Author Tip No. Five

The Back Story

As an author interested in getting your thoughts and ideas out there to the public (selling your book), an important portion of the process is devoted to the back cover copy and sales handle. In terms of elements influential to your readers, next to the cover design (or rather, behind), the back cover copy and sales handle are key. These three components are most often the items found in reviews, online retailer pages, and bookstore databases.

For the back cover, you don't want copy that dryly recreates the content of your book. For fiction, a succinct description of the characters, setting, and plot, leading up to the point of resolution is typical. There should be a tone of suspense that engages the reader enough to make a commitment to find out what happens to the characters, and what kind of life lesson (if any) can be learned. Often a comparison can be made to a similar author (e.g., "If you like Graham Greene, you´ll not be disappointed with this book").

For non fiction, the description needs to prove why this particular book on this subject (which, no doubt, has been written about numerous times over and over) is different or outstanding in some way. What makes yet another book on Italian cooking interesting? Perhaps the recipes include only fresh ingredients, traditions from one region, etc. These are the selling points that need to pop out in the copy.

The sales handle is your chance in one sentence to grab the reader's attention, a very brief description that covers what your book is, and why it´s important to your audience. The handle is usually found near the top of the back cover or directly above the main description.

See how the examples below spark your imagination and compel you to find out the rest of the story:

A tightly woven tale of psychological suspense and a literary tour de force from Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively.

Two mathematicians join forces to stop a serial killer in this spellbinding international bestseller.

Profound lessons for spiritual growth aren´t found exclusively in Tibet and India; they´re found within you in everyday events. This book will show you how to tap into them.

For information on how to get an effective back cover copy and sales handle from the professionals at Mill City Press, follow the link above or go to http://www.millcitypress.net.

The Gambit

Terrorism for profit.

In The Gambit,terrorist events are "engineered" to spike global oil markets for personal profit and political and strategic goals.
The audacious manipulation of events soon spirals oil prices out of control, undermining economies and the reelection prospects of a U.S. president, co-opted by the actions of the conspiracy underway. A conspiracy led by a wealthy Saudi prince who has the goods on the occupant of the White House; a conspiracy operating under the cover of shadowy militant groups, seducing a Houston oilman to subjecting his own company to terrorist assault.
Tipped off by a mysterious Lebanese banker, the U.S. mounts a furious effort to thwart the operation. But, it becomes eerily apparent that the President's first priority is to terminate the banker at all costs. Hastings, the top American intelligence official, acting against orders, desperately attempts to keep the banker alive long enough to understand the full dimensions of the treachery underway, culminating in the truth about the Prince and President dumped upon an unsuspecting electorate in the closing days of the election.
The Gambit's wild ride through scheming oil traders, unstable markets, political blackmail, desperation and greed produces an uncomfortable premise: to what extent has the conspiracy already occurred?

Book Themes

• American Presidential Election Campaign
• Corruption in the White House
• Director, National Intelligence and the CIA
• Enron Debacle/Syriana
• Hezbollah
• Houston and Oil
• Iran and Oil
• Lebanon
• Media Manipulations
• Middle Eastern Terrorism
• Oil Markets and Terrorism
• Oil Price Conspiracy and Manipulation
• Oil Trading
• Saudi Arabia and Oil
• Saudi Royal Family
• U.S. Energy Policy

About Gary Nunnally
Gary Nunnally spent nearly thirty years in the global petroleum business, including many years as an oil trader. Experiences and encounters in the oil trading wars inspired The Gambit. He and his family presently live in Houston.

To visit the website, click on the link above to be redirected.
Gary's website was made by the designers at the Mill City Press. To find out more about how to get your own author website, view our publishing package at http://www.millcitypress.net/Book-Publishing-Services.cfm.

The Fourteenth Year

The Fourteenth Year is a memoir narrated by a young girl whose unrelenting strength somehow carries her through the throes of an extinguished childhood. Her story begins as she attempts to reclaim control of her life from the steamy grip of her biological father. As she describes the exhausting legal process, the
details of the past fourteen years unfold into the culminating showdown between a dad and a daughter.

For Kelly, life is dictated by a sexually and emotionally abusive father whose selfproclaimed deification demands subservience by all. No protection is offered by the emotionally detached mother, who does nothing to stop him. Their daughter must find a way to remain psychologically intact as the abuse worsens, to where
eventually leaving the house or even watching television had a sexual price tag. While looking for safety, she discovers the plague of immorality and mental illness that motivates the behavior of the people in her environment .

She survives the moments that need surviving, with glimmering pieces of hope, humor and memories that bring joy and a sense of direction to her troubled soul.
She must now take that control and make the life for herself she knows is possible.

About Kelly
Kelly Watt lives in the upper peninsula of Michigan with her husband and children. She works as a Registered Nurse and speaks at conferences and fund raising events on the topic of child abuse whenever possible. She is actively engaged in
raising awareness of the sensitive issue of child abuse.

To find out more about Kelly Watt, read some chapters online, or to buy her book, click on the link above. For more information about joining the ranks of authors published by Mill City Press, visit http://www.millcitypress.net/.

Wake of the Raven

Wake of the Raven is a story of the world's corruption, of forbidden desire and its awful consequences.

In 1951, Stuart seeks to repair his broken marriage, and heads back to England in pursuit of his faithless wife. He must first cross the South China Sea to Singapore, a minor step in the voyage. But when an accident burdens him with the care of a precocious girl, the journey becomes a nightmarish odyssey through storm, desire and death.

The mere hundred miles or so of sea is now an impassable barrier, confining him and his bitter thoughts to a narrow strip of sand and jungle, and he is reduced to an animal struggle for survival, with nothing but the girl and thoughts of the dead to help him.

Like all people, evil wars in him with good, fear with ambition, desire with conscience. But when the girl's greater problems arouse his sympathy, it seems that good will triumph, for he unselfishly promises his help.
The result is a disaster that strides towards him fully armed, with disgrace, murder and suicide clenched in its fists.

About Graham Worthington, the author of Wake of the Raven
Worthington wrote his first story when he was eleven in England. Then real life intervened, and for years he travelled the world, collecting true stories that were stranger than fiction. He now lives in London and Toronto.


Published by Mill City Press, Inc. January 10, 2007.
To buy this book, click on "Wake of the Raven" above to be redirected or visit http://www.amazon.com/.

Perpich Arts High School Students featured in the Star Tribune

Lit Kids: Mama Bird and the Electric Rabbit, a book recently published by Mill City Press, was featured Monday 25 June, 2007 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Lit Kids is a collection of original work written by 31 senior and junior high school students from the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, MN. The students received a grant from the Perpich Foundation and raised the rest of the publishing costs through bake sales and readings at the Walker Art Center.

Micawbers Books (2238 Carter Ave., St. Paul) will host a reading July 18th at 7:00 p.m. Lit Kids books are available for purchase at Magers and Quinn (3038 Hennepin Ave. S, Minneapolis).

To read the full article from the Star Tribune, click on the link above. Please visit http://www.millcitypress.net/ for more information on how to publish your book!

Author Tip No. Three: The ISBN

The intials ISBN stand for International Standard Book Number, a unique 10- or 13-digit number assigned to published books. Take a look at any book on your shelf. The ISBN is found near the barcode on the back cover. The numbers within the ISBN are grouped and separated by hyphens or spaces. These groups indicate the country of publishing, the publisher, and an item number specific to the title and edition of the book. ISBNs are an optional investment (in most countries) and even if purchased, do not have to be displayed on the cover. However, those numeric identifiers are useful in the book trade and essentially imperative if you want to sell your book to the public. Books without an ISBN and a listing in Books in Print (the official, comprehensive listing of books, publishers, and ISBNs) are far more difficult to order, distribute, and market. A book without an ISBN is equivalent to inexistence within the industry.

For further information about ISBNs, how to get one, and Books in Print, visit bowker.com or click on the link above. Another excellent resource can be found at http://www.isbn-international.org/index.html.

Self-Publishing Might Be for You If...

Did you know that some traditional publishing houses deduct money from their authors if their books don't sell? Self-publishing might be for you if want to avoid the risk of losing money on unsold books.

Publishing houses often offer retail bookstores a 100% refund on unsold books. Say you have published with a publishing house, and it has placed 150 of your books in a bookstore; if after some months there are a few books left on their shelves, they can return the books to the publisher for a full refund. Not only do they refund the bookstore the total monies paid for those books, they also deduct that total from your account. Also factor in that due to the full refund policy, the bookstore will have little or no incentive to push the sale your book!

Unique to many self-publishing companies, there is no loss of money for you the author because you have some options. As a self-published author you may sell your book through an online retailer which does not have to worry about unsold books sitting a shelf because it does not actually hold or distribute any books. In addition, you may choose to sell and distribute the books personally using website or blog and a tool like PayPal (used on eBay). Both of these options bypass the risk of having unsold books returned to you and/or losing the money you paid to have those books printed and sold.

At Mill City Press, we offer book distribution through Mill City Press or individual distribution, as well as availability through online retailers as part of a personal marketing plan. If you choose to have us fulfill your book orders, you simply pay to have a certain number of books printed, and we keep the books here until they are sold--no return of books to you and no money deducted from your account. Visit our website by clicking on the link above.

Author Tip No. One: Copyright Protection

As an author, important thing for you to consider is why, how, and, when to protect your work.

WHY: Obviously, if you have labored over an entirely original work, an expression of yourself, a statement, you wouldn't want someone else to get away with claiming that work for him/herself, possibly even profiting from that work, right?

HOW: Literary and other forms of written text are protected by copyright protection. Actually, a work is effectively protected by copyright the moment it is written down by the author. However, it may be extremely difficult to legally prove ownership of that work without some official documentation or registration. This is where the government steps in. The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. offers official registration and public record of copyright for various types of work. If submitted, your work will be catalogued and archived in their records, and you will receive a certificate of registration stating that you have claim over the work you created. If your work is not registered with the Library of Congress, you may not sue for copyright infringement.

WHEN: The best time to register your work for copyright protection is up to you. If you are concerned about the security of your intellectual property, you may certainly register your work prior to its being published. However, be sure that your book is in its final form, with its final revisions. If significant changes are made to your work, you will have to re-register with the Library of Congress.

If you wish to find out more information about copyright protection or if you wish to have your work protected, visit http://www.clickandcopyright.com/ now.

Mill City Press on Kare 11

What follows is Kare 11's coverage of Google's $60 million project to digitize the University of MN's entire library. Read the transcription below or watch the video. This clip aired on the 5 o'clock news June 6, 2007.

All images and sound property of Kare 11 News.


Google to digitize libraries of U of M, other Big Ten schools

Jesse Miller knows books.

"[I'm] just trying to read as much as I can in the next few weeks," he said in the University of Minnesota library on Wednesday.

And like most students at the University, the pre-med student also knows books and technology are becoming one.

"I can vouch for myself and a lot of kids that go to school, it makes it way easier to have things available on a computer."

Now Jesse will have even more available on-line.

Big Ten Conference schools will digitize select collections in each of the university's libraries -- up to 10 million volumes -- as part of Google Inc.'s book-scanning project.

The partnership will speed up a digitization process that might have taken hundreds of years, school officials said in announcing the agreement Wednesday. It will result in a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.

"It enforces and reinforces our position as a world class university," said University of Minnesota Provost Thomas Sullivan.

The agreement covers Google and the 12 schools on the Committee on Institutional Cooperation -- the academic arm of the Big Ten Conference.

Besides the University of Minnesota, schools on the committee include the 10 other Big Ten schools affiliated through athletics -- Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin -- plus the University of Chicago.

Under the six-year agreement, with option to renew, Google will fund the digitization and each CIC institution will cover the costs of preparing the books for digitization. The CIC said libraries have estimated the costs of digitization at about $60 per volume meaning the project's value to Minnesota -- which will provide up to 1 million volumes for scanning -- could reach $60 million.

"There is a tremendous value to the University of Minnesota," Sullivan said.

Costs to the university, about $150,000 each year, will involve current employees retrieving and preparing the books for shipping, spokeswoman Patty Mattern said.

Books chosen for scanning will be from each university's strong and distinct collection areas. Contributions from the University of Minnesota, for instance, could include Scandinavian history, literature and culture, forestry, beekeeping and medicine. The universities will offer suggestions and Google will make sure there's no duplication, Mattern said.

"This partnership allows for library digitization at a scale and scope that would not be possible within the limited means available to the individual universities," said Wendy Pradt Lougee, University of Minnesota librarian.

The committee said Google will scan and make searchable materials "in a manner consistent with copyright law." Google generally makes available the full text of books that are a part of the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books.

The consortium will also create what they said was a first-of-its-kind online repository to collectively archive and manage the full content of public domain works scanned by Google within the schools' libraries.

Wisconsin and Michigan already have similar agreements with Google as part of group of university libraries worldwide that also includes Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities. The consortium's agreement does not supersede the individual school agreements, school officials said.

By Genaro C. Armas, Associated Press Writer
AP writer Karren Mills contributed to this report from Minneapolis.


(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

The Saturn Return

This book, The Saturn Return was published by Mill City Press and is featured on the video sharing site www.youtube.com.



Mark Levine has also written The Fine Print of Self-Publishing: The Contracts & Services of 48 Major Self-Publishing Companies – Analyzed, Ranked & Exposed (http://www.book-publishers-compared.com/) and I Will Faithfully Execute, a political thriller (listen to podcast at http://writingshow.com/?p=231), also published by Mill City Press.

To find out more about getting your book published, please visit www.millcitypress.net.

Great Book Cover Design

An eye-catching book cover can be crucial to the sale of your book. Think of how many times you have stood before two different items and weighed the factors influencing your purchase. At some point in your consumer-life, you have made a purchase at least partially affected by how a certain product looks. Now picture yourself browsing online and combatting the myriad pop-up advertisements and links to websites competing for your attention. Every once in a while you are actually tempted to follow the link to a page based on an attractive or intriguing image. A well-designed cover for your book will have the same compelling effect when a user is browsing on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble's website. The image of your book cover may arouse curiosity and cause the reader to find out more about the book.

Mill City Press has skilled and versatile graphic designers who will provide your work with a cover design or book jacket that will complement and draw readers into the text inside.

Here are a few stunning examples of book covers done by designers for Mill City Press:

If you are looking to publish your book, take advantage of Mill City Press' publishing package which gives you the author full rights and ownership over the book cover design and layout, including the digital files. Visit www.millcitypress.net or click on the link above to take you directly to our page describing that portion of our services.

The New Community: The Blog

Creating a personal blog to promote your book online is one of the best ways to market yourself and your work. Not only are most blog hosting sites free, they offer so much more than just space for information on the internet.

If you create a blog, you are automatically entered into an online community, a network of people all over the globe who will see your posts, photos, and whatever else you can imagine to enhance your blog space. With a variety of blogging hosts to choose from, you could enter a community of people of all ages and interests, or you can find one that is slightly more focused in what brings its users to the network. Being connected to others offers a wealth of advantages: think job opportunities, links on their blogs to yours, international interest, perhaps even helpful pointers from people who have been where you are in the book selling or publishing process.

For blog visitors, you have many options on how to entice them and keep them coming back for more. People who have really been captivated by a book usually want to find out more about the author, the book itself, or about other writings the author has done. A blog can keep organized and archive all of this and whatever other categories of information you wish to make available to your readers. Also, blogs that are updated frequently are more likely to be found by major search engines; it is fortunate that it is easy to compose and edit your posts, so that you may contribute as often as you like. As in many well-regarded journals and magazines, you could feature excerpts from your book serially to keep yourself posting regularly and to keep readers wanting more.

Other helpful features are things like visitor counters to monitor how much traffic your blog has received; the capacity to send and receive comments about a particular post; you can also set up a PayPal account to sell books personally through your blog rather than having a chunk of your profit taken through selling with an online retailer.

Blogs are a simple and very effective way to gain exposure to a wide audience.

If you have published through us, visit www.millcitypress.net to find out how we can help you set up a blog.

From Where I Sit: An Honest Look at Publishing As a Business

If you're looking for a well-written, frequently updated blog on the business of publishing, sign up for Michael Hyatt's blog, From Where I Sit. Hyatt is the President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. He offers an-depth look at what it takes to run one of the world's largest publishing companies. Michael also writes about leadership and staying focused on your goals, not the daily "put-out-the-fire" activities thrown in your way.

The Big Bad Book Blog

Another site worth mentioning is the Big Bad Book Blog, hosted and run by greenleaf book group. Broken down by subject and full of great tidbits, into an easy-to-read format (like most of the Internet), the Big Bad Book Blog also has an email subscription for weekly updates.