Running log of marketing pursuits for 'Puzzling Innerverse' book (est. 5Oct24, upd. 7Apr25)
To give you a sense of what indie authors must do aside from the writing
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As I start this running log (at bottom), I await the ‘final’ proof copies of ‘Space Autistic Author’s Puzzling Innerverse’, designed for ages 10-12+ (see https://XHoYenAuthor.substack.com/p/my-puzzling-innerverse).
I’ve arrived at this point after months of post-final-draft revisions and file formatting iterations to make the graphics work in print and to satisfy IngramSpark’s PDF/X-1a requirements (which required me to purchase software) and after finally receiving the evaluations of early proof copies from my gracious volunteer evaluators.
Why a running log? Well, my ‘mental health war buddy’, Gwen, started it. She had an idea to contact a family member of a friend, someone she’d rubbed shoulders with on a project long ago. That person has some reach, shall we say, on the topic of critical thinking and emotional health educational materials, the area precisely applicable to ‘SAA’s Puzzling Innerverse’.
In our conversation about such a pursuit, it came up how I pursue dozens of leads like this and actually have never gotten traction on any of them. (Maybe one… I’m following up on that now to find out.)
Local, independent bookstores adopt the same criteria as traditional bookstores when it comes to indie books, and that’s for the most part understandable. I’m sure these local bookstores get many indie authors (some of whom just use AI to crank out product) who dump books on them in consignment arrangements and then never come back to pick up what doesn’t sell. Or just plain have bad products that don’t sell, which taints a store’s reputation and occupies valuable shelf space. Owners simply don’t have the time or energy to personally evaluate everything.
They rely on online sales to determine if a book is worth carrying (can’t get a job without experience, can’t get experience without a job), and then it must be set up with the 55% wholesaler discount and be returnable. For a new indie author who hasn’t yet found his audience, setting my first book to returnable put me in the red — several entities in Europe bought the book and then returned it 3 months later. It seemed fishy to me, but that doesn’t matter. I had to pay for the books and shipping and have not, as of this writing, sold enough books at my trickle sales rate to pay even for those returns, let alone all the other stuff one pays for along the way toward indie publication (e.g. the aforementioned software, for one example).
For ‘SAA’s Puzzling Innerverse’, a book intended to be marked up by the reader, I can’t ever set it to returnable. How does that work?
When Gwen suggested reaching out to this person, I made it clear that I would never expect them to somehow directly vouch for or promote my book. The best we could hope for is that this person knows of a topic-specific review site that might review it, and/or parent forums where parents review and recommend products to other parents interested in an immersive, educational brain tasks book promoting emotional health and critical thinking.
While that’s happening, I’ll start a list of things pursued. If you see an asterisk (*) to the left of the date or bullet, that means the pursuit yielded fruit. We’ll see how much steam I have for these necessary but usually fruitless pursuits.
04 Oct 24:
• Awaiting word on Gwen’s connection with someone with real reach
• Local B&N Store Mgr is on vacation.
05 Oct 24:
• Contacted the new chair of my old planetary science university dept. for other reasons, but might be able to establish a working relationship
• Visited a local comic book shop that sells activity books, received bizcard of owner, who’s only present on weekdays.
• Visited a “2nd and Charles” to look for something the comic shop didn’t have, and to ask how one gets on their shelves. Answer is same as always — same criteria as tradpub bookstores. (They used to have a local authors display, but haven’t for years. Was the material of low quality? Are customers of this store just as wary of Indie works as everyone else? Perhaps both. That door is closed.)
• Contacted a local indie bookstore (33 mi/53 km away by crow) to inquire about their returnable requirement.
• Contacted another local indie bookstore (>7 mi/11km by crow) to inquire about their returnable requirement.
• Contacted a used book store (40 mi/64 km away by crow) to inquire about their criteria for shelving and not tossing donated books, and whether or not I could get notification of sales or timeouts. (longshot!) If they reply, my follow-up will inquire about possible consignment if there are sales.
06 Oct 24:
• Contacted the educational non-profit focused on thinking skills that Gwen is looking into, via the public “contact us” interface, to see if they make recommendations or know of parent/teacher forums that make recommendations of supporting related products.
• Received final proof copy from KDP, added a little helpful text to the autostereogram page, rebuilt and resubmitted interior .PDF, pressed the big red button for KDP release on 01 Nov 24, submitted copyright cert request to Library of Congress (will take weeks to receive it)
08 Oct 24:
• Returned to that comic shop. Owner wasn’t around. Accepted the staff’s offer to pass along my proof copy and inquiry. (although I’m regretting that)
10 Oct 24:
• Contacted another bookstore (10 mi/16 km by crow) to inquiry about their policy when it comes to non-returnable books.
• Continued the fight with B&N’s vendor business office to resolve the problem with their tax form putting my TIN into the SSN field when it should be in the EIN field.
• Contacted a used bookstore (6 mi/10 km by crow) to check interest in doing consignment
• Bought twenty more copies of the release version (>$80 with shipping, so >$4 per book), ten from KDP, ten from I.S., for the purpose of having copies on hand for author events, in-person promotion, and potential consignment deals (as if)
• Contacted FOUR curated collection stores that sell kids’ products (toy stores, educational toy stores, and a mixed items curated store) to check interest in doing consignment (at first)
• Bought an ad from IngramSpark g00gle search ad, $105! (and that’s the cheapest ad option I had) — follow-up 08 Nov, a day after the ad campaign completed. That $105 bought a 1.1% hit rate and a total of 125 clicks out of over 11k ‘impressions’. It would require 41 sales to pay for that six day ad campaign alone. For my upcoming ‘meet a local author’ two-hour appearance at a local B&N, I bought a tabletop sign for $18, which would require another 8 sales to pay for that. You get the idea.
*11 Oct 24:
• Will attend an event tonight and will see if there are opportunities to spread the word. (Edit: none)
*• Haven’t heard back from that (40mi/64km by crow) used bookstore, but will be in the area, so will stop by for an in-person check while handing final prints to Gwen so she can pass them along to her contact. (They’re informally open to a casual inspection. Understandable.) —> * joy! The Bookworm, an institution in Boulder, Colorado, and a real “reader’s [used] bookstore”, is carrying SAA-PI on consignment! I can’t express how wonderful they were about setting this up. I got verklempt! 12/12/24 update: the first two copies on consignment there have sold! I’ll need to return to restock them! :) 8Feb25 update: one more copy sold since the original two.
• Hours of research yielded a list of ~23 more establishments around the city that I should contact. (game stores, toy stores, kid stuff stores, book stores)
• Messaged 4 of those establishments.
12 Oct 24:
• Sent a compatibility inquiry to the UK’s The Wishing Shelf Book Awards (I’m not sure they accept books like this; there was nothing in the rules about books that get marked up by the reader, but you never know, maybe they’d lump it together with all ‘activity books’, maybe they’d evaluate it as educational fiction, we’ll see)
13 Oct 24:
• Worked through that big list of possible stores to check. Half are not good fits. Many will require me to wait until the book is released and there’s a valid IngramSpark listing available for retailers. I did contact a bunch of them to inquire about the process for getting a book evaluated by them. Others don’t even have a way to contact them remotely and I’ll need to visit them in person on a convenient weekday.
16 Oct 24:
• Nearly had a stroke iterating for the umpteenth time with the B&N customer “service” rep who simply will not read the words I’ve written to him. This time my message included a repeat of the very first message from weeks ago, but with a giant red circle and giant red arrows and text, plus a new one with a big red box for a different screen to make the point a second way. It’s insane!
17 Oct 24:
• After 2 more iterations, I finally got the B&N person to pass my issue along to someone else. Hopefully that someone will actually read what I wrote. (09 Nov follow-up: no word yet from B&N!)
• Howard Lovy of ALLi and HowardLovy.com will be interviewing me next week for his Inspirational Authors podcast. I replied to his open call back on 07 July. It’s a good thing it’s taken this long to be invited, because now I can mention SAA-PI! :)
21 Oct 24:
• Posted a shameless plug in a chat channel at work. That may not sound like much, but technically it stretches what’s both allowed and what’s considered ethical. If a coworker wanted to complain, they could. But these are my STEM/STEAM people. I need to reach out to them!
• Visited one of the shops on my big list to check interest in consignment. The owner has one of my proof copies in hand and will get back to me if interested.
23 Oct 24:
• Answered an inquiry from the Copyright office and got the application approved. I’m to expect the paper certificate in 6-8 weeks.
• Contacted the remaining places on my big list of local shops. (I spoke with two of the owners on the phone.) Awaiting word on their interest.
• Removed one place from my big list of local shops. It just doesn’t seem appropriate.
• Only one local shop remains on my list, and I just realized there’s one more not too far from it. I can and should visit those in person (in two days).
24 Oct 24:
• Got printouts of my media kit, my author-event signs, and my bookshelf eyecatcher for MSD. Folded and cut those eyecatchers at the Office Depot (whose prints are always top quality compared to my local Fed Ex). Needed to have all those in hand during my visits to the last two bookstores on my list, in Parker, CO. Both visits were very pleasant! Jen and Valerie at BooksAreAwesome.org were awesome, and will send me an application. Melissa at Poor Richard’s Book Shoppe, a used book store along the lines of The Bookworm in Boulder, accepted a consignment copy of “Space Autistic Author’s Puzzling Innerverse” to put on the shelf.
https://www.facebook.com/PoorRichardsBooks
• And before that run I had my long-form interview with Howard Lovy, whose “Inspirational Indie Authors” podcast is carried by ALLi (Alliance of Independent Authors). It should be live around mid-November. That sort of news will go into my newsletter.
*25 Oct 24:
• Just made my biweekly check with The Bookworm, and there have been no sales yet.
• *Beyond my 30 November 2-4pm Barnes & Noble “Meet a Local Author” event at Aurora Southlands Mall, I don’t know what else I can do to promote this book. The expensive google keyword search ad will go live for a week on 02 Nov. This 19 day list provides a sense of what an indie author must do to promote a book that isn’t romance or YA or urban fantasy. Unless new opportunities come to mind or appear out of the blue, from now on I’ll just be monitoring all these feelers sent out into the world, and will add an asterisk to any particular action in the above list that yielded fruit.
For my other books, I’ve decided to go deeper into author debt to obtain some DeepL translations and to post “Custodians of the Future” (which is set in Stockholm) on DropCapMarketplace, a book database for international publishers. (My books are global and I’ve learned from the recent SelfPubCon run by ALLi that it behooves me to actively seek international markets.) Seeking additional reputable lauds for CotF, I’ve also enrolled that book at BookAwardPro, also not cheap. The “release it and they will come” mentality simply doesn’t work.
27 Oct 24:
• I’ve begun working on Space Autistic Author, Log 3, my promo and cross-promo fun animated series on youtube. I’ll plug CotF and SAA-PI and will have two guest stars, author Levi Jacobs and artist Elisa Wikey. The episode will be loosely X-Files themed. (These are a tremendous amount of work to build.)
28 Oct 24:
• Copyright certificate arrived!
30 Oct 24:
• Despite being burned out by all this stuff, I went ahead and submitted a panelist application for COSine 2025. By the time January rolls around, I hope to have the wind back in my lungs.
• I know I’m going to have to pursue lauds for this book. I’ve already submitted it to one literary contest, but one is never enough. More on that later.
01 Nov 24:
• Puzzling Innerverse is now live on Amazon and in Bookshop.org! I’ve updated my web site accordingly. (Visit my web site’s Books page for a discounted [dollar off] direct purchase link) Tomorrow the keyword search ad I bought will activate.
09 Nov 24:
• Took contest physical copies to the P.O. after 2 feet of snow came down. My back hurts from shoveling. I need a machine.
• Bought a nice new table banner in anticipation of my 30 Nov B&N “meet a local author” 2 hours. This book should be my big draw. (Update 8Feb25: sold 20 books at this event, 8 CotF and 6 of each MSD and SAA-PI! Far more than at 3 geek conventions combined. Selection effect at geek conventions didn’t remotely compare to the validation granted by a brick-and-mortar bookstore allowing an author table.)
12 Nov 24:
• Bought a contest entry for this book in the Colorado Book Awards, which requires 4 to 7 copies. Won’t know how that goes for half a year. Dropping off the books in two days. (Update 8Feb25: There were no other entries in the middle grade category, so I had to retract the book from the Colorado Book Awards this year. :( )
Upd: 07 Apr 25:
• Used ChatGPT (the free version) to revamp my marketing copy on my book-specific web pages. Informed by the globe’s knowledge of marketing, the thing really did improve my books’ pages. ChatGPT assures me that it has stolen no books and merely uses freely available sources of generic marketing knowledge for its recommendations. This long session with ChatGPT also provided many other useful things for me to dig into. So, while it saved me from having to become a marketing expert, I now have more outreach avenues to pursue (not specific to this book, though).
• Contacted MindCraft Makerspace (STEAM/STEM-focused) at The Stanley Market. They’re interested in carrying this book! Still working out the details. Also, just today contacted CU Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium about carrying this book in their store, as well as the CU Bookstore itself. We’ll see if they’re interested. The Bookworm in Boulder continues to sell at least one a month.