Best Seller Authors

Book Marketing, Publishing, Author Resources

Get More Value From the Books On Your Shelf

I have a large library of book.. get more every day.

Once in a while, I look over the collection and am convinced that the best use for most of the book would be to give them away. Not all of them.. but even some of the ones I love best would help the world more if I found someone that wanted to read and gifted it.

I can always buy or print more.

What About a Service To Help Me Give Away Books?

BookMooch logo

BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books.

BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.

  • Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
  • No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.
  • Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every two you receive.
  • Help charities: you can also give your points to charities we work with, such as children’s hospitals (so a sick kid can get a free book delivered to their bed), Library fund, African literacy, or to us to thank us for running this web site <grin>.

    • Learn more at the BookMooch web site

    Manage Your EBooks To Reach More Readers

    More than a decade ago, while working in the computer hardware industry, I saw some data on the trajectory of screen resolution and capacities for the future.

    Many pundits were saying that screens as good as paper were coming very soon, but one smart futurist showed us a graph of memory and processor capacities, the number of pixels and resolutions of display materials and just what it would take to have screens that weren’t a strain on eyes and cheap enough to be ubiquitously available.

    The DATE for his chart where all of this came together was 2010.

    Recent announcement of Apple’s iPad, improvements in Amazon Kindle devices and a multitude of other readers confirm what we’ve known is coming… That feeling that books are a better way to read is going to start fading away.

    You may be like the hundreds of authors and readers I’ve talked to over the past decade who claim that they will never enjoy reading on a computer as much as holding a book. Culturally, that makes sense. We’ve had decades of lousy screens and centuries of wonderful books.

    Book aren’t going away anytime soon. However, every author should get ready for a much more rapid growth in eBook and alternative electronic distribution.

    We’ve been advising clients to get an eBook reader, try out the technologies.. see where the clash among format, digital rights management, hardware vendors and publisher is moving. Feel for yourself where the market is going.

    One of the last big hurdles has been the complaint that you don’t get to own a hard cover book when you purchase an eBook.. and must rely on the storage system that too often breaks down.

    That’s changing too.

    Watch what Calibre Ebook Management Software has to offer.

    I suggest downloading a copy to manage all those downloads you can’t find on your hard drive. You may still not ever read them, but just watching this video, I could see real progress from the tools I was using just a few years back.

    Apple got us all using MP3 when they got the iPod right.. Maybe they will do this for books.. maybe not.

    What do you think?

    The Draw of Books. Why Your Readers MUST BUY

    When asked about the power of books, especially in this era of ebooks and supposedly less reading, I point the stats or 570,000 books published each year and the irresistable draw we have to book stores.

    Best seller books will be most of what catches a reader’s eye becuase they are in heavy distribution and reader recognize the names. Once they do.. many readers can’t help but to pick up a copy.  It’s what Daniel Pink calls Intrinsic Motavation (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)

    Here’s one fun review of what happens to a reader when they see interesting titles.

    It’s NOT just a question of whether you book is a good read (it better be).. but how many places readers can see you and your book

    How Did You Get That Book Out So Fast?

    Do That Cover - Small.jpgMy friend Gail Kingsbury called to tell me about her new book and the fabulous stories inside.

    I said “I didn’t even know you were working on a book.. How did you fit that in your schedule?”

    The answer.. a collaborative effort. Working together, the co-authors were able to high quality material together, join together for to promote it and have a best seller in record time.

    We’ve used this process over and over to create books. What’s different this time is the fabulous concept of successful people sharing their story of “How Did You Do That”

    They want to get fast results in launching the book and have over delivered fo anyone that grabs the book today.

    A great model for authors.

    Some inspiration for those writing a book and/or a great gift idea.

    I just ordered my copy. I suggest you pick up one or more today.

    Textbooks Will Lead Us Away From Books

    Paper books are winding down. We’ll have them around for a long time to come, but the kids going into college now are going to bring the future faster than you think

    Joel West postulated these 3 reasons why Amazon will get out of the ebook business

    • Amazon‘s (AMZN) Achilles heel is the proprietary mobi format against everyone else’s e-pub, but if college students are using a book viewer for 4 years and renting books for one semester, this becomes almost a non-issue.
    • Moving from selling dead tree books (with printing costs and inventory risk) to renting e-books will reduce the publishers’ costs dramatically. If publishers don’t share those savings with consumers — given the student and politician outcry about textbook prices — there will be hell to pay. I suspect, however, that most will play games with planned obsolescence in hopes of keeping their margins up.
    • I doubt the e-book reader is a separate category over the long term. To me, it seems obvious that the e-reader will go the way of the pocket camera and the MP3 player as a dead-end stand-alone device.

    I think it’s still early. We don’t know who will win the hardware wars

    However, every author and publisher needs to look at how to profit from the move away from selling dead trees