What Does BQB Do For Me Once My Book is Published?

What Does BQB Do For Me Once My Book is Published?

  • On the surface, things seem to get pretty quiet after a book is published compared to the activity during the pre-publishing stages. This is normal, but doesn’t mean that nothing is happening around your book once it gets into the marketplace.
  • Now that BQB has been in business for awhile, we are able to quantify the amount of time and services that BQB puts into each book. While authors pay around $3,000 in expenses to get their book published, BQB contributes around $5,000 of manpower and services in the first year and around $2,000 a year after that for each book that we publish.
  • Because it typically takes 2-4 years to establish a book in marketplace, the main areas of BQB’s investment and focus are distribution and wide-range marketing.
  • While BQB does more marketing and marketing training than the majority of publishers “out there,” we must keep in mind that we are a publishing company, not a marketing company and the majority of our marketing time goes to developing and supporting distribution and in gaining wide-spread credibility for each BQB book with major retailers, wholesalers, and their reading audiences. We support BQB authors with wide-range marketing such as press releases, social media, etc., but we advise authors to hire or recruit additional marketing support if they don’t have the time or knowledge to do all of the activities we suggest for helping to build their fan base.

Terri’s main areas of concentration are:

  • Promoting and selling our books to the buyers of Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, etc. It’s important to understand that none of these entities “have” to carry any book. Some of them like Amazon and Barnes and Noble will list the majority of books presented to them, even self-published books, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will stock the book and that your book will always and consistently be on their sites or that they promote it in any way. Plus, it takes some additional selling and promoting to get booksellers to bring actual stock into their stores. These are gigantic companies and our books are small potatoes to them, so building relationships with the book buyers and gaining credibility for BQB and our books is our long-term goal – a goal that will benefit everyone. It can take 5-8 months to get established into distribution. We work with the Sales Rep to interact with the national buyers, but it’s just as important for authors to work from the local end and reach out directly to the stores around them and request they order and carry their books.
  • Working with our sales rep to identify niche markets for specific books to see if he can get some interest generated. We were recently successful in getting interest from the military PXs, but that didn’t happen without a lot of interaction and work. Because of BQB’s work, New Leaf is now getting established as a vendor for the military PXs which means our sales rep will soon be able to present all of BQB books to the PX buyers, just like he does for Barnes & Noble, etc.
  • We identify and target niche markets for every book we publish. Sometimes getting into a particular market can take months of interaction.
  • Extending our ebook distribution. There are some strong ebook distribution companies that only handle ebooks from publishers, not self-published books, and these distributors are harder to get into. We are consistently identifying and applying to these distributors so that our ebook distribution continues to grow.
  • Once your book is with an ebook distributor, that doesn’t guarantee sales. We have to interact with these distributors to try to get the BQB ebooks highlighted and in front of buyers in every way possible. The distributors don’t do that for us, BQB has to get that done. This takes time and energy.
  • The children’s illustrated ebook market is a relatively new one and requires a conversion to something called an FLePub (fixed layout ePub). There are just a few conversion companies that do these and even fewer ebook distributors that handle them. And, the ones that do, seem to quite often run into quality problems and a children’s illustrated ebook can take time to first get on a site and then to consistently stay there. All of this takes oversight by BQB and communication of errors – the companies don’t do that checking for us.
  • There are a lot of market possibilities that have not yet been identified, and Terri spends a lot of time researching and finding these possibilities.
  • Once an entity agrees to carry a book, inventory management is a huge job. Estimating exactly how many books will sell and how quickly is important to guarantee that books are where they need to be when they need to be there.

Julie’s main areas of concentration are:

1) BQB focused marketing– Enforcing our company brand, promoting BQB news, book events, helping Terri get information and material to the distributor.

2) Author & book focused marketing

  • Press releases – Letting people know about the latest book releases, news, events, successes, etc. I spend a lot of time developing the content or working with writers. Then, it’s posted online to our prlog.org account and distributed individually. This is certainly a place where authors can help with drafting releases and spreading them out to various media sources.
  • Media relationships – it takes a lot of follow up and personalized messaging to get someone to pay attention. Whether it’s a reporter, editor, or writer. A unique and interesting pitch must be formulated, communicated, and followed up on. I encourage authors to work on these too, especially in your local area.
  • Email Marketing – messages to bookstores announcing new releases or news. I also work on newsletters to clients or work with Terri to distribute messages to booksellers
  • Event coordination – on occasion. I do minimal individual author event set-up/connections since it’s not as effective coming from me
  • BQB events (group signings, book festivals like Decatur Book Festival)
  • Social Media and online presence (developing messages, interacting, posting, and building connections through each channel
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • LinkedIn
    • Website – work with Katy to ensure web content is correct and linked appropriatel
    • Blogging – This is three pronged

    1) BQB Blog: developing content for the Tuesday Sneak Peek and Weekend Guest Blogs
    2) Author’s Blogs: Offering topic ideas, editing posts, commenting or sharing post with BQB follower
    3) 3rd Party Blogs: This is one I’ve spent a lot of time developing lately. Also, Rodney Page has some good insight here and everyone should read his post on Southern Writer’s Suite T blog. Connecting with blog owners takes time, but can be a valuable resource to help spread the word about a book. Also, the chances of getting a response are higher since they are constantly looking for new content and ways to attract more readers. The reach of a blog isn’t usually as big as that of a local or mainstream media hit, but there is the chance to reach more focused audiences and people you wouldn’t normally be able to directly connect with. It’s still a valuable use of your time.

  • print materials – signing flyers
  • Author interaction
    • Answering Questions (events, awards, website, social media, reviews, contest ideas, suggestions)
    • Brainstorming Ideas (contests, promotions, targets)
    • Developing Plan (targets and how to reach them, setting goals and action items – this varies depending on author’s wishes, goals, involvement
    • Training with social media, website, events, promotion techniques

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  • Our goal is to get your book into the mainstream where the largest amount of people will buy it and where it will get the most attention. BQB does not concentrate on local marketing of your book . . . that is the author’s responsibility. While BQB has helped set up author book signings in the past, we find that when an author contacts a bookstore, they get better results than when BQB tries to set up a book signing. And we have spent a lot of time setting up signings to have authors back out for various reasons, so arranging local book signings is not the best use of our manpower or talents. We will help guide and train authors in these endeavors.
  • BQB does occasionally set up a book signing when the opportunity arises, but we do not have the manpower, nor is it to the best and highest good of our authors and BQB to spend our manpower on these endeavors
    • We are looking into the possibility of putting on an event coordinator to work with authors on local events in their areas, but at this point in time, we have to ascertain whether it is financially feasible for BQB to do so. And, if BQB does set up book signings, going forward, the books will have to be purchased either through BQB or through wholesale outlets to ensure income for BQB in these endeavors. When an author sets up a book signing and can provide the books themselves, an author makes a much larger per book profit, therefore worth putting the effort into.
  • There are also times when BQB will have the opportunity to set up a signing for several authors at one time, when those opportunities occur, we do so and then make those opportunities available to BQB authors.
  • BQB also picks up the expense of exhibiting at major book festivals where every BQB book is represented and authors are given an opportunity to do book signings. There is significant cost to these events – i.e. a booth at the Decatur Book Festival is $500; it takes two solid days of BQB manpower at the shows and many days before and after to handle all of the details involved. These events are one of the things that sets us apart from other publishers. We invest time and money into a few large events a year so that our authors have the space and support to participate in larger book signings that they may not be able to do individually.