The SLUSHPILE Blog

Yesterday I completed and uploaded the New Home Page of the Double Edge Press Website. I like the new look; I think it is a dramatic and drastic change from the old look. I hope that I have also achieved a ‘warm’ feel to it.

As I had mentioned before, I wanted to shift the focus of our website from sales to literary. Hence, I’ve taken excerpts from four of our books, and the opening paragraph of our upcoming release, and added them to the front page. I didn’t do it for all of our books because then it starts to feel crowded, and as the number of books we publish will assuredly grow, I wouldn’t possibly be able to add them all. There was no rhyme nor reason to the excerpts I chose. They were just what I gravitated to when thinking of the works they were taken from. I hope that they prove to be good examples.

As of today, the site is a little odd with the updated front page and all the old pages remaining the same. I’ll be working on those in the days to come, and switching them out as each is completed. Normally, I would want to wait until the new site was ‘complete’ before publishing, but as I am expecting a month’s worth of free advertising from the Jennifer TV Show website, I beleive it behooves us to look as spiffy as possible for our pending open house.

Everyone have a good day.

Although it is only the end of August, it feels like fall. We went from lots of rain earlier this summer to not a drop in the past month. The grass shows it, being brown and dusty. The trees show it, their leaves are changing. The air feels like Autumn: thin and cool. And the sky gets the brillian blue that it never quite achieves in the human heat of mid-summer.

Along with the seasonal changes, I’ve been working on the changes that I have blogged about previously. Changes to our house. Changes to our business. Changes in how we present our business.

So, I’ve been working on the new web-site design. I think, maybe, it will give you some further insight into the increased focus that I had alluded to on previous posts. Here’s a look at the very basic beginnings:

Everyone have a good Tuesday. 

Yesterday, I blogged about changing the focus of our website from sales to information. One of the reasons (although not the only reason) I cited was the overhead of having instant credit-debit card processing capability.

Ironically enough, last night I received an email alert from our cc processing provider that they were increasing their fees across the board by 30% beginning in October.

Nothing like a little nudge to help make a final decision. You can expect to see changes prior to October.

Speaking of nudges, I had been in a quagmire of indecision in regards to our next release, Caledonian Privateer. What I iniitally thought would fit our catalog, just doesn’t. Add to the problem that I couldn’t ask for rewrites because of it’s already ebook published status through Awestruck (they had the ebook rights, we had the print rights). What to do with it?

Then I receive an email from Gail MacMillan. She had another publisher interested. Would I return the rights to her?

So–Caledonian Privateer will not be our next release. I hope it finds much success with this other publisher (no, really, I do! Better name recognition for Gail means more sales for her title that we still have: Ceilidh’s Quest). And as any publisher she goes with is likely to be larger, better established, and have a bigger advertising budget, it can’t be but beneficial for her also.

We gave back the rights. She got to keep the advance. Despite the fact that she didn’t know I was having serious reservations about publishing it (I wanted a more Christian theme), I did have reservations, and I didn’t feel it appropriate to ask for her advance back when she in fact unwittingly helped me out of a difficult situation.

Now, about that more Christian theme: we’re not taking a change in direction, but we are driving down a straighter line in the direction we’ve been travelling. My gut tells me this is the way to go. My heart tells me this is the way to go. And our sales history tells me this is the way to go. One of the changes coming to the website is that we will no longer be listing ourselves as Christian ‘friendly’ publishers. We’re going explicitly Christian.

What does that mean exactly? I’ll leave it to you to decide and to explore, and then we’ll see how the future works of Double Edge match up with your envisionment.

First up will be Skylar Hamilton Burris’ An Unlikely Missionary. And therein, I believe, lies a fine example of an author’s interpretation of what we want to publish in the genre she excels at.

We’re not changing, but we are Focusing. I hope you enjoy the increased clarity coming.

Another thing I thought about while painting the dining room was refocusing our website. I’m beginning to get the itch to revamp the site again (it seems to come along on about a yearly basis), but it isn’t pure change for the sake of change that is motivating my thoughts of revamping. I’m considering doing away with direct sales to the general public.

Doing away with direct sales to the general public would eliminate a large portion of static overhead. The ability to do online sales does not come free, and it is an expense that remains the same month after month, whether we have many sales or very few. It’s easy enough to post a link to Amazon for each title, and although at first glance it seems that the customer would be on the losing end as Amazon usually only averages a 32% discount from our list price (and in certain instances, doesn’t provide any discount at all) which is lower than the 45% we offer, that first glance may be misleading. The elimination of the static overhead of online sales would enable us to lower the price on our titles in general without lowering our profit margin, and would make all of these titles more competitive throughout distribution, whether on-line or off.

There are still a couple quirky details to work out. Direct bulk order sales would be slightly more complicated, but only for those retailers that we have found to be poor credit risks and that are required to pay up front. Waiting for a check may delay shipments. Other retailers, who normally purchase on net 30 terms would proceed as normal, with us shipping the order and invoicing them for payment within 30 days. I believe it would also benefit us to list our distributor more prominently, as many of these retailers may already have distributor accounts and wouldn’t mind the slightly less discount they receive through them if it means charging the order with whatever terms they already have worked out through them.

Author orders would have to be handled in the same manner as above (minus the distribution route. Authors are contractually awarded a 55% discount on all orders after their initial free copies, and a distributor is not going to be able to honor that agreement). Those authors that can be counted on to pay for their orders would get invoiced. Those that have proven to be somewhat challenged when accepting the fact that books, even their own, don’t come for free would have to place a check in the mail before the books can be shipped

The last quirky detail has nothing to do with Double Edge Press specifically. It is the Hummingbird World Media concept of various artists and craftsmen who share the overall site and who have had instant credit and debit card sales available to them. There is no handy Amazon site which also carries their products at no expense to either themselves or us to point links to for purchase. All the same, a lot can be done with paypal accounts for online sales, and there is always the tried and true of a customer actually speaking with the product provider, placing an order and writing a check.

All of this is not to say that credit and debit card sales are going to necessarily be out of the picture entirely. There are many options out there in credit card processing, and if after doing the research I am able to find one whose overhead is much more manageable, but that doesn’t necessarily allow on-line sales, it is still an option I would like to keep. The ability to run a cc manually behind the scenes if not on the web would still be a great deal beneficial, and do away with most if not all of the delays addressed in the odd instances above, when our extending credit isn’t feasible and waiting on a check can be too time-consuming.

I won’t reach a final decision on this until after we get some advertising in place on various internet book retailers and see if that boosts sales through distribution. Distribution already outstrips our direct sales, but I would like to see it at an even higher percentage before pulling the plug on individual direct sales altogehter.

There’s one other thing to consider: the element of ‘cheesy’. Despite the fact that every other large (and small) publisher I google has sales as a primary option on their websites, I can’t help feeling that the whole concept is a little cheap and a whole lot cheesy. It looks cheesy and it feels cheesy.

At some point, a reader has to wonder, who’s the salesman and who’s the publisher? And why are they both the same? Aren’t writers supposed to be concentrating on writing, and publishers concentrating on publishing? Shouldn’t the sales be left to the retailers?

In short, I would like to spend more space and time on-line showcasing our books, providing information on our authors and less space and time on pitching sales. Interested readers can google a title and instantly have dozens, even hundreds of sites that sell. If they’re showing up at our site, chances are they want information. So, my thinking is, lets give them what they want, and skip the commercials (so to speak).

Maybe we can start a new trend of actually looking literary-minded instead of money-grubbing minded.

Everyone have a great Thursday.

One of the things I thought about while painting our dining room (here’s an updated pic of the finished product, btw) is advertising.

Advertising has been an ongoing project since Day 1 of our business. You can’t survive without it; you can easily go broke putting your advertising dollars in the wrong venue with it.

When I think of advertising, I think of nice, glossy full color pages in appropriate magazines. That would be the ideal. But we’re not there yet. Not only is the cost prohibitive, but at this point in our game, I think it would garner very little in the way of results for us.

Magazine advertising does not lend itself to immediate sales. What it is good for, I believe, is imprinting the item into the buyers mind, so that when they are at the store at a later date, see the item, they have an ‘oh, yeah,’ moment, and purchase. The key word in that long sentence is store. We do have books in stores. Even the large chain ones. But not every one, not by a long shot, and the ones that I have found our books in have been purely by accident. Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Borders thus far have not sent me out a nice list of what books they’ve ordered through our distributor and where they have gone to. Our distributor doesn’t even provide this information. All they provide is how many sold, how many returned. Period. The bottom line, if you would.

So, except for in certain instances (such as with Jim Spurr’s work) I can’t even break advertising down into certain favorable regions. I can’t say, well, the books are in these stores in this area, so we’ll advertise in that area.

Instead, I have to take a different approach. It’s one that I’ve been banging my head up against since our inception. Since the only sure venue where I know all of our books are always available is online, the challenge is to interest the on-line reader. The reader who is familiar with the internet, isn’t nervous about financial transactions over the internet, but who still finds time to read. At first glance, this should be an easy solution: advertise on Google, Yahoo and the ilk. Of course, I tried that road almost from the first day, and although it was good for a few sales a month, it still seemed as though I could use our advertising dollars a lot more wisely. It would just require some thought and some research. Something that up until recently (see previous post) I had very limited time for. And so, except for PR releases (and, yes, you have to pay for those if you want them to actually do anything — you can go the free route, but the old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ certainly holds true in the PR world), some limited advertising in specific newspapers in an author’s area upon a new release, and some odds and ends I tried out here and there, effective advertising, for the most part, has remained a mystery to me. But I’ve never given up on the thought that once I figure it out, it will make a huge difference.

Painting gave me time to think about what we had tried, and why it wasn’t working, which was perhaps the best place to start. Google and Yahoo, I concluded, didn’t work because although they automatically place your ads in spots where the content is appropriate, they don’t target readers. Anyone interested in the War of 1812 or in Duck Tolling Retrievers was going to run across our ads. But they may be doing research themselves. They may be looking for photos. They may be doing a school assignment, or merely getting a take on how people dealing with those subjects build their websites. The point is, not many of them are looking to buy a book, and not many of them are going to be persuaded to buy a book if that wasn’t what they were already looking for.

With these conclusions, I decided that our advertising dollar needed to be spent not where people who were interested in the subject might buy a book, but where people who are buying books might be interested in our subject.

Seems simple, right?

So, beginning shortly, there will be advertisements for our books not in the general Yahoo, Google venues, but in specific book-selling web-sites: Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc. And we’ll see how that goes.

Everyone have a good Wednesday (is it Wednesday already?)

Tomorrow on further Things I think about while Painting: A goal of downsizing our website to information only (non-selling) status.

Yesterday, I finished the first project on our home improvement list: painting the dining room. It is a simple thing, but the results bring such a lift to one’s spirits that you can only wish that every project was as immediately gratifying as a fresh coat of paint.

It’s been a hectic summer for us (as Gail MacMillan pointed out in an email to me querying where her book was in all of this activity) with vacation, house-sitting and now home-improvement, not to mention trying to keep up with the normal summer things such as mowing the grass and doing school shopping for the kids.

Maybe its time to do a complete confession. Maybe it will bring some perspective.

Here’s the confession: When I started this publishing business in 2005, I was not independently wealthy (as probably a look at our dining room in mid-paint job several posts ago reveals). I was working full time, 40+ hours a week.

The first books I did the editing on (T.S. Beckett’s I sub-contracted the editing, mine I had already gone through numerous times over a seven year period) was Jim Spurr’s Sworn for Mackinaw and then Skylar Hamilton Burris’ Conviction: a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I did the majority of those edits at work at my desk while juggling phone calls and my work-load. I would then come home and work on the covers, the text block and the numerous other details that a publish job requires that I couldn’t do at work. I did all this while being married, raising a family of four and all the details that go along with those titles.

By the time I finished my full time career in July of 2007, I was working in Pittsburgh, an hour commute each way, holding down a management position, was still raising four children, was still married to a patient and indulgent husband, and had managed to publish seven of the ten books in our catalog. In July, tired of the commute that was pushing my days into eleven and more hours and with the looked for move to a closer facility by my employer put on delay for an indetermined amount of time, I made the leap from working full time to taking on temporary positions. In April of this year, I whacked it back to sub-contracting out for a mere 2 hours a day. A far cry from the hectic, harried life I had been living for the past near three years.

So am I now painting my house, putting cabinets in my kitchen, and taking an occasional vacation? You betcha. But I can assure Gail and anyone else who has been wondering that the business is receiving far more of my time than I have ever been able to afford it before.

And the painting? It gives me time for something else I hadn’t been able to gain before: a time for retrospection, reflection, and most importantly, where we are headed in the future. Sometimes busy, mindless work is the best thing to allow the mind to loosen, to wander and to make leaps from the day to day and week to week to where do I want to be next year, and the next decade.

In many ways, we’re just beginning.

Everyone have a good Tuesday.

Yesterday, I had quite a long post written up, complete with photos, only to find that the internet connection had dropped at some point in my creating of it. Meaning I had no where to upload it to. And so it got flushed.

I was trying guiltily to make up for my laxness in blogging. I got out of the habit during our vacation, and then during house/dog sitting and am finding it difficult to carve out that small chunk of time each day to again get back into the normal routine.

But that is not what my post is about today. My post today is that I am so close to uploading Gail’s book, and with a lag in sales for the past month, I thought it would be a good idea to paint our house. Not the outside, but several rooms on the inside.

Now this bright idea occurred because I was mulling over the idea of putting an island in our kitchen. Our kitchen is quite simply medieval. It has one wall to ceiling cabinet, a sink with about 12 inches of counter to either side and a single column of drawers, and some built in shelves along one wall and that is the entirety of the built-in storage space. We’ve adapted by adding a kitchen table, some book shelves, and a small mobile counter that hits you not much higher than the knees.

An Island, I thought, would be a welcome addition, and the added storage below would be a life-saver. So I went on-line just to size up things and get some pricing, and by the time I was finished, had a list of four wall cabinets, three base cabinets, and a floor to ceiling storage cabinet. And a new counter-top to go with all.

But before we could do any of this, the kitchen would need painted. And if I were going to paint the kitchen, the dining room and living room could use a good coat also. . . and so that is how major renovation projects take off. In my case it was an island. We once had a family member that ended redoing his entire house over something even smaller and more ridiculous: a toilet seat. That single small change dominoed into new carpeting, wall-paper, fixtures, paint, etc, throughout his entire house. How far mine will actually go, I’m not certain, but we had the roofing contractor in yesterday. So there’s a clue.

I normally like to blog in early morning. But of course, I’m busy painting now in the morning. And no harm, no foul, I felt, because that would leave the afternoons to finish up Gail’s book. What with no orders coming in, and all.

Hah!

Not that I’m complaining mind you, but the reading crowd out there must be able to sense when you have placed the business on auto-pilot and are elbow deep in paint, because orders have picked up dramatically to keep pace with the frenzied strokes of my paint-brush (and I must tell you now that a simple fresh coat of paint would never do for me. Oh, no. We must be creative — shudder).

Anywho, here’s the pictures I was going to share with you yesterday:

Dining Room (wall right is color it — and the entire house — was) Just ignore the clutter, everything will get put back into place (eventually):

Here’s a view without the distracting ‘old’ wall:

Tomorrow, I’ll show you what it looks like with the next wall done.

Is it too much, do you think?

Oh, and if you’re wondering what that funny looking thing is sticking up outside the window of the door, that’s an old-fashioned hand water pump on our back porch (I did mention the house was insanely old, didn’t I?)

Everyone have a great weekend!

I’ll be painting. And filling orders.

Finally, after what seems like a year, but was in fact only a month, we are back home — to stay.

No more vacations. No more house/dog sitting while others are on vacation (although my brother tells me they had a fantastic time in Alaska, so it was well worth the ’sitting’ to allow them the opportunity to go there).

There is nothing quite like getting away from home to really make you appreciate home.

Yes, my brother/mother’s home has three bathrooms (a true luxury for our family of six whose own home only has a single bathroom). Yes, their kitchen is spot-on, up-to-date, with every conceivable gadget, appliance and convenience known to modern man (from a convection oven to an, gasp, electric can-opener — yes, I still use the old hand twist contrivance, due to a sad lack of outlets in our own home — 100 years old and the electrical is nearly as ancient). Yes, they have a bathtub the size of a small pool (bubble baths, mmmm), and acres and acres (and acres and acres) of land to walk, run, hike and play with the dogs. They have a view of two states (possibly three, I haven’t quite decided whether part of that horizon is actually Ohio, or still W.Va — they live in the PA, OH, WV panhandle tri-state area). They even have the convenience of a major shopping center only 15 minutes away (school clothes shopping for the kids — DONE — and when you’re talking four kids, that is an accomplishment).

All of these things were/are luxuries to us. We enjoyed them.

But, oh, it was oh, so nice to come home!

Home to our cluttered rooms, our one bathroom, our ancient definately un-modern kitchen. Home to our own beds and our own pillows. Home to our own t.v. with the clicker I actually know how to work.

Home to my computer, my files, my internet connection (cable beats satellite, I don’t care what anyone tells you), my software programs.

Home, where I can blog. Home where I can finish Gail MacMillan’s upcoming book (finally! the woman has the patience of a saint — either that or she is away at her own summer cottage and is still incommunicato and has no idea that her book still hasn’t been released!)

Home, where I can make a new rule for the business: Never, ever schedule a book release for July. Never again.

After all, if congress can take FIVE weeks off when we have $4.00 a gallon gasoline and need an energy bill passed, I can certainly take a month. From now on, I will.

I would have enjoyed this month of inactivity so much more if I hadn’t watched the days to my deadline tick down and then expire in front of my eyes.

Despite that, I’m feeling refreshed, energized and ready to get to work.

May you all have a good Saturday.

I will provide Alaska pictures as soon as I receive them (and of course, the best ones will be on Martha’s site for purchase soon afterward).

Royalty Statements and Checks for those who have earned out their advances went out yesterday.

Yay!

Every few months, I get an email from a promotional company that I had signed on with a while back about what bookfairs are coming up and an invitation to register titles with them. Yesterday, I finally took them up on their offer.

I sent one title off to the Frankfurt International Bookfair. The show is in Germany from October 15 through 19 and is hailed as the biggest book fair in the world.

May be interesting. We’ll see how the guinea pig does.

Everyone have a good Friday and a GREAT WEEKEND!

One more week of house and dog-sitting and then I can work on my own turf again. Yay.

As much as we enjoyed our vacation, I was more than ready to get back to work upon our arrival home.

There was a lot to get into: Gail MacMillan’s next release Caledonian Privateer and Royalty Statements.

Royalty Statements took precedence as they are required by contract to be mailed by the end of July (for the January 1 through June 30 sales period). They are now ready to go, and will be mailed out on Thursday along with Royalty checks to those who have earned beyond their advances.

Royalty check time is the only time I know my husband (that would be Neal the Irksome) to be cheerful at money going out. He knows that if the author is earning, we’ve probably made it past the break even point on our end and are earning also. Which ever author gets the biggest royalty check is his new favorite author (for that sales period, anyways).

Everything is moving smoothly, except for one wrinkle: A week after our return from Michigan, my mother only had time to wash her clothes, repack her bags, and set off on a two week jaunt to Alaska, with a grand total of 21 family members and friends. She, and two of my brothers and their families, left on Friday. So, on Friday, I repacked our family, at my mother’s request, and basically moved into her home in their absence. She felt better having the house occupied, and they needed someone to look after their dogs. Which meant we had to pack up our two dogs and take them with us.

Would it have been easier to bring her two dogs to us instead of the other way around? Undoubtedly for me. But in the end, they have a closed in kennel compound whereas we don’t. Caring for four dogs is easier on their premises than on ours.

Where it hasn’t been easy is conducting business from her computer. I hate working on someone else’s computer. The settings are never the way I like them, and even though I copied my main business files and what I’m currently working on onto a flash drive, the files never seem quite as readily available. Not to mention I had to re-track down all my normal links and save them into a file I made for me in her favorites. Checking email also requires me logging onto my bb service provider. But my biggest gripe is her screen.

Now I have a decent sized, 20 inch screen. She has a 27 inch screen. What could be wrong with that? you may be asking. Well, for some odd reason, although the screen is bigger, everything else is smaller: the icons, the font, all the wording on the internet sites. I’ve adjusted to enlarge everything as much as possible, but I am still in the position of having pulled her screen as close as the wiring will allow, taking off my glasses and sitting hunched over, squinting like Vincent Van Gopher to see anything. AND her internet connection is slower.

Ah, how I miss Home Sweet Home.

All of these problems I could work around except that she does not have a pdf pagemaker program. I can’t put the finishing touches on Gail MacMillan’s cover until I arrive back onto home turf. I’m driving back and forth a great deal as it is now (an hour each way) so that I can get some things done in a normal atmosphere (like blogging), but Gail’s cover, even just finishing it, is going to take a chunk of time. I foresee tucking my mother’s dogs into their kennel and spending an ‘overnight’ in our home in order to get the job accomplished. At this point, I don’t see any other alternative as we’ve already pushed back the pub date several times on this title and the thought of pushing it back another two weeks just gives me a disgusted feeling.

Progress will be made. We’re too close to finishing this up and uploading it to the printers for me to sit on it another 12 days.

Everyone have a great, and hopefully productive, day, any may you appreciate your own computer, however humble it may be.