I’ve been writing for money since I was 19 but officially became an author last year when my neighbor and I published a book. Always thought it would be cool to be an author… I smoke a pipe and everything.
Don Jose, An American Soldier’s Courage and Faith in Japanese Captivity, is the story of a local World War II veteran who survived Japanese POW camps. You can read more about the book on our website.
Writing the book was the easy part. My co-author and I were blissfully unaware that somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million books are published each year in the U.S., thanks to the explosion of self-publishing and e-books. Most nonfiction books sell fewer than 250 copies a year and have about a one percent chance of getting space on bookstore shelves.
We soon learned that our publisher, a small publishing house in Santa Fe, could get the book online at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble but was unable to get it into bookstores. So, like most authors, we’ve done our own marketing. We’ve done book signings in every bookstore in town, promoted the book on local radio stations and sent an email to every public library in New Mexico. I got publicity in an alumni magazine and my Navy group’s newsletter. My co-author sold a copy to every member of the Knights of Columbus.
We have had some success selling books in the lobby of the exchange store at the local Air Force base, and one local bookstore has been very supportive in stocking the book and hosting book signings. We sold very few books at the veterans’ hospital, though we had some interesting conversations with a couple of guys from the psych ward. We did very well at a convention of descendants of Bataan-Corregidor veterans and at a Filipino-American National Historical Society convention.
Crowd control at the book fiesta
Recently we participated in the first Southwest Book Fiesta at the Albuquerque Convention Center. The event was a spectacular failure, so poorly attended that we thought they’d dropped the neutron bomb. Everybody except the promoters lost money, especially the authors who traveled from outside the area. We had a good time hanging out with other authors and publishers, though.
My co-author is good at the meeting-and-greeting thing and I’m getting better at it. We may have a future as greeters at Walmart. Sometimes we sell more than a dozen books in an afternoon and that makes us feel prosperous – until we subtract the cost of the books and other expenses and find that we’re working for less than minimum wage.
We’ve learned that some kinds of books sell better than others. Cookbooks sell in New Mexico, along with anything about Georgia O’Keefe. Veteran biographies not so much, though the Navajo Code Talkers are big. Every time we have a book signing someone asks if our guy was a Code Talker and is disappointed when we explain that Don Jose was Hispanic. If we had written a book about a war hero who was a Native American artist they’d be all over it in Santa Fe.
Still, our book has done well in its category. Unlike many veteran memoirs and biographies, our story is well documented and fact-checked. We’ve had some good reviews and recently won first prize for biography in the New Mexico Press Women’s annual competition.
One of the experts at the Book Fiesta told me that a book can be considered a best seller if it’s sold more than 500 copies. By that standard we’ve beaten the odds, though our publisher will not give us a straight answer on total sales. We’ve sold a couple of hundred copies online and in bookstores, but most of our sales have been in person, one copy at a time. We’re pleased with ourselves but grateful we don’t have to do this for a living.
My co-author and I sometimes talk about writing another book. I’m thinking about it.