4 Essential Self-Publishing Tips for Writers

Nadia Jones is a frequent flyer on various blogs.  At the online college site she blogs about education, college, student, teacher, money saving and movie related topics.  She sent me a guest blog on self publishing that is longer than my usual posts, but it was so meaty and useful I decided to share it with you. 

With the rise of eBooks and "indie" sentiments throughout society, more and more authors are taking the self-publishing route for their work. Publishing is no longer a realm solely governed by major commercial publishing companies and firms. Fewer authors are finding themselves dependant on third-party publishers to get their book published and out to the public. While this is an extremely invigorating and rewarding process, self-publication with a long list of do's and don'ts and can prove to be a major challenge. Self-publishing is a wonderful option for authors looking to have complete artistic control over their work and have the satisfaction of going through the entire novel writing process on their own. These are four must-know tips for authors interested in self publication.

Pick Your Niche

This first step begins even before the writing process for some. Knowing your book's niche area is essential for the publishing and promoting side of things. You'll want to keep that niche in mind during your writing process to help guide you in a focused way. This niche area will help you determine exactly who your audience is and how to reach them. Focus is important in writing and in marketing. Finding a niche to write within is usually a fairly natural process for writers. We write best when we write what we know. What we know is our niche. Explore the niche you feel most adept to. What's missing from your niche? What does that audience want to see? These are all important things to look at as a writer and a publisher. Knowing who your audience is and what your audience wants are the two most important aspects of successful publishing.

Edit, Edit, Edit

With self publication, you are often your own editor. Unless you hire a professional editor yourself (which can get pricey), you will have to do it yourself. Editing is an extremely important step in the writing process. You should proofread and revise your work thoroughly before you even begin the publishing process. An unfinished or sloppy final product will be difficult to promote. There are numerous online resources for editing that can help with the process and it is always a good idea to get a second set of eyes on the page. Ask a friend or colleague to look over your work if they are willing. Sometimes we can look over our own mistakes very easily. It is also important to get some distance from your work before you try revising and editing it. If you are too close to your work or you have written the words too recently, you may miss important mistakes or be too reluctant to make essential changes.

Know Your Competition

Before you self-publish, you must carefully study your competition. Now that you have your niche in mind, explore other authors and books in that niche and genre. Compare and contrast what you are doing with these books. See where they are successful and where they are not. By knowing what your competition is up to, you can more easily bring something fresh and unique to your niche. You want to find a way to stand out from the others, without alienating yourself. 

Self-Publication Means Self-Promotion

This is one of the most difficult (and important) aspects of self publication. Without a publishing agency or a literary agent to market your book for you, you'll have to learn to do it yourself. Promoting your book is the only way that people are going to be able to see it. Self publication puts you at the disadvantage of not having all of the media and other contacts in the literary world. However, this does not mean it is impossible. Be aggressive and be ready to put yourself out there. Promote your book online, organize book signings, and send out reviews to newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Promoting your book should become your primary goal. Get active on social media, reach out to your professional contacts, and do all you can to make waves about your publication.

You can reach Ms. Jones at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

How Long Did It Take To Write This Book?

Morgan Mandel is a former freelancer for the Daily Herald newspaper, prior president of Chicago-North RWA, prior Library Liaison for Midwest MWA, and belongs to Sisters in Crime and EPIC. She enjoys writing thrillers, mysteries, romances and also enjoys combining them. Her latest paranormal romantic thriller is Forever Young: Blessing or Curse, Book One of the Always Young Series.  I chatted with her at the Love is Murder Mystery conference about her writing process and thought you would enjoy what she had to say.  She was kind enough to send along this guest post/ 

Yesterday marked the close of another great Love is Murder Mystery Conference. One February, three years ago, Austin and I were in the book room at that year’s conference and I was moaning about how long it took to get a book published. He suggested self-publishing. It was a scary thought, but I had nothing to lose by trying it. I hired Helen Ginger as my editor and published the romantic suspense, Killer Career, under my own brand, Choice One Publishing Company, that August.

After that, I kept getting ideas for books. I’d start one, then put it aside when another brainstorm hit. It didn’t help that I also had a day job, so my writing time was limited. I was floundering, not getting anywhere, with people asking when I’d have another book out. I had no idea.

Then, at the end of 2010, a blessing happened, although it didn’t seem so at the time. I lost my day job. Now I could spend more time writing, but at what? I’d started so many. There was the thriller with tons of characters who took a pill to be young again, another about my dog, Rascal, also a NaNoWriMo romance I’d not completed, not to mention a thriller about a guy with amnesia.

I decided to finish them in the order I’d started. In January, 2011, I ignored the other manuscripts and tackled Forever Young: Blessing or Curse. I whittled down its cast to one main heroine, a few friends, plus her opposition, and pasted the extra characters into another document for a spinoff. Sometime in August, I typed The End, but it wasn’t really the end. I rehired my editor, Helen Ginger, hired Stephen Walker as my cover art designer, completed edits and consulted about the cover art, then did the formatting for Kindle and Smashwords. I’d thought the book would be done sooner, but it didn’t land on Amazon until December 16, followed by Smashwords the next day. I then conquered CreateSpace’s foibles and am happy to say my novel is now available in print.

Anyway, getting back to my original question -- How long did it take to write this book? I don’t really know.


Learn more about the talented Morgan Mandel and her writing at http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/ , and
Website: http://www.morganmandel.com/

Can’t Seem to Find the Time? 5 Tips for Developing a Writing Schedule

This guest post is contributed by Lauren Bailey, who regularly writes for best online colleges.  She has a good grasp on time!

If you are like most writers out there, you probably don’t have a multi-million dollar book contract, with deadlines to meet and people to please. Writing your novel is more than likely a labor of love, a project that you set out to accomplish because you feel that you have something important to share with other readers. Juggling this labor of love with many other obligations—raising children, working a full-time job, keeping house—can seem all but impossible. You just can’t seem to find the time. The key, however, is to plan rigorously while still leaving yourself some breathing room. Here are a few ways to do just that:

1.      Don’t set unrealistic deadlines. Be flexible.

Writers are an imaginative bunch. It comes as no surprise, then, that we can be unrealistic about things that we should be approaching more objectively. Instead of setting an impossible deadline, like finishing your novel in a few months, give yourself some extra time based on your internal writer’s clock. Sometimes even a short story can take months from an initial draft to finished product.

2.      Set aside time to write whenever you are most mentally alert.

Socrates once suggested that the key to living the good life is being aware when he said, “Know thyself.” More than just a self-help pronouncement, this is especially good advice for writers, who use intuition and creativity more than any other faculty in order to write well. Knowing when you are most mentally alert and creative—for many, it’s first thing in the morning after a cup of coffee or late at night when the kids have fallen asleep—will help you produce your most penetrating prose efficiently.

3.      Enlist the help of a writing partner who will motivate you.

When we keep our writing projects to ourselves, it can be difficult to stay motivated because we are writing, at the moment, only for ourselves. You don’t necessarily need to join a writer’s group; all you need to keep you working according to your plan is to seek help from a friend or two who loves to read or write. Have them read chapters of your novel as you complete them, sit with them over dinner, and talk about how you can improve your work. Even if your friend isn’t a professional editor, you’ll still get an opinion from a typical reader, and talking about your work with someone else will inspire you to keep at it.

4.      Get into the habit of writing daily, even if you aren’t working on your project.

The only way to produce a steady stream of work is to make writing a hard-wired habit, something that you do as automatically as personal hygiene. Of course, it will take some time, but start by setting aside a short block of time, like thirty minutes to an hour, in which you do nothing but write. Don’t pressure yourself to work on your big project. Even if you are just scribbling journal-style notes, it’s the best way to get your juices flowing in a disciplined manner.

5.      Use milestones as goals instead of page numbers or chapter numbers.

Many novelists try to enforce their writing goals numerically. They tell themselves that they will get three chapters written by the end of the month, and they then race to meet their goal. The problem with this approach, however, is that it doesn’t take into account that novels are, in some ways, like living things. It would be the same if you were to tell yourself that you will find a partner and get married by your thirtieth birthday—life and novels don’t quite adhere to a set calculus. Instead, try setting goals based on plot milestones. For example, you can endeavor to resolve Character X’s mini-conflict within the story by the end of December. This type of goal-setting will help avoid stilted novels that result from thinking in numbers.

Completing a project as long and demanding as a novel is something that very few people, even self-proclaimed writers, are capable of. And it often takes a few tries to get it right. Regardless, if you set goals, both and long- and short-term, without being too hard on yourself if things don’t get done according to plan, you’ll eventually make it to the finish line. Good luck!

Lauren Bailey welcomes your comments at her email Id: blauren99@gmail.com. 

Hardboiled Help from the Sons of Spade

A new friend has set out to help preserve the hardboiled detective genre.  But I should let him introduce himself.

I’m Jochem Vandersteen, blogger behind www.sonsofspade.tk and author of the Mike Dalmas and Noah Milano stories. I’m also the founder of the Hardboiled Collective and Austin asked me to tell you all a bit about how that came about.

When I published my first Noah Milano short story on www.thrillingdetective.com the web was starting to get filled slowly with cool zines showing off the work of up and coming writers. It was a great way for writers like myself, who were writing about PI’s, crooks and other hardboiled character that might not appeal to a huge audience but surely to a niche of connoisseurs. It offered me the chance to introduce Noah Milano, son of a mobster, security specialist and always looking for redemption.

It encouraged me to put out my first novel, White Knight Syndrome at iUniverse. Then I started to promote it by showing people what my work and main protagonist had to offer through the e-zines.

Then the ebook revolution started. What a great way to get my work out there. It changed the writing world even more than those e-zines did. The audience that I could offer my work was huge, the possibilities to promote my work bigger than before. Social media, blogs and boards can help an author to get noticed without the big campaign a legacy publisher can fork over the cash for.

Blogging about PI-fiction at www.sonsofspade.tk I’d managed to befriend a large amount of writers. I decided their work could use an extra push. I decided they could help my work get an extra push.

I started to invite people and most were happy to join. The Hardboiled Collective was born. The goal is to get people to notice and buy the wonderful works of hardboiled fiction out there. We all help each other out by informing our own fans about the other great stuff out there. It’s been great working with these people and we’ve all benefited sales wise.

I think these kind of groups are the way of the future. Writers are not competitors anymore, they need to be partners. With groups like mine you don’t need a publisher anymore.

Check out the great work by the Hardboiled Collective here:

http://www.amazon.com/lm/R11XQIPKS6YD96/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view?ie=UTF8&lm_bb

Getting Reviewed – II

Last time I talked about the sources of book reviews I consider the most valuable.  I started with the most prestigious publications that do prepublication reviews.  However they aren’t the only good places to get reviewed.

A few years ago the holy grail for getting your book reviewed was the separate newspaper book sections.  But those sections have been disappearing rapidly.  In fact the only stand alone book section I know is still being printed (please correct me if you know of another) is the section in the New York Times.

The New York Times Book Review gets in front of nearly a million readers, and until recently it had another million readers on line.  Now that you have to pay to read the paper on line that’s no longer true.  Still, the New York Times Book Review is a hundred year old tradition and still offers informed criticism of a diverse selection of books.  The staff  is generally reviewing a couple hundred books at a time, with a half dozen “preview editors” looking at 15 or 20 books a week.  They’ve added a podcast, online video interviews, a blog and even slideshows. 

I’d also love to have my books reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle.   That paper still includes a weekly eight-page pull-out section with 6 to 8 reviews plus a list of first sentences from new books.  I’d love to get one of my opening lines in there!  They also have local celebrities write about their most cherished book.  

Also valuable is the Los Angeles Times book section.  It’s tucked into the Arts section now but it still has more than 100,000 Twitter followers.  The Washington Post has a very cool book review video series on it’s website.  And the Wall Street Journal has a print section simply called Books.  It’s kinda hidden in the Weekend’s Review section, but it still reaches two million readers. 

A few other sources are highly trusted by readers.   The American Book Review, the American Scholar , the Believer; Bookforum, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Review of Books; O, The Oprah Magazine, and Rain Taxi all have faithful readers who decide what to read based on their recommendations. 

Also, more than a million readers visit the online book section posted by National Public Radio (NPR) every month.  They mostly focus on new-related nonfiction and literary fiction, but at least they cover the small presses.  They run 3 online-only book reviews per week and do reviews on All Things Considered and Fresh Air.   

I know this is pretty subjective, but next time I’ll list more of what I consider the best places to get reviewed – the next tier to aim for if your book gets overlooked by those I’ve already mentioned. 

The challenge of getting reviewed

When we authors build our promotion plan for a new book, reviews are always a part of that strategy.  With a new novel (The Piranha Assignment) coming out October 1 I have been chasing reviews for months.  Getting a book reviewed not only helps to raise awareness of your work, it also legitimizes you as a published author.  In some ways it doesn’t seem like a real book until some objective outsider comments on it.

At one time you could gather some reviews by simply mailing copies of your book to several newspapers around the country.  However, in the last five or six years book reviews have been fading from the news stands.  Financially weak newspapers have been eliminating their book review sections.  In some cases book review space shrank and got tucked into the culture or entertainment section.  Book editors and critics have also been cut from the payroll.  And hundreds of newspapers folded completely. 

“The key word for the changes afoot is proliferation. The number of books being published has ballooned from some fifty thousand books published annually in the 1970s to more than three million in 2010 and climbing."

The good news is that reading hasn’t gone away.  I see a lot of book discussion on the internet and I have visited several reading groups.  People in both camps complain that they have few guides leading them to the best reading.  A lot of bloggers are reviewing books, and many of them have large followings.  So reviews haven’t disappeared, we just have to look in different places.

On the other hand, thanks to print-on-demand and the rise of self-publishing, there are about 60 times as many books going into print every year than there were 40 years ago.  Books do still get reviewed in newspapers, magazines, radio and television shows, but now you are just as likely to find reviews on social media sites like Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Library-Thing, on Amazon.com and a variety of podcasts.  However, most of these reviews are written by fellow readers, not literary professionals.  Writers wanting to promote their work want it reviewed by people readers trust.  I thought I’d list those I think have the most clout.

At the top of the list, in my opinion, are those well established publications that do prepublication reviews.  Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews are examples of magazines that preview books in advance.  Their target audience includes librarians, editors and broadcast producers – the people you most want to know that your book is coming out.  Booklist covers about 8,000 books a year.  Kirkus Reviews is broader in scope and reviews some self-published books. Library Journal publishes more than 6,000 reviews a year.  They sift through thousands of galleys every week and write about books 6 months in advance of publication. And before you decide that librarians are old fashioned, note that Library Journal 18,000 subscribers but about a 150,000 Twitter followers.

Publisher’s Weekly sends a daily newsletter to about 37,000 people, and about 100,000 follow them on Twitter.  So while their target group is publishers, editors, publicists, booksellers, and authors, lots of readers read them too.  Every week PW’s reviewers editors consider between 300 and 600 books.  They publish 150 reviews in the magazine, and another 20 or so on line.  They are focusing more and more on small presses.

I’ve got more to say about places to get reviewed, but I’ll save it for next time.

What if they Google you?

It should not surprise you that for many people, research starts with Google.  That means that if someone hears your name or one of your book titles and they’re curious, they will likely check Google for details.  If your web site is on the first page of results, odds are pretty good they’ll click to your site.  If it’s not quickly visible, well, maybe they’ll get bored and move to the next writer of interest. 

So how do you make your site turn up fast in a search for your work?  I don’t think there’s a quick or easy way, because we can’t know for sure what the Google system looks for.  According to some references, Google changes their algorithms more than once every day!  But there are some things you can do that should reliably you’re your web site closer to the front of the line.

First, keep your web site focused on your reader.  It seems that Google’s focus is on web sites that stay focused on the users.  It can be hard to take yourself out of the equation but you have to try to make your web site all about the people you want to visit it.

It helps to have links from other good web sites, and sites that get a lot of traffic.  I've found two techniques that are almost sure-fire.  Many sites, blogs and even Facebook pages review books.  When I’ve gotten people to review my books they almost always post a link to my website.  Also, when I comment on posts at other people’s blogs I add my URL at the bottom.  Each time you do that you’ve created a link to your site from a site you chose.

You should also Google yourself and see what comes up.  When you see your web site, check out what it shows.  Usually there will be two or three lines from your home page.  That little bit should not be about you.  It should be about your readers.  This really will affect you ranking, so go back and make some changes to that first paragraph on your web site.

There are also some purely mechanical things you can do.  Make sure the right key words are on your home page so people know what your site is all about.  You should also remember your title tags, what your page name says at the very top of your search bar.  Getting your key words there helps your search engine ranking.

Don’t let your page stay static.  Search engines love fresh content, so every time you update your website it helps raise your ranking.  Perhaps the most important thing is to keep your web site current and your content relevant.  If you do that, and follow the other tips above, you are almost sure to move your web site to the first page of any relevant search.