It’s the Peschel Press Newsletter for July 2022!
I’m late this month but I was in Delaware again. And we’ll be going back!
We’ve been accepted to the Wyoming Peach Festival on Saturday, 6 August 22 from 9 am until 3 pm.
Wyoming Delaware, that is. We’ve never done the Peach Festival (https://www.facebook.com/wyomingpeachfestival/), never even attended. I’d considered it back in 2020 but well, you know. The same was true in 2021. Why would we attend a regional festival celebrating peaches when we sell books? And I talk all the time about cash flow and needing to earn actual dollars as opposed to exposure bucks?
Because the Peach Festival takes place on South Railroad Avenue and we can stay with my widowed mother. No hotel fees. She appreciates the company. Plus, we’ll be able to show my family what we do for a living (or try to do). This is important too, as your family is your first line of support. If your family opposes your writing, you’re working with concrete blocks strapped to your hands. Does this happen? Yes, I’m sorry to say that it does.
What’s most common is your friends and relatives don’t understand you being an author, but they don’t fight you on it either. They’re neutral and disinterested. Seeing you in action at an event, with all your books, can change that opinion.
If your friends and relatives are gung-ho about your books, act as your street team, sell them at every opportunity, and chat them up on social media and in person, count your blessings and take them out to dinner once in a while. Pay the tab with book earnings and say so.
So we’ll be at the Peach Festival with our canopy, tables, chairs, racks, tablecloths, banners, posters, bookstands, bowl of Kisses (on ice this time), tote bags, catalogs, and hand-sewn satin and lace bookmarks. And books. It will be much more real to our family than seeing an occasional new book.
The Peach Festival also doesn’t cost much: $50 for a 10 by 10. If I can sell four books, I’ve paid my booth. I haven’t paid for anything else, but I’ve covered the most basic cost.
The other event we’ve got is Bookstore Romance Day on Saturday, 20 August and Sunday, 21 August. Cupboard Maker Books (https://www.cupboardmaker.com/) in Enola is taking the entire weekend to celebrate romance in all its forms. They’re one of our very favorite bookshops (the other is the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop (https://www.mysterybooksonline.com/) but they don’t, obviously, do romance).
I’ll be signing books at Cupboard Maker on Sunday, 21 August between 11 am and 1 pm. The plan is we’ll debut “The Vanished Pearls of Orlov!”
At last. Bill’s doing the layout now for the trade paperback. It’s big, it’s gorgeous, and it’s worth the wait.
Which brings me to a critical aspect of selling direct that I haven’t discussed before. If you’re going to do events, you must have physical books.
Seems obvious, yes? Yet many indie writers only have ebooks. Ebooks are easy to produce. There’s plenty of programs that let you turn your prose into a finished ebook. You’re transforming one set of ones and zeros into a format of ones and zeros that eReaders like. Simple. There are tips and tricks to make your ebook look better, flow nicely, and reduce the file size. If you’re detail-oriented and can follow directions, it’s not difficult to learn. Moreover, once you’ve learned to ebook one manuscript, handling similar manuscripts won’t be much different.
Because it’s comparatively simple, if you choose to pay someone to convert your manuscript into an ebook, it isn’t that expensive. Before Bill taught himself how to format our books, we paid a specialist. Our complex manuscripts loaded with footnotes and art never cost more than $125. A plain novel would be less. (We used BBEbooks (http://bbebooksthailand.com/), run by an expat in Thailand).
This is not true of physical books.
Each and every page in a physical book must be considered as a discreet unit. Change a few paragraphs or alter the font size and you gain a page or lose a page in the chapter, throwing off page numbers in the table of contents. A traditionally printed book is printed in signatures, meaning you’ve got a predetermined number of pages. You’ve got to consider art elements, fleurons, drop caps, headers, and footers.
Because Bill’s got mad layout skills from decades in the newspaper business, he builds our books. If we had to pay someone to lay out The Vanished Pearls of Orlov, with arty epigraph, bookplate, chapter heading art, custom fleurons and footers, we’d spend several thousand dollars.
Spending several thousand dollars to lay out a novel that you don’t know you’ll sell is a big expenditure of cash. It’s a separate cost, in addition to the cover and any editing you pay for. But if you want a book to sell at events, you must have physical copies.
You can, like ebook formatting, teach yourself how to lay out a book. It requires patience and time. What should your book look like? Choose a book from your shelf that’s in the same genre and that you like the look of and copy it. Similar margins, front matter, back matter, and so on.
Teaching yourself to lay out a trade paperback can save you thousands over your writing career and your novels look how you want them to look. With books in hand, you can sell them at library signings, book festivals, and craft shows like the Wyoming Peach Festival.
I can see next month’s topic already: print-on-demand versus using a printer. That’s the other half of having physical books. Somebody has to turn the manuscript into a stack of finished books. The question here is how much do you want to spend versus how much space do you have in your garage.
See you in August, dear readers, with a ripe, juicy peach in hand.