I need advise on self-publishing and selling a book......

[GumboYaYa]

check out his website: www.whenidreamtooslow.com

It describes the book we are publishing and tells a little about the author, a dear friend of mine.

We built the website to promote the book and purchased a banner ad on the Utne Reader website that ran for two months. We had very little success with the ad.

The book is going to be used as the focus of a course to be offered at the University of North Texas, so we hope that will help get it into the public some more.

The author has just started a blog, accessible from his website, and we hope to generate some interest in the book from the blog. He also is starting to do interviews on local radio.

Do you guys have any ideas on other ways to go about promoting and selling a book like this?

[oneighty]

1. My wife

went to an online publisher. Four or five hundred dollars and several years later nothing has been sold.

IMHO it is a waste of money. I expect a vanity publisher would be as bad and certainly more expensive.

I go to a local printing house to have my writings edited and put into book form. But I write just because I want to. Putting it into print is an ego thing.

There are some on line printers that will do a good job printing your 'completed work' and depending on quantity and binding type are quite reasonable in price.

180

[GumboYaYa]

2. He already had 1,000 hard covers printed.

It cost about $4.00 a book. He knows he will need at least that many for the course being taught on the book and sales to people who have bought his other books.

He has had success going through traditional publishing houses with prior books, but doesn't want to do that with this one. We are exploring ways to generate more sales and bring attention to the work without having to go the traditional publishing route. It is a difficult battle.

[petgoat]

3. Place it on Amazon

http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/announcement-list-zshops/slp/102-0715416-6612908

You could try selling it on ebay (for a fixed price).

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. I have used Lulu

and by the way, as a game designer, I automatically fall into SMALL print... and independent house

The problem you have is what ails the gaming industry, full of vanity houses as it were.. we don't get enough respect... what you are doing seems to be teh way to go, but also consider aproaching YOUR LOCAL SMALL INDEPENDENT bookstores, and buying an ISBN that will place it in books in print and on Amazon.

[rickrok66]

5. Marketing your book

Have you considered starting:

A Yahoo Group

An MSN Group

A profile on MySpace.com

All are free and can be used to reach lots of people, show pics and excerpts of your book, plus place links,

Good luck,

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. Yes as well as the ever so popular actual marketing

in gaming magazinses such as ... Dungeon...

It is a game book and my biggest hurdle is actually entering national distribution. For some reason the distributors over the last five yaers have been very reluctant to take on new product, so at this point doing the lets aproach game store and beg...

(Yes the economy is quite weak and these ARE luxury items... you'd also think that game stores would emophazie non D20 product since you can find oodles of it at major chians, but again you have the if it is not d20 it ain't any good)

Will be putting a banner add for bartcop as well as The miniatures page... appropo places

[GumboYaYa]

8. It is the nature of distribution of art everywhere.

To get any attention and break through the clutter, marketing and promotion from distribution companies makes a giant difference. Shelf space or whatever other means of distibution is dominated by the big names (in my case its movie screens). Retailers have to do that because they will get cut-off from the most popular products, whatever it may be.

I am trying to get a film I made in to distribution right now. It is the same story, different industry.

[GumboYaYa]

6. We have an ISBN number.

We are going to smaller independent bookstores. They will give you some shelf space, but even there, you have to guaranty sales.

The author is also going to do some presentations at Unitarial churches; they have been very receptive to the book.

It is just hard to get people to take notice without some marketing dollars to promote a book.