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Bob, Al, and Tallia signing books at The Book Shop in Green Valley (photo provided by Bob Ring, 2005) |
Column No. 58
Bob Ring, Al Ring, Tallia Pfrimmer Cahoon
Last July we wrote a column on our experiences researching, writing, and
publishing our book, Ruby, Arizona – Mining, Mayhem, and Murder, the story of
the old mining camp near the border with Mexico. You may remember our struggles
(challenges?) with many years of research, multiple manuscript rewrites and
painful discussions with reluctant publishers that resulted in our
self-publishing our book with our own money. Today, as Paul Harvey would say,
we’d like to tell you the rest of the story, our experiences with six months of
marketing, sales, and distribution. And since we know that you secretly harbor a
desire to publish your own book, you’d better take notes.
We left off in July describing our elation at picking up our newly printed books
(1000 copies) and reveling in the impressive stacks of manuscripts all over
Bob’s house. The first question was where to store the books. Where would you
put 1000 books? Well, luckily Bob has a big garage and we crammed the books into
some shelves there. That was after all three of us signed every book! This was
more difficult than you might think; your hand tends to forget what your name is
after a few hundred signatures.
The next issue was to start selling those books. But for how much? After careful
research we priced the book at the square root of the sum of the number of
figures, times the number of end notes, divided by the number of pages. If there
is any other logical method, we didn’t discover it; just check your local
bookstores.
We had a marketing plan. Over the last ten years Tallia has hosted Pima
Community College’s Tours of the old Ruby mining camp and we had the mailing
list. We added the names of all the people who we had talked to over the years
in preparing the book, our family and friends, groups we had spoken to, and
people who owed us … We sent book announcements to all of these people and sat
back awaiting the flood of orders. Well, it wasn’t quite that easy, but you
know, to date our network of individuals has purchased over 450 books! We think
that’s fantastic and really appreciate every sale, many to you readers.
So how did we distribute the books? If possible we hand-delivered books to our
customers. For books that had to be mailed, we used media mail at reduced rates
based on weight (number of books). In the beginning, Bob was making several
trips a week to the local Post Office with big boxes full of books in individual
bubble envelope or cardboard mailers. The Post Office people loved to see Bob
coming, knowing they had to weigh and stamp each mailer. Finally, we each carry
a box of books in the trunk of our cars; you never know when a new customer will
pop up and want a book. Does this sound like big business?
The other side of the marketing coin was bookstores. We started with The Book
Shop in Green Valley and expanded to such nearby outlets as the Tortuga
Bookstore and the Historical Society in Tubac, and the Amado Territory Bed and
Breakfast. These outlets have been our best commercial customers, most having
made several orders to date.
It was Bill Sims at the Tortuga Book store who discovered a problem with the
book; some of the pages in some of the books had been bound out of order. Thanks
to Bill’s quick alert, we were able to fix that problem by rapidly replacing all
the “bad” books, and later rebinding them good as new.
A second problem soon arose as our expanding group of commercial outlets tried
to keep electronic records of sales. Somehow our printer published the book with
an incorrect ISBN, the unique number that identifies each title published. Our
solution here was to have the printer issue stick-on labels with the correct
ISBN number to overlay the incorrect one. We were able to rationalize this
embarrassing problem by relating how similar the labeled back of our books
looked to the unique overlay labels many stores put on products. Oh well, who
said this was going to be easy?
We expanded our commercial outlets north to Tucson and Phoenix, east to Benson,
and southeast to Tombstone and Bisbee. Even though we had been warned by many
authors, we were soon disappointed and frustrated to find that the big
bookstores (e.g., Borders, Barnes and Noble) wouldn’t deal with us unless we
operated through a third party, an “approved” book distributor who of course
took a cut of the sales price. And this was after a lengthy book acceptance
review. Also, the bigger stores wanted to deal on a consignment basis, i.e.,
they would pay us only after they sold a book. For our small, self-publishing,
self-financed operation these options were financially ridiculous. So much for
the big book stores supporting the little guys. (We’ll save a little venom for a
separate column on this subject someday.)
As a result we concentrated on an increasing group of small specialty
bookstores, and added libraries, tourist attractions, historical societies, and
state and national parks in southern Arizona. Sales to this group of about 37
commercial outlets also total about 450 books to date.
We have tried to keep marketing the book by responding to invitations for book
signings and to speak to historical societies, retirement groups, rockhounds and
geology clubs, hiking clubs, Westerners groups, the Western National Park
Association, Friends of the Arivaca Library, and the Green Valley Forum. The
book has been noted and/or reviewed in the Arizona History Journal (pending),
Tucson Daily Star, Green Valley News & Sun, Tubac Villager, and the Mining
History Journal. And of course Tallia’s continuing Ruby ghost town tours and
this column give us a steady forum to bring the book to the attention of new
customers.
So you’ve figured out by now that we’ve sold about 900 books so far. We were
told by one of our reluctant publisher contacts that selling 1000 copies of a
book like this would make the book a “best seller.” We will pass that landmark
early in 2006.
In fact the question of the moment is whether or not to print some more books.
We see steady, continuing sales prospects, but do we want to continue in the
book “business” as opposed to beginning another book writing adventure. In a
future column we’ll share our plans for a new project.
We’ve done what we set out to do. After a tremendous effort over several years,
we self-published the Ruby book as a “labor of love” and yet have just about
made our money back to pay expenses. It was never about the money. What a truly
satisfying feeling!
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Bob, Al, and Tallia signing books at The Book Shop in Green Valley (photo provided by Bob Ring, 2005) |
Next Time: Let’s take a hike to the top of Montana Peak
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