Researching House History Presentation

Today was my presentation at The Heights on how to research the history of a home. I arrived an hour early because I have a phobia that the electronic equipment will not work and I'll be stuck with a poor presentation. While some talks can be handled with no visual aids, this particular one would be very difficult to do without my slides. The first words out of the tech guy's mouth were that he could not find the cord to connect their projector to my laptop. Words to warm every presenter's heart. He ended up finding a different projector and we went to work connecting the two machines. I normally work with a Mac, but most facilities do not own the cord to connect a Mac to their projector, so I brought Jim's PC laptop along. We finally got the two machines to talk to each other, but the full slide would not show up on the big screen even though it was full screen on the PC. While the situation was not ideal, I could make do with it if I had to in a pinch. Fortunately someone in the audience suggested that I press Control, F7. Sure enough, that did the trick! And I was ready to go 10 minutes early.

There were only about 10 people in the audience, which was a little disappointing. As Jim pointed out, it takes as much work to prepare for an audience of 10 as an audience of 1,000. (Well, except for running all the handouts!) But those who did attend were very engaged and had a few suggestions on resources they had used in researching their homes that I had not even considered. Plus I sold 3 copies of my book, and considering that 2 of the people in the room already had it that is not too bad. I am hoping that I can do more of these presentations because I really enjoyed it.

As an update to the CreateSpace debate, both the books I processed through CS are now live and available on Amazon. Woo, hoo!

Working with CreateSpace

In a previous post I talked about the fact that Amazon does not always play nicely with others in the publishing sandbox. Take my book Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? Researching a St. Louis County, Missouri Home as an example. I published this book in 2009, using a local printer in St. Louis. While Amazon.com is aware that the book exists, it shows up as follows:

Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? Amazon page

The page indicates that two copies of the book are available from third-party sellers for $99.35 each! And they are used copies at that!

If you want to sell books on Amazon, there are ways to get around this issue. You can set up your own store on Amazon to sell the books, or you can go through their Advantage program and have them sell and ship the books for you. There are pros and cons to both of these options, which you can read about here. Since I don't want to get involved in shipping books, either directly to the buyer or to Amazon itself, I elected to go through their CreateSpace option to get Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? available on Amazon. In this scenario you set up a CreateSpace account, upload your book and its cover, and the books are printed and shipped by Amazon as they are ordered. There are no fees involved for creating an account or setting up your title unless you opt to use any of their services.

Because I had already printed my book in the past, I had PDFs of both the cover design and the interior of the book readily available. It was extremely easy to walk through the steps provided on the CreateSpace website to upload the book and the cover. Their system advised me of two possible problems with my book's interior (both involving low photo resolution) and gave me the option to fix those before continuing. At this point the ball is in their court as I await their review. Following approval, they will send me a printed copy of the book for my review. Assuming it looks good, the book will go live on their website. I am not anticipating huge sales due to the narrow scope of the book, but it is nice to have an alternative place for people to be able to buy the book.

The most interesting thing about the whole process this morning? When I completed the uploading I was immediately taken to a page to set the book up on Kindle Direct Publishing as an ebook. Another great marketing strategy by Amazon! Because I have already published the ebook Keys to Unlocking House History, I probably will not set Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? up as an ebook as well. But it certainly seems like it would be simple to accomplish.

For now I wait to see what the folks at CreateSpace come back with - hopefully I won't be eating my words about how easy this has been!

Nora Roberts and Book Marketing

Nora Roberts books in Turn the Page Bookstore

As a long-time fan of Nora Roberts, I have read every book she has ever written, including the In Death series she writes under the pen name of J.D. Robb. Did you know that she began writing back in 1979 while stuck in the house with two small children during a blizzard? Because I write non-fiction I am exceedingly amazed by writers who spin stories out of their own imaginations, and Nora's books are always filled with interesting people that I would like to meet in real life. Her women are strong and independent, the men sexy and intriguing, and the romance scenes...well, let's just say they are hot!

The latest trilogy from Nora is set in Boonsboro, Maryland, which is near where she lives. They involve the remodeling of a 1790s era inn and the people and places in the town. What is interesting about the series is that many of the places in the book actually exist. Nora bought the decrepit inn several years ago and had it remodeled into an eight room bed and breakfast. Each of the rooms, with the exception of the Penthouse, are named after famous literary couples. The inn really was mostly furnished with pieces from Basts of Boonsboro. Vesta Pizzeria is real, and is owned by her son Dan and his wife. Turn the Page Bookstore, also in the trilogy, is alive and well on Main Street. The bookstore is owned by Nora and her husband. The fitness center (owned by Nora) and new restaurant (also owned by son Dan) discussed in the second book are now open to the public.

Inn Boonsboro

At first glance you might think that the Inn Boonsboro trilogy was just a way for Nora to market her inn, bookstore, and the restaurants owned by her son. That thought did briefly cross my mind. But last weekend I had the opportunity to visit Boonsboro and stay at the inn. What I realized is that Nora has taken her time and resources to breathe new life into a town of 2,800 people that, without her help, might dry up and blow away like so many other small communities. The inn and restaurants provide food and lodging to the hundreds of women and men who flock to the town every year for one of Nora's book signings.

Turn the Page Bookstore

In speaking with the woman at Turn the Page Bookstore, it became clear that Nora Roberts and her book signings are the reason that this store has been able to survive when so many other independent bookstores have closed their doors. It also offers a venue for local artists to display and sell their crafts.

At the end of my visit I came away with a whole new respect for the woman who has enabled me for so many years to slip away into the lives and worlds of her fascinating creations. Beyond the characters in her books, Nora has helped many others in Boonsboro to live their happily ever afters.

Still No Login

It is now Thursday and I still cannot login to myhousehistory.net. I have received no response at all from axspace. I suspect the little guy is sitting in a basement somewhere scratching his head over my dilemma. This is beyond frustrating! I guess the silver lining is that none of my spammer followers will be able to post their "comments" about body part enlargements, movies, drugs or various other items they are peddling. That is the good news.

On Saturday afternoon I will be attending a two hour presentation on researching house histories. It is a little embarrassing to admit that the St. Louis Genealogical Society is sponsoring this workshop, and they sell my book in their store. So one might imagine that they would ask the author of the book to do a presentation of this kind. I obviously do not know the right people in the organization. But I figure I will probably learn something, and I plan to have copies of my book along just in case.

Keys to Unlocking House History Revisited

Keys to Unlocking House History has been available on smashwords.com and through a link on my website for over four months now. The book can be purchased through them for the Kindle, Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, the Sony readers, Palm readers, in PDF format to be read on the computer - pretty much everything out there right now. There have been 27 downloads of the preview and 0 sales so far. Smashwords distributes the ebooks to virtually everyone except Amazon, who has refused to play nicely with others in the publishing sandbox. So I have made a couple of changes. First of all I reduced the price from $4.99 to $2.99. Then I changed my distribution on smashwords.com to eliminate their distribution to Amazon. (I kept hearing that an agreement between the two was imminent, but it has yet to materialize.)

Then I went to Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's own book publishing arm and set up an account. I uploaded Keys to Unlocking House History and in a little over one day the book was available in the Kindle Store on Amazon. Since I now have this account with books for sale on Amazon, I headed over to their Author's Corner and set up a profile for myself. I was able to add Keys to Unlocking House History and From Buckeye to G.I. to my profile, but not Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? I have not sold that book through Amazon, so I figured that was the problem.

I filled out a help request form and was given the option of having someone call me. I barely hit the send button before my phone was ringing. An extremely helpful woman named Theresa went over all three books with me, adding the correct subject areas and search terms to each of the books. She mentioned that Who's Been Sleeping is only available on Amazon if/when a third party puts it up for sale. I asked how we could get around that, and she said she would email me information on their Advantage program. As I understand it, I would send books to Amazon and they would sell them and mail the copies out to the purchaser. So that is something I will need to look into, and I'll probably talk to some of my publisher friends to see how successful this program is since I believe there are fees involved. In the meantime though, kudos to Amazon for an amazing customer service experience today!

Good Day - Presented and Sold a Few Books

Today was my first formal presentation on how to research the history of your house. The Webster Groves Historical Society, as the sponsor, provided wine, cheese and crackers for the attendees. One of the members sat at the table near the entrance and collected money from the book sales for me, so that was really helpful. I donated 20% of the sales from today to the Society, so they had extra motivation to push the books. We ended up selling 6 books. Considering the audience consisted of about 20 people, some of them couples and a few who I knew had already bought the book, that was pretty good. It was a comfortable size in terms of number of attendees as I got fairly decent audience participation.

Jim had volunteered to come with me, which was great as he advanced the PowerPoint presentation for me. We had a moment of silent panic at the beginning when my computer froze. We had arrived 30 minutes early to set up the equipment and make sure all was in working order. Of course at the critical moment it would fail. I made a joke about technology and then quickly restarted the laptop. Fortunately we were error free after that. I'm pretty happy with the slide presentation as a whole. There are a couple of other graphics I would like to add for next time, but overall it flowed nicely. Feedback from the people who came up to speak with me was favorable, so that was good to hear. Bring on the next one!

Point Me Towards the Presentation

As I mentioned earlier, a couple of months ago an organization invited me to give a talk about how to begin the process of researching your home. They said they would do all the promotion and provide refreshments, and that I could sell my books as well. Sounded like a win-win. The promotion has not been forthcoming. There was a brief mention of the talk in their winter newsletter, which goes out to the members. It didn't say where the presentation was being held or who to call for more information. A few weeks ago the President told me she was going to mail postcard reminders to all the members, and those never went out.

Of course I told the reporter from the Webster-Kirkwood Times about the meeting, and thankfully she put that info in the article she wrote about me. The talk did appear in the calendar section of the Times today, albeit in the Saturday listing and not Sunday. And the organization took out an eighth page ad, spelling my name incorrectly and not mentioning what I will be speaking about. Hopefully people will get the gist from the title of my book, if they can read it in the minuscule ad. I am very concerned that there will be a very small turnout due to lack of publicity.

Despite all this, I have been diligently working on my PowerPoint presentation. Since Katie is home she was able to show me how to do a screen capture so I can put information about the St. Louis County website into my slides. That was cool to learn. I'll probably have her look at my slide show when I'm done as she may be able to pretty it up for me. No matter what the turnout, I needed to get this presentation prepared anyway. We'll see what the response is to it.