Crewing Aboard a Superyacht
A Guide to Working Afloat by Kim Davis
published by Adlard Coles Nautical 2004
I have learned some lessons the hard way
For those who may be new here, I have restarted my blog. After a long break from it, the time has come to blog again! (In honor of the new collection of short stories I have coming out this November.) And as background material about myself, I thought I would tell you about my two previous books. In my last blog post, I told about the first one, The Yachtie Bible.
Now I’m going to repeat right here in bold, DON’T RUSH OUT AND BUY EITHER OF THESE OLD BOOKS. While you can still find them on Amazon, they were utilitarian guides with lots of contact information that is long since obsolete.
I left that last post on a cliffhanger. My husband’s aunt marched a copy of my self-published how-to book into the world’s only English language publisher dedicated to nautical books. Then surprise of surprises, they offered me a contract, with an advance. I waffled for a long time, overthinking the whole thing. And I made a big mistake.
A Note about Contract Negotiations
Here’s how I messed up as a newbie: I had always heard that it was best to keep as many of your rights as you could. With that mantra firmly implanted in my brain, it made some twisted sense to me to give that English Publisher world rights in the English language, and keep the US rights for myself, but I didn’t understand that I’d have to produce a completely different edition of the book that would only be available in the USA, and it couldn’t be the original version, either. I wouldn’t be able to sell an electronic version, since that would be in direct competition with the new book. And I’d have to fund my promotions myself.
What a mess! Try promoting a book about working on a yacht in the middle of the Wild West. (I was living in Texas by then.) I tried setting up at bookstores and it was a joke. Those cowboys in their starched jeans never looked twice at me baking in the heat at my little card table in front of the bookstore. I lived 300 miles inland, which was the biggest black mark of all for me with that book. I was nowhere near a region where my desired audience might be. (I needed a marketing plan before I ever got started.)