Update on my book: A Town and A Valley--Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley

My book, A Town and A Valley--Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley, was purchased by the Warner Library in Tarrytown and can be found in the Local History section. I visited the library recently and was pleased to find out that my book had been loaned out, according to the desk librarian who told me where it was to be found. It has also been purchased by the Historical Society in Tarrytown, which makes me quite happy. I know that my parents and my brother are rooting for its success, as are a number of people from my past who have contacted me to tell me that they love the book. 

For those readers who would like to know more about the area of New York State where I was born and where I grew up, the book might be of interest to you. It can be purchased on Amazon: 

A Town and A Valley: Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9798842022946: Amazon.com: Books

and also on Barnes & Noble: 

A Town and A Valley: Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley by Paula Mary De Angelis, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)

A Town and A Valley, now in paperback

My new book, A Town and A Valley: Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley, is now published

This year has been a productive one for me so far. Since I retired last September, I've used my free time to garden and to write. I've published three books this year, all of which were years in the making. I finally finished and published my book about growing up in Tarrytown in New York State--A Town and A Valley: Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley. It is available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book:  Amazon.com: A Town and A Valley: Growing Up in Tarrytown and the Hudson Valley eBook : De Angelis , Paula Mary : Kindle Store                

A paperback version is forthcoming. 

The Gifts of a Garden

I finally received a hardcover copy of my book, The Gifts of a Garden, after ordering it on Amazon. I am very pleased with how the book looks; I love the cover (designed by photographer and graphic designer Paloma Ayala, and how the book looks generally. I'm proud of it. It is available for purchase on Amazon: The Gifts of a Garden: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9798833097694: Amazon.com: Books

I need to create a Kindle version (e-book) of the book, which will then allow me to enter it in the Kindle Storyteller UK contest. I will also be sending the hardcover version to The Frankfurt International Book Fair, which is the world's largest trade fair for books. I will do this via The Combined Book Exhibit company, which will display the book for me at the fair. As their website (Print Book Display - Hardcover Copy of Book at Book Fairs (combinedbook.com) states: 

Showcase your paperback or hardcover book at any of our worldwide book fairs we attend. Combined Book Exhibit (CBE) participates in only the major book fairs around the world. Shows include the Frankfurt International Book Fair in Germany and Book Expo/BookCon in New York City, American Library Association and many others. CBE provides many options for authors looking to display their books without having to travel to the show. CBE displays books from large, small, or independent publishers as well as self-published authors.

Marketing a book that one has published is an important and necessary job. Without it, a book won't sell, and I want my book to sell. I have written a press release about it, have advertised it on my Facebook page Books by PM De Angelis, have written about it on my blog, and have informed friends and family by word-of-mouth. It's hard to know what else to do, except to keep on repeating what I've already done in the hope that it will stimulate sales. Time will tell. 

My new book--The Gifts of a Garden

My new book, The Gifts of a Garden, is now available for purchase in hardcover and paperback formats on Amazon. It will eventually be available as an e-book as well. 

Here is the link to the book on Amazon: The Gifts of a Garden: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9798833097694: Amazon.com: Books

Thank you for your support!  

Movements through the Landscape

Movements through the Landscape: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9798437622254: Amazon.com: Books

Movements through the landscape

My newest collection of poems, Movements through the Landscape, is now available on Amazon in paperback form and as an e-book: Movements through the Landscape: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9798437622254: Amazon.com: Books

This book is a collection of poems originally written in Norwegian and translated into English. I am planning to publish the Norwegian version as an e-book here in Norway. 

My poetry collections

I've been writing poetry for many years, since I was fourteen years old. During the past ten years or so, I've been able to publish most of what I've written over the years as different poetry collections, which I've listed here:

• Cemetery Road, published in 2019
• Quantum Bloom, published in 2015
• One Hundred Haikus for Modern Workplaces, published in 2014
• Remnants of the Spirit World, published in 2014
• Parables and Voices, published in 2011  

All of them are available for purchase on Amazon.com 

My Amazon Author page provides the links to each book: Amazon.com: Paula M. De Angelis: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

A free Kindle book preview of Survivable Losses

I'm posting a free Kindle book preview of Survivable Losses, the collection of short stories by Francesca Stokes. If you like it, please consider purchasing it on Amazon. Thank you. 

Praise for my Blindsided book

I published the second paperback edition of my book Blindsided--Recognizing and Dealing with Passive-Aggressive Leadership in the Workplace in 2009. Nine years ago! I am still hearing from readers who are fans of my book. It is always heartening to read their words to me. Some tell me that they loved the book; others that it is insightful and interesting. They make me realize that I did a good thing by writing it. I shared disheartening work experiences at a time in my work life that nearly devastated me psychologically. I understand enough about myself to know that writing the book was therapeutic. I re-read parts of it from time to time and realize that many of my insights from that time were spot on. I wrote a good book, an inspired book. It is true what people say--times of sadness and depression can sharpen your insights and understanding. So if pain is good for something, it is good for mental growth. It forces you out of your comfort zone; it forces you to hop out into the unknown. And that is scary as all get-out. But had I not hopped out into the unknown, I would never have gotten the chance to become a writer. I am very glad that I got that chance. And I am very glad for the opportunity to meet my readers, and for the knowledge that I have in some way touched their lives. It's a humbling experience to hear from readers who share their stories with me. I think they feel less alone knowing that someone else has experienced what they have experienced; I know that I certainly feel less alone because they wrote to me. To all my readers--thank you from the bottom of my heart, not only for reading my book but for taking the time to write to me. And for those of you who might want to read the book, here is the link to it on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/l5xbj7y

My WriteOn by Kindle author page

Check out my WriteOn by Kindle author page--https://writeon.amazon.com/search?headerQuery=paula%20mary%20de%20angelis&ref_=ign_d_tn_sr_ac

Two short stories so far, and more to come........

Treating customers well

Just had to comment on a pleasant experience today with a large company. It’s not every day that you deal with a customer service department in a huge company that actually treats you well, solves your problem for you, or even gets back to you on the same day that you contacted them. All that happened to me today in my dealings with Amazon.com. I had purchased a DVD TV series for several hundred dollars back in May of this year, and it arrived in Oslo in late June when we were on vacation in Germany. Unfortunately, the post office in Oslo only allows the packages to sit in their buildings for fourteen days, so as we were on vacation for about this amount of time, the package was returned to Amazon before I had a chance to pick it up. I contacted Amazon in mid-July to register this incident as a return, and received an authorization number so that I could track the return process and when the package was logged in as ‘returned’. As it took almost eight weeks for the package to arrive in Oslo initially, I figured it would take about the same amount of time for it to arrive back in the USA from whence it was shipped. Due to other matters, I didn’t have a chance to check on the status of the return until today, three months after I first contacted Amazon. I wrote to the customer service department as the package had not been returned by me but by the post office, so that the return process was irregular. I received an email within a few hours from not one, but two customer service reps, within a few hours of each other. The first one wrote to me to tell me that the package had been returned and that it would be no problem for me to get my refund. The second one wrote to tell me the exact amount that would be refunded and how my Amazon gift card and credit card accounts would be credited. No fuss, no bother, no ‘please contact this or that person’ in a long chain of persons, no recriminations or criticism on their part concerning the irregular return process. Rather, personal emails to me that said that they understood that I was disappointed that I had not received my package and that the refund process was initiated and that it would not take long for me to receive my refund, respectively.

How great is this? This is a huge global company at this point in time, and yet they managed to get back to me the same day I wrote to them. Not only that, they managed to resolve the situation immediately. I am a regular and good Amazon customer and have been since the late 1990s. I have never had a customer service problem with this company, which in and of itself is pretty amazing. Their efficient, fast and friendly customer service ensures that I remain a loyal customer. Why is it that they manage this absolutely crucial aspect of running a business—providing excellent customer service--whereas other companies fail so miserably? At Amazon, it seems that the customer is always right. At least that’s been the case in my dealings with them. It just goes to show that just because a company is large doesn’t mean that we need to abandon all hope of being treated well as a customer. I hope their policy of treating the customer well continues. 

Buying it on Amazon (or how I avoid paying high Norwegian prices)

I thought I’d put in my two cents concerning the discussion about how expensive it is to be a tourist in Norway. There have been a number of recent articles about exactly this topic—how expensive it is to travel in Scandinavia, and especially in Norway—and some of them are pretty funny, at least to me, since I recognize my own reactions (and a bit of shock) to much of what is written in them. Try this recent article, for example http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/scandinavia-on-125-a-day/?hpw). Tourists are not the only ones who are shocked at the high cost of living here; I’ve lived here for twenty-two years and I’m still often taken aback at how much things cost. It’s not so much housing prices (which are comparable to Manhattan and other large cities around the world), but it’s other things, like cars, eating out, gasoline, groceries and other necessities. However, a number of low-price supermarkets have sprung up in Oslo in recent years; here you can find some bargains and that’s always a good thing. Prices in Norway for different items can be shocking; you need to take a deep breath at times and stop converting the prices to American dollars if you’re an American expat. Because if you continue to convert, you will realize how much money you are really paying just to live, and it’s not to live extravagantly. For example, if you convert, you will find that you are paying twenty dollars for one, I repeat, one dental floss dispenser at local pharmacies. It doesn’t matter where you are—in the rich or less rich city areas—prices are the same. And the dental floss is not manufactured in Norway, it is imported. It is good old Johnson & Johnson dental floss that you can find on Amazon for a fraction of the Norwegian price. In fact, a package of six dental floss dispensers (100 yards each, more or less the same size as what is available for sale here), costs about twenty dollars on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Reach-Dentotape-Designed-spaced-Unflavored/dp/B003XDVERE/ref=pd_sim_hpc_1). In other words, you’re being suckered if you pay that price for one floss dispenser in this country. So guess who recently ordered dental floss from Amazon. Even if I pay international shipping costs, which are not much, the total price for six dispensers is still much cheaper than what I would pay for one here in Oslo. And so it goes. Take aspirin. Genuine Bayer aspirin (325mg 200 coated tablets) on Amazon costs 9.47 dollars (http://www.amazon.com/Genuine-Bayer-Aspirin-Tablets-Coated/dp/B001LFG0OI/ref=pd_sim_hpc_1); at an online Norwegian pharmacy, I can get a package of 20 aspirin tablets (440 mg) for 7 dollars. It borders on the ridiculous. Of course, healthcare costs are ‘lower’ in this country than in the USA; but wage earners in Norway pay for universal healthcare through their taxes (at present, the sales tax is 25%), as well as taxes on gasoline, liquor, and cigarettes. I don’t have a problem with paying taxes to fund universal healthcare (something Americans should think more about so that healthcare became more accessible to all), but just so the point is made—healthcare is not free in this country by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing in this world comes for free. But it would be nice not to have to pay through the nose for some basic items like dental floss and aspirin. So whenever I am in the USA, I stock up on such things; it’s worth it. Norwegians pay their taxes willingly, but never believe for one second that they don’t want a bargain if they can get one. Those Norwegians who live on the east side of the country save money by shopping for groceries and liquor in Sweden, where prices are much cheaper. And when they travel, they stock up on duty-free items (e.g. liquor and tobacco products) on their return. And duty-free prices are still expensive, just considerably less expensive than the usual prices. 

Why are prices so high? Someone is getting rich, and it’s not the average consumer. But if you take a look at the incomes of the owners of the major supermarket chains in this country, that will shed some light on the matter. They are quite wealthy; in fact, they are some of the wealthiest people in this country. They control the food prices; the farmers who are always being blamed for the high price of food do not. Farmers are subsidized in many countries; it’s a tricky and difficult profession and I don’t begrudge them the subsidies if this is what helps them to live and as long as the subsidies are reasonable. I have a problem with the middlemen—that group of people who bring the consumer goods to us. Again, I don’t mind paying a 15% or 20% markup so that they can make some profit from importing goods for us to buy. I mind when the markup is 300% or 600%. There is no reason other than pure profit that dental floss and aspirin cost the exorbitant prices they do at present. It reminds me of how middlemen have milked my own profession for years and made huge profits. The suppliers of medical research items like antibodies, buffers and other reagents have charged sales tax on items that should have been tax-free because they were being used for research. They also marked up prices for many of these items by 100% or more. So you had an insane markup plus 25% sales tax. Fair? No. They were finally forced to implement the tax-free policy and made it as difficult as possible to implement. It always surprised me that hospitals and research institutions were not more aggressive and adamant about having this tax-free policy enforced many years ago already, considering the financial difficulties many find themselves in at present. 

Publish Your Book using CreateSpace

I thought I would talk about how to self-publish your book if you want to try this publication route. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but since I have done it once with good results I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For starters, you learn the entire process of not only preparing your book for publication, but also marketing it once it is ‘out there’ for sale. The online publishing world is a fascinating place! All the things you learn along the way about how to sell your book are of course what you would pay a publisher to do for you and your book. But think of how valuable it may be to learn those processes yourself.

If you’ve written a book and you want to try your hand at self-publishing, I recommend CreateSpace (www.createspace.com), not only because I’ve worked with them and am pleased with the results, but mostly because this company is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Why is this good? Because once you have completed the requirements for publication on CreateSpace, your book can be set out for sale on Amazon.com at no cost to you. If you are a new author your chances of getting your first book published via a major publishing house are probably close to null. But ok, let’s say you’re lucky and your first book gets published by a major publishing house—then you may not need to read this post further. But for the rest of us who believe in our work and who want to see it out there in print, CreateSpace is the way to go. It’s a very easy website to use. You set up an account with them and prepare your book on your very own ‘dashboard’. CreateSpace will assign an ISBN number to your book. The preparation steps are clearly outlined in a kind of ‘checklist’ format—in essence, you can only proceed to ‘b’ if you have finished ‘a’, and so forth. They require the uploading of exactly two files in .pdf format—your text file and your book cover file. The latter must be prepared according to a template provided by them that you can download with instructions. I worked with a designer on my first book who prepared my book cover for me according to this template, and she did a great job. CreateSpace also offers free tools to prepare your book and ready-made book covers that you can use if you don’t work with a designer. Once the book was complete and ready for uploading to their website, I uploaded the text file and the book cover file, and waited no more than a day for them to get back to me with the message that a proof book had been created that I had to order and review carefully in order to make sure that it was satisfactory to me. The cost of a proof book was minimal. At no point along the way did I ever get the feeling that I was being ‘scammed’. My intuition told me that this was a good company to work with and it is. Once you approve the proof book, your book can eventually be sold via both CreateSpace on your own ‘eStore’ and on Amazon. I love Amazon for many reasons (it’s a great online bookstore and so much more), but it is also a company that is very generous to budding authors. The great thing about having your book sold on Amazon is that you can create an Amazon Author page that allows you to provide as much or as little information about yourself as you wish. Additionally, if you write a blog, you can feed it directly into your Author page (as I now do), thus generating more publicity for your writing and/or book. CreateSpace will publish your book only when it is ordered, that is, it is a ‘Print-on-demand’ company, and here is where the savings to you come into the picture. There are no requirements for hundreds or thousands of copies of your book to be produced upfront as would be the case if you worked with a major publishing company. CreateSpace states this clearly—that you as the author do not have to worry about ‘inventory or minimum orders’. The only real costs involved are the payments you make when you order copies (as many or as few as you wish) of your book for yourself and family or friends. And because you are the author, you pay much less to order your book than others will pay. You also get to choose how much you want your book to sell for (the list price). CreateSpace makes its money by keeping a fair share of the royalty you will get for each sale, but you can also increase your share of the royalties. There are two publishing plans within CreateSpace that deal with this topic, the basic plan and the Pro plan (slightly more expensive)—but you get to keep a larger percentage of your royalties by signing up for the Pro plan (the cost is minimal and it’s worth it).  I recommend it also because when you order copies of your book you pay less per copy than you would with the basic plan and also because this plan increases the extent of distribution to other book sellers.

If you want to market your book once it’s available for sale, I recommend that you send out a press release describing your book and its date of publication. I used www.prweb.com and was very pleased with their services. They offer several different packages that involve the use of different multi-media formats (online press release, podcasts, etc.) for press releases, but I went with the basic package (online release only) and it was well worth it. I also set up a simple one-page website to market my book, and spent some time learning simple web design (thanks to Microsoft Office Publisher) in order to achieve this; the only expenses involved with this aspect are the website hosting costs. There are a number of web hosting sites and I hesitate to recommend one simply because there are so many out there that offer very good packages at similar prices.

Of course it took some time for me to learn how to use all of the different online sites available to help an author publish and market his or her book, but once I did, I didn’t look back. The costs involved are minimal and the crash-course in the use of different online sites is challenging and fun. I don’t think I spent more than about three hundred dollars to publish and market my first book, and that included the designer’s fee, signing up for the CreateSpace Pro plan, ordering a proof book, ordering several copies of the published book, website hosting, and one press release. I’ve more than recouped my initial investment. If you’re a new author, you may want to choose this publication route at some future point and I can only say—go for it, you won’t regret it.  


Addendum 29 January 2015--I can now recommend Weebly for both web-hosting and website-building. It offers both for free, but if you want to obtain statistical information about your website traffic and get an idea of who is accessing your site, you will need to pay for that information. You can learn more about it all at www.weebly.com. And as far as book promotion, using social media (e.g.Twitter) is an excellent way to promote your book and an eventual author page on Amazon.