Although we did have our temperatures taken, we were still able to meet on Saturday for our March meeting and have a great discussion on marketing and publishing issues.
Caregiver Harbor took some precautions by asking us about our recent travel history and running a thermoter over our foreheads, but that didn't scare away our A!A! members. We had a nice-sized group for discussion, including two new writers, and talked about our current books as well as manuscripts in the works.
One topic that was touched on by several people was about marketing to the agent and/or publisher versus marketing to the reader. Discussion centered on whether your manuscript needs to be rewritten if traditional publishing is your intended route so that it fits into certain publishing guidelines. Certainly trad pub houses have a marketing machine in place that can boost sales along tried-and-true avenues, if your book fits their tried-and-true parameters. If you are independently publishing, you have to do your own marketing to find the right audience. Even very specific genres are bound to have a dedicated audience, although it may not be large enough for a trad pub house to pursue.
We also talked about marketing before your book is published in additon to afterwards and discussed ways to build enthusiasm and pre-sales.
Along those lines, help was asked for regarding a problem with Amazon and BookBaby. While the author's book has been published with BookBaby and is available there as a Print On Demand, Amazon reports the paperback book as "Unavailable" because they don't actually have stock to ship. The author has held back from much marketing because of this. The suggestion was made that since the author has a copy of the manuscript properly edited and laid out, they should upload it to Amazon themselves as a Print On Demand offer. We hope to hear how this goes at the next meeting!
Thank you to Patricia for hosting and to everyone who attended! Great discussions!