Christian Writer's Seminar, Good Lutheran Church, Fresno, Ca. Saturday, February 10th, my talk, by Gina Meyers (Publishing)

"When I grow up, I want to be an author." "When I grow up I want to be a publisher." Sound familar? Both of those dreams were on the career list and in the daiary back in the day. Actually college. I was recently reading over my journal/diary from back in the day at Fresno State and both of those dreams have been realized. The funny thing is both of those "professions" or "careers" have no actual road map. Each author as well as each publisher has kind of traveled their own road to success. I'm going to try to provide an easy road map to publishing success. Here are some tips to presenting your book to a publisher.

Tips on presenting your book to a publisher:

#1 Enjoy the process
#2 Take time to research, do your homework.
#3 Access your strengths and weaknesses. 
#4 Learn something of value from your favorite author, your dream publisher, your competition.
#5 Decide if you want to self-publish.
#6 Decide if you want to hire a literary agent.
#7 Learn publishing lingo, every industry and profession has a language.
#8 Do your market research. The Writer's Market is an excellent guide to publishers in the US.
#9 Once you've indentified your target market, work on niche marketing. (a limited area of demand for your book).
#10 Draft a proposal
#11 Get to the point.
#12 Send out your proposals.

When I taught my Publishing 101 Class in the Spring of 2014, I asked my students what they hoped to gain/goal from taking the class.

TM Gardea said, "I believe it would be fun to change people's lives for the better."
D. Yee said, "to initiate the process of writing my memoir of my life experiences growing up as an Asian-American in Arkansas." Another student took a more practical approach and said, "to acquire better knowledge of publishing and marketing a book, to learn something new." This individual also said, "to learn the difference between self-publishing and hiring an agent." The truth is the process of writing is quite different than the process of publishing, but according to Bookstat, the way we purchase books has changed.

1) Amazon sells nearly half the books sold in the US. Barnes & Noble is shrinking quickly as are other outlets.
2) E Books account for more than half of all books sold in the US.
3) self-published and small press books at low prices dominate unit sales.
4) As always, books are being purchased and read. The best-selling book of the year will be read by fewer than 1% of the people in the US. Bust as long as you have about 10,000 devoted readers, you can make a living.

What I mean is technology has changed and myself as a publisher, I have had to adapt to new and emerging technologies to stay on top of my game. People still have stories to tell, it's the way we communicate this that has changed. For instance, books and book stores have been around for 500 years.

For publishers and authors, we still need each other for moral and organizational support. It's hard work, writers need to write, and publishers have become promoters and still need to research permissions, etc. Shelf-space is no longer king, niche marketing is queen. We can't cater to bookstores, it must be our fans.

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