[Workshop 1 Publishing Essentials Part 2] Transcription Speaker: Amy Harrop This is Amy and this is part 2 of workshop 1 publishing essentials and in this workshop, we are going over the essential tasks and elements that you really need to have in place when you publish your book. Book Cover For the second part of this, we re going to be starting off and talking about your book cover. Having a book cover that works with your book is just essential. In fact, if you are finding that you are not making the sales that you d like to make after you ve already published a book, one of the first things that you should really test and change is your book cover. And here are a few things that you really want to keep in mind and then we will go ahead and take a look at some examples. The psychology of color is huge and you can use that and exploit that for your own book. If you have, let s say a horror story or an exciting romance, perhaps you want to use the color red somewhere in the cover. If you want to have a darker story, you might want to use black with some splashes of color. If you have a selfhelp-type book, you might want to use colors like greens and yellows and reds, so the book seems appealing and easy to access, but also implies taking action as well. One of the things that separates some of the better book covers from the poorer ones is the design element. Many of the better book covers will use simple graphics and professional fonts. So they re not grabbing the same tired fonts that you might see that people use from the computer, like Times New Roman. They re using really distinctive professional fonts that aren t overly excessive but really work with the design of the book. I m not a graphic designer but this is something that by looking at different examples, you can really get a feel for. Other elements for your book cover include correct sizes. Kindle, for example, requires a specific version of size and you want to make sure that when your cover is uploaded to different platforms, that the size will work for that. For Kindle, I
believe the length is 1,000 pixels, so that s a good base line for having your covers created. You also want to make sure that your cover looks good in thumbnail because that s how people are going to be first seeing your cover if they re doing a search. They re going to be looking at a number of books and just looking at the thumbnail. So you want to make sure that you don t have a lot of text on there that could be difficult to read or if you do, for example, have a small blurb, the rest of the cover is pretty easy to see and you can get a feel for what type of book it is before you actually enlarge the cover. And of course, the overall cover should reflect the book. So, you want something, if you re doing a romance, for example, the type of romance you have should be reflected in the book cover. If you re doing what s called a sweet romance, where it s not sexually explicit, you probably would not have a half-naked man or woman on the front of the cover. If you re doing something that s more explicit, that might be appropriate. So keep in mind that your cover, of course, is the first thing that people are going to see and it can really impact your sales. Now, let s go ahead and take a look at some different cover examples. So this is a cover for a book called Collide (http://www.amazon.com/collide- Volume-1-ebook/dp/B00B385VCU/)which is a romance, what s called a new adult novelwhich is a newer and very popular fiction niche right now. This cover, I think works well, because we have the graphic here at the top and you can see that it s sexually suggestive, but not over the top. Then the lower part shows the title, Collide, and it s very easy to read, the C is in big red letters, and it looks intriguing because we see that these people are together and there s some type of collision, but the way that they re posed, it definitely implies romance. So that s a good cover because it has, I think, the right elements of mystery and romance to entice the reader to keep reading. Now, this is an example of a non-fiction cover. It s for a book called Clean (http://www.amazon.com/clean-expanded-edition-ebook/dp/b007mau5ug)and it s about restoring the body s ability to heal itself from water and cleansing out the body. And so what s great about this is the cover is very clean. We have the title, Clean, in a really clean font, nice font. The background is nearly white, and then
we have the glass of water. So the cover itself is refreshing looking and it really works with the content of the book. Now, let s look at a couple bad examples, I think are, and you can agree or disagree. This is one called Dark Chances. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/b00alqh9fw) This book has gotten good reviews and it looks like it s probably some type of vampire romance-type book so we can scroll down here, and it doesn t even actually put what cover it s in, but it looks like it s sort of a mix of adventure and vampire romance. But it s very difficult to see that with the cover. The font obviously sort of, you know, looks like some sort of old fashioned Dark Shadows-type font, which can work okay, but the background image just does not give you any idea of what the book is about or what type of book it is. So I think with this book, the author really lost an example or a way that they could imply and show what their book is actually about. I also think just the overlay of the text over the graphic does not look very professional either. So I don t think this is a very good book cover. I bet the author, if he went and redid it, would probably have more sales. Now, here s a book that s really interesting because it s actually doing quite well, it s a number one bestseller in several different categories, and I just keep thinking that perhaps the author would be selling way more than they re even selling now if they took the time to redo their cover. So looking at the cover, it s nearly impossible to figure out what the book is about. Is it about sailing? It s very difficult. The book is actually called How to Manage Your Money When You Don t Have Any, so it s about money management. (http://www.amazon.com/manage-your-money-when-ebook/dp/b007iuglyo ) It s gotten good reviews and it s selling well. But the cover is not doing this book any favors. It s very difficult to read the title, looks completely blurry, and the ship, while I can see how it actually goes with, I suppose the title, that somebody s lost out at sea and needs guidance, doesn t really relate enough to what the book is about. If I had just seen this cover, I would not even click on it and it s a testament to the author, I think, that the book is probably really good, because they re getting a lot of great reviews and as I mentioned, it s doing well in several categories. I m sure the author could do even better with this book if they went ahead and redid their cover.
So keep in mind with your cover that this is something where you do want to spend some time, maybe test out some different cover versions, get some advice from people, and don t be afraid to change out your cover if you find your book isn t doing as well as you d like. Keywords So the next publishing essential are keywords. Having a keyword list can be really helpful. Keywords tend to apply more to non-fiction books, but they can also work with fiction books as well. The reason keywords are helpful is because when people are searching for information or something online, they re often using keyword searches. This applies to book platforms like Amazon or ibooks or Barnes & Noble, it applies to Google. So if you can do some research and have some keywords that are ideally high search, low competition, and use them for some different elements for your book and your promotional tools, this is going to help drive more traffic to your book. So for example, if you do some keyword research, you can incorporate some keywords into your title, which will help your title be more visible. If you set up a blog, you can use those keywords for blog posts. Press releases, a lot of press releases can easily rank on the first page of Google, and if you choose your keywords wisely, you can use those to drive a lot of traffic. And of course, tags and identifiers for your book. So let me just show you here an example of keyword for one of our books, and this is a Fiverr gig that I had done and we are releasing a book series about the power of colors and healing power of colors. So what I had happen is I told the provider what the book was about a little bit, and then they brought back some different keywords and they brought back monthly searches, and that s in the search engine in Google, the Google search network, and local monthly searches in the United States. So this is just a starting point, but one of the things that you can do, is you can take some of the higher search keywords and lower competition keywords, so the higher the number here, the more competition there is with this. You can compile a list and then use that list for your book for different things. So one of the things, for example, that we did, is we had this title here, Mood Enhancers, and that has 1,300 global searches here, so we wanted to incorporate that actually in our book. So if you go here, let s go up to the Kindle here, and you type in Mood Enhancer, and you ll see here, that another thing you can do in
terms of wanting to incorporate a keyword in your title is you can go ahead and search in the Amazon search box for your title and if it auto completes, or for your keyword, and if it auto completes, that means that people are searching for it on Amazon. So this is a keyword that people are searching for. They re not necessarily searching, however, in books, but they are searching on Amazon for that. So if we type that in, and you can do the Mood Enhancer, since that was the actual keyword that we had, you ll see that my book here, The Power Book of Green Energy Colors and Natural Mood Enhancers, comes up, and it s the only book that comes up here. So we are going to be capturing some of that search traffic from Amazon. What we can do is take that keyword and some of the related keywords and have our blog incorporate those with having some blog posts using those keywords, and so on. So having a keyword list is a great thing to do at the beginning before you start building up more promotional tools with your book. It s even better to have before you even publish your book, because you can use it in your title, you can also use it in your book description as well on Amazon, and some of the other book platforms. Just to show you here again quickly, so if we click on this, and then we scroll down here, you can see Need a natural mood enhancer, that s the first line of the book description. So using your keywords is a great technique when you incorporate them into your book description. Book Description Speaking of book description, that is really another essential for your book. One of the things that you should be looking at with your description is you should really consider it a sales letter for your book. It s a thing that many people read before they buy the book, and I have to say, as a reader, I do not like going to a book and finding not much of a description. Especially for a fiction book, even if I know what genre it s in, I still want a description of the book before I m going to get a sample or check it out. So the sales letter for your book is going to help persuade and compel people to buy your book. It should be exciting and compelling and one of the things that you can also do is you can utilize Author Central and include more information about your book as well, and I ll show you an example of that.
So let s just look at a few different examples here of book descriptions on Amazon. So this is a fiction book, it s called The Boy Next Door, (http://www.amazon.com/the-boy-next-door-ebook/dp/b00amro4mg) and has a cute cover there. So their book description starts with a review and what you can do is if you have external reviews of your book, you can actually go onto your Author Central page, and we re going to be talking more about Author Central in the next workshop. Author Central is Amazon s author tool, where you can put more information about your book and yourself as an author. So here is The Power Book of Green and you can see here, I haven t added any reviews yet, but what you can do is you can add external reviews here, transcribe text from reputable sources, quotes from outside, limited to one to two sentences. So you can include other reviews in here if they re relatively short. And what ll end up happening is that will come up here before you actually have your book description. I would ve recommended this person bold or highlight this or something, which you can do, just so it stands out a little bit more. So in your book description, you can add in reviews and then you can add in additional content as well, so that s something I need to do here with this book. You can also see here that you can bold and do some italics. Now there s two ways you can actually put your book description on Amazon. You can of course do it right into KDP when you publish your book and there is actually a special HTML mark-up tool language that you can use to make your description stand out even more. I m not going to go into too much detail with this, but I will show you another example. So that is the first place that you can add in your book description. The second place, if you want to have a little bit more of a layout, is you can add it into your Author Central account and you can see here that you can use bold, italics, number, and bullet points. So using the Author Central area where you do your description can make it look a little bit better. What I normally do, if I m not doing the HTML language it s a special language that Amazon has is I ll upload the description when I publish the book and then once the book is live, I ll go into my Author Central and then rework it and make the layout better in Author Central and add the bold and add bullet points and things like that, and then it ll take another day or so for it to be available.
So here s a book description, another example, (http://www.amazon.com/killer- Work-Home-Jobs-ebook/dp/B0097YBL6M http://www.amazon.com/killer-work- Home-Jobs-ebook/dp/B0097YBL6M) where they ve used the Amazon mark-up language and they ve put this here, Why you need to read this book, in the same color that Amazon has a lot of their content. So that works really well and that s what you would do in the KDP area with the special mark-up language. Despite, even if they don t use that, I really like how they have this set up here, Why you need to read this book, then they say, why you need to read it, it s basically a sales letter. They ask you some questions and then they say how the book can help you with that. How is this book different? The promise of the author. So I think this is a great example of a non-fiction title where the author has really used their description to compel you to buy their book. So I think that s a very good example. Now here s a couple examples where I think they could do a little bit more work with their description. This book here is called The 8 Pillars of Motivation, (http://www.amazon.com/the-8-pillars-motivation-ebook/dp/b005aq40y6) and again, it has very good reviews, number of reviews, and the book description is pretty long but I had read through this and it s not very interesting. They start off with, Do you ask yourself the ultimate, Where do I find motivation question? And I don t even know what that means really. Then when they re talking about the book, they re just saying the author shows you how to do this, the author shows you how to do that. That really does not suck the reader in to feel like this book is going to help them and solve some of their problems. They say for media praise and recognition, check out the author s about page. Well, they could put some reviews right in here, and that would be better than having to cut and paste and go to another website. So I think this is a description, while it is long, I don t find it particularly compelling and because the book looks great, it s gotten some great reviews, if the author re-wrote this a little bit, I bet this would help them with their sales. Here s a non-fiction book, and this is an Amish romance (http://www.amazon.com/chasing-heaven-amish-romanceebook/dp/b00ap4ljis) and this is all they have here for their description. It talks
about her wedding, and then it goes into her sisters and then check out more of these similar books. I don t think that s a very good description, because we don t really know anything about what the story is, other than she is having a wedding and her sisters wonder whether they re going to get married. But is the book about her, is it about her sisters, who s the man, since it s a romance? Not a very good description. Amish romance is pretty popular right now, but if I were looking for Amish romances to read, this probably wouldn t get picked up, because I just don t even know really what the story s about, it did not hook me in. So making sure that you put some time into your description is really important. Again, this is something that you can do after you have your book published. It s not necessarily something where you have to have every single part of it set up right at the beginning. It s better if you do, but you can always go back in and make changes. Outsourcing Solutions The goal of this training is to show you how you can much more easily implement these promotional tools and you can outsource many of them. So thinking about the formatting, formatting is something that many authors spend a lot of time on. It actually holds them back from getting their book on other venues, because a lot of authors can do very well on other venues, like Smashwords, ibookstore, Barnes & Noble, but they get held back by the special formatting requirements. The good news is though, you can basically outsource all of your formatting, so you don t have to spend any time with that and you can get it done very reasonably. CreateSpace is one of those things that you should, when you have your book ready to publish to the Kindle, you should really be thinking about putting it on CreateSpace at the same time as well. So that is something you definitely want to get outsourced and get together while you re in the mode of publishing your digital book, too. In terms of the front and back matter that you want to have in your book, this again is something that you can outsource. What you can do is have it set up, for maybe your first book, or put the different elements in order. Then you can have an assistant do that for you for future books, or you can use that as a template and just copy and paste in the different pages and just change out the information.
Book covers. You can easily outsource book covers. A few things to keep in mind, if you do use some of the gig sites, like Fiverr, many cases they will want you to provide your own images, so you can find many, many, many royalty free images online and we re including some information with that with this training and you can provide them with some different images so they can get more specific to what you want. That s a better way to do that with that, because that way, too, you ll know that the images you re able to use commercially. Keywords. This is very easily outsourced, so it s something you don t have to spend any time with. Book description. Again, you can get a writer or a copywriter to write your book description or you can take a quick stab at it and then maybe have them, or an editor, punch it up a little bit more. So these are all tools that you can have outsourced. Let me just show you here, these are what you re going to be able to access. This is the providers for Workshop 1. Fiverr Providers Spreadsheet-Workshop 1 Page. We ve gathered providers who do keyword research, who will format your book in different platforms, Kindle, Smashwords, for example, CreateSpace. So you can use them for your formatting. Book description, these people specialize more in copywriting, so they can write more of a sales-oriented type of book description. Front and back matter, this is something that you can have a virtual assistant do. So every part of the essentials for the publishing in Workshop 1 you are going to be able to outsource all or part of that if you want to, so you can go ahead and make sure when your book is first published, you re going to be putting your best foot forward. So this is wrapping up here Workshop 1. Your next steps are to review the checklists we have for each of the sections that were covered in this session, which is the formatting, the front and back matter in your book, the book cover, the keywords, and your book description. Go over some of the tips and strategies that
we ve included with the checklists. You also have the Fiverr providers, which I ve just showed you. So what you can do is take each checklist and then you can basically just copy and paste much of that when you hire your provider, or you can decide which ones you want to do yourself and which ones that you want to outsource. So go ahead and make sure you get your publishing essentials together and we will see you in the next workshop. [End of Audio]