Why Every Author Needs to Hire a Graphic Designer

by Daniel Lamparelli

Every author wants to be a best seller.  What most of them don't realize is the two things that separate bestselling authors from the rest of the pack isn't just prose, it's also presentation.  That's because many bestselling authors have the backing of publishing houses that employ an army of editors, designers and publicists who are there to position and promote client books.  This process begins with cover art designed by a professional graphic designer.  

You Can Judge a Book by its Cover

Image courtesy of GoodBooks.Online

Face it, the first contact the public has with a book is its cover. What most people fail to realize is that everything from the color scheme to the graphical content of a book cover is thought out well in advance.  In fact, it is a science that has been honed over hundreds of years.  To you, the color blue might come to represent the sky or the sea, but the psychology of color tells me that it represents trust, honesty and loyalty.  Red is associated with danger, desire and power.  Purple is associated with royalty, luxury and ambition. 

Unfortunately, many authors fail to understand the major impact that hiring a graphic designer can have on book sales. Looking to cut costs, they may  think that using stock images and free online book cover software will get the job done. It's only after the fact that they start wondering why sales of their book are lackluster, failing to connect cause and effect.

What is a Graphic Designer?

A graphic designer is a trained professional who understands the nuances associated with assembling images, typography, and color in order to maximize the aesthetic appeal of a book. A designer can make your brand stand out in a crowded market, make it appear more professional, and open your books to entirely new audiences.  Graphic designers are often mistakenly thought of as artists, which makes business owners and authors alike wonder what an artist could possibly add to their skillset. But the purpose of a graphic designer is completely different to that of an artist. Where a fine artist creates work that is left to the viewer to interpret, a graphic designer’s work should require no explanation at all.  Graphic designers are some of the best communicators in the world, and if people are interpreting their message in a way that is not intended, the graphic designer is not doing the job properly.

What can a Graphic Designer Do for Your Business?

Not every business needs to stand out to succeed. A locksmith in a small community, for example, will gain enough trade from being the sole proponent of a vital service. For businesses with more competition, however, high quality branding is vital.  The publishing industry is one of the most competitive in the world.  Just like Nike and Disney, a brand is how your customers perceive you.
If you're an author, then your books will become your brand.  Unless you only intend on writing one book, you want your readers to be able to identify you from thousands of other authors vying to get their attention.

In business, a brand is made up from common elements such as the way the phone is answered, to  customer service policy, to the company's name.  A professional graphic designer is able to expertly manipulate these elements to ensure that every customer perceives a client in the best possible light. A strong brand is memorable. It builds trust and encourages positive referrals from customers. A weak brand is instantly forgettable.


Everyone knows that FedEx is synonymous with overnight delivery.  But did you ever take a close look at the FedEx logo?  Did you realize there is an arrow embedded between the E and the x.  That logo was the brainchild of Lindon Leader, senior design director in the San Francisco office of Landor Associates. In a quote from a blog entitled, "The Story behind the Famous FedEx Logo, And Why it Works:"

"Back then, the company was still officially Federal Express," he recalls. "The logo was a purple and orange wordmark that simply spelled out the name.  Although there was enormous cachet around the term, a global research study revealed that customers were unaware of Federal Express’ global scope and full-service logistics capabilities.

"People thought they shipped only overnight and only within the U.S.," Lindon explains. "So the goal was to communicate the breadth of its services and to leverage one of its most valuable assets—the FedEx brand." Lindon remembers that FedEx’s CEO, Fred Smith, placed high value on design and had an intuitive marketing sense: "Any designer worth a lick will tell you great clients make for great design. He said okay to a brand name change and authorized a new graphic treatment. He said do whatever we wanted, under two conditions. One was that whatever we did, we had to justify it: ‘You can make them pink and green for all I care; just give me a good reason why,’ he said. The second one was about visibility. ‘My trucks are moving billboards,’ he said. ‘I better be able to see a FedEx truck loud and clear from five blocks away.’ That was it! So off we went."

By we, Lindon was referring to several teams of designers working on the logo.  This resulted in nearly 200 design concepts.  While tweaking the company's color scheme to make their namemark FedEx orange less red and the purple less blue, Lindon started squeezing the spacing between the text until he noticed a white arrow begin to appear between the capital E and the lowercase x.  And the rest is history.  So revolutionary was the design that over the years since its inception, the logo has garnered more than 40 design awards and was ranked as one of the 8 best logos in the last 35 years.

You Only Get One Chance at a First Impression

Image courtesy of Danial Lamparelli

If you’re busy writing books you simply don’t have the time to be your own graphic designer. Like the FedEx logo, good design is not something you stumble upon. It’s a combination of skill and experience that require special training and a lot of practice. It will also take you years of dedication to master the software needed to complete all your graphic design work at a professional level.   By outsourcing the task to a professional, it will free you up to focus on writing your next book, or having the time to promote your current book.

Ensure your Message is Consistent

In business, an inconsistent message makes a company appear unprofessional. If you have several different logos appearing in different sizes across your book and website, all of which use different fonts and layouts, your message is going to come across as confused as will your design. Likewise, an inconsistent cover design is not a good way to inspire trust among your readers.

A graphic designer can create cover art which will help you get the reader's attention and make them want to read more.  He or she will also help you convey your book's theme before the reader even has a chance to check out your blurb.   They can also help you create an author website that wows readers.  Different designers will be  meticulous when it comes to ensuring that all the elements associated with your books are consistent with their content. They’ll also be more than happy to let you know when it’s not.  (That's why consulting with a graphic designer can be one of the most important things you can do when it comes to selling your books.)


You Can Make Book on That

With so much at stake when it comes to promoting your book, it would be foolish not to improve the odds by getting a graphic designer involved in the mix. As communication becomes increasingly visual and graphic design becomes increasingly critical to success online, you need every edge you can find in order to make your book a success.

Daniel Lamparelli is part of the Dream Team who works with GoodBooks.Online 
To see some samples of his covers and arrange a free consultation click on the link.

Let the Journey Begin

By Ashley L. Grapes

Buy this book on Amazon.com

My first novel, “Journey to Ohmani,” is a cri-fi – a murder-mystery science-fiction that takes place in a futuristic space city dubbed ‘Ohmani.’ The people of the future refer to this city as the ‘Las Vegas of Space’ for its vibrancy, diversity and progressiveness. The most interesting aspect about the metropolis, however, may be its location inside of an asteroid.

As a science teacher, it was important to me that my world-building is based on practicality and possibility. So why would a city be inside an asteroid in the first place, and what would it be like to live there? Great questions! There are several things that make life on Earth possible. It is in the Goldilocks zone between extreme temperatures, it has an atmosphere, and is abound with liquid water. These are just a few things I had to take into consideration when making my book’s setting realistic.

Before Ohmani became a habitable place, it was a monstrous and unstoppable bullet on a straight trajectory towards planet Earth. The human race was saved from destruction by the friendly Midaki aliens – subject of another blog, I’m sure. They helped us hollow out the asteroid and move it to Lagrangian Point Five. This location for a potential space colony is not something I came up with on my own. In fact, there was an L5 Society in the 1960’s when the space program was well funded and immensely popular. This Society was essentially a big group of nerds that had picked L5 to be the location of a space station, if one was ever built. Placing an object at L5 is ideal in many ways. For one, it would require no energy to keep the asteroid at L5 because it is a location where all the gravitational pulls from the moon, Earth, and sun cancel out, i.e. reach equilibrium. The location is also ideal because the asteroid would never move out of the habitable strip taking care of the temperature problem.

Before my brain kicked in, I originally had Ohmani sitting on top of the rock, but that is a huge problem for many reasons. One, Earth has this invisible layer called the magnetosphere, thanks to the liquid iron core churning below our feet. This magnetic shell, along with the atmosphere, protects us from daily doses of killer radiation. The ‘spaceflight radiation carcinogenesis’ phenomenon exists because of the sole fact that astronauts leave this protected bubble. As a side note, the aurora lights result from solar flares (radiation bursts) being fed by the magnetosphere to the poles and exciting the atoms in the atmosphere. Talk about beautiful but deadly!

Image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Another reason Ohmani is inside of an asteroid is because building an artificial atmosphere would be much easier in an enclosed space…especially on an asteroid where there isn’t even a foundation of one. In my book, the main character learns a little bit about the creation of Ohmani’s biosphere when he gets into a hairy situation and ends up in a factory running through rows of bubbling algae vats. Our atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, and so it is entirely possible…albeit expensive…to build artificial atmospheres. In fact, there are plenty of companies that do this today for testing specialized equipment. My book takes place decades after the atmosphere was first established, and so these factories are losing money. During the time of the storyline, enough plants have established so that much of the oxygen is naturally produced.

You can’t think about living in space without thinking of floating or bouncing around like the moon. There is a minor gravitational pull on an asteroid, especially on one the size of Ohmani, but it would not be enough to work with functionally on a daily basis. With the help of the alien technologies, Ohmani spins to create centripetal force. Much like a gravitron at a county fair, this spinning creates artificial gravity all the way around the perimeter. Since the equation gravity is well known (ugh, physics), one could simply plug in numbers and change the rate of spin to get that nice sweet spot of 9.8 meters per second squared we feel here at home.

This idea of spinning the asteroid led to the city being “double deckered.” If you were standing on Ohmani right now, inside the asteroid’s belly, you could look above you and see the tops of buildings coming down at you. It would be quite a strange sight indeed! People would be bustling around and cars would be driving on roads all seemingly upside down. Transport to the other side and your world would be suddenly flipped, like you were right side up and the place you just left was now upside down. This was a really cool element to the book because I had to come up with ways the city inhabitants could go from the “ceiling” to the “floor” rather easily. That was made even more interesting when you consider the fact that the centripetal force caused by the spinning would not be felt in the dead center the asteroid…so you would float there. This would not be good if you barfed, as one of my characters unfortunately found out!

It was a blast world-building not only the physical environment of the city, but the socio-economic fabric that any realistic metropolis would have. Every city on Earth has every type of person and every type of neighborhood. In Ohmani, the higher-class people live in high rise apartments where gravity is lower and the view is spectacular, but its lower income citizens and rough areas were located in what I called, “the Underground.” New York City and D.C have underground metro stations, but Ohmani has a whole underground portion that is described as a dark, cramped, and stuffy warren-like series of labyrinthine corridors. It houses all types of business from dance clubs to political lounges, and it made for a great setting for bad things to happen.

I hope you are able and excited to pick up the first book, ‘Journey to Ohmani.’ I also hope I can offer you an escape, many moments of awe, lively thought, a few laughs and gasps, and a new favorite book series. Thank you for taking the time to read my little blog about the world I have come to love and please stick with me on my own journey of writing stories worth sharing.

Ashley L. Grapes is a sci-fi author and science teacher.  If you want to read more about Journey to Ohmani, click on the link. Feel free to Tweet this blog and video to your friends and followers

            

How to Convert Your Book from Word into an eBook on Kindle

Image courtesy of Danny Murphy

By Danny Murphy

When it comes to publishing books that sell, it's sometimes the little things that matter most. Formatting is one of those small things that make a big difference in how authors come across to readers - especially self-published authors. Formatting can show readers that you’re orderly and detail-oriented, or it can show that you’re sloppy and don’t care much about your presentation. Formatting is as important in eBooks as it is in any other kind of literature.

I currently have nine eBooks available on Kindle at Amazon, including Humor 101: How to Tell Jokes for Power, Prestige, Profit, and Personal Fulfillment. Converting Word files to Kindle books was quite frustrating at first. I’ve learned many things along the way.

If you’ve never converted Word files to books on Kindle and you’re considering it, the following tips might save you some time and help you to get your eBooks looking pretty good.

1. Write the book. When it’s finished, put all your chapters together in a single Word document.
2. Have your book professionally edited.  The last thing you want to do is go to press with a lot of typos and grammatical errors.  While auto-editing is good, it’s far from perfect.  Hiring a pro to proofread your book could set you back a few dollars, but it will make your book much more marketable. (For more information on having your book proofread, go to http://goodbooks.online/proofread.html )
3. Once you have clean copy, then it’s time to start formatting your book.  Format the font. I select everything and then format the font at 12 points Arial.
4. Format the paragraphs. I set the line spacing at 1.5 and put 6 points of space before each paragraph.
5. Insert a page break at the end of each chapter.
6. Chapter Titles. Chapter numbers are generally irrelevant to readers of eBooks. Along with the chapter numbers, I put a short chapter title. A table of contents can be created from the chapter titles and browsers of books at Amazon will be able to see that table of contents. Also, after a reader has the book, chapter titles may help him or her to get to the desired point in the book more easily.For fiction, I use short chapter titles that won’t give much of the plot away. This is what I did with The Narcissus Code. For non-fiction, humorous and clever chapter titles can show readers what the book covers before they buy. One would hope that would help to sell the book.  I did that with Humor 101: How To Tell Jokes.
7. Heading styles will enable you to easily create a Table of Contents (TOC) with links to the beginnings of the chapters. Chapter Titles should be formatted for Heading 1. If you want, you can format headings for chapter sections as Heading 2. You can even go to a third level and beyond if you think that will be helpful to your readers.
8. Create your TOC. Click on References and go to TOC to the left near the top. Page numbers are irrelevant in eBooks so set the TOC to work with links. 
   You can set your TOC to show however many levels you want there. For example, your book may have Chapter Titles and three levels of subheadings. However, those don’t all have to be included in your TOC. You can set your TOC to include Chapter Titles and the first level of subheadings. It’s up to you. Figure out what will work best for your readers and proceed accordingly.
   At the top of the TOC, insert a bookmark called TOC. When readers use the “Go to” drop down menu, TOC is one of the selection options. If the bookmark has been placed properly, clicking on that link will take them to your TOC. Otherwise, there’s no telling where readers will end up.
9. Save the document as a Word doc. Then save it again as a “web page, filtered.” That is html format, which is what you will need to upload it to Amazon.
10. Upload the book.
11. Create a cover. Amazon has templates for this and decent photos and backgrounds to go with them. However, if you are expecting to sell copies to more people than just your friends and family, outsourcing the cover art is well worth it. Covers for eBooks have to make a visual impact as thumbnails, since that’s what people will see on Amazon. (To see some sample covers by GBO’s in-house designer, Dan Lamparelli, go to  http://goodbooks.online/coverart.html.)
12. Categories. You can list your books in two categories and I think it’s a good idea to put some thought into this. You want your title to be in categories where Amazon browsers in search of books like yours might stumble upon them. Ideally, you want to have your book listed as one of ten or so in a category that millions of viewers per day look at. Unfortunately, there are no categories like that. I think there’s a benefit to being in categories with relatively few titles. With less competition, there’s more of a chance of getting near the top. Humor 101 was in the top ten for public speaking for a long time and that helped sales.
13. Keywords. You can select up to seven keywords. Of course, you want to pick keywords carefully so that they will lead people searching for those keywords to your title.
14. Digital Rights Management (DRM). Before you publish, you can select the DRM option. According to Amazon: “DRM (Digital Rights Management) is intended to inhibit unauthorized distribution of the Kindle file of your book. Some authors want to encourage readers to share their work, and choose not to have DRM applied to their book. If you choose DRM, customers will still be able to lend the book to another user for a short period, and can also purchase the book as a gift for another user from the Kindle store. Important: Once you publish your book, you cannot change its DRM setting.”

    I have been plagiarized, and I think anything that makes it more difficult to plagiarize is a good thing. I don’t see any downside due to DRM.
    

15. Preview the book. Make sure everything works. Check the “Go to” links and the chapter links. Make sure the page breaks you’ve inserted at the end of your chapters haven’t resulted in any blank pages.
16. If you don’t like the way something looks, fix it in Word, save it as a Word doc, and then save it again as a “webpage, filtered.” Of course, you could make changes in the webpage version. However, to make sure that my original Word doc is synched with the html version, I do everything in Word and then save it both ways. Upload the book and preview it again. If you’re satisfied with everything, publish the eBook.
17. Buy the book and load it on your own device. It will probably look a bit different than it did in preview. Check everything just like you did in the preview. Make fixes as necessary and go through the last few steps again.
18. Start planning the shindig you’re going to have when you collect your royalties. You’re on your way.

If you want to consider outsourcing the proofreading, formatting and publishing process, go to http://goodbooks.online/proofread.html.

This blogpost is part of the GoodBooks.Online series entitled, "Bestseller or Bust."  

Danny Murphy is head writer, blogger and proofreader at GoodBooks.Online. He also has his own blog at www.dannymurphyauthor.com

Read Any Good Books Lately?

by Carl Weiss

We've all started off a conversation at one time or another with, "Have you read any good books lately?"  It may have been at a cocktail party or a mixer, but it always elicits an answer that's far more interesting then you would have gotten had you chosen to ask about the weather.  That's because asking someone about their reading habits is something personal.  Their response will tell you a lot about who they are and how they think.  It will also clue you into their innermost thoughts, yet it usually won't put you in conflict, as you might find were you to ask about their political or religious beliefs.

That being said, the world is full of good books. While there are only two types of books - fiction and non-fiction - there are dozens of categories, including art, biographies, cookbooks, drama, fantasy, guidebooks, horror, journals, poetry, self-help and travel, just to name a few.  Last year alone there were 304,912 books published in the US alone. (That puts us at #2 behind China with more than 440,000 books published.)


How Much is Too Much?

Talk about too much of a good thing.  It's no wonder that so many fledgling authors have trouble finding their way to publishing success.  Face it, when it comes to choosing a subject, not to mention an author, what do most people do?  They rely on the BIG publishing houses (on and offline) or the NY Times to pick and choose the books they read.  Or, they read reviews and blogs published for the most part by minions of the self same multinational companies.  Talk about the fox owning the henhouse.

What this does is create a funnel effect where only the chosen few hundred books get media attention at any one time.  Does this mean that these books are necessarily the best books on the subject? Not hardly.  Does it mean that high profile authors have a lock on the market?  Yes and no.  Yes, in that bestselling authors through their publishers and publicists have made it to the big game, where the lights are bright and the accolades run deep.  It's a good job if you can get it, right?  However, for every author who hits the big time by finding an agent and a publisher, there are hundreds of thousands who wind up wallpapering their homes with rejection letters.

Until the launch of the e-publishing industry, many authors who could not find a home with a
publishing house decided to be their own publisher by going the vanity press route.  This meant shelling out several thousand dollars or more to have their books printed in limited quantities.  (You'd be surprised at the amount of space 500 paperbacks take up.)  Not to mention the fact that once printed, these authors turned entrepreneurs would then be forced to be their own publicist.  Very quickly they found out there is a big difference between printing 500 books and selling 500 books.  The printing part is relatively easy.  But having to write press releases, not to mention calling bookstores in the hopes that someone will carry your title is a daunting task.

Even if you do succeed at getting your books on the shelves, next thing you know you're making like the Road Warrior as you drive from town to town to do book signings.  And all this on top of your regular 9-5 job.  it sounds like a recipe for a nervous breakdown, if you ask me.

E-Book Millionaires

With the advent of the Internet, e-publishers such as Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com became game changers in that anyone can get online shelf space for their print and/or  e-books.  Instead of packing up the family sedan, many online publishers beat the path to success by posting blogs, press releases, videos and social posts galore all from their comfort of their own home.  While it saves on windshield time, the process of online promotion still takes time.  More importantly, it takes a plan that not only includes the time it takes to write blogs, press releases and social posts, but it takes money to distribute all the above.  Without distribution all you really have is a billboard in the desert.

For those who create and execute their plan successfully, there's gold in them thar hills.  During the past few years there have been a number of unknown authors who have made 6-figures per year self-publishing online.  There have even been several that have made more than $1 million per year.

John Locke - New York Times best-selling author John Locke is the international best-selling author of 28 books in six different genres. He is the 8th author in history (and the 1st self-published author) to have sold one million eBooks on Kindle, which he achieved in only five months. Locke has had four books in the top ten at the same time, including #1 and #2. Foreign rights to his books have been acquired by major publishing companies all over the world. Translations include: Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, and Lithuanian. Literally every e-book he has published has gone into become a bestseller.  In 2011, four of the top 10 Kindle bestsellers were novels written by John Locke.

Amanda Hocking - Amanda Hocking is a lifelong Minnesotan obsessed with Batman and Jim Henson. In between watching cooking shows, taking care of her small menagerie of pets, and drinking too much Red Bull Zero, she writes young adult urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Her New York Times best-selling series the Trylle Trilogy has been optioned for films. She has published over fifteen young adult novels, including the Hollows and the Watersong series. Her latest trilogy - the Kanin Chronicles - is complete, with all three books - Frostfire, Ice Kissed, and Crystal Kingdom - out now. 

JA Konrath - JA Konrath is the author of ten novels in the Jack Daniels thriller series. They do not have to be read in chronologically to be enjoyed, but the order is: Whiskey Sour, Bloody Mary, Rusty Nail, Dirty Martini, Fuzzy Navel, Cherry Bomb, Shaken, Stirred, Rum Runner, and Last Call.

Jack also appears in the novels Shot of Tequila, Flee, Spree, Three, Timecaster Supersymmetry, Banana Hammock, and Serial Killers Uncut, as well as the short story collection Jack Daniels Stories, and the novellas Floaters and Burners.

Other novels include the thrillers Origin, The List, Shot of Tequila, Disturb, and Timecaster.

Konrath writes horror under the name Jack Kilborn, including the bestsellers Afraid, Trapped, Endurance, Haunted House, and WebCam. 


Forget WWW - Focus on PPPPP

While viewed as overnight sensations, these authors all had one thing in common: a marketing plan.  When it comes to working the web, you need to forget about the three W's and focus on the five P's instead:  Poor Planning Prevents Peak Performance.  By that I mean that you need to stop treating your book like a hobby and start treating it like a business.  If you are an aspiring author, I'm sure you spend a great deal of time reading books that show you how to write and edit books.  You probably also read magazines and blogs that help you hone your writing craft.  But how many books have you read on such things as online marketing, publicity, and blogging?

Image courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org

How many of you have put together a business or marketing plan for your book?  Have you decided on a yearly budget for your book launch?  Do you have a website or blog set up and populated?  Do you know what you are going to do in the pre-launch and launch phases of your campaign?  Have you made contact with other bloggers so you can generate an audience?  Do you have tens of thousands of social followers to whom you can post your book release?  While it may have taken you months or years to write your book, it is going to take you even longer to establish a beachhead and fight for readers.

Make no mistake about it, the business of publishing is war.   As Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, "Every battle is won or lost before it is fought."  Before you rush off to publish your book, you had better have a battle plan that can stay the course for the next 12-months.  Because you don't want to win the battle only to lose the war.

Remember, your adversary (BIG publishers) literally have an army of editors, designers, publicists and writers at their disposal.  You are an army of one.  Going in you need to realize that you are going to have to  use guerilla tactics if you are going to have any chance of winning the war.  It also means that you need to marshal your troops.  This means two things: allies and outsourcing.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

Whether it takes going to writer's conferences, joining local writer groups or connecting with bloggers online who can help you generate exposure, a certain amount of grassroots campaigning is a must if you hope to prevail.  It also wouldn't hurt to pick up the phone and call select members of the local press to see if they would be interested in interviewing you.  (Having written 5 books myself, I have been interviewed in print and broadcast more than 100 times.  Not bad for a few phone calls.)

The other and even more vital task you need to decide on before hitting the beach is to choose which tasks you wish to carry out yourself and which you can delegate.  Stretching your forces too thin is a recipe for disaster.  There are numerous companies across the country that can do everything from handle your press releases, to growing your social following, to distributing your blogs.  Click on the link to see a list of resources.  Depending upon your budget, these providers can help level the playing field in the battle against the bigs.  They can also help you generate, engage and sell to an ever growing audience of followers.

This way, the next time someone ask you if you have read any good books lately, you can look them in the eye and say, "I not only read good books, I write them."  Now tell me that isn't a great ice breaker?

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win and publisher of GoodBooks.Online.  He has also written hundreds of magazine articles and blogs, plus 5 books.