Welcome to the First Issue of Advanced Self Publishing

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) What's New At The Shared Self Publishing Experience

Get the first monthly lowdown on what's up!

2) How I Came To Create This Website

Your book has a story. So does this website.

3) The Wisdom of Crowds and The Long Tail

People are crowding the internet to find what they want. Are they finding you? Do you know about The Long Tail? You should.

4) FEATURE ARTICLE: I Love Google; Why Doesn't Google Love Me?

You put up a website. Isn't Google supposed to be sending people there? Unfortunately, the answer is, "Probably not." Here's why...

5) What You Can Do To Help The Shared Self Publishing Experience...And Yourself!

Growing this site means growing how it helps you.

==============
Functionality!
==============
If any links in this newsletter don't work, it's probably because your email software cuts off the link text at a line break, then prints the rest of the link as plain text. To use one of these links, try copying the WHOLE link then pasting it into your browser.
==============

WHAT'S NEW AT THE SHARED SELF PUBLISHING EXPERIENCE

First of all, welcome. The site has been "live" for a month, and this is my first newsletter.

When you signed up for the newsletter you were promised updates on new postings to the site. Well, because we're just getting started, they're ALL new. You'll find

• 18 postings in the Non Fiction section
• 9 postings in the Biographies section
• 5 postings in the "kitchen sink" Everything Else section
• 2 postings in the Children's section
• 2 postings in the Religious/Spiritual section
• 1 posting in the Novels section
• 1 posting in the Textbooks section

You'll find a lot of great information in these posts. I know I did.

HOW I CAME TO CREATE THE SHARED SELF PUBLISHING EXPERIENCE

I have another website, Best Children's Books - Find, Read or Write. It's a reasonably successful website. I originally built it to attract people who might buy MY children's books. (Which I STILL haven't gotten around to posting on the site, but that's another story.) In April the site had over 22,000 visitors viewing just under 50,000 pages.

When you get that many readers, you tend to hear from a few of them.

Every week or two, I would get a letter from someone who had self published a children's book. They would tell me how wonderful it was and ask me to promote it on my site.

I always wrote back, but I always said, "Sorry, can't help you." My job, as I saw it, was to promote the BEST children's books. And frankly, I was a snob when it came to self publishing. I myself had never published anything but very commercial short stories, but I'd made a lucrative living for years writing for Hollywood.

To this snob, that meant that REAL writers are selected by the powers-that-be (be they publishing houses or movie studios), while self publishers were writers in name only who had been selected out by these same powers-that-be. These "pseudo" writers hadn't met MY qualifications.

Well, a couple things happened...

1. My Hollywood career fizzled. This despite the fact that I was quite sure I'd become a BETTER writer over time. How come the studios were MORE interested in me when I was a WORSE writer?

2. Those self publishers who contacted me? They didn't seem pathetic. They seemed driven. Confident. Happy. Most of them seemed pleased with their decision to have gone forward, even if they weren't experiencing "success" in the way I'd been defining it.

Something else, too. These folks - these AUTHORS - weren't nearly so removed from their audience as I was as a screenwriter. They didn't have a bunch of guys in suits standing between them and the public, telling them what the public wanted.

No. They got that information directly FROM the public.

I finally got the message. I created a section of my kids' books website that does exactly what The Shared Self Publishing Experience does: gives self publishers an entire webpage to tell about their experience, in return for a link to their site. The results?

• I win; more traffic to my site
• Self publishers win; more traffic to their sites
• Aspiring authors win; tons of free information on self publishing from those who have "been there, done that."

The success of that experiment made me want to create a website that offered the same opportunity to ALL self publishers. Which is why we're here today!

Now you know the story.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS AND THE LONG TAIL

The power of this site is in the chorus of voices and the variety of experiences that comprise it. I'm confident this site will become much more valuable to authors than any website that speaks with a single voice.

Reading the contributions to this site stimulates the best kind of brainstorming. I hope you agree: there are ideas for the marketing of your book that you haven't yet thought of!

Speaking of marketing, have you read The Long Tail yet? You should, because as a self publisher you're living it!

The Long Tail is about the new world that has

a) put the means of production (in your case, publishing) in the hands of the many, and
b) put the means of FINDING PRODUCTS PARTICULAR TO ONE'S INTERESTS in the hands of all consumers.

It used to be if I had a particular interest in the biographies of biologists, I could visit my library and my local bookstore, peruse the shelves and hope that I might get lucky and find ONE.

The modern consumer simply Googles BIOGRAPHIES OF BIOLOGISTS and comes up with something like this. In a single click, a filtered list of 26 biologist bios! Now I can click to Amazon and buy any or all of them.

In other words, books are first found, then filtered. Your book may be good enough to get through a buyer's filter, but if your book isn't FOUND, you don't even make it to the filtering stage!

The Long Tail is a great book that I believe should be read by every self publisher. Doesn't matter whether you get it through Amazon or the library. Just get it.

Well, maybe you aren't made of money. You can't even afford the drive to the library! Here's a summary that says more about The Long Tail than I have here, and it links to an interview with Chris Anderson, the book's author.

FEATURE ARTICLE: I LOVE GOOGLE; WHY DOESN'T GOOGLE LOVE ME?

I've been thinking about disconnects lately. Here's one: I think writers are the best literary critics. Yet many (if not all!) writers are poor critics of their own work.

Oftentimes, when authors put up a website, they suffer a new disconnect. They depend on Google (and other search engines) to find them the exact information they're looking for on the 'net. But when it comes to their own book, they want to be found REGARDLESS of what the searcher is actually looking for.

Here's what I mean...

You've written a book about a rare Uruguayan butterfly, beautifully illustrated. It's a terrific book. Traditional publishers told you they would have published it if they thought there was more of a market for it.

You felt there IS a market for it and published it yourself. Good for you!

You've gone on to accept the conventional wisdom that you HAVE to have a website. You hire a "web designer" (or actually take on the project yourself) and create the classic one book website.

Now you wait for the search engines to send you your customers.

And wait...and wait...

But they don't come! Why isn't Google "working"???

Google IS working

Let's take a look at the keywords you and your web designer placed in the hidden code of your site.

For real! Follow along with your own site. Right-click on a blank portion of your home page and select the option that looks most like "View Source." Click. Now look for

META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=

What follows are your keywords.

If you're like the owner of most one (or two or three) book websites, your list looks something like this:

"book, books, non fiction, non fiction books, non-fiction, photography books, Steve Barancik, butterflies, Uruguayan butterflies"

Now let's examine the disconnect. You're telling Google that you want to be "found" for these keywords/search terms.

You want to be found for "Books"? Of course you do! It'd be great to come up #1 every time someone searched Books!

But if you were a searcher (not a searchee) looking for Books and the first page Google returned back to you was a book about a single Uruguayan butterfly...

...you'd start using Yahoo.

No, Google sends you to Amazon, and Google Books and Barnes and Noble, and the New York Times Book Review. Just as they should.

Time to get realistic

If you published that Uruguayan butterfly book, here are the search terms on your list that you have a reasonable chance of placing highly for:

• Uruguayan butterflies

And that might even be problematic, since you wrote only about a SINGLE Uruguayan butterfly!

The other keywords are much too broad. Google wouldn't be doing their job if they sent searchers your way for those keywords. Right?

So what does "realistic" look like? It means knowing that the search engines send your one book website pretty much the exact amount of traffic they SHOULD send you. Searches that bring up your site will likely consist of

a) a search on your name
b) a search on the precise title of your book
c) a "long tail" search that pretty much sums up your subject, like "photo book featuring rare south american butterfly."

Realistic means accepting your search traffic and being happy that you have a website you can send people to via email links and the url on your business card.

But what if I want more?

If you want more, you have to build more. Write more. Google sends traffic for more general searches to sites that have broader appeal. Want to be found for a search on Butterfly Books? Write a site about butterfly books - not just your own. And finance your self publishing efforts by selling those other people's books through Amazon; they'll commission you for each sale!

Another approach...

Say you're an expert on backyard butterfly gardening. Write a site that tells people how to create their own butterfly garden. That's what people tend to search for on the web: free information. Provide that free information and you're likely to run into grateful people who take an interest in you and buy your book!

Let's face it: a "one book bookstore" sounds kind of silly, doesn't it? The notion of a one book website attracting significant search traffic is pretty silly too.

Google doesn't hate you. They're just waiting for you to offer something MORE people want.

Thanks to David Evans for getting me thinking about this!

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP THE SHARED SELF PUBLISHING EXPERIENCE

I hear you asking, "Steve, what can I do to help you grow YOUR site?" (Yes, I hear voices.)

Good question. After all, as the site grows, traffic to the site grows, and direct traffic to your site from my site is likely to grow. But more importantly, INdirect traffic will grow. (Let's discuss indirect boosts to traffic - via the value the search engines ascribe to inbound links - in a future newsletter.)

1. Pass around this newsletter to others with an interest in self publishing. Suggest they subscribe.

2. Ask any friends who have self published to post to the appropriate section of the site.

3. Ask any illustrators you've worked with to post to the site. They have their own section of the site to post to.

4. If you've self published in a genre other than the one you've already contributed in, post again! Tell about that unique experience, and go into detail on your marketing.

5. Comment, comment, comment. I need more comments and ratings on all the contributions. This provides more content for the search engines to find, and it helps visitors to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have commented on EVERY contribution. Read my comment on YOUR contribution and offer a follow up!

THANK YOU