Self publishing wasn't my first choice. After all, I'd spent 9 years or so writing and editing and rewriting Grants Ferry. It would be a great relief to hand it to an agent who would find an enthusiastic publisher to support and push it to success. I'm not greedy, but a whiff of celebrity and monetary reward would be nice. And to have it handled by someone with a budget and a stake in the game would be even better.
So I shopped it to various agents for about a year and a half with no luck. A couple asked for the full manuscript after I'd sent them a sample and appeared to have actually read it but in the end decided it wasn't the sort of book they were good at selling. And they were right about that. If agents are not excited about my book they won't be excited when they try to sell it.
Now around this time I had turned 70 and I was suddenly aware that my window of opportunity was growing smaller every day. This is not something I considered much in my 40s or even my 50s, but the Big Seven Oh brings a new perspective. I wanted to see a finished book while I was still alive. Self publishing would see to it.
I decided to use Create Space. I did all the work - the layout, the proofing, the final edits, and even painted the image for the cover because I couldn't find a photo I liked. I kept it simple, partly by necessity, partly by design. Common font, not too small, and no frills. By doing it all, it cost me nothing but the tedium of the final tweaking and edits. And the book was born. I, of course, think it's pretty good. Better than some of the industry published books I've brought home from the library. Way better than some of the self published ebooks I've downloaded onto my Kindle.
The challenge now is to get it in front of people, people who like a good story and for whom $15 is a small price to pay for it. It's only $4.99 on Kindle but in both cases people have to find it first.
One would suspect bookstores would be the perfect outlet for a book and it is if people are looking for it in the first place. But bookstores have no obligation to give me shelf space. Some will take books on consignment and it will be up to me to follow up if I ever want to get paid for them. Not worth it. Nor is it worth it to drive around to bookstores on the chance they'll take a couple copies. I might make $3 a copy if they buy them at all and that doesn't pay for the gas I used to get them there.
A bookstore in northern Vermont schooled me on their side. Bookstores get a 40% discount off the cover price when they buy books. At the end of the year, if they have finally sold them, they might make 10% after expenses of running the store. When they order industry published books through their suppliers they have a return option. This means that all the books in most bookstores are virtually there on spec. They don't sell, back they go. Grants Ferry, ordered through the normal supply chain and published via Create Space, only gives a 25% discount and once ordered the books can't be returned. From the bookstore perspective, it's a no-brainer. Why would they bother? So I understand. If they can't expect to make money, even a little, there's no reason to expect them to take the books. I don't blame them. One day they'll wish they had, of course, but I'll have moved on.
On the plus side, from my self-publishing perspective, Create Space is a print on demand outfit and I can order one book or a thousand. If someone wants a bunch of them, I can order them up and send them direct. I don't need to have 40 cartons of them sitting in a shed somewhere.
As with so many things these days, the book industry is changing. Even book sellers have trouble keeping up. I understand why book sellers have a dislike, if not a hatred, for Amazon but there's nothing I can do about that. People who write books and can't get mainstream publishers to take them on are going to find work-arounds and at the moment the work-around is the Internet and social networking. The traditional Publisher/Bookseller relationship will probably always be with us but it's going to look a lot different in a few years. They may even develop a system for winnowing out the chaff of the self published books and find a way to order and stock the best.
And this doesn't even address the stigma of being a self-published book. But that's another whole issue.
Until then...
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