Newsletter #89 — Publishers Weekly Cover
September 1, 2024
Newsletter #89 — Publishers Weekly Cover
August 18 Publishers Weekly — Late in July the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) offered its members an opportunity to submit their books for a twice-a-year IBPA purchase of a front-cover ad on Publishers Weekly. I debated with myself and Phil whether I should do this, because of the expense. Finally, I decided yes.
This did not guarantee that Exit Velocity would appear on the front cover. Some books would appear on the inside front cover and some on the back cover, at IBPA's choice. But I lucked out and Exit Velocity appears on the front cover.
There is one main reason (maybe only one reason, period) that I did this, and that's because I haven't been able to reach bookstores. I tried reaching them through NetGalley, but they were not interested. I tried an IBPA spring catalog ad directed at nearly 4,000 bookstores. I won't know until October if there were any results from that ad. I tried emails and there I did receive replies. But: all the replies indicated that the bookstores would carry my book in their online-order section, not in the bookstore itself. The bookstore (the actual bricks-and-mortar store) is where readers come in to browse the shelves, and if Exit Velocity isn't on those shelves, they won't see it.
I was very dissatisfied with the replies from bookstores In fact, several people posted on my Facebook page or sent me emails saying that they couldn't buy Exit Velocity at Barnes & Noble and other stores. I had to explain that Barnes & Noble would allow them to order the book online and come to the store to pick it up: but Barnes & Noble would not stock Exit Velocity.
So, I thought I would give it a final try: put Exit Velocity on the cover of a magazine all bookstore owners and employees read. As do all librarians.
Whether this will work, I don't know. But in October, when I receive my first BookBaby statement, I should be able to see what orders occurred after August 18 — and I'm hoping that what I see will reveal that a lot of bookstores placed orders for Exit Velocity.
GoodReads Review — Here's a wonderful review of Exit Velocity, this one from Shipra Shah on both GoodReads and Amazon.
Amazon Ads — In July I took a five-part Kindlepreneur video course on how to advertise books on Amazon under Amazon's updated guidelines. Let me tell you, I find it waaaayyy complicated to set up ads on Amazon. You may recall that I was doing something similar less than a year ago. Those ads were under the old guidelines. The new guidelines are a bit different, stressing relevance of keywords over quantity of keywords.
I feel it's worth the time and trouble to create these ads if they help sell a lot of books. All eight of my ads are now up. I won't go into why one book requires so many different ads, because I promised I wouldn't bore you with the whole keywords topic again. My strategy at the moment is to let these eight ads run for a month or two to see what I can conclude based on the number of impressions they receive and the number of sales that result.
FYI, I've decided that Exit Velocity appeals to four interest groups (for lack of a better term): those who want to read political fiction; those who want to read about women fighting back; those who want to read science fiction; and those who want to read about working class characters. For each of these four groups I've developed two different ads. For Political Fiction, for example, I have one ad on Keywords and another on Authors. That is, authors of books similar to mine in one way or another.
My ads are about two weeks old, and two weeks is not enough time to reach conclusions on what's working and what isn't. Right now the ad that's receiving the most clicks is the Political Authors one. And within that campaign there are five authors receiving the most clicks. They are Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Upton Sinclair, Aldous Huxley, and John Steinbeck. What this means is that when an Amazon shopper is looking for books by John Steinbeck, for example, they will see Exit Velocity. They will either click on it to read more, or they will ignore it. I'm waiting to see what happens.
Rockford University — Back in April I mentioned receiving a request to speak at Rockford University in October or November. That talk is now set for October 23. Here's the description from my web site:
Design, Luck, and the Rockford Peaches: All Things Are Connected. Barbara Gregorich, author of the 1993 book, Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, will speak on how and why she decided to research women baseball players and how her research for the historically significant but always elusive Maud Nelson led her across fifty years and half of the US —inevitably culminating with Rose Gacioch and the magnificent Rockford Peaches. More information will be provided as the date draws nearer.
More About To-Do Lists— In my September 1 blog I write about those to-do lists again. This time about which tasks I enjoyed and which I didn't.