Self-Publishing Basics

Post by co-founder, Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley

     I asked some people if they had any questions about publishing, and the answer was "How do you publish?" So I'm going to cover self-publishing this week, and traditional publishing next week. I will also expand on certain points I will touch on at some point.

Have a Good Product

     Pretty obvious and basic, but something that people constantly complain about self-published books lacking. Your book is not good enough. When you have gone through several drafts, edited it, perhaps given it to some friends to read, it is not good enough. If you published this traditionally, at least one editor would work with you on it for at least one more draft, probably more, in order to make it a product that will hopefully sell. So, how do you make it a good product?


Do several rewrites

     An important beginning point, rewrite it several times, and leave space in between them. It is important to look at it with new, critical eyes and to do your best to make it the best book you can make it. It will be hard, it will hurt, but some things will have to go, and some things will have to be added. You will need to make major changes and minor changes. Write the first draft with that in mind.

Find beta readers

     This is very important. Get the feedback of several people. Friends an family will do, but make sure to stress that you need them to tell you the problems. Remind them that if they don't tell you now, it will end up in the finished book, which is hurting you rather than helping you. Listen to their feedback, respond well, consider it, then decide if you want to use it.
     Beta readers who are writers are very helpful as well. You can trade beta reading, as well as pay professional beta readers.

Send it to an editor

     Do NOT publish your book before sending it to an editor. First get over-all, character, plot, and logic editing. Make sure that the base book is good. Be willing to listen to your editor, they know what they are talking about. However, you do not have to do everything that they tell you to do. Next, get an editor to do proofreading. One of the most frequent problems with indie books is grammar and spelling mistakes.

Have a good cover

     Not exactly a part of having a good product, but you should have an eye-catching, fitting cover. You can usually tell the genre of a book at a glace, without the title. I could tell you one of those erotica "romance" books through frosted glass, and I don't even read them. You want your cover to make sense to your genre, but not be so close to others so as to look like a part of the mass.
     Also, don't copy popular books. The main reason that I never read Divergent was because, on top of the similar setting, the cover looked so close to The Hunger Games. Seriously, a bland, dark background with a circular symbol? A bit familiar.

Choose a Good Platform

     One of the most important factors for visibility and profitability is how and where you self-publish. There are two types of platforms, print and electronic, and two forms within them, hosted and self-hosted.


Print-on-demand

     POD is the easiest, though least profitable, method of selling print books. You find a company such as CreateSpace, upload your document and cover, set your price, and they take care of the rest. Once someone orders your book, they print a single copy of it and ship it. Because of the one-at-a-time printing method, they are more expensive to make, which is why it will be less profitable.  But still, you don't have to take care of it yourself.

En mass printing

     Another option is to pay a printing company to make a large number of your books (the more they print, the cheaper per book) and then sell and ship them yourself. This involves more effort (and storage space) but you will earn more money.

Mini publishing company

     The last printing option is to purchase your own printing equipment and do the whole process yourself. This has a huge start-up cost, but would eventually get you more money, if you sell enough books.

Hosted ebooks

     There are a variety of places that will host your ebook, from Amazon's KDP to Smashwords. These work pretty similarly to POD, in that you just upload everything, and the they sell your book, while taking a cut. The cut is generally smaller than with print books due to there being no printing costs, but the price of ebooks are usually cheaper too.

Self-sold ebooks

     You can make your own ebooks (as PDFs or mobile files) and sell them on your blog or website. This generally has less visibility than when they are hosted and is harder to do, but you get more money per book.

Market Your Book

     Marketing is one of the things that most authors hate doing, but it is extremely important.  There are infinite ways to market your books, so I'll just give some tips on how to go about it.


Begin marketing before your book is ready

     I used to think that I didn't want to market my books until they were released so that people could buy them immediately. However, marketing your book before it is out allows you to build up interest before the big day. Don't market too early, though, or people will forget about it.

Use free methods

     There are lots of ways to advertise your book for free, and many of them are very effective. Pinterest is a great one, if you already have it, as well as Tumblr, Twitter, etc. A blog or website is great too. (You should probably have at least a website, even if you don't pay much attention to it.) They are more natural ways of getting your book out there. People tend to ignore ads, knowing that they are ads, and thus not actually of interest to them.

Don't be obnoxious

     It is easy to fall into the trap of posting a bunch of "Buy my book!" tweets/blog posts/etc., but in the end this will just annoy people. Be nice, think of your customers, and keep promotional posts of any kind down to 50% or less.

Find the good paid services

     There are certain paid things that are completely worth it. Whether this is a book tour, an ad in a big magazine, or paying to get an awesome website, is dependent on your book, platform, and who is offering the service. Be careful with this, you don't want to go overboard, but do keep it in mind. A few good paid services can really help to launch your books.

Bonus tip: Paying for followers, likes, subscribers, etc. is never a good expense.




Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley is an aspiring author and poet. To learn more about her, see our About Us page. You can follow her on Twitter here: @ElisabethGTK and on Tumblr here: http://dragonheartetk.tumblr.com/

3 Simple Steps to Implement Before You Write to Make Formatting Easier

Post by Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley, co-founder

     So, for those of you who plan on self-publishing, formatting is a huge issue. Now, there are many good books on this, many of them free on Kindle, that can tell you how to format you book, but generally you look for those after you've written your book, right? Well, today we'll be looking at a few steps that you take before and during the writing of your book that will make formatting much easier when you get to it. Also, if you're paying someone to format it for you, and they are paid by the hour, then these will severely decrease the cost, as your formatter will have much less to do.

     Step 1: CTRL+Enter

     If you use a computer, then you know that CTRL+Z is "Undo", and lots of people know CTRL+Y means "Redo", but few people know that CTRL+Enter (Or Command+Enter in Macs) means "Page Break". So, instead of simply pressing enter until you reach the next page when you finished a chapter, you just hold CTRL and click Enter, and it will jump to the next page.
     This is especially helpful for ebooks, which normally can be flipped on their side and are rarely in the same proportions as they appear on your computer, which means that pressing enter won't take it to the next page, but rather to somewhere in the middle of the next page, or possibly the same page, or two pages forward. But ebooks understand page breaks, so if you put one in, no matter the proportions or rotation, your next page will actually be the next page. They also making things neater for print books, so if you later on decide to add or subtract something, all the subsequent chapters won't need to be re-positioned. Same for if you change font type or size.

     Step 2: Do not use headings in ebooks

     Or footers, for that matter. Ebooks don't understand them, and they'll either end up as text or something else, maybe have code attached. The best-case scenario is that they won't appear at all. Remember, because ebooks can flip, they don't have page numbers, and does your reader really need the title of the book up there every page? Like Brian Reagan said, have you ever been half-way through a book and gone, "What the heck am I reading?"
     Obviously you can use them in print books (depending on your provider, but if yours doesn't, you may want to find a different company) and when the pages stay the same, it's really nice to have page numbers.

     Step 3: Do not use Tab

     Tab is evil. Neither print books or electronic ones deal with it well. Ebooks generally put the line to about the middle of the page, which does not look good. Instead, before you've even started, set the indent of the first line to .5, or whatever your preference is.

     On a modern Word program (it may be a bit different with Mac or older Word versions, or as new versions come) press CTRL+A to select the whole document. Then look at the top ribbon and make sure you are on the "Home" tab, which is where it starts. One of the sections (e.g., clipboard, font, etc.) should be called "Paragraph". Find the expand button, which is normally in the bottom right corner. Click on it, and a window should open up.
     Go down to "Indentation". There you can choose the right and left indentation, but leave those alone. To the right of them will be a drop-down menu that says "Special". Select "First line" from the list, and then go to the "By" option to the right and set it to .5, or as I said, your preference.

     Now, every time you hit "Enter", your computer will make the indentation for you! Now, if you have anything that is going to be centered, like poetry, you'll have to select that section and undo this, otherwise it will be a half inch to the right, rather than completely centered.


     I hope these have helped, and I know it'll save whoever's doing your formatting in the future, especially if you're doing ebooks!

Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley is an aspiring author and poet. To learn more about her, see our About Us page. You can follow her on Twitter here: @ElisabethGTK.

We have a poetry contest open, the theme is "patriotism". Come see the guidelines here!