Technically it doesn’t start until tomorrow, but I decided to go ahead and post the questions for the KindleBoards In Her Name Book Club (or “klub,” as it’s called on KB).
It doesn’t matter if you have an Amazon Kindle or not – grab a copy of the book from somewhere and join the fun!
I haven’t tried this yet, but this looks like a potentially useful tool for those wanting to track sales figures (and supposedly boost your marketing) for products on Amazon.com: RankTracer.com.
RankTracer.com apparently provides a very in-depth batch of statistics for specific products on Amazon that you want to track, displaying the stats in a variety of textual and graphical formats.
From the site’s FAQ, it costs $2 per month to track a product, although they have an interesting option to waive this fee if you help promote RankTracer.com by recommending them in blogs and so on, which is kind of cool.
Once you purchase a subscription, they begin tracking the product data, but they don’t track everything on Amazon at any given time – just the products people specifically subscribe for. You can track as many products as you want, and subscriptions can be renewed at any time.
On top of that, they automatically add products to their promotional material to help increase sales. The site doesn’t seem to go into much detail on this, however. The two things that I can see that are promotional are the Amazon Listmania entries they put up, and the list of recent sales on the site; they also indicate that promotions are done through articles, blogs, and press releases, although I’m not coming up with any specific details on just what that entails.
So, all in all it certainly looks worth checking out: $2 per month per product (or even free if you qualify for their “promote RankTracer.com” offer) seems quite reasonable for detailed Amazon statistics. I’ll have to reserve judgment on the promotional aspects until I’ve had a chance to check it out directly, but it’s certainly worth checking out!
This isn’t news if you’ve been blogging for a while, but I’m fairly new at this (while an old hand with web sites in general), and one of the confusing things for me was these oddball things called pingbacks and trackbacks.
After a bit of googling and poking around, a found a nice site that has a lot of information on blogging in general – optiniche – that had a very helpful post about pingbacks and trackbacks.
I’m not going to repeat the whole explanation here, but the bottom line is that if you make a blog post that happens to have a link to someone else’s blog post, a comment will magically appear on their blog post that links back to your blog post.
So, in a way, it’s almost like an automatic link exchange feature, which is awesome because exchanging links is one of the best ways to increase web traffic to your site. So understanding pingbacks and trackbacks was important for me because it seems to be getting harder and harder to do link exchanges the old-fashioned way, particularly because there are so many blogs out there now.
Now for a couple of caveats and observations:
So, please do check out optiniche and take a look at some of the information the author has there on blogging and marketing!
For those who may be thinking about Lightning Source (LSI), I wanted to give you a quick rundown on what it takes to at least get your foot in the door and get an account.
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that Lightning Source is not a path for those who don’t know how or aren’t willing to do all the in-depth pre-press work. This company is geared toward working with publishers who have technical people working the nuts and bolts of getting a book to press. They’re willing to work with authors, as well, as long as you really understand what you’re getting into.
So, what’s involved? First, assuming you’re up for the technical side of it, you log onto their site and go through the account creation process. A few things you’ll need up front: your company information; ISBN prefix from at least one of your ISBNs; charge card information so they can charge the necessary fees when you get that far; and bank account information (account number and routing number) for where your royalties will go. As far as I know, they don’t verify that you’re a company, but if you’ve gone this far in getting your book published, you’re silly if you don’t at least set up a sole proprietorship or LLC so you can write off your business expenses (there are lots of other good reasons to do this as a business, but that one goes directly to your wallet or pocketbook). (more…)
Beyond just getting your book on Amazon, it’s now time to look at the bigger picture.
Amazon is a giant, but they aren’t the only game in town, by far. The other on-line (and storefront) biggie is Barnes & Noble, plus the other thousands of other “smaller” chains and independent bookstores out there.
If you decided to go with a traditional POD like Outskirts Press, their upper-tier plans offer distribution to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor. Those last two are key, because they’re the big-boy distributors to thousands of booksellers. I want access to those distribution channels, but I can’t get there through Lulu or CreateSpace (and as I noted previously, the price model with traditional PODs won’t work for a book as long as mine). BookSurge is also not an option, in my opinion, because they don’t have a relationship with Ingram. I wonder if that could be because Ingram owns Lightning Source, which is BookSurge’s main competition. Hmmm…
And that brings us to the focus of this post: Lightning Source. Now, for those who don’t know, Lightning Source is one of the world’s largest – if not the largest – print on demand company (with operations in the U.S. and U.K.) that is used by most POD publishers – but not Amazon’s CreateSpace – to actually print the books. But they don’t offer the “author friendly” services of the traditional PODs or Lulu: if you want to go to Lightning Source as an independent author/publisher, you can, but they put up lots of caveats and warnings that this is not a venture for the faint of heart! (more…)
It’s no surprise that there are a lot of authors and small press publishers who want to get their work on the Amazon Kindle!
Unfortunately, making that happen is not always as easy as it should be, and that’s why I’ve put together Publish Your Book on the Amazon Kindle: A Practical Guide, which is now available in print, on the Amazon Kindle, and on Mobipocket.com.
I wrote this book specifically for folks who don’t have a lot of – or any – technical background, and who are frustrated with the seemingly mystical process of getting a book published on the Kindle. Chances are you’re an author or publisher who doesn’t want to deal with a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo and just wants to get the job done so you can get back to writing. This book will take away the mystery and frustration, and give you a clear path to success. (more…)
Tales and Musings
