Sam takes centre stage, or rather page

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Faith Hope and Trickery, marketing, publicity, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Susan in the City, Velvet Magazine

One of the very hardest things about being a self-published author is the marketing – which is a fancy name for thinking of ways to sell more books.  Traditional publishing houses have whole departments devoted to this, albeit rather less lavishly staffed and resourced than in times gone by, whereas it’s just little old me at Grossey Mansions Publishing.  (Not a real name, but I quite like the sound of it.)  I try to think of one thing a week to promote Sam in all his five flavours, but it’s not easy.  Occasionally, however, something comes along to give me – and him – a real boost.

Many moons ago, I wrote a weekly article for my local newspaper, all about the joys (or otherwise) of living in Cambridge.  “Susan in the City” appeared every Monday for a decade, and indeed I have gathered my favourite eighty of those columns into a little book.  During my time at the paper I met an editor called Alice Ryan, and when “Faith, Hope and Trickery” was coming over the horizon, my marketing task for one week was to contact Alice – now editing the Cambridge edition of a glossy lifestyle publication called “Velvet Magazine” – and ask/beg her to feature me.  And she did!  And here it is, in all its full-colour, double-page, April splendour:

(If that’s tricky to read, you can go to the online magazine instead and head straight for page 64.)

“Velvet” is a giveaway magazine – a rather superior one, in my opinion – and so my lunchtime outing today is to the local hairdresser to scoop up a few copies, which should please Sam as a former barber.  As always, I’ll let you know if the publicity leads to extra sales.

The man from WH Smith, he say…

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Amazon, bookshop, G David, Heffers, paperback, royalty, Susan in the City, WH Smith

…no.  As you may remember, I took my latest book – “Susan in the City: The Cambridge News Years” – into our local branch of WH Smith.  They weren’t keen on considering the Plank books when I took those in, but I thought that a book by a local author, a collection of columns that had appeared in the local paper, might have local appeal.  I had visions of a lovely yellow display alongside the newspaper…  The manager said that he would put the proposal to head office, and perhaps then I should have heard the distant knell of doom.

Anyway, I called in today and was told that, in the “current challenging book market”, WH Smith does not want to take on any new books until the start of their new financial year, in September.  I nodded politely, but inside I was saying, “Whaaaaaaat?”.  As everyone in the book world knows, physical books – as opposed to e-books – have made a strong recovery in recent months: indeed, sales through bricks-and-mortar shops rose by 7% in 2016.  And as for the idea that WH Smith is not going to put out any new titles on their shelves until September – I suspect that this is piffle.  If that’s really the case, they’re going to kick themselves for missing out on the new Ian Rankin paperback (due out on 15 June) and the new Jamie Oliver hardback cookbook (due out on 24 August).

Mind you, I can see how taking on my title in one branch might be too great a risk for head office.  I was offering them five copies, with them keeping 35% of the cover price, on a sale or return basis.  So if their copies did not sell, they could return them to me in any condition and not pay my invoice for £25.97.  Thank goodness they spotted that threat to their commercial survival – and handed any sales to the other two local bookshops that are stocking it, and to the online retailer they really dread.  Harrumph.

(And in case you think this is simply an enormous bunch of sour grapes, it’s not the refusal that has annoyed me: it’s the dissembling.  It’s the same as the email I received earlier this year from a small airline that I use regularly, informing me that, “in order to improve the customer experience”, they will no longer be offering free drinks on their flights.  We all know they’re doing it to reduce costs and increase profits – and why not? they’re a commercial airline, not a charity – so why the mealy-mouthed not-justification?)

Susan on the Shelf

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Cambridge News, competitions, cover, Heffers, marketing, Susan in the City, WH Smith

OK, so it’s not a shelf – and it’s not quite the oak table – but yesterday I was delighted to see “Susan in the City” on the ledge at Heffers.  This is a, well, wooden ledge that runs at about chest height around the mezzanine floor of the bookshop, with the books angled towards strolling browsers, so it’s a prime place to be.  And I am sure you agree that the yellow cover of the book is very eye-catching:

In other news (I know I sound busy, but as all writers will know, it’s much easier to do all of this sort of stuff than to write, and you can still kid yourself that it’s “writing”…), I went into WH Smith and was told that the local manager has sent “Susan in the City” to head office for approval, and that he is going there today on other business and will chase for an answer.  I’m to enquire again next week.

And you may remember that I donated five copies of “Susan” to the Cambridge News (the newspaper in which the columns originally appeared) as prizes in a reader giveaway.  The competition is now closed, and the organiser told me that “we had 30 entries in total – the majority came from Cambridge addresses, with a few from Ely along with a couple from Newmarket and Haverhill.  The five winners reside in Balsham, Sawston, Fulbourn, Stetchworth and Cottenham.”  (Local readers will know what that means – all five are villages outside Cambridge, not Cambridge the city.)  I don’t know quite what I expected, and of course it’s impossible to gauge how many people saw the competition, thought “That’s interesting, but I never win competitions so I’ll just go and buy the book”, but I’m not thrilled with only thirty entries.  The five books cost me £4.50 (sounds cheap, but I bought in bulk and had them delivered by carrier tortoise to save money), so that’s 22½p per person for the publicity!  So maybe not too bad.

Columns of columns

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bookmark, Cambridge News, CreateSpace, formatting, Heffers, Susan in the City

Well, here they are, at long last: my first batch of copies of “Susan in the City” – a collection of eighty of the 510 columns that I wrote for my local newspaper over the last decade:

I ordered these from CreateSpace waaaaaaay back on 17 March 2017 and (thinking to save the pennies) chose the slowest and cheapest of the three delivery speeds, being quoted an arrival date of 9 May.  I will never do this again: with the budget delivery option there is no tracking, and so – from the moment I had the dispatch notification on 26 March – I was looking out for the books.  And they never arrived.  The ones you are looking at are the replacement order that CreateSpace put together when I complained on 11 May and sent by super-über-speedy delivery to arrive on 15 May.  I cannot tell you the hours of angst I have had over this delivery, and so my lesson for today is: never order books without a tracking option.

As for the books themselves, I am delighted with them and their lovely, sunny yellow covers.  The interior is good as well: cream paper, clear font and plenty of space (I do loathe books that use every inch of paper and force their text to the edges, so that you have to practically break the spine to read to the end of the lines).

So what is their fate?  Five were donated to the local newspaper, the Cambridge News – where the columns originally appeared – to serve as prizes in a reader competition.  I don’t know whether this will lead to further sales (I never know whether anything leads to further sales!) but I did slip a Plank bookmark inside each, just in case.

And five were delivered yesterday to Heffers, the bookshop in Cambridge that has always been so supportive and encouraging of my Plankish efforts.  They hinted that “Susan in the City” – having local interest – might even make it onto the oak table.  The oak table is, as you might imagine, a large oak table and it is right at the front of the shop – in pole position, as Hamilton and Vettel might say.  Nothing I have written has ever appeared on the oak table, so I have everything crossed that the sunshine yellow might seal the deal.  If it does, rest assured that photos will appear.

New book on the block

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columnist, cover, CreateSpace, formatting, KDP, Kindle, Susan in the City

I know: I have been a very bad author recently.  Well, to be fair, I have been a very bad historical fiction author, but a rather laudable modern non-fiction author.  Yes, my collection of columns from my decade writing for the local newspaper is just about ready to be launched on the world.

“Susan in the City: The Cambridge News Years” is the final title, and it has a really eye-catching yellow cover.  The cover designer came up with two options – the yellow, and a more serious, almost-Financial-Times pink one – and I had a little poll on my Facebook page, and asked anyone else who would listen, and the yellow was the runaway favourite:

So where am I in the self-publishing process?  I have finalised, formatted and uploaded to CreateSpace the interior file (as a PDF, which must look exactly as you want it to look in the final book – so every bit of formatting, page-breaking, header-and-footering and so on must be just to).  Today the cover designer sent me the finished cover file (that’s a PDF as well, created based on a template generated by CreateSpace using the book size and number of pages that I have specified), and I have uploaded that too.  I have filled in all the other details required – description for Amazon and other catalogues, key words for searching, etc. – and accepted the free ISBN offered by CreateSpace (I’ve never seen the point of paying for my own).  And then I’ve sent it all off to CreateSpace for review, which takes about 24 hours.  When it comes back, I will use their online proofer to check one last time, and then press the big “Publish” button.  And order my own copies.  And wait for the sales to flood in.  Hah.

But in a spare few hours today, I also created the Kindle version of the book.  I wasn’t going to do one, but the nerd in me triumphed again.  So this involved taking out all of that careful formatting – particularly the page breaks, page numbers and headers and footers – as it just interferes with whatever settings people have on their e-readers.  Everything needs to be as plain as possible to maximise legibility.  I then uploaded that very plain document as a Word file – that’s the format they favour, over at Kindle Direct Publishing – along with the JPG file created by the cover designer to work best with e-books, and copied all of the search term and book description stuff.  And finally, I set the price.  I then clicked “Publish”, and KDP said that it takes a few hours for the Kindle book to appear.  But it was there when I came back from lunch, so that’s already published.  Once again, I shall sit back and wait for the sales to roll in.  And once again, hah.