Saturday, June 15, 2019

Books Are Heavy, Let's Give Some Away

When I was in college the most arduous problem to moving was the hundreds of books. A friend of mine once prophetically said, "I want one reloadable book." He got his wish. I've been trying to keep fewer physical books these days, but even though I try to donate all the fiction to the library and keep the Kindle/Audible versions, I still have a ridiculous number of reference and "pretty" books.

Now I have gone and written a book and because I've chosen to do hybrid publishing, I get to pay for the printing and shipping of my books. This is a good, albeit expensive thing. Did you know that a box of 24 books weighs 28 pounds? I know, I lifted one.

I'm starting with 750 books, which is over 31 boxes of books, and it over $700 to ship from the printer to the warehouse. (I've chosen to have 36 books which is one and a half boxes, delivered directly to me) which is a separate shipping fee.

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So now I have 36 books. What the heck am I going to do with them? That's a rhetorical question. I am not into selling my own book, as I don't want to compete with the Amazon version of me (if you will), or offend those that have already bought the book. The dog sports communities often hold raffles at their events, so many of these are going to be given away in raffles or benefit auctions. The cool thing about raffles is people have a long time to look at and talk about the book long before it's given away. Everyone else is doing your publicity. This is called "buzz" and it's a very good thing indeed. Win-win just for the cost of a few books.

So after just a few personal conversations at a dog trial and about four emails, I have homes for 24 books. I signed them all with a varying set of pithy little phrases like
"Read this with your pooch" or "The nose knows" and my name and they are ready to go.


The only trouble is that because I'm not physically there to introduce the book, I need to make a little postcard that summarizes a part of https://ellenclary.org. So we're back to old school. I've make the screenshots, now I need to remember my graphic arts training and arrange them on the page. After about an hour of stealing from my own web site it was ready to go.

Then I get to decide whether just to leave it as 8.5x11 page or make postcards. I did buy a new printer, so I could do either if I bought card stock. the printer probably has a margin which is unfortunate, but I probably don't want to have to hand trim everything though I could do that down at Kinkos. Not sure. This might be a fun debate to start among my Facebook friends who are very tolerant of geeky issues.

I just used ordinary paper as they're just going along with the books as off-line information.






2 comments:

  1. You could also go to local bookstores and offered to give the Person working there a free copy to read, and suggest that if they like it, they could stock it or at least recommend it as a local author.

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  2. I have done that for my local bookstore, though they usually get ARCs that I get from the publisher.

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