If you’ve ever wondered “How can I sell more books on Amazon,” or “How can my book stand out on Amazon,” then you’ll enjoy today’s guest blog  by Jim Kukral, who designed the cover for my new ebook. Stay tuned for details about that!

Jim is a 15-year Internet marketing expert who has a design team he guides. This is important because it’s not the best thing to just hand things like book covers to artists. Artists like to make things look pretty only. Marketers know how to direct artists to make them sellable. Isn’t that why you’re writing a book?” You can learn more about his book cover designs – they are hot – here  http://prleads.jfksell.hop.clickbank.net

I’m a happy customer and a sponsor!

How To Get Your Book Covers Noticed on Amazon

By Jim Kukral

If you haven’t noticed there’s a major publishing revolution happening these days. Now anyone can easily and quickly put a book up on Amazon for sale, without having to have a publisher. This has begun the official gold rush for existing and new authors. Now, hundreds of thousands of writers are able to sidestep the middleman and go direct to their readers. Oh, and also make a lot of money doing it.

Jim Kukral

When you self-publish you have to take on a few of the responsibilities that a publisher used to do for you. Those include things like editing, proofing and of course, cover design. All three can be outsourced to professionals you can find in your area or online. Today I want to talk about effective digital book cover design and how it can affect your Amazon sales.

So what makes an amazing digital book cover? As we all know the attention span of people who use the Web (me and you) is very low. We have become accustomed to finding what we need online as fast as possible and have learned how to scan massive amounts of information with our eyes in seconds flat.

For consumers that’s a great thing. But for anyone trying to sell anything online, it makes our challenge greater. As an author, we have only seconds (sometimes less) to engage a Web visitor and tell them a story about what the book is about.

Do a quick search over at Amazon.com for books in any genre, it doesn’t matter which one. Notice how you quickly look at the book icons on the page along with the book title, and quickly scan down the page. Notice how your eye is drawn to some covers and others not so much.

As an author with a new book coming out, if you don’t have an amazing and eye-catching book cover you’re going to have a tough time making sales on Amazon.com. Here are few tips to help you out.

Image Is Everything

First off, it’s important to realize that design matters. Sure, you could do your book cover yourself, or pay your nephew who’s in college $10 to do it for you, but what you will probably end up with is a home-made book cover. Readers are expecting more, especially on Amazon.com. Your book is going to be sitting right next to thousands of other books with professionally designed covers. Chances are that if you don’t fit in to what’s expected, a potential reader isn’t going to take a chance on your work.

The Thumbnail Matters
When you upload a book to Amazon, the Amazon system automatically sizes your book cover to an appropriate, preset, size for display on their website. There are a few thing you should know at this point so that your book looks as good as it possibly can.
Number one, you should follow the sizing guidelines on the Amazon KDP page to the tee. If you don’t, your book cover may end up looking garbled and hard to read. That’s bad. The other thing to worry about here is that if you have designed your book cover with small type, it’s probably not going to be able to be read without zooming in on it. That’s also bad.
When you’re scanning through Amazon notice how all the top selling books have great looking thumbnail images. That’s because the authors and their designers knew how to design the cover for maximum readability.

Images Count

Whether you want to use a photograph, or an illustration, or whatever, you should know that images help make your book cover get noticed. As most Web designers will tell you, when you add images of people, places or things into your design you have a much better chance at getting the viewer to relate. Why? Because pictures tell stories better than words.
If you have a book about aliens from outer space, there’s not going to be a better way to convey that than to have an alien like image on the cover of your book. If you’re writing a book about butterflies, well, you get the point.
The bottom line is that if you don’t have a readable and beautiful digital book cover your sales are going to be compromised.

Jim Kukral is the CEO of Digital Book Launch, a company that helps authors market and sell a ton of books. He is an author of five books of his own, and has been working on the Web as an Internet marketer for over 16-years. You can read more about Jim at www.jimkukral.com

If you’ve ever sweated over the design of your book cover, or if you’ve paid a small fortune to a book cover designer to get it “just right” then you might not appreciate this book cover for “How Literature Works: 50 Key Concepts,” by John Sutherland. It is published by Oxford University Press. Maybe when you are Oxford, you don’t have to think about book design!

It is a wonderful book. I now realize that every book I’ve read on an airplane over the past 20 years would not be classified as “literature.” And they call TV a vast wasteland. <g> Those books sure were entertaining, though!

Tim Ferriss of “4-Hour” brand fame was called “the wildly popular self-help guru for young men” by the New York Times today (August 17, 2011) in an article which reported that Amazon will publish his next book, “The 4-Hour Chef.”

The New York Times does not bestow honors like this lightly.

Tim Ferriss

Congratulations to Tim!

We’re glad to have helped him get his start when he used PR LEADS to promote his first book, “Four-Hour Work Week.” He even encourages readers of that book to use PR LEADS to get publicity.

He is one of the true breakout stars in the publishing field with an honest-to-goodness bestseller that has been on the NY Times Advice Bestseller list for 84 weeks, according to the report. I’ve been following Tim since he beginning and I’m sure he’s been on one version of the bestseller list or another for close to 5 years. As readers of this blog know, that level of success does not happen easily.

Tim is clearly a person to be modeled.

Lynn Robinson, Intuition Author

Intuition author Lynn Robinson credited the PR LEADS publicity service with helping her get a book contract.

“I just signed a contract with Jossey Bass (a division of Wiley & Sons) to revise and update my first book, ‘Divine Intuition: Your Guide to Creating a Life You Love.’  The fact that I’d received so much media attention was one of the factors that sealed the deal!” she said. The book will be in bookstores in late 2012. Her current books, including “Listen” and “Trust Your Gut” are available on her website and at Amazon.com

“Intuition is a gift from the Universe — from God, if you will — that will guide us unerringly to the realization of our hopes and dreams,” says Robinson, author of this uncommonly readable book. Using personal experience, beautiful illustrations, inspiring quotes, simple exercises, and stories from thousands of clients, Robinson demonstrates that intuition is a gift from the Universe that anyone can cultivate as an unwavering and reliable source of wisdom and guidance.

"Trust Your Gut," by Lynn Robinson

Thanks, Lynn!

Do you have a success story about how PR LEADS helped you get a contract, a client, a job, a speech or anything else that’s really cool? Tell me about it and I’ll tell the world. I’ll write a press release about your success so you can build your brand, get more links that will help your website visibility on Google and help your visibility in general.

I realized recently that if I don’t toot my horn, well, you know the story. So I’m collecting case studies and sharing them with the world.
What’s your story? Please email me: dan@prleads.com and tell me what’s up!

CNN did an unscientific poll Sunday of more than 200,000 people who visited their website and answered the question: Which do you prefer: E-books or paperbacks?

Given this was an online poll; I would have thought e-books would run away with it.

However, paperbacks won by an 80-20 margin!

I have no clue. Most sales reports show that e-book sales are skyrocketing.

In fact, CNN ran a story on the same day saying that e-book sales topped paperbacks for the first time!

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The publishing tide is shifting fast: E-book sales in February topped all other formats, including paperbacks and hardcovers, according to an industry report released this week.
E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 “among all categories of trade publishing” that month — the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/15/technology/ebooks_beat_paperbacks/index.htm?source=cnn_bin&hpt=Sbin

I prefer to hold a hardcover book or a paperback – especially in the tub! But I can see why people like an e-book to read on a plane or an exercycle, especially since you can make the fonts larger.

Why do you think that is?

If you’re interested in writing a book on Kindle, listen to my free webinar with Daniel Hall, which we recorded a few weeks ago. Here’s the link:
http://realfastbook.com/danjkindle.html

Everything you need to know to publish an e-book is in this webinar. Seriously.

In the past, authors did well using email campaigns to broadcast book launches with bonuses. This process is so “2009.” Today, you have to use all of your tools. If you can build followers with your blog and then get attention on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you are more likely to drive people to your book site or Amazon page and make the sale. In this teleseminar, Marcia Reynolds will show how she integrated these tools to take her book to #1 on Amazon for Leadership and Management books for women and still keeps her in the top 10.

Here are a few things you will discover:

1. You started by creating a book blog site. Can you tell me why this is the center point of your campaign?
2. How did you get to blog for Huffington Post?
3. What was your Facebook strategy?
4. What was your LinkedIn strategy?
5. What was your Twitter strategy?
6. Did you use a publicist to help get the word out?
7. Did you use email or print support at all?
8. Tell me about actual book launch day, what did you do?
9. You said you had some struggles with Amazon-can you tell me about that?
10. How are sales going now and have you leveraged any other business from your campaign?

Marcia Reynolds, PsyD speaks globally on leadership topics and coaches rising star leaders on building relationships and making critical decisions in their complex and evolving workplaces. In addition to her Amazon bestseller, Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction, she authored Outsmart Your Brain and has been quoted in many publications including Psychology Today, Harvard Communications Newsletter, and The New York Times.

This free, one hour teleseminar will be held on Thursday, October 14, 2010, starting at

2 p.m. Eastern

1 p.m. Central

Noon Mountain

11 a.m. Pacific

To register, click here:

The event will be recorded and a link will be sent to all registrants.

To register, click here:

John Kremer knows more than 1001 tips which he has documented in his must-read book, “1001  Ways to market Your Books For Authors and Publishers.” Here are four tips he shared at the 21st Century Book Marketing Conference in San Diego this past weekend.

1. Speak. “80 percent of books are bought by word of mouth.” Start locally. Get comfortable and then move on to larger groups. Every book that became a best-seller (regardless of genre: business, spirituality, children’s, even poetry). If you write a children’s book, speak in schools. If you write poetry, speak at bookstores. People love buying books from the author.
2. Present as much content and inspiration as you can. The worst thing you can do is hold back info.
3. The essence of book marketing is creating relationships. Find good people to partner with.
4. Get on TV, especially national TV. TV sells books. Everyone knows about Oprah, but many people don’t realize that the Daily Show and The Colbert Report can help move a lot of books.
John is a legend in the book industry. I highly recommend his book and his ezine and his teleseminar series called “People You Should Know. Read more at http://www.bookmarket.com/tips.htm

Since I’m knowm for making bold predictions, let me put my neck on the line one more time. I’m usually right, so it’s a prety safe bet!

I predict the iPad will change books and publishing as we know it.

To look to future, I look to the past.  Let me explain.

Back in the early days of publishing, monks and artists wrote books or copies Bibles and Haggadahs and other works. Each work contained not only black letters on white background, but colored fonts, large fonts to draw the eye and most important, illustrations.

When Gutenberg came along and invented the printing press, we started to see the book as we know it today. A bland  series of pages with black on white text. Few illustrations, if any, because they are expensive to produce. And all the type was the same size. So you have no idea if one idea was more important than the other.

We saw the beginnings of the change when Jeffrey Gitomer started writing his marvelous series of books.  Pick one up the next time you are in an aiport bookstore. They are easy to find since they sell like hotcakes. Why? Because Gitomer has gone back to the age of the scribes and took their best ideas. Namely:

- Different sizes fonts so you can see what’s important. It isn’t unusual to see one page with just one sentence displayed in 24 point type. That get’s your attention. You know what’s important.

- Different colored fonts. It’s pretty. Why does reading have to be dull?

- Short chapters. Who has a long attention span today? Need I mention Twitter?

I’m sure many authors would love to copy Gitomer, but their publishers won’t let them because of the expense of printing.

Enter the iPad.

Now authors can design their ebooks with type, fonts, illustrations and color, color, color!

All the new, bold design doesn’t add a penny to production costs.

You’re probably wondering. Why stop there? Why not add audio and video? Perhaps an interview with the author? Or video of a role-playing exercise? The sky’s the limit.

One final point. On a recent flight from Minneapolis to San Diego, my two seat makes each had Amazon Kindles. And everyone who passed by them asked them about it. Ebooks are hot and that’s going to change everything.

Your task: Start thinking about illustrating your books, just like you illustrate your blogs.

Book Marketing Tips: How to Build Your Email List & Sell More Books in 6 Months

By Dan Janal

Article marketing is the best book sales lead generation technique on the Web today. Unfortunately, many authors writing articles on the Web fall short in their book marketing efforts. They simply can’t get people to visit their websites to buy their books.

This is a critical fallacy that will render your article marketing, book promotion and sales lead generation campaign worthless. People normally don’t buy on the first meeting. You must develop and nurture relationships. You must get people to visit your website and join your mailing list. If you don’t, you are wasting your time, money and energy.

Sure, it is great to write articles displaying you as the expert in your field. And, yes, it is nice to post articles that help the world in general. But if your goal is to use article marketing to build your email list and sell more books, you might be falling short if your articles don’t have a call to action that grabs readers by the throat and pulls them to your website.

So, how do you get people to come to your website, join your emailing list and buy your books?

At the end of the article you get a bio box, which is your 4 line free ad that allows you to promote yourself, your books and anything else you have to offer. In this bio box, you’re allowed to put a link back to your own website, or your Amazon.com book sales page. You must make it much easier for your prospects to click on this link than to skip it.

To do this effectively, you must create a glittering necklace of persuasion that seduces the eye, charms the imagination, and dazzles the reader. I also suggest creating an irresistible offer so people will come to your website and identify themselves. Once you capture your prospects’ names and email addresses, you will be able to create a sales-winning relationship that will boost your book sales online. If you don’t do this critical step, you’ll never have another chance to sell your books to these people.

Here are three irresistible products to help prospects make the critical decision to visit your website, give you their email addresses and buy your books:

• Free Special reports. Don’t confuse this with newsletters. These are 3-5 page reports on a special topic. Your special reports should include your own insights that prove you are the expert your prospects need and want.

• Quizzes. People love to take quizzes. Create quizzes that have 10 yes or no answers. Design questions so people will see their pain. This sets you up as the expert who has products and services that can help them. Here’s a great site that features a quiz. http://kisstheorygoodbye.com/quiz/quiz.php. Take the quiz and then see how Bob Prosen leads you into learning about his book.

• Offer a free chapter or a free sneak preview of your book. This tactic will overcome your prospects’ fears of the unknown. People will get a good feel for your book, get hooked and then buy it.

The most important part of writing articles is getting people to visit web site to buy your books. If you offer these tactics, you will build your list, get more names for your sales funnel, and sell more books online in 6 months.

About the Author:

Internationally recognized Internet Publicity Pioneer and Founder of PR LEADS, Dan Janal has helped thousands of authors just like you build their email list and sell more books with traditional and online media publicity. For more free tips and information that will help you snag more leads in 6 months than you ever thought possible, go to: http://www.articlemarketingexperts.com/articlenewsletter

You’ve got a published book or two or ten under your belt. Now what?

In this teleseminar, you’ll earn how to use your books to position yourself and your business in the marketplace to gain highly profitable consulting and training contracts. You’ll identify key differentiators between buyers of speeches and buyers of training–and tailor your efforts accordingly.

You’ll learn how to protect yourself on subrights issues so that you are free to produce other derivative products from your books.

You’ll also explore various licensing arrangements to your intellectual property–how to avoid the pitfalls and cash in on the profits.

Join bestselling author Dianna Booher, author of more than 40 books and CEO of Booher Consultants, a communication training firm, serving 224 clients among the Fortune 500 companies.”

Join us for this PR LEADS teleseminar on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at:

3 p.m. Eastern

2 p.m. Central

1p.m. Mountain

Noon Pacific

to register, please go to:

http://www.prleads.com/2007series/booher/

If you can’t attend, we will send you the MP3 file of the session but you must register at the link below. In other words, if you want to attend, then register. If you can’t attend, but want to listen to the MP3, then register. Simple. There’s no cost to attend or listen to the MP3.

Click here to RSVP »