When my first book, Bread Science, came out in 2006, I had a list of ideas on marketing from a guidebook I had read about self-publishing. I made a sell sheet, sent it to bookstores, and got no response. I tried to schedule readings at my local bookstores, also without much luck. But somehow the book started selling, and has sold steadily ever since. I attributed this to luck (meeting Peter Reinhart) and timing (artisan bakeries and home baking were…
What is distribution? For a self-publisher (or as they are now sometimes called, author-publisher), distribution can be the most confusing part of publishing. This is because the term has various meanings. In general, it refers to the means by which books go from the publisher to the retailer (e.g., a bookstore), who then sells them to readers. Before self-publishing became so popular, the distribution system worked a certain way and was intertwined with publishing houses. Some publishing houses had their…
At one of my jobs, they told me to Use More Hashtags! I know this might come naturally to some folks, but I began using social media later in life and decided to research a bit. I read a lot of articles that repeated each other, but the information organized in my head in a different way. Here’s how I see hashtags. Hashtags in General The general advice can be summed up as follows: Keep hashtags short, memorable, unique, relevant,…
Yesterday I attended a webinar about the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) checklist of book standards. IBPA is hoping to change the publishing industry so that all books are judged by their quality, not by who published them. Providing the checklist to self-publishers enables them to produce professional-looking books that won’t instantly be labeled as self-published and therefore inferior. And, promoting the standards on the checklist as the standards to use to judge if a book is professionally published will…
Last month, UNC–Chapel Hill hosted Marc Lavine, a senior editor at Science magazine, to talk on “Communicating Science, Communicating in Science: An Insider’s View.” Most of the audience seemed to be students who might someday seek to publish a paper in Science, and I suspected that most of the talk would be tips for authors. I hoped the topic of editing would come up. Tips for authors Lavine talked about what has changed in science journals since 2001, when he…
