Pam Bonsper's Blog, page 4

What a Wonderful Gift: Reading a Book to Your Child

     A great way to read to your child: Read the story first and then let them read it back to you!

November is Children’s Book Month

      This is what this month is all about…reading to your child or your grandchild or niece or nephew or your neighbor’s child. If you look at the expressions of this precious child’s face, you will see the value of reading books to children. They will be  better for it. (And so will you!)

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The Big Brass Band will be free this week-end!

October 25th and 26th, I will be promoting the Kindle version of my book and will be offering it free of charge through Amazon. Just go to: https://amazon.com/The-Big-Brass-Band...

Share the info with all your friends as I’d like to give away as many as I can!!  And after you read it, if you could write a quick review, I would appreciate it!

The “Beat Lilly” Contest Results

 Sapo the famous frog from Brazil croaked out the results of the “Beat Lilly” Contest today. Here are the lucky winners…Congratulations and Thank You all for submitting your photos!

Now Available as an EBook

The Big Brass Band is now available from Amazon Kindle. I just downloaded it unto my computer, my tablet and phone. It was hard figuring out how to do it, but now that’s it’s done, I’ve forgotten all the birthing pains. I had help from my techie magician so that helped. Check the Kindle version out and let me know what you think! I’ll try to get a link to it posted on here, but for now I just wanted to announce the fact that it’s available. And it can be purchased and downloaded in other countries. So glad about that!!!

I’m selecting the judges for the “Beat Lilly” contest

This will be the Master Judge for the “Beat Lilly” contest. You can count on him to be impartial!!

Marketing Local Retailers

For the past six weeks, I’ve been following the advice of the marketing gurus. I have a website, I’ve done lots of social networking, I have a FB page and I’ve been reading all kinds of books for other authors and writing reviews. I even did an internet Give-Away with Goodreads.

Today was a big day. I finally started doing the local marketing!  I left pretty early in the morning, took a bunch of books with me and hit the road. I had a list of places I wanted to go: four book stores and three music stores. I didn’t have appointments with anyone–just thought I’d try cold calls.

The first store was a doozer. The owner of the music store saw me right away but was very honest about selling my book in his store. It wouldn’t work due to the fact that Amazon was selling it for such a discount. I’ve been wondering why Amazon does this–discounts your book without asking. It makes it hard when your sell sheet says $6.99 and someone can purchase it from Amazon for $4.62. I could see his point. For me to make any money I would have to sell him my book for $5.00. And he would sell it for $10.00–quite a bit more than Amazon’s discounted price. If anyone reads this blog and knows Amazon’s policy, I would love to understand how they can justify pricing the book however they want.

I went to a book store next and was already feeling like retail stores were just not going to be interested. However, the very nice man liked my book and said they could take one and display it and see if there was any interest and if there was, he’d get more. I told him the list price and he said he could charge whatever he wanted. He thought $7.99 would be good. I’d get half. Which means I’d get $4.00. That doesn’t make  lot of sense since I have to pay $4.62 to order my books from Amazon myself. You might wonder why I wouldn’t order them from Createspace, but I would have to pay $3.65 plus shipping and it comes out to about the same. But at least it would get exposure, I thought, and so I left one with him.

I’ve had this unsettling thought ever since I read the fine print about how much I would get for each book. I was under the impression (false one) that I would get the difference between my Createspace price and the list price with Amazon. When I realized how very small the royalty was, I shivered in my boots, but I had to move forward. So here I was pounding the pavement.

My next stop was another book store and she took three books, also on consignment. And then a music store where a stern-faced clerk told me the instruments in my book were all wrong and the children were holding them incorrectly. She said no music stores would want the book. I wanted to tell her how wrong she was, since feedback from some many parents, teachers, etc. has been so positive. She said the owner would feel the same way and to come back and show her the book. I think I’ll pass.

The next store was a music store and the nice lady owner wanted the rest of the books in my bag. Oh, sweet revenge! I didn’t tell her about her competitor, but I smiled to myself. This music store owner didn’t seem to mind that the instruments were in an artistically creative style and that in children’s books a zebra even gets to be purple.

So I guess the moral of today’s story is: you will get all kinds of reactions and some will want to do business with you and others will not. It’s not going to make you a lot of money selling this way, but it will get your book out there. I’ll keep you posted on my next local marketing target which will be schools. So stay tuned. and welcome to the world of self-publishing!

Side Effects

There are definitely side effects to my publishing project.  I’ve joined groups in various social media sites and find myself  getting to know and being fascinated with so many people writing and publishing their own books. Some of the discussions within the groups have not only been beneficial as far as getting writing and marketing tips, but fun and inspirational as well.

And I am also reading all kinds of books and writing reviews for them. Just within the last few days I have read a sci-fi novelette about an attack in galactic space (a book I never would have chosen to read), a very dense and academically fascinating book about the psychological effects of betrayal, a children’s book about nutrition mixed with an adventure with a giant,  and memoirs of a Marine in Vietnam.

Reading and writing do go hand-in-hand. I know reading makes me a better writer. But now I am being exposed to and beginning to understand the different genres. It’s a nice side effect, I must say.

 

Other Children’s Books I Recommend

A delightful story with beautiful original illustrations (by the author) that make the barnyard animals come alive. I highly recommend this book for Story Time in schools.