Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Jacob is Ready to Tell and Sell His Tails!

Yes, Jacob is now ready and willing to both tell and sell his Tails about our seven years of going ‘Back-to-the-Land’ on Cape Breton Island during the 60’s and 70’s (some of you could certainly recognize yourselves). We have Self-published!

And what a challenge and an adventure that has been. There seems to be as many places offering Self-Publishing services as there are offering Emergency Travel Medical Insurance - and the pricing is just as confusing. And that’s just the start of it. Even though some of them have book listings or catalogues, the author still needs to do all the Marketing.

Did you know that Amazon will list your books for nothing but charges between 55% and 75% commission on book sales? Chapters charges about 45%. The least I found was at a smaller book stores and is 40%. The clincher is that they won’t return the books, they rip off the front page and send that back. Horrors!

We ended up contracting with a printer in Calgary that seemed to offer what we thought needed. Blitz Printing not only prints the books, they have a public E-Catalogue called (phone #: 866-479-3248). They list “Jacob’s Tails . . .” in their catalogue; they warehouse the books; and they even take orders and ship out the book. They also accept credit cards which is a real bonus.

The easiest part was actually getting the E-book up and available. We found a service called ClickBank that takes credit cards and verifies them before the customer can download the book. (Click here to go to the web page)

The great thing is that all this can happen while we’re on the road.

Oh, yeah – we have a whole load of books coming with us as we move along. I’m hoping to pick up some book-signing opportunities, especially in Ontario and the Maritimes. So this is going to be a working (of sorts) trip but it should be kind of fun!

Oh, the Website is http://www.firstepbooks.com . Let us know what you think of it!!



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