Director's Desk At What Cost? or Does It Pay to Ignore Ingram? Last year just before BookExpo America, Ingram Book Company announced that smaller publishers would have to have a distributor of record in order to continue to do business through them. This year, a new contract has been sent to people … [Read more...]

Guerrilla Marketing for Writers As a new self-published author, how many books should you really expect to sell a month? How long should it take for your books to start generating significant sales volume? What's the fastest way to find thousands of people who would gladly sell and buy your book? Listen to our interview with the … [Read more...]

How to Make Sure Your Book Will Bring You Financial Success Everything I~ve learned about self-publishing I~ve learned from my authors who have sent me their books to edit, design, and follow through to marketing success. I~ve noticed over the years that some of my authors do very well with their books … [Read more...]

The “-ize” Have It Too many independent publishers use the Christopher Columbus method of planning. They do not know where they are going. When they get there they do not know where they are. And when they return, they do not know where they have been. This is not a good way to run a business. You can avoid … [Read more...]

Distribution to the Booktrade There are four stages in the life of every book: writing, producing (printing & binding), distributing and promoting. Each step is a unique challenge and each challenge must be met. Authors write and promote, publishers produce and distribute and self-publishers do all four. … [Read more...]

The Publishing Game Presents... “To really get bookstore attention, you need to do a fancy PR campaign,” someone advised me. “It can cost $10,000 a month!” But I got attention—and sales—from every bookstore in the country. My monthly expenditure? $50. I announced the first, national, … [Read more...]

In search of the perfect file: Why are printers starting to require PDF files only for printing? I'll try to not get involved with a lot of techno-babble in answering this question. Let it just suffice to say that the printer wants to be able to say, with certainty, that "It is not my fault" … [Read more...]