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A consistent problem with promotional book readings and signings is that they're often barely attended. Now Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) senior news editor Calvin Reid (@calreid) reports, “Science author Andrew Kessler is launching a new online venture called Togather.com (@TogatherInc), a ‘fansourcing’ platform that allows authors or their fans to propose an author event and get commitments from fans planning to attend well before the event is held.”

Much like a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter, Togather.com allows an author to know in advance whether there’s enough interest and support to hold an event at all.

Togather.com is free for authors. Writers establish an account that will allow them to plan events on a custom author event page that can be circulated through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. “The event page allows authors to set up a tour, schedule events, tweak the details, and solicit support for the event before the author arrives,” Kessler said.

In a phone interview with PW, Kessler outlined how Togather works. Using the Togather account, an author can decide what kind of support he or she will require to actually hold the event — sell, say, 20 books, or get RSVPs from 60 people if it’s a school or free event, or sell tickets. Since one of the criteria for an event can be book sales, Togather is also organized to sell books. Fans can go to the page and propose additional events, and the author can review the proposal, accept it or ask for changes, or tweak the level of commitments.

The site lets authors notify their fans how many people it will take to reach a certain level of book sales (Kessler consulted with booksellers on this)....For book buys or other financial transactions, the site will take credit card numbers but not process the sale until the desired commitment level is achieved — if there’s not enough interest, the event is canceled and no one is charged....Kessler said, “[Togather] turns fans into your publicists.”

Read this in full.

Also see coverage by PaidContent, GalleyCat, and TNW.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you stay current with publishing and marketing opportunities for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Here’s a fun way to display the creative variety of typefaces. This Periodic Table of Typefaces by designer Cam Wilde shows the 100 most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces used throughout time. See it enlarged. A print copy is available.

Below is another version of it, promoting Just My Type, the book about “that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about.”

Also see our previous blogposts:

·         “Font Pain and Poetry: So Much Depends on a Curve”

·         “1912 Typeface Specimen Book Now Online”

·         “The Periodic Table of Storytelling”

·         “The Periodic Table of the Books of the Bible”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content with excellence.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard to see all things book-related; especially the Editing tab.

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The public radio program about language, A Way with Words (@wayword), asks, “Why are some book titles so incredibly long?”

A caller complains about book-title inflation, usually consisting of a shorter title followed by a colon and a longer subtitle that seems to sound important and ends with the words “and What To Do About It.” Cohost Grant Barrett (@grantbarrett) explains that such extra-long book titles have long been a form of search optimization by publishers and marketing departments. The more searchable keywords in the title, the more copies sold.

Listen above. Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you select the most effective title, and other marketing necessities, for your book.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Google’s Nexus 7 is the latest tablet on the tech scene, along with Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Microsoft’s Surface.

See a comparison chart above and another one by The Verge (@verge).

See all tablets compared at The Verge.

A new study by Gartner (@Gartner_inc) says consumers are choosing to use tablets now for some activities they previously used to use PCs for.

According to the findings, the “main activities moving from PCs to media tablets” included checking email, a shift observable among 81% of contributors, and reading the news, on 69%.

Over 50% prefer reading newspapers, magazines, and books on screens rather than on paper.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you use current technology to publish and market your brand’s content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

(Cartoon copyright © Dave Coverly. Used by permission. www.SpeedBump.com)

One of our core values is to have fun. ☺ Contact us (@smrsault) to help you with your publishing and marketing needs.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (@Bookgal), offers 50 ideas for inexpensive book promotion, such as

·         Buy your domain name as soon as you have a title for your book.

·         Head on over to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and start your very own blog.

·         Set up an event at your neighborhood bookstore. Do an event and not a signing, book signings are boring!

·         Create an email signature for every email you send; email signatures are a great way to promote your book and message.

·         Start a Twitter account and begin tweeting.

Read this in full.

Also see “Promote Your Book on a Budget: 20 Thrifty Ways to Get Your Writing Out There” and “Promoting your book on a budget: A response to BookBaby” by Suw Charman-Anderson (@Suw).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute your marketing strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Forbes (@Forbes) contributor Suw Charman-Anderson (@Suw) asks, “If you’re starting out and you’ve just written your first book, you really do have to ask yourself the hard question: Is this book actually any good?”

If there’s a common flaw in self-publishing, it’s that too many books are published too soon. Experienced voices across the publishing world continually advise self-publishers to get help with editing, and not just copyediting but story editing too. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to properly edit your own work. But the siren call of the Kindle store is often too seductive. The urge to finish your first draft, chuck it through a spellchecker and release it in to the wild is often far too strong for eager writers to resist.

But resist you must. Not resisting results in your name being married, permanently, to sub-standard work which doesn’t show off your talents to their best. Do you really want, in five or ten years time, to look back on your early work and cringe? More to the point, do you really want your first act of publishing to result in the irreversible blotting of your copybook with your potential fans?

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you professionally craft, edit, publish, and market your content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Editing tab.

In 2 articles, CNET’s (@CNET) executive editor David Carnoy (@DavidCarnoy) offers step-by-step tips on how to self-publish print books as well as ebooks.

Self-publishing a print book is easy. Self-publishing an ebook is even easier.

You choose a size for your book, format your Word manuscript to fit that size, turn your Word doc into a PDF, create some cover art in Photoshop, turn that into a PDF, and upload it all to the self-publisher of your choice and get a book proof back within a couple of weeks (or sooner) if you succeeded in formatting everything correctly. You can then make changes and swap in new PDFs.

After you officially publish your book, you can make changes to your cover and interior text by submitting new PDFs, though your book will go offline (“out of stock”) for a week or two. Companies may charge a fee (around $25-$50) for uploading a new cover or new interior.

Read this in full.

Carnoy’s other article, “How to Self-Publish an Ebook,” suggests basic tips for ebook publishing and lays out best options for publishing quickly and easily.

·         It's gotta be good....

·         Create an arresting cover....

·         Price your ebook cheaply....

·         Avoid any outfits that don't let you set the price....

·         Marketing is all about creating awareness for your ebook....

Read this in full.

Also see MediaShift's (@mediatwit) "A Step-By-Step Guide to US Copyright Registration for Self-Publishers."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content, as either a pbook or ebook.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Publishers tab that includes links to self-publishing services.

Forbes (@Forbes) senior editor Deborah L. Jacobs (@djworking) offers insights she learned in successfully self-publishing her non-fiction book.

Digital technology has made it possible for anyone to publish a book….But turning that book into a successful commercial venture is far more challenging. For more than one year after self-publishing my book, Estate Planning Smarts, promoting it was practically my full-time job.

I didn’t take the decision to self-publish lightly. In fact, I turned down offers from two big publishers because I wasn’t happy with the money they offered. McGraw-Hill’s offer was missing a zero—and I told them so.

...The reason for publishers’ low offers was that statistics show estate planning books don’t sell well. I had a vision for a book that would prove them wrong, but the big companies would never have allocated the resources to produce it.

My business model involved going against the grain by spending money where big publishers are cutting corners: high-quality paper, two-color graphics, printing on a Web press, rather than print-on-demand. And while big publishers were cutting experienced staff, I retained top talent for editing and graphics, on a freelance basis. The goal was to produce a high-quality product that advisers would give to their clients and friends and family would share with each other.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content in this fast-changing digital age.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard;especially the Publishers tab that includes links to self-publishing services.

Somersault’s editorial director Dave Lambert says this New York Times commentary talks about the effects of one author's novels, Sir Walter Scott, on the attitudes that created the Civil War. “Who says books don't affect society?,” he asks.

In the commentary Cynthia Wachtell says

Sir Walter Scott not only dominated gift book lists on the eve of the Civil War but also dominated Southern literary taste throughout the conflict. His highly idealized depiction of the age of chivalry allowed Southern readers and writers to find positive meaning in war’s horrors, hardships, and innumerable deaths. And his works inspired countless wartime imitators, who drew upon his romantic conception of combat.

...[According to Mark Twain], “Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”

Read this in full.

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