MSI Press Blog

  It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic  addresses advertising, i.e. spending money on getting your book enough attention for it to soar, or at least to fly. There is no end to advertising opportunities. The question becomes then, where do you best spend your money if you have it and what do you do if you are broke. I have money. Good for you!  You have options, depending upon how much you have and want to spend. There are print-based ads that can cost a little or cost a lot. Some (but far from all) include Catalogues: Book World Dealer is one example. Book magazines: Foreword Reviews is an example. If you cannot afford a part-page ad, they off

  Excerpt from Tucker & Me (Harvey) - RIDING THE WILD MATTRESS               I was a planned Cesarean birth. The doctor gave my mother a choice of several dates for delivery, and she picked the seventeenth. This was because her birthday was on the seventeenth, albeit in a different month. This was part of an inordinate role the number seventeen played in our family.                      I was brought home as a baby to our residence in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. I only lived there until I was two years old, but it was always referred to as the Hermosa Vista House, in reference to the name of the street. The street number was 417, thus continuing an odd streak of the number seventeen in our family residences. After that house, we lived in the city of Alhambra, with a street address of 1717. The next home we moved to the address was simply 17. Ultimately, the family settled in another town, where the house numbers were 1728. That’s an awful lot of seventeens for one fam

  It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic addresses book sales expectations. Most authors, especially first-time authors, expect to sell thousands of copies. Even with large publishers, that does not happen routinely. A few books sell well; most books sell slowly. Booksellers are not very transparent with their figures, but we do "know" some things. At launch The first day, week, month see the most sales. Typical sales are about 100 books the first month. Generally, book signings at high end bookstores will sell 15-20 books; events coordinators will rarely order more than 25 books for a launch and astute small presses will not agree to

  excerpt from From Deep Within (Lewis)  The Cutting Group   The door to the outpatient clinic’s waiting room opened and flakes of snow swept in with a chilling cold. The room was shaped in a perfect square. Twelve chairs in total leaned on opposite walls. The upholstery had once been institutional grey, but now it had black marks throughout, with tears soaked into the fabric and yellow/brown filth embedded in the seams. The center of each chair had taken on a rounded contour from years of patients sitting in the same place. Footprint marks were embedded in the carpet in front of each chair, showing where hundreds of people had placed their feet over the years. The wear in the carpet reminded me of the worn yellow footprints millions of airport travelers step into every day when passing through X-ray machines at security.   When the weather was damp, the clinic waiting room smelled like wet dirty diapers. At one end of the room was a sliding glass window with one side open. Anita, the