Flood-the-market begins...

As you can see no weekend posts. It was a very busy weekend. Saturday my wife and I went out house shopping. We are currently look at this one. Ha! I wish!

No, this area has a Parade of Homes in which people go to about 25 different homes and check out the new ones being built just to see what is in the area. Some are actually for sale, others are just for show. This was my first year to check it out and it was pretty neat experience. The homes were absolutely beautiful. This one, was an 8000 sq ft home that had a two story theatre. ::drool:: Another had a built in basketball court. I can dream :-) Each house had exquisite decorations and most had books as decorations. I joked with my wife that I should have slipped in my book into all the houses. She laughed and said, "Ya, it would be kind of easy to track who did that." Doh! Yeah, she is the more logical one :-)
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Besides that, I started the flood-the-market campaign in the local bookstores. Yeah, they think I am pretty much crazy. Especially when they hear what I want the store price to be. Well, I never said I was totally sane :-)

Here is the current 81/2 X 11 end cap display that is going out with the books. If I start getting calls to deliver more books, then I know it is eye catching enough.

In the last year, I have only put books into two Christian bookstores. Not because others wouldn't take it, but because I just didn't get out and pound the doors(I'll talk about this later). It is an interesting journey though to adventure into a Christian bookstore with a fantasy book with a lizard creature and dragon on the cover. Talk about the strange looks :-) But I convinced them to try it out. One of the stores actually had an employee that was reading FotU and was just telling the buyer that they needed to stock it. I don't know where he got the book(probably B&N), but it is always cool to hear of people you do not know who have read the book. I would like to say both stores sold out and got great reviews from the readers. If I do not hear from Barnes & Noble, then hopefully these stores running this campaign will be like a pebble in the pond, that I can use to create more ripples out to other stores.

There are multiple reasons I did not touch the Christian market. First, I originally was marketing to mainstream fantasy adult and YA readers. Second, I am having difficulties convincing a Christian distributor to take on the title and help market. I think the whole fantasy thing, is probably a problem. It is kind of sad. Out of all the chains and bookstores, the Christian market seems to be the hardest to get in. Everything is CBA related. Unless you are CBA they will not even look at you. And then you mention, Christian fantasy, and that is even worse. And lastly, with my last year trying to get a new publisher, I did not want to have too much in their market so they knew that I was still marketable there.

So now I move into the Christian market as aggressive as ever. We'll just have to see what happens.

Well I am in the middle of doing a total redesign of the church's website that I attend, so want to get that finished.