Thom Sibbitt's Blog, page 3
March 17, 2013
Retreat
On a crane watching sojourn in Eustis, NE with a small group of performance collaborators. We found a little cabin/family home that was a cheap weekend staycation. It is still a bit chilly to spend to much time outside hunting for cranes, so we've spent most of the weekend hunkered down in this extremely comfortable b & b.
This feels so much like a writing retreat it has brought up the inevitable revaluation of the solo writing project. After stealing away hours of precious free time (and I don't even have kids!) in order the finish a project, the self promoting campaign begins and it requires weekly, if not daily upkeep. With my focus so sharply on getting this novel out there I haven't even begun to think about what my next project is going to be.
It seems like if I already had another bun in the oven, it would be easier to mitigate the stress of the promotional upkeep. Truth told, I have no idea how to be a writer. I know how to be a spread thin, workaholic non-specialist with 3-5 side projects in different states of simmer to boil at all times.
What a supreme luxury, time. And what a perfect word, retreat. With neither time nor retreat regularly at ones disposal, I think I have to fall back on structure. It is time to structure time for the next project. Back to the empty canvas, the blank manuscript. Having spent so long on my last project, I've no idea how to begin. I do trust the creative process implicitly though. It doesn't happen by itself though... Time to strike the iron. Or at least stoke the coals.
Economize promotional upkeep and focus the lion's share of your precious free time on the next endeavor.
(Next blog: get those user reviews, cross your fingers and pray to your god!)
This feels so much like a writing retreat it has brought up the inevitable revaluation of the solo writing project. After stealing away hours of precious free time (and I don't even have kids!) in order the finish a project, the self promoting campaign begins and it requires weekly, if not daily upkeep. With my focus so sharply on getting this novel out there I haven't even begun to think about what my next project is going to be.
It seems like if I already had another bun in the oven, it would be easier to mitigate the stress of the promotional upkeep. Truth told, I have no idea how to be a writer. I know how to be a spread thin, workaholic non-specialist with 3-5 side projects in different states of simmer to boil at all times.
What a supreme luxury, time. And what a perfect word, retreat. With neither time nor retreat regularly at ones disposal, I think I have to fall back on structure. It is time to structure time for the next project. Back to the empty canvas, the blank manuscript. Having spent so long on my last project, I've no idea how to begin. I do trust the creative process implicitly though. It doesn't happen by itself though... Time to strike the iron. Or at least stoke the coals.
Economize promotional upkeep and focus the lion's share of your precious free time on the next endeavor.
(Next blog: get those user reviews, cross your fingers and pray to your god!)
March 10, 2013
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: i play sexy voice
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: i play sexy voice: Audiobook tutorial. Okay, so your book is online, you have a website, your blogging tweeting posting sharing your literary heart out, you've entered a few b...
i play sexy voice
Okay, so your book is online, you have a website, your blogging tweeting posting sharing your literary heart out, you've entered a few book contests and now what?
Whew, that was easy right? Why not start a new project? Lets record this baby as an audiobook! After some research, here is what I found out. Of course, there are several companies who will accept your (entry level $3000) and take your book, hire a narrator, professionally mix it and publish your book for you on amazon and itunes.
Open Book Audio (http://openbookaudio.com) is a company that works directly with amazon and itunes, which kept coming up. If you have piles of money to throw at your project, well, then you are probably not reading my blog.
The indie route: Audio Book Publishers - Creation Exchange (http://www.acx.com), which is an amazon based platform will allow you to create an account, sign a contract and upload your content chapter by mp3 chapter. If you narrate your own book, then you receive a higher margin of the profits. It also looks like a sliding scale royalty arrangement. As is, the more books you sell, the higher your royalty is, up to 90%, which sounds dreamy. Fingers crossed!
I did borrow a nice mic from a friend and I am recording in my bathroom. As long as there is no tv background noise, I should be able to pound it out in 5 or 6 sessions. grrr tv:(
Also, I'm recording my audiobook using garageband. Reading it chapter by chapter, I can easily export the files as mp3, edit out little mistakes and put on my sexy voice.
It was recommended that I drink lots of water while recording and wear lip balm. I happen to be a pretty strong reader, so the recording is going smoothly. If you have a slurry, chewy voice, I'd suggest paying a friend in cart fulls of beer and spending a few sunday's knocking it out. You can play mixer and editor and they can play sexy voice.
Good luck with your project!
Whew, that was easy right? Why not start a new project? Lets record this baby as an audiobook! After some research, here is what I found out. Of course, there are several companies who will accept your (entry level $3000) and take your book, hire a narrator, professionally mix it and publish your book for you on amazon and itunes.
Open Book Audio (http://openbookaudio.com) is a company that works directly with amazon and itunes, which kept coming up. If you have piles of money to throw at your project, well, then you are probably not reading my blog.
The indie route: Audio Book Publishers - Creation Exchange (http://www.acx.com), which is an amazon based platform will allow you to create an account, sign a contract and upload your content chapter by mp3 chapter. If you narrate your own book, then you receive a higher margin of the profits. It also looks like a sliding scale royalty arrangement. As is, the more books you sell, the higher your royalty is, up to 90%, which sounds dreamy. Fingers crossed!
I did borrow a nice mic from a friend and I am recording in my bathroom. As long as there is no tv background noise, I should be able to pound it out in 5 or 6 sessions. grrr tv:(
Also, I'm recording my audiobook using garageband. Reading it chapter by chapter, I can easily export the files as mp3, edit out little mistakes and put on my sexy voice.
It was recommended that I drink lots of water while recording and wear lip balm. I happen to be a pretty strong reader, so the recording is going smoothly. If you have a slurry, chewy voice, I'd suggest paying a friend in cart fulls of beer and spending a few sunday's knocking it out. You can play mixer and editor and they can play sexy voice.
Good luck with your project!
March 3, 2013
DIY
A month has past since the release of my novel. Since then, I have printed up a slew of bookmarks for promotional material, attended a authors' fair at the Omaha public library, submitted the novel to four new-fiction literary contests and for the first few weeks at least, obsessively watched my amazon and iTunes sales.
The result of all this has been a little underwhelming. As much as I would like to say I had realistic expectations, there is always that hope that your project might have palpable and immediate success. The disappointment didn't last though:) if I have learned anything during my haphazard career, it is how to accept the delay of gratification.
Today, I am committing to laying out the next list of to-dos, the top of which is to stay on top of my blog and social media. I think the success you can expect from any creative project is mitigating largely by the momentum (cultural, social, personal) you can build around it.
I am blogging from the local Barnes & Noble bookstore. Knowing that my novel is available on nook and any one of these readers could find it and reading it, is an interesting thought. From a sales prospective however, my nook release has yielded zero sales. This store is full of people looking for an interesting read and my novel is available but invisible. In spite of the fact that my novel is available, I also know that if I laid out a few of my bookmarks, as soon as a staff member discovered them, they would be thrown away.
Meh, I just dropped a couple in the coffee shop. I feel like I just vandalized the place!
It is time to meditate on what my goals are and how I can achieve them, baby step by baby step.
I have to work locally first... And then broaden my view from there. Unless of course, someone else has a different strategy to offer:) The journey of an indie author continues!
The result of all this has been a little underwhelming. As much as I would like to say I had realistic expectations, there is always that hope that your project might have palpable and immediate success. The disappointment didn't last though:) if I have learned anything during my haphazard career, it is how to accept the delay of gratification.
Today, I am committing to laying out the next list of to-dos, the top of which is to stay on top of my blog and social media. I think the success you can expect from any creative project is mitigating largely by the momentum (cultural, social, personal) you can build around it.
I am blogging from the local Barnes & Noble bookstore. Knowing that my novel is available on nook and any one of these readers could find it and reading it, is an interesting thought. From a sales prospective however, my nook release has yielded zero sales. This store is full of people looking for an interesting read and my novel is available but invisible. In spite of the fact that my novel is available, I also know that if I laid out a few of my bookmarks, as soon as a staff member discovered them, they would be thrown away.
Meh, I just dropped a couple in the coffee shop. I feel like I just vandalized the place!
It is time to meditate on what my goals are and how I can achieve them, baby step by baby step.
I have to work locally first... And then broaden my view from there. Unless of course, someone else has a different strategy to offer:) The journey of an indie author continues!
January 26, 2013
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: The Hanged Man
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: The Hanged Man: I am not a huge new agey kind of guy but I do read tarot occasionally and I was kept up all last night with dreams about the book relea...
The Hanged Man
I am not a huge new agey kind of guy but I do read tarot occasionally and I was kept up all last night with dreams about the book release on Sunday. The thought of this image taken by my dear friend Noah J. Ehlert made me think of the hanged man. So I doctored it up a little and whattya know! Worth a share:)
The Hanged Man: Symbolism
letting gohaving an emotional release
accepting what is
surrendering to experience
ending the struggle
being vulnerable and open
giving up control
accepting God's willreversingturning the world around
changing your mind
overturning old priorities
seeing from a new angle
upending the old order
doing an about-facesuspending actionpausing to reflect
feeling outside of time
taking time to just be
giving up urgency
living in the moment
waiting for the best opportunitysacrificingbeing a martyr
renouncing a claim
putting self-interest aside
going one step back to go two steps forward
giving up for a higher cause
putting others first
January 20, 2013
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: Marketing... what? This magic wont sell itself?
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: Marketing... what? This magic wont sell itself?: For all the challenges of indie publishing, marketing, it would seem, is the biggest drag. How big is your network? How many facebook friend...
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: The Big Show!
The Turnpike by Thom Sibbitt: The Big Show!: iTunes and Amazon, Facebook, and theturnpikebythomsibbitt.com, press release, the OM center, cover prints and very modest marketing: The las...
The Big Show!
iTunes and Amazon, Facebook, and theturnpikebythomsibbitt.com, press release, the OM center, cover prints and very modest marketing: The last month has been a flurry of work to get the novel online, spread the word, put a polish on everything and brace myself.
Everything in my immediate power and budget (though I overdrew my checking account this month & and have some shiny new credit debt) has been done to put my novel out there. I am officially self published and will mark the occasion with a public reading and reception at the OM Center for Healing Arts on January 27th. A perfect venue to have a send off, after a pretty harrowing couple of months.
So what i have I learned? Self publishing is scary! It is very doable, if you are the kind of person who is not afraid to dive into something that is both completely foreign to you and completely over your head. It took 3 days to figure out to transfer the manuscript into ePub format. This format is used to layout books for e-readers. Now that it is formatted however, every online book distributor seems to use it. It took me all of 30 minutes to upload my book to Amazon and it was online the following day!
I am currently researching the Barnes & Noble process and it is quite a bit more corporate and lengthy but I should be able to make it available for Nook readers in the next few months.
What really remains, is marketing the book and selling 'units'. At 9.99 a copy, my goal is to break even in 6 months. I can tell right now however, that it isn't going to be easy.
It has become clear that the single most important tool I have at my disposal is my Facebook network. This is of course an embarrassing, frustrating, and obnoxious discovery. I made a page for the novel, and have about 150 likes, have reached about 1500 fb users with at least the title of my book and maybe 6 of my friends have reposted (pimped) my novel on their own page.
The result has been the sale a 20 books, which is awesome, but it does leave me a little short of reaching my 6 month goal and after all my family and friends who have e-readers buy my book what then? It feels a little weird, to be seriously considering FB advertising, but that seems like the first, easiest and cheapest way to get my title out past my network.
I have yet to get any local copy about the book release, but there is one week to go. Hoping there is a little buzz generated that I can build on... a press clip, a local review. Hmm. Going to puzzle over this for a bit. The journey of an indie publisher continues...!
Everything in my immediate power and budget (though I overdrew my checking account this month & and have some shiny new credit debt) has been done to put my novel out there. I am officially self published and will mark the occasion with a public reading and reception at the OM Center for Healing Arts on January 27th. A perfect venue to have a send off, after a pretty harrowing couple of months.
So what i have I learned? Self publishing is scary! It is very doable, if you are the kind of person who is not afraid to dive into something that is both completely foreign to you and completely over your head. It took 3 days to figure out to transfer the manuscript into ePub format. This format is used to layout books for e-readers. Now that it is formatted however, every online book distributor seems to use it. It took me all of 30 minutes to upload my book to Amazon and it was online the following day!
I am currently researching the Barnes & Noble process and it is quite a bit more corporate and lengthy but I should be able to make it available for Nook readers in the next few months.
What really remains, is marketing the book and selling 'units'. At 9.99 a copy, my goal is to break even in 6 months. I can tell right now however, that it isn't going to be easy.
It has become clear that the single most important tool I have at my disposal is my Facebook network. This is of course an embarrassing, frustrating, and obnoxious discovery. I made a page for the novel, and have about 150 likes, have reached about 1500 fb users with at least the title of my book and maybe 6 of my friends have reposted (pimped) my novel on their own page.
The result has been the sale a 20 books, which is awesome, but it does leave me a little short of reaching my 6 month goal and after all my family and friends who have e-readers buy my book what then? It feels a little weird, to be seriously considering FB advertising, but that seems like the first, easiest and cheapest way to get my title out past my network.
I have yet to get any local copy about the book release, but there is one week to go. Hoping there is a little buzz generated that I can build on... a press clip, a local review. Hmm. Going to puzzle over this for a bit. The journey of an indie publisher continues...!
January 5, 2013
Marketing... what? This magic wont sell itself?
For all the challenges of indie publishing, marketing, it would seem, is the biggest drag. How big is your network? How many facebook friends do you have? Linkedin? Tweeter?
Even if your clout is huge for a non-celbritiy civilian, and your book isn't half bad, that isn't gonna make it sell. If you have a couple of $10,000 notes hanging around, you could probably swing your own marketing campaign. Good luck and screw you if that is your disposable income:)
What's left is the ebook platforms: iPad, kindle, nook, kobo etc... Getting your book onto each of these platforms is the first step. In the blogs I have been reading, it seems like indie authors have managed only to get their book onto one of these, which doesn't make that much sense. Once you figure out how to upload to the first platform, why stop there?
Once you're on-air, ideally, your circle of friends will actually buy it, read it, rate and review it. It is very likely that your book will only be available by a direct search. There are about a hundred titles to browse through fiction on the itunes store. How does one get on that list? Presumably sales that you generate. I also think those user reviews are really important. If they feel it is worth promoting for their 30%, they will throw it on the list. knock on wood.
You have a website, you have a blog, you have a facebook etc... all with links directly to your product. It sure would be helpful, if somebody gave your book a review wouldn't it? This is where marketing is a drag. The publishing industry still has its hooks in this department. It is a closed shop, even if you work in the building. Reviews in local papers, online forums, literary magazines, major culture reporters... each of those tasks is really daunting without any connections, credible reputation, or leverage of any kind.
This is ultimately the power of the publishing industry. This power is why authors are willing to give up the ownership of their books to corporations. Mind-boggleing and frustrating.
Here in the adolescent age of online publishing there are, at the very least, alternatives. The world wide web. Intranets and kooky marketing schemes. YouTubes and kick starters! I am going to say, 'go it alone! Put it out there! Hustle! Get your swerve on! spread the good word!' Just continue to move at a pace you can sustain, but don't stop moving.
A friend of mine recently told me that A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 60 times before it was published. That is fortitude. And a significant amount of corporate idiocy.
Next blog: The Local release!!! Book reading and reception... how do you sign a copy of an ebook!
Even if your clout is huge for a non-celbritiy civilian, and your book isn't half bad, that isn't gonna make it sell. If you have a couple of $10,000 notes hanging around, you could probably swing your own marketing campaign. Good luck and screw you if that is your disposable income:)
What's left is the ebook platforms: iPad, kindle, nook, kobo etc... Getting your book onto each of these platforms is the first step. In the blogs I have been reading, it seems like indie authors have managed only to get their book onto one of these, which doesn't make that much sense. Once you figure out how to upload to the first platform, why stop there?
Once you're on-air, ideally, your circle of friends will actually buy it, read it, rate and review it. It is very likely that your book will only be available by a direct search. There are about a hundred titles to browse through fiction on the itunes store. How does one get on that list? Presumably sales that you generate. I also think those user reviews are really important. If they feel it is worth promoting for their 30%, they will throw it on the list. knock on wood.
You have a website, you have a blog, you have a facebook etc... all with links directly to your product. It sure would be helpful, if somebody gave your book a review wouldn't it? This is where marketing is a drag. The publishing industry still has its hooks in this department. It is a closed shop, even if you work in the building. Reviews in local papers, online forums, literary magazines, major culture reporters... each of those tasks is really daunting without any connections, credible reputation, or leverage of any kind.
This is ultimately the power of the publishing industry. This power is why authors are willing to give up the ownership of their books to corporations. Mind-boggleing and frustrating.
Here in the adolescent age of online publishing there are, at the very least, alternatives. The world wide web. Intranets and kooky marketing schemes. YouTubes and kick starters! I am going to say, 'go it alone! Put it out there! Hustle! Get your swerve on! spread the good word!' Just continue to move at a pace you can sustain, but don't stop moving.
A friend of mine recently told me that A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 60 times before it was published. That is fortitude. And a significant amount of corporate idiocy.
Next blog: The Local release!!! Book reading and reception... how do you sign a copy of an ebook!
