These days it isn’t enough to simply be an “author”; if you’re a published writer, you need to be a brand. Curiosity is inbuilt into the human psyche: readers and publishers alike want to know the person behind the writer, the personality behind the words. Fortunately, social media has made interaction the watchword and all of it ridiculously easy.

So what does the new author “platform” mean for you? Website, author profile and bio, newsletter or e-magazine, blog, vlog, podcasts, book trailers on video websites, your articles and articles about you or your work.

In the various components that assemble to make the online “you”, your website is by and large your greatest asset. All of the above can then be tied in to that simple space. Information on your books, their publication dates, where they can be purchased, press releases, critical reviews on your work and a link to your blog or it being in-built into the website. During radio or TV interviews, always ask for a copy that  you can then embed onto your website. When interacting with your readers or anyone publicly, always mention your website as that core source of information about you. Your website can serve as the centralized location of everything about you in an electronic medium: set up a various social network identities: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc and tie them all into your main website. By launching your information on various social networking websites, it will shoot out your content to multiple sources rapidly.

Google has finally announced officially its Google Books for the Android Marketplace. This comes 2 months after its venture started into eBooks, and the Google eBookstore.  With over three million titles available, Google is now set to be able to rival bookstore giant Amazon and to take on Apple and the iPhone.

To make its new venture even more appealing to everyone, Google ebooks and Google eBookstores will operate with all eBook formats.

All this makes the Google eBookstore another great market for self-publishers to distribute and sell their ebooks through.

If you are still fixated on creating a paper based book - get over it ! This is the new millennium baby and things they are a changin'. It wasn't that long ago that I told a group of budding authors that "no problem ... paper based books will be around for many decades to come". Boy, am I eating my words now. In just the past couple of years we have seen "digital books" making huge leaps in the market in terms of sales and acceptability with readers.

Speaking of readers, from a couple of years ago when there were only a couple of, well ... not that great ... readers on the market, now we are being flooded with a vast array of dedicated readers and muliti-tasking reads, and of course there is still our computer screens that we can use to read books with too, but like paper based books, the computer screen based books are also slowly fading to more dedicated books like "How To" and instructional books.

Most authors have had visions of producing a wonderful, great quality, hard cover book. If you haven't produced one of these by now, you probably won't - period. The cost of these can be horrific and unless you have instant sales this form of book is quickly becoming lost and here's why. Book distributors and producers are finding it is just too expensive to warehouse "paper" which is precisely what they are doing by having a warehouse of books. What is slowly taking over are the book printers who can do short runs of books ... 15, 20, 50 and so on. Then the distributors don't have to warehouse the books, they can even have them shipped directly from the publishers shipping dock. This fact ALONE is changing how publishers are looking a new authors, and making decisions on whether or not they want to even publish their works.

The BIG eBook problem is ... ebooks are cheap to produce, easy to store, becoming VERY popular and they are like printing money. You have one file, you make 50 copies, send them out over the Internet ... get paid and ... Zip Bang! ... you are now in the eBook business.

The BIG eBook problem is ... what format do I choose? The answer of course is all of them because we know every format we have now will likely be around for a long time so you will need to accommodate everyone's reader.

The BIG eBook problem is ... how on earth do I sell my books? I can't just dump a bunch off at the bookstore and let them do all the work for me by selling my books ... now I have to do something. Yup, and that's the difference. With new markets come new ways of marketing, new ideas and new methodologies.

The BIG eBook problem is not the digital books, it's the authors and getting them to think "new" and "different". The day of paper are behind us. Each year digital books will take over more and more. Brick and mortar libraries, filled with paperback books will very quickly become empty tombs of knowledge that nobody attends (some are now at that stage) and with all of this the paper back book will substantially fade from use ... at least in the capacity we have become accustomed to it. Yes there will always be a need a use for paper based books, but anyone who wants to forge ahead as an author of the future is already thinking digital ... what are you thinking?

Copyright - Colin Knecht
bookmarkselfpublishing.com

Writers tend to avoid wanting to publish their own books with the most common question being how the final manuscript will be distributed without the conventional network? It’s a natural question and results in a lot of wariness and raised eyebrows from writers. It often shocks them to discover that not only is promotion not the mountain they’ve made it out to be, it also pays incredibly well (you manage all your own profits, after all!). It is also one more rung to add to the ladder to success as an ‘expert writer’.

So how does one promote the final book? Guerilla marketing: intense and no-nonsense. Provided you have a market for your book and it’s been thoroughly vetted beforehand [free from spelling and typing errors, fact checked, etc], success is to be had. The best thing about self-publishing is its ease: there aren’t many [if at all] overheads from websites and you won’t be splitting the profits from anyone besides yourself. Besides, if you’ve already been published before, you’ll already have a reputation you can build from. But even if you don’t want to go through the hassle of buying your own domain, blogging tools like Wordpress and Blogger can help you get started write away.

So let’s dig into the how-to’s of getting your eBook out there.