So I looked further. As you would expect, tags function as “labels” to identify pictures and content on your website. They are descriptive words or short phrases.

Their primary significance to writers is they help us get more hits to our websites and blogs by making them visible to search engines. You’ve  also probably run into them on social bookmarking sites like YouTube and Flickr and in some programs like Windows Live Photo Gallery. If you’ve worked with HTML and XML instructions, you are familiar with tags.  

If you are the one who maintains your website, you can use your web design or publishing program to easily and quickly insert the most commonly used tags. If you have a blog, adding tags is really easy. Right after you enter the title for your post, you’ll see a box or line labeled “tags.”

Google is the most used search engine, accounting for more than 70% of searches (compared to Yahoo – 15%; Bing – 10%; and Ask- 3%), so you want to be sure to make your tags friendly to Google.  Google frequently uses the title tag descriptions you write in the first line of search results. Google provides a manual to help you do that.

Several important things I’ve learned about tags are:  

• They need to accurately describe in summary fashion what’s being depicted, not by a list of key words or a list of synonyms.
• They should not be repetitive. Each page on a website needs to have its own unique descriptive tag.
• Phrases like “This is a page or picture about  <your subject>” are a waste of a tag. Use only words that describe the topic.
• If you use multiple words or phrases in a tag, separate them with commas.
• More important than tags are the titles each page needs and the short descriptions of each page that in 90 to 125 characters summarize the content of the page.

You’ll find tagging makes sense. It’s worth your time and effort to create search-engine friendly tags. They will bring readers to your books

Next week: How to Profit From eBooks Despite Digital Piracy.  

For current developments, check in on our What’s New and Developing page.  I update it daily because so many things are happening as publishing goes digital.

If you don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

1.  They entertain. Novels and short stories account for new growth in adult readers. Nearly 15 percent of US adults read literature online in 2008, so with the continuing sales of Kindles and the iPad shipping of within weeks, the number of fiction readers will continue to grow.
2. They hit a nerve.  Freakonomics and Tipping Point are two examples. They  capture the reading public’s imagination. Freakonomics makes economics, called “the dismal science, interesting, perhaps because it relates to everyday things people live with or see in the news. Tipping Point similarly demystifies marketing in a readily understandable way. But few publishers can predict when a book will hit a nerve.
3. They address a specific customer base. For example enthusiasts for a less-than-common sport or businesses will pay for high value information not easily available otherwise.
4. You sell them at the back of the room as a speaker or workshop leader. If you get audiences interested, excited, and inspired, they will want to take your message home.
5. You give away a great deal of related content free. Betting that takers will become buyers because a high enough percentage of people will have the ingrained sense of reciprocity and that what they get will be impressive enough, they will want more. For example, best-selling Dummies author Janine Warner finds giving away all manner of templates and other useful items helps her sell training videos on her site –http://digitalfamily.com.
6. You vigorously social market to the point others recommend your book to their friends.
7. You use them to sell another service or product such as consulting and coaching. A book helps establish you as an expert and experts are having a resurgence these days. Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer found people are now more willing to pay attention to experts than to friends and peers in Social media sites. You can think of your book as the best business card you can have.

We welcome your ideas and comments and note our new What’s New and Developing page.

Next Week: Tagging – What It Can Do For You

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

It seems Amazon overreached in seeking to establish itself as the online publisher resulting in the heated argument being who controls price, overlooking what the price needs to be to sustain a publishing industry. Now the bits and bytes have settled – Amazon yielded to BigPub and the cost of eBooks, at least new titles, will be going up. Has BigPub discounted the significance of reader boycott when Amazon has tried pricing a few Kindle books above ten dollars? Possibly.

Is boosting the price of eBooks BigPub’s final frontier in the face of the combined effects of more appealing book readers like Apple’s iPad,  rampant file sharing, do-it-yourself pBook scanning, and new habits of consumer thrift borne of this economy? I heard San Francisco agent Ted Weinstein say last November, “The publishing industry is in trouble because publishers have outsourced everything except warehousing and even that will become obsolete.” 

Even readers, like the wife of a middle-aged friend of mine who have resisted eBooks because of the preference for the feel of a print book, can now see themselves reading a book an iPad. Kindle use has spread when friends show their Kindles to their friends. This multiplier effect will increase as iPads get into consumers’ backpacks and bedrooms, attracting more eBook readers. 

The number of digitized books available on file sharing sites is rapidly increasing, too. One of the largest sites posts how many files were added the day before On February 5, the database increased by 29,590. On February 13, 34,166 additional files were added, making nearly twelve million books available for free at this writing. Who’s providing these books and where do they come from?  The majority of pirated files are not hacked eBooks: they are scanned pBooks, manuscripts and galleys, according to Peter Balis of John Wiley.

A large number of pBooks are scanned with do-it-yourself (D-I-Y) book scanners that rival the capability of the $5,000-$50,000 scanners. D-I-Y scanners were the subject of an article in Wired Magazine.  Do-it-yourself scanning has a trade association and a how-to guide for making a book scanner that makes the uploading of pirated books all but unstoppable.

 A 2010 survey by VersoAdvertising found 37% of e-reader owners have downloaded one or more pirated books. At what point does price drive book buyers to move from being purchasers to being downloaders of pirated books? We can safely reason that it’s below $10.00 because file sharing is growing despite Amazon’s $10.00 price point. The history of music sales presents a concerning precedent with songs selling at 99 cents.  Cigarette smokers respond to higher taxes by ceasing smoking, crossing state lines to buy cigarettes in states with lower taxes, or buying smuggled-in cigarettes. We’re looking at a near term in which competition won’t be between Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Barnes & Noble, and Borders for pricing books, the real competition will be free eBooks available by download from file sharing sites.

 How you can you as an author or small publisher win in this emerging environment?

• As an author or small publisher, you can take advantage of the price umbrella being created by BigPub and price your eBook at or below the $9.99 price millions of readers have become accustomed to spending on Kindle books. Large publishers are opening the door to being supplanted.
• As Tim Bajarin of PC Magazine points out, authors of how-to books can do what individual programmers did when iPhones were introduced. They produced the first games using the distribution reach of Apple’s App Store. Authors producing how-to book applications for the iPad will likely beat larger publishers as the game developers did.
• Keep a step ahead of the file sharing sites by adding and updating multi-media audio and video capabilities to your print and eBooks. For print books, even fragrance can be integrated into pBooks as is being done by a Jerry Van Diver, pioneering the mating of fragrance  with pBooks.  See an example of this at http://www.sniffpublishing.com/Use your eBook or pBook to discretely sell your or others products or services as discussed in last weeks’s blog “Can There Be a Silver Lining in Wholesale Book Piracy?

We welcome you to circulate this blog, recognizing our copyright. We also encourage you to post comments, which encourage dialog and hopefully new ideas for you to use. See our new page “What’s New and Developing.”

Next Week: The Eight Ways to Make Money Writing Books Today

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

Your book could well be in the hands of tens of thousands of readers already who might not go into a bookstore any more frequently than they visit a museum.  But from this point on, you can have access to the minds of everyone who downloads your book from a file sharing site. You can upload your own eBooks onto the file sharing sites and take advantage of the opportunity to sell and embed tasteful and useful commercial messages in them.

Your eBook should be preferred by users of these sites because you can provide the most recent versions with a more recent copyright and you can add access to bonus material from you – the author – that pirated versions cannot.  

One choice you have is to sell display advertising directly relevant to your book’s content. Of course, too many display ads can make your book look like a magazine and could turn off some readers, but there are less intrusive ways to embed commercial messages that have minimal risk of offending readers and even may be welcomed by some.  

Think of the product placements you see in movies, video games and on TV.  Correspondingly, wherever a product or service is relevant to the content of your book, you can insert images and hyperlinks to video and audio information. Selling placements like these to a third party who pays you could become a regular source of income for you, perhaps even more than you would have earned in royalties from the sale of your book.

Another way to generate product income is add content to the end of each chapter in which you direct readers  to your own product or service at a moment when readers most apt to be motivated to click a hyperlink or place a phone call.

Crafted and designed well, these types of commercial messages need not look like magazine ads. We at 9Lives4YourBook would be happy to help you explore the potential placements in your eBook as well as guide you in the task of marketing placement opportunities to third parties.

For example, perhaps because of your familiarity with the content, you may already have untapped access to companies related to the content of your book. Since many authors don’t have ready contacts, we project a need for author representatives who will solicit and manage in-book advertising.

Next Week: Are the Publishing Giants Committing Hari Kari?

      And How You Can Win From It

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

 Title                                                                  Users Downloading

Best Home Businesses for the 21st Century - 10800

Changing Directions Without Losing Your Way- 2100

Entrepreneurial Parent - 16500

Finding Your Perfect Work  -  8700

Getting Business to Come to You - 6500

Home Businesses You Can Buy - 5800

Home-based Business for Dummies - 8400

Making Money in Cyberspace - 4800

Making Money with Your Computer at Home -18800

Middle-Class Lifeboat  -  2800

Secrets of Self-Employment – 2500

 Secrets of Successful Self-Employment audio -10300

Sitting with the Enemy - 8200

Teaming Up – 19900

The Best Home Businesses for People 50+  - 1000

The Practical Dreamer’s Handbook – 19900

Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss? - 7700

Working  From Home  -  10500

 This totals 154,500 being downloaded that day. I do not know if these numbers are accurate but checking another file-sharing site, I found similar numbers. Research indicates the “hot spot of piracy is males 18 – 34.” This corresponds with the relatively smaller number of downloads of one our most  recent books, The Best Home Businesses for People 50+.

The print sales of our books come nowhere close to this. Nor do the eBook sales. If royalties were being paid on these downloads at just a penny a book, we’d be earning at least $1545 a day and we’d be writing new books as fervently as we could. But digital piracy yields no royalties or fees are paid to authors or publishers.  

This makes the Google Books actions seem a great deal!

The books are free on these file sharing sites, but sites make money by charging a membership fee. This fee entitles members to download not only books but also software like Dreamweaver and Turbotax, movies including pre-releases,  songs, and games.  Membership fees vary by site, beginning at $4.97. One site offers lifetime access for $26.00. Another offers free updates and new releases for $1.29/month.

Did I download a book? No. I did not want to contribute to sites that disregard with abandon the copyrights and livelihoods of the individuals and companies who create the books, songs, movies, games, and software they use –let alone risk my credit card information on such a site.

And perhaps that’s the hope for authors in the future — for books to be sold like songs are on iTunes. iTunes is able to compete with file sharing sites but sells millions of songs to people who pay 99 cents each for  songs they could download free at a file sharing site. Presumably they do this because they expect both quality and freedom from viruses, but hopefully out of respect for the people who create the work they enjoy.

Sarah’s and my reaction to this wholesale piracy initially was to feel crestfallen, then angry, and then we began think about what tens of thousands of new readers of our books could mean.  Next week I will share the details I’m working out for what we all can do with so many new readers.

I am not naming or providing links to the file sharing sites because I do not want to facilitate more opportunities for digital piracy.  However, if you are an author and want to check whether your book is being downloaded, email me and I will send you the links. Hopefully your books are not there yet.

Next week: Can There Be a Silver Lining in Wholesale Book Piracy?

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

Under this program, eBooks must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99. So as an author, how will you come out compared to print publishing royalties that range between seven and fifteen percent? Assuming you have a print contract with a ten percent royalty and your book is priced at  at $16.99, you’ll earn $1.70. Under Amazon’s new royalty formula and if the book is priced at $8.99, you will earn $6.25 or three and that’s one-half times more per book.  

What’s the rub? By publishing directly, you forego the services publishers have provided – advances, editing, and marketing. But what is the reality of these authors today?

Except for established best-selling authors, advances are about where they were when we got our first book contract in 1982. For the most part, editing is outsourced and judging from the many books we read, we know even best-sellers are replete with errors that in the past would have been picked up by a developmental or copy editor, or a proofreader.  Whether your book is published by a Big 6 publisher or you do it yourself, you will need to line up your own editing if you want to avoid embarrassing errors. Authors have learned that if their book is to get sold, it’s up to them. The situation in publishing houses has become such that some book agents have begun providing editing and marketing support to their promising authors.

Even before Amazon’s 70% humdinger, some big-name authors like Stephen Covey and Stephen King have been going directly to eBooks.  Will you join them?

Don’t know how to proceed with a book you have already written or one you plan to write? I can help. You can contact me directly for a free consultation at paul@9lives4yourbook.com.

So instead of a embedding a link in your text (“Click Here” – a term to avoid), you’ll get better results if you make the desired action visible, including making a tag line in a  larger size of font size than the rest of your text and place it above a bullet containing your hyperlink.

My latest book with just two clicks!

The time of day you send your email may be as important to getting your email read. One of the values of using an email service is that you can see when people opened your email. Then you can send it to them at that time of day. Until you get some feedback from when people open your list, send them to them for the time they arrive after work. My partner and wife, Sarah, author of Sitting With The Enemy who is working on the last chapter of a free sequel that is available on her website, have noticed in our mountain village that this is when web traffic is highest. However, if you want to reach readers at their businesses, there’s research showing email is more likely to be opened midweek shortly after people arrive at work or after lunch.

For people like Sarah and I who have written 18 p-books between us, this is time for reminiscing and nostalgia. As a child, I looked admiringly into the Canterbury bookstore window in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and wished someday that I might write a book that would be on the shelves and in the windows of  stores like Canterbury. So for me, this passage is not just a change in packaging, marketing and pricing, it’s the end of an era that began long before I was born.

This new era promises opportunity and hope for some, perhaps many. To get an eBook to readers no longer requires the intermediaries aspiring authors once needed to navigate. There was a saying that you needed to first please your editor and the sales department, then your readers, and last yourself. Now you only need to please your readers first and foremost as well as yourself. But gone, too, is the financial and marketing support these many intermediaries provided.  To be sure, there will be winners and losers in this transformation.  For newer writers, this is the new normal; for established authors like ourselves we all need to adapt.

• First, the subject line needs to be shorter than a Tweet, at most 50 characters, just five or six words. That’s not even half of the 140 characters allowed for a Tweet. Too long a subject line is apt get trapped by spam filters or at best, truncated and the meaning or impact is lost.
• The subject line must provide enough information that it will interest people in reading your message. It also needs to be enticing, raising curiosity. Here are some possible leads:

                        Seven ways to …

                        Three things to avoid to …

                        Factors to consider when ….

                        When to clean …..

•  To get through spam filters, use sentence case – not all CAPITAL LETTERS.
•  Avoid words in your subject that filters identify as junk mail even when it’s not.  For example, a spam filter recently entrapped an email ad our domain name “Elm Street Economy” in the subject line. We expect the filters don’t have anything against Elm Street, but economy is apparently another matter. Other words that are getting blocked: sale, discount, consumer, % off, free, and even ‘free’ being in a domain name. Anything with a sexual connation, such as hotties and stud are also unlikely to reach your recipient.

So subject lines, like headlines, must interest readers but they must also get past electronic censors.