Newsletter #67 — Exit Velocity Moving Forward
October 1, 2023
Newsletter #67 — Exit Velocity Moving Forward
Exit Velocity Publication Date! — Things have started to move with Exit Velocity, and I suspect I'll be working on publication items every day from now until the book is out. Here are a few of the things I've decided/done so far:
- I've chosen a publication date: June 4, 2024. My first thought was that I wanted to publish on International Women's Day, March 8. But I wouldn't have enough time to do all that needs to be done. My second choice was to publish on International Workers Day, May 1. I would have enough time, but as it turns out May is not a good month for book sales. Mother's Day and graduations take up everyone's interest. By lucky coincidence, though, June, July, and January are the top months for sales of political fiction. June, then, should be a very good month for publication of Exit Velocity.
- BookBaby is my self-publisher of choice for Exit Velocity. I've published twelve books at no cost on KDP, and while I love the "no cost" factor, I feel that I want to try something different, to see if I can get more publicity and higher sales. And I like the fact that BookBaby distributes to bookstores and libraries. It also converts the book to many ebook formats and makes them all available everywhere.
- I've written all the front matter and also the back matter (About the Author) and inserted it into the manuscript. I've chosen the seven keywords for internet sales.
- And then, with feedback from BookBaby, I rewrote and finalized the front matter, back matter, and keywords.
- BookBaby requires exact manuscript formatting. (So does KDP, of course.) I've formatted the manuscript according to instructions. This included putting everything in 12 point Times Roman font, double spacing, removing all headers and footers and page numbers, and using underlining to indicate anything that needs to be treated differently. In most of my books nothing needs to be treated differently, but in Exit Velocity I had some of the chapters in a special font because the POV was from a very different "being." So I had to select all that text, put it in Times Roman, and then underline it.
- I also had to send ideas for the front cover. This is common: the publisher almost always wants to know what the author envisions for the cover. This time around not only did I have to show what I envision (I did a pencil sketch), but I had to tell them which colors I envision, and which colors I do not envision as part of the cover. FYI, I do not envision green as part of the cover. Other than that — who knows.
Social Media Help — The pre-publication stage for Exit Velocity is a long one, from September 2023 through June 2024. But so far it seems I'm busy every single day. And when certain things need to be done, I've started to ask for help from social-media friends. For example, when I needed to rewrite my book description and finalize it for BookBaby, I asked for ten volunteers on Facebook to read it and answer five questions about it.
I got eleven volunteers (and more beyond that, but I had to cut it off or I'd still be rewriting the description) and every one of them contributed something helpful. And the comments were all different from one another. I've now rewritten and submitted the final description.
And, in anticipation of receiving the page proofs from BookBaby, I asked for one volunteer to proofread the already-proofread-three-times manuscript . . . just in case an error slipped through somehow.
Mule Marketing — I suspect that some of you have missed the mule. Not to worry: it is still out and about, kicking at the doors of publishing houses. So far I've sent queries, sample chapters, or full manuscripts to twenty publishers, three of whom have said no, six of whom have gone way past the reply-by deadline. I have marked those six as No, and will follow up on the other eleven. I now have only six publishers to go. But these are publishers I've submitted other books to, earlier this year, and so according to their rules I can't submit again until the end of October. Which I will do. And then I'll have exhausted my list of 40-some possibilities among traditional publishers.
Note: It started out to be 40-some publishers, but as I researched each one and investigated the types of books they were publishing, I removed ten or more of them from my list of possibilities.
Ballad — Appropriately, my October 1 blog is on The Ballad . . . which is the format for the mule book. Which does have a title: Some Will Make It Through: Ballad of the Horse and Mule.