Finally, Something Goes Right

I had a great experience on December 9. I had a radio interview about my book with a web radio. It was with Street Vibes Mix Radio, which has a "Writer's Block" interview with authors every Wed night from 8 to 9 pm. The interviews were helpful, asked good questions and followed up with lots of friendly comments. There is also a Street Vibes Ning site. Go to  http://streetvibes.ning.com/ There you will find info and links to the web radio. Good group of talented young people. I enjoyed talking to them.

Homework in selecting publishers

It sounds obvious that an author should do a thorough job of investigating publishers before making a selection. I set out to do just that but "things happen" and I made some mistakes. One was not really thinking through the pricing of my book. My publisher gave me some minimum prices and I was able to increase them as I wanted. I sure didn't think this through. I wanted as many people to buy my book as possible so I picked a very low price with a minimum royalty. I forgot to consider the costs of shipping in my decision. It's not really a problem as I didn't expect to make money on my book although it would be nice to recoup my costs. It turns out that with the low costs I selected it's not possible for me to directly sell books at as low a price as the publisher. The reason I want to directly sell some books is to be able to sign and inscribe books for long time friends as associates. I can do this but I either have to sell the books at a loss or charge my friends more than they would pay the publisher. The reason is there are two shipping costs involved when I sell books direct. I have to pay shipping from the printer to me and then from me to the buyer. The shipping cost from the printer to me is more than the discount I get as the author. I should have increased the royalty enough that I could sell books at an equal or lower price than the publisher. Oh well, another lesson learned.

Book Blog Updates

I finally learned a better approach to adding blog posts and getting readers to the site. It should have been obvious but then maybe nothing is obvious to people that are new to a subject. I now add my post but also put a related post in LinkedIn  and Facebook groups, and sometimes Twitter, with a short intro and link to the post. The key that I had missed was the short intro that introduces the topic in a way that draws attention. Sometimes I use a question that I then give my answer in the main post. Other times I seek the opinion of others on the topic I am addressing. I haven't actually compared statistics but I think this is helping bring readers to my book blog and hopefully some will then go to my web site and buy the book.