This is my historical takeaway from my book efforts for 40 years. I’m trying to summarize the experience, the efforts, the vanity world, and my frustrations or failures in marketing. I am lucky and grateful to have generated some books I enjoyed writing, and the successes in at least putting them out there. Without you none of this would be possible. I am really appreciative.
Fourth Lesson: Vanity type productions produce hard copy books that are often overpriced for their value.
Fifth Lesson: Readers like to get to know the personna and personalities and blogs of the authors. You often are advised to try to become a personality that responds to hundreds of reader emails and contacts.
Sixth Lesson: Famous or powerful people get attention. Unknown folks don’t. A former governor will produce a book (usually ghost written via interviews) and publishers and readers will gobble it up.
Seventh Lesson. To be taken seriously by publishers and bookstores, you often need to have a well paid agent. Paying for the agent is a bit like paying for a vanity press to produce initial copies. The agent wants the money up front, and you are rolling the dice as to whether it will pay off. Just to sign up with a recommended agent would have cost about $4k.
Eighth Lesson. Get to know how to use paypal.
HISTORY
I’ve never made hardly any profits from these efforts. Conversely, I’d need to see a lot to even break even.
In the late 80s, As a newly elected legislator, I wrote a short novel centered on the State Legislature. It was called Poison in Paradise.
This sat on my desk for about 20 years when I typed it up and sent it off to a vanity press in 2012. Not sure how much I had to pay them, but it did create a hard copy book. I changed nothing so this was in essence a snapshot of what was happening in Hawaii, the media and technology. Vanity publisher was Rosedog Books.
http://rosedogbookstore.com/poison-in-paradise/This was available on Amazon for a time as well.
This book was printed by a local community health center as a potential fundraising book for the center. About 3,000 books were printed, but unfortunately the center director died and most of the books were in boxes in a warehouse. I was able to recover some of them. Apparently the book has made its way to Amazon as a used book. It is in the process of being recreated as an actual hard copy and ebook on my website. It is also being prepared as a combo book with the 1986 novel Poison in Paradise, with the thought these two books, one fiction, one nonfiction, are a civics education window into how legislators work. It is still the only book on Hawaii’s legislature written by a former representative. I suppose if this were perceived as a resource of interest, more legislators would be writing them. Nevertheless, many a legislative staffer still read it.
In the early 2000s I was Executive Director for the Hawaii Charter School Office. I wrote a book on this (A Charter School Story, because of the continued disdain and hostility I found in Hawaii and other state Boards of Education and legislators. Initially this was published as a vanity book on Lulu.com
Litfire was very supportive within the bounds of their financial strategy and profit model. However, the person handling my case turned out to be a valued advisor and handler for future efforts.
Around 2015 a former legislative colleague and I experimented with co-writing a “series” of contemporary detective short novels set in Hawaii. I was able to persuade and pay Litfire to add two of these: The Case of the Good Deed, and The Case of the Rainforest Reunion.
Myu co-author and I were eventually discouraged and decided to end our “series.” We also didn’t have the funds to pay for professional editors or agents..
So what I have is a number of ebooks and a few hard copies available on various sites.
All of the novels, starting with Poison in the 80s, are written in a kind of cinematic form, each chapter is a scene. I had hoped that at some point a TV or movie producer would be interested. Not yet!. But to do this it costs up to $50K to produce teaser trailers to show at film festivals.
Civic Education: All of the books, taken as a whole, all the fiction and nonfiction books provide insights into how our democracy works. They are a cheap supplement for all manner of civic related education courses at many levels. Hopefully, the novels are an attractive and more interesting window into understanding our society.
FAILURES AND FRUSTRATIONS
I am pretty much a failure in book marketing and publishing. I have neither the time nor the knowledge nor the personal finances to aggressively promote these books. I am not well known enough, even in Hawaii, to automatically be of interest to purchasers of books.
Many people think of publishing as you write a book, you send it to a number of publishers, and hope they accept it. There will be costs for editing, designing the cover, etc. Defining the target audience is important. Defining the genre is also pretty important. The right length of an academic book needs to fit into the preconceived, consensus world of publishers.
Self Publishing
With the help of a kind of volunteer enthusiastic case manager who initially recruited Poison, I have set up my own micro publishing platform:
https://hawaiiinsightbooks.com/ With the help of my handler we’ve also created an account with Ingram Spark, which means that if I were to ever get a book store to carry my books, they can sell unsold copies back to Ingram. I’m told that one way to stimulate bookstore interest is to have lots of friends ask for them. This strategy kind of collapsed during the pandemic as folks stopped going to a lot of bookstores.
As for Gadfly (see attached) I just decided that this is the kind of Hawaii centric policy paper that folks are unlikely to pay for this kind of product. So it is posted on Hawaii Insight Books as a free download. (
https://hawaiiinsightbooks.com/) However, I do believe that simply circulating it for free makes it easily available especially to some high school or college classes as a supplement, as well as to other policy centers, as well as legislators.
My goal is that it is read and plants some seeds of thoughts for students, profs, and policy makers of all stripes. So what I would like to see is that folks would simply send Gandfly as an attachment to colleagues who teach history, poli sci, health policy, edu policy and aging issues.
