{{ An Excerpt From Ebook Author Success Guideby Steve Bareham }}

TIPS FOR EBOOK AUTHORS | Part 3 of 3

Part I | Part II

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For those of you who didn’t snag a free Kindle edition copy of Steve’s ebook over the weekend, here’s the final installment of his three-part Ebook Author Success Guide.

And by the way, we’d love to hear from other ebook authors with additional tips to share. Have any particular ebook marketing efforts worked especially well for you in the past? Maybe you have a few words of wisdom to share about a tactic that unexpectedly took you off-track? Let us know in the comments. 

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About Facebook

Since I teach at a college, I have contact with many former students, so it wasn’t difficult to get more than 300 “friends.” Don’t count on your Facebook friends to buy many books, or to help much insofar as marketing and communication is concerned. I’m unconvinced that FB is an effective marketing tool for books, and the research I’ve accessed confirms my suspicions.

You can do pay-per-click with FB, too (I have a campaign running as I write). But so far I’m unable to connect a few hundred clicks to a single sale. I’d love to hear success stories, but color me sceptical thus far.

Facebook also lets you put up dedicated fan pages for your books, and when you make changes or updates, they can be automatically communicated to your friend network. By all means, do this. But don’t expect miracles from social networking unless your friends feel a lot more obligated than have mine to buy your books.

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Picking the Right Genre

I’ve already stated that getting found is your biggest challenge. For this reason, picking the right genre for your book is hugely important on the online selling sites, and especially for Amazon, given its complex search algorithms.

For example, my Progeneter books were categorized as both “fiction” and “action adventure,” and that was accurate. But they got absolutely lost among a few hundred thousand other books. By segmenting more finely, to “genre fiction; men’s adventure,” they instantly ranked much higher and were more easily searchable. This method is usually a bit easier with nonfiction books, given that there aren’t typically tens of thousands of competing titles. Nonetheless, genre selection deserves a lot of thought and experimentation. You can change your book’s genre it on Amazon by contacting them, but you get only two options, so pick wisely.

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Writing Well Helps Sell Books

I’ve spent quite a bit of time checking what reviewers write, and I can tell you that a lot of authors are getting slammed because readers perceive their books to be poorly written, poorly proofed and/or poorly edited. Increasingly, the e-reader crowd is willing and able to nail offending authors. If you haven’t already, take a few minutes to check out books with one-star reviews; quite often you’ll see that it was grammar, spelling and typos that drew the flack—not necessarily the storyline or plot.

Just a couple bad customer reviews can kill your sales. After all, why should a prospective buyer take a chance when there are thousands of other options?

So the onus is on us to set the literary bar high.

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Plagiarism and Paraphrasing

This is an issue that is increasingly coming to the fore, and you’ll note that some online sellers, including Amazon, are now requiring author commitments stating that their written material is original.

There are any number of books available—this one included—that discuss the various ins and outs of plagiarism, and explain how to avoid it via proper documentation and paraphrasing. If you’ve never read anything along these lines before, it’s worth some thought. Most books are a synthesis of a hundred other people’s thoughts, but there are right and wrong ways to use other people’s ideas. Do it the right way, and it’s called research. But forget to document or paraphrase, and it’s literary theft.

Amazon is making moves to lessen both plagiarism and the creation of books using public domain information. Here’s Amazon’s latest policy statement:

“Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your book content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale on the Kindle store. We do accept public domain content; however we may choose to not sell a public domain book if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.”

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Steve Bareham has taught writing and business communication to management students at Selkirk College, Nelson, B.C., since 1996.

His writing career began in 1969 with a decade-long stint as a reporter and editor with several Canadian daily newspapers. He worked next in public relations, marketing and business communications management positions with TransAlta, Simon Fraser University, and the B.C. School Trustees Association before joining the teaching staff at Selkirk. He has written nine print books for publishers such as Harper Collins and McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

As head of marketing and chief editor of EduServ Inc., a North American publishing house that served the education sector, Steve signed authors and edited more than dozen books from 1985-1991, generating several million dollars in revenue. Four of his eBooks will come online this year.

1 COMMENT

  1. Hello Mr. Bareham,

    I just read your 3 articles of tips for ebook authors. Thank you very much. It’s a lot of helpful information.
    I have a question about Amazon and the public domain. (I e-mailed them the question, but never heard back.)
    I have a blog and hope to publish a portion of the posts I wrote as an ebook. I know from experience that people generally don’t go back to read two and three year old posts. I was wondering if you know (as the posts are freely available at the blog) if Amazon considers blogs as unacceptble content?
    Thanks very much for your time and trouble.
    Pam Bickell

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