Sometimes the long way around is educational, if not frustrating.
The Jefferson Bible for the 21st Century! is just under 80 pages. I've been trying to generate some interest for it on lulu.com (print on demand), as the main point of entry for the paperback version. I had originally wanted to get set up on lulu.com and then bridge into amazon.com, to see how far that mechanism would take me.
Not very far, evidently. The price point I had to put on the book in order to see the first dollar of revenue per sale via Amazon is nearly $12. That's a bit (way!) too much for an 80 page book, even if the pages are trimmed in sable and were blessed by the Pope. And that's before shipping charges, which are also absurdly high on lulu.com.
So, I thought to myself, Let's just get things rolling and see how it goes, mkay? We're off to the races now, eh?
But not so fast. I have purchased my own ISBN. In lulu-land, this means that I am not eligible to participate in their affiliate program with Amazon. Or at least that's what the help files are telling me - and they are fairly out of sync with the online application in general anyway. But I was too upset to really bother with checking any further.
To get rid of my template that allows the book to be marketed via Amazon, I had to delete the entire entry, and republish the book. This is nuts. I mean, it's wonderful. I enjoy wasting a half hour of my time uploading the files again and going through the wizard. But. Huzzah! I now have a far better price at $7.99, and I hope some of the curious who have visited will come back for the new lower price.
Next, I decided to jump in on the Google book marketing plan. This works by uploading you book to Google (do no Evil, you know) and then when a search string matches anything in the book, one of the links provided goes to your book's home page.
Nifty! Except now Google is telling me that they can't quite decide if I own the copyright or not. It's another kind of nuts.
So now I've configured a blog to market my book (
jeffbible21.com) on Wordpress (sorry, Typepad) and a twitter account to match. I can't configure the Twitter account until they get their denial of service attack figured out though, so I'm stuck again.
It's the full moon, isn't it? (checks) Yes, why yes it is! Lovely. I'll just chill a couple of days and try again.
Meanwhile if you want to follow my progress pushing my book on Twitter, look for @jeffbible21. I doubt it it will be a very chatty account, but I will be pushing sample bits out as I can. It's the unconfigured page that has no tweets yet. You can't miss it. I'll be there - promise!
Meanwhile, I have the PDF download set at $1 on Scribd (See the button to the left) and most other eBooks at $1 on Smashwords (also next to the button).
The audio book version is in the works, and then I might feel like I'm in a place where I can really do some stuff.
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