April 25th, 2018

Taylor Love

Click on the picture to view the marketing Kit

So as an Indie….normal book institutions are leery on carrying our material. I semi understand, was with online self-publishing and cheap POD anyone can put out anything. So the quality (outside of the story) is up in the air on many books. People don’t take the time to research HOW to do it, or the TIME to edit and review…over and over and over and over again (We put a lot of time into a GOOD book).
However I write so my work can be shared with as many people as possible. Most of my life my books have come from the libraries. It helped me discovery authors and genres I’d never read before. I have no problem with people reading my work for free-through a library.
So I searched the internet and found a free template for a Marketing Kit (I think it was for sending to newspapers or books stores and it was for a Business Book, not fiction). I had to replace all the photos to mine, and change all of the background colors from red to my purple. Word made this easy to do (for the most part). Of course I replaced all the text with my info and changed section titles when I felt it made sense.
The most difficult part was getting rid of 4 extra pages that didn’t make sense for my type of book. Since it was a formatted template I first had to delete all the formatting and then it allowed me to delete those pages. Though I could have just printed to PDF (by only printing the pages I wanted) and then the PDF would have only shown what I needed). However I find on my comp and the programs I’m using whenever I change something preformatted it becomes very sensitive so sometimes a simple process becomes more complicated. 
After I got it looking as I wanted, I was able to then type up a 3-4 paragraph email to my home town library and my local library. I sent the emails along with the PDF of my marketing kit.  I let them know I would love to donate 1 copy to be put into their circulation collection and I let them know I was available for them to buy for Ebook on Overdrive. In the email I included the genre I write in, my background (where I was from, my college experience, where I live now), why I write and my hope that they would support a local artist. I threw in that my book was formatted to match normal publishing house books and had been professionally edited and formatted (which it was-though with practice you can do  your own formatting, I do recommend that you get some kind of outside person with SKILL to at least proofread your book)
I got a response right away from my small hometown Library and they are willing to carry it so I mailed off their book the next day.  For my local library they wanted me to fill out there official short form for Indie authors and send in a book copy (that I could get back if they decided not to carry it). All of this happened just this last Sunday so not sure about my local library yet…I’m hopeful.
All these things I never worried about before publishing. In my mind I “assumed” your local library would LOVE to carry local authors and would have no issue with it. It all depends on your book “Look, Genre, Patron Base”. This can be hard for black authors writing Black stories. As if you don’t live in a town that has a big enough POC population libraries may stick with only the well-known African American Authors (since their selection of these types of books in all genres will be limited).  I believe that my library has a decent selection and patrons who are African American so my chances are probably 60/40.
Some Indie Authors wait until they can “prove” they have LARGE sustained sales and a fan base etc.  I think that is unfair, as again being IN a library is a major way that people learn of author’s period. My finger are crossed! I really would love from them to put me on Overdrive as again, I myself found tons of never heard of authors on there before and became a fans of their books, buying many of them.
Hope this helps other authors and gives readers a peek at what we have to do to try and get our work to readers. The hard work (I’m finding) is after the book is written!