Kathy Brace and I released our book, Born to Deliver, at the end of last year, and are so encouraged at how God is using it to touch lives and bring healing. My good friend, Molly Williamson, of Imago Photography generously offered to help us put together a book trailer that we hope will serve to spread a message of hope and redemption to even more people. Here’s the wonderful result of her creative talent and work on our behalf:

If you’re looking for a great videographer to help you put together a book trailer for your book, I highly recommend Molly!

Despite my best intentions, I have not done a very good job of keeping up with this blog. But it’s not for a lack of writing; it’s just that my writing efforts have been directed elsewhere. In fact, Lord-willing, they will culminate in the release of a book that I’ve co-authored with Kathy Brace called Born to Deliver.

Born to Deliver is Kathy’s story – one that has been life-changing for me, and we hope and pray it will be for many others as well. You can read chapter one for free on the website. And as of today, pre-orders are officially open, so if you’re dying to find out the rest of the story, just click the Buy Now button and you’ll receive one in your mailbox as soon as they arrive from the printer!

Things continue to move forward here, but the number of ideas and projects I want to do always seems to outpace the time in which to do them! My new CD, Journey to Self Publishing – 12 steps to successfully publish your book, should soon be available through Amazon. However, I’ve also decided to make it available as a downloadble mp3 package for those who don’t care about having the pretty CD packaging and want to save a few dollars on shipping. Not to mention that the cost of the downloadble file package is already reduced from the regular price of the CD anyway! Same great content…less cost to you. 🙂

Journey to Self Publishing | mp3 downloadable version | $15

Also, for any of you who may be interested, you can earn an affiliate commission if you become a PayLoadz affiliate and refer others to this product. In fact, you can earn $5 commission for every product sold through your affiliate link!

Would you believe that one of my goals for this year was to post something on this blog once a week? Yikes! That should give you an idea of how well I’m doing meeting my goals this year… Well, to make up for it, I’ve been working on a new product that I think will be incredibly helpful to others who want to publish their books. I’ve spent hours and hours researching and navigating through the ins and outs of publishing, but there were so many times along the way that I just wished I had someone to hold my hand and take me through the process step by step. That’s what inspired me to put together this CD that I hope will do just that for others who are embarking on this journey! Here are the details:

Journey to Self Publishing – 12 steps to successfully publish your book
by Natalie Wickham
ISBN: 978-0-9821828-1-9
Media: 80 Minute CD
$19.99

Many people have dreams of writing a book, but consider it an overwhelming or even impossible task. The publishing world is more accessible than ever to aspiring authors, but long-held hopes are quickly buried during the process of trying to dig through the plethora of options available. In this candid interview, author and publisher Natalie Wickham discusses the three types of publishing, gives an overview of the four critical components of a book, and lays out 12 steps that will help you navigate the path toward successfully publishing your book.

And, to add to the sweetness of this announcement, I’m offering a special deal just for readers of this blog. You can get $5 off of your order for a limited time by checking out at SibroPublishing.com with coupon code: BlogSpecial

Also, you can download and print this free handout to use as you listen to the CD.

After getting Pajama School accepted and viewable on Google Books, I wanted to give their Co-Branded search feature a try. I had a few difficulties. First because there had previously been a version of my book listed at Google Books, but it was not the one with the preview available, so the search always returned nothing since that was the book being referenced by the search. Second, because once I had this resolved, I didn’t realize you had to manually change the code to point to the ISBN for the specific book for which you wanted to set up the search capability. I thought this was coded automatically and couldn’t figure out why the search kept taking me to some book on Lutheranism… Anyway…I’m happy to say that everything now appears to be working properly and you can search the content of my book for any word you like! 🙂

As I mentioned in my last post, it took me a little longer than I expected to finalize the process of getting Pajama School up and running at Google Books. It turns out that the file upload must not have been successful the first time, but once all the files were uploaded the remainder of the process only took about a week. So, feel free to click on over and get a preview of Pajama School on Google Books! 🙂

If you want to make a book available on Google Books, sign up on the Google Books Partner Program homepage. It actually took me forever to find this page because I kept trying to figure out how to add my book from the regular Google Books homepage but could never find the right link. I don’t usually consider myself navigationally-challenged, but the various twists and turns you have to take to find the right programs and portals for some of these book-related sites (ahem…Amazon…) is dizzying!

I was a little hesitant to upload my book to Google Books because I was afraid that it would cut into sales if people could easily view the book on-line. However, you can actually specify what percentage of the book content you want to have made available in the preview so that it will give people an idea of what the book is like, but they won’t be able to read the whole thing. Plus, having Pajama School on Google Books allows all of the content to be factored into searches and will return the book in relevant search results. I will also be able to place a search box on my website to allow interested readers to search for particular words or phrases in the book. A very nice feature. Still working out a few kinks on that one, though!

Also…if you just love the design (cover and interior) of my book and want to hire some professionals to do design work for you (which I highly recommend!), be sure to check out the links to these gifted graphic designers on this post. As you can see, hiring high quality, professional designers to do your book pays for itself over and over again when you can easily upload and make your book available through channels like Google Books.

After jumping through several hoops, I am excited to report that Pajama School – stories from the life of a homeschool graduate is now part of the Search Inside The Book (SITB) program at Amazon.com. The process is slightly more complicated than you would expect, but once I understood the steps to take, it was relatively seamless:

1. Go to Amazon Seller Central and sign up for an account. Because of some of the verbiage, I was hesitant to do this because I thought I might end up having to pay some additional fees. After a brief exchange with the customer service rep, though, I was assured that this was indeed the appropriate procedure for uploading the files and no additional fees would be incurred.

2. Look for the Search Inside The Book category on the left hand side of the page and click on PDF and cover upload.

3. Carefully review all the guidelines for naming and uploading files and prepare the files on your end accordingly. I created a separate folder for Amazon amongst my book files on my computer so that I could keep these files separate and readily accessible.

4. Zip all the files and upload them via the uploader on the Seller Central site.

5. Click the submit button and wait and watch to see when the Search Inside The Book feature becomes active on your book page. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly this process was completed (especially considering that I’ve been waiting for several weeks for a similar process over at Google Books – I’ll have to let you know once that one is up and running!).

For those of you who aren’t subscribed to my e-newsletter, I thought I’d share the exciting news that as of last week, we had sold 475 copies of my book, Pajama School – stories from the life of a homeschool graduate. The book officially released on April 30 of this year, so that averages out to almost 80 copies a month. To be honest, that’s not as good as I expected the sales to be for the first 6 months, but I’m coming to grips with the fact that my expectations might have been a bit unrealistic.

So, as I stated in my newsletter, we are so close to hitting the 500 mark that I’ve decided to make a special offer – whoever places the order for the 500th book will receive their copy of the book entirely free, including shipping! So if you’ve been meaning to order a copy, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet, or you want to order some additional gift copies for friends, now is the opportune time. 🙂 (If you order the 500th copy through our website, I’ll just issue a full refund after the order comes through.)

By the way, if you’d like to subscribe to the e-newsletter, just sign up using the form at the top of the Sibro Publishing website. I send the newsletter about once a month with a brief update about how things are going and announcements about any new endeavors in the works.

Even though things have been kind of quiet around here and I’ve been enjoying some vacation time, I’ve been hard at work behind-the-scenes putting together my biggest Pajama School promotion yet! If you click over to the Pajama School Blog, you can see the Official Contest Page for the Promo Film Contest that I’ve just launched. This has been an exciting project to work on so far, and I hope it really takes off and that lots of people have fun participating.

If you are willing to help me spread the word about the contest, I would really appreciate it! In fact, you can find a list of ways to help spread the word on the Lights, Camera, Action! blog post. And of course, feel free to leave comments over there to enter the drawing for the great giveaway package as well!