How to sell more books??
When I decided to self-publish
Secret Lives, I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work. I’m having
an interesting adventure. Also investing a fair amount of money in the
adventure. I’d like to sell more books and make a return on that investment.
I suppose I could summon up some Great, Universal Mind Power and project
it into the heads of every pagan or witchy woman on the planet.
Buy Secret Lives. Buy Secret Lives.
Buy Secret Lives. Mind Power? Yeah. Right. Like Universal Mind
Power works. So I keep working on PR.
Six of my books were published by traditional publishers, large and small.
Here’s how that works. You and/or your agent submit the manuscript (or
sample chapters) to an acquisitions editor. You wait. Eventually, the acquisitions
editor gets back to you and/or your editor. If they like the book, they
write a contract, the terms of which are almost totally in favor of the
publisher. So you and/or your editor do some negotiating to get you a better
deal—a higher advance on royalties, a higher percentage (your royalty),
more free copies, etc. Next, you answer all the questions on the author
questionnaire, which is where you list all the important people you know
and your media connections. Oh, and you give more information about the
book. Then you finish writing the book and it’s published and the publisher
does lots of PR and your book ends up a best seller.
Well, not quite. I believe what I’ve described was largely true half a
century or more ago, back in the good old days when publishers were still
run by individuals who cared about good writing and respected their authors.
Those were the days when publishers took good care of their authors. Today,
in the Age of Murdoch, publishers are bits of multinational corporations
and seem not to care about anything except making money. A book is a product.
An author is an adjunct to the product.
My first book, a mass market paperback titled
Seeing Solutions, was published in 1989. A book of guided visualizations,
it was published at a time when there were few books on that topic. It
got some very favorable reviews. But not enough. I sit here today and think
about how naïve I was. First, a psychic who was a friend of a friend “got”
that my little book would sell a million copies and I’d be traveling around
the world. And I believed her. Second, I paid a bunch of money to a woman
I’d met at a leads club to do PR. Trouble was, she was going through a
personal crisis at the time, and when I talked to people she’d booked me
to be interviewed by, they kept saying that if they spoke with this PR
agent for an hour, she spent fifty minutes talking about her personal crisis.
One Sunday morning, she phoned and told me that she’d figured out that
her father was the infamous and unknown Black Dahlia killer. That’s when
I fired her. We learn expensive lessons when we’re young and naïve, don’t
we.
I’ve been treated very well by some of my publishers and still call some
of my editors friends. One plays the bassoon, and when I went to a concert
where I heard a bassoon solo, I sent her a note. She recently wrote to
me and said they want to convert
Practicing the Presence of the Goddess to Kindle. But of course!
Other publishers haven’t been as kind. One changed the title of my book
without telling me.
Finding New Goddesses became
The New Goddesses. Fortunately, I had a spy in the room. After she
told me about that dumb new title, I wrote a series of very strong emails
to the publisher and explained why my title was the correct title. I CC’d
all my friends, including other authors, one of whom told me later that
the energy in my emails had crashed her computer. But I got to keep my
title! A couple years later, I met my editor and her boss at a Book Expo.
She and I moved to a table down the aisle to talk about goddesses. Her
boss sat in his booth and gave us that old hairy stare.
Dan Poynter, who seems to know what he’s talking about, tells us that
the “old NYC publishers” are becoming irrelevant, that people want to read
books the NYC publishers reject, that more and more authors are self-publishing.
And e-books are also increasingly popular. So I sent
Secret Lives to Sherry Wachter to typeset and design, and she did
a beautiful job, and then we sent it to CreateSpace, which also did a good
job. I like CreateSpace a lot because they employ live people you can talk
to on the phone. Like my favorite Make It Work tech, they explain things.
Clearly. I’d like to adopt some of them.
Secret Lives has also received some very enthusiastic
reviewshand I’ve been
interviewed several times, including two sessions on blogtalkradio
that were loads of fun. More reviews and interviews are coming up in magazines
like
SageWoman and
Crone, both published by my long-time friend Anne Niven. I’ve also
submitted the octogenarian sex scene (which is pretty tame) to a publication
that focuses on “senior erotica.” I hope they like it!
I want this novel to be read. I love the women I wrote about—they’re as
real in their way as you and I are. So is the cat. Well … maybe. The cats
I live with don’t speak English. I’m as old now as some of the women I
was writing about twenty years ago, and I know that the issues the senior
citizens in
Secret Lives deal with are real issues that my friends and I are
facing.
So how do I sell more books? If you have any ideas that work, send me
an email and we'll talk. If it’s a useful idea, I’ll give you one of my
nifty
Secret Lives mouse pads.
Posted by Barbara on Thursday, November 24, 2011 | Read Comments
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