Barnes and Noble Bookstore Blues

January 16, 2013

Barnes & Noble, or “Buns & Noodle” as cartoonist and book author Alison Bechdel satirized it, is in trouble. Nook sales were down by 12.6 percent compared to last year while retail sales went down 10.9 percent. And no wonder! Barnes & Noble is a second office for my partner and me. We try to […]

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Afraid of Making Sales?

December 15, 2012

Do you believe sales require using forceful techniques such as “handshake intimidation”? Do you think using powerful body language works best to get what you want? And do you say to yourself, “That’s just not my style!” Here’s what I have to share about about making sales. My dad was a salesman. He sold teeth, equipment, and […]

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Get Past Library “Gatekeepers”

July 16, 2012

Knowing your target audience is key to selling successfully. Librarians need your help to buy your book(s). Are you a new small press publisher or self-publishing author? If so, you have a major handicap in terms of getting your book into libraries. Your book(s) are not eligible for the free service from the Library of […]

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Agency Model Pros and Cons

May 10, 2012

On March 1, 2011, Random House, the last holdout against the Agency Model for pricing ebooks, caved. Random House joined other publishers by paying a standard fee of 30% out of author royalties to the distributor(s) of its e-books. The Agency Model for pricing e-book fees was signed onto last year when Apple debuted it’s […]

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Writer Beware: The Perfectionism Pit

April 10, 2012

Why do we need editors? An indexer I know refuses to ask clients to put her name in the books she indexes even though that is a great way to market indexing services. “Why,” I asked. “Because editors always crap up my work.” OK! Here’s what I have to say about that. I’ve been a […]

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Pricing Your Book and/or Services

March 14, 2012

The value of brick and mortar bookstores For the past few years my partner and I have spent at least one day a week hanging out at Barnes & Noble. Looking back, I can see that we learned more from a 3-hour stay at a bookstore than we ever learned on the Internet. That’s not […]

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Costs of A Book Index: Cross-Referencing

February 1, 2012

If you take the lowest bid you get for an index you may be missing out on term consistency in your index. Why is this the case? And why is it important? Expertise of the indexer Taking the lowest bid may mean you don’t get the most consistent index. As with other professionals, not all […]

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Term Consistency and Indexing

January 4, 2012

A term is a word or a phrase. A word or a phrase can have a variety of meanings. In addition, there’s the connotation (implied meaning) as well as the denotation (explicit meaning) of a word. Term consistency in an index is an art which involves making choices such as these: (1) Should the indexer […]

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A Catalog Record for My Book?

December 26, 2011

Let me answer the question, Does my book need a catalog record? with another question: Why do libraries need classification? If you’ve ever taken biology in school, you’ve learned about the classes used to classify all living beings. These are called kingdoms (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria). Classification is the science of breaking […]

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