Get a Book into Amazon's Bookstore by Publishing Through CreateSpace

Writing, publishing and selling a book with today’s technology can take as little as a month.  In this article we review specific steps you can take to design, write, publish, distribute and promote your book profitably.

1. Identify your target market and determine what they need to know and how they need to learn it.  Note: Putting this step first insures that your book will make money, and if you find it difficult then you will find it even more difficult to sell a conceptually flawed book once it is published.
   1. You will have completed this step when you put a 400-word description and an outline of your book in front of prospective customers and they ask if they can pre-order a copy.
   2. Make sure the title of your book incorporates the keywords your target market searches Google for when they want to find the kind of information you are providing in your book.
   3. If you are already selling your expertise, you will find creating the title, description and outline your target market likes fairly easy.  If you need to become an expert in order to write your book, this step will take longer.
2. Start writing your book.
   1. The big secret to writing a book is to write an outline, write the text, then edit the text. If you try to write without an outline you’ll get lost, leave stuff out and repeat yourself.  If you to write and edit at the same time, you’ll never finish because you’ll be second guessing yourself constantly.  If you have something well structured, completely, and accurately written you will find you can edit it after the fact.  You can also find an editor who can clean up what you’ve written. Never write and edit at the same time, and don’t edit a book chapter by chapter. Write it all, then edit it all.  Its faster and the result is almost always better.
   2. Start with the outline members of your target market have already approved, and write the easy chapters first, write the harder chapters last.
   3. Your objective is to write as quickly, clearly and effectively as possible. Don’t worry about the length of chapters, whether or not you are writing in the passive tense, or that your book seems too informal.
3. Once the book is written, give it to a professional editor and have them edit the text so it reads well You can find editors who work for as little as $200 to edit a well written book. You can spend $2K to have them rewrite a book for you.
   1. Elance.com is a great place to find editors who will work under contract and be paid based on milestones.
   2. Make sure that at each milestone you get a copy of the .Doc file that contains your book.  Alternatively you may write your book in Google Docs and have your editor make their changes there.  Google Docs has a feature that will let you see the edits made on each session on a shared document and that is a great way to track the work being done over time.  You can also roll back to previous versions if you like.
   3. When the book is finished, show a copy to a couple of members of your target market.   See if they have comments or edits you want to incorporate.
   4. Make sure your contract with your editor explicitly transfers all rights in the work he delivers to you as a “work for hire” transaction.
4. After the book is written and well-edited, start creating graphics for each chapter that illustrate the key ideas in each chapter.  Sketch them on paper or create them in Google Doc’s using the presentation or drawing tools.  Your objective for each image is clarity and simplicity.  Two or three simple images are far better than one complex image.
5. Hire a professional graphic artist to turn the pictures into 300 DPI images at 8”x9”. You may want to have them design a front and back cover for your book as well.  Make sure your contract explicitly transfers all rights in the work your designer delivers to you as a “work for hire” transaction.
6. Hire a professional book layout professional layout your book in Adobe InDesign.  You want them to deliver all source files and a finished PDF of the book interior that incorporates all your text and artwork. You want to make sure all the fonts are embedded in the PDF file.  This is critical because you are going to publish this book using CreateSpace.com or LuLu.com and if you want to completely control the fonts used they must be embedded in the document.   Make sure your contract explicitly transfers all rights in the work your book design professional delivers to you as a “work for hire” transaction.
7. Upload a copy of your book to the US Copyright Office.  For details on copyright, and the specific protections it provides you, go to www.copyright.gov or your own national copyright registration organization. Generally speaking, in most countries you own the copyright on your book from the moment you capture it in a tangible media, but you get specific statutory rights by registering it.
8. Go to CreateSpace.com or LuLu.com and create your book for free. Titles you upload onto CreateSpace.com give you a 45% royalty when people purchase them through Amazon.  You can make an even higher percentage on books you order from CreateSpace or LuLu.com and deliver directly. There are many Print on Demand (POD) book publishers. If you don’t like CreateSpace or LuLu for some reason, find another firm you do like through Google.  Note, make sure that whoever you publish your book through lets you retain complete ownership of the book. Don’t sign any agreement that says anything else.
   1. Upload your book interior PDF and your book front and back cover.
   2. Enter the description for your book, set a price for your book, and specify if it will be distributed only in print or available for download as well.
   3. Order a copy of your book.
9. Examine your copy of the book. Allow others to read it and suggest final edits.  Don’t feel compelled to take everyone’s advice, but if you get the same comment from seeral members of your target market you should probably make the fix.
10. Start sending copies of your book to members of your target market.  Ask for quotes. Incorporate their quotes into the content on LuLu and CreateSpace.  You will find that LinkedIn makes it easy to find people who may be interested in reviewing and purchasing your book. If you offer to send someone a free copy to review they will usually accept the offer.
11. Write press releases that incorporate quotes from those you’ve given the book to into press releases.  Write additional press releases for any “bulk sales” you make to schools or organizations Publish the press releases using free press release services.  Ensure the keywords your target market would use to search for this book appear in the title of the press release.  If your book is commented on by a well known Celebrity or purchased by an organization, incorporate their name into the title.  You can find a list of free press release sites on the School for Startups website.
12. Build a Word Press website on a domain name relevant to your book that incorporates the keywords your target market searches Google for.
    1. Make sure the domain name incorporates keywords and phrases relevant to your target market.  Post your press releases, comments and reviews as they become available.
    2. Make sure the categories on your site, and the titles of each article use keywords and phrases of interest to your target market.
    3. Make sure your website has a link that connects your website to where the book can be ordered.
    4. Ensure that it uses tools like Tweet Old Post and other social media plugins to promote your book through sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Linkedin.

That sums up the steps required to write, design, layout, publish, distribute and promote a book.  It really is possible to get a book out the door in 30 days if you have a good background in the topic you are writing about and have content you can pull from white papers you’ve drafted, training materials you’ve written, presentations you’ve given, etc.

Obviously you can hire a “ghost writer” to write a book for publication under your name.  You can also hire someone who will draft your book chapter by chapter as you outline what you want to say. You can, if you are more comfortable speaking, record the text for your book and have it transcribed.  Many people find this the easiest way to write a book.

Given all these solutions, there is no reason that you can’t write and publish a book profitably should you be so inclined.  The process is simple, straight-forward, and it can be very profitable if what you have to say is important and you take the time to ensure it is said very well.

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As readers of this column know, School for Startups (S4S) closed its office doors last summer and we all became remote workers. The idea of not having an office seemed at the time to offer much more upside than down side.

In the time apart we have noticed though that the team needs some ‘together time’ and we are exploring how we can do that on the kind of budget a small business has. Most of the serviced office businesses are not set up to provide 8 desks in one space for one day per week with relative privacy. A one day a week company is not a concept that has caught hold yet… (we’re working on creative solutions and will report back).

Meanwhile of course this week has been notable for me in that first, my daughter and I climbed Mt. Kenya, (see a very short video from the top here ) and subsequently came down the mountain to find that another mountain in Iceland had blown its top, turning my travel plans into ashes.

My daughter headed off to Tanzania and wished me the best of luck in getting back to the UK. Though I found a nice hotel at a fine price to hole up in and though it’s quite peaceful here; S4S suffered quite a bit.

We had to cancel our popular class on raising money (Find, Pitch & Close) which was going to be hosted at UCL and we had a lot of people signed up for the S4Stv broadcast at the end of the day – which is a real shame.

One of the things we’ve been working on is trying to re-create the live experience we enjoy at the event for our remote audience. We were going to roll out our new un-named web service at the S4Stv event. Now it will have to wait for May 10^th in Leicester.

It combines live interaction, text, twitter, automatic tracking of all resources found and used and lots of other stuff that make for a completely different learning experience. We’ll keep you posted. It will be fun to see how it works.

The only reason we’re developing it ourselves (technically that means in partnership) , is that there is nothing on the market except lame corporate tools centred around PowerPoint or highly structured academic tools focussed on universities. We wanted something that was vibrant and pulled people together.

Quite frankly, this week has reinforced my belief that all things remote are going to be very important. The volcano has merely underscored our dependence on transport that is carbon-rich and also very expensive in total cost terms.

Flying out to see someone for a single meeting is fabulously expensive in lost time and effort, but we try not to calculate it because we all know that there is an element of business that needs a face to face moment.

Up until recently I thought the same thing about teaching through S4S. But we are realising that there are ways around it; ways to enhance the local and the remote experience interestingly: the people in the audience have just as enhanced an experience as the people who are far away.

But I am writing this blog from Nairobi and I am struck by how prepared the S4S team was for this event. Not because we actually prepared for it, but because we prepare for it every day. We are all remote workers and one of us works and lives in Los Angeles already.

It hasn’t changed much except for me insofar as I have had to really rely upon my kit and as usual my kit isn’t living up to its billing. Skype in particular is troublesome. Troublesome because of hardware issues with my Windows 7 laptop, troublesome because group calls have lots of drop offs, and troublesome because you just cannot rely on it. When it does work though it’s rather fabulous.

We also need to push ahead and get some sort of collaboration tool in place whether it’s Huddle or ManyMoon or whatever. It would cut down tremendously on the email noise and the project management issues.

I do not know whether the volcano is an once-in-a-lifetime event or a prolonged event; but it should be a wakeup call to business. You must stop relying on offices and 20^th century forms of working together. The only way you can pull people together in an electronic age is to take true advantage of the emerging tools that knit us together on the web.

After all, we are just as isolated sitting in cubicles sending emails down the hall but in that case we drove to work to sit alone: the worst of both worlds.

From Nairobi,
Doug

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2. Do We Really Need An Office?
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I have mixed feelings about employees. Not as people. The employees and associates of School for Startups are exceptional people. Nicola, Triona, Victoria, Poppy, Shashank, Alex, Nancy (even from LA) and our associates Erin and Jack are all great at what they do and are fun to work with.

My feelings are mixed because the only time in your life when you can have everything under your control is when no one else is in the kitchen. As soon as there are two people, there becomes slightly more than two people’s worth of work to do. The effort of synchronizing your two activities is an activity itself that usually is not acknowledged until it’s more than two people.

Yet, it is generally understood in management that a team, if they are working in close proximity, and only if they are in close proximity, can only grow to 5-7 people before informal communication absolutely needs to be superseded by formal management activity. A formal manager as the eighth person means that 7 people produce 7 hours of work whilst 8 people also produce 7 hours of work.

Thus the mere act of growing reduces productivity. In fact, I would assert that active managers frequently add too much management (meetings, conferences, reviews, and metrics) so that the drop off with the addition of mid-level management is frequently greater than 12.5%

All companies go through this issue at some point. And there are some simple rules that will reduce the need for management. The first is the most important: Set a goal. Nothing is more important than for everyone to know what the most important priority in the business is. That should be reinforced with various interpretations of the goal. If the business has a goal, then it should have an annual goal, a monthly goal and a weekly goal. Every person should know what the top five things are that they need to do to ensure the goal is met. Every key activity should have someone watching someone else’s back so that the goal gets met. Everyone should know who is next on the workflow chain downstream from them and thus who is depending upon them to meet their own goals. Most importantly, no one can relinquish responsibility for an activity or task until the next person has successfully taken it on.

The gap between desks is the home of many a stalled project or lost opportunity.

This is made all the more difficult when people are not housed closely together in a single room. There is real merit in everyone being cheek by jowl. A huge amount of informal communication goes on in real-time across a room or during a coffee. The cost of setting up a quick meeting is nominal if you are all together, but the loss of a significant fraction of a day if you are not. Microsoft felt so strongly about this that they resisted having a second campus long after they had tens of thousands of people.

At the same time, we suffer from two indigenous issues in the UK that make putting everyone in the same room quite problematic. First, great people are dispersed in the UK and our transport system virtually guarantees that many of the employees will spend quite considerable portions of their day travelling to and from work. Second, if you impose strict geographic constraints on who you choose to work with you quickly find you are not hiring the best people, which is the worst answer of all.

In that spirit, we closed School for Startup’s offices last summer in Cambridge and London and sent everyone home. We virtually guaranteed that no one would have to travel most of the days of the week and at the same time that we would completely lose all the efficiency of working in close proximity.

I wasn’t sure what would happen and how we would cope. I know now. The loss of proximity is very real and very painful. The gains are real too. When people need to concentrate and get something done the ability to work in complete privacy without interruption is unparalleled. At the same time our efforts to get things done, stay coordinated and stay synchronized has primarily impacted our email inboxes.

Our email, which is the default of communication between us has become a bloated many person round robin system on a host of decisions and updates that would have been yelled across the room or settled in an impromptu five minute meeting if we were working together.

We have been slow to solve this problem. We started by instituting a weekly all hands meeting in London for a couple of hours. That wasn’t enough.

We added Skype group calls to supplement the group meetings. Those work but Skype has some noticeable technical issues with call quality and drop offs that can cause real frustration and its not the same as working together.

So now we are stepping up in two more ways. First, we are instituting work together days where we are not together to have a meeting, we are simply having an “in-office” day. Of course that begs the question where that office is as most temporary and serviced offices do not build charging plans that let everyone work together comfortably one day a week. (If anyone has suggestions on this feel free to let us know). We are currently talking to some folks about poaching space on a regular weekly basis.

The second, and I think much more important, thing we are doing is implementing a group collaboration tool for pull us together. Email is ill-suited for the blend of collaboration, project management, task tracking, file management that we require. There are a lot of products out there to choose from and it is not obvious which one we should work with. But after some review there are two that appear like contenders. The first is Huddle (www.huddle.net) which is a local UK startup that offers a nice combination of features. The second is a US product which is part of the new Google Apps Marketplace called ManyMoon ( www.manymoon.com ). It is closely tied to the Google application environment and we are a ‘Google shop’ in many ways. Thus it offers the potential of inter-operating nicely with our current environment.

I’d be interested in knowing how others are trying to solve these problems. There is no golden bullet and none of my employees really wants to go back to the old days of going to the office every day. But the replacement frustrations have to be solved if we are going to grow. So stay tuned.

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by Victoria Atherstone

The short answer is . . . Absolutely.

Let’s start with what I don’t miss. How about that 1.5 hour commute across London, having to contend with those lovely scented armpits on the way home, the person that decided it was a good idea to pour half a bottle of smelly over themselves that day, or the fact that on most journeys I had to stand the entire way. Then there were those early starts five days a week, which to be honest with you, I never really enjoyed. Or how about the ridiculous amount of cash I used to spend on public transport each and every month? Actually with a little more thought I could certainly make this a wonderfully long list.

But actually this is not what this blog is about. This is not about why its good for me to telecommute. It’s about why its good for our business.

So what does School for Startups stand to gain from allowing me and our other employees to work from home? Well I, as a key executive, have saved 3 hours of my day from avoiding that commute. I can choose to spend those hours in bed catching up on much needed beauty sleep which makes me like my company better, or I can add three very precious hours to my working day. Every employee in our company sees those benefits, and we are a very happy and productive lot as a by product.

School for Startups sees the benefit in it’s wallet too. Lower absentee rates, lower travel costs, more productivity . . . If I were Doug and running this business I might well decide to spend that newly acquired money on something like adding to my SEO spend or Google Ad campaign that month.

So what makes working from home really ace and especially so for the employer? Well we use Skype (or as Doug insists on calling it, Sky-pee) to communicate. Gone are the days of monthly landline fees, hurray. In fact almost all our business phone calls now take place on Skype here at School for Startups, whether we are speaking to our wonderful PR agency Seven Hills, our whizz web developer Jack Lenox or our newly recruited and hugely talented designer Erin Rommel. It is also worth noting that being virtual means that we don’t necessarily need to recruit from within London or indeed the UK, our speedy gonzalez and hugely talented Editor is actually working from home right now in sunny California, yes I know, alright for some hey. Sorry Nancy! But what is really ace is that it doesn’t matter where we are or how many folk need to be in the conversation, Skype is certainly the answer. Oh did I mention it’s free! Can you tell I am an advocate?

But yes we can’t always work from home; it’s healthy for team morale, bonding and the like and also for efficiency that we meet once a week face to face. I have to say that I can let you into a little secret and if you’re based in London a great tip too, check out the recently refurbished Royal Institution of Great Britain. Apart from being one of our London homes for live events it’s also a fab place for team meetings! Luxurious surroundings, sensible tables and chairs for working with a laptop, free WiFi, great food with excellent price tags, slap bang in the middle of town, just two tube stops from Waterloo and no membership fee! Oh dear, I think I might have just caused a temporary space problem for the Ri! Seriously folks you need to check it out.

Well I am a bit addicted to the wonderful world of Twitter and I have just tweeted that it appears I am not a natural blogger however on a personal note I have totally enjoyed sharing my experiences and I hope for some this has been helpful. I would love to hear your thoughts on how working from home has been ace for you and your business and by leaving a few comments here you will in fact be sharing the love with your fellow entrepreneurs. What a nice thought to end on.

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What does your business do?

Azam Marketing www.azam.net is a full-services online marketing and design agency which unleashes the potential of the internet to grow our clients’ businesses.

A pioneer in the digital arena, our specialists have 102 combined years of experience in affiliate, display, email and search marketing. We also carry out website design and development, online business consulting, and corporate training.

Over the last 13 years we have developed over 70 niche websites and our mailing lists have now grown to over 5.7 million opt-in subscribers in the UK. We utilise these and our other means to generate millions of pounds a month in sales for companies large and small.

How did you decide to start it?

I have always been in business in some way, shape or form since I was nine years old. When I was a kid, I would work in my father’s Cash & Carry in Yorkshire after school and on the weekends, and at different stages in my life I have had businesses doing copywriting, selling computer games offline, selling books online, and providing IT support.

Due to some unscrupulous people, I was flat broke in 1997. One day, when I couldn’t even afford chicken and chips for £1.99, I told myself I have to sort my life out.

I have been glued to computers since my teenage years, being a programmer in the 1980s, and, when I investigated what the internet had to offer and realised it’s potential, I started spending 100 hours a week on the PC to build my digital marketing and design business.

What were your toughest challenges?

One of the first challenges was developing an internet business when I couldn’t afford to get online! So I enrolled on a course at my local college and that gave me access to their computer centre. I would be the first one there at 9:30am each morning and the last one out at 9pm every night. It was a challenge trying to code websites when the teenagers around me would be swearing and fighting all the time and flicking paper at each other past my nose!

The hardest part in the early years was surviving when I was not making any money. I lived off Tesco baked beans for years! It took me six months to generate my first sale online, which I think was an Eastenders book, and I made 68p profit. And then, when I’d grown the business, the dot.com crash happened in which my clients and advertisers collapsed like nine pins. It was like a kick in the stomach and the business had to go back to square one. But, by the grace of God, I survived all those difficult times and, today, 13 years later we’re in a healthy position and growing faster than ever. We tripled in size last year.

What sites do you recommend?

• www.bbc.co.uk/news – keeps me updated on what’s happening in the UK and around the world
• www.affiliates4u.com – I’ve spent squillions of hours on this online marketing portal in the last decade
• www.notmoresocks.com – gives me ideas on what to buy as gifts, otherwise I end up getting everyone chocolates
• www.freecashback.co.uk – cashback and voucher code portal from Azam enables people to save money at 2000 UK retailers

Which entrepreneurs do you admire most?

I’ll mention one who is well known and another who is not.

• Bill Gates is a personal hero of mine, because he proves the geek can inherit the earth! He had the conviction to take a leave of absence from Harvard to create Microsoft, had the vision to see the money would be on the software rather than the hardware side, and developed a formidable global company. There are a lot of people who have achieved nothing in life who mock Bill Gates, but I have the highest of respect for somebody who works his way to the very top and then gives away billions of dollars to the needy.
• On a personal level, I have had the honour of working with Senthil Kumar, the MD of V A C Media, for the last four years. In a very short space of time he has built an internet company with 70 staff which is the leading provider of loyalty shopping portals in the world. His work ethic is inspirational and I can only think of four or five days in all the years I have know him when he has perhaps not worked at least 12 hours. But what means the most to me is that, despite all his success, he remains a thoroughly nice bloke.

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Emma Jones who runs the wonderful website Enterprise Nation (www.enterprisenation.com) which champions all things relating to home-based businesses, has been tireless in her efforts to get people to realize the benefits of working from home.

There is some evidence that things are changing. Regus, the global provider of temporary offices, have created a new “business lounge” to accompany their temporary offices which should cater to the web-workers of the world. They have fitted out their Bruton Street facility in London to accommodate teams that would use Regus as their focal point when they actually need to work as a group or meet someone face to face. And Mark Dixon their CEO has publicly announced their intent to put one of these Starbucks meets living room meets temporary office type facilities in every town of the UK. It seems eminently logical to me.

But of course when the office goes so to goes the esprit-de-corp. The sense of the team is partly embodied in the close proximity. The efficiency of the casual conversation, the ad-hoc meeting, the friendship ties all become attenuated when there is no common place for everyone. Or is that all just hokum?

Maybe instead what disappears is the endless gossip and office politics; the interruptions, the increasingly difficult transport efforts and compromises on quality of location of our homes so we can draw a rational line between our office and our home.

Of course, if the UK actually had broadband this might be a less difficult conversation. What we call broadband (500k and up) is laughable by South Korean or Japanese standards or for that matter by the standards of many nations. It is the rant of another day to question whether Britain is missing the boat by not focusing on making every home in the country wired at 1000x the broadband we have today.

But back to where I started. Do we really need an office? Well you can find out if you like. We certainly will. On August 1^st School for Startups is abandoning its posh digs in Cambridge and everyone (all three and a half of us ) are going to be working from home.

And I shall keep you informed of the journey. If anyone has advice or ideas about great tools or tricks, we will surely welcome them….

Doug

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