Seasons of Writing – Marketing Part II

I’m working on getting some wind behind my nonfiction book, Seasons of Writing. As I mentioned in my last blog, since I spent so much time working on it and I also believe it’s a great tool for writers, why not put some energy behind it.

You can currently purchase my book on Amazon.com and although I know we are in the age of e-books, I still like the idea of printed books so my next step is to visit bookstores and see if they would be interested in stocking my book. Plus, I would like to start introducing my book to other book clubs.

However, I’m running into a little dilemma. I really don’t want to spend a lot of money. I’ve researched a few book printing companies and since my book is small (in terms of size, not information) and I’m not looking to order in bulk, the prices seem a little too high. But they do offer book formatting. And as anyone would tell you that has self-published, the look of your book is very important.

Luckily, when I was looking to order books for the book club, my company’s Creative Art Services Manager offered his help. He also had contact with a printer. He did an awesome job but because he was doing it for free, I felt I wasn’t in the position to give too many critiques or ask for a lot of style changes.

After receiving the books, I decided the next time I would try my hand at laying it out myself. For one, I don’t like asking people for favors and two, I used to work in Photoshop, create flyers, and logos back in the day.

For the next order, I rolled up my sleeves and worked on the layout. It took a couple of days but eventually I was satisfied that it was ready to go. So positive that I had done such a great job that when the printer asked if I wanted to see a mockup, I arrogantly said no.

Thirty-five copies later and a bill of over a couple of hundred dollars and I now have books that have part of my head on the back cover cut off along with a very tight margin error.

It’s trial and error. I’ll have to eat the cost but I’ve learned some lessons.

I still did another go at laying it out again but this time I paid closer attention to detail and I asked the printer questions that I should have asked the first time. He is also sending me a mockup.

I have no problems working on a project over and over again until it’s right. After all, isn’t that part of being a great writer? The ability to draft and draft until it’s perfect?

Seasons of Marketing

When I last blogged, I mentioned that my nonfiction book, Seasons of Writing, was complete. Since I have not written on my blog since August of 2011, one would think that I was spending all this time marketing my book. I mean after all, I spent months writing it. Then more months editing it until I thought it was perfect. Then I sent it to someone else to do another round of edits.

Sadly, this was not the case. Granted, I did take the time to get it up and running on Amazon.com and I told a couple of friends and coworkers about it. And by chance, I was at an event where I met a woman who happened to be the president of a book club and they asked me to speak at one of their meetings and I was able to sell some of my books. Plus, I was able to reach out to a friend of a friend who has a book store who said that I could place a couple of my books in her store. But sadly all of that happened within a few months apart and there has been no movement yet.

Why? Time. It takes time to market your book and a lot of hard work. Challenging for me because time is limited since I have a fulltime job and hard because when I do have free time, I try to put in some writing.

What to do? I wrote Seasons partly because I wanted to write about struggles of writing and because I wanted to get something out there that had my name on it. When working on a novel and/or a script (I happened to be doing both) it can take years of crafting, drafting, rewriting and editing. And I was never really sold on the self-publishing aspect.

But here I am with a nonfiction book that I’m proud of but which is not moving. For me, it’s not about the money although if it does make me a lot that would be a plus. But I want to make sure that whenever someone Google’s my name it is always connected with writing and it looks good when agents or publishers are checking on your writing history.

So there lies the quandary. I have no choice but to put it in gear to get this baby moving.

In the next few months, I will take the necessary steps to market my book. Stay tune…