• They’re “push” technology: Instead of waiting for a reader to visit your blog, or check their RSS reader, you “push” newsletters directly into readers’ email inboxes. Since most people check their email daily (at least!) there’s a good chance they’ll read your newsletter the day you send it (or shortly thereafter).
• You build a list: You have a record of the email addresses — and often the name and other information, such as location — of your newsletter readers. This is valuable information for anyone with some marketing savvy; most importantly, it means you can always reach the readers most important to you.
• You have pretty exact numbers: It can be hard to analyze website logs to determine how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing there. Are unique visitors more important, or daily hits, or time spent on site? How do you put it all together? With email newsletters, you have numbers that are more like a magazines subscription count: while you can’t be positive the people who get the newsletter are reading it, you know exactly how many are getting it.

Use Feedburner to Create Your Newsletter

The easiest way to set up a newsletter is to use Feedburner’s email service. Feedburner is an RSS feed service, but they can take the content of your RSS feed (which is generated automatically by most blogging sites’ software) and send it via email. They handle the signups and confirmations, providing a sign-up form you can embed on your site, and will auto-generate a newsletter whenever there’s new content in your feed.

You can use Feedburner to simply recreate your blog in email form — every time you post, your list will get a copy of the post via email. Since only a small percentage of websurfers really “get” RSS, this provides a way to turn first-time visitors into regular readers. You can customize the header of your newsletter with a logo, and include ads in your newsletters if you want.

With very little work, you could also create a specialized newsletter “channel”, offering premium or bonus content in addition to your blog — or instead of blogging at all. In WordPress, you can easily set up a category of posts that don’t get published to the front page, and generate category-specific feeds (they’re at “http://yoursitename.com/category/categoryname/feed” for each category). Create a “newsletter” category, and feed its URL to Feedburner. If you’d like to send newsletters out on a specific day, simply schedule all your posts to be published on that day using the WordPress “Schedule” function. On the allotted day, Feedburner will collect all the posts from your RSS feed, apply your custom formatting and header, and generate a table of contents that will appear at the top of your newsletter.

And here’s the kicker — your commission ranges from 4% to 8.5%, which means that, depending on how many sales you achieve and what your agreement with your publisher is, you may end up making more from Amazon sales than you do from your royalties! Look:

Royalties: If you sell a book at $19.99, and get 5% of the wholesale price (usually 60% of the cover price), you’ll make .05 x .60 x $19.99 = $0.60. If you sell 100 copies, you’ll make $60 in royalties.
Amazon Associates: The same book might be marked down at Amazon to $15.99. If you sell one copy, you get 4% of 15.99, which is $0.64. If you sell 100 books, your commission is 6.5%, which nets you $1.04 per copy, or $104 for 100 books. Of course, you still get royalties on those books, too.

To create a link, you can log into your Amazon Associates account and select from dozens of “Widgets”, including ones that will scan your page and automatically create banners targeted towards the keywords on your page (it’s called Omakase). I don’t generally like their widgets, though they’re ok as ads to run in your site’s sidebar. Usually, I create links manually, by adding my associate ID to the end of the URL for a product page. Here’s how:

1. Search for a product. For illustration, we’ll use my book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War.
2. Go to the product’s main page and copy it’s URL. For my book, it’s: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203705368&sr=8–1
3. See that string of numbers after the title and before where it says “ref=pd_bbs_sr_1…”? We only need the link up to there, so cut everything after the slash.
4. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/
5. That’s enough to find the book with, but it doesn’t have my associate ID attached yet. My associate ID code is “dwax-20″, and I’ll just add it to the end — Amazon is really good at picking out your associates ID.
6. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/dwax-20. Clicking that link will take you to the exact same page, but I’ll get credit if you buy the book. In fact, I’ll get credit if you decide not to buy it and buy something else, instead, as long as you entered the site using my link.

Barnes and Noble also has an affiliate program, if you prefer working with them for whatever reason. I find Amazon’s to be far more useful (in terms of providing value to website visitors) but in the end, it’s links to books — and whichever company you feel offers the best combination of value and compensation should get your traffic. Borders recently “divorced” Amazon, launching it’s own online bookstore after several years of fulfilling orders through Amazon. Their affiliate program, then, is only just getting off the ground, but if you prefer Borders, that’s the way to go.

Use your affiliate link wherever you promote your book — on your website, in your email signature, on forums, anywhere you can paste a link. Obviously the vast majority of your sales will not come from you telling people where to find your book, but if you’re an active promoter, a significant number of sales will come from your link, which will be a nice bonus above your regular royalties — and you won’t have to wait a year to collect, either.

Signing up is a little tricky. You have to have an Amazon account, which is easy enough — who doesn’t have one, these days? Once you’ve logged in on the Amazon Connect page, it will send you an email to verify your email address. You click the link, return to Amazon Connect, and continue. You’ll have to “claim” your books — you can claim anything you’re the author of or have a chapter in, from what I understand. This is handled using a nifty little search bar — search your name, and click “add” to claim which ever titles in the results are yours.

Here’s the tricky part — you need a third party — an agent, a publisher, or an editor — to verify your “ownership” of the title. Once you’ve added a title, there’s a little “Select verifier” button; clicking it brings up a form to add your verifier’s contact information — name, company, email, and phone. I chose my editor. They’ll contact your verifier (hint: your verifier might not know about Amazon Connect, so best to tip them off to expect to hear from Amazon) and once you’ve been vouched for, you’re ready to go.

Now, here’s something nice: you can add your blog’s RSS feed! Which means your latest posts on your blog will appear on Amazon — which is nice for me, since I talk about my work a lot in my personal blog (dwax.org, if you care). Of course, if you post stuff on your site that would be out of place on Amazon — maybe you write erotica and children’s books, and keep an erotica blog — it might be a bad idea to use your blog’s feed… You can still add posts directly to your page from inside Amazon, whether or not you also import your blog posts.

It takes a while to verify your account, but you can log into your profile page and start adding pictures, a bio, and even posts immediately (although posts won’t show up until your account is verified). If you’re self-published, check with your printer or publishing service to see if there’s someone there who can verify your authorship — I’m not sure exactly how that works (if anyone’s had any luck with that, let me know in the comments).

Amazon Connect seems like a great deal for published writers — although naturally it only allows you to reach out to Amazon shoppers. I don’t know if other online book stores will follow suit, but if they do, hopefully they’ll all allow you to import posts from your blog’s RSS feed. I could see setting up a new blog for each book and feeding posts to several online bookstores from that single point. I can’t see logging into several different bookstores on anything like a regular basis and creating new posts for all of them — sounds like a logistical nightmare. That said, it might be what’s needed, since few publishers offer much in the way of marketing these days except to their top sellers. Since Amazon is clearly the #1 online bookseller, a little effort there might go a long ways towards making up for the lack of marketing from your publisher.

Note: I know that many authors are upset with Amazon over their poor treatment of self-publishers. Some are boycotting Amazon and focusing on B&N or Borders to promote their work. I’m sympathetic to that cause, but if you have a traditionally-published book, you can’t afford to ignore Amazon sales. If Borders or B&N offer a similar service, I’d recommend using theirs, too, but Amazon is, as far as I can tell, the only one to offer something like this.

Fortunately, musicians know that the labels are all screwed up in the way they handle licensing. For many musicians, the publicity they could get from their songs being played on a podcast far outweighs the couple of dollars they might make from a licensing deal. So they’ve created a new category of music licensed especially for use in podcasts, called “podsafe music”.

There are several places on the Internet where you can download music to use in your podcast. Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network and Podsafe Audio are good sources with thousands of choices, arranged by genre, and artist. In most cases they ask only that you mention the artist, title, and the source of the song; some sites and artists ask that you let them know where they can find their songs being used, which seems like a nice thing to do in any case.

You could also record your own music, if you’re at all musically inclined. Either way, adding music to your podcast is fairly simple, using multi-track software like the free, open source program Audacity. What you’ll do is record the music and voice as two separate tracks. To do this, drag the song’s file into the Audacity window. The program will process for a moment and then a new track will appear with a waveform image of the song (showing the relative volume of each moment of the song).

Once the song is in place, you can crop it down to just the parts you want to use (highlight the part you want to keep and select “Edit > Trim” from the top menu). Then create a new track (“Project > New Audio Track”) and record the spoken part of your podcast (using the big “Record” button at the top — it’s the circular button with the red dot in it).

When you’ve recorded your spoken parts, select the “Time Shift Tool” — it’s the button at the top left that looks like a two-headed arrow) and you can click-and-drag your music to where you want it to appear — under your voice, maybe, or at the end of the show, or in a break. If you want more than one selection of music, you can keep adding new tracks by dragging in audio files, trimming them, and dragging them into place.

To make it sound really nice, you can adjust the volume of each track separately — there is a control (marked only “-” at one end and “+” at the other) on the left-hand end of each track. You can also add fade-ins and fade-outs, which are especially useful for the music that ends the show — click the button at the top-left with the icon that looks like an “I”, highlight the piece of music you want to add a fade-out to (or just the last 10 seconds or so), and select “Effect > Fade Out” from the top menu. To do a fade-in, do exactly the same thing but select “Effect > Fade-In” instead.

You can also cut parts you don’t like; just highlight them and select “Cut” from the “edit” menu. If you’re really patient, you can go through and edit out coughs, sneezes, and the inevitable “umms” and “uhhs” that creep in — you have to zoom in (using the button that looks like a magnifying glass) and listen carefully for the start and end of the piece you want to silence — highlight it and select “Generate > Silence” from the top menu.

Audacity has tons of features that are used by professional musicians to make their work sound better; you can play with it for a long time, discovering new effects and developing a cleaner, more polished sound. But the basics here are pretty much enough — as I said at the start of this series, people don’t seem to care all that much about the sound quality of podcasts, as long as it’s clear — what matters is what you have to say. For now, at least, people are very forgiving about podcasts, and a little bit of roughness around the edges seems to be reassuring. We listen to podcasts to hear ordinary people talk about their lives and passions; when we want slick, highly produced voices, we turn to professional radio.

A lot of fiction authors read their own work, either a short story or poem per episode, or a chapter of a longer work. There’s even a website, PodioBooks, devoted solely to author readings of their novels in serialized form. This might be a problem if you plan to later sell your work, as some publishers may balk at paying for work that’s already available for free online, but a few authors have managed it very well. Or you might choose to podcast work that you don’t intend for publication — and later collect that work for publication when you’re better established.

If you don’t write fiction, or just don’t feel like reading your work aloud, you can talk about topics related to your niche. Review books in your genre, or interview other authors, or talk about the writing process. Talk about news in your area of interest. Describe the places you traveled, or the people you’ve met, while researching your latest feature article.

You can think of a podcast as an audio (or video) blog — whatever you might blog about, you can podcast about. It’s probably not a good idea to simply read your latest blog posts; try to add something in your podcast your audience can’t get in your blog. But if you can add something to what you’ve blogged, it’s not a bad idea to use the podcast to expand the stories.

One thing to keep in mind is that podcasting is a very intimate medium, and just like talk radio, people value the interactivity of it. Make sure you give out an email address and tell your listeners that you value their feedback. You could also get a toll-free number and ask your listeners to leave you voicemail; Kall8 offers a personal toll-free number with lots of features for only $2 a month. Make sure you read your emails and play your voicemails on the show. And for the ultimate interactivity, use a service like BlogTalkRadio and take callers live on the air!

There are plenty of services that will host your files, though; Libsyn is a good choice that offers a lot of features, starting at $5 US a month. Another good choice is WordPress.com, whose free accounts allow you to store up to 3GB of files; you could have your podcast and notes on each episode at yourname.wordpress.com and just post the RSS link at your main site.

Now that it’s available, you want to start telling people about it. Mention it on your site, of course, but also make sure your podcast gets listed in the big podcast directories. The most important is iTunes; there’s a “Submit a Podcast” link in the podcast section of iTunes. Zune software also has a “Submit a Podcast” link in the podcast section. Just cut and paste your podcast’s feed address where instructed. For both iTunes and Zune, you need to have downloaded and installed the software here: iTunes and Zune. Note that you don’t need to own an iPod or Zune to use their software — iTunes works especially wll as a player and directory on your computer.

You should also submit your podcast feed to the big online directories, such as PodcastPickle and Podcast Directory. These are online sites that have built large communities of podcasters and podcast fans; they don’t require extra software. Again, find the link to “submit your podcast” (or something similar — each site is different) and cut and paste your site’s podcast feed address where directed.

Another option — especially if you want to do interviews or have more than one host — is to use Skype and a program designed to record Skype calls. This page lists several software options. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any free software for this task yet. Or you can use a service like BlogTalkRadio to record podcasts using your telephone (you can even take live callers!) — BTR is free.

Video podcasts are a little trickier — you could use a webcam, but for real quality, you’ll need to use a video recorder that can download onto your computer. Most computers today come with rudimentary video editing software that should be fine for putting together your show.

20 years later, it’s almost embarrassingly easy to broadcast your voice to hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands, using the power of the Internet. If you have something to say, it’s almost trivially easy to put together and distribute a podcast — and you can get started for practically nothing.

At its root, a podcast is just an RSS feed with audio or video files attached. Your listeners or viewers copy the RSS feed’s address into their podcast software, which automatically downloads each episode as it’s released and moves it onto their portable media player — an iPod, a Zune, or some other mp3 or video player.

To make one, all that’s necessary is a way to record yourself, a website to host the files and the feed, and… well, that’s it. You don’t need a deep “radio” voice or special broadcasting personality; what makes podcasts popular is the direct, one-on-one feel, their “homespun” qualities. Professional-sounding podcasts don’t do significantly better than amateur’s efforts — what’s important is that you say something worth listening to, not how you say it.

Doesn’t make sense on the face of it, does it? How can sending people away from your site build traffic to your site?

Well, there are several ways linking to other sites can help build up traffic for your own.

1. Outbound links add value: If you post a link and explain why the site or page you’re linking to will be important to your readers, you’ve just done them a favor. They’ll remember how useful your site is.
2. Links let them know you’re there: When someone clicks a link on your site, your web address shows up in the referral log (a list of every site that’s sent traffic to a site) of the site you’ve linked to. If they start noticing a lot of traffic from your site, they’ll eventually come check it out, and hopefully become readers.
3. They’ll link back: The urge to return favors is strong in every human society. When someone notices you’ve linked to them, they may very well link back to you. If they have a lot of traffic, that’s a lot of people finding out about your site.

There are some ground rules, here. 1) Link to sites or articles that are really useful for your readers. 2) Link to sites or articles that you’ve read. 3) Don’t let your site become only links to other sites — this is common in sites that have run out of new things to say. 4) If you notice someone’s linked to you, link back to them — if they’re useful to your readers. 5) Don’t trawl for links — it’s unseemly.

Now’s as good a time as any to cover how to link to another site. If you’re using the visual editor in WordPress (it works like a word processor, with buttons for formatting text and other operations), click the button that looks like a chain link; if you’re in the code editor (where you write HTML code directly), click the “link” button. In both cases a window will pop up asking you to insert the URL of the link and the text you want your readers to click on.

If you’re writing HTML code directly, you use the anchor tag, <a>, to link out. The anchor tag looks like this: <a href=“http://www.dwax.org”>Dustin’s website</a>. “<a>” tells the browser it’s an anchor tag, “href” tells it what site to link to. You’ll insert the URL, with the “http://” at the beginning, where I have the URL for my site. Don’t forget the quotes. Replace “Dustin’s website” with whatever text you want your readers to see. The “</a>” closes the tag.

Common problems:

• The link doesn’t do anything: Check to make sure the URL is in quotes and has the “http://” part at the beginning.
• The link goes to an error page: Make sure the URL is correct and the page you’re linking to is still there.
• The whole paragraph is a link, now: Make sure you added the closing tag, </a>.

The Writer’s Technology Companion Desk-Side Guide To… Writing Ebooks Covers the technical ins-and-outs of writing, formatting, distributing, and promoting ebooks. (12pp plus front matter)

Download [PDF: 312Kb]

I’ve also added an “Ebooks” page to the site. I have several 5-part series in the works, and aim to release at least one a month. I’ve decided that I am going to try to release each of these series as a free ebook after the posts run on the site, and the whole collection will be available from the “Ebooks” page.

I have been thinking about making these ebooks available as physical books through a print-on-demand service like CafePress. However, in order to cover the publishers’ base price, I’d have to price what are going to be really slim volumes at $5 or $6 US — way too much, especially when you add shipping, for such little books. But if I can work out a way to do that — maybe by putting together a “Writer’s Technology Companion Omnibus Edition”, I’ll add that option to the “Ebooks” page.

A note: Despite my best efforts, I managed to munge the base file for the ebook up pretty bad, so there’s a few typos I couldn’t fix (three, that I know of). Considering my own advice to proofread thoroughly, that’s pretty embarrassing — I hope you’ll forgive me my transgressions!