ABA (American Booksellers Association) and NABE (North American Book dealers Exchange) membership advantages. Marketing your book is as hard on a person mentally as construction work is physically. You have all heard the saying, "It takes money to make money." In the case of marketing organizations, it only takes a little, for years of useful contacts and learning about accepted practices from book expositions and conferences. When people at an expo are familiar with your name and work, you will get orders for all of your titles. In other words, you are selling yourself, (The author), not just one book. They will be more likely to order because of your name more than from one book once they get to know you personally. You will find that to be a real advantage in years to come. I've always found it easier to market a book after building up the author as mysterious or controversial etc. before talking about the newest creation, than only advertising the latest book by itself. This is a simple thing that works, sell yourself first and people will buy your material. So how do you sell yourself? You do a little work and get out there where booksellers can see and learn about you, or you send out as much information as you can to as many distributors as you can find. Let's face it, selling books one at a time on the Internet is ten time more time consuming than joining a marketing group or two. You can join both the ABA and NABE mentioned above for a couple hundred dollars and soon be taking orders in bulk going straight into the walk-in bookstores. The benefits are obvious right from the start. With ABA you can get an invaluable CD-ROM of tens of thousands of listings for book dealers. These are not just listings of general information but rather detailed sections of people, procedures and addresses along with information about the types of books they handle, buyer's names and telephone numbers. Both of these organizations have conventions regularly in places like L.A., Chicago, New York etc. As a member you can go and pitch your book to some of the largest book chains in the world to convince them in person to stock your titles. You can even set up a table and sell if you like. Both of the ones mentioned here have web sites. You can search and visit them for more detailed information. It has been a dozen years since I've gone to an expo, but they all still work and do wonders for the small presses. Elaine

PRINT ON DEMAND BOOK MARKETING There are more and more POD (Print on Demand) publishers popping up every year. Marketing the POD book is quite a bit harder than those printed in a normal print run. Most POD books are written by first time authors and they are not aware, or told, that some of the normal discounts available to bookstores and distributors are somewhat absorbed by the printer because of the higher cost of printing single copies. In other words a ten dollar value book printed in a standard print run might cost you about a dollar eighty. That leaves you room to offer the product to a bookseller with the expected 30 or 40 percent discount. It also leaves you a little room for advertising and royalties. The same ten dollar value book from the POD printer will cost you a lot more, leaving perhaps a dollar for your profit and allowing a very small discount for the copies you buy with your own money. There is not much room to make deals with wholesale bookstores and distributors this way. You are almost forced to sell single copies retail one by one, doing all of the marketing yourself. Of course you could buy a batch of your books with your author discount and offer that same percentage to the bookstore to sell them for you. Even if you adjust the retail price of your title to allow more discounts the bookstore will not stock it. They will not handle a ten dollar value paperback and place it on a shelf of twenty dollar case-bound books only to have to return them because they didn't sell. With all of these things in mind, you can see why a BLOG such as this would be invaluable to you. The listings and contact information is something you can't afford to be without. Sincerely Elaine

I have been seeing a number of self published books in groups and thought it might be a good idea to start a marketing blog. We can share marketing tools and contacts etc. with each other. Anyone that self publishes or has a little money can produce a book. The killer for most people by way of time and dollars is the marketing. I'll start things off with a couple of things and hope we can build on it. A HISTORY OF THE SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTOR & CHRISTMAS CATALOGS In the mid to late fifties a quiet underground revolution was going on in the writing community all over the United States. This revolution was being supported and promoted unknowingly by some of the most recognizable names in literature today. Names like Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer" and Tropic of Capricorn" and Anai's Nin, "Under a Glass Bell" and "The journals of Anai's Nin", were considered mavericks, vulgar authors, malcontents and rebels by the large publishing houses of the era. The war and post war era depression was long over. Hemingway had just won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Old Man and the Sea." He and his group of adventuring souls were not making the usual headlines by running amuck across the European continent as they once did. Small pockets of authors, poets' artists and dreamers were popping up and banding together to protest the way of everything they were uncomfortable with all over America. They would soon be called by many names like Hippies, Flower children, Dissidents, Beatniks, and a few other names not so pleasant. On the other side of the coin, some of these authors along with dozens more, were very familiar with the self serving, protect and pump up the bottom line, ways of the European publishers. They had been catering to the whims of these, how many dollars will I make, editors for quite some time. When they finally became discouraged with the way things worked in the real world they began to publish and support each other's work until the world would recognize their names and give them the credit they deserved. The first two names I mentioned aren't the best examples to use perhaps, what with Nin and Miller carrying on a torrid love affair across both continents and Nin not only involved with Miller but his wife June as well. Then Nin, with her bigamist marriages causing her to have to shuffle from the East coast of America entertaining one husband, then off to the West coast and living with another was making greater headlines than the publishing efforts they were engaged in for each other. In fact some of the most valuable works today of both Miller and Nin are the self published, hand bound copies of Miller's book of hand painted water colors and some of Nin's erotica prose done during those hard times in Europe. Since this helping to get friends published was wide spread and being done by well known authors of today it was having another secondary effect here in the States. All the way from Paris and back these persons were publishing highly censored work and the consumer was grabbing it up as fast as it could be printed. The big publisher wouldn't dare touch this controversial material whereas these small press operators could because they were selling direct to the man on the street. Then everyone saw a big hole in the system they were building. The large presses had the retail markets completely tied up. There was no way to get past the large scale advertising a large press did in national magazines to the tune of thousands of dollars a title. The retailer had to buy those titles because people were going to ask for them from the advertising. If a person came in three or four times for something they had seen advertised and the store didn't have it, that person wouldn't come back. They would start going elsewhere. When the large presses saw how effectively they had tied up retailers with advertising, they used it to move slow titles telling the stores they had to buy so many of one thing to get the ones with the advertising blitz behind it. The retailers were forced to buy more than they normally would just to stay on the good side of the publisher who in fact was selling the books for them on a grand scale through these expensive ads. There was simply no room in the lives of the store owners to maintain a personal relationship with thousands of writers and self publishers knocking on their doors. It began to dawn on the dreamers of the times, that some sort of a middle road was needed. They soon figured out how they could stay in close contact with both sides profitably. The authors and artists only wanted to be recognized and sell their books and art to the people that wanted them. The bookstores only wanted to save time and not be forced to take the bad products to get the good ones being advertised by the big publishers. All that these self created middlemen needed to do was consolidate everyone's efforts through one central location and thereby earn their piece of the pie. They did this by giving the retail stores a choice of buying hundreds of new , best quality books from one source, offering slightly more by way of a discount than the normal 25 or30 percent or stay with established practice. Most of the retail outlets elected to go with both. That was so they could still get the sales from the large scale advertising efforts done by the big boys and still have the higher discounts available with the controversial work of some of these young, new artists that had such a tremendous, profit generating following wanting their books. So in time these new middlemen with a distributor base for bookstores to order from, and contacts with some of the best writing America had to offer made life much easier for both sides of the publishing business. A few even went international and the author's work could be sold through outlets worldwide. The workings of the jobber or small press distributor in the beginning was relatively simple. They would hire armies of salesman to go out to the retailer with lists of new titles, samples, information about the authors and details of the discounts to take orders direct. It doesn't work that way today, but it was effective back then. In today's world that system works exactly the same with the big difference being in the modern high speed communications tools available. Instead of the enthusiastic groups of salesmen the jobber of today uses a printed catalog and an on-line database, with periodical updates through the year on a microfilm database or computer disk. Orders are taken toll-free by computer, telephone and fax machines. This is what happens when you get a distributor to handle your products today. The first thing is their being able to look at every transaction as a part of the business without emotion. The distributor is looking for a much different set of criteria than a small press publisher imagines. Their reasoning is very much along the same lines as the retail store that will eventually stock your book. This jobber wants to know the same things the retailer does so that he may be able to convince them to buy your product. They do not read your samples to make this decision. They are very accomplished skimmer's. These jobbers can glance at a few pages at intervals of any book, look at the style, weight, size and price of the product and tell how many they may be able to sell within three or four copies. If your book conforms to what they think their select customers can sell, they will make you an offer to stock the title. Normally they will order two or three hundred of what they perceive to be a fast mover and perhaps fifty of the rest. Now at this point the jobber has to figure out how to address the information the retail store is going to need to determine if he or she should stock this particular item. The things the retailer wants to know are, once again, not what the small publisher would expect. They want to know the following things. 1. How many were printed in the print run and how fast can they get delivery if the title starts to move. If the first run is small, they'll need to know the turn around on another printing. This tells them how much of a hard-sell they can do and not run out of books to ship. 2. They also will want to know if your book is going to fit in with the other titles like it on the shelf space allowed for them and if the price is not out of line with the others around it. 3. Then comes evaluating the attractiveness of the cover. Will it cause people to buy it before something else near it on the shelf? Is there enough information on the back to tell someone what the book is about and convince them to buy it? 4. They are not interested in the contents of the book. They only want to know if they can sell it. It will NOT do any good to make an emotional plea on their need to stock it on the ethical grounds of providing the consumer with the information or anything. On the other hand, they do need to know where the book is going to fit in the store with others of the same kind. In the paragraphs describing the type of book you are offering, you can make your short emotional pitch. 5. They need to know title, author and cost. What kind of person will buy the book? Why would they pay this much for it? What discount is offered to the store? Does anyone else stock it? Will it cause other books in that section to be sold with it? 6. Now they'll want to know everything you can tell them on your return policies. Can they return them in six months for cash or credit, etc.? 7. What did the reviewer's say about your book? Do you have any flyers or advertising material to promote it, or will you share local advertising space cost, etc.? Once you've covered most of these items in your mailing and flyers the chances are very good that you'll get some kind of an order. Even a token order to see how well you deliver is a step in the door. Once the jobber starts to handle the book you'll start getting the large orders on a regular basis. If you have a good book these orders could run into the thousands of copies, so be prepared to reprint as fast as needed. The oldest, bigest and best of these distributors is The Ingram book distributing company. They are modern and geared to an electronicly ordering world. They were also the first to offer to print Christmas catalogs for the retail stores to mail out to their list of best customers before the holiday season. That practice by itself more than doubled all of the pre holidays orders for books every year from the jobber that printed the catalog. The retailer had to make sure they had enough books on hand that was listed in the catalog because the people who received the catalog were their best customers and expected the store to have what they advertised. Sound familiar? That's just exactly what the large publishers had been doing to them all along. This time the store name was on the catalog. That made it more important to stock the books. I've done the same thing a time or two by printing a Christmas book, wish list, with flyers and a few pages of books for big stores. I always made sure a couple of my own titles were on the list of course. It works. The Christmas catalog is a real bargain for the stores. The publishers of the various titles in the catalog pay to be included, so the store gets the magazines for between 10 and .20 cents a copy. They save a great deal by not having to print these catalogs themselves. All of the financial responsibility once again falls on the small publisher. Don't ever be timid about dealing with any of these things I tell you about. There is one thing you all have to remember. That is that the small press publisher pays for everything to keep all of these people in business. No other person who is part of this business takes any risk what-so-ever. If the retailer can't sell them, you get them back, usually damaged. If the distributor can't sell them or gets them back from the stores, you get them back, usually damaged. And so on it goes. Because of this, you must feel you are contributing more than anyone else and can be on an equal footing with any other part of book selling. You have to be competitive, that's true, but you also deserve the biggest profit since you take all of the risk. Don't let anyone back you into a corner and convince you to make such a close deal that you lose money. They need you and your products to make anything at all, so they'll be the ones that will need to back up and take less. If you can cover most of the things mentioned here, in a good quality presentation, you stand a good chance of the distributor or retail store asking for a review copy. That will be followed by a nice starter order if the book makes the grade. It takes three things in today's fast paced electronic world to be successful. Information, Equipment (tools to do the proper job), and WORK. With this kind of article you have the information. You can rent or borrow the equipment. That only leaves one more thing for you. With a little belief in yourself and some dedication the WORK part will come about in abundance, because you'll enjoy the effort you put out for the rewards END So, what does everyone think? Will this work for you? Elaine

Still testing things a little to see how postings show. Elaine

This is a starting post to learn how to use this service. It doesn't work the same as my blog at artvilla so I hope you will all bear with me as I get familiar with it. Elaine