Cake Stories.

Shopping for and reading books just got even better! 😉

Chicago Review of Books

Fifteen years ago, at an event promoting her new young adult novel, Hillary Frank smiled for the camera and leaned closer to the other star of the night – a giant cake modeled after the book. The blue-and-black cake looked like a larger-than-life-sized copy of her book, I Can’t Tell You. To a packed house at The Book Cellar, then a fledgling shop in Chicago’s Lincoln Square, Frank talked about her book and then the crowd ate it up.

The author “was floored” when she first saw it. Thus began a decades-long Book Cellar tradition, in which the store’s owner, Suzy Takacs, commissions large, hyper-realistic book cakes to serve during author events one-to-four times a month for over a decade.

“We had cake and wine and it felt like a real book party,” Frank wrote in an email. “Like, I conquered this book so hard that I am literally…

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And the Winner is….

Ali Isaac, author of the Conor Kelly books and other Irish stories, for naming the POD that sells her paperbacks. Now we can order her books directly from her printer, and she will earn more for her work.

Let’s get selling!

Seriously, Indie Author colleagues, as I posted in my pre-Christmas appeal, if you want my business, you’ll publish on paper*, and you’ll tell me where to find those books. If I’ve put one of your titles on my TBR, I can search and eventually find out if you’ve published via a Print-on-Demand purveyor, but that may take time – and I’m a fast reader, so I like to refresh my inventory as frequently and quickly as my limited budget allows. Why make it difficult (or even impossible) for a potential customer to purchase your product?

Contrary to popular belief, my buying your book from The Major Online Retailer will not improve your discoverability among the millions of publications on offer there. The A-to-Z Retailer is not your friend: it’s an enormous, cold-hearted business that’s only interested in maximizing its bottom line, and it does that by taking a whopping percentage of a book’s retail price as the company’s “discount,” for its profit on the sale (an especially egregious hand-in-the-pocket of those who publish via its subsidiary POD). That means you get a significantly smaller royalty payment.

Coincidentally, after checking out Ali’s POD listing, I found a very interesting-looking book by an author who is a complete unknown to me, and I intend to purchase at least one of his works, too. Because I now know where to purchase his work to ensure that he gets the maximum royalty possible, that author goes to the top of my TBR, too.

Let’s have a little shameless self-promotion here, folks! Reveal below where you’ve hidden your POD paperbacks!

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*I have a visual disability that makes it impossible for me to read for pleasure from a screen.