The Cancer Blog (TCB), all 1,500 copies, arrived during the first time for me to be away for more than a day in 19 months. Of course, they did. But my neighbors had been forewarned, and they made sure the 33 boxes of books were stacked on plastic in my book storage area. Thank you, one and all––especially Carole.

A few days after I was back, I met with my publisher at River Roasters, and we are both very happy with this new printer—Seaway Printing Company, Inc. of Green Bay, Wisconsin. We love the cover and the look and feel of the inside pages. And the color in the photos is nicely saturated. We are happy campers.

I will be contacting those who helped during my chemo period. These are the folks to whom TCB is dedicated. I will be giving each of them a comp copy. Now that the books are here, the fun begins––marketing. I am a one-woman show––I write, market, and deliver the books. I did some pre-marketing on my blog, my Facebook pages, and the Backstreet Gallery newsletter, but I haven’t been to events—such as Yachats Farmers Market, book fairs, and PowerPoint programs––where I would be passing out info about my new book. That really works, and I’ve missed doing that this year.

I absolutely need to update my business card by adding the new book name on the back, create an invoice for TCB, write an info sheet about TCB that I will send to the appropriate venues that sell my other books. Some of the venues that have been the most consistent with selling my books, I will give a comp copy of the new one for them to look at and decide if they want to sell it.

Not all coastal venues will be interested in selling this book. So, I will have to seek out new venues. Since The Cancer Blog has to do with cancer and treatment and healing and staying positive, I will seek out places that have these connections.

I will also seek advice from a friend who is a wiz at marketing through social media, I will check out Instagram since another social marketing wiz advised me to do so, and I am considering creating an actual website, instead of trying to sell books through my blog site.

And I will write a press release and send it out to newspapers, and try to get on at least one local radio show.

While it’s a real thrill to have a new book, it is also the start of a lot of work. It’s time to move on to the next phase. The writing phase is over and the selling phase is about to begin. . . . So, how many copies did you say you wanted?