Marketing your digital book: What's the plan? (#giveaway)

If there is one topic that is almost sure to elicit a quizzical frown and not much else from most children's book authors and illustrators, it's marketing. That's the publisher's job, right? We creative types don't want to think about promotion…yuck. Yet publishers can't do everything and there are many innovative techniques nowadays that are often inexpensive or free. And if you haven't heard yet, authors/illustrators are expected to carry the marketing ball more and more these days. If you choose not to participate, your book's sales will almost certainly suffer.

Indeed, the word is that having a "platform" can make the difference between getting or not getting a publishing contract in the first place. And in the digital realm, many authors/illustrators are now seeking to release ebooks or book apps based on out-of-print (OP) as well as original titles, bypassing publishers entirely. Based on my limited experience with my OP book about sea turtles*, it’s pretty tough to get the word out. Putting a digital book on the iBookstore, App store, Kindle store, NOOK bookstore, et al has been compared to tossing a book into a warehouse and slamming the door shut. Now what?

Fortunately there is a terrific newly-released resource for #kidlit creators by children's author-illustrator Katie Davis, How to Promote Your Children's Book: Tips, Tricks, and Secrets to Create a Bestseller. (Note: I am one of the 60 contributors to the book and received a free copy.) The content ranges from Your Website and What's Wrong with It to Skype Visits to The Secret Sauce and much more…including social media, of course. Katie has built her platform in a myriad of ways that she generously shares. She makes a monthly appearance on TV in Connecticut to recommend great kid's books; she produces a weekly kidlit podcast; writes a blog; gives keynote speeches and presentations; has judged awards; is on the board of a literary charity; and created two book trailers that made it to the finals in the School Library Journal Trailee awards…she clearly has a lot to tell the average author/illustrator. Not incidentally, her book Little Chicken's Big Day was the 2012 winner in the publisher or author-created trailer category for elementary readers. (I just found this out while writing this post, so big congrats, Katie!)

Here are a few random items from the book to give you an idea:

Book Trailer Rule #1: No slow, loving pans of your cover.

On YouTube: It's easy to forget that YouTube is yet another social media site, isn't it? But that's exactly what it is…

On Contests: Don't have a "contest"—have a "giveaway," or a "sweepstakes," or a "drawing"…I've checked, and you just don't want to use the word "contest."

On Printed Postcards, etc.: Now that you know about all kinds of appearances, are you going to arrive empty handed? No, you are not!

The book's tone is lighthearted and conversational while the content is comprehensive and well-organized. There are many, many tips from the various author/illustrator/librarian/blogger contributors plus links galore to a huge variety of resources. At the end of each chapter is "homework" that consists of action items to do such as Create a school visit page on your site. It's obvious that my internal Excuse-O-meter is going to have more trouble coming up with reasons to NOT work on promotion for my books. I certainly won't be able to plead ignorance! After all, the whole point of writing and illustrating a book is to have people read it, and they can't read it if they don't know about it, right?

Katie has managed to get her book into a number of formats/ereaders including Kindle, NOOK, iBooks, and PDF. It's not easy dealing with the different formats and ebookstores; kudos are due on that score as well.

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you would like to become eligible for a free PDF version of Katie's book. Please leave a comment by this Friday, February 3 at midnight Eastern time and I'll choose a random number to determine the winner. Check back on Saturday to see if you won! The book costs $9.99, which is not bad for over 200 pages, no?

Today's post is only the first on the blog tour for How to Promote Your Children's Book; there will be additional giveaways at some of the blogs, so here is the schedule:

Feb 2 - Banana Peel Thursday

Feb 3 - Creative Spaces

Feb 6 - DearEditor.com

Feb 7 - Writing With a Broken Tusk

Feb 8 - Shutta Crum

Feb 9 - McBookWords

Feb 10 - Kerem Erkan

Feb 16 - Elizabeth O. Dulemba

Feb 17 - Fiction Notes

March 1 - 12x12 in 2012

March 2 - Christine Fonseca, Author

Update: Check out Katie's Brain Burps about Books podcast about the How to Promote ebook, with several mini-interviews with contributors.

Thanks for stopping by!

Loreen

My web site

*My iBook about sea turtles, Tracks in the Sand

iBooks Author: Links to resources (so far)

If you are interested in making ebooks, you've probably already heard about Apple's new iBook creation tool, iBooks Author. To clear up one bit of confusion, iBooks Author is a Mac app (for desktop or laptop computer) to make an interactive iBook that is read in the iBooks 2 app on the iPad. In other words, you're not making the iBook on your iPad, unlike Book Creator, for example, which makes a standard iBook. (Here is my post about using Book Creator.)

The term interactive means different things to different people, from choose-your-own-adventure stories to ebooks with tappable read-aloud text to game-like animated book apps. This blog post by Curating Book App Mom discusses iBooks Author and interactivity. Seems like we need better terminology to describe these digital books…but they're a moving target!

In order to download the free iBooks Author app, you must have a Mac with the Lion OS installed. To read the souped up iBooks you need the free iBooks 2 app on your iPad. The free sample of E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth has embedded videos, animations, photo galleries, 3D models you can manipulate in any direction, clickable maps, quizzes, and more. It's quite sophisticated, no doubt about it. The file size is large, though. One of the features I'm interested in using is embedded Keynote presentations. I think the file sizes for those could be much smaller than full videos, while still allowing movement and user-directed interaction.

[Update 2.23.2012]: A (currently) free 94 pages ebook, Publishing with iBooks Author by Nellie McKesson and Adam Witwer is available from O'Reilly. It covers the ins and outs of text formatting, tables, widgets, and much more.
 
To get an excellent overview of iBooks Author's features and what it can and can't do, check out this post by Ben Vanderberg.

Here is Apple's iBooks Author Support, which has several articles and tips such as to use "iPad safe fonts." There is also an iBooks Author forum here.

The templates that come with iBooks Author are set up for textbooks, with Chapters, Sections, and pages. This is great for textbooks, cookbooks, craft books and so on, but excess baggage for picture books, my primary interest. I haven't tackled stripping out those features myself yet, but came across this article by Dani Jones that shows how she put her comic book into a Photo Gallery widget to get full bleed images. Looks promising.

There has been some controversy about the licensing for this software, such as the limitation that you can only sell the resulting iBooks through Apple's iBookstore. (You can give them away on your web site, etc.) The article Why The Emotional Criticism of iBooks Author is Wrong links to some of the critical articles and attempts to address these concerns. There are 172 comments on it as of today, so if you'd like to wade into that, happy reading!

My biggest complaint is the totally inadequate Search capabilities on the iBookstore itself. My iBook Tracks in the Sand is about sea turtles, but if you search on "sea turtles" it won't come up. Only books with "sea turtle(s)" in the title or subtitle of the book show up in the search results. It's like trying to find books in a library that has no subject index, which obviously makes it difficult. If Apple is serious about making the iBookstore and its contents useful to teachers and students and readers in general, they need to support key words and/or pick up terms in an iBook's description. Hello?

Loreen
my web site

Barney Saltzberg: live from Digital Book World

Children's author-illustrator-songwriter Barney Saltzberg is attending the 2012 Digital Book World conference in New York, NY, which runs from today through Wednesday, January 25th. He is live-blogging his notes, so visit "Noodlings" to see what he is finding out. To read the rest of the entries on his blog, click on the right sidebar index of post titles. A few quotes…

How do traditional publishers deal with digital books?

Provide a reason to buy eBooks. Know and understand each ecosystem.

Knowing that tomorrow or whenever, digital is going to be part of the success of the book.
Bookstores and libraries still VERY important in discovery (About finding out about new children's books).

What drives the purchase of a book?

Thanks for the info, Barney!

Loreen
My web site

Picture eBook publishing tutorial by Julie Olson

Freelance picture book illustrator Julie Olson has posted a detailed tutorial about how she created her ebook Princesses, Princesses, Princesses! on her blog called: How to Publish an Ebook Picture Book from a Mac: for Nook, Kindle, PDF.

Like many digital processes, your mileage may vary depending on what tools you have. In any case, check out her post to read a very detailed explanation with plenty of screen shots (yay!) The comments have some good nuggets in them as well.

Note that she has made the words part of the image as opposed to having the words in "live" font form. There are some disadvantages to this that I'm aware of: 
1 A user cannot use accessibility features such as having the text read aloud
2 Users cannot search on a word
3 The word will not stay as sharp if the page is enlarged.
Just some factors to be aware of when deciding how to create your ebook. I’m not sure whether InDesign could export the file properly the way Julie describes with live text because I haven't tried it. If anybody knows, please chime in.

Loreen
my web site

New Kindle Publishing Guidelines released (Kindle Fire included)

The Kindle Fire tablet that was released in 2011 displays full-color images, unlike the previous Kindle ereaders. In addition, the images can cover the screen as opposed to having a white border around them. As a picture book author-illustrator, I’ve been interested to find out how easy or difficult it may prove to be to prepare picture books for the Fire. Finally, the publishing guidelines have been released. This email came yesterday from Amazon's Kindle publishing team:

“We’re pleased to announce that Kindle Publisher Tools with Kindle Format 8 (KF8) support are now available for download. Kindle Format 8 is Amazon’s next generation file format offering a wide range of new features and enhancements – including HTML5 and CSS3 support that publishers can use to create all types of books. KF8 adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, including drop caps, numbered lists, fixed layouts, nested tables, callouts, sidebars and Scalable Vector Graphics - opening up more opportunities to create Kindle books that readers will love. Kindle Fire is the first Kindle device to support KF8 - in the coming months KF8 will be rolled out to our latest generation Kindle e-ink devices as well as our free Kindle reading apps.

Publishers have created thousands of KF8 titles already and customers are enjoying the improved formatting and reading features across all types of books. Additionally, KF8 features such as Kindle Panel Views and Kindle Text Pop Up enable great fixed layout books including graphic novels, comics and children’s books. We’ve updated our Kindle Publishing Guidelines to help publishers get started with Kindle Format 8. 

Please download the new versions of KindleGen ( www.amazon.com/kindleformat/KindleGen) and Kindle Previewer (www.amazon.com/kindleformat/KindlePreviewer) to get started today. More information about KF8, Kindle Publishing Tools & Guidelines can be found at http://www.amazon.com/KindleFormat.

For Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) users, KDP is ready to receive your KF8 books. In addition to accepting books in the KF8 format, KDP is releasing a new KDP Simplified Formatting Guide to help you take advantage of the new features offered by KF8. Go to https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200798080 for more information on publishing KF8 books via KDP.”

The section about fixed layout children's books (i.e. picture books) starts on page 23 of the Guidelines PDF. I’ve only scanned it, but it appears to require HTML coding, as opposed to the process for text-oriented ebooks, which can utilize InDesign, Word, and other programs. (Sigh.) Hopefully someone will create an app for the Fire analogous to the Book Creator app for the iPad. (Here is my post about using Book Creator.)

According to the Guidelines, Amazon has not yet released the additional instructions that will be required to create graphic novels, manga, and comic ebooks. Though I'm only speculating, the reason may have something to do with the ability to read the text, which is typically part of the image in comics et al. My reason for thinking that is that the guidelines for fixed layout books have an option called "region magnification," which allows the user to enlarge selected areas by double-tapping:

I haven’t played with a Kindle Fire so am wondering if this is an alternative to zooming? It seems to me that a better solution (at least for picture books) would be to use a font that is large enough to begin with…just saying. I could be totally mistaken, but I can't find any online discussion about it. Anyway, I’m not going to be tackling this anytime soon; if anyone out there working on a picture book or other image-oriented book for the Kindle Fire, please leave a comment.

Loreen
my web site

Visit me at Cynsations

Today (Wednesday) I visit Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog to talk about promoting and marketing your BOOK APPS. I hope you'll GO READ!!!
Elizabeth O. Dulemba
http://dulemba.com

An interview with Interactive Touch Books

I had the pleasure of working with Interactive Touch Books (ITB) and recently interviewed Ameen Saafir, founder/CEO about his company. The goal of ITB is to offer “A truly interactive reading experience for the iphone and ipad.” Below Ameen explains how authors and illustrators can create an original interactive book or work with ITB to have their designers create your book. (And with ITB you don't have to wait for Apple to approve your App.)  My ITB title is GRANDMA AND ME published in October, 2011. I worked with ITB designer Stacy Russell, who used my existing art from an out-of-print Random House title. Stacy did the work of adding the interactive elements and sound. My experience with ITB has been very pleasant and professional and I was very pleased with the results. Thank you Ameen for taking the time to answer my questions. 

In a paragraph tell us about Interactive Touch Books. When did you get started? What is your position and your history? 

The idea for Interactive Touch Books began to form over a year ago when I noticed that my then 18-month old son found the iPad incredibly intuitive to use. What I found surprising was that there just wasn’t a lot of quality content (e.g. interactive books) available for young children. As I began talking to children's authors and illustrators, it became clear that the issue was not a lack of desire to create app versions of their books, but of resources. It is very expensive to create a children's app for iPad. So I left my engineering career (designing flat screen TV technology) behind and started Interactive Touch with the goal of creating a platform that would let professional author illustrators create interactive books for children for very little upfront cost and without needing to write any code. 

How many titles do you currently have? Who is your audience? How does the public access/buy your books? What e-reader is needed to “read” your books?

We currently have 38 titles, all available for download through the free Interactive Touch Books app on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Our target audience is 1–10 year olds. Books can be purchased directly through the app or at our online store (store.interactivetouchbooks.com) but are only readable through our app.

How does an author/illustrator go about creating an Interactive Touch Book?

1.    Original book?

2.    Existing book? (For which author/illustrator owns the rights.)

Whether an author wants to create an original book for iPad or translate an existing one into digital form, the process is the same. We give authors two options for accomplishing the process.

1. The author can use our online interface to create the interactive version of the book. Our team is available basically 24/7 to provide technical support and can walk an author through implementing a wide variety of effects.

2. You can allow us to create the book for you from your art. This can be for a book that has already been published or it can be a brand new idea. We accept art in almost any format. To create greater interactivity, we prefer .psd [Photoshop] files with background and foreground images on separate layers. However, we have created books from original canvas art and even scanned pages of a published book. This will generally require us to fill in some background art in order to allow characters to move around on the screen.

Talk about fees.

1. Fee for ITB to create book from existing art?

2. Royalty structure.

1. For the vast majority of books, we charge $500 to convert a title for an author. This includes implementation of art, sound effects, and interactive elements. Books are typically completed and live on our app within about 2 weeks of the start of the project. This production schedule may vary depending on the length of our project queue at the time of project submission. Should the project be delayed we will communicate that clearly before agreeing to take it on.

If the author/illustrator creates the interactive version of their book primarily on their own (we are always here for an assist or to answer questions) then it is free to create and publish.

2. The author/illustrator retains all rights to work that is created and published through our platform. This differentiates us from traditional publishers. Our only requirement is that the author does not publish the same material as an interactive book on a different platform. However, the author is free to sell static ebooks or print versions of the book elsewhere. Authors receive 70% of net proceeds after 3rd party fees (e.g. Apple on iTunes). This translates to 49% of sales from in-app purchases and roughly 65% on purchases from our online store.

What are your current needs?

We are very actively looking for high quality educational content as well as puzzles and activity books.

What is your biggest challenge?

Our biggest challenge has been to construct a platform that is powerful enough to create amazing interactive books, yet simple enough that anyone can use it.

Look into the future…where do you think the ebook industry is going?

I believe that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential of digital books.  Right now, ebooks typically look like electronic versions of print books, which is only natural when translating existing media onto a new platform.  At Interactive Touch, we believe we have a unique vision for re-imagining how stories are told using digital platforms, which we will start bringing to market in the next few months. 

It is too early to predict what will happen to the industry in the long term, but as we look back on similar technology revolutions there are a few constants.  We can expect to see a lot of consolidation in the next couple of years, and whoever ends up leading in the space will likely be someone most people have not heard of yet, and will definitely not be a traditional publishing house.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I’d add that what authors/illustrators can expect from Interactive Touch is an amazing technology supported by a team of hard working professionals who will do whatever it takes to make sure every need in the creation process is met. The best testament we get to the quality of our platform and our team is that every author who completes a book with us start working on their next book almost immediately.

Interactive Touch Books Contact information and website:

Authors/illustrators can contact ITB at: authors@interactivetouchbooks.com

Website: www.interactivetouchbooks.com

ITB Informational video:
www.interactivetouchbooks.com/publish/