As we all know, electronic marketing tools such as social media are very important to authors looking to promote their work.  Among other things, SXSW offers you the ability to learn from interactive industry leaders who work on the cutting edge of digital technology.

So whether you’re planning to attend this year of not, to add to Evo’s blog post, I have outlined below some of 2012’s SXSW Interactive panel discussions that are geared specifically to authors and publishers.  The list below may help you save time as you plan your schedule.  If you are not planning on going, hopefully these panels will inspire you to get your late registration in … at the very least, these can help get you excited for next year.

Discoverability and the New World of Book PR
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP13632

Publishing Models Transforming the Book
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP10347

Libros digitales para todos/eBooks for Everybody
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP13728

Rhapsody to Year 0: Music & Publishing Go Digital
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9680

Take a Look It’s in a Book or Now Tablet Devices
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP12327

Self-Publishing: A Revolution for Midlist Authors?
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9146

Social Role-Playing: Brands and Publishers
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9024

Knitting a Long Tail in Niche Publishing
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9356

Making eBooks Smarter: Responsive Page Design
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9737

Books Win the Attention Economy
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9275

Next Stage: Tear It Up: How to Write a Digital Novel
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_OE00939

My name is Tom Bright, and I am the President and Chief Operating Officer at Lulu.  Today, I’m writing my first blog post and what better time than now, when so many new and exciting opportunities are becoming available for authors every day.  In my posts, I’ll speak to these opportunities, like Apple’s newly announced iBooks® Author app, what they mean for you, and how Lulu’s tools give you the ultimate control over your publishing experience.  This will empower you to go even further with your works in more markets including not only the iBookstore℠, but also Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and the NOOK Book Store, as an eBook or in print.

Our mission here at Lulu is to make sure you, our remarkable content creators, are able to take full advantage of these opportunities.  We want to help you reach more readers and sell more books – no matter your background or goals – all while maximizing your visibility and your profits.  We do this through our retail partnerships with companies like Apple, which already has over 60,000 Lulu eBooks for sale on iBookstore shelves.

Speaking of Apple, we think what they’re offering aspiring authors is great.  It is just one more way to share knowledge and ideas with each other – an endeavor that is becoming more and more important. I’ve read the concerns of bloggers and journalists around iBooks Author.  I believe that especially in a self-publishing world, the author has a responsibility to market their book and distribute it as widely as possible.  After all, isn’t this the goal – the transfer of ideas to as many people as possible?  When the publishers and bookstores controlled which books were available for sale, marketing could be left to the publisher.  Today, the barrier to publishing is lower than it has ever been.  No author can afford to restrict their work to a single channel.  Lulu’s tools make it easier than ever to distribute to the widest array of physical and digital bookstores.

Indeed, it is through the power of options that we give authors what matters most:  control.  We’ve found that authors don’t want to choose between formats, channels, or mediums, and we don’t believe you, or your readers, should have to.  Through Lulu’s distribution partnerships, print-on-demand, and eBook technologies, authors are able to best meet the needs of all their customers in the ways that make the most sense for them.  Because an author today can never really be sure how someone might discover and read their titles, Lulu is here to ensure your titles are accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Feel free to click the following links to learn more about Lulu’s publishing and distribution options and how they can work for you.

Cheers,

Tom

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The iBookstore is a service mark of Apple Inc. iBook is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.

Wow.

We just can’t get over how many truly remarkable stories we received for the first ever Lulu Short Story Contest.

Our panel of 25 judges carefully read through the 2000+ submissions, picked their favorite, then read it out loud to the rest of the judges. From there, judges voted on which stories they liked the best from the readings and tallied the results until there were three clear winners with the most votes.  Your stories made us laugh, made us tear up, and some of the judges even got into literary debates over their favorites that lasted for days on end (no, really).

It was amazing to see everyone take such a passionate interest in our authors’ work. I can’t express enough how hard it was to pick just three finalists. But, we had to…SO! Without further ado (and because the suspense is killing me)…here are the winners of the Lulu Short Story Contest:

1^ST PLACE WINNER:

The Red Boots by Poornima Ram Kiram

$1,000 Cash
Barnes and Noble NOOK
A review in Shelf-Unbound Magazine
Free Lulu Publicity

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2^ND PLACE WINNER:

Grass by Charles D. Shell
$250 and a Barnes and Noble NOOK™:

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3^RD PLACE WINNER:

Revenge by Gail Kavanagh
$100 Gift Card to Barnes and Noble

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Honorable Mention:

Persona Quietus by Jesse Lee
Lovely Stranger by Jennifer Porter-Kennard

If you didn’t win, don’t let it get you down.  So many of the stories were so excellent and hey, now you have an eBook version of your story and your name out in the world for millions of readers to see. All just because you believed in yourself. Neat huh?!?

You can take that shiny new eBook of yours and promote it this holiday too for what we’re calling Download Day.  We did some research and figured out that December 26th is the highest traffic shopping day for eBook sales – much like “Black Friday” in November. So, we’re throwing a good old-fashioned author sales contest for Download Day and the author who sells the most copies of their eBook on December 26th, 2011 – even if you sell your eBook for free – will win a Barnes and Noble NOOK and $100 off coupon good for anything on Lulu.

Learn more about Download Day, the highest traffic buying day for digital content on the Lulu blog here. And thank you again so very much for helping make the Lulu Short Story Contest such a success.  Due to popular demand, we’ll soon be posting a full list of all 2,000+ submissions to the contest for everyone to read and we plan to publish an anthology featuring all the semi-finalists and three winners for all to enjoy.  More details on that to come soon.

All the best this holiday from Lulu.

In honor of both Veterans Day and Remembrance Day, we at Lulu want to take a moment, not only to celebrate the bravery and sacrifice of our Veterans, but also to acknowledge military families – those who have loved ones currently serving. For some, today can be a very emotional day, particularly if a parent or spouse is deployed overseas.

Krista Graham is an Army Wife and a Marine Mom who recently published an account of her husband’s year of service in Kuwait. Krista was kind enough to share her perspective on Veterans Day, writing and being an Army Wife tasked with “holding down the fort” during her husband’s deployment.

How many family members do you currently have serving in the military?

My husband is a Warrant Officer in the Army National Guard and one of my sons is serving in the Marine Corps. He is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in 2012.

Tell us about your motivation for writing a book.

I didn’t set out to write a book.

My husband was deploying to Kuwait with the Army National Guard. It was his first deployment, so I knew that all of our family and friends would be concerned and would want to know how things were going for us back home. I decided I’d send weekly email updates to them. This was also therapeutic for me because I’ve always found writing to be an excellent way to process my feelings and sort my thoughts. By writing about the events of our lives, I could distance myself emotionally from them and look at them objectively. I could also see the humor in even the hard things that happened to us. Week after week, I wrote these anecdotes. They were circulated among distant relatives and even posted on the Army unit’s Facebook page for other soldiers and their families to enjoy. When I saw how popular the stories were, and how much the other Army wives related to them, I decided to compile them into a book.

What made you decide to self-publish?

I chose self-publishing in order to make my book widely available as quickly as possible. There are thousands of families experiencing deployments right now. A friend told me, “This needs to get into the hands of every military family so they know what to expect and how to get through it.” If my story can help overwhelmed military spouses gain a new perspective, I want to make it available to them.

What advice do you have for other Army Wives?

Keep your sense of humor and a long-term perspective. My priority was to set a positive tone for our five kids. I wanted them to feel secure that I was not falling apart. Keeping busy, doing projects, accomplishing goals, and doing a lot of fun things with the kids made the year a good experience for them. I didn’t want to just hunker down in “survival mode.” I wanted to thrive!

What does Veterans Day mean to you?

Veterans Day means a lot to me — not just because of the significance of the day itself, but because of what it has meant to our family personally. Three years ago, while our son (who is now a Marine) was in high school, he entered an essay writing contest for Veterans Day. He wrote about a Vietnam veteran visiting the Memorial Wall in D.C. The essay was profoundly moving and insightful, depicting the way being a soldier defines one’s life and the conflict experienced when one actually returns from war having survived when others have died. When my son read that essay aloud, his dad was moved to tears. It was a sobering moment for me because that’s when I knew that our son would most definitely join the military one day. He was sworn into the Marine Corps on November 10th last year, at the age of 17, just one day before Veterans Day.

Do you have any plans for another book?

I am always writing something. I have no doubt another book will follow this one. Perhaps I will write about the experience of my son’s deployment next year. I have also begun a series of personal reflections in a more serious spiritual genre. Perhaps those will find their way into a book. I have several projects underway.

You can order Deployment Diaries here.

Follow Krista on Twitter.

Also check out http://mydeploymentdiaries.com

The other day, I was encouraged via Twitter to view the following video of New York Times bestselling author Seth Godin. The video is a sneak peak for the documentary PressPausePlay in which Godin describes his reasoning for self-publishing an eBook that took him 10-12 days to write. Godin raises a lot of interesting questions about modern publishing in this short video. An interesting question he raises is one that all self-published authors have to address at one time or another, namely: “I finished the book … ‘now what am I going to do with it?’”

As Authors today, we have many choices for delivering our content. We can try our luck and go the traditional route; we can self-publish it as a paperback; we can upload it to a blog; we can publish it as an eBook and distribute it to places like the iBookstore℠ or NOOK Bookstore™, etc, etc, etc. With all these choices, it can be hard to decide where and how to distribute your work.

Having published in different formats, I recently asked the question: is there an eBook “eZone?” Inspired by the “Goldilocks Zone” in planetary astronomy, the eBook eZone represents the length of written content that is too long for a blog post but too short for a printed book. It is the length of content that seems “just right” to be published electronically and made available for download at a minimal fee (or even made available for free). Keep in mind that any length of content can be made into an eBook (with at times unwieldy long books being easier to read electronically, as described here). When I talk about the eZone, I mean college papers, short stories, poetry, magazine articles – content that you’re proud of that didn’t really take you that long to write (relatively speaking) and when you see it sitting idle on your hard-drive you ask: “what am I going to do with it?” From a reader standpoint, eZone eBooks are those titles on your eReader that you can finish on a short train ride, regional flight, or in the time it takes to fall asleep.

Besides content length, the eZone also represents a sort of “sweet spot” between timeliness of content (how current the topic may be) and the time you have invested in writing and researching the content. The above infographic is what I believe the eBook eZone may look like. This infographic is by no means scientific nor does it take into account variables like genre, type of content, etc. The infographic exists to help visualize a point, namely that there may be a confluence of content length, content timeliness, and the amount of time one can devote to writing a title that makes eBooks the ideal vehicle for distributing content.

I figured it would also be helpful to point out some of my reasoning behind this infographic. Problogger.com reports that a typical reader “spends 96 seconds reading the average blog” – giving writers a “96 window of opportunity” to capture a reader’s attention. If the average American Adult has a reading speed of 300 words per minute, then it is reasonable to assume that a typical reader will focus his/her attention, on average, to around 450 words on a typical blog (I have just pasted that threshold, so congratulations loyal reader for being above average). The page length I selected for printed books was less about attention span and had more to do with printing requirements. A U.S. Trade perfect bound paperback book can have a page length of between 32 and 740 pages – anything above that would require a different format. Timeliness of content and the time invested in writing a book are very subjective criteria and are hard to measure. Everyone writes and researches at different rates. Some people like Seth Godin who are content machines can hammer out five best-sellers in the time it would take me to write one sub-par manuscript. So the intersection where timeliness of content and time invested is subjective – but a reality worth addressing nonetheless.

In short, the eBook eZone is a theory. If may turn out to be completely wrong. I just hope that authors test it out, find their writing comfort zones, and publish their content in as many formats as possible. You have many choices, make sure to find the format that’s “just right” for you!

Finding your revenue: You can always check your earned revenue by looking at your “Recent Revenue,” and “All-Time Revenue” tabs found in the blue side-bar in your “My Lulu” tab.  It is important to note that your “Recent Revenue” DOES NOT include Amazon or 3rd party earnings.  Under your “All-Time Revenue” you’ll see a “Total Zero Creator Revenue” tab which shows your own purchases of your content, number of downloads from customers and Lulu support staff.  When you or Lulu purchases your own content, it is at-cost so no revenue is generated or recorded.

Claiming your revenue: In order to claim your revenue, Lulu must have the appropriate tax forms on file, as well as the correct remittance address.  Creators must complete and submit a W-9 form that Lulu keeps on file.  A properly completed W-9 form provides your Social Security Number (SSN), Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), or Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN).  With a valid W-9 form on file, your withholding rate is 0%. If we have no W-9 form on file, your withholding rate is the default backup withholding rate for U.S. domestic entities as set by the Internal Revenue Service of the United States; currently this rate is 28%.

You have a couple choices for how you receive your revenue, each of which have their own set of requirements:

• Paper checks:  Checks are cut 45 days after the end of each quarter as long as the minimum revenue requirement of $20.00 is reached. Unpaid revenue rolls over into the next payment period and continues to do so until the minimum is reached. Q1 payment date – May 15 (for sales in January, February, and March) Q2 payment date – August 15 (for sales in April, May, and June) Q3 payment date – November 15 (for sales in July, August, and September) Q4 payment date – February 15 (for sales in October, November, and December).
• PayPal: PayPal payments for each month are made on or before the end of the  following month. For example: payment for January sales are made by the end of February, payment for February sales are made by the end of  March, etc..  Before you are able to receive revenue via PayPal creators must provide a valid PayPal email address along with the correct remittance address.  Creators will only receive a PayPal payment if their accumulated creator revenues amount to $5 or more, and if all appropriate tax information is complete.  If your revenue does not meet the $5 limit, your earning will be rolled into the next payment period.

Amazon and other off-site retail payments:  Lulu can distribute copies of your book to retail outlets all over the world and a listing on Amazon is even free with a Lulu issued ISBN. Lulu receives monthly statements of off-site retail (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) sales for books with distribution. These sales can take 6 to 8 weeks to post in your account. Retail sales appear in your account as one consolidated cart per retail channel (as if one customer bought all the copies). To see your retail sales, go to the “My Revenue” tab under your “My Lulu” tab in your account.  Click the “Detail” link at the top of the report to see available information. For more information see our Creator Revenues and Earnings FAQ.

There’s no doubt that walking into a bookstore and seeing your work on the shelves is a wonderful feeling and a worthwhile goal for any author. But that is a personal goal, not a marketing goal. If your marketing goal it is to have as many people as possible read your work, you may be better off first focusing your efforts elsewhere – not just on your local bookstore.

Self-published author and book designer Joel Friedlander echoes my sentiment about trying to get one’s book on retail shelves when he writes:

“My own opinion, after watching many self-publishers try to break through into this market, is that it’s rarely worth the effort unless the book has a really wide appeal and is produced from the beginning with retail sales as the ultimate goal.

Most self-publishers of nonfiction will be far better off building an online community, learning keyword research and how to market their book online, using print on demand for fulfillment.”

There are countless creative ways to use social media, blogs, forums and communication technology to promote your book from the comfort of your home. Many online options may help you reach your marketing goals more effectively than trying to get your book on retail shelves.

If your book does have “really wide appeal” and if you truly feel that you need to have your book in a bookstore, then I would recommend that you read the following post from Maria’s Bookshop — an independently owned and operated bookstore located in downtown Durango, Colorado. This shop does a nice job of outlining what they are looking for from authors wishing to be featured in their store. It does not matter if you live in Colorado, getting your title on retail shelves starts with contacting your local book seller. While all store policies may be different, Maria’s requirements can act as a helpful guide when you approach your local store. Doing so, can help you anticipate what book sellers are looking for and you can make sure that you at least satisfy some of the basics (ISBN, bar code, pricing, synopsis of book) before venturing off to pitch your book.

The point I wish to convey with this blog post is to be mindful of why you wish to have your book available on retail shelves as opposed to promoting it through other means. Sometimes, we can be distracted by our innate desires to have our work in brick and mortar locations that we forget that we have access to hundreds of millions of readers through an Internet connection and mostly free online tools.

Finally, it’s also good to remember the importance of a really clever marketing campaign. You may recall that in April of last year, Andrew Kessler, author of “Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission” rented space in New York City’s West Village to sell 3,000 copies of one book … his own. Kessler’s little stunt was picked up my major news agencies like CNN, The Guardian, Time Magazine and The New York Times. Yes, most of us don’t have the means to pull off an act of this caliber, but it helps illustrate a point. Sure, Kessler could have gone to his local book seller to have them carry a few copies of his title, but he decided to take a different approach. If Kessler’s goal was to get as much exposure of his book as possible, I think it’s fair to say that he succeeded.

My advice: be creative, set goals, and market your books accordingly.

Reel in more readers with just four quick steps:

STEP 1: Log onto “My Lulu”

STEP 2: Click the star icon next to your published book

STEP 3: Choose the buy now button you like

STEP 4: Copy and paste the code to your website or blog

When your buyers click on these buttons, they will be taken to a Lulu shopping cart, which will include your book. It really is just that simple – so try it out today!

Take me to My Lulu.

This past May, Lulu team members, along with numerous works by our remarkable authors, attended Book Expo America 2011 in New York City, the largest book convention in the United States.  Book Expos such as BEA offer great opportunities for authors to display their content, meet fellow authors, and hear insights from industry professionals.  Check out the video above of the action from this year’s BEA and see why Lulu’s booth was the talk of the show – drawing such great crowds.  If you are thinking about attending or displaying your book at a book fair, here is a list of up-coming events.  Hopefully this video will get you excited for BEA next year, as we’d love to see both you and your book(s) at the show.