Book Signing

As I had mentioned in an earlier post the lovely folks at 6 North Cafe invited me to hold a book signing and presentation about researching house history at their Ballwin location. We had selected this morning as the date, and what a beautiful day it turned out to be. Sometimes that can be bad for an author event because people want to be outdoors during these lovely fall days. The event was promoted by the cafe through their social media and local contacts as well as by me.

Things started out on the wrong foot for me as my mapquest failed me. It said it would take me 17 minutes to arrive at my destination, and that 6 North Cafe would be on the right hand side of the road. I allowed 30 minutes for arrival, thinking that on a Saturday the time would be adequate. First I was overshot the address. In my defense, not too many of the businesses have an address large enough to read while operating a car. A few more trips up and down Clayton did not reveal the business to me. I finally stopped and asked the kind lady at Clarkson Eyecare if she knew where the cafe was located. Fortunately I was close, and it was on the left hand side of the road, not the right. Bottom line is that I was 20 minutes late and I was mortified by that. As there was no long line of fans waiting for my arrival, it was not that big of a deal. My tip of the day is to always ask your host for help with directions! I do not know why I didn't do that since I was unfamiliar with the area.

As it turned out no one arrived to buy my house history book or to hear my presentation. (Though I did sell one copy of From Buckeye to G.I.) So you might think that I am disappointed in the outcome. But you would be wrong. Four other authors came to the cafe, two because I had been announcing it and two by coincidence I believe. We had a wonderful discussion about traditional publishing versus self-publishing, ebooks, marketing, printers - you name it. It was fantastic! In fact, I would love to see all of us, and more, get together for coffee once a month or so to share ideas.  Even though the St. Louis Publishers Association meets once a month, there is never enough time to have the kind of conversation we were able to have today.

Top all of that with a fantastic cup of brewed tea and an amazing pumpkin scone, and my author event was great!

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!

A Day with the Masters

Yesterday an incredible event for authors and publishers took place in St. Louis. Brian Jud, Judith Briles and Dan Poynter spent a full day here at a Book Marketing Summit. For an extra fee of $75 there was an opportunity to have dinner with the three of them on Friday night to brainstorm ideas for marketing your book. At first blush that seemed a little pricey, but when you consider that you would have the undivided attention of three publishing powerhouses, it actually might have been a deal. We had tickets to the Fox Theatre, so attending was not an option for me anyway. I will attempt to summarize what I learned from each of the three "Masters".

 Dan Poynter started the morning, so I'll begin with him. I have a lot of respect for Dan and heard him speak last year at Publishing University. He is the author of, among other books, The Self-Publishing Manual. I always tell people that if writing a book is like giving birth to a child, then Dan was my birthing coach. His book really helped me understand how to set up my publishing company as well as produce and market my first book.

• set up Google Alerts to notify you when you, your book, or your topics of interest are mentioned anywhere on the Internet
• even if you are going straight to an ebook with your manuscript, still have some print books made up to distribute for review and promotion
• doesn't recommend that you pursue brick and mortar stores, but if you feel you must then offer to do a mini-seminar there NOT a book signing
• if you are going to use different publishing company, google the name of the company + fraud or scam to see if the company is legitimate

Judith Briles was the second speaker, and she is the author of 28 books and has, indeed, been on Oprah. She is known as The Book Shepherd and the founder of Author U.

• in 2010 with the New York publishing companies, only 10 books sold over a million copies; the average book published by them only sells 500 copies
• she recommends placing a QR code on your business cards, bookmarks, etc. so that those with smart phones can scan it and gain immediate access to your website
• make sure that the main page on your website is not static, but changes with your tweets, Facebook feeds, etc.
• Facebook is the 8th largest search engine so have a page for each of your books in addition to yourself
• guest post on the blogs that your potential readers might be following

Brian Jud is also an author and publisher, and his latest book is How to Make Real Money Selling Books.

• know who your market is and where they shop
• book marketing is a simple as pie - plan, implement, evaluate
• shopcompanion.com and mantra.com can help you determine different retailers that might sell your book
• aptac-us.org is a website that gives information on selling to the government

This is but a small overview of what I learned yesterday. It was an  information-packed day that was well worth the the time and money I spent. St. Louis was very lucky to pull in three speakers if this caliber, and some credit goes to the St. Louis Publishers Association for making it happen. I have a long list of things to do now!

Brian Jud, Judith Briles, Dan Poynter & Bob Baker