SelfPublisher News Article

Email Larita at:
larita@laritaarnold.com
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877.355.0462

Reprinted from SelfPublisher News, Volume 1, Number 4, November 2005:

HER BOOKS WILL SHINE LIKE HER JEWELRY

Larita Arnold of Highlands Ranch, Colo., owns Silver Messages 925 Sterling Silver Jewelry (www.silvermessages.com), which is a website and warehouse, featuring 14,000 sterling silver jewelry and gift products imported from nine countries.

Her first book, The Fastest Ship, is described as follows:  "Sail the Caribbean and the Atlantic in this tale of high adventure, romance, and technological revolution.  The year is 1860, at the close of the Golden Age of Sail.  A pirate abducts the daughter of the Governor of Jamaica, who is rescued by the man destined to build England's first iron-clad warship, the HMS Warrior.  Now Warrior's maiden voyage will solve the mysteries of a lost treasure and a lost memory."

"I'm the sort of person who works everything out inside my head," Arnold tells SelfPublisher News.  "Then when I get ready to do a project, I just block out all distractions for blocks of time and slog through it until it's finished.  With The Fastest Ship, I found it very helpful to meditate on the plot and characters just before retiring.  During the night, my mind worked on the story, and when I woke up, I had 10 or 15 pages in my head.  I made myself write until I was blank -- usually about [90 minutes].  Then, that night, I would review what I had written before retiring -- and on we go in a cycle."

The seeds for this story were sown about 26 years ago on her honeymoon in Jamaica, and "the plot and characters have been 'rooming' in [her] mind for the last 10 years or so."  However, this is her first writing venture.  "The jewelry business really takes a nose dive in the summertime," Arnold says.  "So, this year, I had two goals for the summer: first, I wanted to find a pearl exporter in China, and then figure out how to do payments, quality control, and do some original hand-knotted pearl necklace designs.  That was fun, and I learned a lot.  My next goal was to at least start this book.  I got a lot further than I thought I would!"

She has been doing research for The Fastest Ship for about ten years.  "When you do maintenance on websites, you develop what I call 'vampire bio-rhythms' -- you just have to wait until the traffic slacks off, usually around 10:00 p.m. or so.  Then you have to give the customers about a half hour's notice that you're going to shut down.  I put that half hour to good use researching all the detail for the story," Arnold says.

Arnold self-published because "the big publishing houses are in decline and not making a lot of money for themselves."  She continues, "If they can't make money for themselves, how can they make money for me?  And, I like the idea of POD -- it makes no sense at all to print thousands of books and warehouse them or consign them, when you can store the digital version and print it as the books sell.  Not taking advantage of that technological advance is just really poor business sense."

"I read somewhere that two million book-length manuscripts go to publishers each year, and only 10,000 get published -- largely because the publishing houses don't have enough manpower to shepherd more books to market," Arnold tells SelfPublisher News.  "It would appear that the publishers are a bottleneck that weeds out new writers and favors established writers.  They want to retain the power of deciding whom to publish, but there is really no need for them to have that exclusive power now.  Technology has made it easier for new writers to bypass the old publishing houses and publish themselves.  The market should decide what is good and what isn't, not a handful of people in New York."

Arnold has been marketing her business for the last four years, so this gave her ideas for marketing her book.  "It required me to expand my view of Silver Messages -- we no longer sell just jewelry and gifts, now we sell romance.  It may be in the form of jewelry, or a romance novel, or other products we haven't thought up yet," she says.

She gave her Silver Messages customer base a 40% discount on Sterling Silver Jewelry when they bought her book from Amazon.com.  She says direct mail is too expensive and too time consuming.

Arnold says that people who have read The Fastest Ship "are asking, 'What is your next book going to be?  When do you think it will be available?' as if it were the easiest thing in the world to invent a world, invent characters to people the world, and invent a story about what these people do with their lives."

"This was a labor of heart, mind and soul, and it felt like giving birth!  Quite frankly, I don't want to do that again just yet," Arnold tells SelfPublisher News.  "Let's get the baby weaned and walking first.  Writing a book is hard work, and it involves opening your mind, heart and soul, and letting all the people in the world go in there and have a look.  It's risky!  It's certainly not for the faint-hearted, those easily discouraged or easily heartbroken over what other people say."