First Word

Today's topic: how do I price my book ? The question of price doesn't always come up until the end of the publishing process. It's an important question. If your goal is to make money, then price becomes an even greater imperative. I do know many authors whose goal isn't even about money. They want as many readers to be exposed to their books as possible. When an author isn't concerned about how much money he/she is going to make then price becomes less important. However, here are some important facts to know when it comes to pricing.   Suggested retail price is your profit margin no matter what Amazon does to mark down or put the book on sale . Authors sometimes get confused. Amazon will put their books on sale, and they will protest. They believe the sale price will affect their profits. The sale price on Amazon will not matter (this is for print books only). Amazon pays out based on suggested retail price.   Print books get undercut by resel...

  Available for Sale on Amazon in print and Kindle. Also on sale in Nook and Apple iBook versions. 5 Kale soon returned to Arizona for more on-set work. Other staffers from the office went with him so the place was quiet. I didn’t mind. I was able to get a lot of work done, and believe me, the pile of notes for rewrites had only grown. I’d heard, though, that they were actively casting the movie and that Johnny, the hot man I’d met in the hallway, had won the Drew part. As I rewrote Drew’s scenes, I wondered if he would see the movie. It occurred to me as I wrote the female lead that her words might make him feel the least bit repentant, but somehow I doubted it since Drew never expressed remorse. I was staring out my office window thinking about this when I heard a voice come from behind me. “ Are you busy?” I turned around to find Monica standing in the doorway, which surprised me since she had gone with Kale to Arizona and was obviously...

Unless you're a publisher you might give the eBook revolution no more consideration than you do the iTunes revolution. It's happening, and you love your eBook reader -- it's compact, carries thousands of books in your purse or briefcase, and it's really fun to play with. As a publisher, our focus is to shift and change with the business model. While "old-schoolers" continue to embrace their paper tomes, eBook readers are buying the electronic versions in droves. In the last six months, our company 3L Publishing has seen the most dramatic shift in interest when it comes to eBook sales vs. print. This change was long ago predicted to escalate by 2015, and so goes the trend. Our last top-selling book sold one print to nine eBooks. Whereas just last summer our top-selling book sold more like every 4 out of 5 eBooks. The eBook revolution isn't going to slow. Diminishing floor space in Barnes and Noble, increasing restrictions in national distribution system...

Great article on book marketing and social media ( click here ). I don't know how many conversations I've had with clients about consumer behavior, but this article amplifies what I've said. We live in an unpredictable, crazy culture that loved unimportant things like pet rocks, Chia pets, clappers, and a host of funny as-seen-on-TV gadgets that sometimes but most of the time don't work. If I had a nickel for every time an author asks me, "Is this best-seller material?" I would be richer than Bill Gates. I know what I like to read. I know what my friends like to read. I know what people are generally reading. But asking me if you've got the next Harry Potter or fan fiction like 50 Shades of Grey is basically asking me to call the next pet rock. I mean who knew that "mommy porn" and S&M would set American women into a dither or excitement. I was pretty surprised when some of my women friends gushed their love for this book. So in the abo...

Today is royalty payment day. As I'm collecting information from the sales channels and most specifically Apple iTunes Connect I want to write Apple this letter: Dear iTunes Connect, Why? Sincerely, Michelle Why? is a very simple and direct question to ask about their stupid sales and tracking system. Unlike Nook or Kindle, the geniuses over at Apple seem to think they're more clever than the rest of us. They created a sales reporting system that doesn't show what was sold and when! It's strictly a total. Nothing tracks back to the actual product sold and when. The number of products (iBooks) sold is completely disconnected and you can't tell if payment has been remitted either. If I want to know the payment remittance I have to check my business account. I'm hoping my complaints somehow receive the light of day and either A. someone changes the system or B. I'm the one who just doesn't know where the "easy" reporting system is located...

Keep it Simple Stupid... how many times did I hear that in high school? We'll distill this down to keep it simple, period. I'm not a fan of calling anyone stupid -- although some moments warrant the descriptor or moniker depends on how you use the name. So here is my real point. I've been learning our back-end systems at 3L Publishing , which includes the remittance functions for our vendors. Money is important after all. So in my intrepid exploration of the systems, I have constantly run into Apple-related (I won't be kind because honestly they earned it) stupidity. I am specifically talking about their two silos, which should be one system (take a hint from Kindle): iTunes Connect and iTunes Producer. First, let me express my disappointment that any Apple-related product be this disconnected and "dysfunctional". I'm a Mac diehard since the Mac resembled an over-sized lunchbox turned upright on my desk. I use all Apple products. I'm a fan. I am NOT...

With so many self-publishing choices, many authors confuse something very important: the ability to publish OR the ability to publish it RIGHT . Many different "distribution mechanisms" like Create Space enable authors to publish on the cheap (and I use the word "publish" loosely since Create Space is not a publisher but a "publishing tool"). Authors write the book and find the tool (they call the tool their publisher, which again it is not a publisher), and they call their books published. They also believe they got such a deal, and this cheap publishing tool enabled it. The book might sell to friends and family -- and that's all the audience it will ever find. It wasn't even done professionally. It's often not professionally edited (the author is a professional writer and their English teacher friend proofed it). They didn't have a graphic designer design it, they hit "format" in Word and it is "formatted" and not d...

It's freaky Friday or maybe "freakin'" Friday. I was awakened to two different things -- one positive, one negative. The negative, my kitten I have renamed "Evil" who yowled so loud you would think he was about to die. The positive:  Midwest Book Review of 3L book Vengeance is Now : People find their ways to live life all along the way. "Vengeance is Now" is a novel from Scott D. Roberts as he tells the story of Tate Halloway, a man with a crumbling life and finds himsel f accused of many a life along the way. With dark humor, a vague sexiness, and plenty of thrills to keep readers glued to the page, "Vengeance is Now" is a choice addition to contemporary thriller collections.  Buy your copy on Amazon in print or Kindle or go to the 3L Publishing website and buy the printed version today: http://3lpublishing.flyingcart.com/?p=detail&pid=42&cat_id=0

The publishing industry has been in rapid change for the last 10 years. With the advent of easier publishing methods and now the rise of eBooks, many authors (even famous ones) are bypassing the traditional publishing method that has become driven by big name celebrities and well-known authors to bother to give the new and emerging authors a shot. This is why companies like 3L Publishing have risen to open new doors and create opportunities for new authors to have a way to publish. So, what is a hybrid publisher? A hybrid publisher offers all of the services of a traditional publisher only authors pay to have their books published in exchange for higher royalties. Traditional publishers typically offer royalties that range from 10-12 percent. Here at 3L Publishing, we offer royalty rates that range from 35-70 percent. Additionally 3L Publishing selects roughly two to three titles a year to publish traditionally, which means we not only pay advances, but also we pay the entire freig...

California Girl Chronicles is now available in eBook, including Kindle, Nook and iBook. If you enjoy this excerpt and would like a copy, go to Amazon and download the eBook or you can buy the printed copy. Below is an excerpt from Brea and the City of Plastic. Our heroine is demoralized and forced to work in a bikini shop ... I had pounded the pavement for a professional job at a magazine or newspaper, but with the recession I knew I would have to take a temporary job. I had to make ends meet and get out of the apartment with Lance. This led to an interview with a bikini boutique in Santa Monica, called Teenie’s Bikinis. I used GPS and found myself walking into the door of a store no wider than a hallway with multi- and bright-colored bikinis loaded up and down all the walls clear up to the ceiling. The register was in the very back of the store. I spotted a girl with orange hair, red-framed glasses that clashed with her orange hair, and a mouthful of blue bubblegum. She smiled s...

We're diving in and getting the book moving fast with the trajectory of a rocket for sure. First up, on November 15, I will be on KFBK with my favorite local radio personal Kitty O'Neal discussing California Girl Chronicles evolution from a book that has just barely been released to a TV series that we are pitching and working with producers and others to develop. A review is also set to go in the San Francisco and Sacramento Book Review in December. We've also got books out to dozens of national media outlets including GQ , Maxim , Allure and many others. We are now in the follow-up stage with these writers to get them to post a review by the time the book releases on the national scene to the bookstores in January. You can now get a copy on Amazon, and it's available for Kindle, Nook and iBook. Now since it's Saturday, I want to have a little fun and share what I'm enjoying most about this process. Creating fans of the book! When I was out at an event the...

The one thing that my brother's passing this year did was get me to stop for a second. He was only 18 months older than me, and now he's gone. I started really getting the sense about mortality and the horizon of my life. It made me re-evaluate a few things. Life's short, and I want regret-free living. I already confronted part one of my reinvention process. I stopped working the corporate assembly line that I hated so much. So this next phase of confronting how much time is left and how do I want to spend that time. I know one thing: I don't want to put my life in cruise control till the end. A friend of mine said her husband had done that -- hit the button and took the foot off the gas. It's just cruise to retirement -- that sounds just depressing. I'm not cruising right into my grave -- no thank you. It's now or never is how I look at it. Now or never to live out every single dream. You can't keep putting it off. I talk to so many writers who want t...

My new novel California Girl Chronicles arrived yesterday via UPS. A few comments about it. First, I love our printer, who I am not going to disclose for competitive purposes. Every single order they surprise me. What you can't see in that picture to the left is that beneath the jacket sleeve, they embossed the hard cover on front and back. It's done in gold emboss and looks really nice. The quality of the paper on all fronts is excellent. The book turned out BETTER than I anticipated. Big kudos. But that said, 3L Publishing strives for excellence on all fronts. We all work with the best of the best. Every vendor we work with we vet ahead of time to ensure what they produce on behalf of our clients will not just be satisfactory but impressive. With the edition of premiere distributor Bakers and Taylor , we are poised to move aggressively into a very successful distribution model into bookstores. Believe me when I say that it was an impressive feat for us to gain acceptance wit...

I don't know what exactly I was expecting. The eBook market flipped almost six months ago. I see people reading books on their various readers when I'm in airports. I guess now that I think about it, more people are reading off readers these days than print books. So, when our first book A Feast at the Beach by William Widmaier came off the eBook "assembly line," I have to be honest. I really didn't think we were going to do many sales. I was following the obvious market trends that were stupid to ignore, but at the same time, I was just making sure we were doing the right things and doing eBooks, period. After the book got reviewed on Culinate , I was happy to see the review, of course, but didn't consider that it might trigger the first set of eBook sales. It did and the ranking shot immediately down to #76 while the print version took a little while to catch. I'm fascinated to see how many eBooks will sell vs. print copies. The market trending suggest,...

The whole eBook publishing model is pretty exciting in many ways. First and foremost, the return on investment for the publishers and authors is about 10 times greater than with print. You're also preserving some trees (for you environmentalists out there). Setting up the eBook division took some effort. For those of you who assume it's no problem and anyone can get any eBook account with the likes of Apple and the iBook, think again. Apple does not allow every publisher to set up an iBook account. In fact, it takes a lot scrutiny to determine whether or not you're qualified as a vendor and a mound of paperwork (thank you Malia). If you have a new or emerging publisher who says that they can provide iBook access, you should probably make sure they do. It's not an open free-for-all. The industry is trying to discourage any Tom, Diane and Harry from setting up an amateur publishing shop and releasing a slew of bad titles. Apple, in particular, has a reputation to uphold. ...