The Book Delivery Arrives! An IPNE member shares her experience

On Wednesday, March 5th I ended up calling out from work as I received notice late Tuesday that my 2000 books would be arriving. Well, of course, it was pouring rain that later turned to ice, and the books did not arrive. But I was nervous as a cat all day waiting for them and wondering how a tractor trailer was going to turn around on my road -- a dead end. The LSI rep who took the order, knew it was a residence and I hoped they would send a smaller truck. I was in a state all day wondering how I was going to get the books into the house, and wasn't even sure they'd be packed in boxes. By dinnertime I realized they weren't coming that day, but started worrying about where they were. I had images of the truck overturned on Rt. 95 and the books scattered all over the highway. At midnight I received a message on the tracking site to call customer service!

When I did so, I found the books were safely in Bangor and would be delivered Thursday. I had the chance to explain about the road and we agreed that the driver would call me once he was in Belfast and we'd arrange to meet. I knew it would take at least 2 trips in my SUV to unload the books from the truck and get them home.

Finally, in the afternoon, I met the truck -- a huge tractor trailer. The driver very kindly helped me unload and load about 2/3 of the boxes into my SUV, then he went on another delivery in the area and agreed to meet me back at the spot in a little while.

I drove the 2 miles to my house and managed to work feverishly to get the boxes out of the car onto the patio -- all the while wondering what I would have done if they had arrived the day before in the rain and ice!

I got back to the truck and the driver was waiting patiently, and had the remaining boxes sitting on the back of the truck. He again helped me (although his instructions had been he couldn't help with the second loading) so now I at least had all the books.

I spent the rest of the evening bringing the rest of the boxes into the house and figuring out where to store them! I left one box in the car for ready sales. I was really glad I didn't order 3000 books!

Meanwhile, my boss hasn't posted the April schedule yet but it was too chaotic at work to be making any requests. So I'll just have to leave it to chance.

Jean Boggio - Colerith Press
www.colerithpress.com
www.jeanboggio.com

Promoting Books with Video

If you watch the Super Bowl you know that part of the fun of doing that is watching the commercials. Ad agencies around the country work all year to come up with the most clever and ingenious commercials for their clients to debut on Super Sunday. Those commercials cost millions of dollars and reach millions of viewers. Small independent publishers don't stand a chance of ever affording one of those commercials but there is a way to get a "commercial" about your books where millions of people can see them --- promotional videos.

The World Wide Web has given anyone with a product or service to sell a huge forum in which to do it but, as most of us know, getting attention is the big issue. Most of us have web sites and a lot of us have blogs. We can join cyber communities through Amazon and Author's Den and many more such services but getting your product out there is an ongoing challenge. One interesting and effective tool is the growing number of video sites that literally millions of people access every day. So I decided to give it a try.

I knew I wanted to promote my novel The Old Mermaid's Tale and I wanted to get the video live before Valentine's Day in the hopes of taking advantage of the holiday named after me (or the reverse --- I've never been sure which). Since my business, Valentine-Design.com, specializes in web sites and promotional materials for small businesses I figured I should be my own customer. This is how I went about it:
1. Write a script. I knew I wanted to keep my video under a minute and I wanted to create a mood of romance and adventure. I figured each slide in my video would require about 3 seconds of time so I decided on 20 slides (I actually wound up with 24 when I added credits). I wrote a script that consisted of 17 lines of text --- one for each slide.

2. Create a storyboard. On a big yellow legal pad and in my favorite coffee shop with a huge mug of turbo-charged caffeine I drew out a series of squares and began filling them in. The first slide would be an intro, 17 slides for the script, 3 slides featuring the title of the book with a picture of the cover, a blurb, and where to get it. Another slide was added to promote my previous book of romantic love stories (remember this is for Valentine's Day), a slide for the credits, and a final slide with URLS for my press and my blog.

3. Assembling the images. I searched through my own photographs, art work, and collection of scanned art and then went on-line and took images from free photo sites including government sites like the Hubble Telescope. By Googling "free stock photography" I found a wealth of sites where people posted photos that are available for anyone to use.

4. Designing the slides. In Photoshop I created a frame that was the size I wanted all my slides to conform to. One by one I assembled the images using layers, lighting effects, and a variety of filters to give each slide the mood I wanted it to have. I knew that I wanted to keep to a particular color palate of mysterious, deep colors so the white text would really stand out when layered over them. Once the slides were ready I added the text.

5. Selecting the music. I knew I wanted music for the background. In the past I've purchased stock music from sites like MusicBakery.com but for this video I decided to use a snippet of music from a CD. I put the CD in my disc drive and copied it to the hard drive and used Windows Media Player to convert it to MP3 format. Then I downloaded a small freeware program called InAudio to edit the piece down to one minute.

6. Putting it all together. I used Flash MX to assemble the slides and add the music adjusting transitions and timing as I went along. There are many freeware or shareware programs that you can find on Tucows.com that do the same thing. When the video looked the way I wanted it to I clicked Publish and my computer created my video.

7. Here it is!

As soon as I was satisfied I uploaded my file to my various web sites. The next step is to convert the SWF (Flash) file to an MPEG or WMV file to post to Google Video, YouTube, etc. If your computer has Movie Maker on it (mine doesn't) you may be able to skip this step by assembling your movie in that instead of Flash.

And there you have it, a commercial that the entire cyber-world has access to. It might not be the Super Bowl but it's pretty super for us little guys.

- Visit Parlez-Moi Blog for more information on book promotion and marketing.

A Publisher's Dream Turned to Nightmare

The court found for the authors and against the publisher. The judgement: $33 MILLION. Just seven years ago it was the largest award of its kind. The complaint was a contract dispute — the author claimed her book had failed in the United States because it was not properly marketed.

At this point many of the authors out there are laughing and saying, “How can I get in on this? My publisher hasn’t done a thing to market my book!” These days authors know that, if their book is going to sell, it is they who are going to do all the work. A few years ago things were, it seems, different.

The case in question was brought by two women, co-authors Misha Defonseca and Vera Lee, against their publisher Mt. Ivy Press and its owner Jane Daniel. It was tried in Suffolk Superior Court and the ruling was handed down in 2000. The book that began the entire controversy was titled Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years and was about Defonseca’s experiences as a Jewish child in Europe during that period. Defonseca was living with her parents in Brussels and they were in hiding. She was seven years old when her parents were captured and she was placed in a foster home from which she escaped. She spent the next several years traveling on foot around Europe trying to find them. She lived with a pack of wolves who took care of her. It was quite an adventure and a book that looked like it had potential.

Jane Daniel had a small independent press that published a book titled Gigolos (which you can still buy on Amazon) and a few other titles. Through her friend, attorney Jan Schlictman, she met Defonseca and they agreed to do the book together. Jane’s best friend and next-door neighbor Vera Lee, a retired French professor, agreed to help because Misha’s native tongue was French and she needed translation support telling her story. While Misha and Vera began the long, arduous task of writing the book, Jane began to market it.

She had worked with the prestigious literary agency Palmer and Dodge (now Edwards, Angell, Palmer and Dodge) and literary marketing gurus, Ike Williams and Elaine Rogers (now with Fish and Richardson), before. They agreed to work with her on the Misha book. Before the book was even written Mt. Ivy had acquired a movie option from Disney who agreed to pay Misha as a consultant on the film. The Oprah show had flown a film crew to Massachusetts to shoot footage of Misha with the wolves at Wolf Hollow in Ipswich. Translation rights abroad were sold. A schedule of speaking engagement through a reputable speakers bureau was set up. This is the kind of promotion that most of us humble authors can only dream of! Disney! Oprah! Foreign translation sales!!! Who gets that kind of marketing? Misha is reported to have received over $200,000 in royalties just from the French edition alone! All the authors I know are salivating over that little fact.

But somewhere along the line the controversy began. Misha and Vera squabbled and Vera claimed she was being damaged by the project. She filed a lawsuit. Misha’s story was being questioned by Holocaust story experts and the Boston Globe’s David Mehegan wrote an article questioning its authenticity. More lawsuits were filed. Disney backed off and so did Oprah. Everything went awry and soon everyone was lawyered up. The chaos that ensued left Jane Daniel’s publishing company and life in tatters. For seven years she has battled to find some equity around this situation. Her family spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to help. She lost everything. She spent time in jail. Now they want her house. The nightmare seems endless. But Jane persists. Now that the legal cases are settled and she has nothing to lose she is writing about the case in a blog: BESTSELLER! which will become a book.

If you are an independent publisher — or a publisher of any sort — you need to read this blog. If you are an author you need to read it too. It is the story of a project that went awry and has created devastation. There are currently seven chapters on the blog. More are being added as the author completes them. It is gripping reading. Take a look at: BESTSELLERtheBook.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading.

Bookstore Tourism: Is There Anything To This Idea?

About two years ago I started following the work of Larry Portzline, author of the book "Bookstore Tourism". The guy was convincing booklovers to get on tourbuses -- he'd escort them to great bookstores for a day of recreational bookhunting. Not only was he dragging customers to bookstores; he was doing his best to convince the movers and shakers in the bookselling, publishing and library fields that they ought to be getting with his program. He created a complex website, www.bookstoretourism.com, and put together a killer Board for a nascent organization called The National Council For Bookstore Tourism.

What a guy! I had a couple of email exchanges with him -- but of course I was busy and couldn't really think too hard about what he was up to.

But about a month ago I got caught up in a conversation on Jessica Stockton's blog, Written Nerd -- here on Blogger (http://writtennerd.blogspot.com) -- and I said the only really exciting new way for bookstores to be roped into working together was Larry's idea of busing customers along on a tour of a group of stores. And Jessica called me on it, in public, asking when Larry and I were going to stop talking and start doing something more serious.

Well Larry seems to be all about his National Council -- he wants to get other people running Bookstore Tourism companies. So -- I'm going to try to lauch what I'm calling The First real for-profit such. It will be called BiblioExpeditions (thanks to Heidi Stemple for helping develop this name). I'm going to start with a product that exactly copies the Greenwich Village Bookstore Tours which Larry developed in 2003 for bringing booklovers from Harrisburg, PA into NYC for the day. I'm going to aim to run 100 of these per year, from sites in a three-hour driving radius of New York. I must be crazy. Yes.

Here (below) is the business overview I cooked up last week. As you'll see I've built in my favorite themes of corporate sponsorship and financial kickbacks and incentives for all. Please feel free to lob jeers and insults (or constructive comments!) my way -- and, if you feel like investing in the business, I'll accept cash, credit cards, gold -- it's all good.

Your Crazed Colleague,

Andy



BIBLIOEXPEDITIONS

OVERVIEW AND MISSION BiblioExpeditions is the nation's first “Bookstore Tourism” company. A Massachusetts-based for-profit corporation, BiblioExpeditions aims to mobilize readers to channel funds to libraries and community bookstores by gathering public, corporate, and non-profit organization support to achieve the National Endowment for the Arts' (NEA) “Big Read” mission: “To restore reading to the center of American culture.”

DEMAND AND OPPORTUNITY The landmark NEA report "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America" (2004) documented a dramatic decline in literary reading among all age groups, ethnic groups, and education levels. BiblioExpeditions, noting that these findings correlate with a sharp decline in the number of bookstores, implements cause-related marketing campaigns that leverage booklovers' tales of journeying to great bookstores in order to create an image-enhancing value proposition for corporate sponsors. Sponsors invest in Calvert Social Investment Foundation “Community Investment Notes” (CINs) that underwrite rotating credit facilities to strengthen our partner bookstores.

STIMULATING INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT The American Booksellers Association’s stated commitment to promoting bookstore tourism, coupled with BiblioExpeditions’ library fundraising services and publisher product-marketing opportunities, are the tools BiblioExpeditions uses to educate and incent community booksellers and publishers to work together to raise the public profile of recreational bookhunting at independent bookstores, opening new avenues of access to readers, while capturing market share from chainstores and online booksellers.

MOBILIZING SUPPLY Utilizing the Key Initiators Network Strategy of our partner Capital Missions Company, BiblioExpeditions is developing a Community Bookselling Financial Linkage Network composed of corporate executives personally committed to overcoming economic and financial barriers to the growth of community bookselling. These Thought Leaders’ companies will act as BiblioExpeditions’ major sponsors.

PUBLIC SERVICES BiblioExpeditions produces fundraising package tours that escort library patrons to shop at bookstores located within a three-hour driving radius of the host libraries.

MARKETING APPROACH Library outreach campaigns encourage librarians and library volunteers to contemplate roles for themselves in the future resurgence of community bookselling. The National Council on Bookstore Tourism's white-paper publications and seminars at regional and national library conventions will introduce BiblioExpeditions and bookstore tourism to thousands of librarians and Friends of Libraries volunteers each year.

BOOKSTORE PARTNERS BiblioExpeditions will fund the bookstores that serve as our tour destinations. Current partners are New York City's The Strand, McNally Robinson, Books Of Wonder, Housing Works Used Book Cafe, Bluestockings, Vox Pop, Skyline Books, Macondo Books, East-West Books, Lectorum Books, 12th Street Books, Alabaster Bookshop, Partners & Crime, Biography Bookshop, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, Three Lives & Company, Oscar Wilde Bookshop, St. Mark's Bookshop, East Village Books, Shakespeare & Company, Mercer Street Books, New York University Book Center and Booksleaves. We will add as many as 30 more bookstores by late 2008, in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

The Triple Tulip Press

The Triple Tulip Press came to life through a convergence of circumstances. Typically, it is a self-publishing venture, its name derived from the three tulips who support it and whose background is Dutch: Titia Bozuwa, the author: Gijs, her physician/husband; and Paul, their son, who is in the printing business.

When, in 1990, I (Titia), needed to undergo a hip replacement requiring one month of rest, Gijs and Paul gave me a computer. A free-lance photographer by trade, I wondered what I would do with a computer. But the donors insisted that I had always been a prolific letter-writer and maybe I should go into this period of non-activity with the intent of writing about it.

I did. But what came out was not a story about my drug-addicted, hard-luck roommate, although that would have made a good story. Instead the hospital experience brought back the still raw memories of our daughter Joan, who died at 29 from breast cancer.

My husband was dismayed that I re-entered this painful territory, but Paul realized I was serious about writing and sent me a Mother’s Day card that was good for “taking a course in creative writing at a university of you own choice.”

I was on my way to the closest one, the University of New Hampshire, in no time. There, I was told it takes seven years before you can write in a somewhat objective way about a loss. I took their word for it and practiced writing meanwhile.

In 2000, I was ready to publish Joan, A Mother’s Memoir. It sold, saw a second printing, and the profits went to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Because of the personal nature of the subject matter, I had wanted to retain control over the appearance and layout of the book. Thus, we started the Triple Tulip Press. Seeing that it was actually a lot of fun to publish, and since Paul could do the printing and help me through that whole process, I wrote a second book, In the Shadow of the Cathedral - Growing up During WW II. It came out in the fall of 2004 and is still selling. A Dutch publisher picked it up for translation and brought it out in 2005 during an impressive ceremony inside the very cathedral I had been writing about. Back in my hometown, I went through a whirlwind experience of TV, radio and newspaper reviews and talks to students in the schools I had attended during the war.

Meanwhile, I had started the Twin Farms Writers Workshops in 1996 where various UNH creative writing teachers come and give two five-day workshops in the summer.

On February 1st, 2007, my third book will be launched: Wings of Change - A Dutch Immigrant’s Journey.

My Last Romance and other passions

It’s here! I’m.... I don’t know... I opened the box yesterday and there were all these beautiful books with... with... with my name on them! It’s kind of intimidating. I birthed this baby and now that it’s in the world, I have to do something with it.

Of course the big issue now is marketing and promotion but I’ll worry about that tomorrow. The book is on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble and, within weeks, it will be on a lot of other book sales sites. I’ll have to handle local distribution and the press releases but I can do that but, of course, that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that the world now has a book in it with my name on it.

This book is actually a bit of a canary that I am sending down into the coal mine to see how I feel about being an author. After all I have been through with the submission-acceptance-rejection cycle of The Old Mermaid’s Tale I had to rethink whether I wanted to continue to go through that or whether I wanted to do something less emotionally chaotic and go the independent press route. I know I am too emotionally attached to Mermaid to plunge right in with it. I really admire Mark for the way he has approached this. But, being less brave, I decided to gather up these eight stories, polish them up, and send them down the mine to see how frightening the whole thing really is. Less than 24 hours into the process, things are good.

But I want to talk a little bit about the eight stories in the book.

The title story, My Last Romance, is the story of Ruby and Silvio, two characters I genuinely love. I think, in my “other” life, I am Ruby, a torch singer with a big band, led by Silvio. They’ve had a tempestuous life — and a tempestuous romance and now, in their senior years the past has stirred things up for them. I think it is my best story.

There are three short-short stories, Asa, Damian and Danse Avec Moi. Asa was previously published in Level Best Books’ 2004 anthology, Riptide: Crime Stories by New England Writers. All three of them are steamy little vignettes about passionate women who love interesting men. I have to say I am moderately intimidated by their steaminess just because I don’t think people who know me would think I would write that way — but we shall see.

Flynnie and Babe is a sweet little love story about two people who have been through a lot in love and have not noticed the most obvious thing in the world — each other. It’s an old theme and yet one that is so ubiquitous that it bears re-interpretation.

Waiting for Lindy is the only story in the book written from a man’s point of view. It was fun to write. Guy, the hero of the story, lost his wife a few years back and has now fallen under the spell of a “younger” woman in her thirties. He is crazy about her but too uncertain to believe it will last. I love both Guy and his son Hugh in the story. They are both men I know well.

Treat Yourself to the Best was the hardest one to write because it is the one that is closest to my own life. I am nothing like Fifi, the main character, but my world and her world are very much alike. The ending of that story was a profound revelation for me!

The longest story in the book is also the one I am most attached to. The Haven is the story of a married woman, Chrissy, who feels unworthy of both her husband and of the life he has given her. Stash, her husband's much older cousin, is a hard-bitten, tattooed, scrappy mariner who was once the terror of the waterfront. But in Stash, Chrissy finds someone who sees her — sees her completely. I have a feeling it will be a challenging story for some people — I’ll be interested to hear reactions to it.

So this is my book. It is available now through Amazon and Barnes and Noble online and will soon be available from my My Last Romance web site. Or just call me or send me an email (inquiry at parlezmoipress dot com). I’ll send you one. If you like it, please leave feedback on Amazon — or B&N. I hope you do like it. These characters are dear to my heart.

Thanks for reading!

CSNE Report 4/6/06 Mary Ellen Lepionka

Well, that was fun! I arrived at Foxwoods Casino and Resort in Connecticut (operated by
the Mashantucket Pequots Tribal Nation) and set up our exhibit on April 2. We had one
bookrack with 20 books ; three bookstands for books of larger trim size ; the show
catalogs I had made up along with the flyers (participants will receive a copy);
miscellaneous postcards, business cards, catalogs, and order forms that participants
sent ; PMA promotional materials, including a display copy of the PW issue featuring
PMA ; and a big bowl of extra candy brought over from the PLA show in Boston. Photos
are forthcoming. If you want your book and materials returned too you, please send an
envelope with postage. Otherwise I will keep or donate them (but promise you will never
see them on Amazon or eBay).

The show opened on April 3 (no, I was not one of those crazy people who played the
slots all night in the casino). I was very grateful throughout the day for the help and
companionship of Kerri Wetherbee of Focus Publishing, Doug Johnson of Live Model
Books, and Ron Silvio of SourceAid. We had time to conduct our own impromptu
networking sessions, as the show was not well attended overall, a disappointment that
we shared with the other vendors there. Just over 200 college store people came to
CSNE, about half from New England and the other half mainly from New York,
Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. I ’d estimate that fewer than half of those came down our
aisle in the exhibit hall.

Additionally, there were few book publishers as well as book buyers. The campus store
people had come for girl ­cut hoodies, baby togs with college insignia, all ­leather mascot
accessories, graduation teddy bears, things to keep you warm at football games,
gourmet chocolates, posters of 60s rock stars (they got that right), lip balm in retro tins,
and human brain wind ­up toys. Customization was key. And innovation. My favorite
innovation (aside from the walking brain) was a special chair for common rooms in which
you plug in and play your electronic games (looks a little like the chair in Total Recall).
The few book publishers there featured well ­known series in career prep and
professional certification, dictionaries and the like, and medical reference books.
Pearson, Thomson, Merriam ­Webster and Elsevier Health Science were there.
Interestingly, the only other publishers with a diverse offering of academic and trade
books were Houghton Mifflin and Holyoke News Company (which publishes reprints of
classics, including class sets). Specialty higher ed distributors included Matthews Book
Company (distributing APA books, Jossey ­Bass, Guilford, Sinauer, Springer, and 300
other Scientific/Technical/Medical publishers) and Rittenhouse (online and catalog sales
of STM books).

All the big new and used textbook wholesalers and jobbers were there, including
BudgetText, Follett Higher Ed, Nebraska Book Company, and South Eastern Book
Company. Also there were PubNet, Logi ­Text, and other organizations/software vendors
for electronic college store management and order fulfillment. The big college store
buying organizations were there too: ICBA (Independent College Bookstore Association,
which does buying and store management just for proprietary bookstores run by
colleges and universities), Connect2One (serving independent bookstores), and
NACSCORP (serving college stores run also by chains), and I learned that it is possible
to become a vendor of record with all of them (see info sheet).

What few book buyers were there we did manage to interest in our PMA ­Academic
offerings. People at our booth ranged from small private college preparatory schools to
the California state college system. They looked at all the books and listened to us
effuse about what small publishers can offer them. Most of those who took our show
catalog seemed to have specific intentions. Study aids and reference works clearly were
most desired. My sense is that we need a larger selection of books, especially books
with more direct application to academic life. Wherever we exhibit next, I hope to have at
least twice as many offerings, all honed to the market.

The books that seemed to spark the greatest interest (in addition to my Writing and
Developing Your College Textbook , Doug ’s Art Models , and Ron ’s Cite It Right —we
were there to pitch them after all), included Lance Ong ’s F to Phi Beta Kappa (success
guide), Paragraph Publishers ’ Grammar Traps , Fran Hamilton ’s Hands ­On English ,
Cypress House ’s Spanish! Live It and Learn It (guide to language immersion schools),
New Harbinger ’s The Courage to Trust (guide to relationship building), and Aspen
Mountain Publishing ’s Leaving Campus and Going to Work . I am emailing participants
separately to pass back any specific feedback that I heard about specific titles.

I think we made a dent. I had signed up to talk at the “New Product Breakfast,” in which
participants had 60 seconds on a stage with a microphone to pitch a new product they
were exhibiting. I ’m no salesperson, but apparently somebody selling independent small
publishers of academic books was fairly novel, so there was a curiosity factor that drove
some people at least to our booth. The CSNE show committee also came around to ask
us if we would please attend again and not give up, as they liked having us and would
like to attract more publishers. (We politely said we would consider it.)

I did make a couple of contacts that could benefit us all. The VP of Sales and Marketing
of NACSCORP, Jonathan Bibo, said he was interested in helping small publishers of
academic books become vendors of record with NACSCORP and wanted to talk further
about how that might be done. His point was that although a publisher just needs
distribution to participate (e.g., Ingram, NBN, Consortium), he and his assistant Joan
Keehan are always looking for special products, wherever they come from, and will
consider products of publishers who do not yet have representation. He also suggested
that if they can ’t take you on, they will tell you why. Let ’s discuss our experiences with
NACSCORP and academic wholesalers on the Academic listserv.

I plan to propose to Jan Nathan that PMA invite Jonathan Bibo to PMA ­U 2007 to be on
a panel on the subject of NACSCORP and other market outlets for academic and
educational publishers. Also on that panel I also hope to invite someone from the J.A.
Majors company. I talked with Ed Koslosky, the Eastern Regional Sales Manager, who
told me that Baker & Taylor had bought them recently to run a new division for
academic ­oriented trade books. He assured me that J.A. Majors, which traditionally
focused on health and science books and electronics from big publishers, is now
interested in seeing academic, trade, professional, technical, and reference books from
publishers, including small presses. J.A. Majors “Health Science, Professional, and
Trade Books ” will be shipped from B & T ’s warehouses. To round out the panel I will
propose we invite someone from Connect2One and/or ICBA to talk about how small
publishers can become vendors of record.


For More Information
College Stores of New England
60 Hornbeam Hill Rd., Chelmsford, MA 01824
www.csne.net 978 ­250 ­1117 office@csne.net

Connect2One
5412 Courseview Dr., Ste. 150, Mason, OH 45040
www.connect2one.com 800 ­563 ­9034 info@connect2one.com

Holyoke News Company, Inc.
720 Main Street, Holyoke, MA 01040
www.holyoke ­news.com 413 ­534 ­4537

Independent College Bookstore Association (ICBA)
287 Fourth St. #4, Ashland, OR 97520
www.ICBAinc.com 800 ­888 ­9222 office@ICBAinc.com

J. A. Majors Co.
www.majors.com 800 ­633 ­1851

NACSCORP
528 East Lorain St., Oberlin, OH 44074 ­1298
www.nacscorp.com 440 ­775 ­7777

PubEasy (part of Bowker, offshoot of PubNet, providing customer service to publishers,
distributors, and wholesalers for bookstore ordering)
630 Central Ave., New Providence, NJ 07974
www.pubeasy.org 908 ­219 ­0133 info@pubeasy.com

"Independence began here..."

This post is a reprint from Parlez-Moi Blog, January 25, 2006.

That’s the second half of the slogan of the Independent Publishers of New England - “New England Publishers Unite – Independence began here!” It is a good reminder for those of us in the arts that the last 80 years or so of corporation-dominated access to art is dying and it is time for artists to take back their power. Technology – that two-headed monster – gives us the power if we choose to take it.

I’m not sure where it began. Back in the Sixties when home movie cameras became affordable, a new breed of independent filmmakers sprang up. When I was at Penn State in the early Seventies aspiring filmmakers, screenwriters and actors banded together in student union study rooms to plan, write, rehearse, and talk. They scrounged dumpsters behind the VAB (Visual Arts Building) for discarded film and washed it in dormitory sinks. Everything was a problem – but only a problem to be overcome. And it worked. Fed-up with the power of the big and controlling studios like Paramount and MGM, these filmmakers bought their own equipment, wrote their own scripts, shot their own films and showed them in neighborhood rec halls and small arts cinemas. Today we have the Sundance Festival. It worked.

Musicians, sick of the controlling power of corporate rock, did the same thing. The creation of cassette recorders and eventually CD burners gave them the power to record and duplicate. They created their own distribution networks and the world of indie music grew and grew and grew. Today businesses like PureVolume.com attract tens of thousands of listeners from all over the world and sell indie CDs like crazy. We can learn a lot from the kids.

Podcasting and streaming video is growing in popularity as the next generation of what we once knew as television. The internet has placed the power of magazines and newspapers in the hands of anyone who wants to have their say.

And then there is publishing. I’ve talked before about the controlling power of the BNYPs (Big New York Publishers). Throughout literary history writers of distinction have published their own books. Thoreau and Walt Whitman would not be known today if they had relied on traditional printers of their era. But for the last five decades or so there has been a stigma attached to self-publishing because of the vanity presses that advertised in the backs of magazines “Become a Published Author Today!” For a set fee they would take your manuscript, whether it was your version of the next Great American Novel or Aunt Myrtle’s favorite pickle recipes, and typeset, print, bind, and deliver crates of books to your doorstep. Now it was up to you.

The problem was, of course, that vanity presses had no standards. Books were typeset exactly as they were written. For a fee you could have yours edited so that the “theirs” and the “theres” and the “they’res” were corrected but as for the quality of content - caveat emptor.

So independent publishing houses began. Small groups of people, with something to say and a desire to say it well with high standards and literary merit, began their own presses using computer technology to design and layout books and improved printing processes to produce them. As with all indie efforts marketing, promotion and distribution is the challenge.

Last night we had the second meeting of our local Cape Ann independent publishers group. We still haven’t settled on a name but when we get together the excitement builds. Ideas fly, possibilities emerge, what one person doesn’t know the other does. All of us left the meeting fired up with plans for the future.

Independence is a wonderful thing but sharing resources is helpful, too. Local groups like ours and regional groups like IPNE can give members a lot of power. This is the era of Art Against the Machine. If you love good books, stay tuned – we’re independent and we’re here.

Thanks for reading.

©2006 Parlez-Moi Press originally published on Parlez-Moi Blog.

How I First Got into Publishing

I got into publishing after decades of working with academic authors who did not have a clue about the publishing industry or what they were getting into when they signed contracts to write textbooks. I wanted to write professional books that would help them and at the same time might improve textbook quality. I had been working on a book manuscript in my spare time over several years and in due course sent out a proposal. Three offers came in, but I was very unimpressed (appalled, actually) by the terms. The royalty rates were too low, under 10 percent, or were ranked so that I earned 10 percent only after the first thousand copies had been sold! One publisher told me outright that authors of academic books cannot expect to make money--they do it just for love! Yeah, right!

I knew that my market was small (professors involved in writing college textbooks), but even so my math showed that in the best case scenario I would make next to nothing. The publishers would make out fine, because the proposed pricing was so high (too high--one company wanted to sell my book as a $73 hardback, which I was sure would make it unattainable to many and likely would reduce sales)! The idea seemed to be to have such a high price point that volume sales wouldn't matter, (a philosophy I heard later from a distributor who insisted I raise my prices, which did in fact put my book in far fewer hands)! I began to understand that my goals and the publishers' goals were largely incompatible, and I began to think about publishing my book on my own.

The turning point came when I could not get a publisher to assist with or even endorse my ambitious marketing plan. If carried out, my plan would ensure success, I thought, but no publisher would so much as send their catalog to my mailing list of prospects or agree to send galleys to reviewers. The publisher who sent its catalog to 4,000 academics in the humanities was not interested in potentially doubling or tripling sales by sending it to 4,000 more in other content areas. The publishers claimed to have no budget for marketing, advertising, publicity, or promotion for individual titles! (Alas, I have since learned how difficult, expensive, and time-consuming marketing really is.)

I took about a year to research what I would have to do to publish my own works (but there's no end to the learning curve when it comes to being a publisher). I decided to establish my own imprint to avoid the innumerable barriers to commercial success that are thrown into the path of self-publishers. I also thought I would like to have titles by others in my list in addition to my own. I bought a block of 10 ISBNs and set the goal of publishing one book a year. I have three in print and two in the works. I've had a lot of fun but I've made a lot of mistakes. I think I've earned more on my own than I would have with other publishers, but I would not call myself a success. Yet.

Mary Ellen Lepionka, Atlantic Path Publishing

Why Parlez-Moi?

This post is a reprint from Parlez-Moi Blog, July 23, 2005.

So I decided to call my on-line press “Parlez-Moi” and I’m glad that I did. It has proven to be a good name - “talk to me” - communicate. Communication is vital. Now that I am undertaking this blog it seems particularly apt.

I chose the words from a scene in my first novel, The Old Mermaid’s Tale. In it, the central character, Clair, has a nearly obsessive fascination with a tavern called The Old Mermaid Inn in a waterfront neighborhood in a city on the Great Lakes. One night as she and her boyfriend are walking past the Inn she hears a man singing inside. The song is the old Edith Piaf standard "Parlez-Moi d’Amour". Her boyfriend translates the words for her as they stand outside listening. The song, and the voice of the singer, haunt her and, months later she meets and falls in love with him. His name is Baptiste and he is a Breton mariner who lost a leg in a shipwreck and now earns a living singing in taverns. He becomes the great love of her life.

Hearing his voice for the first time is a turning point in her life and so I chose the words “Parlez-Moi” to be the name of my press and blog. Simple as that. You never know when a brief moment will change the course of your life.

When I was a girl in the 50s and 60s, I used to spend vacations with my godparents who lived in Erie, Pennsylvania. My godfather, my wonderful Uncle Buddy (left), used to take me down to the docks to watch the big ships come in and I became mesmerized by the neighborhoods that we drove through on our way down State Street to the public pier. My uncle told me that those places were dangerous and it was not safe to be there alone but, to a romantically inclined kid like me, that was just an added incentive.

Later, as a college student in Erie in the late 60s, I used to do exactly what the novel describes Clair doing - riding the bus through those neighborhoods just to peer out the window on the off-chance I might see something “dangerous”. During one of those rides I noticed a bar called the “Mermaid Tavern” and my imagination went wild. Much of what Clair describes in the novel comes from that moment.

Years went by. I went on to another college and then moved to another state but in the back of my mind that fascination lingered. Finally, somewhere around 1985, I was in Pennsylvania and drove to Erie to visit my grandmother who was living with my godmother by then. My godfather had died some years earlier. By this time I was living on my own in Houston and was quite experienced at going into bars (ahem). I decided that I was going to visit my grandmother and aunt and then take a drive down State Street and stop at the Mermaid Tavern for a beer. I was really excited at the idea.

That drive down State Street proved to be a pivotal moment in my life. When I crossed Sixth Street and entered the rough and tumble neighborhood that had once fed my wild imagination I was shocked to discover how it had changed. All the old bars and flophouses were gone and in its place were smart little shops and restaurants. Where the Mermaid Tavern had been there was now a chain family restaurant. I was devastated.

For a year the disappointment I felt festered and then one day I decided to write about it and, thus, The Old Mermaid’s Tale was born. You never know where inspiration can come from. You never know when your life might change.

So, I decided to name my press and my blog after the fateful moment when Clair’s life changed and the title of the song seemed the best place to do that. Thus Parlez-Moi Press was born.

You never know when the world will take an extra turn.

Thanks for reading.
©2005 Parlez-Moi Press originally published on Parlez-Moi Blog.

IPNE

This is the Official Site of IPNE. This new site is currently under revision. Some links may not be live but please check back.

IPNE is an organization of and for independent book publishers in the six-state New England region. Join us!

IPNE is dedicated to open networking, education, and problem solving; cooperative marketing, exhibiting, and representation; and mutual self-help for small publishers.

MEMBER BENEFITS

• List your company in the online MEMBER DIRECTORY on this web site (searchable both alphabetically and by genre and linked to your homepage).
• Post your press releases to PRESS ROOM.
•· Post your sales flyers to NEW RELEASES.
•· Feature your company in FEATURED PUBLISHER of the month.
• For an additional fee of $36, participate in PUBLISHER PAGES (where you can post five pages of your product and marketing information on this web site).
•· Join us in cooperative exhibiting opportunities at regional and local book shows.
• Attend regional publisher workshops and presentations and other IPNE-sponsored meetings and events.
• Network online with other small and independent publishers and self-published authors in your state and region through the IPNE DISCUSSION LIST.
• Learn about IPNE events and book industry announcements through the IPNE ANNOUNCEMENT LIST.
• Participate in cooperative catalogs and direct mail marketing by genre.
• Contribute to an online IPNE Newsletter and publisher blog column, now under development.
• Enjoy representation and advantages through IPNE’s official affiliations with Publishers Marketing Association, the Independent Book Publishers Association, and with SPAN, Small Publishers Association of North America, including discounted memberships.