The Publishing Game: Bestseller in 30 Days

by Fern Reiss

Make Your Book a Bestseller. In 30 Days. Author? Just sold your book to a publisher? Want it to have a shelf life longer than cottage cheese? Publisher? Want to get those books out of your garage and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1893290883
• ISBN13: 9781893290884
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Peanut Butter and Jelly Press
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Selling What You Write

THE PUBLISHING GAME is a wonderful outline for anyone struggling to sell a recently-published book. Fern Reiss's 30-day plan is full of well-conceived ideas that promise to work well if they are followed. For those who self-publish, this book gives advice on everything from how to get your ISBN to how to deal with the big distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Reiss advises writers to enter their books in contests. Books with "award-winning author" on the front attract sales. She tells about opportunities to sell serial rights to magazines. Over and over again she points out different avenues to generate more sales. This book is worth the purchase price if the buyer uses it only for the addresses and Web sites it provides. The author also gives helpful information about her own costs and experiences in promoting one of her books. She urges the reader to get on with planning the next book. If your book is about to be released, you will find THE PUBLISHING GAME an extremely important addition to your "how to" library. Buy it in time to follow the 30-day plan. More than anything else, Fern Reiss makes book promotion sound like fun.

This is the book I wish I'd read before I self-published

So okay, I would have had to put off publishing my latest novel for a year in order to take advantage of Fern Reiss's guide, which is still hot off the press. It would have been worth it. I'd bought the self-publishing "bibles" such as Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual before publishing my latest novel. But I still wish I'd had Reiss's book too. One great advantage of The Publishing Game: Bestseller in 30 Days is that the focus is on how to actually sell your book once it's in print. For first or even second-time independent publishers, like myself, the process of getting a book into print, even with the aid of a professional editor, cover artist and book designer, is so fraught with tsuris (Yiddish for aggravation), that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that once the copies have actually been printed and shipped to you, it's up to you to sell them. Reiss doesn't go into detail on how to publish in this book -- though she has an updated guide to the publishing process in the works, which doubtless will be equally worth reading. But the fact is, decisions about how to publish a book -- hardcover or paper, price, cover art, and so on -- are inextricably bound up with potential sales. A lot of important details that novice publishers may be completely unaware of -- such as submitting Advance Book Information to R.R. Bowker, in order to get the title into Books in Print -- need to be done before copies of the finished book are sitting in your garage. Reiss tells you what they are and when to do them. This is the second advantage to this guide. Reiss spells out each step the novice publisher needs to take, in the order in which he or she needs to take it. It would have been a godsend to a disorganized person like myself, as I fretted endlessly over what to do next. And this relatively compact guide is filled with nitty-gritty practical details. For instance, Ingram, the country's largest book wholesaler, allows only 30 characters in its titles field (something Reiss suggests keeping in mind when choosing a title). Who knew? And how I wish I'd read her suggestion to reserve a domain name for a new book at the same time the title is chosen. Maybe that seems obvious, but when my novel, A Departure from the Script, was selected for the book group discussion guide, Reading Group Choices 2002, the only website I had was... a dead giveaway that the book was self-published. This blunder not only made it obvious that I'd self-published, but made me look amateurish. Any good how-to book on self-publishing will offer tips to avoid such goofs and increase the appearance and actuality of professionalism. But Reiss goes a step beyond most of the others, as implied by her title: The Publishing Game. The emphasis here is on playing the game, on strategies that call for both cleverness and chutzpah. One example: The Library of Congress will only issue a "control number" to identify books put out by presses with less than three titles rather than the "Catalo

Especially for those new to the field of publishing

The Publishing Game: Bestseller In 30 Days! is a superbly presented, day-by-day, "user friendly" guide written by experienced publisher Fern Reiss for the purpose of aiding the novice publisher in applying a series of promotional and marketing techniques ranging from being featured in national magazines, to non-bookstore sales venues, to the role and uses of publishing industry awards, to print/broadcast publicity campaigns, to author speaking tours, to self-syndication, to the utilization of email newsletters, and more, which would aptly service to increase sales of self-published and small-press published titles. A solid, practical guide offering tips, tricks, and techniques as well as a useful structure by which to undertake the tactics that most other "how-to" books on publishing offer in only broad, general terms rather than specific daily activities. Informed and informative, The Publishing Game is very highly recommended as essential, basic reading, especially for those new to the field of publishing.