{"id":23185,"date":"2015-10-08T00:01:23","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T07:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=23185"},"modified":"2015-10-08T00:01:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T07:01:23","slug":"jack-shoemaker-of-counterpoint-press-shares-fifty-years-of-book-publishing-wisdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/jack-shoemaker-of-counterpoint-press-shares-fifty-years-of-book-publishing-wisdom\/","title":{"rendered":"Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint Press Shares Fifty Years of Book Publishing Wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jack<\/a>
Jack Shoemaker<\/a>\u00a0spoke at Book Passage, Marin. ‘The best publishers should be invisible.’ Photo by Barbara Newhall.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

Publisher Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint Press\u00a0got his start working in a bookstore as a teenager. Fifty years later, he had these words of wisdom to share at this month’s meeting of Left Coast Writers <\/a>at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, California.<\/p>\n

Readers and the World Wide Web:<\/strong> “The web has turned out to be a magnificent marketing tool — for itself. It’s training skimmers.”<\/p>\n

Best marketing tips for authors:<\/strong>\u00a0Find your niche. Hope for word-of-mouth. Get lucky.<\/p>\n

Some popular book niches:<\/strong> Food, travel, history, religion, eastern religion, especially Zen Buddhism.<\/p>\n

Of book publishers:<\/strong> “The best publishers should be invisible.”<\/p>\n

The novelist’s plight:<\/strong> Critics and booksellers are on the lookout for first novels. Second and third novels — not so much. “Everybody wants to discover a great first novel.”<\/p>\n

Of the reading public:<\/strong> “We are living in an a-literate culture. Everybody reads, but nobody wants to.”<\/p>\n

From a marketing standpoint, what’s the ideal spacing of an author’s books?<\/strong>\u00a0“Five years is too long. One year is too often.”<\/p>\n

Print\u00a0vs. ebook:<\/strong>\u00a0While all his books are published as both print and ebooks, Shoemaker likes holding\u00a0a print book in his hands. “Reading on a Kindle is like making love to a love doll.”<\/p>\n

If you enjoyed this post you might like “Splitting the\u00a0Infinitive — How to Boldly Go There.”<\/a>\u00a0 Also, “The Trouble With Daffodils — And My Writing.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Jack<\/a><\/p>\n

Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint Press shared 50 years of publishing wisdom at a meeting of the Left Coast Writers at Book Passage in Marin County. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,52],"tags":[633,134,1574,34,1575,630,82,1576,1161,69],"class_list":["post-23185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-writing-reading","category-the-writing-room","tag-book-passage","tag-books","tag-counterpoint-press","tag-dont-miss","tag-jack-shoemaker","tag-left-coast-writers","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-publishing","tag-writing-room","tag-writing-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}