Every time you leave a comment, a child learns to read

I’m still waiting to hear back from some friends who I sent my manuscript too. A few have given me some kudos, love, support, all that good stuff. “It actually reads like a book,” said one of my colleagues. The best compliment I got was from dear old mom who said “Its not like a Danielle Steele book, I like that.” Yes! I succeeded in my goal of not writing a manuscript like Danielle Steele.

So, sitting here waiting.  What to do now? As a good rule of business, it is not a good idea to just sit and wait for one path to materialize.  So I started thinking “What if I wanted to self-publish” this book.  Barring the many reasons why that is not my ideal route, I entertained the idea for awhile and then thought about what I would need to accomplish this.

In the digital age, cost of production is growing smaller and smaller.  So that was not a concern in my hypothesizing.  I came up with three things that would be essential for getting a self-published venture under way.  (Its the same thing that sells books off a book shelf in a store by the way).

1. Cover : with a bad cover, you won’t sell squat.  I’ve been to enough book trade shows to know from experience…you can almost always spot the self-pub books by their cover.  They are horrendous.

2. Sales Copy : you would not believe how important those 25 word blurbs on Amazon (B&N, etc…) are until you read enough bad ones.  That short little blurb is what will sell the book after the cover gets it recognized.  Hell, from a sales perspective, the back cover copy is sometimes more important than the contents.

3. PR :  you need to call in favors from everyone you know to write, post, comment, review the life out of the book.  You would have to rely on word of mouth, because self-pubs are not going to get the trade journal reviews.

So, with this thinking, I started tinkering with a cover.  FYI, it was done just as an experiment with the crappy editing tools that come stock in Windows XP…so don’t be to crazy with the slams.

I practically copied this from the Vintage edition of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  I liked the feel and design that cover lent to the book itself.

Check out the Prologue if you haven’t done so already.