As Joshua pointed out on Thursday, the official category list provided by BISAC dictates the basic shape of your promotion, but you do still have some decisions to make. For instance, most sales channels will allow you to choose more than one category for your book.

Mix-and-Match

That gives you the opportunity to mix and match. Maybe there’s no “Weird Western” category for cowboys who can talk to ghosts, but you can put your book in both “Fiction > Supernatural & Horror” and “Fiction > Westerns.”

That’s probably the right thing to do, but you need to be aware how your BISAC selections are used for you to get the most out of them.

I should say, right up front, that the makers of BISAC don’t encourage mixing and matching. The system is designed around the assumption that every book matches only one category.

If you wanted to ask them about Josh’s Weird Western, they would probably encourage him to choose the general “Supernatural & Horror” category and be done with it. BISAC designations aren’t meant to convey every aspect of your story; they’re meant to force it into a broad category.

Bookstore Categories

But here’s the problem: Driven by retail competition, bookstore categories shift much faster than the BISAC categories do. If readers are looking for them, bookstores will promote books as Weird Western or New Adult or Dystopia or any other marketing phrase catching popularity, even if BISAC doesn’t recognize those yet.

That disconnect has led to a situation where every retailer has its own set of categories. If you went shopping for bestsellers by category at Amazon, you’d find a different list from the one at Kobo or Barnes & Noble, and all three are different from the BISAC list.

And that’s where the mix-and-match really helps you. Instead of holding your nose and picking the least-objectionable category, slap as many relevant labels on your product as the retailers allow, and the retailers will use all of them to decide where you book fits in their categories.

Egregious Mis-Categorization

Before you go crazy with that, though, spend some time thinking all the way through the implications. The extra categories aren’t just hints; your book should completely fit into any category you assign it.

Retailers takes this pretty seriously. Apple will reject a badly-categorized book with the phrase “egregious mis-categorization,” and for an example they use a book that’s labeled as both “Erotica” and “Children and Teens.” Egregious, no?

But that’s not the only way to get it wrong. If your book is fiction, it shouldn’t have any non-fiction categories. As the publisher, it’s your responsibility to correctly and accurately label your product so the sales channels can market it as narrowly as possible to your actual target market. If you do your part, retailers and customers alike will reward you.

Come back for next week’s Technical Tip, and I’ll show you exactly how to select your book’s categories at each of the major publishing platforms. See you then!

Aaron Pogue is the head publisher at Consortium Books, author of the bestselling Dragonprince trilogy, and serves as the User Experience consultant at Draft2Digital.com. Every Saturday he shares an article about publishing and the new book marketplace.

Find out more about Aaron Pogue at his author website.

Digital publishing platforms address this problem with long, often tedious instructions for preparing books that will work in their systems. These manuals are called style guides, and when it comes right down to it, automated conversion systems basically require them.

The Smashwords Style Guide

The most infamous style guide in indie publishing is the one required for Smashwords. In order to safely process a Word document through the Smashwords “Meatgrinder” conversion process, you not only need to learn how to apply styles, but also generate a linked Table of Contents and (eventually) track down any of your own advanced formatting that’s causing problems in the converter.

If that gets too complicated, you can always strip all the formatting from your document and put it back in one piece at a time. The style guide contains step-by-step instructions for this “nuclear option,” as well as a list of the “safe” formatting to include when you rebuild it.

You also need to include some strictly-formatted information in the frontmatter, including the order and placement of your title, copyright assertion, and a special “Smashwords Edition” tag.

The complete style guide (PDF) is available as a free download from Smashwords, and also in e-book format pretty much everywhere.

It weighs in around 103 pages, or about 25,000 words. It’s important to understand all the concepts in the book, because Smashwords customer support will often direct authors to review a certain page or section in the style guide in order to fix a publishing problem.

Kindle Publishing Guide

That might seem like I’m throwing stones at Smashwords, but the sad reality is that their hefty style guide is pretty close to industry standard. It’s really a desperate attempt to teach writers the nuances of word processor software.

Even though they’re widely seen as the most convenient option in indie publishing, Amazon’s KDP publishing guide (PDF) is almost as bad as the one from Smashwords. This one is 79 pages long (approximately 20,000 words), but its saving grace is the quality of its material. It covers every nuance of publishing through the KDP platform, including chapters dedicated to things like fixed-format illustrated children’s books.

They also have an abbreviated version that’s barely two pages long.

Draft2Digital

As long as I’m talking about style guides, I really should plug Draft2Digital’s. The guys at Draft2Digital like to claim they don’t have a style guide. They say, “Give us whatever you’ve got, just use your style guide, and we’ll teach our system to work with it.” That’s a pretty generous attitude (and they’re surprisingly good at coming through), but for writers who don’t want to wait for the system to learn, the developers have prepared an (unofficial) style guide for their system, too.

Brace yourself, because things are about to get technical. Sorry, that’s just the nature of the game. If you want to get the best possible results out of Draft2Digital’s conversion process, you should really do all of the following things:

1. Make your chapter titles bold.
2. Use a larger font for them than you use for the body text.

That’s…that’s basically it. You can make block quotes by setting narrower left and right margins. You can save yourself a lot of time (and get a much cleaner document) by leaving off the title page, copyright page, and other endmatter and just letting Draft2Digital build those for you. You can….

Nope. I don’t really have any more tips. The Draft2Digital conversion process is surprisingly good. Try it out and see for yourself.

If you’ve already start self-publishing, you won’t find much new here. Mostly, this post is intended for the newbies.

Title Information

I’m going to use “Title Information” as shorthand for several pieces of information: book title, subtitle, series title, and series volume number. All of those except the first are optional, and these can be some of the most complicated elements to add to different vendors’ product pages.

KDP will ask you for title, series title, and volume number. They’ll add all that information to their database (and probably use it to recommend your book to readers), but the only thing they display on the product page is what you provide in the “title” field.

Most of the other direct distribution outlets (PubIt!, Kobo, and iTunes) behave the same way. That means readers who already know a series name can probably do a search and find your books, but readers browsing through lists of books will have no easy way to know that this book is part of a series.

To avoid this problem, I’ve made a habit of including series and volume information in the title field, too. So, for instance, when I used to publish direct through KDP, I would enter the book’s title not as “Taming Fire,” but “Taming Fire (The Dragonprince’s Legacy, #1).”

Now that I publish everything through Draft2Digital, they handle that for me. At Draft2Digital, I can just put “Taming Fire” in the title field (and the series information in the series boxes), and they’ll make sure it shows up at Amazon the way I showed above.

Alternatively, I can put in my own parenthetical at Draft2Digital, and they’ll use mine instead of adding their own. So either way, you’re fine.

Contributor Details

The next major block of information at any distribution channel is “Contributors.” This mostly refers to authors, but it’s also a place to give credit to the editor who curated an anthology or the illustrator of a children’s book or the translator of an international work.

Unfortunately, this is not a good place to give credit to the cover artist or the freelance copyeditor you hired (not at KDP, anyway). I learned that the hard way with Gods Tomorrow, when it showed up on the main Amazon page as “Gods Tomorrow by Aaron Pogue, Julie Velez, and Elyssa Dolinger.” If you looked closely on the product page, you could see that Julie and Elyssa were referenced as my cover artist and cover designer, but on the main listings, they looked like co-authors.

Again, Draft2Digital handles this for you. You can fill in all your Contributors (along with their roles) and Draft2Digital will embed that information in the book’s metadata, pass it along to any of the retailers that do sane things with it, and keep it hidden from places like KDP (where only “Author” Contributor types are provided).

Product Description

The product description is probably the most work you’ll have to do for any of the vendors, but it’s the least complicated part of the form to fill out. If you’re going direct to multiple distribution channels, I’d recommend developing the product description in a separate document that you can then copy and paste to each distributor. (We used Google Docs.)

The only complicated part of the product description is trying to get a little fancy formatting in. Some of the vendors (Apple and Kobo, if I recall correctly) will allow rich text or HTML like italics and bold, whereas the others only take plaintext.

KDP (always the complicated one) will only accept plaintext when you’re providing the product description, but once the book is live you can access it from your authorcentral.amazon.com page (which is not part of KDP) and modify the description there. The Author Central editor does allow some rich text markup.

There have also been some rumors lately concerning ways to artificially inject HTML markup into the text field at KDP. I haven’t been able to recreate them, and they seem unnecessarily complicated when you can just update the description through Author Central.

Again, Draft2Digital allows you to provide rich text markup which they’ll pass along to any vendors that accept it (and reduce to plaintext for those that won’t).

That covers all the promotional material you’ll need to provide, but there’s still a lot more information the retailers will need in order to sell your book: categories and search terms, content files, MSRP, and desired sales channels.

We’ll talk about all of that over the coming weeks, but now you have enough information to get started.

In the interest of saving you from some sprained ankles along the way (even as some of mine are still recovering), I’d like to help you figure just what to expect.

Write Well a Lot!

Everyone with a blog and a book out will give you the same initial piece of advice for succeeding in indie publishing: write a great book. That’s the foundation everything else is built on.

It’s also boringly obvious and distressingly subjective. If there were any objective definition of “a great book,” Manhattan publishing would have mapped out every last edge of it decades ago, and they’d all be busy drinking champagne on their gold yachts instead of frantically trying to figure out what to do about “the e-book problem.”

So! As apt as the advice “write well” may be, it’s pretty much useless. My recommendation, then, is to write a lot. Iterate! Learn by doing.

And the lovely perk of this approach is that when one of your books finally does make it big, you’ll discover all of a sudden that you have a whole catalog of other books for your new fans to pick up next.

Be Discoverable

There’s another perk that may be less obvious, but it’s just as important in indie publishing: discoverability. We’ll come back to that term often, but when you’re an indie publisher, your biggest challenge is getting discovered.

The more books (or short stories or serials or anthologies or manifestoes) you have available, the easier it becomes for a reader to discover your writing. Your first priority is always writing, but when it comes to the publishing part of your career, always keep discoverability in the front of your mind.

In addition to sheer volume, discoverability is accomplished through branding and categorization. I’m sure “branding” will be a recurring topic in Rachel’s column on cover design, but it’s more than just creating a consistent look across your book covers. It’s establishing yourself as a type of author, as a reliable source of a product specific buyers will consistently like.

Brand Yourself

You can do that with your author blog. You can do it with your Facebook page or the sorts of things you talk about on Twitter. Are you a friendly author closely engaged with her readers? It worked for Amanda Hocking. Are you a snide author of dime-store novels willing to speak truth to power, consequences be damned? It worked for J. A. Konrath.

That doesn’t mean you should pick a successful type and become it. You should develop your own type and portray it consistently and effectively. Express yourself. That’s what being an artist is all about. Authors are just accustomed to doing from the privacy of some dark room, and via six (very slow, very obnoxious) layers of intermediaries. But those guys are all going out of business now, so it’s time for us to step out into the light.

Branding yourself makes it easy for people to find you again (and that’s important), but you still need some way to get their attention in the first place. The easiest way to do this is by targeting a category.

Take Aim

We’re going to talk about targeting categories a lot around here. In fact, we’ll be dedicating a whole week to the topic later this month. But the basic concept is simple: Readers are used to discovering new favorite books by looking around in the same places they found their old favorite books.

Traditionally, that has meant sections of a bookstore. Mystery readers would head straight to the mystery section, sci-fi readers would head straight to the sci-fi section, and so on. But even within those section (or categories), there were sub-categories. Romance readers might like sweet romances or historical romances or naughty chick lit.

A good publisher is aware is of all these factors and has a whole bag of tricks to make sure a given book finds the right reader. That’s partly done through category selection (placing it in the right part of the bookstore), but it’s also done by choices in title, cover art, and product description. A book’s promotional material can (and should) state clearly and compellingly what category, what sub-category, what mood and tone a reader can expect from the story contained inside.

That should be the goal of your marketing campaign–not convince people who might like your book to give it a try, but to make sure the people who will like your book can tell that from the most casual glance all the way through a careful inspection.

Publish Your Book

Once you’ve figured all that out, actually publishing the book is the easy part. In April we’ll talk about an excellent new e-book formatting and multi-vendor distribution service called Draft2Digital that makes the whole process a breeze (and puts some extraordinary power into your hands), but even using a retailer’s direct-publishing platform like Kindle Direct Publishing is relatively painless.

All you have to do is upload your book’s content and cover, provide a title and product description, and choose your sales categories. See? The very things we’ve been discussing. And those are the things we’ll keep discussing. Stick around and we’ll make you a master of all of them.

Aaron Pogue is the head publisher at Consortium Books, author of the bestselling Dragonprince trilogy, and serves as the User Experience consultant at Draft2Digital.com. Every Saturday he shares an article about publishing and the new book marketplace.

Find out more about Aaron Pogue at his author website.

That’s definitely a moving target. Technology is developing quickly, and the market is in constant flux. That means all of this might be obsolete information within a matter of months (if not weeks), and a lot of it might have become dated just in the time since I last checked the pulse.

So my goal isn’t to provide a definitive truth, but to establish a known baseline (right or wrong) from which we can begin the conversation. These are the assumptions and premises on which future posts will be built. If something I say here strikes you as demonstrably wrong, educate me for the sake of future discourse. If something seems subjectively unappealing to you, bear that in mind when I make later recommendations on that subject.

Terminology

I’ll dive right into what’s probably the most fluid aspect of the whole conversation: terminology. It’s useful for us to have a common language, but there are a lot of people manipulating the terminology (for reasons good and bad) in an effort to shape public perception during this time of change.

So you’ll see advocates of traditional publishing persistently equating all forms of direct digital publishing with the parasitic industry of “vanity publishing,” as it’s been known for decades. That’s an easy parallel to make because, prior to the recent advent of direct digital publishing, the only easy way to accomplish self-publishing was through a vanity press (and at an exorbitant rate). That relationship has changed radically–most advocates of self-publishing despise vanity services just as much as the traditional folks do–but it’s in the interests of traditional publishers to maintain the outdated perception.

There’s power in words. If you’re reading this site, that’s something you already know deeply. So even as the traditional publishers are fighting for their names, the people disrupting their industry are trying to establish terms of their own. Konrath and Eisler like to refer to the traditional publishing model as “legacy publishing,” and Konrath has even made a solid case for calling traditional publishing the new  “vanity.”

For the sake of our conversations, I’m going to use the phrases “traditional publishing” and “indie publishing” to refer to full-service intermediary publishing and direct-to-retailer publishing respectively. There’s some contention over the appropriateness of the “indie publishing” label (contention I’m pretty willing to dismiss), but I’m primarily using it because it covers not only “self-publishing” but also the sort of low-barrier-to-entry small press stuff that direct digital publishing enables. That is…the sort of stuff I do at Consortium Books.

I might also use the phrase “Kindle Publishing” from time to time as a sort of generic nickname for direct digital publishing. Naturally, there are a lot more players in that field than just the Kindle, but the Kindle has earned itself some spotlight, and the phrase “Kindle Publishing” is far more evocative to the casual audience than something technical like direct digital publishing.

So now we have some code words. What are we going to do with them?

Which is Better: Traditional Publishing or Indie Publishing?

I’ll save us all a lot of time pretending to provide a fair and balanced evaluation, considering the pros and cons of both sides. It’s not hard to find such posts, but I’d have to do a lot of playacting to make it seem like I endorse traditional publishing.

Indie publishing is better. Indie publishing is a lot better. If you’re already at a position in your career where traditional publishing is an option, then you’ll make a lot more money indie publishing. If you’re not at that point, you can learn on the job and make some money indie publishing, instead of spending years banging on Manhattan doors with query letters.

I’ve personally made an exception when it comes to Amazon’s 47North imprint, which feels somewhere halfway between traditional and indie publishing. The contracts are certainly more author-friendly. You can read through some of my reasoning for that, but overall–without knowing a writer’s specific situation–I’d unflinchingly recommend indie publishing over traditional publishing.

Indie publishing lets you manage your own career, keep control of your own creative works, and publish according to your own schedule. There’s some extra (non-writing) work involved, but not as much as you would think. That is, there’s more non-writing work involved in traditional publishing than you would think, so it comes out close.

Meanwhile, it’s our goal to help you out with all the non-writing work, no matter how you choose to publish. That’s why Joshua is posting advice on sales and marketing every week, Rachel is helping you with cover art design, and both Jessie and Thomas are working on editing and revision for you.

And, of course, you have me. Check back next week, and I’ll go into some detail concerning all these extra tasks–what’s required, what’s worth doing, and what surprises should you expect along the way.

While I was lurking a few nights ago, one such question came up. The thread’s title was “The dreaded ‘tab’ question…” and as soon as I saw the title, I knew what would be lurking inside. I also realized that I had the subject for my first feature post!

There’s little more technical about the writing process than the dreaded tab question. It’s a problem that hampers even the best of us. Joshua and Courtney have both been working with me for years, and (if I recall correctly) they both still don’t fully know the answer to the tab question.

Today, I intend to rectify that. This one’s for Courtney and Joshua and the friendly commenter at Kindleboards and everyone else trying to write and publish a book without ten years of Tech Writer training and experience backing them up.

Background

Once upon a time, people had to rely on these monstrous mechanical devices to print and set their manuscripts. My granddad called them “typewriters.” They were tedious and awful and stupid.

Today, we use Word Processor software that many people think is tedious and awful and stupid for one simple reason: they’re trying to use the Word Processor like a typewriter. It’s not. Microsoft Word is a document layout engine, and it is astonishingly useful as long as you use it as a document layout engine. There might not be a better example of this than the dreaded tab question.

Here’s the problem: On typewriters, hitting Return would advance the paper by one line and slide the carriage all the way back to the left margin. In order to visually set off paragraphs, a typist would mash the space bar a bunch of times to insert a first-line indent, and then start typing. In order to save time and introduce (some) consistency, the “Tab” key could conveniently insert those spaces for you.

Efficient typists developed the habit of hitting Return then Tab whenever they reached the end of a paragraph. It was a quick one-two punch, and it created a nice, readable document with no more smarts than one of those clunky devices could manage.

And so, naturally, when typewriter keyboards became the model for modern computer keyboards, and typewriter functionality gradually evolved into Word Processor functionality, the “Tab” key persisted through it all. Many, many authors still build paragraphs today the same way typists did back then. It works–that’s a software feature called “backwards compatibility”–but it causes all kinds of problems because it’s an obsolete way of doing things.

The Unseen

You see…those tab characters hang around. When you press “Tab” in Word, it doesn’t just move the cursor, it sticks a big fat empty space inside the line. You can’t necessarily see the tab character (any more than you can an ordinary space), but it’s now lurking inside your text, and when you try to use that text elsewhere–when, for instance, you try to convert your Word .doc file into an e-book that will look nice on the Kindle–the computer programs converting your text don’t know that you just wanted that tab to move the paragraph’s first line over. Tabs can be used for all kinds of things, and once it’s in the text, the program only sees it as another typed character.

You can get a glimpse at all your tab characters by turning on your Word Processor’s “Hidden Symbols.” To do this in any recent version of Word, just look through the menu bars until you find the paragraph symbol () and click that.

Your document will go from normal reading mode, which looks something like this:

To markup mode, which looks something like this:

And in that mode, you can see the offending tab characters at the beginning of every paragraph, right? When you try to copy or convert this text into anything other than Word, those characters can cause all kinds of problems.

The Solution

I have good news about the solution to the tab problem.

• It’s simple.
• It’s effective.
• It’ll make you much better at using your word processor.

That’s because the secret to fixing your tab problem is learning how to use template-based formatting (which is nearly synonymous with the idea of “Styles”). Template-based formatting allows you to tell the word processor how you want a type of thing to look–a normal paragraph of text, for instance–and allow the word processor to apply that formatting to all the normal paragraphs of text in your document.

I’ve talked about the benefits of template-based formatting before. It’s incredibly powerful, and once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard. You can read that article for a more thorough introduction, but today we’re going to jump straight to the matter at hand.

First-line Indent

The typewriter method is so ingrained that you’ll often hear people talking about “tabbed” paragraphs, but the proper name for the format you want is “indented” paragraphs. You can create the appearance of an indent with a tab character (that’s what the tab character was invented for), but there are other, better ways to do it within a word processor.

The best method is to modify your normal paragraph text. In Word 2010, you’ll find the list of styles right on the home ribbon. Right-click “Normal” and choose “Modify.” The “Modify Style” dialogue will open. In the bottom-left corner, choose “Format” and then “Paragraph.”

All modern word processors work essentially the way I’m going to describe, but for my samples I’ll use screenshots and instructions from Word 2010 because that’s what I happen to have installed on my laptop. If you can’t easily figure out how to do it in your software of choice, do a Google search for “modify paragraph style <name of word processor>” and you should find plenty of instructions.

Everything up to now has been navigating. Now we’re going to make an actual change. This new dialogue describes all the different ways Word positions the paragraphs in your document. Right now, we want to change the first-line indent. So find the section in the middle of the frame labeled “Indentation” and, within that, the drop-down box labeled “Special.”

Change that from “None” to “First line” and make sure the text-box beside it says 0.5″.

Now press “OK” as many times as it takes to get back to your document, and you’ll find the extra indent already added onto every paragraph.

That’s all it takes. Now your normal paragraph style will always start with a half-inch first-line indent, and you’ll never have to press the tab button again.

Cleaning Up Your Mess

Before I leave, I’m going to show you one more trick, although I won’t take the time to explain it in detail here. But after all the work you just did to make your document look better…it probably looks a lot worse right now. That’s because every paragraph now starts with a half-inch indent followed by the old tab characters.

Let’s get rid of the tab characters. The easiest, fastest way to do that is to hit Ctrl-H to open up the “Find and Replace Dialogue.”

In the “Find” box, type ^t (that’s Shift-6 and then the letter “t”). In the “Replace with” box, hit Delete a bunch of times to make sure it’s completely empty. Then click “Replace All.”

That should clean up your mess. Word just deleted all the tab characters for you, leaving a manuscript with first-line indents that come entirely from template-based formatting.

Good work!

Aaron Pogue is the head publisher at Consortium Books, author of the bestselling Dragonprince trilogy, and serves as the User Experience consultant at Draft2Digital.com. Every Saturday he shares an article about publishing and the new book marketplace.

Find out more about Aaron Pogue at his author website.

But even as self-publishing opened the door for a lot of writers to make comfortable livings instead of papering their walls with rejection letters, one common refrain among writers wandering into self-publishing is, “I don’t want to do all the publishing stuff. I want a publisher to do all that. All I want to do is write.”

I know a lot of people who answer that with a condescending sneer. They like to say, “Writing is a business, and you have to treat yourself like an entrepreneur.”

Doing the Bare Minimum

Maybe that’s true, but I think the people quickest to shout it just happen to be the people who are naturally gifted in those areas. Whether it’s business management or social media engagement or product marketing or graphic design…there’s always someone to tell you that this is a fundamental part of your job, and you should be more committed to it.

Personally, I disagree. It’s a fundamental part of your product and of your product’s success, but if you just want to be a writer, that’s a completely legitimate goal. It also means you’re going to have to get clever doing just enough of the work to find success without diving into new and unfamiliar waters in search of success.

For what it’s worth, none of this has much bearing on your choice to go indie or pursue traditional publishing. Even if you have a publisher doing the work for you (and landing a publisher is more work that’s not writing), the publisher will end up asking almost as much work from you as you’d have to spend doing things yourself. I can tell you this from experience.

If you’re ever going to publish your work, you’re going to have to contribute in some big ways. Let’s talk about some of the most basic.

Promotion

One of the main things writers want a publisher to do for them is marketing and promotion. From what I’ve seen, major publishing houses do provide this. They arrange for review copies, they might schedule some radio or podcast interviews if you’re important enough, and they’ll place your books in bookstores.

That last one is the one that really matter. Visibility in a bookstore is still the most valuable service (by far) that a traditional publisher can give you. Its value is declining with every bookstore that shuts down, and publishers’ power to secure that visibility fades with every rack of paperbacks that gets replaced with an e-book kiosk or a shelf full of boardgames, but books on shelves will get your name out there.

It’s not really enough, though, and the publishers know it. Search the web for “author platform” and you’ll find thousands of articles from writers, agents, and editors telling new writers that one of the most useful things to mention in a query is a strong author platform.

That means that you, as an author, need to bring your own audience to the table. That means self-promotion. It’s usually done via a blog or other social media. Sometimes via newsletters or mailing lists. Book signings can do the trick, too, but that sounds like an awful lot of work to pick up a handful of new readers.

Of course, the most effective platform of all is a track record of hundreds of thousands of sales.

But all of that is work you’re going to have to do. My advice to you is to start a blog right now, and focus on that first. Readers (who aren’t writers) really like to grab a peek behind the curtain at the writer’s life. If you’re quirky and inspired, that reaffirms the fantasy. If you’re boring and real, that lets them sympathize with you (and maybe dream a little bigger after your example).

If you don’t feel like connecting personally with your readers, you could always write to other writers. Writing can be a very lonely profession, and there’s so much mystery and opacity around the path to success that writers are always happy to compare notes and learn from each other. Share your experience–whether you’re just starting out or have already found some success–and other writers will care.

Product Description

All that talk of “platform” is about promotion in a general sense. It’s promoting you as the author brand. But, of course, to sell a book, you need to spend some time promoting the book.

The two most important tools for promoting the book are the cover art and the product description. I’ll talk about cover art in a moment, but first let’s consider the product description.

I’m using the name “product description,” by the way, because that’s what Amazon calls it. You might think of it as the synopsis or the back-cover copy (although the terms aren’t entirely synonymous). Basically, the product description is the sales pitch for your story.

If you’re self-publishing, you get to craft your own product description and copy it into the “description” box at whatever website you’re using to publish your book. If you’re traditionally published, you get to craft your own product description and copy it into an e-mail to your editor, who will hand it over to someone with marketing experience–someone who almost certainly hasn’t read the book–to clean it up and add some pizzazz.

It’s nice to have a professional watching over your shoulder, but the quality of his revision is going to depend heavily on what you give him in the first place. That means learning to write product reviews is an important skill, no matter which path you choose to publishing.

Cover Concepts

Covers are much the same way. Unless you’re a natural at the graphic arts, you’ll probably end up relying on someone else to craft the single most important sales feature of your book.

That’s stressful. The best thing you can do to limit the risk (and the stress that goes with it) is to practice developing “cover concepts.”

Learn how to choose scenes that would make good covers. Learn how to provide brief but effective descriptions of the visual elements that a cover artist could capture well. Learn how to find and caption reference images to share with your cover artist, whether it’s a landscape that would make a good backdrop, an actor that’s a perfect fit for your swashbuckling hero, or the exact style of sword he wears on his hip.

Coordinating with the Pros

Whether you’re working with a Manhattan publishing house or doing this stuff on your own, your best bet is to collaborate on a lot of these things with experienced professionals. I lean on Joshua Unruh (my Director of Marketing) to refine all my product descriptions and on Rachel Giles (my Cover Coordinator) to convert my scenes and reference images into beautiful, polished covers.

Having those resources is such a blessing. I’d encourage you to start looking now for some people you can depend on. But while you’re at it, start watching for blog posts from my resources, because Joshua and Rachel are both regulars here at Unstressed Syllables, and they’re going to spend most of their time teaching you how to get the most of those relationships.

Aaron Pogue is the head publisher at Consortium Books, author of the bestselling Dragonprince trilogy, and serves as the User Experience consultant at Draft2Digital.com. Every Saturday he shares an article about publishing and the new book marketplace.

Find out more about Aaron Pogue at his author website.

This site used to be a place for me to keep friends and family updated on my writing and other projects. About a year ago I moved all that stuff over to AaronPogue.com.

I also tried to use the site to teach lessons about writing (whether technical or creative) and eventually about publishing, too. But over time my teaching style got a little stale and unfocused, and my schedule got a little busy, so the whole site gradually ground to a halt.

Something New

Instead of just making a New Year’s resolution to blog more, I went to some of my closest, smartest friends–all of whom also happen to contribute in their own ways to the publishing process at Consortium Books–and asked them to share their specialized knowledge with all the aspiring writers out there.

This week, you’ve gotten to meet the new staff of Unstressed Syllables. I owe them all a deep debt of gratitude for their contributions, and especially to Jessie Sanders who is also working as our Managing Editor. Without her help, none of this would have happened.

My vision for this site is to make it a one-stop resource for anyone who wants to participate in today’s publishing environment. We’ll discuss writing technique, editorial assistance, and the publishing technology that has made a massive new marketplace that makes it easier than ever for writers to earn a living.

Me

Nearly everyone reading this right now knows who I am, but I have high hopes that the new focus and all the new content will bring in some new readers, so I’m going to take a moment to introduce myself.

I’m a self-published author. I started back in 2010 with a sci-fi mystery called Gods Tomorrow, and then hit the big time in the summer of 2011 with a fantasy novel called Taming Fire. In the last two years, I’ve sold 170,000 copies across both series, most of them in the Dragonprince trilogy.

That’s enough to qualify me as a self-publishing success story. I’m not saying that to brag–I can only take a fraction of the credit for my success, as you’ll see over the coming weeks–but to tell you why this blog matters.

Before I was a self-publishing success story, I was a hopeful writer who’d given up on ever being published. In fact, I spent five years avoiding writing altogether (and, incidentally, caught in some pretty serious depression). I was working the dreadful day job and figured I’d be stuck in that for the rest of my life. Then Taming Fire took off, and six months later I walked away from my job with the FAA and dedicated myself full-time to Consortium Books.

Consortium Books is the (tiny) indie publishing company I set up to publish my books and the books of some friends in my writing group. We borrowed the resources of some incredibly talented photographers, painters, and graphic designers for our covers. We were lucky enough to have a couple professional editors in our group, and they helped give us some of the cleanest indie-published books on the market.

And…I did help, too. My most significant contributions from the publishing side came from two places that had nothing to do with my love of writing.

My Best Resources

For ten years I’d paid the bills by punching a clock as a technical writer. In the process, I learned a little bit about formatting, layout, readability, and style. I’d also picked up some pretty useful programming skills along the way and maintained a close relationship with the college buddy who got me into programming in the first place.

That college buddy built a custom software package for me to convert ordinary Google Docs into consistently and accurately formatted e-books. And my experience as a technical writer helped me design those e-books to be reader friendly and professional in a way most indies could only dream of.

After two years of tinkering, we’ve just released that software package as a public service at Draft2Digital.com. But I’ve spent the intervening time learning everything I can about the digital publishing market.

I’ve researched the techniques that work (and the ones that are really a waste of time). I’ve kept tabs on the success stories and made friends with other aspiring writers and learned a thousand little tips and tricks for navigating the process.

That’s what I’m going to be sharing with you. My job is to teach you about publishing in today’s market. It isn’t all easy or obvious, but it’s all accessible to anyone who wants to try. There has never been a better time to be a writer.

My first word of advice: Subscribe to this site. Come back regularly. Get to know the experts who will teach you everything from prewriting to promotion, from fixing your grammar problems to Photoshopping your cover art.

And pitch in! Leave a comment if you have a question (or even a correction). If you’re participating in the market, use the Contact Form to find out about guest posting opportunities. We’d love to build a community here.

In the meantime, we’re going to start sharing what we know. See you next week.

Aaron Pogue is the head publisher at Consortium Books, author of the bestselling Dragonprince trilogy, and serves as the User Experience consultant at Draft2Digital.com. Every Saturday he shares an article about publishing and the new book marketplace.

Find out more about Aaron Pogue at his author website.

But don’t think I’m done with Unstressed Syllables. In fact, we’ve got grand plans for the site that we intend to roll out this fall. We’re hoping Unstressed Syllables will become the go-to site for writing and publishing advice.

In the meantime, I’m hard at work helping develop the new go-to site for self-publishing. I’m the Director of User Experience for Draft2Digital, a new ebook publishing platform, and among other things I’m contributing to their promotional copy.

So today, I’d like to share my most recently finished copy, and get your take as interested parties. I beg of you your feedback.

Why Choose Draft2Digital?

The last few years have seen an ebook revolution that massively changed the publishing industry. Thanks to digital distribution, it is easier than ever to bring your book to an audience that’s always hungry for more.

“Easier than ever” doesn’t necessarily mean “easy enough.” To get the most out of this opportunity, you need to convert a manuscript (usually a Microsoft Word document) into an ebook format like epub, set up user accounts at multiple sales channels, learn the quirks of each platform, and then duplicate the book’s sales information across all those outlets. Every time you make a change to your book, you’ll have to make those changes everywhere your book is listed.

Many authors have learned to use the self-publishing tools available at sites like Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!, and Kobo’s Writing Life. While some publishers love that level of control, we know there are some authors out there who want to participate in this new market but who don’t have the technical skills to format an ebook or the time to manage all those different accounts.

That’s why we created Draft2Digital. This site provides a single, simple process to turn your story into a professionally-formatted ebook and release it through all the industry’s most powerful sales channels. We’ll give you one place to publish your projects, to manage any changes, and to track your performance across all vendors.

And the market is still growing! As new sales channels appear, we’ll be at the front of the pack, learning to manage each new platform so you won’t have to. If that sounds like a useful service, try us out today. You can publish a book at no cost and no commitment and see how convenient Draft2Digital really is.

What works? What’s missing? Does it sound like a service you would like to use? (If it does,  you can sign up for an email notification when the service goes live.)

But that suggestion inevitably elicits the same response:

How?

It’s a fair question. Readers aren’t necessarily writers, and maybe you haven’t tried to do something like this since that book report you wrote in fifth grade.

The goods news is, it’s really not hard to write a helpful review. It’s not even as hard as a fifth-grade book report.

A customer review doesn’t need to be an essay. It doesn’t need to be pages long or strongly argued. All it needs to do is communicate your experience with the product.

The Critique

From the author’s perspective, there are two ways to write a “helpful” review: You can provide a critique, telling the author what he did wrong to help him improve his craft; or you can provide a recommendation, encouraging other readers to buy the book (and telling them why).

Now…I’m a writer and a businessman. My family’s financial situation depends entirely on the number of books I sell. That does bias my opinion here, but there’s an easier way to keep the conversation in perspective.

I’m not trying to describe the perfect book review technique. I’m focusing specifically on ways you can support a writer (in this case, with a book review).

So! With that established, I hope you’ll allow me to say that a public critique is far less useful than a recommendation. I’m unlikely to make significant changes to a book that’s already published, though, even if you provide a detailed and compelling list of plot problems in the customer comments. (And if Idid make those changes, your published critique would become out-of-date and confusing.)

So publishing a critique can’t help the book you’re commenting on. It can only hurt sales. That’s not so say you should keep all your meany-pants opinions to yourself!

I’m also a writing coach and student, and I always want to see writers improving their craft. But these days, it’s remarkably easy to get in touch with writers directly. If you want to provide literary critique of my style, I would love a comment at my author website or a message through my contact form.

As an author, I take all critiques seriously (even the offhand comments in a 4- or 5-star review). In fact, it’s often the critiques buried in recommendations that impact me most.

And as a final caveat (in case I haven’t been clear enough), I’m not claiming negative reviews are useless. If you post saying everything that’s wrong with a book, you should be doing that to help other readers (buyers) avoid making a purchase they’ll regret.

That’s a legitimate service. But it doesn’t help the writer at all. It only hurts his paycheck.

Recommendations

I’ve spent more time on that topic than I wanted to, but maybe it’s for the best. This is what you’re here for–how to write a positive review–and the main thing I want to convey on this topic is that it’s easy.

Here’s the whole guide:

1. Tell the world what you enjoyed about reading this book.

That’s all. That’s how to write a helpful review.

If the story was exciting, say it was exciting. If you got lost in the narrative and missed out on a night’s sleep (or a day’s productivity at work), say so. If you loved getting to know the characters and you kinda miss spending time with them now that the book’s over, mention it!

You don’t have to summarize the plot. You don’t have to break down the elements of story or convince an English teacher you really understood the symbolism and themes. Just say what you liked, and you’ll be helping other readers judge whether this book features the things that are important to them.

Was the story fast-paced and short, so you could finish it and move on to another book? Was it immersive and deeply developed, so you felt like you spent years of your life in this place?

Either comment can be far more useful than “It was pretty long,” or “It was kinda short,” and either comment can be seen as a pro or a con depending on the buyer. If you focus on saying what you liked about the experience, you’ll automatically provide the most useful information within the most useful context.

And in the process you can let your favorite writers know what you want to see more of. That might end up helping you out, too.