Book sales for Think Like a Teacher have dropped off over the past week. They were only ever at a trickle to begin with, but over the last few days, I've sold nothing. I did get a friendly message on Reddit from one person who'd bought my book; she's reading it now and says she'll leave an honest review when she's done. Here's hoping it's a positive review, as I think such reviews help the algorithm (it's all about pushing search results for your product to the topic of the line; I think the term for this is SEO, i.e., search-engine optimization).
I've had promises for reviews made by other readers, but so far, they've contributed nothing. I'm happy to have the two reviews I do have; at least, my book doesn't feel so "naked." But having several more reviews would be nice; it could rebuild my book's currently sagging, flagging momentum. We'll see how things go over the coming months.
And after I self-publish the movie-review book, I want to start working on several more book projects. I want to (1) publish a cleaned-up version of my essay compilation Water from a Skull, possibly streamlining it by making it into a slightly smaller volume and/or by including some religion-related pieces written after 2006; (2) publish a revised edition of my 2001-era nasty book of humor Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms, perhaps taking out some of the old bits that didn't age well and replacing them with material from this blog; (3) put out a book or series of obscenity-themed books about grammar, mechanics, and diction (you've probably heard me talk about Dirty Grammar before). I'm also still thinking about (4) writing a book about hiking the Four Rivers trail—a book with photos, and possibly with parallel Korean/English text so I can sell the book in Korea. Such a project would be very expensive and ambitious, and truth be told, it'd be more for me than for the market, like a memento that could be passed down. To create such a book, I think I'd need to master the Adobe publishing suite called InDesign, which is tailor-made for creating books with lots of images.
Speaking of images, I'm 90% sure I won't be adding illustrations to my movie-review book. As much as I'd like to stick some drawings in there, that would mean hundreds of such drawings, plus the added formatting. And what would the drawings really add to the book, right? Better to concentrate on the book's cover art (and I still need a good title).
Anyway, those're some book-related thoughts.
The Four Rivers book sounds like it would be really interesting. I can't claim to know what the market is on that, but there's got to be one, right?
ReplyDeleteI guess my walk book could be for the coffee-table-book crowd, depending on how nicely the photos in the book come out. I'm thinking the book might need to be physically large both to allow for big, lush photos of the trail and to make room for parallel text in English and Korean.
ReplyDeleteHiring an E-to-K translator is going to be expensive, too. My boss has a former student who regularly does translation work for our company; she's published Korean translations of Obama's speeches, and she regularly works as an interpreter for political bigwigs. I've had some email exchanges with her in English, and she's quite good. But she doesn't come cheap, and I'd be asking her to help me privately, which means I probably wouldn't benefit from whatever discounts she normally gives the company for the sake of her friendship with my boss.
I've got other things to consider as well, such as which photos would actually go in the book. The blurry, sucky ones ought to be easy to eliminate, but a lot of my pics came out looking pretty good, so it's going to be painful to exclude some of them.
And I think, years ago, you and I discussed the question of whether to use my blog entries as the book's text or to rewrite my adventures in a more smoothly narrative form. I think you leaned toward rewriting. I'm thinking I might want to compromise: keep the blog entries (which represent my "raw" thoughts), but add post-hoc narrative commentary to give the whole book a smooth, coherent through-line, if you will.