Wednesday
afternoon I gave a talk to the Rotary Club of Watsonville about
“Self-Publishing in the Digital Age.” If you’re wondering how I got such a gig
with my meager qualifications, I should mention that I serve on the club’s
program committee and can call my own number at any time.
With
only a half hour, and wanting to leave time for questions, I could only skim
the surface. I began by bringing up the memory of one our late club members, Sherrell
Watson, who had self-published a book on steam locomotives in 1995, and tried
to draw a contrast between that era and 17 years later, when I published my
mystery, The McHenry Inheritance. The
primary focus was the rise of Amazon and social media, which can give a
hustling self-published author a modest shot at success.
I
do a lot of public speaking and (braggadocio alert!) like to believe I’m pretty
good at it, which includes reading the audience reaction. This group was
clearly interested, and when I finished the prepared talk and asked for
questions, a half-dozen hands shot up instantaneously. That’s a sure sign
they’re listening.
Interested in the Marketing
As
might have been expected from a business-oriented group, the questions were
mostly geared to the business and marketing aspects of book publishing, as
opposed to the work of writing a book. In fact, the closest thing to a writing
question was whether I’m planning a sequel. The answer is yes, but not a
continuation of the story, rather a new adventure featuring Quill Gordon (my
main character) in a different setting with different characters and a fresh
story.
Beyond
that, I tried to answer the questions in a complex and sophisticated fashion. A
few examples:
Q:
Fifty Shades of Gray was self-published and became a huge best-seller. Do you
think your book can do that?
A:
Probably not. I forgot to include any bondage or S&M scenes.
Q:
How do you make any money selling an e-book for $2.99?
A:
No problem. You just sell a million of ‘em.
Q:
How many people would you guess bought your book because they thought it was
written by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes?
A:
Not nearly enough.
Yeah,
we had some fun.
Surprised by the Response
There
were some good questions about tracking sales and about marketing the book as a
straight mystery or emphasizing the fly-fishing angle. (Gordon is on a fishing
trip in the High Sierra when he gets caught up in the murder and intrigue.) All
in all, I was quite pleased with how it went.
One
pleasant surprise came out at the end. I had mentioned in my talk that I had
probably maxed out on selling the book to my friends and had to be getting it
into the hands of strangers now. I really believed that, figuring that if
anyone who knows me hadn’t bought it after five months on the market, they
weren’t going to buy it at all.
Not
so, as it turned out. In the course of the talk I mentioned that I had brought
some books for sale (I’d recently ordered a dozen from Create Space, Amazon’s
print-on-demand program) and that I would give $3 from each sale to the club’s
community service fund. When the meeting adjourned, there was a crush around
the head table, and when it finally dispersed, I had sold ten books to an
audience of approximately 60 people. Nice work if you can get it, and not a bad
day’s work at that.
