The Rise and Rise of Indie Authors

The Author Earnings website has worked hard at 'scraping' data from Amazon's various sites to provide unprecedented detail on sales data. As Amazon now represents close to a majority of print titles sold, knowing what is being sold and by whom is very interesting indeed. The data shows that independent authors represent a large and rapidly growing fraction of book sales on Amazon. There is also ample evidence that having a book listed on the Amazon bestseller lists provides a substantial boost to non-listed titles from the same author. Overall, Author Earnings claim that they identified over 9,000 authors earning more than USD $10,000 per year, and half of that number were earning over USD $20,000 per year. Read the whole report, which goes into much greater detail.

Property Finance Made Simple in the Kindle Bestseller List

Andrew Crossley's just-uploaded "Property Finance Made Simple" has immediately debuted on the Kindle bestseller list. Our cover design focused on a strong, straightforward combination of text and iconic image, that would reproduce well as a thumbnail and at larger sizes. 

A Man of the Land — Book Cover

Bob Gillespie has taken five decades of farming experience as the basis of this saga of life on the land. He wanted the cover to show some of the character of the land in the southern Riverina, combined with images of the protagonists. Typefaces used: Amberly and Didot.

Faraway Places — Book Cover

In "Faraway Places", Albert Trajtsman writes about strange places and abominable acts. One of the tales dealt with an outpost the wilds of Tsarist Russia, and led us to use the photograph of Siberian windmills in the background, paired with monstrous images from medieval documents.

Famous People Who Have Met Me — Cover Design

Greg Noakes has made a career of photographing musicians and showbiz figures, and "Famous People Who Have Met Me" is the result of a trawl through his extensive photo library, coupled with wry explanatory captions. From Linda Ronstadt to Grace Jones, and Iggy Pop to Cold Chisel, readers will enjoy encountering the famous and infamous of decades past. The cover features Grace Jones and a suitably lurid combination of typefaces. To be released soon, via the Arcadia Imprint of Australian Scholarly Press.

Miles and Miles of Type

It would be difficult to top this website for lovers of street typography — a survey of 13 miles of one of the world's best known avenues. A great showcase of the glorious variety of public taste when it comes to type.

Integrating Work and Life — Book Cover

John Drury wanted a bold, simple design that reflected his theme of integrating life and work, and we represented that via overlapping letters, the colours for which were drawn from his web presence. The whole project was turned around in only a few days, including the print run.

Why Type Selection Matters (or How Not to Give People a Reason to Stop Reading)

Matthew Butterick at Practical Typography makes a great argument for considered type selection and use. A great line from the essay:

“The sub­stance mat­ters, but if that’s all that mat­tered, then every­thing could be set in 12-point Times New Ro­man. And that would be the equiv­a­lent of mum­bling to­ward your shoes.”

How to Help People Using Outmoded Browsers...

This nifty little Google-run service identifies the version of browser you are using and provides easy links for installing alternative browsers. Besides promoting Chrome, the site is designed to nudge people to towards installing modern browsers and to gradually chip away at the huge legacy population of people still using ancient versions of Internet Explorer.

Create your own Audiobooks with Amazon

Not content with dominating the online sale of printed books and ebooks, Amazon is also moving to extend its dominance in audio books. The e-commerce giant already owns Audible. ACX is aimed at small publishers and authors wanting to create an audiobook version of existing print editions. Given the increasing popularity of podcasting and streaming music services, it makes sense to offer independent authors a way to grab a slice of that audio content pie. Authors can create their own audio, but they would need decent equipment and some technical savvy to meet ACX's audio quality requirements. ACX steers authors towards their roster of professional narrators and producers, and offers long term distribution through Audible.

Great Art by the Virtual Truckload

Via the fine folks at Open Culture, a definitive list of the best collections of digitised artworks. 

• Google Art Project (250,000 images)
• L.A. County Museum (20,000)
• New York Public Library-Historic Maps (20,000)
• Norway National Museum (30,000)
• SFMoMA Rauschenberg Collection
• Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center (45,000)
• Stanford University’s French Revolution Collection (14,000)
• The British Library (100,000)
• The British Museum (4,200)
• The Getty (100,000)
• The Guggenheim (1,600)
• The Met (400,000)
• The Morgan Library Rembrandt Sketches (300)
• The Museum of Modern Art/MoMA  (65,000)
• The Museum of New Zealand (30,000)
• The National Gallery (35,000)
• The New York Public Library: Photos, Maps, Letters (180,000)
• The Rijksmuseum (210,00)
• The Smithsonian (40,000)
• The Tate (70,000)
• The Whitney (21,000)
• The Van Gogh Museum (3500)
• Yale’s Great Depression Photo Collection (170,000)
• Vermeer (36)

Many of the artworks are scanned at very high resolution. In the case of institutions such as the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, re-use and alteration of the artworks is encouraged and celebrated. Considerable debate has erupted as to whether the wide availability of such material is somehow corrupting the ability of the general public to appreciate the actual rather than virtual artworks.

For those institutions that allow use and remixing of the digitised artwork, authors and designers have at their disposal a vast and powerful visual resource.

Public Relations and Authors

If you are one of those independent authors to whom selling does not come easily, you might want to consider a publicist. Local publicist Phillip Anderson offers reasonably priced six week campaigns. Such campaigns typically feature the following:

• Author interviews and reviews in relevant newspapers
• Author interviews with key online news sources
• Book reviews across national and regional newspapers and online publications
• National and local author radio interviews (where possible)

Phillip can be contacted via email: phillip@phillipandersonpublicity.com.au. Before engaging in such campaigns, authors will need to get their ducks in a row:

• Make sure their books are easily available in the areas reached by the publicity
• Ensure that they have spare stock in case sales go well (though this does not apply to print on demand and ebook sales online)
• Rehearse the points they want to get across in interviews, the key selling strengths of their book, the so-called 'elevator pitch'. And have some kind of idea of potential customers and what kind of angles might appeal to them

These might seem obvious points, but we have seen a remarkable number of authors who weren't really across any of them before initiating publicity efforts. Remember: bookstores will be much better disposed to independent authors who are making a clear and sustained effort to promote their work.

Takeout Your Google Data

As the self-appointed organiser of the world's data, it makes sense that Google/Alphabet would have good data management tools for its users. And thankfully, it does, the form of Google Takeout. Anything users do on Google (photos, gmail, youtube, drive, fit, plus, etc) can be exported. Google's bots prepare your data and then email download links, or transfer the files to a linked service such as Dropbox. Download sizes can run into the multi-gigabytes. 

Startups and Other Short Lived Things

Internet startups flare and burn like meteorites in the digital sky. Some live longer than others. Some seem so obscure or pointless one finds it difficult to figure out why they were built in the first place. Product Hunt is a good place to see them going by. Also features trending tech industry news, podcast episodes and live chats with industry players.

Writing Effective Emails by Example

Writing effective emails can be difficult. Not everyone is a natural marketing guru. Goodemailcopy.com has a small collection of pithy emails from web based services to potential, existing and past customers. Some use humour, some are blunt, others cute, but few of them waste any words.

Practical Ideas for Authors going Online

From Bookmachine, a useful checklist of must-do items for authors looking to enhance their digital presence: 

* A robust author website to anchor an author’s complete digital presence and act as the central hub and source of authoritative information on everything about the author, her books, her work, and life

* Complete author and book information at book cataloging and community sites like Goodreads and LibraryThing, as well as at all online retailers (especially an Amazon Author Central page)

* Google+ to signal to Google who an author is, what she writes about, and all of the things connected to her

* The right social media mix, which can vary — and evolve — depending on the author, the type of books she writes, and the interests and demographics of her audiences

* Mechanisms to collect, manage, and effectively use email addresses

* Ongoing efforts to maintain accuracy and relevance across all of these

* Effective cross-promotion (across titles and authors)