If you’ve ever done any sort of marketing, chances are you’re familiar with the concept of affiliate programs, but for everyone else, they may be unfamiliar. Simply put, affiliate programs are a way of making money by referring your own site’s readers to other websites that sell products. Those companies pay you a small percentage of the purchase price of products purchased in exchange for that referral.
As an author, you can use affiliate programs to increase your share of the final purchase price of your books, at least for people who follow the links to those stores from your website. Additionally, you can use affiliate programs to help you determine the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. More on this in a bit.
Analytics is a related concept—
and so on. This, in turn, can provide valuable insight into how effective your website is at selling products and into what you can do to make it more effective.
At the core of analytics is the concept of tracking—
This article—
Releasing the electronic edition is one of those things that in an ideal
world would be straightforward, but in the real world is often angled backwards.
I decided from the beginning that I was going to release my electronic editions
directly to all the major vendors—
I am using an aggregator—
In this article—
The fun thing about producing a book in electronic and paper form is that you get to do all the formatting twice. If you’re lucky. In reality, you’ll do it far more than twice. However, most of the formatting work falls into one of two major buckets: formatting for electronic delivery and formatting for dead tree (paper) delivery. This section is all about the electronic delivery. I’ll save the dead trees for later.
In the minds of a lot of readers, electronic books cost nothing to make, and so should be nearly free. Most people think, “It’s no different than making a web page, and anybody can do that.” So why, then, do eBooks cost a lot of money? What makes them so tricky to produce that publishers spend more time and effort on them than on their print editions?
I’ll explore the pains of producing a high
The process of writing a series of interlocking novels is a bit odd when compared with writing a single novel that stands alone. To begin with, you have to be able to adjust the timeline a little bit whenever events in one book take too much time to fit. This is, of course, the easy part. The true misery comes when all of the software you’re using to create the book gets discontinued during the course of the project, thanks largely to the almost geologic time scale involved.
Thus goeth the life of a writer.
This article is the first of several articles based on my experiences while releasing the electronic and print editions of the initial trilogy in my Patriots book series. In it, I talk briefly about writing the novels and the various challenges involved in writing a series of books over the course of more than a decade. Stay tuned for additional articles about eBook publishing, affiliate programs, and print publishing.
I recently attempted to purchase ad space from a blogger, and was
basically told that they would only sell me ad space if I reduced my
eBook’s price to 99 cents. My first inclination was to laugh and
roll my eyes, but then I thought about it further, and realized that
since the subject of 99
So there I was, staring at Facebook, wondering if I should really torture my friends with yet another rant about obscure publisher woes, when I suddenly realized, “Hey! I have a website! I could blog about it instead.” And in the realm of the ’book, there was much rejoicing, for most knew not what I spoke of anyway.
The result is this blog page. It is probably worth mentioning that not everything on this blog will necessarily be of interest to folks who read my books. In fact, I suspect that most of the things I post here will mainly be of interest to other authors and small publishers. With that said, this blog is syndicated (by reference) from my author page on Amazon, so I’ll try to avoid boring those folks too much.
Enjoy.