information is relayed in the comments that I just couldn’t fit into the article.

In the last two articles we discussed the mechanisms of the Amazon internal recommendation queue and the benefit (read: necessity) of strategic, dynamic pricing on Amazon. If you have not read those articles yet, I strongly suggest that you do, as this series has built one atop the other and you may not get everything out of this article if you are not familiar with the terminology and concepts of the previous articles.

I would also encourage you to read my article about optimizing your Amazon product page. It has very specific recommendations that, combined with price pulsing and sales nodes, can help created robust royalties.

Iris Blasi, Digital Media Coordinator, Hilsinger Mendelson East

Ed note: Iris Blasi is a speaker at the upcoming Publishers Launch San Fransisco on November, 2. The conference, which follows StoryWorld Conference + Expo, will explore Ebooks For Everyone Else. Blasi will discuss how small publishers, agents, and authors can make their books more discoverable through social media and make use of a wide variety of online tools. With less than a month to go, you’ll want to register now.

We’re well past the social media tipping point. No longer must people explain its value or justify it as more than strangers announcing what they’d had for lunch. And yet still I find so many showing up at the social media pool, all suited up in their 140 characters, and they’re just doggy-paddling—tweeting about the errands they ran that day, posting an interesting link or two, broadcasting their observations about life, ‘liking’ up a storm, chatting with friends.  As long as you’re not posting anything inappropriate for a public forum, this is all no harm, no foul. But if you have anything other than a purely personal motive for engaging, you’re wasting time with this splashing around. If you’re on Twitter for more than just socializing—if you actually have something to sell—it’s time to learn how to do some fancy dives.

The good news is that as an author, an agent, or a publisher, you already have something to talk about: books. Social media ignites when passion meets profession and, presumably, if you’ve written, agented, or published a book, you love reading. (If not, you may want to stop now and consider a non-publishing career path.) “What are you reading?” is one of the most intimate questions one can ask in polite society, and you can use the magical things that are books to connect with other like-minded people.

The big question is HOW?

There are numerous ways to do this – tapping into category-specific trending topics like #fridayreads; dipping into the search function to find people talking about your subject of interest; actively following thought leaders in your field – but the one I find to be the most under-utilized is the Art of the Nudge.

Social media is often likened to an online cocktail party. In such a situation, you wouldn’t necessarily barge up to a person you wanted to meet, extend your hand, introduce yourself, and launch into your pitch. Instead, you’d engage in the dance of proximity: being interesting within earshot. You tell a joke so on point that the group surrounding you laughs simultaneously; you share an anecdote that sparks an animated conversation. This piques your target’s interest and draws them to you. This subtler art is all too often neglected in social media, in favor of direct contact.

There are handles everywhere in the social media world. Grab onto them. Use them to get someone’s attention and – voila! – they’re pulled right into the conversation.

Back to our hypothetical cocktail party. How often have you heard, “Did you read that thing in the Times?” A good conversationalist can steer the discussion deftly no matter the answer. But imagine if when you posed the question, the person standing behind you within earshot just happened to be the journalist who wrote the article. And that next to her was her editor. And next to him was one of the experts she’d consulted for the piece. And then a college kid writing his thesis on the topic overheard and chimed in with a few tidbits of information from his latest research. And then a preeminent scholar on the subject wandered over to add in his two cents.

What is a relatively unlikely occurrence in that setting (if it happens, it’s a heck of a party) is well within the realm of possibility in social media circles.

Before long, we’ll reach a point where handles are prevalent on business cards, resumes, and hyperlinked every place a name appears. Until then, it is almost always worth the extra 60 seconds to find the right attribution, which will allow that person to overhear what you’re saying. Read an interesting piece that morning? Look to see if the journalist is on Twitter before posting. Giving a shout-out to a book on #fridayreads? Check to see if the author or the book itself has a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. Did you get a nice bit of publicity from an online venue? Post on your Facebook page using their Facebook handle, so it appears in their stream. Have something smart to add to a conversation begun in an article? Include the media outlet’s handle and that outlet may well re-tweet you, bringing your words (and your handle) to the attention of a much wider audience. These are the ways to initiate an interaction. You’re not @replying them; you’re not playing “please re-tweet me” games; you’re not hollering for them to buy your book or read your blog post. Instead, you’re virtually name-dropping in conversation and making sure they hear you. <Nudge nudge.> I’m over here and I have interesting things to say.

When plotting just how you want to brush up against someone using The Art of the Nudge, think about your desired reaction. Do you want them to click through to a link? Follow you back? Re-tweet you? Answer a question? Sign up for your mailing list? Write a review? Having the endgame in mind will change how you plan your nudge. (And, no, “more followers or fans” should not be your objective. Empty popularity contests won’t get you much of anything. Social media should be the means to some kind of end.) Pause for a moment and think about what works on you: with information streaming by at a mile a minute, what catches your attention? Probably not someone screaming out for followers and begging for re-blogs. So what is it, exactly, that earns your click-through? What makes you want to re-tweet? Pinpoint how others successfully seduce you, and use the lessons learned from these online Don Juans with your own followers.

At its core, social media is really the art of the tease.  It’s all about clever headlines and good timing. Sure, you could walk out on stage shouting into a megaphone about how great you are. But if you take off a single glove in just the right way, you might find a lot more people sticking around for the rest of the show.

This post originally appeared in the conference program for eBooks for Everyone Else and has been reproduced with Ms. Blasi’s permission.

Iris Blasi is the Digital Media Coordinator at literary PR firm Hilsinger Mendelson East. Formerly, she was an associate editor at Union Square Press, and she’s also worked for Random House, NBC, and The Idea Logical Company. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Dow Jones Newswires, Publishers Weekly, BUST Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, Bitch Magazine, and BookPage.

By Matthew Diener, Manager, Digital Formats, Loyola Press |

As I have been preparing my presentation for Digital Asset Management Chicago 2011, I have been thinking quite a bit about metadata and how publishers manage it. Carolyn McCray has posted some intriguing articles at the Digital Book World site examining how metadata can be used to increase sales: Best Practices for Amazon eBook Sales, Maximizing Digital Book Sales, Part 1; and Maximizing Digital Book Sales, Part 2. Carolyn also participated in a great DBW Roundtable with Matt Mullin on how to Optimize Your Titles for Online Bookselling.

The key on Amazon is to reduce each customer’s resistance to buying the book. There are two main ways to do this according to Carolyn. The first is optimizing your product description along the lines of this formula: an endorsement from an authoritative source, a short product description, and a strong call to action (buy this book if you love . . .). The second is to use the book category to place the book in less competitive company. This will allow your book to more easily reach the top 100 for the category, and once this ranking in the top 100 shows up on your product page, there is even less resistance to customers to buy the book.

The book description is part of the metadata. Carolyn suggests that publishers should to A/B testing week to week until they find a description that sells the book. If sales begin to drop at some point, start testing again, and change the description.

The categories on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing that publishers/authors can choose are actually BISAC codes. While it is best practice to choose a BISAC code the most fully defines the book, Carolyn is suggesting going even further than this. She suggests that publishers look at different possible BISAC categories and choose one that is least competitive. This is similar to checking Good AdWords to determine which keywords you use on your product description on your own homepage.

Michael Bhaskar, Digital Publishing Director, Profile Books, makes some similar points on his post on metadata in publishing. The two most important paragraphs in this short post are:

Metadata influences search, it influences territoriality and categorisation – metadata is the advert, the sales pitch, the sell in and the advance promotion; metadata is the random book left on the table, the fervent recommendation of a friend, the arresting blurb, the good review, serving the random browser and the determined buyer alike.

Bad metadata means your book is invisible and un-purchasable. Yet compared to many industries either totally or increasingly focused on digital commerce, publishing lags in its understanding of SEO practices, metadata standards implementation, data collection and analysis and systems investment.

I think that most publishers have embraced SEO to some degree on their Web sites. I think the next place the industry needs to go is to MDO—Metadata Optimization. Many publishers treat metadata as something to be completed and left alone. I believe there are huge opportunities if publishers instead begin to optimize metadata, taking advantage of the ability of ONIX feeds to update metadata at all trading partners. This will allow publishers to match product descriptions to marketing and PR campaigns, update them when there are major media appearances, and tie products to current events.

I am sure that a book should have a different description as it moves from pre-publication, to new release, to the heart of the marketing campaign, to backlist. How should they be different? I honestly don’t know at this point.

With discoverability on the Web becoming such a crucial issue with books—especially ebooks—I don’t think publishers can afford to post the metadata for their books and leave it as is for the life of the book. They need to treat metadata as a tool to be managed to maximize the life-time sales of each book. Will it be easy? No. Will it take time? Yes. But how can you afford not to pursue MDO?

What do you think? Are you optimizing your metadata? How?

This post was originally published at Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise and has been reprinted here with Mr. Diener’s permission.

Matthew Diener is the manager of digital formats at Loyola Press. He is currently responsible for the conversion of Loyola Press trade books to eBooks and for managing the company’s product metadata. He has twenty years experience in the book and publishing business, including bookstore retailing, library management, editorial acquisition and development in both trade and curriculum, online book reviews, and eBook conversion and digital strategy.

This article is Part 2 of a 2 part series covering the intricacies of digital book sales platforms and how to leverage this knowledge into greater sales.

In Maximizing Digital Book Sales, Part 1, I covered the two basic ways you get sales on Amazon and others (by external and internal sales) and then broke down the various ways that internal sales can come about.  I also covered the importance of categories and how they directly impact your ability to hop onto Bestselling lists in the most efficient manner. If you have not read my previous article in this series, I strongly suggest you do unless you are extremely fluent in these concepts. I also recommend that you read another article of mine “Best Practices for Amazon eBook Sales,” to be sure that your Amazon page is optimized for sales otherwise you might not see as large a benefit to your royalties.

This article covers what to expect as you increase your sales and how to leverage both external and internal sales into additional sales. From here on out I am going to show my inner math geek so please bear with me!

As a base line, let us say that you have a mystery novel. It had a traditional six week marketing campaign at the time of launch. It peaked at #1823 (you sold 48 books that day to earn that rank) on the overall rankings but did not hit any bestselling lists because it was categorized in the general mystery and thriller categories that were just too competitive for your ranking.

The average ranking however for your six week campaign was #4,902. On average, you sold 21 books per day over that 6 week period. For the next month your ranking sank into the #15,000s but at the 11 week mark you dropped sharply down into the #35,000s and over the past two months you slumped into the low #100,000 range. As we discussed in the first part of this article, Amazon puts books out into the recommendation queues that it thinks will sell. It appears to determine this based on how well you sell that day, that week and that month.

The example above is kind of the “natural history” of a title that did not gain “traction” at its launch.  Once its high launch sales numbers got “stale,” Amazon stopped recommending it and the book’s ranking fell off at pretty consistent intervals. Unless something drastically changes in this book’s marketing plan, it will simply sit somewhere between #100,000 – #300,000 averaging about 5-10 books per month.

So how do you gain “traction” and keep your sales “fresh” so that Amazon continues to put you out into its recommendation queues?  The best way I have found is to hit an appropriate Bestseller list(s).

In our mystery example, I would make sure my sales page was optimized and change the categories to less competitive ones such as “Women Sleuth” and “Hard-Boiled.” Had this mystery novel been differently categorized from the start, this book would have been “in the money” (meaning up on a Bestselling list where it gets more exposure and therefore more sales), its entire launch window.  And not just on two Bestselling lists but in the case of “Hard-Boiled” this mystery would have ranked #23!

And this assuming that sales would have stayed the same, which simply isn’t the case. Overall there is a fairly consistent step-wise increase in sales based on the different berths. On average once you hit a Bestselling list, even at the #100 mark you will see an approximate 5% lift in sales.

Between #50-100 there does not appear to be any great sales advantage. However getting onto the Top 40 Bestselling page does give you an additional 5% increase. The Top 20 Bestselling page, another 7% pop. If you are lucky enough to climb into the Top 10 Bestselling, add another 14% increase in sales if you are “above the fold” (in a slot that can be viewed WITHOUT having to scroll down any further) which is usually about rank #5.

Each step then from #5, to #4 etc usually results in an addition 5% increase with #1 giving you the greatest pop of 10%.

Remember that moving up these lists many times only represents a few extra sales so you can definitely tell by nearly instantaneous increased sales when you climb onto a new page or much higher on the same page.

Let’s take our example from above.

At the book’s height it would have hit #23. But let’s back up. Once it hit the #100 slot it should have garnered a 5% lift in sales which translates to about 2 more books sold. Once it arrived on the Top 40 page it should have earned another 5% increase of another 2 books. Remember that those 4 additional sales can convince Amazon that this book has potential and could result in it going out into the recommendation queues to garner a few more sales as well.

Conservatively I would estimate at least one additional sale.

So instead of selling 48 books they sold 52 (without ANY increase in marketing budget or social media push). Those four books could raise the book in rank enough to bring it to the #20 berth. Once on that front page we know that we get another 7% bump (off our 52 books now rather than 48) which translates into another 3-4 sales. Which more than likely would raise the book up to #19 and probably get us another internal recommendation queue sale.

So our revised sales total for our peak day would have been 57 books sold rather than 48. That represents a nearly 23% increase on same day sales.

And the effect is lasting. Let’s take the book’s average of #4,902 for the entire six week launch. Conservatively let’s say that we saw a 12% increase in book sales due to the being on the Bestseller lists (remember we were also ranking in the Top 100 on Women Sleuths so 12% truly is a conservative number). That means instead of averaging 21 books per day, the title sold 23-24 books per day. That rise in sales is probably going to get us another book sale out of the increased exposure in the recommendation queue which brings out total sales per day up to 25.

This more than likely is going to lower our ranking into the mid #3,000s which is pretty competitive for staying in the Top 40 on the “Hard-Boiled” Bestselling lists. Because of this overall lift in sales and the constant exposure in the Bestselling lists, your sales decline is going to be softened because you now have “traction.”  And the more “traction” you have, the more sales you are going to make, keeping your sales numbers “fresh,” and therefore not experiencing the steep drop-offs that you might normally experience the week or month after launch.

Now imagine putting paid advertising or social media promotions into the post-launch mix to take advantage or even augment your “traction?”

Normally if you can keep yourself in the Top 10 of a Bestselling list you can see sales that equal about 1/3 more sales than internal recommendation queues sales alone. Even if you do eventually slump in sales, I recommend “pulsing” your title. This pulse can either be a price drop to encourage more sales and get you back into the Bestselling lists or a combination of paid advertising and social media promotions.

In digital book sales, there is in infinite shelf-life and you can revisit your marketing strategy and recreate or even surpass your previous launch sales numbers by shrewdly choosing the best categories (which is a balance between how well that category “fits” your book and how competitive it is) for your novel, applying external sales to increase internal sales that eventually get you onto the Bestselling lists for not just added sales but “traction” as well.

Now before everyone starts to challenge the examples numbers let me say these are general estimate based on the fact that I monitor over two dozen title’s sales in real time and currently have access to books at nearly every level stated. The example I just gave was off a template of a recent launch.

Please remember that sales and ranking are relative to your previous sales record (the longer you sell well, the fewer sales you need to keep the same sales rank – an additional way to gain “traction”), the season, and even the time of day. During Christmas the sales numbers I gave may seem ridiculously low while during spring break they would appear ridiculously high. Hopefully this article will have impressed upon you how important your book’s categories can be and how landing within the Top 100 Bestselling Lists can significantly help your short term and long term sales.

If you have any questions, express your views or want to relate your own experience please leave a comment below. Also if you would like me to do a “snapshot” review of your categories please leave the following information in your comment; the link to your book, the two categories you choose when you first published your books along with the links to the Top 100 Bestsellers for those two categories and the link to at least one other bestselling book in an alternate category. I will get to them as quickly as I can, but even if I get swamped I promise to eventually get to each and every one of them!

I strongly urge everyone commenting to subscribe to the comments since many times far more information comes out in my responses than was able to fit into this article!

Carolyn McCray is a social media and sales consultant to writers and publishing houses alike.   And using the principle laid out in this article, her recent non-fiction book, “Dollars & Sense: The Definitive Guide to Self-publishing Success” debuted at #1 on the Amazon Bestselling list for Study & Teaching and reached #2 on the Authorship Bestselling list beating out such rock stars as JA Konrath and Zoe Winters.  Carolyn is also the founder of the Indie Book Collective, an organization dedicated to helping writers utilize social media to sell their books.