Gravel or Gold
This week’s musical theme is gravel or gold, which refers to a 2023 song by country artist Dierks Bentley. I’ve never been a big country music fan, but I just drove to all 48 lower states on my national book tour. I wound up hearing a lot of country music when I was out of town on the backroads of America. The choice was only country music or one of the country preachers on the air.
Is it a gravel road or a street lined with gold?
I got some rust on my Chevy but it's ready to roll/I got a rhinestone sky and a song in my soul
It ain't a smooth ride, life, it's a winding road/Yeah, it might be gravel, but it feels like gold
I've been climbin', tryin' to get to the view/I'm at the bottom but the sky's still blue
They say heaven is somewhere on the other side/But I ain't waitin',/I'm thinkin', it's a state of mind
The basic message is that in life, you can either stick to the safe job (even if it drives you to drink) or you can choose to find your happiness elsewhere. The gravel road may be bumpy to some, but to others, it is the path out into the country, where the air is fresh, the sky is blue, and the sun shines, even at night.
For some people, gravel is gold. I heard that song, and decided that it was the perfect theme song for my book tour. Now if only could sing…
About the book… the one that is always almost done but never quite ready…
The saga continues: The book is now split in two, to keep the cost within reach. You’d think that nothing else can go wrong, but you’d be mistaken. Writing a book is like having all your hair pulled out one by one, and then they start over with the new hair that grows in to replace the old. They just keep pulling.
Writing a book is like someone pulling out your beard hairs
In other words, be prepared for a never-ending cavalcade of delays, mishaps, and complications.
Now, I have to find a way to print the book affordably so that bookstores will be able to sell it at a profit, and I will still be able to make a few dollars on each sale. I did not write the book to get rich, but I also can’t afford to lose money on each sale. I thought surely there would be an easy way to print the book. After all, this is America, where everything always works, and the customer (that’s me) is always right.
No. When it comes to writing books, there are scammers and scoundrels around every corner, waiting for clueless first-time authors (me) who dream of seeing their name on the cover of a best-selling book.
That’s me. As clueless as they come. Fortunately, a friend of mine who wrote a book a few years ago warned me to be very careful about scams targeting new authors. He learned his lesson the hard way. He wound up sinking $25-30,000 into his book, and now he has a garage full of books he can’t sell.
I may end up with a room full of my own books
That scared the crap out of me. I decided from the beginning to be very frugal and invest as little as possible until I see if people will actually buy the book. If no one will buy it, there’s no point throwing money into advertising a lost cause. I learned about print-on-demand, which means that I don’t have to pay up front to print thousands of copies that no one will ever buy. What could possibly go wrong now?
Everything.
It turns out that the big companies that do print on demand (POD) like Amazon, Ingram, and Blurb, are all just doing drop shipping. That’s their business model. Drop shipping means they just lure you to their website with false promises and rose-colored expectations. Once you pay, they suddenly send your book to an outside printer, the cheapest one they can find, and when the book arrives, the quality is dubious.
Then, when you realize the book copies are not satisfactory, you discover there is no customer service line to call. The person on the other end of the live chat line says they don’t take responsibility for the quality of the printing, which is done by third parties. They also won’t tell you who printed the book, because they don’t want you to go direct to the printers for the next job and cut them out of the loop.
Just shoot me.
Gravel or Gold. This applies to book printing as well, because the POD folks make it seem like the road to riches is paved with gold, but when you open the book that they send you, instead of gold, a bunch of dusty gravel pours out.
Eventually, I’ll probably figure out a solution, but for the past week, they have put me through hell. I still don’t know how to fix the problem. I have to go to my first book event on Saturday this week, and the book copies are not of the quality that I want for my readers. I don’t know what to tell customers.
All I can think of is to offer people a significant discount, like 20% off, and say this is the first print run and that we are still working out the kinks. I can’t afford to give the books out for free, and I can’t go to the event and refuse to sell books. So, I’m in a bind. If you know a better approach, please inform me ASAP.
See you next week, by which time I will hopefully have figured out some way to print a good quality book without losing my shirt, and without jacking the price right up into the stratosphere. Wish me luck.
Gravel or gold, here I come.
Will the streets in my life be lined with gold?
