So the page proofs for the cookbook shipped from the new PoD vendor. When I was down at the plant the other day, they advised me to enter their address as the shipping address in the order form, and then I could just run down there and pick them up, free of shipping charges.
Heeee! The message didn’t reach the mail room. Someone actually made out a mailing label and put it in the mail! Hilarious!
Post office said it was supposed to be delivered today. The front office guys were abhorred. They offered to print a new one. I said the world’s gears were not grinding to a halt and not to worry about it.
That will add another couple of days to the cookbook production. Those of you who asked for copies: hang in there! The thing is on its way.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday I was supposed to have posted …. uhm… “published” the third and final collection of Fire-Rider stories — Books XIII through XVIII — to Amazon in Kindle format. For various reasons, that didn’t get done. Now it’s finally winging its way toward my sidekick, who has a PC on which to update the table of contents. Cutely, Kindle cannot read a TofC that has been compiled in or updated in any Mac program.
The new marketing agent had the privilege of tearing her hair (instead of me having to do it!) until she got all a set of ads posted on Facebook, plugging these fine pieces of literature.
As it develops — get this! — Facebook has the most incredibly stupid rule to the effect that an image for a Facebook Ad may not have more than 20% of its area devoted to type. See that boxed set image there? Just the byline and the title cover 24% of the image. Yes. What it means is, in effect, you can’t advertise a book on Facebook!
She finally managed to cobble something together by using one of the designer’s early iterations of the cover that had almost no coverlines on it. But…uhm…what we’re advertising, then, is not what we’re selling.
At any rate, while we await the correct table of contents, the collection’s interior can be prepared for hard copy printing. I need to get all three of the “boxed set” volumes posted at the PoD guy’s site, so copies of those can be ordered as needed.
So I was going to spend part of the day converting that thing for print format.
Instead, though, I ended up spending most of the time available laying out a client’s memoir for print publication — the interior pages, that is. I don’t have a cover image from him and so can’t do anything about that. But I think I’d rather have him see the interior first, lest he decide he’d like a different trim size. The book is fairly long, and I’m thinking the standard trade book size — 5.5 x 8.5 inches — might give us more pages than we’d like. A larger trim size will mean fewer pages. I guess.
I’ve reduced the font size and will install narrower margins once everything is flowed into the template. I’d like to keep the thing under 400 pages, which I think will happen. We’re at 233 typeset pages now; the MS is 300 pages, but he insists on typing single-spaced, so in reality it’s almost 600 manuscript pages: around 130,500 words. A lot of words.
🙂 Guy’s done a lot of living. Most of it pretty interesting…
Other parts of the day were consumed with driving a payment to mail from the post office, since my mailbox was robbed again yesterday, driving to the drugstore, running interference between the accountant and a subcontractor over W-9s, and on and endlessly on.
The new Fort Knox of a mailbox has yet to be installed. Wish WonderHandyman would get off the dime! Not that it matters for outgoing mail: henceforth everything I need to mail will have to be physically delivered to the post office — no more little red flag for the mailman. Uhm….mailperson…personperson.
And now it’s getting late at night. Nothing has gotten done — or at least, nothing has been carried through to completion, other than mailing one (count it, 1) envelope with a check in it. The dogs are conked out, and the human hopes to be so, too. Very soon.
Hi Funny, just curious if at some point you’ll have any info on how all this writing and publishing is working out in terms of bringing in actual money. It sounds like you’re still ramping things up, but wondering if any early returns are giving you an idea on whether all this work looks like it’ll pay off soon. I hope it does, you’ve been busy!
Well… You know how to lose a small fortune?
Start with a large fortune and publish a book.
So far, we’re proving that to be a fact. Returns would be laughable if they weren’t so sad.
Two main reasons for that: 1) we haven’t been marketing effectively; and 2) I haven’t learned how to convert .docx files to .epub. The first has happened because I’ve been sick for so long and because I tend to defer things I don’t like to do until I feel well enough to take them on — and I decidedly do not like marketing; the second because I haven’t wanted to pay my e-book designer’s fees for a job I suspect takes about 15 minutes and (again because of the defer-it-till-you-feel-better peculiarity) I’ve put off learning to use Calibre, the most reliable of the e-book conversion tools.
Recently, however, I’ve hired a marketing agent to create a Facebook Ads campaign for Fire-Rider. Goal #1 there is just to see if Facebook Ads does _anything_ (some say the things are great and others say they’re useless); secondarily, it would be nice to see enough income to pay this woman…which I deeply doubt will happen. Additionally, I intend to advertise the Racy Books on SmartBitches/TrashyBooks and try to market them through a distributor called AllRomanceEbooks.com.
And also recently, one of our writers has figured out how to use Calibre. She sent over ePub versions of one of the FireRider stories and a Racy Book. These things look _fantastic_ on the iPad, using the iBooks reader.
We cannot market the Racy Books on iTunes, which fancies itself a “family” site. However, we certainly _can_ market all the Plain & Simple Press books there. This means we can sell Fire-Rider, the diet/cookbook, and Slave Labor through iTunes, we can now sell ALL our books through Nook and other outlets, and we can sell the Racy Books through AllRomanceEbooks. We hope.
We shall see if this makes any difference.
I figured the enterprise wouldn’t even begin to make a profit until we had 100 books online, a goal I targeted for the end of March. Thanks to six surgeries in 12 months followed more recently by my collapsing with exhaustion, we have not made that target and will not. We now have 48 up, with the appearance (today!!) of the third FireRider collection at Amazon. By the end of March, we should have about 52 bookoids posted at Amazon.
Early returns suggest the following:
* Soft-core porn does not, contrary to published reports, sell itself.
* Self-published works of genre fiction are extremely difficult to sell unless you have a lot of friends and relatives who would feel embarrassed if you found out they hadn’t bought a copy.
* If anything markets itself in this business, it’s the diet/cookbook genre — 30 Pounds/4 Months is in fact selling.
* You would have to sell a PHENOMENAL number of books to make a living by selling them through Amazon. They’re very cheap, indeed, to produce…but zero sales of something that cost almost nothing to produce mean only that you lose relatively little cash compared to the amount you’d lose if you were trying to sell print copies through brick-and-mortar stores.