And now, the real publishing journey begins

My books arrived this morning!  

I’m mainly concentrating on selling books in the US, given the horrendous price of shipping to New Zealand, but I needed enough copies to sell at the book launch party and to place in Christchurch bookstores.

After dealing with yet another round of expenses and hassle (it cost me $360 to clear customs just to get the packages into New Zealand!  Yikes!), I was amazed that the books showed up so quickly.  But they were here this morning, five heavy boxes, and they look amazing.

As soon as I finished celebrating the arrival of the books, I headed over to our local bookstore, Scorpio Books, and handed over a copy for the owner to review.  I’ll know next week whether the store is willing to carry copies.

Then I stopped in at Paper Plus, a chain book/stationary store, and talked to a wonderful lady who gave me all the contact details I needed to see about getting The Natural Order into their Christchurch stores.  I went home and emailed the owner of another one of the Paper Plus stores, and long story short, I’ll be selling my book there for the next four months!

I had never imagined it would be so easy to get into a chain bookstore.

Of course, this is New Zealand, where things aren’t so corporate-oriented.  If I was in the US, I would probably have to go through the head office of Barnes and Noble to get into any one of their stores.  But here, it seems as though the local shopkeepers actually own their own sections of the Paper Plus chain, making the whole process a lot less complicated.

And next up…

My ultimate goal is to get The Natural Order into Boulder Bookstore, my beloved hometown bookstore.  It’s a huge store with a dedicated clientele, so putting my book in there would get it in front of hundreds of people.

Luckily, they are very supportive of local and indie authors, so they have an established system in place for taking on new books.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit more expensive, and I would like to get a good critical review of my book first.  However, if people actually bought large quantities of the book at Boulder Bookstore, the cost difference between shipping to Boulder and shipping to New Zealand would actually mean I could make more money selling in Boulder.