Is Your Publisher Upselling You on Worthless Marketing Products and Services? ByAngela HoyThis article may be reprinted/redistibuted freely, as long as the entire articleand bio are included.I received the following email last week:Since my initial entrance into the World of Writing, as I like to call it, I havenot generated any sales for my four novels, including the one we, (my wife and I)paid a POD Company $650.00, for what turned out to be a rather bogus list of mediaoutlets and bookstores with which to try and get my latest novel into. I am notlooking to get rich overnight, but it would be wonderful to walk into a bookstoreand see my novels displayed upon a self.If you're wanting to see your book in bookstores, the best way to do that is toget an agent and then try to land a traditional publishing contract. While manyPOD companies are happy to sell you useless lists of bookstores, you need tounderstand that most of them are always looking for more ways to separate authorsfrom their money. Let's face it - that's their revenue model. (At Booklocker.com,we don't sell any marketing products or services to our authors. Our advice andcontacts are free because, when a bookstore buys a book, or a magazine reviews abook, or a book gets any publicity at all, that benefits the author AND thepublisher.)I am stunned whenever I see those huge lists of incredibly expensive and worthless"marketing" products and services offered by most of the POD companies. Honestly,who needs 25 coffee cups with their book's cover on them? Believe me, coffee cupsdon't generate sales. Likewise, buying a list of bookstore names and addresses(you can find bookstore info. online for free if you need it, and it costs nothingfor your publisher to email that list to you), is also a waste of money. You canbet the bookstores appearing on that list are being deluged with pitches from yourpublisher's other authors as well. We actually appear on some of these lists andwe're not even a brick and mortar bookstore. Believe me, all those spams, junkfaxes and junk mail end up in the trash. That gives you an idea how great those"lists" are.And then there's that New York Times ad that one POD publisher sells. You pay them$2650 for a small in the New York Times...and your small ad is surrounded by smallads from other authors who have also paid $2650. The ad is also, of course, forthe POD Publisher's services (soliciting even more authors, some of whom willlikely also eventually buy that $2650 New York Times ad). They say they allow adsfor 12 books per ad. However, the sample they have on their website features 14book ads. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt, they earn $2650 x 12. That's$31,800 gross for each one-page ad they run in the New York Times. I wonder howmuch they have to pay for their portion of the ad? Hmm... If I had to wager aguess, I bet they earn more in fees from new authors than they earn in book salesfrom those ads.I'd be curious to hear from authors who have forked over that $2650, authors whoare willing to tell me how many sales resulted from that "advertisement." And,since I'm always wary of fraudulent emails coming from the POD publishersthemselves (we get those all the time), the author will need to prove who they areand I'll be checking on the actual sales of that title.I suggest not paying your publisher any more money for their marketing productsand services and instead purchasing good books on how to sell books. And, to get
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