These are the three basic steps in selling. Marketing is more complex and difficult than selling. When you market your services and/or book, you are attempting to sell to people you haven’t met yet and/or you don’t even know.

Marketing encompasses selling (as the last step). Here are three basic steps you can take before you get to the selling part of marketing: (1) define who you are, (2) identify your target market, and (3) create your brand.

Define who you are

Robert Middleton, marketing guru for self-employed people, including authors, and small business owners, recommends that you define your “unique competitive advantage.” Your unique competitive advantage is what makes you stand out from the crowd. To find your UCA you need to do research on your competition and then take a self-inventory. This step is vital for authors too. Write your book knowing what makes it unique.

When you research your competition, look not only at what they do, but at what they do not do. Are they not covering some aspect of what you write about or not providing specific services that you could? Be sure to include pricing in your examination of your competition.

For example, perhaps you were thinking of charging ninety-nine cents for your ebook? Consider this. The average cost of a best-selling ebook last week was $8.26. If you charge a dollar for your ebook, you’ll need to sell ten ebooks for every one ebook sold by a bestselling author.

After you’ve seen what competitors and/or other businesses like your own are doing, you can do a personal self inventory to see if you’ve missed anything in your research on others that you could be doing for your customers.

Identify your target market

But who are your customers? A maxim in business is that you can’t sell to everyone. This is even truer of Internet businesses. A big advantage of the Web is that it reaches a global audience. As a result, highly targeted sales can be made on the Internet to a much more widespread audience.

Created back in 1999, my first self-published books (actually 12-page booklets) called Brucemaps, sold particularly well to Springsteen fans coming from abroad to visit the US. These fans valued our help in finding places Bruce Springsteen had lived, worked, and sung in the US. One fan from Italy I recall graced our efforts in creating these custom-made maps with the words, “Your most excellent guide…”

Because the potential pool of buyers is so great on the Internet, you can pretty much find customers for anything. In No B.S. Price Strategy Jason Marrs discusses differences in pricing for women’s cotton briefs. Says Marrs, the same briefs can run between $1.50 to $450 online.

No you didn’t just see a giant typo. People from all walks of life use the Internet. That means the price-spread for goods and services is much wider on the Web than in a typical US shopping mall.

This is why targeting is key to success. You’ll need to identify the right group(s) for you to sell to. The more targeted you are, the more you’ll keep your marketing costs down and still run an effective advertising campaign.

Create your brand

Once you’ve identified your target audience(s) for your book or your business, how do you get their attention? You may be reaching out to prospects via advertising, social media like Twitter and Facebook, a newsletter, blog, or personal networking. You want all of these things to work together to help you meet your goals.

Oh yes, goals! Your mission statement should be about more than money – it should reflect who you are and what kind of customers you are looking to serve. If you haven’t created a business plan that’s complete with estimated costs and benchmarks, CPA, Michele Cagan’s Streetwise Business Plans offers everything you need to do to lay out a path for your business and/or your book to meet your expectations.

Once you have a plan, serious marketing of a professional service and/or book requires that you build a brand for yourself. A self-employed service provider helping others to better brand themselves is Patti DeNucci with her web site, newsletter, and book, The Intentional Networker.

A brand is used to establish trust. It should grab people’s attention. It ought to be pertinent to what you do. And you should be able to express it in just a few words and a single image. If you don’t build a a unique brand and work hard to gain customer trust, the only thing you’ll have to compete with other books or businesses is a low price. And that’s a losing strategy for the long run.

Here is the biggest tip I can give you on marketing. Begin setting up your marketing campaign LONG BEFORE you launch your book and/or small business. 

Barnes & Noble, or “Buns & Noodle” as cartoonist and book author Alison Bechdel satirized it, is in trouble. Nook sales were down by 12.6 percent compared to last year while retail sales went down 10.9 percent. And no wonder!

Barnes & Noble is a second office for my partner and me. We try to get there once a week and spend a few hours reading and discussing business. My partner checks out the Mac and Web design stuff. I check out the business books and the indexes in the books we find.

Believe it or not, this is getting harder to do every day. My local Barnes & Noble dumped its music collection and used that space plus a lot of book space for …merchandise?

Really! There are no enticing book display tables in the front of the store, only Nook display tables. You’d think you were walking into ToysRUs or Costco.

Book display tables are out of sight on the right. Indeed, you could walk through Barnes & Noble and not realize it is a bookstore until you see the one display case beside the door with multiple copies of the featured title of the week (recently Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln).

What’s wrong with B & N?

Here’s my list. No doubt you might want to add things:

• They removed comfy sofas and chairs to make room for merchandise
• There are no more CDs with listening stations. (I send CD gifts)
• They no longer stock the complete titles of popular book series
• They no longer carry all library children’s book award winners
• Book shelving is a maze, and there’s no map of subject areas
• B & N can’t tell literary fiction from genre fiction
• All authors with names starting with Mc come first under “M”
• There are no self-serve computers to let customers find books
• Often no one is at the information booth
• They can’t tell a customer if a title is available at a nearby B & N
• On busy days, they never have enough cashiers.

What’s right with B & N?

• It still has a great cookbook collection
• It has a very good magazine and newspaper section
• It has a Starbucks  – complete with tables to sit at

I often wonder if my local B & N would survive without that Starbucks or if possibly Starbucks makes more money than Barnes & Noble does off of B & N customers…

What could be better?

Here’s the elephant that’s not in the room. Amazon is where most people get their books. It’s far cheaper than B & N or any other bookstore. Let’s look at how any bookstore could survive that.

(1) Carry print books people want to pick up and browse

Most people hear about books from TV shows, newspapers and other media. Or they learn about books from friends, family and coworkers who are media and/or library hounds. And most people would love to see those books before investing $15 to $30 for one of them.

Can you find a a book mentioned on Jon Stewart, Colbert, or Entertainment Tonight in my Barnes & Noble? How about books in the major book review journals or Sunday papers? Nope, you often cannot. And certainly not on the day after the show or publication comes out Yet, that’s exactly the kind of service a nationwide bookstore could provide and make money from!

(2) Integrate e-books into its computer system

After looking at a print copy of a book that’s for sale, customers may well prefer to buy the ebook version, especially if it is cheaper. They may be able to purchase a Nook ebook at the store, but what if the book they want isn’t on Nook? This is where Amazon is killing Barnes & Noble. B & N should create deals with publishers to sell e-books for any kind of device right at the store. Think of the new gift business it could get!

(3) Connect buying and book-ordering in its computer system

It’s absurd that Barnes & Noble can’t tell readers if a print book title is still on the shelves at a B & N store nearby. That’s a service that library readers have taken for granted for well over a decade. Clearly, at Barnes and Noble stores, the cashiers’ computers aren’t connected to those at the information desks. Connect them!

(4) Provide self-service computers for finding and buying books

Even Home Depot, with its arcane SKU number system on items for sale lets users buy things without waiting in line. Include e-books on those self-serve workstations. And for reader’s sake, let people look up a book themselves if they don’t know an author’s last name.

 (5) Lastly, provide space for local authors to sell their books

Authors, whether published or self-published, often sell their book(s) out of their homes or offices. They can easily be contacted to bring in an additional copy if the first copy on the B & N shelves sells. Local authors won’t demand the book be returned for remaindering in just a few months either. This certainly isn’t the case with publishers.

Author appearances are one of the best ways to sell books. What city or town in America with a Barnes & Noble store doesn’t have local authors, at least one of whom is nationally known? What book-loving visitor to a new place wouldn’t want to stop by a Barnes & Noble/Starbucks and see what its local authors have written?

Do you believe sales require using forceful techniques such as “handshake intimidation”? Do you think using powerful body language works best to get what you want? And do you say to yourself, “That’s just not my style!”

Here’s what I have to share about about making sales.

My dad was a salesman. He sold teeth, equipment, and dental supplies to dentists. Unfortunately I wasn’t remotely interested in dentistry or sales as a youngster. I went off to college and ultimately wound up becoming a librarian, the kind of librarian who answers people’s questions.

Never in a million years did I think that my work at the library reference desk was making sales, but that is exactly what I did. It wasn’t as complicated as you might think either. Here’s the process in a nutshell.

Three steps in selling

To make a sale:

1. Find out what a person needs or wants
2. Ask yourself if you believe you can help them
3. Connect what you’ve learned about the person with what you can offer them

For example, if a patron in the library wanted information about raising bees, I knew where such a book or article could be found. That’s what library school trained me to do.

I also learned in library school that people often don’t ask for what they really need. That meant the librarian ought to be like a detective and ask them questions about what they were looking for in order to uncover the secret of what they really needed.

But in real life, while working in college, university, public, non-profit and business libraries, I found that was rarely the case. People usually ask for exactly what they need. This makes the first step in selling obvious.

(1) Listen carefully to what your potential customer is saying.

Anyone can practice active listening. You already do it with friends and/or at work. And the next step is equally simple. 

(2) Know your product and/or service well enough to tell if you (or it) can do anything for the person you are talking to. 

If your book doesn’t include what a person needs to know, or your service to author doesn’t cover what a prospective buyer wants, you have to tell them that.

Faking it when selling is never a good tactic. Sooner or later, people will see through any pretense. Here’s a video about that by a punk band, The Saints.

Making referrals

If you can’t give someone what they need, decide if you can refer them elsewhere. If you can refer the person, that’s still a service to them. They may come back for what you offer later.

As a librarian I learned to be careful when making a referral. Don’t refer potential customers to another source unless you’ve checked it out first. No one appreciates wasting time and energy barking up a wrong tree. I usually called a library or an expert before referring anyone to them.

If you want to make referrals, make sure you learn how to network well. To learn about networking to get results, I refer you to a former client whose book I indexed. Patti DeNucci’s free newsletter and book, The Intentional Networker are the best things I’ve ever read about networking with potential customers and/or peers. You can find out more at intentionalnetworker.com.

If you decide you can’t or don’t wish to refer a potential customer elsewhere, that’s fine too. Just tell them, “Sorry, but I can’t help you”.

Now, if you can help someone, what’s left to do?

(3) Answer questions as briefly as possible. Use examples or anecdotes to show how your product or service could address a problem your prospective customer is seeking to solve. 

Drop details into the conversation when pertinent, e.g., “I have two chapters in my book about just that subject”. Otherwise, respond to their questions as honestly as you can.

Here’s a good “To-Don’t List for Selling More“.

Once you are done, ask your prospect if the information you’ve given them has been helpful. Offer to send more information or call them back if they wish. Or if they express interest, ask if they’d like to buy your product or your service.

Whether or not a potential customer buys anything from you, you’ll know you did your best to communicate who you are and what you could do for them.

Next to the excitement of being given money for your book or services, talking about what you do for other people will bring you a lot of satisfaction. Many people will appreciate you for just attempting to help them. Plus, getting to know what your potential customers need will help you in making future sales.

Knowing your target audience is key to selling successfully. Librarians need your help to buy your book(s).

Are you a new small press publisher or self-publishing author? If so, you have a major handicap in terms of getting your book into libraries. Your book(s) are not eligible for the free service from the Library of Congress of Cataloging-in-Publication CIP). Read on and you’ll see why this is a barrier and how you can get around it.

What is Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP)?

You’ll find cataloging-in-publication data (CIP data) on the “verso,” i.e., back of a title page of a book put out by a publisher. But this isn’t the whole story. Behind this small paragraph in a published book there is a large electronic version of the catalog that is sent to any library that buys that title.

Cataloging is a very labor-intensive, i.e., expensive, process for libraries, but it aids library users to find exactly the tome they need. And if is important for you because books that aren’t cataloged wind up on shelves in out-of-the-way corners and back hallways or in boxes or file cabinets that most library patrons will never pass by.

Also, browsing is facilitated by the way catalogs books are organized on the shelves. Library patrons often find a book they love by “serendipitous” searching. Call numbers for books facilitate this – they keep books on the same subject together. Word-of-mouth is the way most books are bought. You want a catalog record because you’ll want library patrons to see your book and tell others about it.

Local cataloging, an alternative to CIP

Cataloging and shelving a book costs a library way more than the book itself. Some libraries will buy a book and create what is called a “local catalog record” for it. They share that local record with other libraries. They will bear the expenses of cataloging. But if you provide your own catalog record, you can save the first library money that buys it and must catalog it.

This may seem like a small matter to you. You may feel sure your POD (or self-published book by a traditional printer) will eventually get into libraries and be cataloged. That may be true, but CIP data is created before a book is published. This means that book reviewers will see this data if you send them a pre-publication copy of your book to review.

Book reviews are crucial for getting your book purchased by a lot of libraries. These are not any book reviews. They are book reviews that librarians use to justify book purchases. How to get into the right book review sources is the subject of much of my new PDF book, Marketing Your Book To Libraries: An insider’s Guide.

Private cataloging, an alternative to CIP

PCIP (Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication) is service from the Donohue Group, Inc. Accredited librarians at Donohue creates a catalog record to use on the verso of the title page of your book. This catalog record will be accepted by libraries and by the digital system that allows libraries to share catalog records electronically with other libraries.

New publishers

So, if you are a new publisher who is serious about putting out quality print books that libraries might wish to make available for their patrons, PCIP will help make your reputation for you and your authors. Trained librarians at the Donohue company will create a catalog record for your books.

The Library of Congress works with many small publishers to provide them CIP data and electronic records, but they must have a proven track record of publishing the kinds of books libraries readily purchase. This usually means a long waiting period, and some publishers may never qualify for the Library of Congress’ program.

POD book authors

What if you publish a POD book? You have an even bigger hurdle to cross than a new small press publisher. Librarians traditionally distrust POD books. POD companies have a reputation for printing poor quality books. The Library of Congress will not spend the money to provide you with a CIP data or electronic record.

Established small publishers, on the other hand, receive 40 percent of the CIP data records produced by the Library of Congress.

Can you purchase a PCIP record and have a POD company print it in your book? Yes, but only if you don’t alter the book’s “metadata”. This is information such as the books title, author’s name, format, ISBN (International Standard Book Number), etc. Nor can you make significant changes to your text. If you do, then you’ll need to get a new ISBN and this means you need a new PCIP record.

Donohue will also send and electronic form of the PCIP record for your POD book to OCLC, the cataloging consortium in Ohio that shares catalog records with libraries.

But don’t forget distribution!

Here is one thing to keep in mind before signing on with a POD company or publishing through a traditional printer. Libraries have a separate distribution system for purchasing books that they have used for decades.

The only distributor that libraries will buy POD books from is Ingram. Ingram is the largest book distributor in the world, and it has a well known catalog that libraries receive. There are smaller library distributors too such as Baker & Taylor and for e-books, Ebsco. These two companies and smaller specialty ones for the college and public libraries focus on distributing books from publishers rather than self-publishers.

If you are a self-publishing author, keep in mind that you’ll need to have a POD company or traditional book printer that can distribute your published or self-published book through Ingram. If you’re a new small press, look for a printer or distributor that has connections to these library book distributors.

You’ll also need to meet the quality standards that Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and libraries too demand from print books. For complete information about the standards libraries require for books they purchase, please see my book, Marketing Your Book to Libraries: An Insider’s Guide, available at Authormaps.com

Authormaps.com is my web site devoted to quality production of books created especially for the library market. If you are a new author, new publisher, or you regularly work with authors to create quality books, Authormaps Tips is a newsletter that you may wish to sign up for. It too is at Authormaps.

On March 1, 2011, Random House, the last holdout against the Agency Model for pricing ebooks, caved. Random House joined other publishers by paying a standard fee of 30% out of author royalties to the distributor(s) of its e-books. The Agency Model for pricing e-book fees was signed onto last year when Apple debuted it’s iPad, and Apple began charging 30% for distribution of e-books via its iBookstore. Barnes & Noble and Amazon to some degree, followed Apple’s lead regarding ebook distribution fees. Where the ebookstores disagree most now is on pricing e-books.

Print books by tradition are sold by wholesaling them to retail stores who then can price the books at the retail price they choose. Ebook pricing is quite different. E-books aren’t sold by wholesaling a limited number of copies. Instead, ebookstores are setting retail price categories for e-books. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have set a maximum retail price of $9.99 for their e-books and encourage authors to publish for even less than that.

Apple, on the contrary, has encouraged a minimum retail price (the DOJ’s alleged Agency Model price-fixing) for its e-books by allowing publishers and authors to set their own prices. Apple’s e-book prices can be above Amazon’s $9.99 minimum and Apple charges the same 30% fee for higher-priced ebooks. All ebookstores encourage authors to publish at particular prices by the way each store sets their fees for distribution of e-books.

The Agency Model – what is it?

The Agency Model would have had all retail sellers of e-books taking a standard cut of 30 percent. Google, however, didn’t agree with that amount. Google’s One Pass services said it would charge only ten percent. Google claimed 10% covers all its costs in serving digital content. Google fixed its minimum cost per “copy” of an ebook title at an even lower than Amazon did! How, you might ask will Google make money? The answer is: as it always does, by advertising. Google ads are a lucrative business for both the sellers and the hosts of those ads.

Apple and the publishers who signed onto it claim the Agency Model is the superior way of pricing ebooks. The Agency Model allows publishers and authors to charge what they choose for their ebooks. But what about the pricing of used e-books? Can you resell them? Apparently not. Like music, sharing of digitally downloaded books isn’t allowed. Digital books appear to be “leased” from the distributor. You buy the right to read the book and maybe make multiple copies for personal use.

This means far less freedom for book lovers. That includes libraries, some of which have had to buy the print copy of an ebook before they could loan out an ebook version to a patron for the library’s typical two-week or one-month book-borrowing period. I like reading e-books. Some have a lot of nice features that print books don’t have. But personally, I just can’t quite warm up to a world where librarians can’t buy new ebooks from publishers and readers can’t browse and pay less money for used e-books!

There is an even more disconcerting change taking place because of the ebook world. The book as an “object of art” is vanishing. Just as with MP3s, there is no physical object representing the book in digital form. The only limitation to the e-book is the programming needed to display it on an eReader. That isn’t insignificant, but unlike mp3s, e-books appear to have the potential to equal or even surpass print books in quality. E-books could possibly replace print books altogether.

Because of the invention of ebooks, books are becoming “virtual”:  they will someday be as vaporous as a holograph of a painting. Of e-books one could echo Helen Mirren’s Prospera, “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s thine own,…” Indeed, I wonder if the book industry, like the music industry, isn’t going to “pay” dearly by creating a leased digital product that cannot ever drop in price.

Is Agency-Model pricing bad for authors?

This is your real question isn’t it? I would say “No,” not for the short-term. As a writer, you have no vested interest in the used book market: used-books bookstores may keep your reputation alive, but you don’t make any royalties from them.

Moreover, traditional publishing provides authors with 10% royalties and often discounts print books to retailers at 50 percent. Hence the lower cost of e-books when the publisher only needs to give a distributor 30 percent of the retail price of a book. If you are a self-publisher it is even better. Because of Apple, you get to keep 70% of the price for your book

However, book pricing, like all pricing, is a matter of supply and demand. Usually, as demand for a good goes up and supply stays the same, the price for the good will go up. But ebook distributors offer an infinite supply of their goods. It costs ebookstores nothing to keep and distribute an infinite number of copies of an e-book, yet they charge publishers and authors the same 30% for each copy sold.

As a result of agency model fees, the price of your e-book can never go up even as demand increases. Nor can it go down. You make the same amount (i.e., 70% of retail price) on the “margin,” i.e., on the last unit sold, as you did on the first unit sold. The marginal unit cost of zero is why a minimal price needs to be set for all e-books. Publishers and authors need to recoup their ebook production costs even if their ebooks do not sell more than the average number of copies, or most will never publish a second e-book. This is a waste of creative talent. Many other countries support their  writers’ efforts by using fixed book price agreements.

Because ebooks have an approximately-infinite supply, successful ebook authors could offset the standard agency price model by selling their ebook at a discounted price through non-agency venues or even via their own websites. But Apple does not want publishers or authors to be able to sell against its iBookstore pricing; it doesn’t allow short-term sales at lower prices for its e-books. Nor does it share most of its customer data with publishers. Amazon and other big ebookstores have adopted this practice too. Only Google demurred. With the advent of its One Pass Service, Google promised to share customer datawith publishers.

What’s really bad about Agency-Model pricing

For published authors not sharing customer data may not seem like a big deal. Presently a published author of a print book can’t get access to information about buyers of their book from their publisher. So Apple’s arrangement is not very different. Apple will give publishers and authors data only from customers who have “opted in” to give consent for their information to be shared. Amazon and Barnes & Noble certainly aren’t sharing customer data either.

In the print book world too, only bookstores have access to information about who buys print books. As a result, a published author does not have the data to market an ensuing book to the audience for their first book. I’ve always thought publishers were extremely short-sighted not to understand that a mailing list of customers is a prime marketing tool in the hands of an author! Amazon, Apple, and other ebookstores also actively discourage authors from using their websites and their own customer data to sell their books.

“Cross-selling,” i.e., selling an additional product to people you have previously sold something to, is much easier to do than starting from scratch. Publishers and bookstores instead, rely on their own reputations to sell books, rather than on their authors’ “sweat equity”. The downside is that if an author switches publishers, the the new publisher has to start marketing that author from scratch all over again.

Apple, however, understands the immense potential for profit from cross-selling the titles of future e-books via its iBookstore. Apple and the publishers of subscription magazines and newspapers have been battling over that very issue for the past couple of years. Each has vied for possession of the names and addresses of of the customers who buy e-newspaper or e-magazine subscriptions. These publishers understand that Apple’s monopoly over customer data useful for cross-selling would make Apple more powerful than they are.

If you are a book publisher or the self-publisher of an e-book, you should be just as concerned about your customer data as magazine and newspaper publishers are!

Apple is now facing a lawsuit for use of mobile phone app personal data. Apps are how Apple publishes e-magazine and e-newspaper subscriptions. Apple’s grab for customer data appears to be driven by greed as well as shortsightedness. Apple’s platform for books, the iBookstore, would enable Apple to collect revenues from advertising, both general and “targeted” (i.e., recommendations to readers about similar books).

Publishers and authors of e-books, on the other hand, will be left with no such opportunities to make more money from their e-books  other than the Agency-model royalty – unless – authors litter the pages of their e-books with ads or resort to accepting product placement in their e-books. I shudder to think of it!

Right now e-books seem like the icing on the cake for publishers and self-publishers alike. In the future, however, e-books are likely to be an authors’ bread and butter. In the new world of digital publishing, authors now bear much of the burden for promoting their own book(s). If authors don’t take care, Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble will be eating their cake and the icing while authors again get the leftover crumbs.

NOTE: For my opinion about why a minimum price needs to be set for ebooks, please see “The Apple Conundrum” by Nancy K. Humphreys at Huffington Post.

Why do we need editors?

An indexer I know refuses to ask clients to put her name in the books she indexes even though that is a great way to market indexing services.

“Why,” I asked.

“Because editors always crap up my work.”

OK! Here’s what I have to say about that.

I’ve been a published writer since I was age twelve. Changes editors made to my work was my main gripe as a writer. But I’ve changed – for two reasons:

Self-employment

Being in business for yourself means your first priority must always be getting new clients. You don’t get a weekly or monthly paycheck when you’re self-employed. And, as a book packager I met a book fair once told me, “You have to reinvent yourself every three years.”

Clients come and go; your interests change; or you get sick of being typecast. Whatever the reason, you must sell your services constantly when you’re self-employed. The up-side of that is that you get in the groove by doing it every day. You can sell your services without even thinking. If you’re an employee, on the other hand, you have to gear up like crazy whenever you are laid off or find you need to move on to a new job.

Also, If you don’t like a client and/or they don’t like you, you can walk away without losing your job. Now that is what I call real “security”. It’s a lot harder to walk away when you are an employee and have only one paycheck coming in.

So when I write an index for a book I ask for my name to be put on the page with the index itself because that is the place it will be noticed by the most people. If not on the page titled, “Index,” then I like to see my name in the front of the book, with my website listed also. That’s my way of advertising for new clients. The nice thing is: it’s free!

Blogging

As a blogger, I’ve realized that editors are people with real skills that writers need. In particular, they can help me pare down my content in ways I would never think of. Blog posts have to be short, much shorter than the kind of writing I’m used to doing with articles or short stories.

Also, I’m old enough to see that everyone in this world needs to feel useful in some capacity. That is how most of us connect with others. Our first question when meeting a new person is “What do you do?” not “Who are you?” Editors, I’ve come to see, are people too. They are people just like me. They want their work to be valued.

In addition, perfectionism is a mean goddess. She requires hours of one’s time as payment for her blessing. Writing is as natural to me as breathing. With so much left to write, I understand now that I really don’t have the time to try to make my writing perfect. In fact, if I did make my posts perfect, I’d have to go back to being “pissed off” at editors who make revisions to my work. Life is too short and precious for that!

On the other hand, you don’t want to be the writer whose writings the editor hates to see coming because they will need to change so much of what you wrote. There’s a sweet spot somewhere in between those two extremes.

That’s why whether I’m writing for a publisher or self-publishing my own posts, I do my best, and I leave the editor a little something to do. That’s not hard, because after all, none of us are actually perfect and certainly not me! (Or should the last word in that sentence be “I”?)

NOTE: If you would like to get this blog by email, sign up for Wordmaps Tips, my free newsletter. The sign-up box is at the upper right of each page on my site, WordmapsIndexing.com. For current news about indexing and book publishing, follow me and see who I follow on Twitter @Wordmaps.

The value of brick and mortar bookstores

For the past few years my partner and I have spent at least one day a week hanging out at Barnes & Noble. Looking back, I can see that we learned more from a 3-hour stay at a bookstore than we ever learned on the Internet.

That’s not to say I haven’t learned anything on the Internet. I have. But in the same amount of time it takes me to read a post, I can check out the table of contents, skim the index, and get right to the section of a book that has the exact information I seek.

And have you noticed even Amazon is now talking about building a brick & mortar store?

Do you believe that free is always best?

Bookstores are organized; the Internet isn’t. And here’s the problem with this difference. Most of us are parasites, finding what we need at the bookstore for free (or perhaps for the price of a decaf mocha grande), and then heading to the Internet to buy the item. What if brick and mortar bookstores charged us to get in? Would we pay? How much?

What if the online Encyclopedia Britannica (now about to cease publishing its centuries-old print version) were to charge a subscription price for using it? Would we all turn up our noses and stick to Wikipedia with its, stubs, essays by amateurs, inaccurate information, out-dated entries, and lack of any index?

And what about those $1 ebooks? How many of them have you tried to read?

Pricing your book and/or your services

In any case, here’s what I want to say about a great book I found at B&N, No B.S. Price Strategy. It was written by Dan S. Kennedy and Jason Marrs and published by Entrepreneur Press in 2011. The table of contents basically sold me the book. I didn’t even bother to look at the index.

Here are three of the basic price strategies these guys explain in the book:

• WAG (wild-assed guess)
• Industry norm
• Client-dictated

I’ll bet if you are like me, you’ve used “industry norm” and/or “client-dictated” sometime in your career. And I’ll bet if you are like me you’ve been totally disgusted with the results. As the authors warn, these are not the tactics used by successful entrepreneurs.

Nor is sitting around waiting for a month, two months or even longer for payment. Here is what the book says about payment: The rich get paid in advance. Are you getting paid in advance for your services? For your book?

Here are some of the other basic strategies in the chapters in this book:

• Cost-plus – methods that involve calculating costs and then adding some amount for profit
• Skimming (the cream off the top – by selling an attribute other than price)
• Sequential skimming (starting at the top and then lowering the price as demand declines)
• Penetration – setting a low price for fast sales (and spending a ton on marketing)
• Target Return – the method technical investors use when they project profits by charting the likely path an investment will take over a specific period of time.

NOTE: Nowhere in these chapter headings do you see the method that seems to be popular with many service providers and ebook authors today:

• Start at the bottom and work your way up

Truly, have you ever tried to raise your price when you started out keeping it low? How do you explain that to your customers? How well do they respond to it?

Inside No B.S. Price Strategy are links for both authors. I would skip Dan Kennedy, but I strongly recommend you check out the one for Jason Marrs. He offers five free sessions, one each week, where he covers 39 specific strategies for pricing. His sessions are audio-only and ten minutes maximum. That means you could literally become an expert on pricing over your lunch hour. Now that’s what I call a real deal.

NOTE: If you would like to get this blog by email, sign up for Wordmaps Tips, my free newsletter. The sign-up box is at the upper right of each page on my site, WordmapsIndexing.com. For current news about indexing and book publishing, follow me and see who I follow on Twitter @Wordmaps.

If you take the lowest bid you get for an index you may be missing out on term consistency in your index. Why is this the case? And why is it important?

Expertise of the indexer

Taking the lowest bid may mean you don’t get the most consistent index. As with other professionals, not all indexers have the same expertise. I discussed the topic of choosing an indexer in my last post, “Term Consistency and Book Indexing“.

Although some indexers choose to charge the same average rate for all books, most experienced indexers ask to see pages from the book first before they give you an estimate. That’s because there are a wide variety of factors that can affect the price for an index. For a list of those factors, see my page at WordmapsIndexing about Cost Factors For Indexes. Consider these cost factors as they may apply to your book.

Address any cost factor that applies to your book with the indexer you are thinking about hiring to do your index. For example, if your book is on a topic with special terminology, you’ll want an indexer who totally understands that terminology. While a general undergraduate degree may be fine for some book, you may need someone with a major in your subject, work experience, or even a Master’s degree in your subject. It all depends.

Expect to pay a bit more for special expertise from an indexer if your index needs it. Now on to why term consistency is important. This week let’s look at the first of three costs for indexing that involve term consistency:  cross-references.

Cross-referencing of headings in an index

Indexes without any See or See also cross-references are usually inferior indexes. Here is why.

Readers don’t always use the same word to find the same concept. You can’t index a book about hell without using synonyms for the beings associate with the Christian idea of hell: Demon, Daimon, Devil, and Satan. Nor can you index a  book about writing fantasy stories without synonyms for the beings found there: Aliens, Beasts, Creatures, and Monsters. the indexer must create cross-references among these synonyms.

How does an indexer go about putting See cross-references in an index?

To avoid making the reader look in four different places in the index for information about the same topic, most indexers will choose one term from either of the two batches of synonyms listed above. The indexer will use  one term and make See cross-references to it from the other three or four terms in the index, e.g., Daimon, See Devil; Demon, See Devil; and Satan, See Devil. The term the indexer picks may be the one most-used by you, the author in the text. Or the indexer might pick the term they think most readers will use to find that subject.

Now, if there are just two terms that are synonymous, the indexer might want to use both terms in the index, and make a See also cross-reference from each one to the other, e.g., Satan See also Devil along with Devil, See also Satan. It all depends on the book and the indexer.

However, if the way two or more similarly-defined words are used in your book is not quite synonymous, then each word will need to be its own main heading and the indexer will need to create See also cross-references pointing to the other similar word(s).

The important thing to understand here is that the indexer must make the reader aware when you’ve used synonyms or near-synonyms in your book when discussing a topic. Readers who look in the index will find the discussion(s) of that topic even though they started their search by looking under different words in the index. In other words, the bee can take more than one path to the honey.

How does an indexer go about using See also cross-references in an index?

A book about fantasy writing can’t be indexed fully without making See also references to more specific instances of the main topics in the book. For example let’s say Beasts are a main topic of your book. If you frequently talk about dragons, a specific kind of beast, and/or mention lots of different kinds of dragons, these can be listed separately under a new main heading, “Dragon,” in the index.

If dragons aren’t listed under the main heading, “Beasts,” the indexer sure as heck must include a See also cross reference like this one: “Beasts. See also Dragons”. Otherwise the reader who looks under “Beasts” may never realize information about dragons can also be found in your book.

Now why is this important? I’ve done research at a college library that indicated students who look in one place and find only partial information on a topic stop right there. They do not look further for the information that is missing. They assume it just isn’t in the library catalog, or in this case, in your book.

The immense importance of cross-references in indexes

Books that have indexes that omit cross-references will cause the reader to miss much of the information that you, the author, have devoted your time to providing the reader with. Nor will readers be able to go back and find something they recall reading about in your book.

For a prime example of the frustration this can cause a reader,  read any of Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad book series and then go back and try to find something you read in it. Famous as he is, Kiyosaki might have far more sales of his book, especially among college students,  if he had simply provided an index his books. But he doesn’t. Kiyosaki’s antagonism toward education, i.e., his “Poor Dad,” is understandable, but not forgivable when you are the reader of one of his books.

Even books with very specific topics or genres need cross references. For example in a cookbook, some people will use the term “butter lettuce”. Others will use the term “Boston lettuce”. What if one reader looks under “cakes” and another looks under “desserts”? Cookbooks almost always must have See and See also cross-references.

Even an introductory textbook should have a real index. I’ve seen introductory math books and even an advanced text about physics where the index included only the definitions of terms. An index is not a dictionary! In index is not a glossary! One of the main purposes of an index is to gather together all of the different aspects of a topic in one place.

Badly-indexed textbooks where only the definitions of terms are indexed appear to assume that students will merely memorize those definitions. Surely most teachers would rather their students understand the concepts being taught. This is why an indexer should index examples and discussions that may further explain a concept. An index should also capture any comparisons of one concept with another in your book!

Cross-references are an important part of terminology control in your book. The amount of cross-referencing needed for your book is a significant consideration for the indexer when determining the cost of doing an index for a book.

NOTE: If you would like to get this blog by email, sign up for Wordmaps Tips, my free newsletter. The sign-up box is at the upper right of each page on my site, WordmapsIndexing.com. For current news about indexing and book publishing, follow me and see who I follow on Twitter @Wordmaps.

A term is a word or a phrase. A word or a phrase can have a variety of meanings. In addition, there’s the connotation (implied meaning) as well as the denotation (explicit meaning) of a word.

Term consistency in an index is an art which involves making choices such as these:

(1) Should the indexer list synonymous terms separately in the index and make See also cross-references between (or among) the closely related terms?

(2) Or should the indexer choose one term only for purposes of indexing and make See cross-references to that term from the term(s) not used in the index.

Term consistency is a subset of vocabulary control which in turn is a subset of quality control in indexing. Term consistency is important to the author for several reasons that I’ll cover in this and the next three posts about indexing. We begin with the issue of how much expertise in the terminology of a specific subject an indexer needs to create a competent index.

Term consistency and choosing an indexer

Indexers debate the issue of whether or not we should have any subject expertise in order to index a book. As “first readers” of the books we index there is a feeling by some indexers that if we can’t understand it, neither will the audience.

While that’s true in a lot of cases, it isn’t always. This response assumes that the audience will be the same for all books. And that isn’t true.

Demographic factors, such as age, educational background, work experience, cultural and national origins, knowledge of the subject of the book, and the reader’s reason for wanting to know what’s in the book can all affect the ability of readers to make use of our indexes.

If the indexer does not share enough traits in common with your book’s audience or at least know something about your audience, your index may not be quite as useful to your audience as it could be.

When to choose an indexer with special expertise

The problem for an indexer is that it is sometimes difficult to know if we do have enough expertise to index a book until we’ve read the book. And then it’s a bit too late! But usually we have some sense of our own limitations.

For example, I would never agree to do an advanced medical textbook for students. I just don’t know medical terminology well enough to see the relationships among terms used for diagnosing diseases, discussing treatments, or the tools that doctors and nurses use.

In a similar vein, I agreed to become the indexer for very technical economics books published by a think tank in Michigan because I have a Master’s degree in economics from one of the best colleges in the US.

When I said, “yes,” the editor thanked me at length. He then told me, “Our last indexer just indexed words. She didn’t have a clue about what the words really meant.”

When to compromise about expertise

Sometimes it’s just a truism that no one can know as much about a subject as the author or authors of a book.

For example, for years I indexed the Black Music Research Journal (BMRJ) for Columbia College in Chicago. My qualifications were extensive experience and training in music and music appreciation, I also had a bit of knowledge of cross-cultural experiences from being a womens studies librarian for several years.

But the Black Music Research Journal is an amazing compendium of information about African culture as it has spread throughout the world with the “diaspora” of black people in previous centuries. Politics, geography, history, anthropology, literature, religion… you name it, these articles covered all those subjects and more in addition to music from every part of the world. I doubt there is any one person who excels in all of these fields.

Yet, I did wonder often whether not being an African-American meant I was missing a lot of important things in the Journal. I comfort myself with the knowledge that my predecessor appeared to be absolutely oblivious of the existence of women in black music.

I introduced a number of headings to the BMRJ index related to black and non-black women that this indexer had simply not even seen. He even failed to index the women who were major subjects of some of the articles!

When to not worry about term consistency

Indexers usually have a college background. For most trade books aimed at a general audience you don’t really have to worry about whether the indexer will understand the terminology of your book.

In addition, indexers are quick learners. We can easily pick up the terminology in a new subject area. We will also do research outside of the book if necessary, but most of us prefer not to have to do this – it takes time, and for us, time is money

Also, some fields are just so broad and so full of individual discovery that an indexer will do well to just to know that basics about indexing that field.

For example, if you have created a cookbook of American cuisine, the important thing you want to know from the indexer, (besides whether they like food!) is whether they know the traditional means by which cookbook indexes are to be structured.

Beyond that, every cookbook indexer usually learns something new when we index a cookbook. That’s because knowing how one chef does things is no guarantee we’ll know how any other chef works.

Surprises and learning about new things are one of the benefits that make us become indexers in the first place.

Three tips for finding your indexer

(1) Make sure you identify who the audience or audiences are for your book. Let the indexer know the details about who you believe will want to read your book. If you have a primary audience and a secondary one, mention that too. This information will help an indexer gauge our ability to index your book.

(2) Help the indexer decide if we can index your book by offering to send us a few pages if we say they might be interested in working on your book. Do this so we can see what we may be getting into. If you haven’t finished writing your book, describe it and ask us if we think we would have the right background to do it.

(3) Don’t assume an indexer will have mentioned everything about their background in a directory of indexers or on their web site on LinkedIn! Indexers often have varied subject interests, many of which we lacked the space to mention or we just didn’t think of it as something an author might write about!

NOTE: If you would like to get this blog by email, sign up for Wordmaps Tips, my free newsletter. The sign-up box is at the upper right of each page on my site, WordmapsIndexing.com. For current news about indexing and book publishing, follow me and see who I follow on Twitter @Wordmaps.

Let me answer the question, Does my book need a catalog record? with another question: Why do libraries need classification?

If you’ve ever taken biology in school, you’ve learned about the classes used to classify all living beings. These are called kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria).

Classification is the science of breaking things down into “classes,” i.e., very broad subjects, then arranging those classes into some kind of order, and then — subdividing each class into narrower and narrower categories within each class.

Say, does this sound familiar? Isn’t that what indexers do? You bet it is!

Indexers “chunk” the content of a book into broad classes of information that we call “main headings”. These main headings can be specific names of people, places, things, or concepts. Main headings are the main “subjects” of discussion in a book.

In a book index, the broad classes, i.e., the  “subjects,” are arranged in alphabetical order. Then these classes (subjects) are subdivided into smaller “subclasses” that fall within the topic of the main heading. The smaller chunks of information, the indented terms under the main headings in a book index, are called the “subheadings.”

In short: indexing is a form of classification of all human knowledge

Difference between a book index and library catalog?

Obviously a book contains a smaller “domain” of knowledge! That’s a big difference. A library catalog is a much bigger project than a book index. The librarians’ domain is all of the human knowledge that exists anywhere at any time.

In addition, human knowledge exists outside of the medium by which it is transmitted. A book is just one way to transmit knowledge.

For example, in an article titled, “The worlds oldest profession: indexing?,” published in the December 2011 issue of  the Society of Indexers’ journal, The Indexer, I talk about the oldest index in the world. This index is said to have been inspired in ancient, prehistoric China by markings on the backs of turtles!

There are many other ways of transmitting knowledge besides what we call a book. Now we are creating new ways of sharing information with all kinds of “digital” books, i.e., app books, audiobooks, ebooks, enhanced ebooks, illustrated (fixed-format) ebooks, and instant-download PDF books.

Similarity between a book index and library catalog?

Yet, there is a parallel between book indexing and what librarians call “cataloging” of books. Cataloging is the process by which a book is described and listed in a library catalog. Cataloging takes place because librarians have developed systems of classifying and organizing large amounts of data in diverse kinds of materials.

Here’s the similarity: classification is a part of the of cataloging library books.

Classification is what is behind the “call numbers” you see on a library book. It’s also behind  the “subject headings” attached to each book that you can search for in a library catalog. Classification is used by both indexers and librarians in organizing human knowledge so that we all can find things in a book or in a library.

This is a very close connection, and it goes back as far as we can see. The first preserved index in the world, the Chinese book of changes, or I Ching, was also the first classification system. The I Ching was a systematic analysis of human society for the purpose of governing in times of war and peace.

Modern library classification systems arose when human knowledge expanded beyond the point where a few scrolls, clay tablets, or books sufficed to encompass all of human knowledge.

In the United States, for example, Harvard University was the first library in what became the United States. Harvard’s initial collection of 400 books arrived on our shores in 1638. Today Harvard has the fourth largest library in the world; Harvard’s libraries now house 15.6 million volumes.

Why get a catalog record for my book?

If you want to sell your book to libraries, getting a catalog record is vital! The key question is not why get a catalog record, but how to get a catalog record. That’s because there are four different ways to get a catalog record for your book.

I examine these  four ways in Chapter five of my new book, Marketing Your Book to Libraries: An Insider’s Guide for Librarians. Depending on how you publish your book and market it, you may decide to choose one method over another to get a catalog record for your book.

Just be aware that cataloging, processing, shelving, circulating, and re-shelving and occasionally repairing a book, costs libraries far more than the book itself! And be aware that a librarian or staff member supervised by a qualified librarian is the only one who can create a catalog record that will be accepted by other librarians for use in their libraries.

What does a catalog record do?

A reason that cataloging of books is so important to librarians is because the classification of books is what enables librarians, library staff, and patrons to actually identify what book titles are in the library. Classification is also what empowers librarians, library staff, and patrons to quickly find where those books are in the library when they want to use the book, show the book to others, and/or borrow it.

(Note: I once worked in an big city library where we had no access to a library catalog that we could use for finding any of the thousands of books in our reference area! We had to rely on our own knowledge of library classification instead.)

As  with an index, classification empowers readers in a library to “browse” among many discussions on the same topic. Classification will let a reader browse virtual shelves in a library as well as actual ones.

For example, here is the Library of Congress’ online catalog. You can input  a call number for a book into one of the “Call Number Browse” boxes, hit the search button, and see all of the other books “shelved” alongside that book. The Library of Congress began with 3,000 books, and it now houses 33 million volumes. That’s the the largest library collection in the world!

Most libraries in the US are responsible for too large a domain of human knowledge to use either the alphabetical order that indexers use for subjects in book indexes or the keyword order that bookstores use for arranging books on their shelves.

This means that if you want your book to “fit in” to the complex classification systems that libraries use for finding and shelving books, you need a library catalog record for your book!

Can’t I sell my book to libraries without a catalog record?

Yes, indeed, you can! There are small libraries that do not use either of the two traditional library classification systems most American libraries use. They will take and house a book without a catalog record. And there are special collections within all kinds of libraries in this country that will buy and keep non-cataloged books too.

The problem is that these non-cataloged materials will be housed separately from the cataloged ones. They may be put in boxes kept on an out-of-the-way shelf or room. Or they may be put in file cabinets. And the only person who knows they are there is the librarian or library staff member who curates those books.

A recent survey of public library patrons showed that 50% of regular patrons will buy other books by an author that they discover at the library. In addition, word of mouth is the best way to publicize your book.

This is why you need a catalog record! If you want many libraries to acquire your book and make it possible for a lot of library patrons to read it and spread the word about it, get your book cataloged!

Now up on Authormaps.com: “Does Your Book Need PCIP?” [a prepublication catalog record]

NOTE: If you would like to get this blog by email, sign up for Wordmaps Tips, my free newsletter. The sign-up box is at the upper right of each page on my site, WordmapsIndexing.com. For current news about indexing and book publishing, follow me and see who I follow on Twitter @Wordmaps.