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.

How to Host a Successful Book-Launch Party

ANNOUNCEMENT!!

I now have a date and venue for my book launch party!  It will be happening on June 11th, at Town Tonic Cafe (Christchurch), from 7-9 pm.

For those of you in New Zealand, make sure you attend, and invite everyone you know!  And for those of you elsewhere in the world, stay tuned for the results of my first-ever book launch.

***

According to Writer’s Digest, here are a few things you have to do to make your book-launch party successful:

Set measurable objectives

That means setting sales and attendance targets, as well as media presence targets.  I hadn’t even thought of inviting any media persons before now, but that might be a good idea.  I have no idea how many people I can expect to turn up.  I’ve ordered 200 copies of the book, though I’m intending to use most of them for the book tour following the launch party.  If 100 people attend, I’ll be thrilled.

Connect book, event, and audience

This means targeting the party theme to the book’s audience.  Well, I’m not quite doing that, since the audience is young adult and Town Tonic is a swanky cafe (plus we’ll be serving free drinks), but hopefully this will still build buzz for the book and get people to pass the word along to more suitable readers.

I’ll try to tailor the book launch party for the second book to a more fitting audience; at the moment, I hardly know anyone who fits in the YA group!

Employ social network 

I’ve been doing this by creating a book launch page on Facebook and advertising it on this blog…my following isn’t the most impressive, given that I haven’t been blogging for long, but it’s worth a try.  I’m more likely to use in-person advertising.  This weekend I’m planning to send my partner to the Christchurch Farmers’ Market, where he can snag as many attendees as possible!

Court local media 

Again, have to work on this one…I’ll give you updates about how successful (or not!) this is.

Create a fun atmosphere 

This has been a big focus for us.  Town Tonic is a lively, suave cafe, so it’s already a great atmosphere for any sort of party.  We’re also playing with the idea of getting live music.

Offer incentives

Again, something very important for us.  As an unknown author with a small social circle, I can’t rely on my name or book as motivation for attending.  So we’re going to have free drinks, snacks, and door prizes, which means no one will walk away empty-handed!

Make buying easy 

Since we’re at a cafe, we can use their register for credit card and Eftpos purchases, which certainly simplifies matters.  We might even be able to use the cash in their register to make change…

Rally your party guests 

This last factor is all about giving your guests a way to help you spread the word. That includes asking them to write reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, post photos of the party on facebook, and tell their friends about the book.  I’ll probably include a “call for reviews” as part of a bookmark that comes with their purchase, and I’m planning to collect emails through the door prize sign-up.  That way I can email everyone to remind them!

I have to think of a good photo op that would motivate people to post photos after the party…any ideas?  Let me know in the comments below!

***

P.S. If anyone is wondering how this ties into my hobby-based marketing scheme (remember, I’m trying to use cooking, travel, photography, and crochet to promote my book), it does in several ways!

1. I work at Town Tonic (my book launch venue) as a chef during the daytime
2. Some of the door prizes will include crocheted things
3. We’ll be making mulled wine for part of the free drinks

So there you go!

Do you want to know my deepest, darkest secrets?

One of the most important parts of an author’s online presence, I’ve learned, is their website.  Someone who looks at an author’s website is far more likely to buy their books than someone who doesn’t.  And the key to a good author website is engaging the readers.

How do you do that?

By providing information they’re looking for (like the author bio, a list of their books, and other important details), and by giving them fun extra material that can’t be accessed elsewhere.  This can include: 

• Excerpts or sneak peeks
• Q&A with the author
• Video interviews
• Book trailers
• Other book tie-ins
• Games, prizes, or giveaways

I’m currently in the process of adding several of these to my own website.  I’m hoping to do several tie-ins related to hiking and backcountry safety, which will provide extra material for kids to engage in after we’ve given wilderness first-aid talks (incentive to visit the website).

I have, however, just put up the Author Q&A page–check it out!  It contains info about The Natural Order and about my writing process, plus a few random questions.

If you have any questions that I didn’t answer this time around, let me know!

Countdown…15 days to publication!

As I sit here with just 15 days left until the release of The Natural Order, I can’t help thinking of everything I still have to do.  So this post will serve as a bit of an inventory: things I’ve finished, things I’ve started, and things I haven’t even touched yet.

It will give you a bit of an overview of my marketing scheme so far, and of course, if you have any further suggestions of something I have missed, I would love to hear in the comments below!

Things I’ve done: 

• Finished the final read-through of The Natural Order, correcting all of the typos that somehow got ignored in the past (I’m a stickler for proper grammar, so I don’t let much slip!)
• Designed the cover
• Set up my website (though some of the pages are still incomplete)

Things I’ve started: 

• The blog!  I’ve been more consistent with this than I expected, though I don’t know how long it will take to see results (such as an expanded readership).
• Getting the book ready for online release.  I’ll work on formatting it for Kindle tomorrow.
• Spreading word to everyone I know.

Things I haven’t even touched: 

• The book tour.  I’ve been putting this off, so expect updates sometime in the next week when I finally get around to planning it.
• The book launch party.  I still have to pin down the date, so I can’t decide any specifics until then.
• My author brand.  I need to decide on one, but I’m having trouble coming up with anything specific.  (Suggestions welcome!!)
• Most of the extra pages on my website.  I have to work on an author Q&A, a sales page, and several other book tie-in pages.

The most exciting news, though, is that I’ll be ordering my first set of copies tomorrow!  They won’t arrive by the official release date, but I definitely need them before the book launch party.  If you have any questions you want answered in my first Q&A page on the author website, let me know in the comments below.

Why you should always, always order a proof…

I’m just a few days away from my first print run for The Natural Order.  For everyone in the US who orders a copy, it will be print-on-demand, meaning each order is printed individually and I don’t have to stock any copies.

Here in New Zealand, though, I’m planning to hold the book launch party in early June, followed quickly by a book tour during which we attempt to get the book into as many independent bookstores as possible.  I have a feeling it will be less of a challenge to get bookstore placement than in the US, because the smaller population means fewer authors and therefore a higher interest in authors who actually live in New Zealand.

Anyway, yesterday my first two proof copies arrived in the mail, just in time.  I had almost given up on waiting for them and ordered several hundred copies before checking to make sure they were right.

Well, that would have been a BIG MISTAKE!!

When Createspace tells you the photo you’ve chosen is too small a file to make a high-quality cover, they mean it.  Even though the photo was such a high resolution that it still looks crystal-clear blown up to twice the size of the actual cover, the printed cover was horribly pixelated, and what’s more, the perfectly centered title was skewed to the right.

I spent hours last night fixing the new cover to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I almost resorted to taking a photo of the cover and blowing that up, though it would certainly have resulted in a loss of detail.  Instead I discovered that you can just change the dimensions of the photo so it’s large enough to fit Createspace’s requirements.

You know what really confused me, though?  Createspace says the photo file must be a minimum of 300 dpi (dots per inch)…and my original file was exactly 300 dpi!  I ended up tripling the original file size before Createspace recognized it as large enough.

You can see why I’m not a huge fan of technology!

This whole book project has exponentially increased my understanding of computers, though.  Before I didn’t know anything about websites beyond the fact that you can make one using a basic template on WordPress, and now I know all about domain hosting and SEO.

Anyway, that’s certainly a lesson for the future–never, ever order a large number of copies of anything without first making certain that the proof is perfect.

Introducing…my fancy new author website!!

Check out my new author website!  It looks very slick and professional, right?

This is part of my goal with publishing and marketing The Natural Order.  It may be self-published, but it doesn’t have to look homemade.  That means no detail is too small to overlook.  Everything needs to look professional, including:

• The cover
• The website
• The interior design
• The editing (flawless grammar, spelling, etc.)
• The publicity materials (I’m planning to hand out bookmarks to advertise both the book-launch party and the author website)

It’s taken a lot of extra effort, and many headaches, but I am very happy with both the cover design and the website.  After looking back at my initial attempts at both of these, I’m quite glad I did not settle for less!

I’m currently making a final round of revisions to the text, fixing a few issues my trusty editors have spotted, and doing my own final read-through to be sure every single sentence flows smoothly.  The plot is there and the characters are there, but I want to be certain I don’t pick up the printed edition in a few years and wonder how I could have missed such a sloppy sentence.

Next on the to-do list?  My first print run!

Introducing…the official book cover!

After many drafts (and after I learned a great deal about installing new fonts), I have finally come up with my official cover for The Natural Order.

From the start I knew the border for the title had to be more exciting, but after looking at a pile of other young adult novels, I realized that not a single one used bland, straightforward text.  This one fits the mood and intrigue perfectly!

And here is the full spread, including the back cover (for those of you who want a bit of a teaser…)