Posts Tagged ‘The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors’

Holistic Book Reviews

The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors is offering members an opportunity for free publicity. We are starting a section of featured book reviews. These reviews will have a twist. A typical book review includes a cover photo with a content critique. The Red Hen book reviews will go a step further. Since we in the association are convinced that book marketing takes more than good writing, we will include a discussion of the book design also. That is why we are calling it Holistic Book Reviews–your book will be reviewed as a whole, not in parts. Customers choose books to buy based on more than the text.

We also intend to include your ordering information.  Or maybe we can work out some way of funneling orders through the Association for a minimal fee, of course. To become viable the Association will need income streams, but we haven’t quite figured that out yet. If anyone has a suggestion about it please feel free to share it with us. We are open minded.

Avoid The Sure Way of Making a Quick Trip to the Discount Bin

Good cover design, page layout, size, and materials can make a great deal of difference to the marketability of your books. Self-publishers have an advantage over traditional publishers in that they control their own presentation.

Traditionally published authors give up ownership of their children. It must be heartbreaking to send your baby out and when it’s released be shocked and embarrassed by what the publisher did to it. I’ve heard tales of ugly covers, misleading hype, and fractured type. You count on the publisher to polish your work and give it the best possible chance for success, but the truth is that publishing is a business. No business large or small, has unlimited funds, or time.  Traditional publishers concentrate more, as they should, on the known money makers. If you are new or untried, you probably will not get top-drawer attention.

As a self-publisher you can take all the time you need to make sure your book truly represents your message. You control the layout, and cover design. You also incur the costs. Don’t go cheap–first rate graphic designers and editors are worth the added expense. If your book doesn’t sell because you decided to use your neighbor’s fifteen-year-old son who is pretty good on the computer, it will cost you more in the end than if you invest in quality. For example, if the cover doesn’t lure the reader, your book will be ignored. It isn’t just the artwork, the title, cover copy, and choice of materials all must work in harmony.

It is All About You

So, if you want to tell the world about your book, we’ll do what we can to help by publishing a book review. Please send a copy of your book to P.O. Box 521418, Salt Lake City, UT 84152-1418 along with a photograph preferably shot professionally and we will write a review including comments about the book’s presentation. If chosen to appear on our website you will be able to use the review in your other marketing efforts. Your book will not be returned to you and because of time and space not every submitted book will be featured. We intend to choose books that represent the best of the self-published crop. If this description fits your book, by all means send it in and don’t forget to include a cover photo.

Bite your Tongue.

Those who decide to self-publish can hold their heads high, because they are counted among some of greatest authors in history. Below is but a partial list of authors who have chosen to self-publish at sometime in their career.

• William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly,Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane,
  
• e.e. cummings,  Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot,Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin,
  
• Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne,Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers,
  
• Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L’Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine,
  
• Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust,
  
• Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair,
  
• Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi,
  
• Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Note: The list was pulled from John Kremer’s Self-Publishing Hall of Fame

If you don’t find at least one of your heroes here I would be very surprised. Also you may have noticed that quite a few poets populate the list. Modern poets complain that publishers aren’t interested in their books. It’s said that poetry doesn’t sell. Compared to a fast paced pop-novel of sex, violence, and action they are probably right. I have to keep reminding myself that publishing isn’t primarily about getting the finest works into the public’s hands–it’s a profit generating business like a grocery store. If the stock isn’t turning it is costing money. I, like many others, tend to glamorize the traditional publishing houses and imbue them with a nobility they just don’t have. It’s a business. Poetry, on the other hand, is something else. Poetry is a work of passion, not business. Publishers probably weren’t any more anxious to publish poetry then than they are now and that is why so many poets had to resort to self-publishing.

The Old Man

One of my readers added this comment about self-publishers: “For me all I had to do was find out that Hemingway’s first book was “self-published,” to help me make my decision and after 32 years of “practice” I feel I did it just right. And then later this year when I found out about Mark Twain’s force of ten thousand book agents scattered across America selling his works and Ulysses S Grant’s Memoirs (also published by Twain’s company which was run by his young nephew Webster).” Miles Cobbett, Author the Alaskan book CHAMPION.

Miles followed up with this comment in another post: “One more tasty tidbit about Hemingway and his publisher, that I bet you already know is his lively discussions in letters between him and Charles Scribner about Royalty Payments. I was fascinated to read in copies of Hemingway’s “Letters” that CS only offered to pay Ernest Hemingway 10 % of the net. And Ernest wrote back in a lively letter that he wanted 15 % or a Minimum of 12.5 %…
This was fascinating to me, especially when I read in the other book I wrote to you about, (Birth of a Salesman), how Mark Twain offered and paid U. S. Grant and his widow, a whopping 70% of the profits from publishing Grant’s Memoirs.”

I have more sympathy for the traditional publishers than you might think from reading my posts. They have to have highly tuned crystal balls to foresee the future. If they choose to take a gamble on an author, and it tanks, what do they lose? Why the entire investment, of course. And what about credibility? What happens to the employee who stands behind a book bomb? Or two, or three? Can you say pink slip?

If you know your book will sell–you stand behind it. Raise the money to print and promote it. You might be like my friend Miles Corbbett whom I quoted above. His self-published book CHAMPION is selling well and he owes it all to word-of-mouth advertising. Miles has this to say about his success: “Getting the word out has been a fun & challenging journey, but it’s all been done so far without any help from a Madison Avenue super advertising blitz.”

If you are a self-publisher, considering self-publishing, or a supplier to self-publishers be sure to check out the manifesto for The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors, Inc. (click here).

Mark Twain had an army of ten-thousand salesmen peddling his books all over the country. He understood the principles of marketing as they applied to his time. Today’s marketing is different and requires an understanding of blogging, social networking, books on Amazon, etc. You can get that information from The Author Platform (TAP). It’s not free but almost click (here) for more information. If you can sell your book yourself you’ll earn 15 times more than if you traditionally publish.

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This article was republished with permission from the author’s blog Talking Through My Hat.