Monday, April 20, 2015

Book Selling

The Alabama Historical Association held its annual meeting April 9-11, 2015 in beautiful downtown Mobile. The History Museum of Mobile provided the hosting facilities. It was a wonderful three days and the meeting was well attended.

The first event on Thursday (April 9) afternoon was a publisher-author round-table. Literally, a rectangled-table. Book publishers stationed themselves at selected tables with an additional seven or eight chairs. Authors took their places and publishers explained how to get published through them. Authors asked questions, of course.

Those of us who knew of the long waits and eventual rejection of manuscripts by publishers already understood the process. But, I guess, it was good to hear directly from these publishers who told us honestly what we could expect. Next year the AHA should have a table for a "self publisher."

After about 15 to 20 minutes the moderator asked the authors to move to another publisher table, and the process began anew.

Of course, books were sold at AHA, too. In somewhat of an ironic twist, one of the many publishers who rejected my latest book (self- published eventually) agreed to sell my book at the AHA meeting. I was grateful for their offer. Didn't sell too many book, however.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015, I was in Montgomery at the annual board meeting of the Business Council of Alabama. I wrote an earlier post about this. Anyway, the subject of my book, former U.S. Ambassador William J. Cabaniss, Jr., was honored at that meeting and he delivered a short talk. Afterwards the Ambassador and I signed books. We sold 100. That was a good day.

Our next scheduled booking signing event will be with the Young Business Leaders organization in early May in downtown Birmingham. We still are working on a book signing event for Washington, D.C.

As a publisher myself, I have three writer working their manuscripts. Two more writers might be contracted within another month or so. One of my sisters has written a marvelous novel which I will publish in May, 2015. I will promote it here on the blog and my other social media accounts.

Stay in touch!

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