No particular place to go
In May 1964, 59 years ago, rock’n’roll innovator Chuck Berry released the song “No Particular Place to Go” on Chess Records. The song was an anthem to the angst of teenagers who felt the urge to be alone and explore their new passions, but had nowhere to go for the privacy they desired. After completing my national book tour, driving 30,000 miles to visit independent bookstores in all 48 lower states, along with my trusted canine companion, Mr. Bones, I now feel a new, different kind of aimlessness. No particular place to go.
Riding along in my campervan/My dog is beside his favorite man
I wrote a book, it does not sell/So now I’m not feeling very well
Book events don’t pay me dough/And I’ve no particular place to go
For six months, I always had a place to go. We had a specific destination every day: a new state, a new city, a number of bookstores, meeting old friends, classmates, and colleagues across the country. Now, I wake up, and other than flogging away at book marketing, we have no particular place to go. I feel lost.
Now that the book tour is over, I feel a bit lost. Where do I go from here?
Funny. We never got lost once for six months, despite traveling 30,000 miles, but now, back in familiar surroundings in the Washington D.C. area, I feel lost. There are different ways to get lost of course. One is not knowing where you are. Another is not knowing where you should be. And finally, not knowing what to do or how to do it. I’m afflicted with not knowing where to go next, or what to do day to day.
The book is now out on Amazon and available to independent bookstores through Ingram, the largest book wholesaler and distributor in the US and throughout the English-speaking world. But once again, almost no one is buying the book on Amazon. I can tell Amazon sales are stagnant by the plummeting rank of my book. In the last couple of weeks, it has plunged from around book #250,000 to #750,000.
My book is falling into the abyss…
I haven’t notified bookstores that I visited during the book tour that the book is available. The reason is that they may want to buy it on consignment, meaning I would have to pay up front for the inventory. They would get the book on loan, essentially risk-free, to see if it would sell or not. For me to supply 150 bookstores that want the book, it would probably cost me $10,000.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in my book. I’ve worked hard on it. I think it’s a great book. But I don’t know if the average bookstore customer will buy it any more than the bookstores do. And it would be an expensive experiment to invest $10,000 in inventory to find out that customers won’t buy it. Then, I’d have to pay for the bookstores to return the books to Ingram, who would charge me to destroy them.
From writing a book I learned that everyone in the book business has their hand in your pocket. I used to wonder why there are no pickpockets anymore. I think it’s because they are in the book business now.
It seems like everybody has their hand in the author’s pocket…
I thought of going to book festivals around the country this summer, but they closed the applications for authors three months ago. The earliest I get into book festivals would be this fall. And guess what? They don’t want unknown authors. They want famous authors. People go to book festivals to see and hear famous authors and buy the signed books. So, in order to get invited, I have to become famous fast.
Not only that, but book festivals don’t pay for travel, lodging or meals for the authors, unless a writer is really famous. So, I would have to fund my own travel again. And once I got there, unless I sold a LOT of books, I wouldn’t even be able to cover my expenses. The same thing happens with book signing events.
Friends who have written books tell me it is rare to sell more than 10 books at a book signing. They make an average of $10 per book. Bookstores takes half of that for hosting the event. Authors make $50 if they are lucky, which doesn’t even pay for their time, gas, and meals driving to and from the event.
It seems that there is almost no way for an author to make money nowadays.
I suspect that someone, somewhere, is making money in all of this, but it certainly isn’t me. There is a fundamental problem with the idea of selling a book at a festival or at a book signing event. Here it is.
The reason may be that the model is seriously flawed. Each author sits alone at a table with a single book. But people are used to going to bookstores and choosing from a stock of thousands of books. No one wants to have just one choice, take it or leave it.
The book event is a “take it or leave it” proposition for potential buyers
Most people walk away under the circumstances.
How does retail shopping work? A typical retail store houses a huge inventory of goods and pays a few staff a modest amount hourly to stock and sell them. Customers come in to choose among hundreds of items. They browse.
Now imagine if a store put hundreds of tables in the parking lot, with just one item on each table, and put one employee at each table to sell customers that one item. That would be insane, right? And imagine if the one employee at the table would only get paid if they sold that one item to somebody.
No one would be willing to take that job because there is no way to guarantee they would be paid. This is what happens to authors at book events and book festivals. Authors have no guarantee of any sales. It is largely a waste of time. If only I could sing and dance, I would put on a floor show.
I don’t think it will help if I try to do a song and dance routine
I’ve been wracking my brains to figure out a new book event model that might ensure authors at least made enough to cover their expenses and pay for their time attending these. So far all I came up with is putting up a sign offering to write people personalized poems for a small fee, kind of like the way an artist might offer to do a quick sketch or caricature of you at a festival for a small fee.
But I don’t think I’ll get rich writing limericks
