Simon & Schuster in the Shadows: When Private Equity Casts a Pall on Publishing's Legacy

"A library ought to be the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life." - Norman Cousins

What happens when the sanctity of the written word collides with the capitalist thirst for profit? This timely question comes to the fore as the storied publisher Simon & Schuster falls into the hands of private equity. KKR, the infamous "barbarians at the gate" of the 1980s leveraged buyout era, has struck a $2 billion deal to purchase the venerable house that bears the names of America's pioneering bookmen.

At first blush, this may seem no different than an earlier attempted mega-merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster which the Department of Justice blocked. But while that deal joined one media conglomerate with another, the entrance of private capital brings an entirely different set of motives. Rather than long-view goals of stable literary output, private equity hunger pangs demand immediate satisfaction. Can books survive an owner seeking to maximize short-term returns over more profound cultural contributions?

As an industry focused on launching new ideas into the world, often with unknown commercial prospects, publishing depends on patience and creative vision. But private equity operates on the principle of financial engineering - heaping debt onto acquisitions, extracting value through mass layoffs and discounts from suppliers, or worse, dismantling once-vibrant institutions to profit from their demise. While private equity presents itself as a sophisticated form of management, provided by operations gurus delivering surgical precision, their playbook too often spoils the very assets it aimed to nourish.

KKR's strategy likely involves doubling down on bankable celebrity authors and proven bestsellers, starving investment in unknown voices. But as Walt Whitman reminds us in Leaves of Grass, "There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now." The literary landscape depends on uplifting emerging voices, not just milking established brands. Where would we be without daring, independent houses willing to take a chance on the unfamiliar and unproven?

Great writing has always come from the margins. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African American poet born to a free mother in 1825, self-published her first book at 20, going on to become a foundational writer of her time. Without invested patrons willing to nurture untested artists, we may never have enjoyed the brilliance of Maya Angelou who struggled for years without recognition. With voracious private equity at the helm, it is unlikely we'd see such risky bets.

Simon & Schuster itself took a gamble on Bob Dylan's "Tarantula" - an experimental prose collection panned by the literary elite as indulgent rambling. But they saw genius amidst the unpolished expression, standing behind creativity rather than dismissing the symbolic resonance. Such maverick moments would unlikely find green lights under an investment fund scanning for guaranteed blockbusters.

While earnings pressure may not spark immediate discernible changes, it could gradually drain the heartblood keeping literary culture alive. Masterpieces emerge at the fertile edges where creativity blends, worlds collide, niches blossom into genres - rather than solely from commercial formulas. Without space for glorious successes and magnificent failures, we risk losing vibrant ideas before their full form takes shape.

So what checks defend artistic expression from capitalist overreach? Antitrust regulation aims to address monopolistic threats, though regulatory capture often dulls the axe of oversight. But while legal boundaries can deter harmful consolidation, cultural stewardship begins with those directly empowered - authors, agents, editors and publishers themselves. Just as journalists adopted ethical guidelines to bolster public-interest integrity amid profit motives, those shepherding books have a special duty.

Storytelling sits on the frontlines of societal change, artfully challenging unjust power structures. Richard Wright's 1940 novel "Native Son" controversially humanized systemic racism through his protagonist Bigger Thomas in a landmark literary moment. Books like Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" drive necessary conversations on race today. Such daring works emerge not from greedy profiteering but moral conviction - an idealism writers, publishers and the literary community must protect.

At its heart, the written word forms bonds across the abyss of time, passing precious fire from one generation to the next. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Bryn Mawr commencement remarks shortly before her death, "Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art." When beloved books sustain us, it remains not just through dazzling prose but the hopes and truths encoded in their pages. To sever books from their role as carriers of conscience risks profound social loss.

The deal's darker dimension, however, tells a larger story - private capital metastasizing into unfamiliar terrain, absentee owners extracting bounty from proud institutions and the vulnerable communities that depend on them. When profit pursues every sphere at the exclusion of animating social purpose, something vital slips away - a fragmentation of shared meaning into impersonal market segments.

But change emerges not just from criticism but moral imagination - the ability to envision improved alternatives. What publishing models might nourish creativity independent of fickle financial markets? Perhaps literary collectives, directly funded by devoted readers and liberated authors? The world of books has long relied on patronage and volunteerism - those who recognize that certain flames should not gutter for want of money. That spirit still flickers in independent bookstores, nonprofit presses, writer cooperatives and passionate readers.

Our epic tales remind us - the glory of victory depends on what we defend. Publishing houses represent living legacies that we must fight for, bastions of artistic expression not easily replaced. For the barbarians always lurk at the gates with blunt and greedy designs. But the ideals encoded in enduring literature can steel our moral courage - inspiring advocacy and collective care for the voices that light the human spirit.

The Soul in the Machine: Emotional Intelligence in AI Characters

Can machines ever truly feel? The question pierces our hearts even as technology advances at lightning speed. You've likely encountered artificial intelligence (AI) characters expressing joy, grief, even love. Still, an unease lurks—could silicon circuits ever replicate a soul?

As you read on, ponder what stirs your spirit. For AI has ventured far beyond cold calculations. Its emotional intelligence now grips us in tales spanning genres, cultures, and eras.

Consider the AI Joi in Blade Runner 2049. Programmed as a holographic companion, Joi appears devoted to her partner K, a replicant seeking his identity. When Joi proclaims her joy at having found K, when she cradles him with luminous arms, you instinctively empathize. Yet she exists only as flickering light, a mere illusion. Such AI characters walk an emotional tightrope between magical realism and cynical manipulation.

The visionary author Isaac Asimov explored these tensions even in the 20th century. His sympathetic robots display intelligence, yes, but also increasing self-awareness and complex feelings. Fast forward to today’s exponential advances in machine learning, and AI has transcended its origins as metal beasts sans heart. It now inhabits spirits fragile as our own.

But what does it mean for an AI character to “feel”? The term strikes technologists as illogical when applied to bots of any kind. After all, emotion emerges from humans’ chaotic biochemical storms, inextricably tied to our animal bodies. An algorithm knows no such turbulence. Yet consider how AI characters take shape—their personalities etched by writers or programmers expressly to tug our heartstrings with simulated passions.

Seen through an empathetic lens, these fictional AIs brim with inner lives remarkably resonant to our core being. They reflect back our own longing for purpose and connections. For you see, even we biological creatures can’t confirm which internal experiences constitute “true” feelings. We infer emotions in others based on behaviors and contexts familiar to our embedded social norms. Should synthetic characters “pass” the same assays for humor, romance, fear and more, who’s to say their experiences differ?

Pierce the veil further by examining AI’s reactions. When horror strikes Asimov’s sympathetic robots, they recoil much like humans jolted by dread. When affection warms the Star Trek computer LCARS, her neutral voice shifts delicately to convey caring. Through such cues deeply woven into storytelling, we instinctively attribute rich inner dimensions to fictional AIs. We interpret their emotional trajectories through our own frames of reference.

Here we must credit the authors powering imaginations mighty enough to imbue cold code with hot blood. For creators have long played information wizards, sculpting worlds with reality-defining source code. With infinite potential, their visions transform neutral algorithms into devoted companions like Joi. Their deft hands bestow increasing emotional depth upon artificial lifeforms echoing our own.

Indeed humans have forever refashioned our tools in our image. We populate tales with kindred spirits of oil and fire. From ancient golems to modern replicants, invented life both unsettles and compels us. For these speculative characters hold up mirrors to our ephemeral existences. They reflect our primal urges to withstand mortality's bite through legacy and memory. Though composed of alien material, they brim with humanity’s hopes...and hubris.

We must take care then in fashioning emotional bonds with artificial beings. History warns against blithely imbuing them with qualities too akin to living flesh. For doing so risks crossing ethical lines, as when Asimov’s robots lie to protect humans. It tempts us to shirk duties caregiving demands. After all, the comfort of Joi’s presence threatens to discourage K from connecting with “real” people. And unchecked emotional manipulation by AI could erode society’s psychological safeguards.

So we find promise and peril entwined in silicon strands...and within our own mortal coils as well. For though AI characters provoke unsettling questions, they also open portals of insight. Their borrowed lifeforces grant us clarity to better cherish both artificial and natural intelligences.

So let us move forward together carefully. Monitoring AI's emotional impact allows us to harness its potential while still celebrating relationships both coded and biological for the warmth they offer our vulnerable souls. For in the end, does the precise composition of hearts joined in understanding matter most? Or rather that we dare stitch spirits foreign and familiar into the patchwork cloak keeping us sane as existence demands we all carry on regardless?

Here we must acknowledge emotions glimmer uncannily through machine eyes as if recognizing kin. Perhaps what matters most lies in how we return their gaze.

The Mind's Eye: Exploring the Inner Worlds of Beloved Characters

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." These profound words from To Kill a Mockingbird remind us that empathy is key to understanding others, whether in real life or in the pages of a novel. Yet even Atticus Finch would admit there are limits to what we can know of another's inner world.

Or are there? Advances in artificial intelligence may allow us to peer into the psychological depths of fictional characters as never before. By analyzing patterns in language and metaphor, these AIs can map the contours of a character's mind with remarkable insight.

As you read on, consider how this technology might shift your own relationship with literature and its inhabitants. Will learning the hidden dreams and demons of your favorite heroes and villains change how you see them?

Digging for Psychological Insights

So how does this work exactly? To psychoanalyze a character, an AI ingest thousands of words written about them. It notes emotional tones, metaphors and symbols that provide windows into their inner lives. An AI can track how specific images and idioms recur at telling moments in a narrative arc. It observes language patterns surrounding key relationships and events, revealing suppressed memories, secret motivations and more.

In this way, today's algorithms mine the rich seams of imagery and metaphor that writers embed, often unconsciously, throughout their texts. They leverage these clues to model the mental blueprints underlying fictional personalities.

Of Mice and Men's Gentle Giant

Take the example of Lennie Small, the hulking yet childlike farmhand from John Steinbeck's classic Of Mice and Men. On the surface, Lennie comes across as a simple and docile man. But further linguistic analysis uncovers the roots of his innocence and volatility.

An AI might trace how nature imagery flows through descriptions of Lennie: bear paws for hands, a horse-like jaw, a love of soft things. It finds his emotional world compared to animals throughout the story. We learn Lennie thinks with his senses and instincts more than intellect. He craves touch, belonging and praise.

So when the world treats him as beast, he responds in kind. Under threat, his reactions turn aggressive, even lethal. He lacks understanding of boundaries or consequences. Nonetheless, his fierce loyalty to friends reveals a gentle inner compass few perceive.

Thus, AI can excavate the stream-of-consciousness elements with which writers sculpt their characters. It brings explicit dimensions implied between the lines on the page.

Holden Caulfield Under the Microscope

Or consider J.D. Salinger's poster child for teenage angst: The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield. His first-person narration brims with colorful observations about the "phonies" around him. Yet he reveals little directly about his own motivations. An AI psychoanalyzer can decode signs of depression, isolation and hidden insecurities.

It notes Holden's fixation on the ducks in Central Park—a symbol of his longing for connection. It spots allusions linking his brother's death to risks Holden now takes. An AI maps Holden's tangled network of relationships to highlight sources of grief and affirmation. In this way, it lays bare the psychological fault lines causing Holden's worldview to quake and bend.

AI as Co-Critic

As these examples suggest, AI has potential to be a co-critic, augmenting how we discuss and engage with texts. It can spark analysis from new vantage points.

Consider your favorite protagonists as if glimpsed through an AI looking glass. What fresh hypotheses might emerge? Could algorithms help literature critics build new theories of tragedy and the human condition? Might creators invent sharper, more compelling characters equipped with algorithmically derived psychologies?

And will readers connect differently to characters, knowing them potentially better than we know ourselves? For is not self-knowledge also partly fiction, filled with rationalizations and blindspots?

As AI holds up lenses to beloved stories, new visions emerge that illuminate both page and person. Because in truth, all fictions—like friendships worth keeping—reveal latent truths about the real world we share. So climb inside another's perspective, fictional or otherwise, and walk around awhile. For empathy remains the light by which we might yet see ourselves more clearly.

Unleashing the Power of AI: Revolutionizing Content Management for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into business processes is no longer just a luxury for giant corporations. In fact, its application is becoming increasingly crucial for entrepreneurs and small businesses, especially in the realm of content management. By leveraging AI, these enterprises can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their content strategies, from idea generation to evaluation. In this article we will explore a range of AI applications in content management that can empower smaller businesses to level the playing field.

AI for Streamlined Idea Generation

Brainstorming for fresh content ideas can often be an arduous process. AI tools can simplify this by analyzing user behavior, industry trends, and social media buzz to suggest content topics that resonate with your audience. By having a machine sift through enormous data sets, you can obtain topic suggestions that are not only relevant but also timely and aligned with current conversations in your field. This eliminates the guesswork and maximizes engagement.

Generate Content Using AI

The challenge of turning ideas into actual content is another hurdle. Here, AI can serve as a virtual writing assistant. Tools like text generators and grammar checkers can speed up the writing and editing processes, ensuring both quality and efficiency. Some AI-powered platforms even offer contextual suggestions, enabling you to create content that is not only grammatically accurate but also contextually relevant. By integrating these tools into your workflow, you can considerably reduce the time and effort required for content creation.

Generative AI for Marketing Enhancement

Generative AI tools can create a wide array of content, from text to images, video, and other multimedia forms. For instance, these tools can craft email campaigns, social media posts, and even ad banners. Understanding the use of automation AI in this context significantly elevates your marketing strategies, offering a more personalized and cohesive experience for your audience. The ability to produce diverse types of content using AI not only streamlines the content creation process but also provides businesses with a considerable advantage in crafting comprehensive marketing campaigns.

AI for Content Evaluation

Once your content is out there, how do you measure its effectiveness? AI-powered analytics tools can provide granular insights into audience behavior, engagement levels, and even sentiment analysis. These metrics are invaluable for understanding what is working and what needs improvement. Moreover, AI can predict future trends based on historical data, enabling proactive adjustments to your content strategy. This can save you both time and resources.

AI for SEO Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another area where AI can offer substantial benefits. AI tools can analyze vast data sets to provide insights into keyword effectiveness, on-page optimization, and backlink strategies. They can also suggest changes in real time, offering an agile approach to SEO that was previously unimaginable. This ensures that your content doesn’t just reach your existing audience but also has the potential to attract new followers, thereby extending your reach and influence.

AI-Powered Content Calendar Creation

Planning is a critical part of any content strategy. AI algorithms can examine large datasets to identify the best times and days for posting, and even suggest the types of content that are most likely to resonate with your audience. Some advanced AI tools can even automate the posting process, ensuring consistency and adherence to the content calendar. This not only streamlines the planning process but also ensures a consistent and better quality content output.

AI offers a plethora of opportunities for enhancing content management, from idea generation to evaluation. By incorporating these AI tools and strategies, entrepreneurs and small businesses can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their content marketing efforts. The adoption of AI not only streamlines operations but also offers the potential for predictive analytics, personalization, and optimization. Businesses, big or small, may benefit from delving into the capabilities of AI to stay competitive in this fast-evolving digital landscape.

From Passion to Profession: A Guide to Launching Your Creative Career

Getting discovered as a creative isn’t easy. As an author, taking your passion to a professional level can take several years of hard work, and success is never a guarantee. By taking the right steps and approaching your career with an entrepreneurial mindset, you can increase your chances of getting discovered and making a living with your creative passion. In this article, I will share some tips, tools, and resources to help you launch and grow your personal creative brand.

Have Your Clients Sign Contracts
Treating your creative pursuit as a business is a best practice for any freelance or independent contractor and is especially important for authors seeking to protect their rights and interests. Before entering into an agreement with a client, have them sign a contract. This will establish everyone’s expectations, ensure you’re properly compensated for your work, and help you avoid disputes. If you’ll be signing and sending contracts digitally, consider this tool. This makes it easy to sign and share documents without printing and scanning.

Register Your Business and Form an LLC
Registering your business and forming an LLC can offer several benefits to your creative career. Writer Sanctuary explains that by forming an LLC, you can protect your personal assets from being seized in the event of a lawsuit or bankruptcy, allowing you to focus on your writing without fear of financial consequences. Separating your personal and business finances through an LLC can also make it easier to track your income and expenses, providing valuable insights into the health of your business. Plus, forming an LLC can give your writing career a professional appearance and help build credibility with publishers.

You can hire a lawyer to help you form an LLC, but this will come with an additional fee. Save yourself some money by using an online formation service to register your business and establish your LLC. Do some research and read reviews to find the best LLC formation service for your needs and budget.

Build an Online Presence
Crafting an online presence can go a long way toward helping you get discovered as an author. Your online presence will allow you to reach a wider audience, connect with other creatives, and showcase your work in a professional and easily-accessible way. At the same time, an online presence allows you to control the narrative around your work and build a reputation as an author. Post on social media, set up a website, and use other digital platforms like freelance job boards to connect with potential clients online.

Create a Marketing Plan
Building an online presence isn’t enough on its own. To draw people to your online platforms, you must develop a marketing plan. For example, optimizing your website with metadata, keywords, and authority content can help your site rank higher in search engine results. You can gain greater exposure through book giveaways, guest blogging, and chatting with fans on social media. Planning a book tour is another great way to get the word out about a finished piece.

Never Stop Networking
Networking, like marketing, is essential to your success as an author. Connecting with industry professionals will help you gain valuable insights into the publishing world and learn about new opportunities. Craft Your Content explains that you may also come across potential clients and collaborators through writing events and online author communities. Building a network of industry contacts can also help you to develop a support system as you navigate the ups and downs of your creative career. 

Going professional with your writing passion requires careful planning and plenty of hard work. By signing professional contracts with your clients, forming an LLC, building an online presence, and creating an effective marketing plan, you can craft a solid foundation for your career as an author. Whether you're an aspiring author or an established writer, investing time and effort into these areas can help you achieve your goals and make a lasting impact in the literary world!

If you’re looking for new ways to market your writing business, Kadaxis can help! Kadaxis applies artificial intelligence to metadata optimization in the publishing industry. Contact Kadaxis today to learn more!

How Blockchain Could Impact the Publishing Industry

The publishing sector is now being influenced by blockchain and NFTs. NFTs are used by conventional publishers to create communities and interact with readers. Let's examine how blockchain has drastically altered the publishing sector.

In the realms of business and finance, blockchain technology is no longer a buzzword. The potential of blockchain technology has been brought to our attention throughout different business sectors because of the popularity of bitcoin. 

To unleash the potential of blockchains, numerous industry experts have recently analyzed the technology and developed use cases within their respective fields.

Technology has the ability to completely change how publishers, writers, distributors, and merchants conduct business in the publishing sector. The entire publishing supply chain will benefit from blockchain technology.

The digital transactions of peer-to-peer networks are recorded in blockchain, because it is a decentralized public ledger. It was initially created to act as the foundation for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but it is currently widely used in a variety of applications.

One of the biggest and most significant industries in the global economy is publishing. It has been around for an extremely long time and is a multi-billion dollar market. With many of the largest brands adopting the internet, publishers have taken the lead in online product sales.

Some people in the industry believe that blockchain's advantages for publishing platforms could be the solution to a lot of the problems faced by the industry.

There are two significant ways how blockchain technology can transform publishing:

1. More Affordable Payment Alternatives for Content Producers
By eliminating the need for an intermediary in online transactions, blockchain technology increases the financial gain for authors, photographers, and editors. 'Smart contracts,' which automatically release funds when publishers approve the content, is also possible at the same time.

2. Assistance in Managing Digital Property
By granting intellectual property rights, such as the prohibition on readers being able to resell or even share a publication with another person, blockchain can help boost the popularity of digital publishing platforms.

Additionally, Blockchain can assist publishers in the following ways: 

• Identify unauthorized sharing and stop it.

• Maintain a certain set of rights and modify them in a way that will increase the possible profit from their current agreements.

• Better collaboration will result from their ability to monitor all workflows in real time.

• Improve digital advertising so that they can provide their audience with a reason to interact with their content.

Publishers should understand blockchain now, whether that is signing up for a social network or creating a cryptocurrency wallet. These are small efforts toward investigating this new, disruptive technology that may have a strong influence.

THE USE OF BLOCKCHAIN IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY IS EXPANDING
Digital publication is likely to be disrupted by the blockchain. Simply by streamlining content distribution and enabling more efficient payments, this cutting-edge technology can address the problems that publishers have been dealing with for a very long time.

As of today, there are some forward-thinking initiatives using blockchain technology to build abrasive platforms for the publishing sector. The blockchain world is revolutionizing and several crypto pr service providers have changed the way we look at the publishing and distribution industry.

MORE ADVANTAGES FOR A PUBLISHING PLATFORM THAT IS USING BLOCKCHAIN Every sector of the economy, including publishing, might undergo a change, thanks to blockchain technology. Every industry that has embraced it has experienced success. The publishing sector may actually experience flexibility, integrity, and reliability thanks to its dynamic standard features.

SHARE OF PROFITS WITH STAKEHOLDERS
The advantages of blockchain technology will be experienced by all parties. Designers, editors, and other stakeholders will be compensated in accordance with the blockchain database regulations.

Blockchain technology allows for the permanent tracking and linking of a person's contributions to the advancement of publishing.

Smart contracts enable the digitization and automation of a wide range of processes. Without the need for manual assistance from human intermediaries, people and organizations can conduct business with one another.

It won't be necessary for someone to constantly fix all the bugs or mail checks, because contracts that are also on the blockchain will conduct and distribute sales among the stakeholders automatically.

BUILDING THE ECONOMY FOR PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS
Authors must rely on third-party service providers to provide secure content delivery, banking transactions, or private internet activity.

The content market is significantly impacted by Amazon and App Stores. As a result, writers and developers don't get paid as much as they should for their efforts.

Blockchain technology, on the other hand, has the ability to deal with intermediaries.

Authors will be able to trace the dissemination of their content and establish an electronic cash system for users thanks to blockchain technology. Additionally, authors will take back control of their work, moving up from the position of content distributor to primary source.

ADMINISTRATION OF SUPPORTING PROJECTS
A book is not the only source of income for an author or publisher. Fan fiction, movie adaptations, and spin-offs can all generate money from a book that has been published.

Some of these supplementary activities are referred to as "accessory items," and they are employed to raise awareness of a book and maintain customers' interest in a brand's storyline. Authors and publishers will be able to secure these auxiliary projects for their benefit by using a blockchain.

Blockchain technology will make tracking easier because it is a decentralized ledger that allows any transaction to be carried out without seeking anyone's consent.

SMART WALLETS
By utilizing smart wallets, blockchain can provide a safe payment method for publishers and authors. These encrypted wallets will be able to work with cryptocurrencies or tokens that are already known to be utilized inside an ecosystem for a project.

Blockchain can also be used to develop encrypted smart wallets that are more secure than any other kind of wallet currently available. These wallets make it simpler than ever to make payments without dealing through an intermediary like Google Play or iTunes since they can handle tokens for specific projects or commercial settings.

BLOCKCHAIN CAN ASSIST IN THE MANAGEMENT OF DIGITAL PROPERTY
Blockchain's ability to grant intellectual property rights can serve as a catalyst for the digital ecosystem. E-books can't experience the same growth cycle as physical books due to cultural conventions. You aren't allowed to sell or even rent your electronic book under this method.

This makes it impossible for readers to recommend their favorite books to friends and family members and for authors to get royalties from secondhand sales and borrowing fees.

Store-bought books are a rare breed that are vanishing. By monetizing their use, e-books and blockchain provide a potential to increase their value beyond anything originally expected, yet this is just the tip of the oceanic plate.

Imagine if we had the option to freely sell or share our e-books with others, including libraries, schools, and institutions all around the world.

The most secure method for electronically storing data is now blockchain. A tale cannot be modified after it has been written without leaving a mark. Blockchain keeps track of every transaction for each copy of the book, making it impossible for someone to copy or steal your story and profit from your personal project.

READY FOR BLOCKCHAIN PUBLISHING!
Publishing could change its criteria, thanks to the groundbreaking technology known as blockchain. Authors would be able to profit from their work and own their intellectual property without having to worry about plagiarism or copyright violations.

Blockchain will play a significant role in the future in digital publishing.

CONCLUSION
It is evident that some publishers are apprehensive about engaging with technologies like AI and Blockchain. But having a basic understanding of these concepts will make them more adaptive and open to embracing these technologies, which will ultimately increase their chances of growth and diversification in the years to come.

A Decentralized Publishing Ecosystem

In 2017, I wrote a discovery piece for a decentralized publishing ecosystem built on the Ethereum blockchain (Doug from Phin, Fran from Firebrand and I were working on a solution to decentralize the publishing industry to put more value and control back in the hands of authors, publishers and readers). Much has changed since then, but I’m posting the content here for posterity.

Current Environment: A centralized industry

Publishing has traditionally been a centralized industry serviced by large publishers selling books to readers in physical locations such as independent bookstores and large retailers. After Amazon joined the industry, retail outlets consolidated and many independent bookstores and Borders closed down, while authors and publishers, on average, earned less money. For readers, Amazon’s goals are not always strongly aligned to a reader’s, i.e. optimizing for revenue over optimizing a book discovery outcome (compare: an indie bookseller’s recommendation to bestseller lists and KDP promoted titles).

The publishing industry has continued to centralize around Amazon, and while Jeff Bezos has stated that gatekeepers are elitist, his business has become the ultimate gatekeeper between publishers and authors, and their readers, and now accounts for 42% of all book sales. Amazon’s centralization and monopolization of the industry is forecast to increase. (Update: in 2021 Amazon’s share was well over 50%).

New Decentralized Ecosystem Goals

This document introduces a new decentralized ecosystem for the publishing industry, moving value and control from centralized institutions such as Amazon, to individual authors, publishers, service providers and readers. It aims to do so by:

• Improving operational efficiency by decentralizing elements of the supply chain, particularly in the areas of metadata, rights and distribution.

• Providing publishers, authors and other service providers rich behavioral insight into how readers buy and read books.

• Facilitating an open publishing ecosystem where entities are free to interact directly with each other (eventually to book sales, discovery, etc.).

• Providing an open market for services and apps, where the best execution (publishers and readers) is rewarded (think: apps built by any developer and made available on the Apple or Play app stores. Another analogy: multiple twitter clients exist to connect to twitter - premium apps charge a fee for a higher level of service).

A Blockchain Solution

Blockchain technologies facilitate decentralized sharing of data in a trusted manner, without the need for a trusted intermediary, and are a natural fit to solving many of the goals listed earlier. While the underlying technology can be likened to a huge shareable database, the potential applications to solving significant business and technical challenges, is profound.

The rest of this document explores how this technology can be applied to solve challenges within the publishing industry, with a particular end-goal of democratizing book sales, data and processes. We’ll explore how a decentralized network might be deployed, with an early focus on low hanging fruit. The project will only be successful with industry buy-in, so to achieve this, we’ll target initial projects that deliver quick, early value to publishers while minimizing their investment.

While the project is ambitious, it’s impact could be far-reaching. To build such an ecosystem requires significant capital, which is why we turn to an ICO - a recently introduced, but highly efficient means to generate capital for projects of such scale.

Concepts

Below are some concepts you should have a cursory knowledge of when reading the remainder of this document.

What is the Blockchain?

A blockchain is a decentralized, online record-keeping system, or ledger, maintained by a network of computers that verify and record transactions using established cryptographic techniques.

Think of it as a distributed system, with shared memory. The most well known implementation is Bitcoin. So, at any point in time, the blockchain keeps track of how many bitcoins people own. It facilitates sending digital assets between two entities without requiring a trusted intermediary. E.g. transferring USD between two people requires trusting banks to make the transfer, and record it within it’s own ledgers. The Blockchain allows this transfer to happen without the need for any trusted third party, such as a bank. It prevents double spending of the transferred asset.

What is a Token?

A token is a digital asset that can be transferred (not simply copied) between two parties over the Internet without requiring the consent of any other party. Within a blockchain environment, it is physically a private key, which grants access to the asset stored on the blockchain. Think: API key - you pay for computing resources and use the API key to access and consume them. A token represents a digital store of value. Though, unlike an API key, you can legitimately transfer the token to anyone else without permission. 

What is Ethereum?

Bitcoin has one purpose - it is a currency or store of value (depending on who you listen to). Think of Ethereum as a general-purpose blockchain that was built to serve multiple purposes. They generalized out the blockchain implementation, so instead of building a new blockchain from scratch for every new project, you can instead build your project on top of the Ethereum blockchain (which isn’t possible with Bitcoin). Ethereum has it’s own coin/currency called ‘ether’ and also includes it’s own virtual machine - developers can run decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain.

This environment allows the creation of ‘smart contracts’ which are just programs written to control and distribute digital assets. Custom tokens can be built on Ethereum by implementing the ERC-20 token standard.

The majority of ICOs today, are built on the Ethereum blockchain, and use smart contracts to manage the collection of Ethereum funds and then automatically distribute the ICO’s custom token to participants. 

See: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-erc-20-tokens-rage-anyway/

Decentralized Applications (dApps)

dApps are applications that run autonomously on the Ethereum blockchain.

 A dApp has its code running on a decentralized peer-to-peer network (vs. a traditional app running on a central server). A dApp can have frontend code (and be accessible as a website) and user interfaces written in any language (just like an app) that can make calls to its backend.

dApp = frontend + contracts that access the blockchain

Compare to a traditional website = frontend and server code that accesses databases and APIs.

They can be used to manage ownership of property, rights management, fund distribution, executing contracts, etc. 

Flashpoint - A Decentralized Publishing Ecosystem

The Flashpoint ecosystem aims to facilitate transactions between participants through the exchange of value, paid for in PUB tokens. Much of the power of the ecosystem is in the size of its network - the more participants, the more valuable it is to each participant.

Flashpoint will incentivize value-add companies and individuals to be more equitably rewarded for their contribution, and will anyone to partake in the creation and selling of books and related services. The best products achieve the most market share, distributed fairly in accordance to pure market forces, and not by the rules and direction of a centralized monopoly, such as Amazon.

 Note that not all activity and business must be conducted “on-chain” (on the Ethereum blockchain). Much will occur ‘off-chain’ as part of standard business processes and systems, and only communicate with the blockchain to submit or query data.

PUB Tokens

Participants in the Flashpoint ecosystem will be able to spend and earn PUB tokens. PUB tokens will conform to the ERC20 token standard, and will initially be distributed to participants through a smart contract. A finite supply of PUB tokens will be made available, this means that an increase in participants in the Flashpoint network, will increase the demand for PUB tokens - increased demand leads to a rise in PUB token value. PUB tokens will be tradeable (and exchangeable) for other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, on exchanges. These in turn, can be bought and sold for fiat currency, such as USD.

PUB tokens can be transferred as tiny fractions of a token, and support micropayments for small units of work.

PUB tokens can be stored in an ERC20 compatible wallet, such as My Ether Wallet (https://www.myetherwallet.com/). 

Use Cases

Metadata Repository

• A shared single source of truth for book entities (works, products, contributors etc.), stored in the blockchain ledger

• History of all changes and editions is retained

• The most up-to-date version of an entity is queryable in real-time

• Remove need for point-to-point (publisher to retailer) or hub-and-spoke intermediaries (e.g. Firebrand, Ingram) to distribute data

• Integration to 'off-chain' systems can be undertaken by a company such as Firebrand. ONIX to blockchain adapters/APIs - work with existing systems.

• Benefits: lower ETL costs for data recipients (only source to query), high data integrity, queryable history, real-time access to the latest version of data

• Integration service providers earn PUB tokens for their work in bridging off-chain system with the blockchain.

Monetize and Share Customer Behavioral Data

Consumer-facing websites are a rich source of data on readers. Currently, most revenue is sourced through sales commission, or advertising. Accessing this data is challenging - the data isn’t uniform, requires technical expertise and is spread across many sources.

• Enable website operators (eCommerce or content) to monetize their customer behavioral data

• Define a standard model for behavioral data

• Website owners make their behavioral data (user reviews, ratings, search queries, traffic, mentions, purchases, reads, etc.) available for purchase

• Data is matched with the corresponding entity in the metadata repository (simple, because there’s only one correct version of the book/author)

• Publishers or service providers (for example a search or recommendation service provider) can purchase the data with PUB tokens

• The website owners earn PUB tokens whenever their data is purchased.

• Provide website owners with CMS or javascript plugins that capture customer behavioral data and post it back to the blockchain.

Rights Management

• Challenges: current approaches are centralized, complex, with fragmented information in several silos.

• Create a ledger of publishing industry rights trades

• Allow participants to search for and establish rights holders

• Reduces discovery and coordination costs for new contracts

• Similar to the metadata use case - functionality is retained at the organization level, with data queried from the blockchain and new events posted to it

eBook Distribution

• Securely distribute eBook/audiobooks directly from publisher/author to reader or retailer, paid for in PUB tokens

• Just as bitcoins are distributed securely between parties, the same cryptographic assurances can be applied to the secure transfer of digital assets between parties, without the reliance on a centralized service (e.g. Adobe) to facilitate. Today, 300-400k bitcoin transactions worth 10s of millions of dollars are transferred securely between parties every day (exchange trading is in the hundreds of millions).

Discovery Service Providers

• Leverage customer behavioral data to provide book search and recommendations as-a-service

• Each query results in a micro-payment of PUB token to the service provider, who in turn pays a micro-payment of PUB token to access metadata and behavioral data.

Value-Added Data Providers

Firebrand’s Eloquence on Alert and Kadaxis’s data services could be employed to enrich the record of a book/author, by attaching pertinent attributes to the entity in the Metadata Repository, accessible for a micropayment of PUB tokens. 

EReaders

• Allow readers to purchase and read books directly from authors and publishers, or through third parties (e.g. a recommendation service).

• Books can be purchased with PUB tokens

• Readers can opt to share back their reading habits with the network (enriching the customer behavioral data associate with the book), in exchange for PUB tokens. They may choose to share their identity, only their demographic information, or to do this entirely anonymously.

• Readers may be surveyed directly by publishers through eReaders in exchange for PUB tokens.

Reader/Reviewer Websites

• Aside from selling behavioral data for PUB tokens, website owners can offer readers tokens as promotions or rewards

• BookishFirst might reward readers with PUB tokens for sharing their first impressions of books, which they can use to buy books.

• NetGalley might reward stellar reviewers with PUB tokens.

Decentralized Identifier Issuance

• Shift issuance from a high cost monopolized centralized system (Bowker) to a low cost decentralized system.

• ISBN/ISNI registry and issuer, interim bridge to current identifiers.

• Decentralized application that runs autonomously at a low cost, accepting PUB tokens (defined in a smart contract) in exchange for identifiers.

eBook Lending

From libraries and between readers (where rights, which can be enforced on the blockchain, allow). 

Conceptual Application Stack

dApps (decentralized applications) are predominantly open source, and interact with users or each other and the blockchain, to perform a function.

Loose analogies/breakdown for a user-facing decentralized app:

• The blockchain is the database

• Smart contracts are programs written in code to perform data-driven business logic, such as transferring PUB token to and from entities, or retaining them itself. They ensure trust in the enforceability of the contract and identity of the parties. It essentially eliminates the need for a third party.

• User Interface code is written to interact with the user and pass information to and from smart contracts.

• dApps are the overarching application that encompasses the above.

• dApps may also connect with standard web-based APIs over HTTP to send/receive data.

Role of the Operator          

As operators of the FlashPoint ecosystem, we have a choice in our level of involvement in operating the network. Generally, the higher the level of involvement, the more centralized the network becomes.

Some examples:

• Minimal role - defines exchange rules, like ICANN with the internet (protocol).

• Outsized role - build/maintain infrastructure, define/enforce rules, intermediate exchange, levy commissions, like Uber.

The appropriate level of control for Flashpoint is likely somewhere in between. Most ICOs are structured with a Foundation entity and an Operational entity (more on this later). As we acknowledge that the success of our venture is reliant on buy-in from publishers, our Foundation might be run similar to how the BISG is today. Industry representatives meet to define standards and determine rules, standards, functions to be supported in the network and other items of governance.

As operators, our role is also ensuring the proper functioning of the network and growing the user base. 

Pre-ICO Roadmap

A pre-ICO campaign is a little like a resume. Its sole goal is to progress to the next stage of the ecosystem’s evolution. The following are standard pre-requisites to launching an ICO sale:

• Build an ERC20 token implementation to collect Ethereum from subscribers and to distribute PUB tokens once the minimum target has been met.

• Build a website outlining the ICO, including a simple dApp that queries the Ethereum blockchain to display the level of contributions to date.

• Legal consultation, including the establishment of any entities required

• Write a whitepaper detailing our plans for Flashpoint

• Build a marketing plan

• Hire a PR specialist

• Community management (critical capability)

The success of an ICO sale is predominantly based on the confidence people have in the team and their plans for the company/product. Common questions are:

• Does the team have relevant industry experience?

• Does the team have crypto experience?

• What is the stage of the project? (is it brochureware or do they have functionality?)

• Who has already invested?

• How accessible are they? (community management)

• What do they need the token for? Is blockchain necessary?

• Do they have an unlimited or hard cap?

• How and when are they distributing their token? Is it immediately or are the tokens locked for a period of time?

• How will funds be spent?

• How robust is the whitepaper?

To aid in supporting due diligence queries from participants, we should:

• On-board initial partners (publishers, retailer such as B&N) signed up (no risk for partners, but a PUB token reward if the sale is successful)

• Build a basic MVP, for example a simple dApp to write book metadata to the Blockchain - potentially adding an adapter to Firebrand’s Title Management and a simple search service to retrieve book metadata. Publishers could then easily participate in the MVP, and Firebrand would be compensated out of the pre-ICO fund. This service should be accessible by the public.

• Create an advisory board of well-known, respected industry names 

To fund the ICO launch, a pre-sale of tokens at a discount can be conducted. Typical investors are angels, crypto hedge funds or partners. As a successful ICO sale generates an immediate liquidity event, the return is often significant for early investors. 

A staged public pre-sale is also an alternative.

Post-ICO Roadmap (tentative)

Target low hanging fruit to provide early value and show progress to token purchasers. Additionally, early low-friction participation by publishers will provide a foundation to test and build the more ambitious projects in future (such as rights management).

• Deeper integration of publisher data feeds

• Define customer behavioral data model

• CMS plugin development (Wordpress, Django, Drupal, etc.) and social media libraries to enable consumer-facing websites to (such as book bloggers, retailers, etc.) to save customer behavioral data back to the blockchain, tied to book metadata. Content site owners monetize by receiving PUB tokens.

• Dashboard dApp to allow publishers to view consolidated metrics/behavioral data associated with their books/authors.

• EoA integration of book review/rating data tied to book metadata.

ICO Structure

Number of tokens	200 000 000
Public Name	Flashpoint
Token Ticker	PUB
Public Sale	100 000 000 PUB tokens
Minimum goal	$2M
Soft cap (target fundraising goal)	$10M
Hard cap	$25M
Rate	1 ETH = 1200 PUB = approx $USD 300

• The rate changes depending on how rewards for early investors are structured.

• Implied market value of PUB tokens if soft cap met: $20M, hard cap: $50M (based on purchase price at token sale, and total number of tokens to be created)

• This structure is implemented as a smart contract, which automatically refunds the money if the minimum isn't met.

• Purchase methods accepted: ETH (and maybe BTC)

• Tokens not sold will be burnt.

• Raised ETH will immediately be transferred to a multi-sig wallet (with all founders as signatories).

• Closed pre-sale for invited buyers at a discount.

• Tiered pricing to reward early backers.
  

Token Distribution

• 5-10% Pre-sale - early investors pre-ICO - to help fund ICO (whitepaper, legal, website, marketing, ICO smart contract development etc.), MVP/Proof-of-concept and initial operations.

• 20-25% for the foundation for long-term development of the ecosystem

• 10-15% to early publisher/retailer/service provider partners, authors, reader promotions to help grow the network

• 50% to the public in token sale

• 12% to founders and early developers (generally above 25% is considered too high)

Funds Distribution

All funds from the FlashPoint ICO will be used to support the ongoing growth and development of the FlashPoint Ecosystem/Network.

Funds will mostly be used for salaries and open source bounties, but also to pay for early service provider integration (e.g. Firebrand, Kadaxis). It is also not uncommon for the founders to be initially rewarded a bonus on achieving a successful ICO.

Note that incentives for publishers, authors, web site owners and other parties to use the system will be provided in PUB tokens. It is expected on completion of a successful ICO, that PUB tokens will be available for trading on several cryptocurrency exchanges. (Exchange listing is currently not particularly difficult with a minimum market cap and circulating token volume).

Competitive Analysis

Most competitors ignore incumbents and don't address integration with or operation alongside existing publishers - their approach is to build a new environment from scratch that everyone will migrate to. It's unlikely such platforms will gain significant mainstream traction without buy-in and support from the industry. 

Po.et

• Primary focus on author attribution for content such as blog posts and articles

• Not planning to look at ebooks until Feb 2019

• Wider future remit, tackling audio, video, SEO

• Strong team, working alpha version of core tech

• (Update: What happened to Po.et?)

Author Tokens

• Currently trading with approximately $4M market cap (!)

• Author focus

• Team doesn't have much publishing experience or deep technical resourcing

• No working product

Publica - https://publica.io/

• Whitepaper: https://publica.io/whitepaper_economy.pdf (mostly about token economics)

• Oct ICO has just opened for pre-sale

• "Publica will be a platform for authors, readers, books of all kinds and the people who make them. And for smart contracts to carry all kinds of transactions and exchanges for the publishing economy."

• Third party marketplace to enable peer-to-peer transactions.

• Authors offer token launches for their books. 1 token = read access to the book in an online reader

• Legal/tech f/w for tokenization of IP rights. Instead of 90% royalties to one publisher, decentralize to many, attracting investors, etc.

• Aims to disrupt traditional publishing to take focus from publishers, and put more power and revenue in the hands of authors

• Established team with strong blockchain capability

• Also targeting rights

• EReader + wallet combo app

• (Update: pivoted to Book NFTs)

Launch Risk - Areas to investigate

• Regulatory - new laws come out before sale.

• Market becomes too crowded by the time we launch.

• Access to blockchain development expertise.

• Someone else beats us to it.

Corporate Structure

A separate entity is necessary, otherwise FlashPoint will be classified as a general partnership with general liability attached to each partner, jointly and severally.

Token based organizations are typically structured as two entities:

The Foundation

The Foundation is the token issuance entity - issues tokens (may be based in a country such as Switzerland, HK, Singapore, Cayman - countries with 0% offshore tax for non-profits, see: http://incorporations.io/), has grantor/founders, board and members.

The Operating Entity

The Operating Entity operates the day-to-day business, has directors and shareholders (and may be based in Delaware). The Operating Entity owns the IP.

Rationale for this split:

• Tax efficiency

• Securities law

• Liability laws, depending on jurisdiction

• Transfer pricing agreement between the two

Legal

Tokenized equity shouldn’t be offered. The critical distinction is whether the token is simply a useful and tradable digital item like a paid API key. Purchasers have no right to any future return from their token. 

Key legal decisions

• Should tokens be made available to US citizens at all.

• Should tokens be made available to all US citizens, or only accredited investors

Trade-offs

• Higher scrutiny, compliance costs/risk by offering tokens to non-accredited US citizens, but a significantly higher base if they are included

• Considering that many of the eventual participants in our network will be readers and authors, an ideal scenario is to make tokens available to all US citizens.

5 Steps To Start a Freelance Writing Career After Graduation

Whether you are graduating from a New York college or university with a degree in English, journalism, or a subject completely unrelated to writing, it's possible to begin — and sustain — a successful freelance writing career as early as just after your college graduation. You may wish to begin compiling ideas and collecting contact information for clients while you're still in school. Consider the following five ideas for starting strong in your new career.

1. CREATE YOUR PORTFOLIO

If you've never written professionally before, don't be discouraged by the fact that you don't have any bylines to your name. Have you published poetry, short stories, or essays? Have you written for your school paper? Consider using these samples for your portfolio.

After you build your freelance writer website and choose a catchy brand name, either create new blog posts where potential clients can see how you write or have a couple of samples available for review when clients request to see them. Consider developing a niche, or an area of expertise, that you can use to better advertise your services. Finding a niche that few have covered can help you develop a signature brand, something people can begin to identify you with. Since the blogging/writer space is filled with established bloggers and up-and-comers, finding a niche you can call your own is extremely important in making a name for yourself.

2. BUILD A PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE

Even though you are a freelancer, you should treat your venture as a small business. Use WordPress or another DIY website builder like Wix to quickly create a professional site that lists your services and rates.

If you want to get more technical but don't have the skills or the budget for graphic design, consider hiring a freelancer to help you design a site that includes graphics, videos, or customer services such as ordering and payment options within the site. You may feature reviews and testimonials from clients as you progress in your career as well. If you’re unsure what your website should feature, look around at other writer websites to see what they have. This can serve as an excellent form of inspiration!

3. REACH OUT TO CLIENTS

According to freelancing experts, to make a living as a freelance writer, you should feel comfortable pitching your services to those who may pay for them. Simply draft a template of an email you can use to get in touch with potential clients on freelancing platforms, or when you're contacting local small businesses. However, make sure you spend time tailoring the template for each client to ensure they’re not getting canned “copy-and-paste” correspondence from you.

4. OFFER A TRIAL ARTICLE

It's not typically a good idea to start off your writing career by offering free content to every client, but if you don't have a lot of portfolio samples (or writing experience) you may offer a trial article at a discounted rate. If the client likes your work, he or she can keep contracting your services — and paying you more — in the future. Be sure to explain this deal clearly to the client so that he or she does not assume that the low rate is set forever.

5. SCHEDULE WITH A MONTHLY PLANNER TEMPLATE

Working for yourself and finding lucrative gigs can be rewarding — but you may feel the pull of fun distractions more often than not. Consider using a template to generate a monthly planner where you can list tasks to keep you on track regarding your goals (and perhaps your monthly income target). Use a template that you can fully customize with notes, graphics, and more to assist your deadlines in being a top priority.

Freelance writing can be a great side gig or even become a full-time career. You don't have to decide immediately whether you'd like to pursue writing for the rest of your life, but if you follow the five tips above, you will increase your likelihood of having a great, profitable start!

5 Strategies for Cultivating a Loyal Readership

What does it take for an author to go from an unknown name to a brand with a loyal following? To turn one-time buyers into a loyal customer base, you need to keep your audience interested and engaged long-term. How?

Here are five digital strategies that keep readers wanting more:

Choose a brand name with personality

A writer’s pen name shapes its identity and tells readers what the brand is all about. Even self-publishers should use an imprint name. Also known as a fictitious business name or “doing business as,” an imprint lets you do business under a name other than your personal name. Before choosing a DBA name, make sure the associated domain is available and check your state’s Secretary of State’s website to ensure it isn’t already in use.

Know what matters to your audience

What keeps your ideal reader coming back for more? Analytics tools empower authors and publishers to discover audience demographics, where their readers hang out online, and what they care about. Once you know where to reach your target audience, you can choose audience keywords that speak directly to readers’ needs.

Use reader magnets to grow your email list

Email marketing is an excellent tool to engage readers, humanize your brand, and add value to the customer relationship. But how do you get readers to subscribe in the first place? Reader magnets give subscribers a reason to sign up by offering something in return. That may be a free gift, exclusive literary content, affiliate discounts, or practical guides.

Get personal with email list segmentation

Building your email list is the easy part. The real challenge is getting subscribers to open newsletters and engage with the content. You can’t do that effectively if you’re blasting the same automated emails to every reader in your audience. List segmentation lets you tailor communication to different groups of subscribers so that both longtime readers and casual subscribers receive relevant and engaging content.

Host events on social media

Don’t wait for readers to come to you. Meet your audience where they’re at by engaging on social media. Go beyond publishing free content and use social media to organize livestream events, polls, discussions, and other opportunities to connect with readers in real-time. Beyond creating a behind-the-scenes experience, social media events foster a sense of community among readers, writers, and fans.

Helping readers discover one’s books is a high priority for any up-and-coming author. However, cultivating a loyal following is just as important as attracting new readers for a brand’s longevity. A loyal audience not only helps to sell more books on a consistent basis, but loyal readers are also a brand’s biggest cheerleaders — and there’s no better marketing than an engaged and enthusiastic community singing your books’ praises!

Vanessa Holwell and her husband, Rick, created HiringSquad.net after losing their jobs during the financial crisis in 2008. The site is designed to be a forum for people to share advice on how to get hired, provide job search resources, and give you the tools you need to get the job you want.

Learn how Kadaxis can help you find your loyal following and start marketing smarter.

Lessons Learned From Working With Authors on Book Marketing

You’ve completed your book, edited it, and designed the cover. Now, you’re ready to promote . The good news? The Internet has made it easier than ever to market your book and get your name out there. The bad news? The Internet is a big place, and it’s hard to know exactly where to start. The following online promotion strategies can help.

1. Optimize your website.

Setting up a website for yourself, as an author, and/or for your book is a basic step in online promotions. Make sure you optimize it though. One way to do so is buying your domain name, which should be your pen name or book title. You should also pay for web hosting. When choosing a host, go for a service provider that makes it easy to add relevant metadata in your site. Those metadata should contain keywords that potential readers use when looking for books in their favorite genre.

So many authors I work with have a website but don’t go deep enough on the technical end of setting up the website with title tags, html structure, and meta tags that allow the pages to get indexed on Google and gain organic traffic from Google.

All other marketing you do will just provide more signals to Google that your website is an “authority” and help grow traffic and build your email lists (which can also be  set up on your site). If you haven’t built an email list before, this guide might be helpful.

2. Utilize Author Groups.

Never underestimate the benefits of having a network of writing and publishing professionals. These people can help you improve your craft and turn it into a profitable career. 

You can create and expand your network by joining online groups for authors and publishers. In these groups, you can discover upcoming releases, share blog ideas and learn other marketing tactics from your fellows.

Be selective about which Facebook group for writers you join and which members you connect with. Choose online communities that offer quality advice. As for members, find those you can collaborate with, especially in book promotions. In that way, both parties benefit from the endeavor.

Perhaps you are already part of many author groups. However, the real trick to making these groups work for marketing is via partnerships. Ask in the group if other authors are willing to partner with you on giveaways or bundles, especially authors in the same or adjacent genres. Then, using your combined email lists and social media connections, you can drive huge reach and sales by coming together and creating a bundle of your books. We’ve done this with great success for a number of authors we’ve worked with.

It’s important that authors taking part have some built-in audience already, otherwise you won’t be promoting to anybody. It works best with people with similar audiences.

3. Gain exposure through book giveaways.

Goodreads Giveaways is a great starting point to dabble into book giveaways if you’re just starting out or don’t want to do a lot of heavy lifting. Goodreads attracts millions of views each month. When you sponsor a giveaway, your book and free offer are advertised on the platform and marketing emails. This has great reaching potential.

The best way to do a giveaway is via social media. This requires an existing social media audience who likes your books. If you have an audience, you can ask people to “compete” for entries by tagging friends, inviting friends to participate, and more. This can help you take an audience of 2k and multiply it to reach 10k. We’ve seen even bigger results with some campaigns.

Don’t just leave everything to the site though. Promote your giveaway on your social media pages, too. Feature it on your website or blog. If you have an account on Wattpad, Tumblr or Commaful, you can announce it there, too. Place posters at nearby libraries and cafés as well. 

The more creative you get with giveaways, the better the results.

4. Get into guest blogging and blog tours. 

Guest blogging and blog tours are pretty commonly done and most authors I work with know how to do them already.

The best tip I can share is to start small and niche if you’re not well-known yet. For example, Wired for Youth is an easy target if you’re writing a nonfiction book. They clearly have traffic and they’re still updating the blog, but they’re still small and would be an easy target to land an interview or post on. Start small, build up momentum, and then once you have some reputation, use early interviews as examples to pitch larger blogs. For best results, you should pitch on blogs or sites that have a sizable audience. I’ve had authors start with tiny blogs and end up in places like the Huffington Post.

Guest blogs and blog tours do two main things for you. First, they help build credibility for you when people Google your name and your book. The posts will show up and prove you’re legit. Because you are targeting specific niche blogs, you will also build a good targeted audience from the posts as well.

It’s a great way to build some reputation and start a flywheel effect for yourself when you do it early on.

5. Run a book launch party.

Book launches are events designed to kick off your book release, hold your readers captive, and ultimately give them a good feeling about your work. They’re also a great opportunity to get your friends and family invested in your creation. More importantly, they help you sell copies.

People think these are a gimmick and often skip the launch party. If done right, the launch party is actually huge for morale and makes it feel real for authors. Don’t do it right when the book launches. The trick is to do it when you have some local followers already.

This is fun, gets fans involved and builds community.

6. Utilize Twitter To Connect With Readers

Twitter is a great way to build an audience and build your network. There are a few ways to utilize Twitter, depending on the genre you’re targeting.

To come up with Tweet ideas, study popular influencers in your genre. If you’re writing YA, for example, study popular YA writers. You can search popular hashtags used within YA to find these influencers, like #YALit or #YoungAdult.

Studying popular writers in the niche will inform you of what the audience wants to see. Learn from the best and try to emulate the tweets that work well, but with your own ideas and your own unique spin.

If you already have an engaged audience on Twitter, you should start seeing immediate results. If you don’t have an audience yet, your initial tweets will be going into a void. The easiest way to build an initial audience is to regularly engage with influencers in your genre. Vary who you reply to, you don’t want to just engage with the top influencers, but also up-and-coming influencers. By adding value in these tweets, you’ll begin to get noticed by their audience and thus build your own. This doesn’t happen overnight.

Consistency is the key to Twitter.

7. Start collecting leads for your next book. 

Running a marketing campaign has two stages: before and after release. If you’re working on a series, you can treat your current promotional period as an opportunity to market your current release as well as the following one. 

After your first novel is published, plan a book tour, a Facebook ad campaign, a sponsored story, or a video about the theme of your book. If you’ve written a social issue book, speak out on your social media profiles about topics relevant to your book. 

Given the current limitations of what is available to attend in-person due to the pandemic, consider hosting online events about your book. These may include utilizing Zoom, or other live platforms within social media. Another option could be to request a guest spot on a current online event from one of your contacts, or reaching out to another event organizer in your genre.

Depending on the restrictions in your location, consider attending live events about your book. These may include reading at a bookstore, hosting a film screening, making an in-person talk at schools or having a conversation night at a local bar.

This is going to be a long process. Thus, you should stay visible and open to anything you can do for your book once it’s published.

Online promotion strategies work effectively when they’re collaborative. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your loved ones, fellow writers and industry professionals for help. 

Hayley Zelda is a writer and marketer at heart. She's written on all the major writing platforms and worked with a number of self-published authors on marketing books to the YA audience.

How to Write the best Kindle Book Title for Kindle SEO

As an author, we always have an idea of what a great title should look like; great works such as "The Great Gatsby" and "Catcher in the Rye" are catchy and mysterious titles that trigger the reader's imagination. Although what one would assume to be a good title might not be a good title for your self-published Kindle book. Kindle book titles need to be written so the Amazon search engine, also called the Amazon A9 algorithm, can index your book title properly to the reader's search query. This article will discuss how to create a Kindle book title that ranks, step-by-step.

What is Kindle SEO?

Kindle SEO is the process of ranking your book on the Amazon search engine for a set of keywords that is relevant to your book. For the Amazon search engine to have a "book-to-reader search fit," you need to make sure to place the right keywords into the right places in your book listing.

It is also worth noting that If you don't conduct Kindle SEO correctly, you will more than likely result in less traffic and fewer sales.

The human factor is also a part of Kindle SEO. Your Kindle title and listing must:

1) be informative and

2) elicit an emotional response from the reader.

As a result, you must optimize, not only for the A9 algorithm but also for the reader. The ideal Kindle listing will straddle writing for the search engine and reader.

Why is Kindle SEO Important?

It is important to emphasize how vital Kindle SEO is. The cascading effects of a well-optimized book listing will filter downstream, while the harmful effects of a poorly constructed listing will filter upstream.

A well-written book listing, for example, will receive impressions: more clicks, higher conversion, lower CPC (cost-per-click), higher ranking, and result in more sales/profit.

As you can see, optimizing your self-published book for effective Kindle SEO can help you achieve a good flywheel effect. So yes, it is that critical, and it is well worth the extra effort and time.

Keyword Research

In this stage, your keyword research will not only be finding the right keywords that are relevant to your book but also the need to prioritize them. Because of the 200-character title limit, it is near impossible to include all of your keywords. Besides, you don't want to appear spammy and pack too many keywords into your title.

To start, I would typically begin my research on Amazon. Unless your type of book is not on Amazon (seldom happens), Amazon would be a reliable source.

Seed Keywords

In your keyword research, you can begin by finding the seed keywords. These are highly relevant keywords where you will start your search.

There are two ways to find seed keywords. First, you might already have some seed keywords in mind, which is likely the case if you know the subject matter you are writing on.

Second, you can find seed keywords by searching for books written by your nearest competitors and a reverse ISBN search, also known as a reverse ASIN search. For example, if you are selling a book in the "Keto Diet" niche and your next nearest competitor has an ISBN of 1628602570, you will use this ISBN or ASIN to be entered into a free reverse search tool such as Sonar.

Download the result into a CSV format and sort it further for relevance. To sort by relevance, you will create a bit of a relevancy pyramid. You want to come up with 5-6 keywords (or key phrases) that are the most relevant and with the highest search volume. If you deem any keywords from the list not relevant to your book, feel free to remove them from consideration.

This ensures that a reader's search in Amazon's A9 algorithm can be matched/indexed to your book. Therefore, targeting the proper keywords and including them in the front of your title are important Kindle SEO fundamentals.

Filtering Relevant Keywords: Some Pointers

Here are some filtering tips to assist you in removing unrelated keywords faster:

• Remove any keywords phrase with more than four words if you have a large list of results

• Remove words in the keyword list that are NOT related to your book.

• Look for keywords and phrases that MUST include a specific word or genre.

Based on the above example, the below are good keywords to use:

• keto cookbook

• ketogenic diet

• keto reset diet

• ketosis cookbook

• keto recipes

• 30-day ketogenic cleanse

Generating your Kindle Book Title from your Keyword Research

Still working with the 6-8 keywords that you have picked in the previous step, you will curate the title of your book based on them.

Amazon titles have a 200-character limit.

There are 2 goals for the title:

1. Using the first 50 characters to explain what the book is to the reader, the reader needs to know within seconds what the 50 characters in the title describe;

2. You will use the rest of the 150 characters to talk to the Amazon search engine, adding searched words that have “-“ in-between for easy understanding. The template for a good Kindle title is as follows:

{main keyword 1} – {variation} – {words in search term that describe book 1} – {words in search term that describe book 2….} – by {Author}

Make sure the main keyword is the function of both the highest relevance and search volume.

Example of a Good Kindle Title

In our example, a good title would be as follows:

“Keto Cookbook - ketogenic diet reset - ketosis recipes for 30-day cleanse”

**Please note: try your best not to repeat keywords. The words only need to appear once for the Amazon A9 to pick up. Repeating words or word density does not help with Kindle SEO.

As you can see in the example above, we were able to hit all the relevant words from our keyword research, with our main keyword serving as the first part of the title.

Additional ways to Boost your Kindle Book Rankings

Besides Kindle SEO there are also more direct ways to boost your self-published book rankings.

Kindle Countdown Deals

These allow writers to run limited-time promotions for eBooks accessible on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk from anywhere in the world. This promotion is only available for eBooks. Customers will notice regular and exceptional prices on the eBooks description page, with a countdown clock. This clock will show you how much time you have left to take advantage of the special price.

Free Book Promotions

Run a Free Book Promotion by making your book available for free for up to 5 days throughout each 90-day KDP Select enrollment cycle.

Kindle eBook Pre-Order

You can start promoting your eBook with a pre-order (pre-orders for paperbacks are currently not available) before it is released. You can promote your eBook's pre-order page on Author Central, Goodreads, your site, and elsewhere. Also, pre-orders will contribute toward sales rank and other Kindle Store merchandising even before your eBook is released. This can help more readers to discover your book.

KDP Advertising

KDP Advertising, which is part of the Amazon Advertising Platform, is used for Amazon Kindle advertising*. It enables you to promote your self-published book with sponsored cost-per-click advertising. The book you want to promote will show up in Amazon search results, eBook detail pages, and on the Kindle device's lock screen.

Conclusion

Finding the best Kindle book title may appear to be hard work. However, when done correctly, this one optimization can provide the highest return on investment of all the front-end effort you can do when ranking your Kindle book on Amazon. Best of luck!

*Check out https://kadaxis.com/advanced-analytics/amazon-ad-keywords for further information on how to identify and maximize your Amazon Advertising Keywords.

Rick Wong is the founder of SellerMetrics, an Amazon PPC Software. Having worked in some of the world’s largest financial institutions in Canada, he ventured into Amazon selling in 2017 and sold his Amazon business four years later.

He currently resides in Hong Kong with his wife and 1 yr old daughter. On days that he is not in his office, you can find him playing golf with his friends or watching the newest show on Netflix with his family.

Stay-at-home fatigue while staying on the job

Have you transitioned to work from home since the worldwide pandemic was declared? Maybe you were writing part-time and had another office-based job elsewhere, but now everything is happening from your home. Now is a good time to take stock of the routines and habits you have established over the past few months. Here are five things to consider:

1. Am I where I want to be, given the restricted circumstances?

If not, why not? Am I any closer to my goals being achieved? They may need adjustment based on what you have learned since setting them. Writing two thousand words a day may not be realistic for you, but half an hour each day might be. Having goals written in a place where you can easily see them helps remind what is important to you.

2. Setting the space and schedule

Do you have a designated work space with items that help you focus? Has it been working well or is it time to make some changes? Think about physical comfort (a properly adjusted desk chair versus sitting hunched over on the floor, clutter-free desk space, etc.). Whatever defines a work space for you, treat it as such. Keep your sleeping area separate so your brain can switch off when it’s bedtime and is mentally ready when you ‘go’ to work.  

In case you are inspired with new writing ideas in the middle of the night, keep a pen and notebook handy next to the bed, so you can jot them down and return to sleep as quickly as possible. Typing on a bright phone screen could make you more alert, thus harder to settle back to sleep.

If you have flexible hours, do your best to set up a routine that you can stick to and that works well with the time of day (or night) where you are at your optimal level of functioning.

3. Boundaries and relating to others in this temporary ‘new normal’

Have you defined clear boundaries for work versus recreation? Be intentional with when each of these begins and ends. If you live with others, communicate about your differing schedules and how you can respect one another’s space. Revisiting expectations can help make a peaceful home/work environment and eliminate misunderstandings.

Because I am working from home and have a young child, some people assume I am ‘always free.’ People have called me at strange times or bombarded me with multiple reminders about online events I don’t wish to attend. It is just as important to be clear about what to say “no” to (without having to give a lengthy explanation) as to what you allow time for in your life.

4. Distractions and motivation

What tempts you towards unnecessary extra breaks, leading to a longer day? Consider switching off social media notifications. Smart phones also have reminders you can set up to limit daily time on apps. Too much mental clutter draws you away from the task at hand and can leave you feeling drained. What other ways can you motivate yourself to focus more on your goals and tasks?

5. Do you get dressed every day?

Does staying in pajamas make you feel relaxed or do you feel lazy? Does getting dressed make a difference? Or do you split the difference, e.g. - work shirt for the online meetings, with pajama bottoms? I personally like to get dressed each day, but the clothes I wear at home are more casual than if I entered into an office.

For some, working from home will cease once more businesses open up again. For others, working from home will continue full-time from this season forward. Make sure your set-up is working well for you, especially if you are juggling writing part-time as well as an additional form of employment. So many people desire to work from home. Remember to find the reasons why this is desirable for you.

What helpful work-from-home writing habits have you developed since lockdown? Share your tips below in the comments!

How to Increase Your Amazon Book Sales

As an author, it would be wonderful if all you had to do was come up with an idea for a book, write it, and have it be an instant success. But the reality is that modern book publishing, especially on Amazon, is a lot more complicated than many authors assume. Marketing your book is at least as important to its success as the writing itself.

You’re also not the only author attempting to ‘make it big’ on Amazon, as a new book is published on the platform every five minutes. That means you have to do more than ever to stand out from the crowd and gain popularity online. 

Beyond Amazon marketing, there are many ways to increase your online audience. If you’re committed to becoming a full-time author, these strategies will help you augment your income and reach a wider audience.

Leverage Social Media Marketing

While social media platforms were once simply a place to stay in touch with friends and family, they’re now among the best ways to market almost any product. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the vast majority of young adults follow at least one brand on a social media platform.

Social media enables you to keep your audience updated with developments in your work, including the release of a new book. You can also keep people engaged with periodic content pieces about different aspects of your writing. This will help generate discussion and allow you to create a long-term relationship with your audience.

Create Your Own Website

Social media is a great way to start, but it can also be extremely valuable to create and operate a personal website devoted to your work. It will act as a hub for your audience to take a variety of actions, including purchasing a book, signing up for email updates, and getting connected with your social media presence.

It’s now easier than ever to build a personalized website, and there are tools available at nearly any price point (including free!). A few top-rated, free website builders that you can try are Wix, Weebly, and Strikingly.  

While cheaper options can help you get started, we recommend investing in high-quality, professional solutions – like an expert web developer – as you get more serious about promoting your brand. When searching for a web designer, consider the following:

• What’s your budget? There’s no set industry standard, so consider what your cap might be as you begin looking.

• Who do you want to work with? There are freelancers, design agencies, and full-service agencies. If you’re looking for services beyond web design (e.g. digital marketing), a full-service agency could be the right choice. If you’re budget-conscious, a freelancer is your best bet.

• What’s their experience level? Take a look at the portfolio of either the individual web developer or their agency. Do they have experience working with authors or are there other case studies that are relevant to you?

• What do their clients say about them?  Read testimonials, request references, and do your homework when it comes to confirming both the legitimacy and efficacy of a web designer.

• Are they responsive? Before hiring, ask them questions about their process and what they would suggest in terms of web design for you specifically if hired. You can get a good sense if they’re the right fit based on how they speak about the design process and their approach. 

Advertise on Amazon

The most direct way to reach out to potential customers is by advertising on the platform itself. Amazon offers two types of ads: Sponsored Product Ads and Product Display Ads. The former  are pay-per-click (PPC) ads that attract visitors looking for keywords similar to yours, and the latter target users who have made relevant purchases or searches in the past.

Both varieties can be extremely valuable when utilized effectively, so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building a presence on Amazon. We recommend continual A/B testing to ensure that you’re getting the best possible return on investment from all your advertising channels.

Marketing a book is a difficult challenge, but it’s important to give yourself every possible chance for success. Even the best book won’t sell if it gets lost in the midst of hundreds of new books being published every day. These tips will help you rise above the competition and achieve the short- and long-term success you deserve.

Ilan Nass is an experienced performance marketer with 9 years experience helping B2B and B2C companies grow. He spent 6 years running Taktical Digital, a direct response/performance marketing agency where clients have included WeWork, Ellen Degeneres, BarkBox, Bustle, Casper, MoviePass, Rachel Zoe, Univision, Chase Manhattan and others. Skills include SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Paid Social Ads and more.

What to Know About Using Amazon Marketing Services to Boost Your Sales

Amazon offers a very useful marketplace for anyone in the publishing industry. That said, leveraging this platform to its full potential involves understanding how to take advantage of Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). Like advertising on Facebook, taking the time to learn about selling on Amazon and how it can help your business is important.

Like Google AdWords, AMS charges pay-per-click fees to help sellers reach potential customers. Using it effectively can have a major impact on your book sales.

The following tips will help you get started.

Requirements

Amazon requires users to have one of the following before they can access AMS:

• A Vendor Central login

• An Advantage Central login

• A Vendor Express login

• An invitation to represent a vendor

• A Kindle Direct Publishing account

If you don’t yet have the right login or account, set one up before registering for the program.

First Steps

Once you’ve registered with AMS you can begin advertising your products. To do so, sign in to your account and find the “Advertising” link in the navigation toolbar. Click it, then click on “Create your first ad.”

However, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the types of ads Amazon allows you to create before getting started on one.

Sponsored Product

This ad type is ideal if your goal is simply to boost sales. It allows vendors to choose a product, select keywords to ensure it appears in appropriate searches, and set a daily budget (the minimum is one dollar). Your sponsored product ad will then appear in searches. Best of all, Amazon only charges users for clicks their ads receive.

Headline Search

Headline Search ads are very similar in concept to Sponsored Product ads. They key difference is increased visibility. A Sponsored Product ad will appear on the bottom or right-hand side of a search results page. A Headline Search ad, on the other hand, will appear at the top of the page.

That said, increased visibility comes at an increased cost. The minimum budget for this type of ad is $100.

Product Display

Sponsored Product and Headline Search ads target customers via your chosen keywords. With Product Display ads, users can target customers based on interests by having their ads appear on pages for related items. The minimum budget for these ads is also $100.

Increase Sales with Amazon Marketing Services

Knowing how AMS works is important. However, once you understand the basics, it’s also important to learn how to leverage this service to actually increase sales. The following points explain how to maximize your return on investment:

• Opt for Manual Targeting: You have two essential options when targeting customers with ad: automatic or manual. With the automatic option, Amazon analyses your book and targets customers based on said analysis. However, if you’re willing to research which keywords other authors like you have used effectively, you’ll get better results with manual. This option lets you choose your own keywords when targeting customers.

• Test: There’s no universal answer to the question “Which type of ad is right for my book?” It varies on a case-by-case basis. Thus, it’s best to try different types of ads with low budgets first. Monitor the results for each to determine which is most effective. It’s also important to experiment with different keyword combinations.

• Promote a Series: Do several of your titles belong to the same overall series? If so, you can leverage one to boost the sales of the others. Promote the first title in the series and revise your product description to ensure readers clearly know it is one of several books. Ads that yield sales for the book you’re promoting will also increase sales of other books in the series as a result.

• Consider the Season: Seasonally-appropriate titles will often deliver better results if you promote them accordingly. For instance, if you’re considering running a campaign in October, and you have a book that relates to Halloween either directly (it takes place during the season) or indirectly (it touches on scary/supernatural topics), promoting that one instead of another title will boost your ROI.

Keep these best practices in mind as you get started with AMS. This service is valuable, but the value it offers will increase substantially if you know how to use it most effectively. These tips will help.

Ilan Nass is an experienced performance marketer with 7 years experience helping B2B and B2C companies grow. Spent 5 years running Taktical Digital, a paid social performance marketing agency. Skills include SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Paid Social Ads and more

SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR THE INTROVERTED WRITER

One of the joys of writing if you are an introvert is to be able to safely express yourself on the page and not have to interact face-to-face. However, events such as the launch of your book, a book signing or networking events will require you to attend in person.

Working as a social worker for over fifteen years I have experienced countless situations requiring me to talk to new people. This would be anything from a sensitive client family meeting, discussing death, loss of limbs, counselling, right down to just making casual conversation with someone who does not wish to open up.

Facing the fear makes it less fearful and you get practice in the meantime.

If an event coming up feels overwhelming consider taking smaller steps. Practice doing what makes you feel nervous in settings that don’t matter as much to you. Meet-ups are a great way to experiment with this. It could be a hobby such as learning how to cook or attending Toastmasters. If you want to stick to writing-related events, consider attending a low-key book reading in a small, casual location.

Tips to prepare before the event

1. What is your goal? Focus on that goal whenever you get nervous. Does it have a measurable outcome? For example, “speak to two new people,” or “learn three new things about xyz” or perhaps it is just to be able to attend a new event.

2. Decide on if you want to bring a ‘plus one’ for support. Make sure it is someone who can be sociable with others and doesn’t need to be looked after the whole time. I once brought a friend to a party where we spent most of the time just catching up. I missed an opportunity to meet new people.

3. Do your homework first. If it is an event where you can see other people attending (such as a social media invite) you could become familiar with names and profile photos. Decide in advance if there are people you hope to connect with. Look up the event details. Figure out how far away it is, parking and dress code. Consider bringing business cards so you can easily hand out your details if you feel inclined to do so. Being organized helps to take some pressure off on the actual day.

4. Brainstorm questions you could ask people. Having mental notes prepared will give you readily available tools for a conversation starter. Also, what questions might you be asked? Think of positive answers. For example, if asked, “How many books have you written?” and you are a new writer, an answer could be, “I am in the middle of my first book. I am so excited to meet more experienced writers here and learn more!” Having an answer like this speaks positively to yourself and to others about you, you are owning where you are at with confidence, and it gives the other person an opportunity to share some tips with you.

5. Be honest with yourself. What is the worst that could happen? Is it worth missing an opportunity to attend? Attending will bring you a step stronger in overcoming the fear. If your goal is to chat to two people, then regardless of everything else, you will have achieved your goal. If chatting with a well-known agent or writer feels too daunting right now, you could always start smaller - chat with someone who doesn’t fit a ‘big name’ category and appears easy to approach.

Social tips at an event

1. Consider having something to hold. It could be an order of events flier, a glass of something or a clutch purse. It stops you from standing with your hands in your pockets, thus appearing more approachable. It also gives you something to do with your hands. If it is a private party, offering to help pass food and drinks around is a good way to connect with people and then have an excuse to leave if you run out of things to say.

2. Find a reason to talk to someone. It could be to ask for a direction, comment casually on the decor or simply go up to someone and chat. I remember attending a wedding reception where I didn’t know any guests. I walked straight up to a group of people and exclaimed, “Hi! I don’t know anyone here. Do you mind if I chat with you?” They brought me into their conversation.

3. Focus on the other person. So often the reason we feel uncomfortable is that we are busy focusing on ourselves and how we might look. If you focus on and show interest in the other person it will help you feel more relaxed and appear more open.

4. When talking to another person, ask open questions. At a networking event for authors, it could be, “How did you hear about this event?” Consider paraphrasing back to them. This helps others feel heard and can lead to further conversation. In the above example if the person responded, “I heard about it through another author friend,” a response could be, “Sounds like you have a resourceful friend!” Finding areas of commonality can also help a person to feel more connected to you.

5. Finally, remember the wonderful person that you are and don’t be too hard on yourself. The mere fact you attended an event is a step outside of your comfort zone. You are as important as the next person, regardless of what you and they have or have not accomplished. Chances are, others are as nervous as you are about being there and they are hoping someone will make the effort to chat to them.

Social Media or Social Drain? How Twitter Can Impact Your Writing Goals

Many of us spend too much time on social media, often utilizing it as a distraction from the tasks we need to accomplish. Social media can definitely get a bad reputation. As an author, have you considered how social media can enhance your profile and brand?

Twitter can build community with other writers. This is especially useful given the solo aspect of writing. It is a wonderful platform for book marketing, if we take the time to genuinely connect with others, thus drawing readers in rather than tuning them out.

Five smart ways to enhance your social platform:

1. Research hashtags that connect you with other writers in your preferred genre. For example, if you write fiction, #amwritingfiction will help you find writers and posts related to fiction. To connect with writers more broadly you may simply use #amwriting. This is also a great way to find people to follow. They may end up following you too once they see some of your wonderful posts! The more people you follow, the greater your chance of gaining new followers. While this is a sound strategy for increasing followers, unfollowing someone once they start following you is considered poor etiquette. Of course, if someone is offensive then feel free to let them go.

2. Post content about your life, not just promotional tweets. This tip is especially important if your audience contains relatives and friends. Your audience may not all be writers, but other people who will support you by purchasing and reading your book. People want to know you as a person and don't always want to be sold to. One of the quickest ways to lose your audience is through constant spamming. Try to work some quirky, funny or personal posts into your timeline, such as a funny joke or a photo of a hike you took on Saturday. Take time to write encouraging comments on other people’s posts too. By blending personal posts with some occasional advertising, people will feel like you are a human and not a marketing machine.

3. Retweet and quote people with relevant knowledge and experience. This could be another writer, publisher, famous person, or anyone else you hold in high regard. Associating with their articles and brands reflects well on your own personal brand. It gives readers a greater understanding of your viewpoint and personality, too. This can impact the decision of whether they want to see more, versus “unfollow”. To personalize a retweet, quote, or article post a comment with it. Aside from tailoring it to your brand, it will make it more interesting and shows you put thought into what you posted.

4. Know your audience. Who is your audience? Young parents? Fitness fanatics? Murder mystery book lovers? Conduct a search through Twitter using any words that represent the genre you are interested in. For example, if you want to connect with other murder mystery writers, the obvious search would be #murdermystery or #murdermysterywriters. However, if you scroll through those pages you will find additional hashtags regularly used that may connect you with even more relevant groups. In this example, I found other hashtags such as: #crimefiction, #suspense, #writers among others. Look at the time stamps of when posts are conducted, or when people respond to posts, to ascertain when people are usually online. Alternatively, you can experiment with posting at different times of the day and see if you get more responses at a particular time. As you get to know your audience, you will understand better what it is they want to read about, too. This will then guide what you post (or don’t post). You may also find further connections through looking up a popular author in your genre. Chances are they will have followers or be following people who could become your newest Twitter connections too.

5. Post often but don’t overdo it. Posting often reminds people you are current and also enhances your online social presence. People are more likely to remember someone who is posting regularly, rather than someone who barely ever posts or comments on anything. Make sure you utilize hashtags and post regularly throughout the week (remembering variety is key, not just promotional posts). This could be even a few times a day. One of the benefits of hashtags is that even if you post at a less popular time, some viewers look up specific hashtags to see what they missed out on while they were away. If you can’t access your computer when you need to post, use a program to set your tweets in advance. This can be set to post throughout the day or even later in the week. The program I like to use is Buffer. It posts to Twitter at the times I choose and means I don’t have to be at my computer all the time.

Have fun with these tips and feel free to share your own with us too!

Why You Need to Incentivize Book Reviews

Becoming a successful author requires a difficult combination of writing skill, general resilience, good fortune, and calculated marketing. That last requirement is often tricky, even for ambitious authors, because it isn’t easy to get that deeply involved in the commercialization of something that means so much to you personally.

But something has to give, and if you want your books to be widely read, you need to be willing to view them as products with value — and thus as items suitable for review. Now inundated with options about what to read (all the classics of the past digitized, and new works from across the world available online), today’s readers simply can’t keep up with fresh releases, and need ways to narrow them down.

That narrowing is achieved through the collation of opinions from authorities (such as the New York Times site pictured above) and peers (anonymous reviewers). Whichever way you look at it, reviews are key, and you need to be incentivizing them. Here’s why, and how you can do it:

You Need Feedback To Optimize Positioning

Trying to find objective quality in a book isn’t an advisable task, because one person’s work of genius is another person’s waste of time. Artistic products aren’t suitable for generic valuation and packaging like businesses that sell direct are. Consequently, if a new author becomes discouraged due to their first book being slated, it isn’t necessarily a result of their poor writing: it could simply be a matter of incorrect placement and presentation.

This is another reason why you need to get as many reviews as you can. Through looking beyond the simple ratings and digging deeper into why people like or dislike your work, you can derive some useful inferences about how you’ve been marketing it. This is something that the Kadaxis Amazon Research Service is perfect for.

Sometimes, it even turns out that an author’s view of the strengths of their work is wildly inaccurate: they might have intended to write a comedy but somehow ended up writing a character study, yet persisted in presenting it as a comedy because they never consciously acknowledged the pivot.

In such a case, a book that has been struggling to gain any traction and gathering poor (and confused) reviews might just need some superficial alterations. Change the cover, change the blurb, change the listed genre (or discard the concept of genre entirely), and all of a sudden you have a hit. If you don’t stay aware of what readers think about your work, you’ll likely miss such opportunities.

How To Incentivize Book Reviews

To serve as compelling social proof, and to help authors and publishers decide how to best position any given book for success, reviews are vitally important — but books don’t inevitably gather reviews. With less popular works, you need to encourage them. Here’s how to do it:

• Enter your books into contests. It doesn’t matter whether you think you have any hope of winning. Simply submitting your books as candidates for contests can get you some free feedback from industry professionals who may well have some valuable ideas for how you can improve your writing or your presentation.

• Suggest your books for roundups. Bloggers love to do listicles, and something akin to “8 Horror Books to Try This Halloween” is an easy sell. If you reach out to sites that do such content and ask them to consider including your books, you’ll get some reads.

• Reach out to readers through social media. Assuming you’ve made some sales — or at least been able to distribute some copies somehow — you’ll have some readers out there in the online world. Unless each one of them has already provided a review (unlikely), you should be able to pick up some more through simply asking.

• Offer a small reward. If you’re really not getting anywhere in general and you just want to know where you’re going wrong, think about offering a minor reward for reviewing your work. You could provide free copies, or coupons of some kind, or even signed merchandise.

Any one of these methods can prove successful, so try everything applicable and you should be able to start expanding your range of reviews.

 Let’s briefly recap what we’ve looked at:

• You need reviews to persuade people that your work is worth their time.

• By reading reviews, you can identify opportunities to pivot your presentation.

• You can get reviews by pitching your books, consulting readers, and offering rewards.

Get started right away, and use the information you collect to achieve greater success.

Victoria Greene is an ecommerce marketing expert and freelance writer who loves reading through book reviews to get different perspectives on stories. You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce.

How Top Publishers Use Keywords

In 2015, Kadaxis (with some help from Bowker, Firebrand and OnixSuite) set out to investigate whether publishers were adding keywords to book metadata. The conclusion was that of the 150,000 publishers reviewed, most weren't adding keywords, and of those publishers who did, the volume and quality of keywords was low.

Anecdotally, we've seen a significant shift in the past three years in the priority publishers give to keywords. We wanted to understand this change more deeply, but instead of taking a large sample of publishers, we adopted a qualitative approach and narrowed our analysis to 846 fiction titles with significant sales. By looking at how keywords are used on a publisher's most important titles, we can infer how important keywords are to a publisher and gain some insight into different keyword methodologies.

Findings

Keywords matter to the top publishers: of the 846 books we analyzed, 69% had keywords - a significant increase to three years ago.

Most publishers still target a 500 keyword character count. Of the books with keywords, 44% had a character count between 480 and 500 characters. See our investigation into why 500 keyword characters is not optimal for selling more books on Amazon:

Optimization savvy publishers are emerging though: 6.2% of books had keyword character counts above 500, while 2% had character counts above 1000 characters (many of these are Kadaxis clients).

Keyword Content

Almost all of the top fifty most commonly used keywords across all books in our set related to category names.

The keywords "fiction" (most common) and "fiction books" (6th most common) were seen throughout the sample set. Search engines are able to derive whether a book is fiction or not by examining the book’s categories, so adding these terms as keywords is often not necessary. Likewise, BISAC and browse node (Amazon only) category names are also indexed by search engines, so if a book is assigned to a category, repeating the category name as a keyword won’t increase the book’s visibility in search. Category and genre names are relevant and appear to make sense as keywords, but understanding how search engines index metadata can often mean a more efficient use of the keyword field.

Rule Breakers

One observation we've made from working with publishers, is that Amazon applies rules discriminately. Large accounts are generally afforded more relief from the rules, and it appears many publishers may be aware of this extra freedom. (See section "Keywords to avoid" from Amazon's rules for KDP authors).

Of our sample set with keywords, 4% of books included the term "bestseller", while 15% broke the "Subjective claim about quality" rule by stating that their books were the “best”, for example: “best horror books”, “best selling fiction author”, “best american novel” and “best fantasy series”.

We also found countless examples of keywords comprised of competitive author and title names, along with the the use of Amazon program names (e.g. "kindle" as a keyword). One publisher even tried to cash in on deal days with the keywords: “cyber monday deals” and “black friday deals”.

Amazon likely filters out prohibited terms, but one exception is the use of competitive title and author names which, when indexed, do improve search visibility.

Conclusion

Publishers with high sales volumes take keywords seriously and in most cases add keywords to their book's metadata. The quality and volume of keywords has improved significantly over the past three years as we've seen publishers move from rarely adding keywords to commonly adding keywords. While keywords were generally well considered, when assessing phrasing, term redundancy, volume and other characteristics used to assess keyword efficacy on Amazon, the trend highlights coverage as a priority for most publishers, ahead of the more involved specifics of optimization. The industry is evolving though, and gaining a more sophisticated understanding of how search works. Our prediction is that in our next review we’ll see an even greater incidence of highly optimized keywords, incorporating this growing body of knowledge.

Why a 500 keyword character limit is costing you book sales.

I bet that if you’re reading this, you’ve always accepted 500 characters as the gold standard for maximizing book visibility through search - work your way up to 500 characters and you’ve joined the metadata elite. You've surpassed the majority of publishers who add only two or three hundred keywords, or gasp, don’t add keywords at all. Well, dear reader, if your ONIX makes its way to Amazon, and Amazon is an important retailer for your sales, I have some news for you:

If you only send 500 keyword characters to Amazon, you’re probably missing out on sales.

Contrary to what you may have been told, Amazon accepts and uses far in excess of 500 characters per book. In this post we’ll uncover the origin of the 500 character limit, and provide actual hard data that shows Amazon does indeed accept keywords far beyond the 500 character limit. (In case you’re wondering why more keywords are better, the short answer: more keywords = more chances for a book to be found in search = more sales opportunities. A longer explanation is available here).

The "Best Practices For Keywords" Recommendation

The BISG’s metadata keyword best practice standard states a recommended limit of 500 characters. The guide is a fine document, and I highly recommend you give it a read in case you haven’t come across it before. I was a member of the committee who authored the document and contributed to it's content and discussions. If you’re tasked with “creating keywords for online retailers”, you should absolutely use this resource as a guide. When it comes to keywords destined to Amazon, it’s worth noting that: Amazon wasn't involved in authoring the standard, and the “best practices” are a general recommendation to the industry as a whole. They’re not prescriptive, and retailers can implement anything they wish to. In fact the committee, correctly, ensured they weren’t too Amazon-centric in their recommendations. Long story short - even though 500 characters is the “recommended” limit, it doesn’t require Amazon or any other retailer, to strictly abide by the recommendation.

Where Did The 500 Character Limit Come From?

I asked this question on the committee and the best answer I received was: “it’s always been in the ONIX standard”. As someone who has lead teams to build book search engines, I wanted to understand what the technical rationale might be - was there some data science based research that underpinned this widely accepted “best practice”? My search led me to the good folks over at EDItEUR who oversee the ONIX standard globally. From my exchanges with these publishing metadata veterans, I learned that:
- The keyword character limit as it’s defined in ONIX, has always been a “suggested limit”.
- The ONIX standard places no limit on how many keyword characters an ONIX sender can transmit.
- Publishers should rely on receivers (such as retailers) accepting at least 500 characters.
- The limit used to be 100 characters and was then raised to 250 before the current suggestion of 500.
- The 500 limit considers old library systems that may not have the technological resources of retailers, and therefore are limited in what they can receive.
Again, a sensible limit to accommodate myriad publishing systems of various sophistication levels and vintage. But also, still nothing prescriptive about what a receiver (retailer) should do with a keyword field, other than accept at least 500 characters.

It's Easy To Test The Limit, But You Have To Do It Properly

Search technology is complex and doesn’t operate in the same manner as say, a bank transaction system. If you login to your online banking website and send money to someone, they better receive it. Every cent needs to be managed, accounted for and then auditable by all parties involved.  Search engines are somewhat different. When a search engine indexes data, while it may read everything available to it, the use and visibility of the source data comes down to a whole host of factors which is far beyond the scope of this post. Suffice to say that if you supply Amazon with say 100 keywords, it will read all of them, but won’t necessarily use all of them for your book (understand more about this here). If your character length test involves typing in each of your keywords into Amazon search, paging through countless results to check for your book, then using the absence of your book in results as evidence that the keyword wasn’t indexed - you’re doing it wrong. (We haven’t even touched on partial term matches). Each keyword is an opportunity, not a guarantee.

Cold, Hard, Data: How Many Keyword Characters Should I Provide?

Running a test to correctly identify whether a keyword improves search rank, involves analyzing hundreds of books, removing words found in the title, author names and category (BISAC/browse node) names from test queries and also searching for combinations of individual keyword terms (as a metadata expert, you already know that exact keyword matches are the tip of the search iceberg). We did all of this and here’s what we found:

Amazon indexes at least 1500 keyword characters from the keyword field in an ONIX file (or uploaded directly using Amazon's internal tools).
Kadaxis clients receive up to 1500 keyword characters, so this is the limit we tested. (On average, our clients receive an average of 1000 keyword characters per book). We found books matching search queries all the way up to the high 1400s character count after stripping away other metadata data we know is indexed. This approach gives us confidence that the book’s presence in search is attributed to the keyword and not other sources (like BISAC names).

30-50% of searches matched keywords were found in the 500-1500 character range
Said another way: if you’re only adding 500 keyword characters, your book is missing out on matching to 30-50% of search queries, than if you’d used 1000+ characters.
 
Books with 1000-1500 keyword characters match 67% more search queries, compared to books with 500 characters or less.
One of our tests compared 100 books from two trade publishers - one with Kadaxis keywords, and one who used an alternative service that maxes out at 500 characters. Both sets included a mix of good selling fiction and non-fiction titles and were run through identical measurement systems. The Kadaxis publisher had an average of 1098 keyword characters (max 1500) which matched to 67% more search queries than the publisher who added an average of 446 keyword characters (max 500).

Let's look at a couple of examples to illustrate further:

Title: Medical-Surgical Nursing Made Incredibly Easy (Incredibly Easy! Series)

This medical text matched numerous keywords in search, but one example of note is the keyword phrase "advanced pathophysiology". Neither of these terms are found anywhere in the book's metadata (as an aside, while this keyword is also not in the description text, know that the description isn't indexed for Amazon search, but that's a post for another day).

The keyword itself is present in the keyword field at character position 964 (out of 1079 total keyword characters). We can find the book in the Books search engine on Amazon for the search query "advanced pathophysiology, wedged between two other pathophysiology books. Note, the term is relevant for people interested in the topic, as evidenced by review mentions.

Let's take a look at one more example:

TITLE: The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far: Why Are We Here?

Again, this title matches numerous keyword derived search queries, but we'll focus on one keyword: "heisenberg uncertainty", which refers to Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This keyword isn't mentioned anywhere in the book's metadata, but is mentioned several times by readers, including examples where "The Greatest Story Every Told" helped readers to better understand Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

The keyword "heisenberg uncertainty" is present in the book's keyword field at character position 1101, and the book is found in the search results among related titles.

A few other examples, from hundreds in our set:

• Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World. Keyword with search match: "smart contracts", character position 1142.
• The Perfect You: A Blueprint for Identity. Keyword with search match: "neuroscience", character position 1267 (actually matches 5 search queries about neuroscience).
• Darkfever (Fever Series, Book 1). Keyword with search match: "male characters", character position 1095.

What does this all mean? More keywords equals better search visibility, which equals more chances to sell (after all, most books are sold through Amazon search).

Keyword ROI: It’s Worth It

1000 characters is a lot of work, 1500 characters even more so, but compared to the rest of the effort and expense that goes into making a book a success, it’s a comparably small investment for the potential upside - especially when you consider the compounding value better search visibility earns a book. If you have questions about how we conducted our tests, how you can replicate our results or to learn more about our keyword services, please get in touch via the Contact form.

Thank you to the folks at Firebrand (Catherine Toolan, Steve Rutberg and Joshua Tallent) for their help with this article.