Briefs for the Reading Room is now in stock at Amazon. Yay! They still haven’t posted the cover picture, but it’s available for purchase. Here is a link:
I have also applied to Joseph-Beth (a local bookstore) to have them carry the book, hopefully I’ll hear back in the next couple of weeks. I’d like to get it sold through them so I can do a book signing there, and see it on the shelf.
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Yesterday I got around to asking LSI about distribution. For $12 a year, they will distribute my books and add them to Amazon and B&N. That’s a small price to pay compared to the mountain of paperwork I downloaded from B&N and the hassle of sending Amazon my book. I mailed Amazon my book over a week ago and they still don’t show it as having been received. The other nice thing about LSI’s distribution is that it’s through Ingram, one of the largest book distributors. That immediately makes me look more professional than just saying “I’m distributing it myself.”
Also yesterday I filled out the paperwork to have Joseph-Beth carry my book in Lexington. That should open the door to having a book signing there and get my sales jump started. It will take a month to hear from them, I hope they decide to accept my book. It would be neat to go to a local bookstore and see my book on the shelf!
So, that’s the updated for today, distribution and a book store. It seems like the pace of progress is slow but it IS progress! Maybe one of these days I’ll actually sell another book 
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On Friday the 6th, a package arrived from LSI containing Briefs for the Reading Room. It was just a plain brown carton, not that auspicious looking really, but inside was the culmination of a lot of hard work and not a small amount of expense.
I took a few minutes to look it over. The cover looked great I thought. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons it’s not perfect, but to me it looked fantastic. It’s much better than the first iteration. Inside, the pages looked… like a book! Success. I didn’t find any typos. I didn’t find any “Oh crap, I wish I had fixed that”s. I just found my stories, one after another, looking for all the world like a real book.
The back cover looked good too. The only thing I could find was that they had inserted an extra three blank pages at the end in order to print some little “Printed in the USA” thing on the last page. If that’s the worst thing I could find, it must have looked pretty good!
If you’ve been following this blog, you know what I had to do next. I took Briefs and snapped a couple of pictures to prove that it’s really a book, then wrapped it up all snug and tight back into a box and shipped the whole thing to Amazon. It was a few days after my first deadline, but I felt like I had accomplished something. My new book, all bright and shiny, is now at Amazon and should appear ‘in stock’ with the cover and a preview in a few days. I sure hope that all of this ends up in selling a few! I won’t be able to ship them one at a time to Amazon and make any money, what they pay me and the postage add up to more than I pay to get the books. It cost $2.20 to ship there by media mail which seems like too much. I may have to figure out how to get that cost down. I wish I could have just dropped it off at Amazon, I drove by the place where I mailed it 2-3 times this weekend.
The next steps are repeating the process, with Barnes and Noble, with local bookstores, which whoever will carry my book. I need to order enough to start selling them out of the back of my car, as I saw someone describe it. I need to start paying myself back for the money I’ve got in the book! I also have been writing the followup, I added two new stories last week. The next one I write I will send out as an email just to keep people’s interest up.
So, yay me! It feels like progress.
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LSI has apparently been dilligently working on Briefs since the short delay for the ice storm. I apparently uploaded the cover file instead of the inside, I’m still not sure how that worked but they were good about communicating the problem and I got it corrected on Friday. I pushed my shipment to Amazon out until the 9th of February, so I have 6 days to receive the book and ship it out. So far I’ve ‘invested’ $105 at LSI and $50 in the cover for a total outlay of $155. My order from Amazon is for $5.84.
Net cost – $149.16
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