February, 2014
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What’s In A Name?
I have had numerous conversations lately about how and why to name your publishing imprint.
If you are going to be an independent or small publisher, if you are going to take on the time, expense and trouble of publishing your own book instead of letting a vanity press do it for you, you need to know the following about the name of your endeavor:
- Bookstores ARE willing to stock books by independent authors who have published themselves
- Bookstores are NOT all willing to stock books that look like they were published less than professionally
- Having the author’s name as the publisher name, or naming the publishing entity in a similar vein to the title of the book will look amateurish
- Avoid this… come up with a professional sounding, independent book publisher name for your new small business. This is small business… name it as such
- you MUST register the name with Bowker and make sure all of your materials and data uploads contain the name exactly as you gave it to Bowker.
Enjoy being treated like a professional!
How to Sell and Market Your Book All on Your Own
I recently had a session with a client and there were so many good ideas that I thought I would share what I could.
The main ideas to come out of today’s session were:
- Make sure you always have a copy of your book with you. Spend time every day dropping off signed copies of your books to store managers
and/or following up with manager who got your book last week. - Keep doing events, get creative. Remember that events are about exposure and stocking… not just about sales that day.
- Learn the rules of distribution and sales and follow them!
- Keep finding reasons why the press should write about you.
- Constantly write articles and submit to the large web and print media organizations.
- Reach out to bloggers on your topic and offer a guest post.
- Participate in discussion groups on line every day.
- Give away books every chance you get. Send them to the media, to reviewers, to bloggers, to retailers. Keep sending them out. (But make sure you put stickers on your review copies so that they don’t end up getting sold)
If you would like to hear more and get more detail about these and other ideas. Check out our other blogs
D5 Creation