Live Full Throttle Book Debut!

Please join me as I launch  Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer. 

• When: Wednesday, December 7, 2011 from 5-7pm
• Where: 300 East Tremont Ave Charlotte, NC 28203 Dilworth Billiards

After riding my motorcycle through 25+ states with a pink bra strapped across the windshield for breast cancer causes, I’ve collected a lot of wit and wisdom about life from friends who faced cancer.

Drop by Dilworth Billiards any time from 5-7 to hear some of my friends’ stories. I’ll run slides from this year’s roadtrip on the wall and bring plenty of copies of the book.

Napoliltano’s will be there with Italian fare like paninis, pasta fagioli, minestrone and tuscan white bean soups, and chocolate ravioli for dessert.

If the weather permits, hang out around the koi pond in the courtyard or stay indoors and pick up a cue stick. Dilworth Billiards has been a great supporter, having hosted Think-Drink-Eat-Pink before I left for this year’s roadtrip.

I’d love to see you, whether you buy a book or just come to wish me well. Nothing formal; leave your tiara at home but bring a friend or co-worker.

What’s the TRUE Cost of Your Book?

People always ask how much my book cost to produce. Some want to use the intel as they consider self- publishing, and some just like knowing things, I guess.

Most people scratch their heads when I answer that the cost depends on how many I sell. Here’s where I tap my MBA to explain the importance of understanding that the total cost of your publishing effort includes fixed costs and variable costs.

 Total cost = fixed cost + variable costs

Fixed costs. If you’re an indie author who doesn’t hire a ghostwriter, you’ve still got to pay other creative professionals to help you produce a quality product. You may not need a cover artist/photographer and layout designer if you’re using a print-on-demand program, but please hire a copy editor.

Be sure to capture any travel costs, meals you picked up for people you interviewed, research materials/subscriptions, and so on. Are you planning a book tour? What about promotional materials? Revamping your website so you can sell them online? Cha ching…these are fixed costs.

Allocate these over the number of books you sell. For example, say the fixed costs are $5k and you print 1000 books–hit each book with a cost of $5. Allocate that same $5k across 20,000 copies and you’re down to $.25 per book.

Variable costs. In addition to the cost to print your books, you’ll have to pay taxes and shipping on them, plus the costs to distribute them to readers and/or retailers. Order your quantity wisely. You’ll be tempted to order a high quantity to get the lowest cost per book (unit cost), but if you don’t sell what you print, this strategy will backfire.

For example, if you can get your unit cost down from $5 at 1,000 copies by ordering 2,000 books at $4 you’d better have a plan to sell every one of them. The cost per book is $16 if you only sell 500 books ($4 x 2000 copies ordered = $8000/500 copies sold =$16).

There is another variable cost that I don’t have experience with, therefore no numbers to share, and that’s distribution. If you use a book distributor you will pay a setup charge of somewhere around $500 plus a monthly storage charge plus a cut of your sales.

Total cost. My fixed costs are upwards of $10,000 (photography, editing, design, travel, office supplies, promotional materials) and my book tour will run upwards of $10,000. If I print 1500 copies my total costs will run about $27,000, which means at a retail price of $25 I don’t break even until I’ve sold 1080 copies.

You can play with the numbers and say I shouldn’t charge the entire book tour to the book because I’ll use it to market my ghostwriting services and to gin up paid speaking engagements. Fine, back the total cost down to $17,000 and at $25 retail, I break even at 680 sold copies.

Caveat: Nowhere in this post have I discussed the numbers related to wholesaling and consigning your book to retailers. At this point you need spreadsheet skills (or someone with them) to determine the total profitability of your book publishing venture. If you, like I, will pursue a blended strategy of selling books yourself at full retail and through retailers, your break even number will be higher than if you sold them yourself. Retailers who sell your book on consignment will take 40% off your retail price and pay AFTER they’ve sold it, while those (few) who buy it outright will take a 50% cut.

Is this any way to make a living?

Being an independent author is not a viable way to feed yourself unless you sell a ton of books, but if you use the book as a marketing vehicle, a book can be priceless.  Compare a sunk pylon supporting a bridge to a book supporting your career. For many business professionals who want to speak at conferences and professional associations, a book credential is required before the organizers will consider your application. If your colleagues or competitors boast author credentials, your ante has been upped–get with it.

    

Book Tour with the International Motorcycle Show

I’ll be following Progressive’s International Motorcycle Show this season as I introduce audiences in twelve major markets to my book, Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons from Friends Who Faced Cancer. Here’s the show schedule:

• November 18-20 San Mateo, CA
  

  Tamela speaking at the 2010 International Motorcycle Show

• December 2-4 Dallas, TX
• December 9-11 Long Beach, CA
• December 16-18 Seattle, WA
• January 6-8 Novi, MI (near Detroit)
• January 13-15 Washington, DC
• January 20-22 New York, NY
• January 27-29 Cleveland, OH
• February 3-5 Minneapolis, MN
• February 10-12 Chicago, IL
• February 24-26 Charlotte, NC
• March 14-17 Daytona Beach, FL

Speaking at bookstores and motorcycle club events

While I’m in each of these fair cities I’ll be signing books and speaking about what I’ve learned about life after 25,000 miles across 32 states and 3 Canadian Provinces on my BMW motorcycle.

If you live near these cities I’d love to talk to your club. Perhaps you have a favorite book store you’d like to recommend I contact for a signing? Motorcycle dealerships often host authors with moto-themed books, so please let me know if your favorite dealer might be interested and I’ll take it from there. Cancer support groups have been interested in talking to me about the book, so please let me know if I should contact any of them in your region.

If you’re planning on attending one of the shows please look me up. I’m easy to find on Twitter: @TamelaRich  and Facebook and GooglePlus.

Self-Publishing: Book Prototype for Publicity and Advance Sales

So far we’ve talked about the need to hire a book designer and editor. I took the step of developing a prototype for Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer.  Mine is in a PDF and included the cover, introduction and first chapter, but you could include less. You’ll see that I used the Flash capabilities of Scribd to embed it here.

Intro and First Chapter of Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer

Nine ways to use your book prototype

• Send it to possible reviewers to see if they’d like to provide a blurb
• Include a link to it in your social-media and traditional press releases
• Query with it for interviews with podcasters, bloggers, radio, TV and other media
• Post it on your social media outlets to build buzz (including LinkedIn). While we’re talking about social media, listing it on Scribd will help it gain a wider audience and Scribd provides great statistics on readcasts.
• Get your book listed in catalogs by the time it’s in print. For example, there are motorcycle accessories companies that carry books and I’m using prototype to go through their screening process before they’ll  include it in their inventories
• Want to speak at a conference?  Most will ask if you’ve published a book. Send a link to the prototype with your speaker/panelist proposal
• Going on tour? Send it to interested groups to get on their calendar by the time the book is back from the printer
• Send it to professional magazines/journals for possible syndication
• Use it to generate advance sales (speaking of which, you can do that today!)

Self-Publishing: Everyone Needs An Editor

Ask any professional writer about the need for a fresh set of eyes and they’ll tell you it’s essential. I don’t have an editor for my blog posts and newsletters, but when I write long form, whether a white paper, article or book, I always collaborate with one.

When putting together my team for Live Full Throttle I knew I’d use Aprill Jones (@aprillwrites on Twitter). Aprill writes copy and is as an account social media content manager with an area advertising agency, in addition to being a freelance copywriter and editor. We’ve hired each other to edit client’s book projects.

Editor as Reader Advocate

There are different kinds of editing assignments. One is a “conceptual” editor and another is “copy” editor. The conceptual editor  is akin to an architect and a copy editor to a home inspector. The conceptual editor guides the writer in how to present the material for maximum impact, while the copy editor makes sure the final output doesn’t distract the reader with inconsistencies, punctuation, grammar and other details of craftsmanship. Some projects call for another layer of edits between conceptual and copy, because familiarity with the work dulls the senses (and that familiarity begins with the writer). Editors are the readers’ advocates for the project.

For Live Full Throttle, I asked Aprill to focus somewhere between conceptual and copy edits on the first round.  I originally wrote:

In 2005 Karen was diagnosed with Choroidal Melanoma, a form of eye cancer. Five years later, in a three-month period, her position with an Episcopal parish was terminated, her husband left her, and she was literally run over by a Mack truck while riding her motorcycle out of state.

She described cancer was “a skate” compared to the triple-whack.

What’s a laid off minister facing divorce do with a paid sabbatical? Take a motorcycle trip on a Suzuki Boulevard, of course. But what began as a wind-in-the-face opportunity to assess life and career options ended in an orthopedic exoskeleton from neck to waist.

After Aprill’s feedback it became:

In 2005 Karen was diagnosed with Choroidal Melanoma, a form of eye cancer, which she described as “a skate” compared to what came five years later. In a three-month period during 2010, her position with an Episcopal parish was terminated and her husband left her.

Insider View of Self-Publishing

After writing about how to roll blog posts, newsletters and articles into books, self publishing, writing book proposals and what a book can do for you professionally, I invite you to walk with me down the path of self-publishing a book of my own.

Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer will go to press some time in November and I should have it back by January. Between then and now I’m working with a book design firm, printers, and my marketing intern, Alex Boss.

Live Full Throttle’s back story

In 2010 I learned to ride a motorcycle, then joined a group of women bikers dedicated to raising money and awareness for breast cancer causes. After hearing hundreds of stories about facing the ultimate sink hole—death–from women doing it with grace, humor, moxie and joy, I decided to share what they taught me in this book.

Why self-publish?

I decided to publish the book myself after walking through the list of questions I would pose to a client trying to make the  same decision. Here’s a recap of my thought process.

Timing

I saw no reason to wait 12-18 months in light of the people I had waiting to buy it. I’ll be riding with the breast cancer fundraising group again in 2012 and they want to see this book NOW.  Not taking into account the time required to get an agent and then a contract with a publisher, which is considerable, publishers have production queues that I have no means to influence.

Greater profits for savvy marketers

Even if a publisher picked up the cost of designing, editing and distributing the book, the hard costs (and hard tasks) of marketing it would be up to me.  With the extra margin that publishing gives me, I’ll reap more of the financial rewards from hard-won sales than I would have realized with a publisher in the food chain. In other words, for the same amount of effort on my part I’ll make more money.

As my own publisher I can cut deals to consign the books with shops, vendors and speakers. I can co-brand the book with like-minded organizations and work out creative fundraising opportunities for nonprofits. I even can run a personalized edition for companies that would like to offer it to their stakeholders.  Authors with total control over their P&Ls can do this; authors with publishers have to go hat in  hand.

Unconventional format

Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer is a hybrid of memoir and photo essay. At the end of each chapter I provide exercises designed to help readers apply the life lessons. An experimental format is difficult to sell to publishers, and I knew there was a strong probability that they would change the concept anyway, whether I was on board with their changes or not. Who needs that kind of creative castration?  That’s why I’m freelance in the first place!

Platform

Publishers want authors with strong “platforms,” which is jargon for how many people already know about you and are waiting with bated breath for your book to roll of the printing press or to finish downloading. An author platform is gauged in a variety of ways, including the number of social media followers and blog and newsletter subscribers, speakers bureau representation, and so on.

For a first-time author planning use a book as a means of building or growing a platform, the whole “come back and see us when you have a big platform” line is like telling a teenager they can’t take the car out at night because they’ve never driven in the dark. In the time it would take me to convince a publisher that I have enough book buyers to warrant publishing it, I can just start selling the book.

 Choosing a designer

I believe in putting out a quality product. Research shows that even ebooks with attractive “covers” sell better than those with cheesy ones. I’m not a designer and don’t aspire to be. Yes, ebooks can be formatted in Word and converted, but my book is full of beautiful photos by Christina Shook and needed real design expertise. I wasn’t about to skimp on design.

I also believe in the power of tribe. It’s always nice keeping dollars in your own community but that’s not the only reason why I chose Spark Publications, headquartered here in Charlotte, NC, to design my book. I wanted to work with a design firm that KNOWS BOOK PUBLISHING, and Spark has designed a raft of successful book projects. The president of the firm, Fabi Preslar, knows how difficult it is to be a self-published author, since she wrote a book of her own this year.  Finally, Fabi is well regarded in business and professional circles in this region, meaning she has a great platform for promoting her clients’ projects; I wanted to benefit from her network and pro-client passion.

Choosing a cover

Spark began the project by suggesting different cover ideas. Scroll through to see the first round.

Next, I put the question out to friends and social media followers. On their feedback, I went back to Spark for iterations on the first layout. Here’s what I got.

And finally, here’s where we landed. I adore it.

Next up: Mission, Goals and Cover Guidance.

Lessons from the Road

Helmet time often produces deep thought. On my motorcycle for 40 days this summer, I had a lot of helmet time. Among other things, I pondered relationships, physics, environmental economics, disease, mortality and the direction I want to take my life.

Fear as a motivator

I thought about the role of fear in our lives and how it seems to motivate people more than anything else. Americans seem to particularly fear failure.  Surrounded by crumbling institutions, people are living their lives as if there’s no margin for error.

I almost took my life after a business that I owned failed and took down family and friends financially. A lot of people can relate to that experience, sadly. I’ve drained the dregs of failure’s cup and have decided to move onto a different beverage.

During my 9559 miles of summer I thought about my life’s lessons and how easily I could contextualize them with motorcycling metaphors. Helmet time has that effect on me. Here’s a start:

• Lean in, lean out: Techniques used to control the motorcycle also apply to life
• Everything wobbles:  But a wobble doesn’t inevitably lead to a spill
• Blind corners abound: Ride your best ride and take uncertainty as it comes
• Exploit the detours: They’re usually providential
• Embrace the switchbacks: The safest way to the mountaintop isn’t the shortest

Taking those lessons on the road

People are fascinated by motorcycle travel, especially when undertaken by someone who breaks their stereotypes of who’s a biker. In the last year I’ve been asked to speak to business and community groups and been interviewed for newspapers, radio and television. Thanks to helmet time I’ve decided to reach out with the lessons I’ve learned in a more proactive manner, through a book, keynotes and presentations. Here’s who I’m reaching out to:

Review: The Biker’s Guide to Business

Sure,  management consultant and avid motorcyclist Dwain DeVille could have delivered a book with lots of worksheets and case studies to walk a business owner through the difficult process of strategic planning. Thankfully he approached the subject from his own hard-won experience with entrepreneurial road rash and used motorcycling metaphors to keep our right brains engaged in the process.  He uses the straight talk and occasional cuss words that people seem to expect from bikers, too.

Hell, ask me where my company needs to be in five years, and I’ll answer without a moment’s hesitation. However, ask me where I want my life to be in five years and I couldn’t begin to tell you. And after all these years in business, that’s a pretty crappy place to be. I’d allowed the needs of the company to drive my personal life for too long. It was high time to anwer the question “What’s Next” and redefine my dreams. It was time to focus on my lifestyle.

Written for the business owner, not a cog in a big corporate wheel, The Biker’s Guide to Business: When Business and Life Meet at the Crossroads, DeVille’s philosophy sounds familiar to those of us who’ve read one of the eMyth books, but DeVille has his own spin on how to steer a company to serve its owner instead of the other way around.

DeVille is quick to point out his disdain for traditional business plans that end up collecting dust on the shelf. He insists that business owners who follow his process will walk away with a plan that can/will be executed. He provides these tools and instructions on his Bikers Guide to Business web site as well.

Dwain DeVille's book

Beginning with failure

DeVille pulls no punches in describing a business venture he took on for all the wrong reasons and the financial and emotional aftermath. That experience taught him that “the key to success isn’t recognizing opportunity, but instead recognizing the opportunities you should not chase.”

No sooner had he straightened things out on the business front, Deville faced a cancer diagnosis and the loss of a kidney. Wham-Bam.

He decided it was time for a road trip through the American west on a rented Road King, a move I totally understand! The fruit of his trip was a strategy for his own management consulting firm and the outline for this book, which is also available on Audible, narrated by the author in his delightful Louisiana accent.

Now DeVille leads three-day motorcycle retreats for business owners to help them achieve the same degree of clarity that his seminal trip provided to him.

The book is written not written exclusively for bikers; indeed DeVille does an excellent job explaining the motorcycling metaphors to the uninitiated. That said, I think bikers like me are bound to enjoy it on a deeper level.

Note to aspiring business authors

If you’re thinking of writing a book on a dry subject, like business planning, consider DeVille’s approach of filtering it through a metaphor or a simple tale (ex: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari).

A couple of weeks after downloading a Kindle version of The Biker’s Guide to Business: When Business and Life Meet at the Crossroads, I received a personalized copy from its author, whom I “know” through Twitter. This is the first book that I have in both formats and it helped me see exactly how books differ between print and digital.  With that homework done, I recommend that business authors distribute their books in all three formats: print, digital and audio.

In Search of a Sugar Daddy Publisher

When I talk to prospective authors about their publishing plans very few know what they’re up against trying to get a traditional publisher to fund their project. That’s how you should think of it — funding the project.

Before an aspiring author settles into a daydream of how to spend all that advance money and how lavish her book launch party will be, she needs a dose of reality on the  economics of publishing from the publisher’s perspective.

A Fantasy Scenario

A publisher takes care of several things, pre-press activities, printing and distribution. Promoting the book is almost always the author’s responsibility.

Printing Press by Digitalholgi on Flickr

Pre-press costs

Let’s engage in fantasy and say the book is so well written it only needs copy editing before it’s ready to be designed and sent off to the printer — that’s a quantum leap but we’ll take it.

A quick search through self-publishing price charts gives you a sense of cost to get the book to the printer, including covers, page setup, copy editing ISBN number, bar code, etc.  Let’s pretend $4000 is a reasonable estimate to get the book ready to go to the printer.

Printing costs

The cost to print each book is a volume game. Createspace has a handy calculator that shows your cost at about $2200 for a run of 1000 softcover copies of your 100-page book.  Sure, you can get printing at better prices, but this is close enough for Fantasy Land.

So far, without your publisher paying you anything for the time and effort to write the book (much less the cost to pay someone to write it for you), you’re looking at $6200 to produce 1000 books including pre-press and printing.

Distribution costs

Distribution is a hefty expense.  The distributor will charge $500 to establish an account for your book, plus a monthly fee and storage charge for warehousing your book. Then, they’ll take a chunk out of the retail price of each book to handle shipping, selling it to retailers, collecting money, etc.

When you add distribution charges, you’ve got an $8000 project for sure WITHOUT paying anything to promote it. Can you move 1000 books to your network without a promotions budget?

An easier way to make a living

Selling 1000 books means your publisher will have to price the book at $20 to make $12,000 gross. Because this is a fantasy, let’s say you took no advance to write the book and negotiated 30% royalty on sales. Congratulations, you and your publisher just scored $6000 each.

Let’s be honest, there’s an easier way to make a living.

You say you want an advance to write your book?  Even just a trifle? Let’s do the math with a $10,000 advance and the same 1000 book run.  Do you know 1000 people who are going to pay $30 for your book?  Hold on before you answer. Mark Twain’s 760-page autobiography was priced at $34.95 retail.  Oh well, since we’re in fantasy land let’s say you sell all 1000 copies at $30.  Your lucky publisher can hope to make $12,000 and you’re not going to make any royalties on top of the advance.

Yep, there are lots of easier ways to make a living for both you AND the publisher.

Are you writing a book to make a profit or to meet some other goal(s)?

Skinny profits mean the publisher’s’ most important concern is the author’s ability to SELL the book. The business professionals I work with can usually sell 1000 books to their built-in audience, more if they can sell them at speaking engagements, but even small publishers will need to sell more than 1000 books to make it worth their while.

Of course profiting on the sale of your books isn’t the only reason to write them. This post will help you think through your goals.

Bottom line for aspiring business authors:  self-publishing is probably going to be more profitable, provided you can FUND THE PROJECT. If you need help with funding, you could always sell “shares” in the book or sell advertising or licensing rights. There are several creative ways to fund it without involving a publisher.

So, You Want to Write a Book

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” ~  Marcus Tullius Cicero

While more people are inquiring about my ghost writing services this year, it seems once aspiring authors come to grips with what’s involved with writing a book, they cower.

If you find that you want to write a book after answering the series of questions in this post, let’s get started. If you’re discouraged, better now than later.

What are your goals for the book?

You do have goals for the book, right?

Very few people want to write a book just to check it off a bucket list — that’s the poet’s purview. Most business people are motivated by fame, fortune or passion for a cause.  These questions will help you determine whether a book will meet the goals you’ve set for it.

• How will you calculate the return on the investment of  your effort?  Your answer could be expressed in hard or soft dollars or social outcomes.
• Could you meet your goals by giving your book away? Or do you need a profit on your book? A good number of decisions hinge on your answer to this question, including whether self-publishing is preferred.
• Whose work is your audience reading today? What unique point of view do you offer?
• How many platforms can you distribute your content on? In other words, can you write it once and move it electronically, in print, through a recording, and perhaps video seminars?  Some books, for example coffee-table books, just don’t translate well to audio or text-only readers.

What’s your magnetism?

One of my (young adult) sons is a Jersey Shore fan. Please don’t judge me. I bring that wretched TV show into the conversation simply to make a point — Sookie’s book sells because the show has fans. Truth be told, I didn’t know Jersey Shore fans read books — the one in my house doesn’t.  But I digress.

The takeaway here is that A Shore Thing is an extension of the Jersey Shore franchise, not its cornerstone. If you want to sell your book quickly, you need a fan base, too. If you need to sell the book, not give it away, do you have at least 1000 people who would spend at least $5 for it? Would they spend $10? $20?

Too many people think that a book will bring them new fans/clients instantly.  This is possible if your existing fans are sufficiently motivated by your message to evangelize others into buying your book.  Otherwise you should count on paying — in some combination of time, effort and dollars — to promote your book. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Two of the best resources I’ve come across to help you figure the book business out is Guerrilla Marketing for Authors: 100 Weapons to Help You Sell Your Work and Dan Poytner’s Self-Publishing Manual.  I suggest reading them before you begin writing your book, even if you intend to place your book with a publisher.

Bottom line: If you have a passion for your subject, you have clients/fans who are passionate about you or your message, and you’re willing to immerse yourself in the book project for a couple of years (writing and promoting it) a book might provide you with personal and professional satisfaction.  You might change lives and make the world a better place. You won’t know until you try.

If you’d like to talk about your project, reach out. Our first conversation is free.

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