Jumpin' and a'Shakin'

Things have gone from a simmer to a full boil here at Sheaf House. I keep intending to update you all, and my schedule has been just unreal, so as usual I’m way behind. I’ll try to bring everyone up to speed in as few words as possible . . . Oh, well, I have good intentions, but you know how wordy I am!

As of a couple of months ago, we acquired a marketing and publicity director, and she’s been shaking things up. Please join me in welcoming Penney Carlton aboard!

Penney is an independent TV producer who was the associate producer on Tanya Tucker’s TLC reality series, Tuckerville in 2005-2006. She’s been a freelance marketing consultant for numerous authors and small businesses and was writer and co-producer on a pilot reality show, Indieville. She also wrote and produced a one-hour documentary on Nashville’s homeless community, The Invisible America, that ran regionally and for which she’s written a companion book with the same title She is the founder of a non-profit corporation to aid the homeless, 20for1: The Journey Home. She has a number of television series and documentaries under development. She’s one busy lady, and now she’s working to get the word out about Sheaf House authors and books!

One of the first things Penney did for us was to get Beth Shriver onto the Lifetime Television program The Balancing Act. They’re down in Pompano Beach, FL, taping her segment today, and the show will appear sometime in September. For regular updates and the final date when the program will appear, stop by the Peace for Parents of Teens fan page or the Sheaf House Web site.

Beth and her daughter Madison, whose struggles as a teen prompted Beth to write the book, are appearing together on The Morning Show, a local program on WSFL-TV (SFL), a Miami-Fort Lauderdale network, at 7:20 a.m. And from 6 to 9 that evening they’re doing a meet-and-greet at Jacob’s Ladder, a large Christian Bookstore in Margate. So they’re having lots of fun, and Penney told me it’s actually cooler there than it is here in Nashville! Sheesh! They’re really sacrificing, as you can tell by this view from the hotel window . . .

On the home front, this week I have an amazing young woman, Katie Pedlow, interning with me. She’s an English lit major at a Christian college in California, and I simply couldn’t ask for a better fit for the work I need her to do and also personally. I’m going to adopt her! And her family too!! We’re working hard but also taking off time to play. I’m really going to miss her when she has to head home!

Then next week John Robinson and Deb Kinnard are coming in to do some author events in the area, along with Jen Stephens and Diane Moody. We’ve scheduled some meet-and-greets so far, and Penney is working on lining up more events and media coverage. Plus I want to take them to meet our sales and merchandising director at APG, Cary Johnson, and hopefully get a tour of the warehouse. And we just simply need the face time for Penney to meet them in person and for us to talk about further promotions and their upcoming releases. So it’s going to be a busy few days.

Also among many, many other things Penney is working on is getting a booth for Sheaf House at the Southern Festival of Books, which takes place at Legislative Plaza in Nashville October 8-10. Jen Stephens got the ball rolling, and she and I were chosen to participate on an author panel during the event, which will hopefully publicize our books and the SH booth and result in some good book sales. We tried to get Diane Moody on the panel too, but apparently Confessions of a Prayer Slacker doesn’t fit into their focus for this year. Boooo, hisss!! But if we have good results this year, we’ll try again next year.

Joy DeKok also clued us in on the Twin Cities Book Festival, an all-day book exhibit and festival in the Minneapolis area October 16 this year. We definitely want to participate in that one too. These events will help us determine whether book festivals are worth the time and effort as far as sales are concerned.

Going Kindle. One thing I’m having my intern, Katie, work on is transferring to the Word files the final corrections that were done in Quark for our 2010 releases. After looking at how are sales are growing in Kindle, and considering that Amazon has increased the amount of the royalty payout, I’m going to convert all our fiction to that format. Not sure yet about our nonfiction issue titles, especially the devotionals. How well do devotionals sell on Kindle? And for them, it’s too expensive to convert the graphics because they have to be input by hand one at a time, so we’d lose those elements. I’m thinking that some titles, like Confessions of a Prayer Slacker, are a more natural fit for Kindle than devotionals would be. So I’ll have to think about that.

New Team Members. We have some new team members to introduce, and I’m going to do that in my next post since this one is already waaaayyy too long!

That’s all for now. Check back soon!