Hello now the big thing over Christmas was Kindle, Amazon sold loads and loads of them and certainly here in the UK it was the ‘must have’ gift, I even bought my wife one – she absolutely loves it.
Now you know from previous blogposts that I’ve covered
Kindle before here but what I haven’t told you until now is that I aim to launch myself on Kindle as soon as possible.
Digital books
The new buzz name rather than ebooks is where its at and with the astonishing growth experienced by Kindle and other ebook readers including of course the Apple ipad and Sony reader this is a marketplace worth literally billions of dollars worldwide.
So Why Do It?
I see this as an amazing opportunity to not only increase the awareness of “the brand” but tap into what is an opportunity where many publishers are making serious money.
Traditional Publishing as it was
Here’s a little bit of background when I first stated work I worked for a specialist book publisher based here in the UK. They specialised in titles in the agricultural market so we were looking at veterinary, looking after stock, farming methods etc – really exciting stuff!!!
Well as I said it was my first job and I was the assistant to the Sales Director of the book publishing division, but basically he & I did it all. It was a very interesting learning curve for me because I got to do everything, even costings, profit and loss, setting print runs and marketing.
The other thing that sticks in my mind was just how many manuscripts turned up in the post looking for publishing deals and how 99.9% got absolutely nowhere, discarded but with a polite letter – now how times have changed – amazing.
Publishing On Demand
What a brilliant concept it is and I plan to get involved as soon as I can. In fact my first project I hope will be ready in 2-3 weeks from now and will be on a health related topic – more news to follow soon.
So Where Did I Start
Well for me it’s all about time against resource. And what wit my day job, my Internet marketing activities and our property portfolio I don’t have whole heaps of spare time. So for me using outsourcers is the way to go.
How I Got Started
I have used a number of outsourcing companies over the years but there’s one that I keep coming back to and that’s Elance.com, called something else now but the domain still defaults to the new site – 2 reasons their site is very simple to use and the quality of their writers if you search though are pretty good.
Essential Tip That You Skip At Your Peril
You can get virtually anything written but you need to give a good brief. The end result will only ever be as good as the brief you give writers – so it’s worth spending time drafting this properly. Decide on the subject and then a direction within that especially if it’s a “how to” kind of book, so that the reader totally understands what he/she is getting-what problem are you going to solve for them.
So don’t skip this area the brief should be detailed and precise. You can also ask advice from those who submit proposals. But you need to determine the structure and overall direction yourself.
Proposals start to come in – to give you an idea I posted a job there and within 7 days I’ve had over 20 proposals and they are still coming in
For me I write under a pen name and the more markets I get into the more pen names I’ll use because certain subjects lend themselves to certain writers ie a knitting book written by a bloke – not sure, you get my point!
Ok that’s it for today
Bye for now
