Self-Publishing Tips

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Late Breaking News (010110)....
-BookSurge is now called CreateSpace, but still part of Amazon.com https://www.createspace.com/Special/Announcements/20091103_BookSurge.jsp
-Visit this URL for more author info: https://www.createspace.com/pub/services.home.do
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How to Self-Publish Your Book and Sell It on Amazon.com in the Same Day

If you really want to publish your book and sell it on Amazon.com, do as I did and go to POD Publishing.

“What is POD Publishing?”

POD or Print On Demand Publishing is the new computer driven digital high-speed laser printing technology that allows a complete book to be printed and bound in a matter of minutes. With this new technology, one book can be printed and delivered on an as needed basis. True, with POD Publishing the unit price is higher but the increase is off-set by the cost of not having to warehouse a traditional print run of a thousand copies, the possibility of spoilage and the always disquieting and vexing - “lack of demand” factor.

Print On Demand is a Great Way to Tell Your Story: Do you have a great story to share with others or maybe a happy or sad life experiences that could help someone else? How about a family history you want to pass down to the grandkids or genealogy information you want to share or a biography of a special family member or your own memoirs? Do you have a book burning in you dieing to get out, a piece of fiction or non-fiction or poetry or maybe a cookbook? Print On Demand Publishing can make that dream happen.

Traditional Publishing vs Vanity Press vs POD Publishing

Traditional Publishing pros and cons: With traditional publishing once you have finally finished writing your “whatever”, now you have to find someone interested in publishing it for you.

First you have to have chosen a “saleable” subject to write on, one that has a market. “A Hundred Was to Cook and Eat Possum” will be a tough sell.

Next you have to find an agent, but that can be a catch-22. It’s like trying to get a truck driver’s license. You can’t get a license unless you can drive a truck. But you can’t learn how to drive a truck unless you have a license. The same situation prevails with Agents. You can’t get an agent until you have a book contract with a publisher. But publishers won’t talk to you unless you have an agent and if you’re successful enough to get a book contract, why do you need an agent – catch-22.

What happens is you wind up writing query letters to both categories - addresses found in the pages of “Writer’s Digest”. Industry etiquette suggests you “query” one publisher at a time (no duplicate submissions accepted - darn).

Then you sit back and wait and wait and wait.

After dozens of rejection letters you may get published or not.

If you do successful get published, they will do all the sales and marketing of your book for you, not to worry, and they will give you 10% royalty on hardbacks, 6% on paperbacks and 2% on book clubs (percentages are sometime negotiable). For example, if you sell 1,000 hardback books at $20 each, your royalty check would be $2,000. If you sold 5,000 copies, your royalty check would be $10,000. I don’t know about you but it took me four years to write my first book. So yes, I could have gotten paid better digging graves but the reward would not be the same. So no, you can’t do it for money. You have to do it to get the first book out of you so you can get busy writing the next.

Before I go into the Pros and Cons of self-publishing, let me offer this Web site as a warning and caution about subsidy publishing from the folks at Science Fiction Writers of America: http://www.sfwa.org/beware/printondemand.html

Vanity Publishing pros and cons: With Vanity (Press) Publishing you have to pay all up-front costs first before the presses start to roll. You have to pay for printing, binding, trimming, boxing, shipping and warehousing – generally in your garage - plus a little something for them to talk to you and tell you how grate you are and how grate your book is. For that lump sum (or three easy payments) they will outline all of the things they are going to do for you (mostly that which was enumerated in the sentence preceding this one). Generally, the most economical print run is a 1000. So for a book that cost $5, they will expect $5,000 up-front. The per-unit cost increases with the fewer copies you have printed. In traditional printing the “first copy” is always the most expensive. If you only printed one, using this method, it would cost you an arm and a leg or about $5,000 for one copy.

Vanity Publishing and Subsidy Publishing are interchangeable words. The word subsidy means ‘money given by one person to another’ (I did that monthly when my girls were going to college). Since the words are interchangeable, Vanity Publishing is just another way of you giving your money to someone else to fill your garage with 1000 copies of your books - and then to watch them do nothing or little to help you sell down your inventory.

Vanity Press Publishing, in self-defense, could argue that POD Publishing is nothing but more of the same.

Not! Stay with me.

POD or Print On Demand pros and cons: With POD Publishing you have a minimal up-front investment and no inventory oozing out of your garage. I’ll get to how minimal, minimal is in a moment.

Like Vanity Publishing with POD Publishing you are responsible for the quality of the final product: sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, spelling, proofing etc. A reputable publisher, before they put their brand name on your product, will make sure it meets certain industry standards. Vanity Publishers don’t care and Print On Demand folks don't get involved. They are too busy printing one at a time – next, next, who’s next.

Now all of that’s not totally true. For a fee both Vanity Publishers and POD Publishers will provide you services – all the way from ghost writing it for you up to cover design and picture taking. So with both you can pay them so much money that you can’t afford to sell a book, let alone write one.

Having said that, if you have written a good book, one that you are proud of its quality and content, what then is the pros and cons of POD Publishing.

The biggest pro is no inventory. If you have written a ‘dog’, it is nice to know you will not have to be buried with 999 copies of it, after you have ‘given’ a copy to your mom and dad. Or if on the other hand, you have written something really grate but has no market - “A Hundred Was to Cook and Eat Possum”, and only a dozen really hungry people are interested in buying and reading it, you’re not out $5,000 or stuck with the remaining 988 copies.

Like I said, the great thing with POD Publishing is you have a minimal up-front investment and no inventory oozing out of your garage. How minimal is minimal? How about $99! That’s right. For $99 (now $299 as of 051508) I sent BookSurge two PDF files, my cover and my book matter, and in less than two weeks they sent me back a beautiful (single) copy of my book. I’ll get into more of my personal (successful) experience with BookSurge and POD Publishing later but first let’s get to the specifics of: “How to Publish Your Book and Sell It on Amazon.com in the Same Day.”

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Step One: Define Your Publishing Goals Do you want to sell/give to friends and family and to grandkids your genealogy, biography, family history, autobiography, memoir. Or do you plan to sell to everyone and anyone your cookbooks, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.?

Thinking this through can save you some upfront money, like buying or not buying an ISBN number or a Library of Congress Number. This will become clearer later – but think it through and try to define your goals. Are you doing this for friends and family or for the mass market?

Step Two: Select a Print On Demand Publisher: There are a number of vendors to choose from? iUniverse, Xlibris, Xulon Press, Lulu and Blurb, Third Dimension Publishing at http://areyouawriter.com, Lightning Source (a division of Ingram Book Group), BookSurge (an Amazon.com company), just to name a few.

Step Three: Select the Pre-Publishing Options they have to offer and you want or need

Editorial Services Basic Copy Editing .015 cents a word With BookSurge's Basic Copy Editing service, a professional book editor will review your manuscript for technical elements only, such as grammar, punctuation, spelling and consistency. With this service, the editor will not offer any feedback or suggestions on the content, character development or structure of your work. The cost is .015 cents a word. A 25,000-word manuscript would cost about $ 375. See Appendix BookSurge Editorial Services for details.

Comprehensive Copy Editing - Multiple Rounds .03 cents a word With BookSurge's Comprehensive Copy Editing service, a professional book editor will review your manuscript for both technical and stylistic elements; these elements include grammar, punctuation, spelling and consistency - as well as the manuscript's concept and intended use, organization, tone, characterization and other principles specific to the book's genre. The editor will provide feedback and suggestions for making improvements to your work. You get three rounds for .03 cents a word. A 25,000-word manuscript with max of three rounds would cost about $ 2,250. See Appendix BookSurge Editorial Services for details.

Custom Cover Design $999 Custom Cover Design includes collaboration and consultation with an experienced designer/artist, 10 hours of artist production time, concept sketch and additional proofing, appropriate image(s), bar code, back cover text (provided by the client), and, if desired, author photo on your custom back cover. The cost is $999. See Appendix BookSurge Custom Cover Design for details.

Pricing Structure (Many) Express Publishing Program B&W $99 Author's Express Publishing Program - Black & White The fastest and most economical publishing choice, designed for authors who have worked independently to have their black & white book's interior and color cover designed and converted into ready-to-print Adobe PDF files. This is the service I elected to use. The cost is $99. See Appendix BookSurge Pricing Structure for details.

Express Publishing Program Color $299 Author's Express Publishing Program - Full Color This product is designed for authors who have already worked independently to have their full-color book's interior and cover designed and converted into ready-to-print Adobe PDF files. Full color books can be no longer than 60 pages. . The cost is $299. See Appendix BookSurge Pricing Structure for details.

Advantage Publishing Program B&W $499 Author's Advantage Publishing Program - Black & White One of BookSurge's most popular book making programs, Author's Advantage provides you with design, layout and book publishing choices that give you considerable creative control for your black & white book. You choose the design templates; we format the book into your design. Additional fees apply if you choose to include black & white images inside your book. The cost is $499. See Appendix BookSurge Pricing Structure for details.

Advantage Publishing Program Color $699 Author's Advantage Publishing Program - Full Color These publishing programs are ideally suited for authors whose manuscripts contain full color graphic images or illustrations, with a minimum of 24 pages and a maximum of 60 pages. The cost is $699 for Traditional Picture Box or Classic Storyteller. See Appendix BookSurge Pricing Structure for details.

Advantage Poetry Publishing Program B&W $2,499 Author's Advantage Poetry Publishing Program - Black & White Interior ONLY Choose between one of our three poetry interior design templates and BookSurge will format your work according to the design you select. Additional fees apply if you choose to include black & white images inside your book. The cost is $2,499. See Appendix BookSurge Pricing Structure for details.

Step Four: Select the Customized “Publishing Package” that you want or need

BookSurge recognizes that a business writer requires different resources and tools to be successful than a novelist; a children's book writer needs elements that don't make sense for an author writing his/her own biography, so they have developed packages tailored to specific genres to help you reach your goals.

Kid's Choice - the ideal package for authors of children's literature - $6,499 Achieve your dream and make a child smile with our Kid’s Choice Publishing Package, complete with cover and interior illustrations to bring your ideas to life. Along with the powerful development tools included in your Kid’s Choice package, your finished book can be published in both trade paperback and hardcover versions.

FictionWriter - a bundle designed for authors writing works of fiction - $5,299 You have carefully developed characters, a fantastic storyline and a goal of selling books while a sequel brews in your head. Let BookSurge transform your work from manuscript to professionally edited, formatted and thoughtfully designed book. Whether your goals include creating sales velocity to reach additional publishing avenues or building your own success as an authorpreneur, the FictionWriter publishing package includes all of the elements you need to get there.

SpirituallySpeaking - the perfect package for authors of spiritual or religious works - $5,799 You have a message, a belief, a story that should be shared with the world. You've put your heart and soul into your endeavor, let BookSurge transform your work from manuscript to professionally edited, formatted and designed book. Whether your goals include creating sales velocity to reach additional publishing avenues or building your own success as an authorpreneur, the SpirituallySpeaking publishing package includes all of the elements you need to get there.

Your Life. Your Story. - a biography and memoir publishing package - $3,799 You have a story to tell – a real one. It’s about your life and should be preserved for future generations to read about and learn from. The BookSurge Biography & Memoir Publishing Package gives you all the tools you need to transform your ideas and stories from manuscript to professionally edited, formatted and designed book, at an unbeatable price to begin sharing your legacy.

The Expert - a package designed for professionals with expertise to share - $5,799 You are a consummate professional with expertise to share, experience to impart. You’ve put your knowledge into the content of your book, let BookSurge transform your work from manuscript to professionally edited, formatted and designed book. Whether your goals include creating sales velocity to reach additional publishing avenues or building your own success as an authorpreneur, The Expert publishing package includes all of the elements you need to get there.

Contracts - Morris Rosenthal offer this on: Negotiating Book Contract Terms and Royalties “A good subsidy publisher will offer a short contract that describes the publisher's responsibilities, a royalty schedule, and how the author can (quickly) terminate the agreement, not a three year lock-up. There's no reason you should be giving away any rights at all when you're paying them to publish the book. Some subsidy publishers hide their contract details until the last minute, hoping you'll sign simply because you've gone so far down the path. Don't even consider a subsidy publisher who doesn't have their book contract available on their website where you can read it before you contact them.” SOURCE: Morris Rosenthal's Web site: http://www.fonerbooks.com/porder.htm

Step Five: Select One of the Marketing Programs offered by Your POD Publisher:

Publicity Kit - $499 Let BookSurge create professionally designed and printed promotional materials, perfect for pushing your book into the market. Utilizing your book's cover, sales information about your book, your author biography and more, BookSurge will create full-color postcards, business cards and bookmarks designed to make your book stand out to potential readers and book buyers. The cost is $499. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Advanced Marketing Copy - $199 Writing a book is hard enough! Compelling marketing copy takes objectivity and advertising knowledge from a professional who is familiar with the writing techniques used to get attention and sell more product-namely, your book. Let BookSurge create a professional, eye-catching short description and sentence description, as well as compelling back cover text and author biography to really bring home the sale. The cost is $199. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Professionally Written Promotional Copy - $399 Promotional Copy by a New York Times Bestselling Author - $399 Instantly give your book credibility with a marketing-style book review by New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Tanner Marsh. The cost is $399. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Press Release Creation Service - $199 Press releases are the accepted, professional format for delivering news to the media. As the media is often overloaded with news, creating a press release that will stand out and catch their attention is a distinct skill and often, a job best left up to a professional. Let a BookSurge public relations writer create a well-crafted release for you. The cost is $199. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Press Release Creation and Targeted Distribution Service - $598 Not only is a well-written press release a foundation for your book's sales success, getting it to the right media outlets is one of the most crucial elements to your public relations plan. Our editorial team will distribute your press release to a customized media list tailored to your specific book genre and region, usually consisting of a minimum of 50 contacts. The cost is $598. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Buy X, Get Y Program through Amazon.com - $1,000/month Gain more exposure and visibility for your title on the world's largest online bookstore, Amazon.com. Through the Buy X, Get Y (BXGY) program, you can pair your book with a top-selling book for one month on Amazon.com to offer shoppers added value for purchasing both items simultaneously. The cost is $1,000. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Author Domain Service - $150 one-time set-up; $39/year Do you want a web presence, but don't want to hassle with the up-keep, cost and technical knowledge required to maintain your own web site? BookSurge has a solution. With our Author Domain Service, you choose a memorable, marketable domain name (such as www.yourbooktitle.com) and we'll point that domain to your Amazon.com bookselling and detail page. The cost is $150 one-time set-up; $39/year. See Appendix BookSurge Promotional Tools for details.

Step Six: Publish Your Book (Congratulations) and Now Market It.

Earlier I said I would get back to my personal (successful) experience with BookSurge and POD Publishing. Well, let me do that now and use my book “Marriage, Divorce and the Soul Mates Left Behind” as a case history of: "How to Publish Your Book and Sell It on Amazon.com in the Same Day."

I wrote my book in Microsoft’s WORD. It took me four years. I was married for 36 years and I though we were soul mates. She would breath in and I would exhale. So when she left I felt like a Soul Mate Left Behind. The book was an outgrowth of my learning how to survive a broken heart after a sad divorce. It’s a self-help book. I wanted to publish it and share it with anyone and everyone.

After much research I concluded that POD Publishing was the fastest way to market. I contacted BookSurge.com and found out I could save a lot of up-front money if I would do everything myself (I’ll explain what everything is in a moment). They told me for only $99 plus two PDF files, they would provide me with the first copy of my finished book and make additional copies available on Amazon.com, their parent company’s Web site.

What is everything? Well, my book consisted of a color front and back cover and black and white words with no pictures or illustrations inside. The front and a back cover, to them is one PDF file. The inside words are called the “book matter” and are another PDF file.

How I got my WORD file over to a PDF file is the trick.

I went up to Adobe’s conversion sight: https://createpdf.adobe.com/index.pl and piped my WORD file through their converter for FREE (first five times free). However, I could have bought Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium for $1,199 (Order by Phone: 1.800.833.6687) and converted it myself. I could have taken the WORD file down to Sir Speedy (or Kinkos) and they would have converted it for me, with design work, for $35 per hour. Or I could have converted my Word files to PDFs with the freeware from Ghostscript, which can be found online at the University of Wisconsin’s Web sight: http://www.wisc.edu (to search use the keyword: ghost - http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ ). See Appendix Rosenthal Convert to PDF for details.

The cover PDF file(front and back) proved more difficult than the “book matter” PDF file. I felt I needed a professional picture taken for the front cover. I wanted a bride looking off into the sunset – forlorn. I was lucky. A local professional photographer, for photo credit inside my book, offered to provide the bride’s picture and title art for free. The artwork (picture and title art), having to be at 300 DPI, was no problem for the photographer. I’ll explain 300 DPI in a moment.

Next I created some selling words for the back cover along with an author photo and an ISBN number. I took her art-work (cover) and the back cover I created and pumped both through the PDF converter. When I was finished I had the two PDF files needed. I emailed them to my BookSurge contact and once I paid them with a credit card the wheels started turning. In less than two weeks I had the very first copy of my published book in hand. I went up to Amazon.com and there it was ready for ordering.

Voila. “How to Publish Your Book and Sell It on Amazon.com in the Same Day”!

Okay, why 300 DPI? Simple. The high-speed laser printers they use needs that kind of quality. The Internet 72 DPI JPEG files that look good on your monitor look stair steppy when POD’ed. See Appendix 300DPI vs steairsteppy for details. (http://www.booksurge.com/selfpublishing/resources/downloads/digital_image_guide.pdf)

The author photo was taken with a home digital camera that had no problem taking an image at 300 DPI.

To be totally honest with you, I paid more than $99 out of pocket. The ISBN number cost me $50. But without it I could not sell on Amazon.com, in bookstores or anywhere else. They use the ISBN number for tracking. Now if you plan to sell/give your book only to friends and relatives you can save $50.

The Library of Congress (at http://www.loc.gov/loc/infopub/publish.html) had this to say, "We do not administer or distribute International Standard Book Numbers. Please contact R.R. Bowker at: 877-310-7333." www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/ FYI: an official copyright registration, an optional choice once the book is in hand, costs $30 http://www.loc.gov/copyright).

The Library Of Congress Number cost me $75. That number is important to libraries. That is they way they track their inventory. Again, if you plan to sell/give your book only to friends and relatives you can save $75.

I didn’t stop with $99, which I guess they figure you won’t. For $924 I bought 100 copies of my book. Like anyone, I guess, I was so proud to have finally born a book I wanted more than just one copy. Fortunately, however, I wasn’t out $5,000 and looking for a home for 1,000 copies, as I would be if I had gone the Vanity Press route. The $924, however, included free shipping for 100 books, $50 for the ISBN number, $75 for the Library Of Congress Number and a waver of the original quote of $99 for two PDF files. As of to date, I have given away about 10 copies and have sold 15 at $19.95 each, clearing about $300. I still have 75 copies that need a home. Want’a buy a book?

Just kidding (Not.).

My book “Marriage, Divorce and the Soul Mates Left Behind” cost me $9.24 per copy to print. It has a retail price of $19.95. That is $10.71 profit/royalty. If I sell it on Amazon.com, it sells $16.00 and I get a 25% royalty or $4.00 for each sale, paid monthly. Why am I willing to give up $6.71 profit/royalty?

Fulfillment. They do everything, order processing, printing, shipping and handling. Plus (and this is the big plus) everybody knows them. Given that, my marketing task then is to drive the traffic to them so that Amazon.com can do their magic.

That brings me to the subject of Sales and Marketing. It’s great to have your book available on Amazon.com and have the marketing power and reach that they offer. But you have to help them out. Here’s what I did to drive traffic to Amazon.com and what more I can do and plan to do.

Marketing - “Marriage, Divorce and the Soul Mates Left Behind” Like I said, my book is a self-help book on how to survive a broken heart after a sad divorce. My goal was to communicate with people who are dealing, on a daily basis, with people who are suffering a broken hearts, people like pastors, marriage councilors and libraries (people hurting go to libraries to find answers).

At Sir Speedy, I made a flyer on card stock using 8.5 x 11 folded to 5.5 x 8.5. On the front fold of the flyer I reproduced the cover of my book. The other side of the fold was used for name and address labels. Inside I reproduced the selling message from the back cover of my book. On the other inside page I wrote a short message explaining why I was sending the flyer, what the book was about and how it could be order on Amazon.com.

I went up to www.switchboard.com and searched for all marriage councilors in large metro areas through out Arkansas (I’m a local author, that may buy me something.). I did the same for public libraries. I mailed out 300 flyers in three weeks. I only got 22 back because of bad addresses. I am working on a list for Arkansas pastors now. I plan to do all of the above for each state. Hopefully I’ll sell some books to help finance my extended “national” marketing plans. Each mailing of 100 flyers cost me about $53 or 53 cents each. My out of pocket expenses were: 39 cents postage, 13 cents each card stock printed two-sides, .005 cents for stick on labels, .001 cents for sticky tabs used for closure and “my time”.

I found three local bookstores that were open to consignment deals and put three copies in each. I tried to get into Book-A-Million and Barns and Noble but they buy nothing at the store level, all decisions are make at the warehouse level. They were polite and gave me forms to fill out and send, along with a sample copy of my book to the Manager of Distribution. The forms were not complicated. They explained it was better to do centralized buying because then all the stores had access to the new titles.

Auctions – I scanned the local paper for non-profit groups who were holding a fish fry and auction. Over the first few weeks I found four, a school, two churches and the Elks. I gave them a free autographed copy for their silent auction table. My hope was, as the book lay there being looked at and perhaps talked about, that someone who was hurting or knew of someone hurting would buy the book or write down and visit my Web site.

My goal for all of the above was to create a ‘buzz’. “Out of sight out of mind” as the old axioms goes. So I tried to be ‘in sight’ as much as I could.

I created an Internet Web site: www.soulmatesleftbehind.com It was easy thanks to Yahoo.com. Okay, before retiring, I spent the last forty years in the sales and marketing of computer and peripherals equipment in Silicon Valley California, but seriously it was easy – thanks to Yahoo.com. See the Appendix YahooBuildWebPage for details - http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/

With WORD I printed up some business cards with my Web site on it. The cards came in handy.

Future Marketing Plans for “Marriage, Divorce and the Soul Mates Left Behind” I’m going to keep up my direct mail campaign. The addresses are so easy to collect on www.switchboard.com and the per-unit cost of 53 cents (39 cents of which is postage) is reasonable enough to allow me to continue contacting my target audience and hopefully create a “buzz”.

I’m going to continue trying to sell my book into the libraries. I was wise enough to buy a Library Of Congress Number for $75 and have it included in the printing of my book. Libraries won’t touch your book unless you have a LOCN number. They use it to track their inventory. Without it, they can’t so they won’t bother with a book that doesn’t have one. Make sure you buy one BUT only IF you plan to market your book outside the circle of your friends and relatives. I’m hoping by selling one copy to the library it will have a multiplier effect. One person reads it and tells two. Two people reads it and tells four, etc.

On my Web site, in the future, instead of being hyper-linked and sent to Amazon.com to buy a copy of my book, you’ll be able to order an autographed copy direct from the author. Since, I’ll be involved then with the cost of shipping and handling (fulfillment), the price of the book will have to reflect that added expense or the S&H expense will have to be absorbed in the cover price of $19.95, reducing my ROI.

Magazine Advertising Pros and Cons Advertising in magazines is expensive. A 1/8 of a page ad in XXXXXname cost XXXXXdollars. For that kind of money I can do a whole lot of direct mailing. Sure I have to do the work (building the list, licking the stamps, etc.) but direct mail is a rifle shot verses the shotgun approach of reaching a large audience that isn’t trying to survive a broken heart but trying to buy the latest fashion, cook a low fat meal or choose a luxury vacation destination.

Now with my next book, “Huckleberry Fin Joins the Civil War” (this is a working title – its about a precocious twelve year old orphan boy who gets sucked up into the life and times of the American Civil War.), I will be buying advertising space in all the different papers and magazines that cater to Civil War re-enactors, Civil War buffs and kids who belong to parents interested in the Civil War.

Example: A 1/8 of a page ad in XXXXXname cost XXXXXdollars. That is reasonable for my budget and it is going to the homes and hands of the people who live, breath and eat the Civil War.

Since I have already developed a mailing list for libraries, I will create a similar flyer for my Civil War book and start another direct mail campaign into libraries.

Let me offer an aside. When you do publish your book and give a copy to a friend or relative, don’t just autograph it with the date, add something sweet. Add something like “good luck and thanks for being a friend”. It may sound funny but if you don’t write something sweet you may lose a friend. Crazy? You’re right. But try not saying something sweet and see how the ozone changes in the room. Hey, praemonitus, praemunitus is Latin for forewarned is forearmed.

So that is my success story of how I published my book and sold it on Amazon.com in the same day. Would I do it again? Yes. I believe the publishing and the book industry are going through some cataclysmic and paradigm shifts. I think POD and the Internet have caused a calamitous shift in the dynamics of publishing just as the Gutenberg press did to the printed word and the dynamics of long distant commutations.

I avoided traditional publishing because I’m impatient and didn’t want to wait. But more importantly I went to POD Publishing because I think it is the next wave of the future. Just as cell phones, Blackberry, Wi-Fi and TiVo have changed traditional thinking and doing, I think POD Publishing will change the way the printed word is perceived.

I don’t think brick and mortar marketing is dead or dieing. However, I do think new, exciting and different channels of distribution are emerging. I wanted to be there with my book and I hope after reading and considering this paper, you’ll feel the same. In fact I plan to soon offer my book as an e-books. I wonder what that little 1455 innovator and inventor of movable type would have to say about that?

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