 coming, but we want to get the show on the road. We have a lot of speakers, a lot of information. I'm sure you have a lot of questions. So thanks for coming. My name is Samantha. Thanks for coming to Bear Pond Books for our workshop marketing, your indie book or your self-published book. Charlotte was so kind to point out to me that the field prefers the term indie for independent publishing rather than self-published. But whatever you're doing, we're here to help you do it better, hopefully. We're happy to present this workshop in collaboration with the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick. They'll be having the same workshop tomorrow night if you have any friends or know anyone that would like to take the workshop, you can send them up to the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick. I'd like to thank IngramSpark and the independent publishers of New England for their generous support and resources to make tonight happen. I'd also like to thank Orca Media. They're here filming the event and you'll be able to watch that on both public access and we'll have it on the Bear Pond Books website. Let me tell you about a few upcoming Bear Pond Books events before we begin with this event. We have transforming trauma, how sharing stories can help us heal on March 13th and on March 27th we have a book group discussion about David Daley's rat-fucked why your vote doesn't count and that's facilitated by Norwich Professor Edward Coney Cohn. So look for information about that in our newsletter or on Facebook or on Twitter. We're at Bear Pond Books and you can go online at bearpondbooks.com. The format for tonight's event is that each panelist will speak for about five minutes. They'll introduce themselves and they'll give advice for those of you who want to publicize your indie or self-published book and then we'll take questions from the audience. So I ask that you please hold your questions until the question time. I'd like to let you know the bathroom is at the back of the store which is this way and it's to the right and the switch is outside. Oh the switch thank you I forget to mention that the light switch is on the outside thank you Serena. Our back door is locked and so if you need to leave in an emergency the front door is open where we're reversing it. And I ask that if you haven't already please mute or turn off your cell phones and I'd like to thank our panelists for coming. Let me introduce to you briefly who we have tonight. We have Charlotte Pierce I'm going to introduce her right here. She joins us from the Boston area where she runs Pierce Crest and she helps authors make better books and sell more of them. That's the goal. I try. We have Serena Fox she's on the end. She's from Watesfield she's a publication designer with a background in branding and marketing. We have the author of award-winning Connor McBride series Catherine Guar. She's also a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors and the Independent Publishers of New England. We have Bill Shubart many of you may know him from a VPR commentating and he's a board member with IP&E and the acclaimed author of the Limoil Stories among others. And you may also know our very own Claire Benedict the co-owner of Bearpond books since 2006. She's been in the bookstore business since she and her husband moved to Vermont in 2002 to purchase Rivendell books. And we're extremely pleased to present this panel of experts. We hope you learn a lot from the marketing workshop. Let's begin with Charlotte. All right. Thank you. One of my favorite things to talk about because it's one of my favorite things to do and how many people just love social media? Yeah? Great. I'm happy to hear that. How many people just never do it? Is there anybody that never does it? Okay. We'll get over that because you're going to have to do it if you're an independent publisher. We try and avoid the term social or self-publisher because it's got a lot of baggage about vanity press and you know just I guess it's cooler to be an indie, you know? It's like anyway. I started out in publishing and magazine publishing in Seattle and New York and then I moved up to Boston and started Pierce Press. But I've always been kind of a techie adopting an early adopter I guess is what you call it. So I've been doing and I included this sheet. There's probably two hours worth of material here. I think what what indie authors do when they think about social media if they're not used to it or not familiar with it is you kind of throw up your hands. There's just too much out there. There's so much so many options and so I'm just going to give some recommendations of what in my experience can work in terms of platforms for social media and and an approach to social media. The general checklist here is probably the most important thing but I have put down on each platform Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Your own blog is the most important thing. Your own blog or your own website is like owning your house. You're not depending on Facebook's algorithms to I mean it's it's something that you control. So that's where you start. And building a building a platform. Do people know what I mean about that building an author platform? No go ahead and tell us. Tell us. Okay. Tell you. It's it's like setting yourself up in business hanging out your shingle. Everyone knows you've you've connected with a lot of people in these different platforms and it's something you can start to do right now even if you have never written a word if you don't have a manuscript and if you have a book already start now because when you when you publish a new book you'll be able to tap into those connections that you've made on social media and and so so that's it's kind of you you say I've got a new book out and 500 people are excited about it because they know you and I think one of the most important things to do on social media whether it's Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or the main ones YouTube's second is another option for you and but is to be authentic you know it's if you're a goat farmer talk about goats post pictures of goats if your book is about goat farming you know paste post funny pictures of goats jumping over turnstiles or you know just to be kind of to communicate that you're a real person you're authentic and people like to deal with with that kind of approach and let's see there's there's so much to talk about how many people are on have your own blog or website yeah it's I mean then you know if you think I can't start my own I don't know how to start my own blog or or website I mean you can pick and choose you can learn or you can hire somebody to do it it's there are lots of people out there willing to help I use WordPress online piercepress.com if you go there it's a WordPress it's nice and clean it's a lot of people know how to how to do WordPress but so I'm just trying to see see what might be the most so get your blog going start on the 80-20 rules is a really important part of of building your platform and I think other speakers talk about this and other disciplines but it's 80 percent about other people and 80 percent about stuff that doesn't say buy my book and you know how annoying it is you know when people throw advertisers throwing things at you and they want you to buy something they just want you to take the do they want to separate you from there your money as soon as they possibly can so kind of building up yourself as like and is you know you've done that with toxic staple and you're you know you're gluten you know you know you've done that yeah I mean I really admire that and it's you know your passion is evident that's I think that's what helps helps you know established loyal followers um how much time do I have okay yeah uh yeah just I mean and I'll talk to any one of you independently these are my business cards and if you want to call me about you know those questions that come up do you want to mention the you know benefits of Twitter versus Instagram yeah Twitter is is something that I've been working on and it's it's kind of hard to get your head around but it's it's kind of they've recently upgraded from a 140 to 200 140 to 280 characters so you have more space to do things important things to do there are post images um again the 80 20 rule um videos even uh and then in all this another great tool is a tool like HootSuite does anybody use that HootSuite you're you're a star that's great um I live and breathe by Hoot by HootSuite it's it aggregates all of my social media or most of it into one application so I can post to Google plus I can post Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Facebook pages all in that one interface it's really a lifesaver highly recommend it there are others and there are free versions of these all these programs and there are pro versions so if you're going to be doing a lot of it yourself I'd invest in one of those Instagram is is more of a visual witness the dogs of bear pond you when you're using these platforms you tag people and use hashtags so you all know what hashtags hashtags are a universal internet language basically so if I put hashtag bear pond books like everything I'll find everything that's um on Google search or something I'll find everything in Facebook Twitter Instagram all over the internet that's that's um recently been in it'll be ranked in in um whether it's in the most recent order so to the to the most um it's important to respond um and I think like my first point here on um besides the regularity engagement authenticity and collaboration um you know I think regularity is more important than by you know amount of time so don't be afraid to just if if you choose something choose regularity over like two hours a day you don't need to do it two hours a day um you may need in the beginning to do some time um up getting up to speed um Facebook you have your personal profile pages um lots of different ways to use those and and again cross posting making connections friend everyone you can or connect with everyone you can there are different ways to sort out your contacts into lists and people that you may not want to you know know what your kids look like you know there's there's ways to kind of separate yourself from that so um LinkedIn y'all know what LinkedIn is yeah more business to business but it can be valuable um I published there probably once a month you know when I have a video or I'll publish that about because I do a lot of publishing on our um social media on about about the publishing process as as a member of past president of it me and a member um so that's relevant to businesses uh YouTube yeah YouTube I've gotten I've been doing YouTube videos for about six years um shows that recorded shows and um it's it's kind of a it's it's a bridge too far for some people because there's a lot of kind of technology and elements like audio video you know the community media station would understand this but it can be very powerful and you can do it easy you can actually do it easily you can do it for free and it can be a very powerful way to get your message out about your books so um I haven't touched like about 10% of what I meant to but I'm happy to talk to anyone separately too so thanks I just emphasize that point you made is that everything you're talking about is free yeah yeah yeah it's important if you're feeling hesitant if you're not familiar with all these things yeah this is and you if you're more time than money is free yeah I think you can buy the pro versions and they will do more for you but um you don't have to spend a lot Catherine so just as a segue from that just my own experience is that it's helpful if you're not a whiz with social media it's helpful to start with the thing that you feel most drawn to um because if you force yourself too much like I've got to learn Twitter and it's not enjoyable at all for you it just makes it so harder and it's it's an uphill battle so I mean looking at all the different ones that Charlotte was just describing I would say if there's one that you feel like oh I think I'd maybe like to do that or I think I could handle that for me it was Facebook I have never been able to really figure out Twitter I confess um I could figure it out but I just um yeah it didn't work as well for me it wasn't I wasn't as comfortable with that sort of communication structure I guess or platform I found Facebook to be more useful for me um I knew more people on Facebook too I think one of the things is that you're trying to find your readers you're trying to connect with your readers and probably your first readers are going to be your friends um so if you have a lot of friends that are on Facebook that might be where you want to go if a lot of your friends are on Twitter you know that might be the place that you want to go first so but that's just sort of tag along my experience of that um I thought that I will just I publish a suspense thriller series that's my background I started my first book was got published I independently published it in 2013 I started with an assisted publishing service and then I just went completely independent so an assisted publishing service is one that basically you you pay them a fee and they take care of it all for you and that was very appealing to me when I was starting out um and then as I got more knowledge on how this whole process works I gained more confidence in knowing that you know a lot of this is not that hard and I think I could probably do a lot of it myself um so I started doing everything independently but I do not I don't um wouldn't attract it all from for somebody who wanted to do an assisted publishing my advice would be if you're looking if you're weighing how you want to do it if you've decided that you want to independently publish is just to really vet the the group that you're looking at in terms of who you might be giving your money to um and make sure that they are reputable make sure that they're not taking more than they should um you know check with others maybe to to just make sure that you're really getting something of value and something that's not kind of a scam because they there are scammy ones out there um there are also really good ones out there I think that if you're doing it for the first time you might find that that's the way to go um you might have enough confidence right at the beginning to just say I think I can do this myself um and you can I mean that there are a lot of moving parts to independent publishing but they are conquerable um if you sort of break them down into the pieces of what what you need to do in terms of um you know you need you need editing assistance you need design assistance you need formatting figuring out your distribution all of that it's a big job but you know if you sort of take it in pieces and learn it slowly it's it's doable I did it um so if I can do it let me tell you anybody can do it um in terms of the marketing piece that's going to be the the the part that will be the hardest everything else the act of actually getting a book made and onto a shelf or um you know in a bookstore online um that's not going to be the biggest challenge the biggest challenge then is going to be the visibility and how you can how you can get readers um from my experience I thought I might talk a little bit about the e-book strategy um because that is you definitely should have an e-book if you go ahead and decide that you're going to publish your own book um I think it's some people will only do e-books now I I think it's good to have a print book um I like to have print books I like to have them you know it's a thing that you can give somebody and show I did something um but e-books are definitely they need to be in your toolkit because once you've had them formatted or if you get to that point you formatted it yourself there's no production cost and and the distribution is pennies to distribute um so it's definitely something to have in the toolkit because you know there's it's it's going to bring a return on your investment pretty quickly um it's also there's there's more infrastructure in place to market e-books um in terms of online opportunities and I can tell you a little bit about how that has developed over the years the the earlier days up until about 2012 when self publishers were kind of starting to get rolling in between 2008 2009 through 2012 um and they were kind of feeling around for what to do there weren't a lot of there weren't a lot of resources at that point so for the most part and there also wasn't a lot of content so people would just you know put things out and put things online and they would sell because of the price so the price point was the key early on people were selling their e-books for a lot less money and that was all they needed to do to get to get their books sold um then as you know competition started getting a little bit more intense you needed to have some other strategies and that's where some some of the strategies came in for you know juggling the pricing of your book um maybe looking at how the books are being described at your various retail sites um you know making sure that you're kind of grabbing the algorithms of the online retailers that are selling the book um and there are different strategies for that as time went on there started to be promotional sites available to to help um market the e-books through um you know you could run it's basically a one-day promotion and these promotional sites would have um big mailing lists that they would send your book out to and it would either be maybe 99 cents for the day or free for the day um and that started to be you know the thing to do that was sort of the the fad for a long time um was to use the promo sites bookbub ended up being the biggest one I don't know have any of you heard of the bookbub site um that ended up being the best uh return for um authors because it was a more selective process there were fewer slots available it was more expensive um to promote and you it was harder to get a slot when you did get a slot they have a an enormous subscriber list at this point so the return on the investment it would cost you three three hundred dollars I think is what they started at it's over four hundred dollars now for for a one-day promotion but you would make at least double that um for the promotion so that started to be a pretty intense um strategy that authors use for a while in today's landscape bookbub is still is still very much um out there and and people still get slots if you have a wide distribution if you have lots of different retail points um it seems to be a better uh option because I think they they are more likely to accept a book that is widely distributed instead of just being on Amazon or just on Kobo these are different sort of online retailers Barnes and Noble Kobo Apple Google Play Amazon um so if you're widely distributed on all those platforms you you're you're better um apt to get a bookbub slot um the other promo sites not as much but um that's kind of how that works um the new thing though is the social media advertising that is becoming a far more active part of a lot of authors straight marketing strategies now and it is it sort of reflects the gradual professionalization of um independent publishers because it is them becoming really more savvy marketers and advertisers so they're actually they are advertising on Facebook and they are advertising using Amazon's um marketing services so you can actually design little graphical um you know just little graphical ads as sponsored product ads or if you're if you're going through Facebook you'll come across these sponsored posts and those are ads basically that's that whoever it is if it's like McDonald's or Sears or whoever it is that you're seeing that's an ad that that group has paid for and every once in a while you might see a book you might see an author pop up in your news feed and it'll be you know a little blurb for a book um that you can buy that whatever retailer they're pulling out um that's a that's what a lot of people are seeing as a long-term strategy for for marketing their books their ebooks I should stress um because they're it's more sustainable it's using a lot of different you know audience targeting functions segmenting um analytical tools that are provided by Facebook and Amazon different lists of keywords that you can you know target to send to specific audiences that you think might be interested in your book um it's very complicated I have not mastered it myself yet it requires a lot there's a steep learning curve for it people who have that sort of aptitude that likes sort of the analytics and the graphs and and that kind of thing I do really well with it um it requires some basic graphic design skills because you have to put up your own little ad on Facebook and and Amazon um but so so that those are some of the things that that are kind of on the landscape right now um the old-fashioned strategies I think are still relevant I still have a lot of success with the promotional sites there are lots of different ones um free kindle books and tips and e-reader news today are two that were two of the first ones that came out um but there's also kind of there's one called the fussy librarian uh free booksy there's just a whole bunch of different promotional sites and you basically you you grab a slot for a certain amount of money you um have a discounted price on your book or maybe you're offering it for free for one day um and they're sending it out to their mailing list and you're watching downloads happen and the idea is that hopefully on the day after you've had your promotion people are going to people are going to be still hitting that ad and even though it's not free anymore they're going to start buying it um when you when they start buying it your rank at the retail site that you're at goes up a little bit it becomes more visible and more people buy it and you get sort of a little bit of a knock-on effect there did you mention those companies again sure um free booksy free booksy yeah i think it's just free booksy dot com uh the fussy librarian kindle free kindle books and tips uh e-reader news today those are just a few there's a ton of them actually there's a bunch more insta free me yeah um so that's so that's kind of i i still do find that useful there are some people who are saying you know that's it's that it's the facebook advertising and the and the other sorts of uh more analytical advertising that is the wave of the future um since i have not been able to master that yet i'm still i'm still focused on the promo sites and i'm doing all right with those so um so i still think that those are good pump primers to sort of get some sales happening and maybe also to get some reviews happening which is always a challenge once you've got a book out there is to try and get people to post some reviews for you because that also helps to make the more you know the more you have on the site the more you have on your product page the more the algorithm is kind of finding it and picking it and showing it to people so so all of the so i do think the promo sites can be helpful um i think that it's good to not to try to do everything at once once you get the first one done is you you know i wouldn't say dive into facebook advertising and the promo sites and you know the the big twitter i think you might again sort of think about what is going to work best for you and how you know where your strengths lie um and and and have that help to guide you into what you think is going to be the best place to start anyway with the marketing um and i will say that marketing also works better once you have one book published so it gets easier when you have another book published and then another book published um the more shelf space you have the more visible you become um so the best marketing strategy is to keep writing and with that i'll turn it over thank you um i'm going to try and say really a lot in five minutes um so i will just jump in my name is bill shubard um i published seven books um across the spectrum of publishing my first book was with a hybrid or assist publisher who approached me about doing a book it's called the moral stories um i self-published the next six books and my last book um was published on a simon and shoester imprint um as a hardcover and i've just finished another book which is going to the editor um i want to say a quick word about how radically publishing has changed when i was young there was no spectrum there was vanity publishing and there was traditional publishing it was like nurses and doctors who were in between and now it's completely filled out and um you charlotte i think you said earlier um or it may have been you um in the middle you have to be really careful you need to get a really you need to say i want to know i want the emails of three or four authors that you've published and verify that i i will also say to you that publishing is in utter chaos um i used to run a company that managed distribution for broadcasters and publishers and i remember talking to the then president of harper collins at her request about how she could market online and a long discussion that i won't bore you with but i basically said harper collins is not a brand it's a financial brand nobody walks into bear pond books and said what's new from harper collins and that got the whole conversation off badly the second thing where i drove myself right into the ground with jane was um i said you made a terrible mistake because when ebooks came along you imputed no value to content readers always assumed that the value was resident in the medium not the content readers thought a hardcover book is worth twenty five dollars a paperback book is worth fifteen an ebook there should be free or ninety nine cents and because you never came out to the public and said content is worth eight dollars if you want that content as an ebook it'll be nine ninety five if you want it as a paperback it'll be fourteen ninety so on whatever and um i think the publishers are still absolutely scrambling to figure out what the hell is going on how they can how they can put up a defense against amazon they never understood that their their brands were their authors not themselves so i just i i had to say that um but content is king and content has value um everyone in this room is either a would-be writer or a writer and you think your writers if you're going to be serious about your work you might start thinking right now that you're going to have three job descriptions you are going to be an author you're going to be a publisher even if with you you are with a traditional publisher and you are going to be a marketer and if you don't tick through all three of those things every day success is going to be very elusive because you have three job descriptions and i gotta tell you it's a bitch managing those three i don't want to be a marketer i don't want to be a publisher i just want to be an author but i learned very early on that i need to be all three um the the most important thing that i would say to you is and i i i say this to writers as well as people who are trying to sell their books the most important thing is to get out of your head it matters less what you write than what is read just as in the conversation it matters less what you say than what is heard so and i'll come back to that in a second how that impacts my own process um but the same is true in marketing you know if you get 2,500 offset books from your hybrid publisher or your your independent publishing yourself publishing and you go marching into a bookstore and say hey i've got a new book it's absolutely unbelievable it's going to be a best seller i need you to take 50 copies you know you can just put 10 in the window and maybe i can get an end cap and um can you pay me cash you have so destroyed any relationship with anybody who can help you and and the reason i i suggest that sort of allegory about writing is it's true in marketing too if you want to be in a bookstore you need to understand what a bookstore owner has to go through you really need to know that before you walk in the store and say i have a new book can you help me it's a very different approach that is true of libraries that is true of book clubs that is true of book festivals you need to get out of your own head and into their head what are they looking for that you might be able to help them with so if you get stuck in the artistic ego you're going to struggle it's going to be really hard um the um i'm going to say a little bit i want to go back to something i said about being a writer um when i write a first draft of a novel or a collection of short stories i have no idea if it's any good i have no idea and that sort of odd humility defines my process the first thing i do is find three people to be a critical reader and they're not my best friends they're not my kids they're not my family there are people who don't owe me anything who who i will get a clear answer from the second thing is and this is never popular when i say it is i pay them um as an author the number of people who come up to me and say oh i have a small favor to ask you would you really need a 300 page manuscript maybe write you know uh four or five pages about what you think about it and you know we could maybe talk you know i i'd buy you lunch you've just asked for a week of my time 72 so i pay critical readers and i pay attention to what they have to say and we need for an hour or two hours and some of the feedback i get is hard copy my new book is about a catholic priest and i used a catholic priest as a critical reader and i got a tremendous amount of stuff like you said apps you meant nave you said vestry you meant sacristy you said alb you meant chasable and those things seem small but really important because they become distractions in in marketing um i have developed over the year the tools that i need and those tools are databases i have a database of every functioning bookstore in vermont i have their website their facebook page their contact information the name of the book buyer in the case of a large bookstore there may be three people in the case of a smaller bookstore maybe one contact person and in that excel database it says they only do mystery or they only do used books or they're a college bookstore or they're terrifically good at literary fiction which not everybody is um so i have i maintain that i've developed it over the years it's got 70 entries i do the same with what i call reader friendly libraries there's 251 i think libraries in vermont and probably about 40 of those love having authors come in so i have that same database for them the email contact for the events person phone number facebook page and when i have a new book come out i send out a what looks like a personalized email but it's it's a general email to those people saying i'd love to come talk to your your patrons and i don't say i want to come market my book because libraries don't sell books i take something that i believe is relevant from my book my latest book lila and theron it's really about how rural culture has changed in the last hundred years so i structure a conversation not about my book i structure a conversation about and it one that engages people how has rural culture changed and then of course during the course of that it's the 80 20 rule that you mentioned charlotte um people develop an interest in the book and i might allude to the book during that but the conversation is an engagement between me and the people who come to that event it's not me trying to sell them a book um i have recently begun teaching a course at the elder college and again it will be a course built around a book that i've written um i've taught one in middlebury at the elder college and it's sold out the first time and i've just taught another one based on lila and theron it wasn't about lila and theron but everyone who came to that course had to read the book and they of course had to buy it um and again the discussion was in your lifetime how has rural culture changed as it relates to the culture in the classroom when you were a child the retail culture in your community how people viewed death how religion and churches had changed completely engaging not me selling my book but me having a discussion with people about something that they cared about that just happened to relate to my book um the um i want to say a word about quality um every once in a while somebody sends me a book and i look at it and i am completely i've totally lost interest because i've looked at it i haven't even read the first paragraph if you are anywhere in the spectrum between self-publishing assist or hybrid publishing or traditional publishing if your book doesn't look like it was published by furar strauss and giro don't waste anybody's time i get books that look like they were made on mimeograph machines and what it immediately says to me is the same thing it used to say to me when i owned a record company and people would send me a demo and i'd put the cassette in i'd listen and the guitar would be out of tune i never listened to the song if the person doesn't care enough to tune the guitar i don't want to hear what they have to say i'm sorry and the same is true of the book and that means you put a lot of attention into the preparation of a book or you will be unable to market it and that includes the indisha page the quality of the graphics the quality of the type style um you know the library of congress information the books and print information so if you care about what you've written make sure it looks like it was published by furar strauss or can up for you know some and it's not hard to do but that's a key piece of the marketing if you go to a publisher or an agent today the first thing they're going to ask you is not oh what have you written they're going to say what's your platform and that is important and you know you both alluded to it um my platform which is different is i'm a commentator from among public radio and i've got sixteen hundred people who have opted in to get my commentaries on vpr and so what i do is i send out those commentaries to those people um and then occasional when i have a new book coming out i say thank you for you know subscribing to my my commentaries on vpr you might be interested to know i have a new book here's what it about here's what some people have said about it um and that's it and i do that maybe anywhere from once to three times a year and that's it because i don't want to abuse the platform but i want to use it so again to your issue of charlotte of the 80 20 rule if i was promoting a book every time i sent that out i would start to get unsubscribed so um use that carefully and wisely um answer emails if i write a if i write an edgy commentary i may get a hundred emails running from you have no idea what you're talking about i wish you were dead to um boy this was i'm really glad you said this most of them are supportive i mean vermonda's not i don't get hateful commentaries i get commentaries that are fair and disagree i had one in digger this morning and a woman wrote a really beautiful commentary and i responded publicly to her commentary and i said you're absolutely right and maybe i did not make this point strongly enough it was about depression and medicating depression um so but but my rule is no matter how many emails i get i answer all of them it may be just thank you very much for being in touch i appreciate your perspective um and i think i've spoken long enough but again the most important thing i would say to you is get out of your head if you really want help from other people get into their head because then you will understand and they will appreciate the fact that you made the effort to understand how incredibly complicated the independent book business is people are in the independent book business not to get rich they're in it because they believe in community they believe in authors and writing and quality and if they make money they're grateful and if you understand that and you approach them on that basis you'll get much further thank you i wish i'd gone first clearly you are a talent of engaging people okay i'll give you a shot you're gonna be good i know thanks i know so thank you for saying all that i mean there's so much about that that i resonate with and what everybody said so i'll go back there a bit and you guys have probably read my bio so you know i've designed for more years that i feel like talking about but i i too come from a publishing background and books and continuity and books when we cut books when we were there were no macintoshes there were no we were putting books together it was beautiful it was a beautiful thing and and when that went away the industry already began to change and it has changed so much and for me some of the sadness in that has been to see some people say yeah i wrote this book and now i'm going to this publisher and they're taking on the design and they're going to run off with this thing and make this thing happen and that really breaks my heart because whatever you've worked on whether you have already or you're starting is something you've put all of your heart into it's your expression it's your art so if you look at the wall behind you there's a whole wall of beautiful books and beautiful book covers and hopefully 98% of those people love the cover that's sitting on that bookshelf that's what you want so for me in my relationship with a writer i want them to know that they are part of the design the design is there so you made four points you said you have to take you you need to understand that you are not only the author but you're also the publisher and the marketer you're also the designer so in my work i do what is called collaborative design alchemy and what that means is i may be designing but it's never without you so it's what we do together and the alchemy part of it is that in the end we want the golden nugget the philosopher stone but the whole path through has its ups and downs i never go straight to design no matter what you said we'll have conversations many conversations and i highly recommend a couple of things one is when you choose your designer look at their work but also like them you have to love who's on your team and that's a big story when you talked before about you know um do your homework who are you working with what's the attitude of the person that you're dealing with when you're on the phone with that person do you feel that they have as much care and devotion to your creation that they should and maybe beyond this is a long relationship you want to feel at home with the people you're working with it's really important there were a few things said here that i love charlotte said be your truth be your truth we talked about blogging your truth in your book the way it looks the way you market it it's you so don't take somebody's formula and get lost in the formula this is you this is your work this is your art passion it is your passion so when you blog or whatever you do it's important that you show up truly authentically because if you don't that will be seen over time as well um kathryn said um recognize what you are most drawn to that's all about chemistry so all of this in your project in the labors that you've done in creating what you have come to now needs to continue on into the world in a beautiful way it should roll out in as if you are still writing it so it may seem really overwhelming i don't get the marketing i don't like facebook i don't like you don't have to like them all you have to focus in on one or two whether you like it or not and after you get over it you probably will like it okay because it serves you quite well for instance if you do a website in the square space to support your book which is not expensive it too every blog you make there can be posted on facebook and twitter and everything else so with one click of one button you're out in the world but to back up from that when i work with a client i want to read the book i want to talk to the client many many times i want to know why you wrote the book what's your passion why do you want that out in the world if you're doing a book on canning because you're so passionate about canning but your real deal is you don't just want it here you want people in cities all over the united states to start canning in small quantities in tiny apartments i want to know that because the cover needs to reflect that same passion all the covers on the wall here you know you look back on them and you may look at a few and go like oh that doesn't work for me at all and oh i kind of like that one and that's what we want to get to so whoever i guess if i'm going to be back up here in the design process whoever you work with not only do you want to like what they've done in the past you want to like their attitude you want to know that they love what you're doing just about as much as you do that their real goal is to launch that baby onto that shelf or on some page in a jpeg format that really makes your heart sing makes you super happy if you don't do that it's kind of like you made all this effort and then just said eh oh well and it's going to hurt like having a bad paint job on your house every time you see it you're going oh i did all that and whoa right um so i think the common theme in all of this is you've made a beautiful project you need a team that you trust and love to help you get it out there and in the end when it is out there you're going to want to do another because it was such a beautiful relationship uh i don't think i'm really for not anything i i kind of like what i have to say i just want to add one short thing to that i think it's so my my approach to a designer has always been i'm a writer you're a designer i need you and i'm just supporting everything you're saying but i need you to read my book and make a beautiful cover and it was interesting because in my last book i was told well when you go with this imprint of simon and schuster you're going to lose all control and they hired a book designer who had done 26 new books living powers and he read the book and he sent me a note very uncharacteristically and he said i love the book do you have any thoughts he said i've worked out the format the topography everything else and i said i love this photograph and it was a richard brown photograph and some of you i'm sure are familiar with those he's been on three of my covers and his new book by the way is gorgeous the law of last of the hill farms and i sent him the photograph and he said it's breathtaking it works perfectly he used it we stuck because i thought it would be a typical sort of amazon topography solution so that whole issue of understanding collaboration could not be any more thank you okay i'm going to talk about some of the practical matters of getting your book in local bookstores and you want a lot of you i know or live in muck hillier and you're probably going to think of bear pond first i hope but you don't want to stop there but getting it just in your the store in your town is not enough you want to go further than that so and so anyway i'll have some tips for how to get that done the first thing that the bookstore needs to know is we need to know about your book we need to know it exists we don't we don't know this we don't get this information from other places necessarily unless you're with a major publishing house so let us know ahead of time preferably if you can it come into the store if you don't know who to talk to if you don't already know who the person is the buyer is in the store you can bring in a copy of copy of the book and drop it off with us if you have one bring a cell sheet which would can be just a one page sheet just tells us basic information who you are what your local connection is what maybe what the local connection of the book is if it's set in vermont it's about vermont if and it doesn't need to be but that is an added kind of bonus for for a local store what your local connection is how we can get in touch with you how we can order the book that's a very important factor for us how are we going to get the book if we carry the book are we going to get it directly from you that's okay but we need to know are you going to is it going to be available from our wholesale distributors that we work with regularly or directly from the publisher all those things we need to know we need to know how much it's going to cost we so come on in with your book and you think please do not give a sales pitch to the person behind the counter that person may not be likely is not the person making the decision sorry um is there more than one person named bill here okay is your car back here yes it's in a toe zone so i just do not want to skip over that point about please do not um give your sales pitch to the person behind the counter please do not tell them what your book is about in the full plot how meaningful it is to you those are great things to talk about at a later date but the person behind the counter is not necessarily going to be making that decision nor has time for a cold call and that's what it is and nobody likes a cold call so that that's just a matter of politeness and um it's something a lot of people don't know so um quite often we'll offer to carry a local book um that doesn't maybe have a track record or an author who doesn't have a track record on consignment we do that that's pretty standard operating procedure that is um not an insult which most people know but we've had a we had a recent rush up on facebook i mentioned it because maybe people saw it where um someone really felt a local author really felt that that was offensive that we offered to take their book on consignment it's not it's really not it's just how things work um if a book doesn't have a track record or it's somebody we don't know we just that's just not how it's done um um and i mentioned yes tell us where we can get it so books that we're most likely to take are books that do have some kind of local angle whether the subject matter or the author most of you are local already so that helps um sometimes so a local author will write a book about their mother's story growing up on a farm in Kansas that's going to be a hard sell for us um so you just you know you have to think about things like that uh we can't oh we can't sell it doesn't mean we won't take a book if it's a local author but it that is going to color uh whether we we think it's going to sell or not um we are more apt to take books that we can get conveniently if it's available from ingram for example as a wholesale distributor or um that is really easy for us if you live in town and you're willing to bring them down that's really easy for us um but with some published some independent publishers uh even if we can get them on ingram there might be a short what we call a short discount uh which is very small discount for us that does not benefit us or they're non-returnable those are books that we're not going to take a chance on we don't carry books at a short discount we rarely can't we like to not carry books that are non-returnable um so if that's your deal if you're if you have a deal uh with ingram those are factors for us um um consider who you are publishing with uh you know amazon has a lot of options um we don't carry books that are published by amazon a lot of people are surprised to hear that after they've published with amazon and bring them back to us um amazon is well we have a lot of feelings about amazon we don't work with amazon i can tell you all my feelings about another time i'm sure you can imagine but we don't we do not carry books that are published on amazon so consider that when you're making a decision maybe that's okay with you maybe you really want your book on amazon and that's the way that that that works for you can i just clarify do you you mean published by amazon published by amazon books that are available yes but not create space yeah yeah so not yes phoenix is the same uh independent bookstores that i know of have a similar in fact most of what i'm saying is a lot of the other independent bookstores in the area um have the same policies so um and you know we wrote this do and don't list with galaxy you know we all we all kind of have the same feel the same way um yes just one tiny little thing because people might worry about and want to be on amazon if you have an isp in you pretty much going to get on amazon i think that's yeah it's not being on amazon it's not that your book is sold by i know i can say i tell people to publish and you're always saying i want to just create space because i want to know amazon you're gonna get an answer anyway yes um so you kind of have to balance what what your goals are if um amazon is not going to put it on the shelf in your local in your community so if that's what's important to you consider that um consider your costs um when you when you're self publishing sometimes people it's very expensive and if you come in with a a paperback that's thirty dollars that you have to get thirty dollars for to cover your costs and then we need to get our cut of our 40 percent and then you're like oh then i'm not going to make any money at all but it's already a thirty dollar paperback it's good that's going to be hard sell we can't we're probably not going to be able to sell it we might carry it for you but it's probably not going to sell um if that's something that you're concerned about in the process in the production process we'd be happy to talk to you about it then and give you our advice on whether it's sell or not um we have been doing this for a long time so we do we are pretty familiar with what we'll sell and what won't doesn't mean we're right all the time and doesn't mean that things can't take off but we we do know our customers and um we know the market pretty well um and we do love an author who comes in with a good marketing plan you know somebody who knows what they're doing is very appealing to tag them on instagram tag them on instagram contact local media outlets and small contact the bridge and the Times Argus with press releases those small local papers are willing to do articles or reviews about a local author um you know contact as other people said contact libraries uh put out to on your facebook page that you're willing to come talk to book groups give them the idea choose my book and i'll come to be a guest speaker at your book group people love that we do it here in the store we do it you know with local book groups it's it really adds something to a book group to have an author come um so they might be willing to read your book when maybe they weren't thinking of that already um let's see uh we have uh some authors who will tell their um well first of all they'll they'll tell people where it's where the book is available that it is available locally and we very much appreciate that so you tell your friends that put that on your social media that you can get it at bear pond put it on your website you could link to us on your website um you can also we have some authors who will put out on their website order it from bear pond books and i will come down and inscribe it for their out of town friends i will come down and inscribe it and bear pond will mail it to you and we call them up and say hey got some orders come on down you know takes a few days it's not a real super quick process but uh people love that so that you know you you reach your out of town fans who um when i have an opportunity to get something personalized like that so those are some of the ideas um then quickly on events because everybody wants to have an event too because that's a great way to get um the word out about your book is to have an event at your local bookstore um we um get far more event requests than we could ever do in a week or a month or a year um so we are not going to be able to say yes just because you are local um we we love we do a lot of local events do you ever combine them like have a couple of authors at this yes we do yes and we're working on some things and um right now um yeah so um we will definitely consider it but we can't always say yes unfortunately it's just it's it's a labor intensive for us resource intensive for us to throw an event um you know sometimes we have people say well i see that you don't have anything next Tuesday can i come it's just not that easy um you know we we have a lot we put into our events and you know we do a lot of work for them and we just can't we can't say yes to everybody unfortunately um so we would like to know about books ahead of time if we are going to consider events sometimes it's like we plan events three to six months ahead of time um you know we are booked right now through i think the end of May right now through June so um so let's see if there's anything else um yeah and just that we have a good feel for how our events go so we just ask people to when we make a decision about that to respect that decision we don't want to if we don't want to throw a bad event and if we really feel like we're not going to get a turnout for a book and we decide not to do an event um that's actually in your best interest because you don't want to do an event that nobody comes to either so we do know our audience and we do know who we're marketing to so just and the author should be a full participant in the promotion of the event right absolutely we would need the author to you know email their contact list put it on their facebook page the whole bit yes um so i think that's everything that i have um but definitely willing to take questions are we now's a good time to go to the question first question has anybody worked with audiobooks from south publishing what was your experience like um it it's difficult because there aren't it's harder to market because you don't have any control over the pricing of the audiobook the yeah audible and acx the there are different platforms that you can use if you're using the acx platform and and going to audible and itunes and google i think is the third one um then then then you're exceeding to what they want to price the book at if you do it more independently then you're taking on more of the responsibility for you know getting the distribution out there to various places but then you do have a little bit more control over do you get your own narrator yes there the the platform is uh is one that that kind of connects you with narrators so you upload an audition script you put up your book title and a little bit of a description um if you want you can audit i unless you're a really really good narrator i don't recommend a lot of people probably think oh i can just read my own book but if you're not really good at it then it's not you should yeah yeah i would and there are some people who are very good at it and i've and i've certainly listened to audiobooks by people who have read their own and and sometimes it works i think you have to you know let somebody tell you maybe yeah yeah um clear that question about um about um the discount sorry i'm sorry were you don't like if that answered your question so in ingram they give you a choice 40 percent or 50 percent 55 discount i mean off the cover price they give who a wholesale wholesale discount so i can choose i can choose 20 40 50 so that when you order a wholesale when a bookstore orders it do you get i mean are you buying that book at 55 off like what do they give you as far i mean what do they take off of that for ingram it's usually more around 40 percent okay so they're gonna keep 10 percent 15 percent yeah they're gonna get their cut everybody's gonna get their cut so especially ingram needs a cut the bookstore needs a cut everybody needs good but it's better for us is to encourage bookstore sales to give the highest discount so that you you get i don't know that end of it i don't know that i didn't know that you had that choice yeah i mean if you really want to be in bookstores just go with the highest conventional yeah and and the other thing you need to sign up for is 100 returns yes that's true yeah yeah and that may be i don't know what they present to you but that may be why sometimes we get things and you'll only get 20 off on it right so and it's non-returnable that's not that's not a risk that we want to take and we found that some um like well somebody we know in montpellier we know we're gonna sell some so sure we'll take some even though it's short discount and it's not returnable but we're willing to take a chance on it it's somebody we know and they've got a network and that's fine and then they go to other bookstores in vermont and the other bookstores are saying no we don't know you i'm not going to take a chance on this so they've gone through all this and they've gotten their book in one bookstore yeah and that's so you know watch out for that because the bookstore in burlington is not going to take a chance because well i don't care if you're from montpellier i don't know who you are you know yeah um do you have a standard consignment rate or do we do it's 60 40 you do 60 40 60 for the because major publishers typically have a 55 discount and the distributor gets 15 and the bookstore gets 40 that you get so when you do consignment you stay with your 40 which is where you're comfortable for your own discounts etc can i should clarify that i use lightning source not ingram spark because i was grandfathered in as i before ingram spark was started so i get more options i think yeah so what is the difference anyway between those two one is for like small or medium sized or for you know like when you've had a few books i'm not sure exactly what the criteria is but if you have one book you're going to go with ingram spark ingram spark really was designed to compete with create space yeah create space they wanted to get into that they wanted to they wanted to use all their on-the-man printing that they had um if you if you are a small self law pusher the ideal place to be is is lightning actually it's not an option anymore lulu is horrible i know i grandfathered into lightning so all my books are available there so i'm treated essentially like a publisher and you all have a book about ingram spark and you lulu you should stay away from lulu in my opinion um crappy crappy quality it's not known as a good uh is for distribution and it's don't use lulu do not use lulu did you say google no lulu lulu i agree yeah it's crappy question yeah the nice thing about ingram spark also is that if you want to get online you're automatically online with a lot of download sites yeah um i i actually uh had a small publisher myself and uh i i want to underscore everything that the folks here said because they're all really important things to consider as an author probably doing the cover right editing it not editing it yourself but actually hiring an editor or your grandmother who was an english teacher exactly all of those kinds of things are really important one of the things that i've learned in this business is that what all of this is about is your story whatever the story is you're writing whether it's a book of poetry whether it's a book about pain-free joints uh no matter about goats no matter what it's about it's a story and your book is filled with all kinds of stories um and when you quote sell your book that 20 percent of the time when you're selling don't sell it in the sense of i'm selling you the book now please buy my book tell the story tell one of the stories pick the little parts of it the little teasers you know the music the music business which i was in for a long time the movie business one of the things you may have noticed is that there used to be no trailers okay there were previews in the theater that's that's how you found about not about a movie then there were trailers trailer number one we're just trailer sometimes you see trailer number one trailer number two trailer number three they're telling telling a little bits and pieces of that movie they're not selling it they're just letting you see parts of that and that's what you got you got your own story that's a really good point it use that i would i would say don't be afraid to give stuff away i mean yes it's it's people are not necessarily going to take it and you know crush you i've got a book that's the piragaji handbook and it's it's public domain we encourage people to take it we give it away for free on on piragaji.org it's about peer learning and peer production and please take it copy it please you know but we still sell it we still sell the print book for 20 bucks and we financed our print run that way so it's really i mean i think piracy is a real thing but i don't think you know i think giving away chapters things like that fictional cafe which i just started working with there's a thing in your um you can send us a chapter and you know it's we've got 500 subscribers it's it's a great way to get like you were saying you know just give people a sample give them a taste a variation on that is a christmas time if you have a blog platform send out a short story gift to say merry christmas here's a short story from my collection or here's here's it you know a compelling chapter whatever but that just supports it and make it look nice that's no that's absolutely right sesame yeah um you had uh you've written something yourself and you had a publisher interesting is there a reason positive reasons you would self publish rather than go with with control i didn't understand if you mean if you had an offer say you've written something and there's a publisher that you sent it to who's interested in publishing it a traditional publisher would but i mean are there enough positive reasons to self publish in terms of control that you might turn down the publisher and do it yourself no it depends on what it depends on what the i would say it depends on what the publisher is offering right um and what kind of contract there are contracts now where you are giving up you know the book you've written and any book you're going to write for the next 10 or 20 years you're giving up with that happen yeah so it's really sad for her she spent all this time putting this book together and then lost all control over imagery and you know her book anymore so it's so it's sad for her to see it on the shelves yeah you know the writer neil gayman yeah he did he took i don't know if he does every book but this way but he took his american gods and self published it added some stuff added some stuff that the editors had taken out of the first edition and uh he's one of them you know that story right bill yeah i i think i'm sorry go ahead i just i came here to learn some stuff because i'm an idiot but um did you learn some stuff no i'm not yet um i'm at a price i do the remote wild series it's one of the best selling series of remote and i do everything totally opposite i will very briefly tell you here you don't test it around you know you haven't read it or bought it but you know the covers i did know okay and uh riverdale sold a ton of books for me thank you very much for you all i wish you're still there because the baller by people okay so i did a thing just this winter which is um i sell it all for my bookstores i for my only because i don't give crap about the rest of the world and uh i have no intention of going through ingram or lulu or spark or anybody but you deliver myself or hire my own artist to be three years fine i work independently with people i don't have to love them they have to do what i tell them because i went to the leader of writers and had the crap scared out of me by a nice man who spent five years working on a book for the world health organization on before it was i mean he knew about all the stuff that look and when they did the cover they said they would collaborate with him and he would be consulted that was the word consulted he was consulted and they said a cover that looked like peptidism with cartoon characters on a book that ripped this guy's guts out about the new disease of the day and i said that will never happen to me nobody can tell me what to do i'm too old and i'm too new and i'm independent and i'm going to spend a lot of money doing my books but i'm going to do it my way i advertise my books i only put them out around christmas that's what people buy books christmas okay so you get the book out around christmas don't put a book out in january or february you're shooting yourself in the foot okay like this bookstore god bless you is dead for three months they could go to florida most of the time was just a real big happening so i just think it's totally different i have a friend who dresses a lot better than me it's more polite and she goes around and sells books it looks like it's not okay so i'm not going to turn down a none even though they look at a cross which is really a bunch of porpoises they don't know it's just like they're not going to tell sister mary what the hell they hit the road they're going to like thank you we'll consider it and then i i've had bookstores refuse me and i run ads in their local paper saying the book is there and they have to call me for the book and it becomes one of the best i'll do anything to sell my book because it's freaking funny i'm hilarious one of the few days i get out into the world and it works so i've sold 40 to 50 thousand books every month okay and i don't get crap about ingram they will rip you off all of them and you're going to pay for those returns you're going to pay for every ad so just do it yourself i will be using your hustling you're hustling all the time you're working hard this is my world i do nothing else i have no life because i'm really into this i don't know why but what i either eat or write it's whole hog obviously and i just keep at it until i drop and my phone is shut off i don't google i don't care i don't want anybody even know where i live i just do this and then i hide but now i have a family of little stickers and people find me and go oh my god that's you that's like the and harper lee of vermont black job that's right i think no but it's pretty obvious nobody else looks like this she dresses as badly right and has a sticker on it find your own check but my thing is to not get taken advantage of by any publishing house et cetera i will be teaching it's free so i'm not making anyone i'm going to teach at the mix me library how to get your book out there whether you just writing i think it's just as valid to write your family stories and get them in print for five bucks as it is to spend a billion dollars and you will pay either way whether you go through a traditional publisher whether you self publish it's going to cost you money it costs me about 15 grand every time to put out every book and that's nothing for my time okay because i'm real serious about the art in the thing and even then there's typos there's crap i can keep the text right i don't shoot myself but they're freaking funny all these woodchucks and listen you got that book and they know what they're talking about so find your own stick do it i'll be at the mix me library entertaining every Thursday in april from seven to six to eight something like that where it sounds like that's for gents it's worth coming to see because i'm funny but somebody might walk out but it's funny anyway and you have to be an adult so it's a good one right down the street and they put up with me and um they're very fair if they screw something up they fix it and i've had a screw up in the midwest to the tune of thousands of dollars and i just walk away it's like not worth dealing with you don't want that to happen what else they're pressing l brown sounds they got a 10 million dollar height of the press they got typesetters i don't like their book cover designers you got on a round league of vermont writers join it on a round you have to vet feet you have to really check what you're doing and get recommendations so that's it well i won't be appearing here i think you've been here do you have anything to say about piracy i mean i should be flattered right but i don't think it's worth worrying about i can talk to you go ahead piracy only happens mostly in traditional publishing it costs a lot of money to print a book and i have a good friend who used to be cfo at random house and i was visiting one day and he pulled out they were so desperate to stop piracy they started embossing covers remember that in mass market and he pulled out a mass market paperback cover because bookstores and paperbacks only return the cover and they either pulp or sell the book without a cover and the the pirates had gone to the trouble of just running the covers embossed so that could be returned but that only happens at the very top level piracy at the lower level it's just not worth it even midwest writers who sell you know 25 50 100 000 books it's not worth pirating their books like with the piragaji handbook we we've already planted our flag on the moon you know if somebody takes that and copies it and says that we came up with the piragaji handbook it's just not defensible i you know i don't know you're right it just it is too expensive as we know i think you had a question silly me i thought the hard work was in writing the book and what i know is below the bottom rung of the ladder way way below about everything you've been saying so i'll try to formulate sort of a dual question can someone to describe what a hybrid publisher is number one and number two if one had an opportunity to go with the university press rather than a traditional you know label is there any advantage to a university press are there disadvantages the university press is a traditional press it's just in a specific area usually academic but it's essentially the same as a traditional publisher it's not a mass market publisher it's a specific but but these terms really have to do more with the financial deal and a university press would usually treat you in the same way as a traditional publisher but they won't give you as much of an advance because a lot of them are on their beam edge or they are supported by the university and it's it's a brand asset rather than a huge money source hybrid and assist publishers it's the sort of the center of the spectrum they kind of mean the same thing but it is somebody you can go to who will help you you know they will charge you anywhere from two thousand to seven thousand dollars and lead you through the process and and they'll work with you the copy edit the literary edit the design the indicia all the things that make a book a book for them yeah yeah and you need to love them and and the quite frankly the contract they tender you will tell you everything along with the authors they work with and and the variable is there are hybrid or assist publishers who will take anybody who bring the money there are other hybrid and assist publishers who will say I really don't want to take your money I don't want to take you on unless I think we can actually sell this book and there's everything in between so the comments made earlier about really knowing who you're working with is really critical one thing too about the university press you might not make as much money but you might stay in print for a lot longer which might you know depends on whether you care about that I think it's really important to think about what your goals are when you're publishing that's because that helps guide you also in terms of the decision-making is if you think it's going to be beneficial to you in some aspect of your career to be connected with the university press if it's or just personally and it's going to be used for my course yeah maybe that that yeah so then right that makes sense one caveat on choosing a press I have no value judgment about this except that I completely understand it there are four bookstores in Vermont that probably won't even take your book if you do it with create space and I understand why I have a very good friend who owns a bookstore who said to me one day how do you feel about a bookstore owner who walks around and asks three four five people a day to leave his bookstore and people will come into his bookstore they'll pull a book off the shelf they'll open it up they'll read the the dust jacket maybe read you know a few pages stuff it back in take their cell phone out skin the bar cup and amazon will send it to them two days later for five or six dollars less and they have no shame about that and the bookstore owner goes up to them and says you know I'm really sorry I'm not a showroom for amazon I have to pay for and stock all these books and I can't afford to do that for amazon amazon can afford to do that so I have to ask you to leave unless you'd like to buy that book now think about the complexity of that so you wonder why there are bookstore owners that have a deep antipathy they don't have an antipathy to ebooks but the highly predatory way in which amazon works is really problematic and bookstores are more than just retail stores they're community centers you're all here tonight you know this is a community event and this is what creates community adhesion so it's just important to have that sensibility and what makes me nervous is amazon is going to establish brick and mortar stores yes so you guys are really bashing on create space I self-publish or independently published in 2011 with create space and I have been wanting to come back up and do another book and because I did it in 2011 is that the only place that I can you can put it on a lightning source or at England's fire yeah you can sure okay you might not get some amazon exclusives I think it changes all the time so I don't really know but it does you can actually have them in multiple places and and recently create it looks it's possible that create space won't be around much longer they've been laying off a lot of employees because them they're trying to move people into the KDP platform which offers feedback as well so you can you can you can have both you can publish with ingram spark yeah and you can publish in other places as well and ingram will put you on amazon as well seven years ago and I remember so little about it except all the formatting out is if you are with if you're with ingram and in my case I'm with lightning source I don't let them do my ebooks I do my books directly because the revenue that I get from ebook sales is much much higher than I would get on a pass through ingram so that's just worth looking at if you want to keep your life easy and you're working with ingram then just let them do the whole thing if you're looking at margin and that matters to you pay attention to that no not at all I have an amazon page I have the whole thing I'm just sensitive you know to the concern about local bookstores and my allegiance is primarily the bookstores I don't write amazon I don't you know do stuff I want my books on amazon I want them on google and I want them on apple because there are people who buy them there but when I go out to do the hard work of marketing I pay attention to people in my community can you talk a little bit about how you do create your ebook how I do create about how you do create your ebook do you actually creating yourself would you know I had someone who does it so that I'm very focused on the design piece because I do the whole the whole the finished book is done first so the ebook is created from that design all the way through so that is a technical what platform is the book created on so we can export yes there's more than one file format for different readers right yeah but they should be sort of if your book is designed in in design you can export that's right and does it go online where I mean you have to decide where to put it or no there's a process once you've developed your ebook there's a process for getting on google and itunes and amazon and indie bound I mean when people say I want to buy your ebook I don't send them that was on yeah indie bound me too because there's some revenue sharing with my local bookstore I tell people to order it on indie bound and pick it up at porter square books which is a near being you know it's kind of a it's a nice way for the it's easy to put the link in and people can follow it yeah we don't do anything it's not it's too complicated and not worth it to us yeah we feel that we we basically at one point had to make a philosophical decision is that what we do is bricks and mortar paper on shelves and that's what we do well and the hoops to jump through for ebooks for us I mean we we can't compete with um you know the other options out there it's just it's just not worth it I would say very briefly I sell all my books I started like 2010 I never discounted them in 1995 I don't care if it's new or it's old and I don't fight with people I say even if I don't it's pretty funny and I'm not discounting it because it does as much work to write it then than it did now so pick whatever you want and be bills absolutely right on the ebook thing people discount it because it's 99 cents I refuse that as well I do sell ebooks on amazon they just send me I look at my checkbook and go oh let me send me some money good but I can hear and so but they're all like half the price of the print book and I do not sell print books on amazon however bookstores do there's a bookstore who I will mention that not this one that markets my books and sells them and I'm going how stupid am I I send them to them and I get the 40 percent I mean I lose 40 percent and now they're selling them for full and I sign them for them so they're selling them more now what is very far once you all become famous authors and your book will go all over the country in the world and they'll be selling them used with your signatures sometimes they're 40 bucks that's a really good point which is some of the approaches you're aligned to get their books signed and they won 20 books signed that's kind of a fence did we have any other questions from the group I just wanted to say something which is that what I hear sort of across the board here is that whatever you choose to do you've made this effort this beautiful piece however many pages or whatever it is so be in alignment with how you carry it out take the time do you know that as you go through this whole process it's working really well for you it's resonating resonating as it should be because otherwise you've done all this work for what to have it sort of you know like the train go off the tracks no this is your huge project make it a joy that was the train left can I also just mention that I am hoping to offer a workshop here locally it's not going to be nearly as hysterically fun as Vixby Library I have some flyers here people are interested basically what I'm doing right now is just taking some names and having people indicate what Saturdays in April and May they might be available for I'm going to do it hopefully at the senior center here in Montpelier I could do it also and I don't know if there are people who came here from Hardwick somebody said they came from Hardwick but I could offer it somewhere else if there was if there was interest as well but there are flyers here it's basically something that's going to be a full day of looking at from kind of soup to nuts deciding how to choose what you need to do what the you know what the distribution channels are what the different cover design principles are and layout principles ebooks marketing all you know sort of just the whole gamut of things to be thinking about so if you're interested there are flyers here and you don't that this implies no obligation if you put your name in your email address it's just kind of trying to get a sense of people who might be interested did everyone get one of these the independent publishers is anytime you come to one of our live events we um it's half price membership so was that they I think they all have okay this is a good time for me to say that um take a look at all the information in your packets feel free to look at the extra information at the table as Catherine said she's a flyer about her upcoming workshop the panelists are here for a few more moments if people want to approach them with individual questions um and then they'll be sending out a survey and if you have any feedback for us we love it as well and their books and their books are here and we have Catherine's books we have Bill's books um we have a book from um to Charlotte's practice the new children's books so please do check those out thank you for going