Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Informing the Press in This Electronic Age











It's amazing how little time it takes these days to get the word out to the "trade" press about a new eBook. This morning, I wrote the release below, and sent it along with a copy of its cover art and and my bio to the editors of 126 Catholic newspapers:


INSPIRED COMMUNICATIONS PRESS RELEASE


New eBook Details the Extent of Jesus’ Suffering and Death

For Immediate Release:

INNSBROOK, MO — Just before the Church’s solemn celebration of Holy Week, author John O’Neill has published a new eBook that, in several chapters, includes graphic descriptions of the sufferings and death that Jesus of Nazareth endured for the salvation of mankind.
“In Part 3 of the book, I wanted to show the readers what excruciating pain Jesus went through on Holy Thursday and Good Friday to pay back to His Father the infinite debt caused by our sins,” explained O’Neill, the author of A Sign Contradicted: Essays on the Life of Christ.
“This collection of twenty-two essays on the life of Jesus,” he continued, “gives its readers more information, not mentioned in the four gospels so that they might more readily experience, in their readings and reflections on these events, something of what others who were actually there with Jesus saw, heard and felt during each event. To accomplish this, I used information from historical, archeological, medical and theological sources to “flesh out” these narratives, hoping to recapture a sense of being there with Jesus as He ministered to the people in first-century Palestine, accomplishing, through the horrors of His suffering and death, infinite expiation to His Father for our sins”.
“I’ve arranged the essays into four parts. The five essays in the powerful third part trace the horrors inflicted on Jesus during the solemn days of Holy Thursday and Good Friday: His Last Seder; His agony, betrayal and arrest in the garden of Gethsemane; His late-night trial before the Sanhedrin and subsequent beatings by the palace guards; His trial and sentencing by Pilate; His even crueler torture at the hands of Pilate’s Roman guards before carrying His crossbeam to the summit of Golgotha; His extremely cruel crucifixion and excruciating death; and, finally, the hasty interment of His body in a nearby tomb.
Copies for sale at $4.99, and a free preview sample of A Sign Contradicted: Essays on the Life of Christ, can be found at the publishers’ website listed below:


For more information or for a book review copy:

Contact John O’Neill at johnoneill1021@gmail.com, or by phone at 636-295-0449 or 636-745-7861.
###  

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Promoting eBooks on My Blogs

In September, 2008, I began my first and primary blog,  Catholic Writer's Notebook, as a testing ground for some of the topics I planned to include in my manuscripts for publication. When, in January,2010, I actually published one of my manuscripts as an eBook on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and smashwords.com, the experience was so exhilarating that I decided to share it with fellow or aspiring eBook authors on the weblog which you now are reading.

Becoming a blogger, like becoming an author, is fraught with challenges. The blogosphere is a very crowded place. Even in my niche of Catholic life and spirituality, the are, at minimum, close to 2,400 active blogs; many of which are sponsored by Catholic dioceses and archdioceses, Catholic newspapers, well-known Catholic authors, Catholic magazines and major publishers or retailers of Catholic books —all with a built-in following. How can some poor schlemiel with nothing but a penchant for writing religious books in the Roman Catholic tradition compete for their attention?

Many of the competitive blogs are developed by pros who know the ins and outs of HTML, traffic-building search engine optimization (SEO), source code validation, Technorati ratings, etc. In order to compete with them, I’ll have to concentrate on learning these things, too, if I want to make my blogs effective selling tools for my eBooks, and vice versa. After all, if I want the Holy Spirit to drive web traffic to my blogs and eBooks, it might be helpful if I gave Him something to work with. (Not that He needs it, but I’m sure that He expects me to do my part.)

Registering for placement in Catholic blog directories (CatholicBlog.com and StBlogsParish.com) is an important first step for spreading the word in my niche. For those who search for Catholic topics on these sites, they’re a great opportunity for my blogs to be seen every time they search for a topic covered on one of my blogs. So, also, is registering to be indexed by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.).

Right now, I’m getting back into reading about blogging. I’ve dusted off the covers of such books in my library as Problogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, Getting Noticed on Google by Ben Norman, Blogging for Dummies by Susannah Garner and Shane Birley and Publishing a Blog with Blogger by Elizabeth Castro, concentrating mostly on how to make my blogs better traffic builders to my blogspots and my ebook pages on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and smashwords.com.

I’ll update you with progress reports as I go along. In the meantime, keep watching on my two sites:


Just in Time for Holy Week and Easter Sunday

When I was a first-year student of theology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., I attended lectures by Fr. Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., on the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament. Thanks to his vast knowledge of Old Testament history, languages and archeology of that period, — and, most of all, to his enthusiasm about his topic — he made the persons and events of that book come alive for everyone in his class.
In imitation of Fr. Murphy, I’ve mixed, in this collection of essays, references from the gospel narratives with information from historical, archeological, medical and theological sources, to “flesh out” these New Testament narratives, hoping to recapture a sense of being there with Jesus as He ministered to the people of Israel in first-century New Testament times, and accomplished, through the horrors of His suffering and death, infinite expiation to His Father for our sins.

The whole point of this collection of twenty-two essays on the life of Jesus is to give the reader more information, not mentioned in the four gospels so that you might more readily experience, in your readings and reflections on these events, something of what others who were actually there with Jesus saw, heard and felt during each event. I use information from historical, archeological, medical and theological sources to “flesh out” these narratives, hoping to recapture a sense of being there with Jesus as He ministered to the people in first-century Palestine, accomplishing, through the horrors of His suffering and death, infinite expiation to His Father for our sins.

I’ve arranged the essays into four parts. The two essays of the first part depict the period from Jesus’ miraculous conception in His mother’s womb, through the joyful and perilous circumstances of His’ birth, early infancy and pre-adolescent life.

The twelve essays of the second part take us on six jouneys with Jesus though many of the significant events of His three-year public ministry throughout all of Palestine. Each essay strives to add all the more realism to the story by including details not contained in the gospels narratives, but literally were unearthed in later centuries.

The five essays in the powerful third part trace the horrors inflicted on Jesus during the solemn three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday: His Last Seder; His agony, betrayal and arrest in the garden of Gethsemane; His late-night trial before the Sanhedrin and subsequent beatings by the palace guards; His trial and sentencing by Pilate; His even crueler torture at the hands of Pilate’s Roman guards before carrying His crossbeam to the summit of Golgotha; His extremely cruel crucifixion and excruciating death; and, finally, the hasty interment of His body in a nearby tomb.

The fourth and final part concludes Jesus’ gospel story with three essays, which give a fuller explanation of the evangelists’ sketchy accounts about His resurrection, His post-resurrection appearances to His disciples, and His ascension to His Father.

Just in time for Holy Week and Easter Sunday, this eBook is on sale on the Smashwords.com website below. Its powerful Part 3, reflects on the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday in the chapters on Jesus’ last Seder, His betrayal and arrest, His criminal trials, His torture, crucifixion and death, and His hasty burial before the sabbath. Its glorious Part 4 concludes the book with the events of Jesus’ resurrection, His post-resurrection appearances to His disciples and His ascension to His Father forty days later.
You can see a sampling of the book at:



Saturday, April 2, 2011

Getting the Word Out in the Catholic Press

I'm a big believer in the power of the press. That's why the opening salvo in each of my eBook launches is contains a press release to the editors of the major national, archdiocesan and diocesan Catholic newspapers and national Catholic magazines in the United States.


When I announced the publication of my first eBook in January, I sent the press release with a JPEG cover image to 131 Catholic newspaper and national Catholic magazine editors, offering each in the covering e-mail a free 14-day loan of a copy of the ebook for their inspection and review on their computer or eReader. I was gratified by their response.


Virtually all of these publications are available to all Catholic men and women in their diocese in print and online editions, opening a market of millions of prospective readers who are the most likely buyers of my type of eBook.


In those dioceses where I actually lived and worshiped at one one or more of their parish churches, I lead off the announcement by identifying myself as a former parishioner of those specific parish communities. The example of the announcement below is the more generic version sent to those dioceses, in which I had never resided:


INSPIRED COMMUNICATIONS PRESS RELEASE


New eBook Urges Catholics to Help Jesus’ Less Fortunate

For Immediate Release:

INNSBROOK, MO — These times of disastrous economic conditions and events spawned by global geological and climactic changes require more Catholics to do something for those unfortunate ones who suffer most their consequences.
So says John O’Neill, who has published his first eBook, Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You. In the book, he classifies Jesus’ instructions to His disciples into six keys designed to transform ordinary Catholics into extraordinary people, dedicated to imitating Christ by serving others, especially the poor and suffering, whom Jesus called His “least ones”. The book also suggests practical ways in which the reader can perform these corporal and spiritual works of mercy through various charitable organizations in his or her community.
The electronic book is available on amazon.com (Kindle), Barnes and Noble (Nook) and Smashwords.com, publishers and distributors of eBooks in all formats. “I chose these three publishers for their retailing success,” said Mr. O’Neill, “and for their ability to format and download books onto PC and Mac computers and Kindle, Kobo, Nook and Sony eReaders, as well as onto such mobile devices as Blackberry, iPad, Android, iPod touch and netbook, a valuable aid in spreading Jesus’ teachings to the large market of Millennial and Post-Vatican II generations of Catholics nationwide.”
John, a seminary-educated Catholic layman, with a degree in Thomistic philosophy and a year of post-graduate theological studies at Catholic University of America, continues to write manuscripts which he hopes will become future eBooks in the Catholic religion and spirituality or self-help genres.
Copies for sale at $4.99, and a free preview sample of Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, can be found at the publishers’ websites listed below:

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/ [Search on title name]
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks/index.asp [Search on title name]
http://www.smashwords.com/books/byauthor [Search on John O’Neill]

For more information or for a book review copy:

Contact John O’Neill at johnoneill1021@gmail.com, or by phone at 636-295-0449 or 636-745-7861.
###  

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Importance of a Hyperlinked Table of Contents


I've just published my second eBook on Smashwords.com. I’m concerned because, when I published my first eBook on their site, I had the devil’s own time of it, especially because of the difficulty in formatting, bookmarking and hyperlinking all of the elements of the Table of Contents. The whole point of the exercise is to enable the reader to switch easily back and forth from the table of contents (ToC) to a specific chapter and back again to the table of contents.

After the third or fourth failed attempt at it, I really began to debate the sanity of such an idea. So, I reviewed again why Smashwords felt was advisable or even necessary to include a hyperlinked table of contents in the book.

Since my book was a work of non-fiction, organized into named chapters, Smashwords advised a hyperlinked ToC because it added value to my book by making it a lot easier for the reader to find something in a particular chapter by enabling them to jump from one chapter to another. (Apparently, eReaders have the technology to detect automatically my linked ToC in their ePub, Mobi and PDF readers.)

So, convinced that I had no other choice in the matter, I studied all the harder how to build a hyperlinked ToC that would perform as it should in the eReaders. As usual, I had no problem with bookmarking and hyperlinking the chapter names in the ToC to the chapter headings in the text. It was getting the reader back from the chapter to the ToC that wasn’t working for me.

Then, on this final go around, I discovered something that I’d been overlooking before: “Some authors prefer to link their chapter headings back up to the Table of Contents. Other authors prefer to insert other text, such as, “Back to Top.”  I chose “Back to Contents.”

The results became my recipe for eBook Table of Contents formatting success:



1.         Type the Table of Contents
            Immediately after your title/copyright page and before your other pages, type your table of contents, using Normal paragraph style, left-justified.

2.         Bookmarking Individual Chapter Headings
            a) Highlight the first chapter heading.
            b) In MS Word, select “Insert”, then “Bookmark.”
            c) Click “Bookmark.”
            d) In the Bookmark window, type in the name of your first bookmarked chapter heading, without spaces or punctuation between words.
            e) Click the “Add” button.
            f) Repeat this procedure for each succeeding chapter heading until all are bookmarked.

3.         Return to the Table of Contents Page
            a) Highlight the “Table of Contents”  heading at the top of the table of contents.
            b) Select “Insert”, then select “Bookmark.”
            c) Name this bookmark “TableofContents”, “Contents” or “ToC.”
            d) Click the “Add” button.

4.         Hyperlinking to Chapter Heading Bookmarks
            a) In proper order, highlight each chapter heading in your ToC.
            b) Click “Hyperlink”
            d) In Word’s hyperlink menu on the left side of the “Hyperlink” window, click “Place in This Document” to see the ToC chapter heading bookmarks in the main window’s right-hand side.
            e) Select the appropriate bookmarked heading in the main window.
            f) Click the “OK” button.
            g) Repeat this procedure in sequence for each chapter heading in your ToC. Be sure that each heading in the ToC turns the color blue and is underscored.

5.         Linking the Chapters Back to the Table of Contents
            a) On the line at the end of each chapter, type “Back to Contents” or “Back to Top” in the Normal parargraph font, and format it as 10 pt, right-justified.
            b) Highlight it
            c) Click on “Insert”, then “Hyperlink”.
            d) Select the small “Place in this document” window in the “Hyperlink” window.
            e) Select the “Table of Contents” heading in the main “Hyperlink” window.
            f) Click the “OK”, then check to see if the “Back to Contents” legend has turned the color blue and is underscored.
            g) Repeat this same procedure at the end of each chapter, applying the “Table of Contents” name to each.

6.         Troubleshooting Tips
            a) After all links are found to be underscored, before you test them, click Insert: Bookmark, then uncheck the box that displays “hidden bookmarks” to discover any unwanted bookmarks. Delete all the unwanted bookmarks to make your ToC work more reliably.
            b) Carefully test each each link to see if they’re operating properly
            c) If you edit names of bookmarks or the linked text, you might damage the viability of your links; if you have edited any, be sure to remove those former intra-document hyperlinks and re-apply them.
            d) Do not use Microsoft Word’s automatic Table of Contents generation feature!!

6.         Testing Your Links
            a) Check to see if all links are underlined
            b) Ctrl+Click each link to make sure that each goes where it is supposed to go.

           
Here is the ToC I was working on:

Table of Contents
Preface: “Fleshing Out” the Life of Jesus
Part 1: A Portent of Things to Come
Chapter 1: Mary’s Conception of Jesus
Chapter 2: Jesus’ Birth and Childhood

Part 2: Jesus’ Public Ministry
Chapter 1: The Baptism of Jesus
Chapter 2: The Temptations of Jesus
Chapter 3: Jesus Calls His Apostles
Chapter 4: Jesus Begins His Public Ministry
Chapter 5: Jesus, Teacher
Chapter 6: Jesus, Healer
Chapter 7: Jesus Rejected in His Hometown
Chapter 8: Jesus Feeds Thousands
Chapter 9: Peter Confesses Faith in Jesus
Chapter 10: The Transfiguration of Jesus
Chapter 11: Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem
Chapter 12: Jesus Cleanses the Temple

Part 3: Jesus’ Passion, Death and Burial
Chapter 1: Jesus’ Last Seder, First Mass
Chapter 2: Jesus’ Agony and Arrest
Chapter 3: Jesus’ Criminal Trials
Chapter 4: Jesus’ Torture, Crucifixion and Death
Chapter 5: The Burial of Jesus’ Body

Part 4: Jesus’ Glorification
Chapter 1: Jesus’ Resurrection
Chapter 2: Jesus’ Later Post-Resurrection Appearances
Chapter 3: Jesus’ Ascension to His Father


Here's the format I'm using to return the reader from the chapter to the ToC:

Back to Contents
Chapter 2: Jesus’ Birth and Childhood

It is spring, nearly six months since Mary’s return from the home of Zechariah and her cousin Elizabeth. Mary is well into her third trimester. Recently, Roman soldiers had come to Nazareth to announce to the townfolk there the decree of the Emperor Caesar Augustus, proclaimed byPublius Sulpicius Quirinius, who was sent by 


I thank the Holy Spirit for His inspiration to the solution of this problem. It enabled me to have my first eBook accepted into Smashwords’ Premium Catalog, which permits distribution of my book worldwide to many more online booksellers. With His continued help I hope to be able to do it again.


Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The E-Mail Campaign for an eBook

One of the best publicity resources for any author’s book marketing campaign is his/her email address book.

Currently, I maintain a gmail address book of more than 270 names, grouped into fifteen different categories, including family and extended family members, Catholic magazine editors, Catholic newspaper editors, friends and acquaintances at our church, friends and neighbors within our present community, friends in former parishes and communities, previous eBook buyers, etc. These categories enable me to segment my list in order to tailor my e-mail message according to our particular relationship or their particular function (e.g., as editors of or bloggers in Catholic media or reviewers of Catholic books).

The specific type of eBook genre that I write (Catholic/Christian religious books) dictates the make-up of my target market segment. If I later switch to writing in another genre, I’ll have to develop new e-mail address groups according to their prospective interest in that genre.

An important promotional tool of each e-mail message in each campaign is the author’s unique signature, which includes my name, my occupation (e.g. “eBook author/publisher) and the links to my various e-Book pages and my blogs.

Here is an example:

John O'Neill
eBook Author/Publisher

My Amazon Book Page:

My Barnes and Noble Book Page:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks/index.asp [then type "jesus' six keys to a more perfect you" into the search box at the top of the page] 

My Smashwords.com Book Page:

My Blog Pages:

REMEMBER: your email message to any of your groups should always be a soft-sell invitation to read (or review or publicize) your eBook. No hard-sell. No unwanted Spam.

Obviously, I’ve included examples taken from my personal experiences in my particular genre market. Based on the types of eBooks that you are, or will be, writing, your market segments might be altogether different. If so, be sure that you’ve researched your book market thoroughly, and build your email address book accordingly.

Know the print and online media in your target market. Research the influential newspapers, magazines, blogs, websites and social media reaching your target readership. Categorize them into groups within your address book. Then, as you publish each new eBook invite them to read and review that book.

In the case of potential book reviewers, offer them a free review copy of your book. If you publish on amazon.com (Kindle) and barnesandnoble.com (Nook), two of the major book retailers in this country, permit you to lend them a copy of your eBook for a 14-day period. Smashwords.com has a coupon program, which enables you to send them a coupon code that will allow them to acquire a copy of your book at no cost.

The object of all publicity and promotion is to get people to seek out more information about your eBook so that they’ll want to buy it, read it, review it and recommend it to others. Your e-mail address book and signature can be very valuable tools for achieving those goals.   




Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Developing Your eBook Platform

“Platform” is the current publishing buzzword for a plan that you have developed to promote your eBook once you have published it. Your platform consolidates a number of tools to spread the word about your new or latest eBook. The responsibility for promoting your book is solely your own. You are not only the author; you are your own publisher, too;and, as such, you are totally in charge of getting the word out to anyone you want to buy and read your book.

I work with three well-known eBook publishers-distributors: amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and smashwords.com. Amazon is the major online bookseller, with an inventory of more than 800,000 books; Barnes and Noble is a leading national  bricks and mortar and online eBook retailer; and Smashwords is an international eBook publisher, distributor and online retailer, which specializes only in eBooks and now respresents 40,000 of them. All three of these publishers offer a number of services to help me market my eBooks to my chosen market segments.    

Since mine is an eBook, published electronically for a potential readership who will acquire it, store it and read it in an electronic format, it stands to reason that I can reach this potential readership by electronic means. Here are some of the things I’ve used to publicize my first eBook:

Book Review Copies

Amazon and Barnes and Noble both enable me to lend my book for a period of two weeks to a target list of potential book reviewers associated with Catholic newspapers, magazines and blogs, who might help me to spread the word about my book. Smashwords goes one better: through their unique couponing program, they allow me to send online coupons to this same target market, who might publish an unbiased review of my book for their specific readerships.

Press Releases

In order to implement my plan for book reviewer recruitment, I develop a press release tailored, whenever possible, to each specific geographic segment. For example, in writing to the editors of Catholic newspapers or magazines in dioceses or archdioceses in which I’ve lived over the years, I mention in the release the name of the parish in which I was active, or the elementary school which I or our children attended.

Author and Book Pages

Each of my chosen publishers offers me free author and book pages, which enable me to provide relevant information about my eBook(s) and my biosketch, a link to my pertinent blogs and an opportunity to sample and (hopefully) buy my book.

My Pertinent Blogs

I use two of my weblogs, Catholic Writer’s Notebook, and, of course, the blog you’re now reading, to publicize any new developments regarding my eBooks. If you’re a writer and/or an author, I strongly encourage you to take up blogging. It’s a great way to express yourself on a regular basis, and it’s not as difficult as you might think. In fact, Google Bogger makes it very easy with step-by-step tutorials and ready made, neat and clean templates that take all the techy part out of it.

Social Networks

This is an arena that I’m beginning to develop for my marketing strategy. Right now, I’m limiting myself to Facebook and LinkedIn. With Facebook, I’m getting much better results, and I’m developing more of a fan base of family and friends, and of friends of friends. Facebook enables me to publish news about my publishing exploits, replete with images and/or direct hyperlinks, which let my readers go to my author pages, book pages or to specific blog posts to see what they’re all about.  

E-Mail Promotion

In preparation for publicizing my eBooks, I developed an extensive list of e-mail contacts, categorized into a number of groups: family, friends, fellow parishioners, Catholic newspaper editors, Catholic magazine editors, Catholic bloggers, Catholic book reviewers, etc. When I first published Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, these sub-lists enabled me to tailor my messages appropriately to each specific group.

Publish More Than One Book  

Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords emphasizes in his Smashwords Book Marketing Guide that a very powerful tool to multiplying your eBook sales is to publish more than one book, and to publish a list of each of your previous book titles on the title page of each succeeding book that you publish. I’m about to publish my second eBook, and I am listing the title of my first eBook prominently on both the front cover art and on the book’s title page.

Use a Professional Front Cover Designer

It is axiomatic that, especially in the eBook publishing business, your front cover image sells your book. I am extremely fortunate to have a daughter who is a very talented and experienced magazine graphic designer, trained in her craft at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. When I asked if she might be able to design a digital front cover for my first book, she did not disappoint. It was a thing of beauty! And now that I’m getting ready to launch eBook #2, she did it again. Even if you’re not so fortunate, I urge you to do whatever it takes to get a professional digital front cover image for your book. If you want to publish on iPad and some other major eReader formats, it is required. Shop around your locale; compare samples of their work and what they charge. Then make the best informed decision that you can.

In future posts on this subject, I will offer more more specific posts on each of these and other promotional strategies.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Why I Published My First eBook

In November of 2007, I began work on a manuscript. It was to be about the teachings of Jesus, and what they mean for the twenty-first century Christian, particularly, the Christian baptized into the Catholic tradition. It was to trace Jesus’ instructions to His apostles and disciples through the four gospels, gleaning from them the paradoxical Wisdom of the incarnate Word of God, the Son of God, “the kingdom of heaven” here on Earth.
Over the ensuing months and years, as new ideas — some, no doubt, prompted by the Holy Spirit — came and went, it morphed into Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, a step-by-step recipe designed by Him to make us holy by showing us how to seek and find the Father’s will for us, and convert it into loving, merciful action on behalf of the less fortunate, whom Jesus called His “little ones”.
The more I read the gospels, the more I began to get the message. In His short ministerial span of three years, Jesus gave us, in His sayings and parables, everything we needed to know about how to do the Father’s will for us in order to prepare ourselves for His return when — as He explained in the parable of the Last Judgment — He would judge us according to our merciful works toward others and admit us or not admit us into the everlasting rapture of participation in the loving comradery of the Father, the Word/Son and the Holy Spirit. That’s when it all came together, and, finally, I finished the manuscript.
Then came the hard part: selling it to a publisher. Three or four times, I prepared book proposals, and sent them off to Catholic book publishers; three or four times, I received polite emails of rejection. It was depressing. So much hard work, so little appreciation.
Not long ago, a writer friend gave me the one-word solution: “Kindle”, she said.  She had discovered the joys of self-publishing online at dtp.amazon.com, and her computer-savvy husband helped her to upload her manuscript onto the site and voilà!, the Amazon people processed it, and an eBook was born.
I, too, with the help of her husband, uploaded my manuscript, and waited not so patiently for less than a week until I was notified that I was the proud author of a new eBook. Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You was a literary reality! God be thanked and praised!
If you’d like to see my eBook on the Amazon.com site, just click the link “Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You”  under the heading “MY BOOK PAGES” at the top of the right-hand column of this page.
About My First eBook
Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You presents Jesus’ teachings on the six keys to living an active, relational spirituality through merciful service to needy others in this time and place. Each key demonstrates how to transform yourself, step-by-step, into the effective agent for positive change in this world that your Creator designed you to be.
Developed and taught by the greatest authority on positive world-change, Jesus’ Way will inspire you, as it has inspired untold billions over the past twenty centuries, to grow in Christ-likeness for the betterment of humankind and the extension of His Father’s kingdom on earth.
Additional features of this book include practical ways in which you can serve the less fortunate right in your own community, contact information for specific charitable organizations and suggestions about further readings on these six keys to your own spiritual perfection.

DDDD

In ensuing posts, I’ll get more into the details of formatting and publishing eBooks. It’s not as easy as I expected, especially when I was publishing on three different sites, each with formatting requirements unique to its eReader(s). And then there was the headache of performing all the editorial, publicity and legal tasks usually handled by the staff of a print book publishing company.
Once you get the hang of it, though, it is well worth the effort.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Spreading God’s Word Digitally


Have you seen the mega boom of eBooks being publishing these days? Thanks to the likes of Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords.com, eBook sales have risen steadily since 2009, now to the point where they’ve exceeded the sales of trade paperbacks in all genres.


This trend has been seen in the sale of religious titles as well. In fact, it looks as if the sales curve for this category is on a definite upswing, which is welcome news for Catholic Christian authors who want to spread Jesus’ good news in a way most effective in reaching the Millennial Generation of Catholics in this country — on their PC and Mac computer, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPod touch, or netbook.

Clearly, we’re witnessing the dawn of a new opportunity for eBooks related to Catholic Christian religion and spirituality. The Kindle Bookstore, for example, lists a total of nearly 826,000 eBooks in all genres. Among these, nearly 61,000 (seven percent) are classified in the religion and spirituality genre; over 27,000 forty-four percent of the R & S category of which are classified in the Christianity sub-category, which contains a substantial number of classic and contemporary Catholic titles written by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Francis de Sales, John Newman, G.K Chesterton, Benedict XVI, Thomas Merton, Scott Hahn, Henri Nouwen, and many others. Barnes and Noble’s Nookstore offers about 35,000 titles in its Religion and Spirituality categories. Traditional Catholic bookstore blogs offer online sales of many eBooks by Catholic authors, especially those which appear on the Catholic Book Publishers Association’s monthly top ten bestsellers list.

Still, there are many good contemporary Catholic writers who are not published in the eBook format. They must if they want to spread the word about Christ and His teachings to young American Catholic adults via eReader apps for computers, eReader tablets or smartphones.

If today’s Catholic authors want to reach and capture the readership of Catholic adult students and professionals between the ages of eighteen and fifty, this is where they’ll find most  of them and they’ll have to sell them by marketing to them at their e-mail and social media addresses.

For the Catholic author of today, eBook publishing is a faster, much easier way to publish. Catholic publishers of print books turn out very few titles per year, and can no longer bear the entire burden of marketing the print titles that they do publish. Consequently, much of the responsibility for publicizing their books rests with the authors themselves. Ten percent of the sixty-eight member-publishers of the Catholic Book Publishers Association notably Liguori Publications, Liturgical Press, RCL Benziger, St. Anthony Messenger Press, Saint Mary’s Press, Sheed and Ward Book Publishing and USCCB Publishing publish currently in an electronic format, variously called a digital, download, eBook or internet format.

eBook authors also carry the lion’s share of the promotional responsibility for their own books, but the major eBook publishers (e.g., Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook and Smashwords.com, with whom I’ve published) do supply support by providing excellent emarketing tools such as a personal book page and author page and free downloads of eBook marketing guides on their sites for the newbie author with instructions and suggestions on how to use them effectively to sell their own eBooks.

I urge Catholic book readers to look into buying electronic Catholic books online at various Catholic bookstore blogs, or, if you can’t find a specific title there, look into such major online booksellers as amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com or Samashwords.com. On each site, search for the Religion and Spirituality category, then the Christianity sub-category. If you can’t afford the prices of the eReader tablets or the smartphones with eReader apps, Kindle, Nook and others offer free downloads of eReader applications for your computer or smartphone.

If you are a published Catholic author, I suggest that you investigate with your print-publisher the possibility of publishing your print books in eBook formats as well, and to publish these on any or all of the major online digital publishing sites so as to expand your coverage of this key Millennial Generation market. Most book publishers are well aware of eBook publishing procedures.

If you plan to self-publish your eBook, based on the effort that you put into your manuscript formatting and your post-publication promotion via email, blogs and the social media, you may not only realize your dream of getting published, but you will begin to fulfill effectively your Christ-given mission to share your Faith with others.
If you haven’t already done so, think about starting your own blog on Catholic topics you like to write about. In 2008, I began my blog, entitled Catholic Writers Notebook, which I promote shamelessly on my Facebook page. On both my blog and my Facebook page, I shamelessly publicize my first eBook, Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You (See! I can’t help it; I’ve done it again). I boldly publicize it because I believe in it, and in the Holy Spirit’s power to use it for the good of the reader and of the Church at large.

The entire post-publication phase of eBook publishing centers on the book promotion platform, in which I am transformed into a relentless self-promoter for my eBook. In book publishing circles, promotion means publicity. For starters, since I have published in the Catholic Christian eBook genre, there are a number of Catholic market segments on which I’m focusing my publicity efforts to maximize my coverage of this market. I’ve segmented my e-mail address book into a variety of specific groups: my family, my former seminary classmates, my fellow parishioners, my Catholic friends in other parishes throughout the country, Catholic news services, editors of independent national Catholic newspapers and Catholic archdiocesan and diocesan newspapers in the many places where I’ve lived in parishes or studied as a seminarian.

In addition to these, I am contacting Catholic book or book-review blogs and websites to offer them a free 14-day loan of my eBook (provided by my publishers) if they’ll agree to considerate it for review on their site. I am making the same offer also to those Catholic magazines which provide reviews of selected Catholic books as a service to their readership.

It’s a great deal of work, but it’s an inexpensive way to introduce my book, and, more importantly, to spread Christ’s teachings as I am obliged to do by the Trinity-given grace of my Baptism. For this reason, I chose this method of distribution for my first book, Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, and will do so again and again with other manuscripts in development.

I highly recommend this new technology for all Catholic writers. It is easy to accomplish, without the disappointments and delays of the traditional print publishing process. In some rare cases, it may even reverse the process by using these digital distributors to place my e-published work before the eyes of literary agents and print publishers.

The downside, of course, is that I must assume the multiple responsibilities of the tradition print publisher — editing, seeking permissions, ISBNs, publicity, etc. — or pay a qualified freelancer to do so. Fortunately, I can handle these chores myself, having spent most of my forty-five year career in writing, editing and publishing, so it is well worth the effort to put my eBook into the computers, eReader tablets or smartphones of the future parish lay leaders of the Catholic Church in America.

Like the shepherds of Bethlehem, I am chosen by the Father to spread the Good News about Him, His only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit. Now I have the technology and the instantaneous distribution to do the task far more efficiently.