Produced by the owners of a bookstore in Toronto, this stop-motion video was filmed during many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at their bookstore. Enjoy.

If you sell digital books and are actively increasing or seeking to increase the worldwide sale of your ebooks, I would suggest that you consider a service that provides a digital goods ecommerce platform in addition to having your ebooks listed in online retail stores.

With a digital goods ecommerce service, you can still host your books on your website, but sales and fulfillment are made through the digital sales service. This service store your book files, collect the payment when a book is sold, and send a unique link for the download to each customer (helping to reduce piracy).

Two services to consider are PayLoadz and Kagi. Both of these services basically provide the same platform; however, they do differ on pricing. PayLoadz charges a monthly maintenance fee and then takes a lower percentage cut of each sale, while Kagi does not charge a monthly maintenance fee, but takes a higher percentage cut of each sale. Each service also places your product in their online store as well as allowing you to sell directly from your website, Facebook, and other online places you have a presence.

Using one of the digital ecommerce platforms to sell your ebooks has a few benefits:

1. You don’t have to worry about collecting sales tax or value-added taxes or even staying abreast of these laws. The service does this for you.
2. You don’t have to spend time fulfilling your ebook sales.
3. These services offer the most secure platform to deliver ebook sales to customers, decreasing piracy and the number of stolen ebook files.

If 2012 is the year you want to increase the worldwide sales of your ebooks, maybe it’s time you checked out these services.

In this interview, Dan talks about writing and the importance of making sure what you write is truth. Good advice for all writers, but especially for you who seek to advance God’s Kingdom through your books.

World Book Night is a fascinating idea. It is a campaign that hopes to distribute one million free books across America all in one day—April 23, 2012.

You read that right. World Book Night is giving away one million books on April 23, 2012, in an effort to get more people to read.

To accomplish this, the campaign is seeking 50,000 volunteer book lovers to distribute the books on April 23, 2012.

Organizers of the event have said, “We want the book givers to reach out to new or light readers, especially in underserved places like nursing homes, schools, hospitals, and poor neighborhoods, but also in public gathering places like coffee shops and malls. And by offering a range of fiction, nonfiction, and books for teens, we believe we have great books that the givers will be passionate about handing out and that will appeal to a wide audience of potential new readers.”

Volunteers will give away books from 30 titles chosen by a panel of judges. Looking at the list of titles (which you can view here), not one of these books is a Christian book.

I think that World Book Night is a laudable idea. Giving away books to encourage people to read and promote literacy in the United States is wonderful. Here comes my but…

Think how much more powerful an impact World Book Night would have if, instead of just giving away one million free books that encouraged people to read, it gave away books that also had an eternal impact on people.

Maybe someone in the Christian community will start an Eternal World Book Night. Now, that would be awesome.

Here is how Pay with a Tweet works. To gain exposure for your new (or old) book via social media (Twitter or Facebook), you offer a teaser version of your book for the price of a tweet or post. People pay for the teaser version of your book by telling their friends on either Twitter or Facebook about your book. After tweeting or posting, the reader gets to download a copy of the teaser version of your book.

With this system, readers get new material and you gain more exposure for your new book.

Authors and Publishers can use the Pay with a Tweet service to create a “Pay with a Tweet” button to use for promoting the book and allowing people to purchase the teaser version of your book with a tweet (or post).

Watch this video to learn more about how Pay with a Tweet works.

In the first six months of operation, BookCrash had 150 bloggers sign up to review books. I decided to take the time and compile some statistics from the program to date.

One of the questions a BookCrash reviewer answers is whether they prefer a review copy of the book in ebook or print format. To date, only 13% of BookCrash’s blogger reviewers have indicated that they prefer an ebook version to a print version.

CSPA member publishers have the ability to specify whether they want to offer review copies of their books in print or ebook format, or a combination of both. Thus far, 28% of the books offered have been made available only in ebook format for review.

What I found most interesting is that, on average, the books that were offered as ebook only for review received only one-half the requests for review copies compared to those books that were offered in print or a combination of print and ebook format. The books offered in ebook only format do not differ significantly in genre from the other books offered.

Here is what this data suggests for me. All things being equal, when given a choice of a free book in print or ebook format, people prefer the print book.

The question I can’t answer is “why?” Is it because a print book still has a higher inherent value than an ebook? Is it because one can’t easily give an ebook away when done reading it? Or, is it because the majority of people still prefer to read print books?

What do you think?

Groupon, Living Social, and other daily deal services all allow businesses to target a city with their deals. This strategy does not work well for publishers. Books readers fit profiles better than geographical locations. In other words, some people read romance, some read history, others read memoirs, and others prefer Christian living materials. Targeting San Francisco, California, with a deal for a new book for Christian women will not garner the same response that targeting Christian women who read across the country would.

Enter Jellybooks.

Believing that many truly great books never appear on a best-seller list, Andrew Rhomberg decided to combine a book discovery sharing tool with Groupon-like deals to help people find great, but possibly obscure books. To this end, he is developing a new service called Jellybooks.

Set to launch in the Spring of 2012, Jellybooks will initially be offered only in the United Kingdom. Andrew hopes to have it running in over a dozen countries by the end of 2012.

In brief, Jellybooks will allow users to find books that look interesting. Publishers will place samples of new books (the first 10% of the book) on Jellybooks. Once people have started browsing, downloading, and sharing, Jellybooks will use the information it gathers to offer users special 50-percent off “Sweet Deals” on books that fit well with their choices so far. Publishers will nominate books to be Sweet Deals. These deals can be used to give a book a second wind six to nine months after publication, to promote a previous title when an author has a new publication, to expose readers to a first book in a series, or to sell bundles of back-list titles.

Jellybooks sounds like the type of coupon service the publishing industry needs. I sure hope that it gets off the ground this spring and becomes a useful tool for readers, authors, and publishers.

Many big publishers have adopted the agency-pricing model (where publishers set the price of the ebook, not the retailer) in rebellion against Amazon’s $9.99 pricing strategy for ebooks. Publishers were scared that Amazon could gain control of pricing and then continue to drive ebook prices down, eventually paying less to publishers and decreasing their profits. As a result, many publishers are now pricing the ebook version of a new book only slightly lower than the price of the print version. For example, Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Steve Jobs sells for $14.99 in the ebook version and $17.40 in the hardcover edition.

Interestingly, some experts are claiming that by increasing ebook prices, publishers have slowed the ebook market growth. However, it appears that this may not be true.

One market research firm, Yankee Group, found that, on the whole, ebook prices are falling. They report that “the average price of a consumer digital book had fallen to $8.19 by the end of 2011 from $9.23 in 2009.” This firm also forecasts that the average ebook prices will drop to $7 from the current $9 over the 2012 year.

Whether ebook prices rise or fall, I highly doubt that higher ebook prices will slow the growth of digital reading significantly. After all, digital reading is not just about price. It is about a new way to easily store and read books. eBook sales have grown and are still growing. The Yankee Group expects ebook sales to be 4 times higher by 2013 then they were in 2010.

If these conflicting reports leave you wondering what the best price for the digital version of your next title should be, take heart. There is no new hard and fast rule for pricing ebooks. I believe the old rule is still valid. Price your book within the price range of its competing titles. Pricing it significantly lower or higher than similar titles will curtail your sales.

One great way to stay abreast of the trends in publishing and selling books, to better understand your competition, and to stay up-to-date with rules and regulations for publishing books is to join a professional association.

If you want to take your publishing efforts to new levels in 2012, I encourage you to join Christian Small Publishers Association (CSPA). CSPA exists to represent, promote, and strengthen small publishers in the Christian marketplace.

In addition to providing our members with vital information, CSPA also offers affordable avenues to help you promote your books.  A full list of membership benefits is listed on our website.

Member publishers of CSPA often tell us how helpful they find the information and services that we provide. Here are a few of their comments:

“Thank you for CSPA—it is the best single asset I have as a Christian publisher, bar none.” —Joseph

“The newsletter for the Christian Small Publishers Association is worth the price of membership all by itself—we get gems from every issue. Thanks for what you are doing for the industry!” —Melanie

“As a new member, we have been extremely impressed with both the professionalism and the breadth of services from the CPSA. We are just getting started as a company and you have been a huge help.” —Tim

Joining CSPA is now as easy as 1-2-3.

1. Go to the URL www.christianpublishers.net.
2. Click on “Become a Member.”
3. Fill out the online form and then either pay the $75 annual membership dues with the PayPal link, or mail us a check for $75.

I wish you much success with publishing and selling books in 2012.

With so much marketing emphasis on social media and mobile these days, it is easy to abandon older technology in favor of the new. Here is a word of caution. Older friends are gold, while newer friends are silver.

I think the same applies to marketing. Social media is silver. However, the older marketing techniques such as email blasts, mail campaigns, and good old fashioned in-person promoting and selling of books are still gold. Don’t throw them away.

BookBrowse, a website all about secular books, recently completed a survey of its 3,400 member reading audience. Here is part of what they found out:

• 65% regularly use social networking sites, ranging from 95% penetration among 18-34 year olds, to 37% for those aged over 75.
• Facebook dominates, followed by GoodReads. LibraryThing, and Shelfari trail.
• Even though two-thirds use social networking, only 25% use it to keep up with websites. E-mail remains the preferred vehicle to stay in touch.

I think the last point means that readers still rely on email to stay up-to-date with the companies they like. While they may be fans of these companies on Facebook, they still prefer to receive emails alerting them to new products, specials, etc.

Email is still gold. Don’t abandon it yet. Use it to keep your customers and potential customers informed about your books, your authors’ events, and any sales or specials you are running.