My thriller, THE SHOP, has had a checkered career. This book got me the agent of my dreams, one of the best in the business, who could get the undivided attention of every big publisher in New York. She read the book on a plane during a terrible thunderstorm, and told me that reading the book was the only thing that kept her mind off the prospect of the plane crashing. She was positive the book would sell, and sell very well.

But that didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, my husband Glenn and I had built a promotional blog to attract agents and publishers called “Who Killed Brienne Cross”? whokilledbriennecross.com

Putting together “Who Killed Brienne Cross” was a labor of love. We created an alternate reality, adding stories, interviews, photos, and comments over two years’ time. Some of our friends commented, too—and those comments are pretty funny. If nothing else, “Who Killled Brienne Cross” should qualify as a very nice piece of performance art. But I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t yearn to show it off to the world.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2011. Thomas & Mercer, Amazon’s thriller imprint, bought THE SHOP as part of a three-book deal. THE SHOP will be rereleased, newly-edited and packaged, on February 6, 2012.

No longer will we have to find a way to promote the book to publishers.

Now we want to promote THE SHOP to readers.

And so I have this labor of love—I’ll be frank with you, this is my baby—still sitting up there on the Internet, pretty as a picture and twice as sweet, and I’d like to put it to work.

So I’m asking. Readers, fellow authors, entrepreneurs, marketing gurus, publishers, husbands, wives, kids, cute little kittens and puppies. How can we use this site to get the news out about THE SHOP? I’d love ideas, no matter how crazy, off-the-wall, staid, obvious, creative, or scintillatingly brilliant.

Please help.

whokilledbriennecross.com

Zandri comments, “I could stare at this cover forever…Or perhaps have a poster of it framed and hung in my living room.”

He goes on to say:

“Darkness on the Edge of Town is one such thriller that is a runaway bestseller (Carson is currently smoking my sales numbers). What makes this novel enticing initially is the cover. Its depiction of a neon lit street corner screams noir. The image has depth and wickedness in it, and mucho suspense. Words appear floating over the image…words that appear to have been typed on an old fashion Smith Corona typewriter. The kind Dash Hammett might have used when writing The Maltese Falcon, or when typing up a grocery list for his mistress Lillian Hellman which no doubt included several bottles of gin.”

Read Vincent Zandri’s blog post, Sunday Blog in Bed: The Eye of the Reader, and see why a great cover is an important element in the overall mix of what makes an eBook novel successful in the new realm of publishing.

J. Carson Black asked Vincent Zandri: “You have broken many sales records. Is there any silver bullet for bestselling E-book sales?

From the Vincent Zandri Vox Blog:
Is There a “Silver Bullet” to Achieving Bestselling E-book Sales?

(What follows is part one of an ongoing informal Q&A I’ve got going with bestselling author J.Carson Black. The Q&A will be published in parts here and on Black’s blog and eventually in its entirety)

The Silver Bullet for bestselling book sales: Does it actually exist?
My humble opinion: There is no silver bullet per se, when it comes to selling a lot of E-Books, Nooks and Kindles, so much as there are “bullets.”

What’s for certain is that every E-Book which is successful (and paper book for that matter) will have at least four things in common:

1. A great cover.
2. An intriguing and well written product description.
3. A price that says “Buy me” to impulse buyers ($.99 is a good place to start).
4. Great writing and a great story.

The other stuff or, in this case, more bullets: Social Networking on Facebook and Twitter helps keep you in the know, and so do virtual tours. Every published author has to maintain an up-to-date blog these days, and it pays to put out as many books as you can write well in a reasonable amount of time since you never know which title or titles is simply going to take off. Bestsellers like Aaron Patterson and JA Konrath have reminded us of the important of title proliferation time and time again in their own blogs.

The one silver bullet no one can control however is this: Luck.

Some books either have it or they don’t. There are books out there that get terrible reviews and win no prizes that somehow hit the Amazon Top Ten Bestselling Kindle E-Book List and there are books that win major awards like the Edgar and receive wonderful reviews that tank in the marketplace. You simply never can tell.

I’m convinced my new books have sold well in part because I’ve published two novels with the big legacy publishers in New York City. Titles that received a lot of praise from such notable publications as Publishers Weekly, The Boston Herald and the New York Post. Those reviews are mine to keep forever and ever, and my new publisher at StoneHouse/StoneGate Ink does not hesitate to display them prominently now that the same books, THE INNOCENT and GODCHILD are republished and enjoying Top 100 Amazon Kindle Bestseller status (“Innocent” was in the Top Ten for a month).

However, despite all the above, if you were to twist my arm and hold me down on the ground and demand one solid answer to the question, “What’s the silver bullet?” the closest sure bet would be price. Simply said, when a title is $.99 it tends to sell. On the other hand, there are many more books priced at $.99 that DO NOT SELL than there are books that move! Remember what I just said about luck?

There’s something else to consider about price: Do these “one buck” discounted e-books make the kind of money that a novel priced at $2.99 or even $3.99 will make? Not by a long shot. But if you are lucky, you might move a thousand or more per day and that will give you a great Amazon ranking.

“Innocent” was priced at $.99 for a short time. But at the start of this month it went back to its normal, $3.99 price tag. At the same time we witnessed a steady drop in ranking from No. 3 to around 90-120 over the past three weeks (after moving around 80,000 – 100,000 units in eight weeks). Trust me when I say we are pleasantly surprised. A price increase of 400% raised the possibility of the novel immediately plummeting in ranking to somewhere back in the 4 figures. But “Innocent” has proven its worth with a great cover, great product description, great reviews, and what I hope is very good story. What it won’t do at that price however, is entice many of the impulse buyers who buy now/read later. Still, the novel is making far more money at the new, higher price. And we feel that $3.99 is still a bargain. Have you bought a Big Mac lately?

So, to repeat, there is no silver bullet when it comes to selling books, but there are bullets. And each and every one of them is painted with a layer of luck in order for them to hit their target.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

At first glance, the shooting death of a police chief in a rundown Florida motel room looks like an assignation gone wrong. But as detective Jolie Burke plumbs deeper into the crime’s murky undercurrents, she unveils a conspiracy shocking in its scope.

In her relentless pursuit of justice, Burke follows a byzantine path that will take her from the lottery-driven fantasies of a yard maintenance worker to a Panama City Beach missing-persons case and finally to the island compound of her estranged uncle—the Attorney General of the United States.

And in a ski chalet in Aspen, Colorado, the table has been set for an orgy of death, destruction, and infamy. As the stakes rise, Jolie finds herself teamed with a killer. Only Jolie and her unlikely partner, assassin Cyril Landry, can dismantle the shadowy entity known only as The Shop—before it strikes again.

“Fresh and imaginative, J. Carson Black’s THE SHOP is a riveting read and a compelling tale of character. From FBI agents to local cops, from heroes to villains, THE SHOP is an exciting, sweeping crime thriller that will linger in your mind for a long time.”
—Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of THE BOOK OF SPIES.

“Infused with an original voice and packed with compelling characters, THE SHOP is a thriller to pay attention to.”
—-David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE.

“Welcome to a strong new voice in American crime fiction.”
–T. Jefferson Parker, Author of  Iron River

1. Did you see the last episode of LOST, the TV show? It was crammed full of commercials. You want your Facebook presence to be LOST (the show, the content, the experience) itself, not the marketing/advertising of LOST.

2. With Facebook, facilitate existing relationships. You want to be making those friendships better than they were.

3. Important! Profiles – people have profiles, brands (companies) have pages. To do marketing on Facebook, use a page, not a profile. You create pages from your profile.

4. Know your audience (do your research-what do they like, what are they doing?)

5. Avoid buzzwords (that includes SEO, optimization, marketing, advertising, integrated, leverage) You dont have a beer with a friend and talk about leveraging. We tend to talk socially about fun, positive interesting things (usually). When I talk about this blog post on my Facebook page, note that I won’t use the word “marketing”.

6. Food is awesome on Facebook! Ice cream, choc, milk, fruit, and sugar rank highly.

7. Most liked page types
movie
TV show
book
musician or band
television
athlete
actor

8. Least liked pages
religious organizations (some do really well though)
pets
bars
pharma
writer
nonprofit
retail
education
restaurants
hotels
websites

9. Is Facebook a good way to market a blog? Yes it is. The share button on your article within your blog site is becoming more used, an important channel for marketing.

10. Emphasize social proof. Make sure your like or recommendation buttons for your articles etc are in super prominent positions.

11. Video Sharing. Effect of the word video on sharing: the word video in the title is shared 30% more on FB and 30% less on Twitter. Video is more embedded on facebook than Twitter. Facebook is more video friendly, and people use Facebook more on the weekends when they are likely to watch online video. Twitter users are a more geeky and techy audience. Twitter is often used in the office, where people are less likely to watch a video that is not work related.

12. When writing for Facebook, plain and simple works best (avoid excessive use of adjectives and adverbs).

13. Most Facebook shareable words (words that encourage people to share what you wrote with others)
facebook (don’t overuse this word on Facebook — on Twitter, fine, there is lots of talk about Facebook and Twitter on Twitter).
why
most
world
how
health
bill
big
says
best
video you
apple
media
top (lists do well — note that I used the word top in my article title here)
first
obama

14. Least shareable words
vs
apps
review
down
poll
game
york
twitter
social
time
iphone

15. Think Mainstream (ask yourself–why do people like the jersey shore, for example).

Some final thoughts:

Again, don’t use your profile for marketing. Use your profile when you are connecting with people. You can friend a customer or thought leader from your personal profile. For instance, you may be interested in your customer’s favorite book or an article they shared.

Is Facebook relevant to Business to Business marketing? Yes!
We can drop the perception that people in companies are in the office all the time. They are consumers in other settings, they are people like ourselves, they like movies, have their favorite books and other interests.
Make your page something people will want to interact with on a personal level.

In a career spanning more than two decades, Henry Rubin has played a key role in the television production of several Summer and Winter Olympic Games as an Editor and Edit Supervisor, currently with NBC Olympics, and most recently at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. He is Broadcast Operations Manager at the Center for Learning Technology in Tucson. He was Vice President and Senior Editor at Video Workshop, and Senior Editor at PBS affiliate KUAT-TV, also in Tucson.

As a broadcast media consultant with RubinMedia Consulting, Henry is a regular consultant and trainer for Sony Electronics (this week he returned from another stint with Sony at NAB), and Editor-Producer-HD consultant for the City of Tucson. He is also an Edit Supervisor at NBC Sports.

With the explosion of “do it yourself” media production, there is even greater interest among young people in getting into the television and digital media industry and enjoying satisfying, fulfilling careers. The Internet opened a new world for creation, production, and distribution of content simply unavailable to us until the last several years. The last couple of years has seen an explosion of media content on the Web that has revolutionized how young people view media and their active involvement.

For those wishing to work at the apex of mainstream broadcast and digital media, the door to entry is still a competitive and elusive one, yet open to those who seek the right opportunities and are willing to work hard learning their craft.

“It’s a multiple algebraic equation,” said Henry. “A factor in student success is the internship.”

He stressed the importance of the internship experience as a key element in progressing toward professional success. “They need this experience, to get it somehow before they commit to a career path, so they know where they want to be,” he said.

“For those who want it and prepare for it, we need to place them in those situations, whether it’s a radio station, the IT world, a TV station. Hands-on experience with professionals is what these students need.”

Henry went on to describe a simple formula for success—typical of those working at the highest levels of their industry. “Individuals who have made it in the business have a love of the craft. At that level, there is a combination of being good at it and loving what you do.”

It starts with getting a good education, he said, and whether it’s secondary school or higher education, you need qualified professors.

“At most colleges and universities, you have professors who are not qualified, often those with little professional experience. They can theorize and students need a solid grasp of theory, but many professors cannot tell you how to go from A to Z—from an interest in a career to being a working professional in the industry.”

“Both theory and academics are important so you can guide individuals to where they want to be,” he said. “It’s a good start to introducing students to media.”

However, Henry thinks many students get an unrealistic perception of what careers in television really entail.

“TV is perceived to be “cool”, but it may not be the best choice for the student.”

Awhile back, Henry considered accepting a teaching position at Western Carolina University where one of his responsibilities would be to guide students into broadcast and other media careers. These students do internships with major media corporations. While he chose not to make the move, he continues to advise the University on internships and connects students with these opportunities through his network of contacts.

Students need to be serious and pursue excellence as a prelude to networking with the right people to gain access to the opportunities they need to develop careers. Henry said the world of TV sports provides a clear example.

“The professionals doing sports now, they know intimately the teams and players of the sport they are covering. The writers and producers know that particular sport,” he said. “Look at NFL Films. They have a multi-million dollar facility in New Jersey. They recruit top students from the top schools like Notre Dame. They want people working there who can think and are invested in their schooling.”

ESPN has taken on the campus mode at their headquarters in a way similar to what Microsoft did in creating their campus in Redmond, Washington.

“The ESPN campus grew up in Bristol Connecticut and their program engages college grads, interns, as well as professionals—it’s a culture.”

Like CNN, ESPN started out as a dinky cable programming company and grew into a giant, he said.
Henry emphasized the point that once college students enter the industry after graduation and become professionals, they need to stay current. Like any profession, the learning process never stops. The field is constantly changing. Henry himself is currently at work in studies in a master’s degree program.

“With technology, it’s axiomatic—the technology changes, but the stereotype is true. The Olympics – the technology completely goes through a quantum change every two years for the Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics,” said Henry.

In 2010, NBC went through another quantum change for the Winter Olympics coverage. Henry recounted the new paradigm that reflects the rapid increase in Internet TV development and penetration.

“For the Vancouver Olympics, they told us, this is going to be the “live” Olympics. True, but the programming is stored on and delivered from servers. There are multiple distribution channels including Universal Sports, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Telemundo, and the Highlights Factory pumps out highlights for Web entities.

“The IOC designed this as the first Olympics where all the games were online and delivered throughout the world. The exception was in the U.S. where NBC had exclusive distribution rights in their contract for which they made a huge investment. But elsewhere in the world, viewers could watch all the games anytime.”

“NBC Universal paid big dollars for rights negotiated for their first two contracts for the Sydney and Salt Lake City Olympic Games and then negotiated again,” he said (NBC is reported to have paid a record US $2.2-billion in 2003 for the U.S. broadcast rights to the Beijing 2008 Summer and Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, and actually lost money on the Vancouver Games for the first time in its history of broadcasting the Olympic Games).

At Vancouver, student interns performed a variety of tasks, he said, many of them what might be considered menial but still important, whether it’s logging program content, running and fetching, getting drinks for staff, or photocopying.

“This is a farm, a nursery for college-age kids, young talent, for the most part volunteering to learn and be involved in the process by filling the need for interns. These kids are basically volunteering or getting paid little for their work–the value is in the experience,” said Henry.

“Nowadays, kids are already producing their own videos and posting them on YouTube and other social media sites,” he said. “They’re part of the DIY generation. Each development in technology brings the individual closer to communicating worldwide.”

As each new generation, more media savvy than the last, comes along, industry professionals like Henry Rubin are taking responsibility for guiding those students who are truly passionate about the work and acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and experience.

By forming a channel and continuum through education and networking into professional experiences, we lead this new generation to positions where they can create a new future for television and digital media of all kinds.

In his recent syndicated column titled, “Innovations in Service May Require Disruption”, Dale talks about the need to build “a culture of innovation” or “a culture of disruption”. He cites the example of Kim Gravell, vice president of innovation for Cardinal Health who calls it, “breaking the china”. Dale stresses that while ideas are essential to innovation, they must also be “pounded, dragged, charmed or sneaked into existence” and recounts how Gravell built a team of people who could talk numbers and processes to get buy-in within her organization.
Corporate sponsorships of programs and events and corporate partners programs in higher education institutions and in municipal governments are slowly getting acceptance.

There are some examples of successful programs, but there is within any organization a hesitance to “break the china” and a tendency to hold on to the status quo. How to implement an innovative idea like corporate sponsorship of non-athletics programs and events across a higher education institution?

I spoke with Eron Jacobson, Director of Corporate Partnerships at the University of California, Los Angeles. I wrote about the work Eron and his team is doing in my article “Corporate Sponsorships in Higher Education Institutions”

He said that UCLA adopted a new tone in regards to corporate relations. “Our vice chancellor told us that we have to be thinking creatively and differently. What has worked the past 100 years does not necessarily work now. What’s worked in the past may not be what is needed now.”

The UCLA administration realized that the Athletics model of a corporate sponsors program could be adapted and applied across much of the institution. UCLA Athletics had enjoyed success in this area for decades and the administration acknowledged that the wealth of this vehicle had not been used for non-athletics campus programs and events. At the time, developing support from corporations outside of Athletics was only being done from a philanthropic perspective and not a marketing perspective.

The administration understood they needed to leverage those marketable assets in different ways: online, putting sponsors’ products and services into the hands of consumers, and delivering to the UCLA community the brand experience of UCLA’s corporate partners. “Corporate America wants to put their stamp on it (the University community) and they are willing to invest in it,” he said.

How did the institution respond to this new initiative? Jacobson said that he has encountered some uncertainty from UCLA units to this program and faced the challenge of getting them to understand the benefits of incorporating a corporate message or brand directly into an academic or administrative program or event.

He cited his greatest success so far as the development of a group of important allies on the UCLA campus who understand the value of making UCLA’s sponsorable assets more marketable and available to corporate sponsors. With this group of allies, Jacobson has been able to do something along the lines of what Dale Dauten talks about in his column and what Kim Gravell of Cardinal Health is accomplishing across her large and diverse organization. With his group of allies, Jacobson is getting this new corporate partners program positioned with UCLA units as something that will bring value to them.

One benefit of this approach is the packaging of larger sponsorable properties that combine assets across multiple units on campus. “We find things with a common thread across units,” he said. “All Things Green—sustainability, is one theme. We can then embed a corporate partner for that”. Jacobson said that by identifying the market value for each unit’s assets that are contributed to the package and gauging the overall value of the sum of its parts, he is able to equitably divide up the sponsor’s cash and in-kind investment among the contributing units.

The UCLA Office of Corporate, Foundation and Research Relations takes only the standard 6% administrative fee that the office charges to process the revenues through their system. All revenues are funneled through the Foundation and the packages are tailored so that all fall under the IRS guidelines for qualified sponsorships and avoid Unrelated Business Income Tax.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll report more on how Eron Jacobson and UCLA are innovatively drawing upon the assets of multiple units to create value in higher education corporate sponsorship packages.

Getting it Going
Getting your microsite or landing page set up with WordPress is a several-step process. It may seem somewhat complicated at first, but with some dedication to learning the basics and a dose of persistence, virtually anyone can do it.

We assume that you have first done your search engine marketing homework and judiciously selected your domain name(s) based on targeted, relevant keywords. Go to a domain registrar like GoDaddy.com and register your domain. I have several domains registered with GoDaddy–the fees are reasonable and their services are good quality. A dot-com domain will set you back all of several dollars and you can buy multiple domains at a discount. You can get dot-biz or dot-info domains for even less.

You don’t have to register your domain with your host server company, in fact, I recommend you don’t–I think it’s better to keep the two separate and you’ll probably save money in the deal. All you need to do is use the domain name system settings of your host server company wherever your domain is registered. Once you’ve reset the DNS, propagation of the domain at your host server will take anywhere from an hour to a day or so, and you’ll be ready to move forward and install WordPress.

You’ll need a host server account with a company like Media Temple, BlueHost or HostGator. Full disclosure here (if you haven’t heard, there are new FTC rules governing endorsements and testimonials) — I use Media Temple and you may have noticed the mt-media temple banner ad on this site. I get a referral credit sent to my account when people sign up for their service through the link. I’ve used Media Temple since 2005 and their (gs) Grid Service is superb.

(gs) is a cluster-based service powered by hundreds of servers working in tandem to ensure power, burstability and reliability. I’ve also used BlueHost at the University of Arizona and their service also performed admirably. Hosting service fees will vary from about $75 to $250 a year or more, depending on how robust a service you need for your business, whether you pay upfront annually, and other factors.

In WordPress for Microsites and Landing Pages – part 2, we’ll talk about selection and installation of your WordPress themes and plug-ins and customizing your microsites and landing pages.

In our interconnected, interlinked, and networked society, more and more we will need to position the book as the center of a network rather than at the end of a delivery chain. We know the effect that rapidly evolving social media is having on the way we consume content of all kinds. Content is becoming more sliced up, reconnected, blended, “mashed up” and reused–and that includes books. This may apply mainly to non-fiction books right now, but look out for the new modes of delivery and the ways that fiction books are also created and presented. Check out the Vook for an example of a new trend of presenting book content through a variety of interconnected media.

New modes of reading published work are proliferating like mad, with reading platforms such as the Amazon Kindle, Sony’s e-reader and now the iPhone taking on whole traditionally-published books, e-books, periodicals, and even pdf versions of documents of all kinds. We’re getting new choices on what we read, how we read it, and when we read, and oh by the way, with whom we share it.

Not all books need to be networked books. Just like radio never went away with the advent of television, printed books will continue to satisfy the need for the physical touch, the total immersion experience of reading print on the page. And the traditional book publishers still exercise creative judgment over what they will produce and distribute and readers will continue to spend their money on product that passes through the gates of these gatekeepers. There is value in that for many readers and that will continue. But when an author can publish cheaply a novel electronically to Amazon and use search engine marketing to drive a substantial number of niche-market readers to ordering the book for reading on their e-readers, Kindles and the like, then the number of viable and sustainable business models begin to increase.

For now, “Old Publishing” will not go away. Authors will continue to get their best deals there, the money and status needed to earn a living and survive. Authors will take their novels created for large audiences to the major publishers which still wield tremendous influence and control over what the retail distribution chain offers to the buying public (although that is diminished from year’s past and even their marketing role has decreased substantially).

Going for the apex of the publishing pyramid currently inhabited by the best selling authors holds tremendous appeal for any author who wants to get their physical books into the hands of large numbers of readers. These books are carefully selected, edited, packaged by the publishers and then presented for retail sale by the drug stores, the major book chains, and Costco and Target stores.

But the value in the delivery chain is shifting from a model where the content is wrapped up with the distribution to a model that simply values the content. Publishing is evolving and so quickly that we may not even recognize it when the evolution reaches its natural state.

Traditional publishing is concerned with quality control and has inherent big-time costs associated with the business model. The New Mode of publishing is cheap for production and distribution and is an open content market unconstrained by the type of organizational taste exercised by the major book publishers.

Watch out for the new and expanding trend of Web-only fiction and alternate publishing modes. Like electric vehicle charging stations, fast print-on-demand machines are going into bookstores like the University of Arizona’s Main Bookstore on campus. Electronic editions of many kinds and destined for more and more new devices coming online every day will be offered with varying levels of editorial selectiveness. It may be something of a crapshoot on quality, but with social networking and word of mouth, readers will find their own base of “experts” and other readers whose recommendations hold weight.

In the New World of marketing and PR, where the crowd holds sway, niche markets reached through search engine marketing strategies offer ways to reach buyers where breaking into a sale to a traditional book publisher isn’t possible or maybe even desirable.

Tastes are changing and becoming more variegated. Web-only fiction is becoming popular and often doled out in episodes similar to the TV model and the serial novels of the 19th century. And some novels aren’t languishing in a market backwater. Some have built large audiences of tens of thousands of fans. Major publishers, noticing that there is a built-in fan base/market for these novels, have picked them up and given large advances to the authors, and published them well. This is an interesting track that is really different from the standard route of hiring an agent, having the book submitted to publishers and their acquiring editors, and completing a sale into the production and distribution chain.

I’ve just finished formatting two novels for Amazon Kindle, written by one of my clients. These two books were published as mass market paperbacks by Signet, an imprint of New American Library (part of Penguin USA). The books went out of print and now Amazon and other digital outlets offer a new lease on life for these out of print books that went away. Once I upload them to Amazon and begin their search engine marketing campaign, they will find new audiences.

Major new publishing roads are under construction and content creators, including new and established authors, are already traveling down those roads to reach new audiences in innovative ways. How the major publishers will evolve in line with these changes remain to be seen.

In the meantime, Internet marketing and digital distribution offer authors and Internet publishing companies rich opportunities for success.

New Roads for Publishing