Book Authors’ Corner

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[Editor’s Keynote: The distinction between traditional publishing and self-publishing has become hard to defend. Who, after all, is the arbiter of a book’s merit? Numerous bestsellers from traditional publishing houses are of dubious value (other than as light reading for the beach or an airplane flight), and many of the works represented in the collage of covers to the right are very good (although not all of them were self-published). To take a hypothetical example, what if, after JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by a dozen traditional publishers, Ms. Rowling had self-published rather than go to a 13th? Would Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone have been less good?]

Contents
About the corner
Writing
    Go with your strengths
    Second thoughts
Publishing
    Promising alternatives
    Hesitant choices
Publicizing
    These options might work
    Risky maneuvers
Selling
    Things that work
    Iffy things 
Links to some useful resources

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About the corner
The purpose of the corner is to support the blog’s book authors in writing, publishing, promoting, and selling their work, by:

• Networking and sharing resources and information (e.g., tips for  writing, publishing, pricing, publicizing, selling),
• Trading experiences (e.g., what has or hasn’t worked for individuals), and
• Inviting reactions and suggestions from readers (who may leave comments in the place provided at the bottom, or use the contact form in the sidebar).

    The corner will be managed as a working page in progress. Contributions, whether sent to me by way of email, texting, or comments below, will be incorporated in the body of the corner as might seem useful.
    Thanks to contributing editor Ed Rogers for suggesting such a “writer’s corner,” whose very existence owes to his initial ideas. Thanks as well to everyone else who has contributed substantially to this point, including Randy Somers, Jim Rix, and Shirley Skufca Hickman.

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Authors represented include:
Michael H. Brownstein
Shirley Deane/Midyett
Ralph Earle
Rudy Gerber
Steve Glossin (also as J Randall)
Michael Hanson
Tom Harley
Roger Owens
D. Michael Pain (1941-2018)
Jim Rix
Ed Rogers (as edRogers)
Shirley Skufca Hickman
Randy Somers

Writing
    Well, writing is where it starts, right? All of our authors have proven they can do that, and they exemplify some things that others might consider.

Go with your strengths. Life is too short to beat dead horses.

Ask yourself what you have written that was successful. Shirley Skufca Hickman, for example, has proven herself in memoir, fiction, and romance, and Steve Glossin & Ed Rogers in thriller fiction. Jim Rix wrote a great true crime book.

Join a writing critique group. Shirley Skufca Hickman taught a class in Creative Writing at a local community college many years ago. Since then she and the other writers have continued to meet, with high value for everyone. They usually read and critique a chapter a week.

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Second thoughts. xxx

One thing to have a second thought about. xxx

Another thing to have a second thought about. xxx

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Publishing
    You may not make a lot of money (or you might), but you would like some readers and some recognition in any case.

Promising alternatives. Several well-established self-publishing companies are available for “indie” authors to submit their books to, including ones we have become familiar with: the Amazon companies CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), the Ingram Content Group company IngramSpark, and Xulon Press. Most of the authors whose book covers appear in the collage have used an Amazon company, and Shirley Deane/Midyett is in the process of using both IngramSpark and CreateSpace to publish Brain Tangles. Randy Somers used Xulon Press.

Enter writing contests. Shirley Skufca Hickman entered her Sarah Darlin’ in a romance-writing contest, and won. The first prize was the book’s publication by Oak Tree Press, whose publisher liked her books and also published Is Everybody Happy Now, Family Is Forever, and Fall in Love With an Orange Tree or a Book.

Set the right price for your book. Pricing is not a simple matter. It will repay you to do a bit of research. Here are some articles that might help:

• “Tips for Pricing Your Book” [IngramSpark]
• “Ten Tips for Pricing Your Book Profitably” [SelfPublished Author, by Bowker]
• “Publishing: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Pricing Your Self-published Books” [Alliance of Independent Authors, ALLi]
• “Your Five-Minute Guide to Pricing Your Self-Published Book” [The Book Designer]
• “What to Charge: 6 Simple Rules for Pricing Your Book” [Author Unlimited]

My own main takeaways from the articles are these:

1. If your main objective is to reach readers, then don’t ever raise the price so much as to make the book unattractive on that account.
2. What price to set is not just a matter of “typical paperback prices,” but typical prices for paperbacks in the same category.

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Hesitant choices. One obvious sign that you did something wrong, or miscalculated, is that you have a storage shed loaded with boxes of unsold books. Or you’ve tried something many, many times without success.

Can you possibly get an agent? Shirley Skufca Hickman tried to get an agent, but what she writes doesn’t fit into some of the popular categories. She says that if you haven’t heard from them in two months, they aren’t interested. “Generally, agents accept 2% of what authors offer. Then the publishers accept 2% of that. Authors could wait for two years before seeing their book in print.”

Don’t print a whole lot of copies on speculation. Jim Rix self-published Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out in 2007, after 10-20 query letters to publishing houses elicited at best a polite, complimentary “not for us.” He founded Broken Bench Press and had several thousand copies of Jingle Jangle printed, hard-bound, shrink-wrapped, and boxed to warehouse for the avalanche of orders he expected to roll in. To date, Jim has sold somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred copies of Jingle Jangle.

Try to avoid a pricing competition with Amazon. Randy Somers’s take on Amazon is conditioned by the fact that he did not use Amazon to publish his book. “If your book has its own ISBN, Amazon will carry your book for sale. Amazon is the 900-lb elephant in the room of all publishing. My main issue with them is that, where they are selling a third-party product like mine, they choose whatever list price they want [and can afford] to move the product, in direct competition with other vendors, including me. I too can set the price on my own site for whatever I want, but if Amazon lists the book for substantially less, my customers will leave my site and go to Amazon.”

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Publicizing
    The extent to which you publicize, and how you go about, vary much from writer to writer: personality, desire, confidence, means, time. Review the options, talk about them with others, do some research, and experiment as your unique circumstances allow.

These options might work. Once again, our authors have demonstrated some successes that others can emulate.

Buy publicity services. Randy Somers reports that the publisher of JT: Another Mighty Midyett [Xulon Press] also sells publicity services. He had at first “waded into [promotions] blindly and found out what a minnow in the Pacific looks like.” Xulon supplied him a press release, although he wrote his own “trailer.” “Xulon aggressively sells its publicity services to writers, continually wanting to feature your book at a show or in a magazine, and offering special prices on orders (I doubt if I have ever paid the same price to purchase the books because of the variety of specials they run for x days etc.) I receive an email from Xulon daily on specials and events they attend at which they want me to buy spots to promote my book. They get a huge presence at book conventions and get scores of authors to buy a billboard-type spot or a prominent place on a display rack. And their services are advertised in the process.”

Flood book retail outlets with calls. This idea hasn’t been tried yet, that we know of. But it came up in discussions with Vic Midyett as Shirley Deane/Midyett’s book Brain Tangles nears release to world-wide distribution by Ingram, which will send out “metadata” descriptors about the book to scores of distributors around the world. It is not realistic to expect than Barnes & Noble, for example, will pick up a book just on the basis of descriptors about it. But what if B&N started getting calls (lots of calls) from people wanting to buy a copy of the book (whether in paperback or as an eBook)?

Write reviews for one another. Ed Rogers: Let’s say that Michael Hanson wrote a review of one of my books. It could start with the fact that he is a writer and mention some of his books. That way, anyone who bought my book might see his name and titles. And I, of course, could write a review of Michael’s books; he and I would be promoting each other’s books.
    We could even incorporate quotations from such reviews into a “testimonials” page immediately inside the front cover, or insert them onto the back cover. On Amazon, you can change your book’s cover or text and be back up within a couple days.

Get on a TV or radio show. Jim Rix was on two or three television interview shows, including one with Ray Krone, but the best plug he could get for Jingle Jangle was a bare mention that he had written a book – no web address or other “ad” was permitted. For example, “Jingle Jangle on ‘On the Case with Paula Zahn’ this weekend.”
    [Ed Rogers]: Some morning shows invite authors to talk about their books and answer interview questions. On local Channel 3, the author talks about one book, but normally has his or her other books on the table, where the camera can pick up the titles, so the author can get in a plug now and then. I went to a local TV show’s Facebook page and sent a message asking who I could send a book to for consideration, and one minute later I got an e-mail address for one of the hosts of the show. Now I’m not sure which book to push! I’m sure all stations have something like this, or maybe, on slow days, they could use as filler. It wouldn’t hurt to go to each local station’s Facebook page and ask.

Distribute flyers. Jim Rix created and disseminated several fliers for Jingle Jangle and managed to elicit I think two reviews in publications targeting the legal profession. For example, “The top 10 reasons to read this book.”

Do an Amazon ad campaign. Jim Rix’s current strategy to publicize Jingle Jangle is to mount a marketing campaign on Amazon. In his own words:

I recently reduced the price to $9.99 and set up an Amazon “Ad Campaign” whereby Amazon displays a Jingle Jangle icon to its users based upon searched keywords. It costs me 50 cents every time a user clicks on the icon. In the first week Amazon popped up 4,500 icons (impressions) and produced 2 “clicks.” I'm waiting to see how many clicks it takes to generate a sale. Another finding of the ad campaign was that keywords beginning with “criminal” (“…justice,” “…investigation,” “…law,” “…procedure,” etc.) get 44% of the popups, and “true crime” alone gets 28%. Note that I included the keywords “true crime” and “criminal justice system” in my Amazon blurb:

AUTHOR Jim Rix on his TRUE CRIME ADVENTURE thru the CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM – After learning that his cousin Ray Krone was on Arizona’s Death Row, he began looking into “The Snaggletooth Murder” and was soon convinced that Ray was innocent. His book details his 10-year quest to free Ray, showing how the person he believes responsible got away with murder (the book’s subtitle is “The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out“). Rix’s account is an eye-opener about how little justice there actually is in the criminal justice system, where the police overlook suspects, prosecutors try to win at all costs, junk science is allowed, and “expert” hired guns sway juries. Rix’s penetrating survey of criminal justice reveals crucial remedies for fixing the system. This is a MUST-READ for anyone interested in true crime, criminal law, and justice. And CONGRATULATIONS TO JIM RIX, who successfully helped Ray Krone become the 100th inmate of Death Row exonerated by DNA testing!

Set up a page for your book(s) on Facebook. Ed Rogers: I set up a free page on Facebook.
    [Note: Moristotle & Co. also has a free page on Facebook.]

Get into a Twitter fight with Trump. Ed Rogers, thinking outside the box as usual, suggested this. However, he is no longer on Twitter, saying “I have had enough of that.” But maybe someone who is on Twitter could try to engage Trump on Ed’s behalf? “Hey, Pres Trump, I think someone has written a book about you, UNWANTED PRESIDENT, by a guy name of Ed Rogers...It could make you famous....”

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Risky maneuvers. Facebook, Amazon, and others sell promotional or advertising services. Are they worth the money?

Play Amazon’s numbers game. Ed Rogers: It’s a numbers game on Amazon. We can change the price of an eBook from day to day: one day free, the next day the normal price. We could pick a day for one of us to set his or her eBook’s price to free, and then all go on and download that eBook and write a review for it on Amazon. It would be nice if we read the book, but all you have to do to qualify to leave a review is to have purchased the book. We can play this numbers game without having read the book.

Advertise an Amazon “promo” on Facebook. Ed Rogers: I have run “promos” on Amazon where my ebook was free for a couple of days, which I announced on Facebook, with a link.  I thought I could at least generate some comments with the free books, but while people were happy to take the free book, I never got one comment.

Do a paid Facebook promotion. Ed Rogers: I paid for a promotion on Facebook (cost me $3 a day). By their count, it reached 840 people total. I got two or three e-mails but no sales. I only ran it for three days. I figured if out of 840 people I couldn’t sell one book, I was beating a dead horse.

Put up billboards. Before publication of Jingle Jangle, to spark anticipation, Jim Rix put up billboards on major highways in Phoenix, where interest in Ray Krone’s trial had been high (if, unfortunately, some years past). Jim regrets that the billboards seemed a complete waste of [quite a bit] money.

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Selling
    Not everyone writes for the money, but authors do like to be read, and unless you just give your books away, one way to get readers is to sell them a book! Besides, people are more likely to read a book they bought than one that was just handed to them.

Things that work. Our authors have several success stories when it comes to selling!

Set up a book website. Randy Somers saw three options for marketing JT: Another Mighty Midyett: His best profits by far have come from paperback sales on his own website: Official Website of Randy Somers. (His first purchase from Xulon was for 500 copies.) Sales by his publisher [Xulon] have been second-best (Randy gets 50% on each sale). Third-best have been paperback & ebook sales by third-party vendors like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, both of which acquire the products from Xulon. [Randy has agreed to provide some comparative numbers as to books sold from his website, in person, by Xulon, and by way of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but he needs to schedule some time with his accountant. He may also be able to tell us the approximate ratio of revenues from (sales of paperbacks and eBooks) to total expenses.]
    He says he had fun putting his website together. “I knew from comments I was getting that the cover I pieced together was an eye-catcher and needed to [head the webpage].” He designed the site and paid someone to build it, and continues to pay them annually to host and maintain it. “Costs are negligible, about $15 a year for the domain name and $200 a year for the hosting.”
    His marketing efforts have focused on email blasts into communities where either his name or his uncle, JT’s, would be recognized. He used some Facebook and any event that could get him in front of a crowd (his professional activities over the years have included a lot of public speaking).
    While a website works 24/7, he points out that you have to figure out how to drive traffic to it. He is considering a YouTube upload of himself giving a short sales pitch.
    Jim Rix registered Jingle Jangle’s ISBN with the Library of Congress, and Moristotle used HTML skills he had recently acquired to create a website for the book, which eventually proved to be not worth the expense of its hosting.
    Another example is the website that I set up (free on Blogger) for Change Foundation, the publisher of Shirley Deane/Midyett’s book, Brain Tangles. Its primary post so far is the one that provides links to retailers around the world from whom the book can be ordered (the website itself does not take orders). By the way, after less than a month and a half, the list of retailers has become impressively long:

• Abebooks (worldwide)
• Adlibris (Sweden)
• Amazon:
• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• France
• Germany & The Netherlands
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• Spain
• United Kingdom & Ireland
• United States of America
• Barnes & Noble
• Bokkilden (Norway)
• Bokklubben (Norway)
• Bokus (Sweden)
• Bol (The Netherlands)
• Bookshout (eBooks)
• Booktopia (Australia)
• Fishpond (New Zealand)
• Foyles (United Kingdom)
• Hugendubel (Germany)
• Jet (United States of America)
• Manz (Austria)
• Rakuten (Japan)
• 7switch (Germany)

Set up a booth to sell autographed copies. Jim Rix secured about a dozen gigs at a table in four Costco stores, where he sold autographed copies of Jingle Jangle at the average rate of about one every ten minutes (one every six minutes during one two-hour period). For example: “Reno Costco almost sold out barely midway through,” “Jingle Jangle sells!,” and “May those stacks of Jingle Jangle sell quickly!”     Picking up on Ed Rogers’s suggestion to get on a TV talk show, if you could wangle a booth at Costco, you could have twenty or so copies of each of your books. Having them all sends a message of its own: “This author has a track record.” Many readers like to read everything that an author they like has written. I can easily picture shoppers taking a copy of all three of Ed’s current books home with them. Ed says that there is an annual Spring Fest in the town square where he lives. “If a small booth doesn’t cost much, that could be an idea. There was an Native American selling CDs one year.”

Sell to schools. Because Shirley Skufca Hickman rightly judged that her book Fall in Love with An Orange Tree or a Book was ideal for high school students, she contacted schools, two of whom bought a hundred copies. She also offered lesson plans to go with the book, but the schools preferred to use their own approaches. Shirley did speak two groups of students who read the book and discussed it with them, recording such comments as: “This is the best book I ever read,” “This book is the first one I could hardly wait to finish,” and “Why don’t they have more books like this in high school?”

Place copies in stores. Shirley Skufca Hickman tried promoting her books at one point by leaving copies in the gift shop at an art museum, but she took them out when she learned that the people working at the museum were reading them but not buying them. We wonder whether an author might arrange a “consignment” whereby the store would be financially responsible for the copies, and could earn a percentage for copies sold?     Michael Hanson did the latter in at least one bookstore in Chapel Hill, which gave him a prominent spot for Tripping to Dickeyland on a table near the entrance. And other bookstores in the area have a “local authors” or “Southern writers” section.     Randy Somers went to a few bookstores but did not push. “If you are not well known and do not have a blockbuster title, stores are a slow boat to China.” He travels to churches and organizations that sponsor JT.

Ask friends to request their libraries to acquire copies. When Vic Midyett informed me (on May 28, 2018) that “a friend of ours asked the Perth Library if they had a new book called Brain Tangles; they told her no, but would put it to their committee to get a vote on whether to buy it for the library,” I was reminded that sales to libraries could be a significant outlet for authors’ books. I created a one-page request to take to my own local public library (and to UNC-Chapel Hill) on behalf of Shirley’s book. I share it here as an example of what other authors might do:

TO MY LIBRARIAN:
   
Please order a copy or two of this book for our library:
    Title: Brain Tangles: Unraveling the Mysteries of Communication and Human Behavior
    Author: Shirley Deane/Midyett
    Publisher: Change Foundation (https://change-foundation.blogspot.com/), using the world-wide distribution services of Ingram Lightning Source
    ISBN: 978-0-6482690-0-7 (printed book) / 978-0-6482690-1-4 (eBook)
    Keywords: addiction, autobiography, communication, counseling, eidetic art psychotherapy, human behavior, psychological development, personal growth, psychotherapy, therapy
    Short description of the book: Autobiography recounts author’s experiences and discoveries as a mental health professional (addiction counsellor, psychotherapist, Biomedical Communication Specialist, researcher, program developer, and eidetic art psychotherapist) for many years in Australia and the United States, including her contributions to therapeutic theory and practice.
    About the author: A citizen of both Australia and the United States, a mental health professional for over 45 years in both countries. A counselor and psychotherapist in early-episode psychosis programs, and with severely mentally ill clients in community mental health and drug rehabilitation centers. A certified addiction specialist having served on staff with two rehabilitation in-patient units, working with men and women on probation and parole. Experienced in working with people in crisis, including providing support in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
    Review: I believe this book can be helpful to those practicing counseling as it pulls together several conceptual frameworks, including the once very popular Transactional Analysis. But this book would also be excellent for the client to be reading while in therapy. It’s possible Shirley Deane’s checklists and explanations of T. A. would enable a client to process inner dynamics more quickly and work on behavioral changes more readily. I’m a retired psychotherapist. I actually worked with Shirley many years ago and this book is a beautiful reflection of her personality and beliefs. She’s a beautiful, transparent woman and this shines through in her writing. I can heartily recommend this book...it’s very accessible to the lay reader and gave me a great review of materials I studied years ago.   –Pennelope Skoglund, Ph.D.
   
                                Thank you very much!
                                [signed]

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Iffy things. We’re trying to think of some things to avoid when it comes to selling.

One iffy thing. xxx

Another iffy thing. xxx

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Links to some useful resources

• U.S. Copyright Office
      “Copyright registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work.”
• “How to Market a Self Published Book” [WikiHow, without date] (Contributed by Ed Rogers)
      “Self publishing is on the rise and many people are bypassing the traditional route of seeking the affirmation of publication worthiness via commercial publishers and are striking out on their own, with a large dollop of self faith! Getting your book noticed, however, is a big challenge and without the resources and connections of a publishing house behind you, you'll need to do your own marketing and get that book out there! Here are some ways to do this effectively.”
• IngramSpark Print-on-Demand Books for Self-Publishers (Ingram Spark is part of Ingram Content Group, One Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086.)
• “The Indie Author’s Guide to Self-Publishing” [Pressbooks & SELF-e] (Discovered in April 2018, in the process of preparing Shirley Deane/Midyett’s Brain Tangles for eBook submission to IngramSpark)
• CreateSpace: Publish your words, your way (CreateSpace is an Amazon company.)
• Kindle Direct Publishing: Self-publish eBooks and paperbacks for free (KDP is an Amazon company.)
• “How to Use CreateSpace and IngramSpark Together,” by Karen Myers [ALLi, April 2, 2015]
      CreateSpace offers standard and expanded distribution. “Expanded Distribution offers you the opportunity to access a larger audience through more online retailers, bookstores, libraries, academic institutions, and distributors within the United States. Expanded Distribution will also improve discoverability of your book across all the channels. Regardless of whether or not you include your title in Expanded Distribution, all CreateSpace titles can be distributed through the Amazon.com and Amazon Europe channels....
      “So why not only use CreateSpace – free ISBN, no charge for books, ease of ordering at Amazon? Because there’s a whole wide world out there that isn’t Amazon.
      “CS is NOT a worldwide distributor (other than for Amazon). When you use the CS expanded services, what happens is that CS uses Ingram to distribute the print book (like many other small vendors). It registers your book in the Ingram database, as ‘Publisher=CreateSpace’ (EVEN IF YOU USE YOUR OWN ISBN, NOT ONE PROVIDED BY CS). This means when a bookstore (including online bookstores) looks for your print book, they search the Ingram database, find it under ‘Publisher=CreateSpace,’ and if they are sensitive about Amazon as a competitor they may refuse to carry it. For example, at Barnes&Noble, where my ebooks are sold, my print books appeared as ‘available from third parties’ (when I only used CS). Some bookstores think of Amazon as competition, and others associate CS with ‘indies’ and scorn indies as presumed low quality.
      “If you use Ingram directly...your books appear to bookstores as ‘Publisher=YourPublisherName’ and no one can tell that you’re an indie publisher (there are thousands of publisher imprints). That means that your print books now appear at online retailers, matching your ebooks, and bookstores are willing to carry them.”
• “Alliance of Independent Authors: Association for Self-Publishing Authors” [Self-Publishing Advice from the Alliance of Independent Authors]
      We asked Sarah Begley of ALLi whether ALLi endorsed Karen Myers’s recommendation. She said they do. She also told us:
      “Once you become a member [of ALLi] you have full access to our team of self-published authors, as well as other members where you will receive trusted advice to help through all aspects of being a self-published author. We have a monthly Member Only Q&A with Director Orna Ross and special guest where you can get specific advice on any questions you may have. We can also give free legal guidance and feedback on publishing and self-publishing contracts. And you can be listed in our searchable ‘Find An Indie Author’ member database, trawled by literary festivals, event organizers, journalists, publishers, literary agents, self-publishing platforms and anyone who wants access to successful self-publishers.
      “ALLi also connects with book fairs, booksellers, distributors, literary festivals, self-publishing services and rights managers on your behalf. We bring the three big publishing fairs, London, BEA & Frankfurt, to you each year through the Indie Author Fringe online and take your books and services with us wherever we go in our directories and databases.”
       [Note, however, that paid memberships in ALLi are expensive, but the website is available for perusal by non-members, and we access topics of interest by googling the topic, sometimes even including “alli” among the search terms.]
• “CREATESPACE VS KDP PRINT,” by Gundi Gabrielle [Kindlepreneur with Dave Chesson, undated, said to be kept up to date]
      “In the summer of 2016, Amazon launched a 2nd POD platform – “KDP Print” – right in the KDP backend that most authors use to publish Kindle books.
      “At that time, only a limited number of authors were invited, but on February 15, 2017, KDP Print – still in Beta testing – was opened to the public.
      “Now suddenly, authors were scratching their heads trying to decide which platform to use, with KDP strongly promoting their new POD feature right within the author account.”

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