BUSTING MY BRAIN AND SCARING MYSELF
August 5, 2008 by admin
I’m a few hard-reading days into my new collection of Self Publishing books. All my Amazon.com books are here, having arrived almost instantaneously while I was polishing off my library volume. So, books fill my coffee table beside the sofa where I like to lounge while studying. My strength-trained body is forgetting its lessons. It seems so hard to schedule exercise, between reading and computer time. Our modern day work habits aren’t quite as physical as in the olden days, are they?
All of the tomes that I started off with were extremely complete and filled with greatly detailed advice about duplicating the efforts and effects of the major New York publishing houses, all from our own living rooms. There are only about five Biggies now in this country. The major houses have swallowed the minor ones and there are now just a few conglomerates running the book producing show. However, small mom & pop publishers are springing up with these new tools at hand, and are transforming the whole trade. Therefore, many of my books are teaching readers how to duplicate what the big houses do.
Scared me to death! Wait a minute! I don’t want another career, here. I just want to sell my book over the internet, using this blog and Amazon.com. I don’t want to deal with bookstores through their wholesalers and distributors, and I sure don’t want to be boxing and shipping out orders from cartons stacked in my closets and hallways. Help! What am I getting into? At the same time, these encyclopedias of private book publishing knowledge are right there, for any question I might have, on any subject, so they will make a valuable addition to my reference library, as well as to my mind. But, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe this whole idea just isn’t for me. Too much work! And how will I go off traveling again?
Well, thank goodness I had ordered Aaron Shepard’s “Aiming At Amazon.” That’s the speed for me. He basically says to forget about going after the bookstores and that whole distribution boggle, and that libraries are nice, but might not be worth the hassle. They’ll come on board if the book makes it big. This cuts away a huge amount of the work in dealing with your product after it’s produced. Just let Amazon.com carry it and spend your time working all the angles that you can to get it to pop up frequently on the site’s search engine as well as planning your title and cover art to show up well on their displays. Of course, every author has to do their own promotion, but more and more, that leads a potential reader right to the internet and not the bookstore. Plus, if a customer asks for it, a bookstore can still order your title for them.
Now, I can study all the books for their good advice about the many things involved in getting the final copy ready for my printer. More and more, I’m leaning towards Lightning Source, which is the one my friend, Fawn, uses and recommended in the first place.
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