Premier Publishing

We’ve had quite a few enquiries from students asking for help with essays. It’s been a while since any of us had to write an essay (we all graduated quite some time ago now) – but I managed to find something the other day that might prove useful.

There used to be a big issue with plagiarism – this got worse due to the Internet – but since then educational establishments have managed to create some excellent software for spotting plagiarism.

Now it is increasingly difficult to cheat on essays – but the good news is that it has become easier to get essay help. Coursework.info provides a service where you can search through other students work – helping you get better ideas and improve your essays – and as long as you cite references and include quotations, it is not classed as plagiarism.

Coursework.info are the “UK’s largest academic Coursework Library” – so there is nobody better to go to when you need help with an essay.

Infinity Publishing have got a free guide to becoming a published author, just click over to their site and fill in the form here.

If you are outside the US or Canada you will just get it in an PDF format.

I’ve just ordered mine and I got it as a PDF straight away – I skipped over most of it, to the part I feel is most important. Marketing your book. You can spend weeks, months, even years writing your book – but if you don’t have a great marketing strategy it is likely to flop! On the whole I found their marketing packages lacking – I think you could do it all yourself much cheaper…

There are many different writing styles, it just depends on what your writing about and who your audience is. If you are writing a non-fiction book which teaches people how to do something, then it is best to use simple words and keep your layout nice and structure, making heavy use of subtitles, bullet points and diagrams.

If you are writing for children, then again, it is best to use simple words and keep the storyline interesting as children have an increasing tendency to get bored in our modern overstimulated environment.

Finally if you are writing for an adult market, then feel free to use more complicated language, but beware – some adults still have trouble, so it depends on your market.

Here are five ideas I think would be highly successful:

1. How to write Wordpress plugins
I happened to be searching for one of these on Amazon a few weeks ago, I found that there was only one currently on the market.

2. All things Twitter
Twitter has been growing fast, with many services starting on the back of it. There are many opportunities to write books related to Twitter.

3. The Mobile Office
How things are changing, with wireless networks, mobile broadband and phones getting more and more powerful – how to best utilise this technology.

4. Paranormal Romance
This I find weird, but there is actually a large following of this genre. If you check out the Amazon Tag cloud, at the moment this is one of the big ones – there is a whole paranormal romance community!

5. The Top 100 Internet Software
Basically a book with 100 different websites that provide software, for example Google Documents, Google Mail, Twitter, Feedburner etc.

I was looking at a few publishers today and comparing royalty fees and book printing costs. I read one website which was talking about the distribution network for publishers. Apparently on demand publishers aren’t quite so good when it comes to getting your book sold. Let me explain.

On demand printing means that once a customer orders a copy of the book, they print it and send it out. Unfortunately this type of book selling results in only 10% of all book sales – with 90% of them still coming from off the shelf purchases. What does this mean for self publishers?

Well first of all once they have written and published their book they then have to do two things:
1. Promote it online so it will sell.
2. Approach book shops and ask them to place their books – risky as sometimes you have to buy them back at a particular cost – this could actually lose money!

So perhaps paying out a little extra at the start is worth doing. If you want my advice – use self publishing to test the market, if it works roll it out with a big publisher – if it doesn’t work, perhaps don’t jack in the day job!

Well this depends on a lot of factors:

1. Is your product any good? If not then it won’t spread quickly, you’re likely to get flat sales and it won’t grow.
2. Is there a market for it? If not then you won’t sell any.
3. Is there a big enough market for me to warrant writing a book?  If not, then guess what?  You just wrote a book that earned you less than $0.30 an hour!!!

For me the market was initially big, but then got 100 times smaller in two months, unfortunately I missed the peak and as a result my sales are pretty low – there just isn’t the market for what I’m selling at the moment.

I initially estimated $10,000 for my book! Crazy now I look back on it…  I’m earning around $80 a month, and I think my book will stop selling in September (the game I wrote my book on will go be replaced by a newer one).  If I’d got it out in the first month I would have seen sales of around $8000 in the first month and $2000 in the second – based on search volume research I did recently.

So if you are writing a fiction book then the amount you can earn really depends on how well you promote it.  You have to create demand for it by encouraging:

• High ratings
• Good reviews
• Referrals (people recommending your book)
• Online ad campaigns (Facebook ads may be worth looking at…)

If you are writing a non fiction book then the same applies, but you can look at what the likely demand is by searching on Google.  It will give you some idea of how big the market is – as for estimating this, its nearly impossible!!!

This is probably the hardest part of self publishing – promoting the book so you actually sell a few copies. Fortunately we are lucky to have companies such as Amazon to help do that for us!

Getting people to visit your book’s product page

There are a number of methods you can use to get people to look at your book within Amazon. The first and most obvious is to ensure the title of your book contains popular Amazon keywords – this way it will naturally appear in the search listings for products. Secondly you want to tag it with many related keywords – as many as you can – this will allow it to appear in the search listings for that keyword as well. One of the most effective ways (I found an increase of 100% in sales when I did this) is to write reviews on books that are related to yours – and then embed a link using Amazon’s code to your own book.

Getting people to buy

Once people get to your page you need to ensure that they are likely to buy. I would recommend reading up on copywriting and AIDA in order to write a synopsis that really sells the book. Also to get your rating higher, but a request at the end of your book to please rate this book on Amazon and to recommend it to a friend (if they like the book they will get to the end, if they don’t like it, they won’t). Perhaps even ask family or friends to put reviews on. Finally you can also do a video review, perhaps talk about how you are the author and hopefully people will warm to you and buy your book – after being given that personal touch.

These techniques are very effective, if you implement them one at a time you will see the difference, but take my words for it and do it from the outset and you will sell a lot more copies.

The red tape involved in publishing my book was the biggest stumbling block I faced when publishing my book. I had a small window of opportunity with the potential to make thousands of dollars in a short space of time, but unfortunately this plan fell apart because of bureaucracy.
I had my book published with CreateSpace – so I waited until the proof copy arrived and got the book authorized two weeks before Christmas. But they still wouldn’t published – and then I saw why. IF you are publishing in the US, but you are not a US citizen then you have to have what is called an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) from the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). In order to get one of these you need to fill out a form and get a copy of your passport notarized and send it all to the IRS to be processed. Once this is done, if you are a British Citizen you can fill out a W-8BEN form and get tax relief on your royalties, due to a tax treaty agreement between the US and the UK. This will allow you to keep all your royalties and not pay any to the US tax system.
It can take up to two months after sending your forms to get the ITIN, once you do this you can fill in the W-8BEN form and just send straight to the publisher, in this case CreateSpace. CreateSpace then swiftly processed it and within a few days my book was for sale on Amazon.com (it says it can take up to 15 working days normally).

Self publishing can sometimes be the only way you are going to get your book published. It does have both disadvantages and advantages, however. Firstly it is commonly the cheapest way of getting published – and it does allow you to judge the popularity of the book before investing any more time and money into writing, publishing and promoting. It does mean that you have to do everything yourself – from cover design to distribution to promotion. Promotion in my opinion is probably the hardest part of self publishing. It is the promotion of a book that really makes a difference between a books success and failure.

There are a few places you can choose to self publish a book, personally I would recommend CreateSpace (an Amazon company). The reason behind it is that they give you an excellent deal on your royalties. Here is an example, comparing it to Lulu:

I created a 130 page book and created the book on both Lulu and Createspace – both give the option to sell through Amazon and both ship direct from the US (despite the fact Lulu has a UK page – it’s not based in the UK). My book was priced $14.99 – at Lulu I would get around $1-2 for one book sale, at Createspace I can get well over this amount, with $6.58 with each book sold through Amazon.

There are disadvantages to using Createspace – for starters you need to be able to design your own cover and get both the book file and cover file to meet their strict specifications. To this I would use the following programs:

• For your book file I would use Microsoft Word, but if you don’t have it, just use the word processor with Open Office (which is free)
• For your cover file I would use photoshop, paint shop pro or The Gimp (which is also free)
• Finally you can find a number of print to PDF programs, so you do not have to pay to use Adobe. I use Primo PDF, but there are other ones out there that do the job

So in a nutshell, use CreateSpace to self publish, not Lulu or Cafepress.

Tne thing that shocked me when writing my book was how much work is involved.  Many people get shocked by the word count involved in doing a dissertation for their bachelor degree, well I’ve got news for you 10 – 15 thousand words is nothing.  If you want a book that doesn’t look like it was written in a day, your looking at around 30-40 thousand minimum.
My book was a small guide book, I wrote around 22,000 words and I thought the book looked flimsy and small.  If I was to write again I would ensure it was at least 40,000 words.  You need to ensure you have the following for your book:

1. Cover (obviously!) – This should tempt people to look at the book, hopefully read the back
2. Title page
3. Copyright page with ISBN and copyright notice (this is easier than you think)
4. You may want a table of contents if you are writing a non-fiction guide
5. You may want to thank those that helped you (a lot of people help proof read your book – it takes hours)
6. You need to write yourself a little biography for the “about the author” bit
7. You also need to write a small summary for the back of the book which will encourage people to buy it

I would say once your book is written and proof read and finalized – the rest of the process takes around a week to finish.