I’m changing my blog address!

We are about to add two new blogs to our chain (we’ll share more about the other two next month), so we decided to add conformity to our addresses.

The theme will be the same, except that I will offer more about it more often.

Will you change your feeds or address info so we can stay in touch?

We will be at http://blog.gordonburgett.com. The old blogs will be there too, archived.

See you there? Still wordpress.com: great service, great place. But we’re just easier to find with the new name.

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

How to publish your book almost free and without marketing…

Gordon's brain pecked at by a wooden bird

Sound too good to be true?

It’s called ancillary book publishing and there are seven ways any writer can make it happen. You submit the ready-to-go manuscript and a cover file (two firms will let you create a cover on their site, free) and they send you a proof. If you like it, they list your book and you, your shocked friends, and others eager for your words can buy them immediately.

Best yet, almost all of the publishers will then continue to sell the book through key distributors like Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Amazon, and others.

The cost? Just mailing the proof to you. I did it all seven times and that ran $7-30 each.

It scarcely matters the kind of book, either. A regular how-to, a novel, prim, erotic, cookbook, memoirs, niched, almost anything. Some create bound books, others, e-books (where charts, graphs, and images can be hard to faithfully replicate).

I walk you through the process, give you all the publishers and their links, and try to explain how you can get in print about as fast as the book is done, proofed, and posted. It’s in my last (10/1) newsletter. Just link, link, and read.

I’ll be following up on this almost every month in this newsletter (as well as a whole lot of other stuff about writing, speaking, and product development), and since it’s free (and easy to escape if that’s your wish!), get subscribed so you can directly receive the next issue.

Most important, you have something (probably man things) we need to know that you can share in a book. Here’s how to jump past all the big house foolishness or self-publishing hoops and get in print almost free almost immediately!

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

Disappointed in Internetwarrior.com website but the book has solid content

Michael Zapolin’s book Internet Warrior has solid content and is well organized, though it has typos and the layout is a bit amateurish.

Most internet marketing copy you buy from the Web is at the least suspect, and lots of it is awful. So for a $39 hard cover book with two CDs, I had mixed expectations. He surprised me. Made a solid case for buying domain names, filling them with relevant copy, and selling them at a much higher price.

The tools he used weren’t very well explained but he promised much more at his website, with the hint of help as well.

Good luck! Mostly colorful boxes with links of developers eager for you to click! Not much more, and what was there was from the book itself. Suggested you go to the FAQs for answers. But the search engine drew a blank on FAQs, and they weren’t to be found anywhere else. What a disappointment.

At least the book has a great looking dust cover!

Gordon Burgett

P.S. Check the 10-1 newsletter for exciting info about ancillary publishing: how to get good houses to publish your own book in less than 30 days.

Query letters are the magic key to getting in print

Gordon attacked by wooden bird

I just posted 11 things you should know about query letters if you want to put your articles in the magazines of your choice. Actually, to get your words on almost any editor’s pages in or in whatever medium.

It’s simple enough. I’ve been an editor several times and there was always a lot more folks wanting to be on my pages than space for them. I was the gatekeeper and I needed to know what they had to say that that my readers should hear that was also consistent with why the publication existed. (Mostly, it existed to sell products that its readers might buy, so the writer’s main task was not to scare them away with words that veered too far from the publication’s theme or from common sense.)

Then, if they suggested something sensible and appealing, I needed to see how they said it. Humor helped, scattered evenly like sugar on a roll. But I’d settle for three main points, examples, three quotes or so, and some point that would make the readers say, “Wow!” or “That’s interesting.” They had to organize that on one page of well written prose, spelled correctly, with any relevant credits mentioned, and their e-mail and phone number included. I also wanted a self-addressed, stamped envelope to return rejections.

There’s a lot more. Take a look at my newsletter on 10-15. It’s free and you can flee whenever you wish at the unsubscribe button!

I sold 1,700+ freelance articles and I can’t remember more than a dozen that didn’t involve querying. It’s like that free food at Costco: why would I buy 95% of it if it didn’t convince my taste buds first?

Gordon Burgett

Why not publish your book almost instantly and free?

fiction, non-fiction

There are 4-7 publishers that will produce and market your non-fiction or fiction books almost instantly and almost free (or totally free!) once you have the text written, edited, styled, and in print-ready form.

I doubt you’ll make a bundle by any path, or all of them together, but you can have seven different copies of the same book out at the same time, all buyable by your friends, family, and new fans, and all paying you a modest royalty. It’s super for novels, memoirs, family history, and specific how-to books.

The process is called ancillary publishing and it involves your posting your masterpiece at these sites: lightningsource, Lulu, CreateSpace, Kindle, and perhaps Blurb, Smashwords, and scribd.

But before you do that, see my free 10-1 newsletter where I explain the whole process and walk you through my journey of putting out nine books in 30 days. I’ve got the links, the royalties they pay, which works best where, and how you can integrate all of this into your own parallel self-publishing activities.

It looks like the deal of all time for folks who have a book in their mind or are ready to go but can’t or don’t want to do it all themselves. I’m not hawking anything here; you work with them. But I can’t think of anything this immediate or well structured so fast or so free since I put my first book (of 38) out in 1982!

(Yes, I will release an audio CD that will make collective sense out of ancillary publishing in a few weeks. Keep your eyes here about 11-1, but do your own digging now. The newsletter just out will give you valuable starter guidance.)

Best wishes,

Gordon Burgett

Are you being quoted enough?

Gordon attacked by wooden bird

If you’re a writer, are you waiting for others to find you best stuff to use for quotes?

Want to get a sentence or two of your wisdom in a reader’s 25,000-member mailing list?

How about your saying or how-to suggestion finding a nest in another’s best-selling book, thus finding favor in every corner of the world in print forever?

You get the idea.

I just released an 18-page, 6000-word report called “How to be Quoted Almost Everywhere Almost All the Time” that explains the “why’s” and the process–costing $19, but only $10 until Oct. 15. That’s $ .0017 a word for a free ticket into posterity.

If you want the details, go to my newsletter out tomorrow (or see the archives): www.gordonburgett.com/nl.htm. Or go to www.gordonburgett.com/order3.htm, find the product, and put 5350 in the coupon–before I come to my senses, or Oct. 15, whichever is first.

If you want to see your own quotes in print, you have to seed the field. They almost never appear spontaneously.

But it’s easy to do, fun, and it works, if you do.

I don’t know about you but when I see someone else quoted, I figure they are among the chosen few. And in a way they are, but they got there by standing in line waiting to be chosen!

The line starts at the links above!

Gordon Burgett

P.S. Why not jump ahead of the line and send in an instant subscription to my free monthly newsletter? If it’s not for you, then unsubscribe. We’ll never say a word, and your address is never, ever sold or traded. It’s too valuable!

A great edition coming up on 10/l about how, once you’ve published your book, you can put it out in print seven more times almost free!

Elance writers: feels my newsletter comments were “a real put-down”

A much appreciated comment to my 9/1 newsletter:

Gordon,

What I got from the tone of your newsletter was that the only use you had for Elance was to hire someone dirt cheap to write the “easy” stuff you didn’t have time to do or to write something you could sell over and over and make a bunch of money from. I feel that is a real put-down to those of us who use it to make an honest living and charge real prices instead of $5 a page.

I have written some really specialized materials for large companies and gotten ongoing work in areas I never could have broken into in any other way. True, I don’t get royalties off of it, but that is the nature of ghostwriting. I do have credits on several web sites where I started out as a ghostwriter such as www.XAMonline.com and www.TrainPetDog.com and the long-term relationships have yielded thousands of dollars.

I definitely agree with you that both Elance and Guru have “improved” their sites in ways that have made them much more baffling to navigate. Both offer tutorials if you care to spend the time. Their tutorials are very helpful and even taught me how to write a proposal and how to figure out if something I bid on was probably going to be done or not so I did not waste a lot of time. They provide a lot of safeguards to make sure the freelancer gets paid and the client gets the product.

The other thing you did not mention was why the ebook you were selling (edited by Bob Bly) was written which I think is the most important aspect! Bob hired her through Elance to write a different ebook, but Elance shows how much each person has made on Elance and Bob was so impressed with her money, he asked her to write about how she did it! Many of us have made more money in the same time frame, but a lot of it has been through ongoing relationships instead of all through Elance. Once I forge a relationship through Elance or Guru, we work through e-mail and PayPal so that we don’t both lose commissions to Elance and Guru.

You are welcome to use any of my comments on your blog.

Sally Rushmore
srushmore@indy.rr.com
 
A quick reply:

Heavens, all blessings to elance writers–that’s why I linked to Lindsay Zortman’s (Bob Bly’s) book telling my readers how to join their ranks. Yet I see my newsletter readers as mostly being publishers, published writers, or empire builders and I see them most profitably using elance writing services for ancillary purposes. And yes, to increase their publishing income while filling the writer’s coffers too. I think we’re on the same side!

Gordon Burgett

Have you sold anything at scribd.com?

I’m checking the selling responses at the public contact houses and I am particularly wondering about scribd.com, especially since it says that 6,000,000 visit it.

Has anybody out there sold much through scribd.com?

I am about to ask my own newsletter subscribers (on 9/1) about their luck, and if indeed they have had selling success to please share that with all of us here at this blog as a comment.

But if you are not in that gilded gathering (yet), I–all of us–would appreciate your feedback too.

As my readers know (or will in a few days) I put up four test items in mid-May. Two sold for $3 each (if anybody had bought them, of the 155 who dared to look). Two more (the same piece to two different markets) were free, and a total of 487 looked at that double posting. You can see them too at www.scribd.com, ask for Gordon Burgett.

Thanks for sharing your responses or sales.

I like scribd.com, and it’s very well designed for a quick deposit of info that others can use. I’d like to see it explode with sales and deserved attention.

If the newsletter interests you, it’s free, monthly, and brings you three good reports for subscribing at www.gordonburgett.com/free-reports. (You can see it first at www.gordonburgett.com/nl.htm.)

Thanks,

Gordon Burgett
www.gordonburgett.com

Print your book 8.5 x 11 or 6 x 9?

I just responded to this question at Lundekin, so here it goes again–with a couple of ideas I got from other respondents added in!

(1) If you sell to libraries, the bigger size won’t be bought (unless it’s a LARGE PRINT book), or of it is (rarely) it will be hiding somewhere on the too-big shelf.

(2) Weight is also very important, and, yes, the big one weighs more–and it’s a bit bulkier to ship.

(3) I’ve never seen anything that didn’t fit as well in the smaller format as the larger, unless you have in mind a coffee table book and they are larger than 8.5 x 11 (and much costlier, and much riskier)…

(4) Books must be more mobile now, another argument for 6 x 9 (or, sometimes better, 5.5 x 8.5; less paper loss in printing so often an even better deal). How often do you see readers of the big book in the airport or flying?

(5) Having said that, for years we published giant SOPs books mostly for dentists that fit in three-ring binders, in 8.5 x 11, so first figure out who will buy the book and why, if sales are important!

(6) Whatever size the bound book is, always figure out how you can also produce a digital download. Those are zero size, zero paper, zero shipping, and few seconds appearing anywhere–they will be a key part of future publishing (particularly for textbooks). See the July issue of my free monthly newsletter for 46 ways small publishers can be involved with digital publishing.

Anyway, if you are reading this, congratulations on having created a book that must be sized and printed!

Gordon Burgett

Do you need a speech written?

If you have been asked (or “volunteered”) to speak and you have nothing to say, or have a lot to say but have no idea how to organize or say it, half your victory is having a professional help you prepare your words!

You might want to consider a seasoned veteran who has offered 2,000-plus paid presentations, but instead of him speaking, he can help you share your vigor and knowledge with an eager audience that wants you to succeed.

Excuse me for being forward, but that someone is me! Since all of my presentations are customized, it’s a short step to helping you customize your words to give in your way so you can comfortably wow those who need to hear what you have to say.

Mind you, if you want to shout and throw things, swear, or berate your listeners, I’m probably not your guy. But if you want to educate or amuse or convince them (or all three), all you must do is quickly educate me so I can help you be your best you…

I’ve been a businessman (my own publishing company) since 1982, a teacher forever, and a sort of set-up MC for decades, so from that I can help you find your theme, put your words (and visuals) around it, create the tone you wish to share, and help you get on and off in one piece, on time, and with a sincere “great job” your reward.

If this interests you, let’s talk. Let’s share, in confidence, what you need and how I can help. (If I can’t, I’ll tell you.)

Gordon Burgett

P.S. Who in the world is this pompous idiot? See his (my) website, my newsletter, or my bio.