How Best to Sell and Distribute Your Electronic Products

31 Aug

admin |  August 31st,2010 | Internet Marketing |  No Comments »

As there are with physical products, there are many ways to sell and distribute electronic products. You can simply list them on your website and have buyers send you an email when they want to buy.

But really, why would you ever do something so simple when there are so many less expensive (and less cumbersome) ways to sell and distribute electronic products?

The answer might be because you may not know about any other ways. If so, I am going to show you one of the many ways you can do it.

Set Up a PayPal Buy Button
You can set up an account on PayPal in only a few minutes (if you don’t already have one). After you have an account, you can generate a Buy Button with the correct price of your product, and you can place this button on your website under your product. PayPal even offers a shopping cart feature you can use for multiple products.

The advantage of this method is this: you can do it very simply and quickly. If you have ever researched shopping carts, then you know how complex they are and how many hoops (electronic, physical, and monetary) you need to jump through to get it done.

Online shopping carts require term agreements and all sorts of other messy things. It gets to be a really big quagmire when you try to compare all the different shopping carts with all the different features. You also will have a more significant issue with interfacing the shopping cart to your site. You need a more complex (and costly) relationship with a web programmer for one.

It goes on and on, but when the rubber hits the road, it all comes down to this:

Most, if not all, new Internet Entrepreneurs have little or no understanding of how their product is going to perform online, so why spend a gazillion dollars setting up a monolithic shopping cart system just to find out?

The disadvantage of PayPalling it is that you are making “pals” (in the financial sense) with PayPal, and maybe you do not want to have a buddie like PayPal. Many people think PayPal is kind of creepy, primarily because they are not regulated like normal financial institutions are, so they can (and do) get away with some pretty creepy stuff. PayPal dodged all of that regulation stuff (for the most part) because Internet Commerce evolved so quickly that the regulators could not put the normal regulatory “stranglehold” on them-sort of like Microsoft in the computer business. PayPal got huge before anyone in the regulatory world realized it. Now they are literally the King Kong in the online transaction world.

Could you ever put a stranglehold on King Kong?

Maybe if you were as big as Uncle Sam, you could pluck an itty bitty weentsy hair on his pinky toe, but that is about it. The existence of Microsoft—with all of their evil doings—is living proof that online King Kongs can happen. Most people do not even understand how evil Microsoft is, but if you do, then you understand that these sorts of King Kongs can and do exist—Paypal is one of those.

Since PayPal has no regulatory oversight, they can shut your business down in a mouse-click with no recourse. There are many horror stories out there of Paypal just putting a lock on someone’s account and giving them little or no explanation while the merchant’s business slowly, or quickly depending upon cash flow reliance, starts to fail (although PayPal has matured to realize that they need to tread more lightly, so the horror story count is diminishing).

Suppose a terrorist in Klackistan buys a product from you and PayPal decides to investigate you for money laundering; during the investigation, you have to declare bankruptcy because PayPal has frozen your account and you have no cash flow. Such things have happened.

King Kong has a fit, rightfully or wrongfully, and you get smashed.

No questions asked (actually, you might ask them, but–unlike with a bank–no one has to answer).

Anyways, back to your PayPal buy button. If you don’t mind being pals with a big, stinky, money monkey, you set up a quick and easy PayPal button and you are in business. I know of about 5-10 other ways to sell and distribute products online, all with advantages and disadvantages depending upon the nature of your product/business; for now, a PayPal buy button is the quickest and easiest.

www.juggernautpress.com
www.bettercovers.com

The “Ultimate Bible” of story structure, Robert McKee’s book, STORY

12 Aug

admin |  August 12th,2010 | Story Structure, Writing / Editing, Writing-Fiction, Writing-Nonfiction |  No Comments »

If you want to understand story structure, you might consider reading what I would consider “the ultimate bible of story structure,” Robert McKee’s, Story. Although many books aspire to adequately address the subject of story, many fall short.

To be successful, fiction and nonfiction should be infused with the basic elements of story.

Here is a good book review of Story:

STORY by Robert McKee
New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1997

Spinning a good tale requires a bit of magic, so rather than present a recipe or stock method for story construction, Robert McKee outlines the key components shared by all good stories. While this book is primarily aimed at screenwriters, the points it makes apply equally well to novelists. A former Fulbright Scholar, McKee has been teaching classes on this subject to packed halls around the world, his students producing such works as The Color Purple, You’ve Got Mail, The Deer Hunter and Forrest Gump.

McKee outlines the different story forms, but points out that if you want to write for a living you should avoid the avant-garde and follow the classical design structure emphasized in this book; it more closely mirrors the human mind, and other story forms just don’t sell as well. He believes that most of what Hollywood produces is mediocre or worse, and he challenges the seemingly insurmountable odds of getting a screenplay produced. People intrinsically recognize a good story and if you build one you will beat the Hollywood odds; it’s a seller’s market when the product is a well-structured story.

According to McKee, there is only one true story, the quest, and all stories take this form:

‘For better or worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a quest for his object of desire against forces of antagonism.’

Five key elements are required in a well-constructed story: the Inciting Incident, or the event that launches the protagonist on his quest; the Progressive Complications encountered on the quest; the Crisis Scene, or final choice that completes the quest; the Climax Scene, or last action beyond which the reader cannot image another; and the Resolution, or tying up of lose ends.

McKee believes that the phrase “character-driven story” is redundant as all stories are essentially character-driven. True character is concealed behind a façade of traits and revealed only when real pressure—brought on by increasingly difficult plot choices—peels away that façade. Plot and character mirror one another and when you change character, you must change plot accordingly.

A well-constructed story leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality, creating surprise and curiosity and insight, sending us back repeatedly. On each trip, we gain a deeper understanding of the characters and their world.

In McKee’s words, “The protagonist can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make him.” Fully realized and satisfying antagonism only occurs when the primary value at stake in the story progresses through the limits of human experience. For example, in a story about injustice, the protagonist should not simply be the victim of a crime; he should also undergo tyranny. The antagonism should be powerful enough to make a legal action illegal, prosecute and punish the protagonist for it, and then declare the action legal again. This would be injustice masquerading as justice. McKee terms this extreme “negation of the negation” (a phrase borrowed from dialectics). If, on the other hand, love is the value at stake in the story, the negation of the negation would be “hatred masquerading as love,” a far more interesting antagonistic force than simple hatred (as exemplified by the mother character, played by Mary Tyler Moore, in the movie Ordinary People).

To date, Story has sold more than 100,000 copies, underscoring its popularity; and it would be a valuable addition to the library of any serious novelist, screenwriter, or nonfiction writer.

(Book review copyright, 2010, Juggernaut staff writers)
staff@juggernautpress.com

www.juggernautpress.com

Story Openings

01 Aug

admin |  August 1st,2010 | Writing / Editing, Writing-Fiction |  11 comments

Is your protagonist waking up in the first sentence of your story? Is she smiling at her knight in shining armor, leaning over her father’s deathbed, or looking out the window at a river snaking through the valley?

Editors commonly doze off after reading only the first few sentences or paragraphs of a short story.

During the past nine years, I’ve read roughly 25,000 story openings (most while working as an editor at a literary journal; also, fiction of every caliber can be read at various online writers workshops, where hundreds of short stories are posted each month). Besides getting an inordinate amount of unwanted sleep, I’ve identified several patterns that exist at all levels of writing expertise.

What actually constitutes a “story opening”? Usually it’s the first paragraph, but that’s not a clear-cut definition, and rather than delve into the sundry possibilities, let’s just say a story opening consists of the first few sentences or small paragraphs, up to where it becomes evident that something interesting—or not much at all—is happening.

Opening patterns vary in relation to tense, point of view, or immediacy. For simplicity’s sake, let’s avoid the nuances of these more complicated topics and focus on the nine most common (ordered by frequency) patterns that appear in roughly 50% of all story openings:

1. Alarm Clock
2. The Look of Love
3. Weather Report
4. Ceremony
5. A Writer’s Life
6. The False Start
7. A Gross Image
8. Maxim, Opinion, or Facts
9. We’re Talking Dialog

1. Alarm Clock
The protagonist of the “Alarm Clock” opening is becoming conscious in some way, often waking up at home, starting another day. Although this opening is very common and possibly the most detested by slush pile editors, I hesitate to warn you against it because it’s the pattern used by Dan Brown in the first chapter of The Davinci Code.

2. The Look of Love
In the second most common—but often very successful—opening, two individuals meet and spark some sort of relationship. This is usually the traditional boy-meets-girl, but it can also be boy-meets-boy, girl-meets-girl, and other less familiar hi-how-are-ya’s.

3. Weather Report
This dreary pattern takes the form of landscape, weather, or geologic structure description. The sky, moonlight, clouds, setting sun, a wicked thunderstorm, or some other snooze-inducing event or locale is overly described. Note, however, that many very successful writers use this pattern (TC Boyle is one, John Steinbeck another) to help characterize a person or a setting, so it can be done effectively.

4. Ceremony
Stories with hooks about death, birth, marriage, a holiday gathering, or other type of human ceremony fall into this category, and there certainly isn’t anything wrong with it.
Many excellent fictions begin this way. Note that the classic cancer story has this format, and some very accomplished writers use it.

5. A Writer’s Life
An old adage says, “Write about what you know!” but for the most part, only writers find stories about the writing life interesting. Tales about writing often do well because the people judging them (editors) are writers, and in the case of literary journals, a large percentage of the readers are writers. How many novels have been written about an English professor falling in love with a student? Beep beep—Snooze alarm!

6. The False Start
An example of this type of opening would be: “It was the worst day of my life. Actually, it wasn’t all that bad.” Or, this pattern can be as subtle as: ” I don’t usually take a nap, until recently that is.” For whatever reason, this form is a favorite with beginning and intermediate writers, and as such, I would assume it’s a red flag for editors.

7. A Gross Image
Possibly, some writers believe a gross image is a guaranteed way to “shock” the reader into continuing, but after suffering through hundreds of such images, I can assure you that it reeks like rotting fish. This pattern includes excessive cussing and seems to be present at all levels of writing skill, although clearly less in accomplished writers.

8. Maxim, Opinion, or Facts
In this form of opening pattern, the narrative begins with a catchy statement that is either objective or subjective. This is not an epigraph (an italicized section often skipped by many readers); rather, the maxim, opinion, or facts reside in the opening sentences of the story. An example of this opening would be: “My father always used to say, “A rolling stone gathers no moss…” Or, it can be as subtle as: “After waiting two hours for my doctor, I finally realized the meaning of the word ‘patient’…”

9. We’re Talking Dialog
A double quote mark is the very first character in stories that open with dialog, and this type of character seems hardly interesting. This pattern also includes epigraphs. Since dialog is actually a subtle form of action, I suspect the writer is trying to infuse motion into the opening. Note that many successful stories begin with dialog.

The above 9 patterns appear in roughly 50% of stories written by beginning and intermediate writers. In comparison, stories published by advanced writers2 also contain one or more of these patterns approximately 50% of the time, although not in the same proportions.

What can you do with this information about story openings? Some of them should probably be avoided (Alarm Clock and Weather Report top the list), but you might also find a use for some of the others as they appear in very successful stories. Consider the following story opening: A writer, who is dreaming of snow-capped mountains, is awakened and immediately love-struck by a strange but handsome man—a man with cancer, a cancer so aggressive that he vomits and dies immediately. Given the above patterns, this would be meta-fiction at its best, and somewhere out there, a deluged—but informed—slush pile editor might just publish it—if she ever reads past the opening sentences.

www.juggernautpress.com

The Quality of a Book Cover Design is Relative to the Target Audience

13 Jul

admin |  July 13th,2010 | Graphic Design, Internet Marketing |  2 comments

When it comes to designing commercial book covers, quality is a relative term. For example, if you ask an Internet marketer what makes a quality book cover design and you also ask a New York publishing executive the same question, you will likely get very different answers.

This is simply because the target audiences are usually different. Based on our results (with the conversion rates on more than a hundred book projects), the Internet prospect usually responds better to graphics that are more colorful and have more flashy design effects—graphics techniques like embossing and gradients and strokes. When designing for the Internet prospect, you should create a design that comes alive and explodes out of the screen. You want to infuse it with elements that “shimmer” or move (think optical illusions). You want the book cover design to grab attention.

Since you are using a display screen to present your product, you can embellish with colors and lots of shimmer to grab attention.

Conversely, when designing a book cover for a more conservative prospect, possibly a C-level business executive, you need to give the overall cover a more conservative look and feel. Usually, these more conservative prospects are put off by flashy colors and infomercial-like presentations. They are more impressed by a book cover that looks more like a textbook. Avoid flashy graphics and limit your colors to three or maybe four at the most. You should use big conservative text and spaces filled with flat color.

If you follow these basic cover design guidelines, your conversion rate will be higher; we know this from experience.

www.JuggernautPress.com

When it comes to designing commercial book covers, quality is a relative term. For example, if you ask an <em>Internet marketer</em> what makes a quality book cover design and you also ask a <em>New York publishing executive</em> the same question, you will likely get very different answers.

This is simply because the target audiences are usually different. Based on our results (with the conversion rates on more than a hundred book projects), the Internet prospect usually responds better to graphics that are more colorful and have more flashy design effects—graphics techniques like embossing and gradients and strokes. When designing for the Internet prospect, you should create a design that comes alive and explodes out of the screen. You want to infuse it with elements that “shimmer” or move (think optical illusions). You want the book cover design to grab attention.

English Language—Duck, Bob, and Weave

27 Mar

admin |  March 27th,2010 | Writing / Editing |  15 comments

Most of us go through life thinking the language we speak read and write is a static sort of thing, when actually it is constantly changing.

Consider the sentence: “Some may require followup a month after the sale, while others will require a followup immediately.”

HERE, followup is used as a noun. Since the dictionary does not define the word “followup,” I would hyphenate it. But actually a new word is evolving and being formed in our language. Remember, the English language—and any language for that matter—is a moving target, as are the grammar rules of the language.

If you doubt this, take a moment to read some Shakespeare, which is only several hundred years old. Note that many of the words he uses are outdated now and to understand his stories, you must do quite a bit of work deciphering all the subtle nuances in the words.

Language is moving, and at a pretty fast pace. Listen to the slang words of any teenager and watch them grow in popularity. At first, the words sound odd and out of place; but before long, the mainstream media has taken them up and we have included them in our own vocabulary. When a new word emerges, a sort of democratic process takes place with usage being equivalent to a vote. If the word gets enough “votes,” ultimately it is formally accepted into the language by being included in the dictionary.

Teenagers are not the only word generators in society; technology is the provenance of many. As technology evolves and new processes and objects (verbs like google and nouns like computer) emerge, words to describe them are added to the lexicon.

Think of “followup” or “follow-up” as a noun or adjective, and “follow up” as a verb construction.
- “She is going to follow up.”–verbish.
- “He is going to get some follow-up.”–nounish
- “He is going to a follow-up meeting.”–adjective.

Back to Shakespeare for a moment. Consider the following line from Twelfth Night, Act1, Scene II:

“Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you, sailors?”

Consider the word, perchance. Is it possible that this word started as two words “per chance.” Is this sort of like “follow up” and “followup”?

I think so.

staff@juggernautpress.com

www.juggernautpress.com

Secrets to Writing Great Nonfiction

26 Jan

admin |  January 26th,2010 | Writing-Nonfiction |  51 comments

After reading the online reviews for the book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall, and watching the author’s video (available on the Amazon page for his book), I have concluded that McDougall’s book is not just about running but it is also about life. This book is succeeding in the marketplace because it is “transformative” (my own word) and not just technical.

Transformative is a word I use to explain what a good book does when you read it.

Besides being transformative, the Born to Run book employs a good marketing strategy: it is based not only around the South American runners but also around revealing their SECRET. Revealing secrets is big business in the marketing world because it sells product (look at any sales page on the Internet or watch any infomercial on TV). And in general, the technical aspect of any good nonfiction book should have a “revealing secrets” element when it talks about the techniques that are the subject of the book.

Here is another example of transformative. Consider the book, Got Fight?: The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat, by Forrest Griffin. If you read the sample pages on Amazon, you will find yourself being pulled into a very engaging story.

Why does it pull you in?

Because it is transformative.

Yet, before you click the BUY button, you might visit the bookstore and preview the actual book. I found it to be not as good as the first few pages because it seems mostly written for professional fighters or wannabe UFC fighters. Somehow, the author loses touch with me as a reader and the book becomes much less transformative because I am not seeking to fight people, nor am I interested in how to lose pounds for a fight, etc.. And these technical aspects are not infused with enough transformative elements to keep the book engaging for me. (Forrest, please don’t kick my ass). However, it is apparently a big success with fighter types.

This is key to writing successful nonfiction—or fiction—books about any subject, and the blockbuster bestsellers do it in a way that is engaging—all the way through—for almost anyone.

A Transformative Daydream

Most readers are reading to engage in daydreaming to some degree, and this lies at the heart of the transformative experience. Readers want to “root for the underdog” because in their own lives they are the underdog in some way, and hopefully the book—by inspiring them to daydream—helps them overcome the oppressive elements of their own world. At least it gives them hope.

Good nonfiction reveals a secret technique that can help the reader win their own personal battles.

The Got Fight? book opens with a story of a scrawny guy who beats up a jeep full of bully football players (actually, he scares them off because no matter how many times they knock him down, he gets back up). This is transformative because every reader in their own life is fighting their own personal version of a jeep full of bully football players, whether it be a coworker, a neighbor, a business competitor, a family member, or whomever is antagonizing them. This sort of underdog-winning story gives the reader hope that they too can overcome their own antagonists. The scrawny kid scaring off the bully football players becomes a sort of transformative daydream with the secret technique in this case being: don’t give up.

So how do you make your own writing transformative? You need to mix transformative experiences into your chapters whenever you can. Design them into the structure if possible. The words should connect to the reader in an emotional way. You might add case studies or your own reflections on life and how it relates to the technical aspect of your nonfiction. The technical material is only half the battle.

The Good Writing Duality

I’ll use another example to illustrate the concept of transformative. There are 2 components to good nonfiction (and this relates to fiction and to storytelling in general):

First you have the story element, or the transformative part.

Second you have the technique or howto section. This is like the plot.

To illustrate this duality, I’ll use a fiction example. Consider the movie TOP GUN (if you haven’t seen it, it is exceedingly transformative and was successful at the box office as a result). The transformative part is about a fighter pilot struggling with his own internal demons, who are putting him in conflict with the strict procedures required to fly a fighter jet. He loses his best friend and is not sure if his internal struggle/weakness caused the death. He also discovers that his father had a similar “affliction.” This internal struggle is the story element, the transformative part. The technical part of TOP GUN is about flying jets and killing Russians—that is the plot, the howto section, the secret techniques that win the battles to overcome the bad guys.

The Born to Run book is doing well in the market because it addresses both of these elements. It does not simply discuss the technical aspects of running—good shoes, warming up, etc.. It also reflects on life, and presents its nonfiction components as a “secret” being revealed to the world: Throw away your running shoes forever!

To write good nonfiction, much of the battle is developing a good editorial eye and overcoming the frustration you feel when you realize what you have written is not transformative. For the most part, when writers begin their writing careers, they focus on the technical aspects and not the transformative part, and that’s OK. It’s like they must first get it out of their system before growing into stage 2. Many young writers become frustrated and give up entirely, but if they continue working hard, they eventually stumble into the transformative stuff, or they get lucky and figure it out, or possibly they discover it in some other fashion—maybe someone tells them about it, reveals the secrets.

Staff@JuggernautPress.com

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