We’ve told you about sites devoted to tracking Amazon.com sales ranks before, but here’s a new one: Ranktracer.com. Tracking only books that have been added by users, the service offers several appealing features, including slick flash graphics, estimates of Amazon’s highly guarded sales numbers, and tracking of ranks on international Amazon sites.

Ranktracer also offers promotions on its own site and Amazon’s, which you may or may not find useful. Size it up with the other Amazon tracking sites and let us know which one you find most functional. (Ranktracer does charge a small fee, which is, hint, waiveable if you have a blog.)

Ranktracer tells visitors all about Amazon sales ranks and what can be done with them on the front page of its site, and—while much of the information is eerily familiar—it brings up a good point: The rank, although visible to any Joe Schmoe lurking the web, can be a powerful market research tool. The ranks of your niche competitors are available at any time to help feel out what’s happening in your genre. It’s a good idea to request that a rank-tracking site add competitors to its database early; none of the sites can retrieve data from before tracking on that item was initiated.

Also, if you don’t have access to BookScan, but want an idea of whether that promotion did anything at all, check for drops in your rank after marketing or publicity activity. Not incredibly accurate, but it might help you gauge what works and what doesn’t.

Alternatively, you could distribute defamatory pamphlets about a close competitor and check their graph for spikes. Either way, comprehensive sales rank data can be very helpful.

Author Cory Doctorow has good reason to be wary of digital rights management. After switching from Mac to a Linux OS, he tells of the months-long task of laboriously converting his extensive DRM-controlled audiobook collection to the universal MP3 format. Ouch.

Digital rights management has long had its critics, who argue that piracy prevention efforts are more of a burden on honest consumers than on illegal sharers, who will find a way to “crack” the content–DRM or no DRM.

Random House has joined the many music labels who have decided to abandon what some characterize as draconian protection measures on content sold online in favor of–they hope–more sales. The publisher announced last week that it will now sell audiobooks on eMusic.com in MP3 format, which has no restrictions on where it is played. That means customers will be able to buy the product and listen to it however they like, whether that be on an iPod, Zune, burned CD, etc.

Compare that to Audible.com and iTunes, who refuse to sell non-DRM audiobooks, even if the author doesn’t want such protection. (Random House will still use rights management for those publishers who feel it will prevent illegal distribution.) Amazon.com, new owner of Audible, has said it will stop encoding audiobooks if the public complains. So if you’re for universal file formats, barrage them with annoying emails and phone calls!

In its refreshingly down-to-earth announcement (PDF link), Random House acknowledges piracy as a “fact of life,” and shares the results of an experiment it conducted with eMusic that bolstered their decision to discontinue mandatory DRM. They watermarked MP3 versions of a variety of titles, sold them through eMusic, and hired a company to watch for them to show up on filesharing networks. Not one has yet appeared, according to Random House.

A big step has been taken by a publishing giant, opening the door for further changes in audiobook distribution–and many thinkers in the book industry are hoping this development will soon extend to e-books.

Amazon.com is the hands-down leader in the online bookselling marketplace. And—although it’s notoriously difficult to speak with a living, breathing human being—Amazon prides itself on meeting its customers’ needs. What’s the easiest way to drive sales for your book on Amazon? Easy: maximize the content on your product page and optimize your chances of coming up in search results via Amazon’s internal search engine.

You’ve heard of optimizing your website, optimizing your web presence, optimizing your blog, etc. The point of this optimization is to increase your visibility through various online search mechanisms. While self-contained, Amazon is a powerhouse search engine in its own right. Despite being a retail site, it should be treated as a search engine from an online marketing standpoint. Think about it: what’s the first site you go to when searching for information on a book? Amazon, of course. Remember that on top of its own strong brand, Amazon powers the virtual marketplace of Target.com, AOL’s Shop@AOL service, and, for a short while longer, Borders.com and Waldenbooks.com—just to name a few.

To leverage Amazon’s search power, a major component of your online marketing strategy should involve making your Amazon product page as informative, search-optimized, and consumer-friendly as possible. It has been our experience at Greenleaf Book Group in optimizing Amazon pages that the product’s rank improves as it collects additional content. Whether search suggestions, tags, inclusion in Listmania lists, and so on have a direct effect on the sales rank formula is unclear; it’s more likely that books with more detailed pages and links to the title information from outside pages simply attract more buyers. Regardless, ensure that your product page does a good job of representing your product with no detail spared.

Amazon offers many features to enhance your title listing that, when properly implemented, can increase page views and potential sales for your title. Understanding and executing these programs has been historically time-consuming work, but since Amazon is a content-driven site, the benefits are clear. The more visits you get to your book detail page, the more popular your book will become in the eyes of the Amazon internal search results algorithm. The Amazon algorithm favors the most popular items, so if two different products match a user’s criteria, the more user-popular item will show up first. Our Amazon optimization work has uncovered some powerful tools for influencing Amazon search results, as outlined in very basic terms below:

Tags

A tag is most easily described as a keyword or category label that a user places on a particular product. Tags appear on book detail pages and will help users find book on Amazon within a certain category or genre. Each link increases your exposure on Amazon.

Listmania! Lists

Listmania! lists are different groups of products that a person finds interesting. Each list can cover any type of category and helps other Amazon users discover your favorite products. These lists are rotated on various search result pages and on individual book pages. A popular list will appear on the product pages of all the books it mentions. The more popular the list is, the more exposure the products within your list will receive. Take the time to carefully research the other books on your list so you are more likely to appear before your target reader.

So You’d Like to . . . Guides

So You’d Like to . . . Guides are a way for you to help other customers find all the items and information they might need to discover something new about an interest or hobby. The guide includes a short, informative article targeting consumers interested in your genre and is connected to your book’s detail page and to other similar bestselling books. These guides are more detailed and informative than the Listmania! lists.

Reviews

Reach out to your friends and family to write reader reviews for your title. Reviews boost the exposure of your book detail page because the Amazon algorithm examines the number of reviews and the review ratings when determining exposure levels. Greenleaf Book Group makes a listing of the top-rated Amazon reviewers available to its clients. Reviews by this elite group are weighted more heavily in the system. Ask your distributor if such a list is available to you so that you can solicit these powerful tastemakers’ reviews for your title.

Search Suggestion

Amazon also has a way for users to help customers find items and to provide tailored information on product pages via Search Suggestions. Like tags, this tool requires some front-end thought and research on your part. Search Suggestions can:

• Associate an item with a search phrase so the item is more likely to be shown whenever anyone searches for that phrase. This is helpful for items that may be associated with a person, genre, or theme that may not appear on its product page
• Explain the relevance of your suggestion to searching customers and have your explanation and your name appear in search results
• Add information to the product page, which is tailored to the customer’s search

Amazon.com is constantly evolving. Take advantage of the features outlined above, and be on the watch for new offerings to increase your exposure (or hire an expert in the field to do this work for you). This will increase the number of eyeballs on your product’s page and result in additional sales. Amazon has millions of registered users and continues to lead the pack in online books sales. And in Amazon’s realm, there’s no such thing as too much information.

Ever wonder what happens to the unsold books sitting in the major publishers’ warehouses across the country once that publisher decides to call it quits on a title? In short, they get the hook. This hook isn’t the one that a roomful of people spend weeks devising to convince the media and public to pay attention to the title in the first place; it’s the one that unceremoniously pulls our featured performer offstage.

In the interest of making sense of all of this, let’s clarify the difference between “books” and “titles”. In the publishing industry, a “title” refers to an individual work of intellectual property. “Books” refers to multiple reproductions of the “title”. So we may say that a certain title has 20,000 books in print.

Publishing is as unpredictable as the tastes of its master, the public. If any publisher knew the secret formula to a locked-in bestseller at the consumer level, he or she would be a gazillionaire. The reality is that creators of media are at the mercy of a lot of factors beyond their control.

A publisher may look at a potential new addition to their line and consider the quality of the work, the performance of comparable titles (“comp titles” in industry speak), the author’s ability to reach the masses, marketing budget, initial feedback from sales reps, and the current buzz on the subject matter to determine whether or not to take the plunge on a new title. If all signs say go, the publisher engages their editorial staff for improvements, finalizes a marketing strategy, and goes to press for a significant quantity of books. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, the public and the marketplace can be fickle. Public opinion on the subject of a biography or an issue may turn, an unexpected competing title may be issued around the same time, or the title just may never hit with the media and/or public. It’s a guessing game to some degree, and we all guess incorrectly here and there.

When a publishing house has a surplus of inventory and a lack of sales momentum, remaindering the books is an option to at least recover a portion of production costs. Remainders are “overstock” units of a title that may be sold in large quantities through a bid list to bargain book wholesalers. The wholesalers then resell them to retailers. These books may also be sold directly to retailers in smaller quantities in what is referred to as a “white sale.” In general, remainders bids come in at less than 10% of retail price under an exclusive buy arrangement. The market skews heavily towards the soccer mom demographic—gardening, travel, cooking, kids, etc. A remaindered title will generally be taken out of print and/or have its barcode punched in an effort to safeguard against returns to wholesalers and retailers at the full price.

When making a decision on how to proceed in publishing your title, this information is important in a couple of ways. First, to give your title more time to sell, consider holding onto your rights and publishing outside of the major houses so that you may have more control over how long your title stays in print. Second, remember that it’s a crowded marketplace. Hone the value, uniqueness, and quality of your product and invest in marketing support—you’ve got a lot of competition. Third, realize that these remaindered titles are competing on the same turf as your new book at a fraction of your cover price and then reread the second point. Do your homework and plan carefully up front to give your title its best shot at a successful launch and a long, profitable backlist life.

Going to press is exciting. Lots of hard work is behind you, and the finished book is close to becoming a reality. But as you print your books, you should be aware of potential complications. Consider the printing of your book as a custom project. The jacket, covers, and text are unique–written, designed, and printed specifically for you as opposed to being interchangeable commodities to be pulled from a shelf.

That being said, it’s difficult for a printer to produce the precise amount of books you request. When the printer orders materials for printing a book, he must allow for spoilage at each manufacturing stage. If production runs smoothly and spoilage is kept to a minimum, there will likely be higher yields of the final product. These extra books are referred to in the industry as “overs.”

And here’s where people tend to get confused: Your invoice will reflect the total amount of books shipped from the printer, meaning that if relatively few books have defects, you’ll end up being charged for the total number of books shipped.

Potentially, there are also “unders.” You guessed it–that’s when spoilage is higher than anticipated, leaving you short on your print run. Unders are less common than overs, but your chances of receiving them rise with smaller runs and more complex projects. Press “make ready” (bringing a press up to speed, setting the proper ink densities, registration, etc.) typically takes the same amount of time and material whether you’re printing 2,000 or 20,000 books. Thus spoilage, or lack thereof, can have a greater impact on the actual copies shipped on smaller runs versus larger runs.

When you go to press, you should be prepared to receive up to 10% variance in the final amount of copies. That’s the industry standard, but you shouldn’t be charged for overs that exceed 10% of the initial run. Likewise, the printer should be expected to provide at least 90% of what you ordered.

Don’t, however, assume anything. Communicate with your printer, getting detailed information on their over and under policy, before signing an agreement. Set a print run that takes into account worst-case scenarios. If you must have 2,000 books for an event, order more to avoid too few copies. An unexpected underage can leave you in a tight spot, as you will probably not have time to go back to press. (Average time to allow for reprints can be 5-6 weeks, even longer if you’re printing overseas.)

It’s best to go in knowing that you’ll have to be flexible. But the important thing, as always, is to create consumer demand and sell the books you do get, no matter what the exact quantity may be.

Last time around, we identified the main problem with e-books. There are too many formats, too many e-readers, and too many FAQs you have to pore over before successfully accessing them. Say, for instance, you’re a fan of Stephanie Laurens’s Bastion Club series and you’re dying to read the latest installment, Beyond Seduction, a featured e-book on harpercollins.com. Click on the product page and you’re asked to choose a format for your e-book: Adobe eBook Reader, Gemstar eBook, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, Palm Reader, or Sony.

A little perplexing for e-book newbies. Fortunately, Adobe’s PDF files are on their way to becoming the industry standard for e-book formatting. The main competition came from EXE files, but the PDF’s cross-platform ability helped it quickly outstrip the EXE. The only advantage PC-exclusive EXE files have over PDFs is its lower price and rebranding abilities (which allow companies to insert their own affiliate links in e-books they distribute). The PDF is not susceptible to viruses, it automatically numbers pages, is easy to edit, and can be created from familiar applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Now for a viable, convenient e-reader. There are many software programs available for free download that support PDF e-books, and many are functional, well-designed, and incorporate features like library displays, which arrange your e-books on a virtual shelf for easy perusal.

But things get really interesting when e-books jump from the desk-and-lap-shackled computer to handheld devices in an attempt to mimic paper books. E-reader hardware has been around for years, most notably in Nuvomedia’s Rocketbook and Softbook Press’s Softbook. Both flopped early in the new millennium, despite good buzz (ah, hindsight) and, as the New York Times reports, selling a good number if “Star Trek” novels. Now there’s a second wave, led by Sony, giving the old e-reader a second try. Here’s a rundown:

Sony PRS-500 Reader: Highly anticipated and released (after multiple delays) at the end of last year, the Sony Reader is a hardware device that uses electronic ink technology for portable e-book reading. A sort of iPod for e-books, the Sony reader displays PDFs, JPEGs, RSS newsfeeds, and Sony’s proprietary BBeB (Broadband eBook) format. E-books are purchased, iTunes-style, from Sony’s Connect store. Weighing nine ounces with a 166 dpi, 6 inch display, the device tries valiantly to emulate a bound book in manageability. Complaints range from sluggishness in e-page-turning to expense. (It’s normally $350, but Sony’s selling it for $279.99 at the moment. Buy before the end of September, and you get 100 free e-books from the Classics section at Connect–now’s your chance to see what all this Jane Austen fuss is about.)

Sony has announced that future models will be compatible with Adobe’s new Digital Editions, and they purportedly have their eyes on wireless capabilities and, not surprisingly, the educational market, where they hope to free students from the weighty, dog-eared tyranny of textbooks.

Sony Librie EBR-1000EP: This earlier reader from Sony is available only in a Japanese language edition. It differs from the PRS-500 in its slightly larger size and qwerty keyboard keyboard below the display screen so that users can electronically mark up a book’s margins.

iLiad: Developed by iRex technologies (good thing Apple hasn’t compyrighted that whole “i-” formula), the iLiad boasts the largest screen size of handheld e-readers (8.1 inches). it supports PDF, XHTML, and plain text formats, as well as Mobipocket e-books. It was released in July 2007, and your wallet will be a whopping $699 lighter if you want one. Great for reading Homer.

Mobipocket: Mobipocket, a French company acquired by Amazon in 2005, produces free e-reader software for use with a variety of PDA and Smartphone devices (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, BlackBerry, and Psion). You download the reader, buy e-books, and then plug in your device via USB to load it with e-books and other documents. Amazon sells all e-books through Mobipocket, but the e-books are in a PRC format rather than PDF, and Mobipocket has been getting some bad press lately for going offline for over a week in August–without telling anyone when they;d be back up. Stephanie Chandler of PMA can tell you how to submit books for Mobipocket distribution.

The PRS-500 and the iLiad are the closest we’ve come to a reader that people might actually buy, but they’re still expensive, limited to grayscale, not widely known, and–most importantly in the age of the iPhone–unable to play YouTube videos. That may all change soon. The e-book underground is rumbling with rumors of a new device from a huge player in the game. Sadly, we can’t tell you about it at the moment, but if it’s all it’s cracked up to be, it should make a bigger splash than Sony’s first offering and then, perhaps, prompt something even better from Sony.

I’ll leave you with a cute little neologism I just learned: if you want to talk down to a friend who’s still leafing through paper pages, ask them why they have such a “p-book” fetish before giving them a get-with-the-times eyeroll and using your thumb wheel to start on the next chapter of Beyond Seduction. But should you have a p-book fetish yourself, CaféScribe is developing the world’s first scratch-n-sniff e-book to replicate that old book smell we all know and love. At long last, the missing ingredient in e-book success: a comforting, musty odor.

Among all of us at the BBBB, we know a thing or two about books, and we want to share our knowledge with you. So from here on out, we’ll distill some advice into a handy little tip each week and post it on the blog. Whether groundbreaking or tried-and-true, we hope the weekly tip will provide you with new ideas for getting your book off the ground–and keeping it there.

We’ll focus mainly on new strategies and resources to help you market your work. Maybe there’s a new book-based social networking site that’s totally hot right now. Maybe there’s a common mistake new authors make when starting their book campaign that we want you to avoid. Or perhaps there’s a small detail about the complexities of book distribution that we think could make your publishing experience a little smoother.

A few teaser tips to whet your appetite:

• New publishers are frequently surprised and confused by the listings for “new and used” copies of their brand-new book on Amazon.com, eBay, and other sites. They are not stolen books or unreported sales. These online “virtual booksellers” are pulling title and inventory information from Ingram’s electronic database feed, and they rarely have the books in their possession. They will order from Ingram when one of their customers orders the book from them, so the publisher still earns their royalties.
• A new site in beta testing, FreeIQ.com, describes itself as the marketplace for ideas. They plan to allow speakers, authors, experts, consultants, trainers, etc. to upload content (audio, video, or print), which the site will then host in its entirety, free of charge. Internet users can then find specialized knowledge from the best people in their field of interest, and the experts get exposure and publicity. Search results are ranked based on quality of content, as determined by users and other factors the people at Free IQ haven’t given out yet. If you have seminars, speeches, or other presentations just sitting around, go to FreeIQ.com and put it to use. The site also allows you to sell your media products through their network of affiliate marketers.
• As a book moves out of production and into the distribution process, the manner in which its page count is tabulated changes. Remember that as a book is being assembled, the printer needs to know the number of physical pages in the book, arranged into signatures. But when a book is complete and moving into bookstores, and as you begin your marketing campaign, it is more important to give consumers an idea of how many pages in your book have printed subject matter on them. To give a better idea of the amount of content contained in a book, use the numbered pages as the page count after production is complete.

But wait! There’s a quicker way to take advantage of the breathtaking scope of our knowledge. Should you come up with a burning book biz question we haven’t yet answered, post it on the publishing Q&A in the wiki section of our site. We’ll promptly answer it. If you stump us, you get a prize: the satisfaction of having stumped us.

At the turn of the century, many in the book industry excitedly anticipated the advent of the electronic book. With titles like “The Future of Cyberpublishing Is Now!“, articles breathlessly told of the undiscovered world of e-book publishing and all its implications for authors, publishers, and the reading public. Paperless books would surely revolutionize the stodgy old book industry. So now, almost a decade later, why do most consumers react to the term “e-book” with a blank stare or casual head-scratch? Should the pronouncements of the e-book future seem as ridiculous to us now as the Y2K scare? [Unrelated fact: The author of doomsday classics The Y2K Personal Survival Guide and Millennium Bug seems to have overcome his embarrassment, becoming the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson, the nation’s largest Christian publisher, in 2005.]

Some cite a general wariness with the format as the major reason the e-book fizzled so anticlimactically. Aren’t most people who buy books the types who savor sipping coffee in a bookstore, smelling the fresh paper of a printed book? Don’t avid readers enjoy coming home and curling up on the couch by the crackling hearth, a bound copy of their favorite novel nestled in their palm? And who wants to look at a fluorescent screen in their free time after they’ve done so at work for eight hours?

A more concrete answer for the sluggish e-book takeoff can be found in the mind-boggling abundance of formats in which e-books are available and the multiple platforms for accessing them. Pair that abundance with a scarcity of actual e-book content, and you have a situation in which the public won’t show interest until there is more material available, but publishers won’t put out more material until they see more consumer demand. So all we need for the e-book revolution to take place is, theoretically, an affordable, user-friendly reading device and a large enough pool of similarly formatted e-books to justify purchase of the device.

And the presence of e-books is increasing. HarperCollins, Random House, and (to a smaller extent) Penguin all offer a wide selection on their Web sites. Barnes & Noble entirely dropped e-books in 2003, but Amazon.com’s Mobipocket site continues to build an electronic catalog that includes fiction, non-fiction, and reference books, mainly for use on handheld devices. They now have over 40,000 full texts available for purchase. Independent booksellers are jumping on the bandwagon, too. BookSense, a marketing consortium for independent bookstores, just launched a program that allows consumers to purchase e-books through independent booksellers’ BookSense-templated sites. And although the American Association of Publishers estimated an overall .03% drop in book sales for 2006, e-books showed the largest gain of any sector, rising 24.1% to 54.4 million. An unimpressive number in sales, perhaps, and certainly not in line with the old dotcom projections, but the significant growth bodes well.

No matter how slowly they’re taking hold, electronic books can still be useful to authors and publishers, and may yet play a significant role in the future of the industry. Let’s take a look at the good things about e-books:

• They sell books: It’s widely believed that distribution of free e-books actually boosts traditional sales. Avant-Guide, publishers of a well known series of city guides, have adopted this strategy in hopes that they can increase brand awareness and reach potential customers. Confident that users will be impressed with quality content and head to the bookstore, they offer a selection of their most popular titles in digitial form for free. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow is also known for his forward-thinking e-book practices; he’s been giving away free copies online for years as a way to sell more in brick-and-mortar stores. In a 2006 article for Forbes, he writes:
  

  Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.

• They provide extra content: Many e-book editions offers special features, such as author interviews or excerpts from the author’s other work, giving them an edge over their printed counterparts.
  
• They have cool features: Advanced reading devices now have excellent resolution that mimics the printed page. In addition, users can highlight passages, make marginal notes (either through keypad entry or stylus), change font size, and read in the dark. E-books also provide a great level of portability, enabling readers to carry the equivalent of a shelf of books around in a device that’s usually well under a pound. And you can read them all with one hand. Again, the success of the e-book is contingent on the development of an attractive, functional reader and a critical mass of available titles, and we’re getting close.
  
• They can earn you a bit of extra revenue: WOWIO is trying out a new model which consists of offering free e-books for download in exchange for viewing of a few ads. Full-page advertisements are insterted in the e-book documents. The ads can be quickly skipped over and are tailored to the reader’s interests based on questions answered during initial registration. Publishers are paid a small amount per download, making the site a great way for publishers and authors to expose their work and make a little money. Visit www.wowio.com for more information.

So don’t write off the e-book just yet. Stay tuned for more; in an upcoming article, we’ll attempt to unboggle your mind to all those different e-book formats and let you know who’s closest in the race for a viable e-book reader.

Book publishing is a lot of things, but an exact science it is not. In fact, it’s an educated guess at best. So what do you do when you finally get down to deciding the hard numbers of how many books you need for an initial print run? First day sales for Bill Clinton’s My Life exceeded 400,000, prompting the publisher to print 725,000 more copies beyond the initial 1.5 million printed. So does that mean that all books on famous people will have instant success? Hardly. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2005, the book Brad & Jen: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Golden Couple, shockingly or not, sold a meager 4,000 copies. There is no magic answer, but there are factors to take in account when making your decision.

Actually, it’s a little bit more than that. Specifically, it’s the lifeblood of a business, whether it be a lemonade stand on the street corner or a book publisher. And when it comes to the latter, we all love to see an endless stream of book sales roll in. But turning that mounting stack of purchase orders into cash receipts involves more than sitting back and waiting for checks to arrive. Wholesaler accounts payables departments may try to be diligent about meeting payment deadlines, but let’s face it: they deal with an enormous amount of paperwork every day. So don’t rely upon them to process your payments on time. Take it upon yourself to make sure they are on top of your accounts and you will, in turn, maximize your cash flows. Here are some helpful tips to make this happen:

• Maintain updated contact information for the person who deals directly with your account and that person’s supervisor. The former will help make sure you’re paid on time, the latter can make sure things get processed if Plan A doesn’t pan out.
  

• Be persistent when inquiring about payment status. One e-mail or phone call, often not returned, won’t get you anywhere. It’s not that they are ignoring you; they handle many accounts, and yours can get lost in the shuffle. Don’t allow that to happen. Stay on top of the person who won’t get back to you. The squeaky wheel does get the grease. At the very least, at some point your contact will simply get tired of you trying to track them down, and you’ll get a response.
  

• Don’t wait for your account statements to be requested in order to process payments to you. Find out when they’re normally due, and set up a schedule to generate and send them on–or ahead of–schedule.
  

• If it’s available, have your database administrator set up the functionality for e-mailing statements, invoices, credit memos, and any other paperwork that your accounts payable contact may want. It’s a huge time-saver for everyone involved. Severing your ties with a fax machine is always a good thing, and Mother Nature will like you a little better, too.
  

At the end of the day, if someone owes you money, don’t hesitate or apologize for being aggressive and proactive when trying to collect it. You don’t have to break any knees (unless it’s absolutely necessary) to stay on top of where your books and your money are.