Many indie authors dream of turning their small businesses into lucrative cottage industries. In that respect, Alexandra Koumoundouros and Valerie Aiello are no different. They’d like for their music-minded self-help workbook, No One Gives a Shit About Your Band, to make the New York Times best-seller list, to be on everyone’s coffee table and to launch a successful series of No One Gives a Shit About… books. And they are taking a uniquely challenging road to get there.
Koumoundouros and Aiello published the book themselves, under their This Town Press imprint, and never thought about hiring an agent or a publicist. And they take an extreme hands-on approach to distribution, reaching out to individual stores by email and often in person. “We want to do it all ourselves, and we want to walk into stores, the stores that we want the book in, and we want to show them the book and talk to them,” says Koumoundouros. “Every store we’ve walked into, first they see the cover, they start laughing, they flip through the pages, they think it’s hilarious, they read a couple of pages, and the next thing you know, they’re taking the book in.”
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