Rick McBee's Writings
Explore the magic of new ideas and books to read as well as see what books I have written, my favorite photos, my opinions on may subjects, including Science, Africa, the Caribbean, the Civil War, my Book Reviews, and Much More!
Marketing Prep for the book release -Continued
Today was another of those great February false spring days with a bit of sunshine, temperatures up in the high forty’s and no winds. I could almost hear the buds on the grape vines and apple trees beginning to pop out. Let’s hope they don’t because this really is a “false” Spring. It seems to happen every year about this time and we all think that Mt Hood will be bare of snow next summer. Then like clockwork, winter comes back in for the end of Feb. and we usually get over fifty percent of our snow pack laid down in a couple of weeks, the Cascade Concrete piles up on the ski slopes and we all know that the ski season will once again last until May first.
Oh! So what about marketing? Yes, almost got carried away with Spring! Well it was a good day, so out I went to post a couple more advance reading copies of “Rough Enough”; pick up a couple of returns from the people who don’t know where they live and have never changed their mailing addresses on their web sites; stop in to the Hood River News to chat with Kirby, the Editor about doing a book review and an interview; stopped off at Waucoma Bookstore to see about doing a book signing and last but not least stopped by the Library to find that they are closed on Mondays. OK, one more thing to do tomorrow in addition to putting out the rat poison under the chicken house and dropping sulfur smoke bombs down the gopher holes that are popping up all over the place now that the snow is gone and the little furry critters think that Spring has come! But it really is just a “false” Spring!>)
Oops! What did you say that Media Book Rate Was? $2.53 or $7.59?
The other day I was bragging to a friend about how mailing out the several hundred media copies of my new book, Rough Enough was only costing me $2.47 a book (now $2.53 with the new rates). Pretty good when you consider that regular post costs almost a dollar more. Since I was emailing all the publisher information to each newspaper, magazine, etc. for free, it sounds pretty good to save 900 dollars on getting out the review copies.
Oops! Nobody informed me about what happens if your book gets sent back for having the wrong address! “That will be another $2.53 in postage due please! The book or media rate only pays for the outgoing postage,”
So those addresses better be CORRECT! Because that book has now cost you $5.06 cents and it hasn’t gone anywhere. (Well that’s not really true, a few of them went clear across the USA and back….You should see what those sorting machines do to your book envelopes (purchase “Kevlar” ones)!
So the next day as I waltz in with the correct address. You guessed it, $2.53 again please to mail it out once more. Now we have a total of $7.59 invested in mailing, not counting the envelopes, return address labels and gasoline to run the thing back and forth three times. Hmmm…. How long does this take to eat into your savings? Well, for the moment, I’m figuring that I won’t get back that many, so I’ll be ok, but very quickly you can see how 10 books which might have cost $25 and change can go to a cool $75.90. I don’t want to think about how I’d feel if 100 came back.
Carry on, just around the corner is that great review from ….. who’s endorsement will ensure my six to eight figure return on the five I’ve already put out there!>))
Sun’s out! Spring is coming to Hood River!
A Fix for “Words with Friends”
Have you gotten tired of waiting for Words with Friends to fix your frozen App on your mobile?
- Try this, it appears to be a quick fix!
- Go to your PC and go through your search engine to “Words With Friends.”
- Then click on the link and when the site opens up, click on the “Play with Facebook button.”
- It will then ask you to log on to Facebook which I did, using my email address and my Facebook password.
- A pop-up will come up saying something to the effect of “Are you already Playing Words With Friends on your Mobile?”
- Click “Yes”
- It will then ask you if you want to link your mobile to your facebook games, “Click “”Yes”.”
- Now when the window comes up with all you mobile games on it that have “your move”, make a move or two on your PC for each of the games so that you see that they work just fine.
- Now close down your PC Facebook and go to your Mobile.
- Open up “Words with Friends” on your Mobile again and then “Log Onto – Facebook” through that app.
- Now your games will appear on your Mobile with the Facebook pics of people who have their pics on FB.
- Go to each game in turn and make one move (if it for some reason doesn’t work, try a “Hard Shutdown” -(That doesn’t mean the sidewalk!) and then reopen your Mobile with step #10 above.
- Most of you will have your games back up in 10 minutes
- Let me know!
More PR work on “Rough Enough”
I’m beginning to understand why a lot of authors just put their book out there on the internet and hope that someone will discover them (which of course the probably won’t with 50,000 books per year being published). It’s bloody hard work to do PR for a book! In fact, the title of my book, “Rough Enough” could be used for an article on book sales and PR by beginning or lower echelon authors hoping to make good. This hometown boy (pick Hood River, OR, or Bozeman, MT) is doing his utmost to go the second mile in order to make the grade. Here are five pointers towards the things you ought to be doing if you hope to get beyond the “just published” but “zero sales” level:
1. Recognize that being an author is a business and unless you already know and hobnob with the in-crowd for your book publicity, it will be who you “get to know” that will determine whether you make it up the ladder.
2. Get started on the “getting to know you” while you are still finishing the final year of work on your book. Blog – Blog – Blog, work and rework your profile and contacts lists through WordPress, LinkedIn and Amazon (just 3 of the many you can be on). Make the contacts and have enough content to keep them interested in what will be coming out.
3. Decide how much money you are willing to invest in the marketing of your book. I constantly am asked the question, “Why doesn’t your publisher mail out gallery proof copies and contact all the media?” My answer is simply, “I am still small peanuts in the publishing world which means that publisher has been willing to carry my book through to print, and is willing to get out the word that the book exists, but they don’t have the cash to be able to float a lot of books out to prospective reviewers who may decide to not take a chance on a new author.” So the amount of money you are going to invest in your small business venture is important! If you are going to have books available to sell and sign as you move around you community, you have to invest in inventory. If you are going to mail out media books ahead of the publication date, then you need to have more inventory. Inventory costs $$$$ even at the discount rate offered to authors.
4. Put in your investment money and then follow up on your commitment with hard work, energy and time to build the publicity. I have it figured that with an investment of $10,000.00 dollars for publicity, mailing, printing leaflets, envelopes, gas, etc., etc., etc., I should be able to break out above the average “wait until they find me,” author.
5. Carefully pick out the list of who to send media Gallery copies. I picked only magazines that would work with my interest area or that have book reviews for bored inflight passengers and retired folks. I picked newspapers only of larger size, but all over the US, and they always have a Sunday edition which is more likely to have some book reviews in it. I also concentrated especially on the States of VA, MA, ND, SD, MT and OR where the book is centered, and I think there will be higher sales. I picked other reviewers as persons, authors, and persons in my field who responded to my queries and who would bother to send me their mailing address (You wouldn’t believe how much work this takes!). I also selected 20 universities that have programs of history that might very well have Civil War courses and pitched them for possible use of the book as supplementary reading…..
The list goes on, but the chicken eggs are waiting to be collected down the garden so more with the next blog.
Cheers, Rick;>)
Richard McBee – Link to New Civil War Book
Richard McBee – Link to New Civil War Book
At this site you can purchase new copies of my Civil and Indian War book, “Rough Enough” that follows young Richard Clow into the Civil War through his letters home to his sister in Boston while he is on the front lines in Petersburg, VA. Then you can follow him through his reenlistment after the war when he joins the 13th Infantry to build front line forts in the Upper Missouri River Basin of Montana and read his letter to his sister in 1869 from Fort Buford, where, as First Sergeant, he was witness to several Indian battles. Finally, battling through melancholy, loss of family members and depression, he finds a new life, riches and a wife in the gold fields of Deadwood, SD. He was panning in the hills the same summer that Wild Bill was shot. You’ll love the history! It’s non-fiction, yet a great mover through some lesser known periods and areas of our country. Enjoy!
Star Wars – Death Star – Nixed by President – Hurray!!
Hurray! At least one budget breaking military FUBAR has been nixed! If you, America, got upset when someone put a bit of federal money into research on green energy and then the company went belly up, you ought to be really be upset by the kinds of wasteful projects that our military throws out on the table and they never seem to go bankrupt even though they repeatedly blow money away like it was going out of style. Our nation could go completely bankrupt on this kind of boondoggle! So who are we going to blow up? The Maritians? The little green cheese men on the moon? Ourselves more likely. My word, aren’t we the dumbest animals on the planet and we still haven’t realized that we have already met the enemy and it is US!
Marketing “Rough Enough” – How I got started on the book!
The Civil War is a lifelong compulsion for some persons so in that respect I an a Ricky-come-lately having only really gotten interested in 1994 while discussing with my then dying father some of the papers and letters he wanted to leave to me. These included several small boxes of papers from his own mother and father as well as a box from his grandfather, Richard Clow. The box was a gold mine of material, including a knife used by Richard during the Civil War, a cup, fork, powder horn, and some letters in their original envelopes with stamps unfortunately torn off by my father during his budding stamp collecting days. In addition there was a small diary which became the mystery booklet that kept me working on research for over ten years. Its cryptic notes, old song verses, Spanish sections and lists of ducks killed and people met, carried me from Fort Buford, ND to Little Sioux, IA and then back through Cheyenne, WY to Deadwood, SD and the gold mines. Ultimately I followed his track onto Montpelier, ID, Granite, OR and then to Mapleton, OR and the little museum in Florence which has a large picture of Richard Clow and his wife Linnie,(Story) Clow in the first room. Wow! A lot of miles, and thumbing through papers in museums and court houses to find all the materials. Along the way I was reading every Civil War book on the Petersburg, VA area and then took a trip out to walk the battlefields. Amazing!
More Marketing on “Rough Enough”
Raining in Hood River, can’t go skiing so this AM is another push to get out copies of the book to a number of people who have indicated that they would be willing to review it in their local newspapers or on Amazon once it’s released on March 1st. It’s not what you call a “big show” day, but one of those days when most of us as writers tend to dither over and do things like clean the toilet, scrape the dried dog poop off the shoes we left from last summer and every other chore rather than the one that will promote the book. So, here goes! I resolve not to clean the toilet or do the poop covered shoes today! They can wait until after I get the nit picking writer chores done that need attention!. Wish me luck.
End of World Events: Getting Scientific Proof Finally!
Scientific proof is possible in two ways:
1. Since the entire universe is expanding at just under the speed of light, the new universe is going to be just slightly out of kilter with the old one. So if you want evidence of this event’s occurrence, all you have to do is set up your measurement equipment next to any object and the day after, your equipment will register that it has been displaced by slightly less than 1.14048 x 10 to the minus 8th inches! (This is the amount it would have been displaced if the universe was moving at the speed of light.) We should have the ability to monitor this type of event although quantum movements may skew the evidence somewhat.
2. The other proof of the event comes from the evidence left behind by the methane gas released by the simultaneous nan-farts that are let off everywhere on earth by living organisms just after the occurrence of the reincarnation event. It should be possible in the near future with our sophisticated atmospheric gas monitoring systems to record this through a reincarnation event, since the old record would be in existence and the reincarnated metering system would then show a blip in gasses just following the event.
I hope this helps all of you understand the End of World Events and why you haven’t noticed them even though they seem to occur quite frequently. I actually was able to record both the movement and the gas passage of the Mayan event. Unfortunately, my coffee cup knocked my instrumentation and I will have to wait for the next event to replicate my results which were thus lost to history!>)
Targeting the Newspapers for Book PR
Interspersed with the “at home” holiday snacks and drinks today I managed to put together another bunch of addresses for recipients of my PR materials that will go to Newspapers. It’s always amazing to see how long it takes to get things done on the internet with the distractions of pop-up ads and side-bar junk. It’s no wonder that I find it so much easier to get my actual writing work done on the old computer that I don’t connect to the internet. With that machine I can just get in the “zone” for writing and stay in there for hours on end. It makes for consistency and well developed thoughts rather than the usual “snap judgement” stuff. Yesterday evening I upgraded my LinkedIn subscription for a fee of $20 per month. I figure three at home book sales per month will cover the additional cost and I can certainly manage that. I am hopeful that the additional coverage will give me an even larger audience for book sales and PR as we move toward the release date of 1 March for my book, “Rough Enough”
http://www.pdbookstore.com/comfiles/pages/RichardMcBee.shtml
South Africa Book Group on Goodreads
.gr_grid_container { /* customize grid container div here. eg: width: 500px; */ } .gr_grid_book_container { /* customize book cover container div here */ float: left; width: 39px; height: 60px; padding: 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; }
1557 membersThis is a book club for all South Africans who love reading! We also have members from other coun...
Books we've read
View this group on Goodreads »
Share book reviews and ratings with South African Book Lovers, and even join a book club on Goodreads.
Rick McBee's Writings 