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Posts Tagged ‘publishing’

Weasel-On-A-Stick: My Recipe For Success

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Hey People!

This just appeared in CoastViews and I thought I’d share it with you folks, too. Even though if you are here, you already know about this part of my new evil plan to dominate the publishing world. But here this is anyway.

Hugs,  Janet

For eighteen years, I wrote novels, submitted them to large publishers and got… nothing. While most writers dream of The Big Publishing Contract (me included), the truth is writing is a crapshoot. You can write hundreds of novels during your life and never get published. But with the aid of the new advances in technology, anyone can now publish a book.

Which is a good thing and a bad thing. Good for those of us who can write, but don’t have million-plus readerships that attract the attention of the Big Guys. Bad because now Grandma is publishing collections of her favorite colonoscopy anecdotes and Jeb, the guy who works graveyard at 7-11, is publishing his belly-button-lint art books. Which, I suppose, for the sake of diversity isn’t a bad thing.

But for me, these advances in technology have been amazing. I am now selling books. Confessions of a Pink-Haired Lunatic (a collection of my columns) and How To Make Your Life Suck (a parody of self-help books) are available through my website; Lulu.com; Stage Road Shops in Pescadero; Coastside Books, Moon News, and Bay Books in Half Moon Bay; and Barnes and Noble in San Mateo. By the time you read this, my books will be available on Amazon.com and for special order at all bookstores.

I have been considering self-publishing for years. But in publishing circles, when you say you’re self-published, it’s like virtual toilet paper on the shoe. No one takes you seriously. Well, until you sell big numbers and then suddenly, they always loved your work and you’re a star and here’s your contract. (Think The Celestine Prophecy.)

But when I attended the Romance Writers of America conference last summer, I took a workshop for published authors called Shameless and Shocking Self-Promotion that completely changed my mind about my career. At the time, I assumed my latest sci-fi novel, Tastes Like Chicken, would sell to a publisher faster than photos of Brad Pitt naked (ahhh, denial) and I wanted to find out what my next step would be. What an eye-opener that seminar was!

When you get your first publishing contract for fiction, you get an average advance of around five grand (varies WIDELY from $300 to double digits). Basically, the large publishers buy bunches of these first books and throw them out there to bookstores and see what happens, like throwing cooked spaghetti on a wall to see if it sticks. If you sell, you get another book contract, if you don’t… you go back to the end of the line and hope someday you get another shot.

When a publisher spends five grand on a book, they do no promotion for you. Which dollar-wise makes sense. Like they’re gonna spend three grand on an ad in Romantic Times for a book they paid five grand for? So basically, you have to spend your own cash and energy and time promoting your work.

The agent who taught the workshop, Jessica Faust of Bookends, LLC, said authors need to “think outside the box” and utilize any and all of our special talents to promote our work. At this point, I realized that I could do a lot for myself while I was waiting for The Big Contract. And so began my journey.

So far, I’ve self-published two books, had three websites built (www.janetperiat.com is one), started two blogs and now, I am working on the promotion of my projects (yes, this article is part of my evil plan to dominate the publishing world, one reader at a time).

For self-publishing, I chose Lulu.com, basically because the service was free and relatively easy to use. Lulu.com along with several other Publishing-On-Demand companies utilize a new technology: a sophisticated printing machine that spits out one finished book at a time, cover and all. On Lulu, you upload the text of your book, choose a cover (the free ones are pretty limited, but doing your own is as simple as taking a photo and uploading it) and whammo, you are published and can buy/sell your books. While the service is free, we paid a hundred bucks per book for distribution so my books would be available on Amazon.com and for special order at all bookstores.

You have probably wondered what Weasel-on-a-Stick has to do with any of this. Well, Weasel-on-a-Stick.com is one of the websites I had built. WOAS is a fictional, intergalactic fast-food restaurant featured in my latest sci-fi novel, Tastes Like Chicken. While WOAS almost a throwaway in the book, the name gave Frank and I the giggles, so I decided to use WOAS as a promotional tool to sell Chicken. I hired cartoonist Randy Cleveland to do the logo and musician Glenn MacPherson to do the jingle.

Frank put the logo on CaféPress.com (an online t-shirt and promotional schwag printing shop—you upload images, people buy the stuff and you get a small cut of the proceeds) and put up the one-page website. So now, at www.weasel-on-a-stick.com, you can read an excerpt of the book, buy schwag and hear the jingle. All to promote a book I haven’t quite finished yet… Yes, I got the weasel ahead of the cart, but hey, at least I’m selling some t-shirts. I’ll be self-publishing the book soon while also promoting it to large publishers.

Coming up this summer, I’ll be using my performance background and starting a new venture: podcasting. Podcasts are videos or radio-type broadcasts you upload to the Internet, like YouTube videos. I’m going to perform some stand-up routines, film them and upload them to YouTube and my website/blog thingy. In September, I’ll be taking some of this material and performing it live in Pescadero at Harley Farms for a special event to promote my books.

While I’m not a household name and I don’t have a huge publishing contract (yet), I feel so good about myself, I can’t tell you. Actual movement in my career other than collecting rejection letters! And I have made Weasel-Wear available to the globe at large! Such worthy endeavors!

So check out my websites and listen to the Weasel jingle. If you’re feeling generous, please visit your local bookstore and pick up a copy of one or both of my books. The bookstores and my mortgage company would greatly appreciate it.

©2008, Janet Periat

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