ForeWord Magazine
"Vita's Will" Finds its Way with POD
Mardi Link, Editor-in-Chief, ForeWord Magazine, "ForeWord This Week"
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| "print-on-demand has received so much muddy press lately, the radical approach to this subject is to rake the muck until something shiny oozes up. That something shiny is Debbie Gisonni." |
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While looking for the "dark side" of convention has been a successful journalistic formula, print-on-demand has received so much muddy press lately, the radical approach to this subject is to rake the muck until something shiny oozes up. That something shiny is Debbie Gisonni.
The former Publisher of InternetWeek, the current President of the San Francisco chapter of Women's National Book Association, Gisonni does not fit the stereotype encouraged by the hoity-toity publishing's establishment of the shunned wannabe author who turns to a print-on-demand publisher in desperation. Yet, that is exactly how her story starts out.
Faced with the deaths of her mother, father, sister, and aunt in just four years, Gisonni naturally turned introspective, and soon decided she wanted more from her life than a chunk of brick in Silicon Alley. Even if that chunk was pretty big and impressive. She quit her job to write a book.
"When I left my job, I started doing some research on the book industry and I approached the traditional publishers, the traditional agents, just the way my research told me I was supposed to," she said. "As the rejection letters were piling up, I continued to write, just like they tell you to. I thought I would be a good sell to an agent. Hey, I've launched publications before, right? I can certainly launch one book. Nobody bit."
And that's where the cliche ends and Vita's Will begins. Gisonni signed herself up for every information source available on the publishing and bookselling business and pretty soon was reading about print-on-demand and iUniverse.
"Because of my high tech background, I sort of had an affinity for it. When I learned more about POD, I immediately thought, this is a model I can really work with. Coming from the tech industry, I still can't believe how slow publishing is. Some people I was dealing with did not have e-mail. You send your submissions and you hear back from them four months later? This whole system is really slow and antiquated! I have no idea why it takes a year or more to publish a book."
Before she signed on with iUniverse to publish Vita's Will, Real Life Lessons about Life, Death & Moving On, Gisonni hired an editor, a cover designer, and a publicity strategist (Susan Harrow, Oakland, Calif.). Together with Harrow, she developed a marketing plan that included workshops, sample articles, and column proposals for consumer magazines, lists of television and radio producers and even three main angles to snag the media.
"The negative press POD has been getting assumes that unless you're with a large publisher, you can't ensure that a book is any good," said Gisonni. "Does that mean that every book that has been published by a big New York publisher has been a great book and that they've never published a bad book? I don't think so."
"The percentage of bad books published by POD publishers is probably higher, I agree. But because I come from a marketing background, I kept thinking that I was the best person to let people know about my book. The best judge of any book should be the readers. That's your customer. If they like your book, they are either going to buy more copies for their friends and family or they're going to recommend it."
Gisonni's press materials state that Vita's Will has ranked in the top 5% of sales at Amazon, though since their database is so mammoth, that puts her book at about 40,000. Vita's Will has, however, been number one on iUniverse's website which lists about 6,000 titles. Her theme of "Real Life Lessons," which is also the name of her company (http://www.reallifelessons.com), has been meaningful to readers and she says she is planning more titles. Maybe they will be published by iUniverse, maybe not.
"I've already been talking to other publishers, it depends. I am not saying that I have to go iUniverse, but, I certainly am not going to sit at home and wait until some agent or editor decides my book is worth being published. I come from a marketing background. I want involvement. In retrospect, everything does happen in perfect timing. I might not have fit into that traditional model."
April 11, 2001 |
