Think your book would make a great Christmas gift? Being featured in a holiday gift guide could give your book sales a nice year-end bump. But you have to think ahead.

The following guest post from Corinne Liccketto of Smith Publicity offers more information.

5 Tips for Submitting Your Book to a Holiday Gift Guide

by Corinne Liccketto, Smith Publicity

If you’re interested in having your book placed in holiday gift guides, late August to early September is the time to pitch. If you wait too long, you’ll miss your chance.

Here are five tips for submitting your book to holiday gift guides:

1. Know your desired outlets and their submission guidelines. List the outlets for which you’re most interested in securing coverage and determine their submission guidelines. In most cases, along with a copy of your book, you’ll want to send a personalized cover letter, book release and author bio. Make sure you follow the guidelines! Editors won’t waste time digging up needed information on their own.
2. Know when to pitch. Deadlines are crucial. Pitch too early and your book will be forgotten; pitch too late and you won’t even be considered. Armed with your list, research the deadline dates of your most desired outlets. Magazines will likely need submissions by August (early September at the latest), whereas newspapers may require submission only two months before the holiday season. Don’t pitch every outlet at once because it’s easier for you that way. Respect the media’s deadline dates or you run the risk of annoying editors and ruining your chance at inclusion.
3. Donate a portion of your holiday sales to charity. Not only is giving back the right thing to do, but by donating a portion of your proceeds to charity you increase the appeal of your product. Media contacts can plug the cause your product benefits, giving the charity extra coverage too. It’s win-win.
4. Position your book as a ‘great gift under $30′. Or $20. Or $15. Whatever the price of your book, use it as a hook when you submit for consideration. By encouraging awareness of the cost of your book, you might inspire the editor to include your book in a featured section of the holiday gift guide.
5. Give a reason why your book is different than others. Does your book recap a hot trend of 2010? Is it eco-friendly? Telling editors why your book is different from others will give it an edge.

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Corinne Liccketto is the Sales Manager at Smith Publicity, Inc., one of the world’s leading promotional firms, specializing in book publicity. Fueled by a passion for making good things happen for clients, the company has worked with over 900 individuals and companies, from authors and entrepreneurs to publicly-held companies and businesses representing a wide range of industries. The Smith Publicity reach is international with offices in New Jersey, New York City, Los Angeles, and London.

Have a book you want to promote? A tool from author Jenny Blake just might be your new best friend.

Here’s how Blake describes it:

When I was getting ready to launch my own book, Life After College, I knew I needed a way to track the hundreds of book promotion action items and ideas floating around in my head — everything from website development to book tour planning to advance copy recipient lists, so I created a 15-tab master spreadsheet as a way of organizing the hundreds of things an author thinks about on the road to book launch.

This is one amazing resource — and it’s free. You can download a copy of the Book Marketing Spreadsheet from Blake’s website.

Last month, New York-based author Andrew Kessler opened a bookstore, as in, a store with one book — his own.

“The store is part marketing ploy, to be sure (Mr. Kessler is a creative director at an advertising agency), but also part meditation on the meaning of the book in an age of e-readers and a bankrupt Borders.”

Now that’s what we call specialization.

On the self-publishing journey, there’s the production of your book and there’s the marketing of your book. Two separate things, right?

Nope!

How you create your book will have an impact on your marketing efforts. If you miss an important registration detail, fail to follow an industry norm or make it difficult for readers to find you, your marketing becomes that much more difficult.

While producing a great book doesn’t automatically guarantee sales success, a book with sloppy production values is hobbled right out of the gate. Here are some tips for building success into your book from the beginning.

Spend time on the title
Coming up with a great title isn’t easy, but it’s worth working on. Too many first-time authors try cramming a 25-word synopsis of their book into the title. They end up with titles that are insufferably long, hard to understand and impossible to remember. Yawn. Titles are usually very short, sometimes just one or two catchy words. The subtitle then picks up the job of describing the book in a bit more detail—but still use only five to eight words or so.

Hire a professional designer
People really do judge a book by its cover, even when it’s just a thumbnail. Whether people are browsing a shelf at their local bookstore or clicking through Amazon.com, whether they spy a copy of your book on a friend’s coffee table or reach your website from a tweet, the first they’ll see of your book is the cover. So much rests on the image your cover conveys that it’s foolish to risk a poor impression. Hire an experienced professional to design it. Can’t afford it? You can’t afford not to.

Register your book
Every book needs an ISBN. (Without one, you can’t even sell through Amazon.) Also register your book with your national library, whether that’s the Library of Congress or the National Library of Canada, and invest in having Cataloguing-in-Publication data created. These registrations ensure your book looks professional and is discoverable.

Remember the formula: If p, then e
Despite what you may read, print books aren’t in danger of disappearing anytime soon. Plus, print books still work best as gifts or client premiums; having something tangible to hand out is crucial to making the right impression. So it makes sense, most of the time, to plan on a print edition. Just don’t overlook e-books altogether. It’s so easy and inexpensive to spin off an electronic edition from print files that it should be an automatic part of every author’s publishing process. The more ways people can access your book, the greater the chance of a sale.

Edit your book well
Editing is last on the list, not because it’s least important, but because it supports everything else. You can have an outstanding title, a kick-ass cover and multiple available formats, but if people read your book and find the content stinks, you won’t go far.

• Fill your non-fiction book with helpful information, not promotional copy. People don’t want to pay money to read a long brochure.
• Keep it tight. If you can tell readers how to solve a problem in 200 pages instead of 300 pages, do it. If you can explain the topic in 100 pages, consider a shorter format, like a Kindle Single. Avoid padding just to hit a page count.
• Watch your stale date. A book is no small project so it’s best to create a product you can sell for years to come. As much as you can, avoid information that changes frequently. Instead, focus on timeless principles and point people to your website for information that needs regular updating.
• Hire a professional editor. In fact, hire a couple. At Highspot, we employ up to four different editors on each book because we know that fresh eyes at every stage of the process—from developmental editing through copyediting and printer’s proofs—help us catch more mistakes.

When self-publishing, it pays to think about your book like a traditional publisher: how can you get the best return on your investment? In a hypercompetitive market, give your book a fighting chance with top-notch production values, then market it as the great product you know it be.

A number of years ago, I attended my very first country auction. It was so exciting to listen to the auctioneer and watch the flurry of bidding on each item. I decided to bid on an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1907—and I won it!

Cosmopolitan magazine in 1907 wasn’t like the Cosmo of today. It was a family magazine full of short stories, essays, investigative journalism, and genteel illustrations. One thing it does share with its modern day counterpart, however, is its abundance of advertising.

As I flipped through the ads, I was struck by how many of them offered information enticements to drive business. With the advent of e-books, downloadable reports, digital audio, and all the other modern methods of information delivery, it’s easy to forget that marketing a business with knowledge products has been around for a long time.

Booklets, books, and magazines were a staple of marketing back then, and the same principles still work now. Take a look and see what 100-year-old lessons you can draw from them.

Click on any thumbnail to enlarge and read the ad.

Money Matters
A brilliant ad from start to finish, it offers a $1 book for free. A dollar was a lot of money in 1907. Pay attention to the use of testimonials, the list of subjects covered (an early version of the bullet point lists so common today) and the closing paragraph:

“Not like any other book ever published…can be had from no other source…This book is not an advertisement…”

Six Months Free
This enterprising fellow started a magazine that he sent for free for the first 6 months. Why do you think he would do that? This is the 1907 version of a free e-zine. Check out the personal branding with the large photo of the author.

“…every issue is filled with interesting, helpful articles…”

Chicken Sense
Here are two ads offering information products about the poultry business. The first charges 15 cents for a 220-page book on the care and feeding of chickens, but the text is pretty blah. The second book is free for the price of postage but — here’s the pitch — describes the publisher’s 30 varieties of chickens available for purchase.

Excellent Opportunities to YOU
“Make big money” ads have been around for a very long time. This one promises hefty earnings in real estate and offers a 62-page book for free to tell you all about it.

How This Was Done
Another “make big money” ad and another offer for a free book.

Only Brainy, Steadfast Students, Please
Advertising as a profession was still in its infancy at the turn of the last century yet 100 years later good copywriters are still in demand. I love this line from the seventh paragraph:

“Powell graduates are preferred all along the line to the theoretical ad writers of the old-fogy school plan. “

So there, old fogies!

Look for the offer of two free books in the last paragraph.

What do you think? Is there anything 21st-century knowledge product marketers can learn from these antique ads?

Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar is releasing his autobiography in February. But this isn’t just any old memoir.

It measures about 18″ square, weighs 81 pounds, and runs 852 pages edged in gold leaf. Oh, and it also contains Tendulkar’s blood. You read that right. Actual drops of Tendulkar’s blood will be mixed with the paper pulp to create a red resin.

Only 10 copies of the special blood edition will be created, and each one is priced at US $75,000. They’re already sold out.

A second run of 1,000 autographed copies — no blood — will be priced at $2,000 – $3,000. The rest of the crowd will be able to purchase a plain copy for the bargain price of $200 – $300.

We’ve noted before how, in publishing, scarce=special=valuable. This may just be the ultimate example.

The days of having just a traditional PR person pitching you as an expert are long past. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the old mass pitching methods of fax, spam mail, and phone do not see the uptake they once did.

More than 50% of journalists and bloggers are freelancers. It’s vitally important to remember they are actively on the hunt for the next great story because that’s how they’ll get paid!

That next great story could be YOU.

As a longtime journalist turned online visibility strategist I’ve seen many of my clients apply the power of their social media content to connect directly with journalists and secure media coverage.

Here are five tips on how to use your blog content to garner media attention.

1. Set up Google news alerts that match your expertise and respond to at least one major media article that comes through those alerts on a weekly basis. Link to the article in a blog post, and give additional insight from your perspective to the article’s topic. Don’t be snarky. Give actionable insight.
2. Subscribe to three e-newsletters from publications that cover your topic. When you get those e-newsletters, read through them to see if there’s a wonderful article you can cite in your own blog. Again, give your take on the article. (Extra tip: After you’ve made your blog post, go to the site where the original article appears and leave a comment. Always comment authentically, not just to get a link back to your site.)
3. Be a news breaker. Offline PR people spend hours scanning the news and trying to determine how their clients can comment on breaking events. You can do the same by monitoring media stories and using your blog to comment as things happen. If you’re a fiction writer, for instance, you might keep up with the latest sales in fiction and share your insights with your readers.
4. Don’t leave out the local and regional. Too often we’re focused only on national blogs, media, and coverage. Once in a while, blog “close to home” by sharing some local insight or linking to your local paper. You’ll begin to catch the local media’s attention. Imagine if your local paper is The Washington Post and the editor is scanning blogs for local folks to comment on business stories.
5. Stop waiting for just the right blog-bite. The longer you wait to start sharing your insight on your blog, the more the competition will outpace you. Take 30 minutes today and write up 10 things you know that you could effectively comment on to the media. Start building some content around those topics on your blog.

You will succeed!

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For more tips on how to use social media to promote your book and garner media coverage, join Highspot for a free teleclass with Nettie Hartsock on September 28. Full details and registration here.

Nettie Hartsock is a digital strategist and teacher who works with individuals and companies, helping them create and convey their messages to the online world. Find Nettie on Twitter at @nettiehartsock.

Coming up with a great title isn’t easy, but it may be the single most important thing you do for your book. Both the title and subtitle can have a major influence on your book’s success. A great title alone won’t sell your book, but a poor title can make sure it doesn’t sell.

Too many first-time authors try cramming a 25-word synopsis of their book into the title. They end up with titles that are insufferably long, hard to understand, and impossible to remember. Yawn.

For the main title, you want something memorable and easy to say. Titles are usually very short—sometimes just one or two catchy words. The subtitle then picks up the job of describing what the book is about in a bit more detail. The title piques interest, the subtitle explains.

Consider these partnered titles and subtitles:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Cost of Everything
Death By Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Surviving The Most Painful Problem in Business
Small Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

Brainstorm a list of keywords related to the content of your book and its intended readership. What is the main benefit someone will get from reading your book? Use these keywords in your title and subtitle to help draw the right people to your work.

Read through your preface, introduction, and cover copy. Sometimes you’ll find a choice concept or turn of phrase that can be pulled out and turned into a catchy title.

Once you’ve come up with keywords and done some brainstorming, narrow your list to one or two contenders and try them out on others. Your best test audience is made up of people who fall into your intended readership. Poll some clients if they’re the ones you want buying your book, or talk to colleagues in your industry if you wrote the book for them.

Avoid getting too attached to a title before the feedback comes in. And if you find yourself stuck without a title after all of this, get help. With so much resting on what goes on the front cover, it’s definitely worth the investment.

When is a book worth more than a book? When it’s a limited edition, of course.

The folks at Taschen America recently published a limited run of 1,969 copies of MoonFire, a book by Norman Mailer commemorating the 1969 moon landing. Each of these copies, accompanied by a signed photograph of Buzz Aldrin, will sell for about $1,000. But even more exclusive are the 12 copies that will come bound with pieces of authentic moon rock; these copies are expected to fetch several hundred thousand dollars each.

Special editions, limited editions, product bundling, author inscriptions, and other enticements are all time-honoured ways for publishers to spur interest–and revenue–for a book.

Two more examples, this time from the world of fiction:

• When historical fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay released Ysabel in 2007, his publishers offered up for auction the first book off the press. First printings of first editions are prized by collectors. The additional sweetener of having the very first completed book off the press and an inscription from the author helped the copy earn a price of more than $550 CDN.
• JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, handwrote and illustrated seven copies of a book of fairy tales. The volumes were bound in leather and decorated with semi-precious stones. Six copies were given away to friends, while the last was auctioned off for charity. The hammer price? About $3.3 million USD.

More than a few people are predicting that, as ebooks rise in popularity, print books will become increasingly prized for their production and collector values. While few authors have the drawing power of JK Rowling — or the ability to garner millions for a single volume — there are plenty of opportunities for self-publishers to create extra value around their books.

Yen Cheong over at the Book Publicity Blog recently posted a helpful list of firms and freelancers that do book publicity. Each listing indicates the type of books that firm or person deals in, so you can quickly find the ones who handle non-fiction.

You’ll find that most of the publicists are based in the US, though I did see one firm from Germany and there may be other international firms tucked away on the list.