We are really excited to pass another milestone in the growth of Sharing-Books. This milestone is particularly significant as it relates to the content available on the site. One hundred books published in just a few months is quite significant in the world of children literature. We are touched by the trust our authors have placed in our innovative business model. And we are thankful that thousands of e-books have now been delivered to young readers for free.

While we are happy to note the milestone, this is just a start. We look forward to celebrating our 200th book.

Some time last night while I was sleeping Sharing Books passed the 3000 downloaded books milestone! Since September we have seen a steady increase in the number of books being downloaded on the site. It took us 3 months to get our first 1000 downloads. It took us 2 months to get to 2000 downloads. It has taken us just a smidge over 4 weeks to get to 3000 downloads!

We are so very excited to see things speeding up every week. Thank you to all our book creators and our readers, our success is your success!

On Friday February 20, a group of us including founders, investors, writers, illustrators and friends got together for an update on the project and to mark the second anniversary since Andrea Azevedo introduced her book The Little Suitcase to Bonnie and I. As Sharing-Books is a boundary-less organization with friends in dozens of countries, we missed all our long-distance friends. So this Vancouver group cheers all of you around the world.

As we recently added revenue features to the web site, this was also the occasion to present our first monthly cheque to Sharon Davis of the Vancouver Room to Read chapter.

Some of you may have noticed a brief interruption of your Sharing Books experience this morning. We have pushed out some minor cosmetic changes, and most importantly we have launched our Partner Stores affiliate program. These are businesses and affiliates who have agreed to share a portion of the purchases that come from the Sharing Books website with our company. This money, like all our revenue sources, will be divided amongst our creators ( 1/3 ), Room to Read ( 1/3 ), and operations of the website ( 1/3 ).

If you have a moment take a look at our current affiliates.

Labels: features, news

This article combines the opinions of Pierre Lapointe for the business part and Marcus Riedner for the technical part. We defer to our authors when it comes to writing and illustrating a book but we hope our combined experience can help you build your own brand with our recommendations on using online tools.

We have launched our first contest recently and we want to help our authors to maximize their traffic and chances to win. We will hold more contests in the future so we hope this information will help you even if you did not publish on Sharing-Books yet.

Why build your brand?

1. You have worked hard on your book. You have have made an emotional investment in your book in addition to all the time you spent writing and/or illustrating it. Your work is worth investing a little effort to give it the visibility it deserves.
2. People buy from people. People will buy more books from you if they feel they know you. You have to open up and let your fans connect with you. That's the only way they can become loyal to you, recommend you and anticipate your next book with excitement.
   
3. It is your responsibility. Until you are a rich star and can afford to have a PR and Marketing agency handle your brand, it is a do-it-yourself world.
4. It is not difficult. You may have to learn a few things but the potential rewards are huge relative to the effort. Most of your brand building can be free at this stage and done with sweat equity.
5. You can now reach the world. In the past your paper books would usually only reach the local market. You might miss a market that would really love your work simply because of the distance. Today, the internet takes your books and your brand everywhere instantly.
6. You need the money. Yes we love to create, but to have more time to create we need money. Remember Time = Money. An equation works both ways, so Money = Time. Being smart about your brand will help you earn more income and move your writing activities from the hobby level to the career level. Most people are too shy about asking for money. A good brand communicates value and makes it a lot easier to ask for the money.
   

Think before you brand

Planning your brand is very important. In marketing terms a brand is much more than a logo it is the emotional representation your clients and the public have of you. Your brand is the sum of the emotions your business image communicates.

Take a moment to list and reflect on what your personal values are and what you stand for. Then look at that list and analyze the unintended consequences of your choices. We mean by that that you will not please everyone. Some of your values may lose you some business while making you stronger with a core group of followers. Accept that you cannot please everyone so choose wisely who you want to please.

What are things that influence your brand? The images of yourself you choose. The topics you discuss on your site. The items from other sites you decide to link with. The words you choose when you talk about yourself or when you write on a blog. Your choices have a lot of impact on how you are perceived.

Once you have decided the key emotional elements of your brand. Decide on how you want to communicate with your market. This varies greatly depending on the industry and the markets so we will focus here on our recommendations for a children's books writer or illustrator.

We recommend a three prong approach to building your brand. Obviously you can do a lot more but at this time we are recommending free services that create what we call in business quick wins. Note that we do not cover building your own web site here because personal web sites are are not free and they are a whole long different topic.

Connecting within our industry

This is where you will find expertise, advice , mentors, friends and a host of connections that will enrich your experience with our industry. This is where you will find colleagues, sometimes from around the world, to collaborate with on a book project. There are a number of sites available for children book authors and illustrators all with good qualities. You have to find the one that suits your needs best.

One of our favourites is www.jacketflap.com . Tracy Grant and her colleagues have done a great job of combining a useful set of features. We were delighted to discover Jacket Flap as we had foreseen the need for such a site. The original business plan for Sharing-Books featured a second web site very similar to what Tracy and her team have built. We were delighted to join JacketFlap.

We like the fact that JacketFlap has a large base of users from a variety of roles. Here are Marcus' recommendations on how to get the most out of JacketFlap:

1. Participate, Participate, Participate! Getting the most out of JacketFlap is a lot like gardening, you have to be out there every day watering, weeding, and planting. On JacketFlap it is all about commenting on people's work, cultivating friends and partnerships, and offering your help without strings attached. The more you do on JacketFlap, the more response you get.
   
2. Cross-link with your other efforts. JacketFlap is great for cross-linking to your other efforts. You can link to your website, to multiple blogs, to blogs you read, to your friends blogs, to other web communities you participate in. The more you cross link, the easier it is for people to find you on the web. Take advantage of these networking and connecting features on JacketFlap.
3. Be open, honest, and respectful. JacketFlap has a wide variety of people in their community, ranging from industry veterans to hobbiests. There are people from all levels of the publishing industry floating around on JacketFlap, and they read and watch what you say and do. In an open environment like that people really get an idea of what your hidden agendas are very quickly, so do not bother hiding them. JacketFlapers are open to you talking about what you do, to promoting yourself and your work, but only if you are honest and open about it. At all times be respectful, a JacketFlap page is akin to someone's home, so be aware that if you go to their page and post advertising links to your work you could be alienating someone. Nobody likes junk mail or spam.
   
4. Find the ultraconnected. Not everyone is a connector. Most people on JacketFlap are either too busy to build an extended network, or they do not have a personality type that is geared to connecting to large numbers of people. If you are not a connector, connect to someone who is, and leverage their network. If they have over 100 friends, they are ultraconnectors on JacketFlap. Try to find one of these ultraconnectors that fits with your goals, and make friends with them, and keep an eye on the things they are doing. They will get you a steady stream of information that is useful to building out your brand and where to do it.
5. Do not ask others to do your work for you. This is really important. Just about everyone on JacketFlap has something on the go. People who are ultraconnected on JacketFlap usually have a few dozen major and minor projects on the go at any given time. Everyone is more then happy to connect with you, and more then happy to give advice or occasional help, but the get frustrated when they are asked to do your work for you. If you need help, ask how questions. 'How do I add my blog to JacketFlap?' will get you a much warmer response than 'Can you add my blog to JacketFlap?'
6. Make use of the email features. Let people in your JacketFlap network know what you are doing when you have a major milestone event, such as you've published your book or added new work on to your illustration galleries. The key here is to do this at major milestone points, not constantly.
   

Connecting with your crowd

There are a number of social networking site. For personal preferences we are partial to facebook. Facebook just celebrated its fifth anniversary and the number of users has now reached 150 million - ahead of MySpace's 120 million. Either one offers very large audiences. We have more of our friends on facebook so we are finding more connections on it.

Do not dismiss social networks as irrelevant because you do not really understand them. They are extremely useful today. A majority of employers report that they visit social networks sites as part of their references check. My mother is on facebook and she checks regularly on her twelve grand children - most of them adults. She loves how she can follow their adventures as they travel the world and post photos and comments. The connections social networks enable matter a lot for your brand.

As your books become more popular, your readers will want to know more about you. Building a good profile is a great way to introduce yourself to people. Nobody has completely figured out how to best use facebook for personal branding. There are however some best practices that can really help communicating with your fans. Here are Marcus' recommendations on how to use facebook to build your on-line brand:

1. Find and join Children's literature Facebook Groups. There are well over 100 children's literature groups on Facebook, they range from small ( under 50 members ) to huge ( over 2000 members ). Find some groups that fit with your personality and branding goals, join them, and start participating.
2. Build a Facebook Page for your brand. You can build a Facebook page for anything, a book, yourself, a company. Build one for your brand, and get your friends and family to become fans of you. If you have a book you really want to promote, build a Facebook page for it. Link these pages together, and link them to your blogs, so you have a constant stream of new information on them.
3. Build a Facebook Group for your brand. Build a place for people to come and talk, track, and find your work. Building a group on Facebook is fairly simple and painless, and you can use it to drive people to your brand, websites, books.
4. Watch what other people are doing, and copy them. If you are a book creator, and you are focused on writing and illustrating your books, you probably want to spend most of your time doing that. Do not worry about figuring out new and innovative ways to use Facebook. Just watch what others do, and follow suit. There are hundreds of people who use Facebook as a marketing tool, do what they do.
5. If it costs money, avoid it in the early stages. Facebook lets you pay for adverts to promote your groups and pages. You can put advertising for your website on Facebook. Avoid doing this if it is going to cost you money in the early stages of building your brand. You will be wasting your time and money on paid web advertising in the early stages of your brand building. Word of mouth is going to get you far more effective results.
6. Participate! Participate! Participate! "If you build it, they will come" is a false hope. You have to go and participate in all of the above. The more time you spend in other groups, running around talking about issues you are facing in children's literature, and communicating with your fans and group members the better. Building your brand is a lot of work, and it is work you have to keep doing regularly.

Marketing your books

First we recommend you use Sharing-Books as your publishing engine. We built it for that exact purpose. It is free, it is fast and it is designed to help build your career. There are power in numbers and using one collaborative site regrouping a large number of books and authors will bring you more traffic than just having your own web site.

When you prepare a book to be published on Sharing-Books we recommend you add a last page about you. There is no jacket flap on an electronic book - you need to create one. Add a page at the end of your book with some personal information, a photo of yourself, and how to get to know more about you. Add links to your JacketFlap and facebook profiles and to your web site if you have one. Ask the reader to make a donation on the Sharing-Books site if they appreciated your book. Remember: you don't ask you don't get.

When you have published a book on Sharing-Books, tell the world about it. This is very important - you have worked hard, a little extra effort goes a long way in bringing your work the recognition it deserves.

1. Send an announcement email to all your contacts. Include the url that takes them directly to your book page. And ask them to forward your announcement to everyone they know who likes children book.
2. Announce your new book on your profiles at JacketFlap and facebook and send a notice to your friends. Ask them to forward the announcement to their friends interested in children books.
3. Post a link to your book(s) on Sharing-Books and JacketFlap so that future friends can find your book(s) easily.
   

In closing, I want to highlight one of the benefits for you of a collaborative publishing site like Sharing-Books. When visitors come to Sharing-Books they rarely look at only one book. I fact the data we have shows that visitors stay significantly longer and see more pages on Sharing-Books than the sites Google uses to benchmark us. The visitors you send to Sharing-Books will likely look at other author's books - but the visitors referred by other authors are just as likely to discover your book. There is an important multiplication effect in cooperating - we all win.

We hope this helps.

Marcus and Pierre

I woke up today to find an email sitting in my inbox from Mark Gladding letting us know that there were some posts up on eBooks Just Published about Sharing Books. I am always excited to see anything that mentions our company, particularly when I'm not mentioning it.

eBooks Just Published is a real find, they trawl the internet to bring people ebooks that are new, fresh, and DRM-free. And they do it every day. For any of our authors, take note, this is exactly the type of site you want to discover your work. We already have one book from our roster, recently published Scatsby the Bear, show up on their site. I'm hoping down the road we see more of our authors showing up on eBooks Just Published, since it is definitely a place to spread the word about your work.

While poking around on the site I found an interesting article on eBook readers for children. There are some interesting points here, mainly revolving around what the reader needs to look and be in order to work for children. While I completely agree, the device describe in the post would be an absolutely fantastic computing device, not just an ebook reader for kids, I do think that there are current devices that can bridge that product gap.

I think that the real targets for children's ebooks is not some down the road technology, but rather the tools that exist today. Things like the Leapster, the iPod Touch, the Nintendo DS, the Playstation Portable ( PSP ). These are all existing products with high market penetration, and they all support some form of ebook reading. The iPods and Nintendo DS are particularly attractive, since they support DRM free file formats such as PDF. Kids are already using these devices for all sorts of things, from browsing the internet to reading to playing games. All that needs to happen is one decent bit of software marketed towards children, and the nut is cracked.

Some may argue that the Nintendo DS is too small for children to enjoy the books, or to use before a certain age. I do tend to agree on an aesthetic stance, the DS has a small screen and small controls. That being said, I've seen 4 year old children pick up a DS and start playing a game. I see no reasonable barrier to usage that can not be solved with proper interface design. Same goes for an iPod or PSP.

I honestly feel that technology devices are converging, that computing power has reached a point where it makes more sense to build devices that let you play games, surf the internet, read a PDF, listen to music, etc. Certainly there is a place for illustrated ebook readers as a specific market product, but when it comes down to it, if I am spending $300-500 on a device for my kids, I'll lean towards one that has functionality they can grow into and with, rather then a one-use product. Though I really do want a nice tablet computer, about A4 size.

Labels: discussion, e-books, media coverage, news, technology

Sharing-Books is an e-publisher so you know how we answered the question. However I think it will be of value to current and future authors pondering whether to e-publish or not, to share some of the reflections that led us to spending quite a bit of time and money building an e-publishing engine for children books.

First let me confess that I am a paper book fanatic. Our home (and our garage) is full of paper books. I love the smell of ink and glue that tickles your nose when you open a new book. It is just like when you smell that your favorite dish is in the oven. So if I love paper books so much, why am I an e-book publisher?

Simply e-books are inevitable. Paper books will remain with us for a long time but their importance will diminish. Fortunately for us we can look to the music industry to see our future. (Along with the cases of books in our garage you will find boxes of vinyl LP's.) Although many have resisted, no musician today would think of not releasing new music as digital files.

So as a writer and an illustrator you have to adapt to this new medium. First you must start by separating the content from the container. Your book, your story is the content and it is the part that matters whether the container is made out of paper or electronic bits and pieces. However this new container offers new and different possibilities even if we lose some of the features we are romantically attached to.

Some of these changes will be challenging, like how to promote your book. The music industry used to have quite a packaging surface with the LP to create eye catching covers. Then the packaging shrank by three fourths to the size of the CD cover, and now in digital format all you see is a thumbnail picture. There are numerous similar unexpected changes that will come as the book industry goes digital.

Let me examine the key changes that we have identified. Hopefully it will help you embrace this new way to publish knowing what to expect from your efforts as an author. As you will notice, many of these changes have to do with what we call removing the friction is the business model - making things happen much faster and at an insignificant cost. These changes will disrupt the publishing industry as we know it the same way that the music industry has been.

• Paper books have limited distribution due to geographical constraints like transportation costs or duties and taxes. E-Books are instantly available world wide at no cost. This means that if your paper book failed in a region it is unlikely that it will be offered elsewhere. On the other hand, your e-book can fail in one region and be immensely popular in another region at the same time.
• Paper books are made from dead trees and chemicals. Now that there is a more eco-efficient alternative, it is just a matter of time before paper books become an issue with environmentalists . While the electronic devices we use to read e-books do have a certain environment cost in their manufacturing processes and recycling, each device can hold thousands of books and therefore they are far more eco-efficient.
• Another environment element is that there is no wastage with e-books. Paper books require long print runs and often the unsold books are either liquidated as remainders with losses to the publisher, and hopefully they eventually get recycled.
• A paper book is passed from reader to reader one person at a time. An e-book can be passed from one person to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. Going from one to one to one to many means that the popularity of an e-book is achieved much more rapidly.
• While a strong person can probably carry 50 paper books, a weak person can carry thousands of e-books. We use to go to the library with our kids and come home with a pile of books. With e-books the entire library comes to you or your child.
• A paper book can be easily damaged and can't be repaired. Electronic devices become more rugged with each generation and if you damage one you can easily replace your e-books in a few minutes.

By now you should see the irresistible efficiencies offered by e-books. Paper books will not disappear but their relevance will decline. Like any transition to a new technology this change has some challenges that must be pondered and planned for.

• Your first challenge as an author publishing an e-book will be the resistance of the industry. You will not be recognized as a "real" writer by older paper published authors or publisher. Many will cling to their status and put down this new technology that threatens the status quo. Accept it. You won't change them. On the other hand with e-books you might have the joy of Andrea Azevedo, our first author, whose two young sons exclaimed "Mom! You are famous! Your books are on the Internet!"
• The most difficult change to adapt to and to understand is how this affects copyrights and piracy. Physical media like vinyl or paper offered much greater protection for your intellectual property. The music industry has tried everything it could to protect digital files with software referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM has failed. There has not been one version that was not been rapidly broken by hackers who took pride in their feat.

At Sharing-Books we decided to offer the books without DRM and to accept that this is now a fact of life. We simply need to create new business models that take advantage of the speed of distribution of e-books. We plan to have the books sponsored and if a book is copied and emailed a thousand times, it simply means more value for the sponsor. Some of you will be scandalized at the idea of sponsoring a children book. However, we are talking about sponsoring not advertising, something that is done for every play you attend. You will also find it interesting if you shop for antique children books to find many that were sponsored in the same fashion a hundred years ago.

• E-books present different challenges for illustrators. They will likely be read on a screen that does not offer the same resolution as paper. Colors will be displayed differently depending on how a reader has set up his/her screen. The screen sizes will vary greatly. From PCs with great screens to black and white e-readers to cells phones and to gaming devices. You will find e-books everywhere. Our job at Sharing-Books is to make our authors e-books available on as many device types as possible. The illustrator's challenge will be to draw in a way that is flexible and adaptative.
• E-books present different opportunities. Paper children books sometimes have pop-up features or pull features that work for some time and then are usually damaged by the children. E-books will offer more flexibility for the creative mind. Click on the cow in the picture and see information about cows or hear the cow moo. We are excited to see what our creators will come up with.
• E-books can become paper books. On demand printing will be the norm and the reader will be able to customize the printed copy. No waste and a great marketing opportunity.
• E-books offer great opportunities for teachers. E-Books are free or at least they save money. The majority of teachers end up spending their own funds to supplement school materials. As we advance Sharing-Books will be able to offer teachers tools to integrate books, questionnaires and lessons in coherent programs that will use the capabilities of the devices the children use to read.
• E-books offer great opportunities for students. E-books are free. Voracious readers will never run out of material to read.
• E-books are much easier to convert into formats friendly to the visually impaired or the learning challenged.
• E-books' world wide and free accessibility will help bridge the knowledge gap between developed and developing nations. This means that we will also have better access to literature form authors from developing nations and that they will be able to benefit from their exposure to developed nations markets. This will be the literature version of free-trade coffee.

We do not have complete answers to all the changes described above but we prefer to see them as opportunities for imaginative solutions and innovations.

Already after only a few months in business, we have seen one of our authors Jennifer Poulter come up with the idea of the one page book. Jennifer collaborates with illustrators to create poster-poems that can be downloaded and printed by teachers who get an instant vocabulary lesson for their class. Jennifer received a number of testimonials from enthusiastic teachers.

We have a number of our own innovations in development but we are anticipating that our authors, illustrators and users will continue to come up with great ideas - many better than our own.

Indeed the answer to the question to E or not to E, is to E.

Labels: children books, content, e-books, marketing, publishing, reading

A thank you to all the authors, illustrators, editors, creators, PDF makers, and go-getters who got their books uploaded to the site by the 31st of January, 2009. You guys did some great work, and though they all may not have shown up on the site quite yet, we have a bunch of books under review and getting ready to roll out.

Thank you all for your work!

To everyone who found and had any problems getting their work on the site, thank you for your patience. Hopefully our emails to you were clear enough to follow! We're taking all the feedback and planning some changes down the road to streamline things, and make the whole process easier and smoother for everyone involved.

Over the next month or so I am hoping to put together some blog posts that are basic tutorials on how to get your work up on the site, and how to deal with the standard questions that creators were sending me as they uploaded work for the contest.

The next phase for everyone who's uploaded their work as of the 31st is to get out there and get people reading your work, spreading your brand, and voting on your books! We've provided the place for your work, a showcase online, and the next phase is all about getting your brand to spread. Thanks again for all your work everyone!

Labels: content, contest, thanks