Sometimes to accomplish more, we need to make the tough choice and DO less. We’re putting the blog on hiatus while we bring other content online.

With 300+ posts and counting, our Daily Tips blog has provided bite-size business information for over a year. I hate to break the momentum, but sometimes one needs to make the tough choice and put one goal on hold in order to accomplish another. Proper prioritization is a basic tenant of productivity. Since I can’t magically add more hours to my workday, I need to reevaluate how I’m using the 24 hours I have.

Discovering material and researching it further takes time. Writing and scheduling these blog posts on my self-imposed deadlines five times each week has meant that I’ve been delaying other work on our site. So, while I think these tips are useful, I’m reprioritizing for the next 30 days to bring other content online in our Resource Library.

All during September, I’ll be pulling my raw notes together and posting new permanent pages to AuthorEMS. They’ll provide more in-depth coverage of a topic than I can fit into a Daily Tip. With only four months left in 2012, there’s so much I want to get done!

Never fear: Daily Tips will return at the top of October.

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As social networking morphs into social commerce, how can authors best promote their books? Maybe it’s less about marketing and more about human connection.

A recent post by Aziz Isham on Digital Book World highlights the importance of social media for “culture consumption.” His post discusses how the average person is more likely to seek a human recommendation than trust a search engine when it comes to seeking new authors, musical artists, books, tunes and movies.

Which makes sense, doesn’t it? It hearkens back to the bygone era of asking the librarian to recommend a book. Amazon can feature a number of “also bought” book covers on your computer screen, but readers are more likely to invest in a book that someone they know (or feel they know) has recommended.

This past week also saw the brouhaha over paid reviews as revealed by the New York Times.  Now, jaded readers have cause to doubt every reader review posted anywhere on the Internet.

Book bloggers, review sites and book clubs that have been cultivating a following and building trust with their readers are uniquely poised to continue to recommend books. Reader-based social networks, such as Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing offer an opportunity to reach out to readers who will spread the word about books they love.

Twitter offers memes such as the popular #fridayreads or #amreading for folks to tweet their current book recommendation. The trick is to connect with readers in a way that lets them feel they know you. Even then, promoting your own book will never be as effective as having a fan share their excitement over your story or characters.

Maybe it’s time to review your approach to social media and make it less media (marketing) and more social (human). Join in the conversation as a reader more than as a writer. Talk with your fan base directly via newsletters and email and less by social media broadcast. Continue to promote your book to book reviewers and book bloggers by offering to write guest posts and provide author interviews.

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The Internet makes it easy to build a store-front on our website, but before you start selling books directly to your readers, consider all the pros and cons.

With the explosion of self-publishing and online retailers that offer up to 80% royalties to authors on their book sales, a few authors have pondered the possibility of cutting out the retail middle man completely. Why not sell books directly to readers and keep the entire selling price?

Certainly, the Internet makes it easier for you to find readers and for readers to find you. It’s fairly easy to design a web store and use PayPal or another shopping cart service provider to handle the financial transaction. And it you’re selling a digital book, you can email the file to your customer or set it up for an automatic download. But before you start counting the dollar signs, consider some of the expenses.

You may not have the technology background to build and integrate all the necessary pieces of a retail site. There’s a lot of automation to take a customer through the payment process. Plus there will be fees involved for a service such as PayPal or any other to handle your payments. Possibly the single biggest drawback is that when you sell retail directly to customers, you become responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax on the transaction. The sales tax itself isn’t so bad, generally less than 10%, but the accounting and reporting process can be time-consuming and may require hiring a business accountant.

Plus, will you ever draw the book-buying traffic that an online bookstore can draw? For some non-fiction writers who have an active website and an audience, selling directly may make sense. For fiction authors, you may prefer to focus your energy on promoting your book’s page on Amazon, B&N or other retailers.  It’s easy to create buy links on your website that send readers directly to their favorite retailer.

PROS

• Direct contact with customers who buy your book
• Higher gross profits
• Full control of the sales process

CONS

• Must integrate extra technology to automate the sales process
• Must keep full accounting for income and sales tax purposes
• May require a web designer to set up and maintain site
• Must pay service and/or transaction fees to the shopping cart provider
• Must drive readers to your site to buy your book

Bottom line:  Be sure to weigh all the costs and the extra time it will take to build and maintain a store on your website. For more information on how to set up a store-front on your site, try these resources:

• PayPal
• ClickBank
• Cashie
• Digital Content Center

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Looking for reviews for your new release? Trying to set up a blog tour? Wish it were easier to make contact with the right reviewers for your book? Meet DOR.

DOR is AuthorEMS’ Database of Online Reviewers. Yes, a searchable database where you submit key information—starting with your book’s genre—and you get a listing of search results. Each entry on the list is clickable, and brings up a detail window of information including the link to the review site, contact details and submission guidelines.

We even added search criteria so you can find which reviewers conduct author interviews and/or offer advertising space on their sites.

Now, isn’t that easier than traipsing all over the Internet?  It’s certainly a time-saver.

We now offer a 30-Day DOR Pass for $10. Plan your marketing efforts for you latest or upcoming book launch. Find new sites to place inexpensive ads that reach readers. Discover book reviewers from all over the world who want to read your book.

DOR lists 500+ book reviewers with new additions each month. Curious to see how it works?  Watch the video and order your DOR Pass HERE today to get started!

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Need to find a freelancer to help you in your self-publishing process? Check out our lists of editors, formatter and cover artists.

Self-publishing presents many challenges that can be new to authors. Stepping from the role of author/creator to publisher/producer sounds easy, but there are many pieces of the publishing puzzle to fit into place if you want your book release to be a success.

One of the major decisions facing you is whether you should do everything in the publishing process yourself or hire professionals to provide key elements for your book.  Many authors choose to hire professionals to assist with editing, formatting and cover art.

But where do you find these professionals? For starters, try our Working With Freelancers page. Here, you’ll find links to other sites that list freelancers, plus we provide some tips to help you start that decision process of what to do-it-yourself vs what to hire out.

In addition, we have pages that list freelancers we’ve learned about, including links to their sites and a brief overview of what services they provide. They’re grouped as follows:

• Editor and Proofreaders
• Formatters
• Web Designers and Cover Artists

As more and more authors choose to explore self-publishing, the number of individuals and small companies offering services is growing. Before hiring anyone, we recommend asking for references from their current client list. Also, ask if they have a standard agreement or contract that clearly outlines what services they provide.

Most importantly, if you want to hire a freelancer, don’t wait until the last minute. Start your search well in advance of when you need to have the work done. Top quality freelancers are in high demand and many book their workload months in advance.

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Everyone in publishing today discusses the importance of visibility, but for a book to climb in sales, you want word of mouth to spread.

Digital Book World published a great post by Rob Eagar last week: Discoverability Without Spreadability Is a Marketing Disability. What does that tongue twister mean?

Everyone in publishing today discusses the importance of visibility. The goal is to get your book seen by Internet users and readers. You want your book to appear on Amazon lists, in B&N’s “Also Boughts,” on your Facebook page and you’re even willing to pay money to place your book on key book review or promotional websites.  But Eagar warns that people seeing your book is only a small part of the marketing battle. You need to give them a reason to buy. Maybe even more importantly, you need to give them a reason to spread the word about your book.

How do you do this? Eagar explains that tapping into a consumer’s self-interest is key. Consumers buy because of how they perceive a product (a book) will affect them. Lost as to what that means? Here are some basic marketing concepts to get you started:

• With non-fiction books, don’t merely highlight the topic or outline the key points of the book. Explain why a knowledge of those key points will benefit the reader. This is known as the difference between communicating features and benefits.
• With fiction books, don’t merely highlight the plot points of the story. Share the core conflict and why the main character feels compelled to take action. Conflict draws an emotional response from readers, and when readers connect with a protagonist, they want to know more.
• When using Twitter, don’t merely tweet your book title, price and retail link. Find a clever way to share a benefit or draw an emotional response from readers. Yes, in 140 characters. Hey, we didn’t say it was easy!
• When querying book reviewers to review your book, focus on these benefits and emotional responses. Why is your book so unique that the reviewer should make room for it in their mountain of a to-be-read pile?
• Clever language in a tweet or an awesome book trailer may get spread, but be sure the content also gives new readers/viewers a reason to buy the book.

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Do you keep track of how much you tweet on various topics? Ever wonder how others may view you? Now you can find out with twXray.

The Twitter stream is a raging current of information that rushes past on our screen. The beauty (and fun) of it is that we can toss in our commentary and watch it bob away along with all the other messages. Twitter makes it very easy for us to share our two cents’ worth on every topic du jour.

But what do you really tweet about?  Do you ever try to keep track?  And what about the 50 people who started following you? Should you follow them back? Will they be interesting? Do they have an agenda?

All Twitter shared their discovery of a free online app currently in beta testing. twXray (pronounced twix-ray), has been developed at the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University. You simply put in a Twitter handle (without the @), press Go, and TwXray analyzes a sample of 100 tweets from that user’s Twitter stream. It then returns a lovely pie chart that breaks down the percentage of what the person tweets about.

Its search algorithms aren’t perfect, and we did find that out of 5 searches, we got some error messages returned. We’re not sure if twXray was busy or if Twitter was, but we did finally get a chart for every name we tested.

twXray may help you make decisions on whether you should follow someone back. It can also help you learn how others may perceive you.

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If yesterday’s Productivity tip scared you as being too technologically advanced, you might want to explore this side of the productivity question: can working with the planetary alignment improve your productivity?

Author and editor Christine M. Fairchild alerted us to a great website if your mind is open to combining business and astrology. The Polaris Business Guides site (and books) by Madeline Gerwick offer tips and insights on when and how to conduct business more effectively. As Fairchild explained, “For example, when Mercury goes retrograde, I know not to submit manuscripts or articles, but go back into editing or teaching mode.”

If you scroll down on the Polaris home page, Gerwick shares a daily grid to illustrate what is good to do that day. A racing flag shows the overall flow of the day, with a left/right bar showing various colors to denote what hours are good (green), challenging (yellow) or fruitless (orange).

Beneath the overall rating, the grid gives color-coded ratings for

• New starts, activities, manufacturing,
• Communications, computers, and travel,
• Contracts, negotiations, and legal issues.

You can enter your time zone for a personal timeline, too.  Click on the large question mark to the right of the date to open up a window explaining how to read and interpret all the codes.

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Make your computer a minion by automating tasks using free scheduler software.

We’ll admit it: this software is a little intimidating, but the idea is awesome. At MakeUseOf, Ryan Dube shared how he uses a PC automation application to schedule various tasks on his computer. The concept is simple: he schedules tasks that could normally interrupt his day to run automatically in the background while he stays focused on the real work.

He uses a free software called Smooth Scheduler from Xemi Computers. In the article, Dube takes us through a typical workday to show how his computer:

• automatically wakes him up like an alarm clock
• logs into the website where he records his workout details for the day
• loads his calendar so when he sits at his desk he can see what’s scheduled
• logs into his blog and open to a New Post window so he can add new content
• alerts him when it’s time to wrap up his day

What he’s done is turned his computer into a minion.  He probably took 1-2 hours (maybe less, because I bet he’s amazingly tech proficient!) to set up all these little schedules and learn the program, but over the course of a day, think how many key strokes, how many windows loading he doesn’t have to sit through anymore. All the repetitive opening of software programs, logging in on sites, navigating to specific web pages—it’s all done for him.

There are similar softwares for Mac, although we didn’t find one that looked as robust and was free. If you Google the terms “task automation freeware mac”  (no quotation marks), you’ll see listings for a few options.

Even if all this automated technology sounds intimidating, we recommend reading Dube’s post at MakeUseOf and taking a fresh look at your daily productivity.  Are there ways you could combine tasks or simplify processes?

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Are you confused every time you need to set up email on a new computer or device? Learn the fundamental difference between POP and IMAP to see which works best for your needs.

If email has become your primary source of business communication, it’s important to get it right. But as technology changes, softwares upgrade or we transition to mobile devices, it can be time-consuming chore to set up our email.

All email travels through a server and, depending on how you program things, it may download into your email software (aka “client”) on your physical computer.  The big online servers include AOL, Yahoo, Google (Gmail), Hotmail and Live. On your computer, you may use Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora or Mac Mail.  This allows you to store your important correspondence on the webmail server or on your computer (in neat little folders) or both. Ask yourself, do you log in on your computer, open an email program and wait for your messages to load in?  You’re using an email client on your computer.

Which is where understanding the difference between POP and IMAP come in. These are two different protocols for handling that transfer of email from the online server to your computer.  MakeUseOf shared an awesome post on POP & IMAP, which we strongly recommend you read (also note they have some wonderful links at the end to even more email articles).

The most vital differences:

POP (Post Office Protocol) was created in 1984. It connects to the server, retrieves your email and downloads it to your computer. Usually, it then deletes those messages from your server (you can usually tweak the settings to override this).  This is great if you use one computer or device and want to store your important emails on it.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) was created in 1986. It connects to the server, fetches the new messages on the server and downloads copies of them to your computer. As you read or delete these messages on your computer IMAP sends that info back up to the server. This is great if you access your email from different devices—say a work computer and home computer, or a computer and a smart phone. IMAP allows the updates to be synched across all the devices because everything is recorded at the server level.

Gmail and many domain email hosts offer instructions for setting up an email client on your computer or device. They will offer settings for both POP and IMAP to allow you to choose which is better for you.

The MakeUseOf article goes into more details on the advantages of each protocol and which to choose to best serve your needs.  If email is an important part of your business (and we assume it is!), this is definitely worth reading.
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