I have been doing some searching and thinking, some would say about time, about how Bearly Books can help you make money as an author. There are multiple ways to make a living by writing and I will explore all of those for you over the next few weeks and months.

All over the Internet there are websites dedicated to helping writers do their research, develop characters, write better stories, and get published either traditionally or self-published. There is really no good reason to keep beating that drum except to provide the links and some reviews about those sites. I will also tell you how to take advantage of the information available.

It seems that the part of publishing your book that’s missing is how to actually market it to those who want to buy it. If you can’t find buyers and readers then only you will know how brilliant it is, and perhaps your Mum.

Writer or Marketer?

I know that many of you will wail that you are a writer not a marketer and that is exactly the problem. Even if Random House does pick up your book you will still have to market it, with their help to be sure but you will be the one in the front line.

You’ll have to do media interviews, book readings, book signings, public appearances and a myriad of other things if you hope to do much more than average sales. The more you can do at this early stage to find and communicate with your audience the better. The more people you can reach with your message the more books you’ll sell and if you sell enough then your publisher will put more resources into helping.

There are over 150,000 new titles published every year. On an average business day, 500 new titles are released with 500 new authors competing for the attention of the book-buying public. These figures are out of date. Unless it it promoted well there is a good chance that a book will not sell enough copies to make it to a single reprint.

Help is Here.

So, while Bearly Books is still in the business of nurturing new authors with training and support the main focus will be on marketing and selling your books. With a special emphasis on the type of promotion that I have had the most experience with, online marketing.

There is also a bit of overlap with off-line marketing because that can bring more targeted traffic to your website and sales funnel.

The Basics.

You will need your own website.

Yes, even if you publish via a publishing house you will still need a website. It’s best to register your name or nom de plume as the domain name like www.edwardbearly.com if it’s available. If it’s not available try www.edward-bearly.com, www.edwardbearlyblog.com. The aim is to have your name in there. You can use hyphens to separate the words and add stop words as prefixes or postfixes.

Stop words are ones that the search engines ignore. Download the search engine stopwords here.

You will need a blog. That’s easy with most of the web hosts, they have a thing in the cpanel called Fantastico which will install a blog for you with just a couple of clicks. Don’t muck about, install WordPress. There is so much help on the Internet to do with using WordPress that it all becomes very easy.

Most of the web hosts also have extensive video training on how to do things inside the cpanel.

Stay in Touch.

There will be an increasing amount of information posted here on how to target and attract visitors to your site and what to do with them when they get there. There is already some information that you will find useful on this site. Try these posts for some help

how to sell more books and get your publisher active

why are back links important for traffic

more about backlinks

no links = no visitors = no sales

Well I have done it. Something I have considered for some time for this site was to convert it from the Drupal CMS to WordPress.

Honestly I really liked Drupal and the way it all works but I had problems every time there was an upgrade. It would take me hours to get the site back on-line after a core upgrade and even some of the modules cause issues. It is also a big CMS with lots of functionality and really needs it’s own server to explore it’s full capability and deliver pages with speed and precision.

Contrast that with all bar one of the WordPress upgrades I have done on many different sites being totally fuss-free upgrades. WordPress has grown a lot since I first chose Drupal and now there are plugins for almost all the same functions. WordPress has a much smaller footprint and uses much less resources on the server so it can deliver the pages faster.

I did lose some of the functionality with the change but that is a relatively minor issue as those functions were not being used by the visitors in any case.

So I bit the bullet and spent several weeks checking, planning and testing. I got my start for this translation from this excellent post, Convert a Drupal 6 site to WordPress 2.7, my conversion was from Drupal 6 to WordPress 3.12.

The difference is that I created a page to make the transition much easier than playing in the MySQL database. Before you download my page I want you to understand that if everything stuffs up for you and you didn’t make back-ups of your database and website then that’s your problem. This is offered to help you make the switch but it is your responsibility to protect yourself.

Test this on your own local server, instructions for setting one up all over the Internet, before you do this on your production site so you can be sure it works as expected. It won’t convert everything because WordPress can’t use everything Drupal uses but it will migrate posts, taxonomy, users, comments and categories. I installed WordPress in it’s own directory in the main Bearly Books directory so I didn’t have to re-point the DNS.

translateDrupaltoWordpress

Just right click the link and save as…

I am not going to be able to offer much technical support but installation is a matter of unzipping the file and uploading the contents into the server where the databases you want to convert live. Point your browser at the file and follow the instructions.

Good Luck. Please leave a comment and share the file.

P.S. I have just noticed that some of the links in the posts don’t work properly. This isn’t an issue with the conversion but an issue with hard coded links. The only real solution to this is to check all the posts and edit any links. Should only take a couple of days but that is a trap to watch out for.

The other thing I noticed is that a lot of the posts came through with categories intact but still didn’t display correctly. A bulk edit on the posts to tag them all with the same category corrected that, now I can reset them as I go through and edit any links.

I wanted to rejig the categories in any case so this isn’t a problem for me at this stage.