Amazon – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Introducing Slattery Publishing

So that I now have books on IngramSpark and Amazon and have created The Chamber Magazine and have some items on Zazzle and am constantly exploring other possible online businesses, I have decided to bring them all under the organizational umbrella of Slattery Publishing. Expand this article to read more…

I have decided to push Slattery Publishing a bit more as a business.

I created Slattery Publishing (not an official, established, incorporated company, just a one-man operation) to get a check in the box when I published A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror on IngramSpark. The form requested a publisher, so I gave them that name. Slattery Publishing also had a different logo originally. The current logo is another spur of the moment decision.

So that I now had books on IngramSpark and Amazon and was creating The Chamber Magazine and had some items on Zazzle and was constantly exploring other possible online businesses, I decided to bring them all under the organizational umbrella of Slattery Publishing.

As you know, I have published my works on Amazon and one at IngramSpark as well. Recently, while watching some YouTube videos, I became interested in publishing no or low content books as an additional line of income. They are relatively easy to make and may bring in another cash flow if handled right.

If you are not familiar with no/low content books, these are books like journals and diaries and blank books (no content) and coloring books and puzzles, etc. (low content books).

I have not tried to create any low content books yet, but I have created several on Amazon. They are fun and easy to make. I made a few test samples, which are at amazon.com/author/philslattery. These I made with no title or subtitle as those would be on the amazon page anyway and I did not want to limit possible buyers to a particular subject. A simple photo can be seen as representing many things, but once a title is added, those possibilities are narrowed considerably. But then, I found out that Amazon indexes by title and subtitles and it’s easier to recognize the purpose of a book if it has a title. Therefore, my next several books all had titles and subtitles.

Once I started creating these books, my creativity took hold and I found it was hard for me to stop creating these. I decided to start afresh with the journals and to keep them separate from my personal Amazon account, so that my few works of fiction wouldn’t be lost in the deluge of no-content books. Therefore, I created a separate Amazon account for Slattery Publishing.

I have created several notebooks so far. I am trying to make them incredibly beautiful and colorful, so that they catch eyes wandering over hundreds of notebooks trying to find the prettiest one or the one that best suits their philosophy or mood or whatever. Also, I now try to give them titles that reflect a certain subject, which is represented by the cover art. I also put a watermark related to the subject on each page and all the pages are numbered. Although most “blank books” don’t do this, I would find it useful if I ever wanted to jot down where I could find a specific note or create a table of contents or whatever. I also make them often in large sizes (8.5 x 11) with 200-300 pages so that the owner make copious notes. I also make some in a more convenient 6 x 9 size and I will experiment with other sizes as my creative side develops.

So, check out the notebooks at the links above and see which you think is the most beautiful and eye-catching. If you really like something, let me know, so that I can expand on that line. If you see something you don’t like, let me know, so that I can improve the marketability of my books and Slattery Publishing will be able to produce better books.

A few examples of the covers are below. you can find all at Slattery Publishing.

Be forewarned: as these are new, there may be a few glitches on Amazon’s part. I spot-checked one and it had someone else’s interior. All mine will have numbered pages and a watermark on each page. Nothing else at this point, though I will probably introduce lined pages soon.

More choices are available at Slattery Publishing.

Alternate Ad For A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror

I am testing this to see how effective it might be if I used in marketing channels (keywords, links, etc.) other than the ones I have been using for it.

Update of August 15, 2020: You can purchase the print edition of Nocturne through Barnes and Noble.

Phil Slattery portrait — Phil Slattery
March, 2015

I apologize for not getting a Saturday Night Special up tonight. It fell through the proverbial cracks.

However, I do want to make it known that you can now get the print edition of Nocturne: Poems of Love, Distance, and the Night, a callous and disinterested lover through Barnes and Noble. They are not stocking the shelves with it, but if you ask they can order for you.

I was in Little Rock to buy a new cell phone today and thought I would drop by the nearby Barnes and Noble. I have always loved to hang out in the cafe with an iced tea or coffee and write or peruse the stacks. I went in for that purpose and while I was there I inquired about what are the most popular books (this is just for the Little Rock location on Chenal). I found out that for about two years they have had a problem staying supplied with Where the Crawdads Sing and that the most popular horror writer they sell there is Darcy Oates. I looked at some of her books. They appear interesting. I may have to get one soon.

As you probably know, I have been looking at using someone other than Amazon to publish the print editions of the my works. One factor I have to consider is each of the publishing platform’s distribution. Amazon distributes to Barnes and Noble along with many others. So, I wondered if someone could order my works through B&N.

I went to the counter and asked the lady if she could order A Tale of Hell… She said no, it didn’t appear in her search results. So I went back to perusing the shelves, studying cover design, etc. Then I thought, let me see if she can order by my last name. To my surprise, she said the print edition Nocturne was available. I almost fainted. I had published it only a few days ago. I told her I was the author and asked a few more questions of her. She said it had probably appeared because it was a new work. My other works, she said, they would have to order through Amazon and were print on demand. This was excellent news to me, because my latest edition of A Tale of Hell… should be coming out by the 17th if not sooner. It seems that Amazon has changed their distribution procedures and now print editions go out to the stores. That’s my assumption. I won’t know for certain until I do more research.

New cover of Nocturne — New Cover as of August 9, 2020

Now, I plan to issue new print editions of all my works, except for Alien Embrace and Diabolical. These are included in A Tale of Hell…. I published these separately only so that readers can sample my work in a specific genre. These smaller collections are also cheap in terms of print costs, so that I can hand out samples of my works at little cost to me.

I am thinking I will also have to rethink how I produce collections. The new print edition of A Tale of Hell… is about 300 pages and at $14,.95 is priced approximately the same as other books of that length, if not a little cheaper. But I think I am going to have to come out with a more professional cover design, if it can now be placed on shelves at places like Barnes and Noble. So, there will be another edition of it coming out soon, and I may included Click in it as a bonus story, simply because at this time I have no other similar stories of that genre to collect into one volume. I might as well use it to increase the size of A Tale of Hell… and keep the price the same to that the reader gets more for their money.

I am considering grouping Nocturne and The Scent and Other Stories together to make a bigger volume, but I am not certain how I would do that, as they are so different thematically. I may through my stories and see if there are a few more that I might include or that would not take much to finish them, so that I can include them.

Of course, I am also considering just grouping everything together in one big volume, but I am not certain how that would work because the genres are so different.

Anyway, those are some initial thoughts.

I am going to now come up with a plan to get local stores, and by “local” I mean at stores between Texarkana and Memphis. If I can do that, I might have toehold on getting even more widespread distribution.

Cover for New Print Edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror

So, I have a lot to think about.

If you have suggestions, please let me know, I welcome suggestions and recommendations.

Of course, if you are a book dealer and would like to sell my print editions, please contact me or go through whatever distribution connections you have with Amazon. And, if you sell books, I would be happy to discuss a book signing and/or reading with you.

Hasta luego. Please leave any comments, thoughts, suggestions, and recommendations below.

Update of August 13, 2020: Kindle Keywords

Since Tuesday, I have spent some time trying to improve my book sales by using keywords better on my Amazon site.

When I set up the site, I saw that they had seven fields for seven words up to fifty characters long. Mistakenly, I thought you could have only seven keywords, I feel like such a dummy now.

I read two articles today: 7 KINDLE KEYWORDS: USE ALL 50 CHARACTERS OR NOT? and Make Your Book More Discoverable with Keywords. What I took away from these and what I decided to do are two different things.

Below are the things I decided to do. What I took away is not as important as I what I decided to do, so I won’t bother you with that.

First, for Kindlepreneurs, jam as many words into each of the seven boxes Amazon gives you. The maximum number of characters is fifty. I did not see anything that said the words have to be separated by commas.

For keywords, choose words that are not in your title or description. This makes sense because that would be redundant.

Google search engines put more emphasis on the titles and description than keywords. So, maybe it would be good to put any words you would use as keywords in the title and/or description.

Sometimes it might be useful to think of an exact phrase that someone would use in searching for your book and put that in as a keyword. Google search engines sometimes look for that.

I tried to think of as many keywords as I could for my books, but after a few, my imagination was crapping out on me. I came up with an idea to help with this though. This is something not taught in either of the two articles I mentioned. I would think of a word describing the essence of my book, something that people might search for, and looked up its synonyms on line. My reasoning is that words have nuances and the meaning and nuances may vary somewhat from speaker to speaker. For example, someone wanting to read my book Diabolical: Three Stories of Jack Thurston and Revenge (I may change this title to make it more marketable), the primary theme of this book is evil. Thesaurus.com gives 48 synonyms for evil. Therefore, I selected several keywords from this list trying to choose one used widely today such as: wicked, malevolent, depravity, misery, suffering, etc. Then I moved on to another descriptive word and its synonyms. I changed all my keywords on Tuesday and still haven’t seen any results, but it is only Thursday.

Try out some of the suggestions and let me know how they work out for you. Leave any recommendations of your own in the comment box below.

Hasta luego.

Update, December 5, 2019: The Scent and Other Stories and X-Ray

New Cover for The Scent and Other Stories — New cover as of November 21, 2019.

On Thursday the 5th, I made use of a new Kindle author’s feature called X-Ray. X-Ray links characters and terms in an author’s work to either links (written by the author) or to Wikipedia Articles about the character/term. It is very easy to use. An author goes to his/her KDP page for the work and selects a button to enable X-Ray. After a short time of a half-hour or longer, when the author comes back to that KDP book, a drop-down menu of characters and terms from the work are displayed. The author goes through each and decides whether to include that character/term among the links, choosing a radio button for his/her choice. He/she can then either write a short description of the character/term or select a Wikipedia article on it. After all characters and terms have been reviewed, the author can publish the ones chosen. Then, after about a half-hour or so, links will appear in the Kindle ebook, which a reader can click and which will take him/her to the author’s or the Wikipedia article.

I think this is a neat service to provide to readers. It is also something an author can advertise about his/her works, which may give an advantage over non-X-Ray-enabled works in the marketplace. Simply writing an article about it, as I have done here, will garner a little more publicity for the author.

I tested this on The Scent and Other Stories tonight. Get an e-copy when you can and check it out. You can purchase a copy from Amazon at anytime or you can wait until Christmas Eve, which, if I recall correctly, is the next time that The Scent and Other Stories is offered free.

If you are a Kindle author, be certain to check out this new feature.

I will be doing this for my other works as time permits.

Hasta luego.

Update on My Blog & #Marketing Strategy.

If you keep up with my website and social media posts, note that I have changed my website on most from this WordPress site to my author’s page at Amazon. This is simply so that readers have a direct link to where they can purchase my works. I will still blog from here and my posts will show up on the Author’s page.