How we wrote a book.
I get questions all the time about how we self-published the book and how we wrote it in general so I thought I would put our story on here. I also received some questions from someone today so I put my answers in under her questions. Tawra
I self-published first. That means I did all the typesetting, editing, designing the cover etc. on my own. It also means I put up the money to pay for the books. We took out a low interest low on our credit cards for 3% interest since we had good credit. $9,000 for the 1st printing of 2500 books. (The 3rd printing was 30K for 11,000 books)
It's been 6 years since it came out and we still haven't seen any income from it. It pays for it's self but we haven't made any money yet. I say all that first so you know what it is involved if you self publish. If you are looking to make a quick (less than 4 years) income self publishing probably isn't the route to go.
I got a publisher to take it over 2 and a half years ago and the new edition just came out last Feb. It was supposed to be out Aug. 2003 but they have been messing around and just not getting it done. The publisher we chose was a really bad move on our part! (more about that later)
Basically if you want a publisher to do it and not self publish you have to send a letter to each publisher and just ask them to look at your idea. You can get a lot of ideas from the books 1001 ways to market your book by John Kramer and How to Jump Start Your book Sales. I think their last name is Ross.
http://www.bookmarket.com/ This is John Kramer's website and he used to have some good info on finding a publisher. I haven't been there for a while but I think it's still on there. If you do get a publisher they pay 10% of they price they sell it for which is 60% off to bookstores. So for the book that will be $20 in the store I will get about $ .80. Also if they get a "special" deal with places like Sams or the school book clubs then you get about .30 for each book. You have to spend the money to get publicity and pay for your plane tickets etc. for TV appearances if that is something you are thinking of doing.
The publisher paid to have the book re-designed. Then they paid for the first trial run of 5,000 books. A very large bookseller, Books Are Fun, wanted to do a trial run of 500. They are a huge company that sells to schools. Books Are Fun just ordered 103,000 copies 2 weeks ago. This sounds like a great deal but.....
Books Are Fun will pay for the printing and give my publisher 70 cents a book which I get 33% or 23 cents for each book. Even though it sounds like a great deal of books by the time we pay off the remaining books in our garage, 10K, and split the remaining money (14K) with my mom, my co-author, then we will have made about 7K or $800 a year for the last 8 years worth of work each. That's the bad news.
The good news is that I have a re-order form in the back and it is very good advertising so we should get re-orders from this. There is a possibility that Books Are Fun will order more so we could sell a lot more books over the 103,000 they already purchased.
Anyway, I am hoping this will help us turn the corner so we can actually make some money doing this. You will have to be patient. Even having "proven" myself that I can get a lot of media attention the publishers still rejected me so if you really believe in your idea then just keep sending them letters.
It is a lot of work, a full time job. I don't have the time or the energy (I have 3 kids, CFS and FM) so I can't sell them like I would like to. (Which is why we haven't made a profit yet.) I can't concentrate on it for any time at all at the moment. Unfortunately books just don't sell themselves. You have to spend a lot of time and money trying to get interviews and sending out free copies to the media. It's like any other small business it usually takes 3-5 years to start making money at it.
The one piece of advice someone gave me when I asked them what you asked me is "writing the book is easy. It's selling them that's the hard part." That has turned out to be the truth, so I give that advice myself now.
I don't do all the work myself. My mom helps me write and edit. My husband does all the computer work, editing, proofreading, bookkeeping and my heavy lifter for the post office. My brother draws all the art work. So there is a lot of work that is involved.
Now for the additional questions:
Tawra, Thanks so much for all that information. Very enlightening. I'm just the most curious (nosey) person in the world. I was interested in things like, were you and your Mom driving in the car one day and one of you said, "Hey, we've got all these recipes, and experience with scraping by. Let's write a book!"
Well, yes, sort of. I read the Tightwad Gazette years before around 1992 and thought "wow, we do that and even more". At the time I had no intention of writing a book. I went to school for horticulture and all I wanted to do was open my own greenhouse and herb farm.
I re-read the Tightwad Gazette when I was pregnant with my first baby in 1997. In there she said how everyone kept asking her to write a tightwad cookbook but she hated to cook and it would be too much work to do a good job. That is when I said "I could do that!"
I made the announcement to Mom and Mike that day and they both laughed and said "Ok". (Their enthusiasm was under whelming!) I was one of the worse cooks you had ever seen. I burned everything! Ok, I confess there some days I still do! I figured if I could learn how to do it then others could do it too! Mike confessed a few months ago that if he would have known then what he knows now he would have told me "no way!". He said he was just "being supportive" and didn't think I would really do it! LOL
From the time I came up with the idea and started writing until we got the book back from the printer was 2 babies and 2 years later.
Did you two sit at the table night after night hammering out the book?
Well, sort of. I started writing and Mom would call or come over (she lived across the street at the time) and say "you need to be sure and tell them this......." . That's why in the front of the book I say I was the typist. :-)
There were several times I printed it all out and we would sit and edit it and add more stuff.
How long did it take you to gather all the material?
50 years. We used several recipes from my grandmother and great-grandmother along with mine and mom's recipes and tips. It took about 2 years to get them all together in a book.
What was the thing that lit the fire under you to continue to pursue writing when road blocks came up.
I feel that this is a true calling from God for me to help others. I wouldn't still be doing it if I didn't have constant confirmation from Him that this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
While we were writing it I was just going to quit one night because it was so hard doing it all ourselves. (Mike was working 100 miles from home and only home on the weekends and I had 2 kids 6 months and 20 months plus CFS.) I received a Word from Him to keep going so I did and we got it done.
MANY times since then I have thought about quitting. Whenever I do I pray and ask if I am supposed to stop and EVERY TIME I get a verse from the Bible that tells me to keep going on and He will do the work I can't.
The time before last that I thought of quitting about 2 months ago (this was before the publisher got the order for 103,000 books) and I asked if I should keep going he gave me the verse "if you will persevere I will reward you".
The next day in the mail came a poster that said "Never Give Up" with a person hanging onto the side of a mountain at the top. I knew that I was supposed to keep going. That poster is now hanging on our office door!
The last time I wanted to quit (about 3 weeks ago), I found out some really stupid mistakes I made in the contract with my publisher and some not so great things about them. I was talking to the lawyer until 10 that night.
After I got off the phone I just started bawling and told Mike "I am so sorry I got us into this mess. We have 6,000 books sitting in the garage that we can't sell, working hard and long hours on this without seeing any money from it." He finally got me calmed down and we were able to sleep that night.
That next morning I was wondering again if I should keep going on and I sat down to do my Bible study and the very first verse was
Psl 37:7-9
7 "Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret-it leads only to evil.
9 For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.
I knew again that I was supposed to just be still and wait. 6 hours later we got the phone call from the publisher that they got the order for 103,000 books.
Knowing what you, and your Mom did behind the scenes is more what I'm wondering. Personal experiences. Do either of you have a degree in writing?
No mom was a SAHM and I went to tech school for horticulture. I just felt like writing a book, did it and dragged the rest of the family right in along behind me! LOL
How did you find out exactly how to construct a professional looking book?
We looked at how other books looked, found some we liked and then just tried to make it look like that but our own style.
The book has had 3 different covers now. Basically we just learned as we went.
Thanks so much for elaborating on the ins and outs of self publishing, and signing with a publisher. Anne
I am happy to share our experiences. If nothing else just so people understand that it isn't even close to being as easy as it sounds. That even if Oprah does call, which they did call us, it doesn't mean you will get on and sell thousands of books. (They said our story was great but that people wouldn't want to do what we did to get out of debt.) Looking back we see that if I would have gotten on the show we wouldn't have been able to handle to orders or the work load it would have caused.
Having said all that. If God wasn't in all of this, we would be nowhere today. It's only through Him that we could have done this because I had no clue, not to mention I am horrible with grammer and still burn things!! LOL
Tawra
I self-published first. That means I did all the typesetting, editing, designing the cover etc. on my own. It also means I put up the money to pay for the books. We took out a low interest low on our credit cards for 3% interest since we had good credit. $9,000 for the 1st printing of 2500 books. (The 3rd printing was 30K for 11,000 books)
It's been 6 years since it came out and we still haven't seen any income from it. It pays for it's self but we haven't made any money yet. I say all that first so you know what it is involved if you self publish. If you are looking to make a quick (less than 4 years) income self publishing probably isn't the route to go.
I got a publisher to take it over 2 and a half years ago and the new edition just came out last Feb. It was supposed to be out Aug. 2003 but they have been messing around and just not getting it done. The publisher we chose was a really bad move on our part! (more about that later)
Basically if you want a publisher to do it and not self publish you have to send a letter to each publisher and just ask them to look at your idea. You can get a lot of ideas from the books 1001 ways to market your book by John Kramer and How to Jump Start Your book Sales. I think their last name is Ross.
http://www.bookmarket.com/ This is John Kramer's website and he used to have some good info on finding a publisher. I haven't been there for a while but I think it's still on there. If you do get a publisher they pay 10% of they price they sell it for which is 60% off to bookstores. So for the book that will be $20 in the store I will get about $ .80. Also if they get a "special" deal with places like Sams or the school book clubs then you get about .30 for each book. You have to spend the money to get publicity and pay for your plane tickets etc. for TV appearances if that is something you are thinking of doing.
The publisher paid to have the book re-designed. Then they paid for the first trial run of 5,000 books. A very large bookseller, Books Are Fun, wanted to do a trial run of 500. They are a huge company that sells to schools. Books Are Fun just ordered 103,000 copies 2 weeks ago. This sounds like a great deal but.....
Books Are Fun will pay for the printing and give my publisher 70 cents a book which I get 33% or 23 cents for each book. Even though it sounds like a great deal of books by the time we pay off the remaining books in our garage, 10K, and split the remaining money (14K) with my mom, my co-author, then we will have made about 7K or $800 a year for the last 8 years worth of work each. That's the bad news.
The good news is that I have a re-order form in the back and it is very good advertising so we should get re-orders from this. There is a possibility that Books Are Fun will order more so we could sell a lot more books over the 103,000 they already purchased.
Anyway, I am hoping this will help us turn the corner so we can actually make some money doing this. You will have to be patient. Even having "proven" myself that I can get a lot of media attention the publishers still rejected me so if you really believe in your idea then just keep sending them letters.
It is a lot of work, a full time job. I don't have the time or the energy (I have 3 kids, CFS and FM) so I can't sell them like I would like to. (Which is why we haven't made a profit yet.) I can't concentrate on it for any time at all at the moment. Unfortunately books just don't sell themselves. You have to spend a lot of time and money trying to get interviews and sending out free copies to the media. It's like any other small business it usually takes 3-5 years to start making money at it.
The one piece of advice someone gave me when I asked them what you asked me is "writing the book is easy. It's selling them that's the hard part." That has turned out to be the truth, so I give that advice myself now.
I don't do all the work myself. My mom helps me write and edit. My husband does all the computer work, editing, proofreading, bookkeeping and my heavy lifter for the post office. My brother draws all the art work. So there is a lot of work that is involved.
Now for the additional questions:
Tawra, Thanks so much for all that information. Very enlightening. I'm just the most curious (nosey) person in the world. I was interested in things like, were you and your Mom driving in the car one day and one of you said, "Hey, we've got all these recipes, and experience with scraping by. Let's write a book!"
Well, yes, sort of. I read the Tightwad Gazette years before around 1992 and thought "wow, we do that and even more". At the time I had no intention of writing a book. I went to school for horticulture and all I wanted to do was open my own greenhouse and herb farm.
I re-read the Tightwad Gazette when I was pregnant with my first baby in 1997. In there she said how everyone kept asking her to write a tightwad cookbook but she hated to cook and it would be too much work to do a good job. That is when I said "I could do that!"
I made the announcement to Mom and Mike that day and they both laughed and said "Ok". (Their enthusiasm was under whelming!) I was one of the worse cooks you had ever seen. I burned everything! Ok, I confess there some days I still do! I figured if I could learn how to do it then others could do it too! Mike confessed a few months ago that if he would have known then what he knows now he would have told me "no way!". He said he was just "being supportive" and didn't think I would really do it! LOL
From the time I came up with the idea and started writing until we got the book back from the printer was 2 babies and 2 years later.
Did you two sit at the table night after night hammering out the book?
Well, sort of. I started writing and Mom would call or come over (she lived across the street at the time) and say "you need to be sure and tell them this......." . That's why in the front of the book I say I was the typist. :-)
There were several times I printed it all out and we would sit and edit it and add more stuff.
How long did it take you to gather all the material?
50 years. We used several recipes from my grandmother and great-grandmother along with mine and mom's recipes and tips. It took about 2 years to get them all together in a book.
What was the thing that lit the fire under you to continue to pursue writing when road blocks came up.
I feel that this is a true calling from God for me to help others. I wouldn't still be doing it if I didn't have constant confirmation from Him that this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
While we were writing it I was just going to quit one night because it was so hard doing it all ourselves. (Mike was working 100 miles from home and only home on the weekends and I had 2 kids 6 months and 20 months plus CFS.) I received a Word from Him to keep going so I did and we got it done.
MANY times since then I have thought about quitting. Whenever I do I pray and ask if I am supposed to stop and EVERY TIME I get a verse from the Bible that tells me to keep going on and He will do the work I can't.
The time before last that I thought of quitting about 2 months ago (this was before the publisher got the order for 103,000 books) and I asked if I should keep going he gave me the verse "if you will persevere I will reward you".
The next day in the mail came a poster that said "Never Give Up" with a person hanging onto the side of a mountain at the top. I knew that I was supposed to keep going. That poster is now hanging on our office door!
The last time I wanted to quit (about 3 weeks ago), I found out some really stupid mistakes I made in the contract with my publisher and some not so great things about them. I was talking to the lawyer until 10 that night.
After I got off the phone I just started bawling and told Mike "I am so sorry I got us into this mess. We have 6,000 books sitting in the garage that we can't sell, working hard and long hours on this without seeing any money from it." He finally got me calmed down and we were able to sleep that night.
That next morning I was wondering again if I should keep going on and I sat down to do my Bible study and the very first verse was
Psl 37:7-9
7 "Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret-it leads only to evil.
9 For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.
I knew again that I was supposed to just be still and wait. 6 hours later we got the phone call from the publisher that they got the order for 103,000 books.
Knowing what you, and your Mom did behind the scenes is more what I'm wondering. Personal experiences. Do either of you have a degree in writing?
No mom was a SAHM and I went to tech school for horticulture. I just felt like writing a book, did it and dragged the rest of the family right in along behind me! LOL
How did you find out exactly how to construct a professional looking book?
We looked at how other books looked, found some we liked and then just tried to make it look like that but our own style.
The book has had 3 different covers now. Basically we just learned as we went.
Thanks so much for elaborating on the ins and outs of self publishing, and signing with a publisher. Anne
I am happy to share our experiences. If nothing else just so people understand that it isn't even close to being as easy as it sounds. That even if Oprah does call, which they did call us, it doesn't mean you will get on and sell thousands of books. (They said our story was great but that people wouldn't want to do what we did to get out of debt.) Looking back we see that if I would have gotten on the show we wouldn't have been able to handle to orders or the work load it would have caused.
Having said all that. If God wasn't in all of this, we would be nowhere today. It's only through Him that we could have done this because I had no clue, not to mention I am horrible with grammer and still burn things!! LOL
Tawra
posted by Tawra Jean at 8:38 PM
1 Comments:
Tawra:
I am one in my younger years that used to chase the "greener grass" on the other side of the fence and it got me into deep trouble and some very nice people were hurt along the way. I finally came to realize late in life that if I just took care of my own pasture life would be much more rewarding. I was just trying to share this life experience with my neice a couple days ago when a flash of realization hit me on how stunningly beautiful my current husband has made our yard. We have lived on our property six years, the front 2/3 is about two acres and this year it looks like a beautiful park. My husband has chronic back pain, is going in this coming week for his third surgery and yet has perservered over the years to put in all by himself very creative flower beds, new trees and bushes. He is a deal hunter and many of the plants were started from seeds, cuttings, bought on sale or through wholesale. God has really blessed me in the physical sight to show me what can be manifest with a change of heart.
I am glad you have explained that "success" is not easy, but with percerverance (?) blessings can come if you continue to walk in God's will. You were very right about going on Oprah. It is very exciting to be there, but the onslaught of afterwords can be overwhelming afterwards.
Keep doing what you are doing as long as the Lord leads you. I appreciate having you "in my life". Thanks for picking up where Tightwad Gazette left off. I am sure you are a blessing to those who need you.
Linda Summer
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