The Book Blog

[Phil Davis]

The other day, EelKat linked to my blogsite and so I ended up spending the good part of a Sunday morning bouncing around all of her websites, blog site and chat rooms. And I even decided to join here. I am very focused on my business these days without much time for other pursuits, so I will most likely be talking a lot about the publishing business on this site. That's kind of a dry topic at times.

One thing I like to do on my blog is to introduce authors. So if you are an aspiring author and want some free publicity, leave me an intro to you and your book and I'll post it here and on www.howtopublishabookblog.com

Here's a sample of what some other authors have done:

Michelle Huggins, author of Confessions of an Angry Woman, is our featured author this week.

Michelle successfully sold all 100 copies of her hardback edition at a single book signing. Michelle epitomizes a "do-it-yourself" publisher. She was very hands-on throughout the entire process and she had a clear vision of what she wanted her book to look like. If you plan on publishing a book of poetry, you can benefit from Michelle's experience. Today I'll cover just some ideas on manufacturing a successful book of poetry.

Here are the key points of what Michelle did to make her book a success:

1. She went with a hardback edition for her first 100 books. As a rule of thumb, I try to discourage authors who are publishing their first book from using hardback because it costs about 5 times more than the more common softback or perfect binding. But Michelle showed me how using hardback binding can justify charging a higher price and if you plan to sell a small number of books, using hardback may be a good idea. It certainly worked for Michelle.
2. Michelle wanted an expensive, off-white linen paper. As this paper would greatly increase the cost of her book, Michelle went directly to our paper vendor, picked out the paper she wanted and then brought her paper to ZDocs. Smart move and ZDocs is happy to help authors out in this way.
3. Michelle went to http://www.isbn.org/ and got her own International Standard Book Numbers and she was very hands-on throughout the editing and file set-up operations.
4. When it came to pricing her book, Michelle was set on charging $19.95 a book because her market research had shown her this was a pretty reasonable price. But her books looked so good I suggested she charge $24.95. Michelle was doubtful so I didn't push her and she went off to her book signing in Park City, Utah.

When I called her the following Monday, Michelle told me she had sold all 100 copies of her book. My first thought was, 'you should have went with the $24.95 Michelle,' but before I could put my foot in my mouth, Michelle told me that at the last moment she decided to go with the higher price. That decision in addition to all the other decisions including how to bind the book and what paper to print the book on, made her an additional $500.00 and made her book a profitable venture.

A point I want to stress is that during the whole process, Michelle was calling the shots. ZDocs was by her side to offer ideas and suggestions, but at the end of the day Michelle made the final calls. And in all cases, I think she made the right decisions as we can see by the sales of her book.

This week we'll be hearing more about Michelle's self-publishing adventure as well as checking out popular writer's websites and learning about the library of congress and copyrights. If you haven't subscribed yet, we invite you to. All you need to do is click on the subscription button on the sidebar.