For Emphasis, Less Is More.

Some Writing Basics: Inexperienced writers tend to use various techniques to emphasize all or parts of their text. Most of them are wrong and will be eliminated by your copy editor. Avoid the rush and don't use them.

• All Caps: Sometimes, titles and chapter titles are fully capitalized. Other than that, except for the occasional appropriate use of all caps within your text (e.g., BANG! or IBM) or when quoting from a source that used all caps (ugh), don't use all caps for emphasis. And while you're at it, get rid of the "Caps Lock" button on your keyboard.
• Initial Caps: In German writing, initial caps are part of the style, being used for nouns. However, in American English, initial caps are reserved for the beginning of sentences, key words in headlines (in an "up style"), and proper nouns. They are not used to emphasize words or phrases that you think are particularly important.
• Bold Face: Many writers like to use bold face to emphasize words that are more important than words that are italicized. Don't. Reserve bold face for its proper use in headings, subheadings, and paragraph or bullet lead-ins (such as I've used in this post).
• Exclamation Points:  Like a smack on the back of the head with a baseball bat, the exclamation point has its uses. However, said use should be rare. (See aforementioned, BANG!) Unless you're a 13-year-old girl, never use more than one. Got it!!!! (And I hope that hurt.)
• Italics: Last but not least, words or phrases to be emphasized should be italicized. However, beware of overdoing it. If you emphasize too many words--let's say way more than one percent--you've reached the point where nothing will be emphasized. The Publishing Pro

Kindle: What We Know So Far

By popular demand: In the past couple of months, egged on by my customers who were baffled by the process, I've been sticking my toe into the Kindle waters. I've learned much and have more to learn.

• Smashwords' Advantage Over Kindle: Easy. Smashwords makes your book available to more different devices, including Kindle. Also, setting up your file is easier. 
• Kindle's Advantage Over Smashwords: Also easy. While your customers can access your Smashwords edition with their Kindles, your book will not appear as a Kindle edition on Amazon unless you do a separate Kindle edition through KDP Amazon. That's a big deal. (KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing). 
• What To Do: You can do both a Kindle edition and a Smashwords edition. Neither KDP Amazon nor Smashwords buys exclusive rights.
• But: You cannot sign up for KDP Kindle Select if you also have any other digital edition, including but not limited to Smashwords, in publication. Kindle Select gets you into libraries, where patrons can download the book for free, for which you get paid through a mysterious process and which may (or may not) be useful promotion. See "Pros and Cons of the KDP Kindle Select Program" by Rebecca Livermore for a walk through the ups and downs. And here's the voice of experience on a KDP support board.
• CreateSpace vs. KDP Amazon: CreateSpace and KDP are both owned by Amazon, so "versus" perhaps doesn't describe the relationship correctly. Just know that CreateSpace is where you want to go to self-publish your book in print. KDP Amazon is where you want to go to publish your book in Kindle format. End of story. If you've self-published your printed book through CreateSpace, don't bother asking them about publishing a Kindle edition. In the end, what they'll do is put you through the KDP system. On the way, they'll confuse you no end. Avoid the rush, and go direct to KDP Amazon. The strange thing is, the KDP setup is similar to the CreateSpace setup.
• The Difference Between Print and Kindle: The advantage of print for the author-publisher is that you control the design, production, and the customer experience. What you (the publisher) see is what (the customer) gets. With an ebook, unless it is a PDF, you have control over the content (you hope) but surprisingly little control over how your customer is going to see and experience that content. Kindle formatting is html-based, which like a website adjusts itself based on the customer's device and choice of settings. Alignments don't happen the way you expect. Pages don't break where you want them to break. Long URL addresses blow up. You do your best, but your canvas is a moving target. You are designing for iPhones and larger tablets and things in between This is not a game of precision. On the other hand, you don't have to pay to print a book. And your customer can hop from place to place, via hyperlinking (not always an advantage for the publisher).
• Is it hard? Yes and no. If the basic formatting is simple, it is no harder to format a book for Kindle than it is for Smashwords. If it has graphics, tables, or (egad) footnotes that need to be linked to references, it can get hair-pulling. Most books are simple--or can be made so. If you need your book turned into a Kindle edition, give me a buzz. The Publishing Pro.

Marketing Tip: Lead with Your Strength

Good news for introverted writers: I was on a publishing panel last month with Michelle Vandepas, a marketing coach who works frequently with authors. At one point, she noted that book authors tend to be of two different types, those most comfortable with the creative aspects of the job ("writers," in my vocabulary) and those most comfortable with the social aspects of publishing ("authors," in my vocabulary). The latter always have an easier time with marketing, she said. No news there.

What got my attention was her insistence that writers and authors should build marketing strategies around their strengths rather than their weaknesses. When I put it this way, it seems obvious. However, the surest way to sell books is to interact with potential readers, via all manner of presentations, and sell books directly to them. Extroverted authors are at a clear advantage in this arena. Introverted writers, on the other hand, are known for cultivating the "if you build it, they will come" fantasy. If you write a book, get it published, and get it into stores, readers will be found. (Passive voice used intentionally.) This is so delusional, in my experience, that I've just assumed that the introverted writer who truly wants to be successful must suck it up and act like an extroverted author.

Not so, suggests Vandepas. She believes in building marketing platforms for writers around their aptitude and propensity to write. Thus, the introverted writer may find herself being pushed to work seriously on a blog (or blogs), become active commenter on other blogs, join and participate in Yahoo groups, and so on.  

To be honest, I don't think the introverted writer should forego the in-person social interaction that is most effective for selling books, but the idea that your marketing strategy should be based on your strengths is both compelling and reassuring--especially to this introverted writer.--The Publishing Pro. . 

Social Media: Separate Business from Personal.

Harder than you think: One of the difficulties with social media is separating your business posts from your personal ones. This is worth working on. If you look around, you'll see that those who have a handle on how to use social media in their businesses are precisely those who can keep the personal out of it.

This is a bit counter-intuitive in my world, in that I often can be heard telling my customers, "You are the brand." It's my mantra. But now I can hear the same customer saying, "If I'm the brand, how can my use of social media not be personal?"

Good question.

When I say, "You are the brand," I mean that you are the face of your business. You are its personality. You are its voice. In the book world, it almost has to work this way. The author must be the brand. 

However, I do not mean that you are only your book. Or that you are only your business. I do not mean that everything about you must become part of the business. Your religion, your politics, your hobbies, your family, your friends, your guilty pleasures, your eating habits, your workout regimen, your views about your neighbors or in-laws, your pet peeves, your children's successes or failures, and so on ... may not be appropriate fodder for your business. Depending on your business, some of these areas may be fair game. Even so, some of them surely won't be. (If someone on your Facebook page has just announced that she's finished clipping her toenails, you know what I'm talking about here.)

You are, in short, more than your brand (even if your brand is you). Understanding this will be good for you and your business.

This may not be easy, and it certainly is a different kettle of fish for each of us.

For example, The Publishing Pro, LLC, is what I would call a "secular business." By this I mean that I want my customers to be authors or wanna-be authors, but I don't want to otherwise restrict them to a particular religion, political persuasion, philosophy, subject, point of view, and so on.  For this reason, I need to be careful about what and how I express myself.

Not all business owners feel this way. Some businesses are clearly sectarian. If you start a business selling crucifixes, you're going to have the most success marketing to Catholics. If you write a book about being born again, you might want to target your book to evangelical Christians. Some businesses seem sectarian—that is, they aren't about a product or service limited to a particular group—but the owners are comfortable making their religious or political views part of the business. If you make it known publicly that you will never hire a Smurf to work in your Gerbil Burgers Restaurant, you may lose the business of all the Smurfs in your area. However, that may be a price you're willing to pay, especially if the people in your area love Gerbil Burgers and are known to be uncomfortable around small blue beings.

My problem is that I'm a "scanner," which is a term I borrowed from Barbara Sher, a career professional who used to appear regularly on PBS. A scanner is a person who can't focus long on any one subject because he is interested in nearly everything. As a scanner, I have a little bit of ADHD in me, maybe more than a little bit. I'm a bumblebee, hopping from flower to flower, looking for the latest innovation in nectar. My opposite is a "diver," who becomes obsessed with a particular subject and dives into it, ultimately becoming an expert in the field. I'm not a diver. 

My business is perfect for a scanner. People of different interests come to me, and I get to work on their book projects. The trouble comes with social media. Because I'm interested in so many things, I'm inclined to write about them. Social media gives me all kinds of opportunities to sound off. About anything. And doing so is usually not good for my business.

Discipline is called for. The Publishing Pro.

How Should Authors Use Social Media?

Back to basics: All of the students from my first six-session "Writing and Publishing Your Memoir" course have signed up for a six-session extension. One of the areas we'll be looking at is how to use social media effectively when you're an author.

This will be something of a challenge for me. A good one. I'm not an unabashed fan of social media. On one hand, I don't dare ignore it. On the other hand, umm, does anyone really know what they are doing? Emails. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn, Pinterest. Tumblr. Blogs. When I look around, I know that some people have no idea. It's entertainment. It's a time-waster. It's a reputation-damager. But some people do know what they're doing. I'd like to be one of those, and I'd like my customers to join the in-crowd.

I'm looking forward to the next weeks as a way to work with authors to come up with some strategies and tactics that makes sense for them. But where do we start? It occurs to me that social media is, well, media. Interactive media, to be exact, which is a powerful concept when you think about it. As book authors and publishers, we should have a leg up on this. We're authors. We're dealing with media, specifically printed books and digitally distributed books. However, books are--or were, anyway--information delivered in one direction. Social media is information (and other things, like emotion) delivered in two (or many more) directions. How can we take advantage of that?

Let's begin with the same principles I teach my book authors.

Principle #1: Identify your core customer (reader or audience). Rookie authors often set out to write a book "for everyone," thinking this is the way to generate a best seller. If your book is for everyone, it's unfocused. You won't have any idea how to write your book, let alone how to market it. Instead, the more specific you are, the better off you'll be. When you identify your core customer, be specific. The more specific the better. Not people. Not women. Not thirty-something women. Maybe something like, "a 35-year African American woman going through a career change."

Principle #2: Define your subject area. Again, be specific. If your core customer is the above, your subject area might be careers.

Principle #3: Define how you will change your core customer's life. The whole idea of your book, or ultimately your business, is to change your customer's life for the better. If you can promise to do so with some justification, your customers will be looking for you as much as you're looking for them. So ... with the above example, you're mission might be to help your thirty-something African-American woman find the job of her dreams (or get to the next level or make more money).

Once you do that, you can begin to look at each of your social media accounts and ask yourself these questions:

• Is this account aimed at my core customer?
• Is this account about my basic subject area?
• Will this account help me change my core customer's life?

If you can look at one of your social media accounts and answer yes to those three questions, you're on your way (at least with that account). If you can't answer yes to all three questions, you have some work to do. Stay tuned. The Publishing Pro. 

Copyright May Not Work the Way You Think.

When to sweat it, when not to: Rookie authors worry about copyright issues, as they should, but more often than not they have it backwards. The danger may not be where they think it is.

• Registering Copyright of Your Book: Don't Sweat It.
  Authors, like inventors, instinctively worry about someone stealing their words, their ideas, their work. The solution seems obvious: Register the work with the government. Get a patent, get a trademark, get a copyright. In general, this defensive posture is, well defensive, when the smarter play is to go on the offensive. When I was a young journalist, thinking about starting a magazine, my editor advised me not to worry about anyone stealing my idea. "If you think you're a genius because you've had a great idea, then you're smart enough to have another idea. And another. And another." A marketing director told me something similar, that it was smarter to put my efforts into getting my project to market than focusing on hiring lawyers to protect something I hadn't proven even had a market. Copyright differs from a patent (and to a lesser extent a trademark) in that it is protection you get the second you create a work. You don't need to register it. You don't even need to add a copyright notice (though you would be wise to do so). You can register it with the U.S. Copyright Office for $35.00 (if you do it online), which gives you some leverage if you wind up in court. (Legal experts say you're more likely to be awarded court fees if you win, though you may not be more likely to win.) The U.S. Copyright Office requires an actual copy of the book, which creates a problem for today's self-publishing printing-on-demand author. Every time, you revise you book, you need to register again. So ... it doesn't hurt to register your book with the U.S. Copyright Office, but it's down on my list of priorities.

• Violating Someone Else's Copyright: Sweat It.
  On the other hand, authors tend to pay too little attention to the possibility that they may be violating the copyright protection of others. To a great extent, I'm guessing, this comes from our college experience where we're taught to write papers filled with quotes and references. Plagiarism is a concern, so the emphasis is on quoting and attributing accurately, but there is no emphasis on getting permission to use said material. Indeed, in the copyright world, the U.S. Copyright Office has a long and complicated explanation of "fair use," which includes the lifting of images and quotation of material for purposes of education, research, and scholarship. There are also "fair use" guidelines that list consideration of the percentage of material taken from the copyrighted work, the percentage of copyrighted material that makes up the new work, the purpose of the new work (commercial or nonprofit), and so forth. For example, one might be able to fairly quote 500 words from a 100,000 word commercial work but get in trouble for quoting the entire 50 words of a poem or song in a 60,000 piece of non-fiction published by a nonprofit. In the end, "fair use" is really determined by the copyright holder and the U.S. Copyright Office says the following: "The safest course is to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material. The Copyright Office cannot give this permission." You can use material from the "public domain," which refers to material that is decades old but is also subject to a complicated definition. Nowadays, authors assume that words and images found on the internet are in the public domain, being in front of people in a very public way, but this is definitely not true, especially for images but also for words. Keep in mind that you don't always need to quote. You can carefully paraphrase, direct people to books and websites for more information, and always give credit. I have worked with several authors capable of doing their own bible translations from Hebrew and Greek. Authors can make informed decisions about how much risk they are willing to take, but I always advise them to do so in the context of the highlighted words from the U.S. Copyright Office above.

• Protecting Your Copyright from Contributors: Sweat It. Finally, you need to pay attention to your own copyright when you assign someone else to produce some "work" in the form of words, graphics, or images for you. The cleanest way to do this is to assign it as a "work for hire." However, you must specify the copyright and ownership implications in writing. This is because copyright law protects the "creator" of a work. Thus, if you hire someone to produce illustrations for a children's book that you wrote, you need to clarify your relationship and ownership of those illustrations in writing. This can go any number of ways. You can own the illustrations completely, or own them for the limited purpose of using them in this book (including subsequent editions), or own them for use in the book or in an electronic edition, or own them for use in the book and promotional purposes and so on. You can be generous in the way that you allow your illustrator or writer such work product (in their portfolios, for showing in galleries, or for creating and selling prints, for example), but you need to protect the use of those illustrations or work product for your original and intended purposes. The Publishing Pro.

Two More Tools You Can Use

Pinterest and Everything: A pair of my customers, Nancy Diehl and Kathi Kemper (authors of Art-Based Curriculum) turned me on to Pinterest. Okay, I'm still a little short of turned on, but I'm looking at it with, uh, interest. Some publishing consultants and a ton of small-business consultants are saying, "You gotta be there." Pinterest is another one of those social-networking sites that seem to spring up overnight. This one allows you to "pin" items into various self-determined groups (categories) that entangle with other folks pins and groups and supposedly do you good. I have barely stuck my toe in the water, and I'm still trying to figure out how to keep my business interests separate from my personal interests, which would seem to muddy the waters. On that score, I found this post by Social Media blogger Betsy Kent, who seems to enjoy the game and have it figured out. Still, the whole concept seems a little chaotic, like the rush of consumers into Walmart on Black Friday. Still, it pays to pay attention.

My second find came about because I was working on a project with hundreds of images and no file or folder naming conventions. Much of my time was spent on searching for the customer's photos. And then the search mechanism on my Windows Explorer broke. Great. I went online looking for clues on how to fix it. When I got nowhere with that, I looked for an alternative. I found a free program called Everything. Well, that about covers it. I don't expect much from freeware, but Everything is a beauty. It's fast. Really fast. Like instant. It makes Microsoft's search look like a dinosaur. It's a little cumbersome to adjust your search parameters, but I'm finding little need to do that. I downloaded mine at CNet. Saved my bacon. The Publishing Pro.

Book Trailers: Are They Worth It?

Maybe if they're free: Book trailers—similar to movie trailers—have become de rigueur in some quarters, mainly in the quarters of those in the business of making them. The argument is that you need this medium in an age where attention spans are getting shorter. I buy part of the argument. Attention spans are getting shorter. I'm a reader, and I can't watch a book trailer for more than a minute. I can hardly wait out the fifteen second ad that precedes the minute-long video I might be willing to look at. As it turns out, many experts suggest a minute as the upper limit for a book trailer. Some even suggest thirty seconds, but I'm seeing many trailers that are two or three minutes. You must be kidding. If a book trailer is that tiresome, think about the book. The trouble with trailers—and why do they call them "trailers" if they precede the movie or book—is that they take time and they crawl. If I'm looking for information, plain words—I can read 700 words a minute—are better. If you let me hyperlink, I can absorb an encyclopedia by the time the average trailer is done.

On the other hand, book trailers are a thing. If you google "book trailers," you'll get a list of websites where you can post your book trailer. Many of the websites—YouTube.com is an exception—seem to be devoted exclusively to book trailers. I'm not sure how this works. I have trouble imagining that people go to websites expecting to browse book trailers. I can imagine having a book trailer on my website or sending people a link to the trailer and inviting people to view it. 

In any case, I'm not at a point where I'll pay someone to create a book trailer for me. On the other hand, it appears to be relatively easy to create one myself using free tools like Microsoft Movie Maker combined with Apache OpenOffice Presentation (a free competitor to Microsoft Powerpoint). Such a book trailer would be simple: a combination of text, images, and music. A good writer should be able to put together a decent trailer. I can see that once I get past the learning curve, I'll  spend most of my time searching for images and music, especially ones I can use at little or no cost. I figure: If I can make my book trailer for nothing, it could be worth every cent I put into it. I'll give it a try.—The Publishing Pro, LLC

My Authors Have the Best Ideas.

A motherlode: I've been staying in touch with previous customers in hopes of mining the ideas and practices that have been working for them. Here are three recent contacts. 

Five years ago, Lisa Schwartz completed a novel called The Paper Shack about a family drafted for service in a coke-producing (the sooty fuel, not the fizzy drink) town in Utah during World War II. The story was loosely based on some family history and was both interesting from a historical point of view and entertaining. (Visualize a prim 1940s neatnik in frilly house dress trying to keep her tar paper shack free of ever-present coke dust.) However, Lisa's own story was even more compelling. She was raising a child with serious developmental disabilities (plural and then some). At the time, I encouraged Lisa to share this story with others, via a memoir or other non-fiction work. Recently, Lisa began doing so in a form I hadn't imagined. She's doing an online comic that manages to be heartbreaking, sarcastic, and funny all at once. I encourage you to check out Our Special World Comic. Click on the comic thumbnails to view four or five different comics. Then forward the link to anyone you know raising an autistic or special needs child. They'll be glad you did. 

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Mark Horner, author of Consistently Persistent: Living with the Tourette Trifecta, is having as much success as any of my authors with his blog. He started with a regular column in the Dallas Morning News and has segued into regular blog posts that consistently attract multiple comments and new followers. He attributes his success to his use of labels or keywords for his posts. Well, that and his fondness for ripping the educational establishment and contemporary parenting practices. When I last looked, I noted that he is highlighting "recent comments," a smart practice. Check out his blog, also called Consistently Persistent.

***
Nancy Diehl and Kathi Kemper are enjoying some success with their first book, Art-Based Curriculum: Discovering the Alphabet with Imagination and Art. The book, aimed at teachers of young children, has several art projects associated with each letter of the alphabet. Nancy and Kathi have been surprised by their early success with "grandmas." No surprise here. Grandmas usually are a good market for children's books or, as in this case, books for adults who are looking for ways to engage imaginatively with children. Check out their blog, also called Art-Based Curriculum.They also seem to be having some success publicizing their book with Pinterest. I'm still trying to work up my nerve to try that. The Publishing Pro.

Try These Tools.

Or not: Below are three tools that I either use or have run across recently:

Tracfone: I've had a Tracfone for several years because it's pay-as-you-go, doesn't require a contract, and is cheap, cheap, cheap. I use it as my office phone, and it's strictly for talking with customers (and auto emergencies). I'm required to buy some minutes every 90 days, which so far has cost me between $7.00 and $10.00 a month. For that, I'm happily not joining the ranks of smart phone users. Actually, my new phone is app-capable, at least with the addition of more memory, but it's still just a phone and will stay that way for a while. Oh,yes, it can text. I don't have much use for that either. One caveat. Because Tracfone is pay-as-you-go and requires almost no information, it's popular with drug sellers, criminals, and other ne'er-do-wells--and their short-term phone numbers are recycled. My last phone number was used by a serious deadbeat, and I began getting collection calls for him. When the calls got up to three-times-a-day, I let the minutes run out and bought a new phone--with a new number. So far, so good.

Square: Speaking of smart phones, you can now use your smart phone to take credit-card payments, which is handy for those of you selling books direct to your customers after presentations and the like. Square is just one of the devices I've heard about. It's getting raves about its ease of use and its cost, but there are concerns about its customer service. I haven't used it myself--hey, no smart phone--but I know people who have and like it. Our Toastmasters club is contemplating using it to make it easier for new members and existing members to pay their dues. Competing services include GoPayment from Intuit and ProPay, which is more robust. I expect PayPal, which I use for taking credit card payments online, will get into the mobile credit-card processing game sooner rather than later.

MagCloud: This is an HP business that is combining POD technology, social media, and magazine distribution. I wondered why I hadn't seen POD technology applied to magazines before, but printing hard copies of magazines (unlike books) is a challenge. While their 20-cent per-page price compares favorably to prices at local copy printers, it does not make printing hard copies of a magazine attractive. It is no surprise, then, that the emphasis seems to be on creating PDF magazines, which makes me wonder why we need HP. It's interesting, but I haven't figured it out yet. The Publishing Pro