CAG President and author Bryan Powell will be presenting an interesting program at the meeting on Monday, February 2, (Ground Hog’s Day) to members and visitors.
“I will be bringing a class on Mind Mapping –an Alternative to Plotting. Also, if time permits, I will present a writing exercise on onomatopoeia’s. It should be a bang….blast…sizzle (you get the idea)”.
For directions click on the “Meetings” tab above.
composer Kay Houston Hall as she shares her writing journey. If you are interested in jump-starting your personal writing interest in this new year, you won’t want to miss this informative and entertaining meeting. See “Our Meetings” tab above for details and directions. Visitors welcomed.Kay Hall, as an author, has published two books: her first features a fictional character Dot Com who, along with her friends, saves the Pentagon in Washington D.C. from disaster. Her second book , “The Little Blind Shepherd” is a fictional story based on Luke:2.
Kay Hall, the actress, appears as the teacher in the Netflix Christian film, “The Solomon Bunch”, and Kay, the composer, was the recipient of the first place National Award in Music from the Freedom’s Foundation at Valley Forge for her song, “The American way.”
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, she relocated to Atlanta when she was five years old and learned to be a Georgia Peach. Kay received her Bachelor of Music Degree from Shorter University, and has a Master of Music Degree from Georgia State University. She is the pianist at the First Baptist Church of Sandy Springs, and is a retired Georgia Music Teacher. Kay is the proud mother of two sons, Chris and Greg, and “Grammy” to Will and Emily, her grandchildren.
New Year.If you are inspired to improve your writing skills, we hope you will join us in 2015. We have a great year of meetings planned with informative classes and motivating guest speakers.
Our CAG leadership team will be meeting Monday, January 5th, at 7 PM, and our first full meeting for members and visiting guests will be on Monday, January 19, at 7 PM.
All meetings are held at Prayer & Praise Christian Fellowship, 6409 Bells Ferry Rd., Woodstock, GA 30189. See “Our Meetings” tab above for map and directions.
We hope you will visit with us soon.
Bring a guest, spouse, or friend as well as a side dish and join CAG members as we celebrate Christmas this Monday, December 1, 7 PM, at Prayer & Praise Christian Fellowship, 6409 Bells Ferry Road, Woodstock, Georgia
After dinner, lean back and enjoy some seasonal readings by members, Christmas carol singing, and a humorous “String Slam” presented by several CAG authors. There might even be a visit from a very special historical guest.
Be sure to wear your tackiest Christmas sweater/shirt. 
Need the newest CAG book “Relief Notes” for Christmas gifts? They will be on sale Monday night at special member pricing.
Christine Hornback
Author, artist, and inspirational speaker Christine Hornback will be the featured guest at the November 17, 2014 meeting of the Christian Authors Guild
She will be sharing her unique and interesting writing journey.
Christine has several books published which include two Juvenile Fiction books Jenny Lynn’s Secret Mission and Caleb’s Cereal. She also has an Adult Inspirational book entitled Tell the Enemy to Scat! Her latest book an Inspirational Romance/Suspense entitled If Oak Trees Could Talk was recently released in July 2014.
The meeting begins at 7PM at the Prayer & Praise Christian Fellowship in Woodstock, Georgia. Visitors are welcome. Refreshments are served. Free. For directions and map, please click on “Our Meetings” tab above.
The next meeting of the Christian Authors Guild will be Monday, November 3 at Prayer & Praise Christian Fellowship in Woodstock, Georgia. The meeting will be held in the church sanctuary. Besides a brief business meeting, there will be an interesting writing presentation and critique groups. Visitors are welcome and refreshments are served. If any member is interested in serving on the CAG leadership team in 2015, please let Preseident Sue Schultz know prior to this meeting. 
Join us for our meeting on October 20th for special guest speaker, Dr. Casey Cochran, Professor at Emory University.
Dr. Casey Cochran is a native of Smyrna, Georgia. He became a Christian at the age of 20 while a student at Georgia. During the 1980s, he and his wife Linda were involved in Christian schools in California, Virginia, and Hawaii. Since 1995, Cochran has been on the faculty of Emory University, where he teaches History of American Education, Philosophy of Education, and Classics of Educational Thought. He has also directed an academic program for home schoolers since 1998. The Cochrans reside in Woodstock; they have 5 grown children and two grandchildren.
Our meeting will begin at 6409 Bells Ferry Road, Woodstock, Georgia from 7:00 p.m. to 9:15 p.m.
Okay, you’re booked in a half dozen locations, that’s great. Congratulations!
If you’ve done your homework and built a platform, you can have a great time talking to your friends and customers.
The question now is, “How do I get compensated? After all, isn’t that the goal (at least somewhere down the list after being a blessing and having fun and getting the word out and creating a wave and all that stuff)?”
Before we discuss the compensation from the retail side, we need to understand the wholesale side. If you are published through a traditional publisher, you need to read and understand the commission split in your contract.
I know it’s hard to read all that fine print, but you need to know it or you’ll end up embarrassing yourself. The one thing you don’t want to do is call your publisher and demand to know why your royalty check didn’t come the day after the end of the first quarter.
Let’s say you completely understand your contract (not). What next?
Negotiation
Know how much you paid for your books on the wholesale side. If you paid 40% of the retail price. That means you make a whopping 60% profit, not bad. It would be better if you could wheedle out of your publisher 35%. That’s the negotiation part of this blog.
I begged my publisher, using all sort of spurious excuses such as: I’m a poor, starving artist, my kids will go hungry if I don’t get a better discount, and I’ll have to put my mother-in-law in a nursing home if you don’t give me a better discount.
To my dismay, he didn’t budge. I was crushed, but he did throw in an extra 25 books. Free I might add. Shew! That was a relief.
Retail Compensation
Some venues will charge a “consignment fee” and others won’t.
If you don’t charge your customers the sales tax, you’ll have to pay it and that comes out of your profit margin.
That’s where profit margins are so important?
Remember, they are your books. No one cares for them as much as you.
So What Have We Learned?
Writing a book is only half the fun. The other half is meeting people and signing (selling) your books to an adoring crowd of happy, smiling, anxious readers. But the other side, the Business Side of Writing, is your profit margin.
Don’t back away from your price unless you have a good reason. A poor economy, they are your friends, and you’ve only sold one book today are not good enough reasons to cut your price.
You wrote it, your publisher set the price, so smile, and quote your price.
Now go sell your books!
Much has been written about finding your “voice.” You can attend a writer’s conference and learn how to reach deep within yourself, discover the real you and express it in cogent terms.
But how many of us have found someone else’s voice? How many of us have been charged with the responsibility of expressing another person’s thoughts without tainting them with our own?
Recently, I had the privilege of doing just that.
By divine appointment, I was given an older gentleman’s journal. As I sat and read it and later interviewed him, I discovered he had a story to tell. He had a message to give us. Like a canary, held captive within a cage of flesh and bone, his spirit yearned to be set free. However, with his limited vocabulary and lack of skill, it languished, thinking it would never take flight. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to set it free. When that happened, his voice echoed throughout the pages of his story, and it rose to new heights.
The more I studied his life, the more I saw his motivation and message. I discovered his love and passion, his goals, his dreams and yes, his weaknesses and failures.
He taught me two important principles that guided his life. The first one; God can use a person for His glory no matter how unskilled that person is. This simple man took faith’s baby steps and soon found manly strength to run the race, keep the faith, and win the crown.
The second guiding principle was a bit harder to find, yet it was there. He said, “Find people smarter than you to do the things you don’t want to do and hire them.”
That was his message and his motivation. He spent his life finding jewels in the rough and developing them, polishing them, getting them ready to take his place. And by doing so, he built people and a fortune.
From his humble beginning as a dirt farmer in central Georgia during the Depression years to the present day, he invested his life in helping people reach their potential.
The benefit to me was that I was privy to those formative years through his journal. I watched him grow to manhood; I grew with him, I hurt with him and even loved with him. I heard his voice, captured his thoughts, emotions, his heart. For those precious hours in which I labored over the text, I became this man. And so will you when you invest the time to get to know the person you are writing about.
So the next time you undertake a story: fiction or non-fiction, biography or historical, get to know your character. Plunge deep into the well-spring of creativity or reality and discover their voice. In so doing, you may find your own.
So, you’ve written a book. Congratulations!
Putting in the time and effort to write your thoughts is a great accomplishment. Greater still is publication. Now you can sit back and watch the dollars come rolling in, right?
Wrong!
Besides the hard work of writing and editing, there is, The Business Side of Writing.
If you plan on selling your book there are several important aspects that must be taken into consideration: promotion, compensation and negotiation.
The Art of Shameless Self-Promotion
How do you get to be a New York best seller?
In a word—promotion; shameless, relentless, white-knuckled promotion.
It is a necessary part of the writing process. No matter how much you may hate public speaking, it is a necessary evil.
While much of today’s focus is on cyber marketing, good old-fashioned public appearances are another important part of the mix.
Why do some writers succeed at this and some fail? The better question is; why do some of us persevere, and others give up? The answer is simple. There are those of us who will give anything to achieve our dreams, and there are others who will give anything to stay on the couch. Okay, so I’ve convinced you. Where do you begin?
Start With a Smart Strategy
The phone can be your best friend or your worst enemy. When I was in real-estate, my broker challenged me to make 100 calls a day and ask two simple questions: “Do you want to sell your house?” and “Do you know someone who wants to sell a house?”
I was chasing customers I know, but it worked. The last house I sold was a $400,000 home to a woman from Brazil.
I learned to get tough skin and make the calls, but in the book business, who do you call?
Reach Out
1. Start with your niche market. If your book is about gardening – call stores that deal with gardening. If it’s a cookbook – call restaurants and sandwich shops. Ask if you could set up a display and talk to the customers about your book.
2. Independent bookstores
3. Libraries. They love authors. Ask about literary or local author events.
4. Christian book stores and big-box book stores are the last targeted phone calls for retail stores. Invariably, they will charge 40% to sell your books on consignment. We’ll discuss this in greater detail in my next blog.
5. Fairs, Festival and Literary Events.
6. For the fun of it, call independent living facilities. (Those are the ones where the residents control their own money). Have the activities coordinator to promote you as a local author coming to do a reading.
7. Call schools and ask to speak with the English/Language Arts teacher and see if you could be scheduled to come and speak to their class.
8. Become your own competition.
The take away of this is simple. If you want more than the satisfaction of having your book published, and I hope you do, then you must establish goals and a marketing plan. Work within your time and finances. Step out of your comfort zone and let’s sell some books.
Our contributor, Novelist Bryan M. Powell is also a composer/arranger with over eighty choral works to his credit. He now enjoys pursuing a career as a full-time writer. Some of his fifteen Faith-based “G” rated mystery novels have found their way into publication by Tate Publishing, Kindle Direct and Vabella Publishing. His website is www.newlifepublicationsonline.
