Authors Are a Lucrative Market

This means YOU!
Talking to a fellow author yesterday, he asked if I know about (BrandName withheld for legal reasons) Shoes. I’m going to try to reproduce the conversation as closely as I can.

“BrandName? Of course I do,” I replied. “Everyone does.”

“That’s right, everyone does. But did you know that BrandName no longer makes their own shoes?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no BrandName factory making shoes. Everything is subcontracted. The owners don’t do anything except take in money.”

I laughed, but I was still curious. “How does that work?”

“Every year they pick one or two new designs. The designs are submitted by a design company. The approved designs are sent to a manufacturer, who makes the shoes. The shoes are packaged, and then promoted by an advertising agency. A distributor sends them to the stores. Ultimately the shoes probably costs about 6 or 7 dollars a pair. The shoes retail for anywhere from $70 to $100. That’s a profit of $63 to $93 per shoe.”

“Before costs?” I asked.

“No. That’s after costs. Do you know how many pairs of BrandName shoes are sold worldwide?”

“No, but I bet you do.”

He did. But I still looked it up for myself online. BrandName brought in 14.54 BILLION dollars in 2012 and again in 2013. Stats for 2014 aren’t in yet. This amount then is divided between the owners (I think there are only three of them) who don’t have to lift a finger unless they want to.

What’s the point of this story? A lot of businesses are following this model. No matter what they produce or what it says on the label, they’re just in business to make a maximum amount of money with as little effort as possible. And one of the markets they tap is YOU, the author.

Now wait a minute, you’re thinking. What’s wrong with making money?

LADY & the PIRATE awarded the 2011 Royal Palm for Literature

THE LADY & THE PIRATE by Johanna M. Bolton has been awarded the prestigious Royal Palm Literary Award for Best 2011 Romance Novel.

According to Bolton, the novel was first conceived when she was 16 years old and fascinated with sailboats, the sea, and a TV show called “The Buccaneers.” She dragged the manuscript around with her for the next 50 years, adding to the story now and then. Finished just last summer, Bolton entered the book in the Royal Palm competition on a whim. She only learned she had won on Sunday morning while she was appearing at Necronomicon Science Fiction Convention in Tampa, Florida where she was a guest speaker. Primarily a science fiction and mystery author, Bolton had no plans to ever write a romance, but this tale was so different that it demanded she tell it.

The book’s title has been changed. It was a difficult decision, Bolton admitted, “but I don’t think it will make that much of a difference — the manuscript is still the same. However, I called the story THE PIRATE’S LADY since — well since the books inception. But when I typed the name into Amazon’s search engine, I came up with plus two pages of Pirate Lady’s. The new title, LADY AND THE PIRATE, only raised one other book.” And some early readers, she added, liked this title better.

You can get a copy of LADY AND THE PIRATE for Kindle and as a treebook from several online sources including Amazon.com.

How do you like the new covers? The first one (with the redheaded girl) I was told made the book look too much like a YA novel. So I got a new cover.

This one (with the bare chested male) is more “mature” but it’s not historical enough. So the third cover, lace and a saber, er, cutlass) looks like the one I’ll keep.

What do you think?

Robots Reading Poetry

Can you imagine anything more ludicrous than a cartoon robot reciting poetry? Still, it seems to fit. It’s a poem about mathematics, after all.

You have to cut and paste the link … http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8188983