Navigating The Publishing Trail

by Dee Dee Phelps
(Pacific Palisades, CA, USA)

It took me four and a half years to write Vinyl Highway, a memoir of singing as rock duo Dick and Dee Dee in the Sixties. When I finally completed the book I thought I had all the publishing answers. I sent proposals to literary agents during the writing process. Several agents asked for an exclusive and held up the book for three or more months before letting me know the book wasn't a fit for their company. After that, I was ready to try print-on demand publishing.

I researched the top three POD companies and called each one. A representative from the first company spelled out the process, but when I told her I also wanted to sell books from my website, she screamed at me, "No! No! You can't do that! We have our own website to sell books." Not appreciating being yelled at, I moved on.

The second company charged the highest rates to print the book. I felt sure I could do better.

At this point, I'd viewed other authors books published by POD companies and saw how amateurish many of the covers were. That started my internet search for a great cover designer, which I finally found in the Midwest (I live in the Los Angeles area). This designer eventually created the cover for Vinyl Highway, which was one of the best moves I ever made. I was to later find out that when most POD companies create the cover for you they won't let you take that cover with you if you leave them.

A third POD company sounded wonderful as they had a promotional package attached to the process that helped with publicity. I decided to hire them and had to pay a substantial sum up front. I submitted my manuscript and they hired an editor to work on it.

One day I received a personal telephone call from the editor. She explained that she hadn't been paid for her services for months and just found out "through the grapevine" that the company was going to go belly up. They were hoping to make enough money to cover their costs by selling the large promotional packages.

I requested a refund, something I was entitled to in my contract, but met resistance. I finally hired an attorney who threatened to announce their potential bankruptsy to the public and they paid me back pronto. But of course, I was out the attorney's costs.

Finally, I went with Trafford Publishing in Canada. The editing process there was excruciatingly difficult. The editor made a number of changes and sent a sample book to me for approval. I approved all the changes but, in re-reading the entire book, found there were now many errors in the text that weren't there when I sent the original manuscript! I wound up writing them eleven pages, spelling out each correction that had to be made, that was originally correct when I submitted the manuscript. It took five more tries to get it right, with my being billed for each new sample copy of the book they printed (naturally, all payment is due up front).

Finally, after a number of months, my first box of books arrived. What a thrilling moment. What I didn't realize was how the book pricing was going to prevent the average reader from buying the book. Trafford has a calculator so you can see how much you will earn from each copy sold. They take their basic printing costs and add their own profit margin into it. My book, which in the current market would have retailed for $16.95 was priced at $24.95. I'd had no option but to go along with this.

The good news was that I'd get all the Amazon and personal website sales. I announced the book and started selling a fair amount of copies through the Dick and Dee Dee website. We eventually added the CD "The Best of Dick and Dee Dee" to the sales, throwing in a free autographed photo if a book or CD was purchased. The book was launched.

I went to Book Expo America in Washington, DC the summer of 2006. The best thing that happened there was going to a private breakfast with Obama, one of the keynote speakers at the convention. He was pitching his book at the time and told stories of his background.

We had a great time meeting the then founder of Trafford, his assistant and other Trafford authors. After standing on our feet at the booth for several days, we returned to LA enthused but exhausted. Nothing much was accomplished, since everyone I talked to told me that book stores won't stock a print-on-demand book. They advised me to find other ways to publish it.

By then I'd joined several writing and publishing groups, i.e. Span, Spawn, and Independent Writers of Southern California. In their newsletters, they talked about the concept of self publishing, in other words, creating your own publishing company, finding a printer and printing the book yourself.

This idea appealed to me so I started gathering information about the process. I applied for a business license, opened an account, researched printers, etc. In the meantime, I'd joined PMA. They were having a contest to win a national distributor, something I felt was essential to getting books into brick and mortar book stores. I was told that they accepted only ten percent of the contest applicants. Vinyl Highway was chosen for national distribution through IPG in Chicago.

IPG requested that I lower the price to a competitive $16.95 and also redo the back cover, which I did. I printed 3,000 copies through a printing company located near the Chicago distributor, to save in shipping costs. They sent me 500 books for my own sales.

Unfortunately, one of the mandatory conditions set forth was that I had to give them all Amazon sales, which I agreed to. I was later to find that in America, we have an unusual returns policy that apparently no other English speaking country in the world has. A large company like Barnes and Nobel or Borders can order as many copies as they think they can sell, which they pay for in advance. However, if copies don't all sell, they can return them to the distributor and get one hundred percent of their original purchase price back. If the books are damaged in any way, the author is out the cost of the books.

As independent book stores started to fail, as POD companies flooded the market with product and as everyone in American became a seller of used books on EBay and Amazon, we had to fight for publicity to promote the book. We were charged for every listing and promotion available to us.

I sent out one sheets (author and book information, complete with photo and author bio on one side of the paper and book cover photo and ordering information on the other side) to libraries, etc. I also sent out over 100 review copies to the top 100 newspapers in the country (only to find that many of them had recently discontinued their book review sections).

Over the past year and a half, I've also held interviews on over 50 radio stations across the USA. Vinyl Highway won several awards.

The book is currently for sale through bookstores, which can order it from the distributor if they don't have it in stock. It's also available through Amazon, as well as (researched today) twenty six other book sites listing the book through Amazon. And, of course, I continue to sell it through www.dickanddeedee.com.

Since I recently started singing as Dick and Dee Dee again, I anticipate many "back of the room" sales at concerts in the future.

The single greatest book that I read like a Holy Grail of self publishing is The Well Fed Self-Publisher by Peter Bowerman (www.wellfedsp.com). It answers any questions you might have about the self publishing process as well as a time line for what to do and in what order. Good luck with your publishing and remember, all the promotion is entirely up to you. So take off your writer's hat and get rollin'.

Visit Dick and Dee Dee.