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| Dani Greer |
I was going to ask
Dani Greer (founder of the Blog Book Tour Café) to share a little of the
background that resulted in The Corner Café. Unfortunately, Dani lives in Colorado in an area very much impacted by the fires. Do you know some of that background, Bodie? This book took quite a bit of organizing, I'm sure.
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| Bodie Parkhurst |
Pulling together a project like this was a bit like
getting together a group of people who all speak different languages, to
produce a book in a language only some of the group speaks. Complexities arose
in a couple of areas.
1. Getting everybody's files to "talk" to
each other. We're all independent writers, and we work on different platforms,
in different programs, and in different ways. Just getting files to open
properly was the first hurdle. And then, of course, the files had to be
prepared for Kindle. That's not as straightforward as it looks, or sounds.
Creating a Kindle file from "scratch" is one thing; taking a file
that many someone else's (most of whom are completely new to Kindle requirements)
created and converting them for Kindle is something else again. And Dani did
it.
2. The second
issue was less about technology than it was a simple fact of the writing
life--when we saw our stories prepared for Kindle, we saw them with new eyes,
and spotted all sorts of things we wanted to change (probably not all of us,
but enough of us to make it necessary for Dani to Lay Down The Law about what
sorts of edits could be made (typos and grammatical goobers) and what couldn't.
I design books for a living, so I wasn't terribly surprised. Part of writing a
book is knowing that at some point you have to let it go--and you'll always
find things you'll wish you'd done differently.
Bodie,
I've noticed that you've been putting each of your other books on Amazon as
free books for a day or two during this Blog Book Tour. Have you seen your
sales numbers climb during this period (if you want to share this information)?
As a writer, how have you benefitted from publication of The Corner Café?
I'm a comparatively unknown author--I sell less
than $1,000 of books a year--so as far as I'm concerned anything that helps me
build an audience is a help. As for my sales, they've not increased
drastically, but I'm seeing a lot of downloads on my free days, and I suspect
part of that's from "The Corner Cafe's" tour--certainly on the days
when I get mentioned in the posts I see a jump in the free downloads. I'm also
seeing people taking chances on some of my books that have seen virtually no
sales to date--one of my noviels, Redeeming Stanley, tends to jog alone at
about 2-3 books a week in Kindle sales. Until we started the marketing and I
started doing the free download days my other books virtually NEVER sold. I'm
seeing them beginning to move, very, very, slowly. I'm sure that "The
Corner Cafe" has helped because it's gotten my writing into a lot more
people's hands. My job is to make sure that the writing's good enough to earn
reader loyalty.
As I mentioned, sales
have very slightly increased, but since I've been running "free
download" days it's hardly surprising that they're slow. I HAVE been
getting some pretty hefty download numbers--there have been over 1,000
downloads of my books so far--Redeeming Stanley's by far the most popular (that
one's heading for 800 downloads, and it's climbed in the rankings
considerably), with the second most popular being "Good on Paper."
"Benchmarks," (the memoir) is hardly moving at all--less than 100
downloads. So I would say that the book tour helps, but it's not a magic
bullet.
Do
you think some readers have more interest in an anthology featuring a variety
of authors than they do in books by individual authors? Do you believe readers
like to sample writing, then buy other works later on by that same author?
Interesting question. I tend to steer away from
anthologies, myself, and a publisher friend of mine says they tend to be a hard
sell in the industry. However, I think that writing for anthologies can be a
good sales tool, particularly for unknown writers (like me). It gives us a
chance to be sampled, when readers might never pick up one of our books as a
stand-alone offering. So I guess my answer's "yes," I think that a
Kindle sampler like this can be a great way to dip your toe into a lot of
writers' ponds, and see where the water suits.
Bodie,
would you recommend a group anthology as a selling tool for writers?
I'd say "yes," as long as the writer
realizes that they are participating primarily for exposure and the value of
joint marketing. I think that's really the key--a book only sells as well as
it's marketed. A project like this that involves a lot of writers, many of whom
have active blogs, means that we can all benefit from everybody else's
marketing efforts. We expand our marketing reach far beyond what we might
otherwise be able to do. Unless there's a coordinated marketing plan in place,
though, sales are going to be unpredictable.
If
you had the Blog Book Tour to start over again, what, if anything, would you
change? What have you learned from this project?
Thank you, Bodie, for filling us in on background details to help us understand the process that resulted in The Corner Cafe.
Our heartfelt wishes go out to Dani Greer and all the others facing troubling times and great hardship in Colorado.
The Corner Cafe is available now for $.99 from Amazon. All proceeds from this project go to charity.
There are Corner Cafes all over our country. Right now, I'll bet many of them have someone sitting at a back table typing away on a laptop or a notebook. There's a bit of a mystique to someone writing a book while sipping coffee in 
Those paintings inspired me to devise a story that crosses the ages between present day Jamaica and the days when the island was a British colony known for its sugarcane and rum. To add another exotic touch to this book, the final edits were made by telephone from the island of St. Martin--another fabulous destination where I hope to someday set a story.
Today is the launch date for The Corner Cafe, a book of short stories written by authors who are members of