End Of The Month

I'm not going to give you the sales figures this month but I'll say it was better than last month.  That's all you can hope for.  I have no idea if it was better or worse at BN, the number is so low it hardly matters.  The 2 horse books are still the strongest sellers there.  Why?

I had an idea for the cover of NLM2 this morning so I spent a couple hours trying to organize that.  I don't want to give it away, but I'll say it's not pastry.  I had been looking at a dessert book on Amazon a couple years back on this topic but didn't want to invest in it.  That's always pretty much of a mistake.  So today it's not available here except as after-retail and it was $50.  No way I'm paying that for a used book in French.  I don't speak French.  I looked at Amazon Canada and they had it for half that but the wait is 1-3 MONTHS.  I wound up buying it from Amazon France, it'll be here in about a week.  I've bought from them before.  It doesn't take long.  Then I got 2 yards of oilcloth for a good price to use underneath the objects.  (Everything is a good price until you add in the ridiculous shipping costs and they're complaining the Post Office is going broke.  It's from something other than highway robbery.)  Then I looked for spoons.  I could always use one of mine, but how about if while I'm doing the shoot I have a choice.  So I had to order some baby spoons.  Well why not just go to the party outlet if I have to have yellow spoons.  Because these are both yellow and a pleasing shape.  We're talking art here.

I'm going into quite a bit of detail so you can see what can go into getting the right image for a cover.

Why didn't I just put the glass (yes, a glass is involved) down on a board and start shooting.  Well, yeah, I could but for me, that's not the point of this whole self-publishing exercise.  I can finally control everything.  The ideas I've been walking around with can finally be implemented.  So yeah, I want to do the best I can creating the image.

I don't know if this will work.  I may have to do petit fours or something anyway.  It's such a bad time of year to do stuff that will melt.

I ordered a book from an Amazon Marketplace seller last week and it arrived today.  So that's fantastic speed.  It was a little more than I like paying for used books but I wanted to read this one and it said it was in good condition.  It's nearly in near fine condition (that's a bookseller/collector term) so it was pretty much worth the money.  I would have gotten it as a download but it doesn't exist in digital.

So there's your business plan.  You pay the writer to write the book.  It doesn't sell.  It's remaindered.  Booksellers buy it for $1 then sell it for whatever.  Neither the publisher nor the writer makes a penny ever again.  And I'm happy to buy these things for 1 cent plus shipping.

Or you, the publisher, could be smart and get the damn things digitized (and I'm so sick of hearing how expensive that is to do.  You don't have the money?  Give a million bucks less for your next ridiculous advance and hire some computer tech students from NYU, CCNY, and Columbia, they'll get the job done.) and you have the hope of making some money forever.  All your backlist books could be priced at $4.99 or something.  And it's a potential bonanza.  But no.  They don't see the wisdom in that.

I'd like to see the day when every book in the Library of Congress is available in digital format