I’ve been thinking about a client of mine who came to me with a lovely novel that he decided to self-publish.  In our initial conversations he expressed knowledge of how he knew this was a venture that might not yield a lot in the way of money, but for a man in his position it wasn’t a major concern.  In a few words, he had resources.

With the ability to pay for a well-conceived package for the book, an editor, a web designer, and of course a public relations and marketing team, he was off to a really good start.

My client had a great idea for a book.  It was a story about a single mother and her sons, one of whom was really good at sports, especially baseball.  Throw in some flashback scenes with a few old-time famous players and you have the perfect combination of adult/YA crossover with a sports theme. His book had the opportunity for different targeted markets.

Our planning started in July and August with a fully fleshed-out timeline.  The production aspects related to the book were completed by October including the edited copy, interior design, and jacket design/copy/etc.  In September we started kicking off the marketing with a two-tiered plan of big-mouth and bookseller outreach as well as setting up and starting the social media.

We encouraged our author to blog; we handled his tweets; we advised on Facebook posts.  We also connected him to some online outlets that wanted original blog entries.  We did a customized press kit with peanuts, cracker jacks, a baseball card, and a copy of the book to select retailers and media people.  We helped manage the first event, which took place near his home and was in a perfect location–a gated community with a captive audience that added to the friends, family, and other contacts who were able to attend.

In December, shortly after the official “launch” of the book, he sold over 500 copies.  In the months following up until March/April he was selling as few as 20 per month to as many as 80 (approximate numbers here but in the correct range).

We set up a blog review tour leading into the winter months, which certainly helped with the sales, but it was slow, especially after the initial blast of December that had been made possible by the marketing lead up and tapping all of those friends, family, and contacts.

Was he happy?  No.  He was looking for a steady sale of around 800 copies a month.  In the publishing industry in general (traditional and non-) that is not an easy number to reach, especially for a novel by a new author.

So, here’s what happened.  He was asked to blog and write pieces for a couple of websites, which he didn’t really see the value in doing.  He wasn’t motivated to keep up with social media, and it really wasn’t his thing (which is fine, not everyone loves the 140 character story).  He decided to work with an ad agency to put notices on some of the higher end literary websites, which we didn’t recommend because the book itself wasn’t right for that market.  Eventually, I think he gave up.

This was a hard one for me because I really liked the book and thought it had a nice slow burn happening with additional opportunities to feed the fire.  As anyone who self-publishes knows, overnight success is rarely possible.  Usually you have to be willing to keep your day job and work at marketing in the off hours.  Will you make money from your first book (or any book for that matter)?  According to a survey from Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest, most authors (both traditional and non-) are making less than $10,000 a year.

The biggest lesson here for me was to make sure that everyone I work with understands the realities of the publishing industry.  Sometimes having an alternative goal to selling books, like raising your public profile or getting pitched to do speaking engagements, helps authors because it is part of a bigger plan for their careers.  With fiction this is a bit more difficult.  The whole process is a journey and although experts can advise and predict based on their experiences, there are many factors that go into the success of a book.  But when your book is selling, even just 20 copies a month, it is something to be proud of and it means there is potential there.  It’s a question of tapping into it, nursing it along, and not letting it go for anything.

Short answer is yes, it is possible to get brick and mortar bookstores to take your self-published books, but it isn’t an easy option.  The simplest course is to hire someone to get your e-book set up on every available platform including Nook, iBooks, Kindle, Kobo, etc., and then market like crazy online.  But today I am highlighting an author and how his perseverance with booksellers continues to pay-off, over a year later.

A gentleman hired me to work on his debut novel.  It was well over 450 pages and he wanted to print it in hardcover–did I mention he was doing this by himself?  The book was professionally edited, a compelling story, and he did everything he could to maximize the actual look and feel of the product with beveled edges, a beautiful cover, and decorated end papers.  Next, he set up his own press, where he featured other previous non-fiction work (of his)  as well as his upcoming titles.

Now, he wasn’t a person who had grown up through the digital age, and the whole Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Goodreads world was not something that came naturally.  What he was hoping for was attention in traditional newspapers like the New York Times, which I told him was not going to be an option, even though we did try.  In the old days (like 10 years ago) if you wanted to build interest in a novel by a new author, one path to success was to market heavily to the independent bookstore market.

But independent bookstores are not necessarily selling venues for independent writers.  Booksellers have been hurt by the advent of etailers and the decrease in sales of print books just like everyone else in publishing.  They have only so much shelf space and they have seen and heard every pitch.  But that didn’t daunt us, or our author, in this scenario.

In fact we put together the most thorough list of independent booksellers in the Northeast, along with the local chain.  Our author set his hardcovers up with a distributor for legitimacy and also just for ease of distribution.  I mean whose back can hold up packing and shipping cartons of big hardcover books from their house?  He also offered traditional publishing terms with a 40% discount to booksellers off the cover price and free shipping BOTH WAYS.

Then we all hit the phones.  “You are representing who?  And What?”;  “Send it to me and I’ll see what I can do.”; “I have a pile a mile high of potential sellers”  These were some of the responses we received.  But we marched on with the knowledge that there were 2000 copies of this bad boy to get out the door.

We emailed and pitched with every possible thing we had; we offered additional marketing materials and advertising; we even offered to give them the books if they just tried to sell them during their busy seasons.

In the meantime, our author was setting himself up for appearances where he promised to show up at the store, sit at a table, and simply sell and sign the books for the store.  I think between what we set up and what the author did himself, we had almost twenty stores for him to visit.

In the last couple of months I’ve been receiving requests for copies of the novel’s book jacket for event promotion, from Barnes & Noble to independent stores.  I hear the book has gone into a second printing.  It is just over a year since the book was originally published.

I was told that E. Lynn Harris sold books out of the trunk of his car before becoming a bestselling (romance) author.  It’s not the same genre and it’s not the same time period, but I learned a few things from this experience:

1. Literally “never say never.”

2. If you leave your pride and ego at the door, much can be accomplished. (If it isn’t already, this one could be inside a fortune cookie.)

I’m not necessarily recommending this way as a means to a selling end, but I am just pointing out that there is always an extreme case out there where something initially thought impossible, becomes possible.  Was it the best course of action?  It was what our author and the book needed in order to get noticed.  Did it get the book where we wanted it to go?  There are movie options being discussed and books definitely got sold.