It's tough

During the past week I finally met with some success for all the efforts I've been putting in. During my first month with Encircle Publications I spent a lot of time building marketing lists of publishers and authors whom might be able to use our graphic design expertise. After I'd generated a couple fairly sizable lists I created a marketing email that went out en masse to all on the list. A good 20% of these emails were returned undeliverable. Several more were probably sorted into the recipient's spam folder and automatically deleted. Others were not even looked at. To be sure some did get through and got read. I know this because we had an author call on the basis of my email. We quoted him our price to do the cover design on his latest novel and any other promotional items he might want. After visiting our website and the portfolios of our various designers he was ready to go with us. High-fives all around. Me and Eddie were elated, my first sale! Great success! This week however, the fruits of that success were ripped away from me. Whatever. I'll still call it a success. It seems that our latest client needed the work done very fast, which we usually can do. The problem was that the specific designer he had chosen to do his cover is currently on vacation and wont be back in a timely enough manner. These things happen. The good part though is that this author is going to be coming out with a new book series encompassing several books in the coming years and is still interested in doing business with us on those titles. So perhaps it's not so bad after all.
The thing I've learned is that this is a tough business. We are not the only company out there that offers these services. I've had to create all the marketing schemes from scratch based off what little research I've done on my own and have yet to implement anything that is slick and efficient. Indeed I am still on the learning curve in regards to all of this. It's also a tough economy and in times like these everybody seems to want things done on the cheap. In my research I've found several self publishing outfits offering services at such low-ball prices that I wouldn't hesitate to call some of them a scam. Just how many self publishing authors get sucked into these scams and publish books of shoddy quality, with no distribution, in turn costing them more out of their own pocket than they can ever hope to make back in return. Our work is high quality work which we believe will produce high quality results, and it is because of this that we do not offer our services on the cheap. This doesn't mean we aren't reasonable or fairly priced with what we do. It's just a reminder that you get what you pay for. In an economy like this people tend to forget that. My job is to remind them and give them all the reasons in the world for why they'd want to do business with us. It's tough, but I know that once we get the ball rolling, the good word will spread and it will make things a bit easier.