Second Book

I am writing a second non-fiction book. This time I started a web site and a blog a year before I expected to publish. I am hoping the blog and web site traffic will build a market for the book when it's published. So far the blog traffic has build up over time as I had hoped. I am doing more of the book design myself this time. I plan to publish with Create Space and am using their free templates. This is working fine so far.

Library Workshop and Book Signing

I finally got around to doing a book signing at our local library. Since there are not a lot of traditional working people in our area I could not expect a large audience. The librarian came up with a great idea. I held a workshop for managers; especially managers of volunteer organizations. The library publicized it it and the attendance was pretty good. I enjoy doing work shops so it worked well for me. Sold only a couple of books but that is what I expected. I am thinking about offering to do a similar workshop in a neighboring community.

First E-Book Sale

Authorhouse.com, the publisher of my book, offers an E-book version as well as hard cover and soft cover version. The E-book sells for less than half of the cost of a soft cover so I expected people would buy more E books than conventional books.  I was wrong. For months no one bought an E book. I finally had the first E book sale recently. I guess people would rather have books in hand than read them on a computer screen. I would prefer to have people buy the E book as I get twice the royalty compared to conventional book sales.

First Royalty Check

An exciting day. I received my first royalty check. It was for the first quarter of book sales and, while not a significant amount of money, it was exciting to get a check. I have downscoped my book marketing as I found I just don't like doing it. I missed my art. At my age I don't have to spend time doing things I don't like at the expense of not doing things I like. So I have gone back to drawing and painting and am just maintaining an active blog related to my book. Also decided that a second book that I am thinking about will be done as a series of blogs or ezine articles. That way I do the writing, which I enjoy, and I avoid the hassle and expense of publication plus I don't have to think about marketing.

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.