July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Reading is generally a quiet activity, but today Bookshout! is proclaiming that it has raised $6 million.

Bookshout offers multiple tools to support reader engagement.

On the consumer side, Bookshout has a social reading app where people can find books and connect with their friends and authors. However, the company has shifted to a stronger focus on publishers and authors.

On Bookshout’s platform suite, publishers and authors can promote their content and deepen engagement with audiences. Authors create branded pages that highlight their work and form communities around the pages, known as “circles.” Whenever someone buys a book through Bookshout, it adds them to the author’s circle. Authors can communicate directly with their fans regarding announcements, upcoming events, or new releases and distribute branded promotional codes and gift cards for their books.

Bookshout recently added a channel for publishers to conduct digital bulk, custom, and corporate sales and gather analytics. The Dallas-based company said it works with more than 250 publishers and is currently generating revenue. This round, which was led by Texas venture capital firm Ambassador Enterprises, will build out the bulk sales and analytics for e-books tools.

This is Bookshout’s second round of funding, and significant for the North Texas investment community which the Dallas Morning News called “lackluster.” The company previously raised $2 million from Ambassador in 2011. It is based at the Plano incubator Gravity Centre and has 12 employees.

Photo Credit: Puuikibeach/Flickr 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Guy Kawasaki is perhaps the consummate entrepreneur.

He’s built and sold three companies, invested in dozens more as a venture capitalist, still runs a few startups fairly actively, and worked for Apple in the early breakout years of its 1984-style fight against Big Brother (aka IBM). But he’s also a prolific writer, with books like The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries that have been must-reads for founders and intrapreneurs for years.

Put the two together, and you’ve got someone who budding authors should listen to about what it means to write  books in 2013. Especially if you actually want to sell any.

Kawasaki put all that entrepreneurial and authorial perspective into his latest book, Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish Your Book. APE came out recently on Kindle and is launching in dead tree format tomorrow. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, and spent some time chatting yesterday with Kawasaki about the changes he’s seeing in writing and publishing.

Short version? We ain’t in Kansas anymore.

VentureBeat: What’s your main reading modality today?

Kawasaki: I use a Nexus 7, with the actual books in Kindle Reader. For me the 7″ format is the largest format that when I fall asleep and it hits my face, it doesn’t hurt. Full-size tablets … not so much.

VentureBeat: Talk to me about the timing of the book … author, publisher, entrepreneur. There’s something going on here that’s new.

Kawasaki: I had a very bad experience … I recently self-published a book called What the Plus. I had this idea that self-publishing was easy — bring your Word file to Kindle and you’re done – but, especially if you’re writing nonfiction and have tables, bullets, lists, images … it’s extremely non-trivial.

So I thought that if I, with with my background in technology, was having a hard time, others would too. And I wanted to help.

VentureBeat: Of course, it’s not just the technical bits … you’ve got three parts there — author, publisher, and entrepreneur. Is the entrepreneur piece the toughest for most authors?

Kawasaki: For a novelist the publishing is not hard. For nonfiction it is, but even then you can find someone who can do it.

But the marketing part … I guess you could hire someone, but it takes nine to twelve months of concerted effort to build a platform. Which means having lots of followers, and fans, and subscribers … and that has to be started the moment the you begin.

VentureBeat: And on the publishing part …

Kawasaki: I really want authors to understand that traditional publishers used to provide two to three main sources of benefit:

First, they were a filter of what was good. Someone smart and talented picked what was good from what was crap, so the best stuff came to market. (I no longer believe that’s true, by the way. Now people go to Amazon, see 4 stars, click, and the book is bought.)

Second, they were very good at getting dead trees to retailers. The only problem is, there are far fewer retailers now.

So for an author today, you have to question whether it’s worthwhile to go through this rigamarole of finding a publisher — which takes maybe six months — and then be forced to wait another 12 months while your book winds its slow way through the massive publishing machine.

Now, maybe plan A is to find a traditional publisher, get a big advance, and and editor, and write the book. Almost no-one can do that. Plan B is to write it, upload it to Amazon, and make $2 out of every $3 the book takes in.

Plan C — which is a great plan, by the way — is to do plan B, and then, when your book is successful and being downloaded, go to plan A.

VentureBeat: You’ve done all three. What are you seeing with sales of your own books … digital vs paper?

Kawasaki: I’ve written 12 books now, and the best data I have is with Enchantment, where the ratio of print to ebooks is two to one.

There is a myth that more ebooks are sold than paper books, but generally speaking the total U.S. market for books is about $25B, and roughly 10 percent is ebooks. The place where ebooks really dominate is adult fiction.

I think that it will be 90 percent ebooks someday … but that’s not true today.

Venturebeat: Amazon is so dominant in digital publishing. Should you just focus on Amazon?

Kawasaki: For a novice author, the answer is probably yes: Amazon is roughly 80 percent of the action. The Nook, Apple’s iBooks store, and Kobo is the rest.

Plus, you do get some significant benefits if you go exclusive with Amazon, like the Kindle Direct Publishing program. It’s much simpler … if you’re successful, then go to the other platforms.

VentureBeat: About print … it seems sometimes that the book is the artifact, the souvenir, while authors are making much more revenue around it in terms of speaking, consulting … is that a good reason to write a book?

Kawasaki: I say it’s bad reason because it’s unlikely that most authors will make significant money.

I also believe that it’s bad karma. A book is an end in itself … if you think of a book as a means to an end, I just think that’s bad karma. For example, in a marketing sense, if you pretend you are on Amazon, and you’re seeing books by famous authors and you see your book — the Shmoe Way by Joe Shmoe from Schmoe Publishing — you have to ask why should anyone give a shiitake about my book?

No-one wakes up in the morning and says I’m going to give Joe more money, more business, more speaking opportunities. They don’t buy it to help you.

So the only way the book is successful if it’s helpful.

VentureBeat: One of the problems authors face when they publish themselves is pricing … how much is my baby, the book I’ve been working on for so many months, worth?

Kawasaki: Well, first you have to understand that pricing is witchcraft, not science. But there are some guidelines.

If you’re a novice novelist, go $0.99. After you’ve built some track record, you can bump it to $2.99.

For a non-fiction book, the sweet spot is $9.99. A hardcover would be $26, and you have to be lower to make people feel they’re getting a good deal when buying digital. But anything less, and people start thinking: how could it be worthwhile?

But there are some exceptions — if you’re an iOS developer and you write a book that’s going to help someone build the next Instagram … that book can cost $99.

(Laughing)

Try that the traditional route: go to a New York publisher and tell them you have a $50 iOS book … and then it takes 12 months to get it out, and it’s out of date before it’s ever published. Not going to work.

VentureBeat: Is today the best time ever to be an author?

Kawasaki: I don’t know if it’s the best ever in financial sense … but I would make the case that it’s the best ever in terms of independence. Today, publishing is pretty democratized.

photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Matthew Mather started his career at the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines. He founded one of the first tactile feedback companies — Haptic Technologies Inc, which he eventually sold for $10 million – and won a $2 million “best new video game” prize in 2007, and has worked on nanotech, genomics, and cybersecurity.

He’s also the author of a chart-topping Amazon book that sold 40,000 copies in its first eight weeks of publication — and shot to the top spot in Amazon’s science fiction charts — by following a very strategic publishing and publicity model, which he shared with me when we chatted a few weeks ago.

This is a hot topic right now. Well-known entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki just published APE (Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur), which gives step-by-step instructions on how to self-publish. And an astonishing 27 of the top 100 books on Kindle are self-published.

Here’s how Mather did it.

“I have a background as an entrepreneur and as I was writing the Kindle came out and I wanted to try it,” Mather said. “Traditional publishers have the connections into the bookshops, and pay for printing … but now creators can access the market directly.”

Mather had started writing his novel in 2010, and by 2012 had 150,000 words and 600 pages of The Atopia Chronicles. But he didn’t just throw the novel into the massive Amazon ocean of titles and hope for the best. Using his background in startups and his savvy as an entrepreneur, he created an 11-step program to market and launch the book.

“If you go the self-publishing route, it’s definitely the year to get started,” he told me. “But you need to start with good reviews and get early sales … if you start to become popular, you get into the recommendation system, and the system feeds itself.”

So Mather created the Shakespeare system, an 11-step process to get to number one. Briefly, it outlines the key tips to getting attention, getting reviews, and getting sales:

1. Serialize
   Attention spans are short and readers don’t necessarily trust a new author. Consider breaking your novel into smaller, bit-sized chunks
2. Hook
   The first part of your story needs to be punchy and leave the reader wanting more.
3. Amazon only
   Focus only on Amazon first, because it’s the biggest and sells the most. By focusing, you can promote better, and you can move up rankings quicker. After some success you can consider other platforms.
4. Key networks
   Promote the book in your personal networks. Ask people to re-post your free book offers. Email people. Share it on LinkedIn. Email top-selling authors, and ask them to review your book or even share it with their audiences.
5. Empathy
   You must create a character that people can connect with
6. Select Program on Amazon
   Choose the Amazon Select Program because you can offer your book for free for 5 days in every three months. Then promote it on the free books websites.
7. Perceived value
   Create perceived value by offering a deal … for instance by pricing six serialized parts at $0.99 each, and the entire book at $2.99
8. Editing
   You will get killed in reviews if your book is not well edited. Go on Craigslist, find some unemployed English major, and pay a few bucks to get it edited. Use a real editor if you have the cash, but it’ll be expensive.
9. All free posting sites
   Get feedback on your book from 20 or so people by paying the $10-20 for reading your book. Bonus: they’ll probably become your biggest promoters and will be happy to write reviews for you later. And use the free press release sites when you release your book.
10. Reviews
    It’s critical to get reviews as these have a direct impact on Amazon ranking and recommendations. Don’t do fake reviews — you’ll get caught. Do ask friends and relatives and contacts to review the book.
11. Engage
    Engage with readers via a video blog, or any blog (here’s Mather’s). Show progress on future books. Get them engaged somehow.

By using this system — and by working a 14-hour day when his book was released — Mather ensured that his book launch didn’t disappear into the vast Amazon machine without a ripple. (If you’re wondering why it’s called the Shakespeare system, check the first letters of each step.)

“You need to prepare beforehand and do it all at once, at launch day,” he told me. “I started at three AM, sent out three to four press releases, ran through the whole marketing program in 14 hours, and by the next day I was number one in science fiction.”

One thing that is critical, Mather says, is pricing.

“I talked to a lot of science fiction readers, and it’s sort of like the music industry,” he told me. “A book from a big publisher is $10-15  … so people will pirate them. But if you price it at $2-3, they won’t. And, since you’re getting 70% of the purchase price from Amazon versus maybe 20% from a regular publishing deal … you’re better off in the end.”

The results are pretty obvious: a book that went to first in Amazon’s science fiction list in a day is still on three different top-ten lists and is currently ranked 1,813 on the overall Amazon’s best-sellers list. Not bad for a first-time author.

Of course, it’s not all about the system. One thing that Mather did add when we chatted: it helps if the book is good.

Smart, technical, superrich, twice-successful entrepreneur, powerful, beautiful (fine, call me sexist in the comments), a successful public speaker, a smart dresser: Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is now, apparently, also an author.

Sandberg has written a book called Lean In, as Kara Swisher reported today, to encourage women to double down on work and career.

She is already one of the most powerful women in technology, having held key roles at Google before joining Facebook to lead monetization efforts. Sandberg currently sits on the board of Facebook — its only female member — and other boards, and she has shown concern in the past over women’s lack of advancement in business.

In a 2010 TED talk, Sandberg talked about three things women need to do to succeed in business:

1. Sit at the table
   (Be present, and don’t accept subordinate roles.)
2. Make your partner a real partner
   (Have or get a husband who helps out at home equally.)
3. Don’t leave until you leave
   (Don’t emotionally prepare for maternity or other job interruptions by mentally leaving before leaving.)

Sandberg has had her own challenges with motherhood and career, as she’s talked about, and the book will presumably deal with some of that in addition to advice for women who want to sit in the corner office.

All of the profits, Sandberg says, will go to women’s charities, and the book will be published in 2013.

And for those who think that she must be busy enough with Facebook’s current monetization and stock value issues, the book was finished before the IPO.

Image credit: Hubert Burda Media/Flickr

Which means that some lucky self-publishers will see their books not just in the digital recesses of various online stores, but front and center at America’s last major bookseller.

VentureBeat spoke to FastPencil’s chief executive Steve Wilson about the deal.

“We’ll publish several thousand books this year,” Wilson told VentureBeat. “And we’ve got three different imprints under which we publish.”

Big-name FastPencil authors, such as US Senator Barry Loudermilk or The War of Art author Steven Pressfield, are in the top level tier: Premiere. With the new deal, Premiere level authors automatically get access to Barnes & Noble’s physical locations. And their books won’t just be in the store — they’ll be featured in the “octagon,” the high-profile front table visible as you enter the store.

In addition, FastPencil’s top authors get premium placement on the web and in the Nook store.

The lower two tiers of FastPencil’s authors, in the company’s Wavecrest imprint and self-publishing level, will have the opportunity to be presented to Barnes & Noble to be considered for inclusion in the program. Good sales and a great book, of course, are the best ways to get noticed.

“That’s an opportunity most self-published authors don’t get,” said Wilson. “Barnes & Noble is the only major retailer left in physical book sales.”

Wilson says that FastPencil, which he launched in 2009, currently has about 50,000 authors.

“95 percent of our sales come from the three big players: Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble,” Wilson told me.

About 40-50 percent of those sales are via Kindle, with 30-35 percent on Nook, and the remainder on Apple iBooks.

FastPencil also has a smaller marketing agreement with Amazon.

Image credit: Vesna Cvorovic/ShutterStock