June 1, 2008 Volume 4: Issue 12

"Self Published Authors" Bi-Monthly Newsletter
Helping self-published authors promote and market their books and share information and resources.

June 1, 2008 Volume 4: Issue 12
Dan Shaurette
editor@selfpublishedauthors.com
http://www.selfpublishedauthors.com

By Subscription Only! You are receiving this newsletter because you requested a subscription. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of this newsletter.

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IN THIS ISSUE
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1. Editor's Notebook
2. Newsletter Submission Guidelines
3. Feature Article by John Penberthy
4. Resource Links
5. Interview of Robert R. Best by Dan Shaurette
6. Products, Services, and Downloads
7. Publicity Article by Judy Cullins
8. Free Sites and Services
9. Writing Article by Dan Poynter
10. Events
11. Commentary by Afrika Midnight Asha Abney
12. Reciprocal Links
13. Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information

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1: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
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Welcome to the June 2008 newsletter for SelfPublishedAuthors.com. For those of you who are new to the website and newsletter, welcome and I hope you enjoy the issue. Thank you for visiting the website and subscribing to the list. To the regulars out there, welcome back for another issue.

This issue has my interview with Robert R. Best discussing his book, ALL KINDS OF THINGS KILL, which is a horror short-story anthology. Of course we also have a fine collection of articles and resources that I hope will help you all succeed in your writing and publishing goals.

As always, if you have questions, comments, suggestions, or if you'd like to contribute, be interviewed, add an event or have a request, please reply to this email, or drop a line to me at: editor@selfpublishedauthors.com. If you are interested, don't hesitate to send a query my way.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the issue!

Dan Shaurette
editor@selfpublishedauthors.com
http://www.DanShaurette.com

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2: NEWSLETTER SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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The newsletter for SelfPublishedAuthors.com is here to provide a resource for all authors. Obviously, I want to help you succeed in your writing, self-publishing efforts, and self-promotion. I have received a few requests from fellow authors asking what they can do to promote their books in the newsletter.

I am always happy to help promote an author and their works in the newsletter. That's what we're here for. That being said, the best I can do is one of the following.

If you are interested in writing an article about your experiences as a self-published author, I would be more than happy to consider it for publication. If I publish the article, I will give you space for a signature box that you could use to promote yourself and your book.

If you would like to send me an ARC copy of your book, eBook format preferred, I would be happy to review it and interview you. The interview would most likely be what gets published in the newsletter, but reviews of recommended books may also be published. Please note, I have already been presented with some works to read, so please query me first before sending your books. I'd rather return a book than form a slush pile.

If you have a book signing coming up, we do try to list those when they are timely. Remember our newsletter is published in February, April, June, August, October, and December. If you host a class or workshop, or have a website that promotes a writer's resource, please let us know about it. All links about such events are provided free of charge. Your name, location, dates, and contact info. will be presented.

If instead you are just interested in placing an advertisement in the newsletter for your book or website, I'll ask for some patience. I am re-evaluting various plans for advertising in both the newsletter and the website.

Currently there are places for you to list your books, websites, and even join our banner ad exchange. You can also feel free to post in our forums and tell us about yourself and your books. As soon as I figure out a new model for classified ads in the newsletter, I will let you all know. Thank you for your patience.

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3: FEATURE ARTICLE by John Penberthy
Hitting Paydirt With Foreign Rights Sales
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Twenty years ago a book idea for an inspirational allegory about bees, sort of a Jonathan Livingston Seagull of the insect world, came to me in a meditation quick as a download. Given that I had never before (or since) had this kind of inspiration I decided to put it to paper and so TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE was born. When I was done I felt I had something special and unique and sent the manuscript off to 40 literary agents. It was rejected by all but one, who never found a publisher. Then a friend of mine decided he wanted to publish it, which suited me fine as I was taking a job in Indonesia. My friend sold about 3,000 copies while I was out of the country and that was that.

Or so I thought. Over the last five years Buzz, my main character, kept popping into my mind saying, "I never really got a fair chance. Now you've got the internet. Give it another go." Knowing how tough it was for an unknown author to land a publisher and how much tougher yet it was for an individual to successfully market and distribute a book nationally, I resisted. But Buzz was persistent and I finally gave in. In 2005 I edited TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE and had it professionally illustrated, laid out and printed, and had a website designed. And so I set myself up for the most distasteful part of the whole business -- marketing -- for like many writers I'm a confirmed introvert and detest marketing.

In preparation for publication I read the The Complete Guide to Self Publishing, joined the Colorado Independent Publishers Association and did a lot of networking. While participating in a brainstorming group, someone suggested getting a trailer made, which I did and included as a part of my site. This proved to be extremely helpful as people sometimes think TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE is a children's book, and the trailer suggests its cleverness and spiritual sophistication. And, although I couldn't foresee it at the time, the trailer proved instrumental in getting my book into the hands of readers worldwide.

One thing that I kept hearing and reading was the importance of selling translation rights to foreign publishers. Great -- anything to avoid marketing to the public! As soon as the book came out I researched foreign literary agents online and emailed a brief two paragraph letter along with the link to the trailer to about 150 of them worldwide. I knew literary agents are loathe to take the many hours it takes to read books submitted but figured they could surely spare 60 seconds to view a trailer. At that time I also offered the ebook version free through my site as a way of building buzz, which enabled interested agents to read the book online (which can be done in 90 minutes).

Bingo! Within a few days an agent from Korea emailed me saying that he had a prospective publisher in mind and to please send him a hardcopy. A few weeks after that we had a contract! Subsequently a Spanish agency was interested and over the next few months they landed contracts with major publishers in Italy and Latin America (for both Spanish and Portuguese rights). Suddenly I was able to see my way out of marketing my book by selling it to other publishers -- hallelujah! And I came to realize that with enough foreign rights sales, my book would be an easy sell to a publisher in the largest market of all -- the U.S. In the ensuing year other agents landed me contracts with five more foreign publishers for translation rights in China, Slovenia, Taiwan, Romania and Vietnam. Advances have ranged from $1,000 to $12,000, with a total of $41,000 so far. Additional foreign rights deals are in the works.

With this track record I sent books to 50 U.S. literary agents, four of whom responded. I selected one and within two months she landed me a contract with Sterling Publishing, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, for World English Rights. This was by far my biggest advance but equally as important was the load taken off my back by turning my book over to the pros. Sterling re-released TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE in hardcover in the U.S, Canada, U.K. and Australia in December.

Needless to say, I'm pleased as punch but guess what? Sterling expects me to play a big role in marketing my book! The good news is that most of this can now be done on the internet, a place where, with the help of books like Red Hot Internet Publicity, we confirmed introverts feel truly comfortable and at home.
___

Copyright © 2008 John Penberthy. Reprinted with permission.
John Penberthy is the author of TO BEE OR NOT TO BEE. View the trailer and send free e-cards at http://www.ToBeeBook.com/. To receive a listing of 15 websites listing foreign rights literary agents around the world, email him at info@ToBeeBook.com.

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4: RESOURCE LINKS
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THE AUTHOR’S REPAIR KIT
The Author’s Repair Kit is a NEW ebook designed to help you breathe new life into your faltering or failing book. Use Patricia Fry’s post-publication book proposal system and heal your publishing mistakes. The Author's Repair Kit, only 27 pages: $5.95.
http://www.MatilijaPress.com/author_repairkit.html

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5: INTERVIEW: Robert R. Best by Dan Shaurette
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Robert R. Best is the author of a new self-published anthology of horror short stories entitled ALL KINDS OF THINGS KILL. I recently discovered it and have absolutely enjoyed the stories. He has put them all up online on his blog for everyone to read.

DS: Robert, I wanted to let you know that I really liked this collection of short stories. I have read horror before and listened to it, and to me it's a sort of acquired taste. I mean, I like certain stuff but there's some things that I watch or I read and I think it is too violent for me or too cliché. But all of your stories had a fresh new take on them. Everything from vampires, to werewolves, to cannibals, oh my. So I wanted to know first, what is your inspiration for writing horror stories? Where did you get your start?

RB: Well, for a long time, I've also been a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy, and I really wanted to write those also, but I found that the horror just came more easily to me. I think, for me, the horror genre is about exploring fears and dealing with those fears, so a lot of them are just things that frighten me, and you can kind of work that out through the stories. I also assume that if it frightens me it will frighten someone else. That's really it; I just found that I had more of a knack for those kind of stories than I did straight sci-fi or other genre-type things. So I just kinda gravitated towards that.

DS: Have you been writing for a while?

RB: Off and on, yes. I've been writing with varying degrees of seriousness since I was a kid, really. So, off and on for probably about twenty-some years. I only just recently got really serious within the last four or five. I was writing stuff and submitting it around and I'd read some other stuff that had been printed online and heard some podiobooks and stuff like that and it just occurred to me that I could do that, too.

DS: Oh absolutely.

RB: So I just decided to jump in to that end and it's been a lot of fun. I mean the book had only been up for a few brief weeks before you guys found it and that was the first bit of interest in the book that I hadn't gone out and instigated myself. So that was a lot of fun and I want to thank you guys for that.

DS: Oh, it's our pleasure. Have you submitted the stories in this book previously to other publications or this book as a whole before you went the self-published route?

RB: Not the book as a whole, but probably about half the stories. I forgot exactly which ones now. Some of them weren't done at the time and I completed them in order to have the book ready. But the ones that were done, I think "Charity [and the Vampire]" was one of them. I sent that around a bunch and I get a lot of good reports back but not good enough to print them. Yeah, so some of them yes and some no.

DS: Very cool. Yeah, I will admit that a lot of the stories are short and fast reading. I don't know, but a lot of anthologies have requirements on length, so some might pass on it because of that, or it's not quite what they are looking for. But we've all heard those rejections before. You did what a lot of authors are doing these days which is say, "Thank you, I'm gonna do it myself, thank you very much." Lulu makes that possible, and that's who you chose as a publisher. How did you find out about Lulu?

RB: Oh I forget now, I think some other show mentioned them. I think it might have actually been Leo Laporte on one of his tech shows. The idea interested me a lot and I did some research on them and they seemed to be more above the board than some of the other P.O.D. services.

DS: Indeed.

RB: They seem to be very straight-forward about who they were and what they did and they seemed to be the most fair so I went with them. When I ordered the test copy of the book and I was impressed with how good it actually looked.

DS: Yes I will say right now that I have placed an order for my copy -- it hasn't arrived yet -- but I will be happy to report on the quality of it too when I get it. I've seen their books before and Lulu is top-notch when it comes to the printing materials. They are also quite flexible on the licensing of the books and other stuff they produce as well which is the next thing I wanted to talk about. You decided to go ahead and release this not only as a paperback and as an ebook but also made it Creative Commons licensed. Tell me about why you decided to do that.

RB: Well, I wanted to maximize its availability and also I've been kind of a supporter of that as far as other things that I like. I like when they go the Creative Commons route. I thought that it may be a little hypocritical of me if I put something up and didn't do the same thing. So the Creative Commons is sort of like what we all would want Copyright to be, where you can make a copy of it just so long as you don't sell it or change it or anything like that. Which I think is what we assumed it was back before the record industry started cracking down. So Creative Commons just seems to be a good response to that. It just makes a little more sense.

DS: I agree, and you are in the process of actually podcasting your stories as well, correct?

RB: Right, yes.

DS: How goes that?

RB: We're about halfway done. My wife, Laura, is going to be doing the reading of the stories, because she has a much better recording voice than I do. She'll be doing the actual stories themselves then I've put together some music for the intro and outro and little short things to introduce the book and give links to the book online. Then it's just a matter of editing them all together, but she's about halfway through the actual raw text of the stories. So we should have something soon. I want to say maybe a month, but I'd hate to say anything for sure, because I really don't know yet.

DS: And it sneaks up on you, too. I mean you could be doing this for a while and before you know it, months have passed. Yeah, I totally understand. Well, please let me know when that goes live because I will definitely spread the word about that.

RB: O.K.

DS: So when it comes to other stories, have you written anything else that hasn't made its way to a publication somewhere? Or do you have plans to write anything else?

RB: I have a handful of other things that just weren't done in time for this book, or they were too similar. Like there's another werewolf story that I decided not to use because there's already one in the book. Mainly I'm working on a zombie novel right now that will be out soon. I can't say for sure how long as it's still in the first draft stage, but I have a clarity of where it's going. It should be done, hopefully, sometime next year at the latest. I'm looking forward to that and I'll probably do the same kind of thing where I'll put it up online and then also have the print version that you can buy.

DS: Cool. Do you have any vampire books in you somewhere? I mean "Charity and the Vampire" was an excellent story and do you think you might follow that?

RB: Yeah, Charity was actually intended to be -- not of the characters but rather the kind of world they're in --which is the same as a book I've had in mind for a while, so I hope to have that eventually. But yeah, there will be something some day with that, yeah.

DS: You had mentioned that you've been kind of shopping the stories around and getting the word out, and I was the first one to sort of came out you without that kind of marketing that you've been doing. What have you tried and what has worked for you, do you think, besides just putting your blog up?

RB: Well, I put together a quick little press release and sent that around to several horror-themed sites, and I got a response or two on that. A couple have offered to review the book, but I don't know when that'll be. I registered it with a few horror search engines and I did the web ring thing, and those have gotten quite a few hits in just the few weeks that the book has been up. Quite a few hits have come through those, so those really do work. The link exchange thing, and the web ring thing, and the banner exchange stuff really does help. Beyond that, not much else. I'm still kind of thinking of other things to do, but I've actually been surprised how much the site has gotten. I mean, the numbers aren't huge, but they're more than I expected in the first few weeks.

DS: Right, and I think that going the podcasting route is going to help with that, too, because lots of people subscribe to podcasts, and they pick up on them. Podcasts cross-promote and discuss each other, so you'll get some pick up and infiltration just from that as well, I would think.

RB: Yeah, I'm hoping for that, too.

DS: Very cool. Well, Robert, thank you very much, and much success to you.
To find out more about Robert R. Best and his book, visit http://allkindsofthingskill.blogspot.com/ and http://robertrbest.blogspot.com/. To purchase a copy of the book, please visit http://stores.lulu.com/robertrbest/.
___

Copyright © 2008 Dan Shaurette. Reprinted with permission.
Besides being the newsletter editor for http://SelfPublishedAuthors.com, Dan is the author of LILITH'S LOVE, a modern vampire romance novel, which you can learn more about at http://Liliths-Love.com/. He is also the host of the Out Of The Coffin podcast, which is all about vampires and can be found at http://OutOfTheCoffin.com/. You can find out about all of his projects at http://DanShaurette.com/.

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6: PRODUCTS, SERVICES, and DOWNLOADS
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WORDHUSTLER.COM
You've Just Finished Your Masterpiece. Now What?
Writing for publication? Figuring out where to send your work, sending it, and keeping track of your submissions is hands down the least enjoyable part of the process. With WordHustler, you can spend more time writing because we simplify, streamline, and organize the entire submission process for you. Not only that, we print and ship each manuscript, saving you time, inconvenience, and money!
Bottom line: you're a writer. You should be spending your time writing. Sign up now and your first submission is free.
http://www.WordHustler.com/

BLURBINGS.COM
We are a promotional company for authors and publishers. Currently we have some promotions going and we would like to offer your members a limited time promotion. We are offering a 25% discount to your group. All they have to do is select a promotion package, enter coupon code: group21 and click apply. When they checkout, they will receive a 25% discount.
Please feel free to take a look at our website, Blurbings.com or our myspace page, http://www.myspace.com/blurbings. On our blog we have a lot of information on who we are and how authors can benefit from us. You can also encourage your members to read our blogs for more information.
http://www.Blurbings.com

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7: PUBLICITY ARTICLE by Judy Cullins
Why Isn't your Book Profitable? 10 Reasons
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You spent a lot of time and energy on your book--your labor of love. You even had it professionally edited. But, often hidden reasons don't surface, or you are simply unaware of your actions and attitude that stop your book's success.

Here's 10 reasons why your book is not "Over-the-Top" successful.

1. You don't specifically define what you want your profits to do for you.

Does it mean taking a month's vacation each year, buying a home, paying your child's college tuition? Be sure you know what your money target is and what it will do for you before you chase it. It's all important to have a goal beyond just the money.
Money is just the means to the real life goals.

2. You shotgun your promotion efforts and don't focus on one or two books.

So many times I hear colleagues adding another book, CD, or other product to their offerings. Just remember, you can only market one thing at a time. Presenting too many products and making too many offers confuses your would-be buyer.

3. You set goals far too unreachable in the time allotted.

While it's great to set goals, make sure you will move forward to the finish line. Stretch, but define your goal in reasonable terms so you believe you can reach it. Like a huge weight loss in six months, it doesn't make sense to say, "I'll make a million $ with this project." When you take a step and succeed at it, you'll feel confident you can keep succeeding. Remember after the goal, you have to "show up" and do the high-level activities.

4. You think your book project to death.

So many of us plan and plan, but don't act enough. Think about my favorite maxim, "Get ready, Fire, Aim!" Once you start, you may make mistakes, but feedback from your peers will help you grow much faster than you would in a vacuum. For me, "check and correct" means to put it out now, then adjust what's needed to make the copy or offer much stronger. Often, the best way to kick start you is to copycat another successful person, then tweak to suit your specific talents and ideas.

5. You don't think your book project is urgent and must be finished now.

So many clients get discouraged because they want their book to be easy and fast. That's good, but to get to easy and fast, you need to learn what selling points make your book a winner inside as well as promotion campaigns that showcase your book's benefits and best parts. What may look like an obstacle can help you develop strength and skills. You must focus all your intent, your direction and your attention toward you goal. Always expect the best, but make no expectations.

6. Make your plan realistic.

So many times clients say they want their book finished yesterday. If you do want to finish a project fast, realize you'll have to put full time effort on it. That doesn't mean a few hours a week. Since most small business people already work 30-40 hours, they need to know they'll need to get up early several days a week or work into the midnight hours. Your coach recommends you put aside at least 10-15 hours a week to devote to your new project. When you put attention on your goal, its finish line will appear much sooner. You can always check with a successful business person to get their take on realistic.

7. You don't follow through with actions. Distractions reign.

Follow this $25,000 key to finishing your important projects.
This is the amount Charles Schwab paid for this advice.

One. Do the most important thing first. In your planner, put the top three High Level Activities (HLA) down for each day of the week. For example, 1. Write Chapter Two middle of how tos, tips, and stories. 2. Visualize project completed and describe what you hear, feel and see now that's it's done. 3. Contact mentors or get resources to help get your project done the right way.

Two. Finish # 1 before you act on other projects. This is the key because we get easily distracted by the phone, piles on our desks, or friends and family. We really can only work on one thing at a time, although we kid ourselves about the benefits of multi-tasking.

Three. Write down in your organizer the three High Level Activities the night before. When you write, you commit more, and this message goes straight to your unconscious mind. There, you'll notice the job is half done when you awake. Many people wait for coffee, then write down the to dos. This slows your start and you'll notice it's much harder to stay on the important tasks first.

8. You don't treat your book as a business.

It's one thing to write your memoir for you family. You don't expect to market it. It's another to write a self-help book that makes you the savvy expert, brands your business, and attracts many new clients or customers. For your best audience who you can help to a better life, get testimonials from to buoy up your web book sales letter. Create a book marketing plan before you leap to buy expensive programs or Amazon best seller promises. My web site sells far more copies than Amazon because I market it weekly. For more information on advanced marketing plans contact a professional book coach.

After the plan, you need to follow up with actions each day of the week. For myself, three high levels activities do just the right amount for the income I need to take two months vacation a year, get a new car, and feng shui my beautiful home in San Diego.

9. You ask for approval and feedback from friends or family.

Remember, they are not your audience. So, don't ask for feedback from them. They will be too easy and not notice glitches, or they will criticize you because they don't know your topic or agree with your philosophy. These attitudes pull you down when you are just starting out. Instead, ask for feedback from a professional coach for book writing, publishing, and article marketing. Quality coaching comes from someone who has been successful and knows the ins and outs of book selling. What we got in school, even college, did not show us how to write effective copy. Read a book on how to write a book or how to write web copy. That's the first and least expensive way to learn how to make your efforts sell well. Take a teleseminar that specifically shows you what to do first, second and last. Your thoughts are not enough. You need professional feedback along the way to succeed.

10. You give up when your project needs changes.

Most new authors just write their book, even edit it a few times and pronounce it's done. Maybe done, but not finished. Always get a coach's professional feedback in addition to editing. An editor can make your sentences good, but what about flow, order, getting your readers to keep motivated to finish all chapters? Without your audience finishing your book or web site sales letter, you miss the 24/7 sales team that spreads the word about your great book. You miss any great testimonials you could get, just for the asking. Think of challenges as a chance to grow your book project to a higher level. After you overcome them, you'll discover the amazing fruit that feedback gives.

How many of these reasons can you identify with? When you pay attention to them and correct them before you launch your book, you'll attract more buyers than you ever dreamed of!
___

Copyright © 2008 Judy Cullins. Reprinted with permission.
Book and Internet Marketing Coach Judy Cullins helps businesses get all the clients and sell all the books they want. Author of 13 books including How to Write your Book Fast, The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Targeted Web Traffic, Advanced Article Marketing - Nine Mistakes and How to Solve Them, and Advanced Article Three Book Program. Judy offers 256 articles and free eBook "Book Writing and Marketing Tips" with monthly ezine subscription at http://www.bookcoaching.com and http://www.advancedarticlemarketing.com
Email her at judycullins@cox.net or Phone: 619/466-0622

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8: FREE SITES AND SERVICES
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SELFPUBLISHERSPLACE.COM
Book lovers and self-published authors welcome. For absolutely no fee of
any kind self-publishers may display their book's cover, a blurb and a
link to their own website. Book lovers deal directly with authors cutting
out the expensive middlemen. We have a unique sales plan and work
tirelessly to help authors promote their books.Our international forum is
open to all. Whether you are a writer or a reader please check out our new
site and let us know what you think. We value your input.
http://www.SelfPublishersPlace.com

BRAGGING RITES - Yahoo Group for authors and publishers
Bragging Rites Yahoo group is an area designed to highlight publishers' houses, their authors, or any author regardless how they are published. Every day is a bragging rite and writing announcements to promote and help fellow writers. Thursdays and Fridays are reserved for 'by invitation only' publishers and their authors to promote their books and publishing houses. Or authors can book their own author spotlight days to showcase their books.
Bragging Rites allows authors to place an excerpt, a review, a link back to their site and/or the publisher's site during their stay with us. Also, we would like for them to be available for questions by our readers.
For more information on the group, you can visit here:
http://ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/BraggingRites/

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9: WRITING ARTICLE by Dan Poynter
Writing Books @ The Speed of Thought
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Books are changing -- for the better. There is a New Model for book writing, producing, selling and promoting. Now you can break into print faster, easier and cheaper. One part of this revolutionary change is in book writing.

Gone are the days of manuscript boxes holding boring sheets of paper with double-spaced lines in Courier typeface. Gone too are dull manuscripts without photos and drawings. Today’s manuscripts look like books. In fact, they are books with four-color soft covers, single-spaced lines, words that may be bolded or italicized and headers with page numbers. New printing techniques let you produce books faster and cheaper -- and this changes the way the books are written.

Today, authors "build" their books; writing is just part of the assembly. Building your book is like building a speech with PowerPoint. The computer simply provides you with more visual aids to help you get your point to your reader. Now, in addition to the printed word, you add digital photos and scanned drawings to your manuscript as you write, you pull information from the Web, add resource URLs to your text, search encyclopedias for background information, art sites for illustrations and quotation sites for quotations. You draw from all these visual-aid sources as you draft the manuscript.

First you set up your book in a binder with frontmatter pages, dividers for each chapter and a backmatter section. You fill in as much as you have for the title page, copyright page, acknowledgements, about the author, etc. Then you build the manuscript by filling in the pages. For a complete description and page layout instructions, see Writing Nonfiction. http://ParaPub.com

You will save time if you submit your completed manuscript to your copy editor by attaching the file to email. Have the editor make changes to the file and return it to you. Then re-read the manuscript to make sure the editor improved the copy without making material changes. If the corrections are made to a printout (the old way), you will have to enter the changes and then proof the changes. This is time consuming and there are more opportunities for error.

Following this New Model, your manuscript grows looking like a typeset book from the start. Next, pour the word-processing file into a page layout program such as Quark, InDesign or PageMaker. Then with a click of the mouse, you will convert the file to Adobe Acrobat PDF and you are ready to send the file to a printer. For information on PDF, see http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html.

You can wring maximum value out of your work by re-purposing your core content into other products. Those versions may be for Web-based downloadable books, eBook readers, compact discs, articles, special reports, compatible (non-info) products, seminars, consulting and digital audio.

The electronic edition of your book will have even more features than the print version: it may have color illustrations, sound, video and hyperlinks. Your eEdition will take up less space, be even less expensive to produce and will provide a richer experience to your reader. With digital printing, authors may send their book to agents and publishers. A finished book is more portable and a nicer presentation than a bunch of loose manuscript sheets.

With short-run digital printing, publishers may send copies sooner to major reviewers, distributors, catalogs, specialty stores, associations, book clubs, premium prospects, foreign publishers suggesting translations and various opinion molders. In the future, books will not be printed on spec -- in the hope they will be sold. Books will not be produced in great quantity until after they are sold.

New computer programs, new printing processes and the Web are transforming the writing, producing, disseminating and promoting of information. Books will never be the same. The winners are authors, publishers and readers.

For more details on The New Book Model, see http://ParaPub.com/.
___

Copyright © 2003 Dan Poynter. Reprinted with permission.
Dan Poynter does not want you to die with a book still inside you. You have the ingredients and he has your recipe. Dan has written more than 100 books since 1969 including Writing Nonfiction and The Self-Publishing Manual. For more help on book writing, see http://ParaPub.com/.

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10: EVENTS
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NEW YORK BOOK FESTIVAL LATE REGISTRATION
The 2008 New York Book Festival is now in the late registration period for its annual competition celebrating books that deserve greater recognition from the world's publishing capital. Final deadline for competition entries is June 12. Entry forms are online at www.newyorkbookfestival.com

Last year, over 20,000 attendees enjoyed the beauty and serenity of Manhattna's Central Park as they browsed books, listened to music and author readings and enjoyed our vendor offerings. This year, the June 28 edition of the day festival will offer expanded stages and new opportunities for authors, publishers and vendors. Please email NewYorkBookFest@aol.com for information.
http://www.newyorkbookfestival.com/

DETROIT'S FIRST ANNUAL URBAN BOOK AND MUSIC EXPO
On July 12th and 13th, Nyack Books is hosting Detroit's First Annual Urban Book and Music Expo. Right now we've discounted booth prices to make it affordable for authors and vendors because your presence is important to us.

Feel free to check out the website at http://www.urbanbookandmusicexpo.com for more information. In case you are unable to attend the event, you can still make an impact by having our designated personnel man your booth, or you can place an ad on the website.

Derek Vitatoe, Nyack Books
http://www.derekontheweb.com
313-404-0255
http://www.urbanbookandmusicexpo.com

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11: COMMENTARY by Afrika Midnight Asha Abney
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Greetings,
Are you using online social networks to promote yourself, writings, books or products? If not, then you might want to consider using them. There are many people throughout the mainstream society that are using online social networks which include any of the following listed below.

Black Writers - http://blackwriters.ning.com/
Black Authors Showcase - http://blackauthors.ning.com/
Book Marketing Network - http://bookmarket.ning.com/
Published Authors - http://publishedauthors.ning.com/
Black Authors Network - http://blackhistory365.ning.com/
Author 2 U Books - http://author2ubooks.ning.com/
The People’s Lounge - http://thepeopleslounge.ning.com/

[EDITOR'S NOTE: http://www.ning.com is a great social network site that allows you to join groups to discuss just about anything, and you can create your own group there for free. Just thought I would add that since all of Afrika's link came from there.]

Peace and Blessings,
Afrika Midnight Asha Abney
___

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12: RECIPROCAL LINKS
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LISTINGS:

ADD YOUR BOOK LISTING & AUTHOR BIO:
This is a marketing feature you don’t want to miss:
http://www.selfpublishedauthors.com/books.php

THE POST-PUBLICATION BOOK PROPOSAL
If you didn't write a book proposal before writing your book, you missed a vital step in the process of successfully producing and marketing a book. Don't let sagging sales determine your grim future in publishing. Write a post-publication book proposal and get back on track. Order Patricia Fry’s FREE report, The Post-Publication Book Proposal. PLFry620@yahoo.com.

SHAURETTENET: The Home Page of Dan Shaurette
- His Novel, LILITH'S LOVE - http://www.Liliths-Love.com
- The Lurkers' Domain (creative writing forum) - http://lurk.us
- Is This Thing On? Blog and Podcast - http://www.DanShaurette.com
All of this and more at: http://www.Shaurette.net

YOUR ADVERTISEMENT COULD BE HERE!
Contact Dan Shaurette for more information at editor@selfpublishedauthors.com

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13: Subscriber Management / Contact Information
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Archived issues of this newsletter can be found at
http://www.selfpublishedauthors.com/newsletter.html

To subscribe, also visit:
http://www.selfpublishedauthors.com/newsletter.html

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Self-Published Authors
P.O. Box 3426
Scottsdale, AZ
USA 85271-3426

Self Published Authors

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