I was excited to discover that the University of Southern Indiana’s official library reading group is hosting two reading groups for A Greater Monster on February 14 and February 15. Event is listed on Facebook here.
Visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daviddavid/the-kickstarter-letters-a-handmade-and-illustrated to watch the entertaining video I created to introduce you to my third book, The Kickstarter Letters.
The Kickstarter Letters is collection of 52 letters I wrote to the supporters of my A Greater Monster Kickstarter project featuring 20 illustrations, a music playlist and a fantastic cover by Mike Wilgus. It’s available as a limited edition, handmade hardback edition–signed and number–and as an ebook. Please visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daviddavid/the-kickstarter-letters-a-handmade-and-illustrated for details. The handmade edition, which will retail for $40 after the project ends, is available for $25.
Shortened URL version, handy for tweeting: http://bit.ly/KICKLETTERS
Dear Friends,
After nearly eight years of labor, I’m proud to inform you that my second novel is now available for purchase. You can find it on Amazon here. And on Goodreads, of course, here: [book:A Greater Monster|12480602]. It is also available in Chicago at Quimby’s Bookstore, Unabridged Bookstore, Chicago Comics and Sandemeyer’s Books. At some point in the next couple weeks I hope to make it available via PayPal on this site, if you would like a signed copy.
My book release party was a great success! There were about 45 people in attendance, and the crowd was quite engrossed in my reading. Eight people actually showed up as we were closing down! Drinks were imbibed, and good times were had by all. A few snaps here:
In the meantime, I’ve been hard at work on my Kickstarter project rewards. You can still watch my amusing video (about the book. I pre-sold 120 copies through this project and all the pre-orders have finally been mailed out. I’m also halfway through writing stream-of-consciousness letters and emails that were included in the rewards. It’s quite fun but also a bit exhausting to write 125 emails and letters and keep the inspiration going.
On top of that, I’ve been trying to make the rounds to the bookstores in Chicago. Sadly, there are so few independent new bookstores left. There are numerous used bookstores, but they won’t carry any new books even on consignment.
I’m still working on landing a national distributor for the book as well. Was turned down by Small Press United, which was my first shot. They sent a form letter rejection without explanation. C’est la vie. The point of having a distributor, for those who don’t know, is to provide bookstores a way to order your book when a customer requests it. It will show up as available in their system. Ingram is the top distributor, but they are hard to break into. Some of the smaller distributors will network with Ingram. Createspace through Amazon supposedly gets you into the system—but then you need to accept the quality of the job they do and the large cut they take with each print-on-demand book.
A good distributor will also notify bookstore buyers that your book exists via some sort of catalog update or a sales call in an effort to get some orders. (Createspace doesn’t do that as far as I know.)
Next steps are to visit more bookstores in Chicago and begin sending out review copies and interview requests to bloggers. As well as finish all my Kickstarter rewards. I’m a busy boy.