I sure don't know everything about the book business, but what I do know is, it's darned hard to get a book published (in the traditional way) and just because you have a book between covers doesn't mean you should schedule a flight to Paris to celebrate already. I attended a media conference on publishing books and marketing. The stats were really eye-opening, and quite disappointing. It seems that unless you are a movie star or a congress-person, or an inventor of some miraculous cure for a dread desease, or some other sort of celebrity personality, the chances of your book selling big time in any of the retail stores around the country are just about nill. In fact, most published books end up on the super discount table or returned to the publisher.
I was quite surprised when my nice little book "The Lilibet Logs" just disappeared off the Barnes and Noble shelves about 6 weeks after they got there - and it wasn't because they were selling. It was because Barnes & Noble - like every other big book seller has a return agreement with the publisher. Hmmmm!
The statistics say that if you sell more than 500 books total in the lifetime of your publication, you have done well. If you self publish your book and sell more than 75 copies, you are above the average in the sales of your book. How disheartening is that?
What the book marketing guru did say (at least a million times) is, the success of your book, depends almost entirely on you - the author. This means if you really want more than a spiffy book authored by you, on your coffee table at home, you'd better be ready to jump on the marketing bandwagon.
As an artist - painter/sculptor, I guess you could say I've been on the marketing bandwagon for most of my life, so while these stats were pretty disappointing ( I thought getting my books published would allow me to jump off the bandwagon and spend a lot of time being creative), the stats made me aware that nothing much had changed in my life. Okay!
The other thing I learned from the guru was that self help books sell better than novels (unless you are Steven King). In that vein, I decided to write a self help book. I chose a somewhat unlikely subject (eulogies) which immediately limited the scope of readership, but I figured this would be a fun project and a test of my ability to make a rather negative subject into something worth reading. The title of my book is "A Few Last Words - Your Guide To Self Memorializing." It's a guide to writing your own eulogy and it's funny and informative and sensitive and people who have read it now that it's published, really like it. If you'd like to have a copy of this book, go to Amazon.com or order one from me at teawater@rocketmail.com So far so good.
The deal is however, I couldn't get a publisher to touch this book because it has no mass readership appeal. That translates to no monatary success. "Well," I said to myself, "If you're going to be in the self help book business, you may have to end run the standard publishing game and do a self publishing gig." I mean, once the manuscript was finished, I couldn't bear to see it laying about collecting dust.
Stay tuned and I'll talk about my experience in the self publishing department.
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