New book - Thanks to HubPages!

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   Urbane Chaosposted 7 years ago

   
   I meant to share this awhile back..
   
   I write about Oklahoma - mostly trivia and things that people generally don't know.  For example, did you know that Mister Ed is buried in Oklahoma?  Or that Dick Tracey had his roots in Oklahoma?  My latest article talks about Mickey Mantle's home town, yes, in Oklahoma.
   
   I've published a few books before, but I wanted to do something a little different.  I took articles that I had published here on HubPages and transformed them into a book.  With most of the articles, I expanded on them and added a lot more photos and other information. 
   
   Really, it was a test to see how it would do.  I've been pleasantly surprised!  I thought that since people could find the information for free online, many wouldn't buy the book.  So far, I've sold over 4,000 copies and it's been out since October.  Because of the success, I've been working on a third "Oklahoma Traveler" book based on stories I've created for HubPages.
   
   In the Stories of the Mountain Gateway book, I made sure to thank the great staff at HubPages, as well as the editors.  Hopefully that will help drive more traffic to the site.
   
   I wanted to share this since it may help out other people.   
   
   With the last three books we've published, I've gone through CreateSpace.  I used to go through Univeristy of Oklahoma Press, but the royalties they charged were a bit much.  I primarily used InDesign, Photoshop, and Word to publish the book.  Articles were copied over into Word where they could be edited and added to.  From there, I copied them into InDesign using the book feature - each document in InDesign is a separate article, then I combined them using Book.  Once the text was in, I added in boxes for the photos.  With the old photos, most of them didn't have any copyrights attached, so I simply edited them in Photoshop to make them clearer.  For other photos, I visited the places to get new ones, then edited those as well.  Finally, imported that into the boxes in InDesign, added the TOC, copyright, and information pages, then exported it to PDF.  From there, I uploaded it to CreateSpace and was good to go.  (There are free, open source programs available too that do the same thing.)
   
   For those that have articles, that may be a way to pick up a few extra bucks.  Hope this helps someone!

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      Christy Kirwanposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Congratulations! HP staff always loves hearing about ways HubPages has helped our authors be successful. This book project sounds like a lot of hard work, but very rewarding!

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         Urbane Chaosposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks! It was a fun (at at times, challenging) process.
         
         I saw something else a couple months ago that I haven't had time to look into yet.  I don't think it would be that hard to take evergreen articles and convert them to video, then link back to HubPages.  When I have some more free time then that's something else I would like to try.

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      Coffeequeeenposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      That is good news, well done. 

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   theraggededgeposted 7 years ago

   Congratulations and well done! It's a great example of maximising your work.

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      Urbane Chaosposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks!  I do decent with HubPages - I'm a big believer, but wanted to see what else could be done that wouldn't impact articles here.  With the book, that worked perfect.  Since most of the writing work was already done, it was just adding in a bit and then formatting.

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   Gregory DeVictorposted 7 years ago

   Congratulations on your achievement. I would really like to read your book since the topic is so very interesting. I also see that your book is featured on Amazon. Great job!

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      Urbane Chaosposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks!  Most of it is already on HubPages; the idea with the book is that it combines everything  together.  Hopefully it will help give other people here some ideas as well.

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   Kenna McHughposted 7 years ago

   Congratulations!

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   jansharesposted 7 years ago

   Wow! Good for you and congratulations. Love success stories.

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   Jessie L Watsonposted 7 years ago

   Awesome. Did you publish with Amazon?

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      Urbane Chaosposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      It was published through CreateSpace, which is an Amazon subsidiary.  The nice thing is that they help you get on a lot of those sites - such as Abebooks and even Barnes & Noble.  You get less royalties that way, but it's still money in the bank.
      
      What I did, I published through CreateSpace and then manually submitted my book through other outlets, then visited with a number of local book sellers to have my product on their shelf.  For me, this worked even with national chains.  They usually have an area for local books as well.  I can't say I've made much from the national chains, but it's still nice to walk in and see something you wrote sitting on their shelves.

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   HoneyBBposted 7 years ago

   Congrats! Way to go! The cover page looks awesome and definitely a catchy title.

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