I’ve spoken with many talented people in the last few months
who have a book they want to write, but don’t exactly know where to start once
the writing part is done. Most think they need a “publishing deal” to get their
work in front of readers, but we all know publishing deals are few and far
between these days.
My first book, “The
Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton: From Tennessee to Timbuktu,”
was published through traditional channels with The
History Press, but they, along with a couple book agents, passed on my idea
of a book about Odd McIntyre. Even without a publisher, I felt it was a story
that people would find interesting. After doing a year or so of research on Odd,
I felt like I had what I needed — a good story that had not been told and a lot
of good information to tell it.
I began exploring self-publishing and discovered a whole
world of writers who are passionate about writing but who skip the publishers
and take their books directly to consumers.
Just like the significant changes in the music, movie and
news industries brought about by technology in the last few years, the world of
publishing is being dramatically impacted by the fact that those who are
willing to learn a few new skills can take a book directly to the marketplace
with very financial little investment or risk.
My book, “An
Odd Book: How the First Modern Pop Culture Reporter Conquered New York,”
will be published (by me) on April 1.
In the last few months I’ve spent hundreds of hours
listening to podcasts, downloading “how to” books and reading about
self-publishing online. I’m sharing some of what I’ve discovered, hoping that
it may be helpful to some of my friends and associates who are interested in
self-publishing their own books.
The business of self-publishing is quickly evolving and the
different directions you can take and resources that are available are almost
endless, so these are just the tools I’ve found helpful, and those I think
would be most applicable to the most people, regardless of the type of book.
The first thing I would recommend is to join the Alliance of
Independent Authors. In addition to some helpful guides and discounts, its members-only
message board on Facebook has been incredibly valuable. Questions about
writing, publishing, distribution and marketing are answered almost immediately
by other members, many who have been self-publishing for a decade or more.
The weekly podcasts that I’ve found most helpful are The
Creative Penn Podcast by Joanna Penn (I’ve also downloaded some of her other tools), The
Publishing Profits Podcast Show by Tom Corson-Knowles and The
Sell More Books Show by Jim Kukral and Bryan Cohen. I listened to these
three podcasts every week for months, and also listened to some of their recent
archived shows. I didn’t go too far back because this industry is changing
quickly. There is a monthly podcast called the ALLi
Author Advice Centre by Orna Ross that is also very helpful and features a
lot of the self-publishing superstars sharing advice and case studies.
This is a minor detail but one I found interesting so I am
sharing. While it’s not “required,” you will want your own ISBN number for the
work you create. That little number uniquely identifies your book, and
facilitates the sale of your book to bookstores (physical and digital) and
libraries. In the United States, you can only buy those from Bowker. For some
reason, one ISBN is $125 while 10 ISBNs are only $295. I love a deal so I
bought 10. Now I’m obligated to produce more books so my ISBN numbers don’t go
to waste.
Of course, I’m assuming you’re starting with a great book
that’s been professionally edited and has a well-designed cover. Should you
need resources for those services, there’s a really interesting company called fiverr. Fiverr is primarily used by
freelancers who offer services like website design, copywriting, editing,
graphic design, marketing and more. People who use the freelancers then rate
and comment on the service they received. It’s also a great place to find a “virtual
assistant” who can do work for you a few hours a week or for an extended period
of time. Most authors advocate getting a few people in your “production team”
that you go back to for each book.
I wanted to sharpen my web design and production skills so I
spent a weekend designing a site on Wordpress.com,
only to discover a site built using Wordpress.org and hosted on a server was much
better for me for a variety of reasons, so I spent another weekend doing it
all over again, hosting on Bluehost.
The sales of a self-published book is directly tied to the
number of people who hear about it, so building an email list is important. I
used MailChimp and found it to be pretty
intuitive (sign
up for my enewsletter here).
There are many different ways you can go about getting your
book in the hands of readers. After much thought and research, I decided to use
CreateSpace to sell my book on
Amazon and to print copies for selling at signings and events, IngramSpark to sell to libraries and
book stores, Amazon's Kindle Direct
Publishing (KDP) for those who want to download the e-book to their Kindle,
and Smashwords for those buyers who
want to download it via e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Apple
iBooks, Kobo, Tolino and others. Each of these requires the book to be uploaded
in a specific format, so you have to start the process knowing there is going
to be the need for flexibility, patience and time.
The retail price of my printed book will be $18.99 and the
price of the e-book will likely be around $7.99, but it has no photos. The
printed book has 135 photos, many of which have never been printed before so I
hope more people purchase that.
I wrote “An Odd Book” in Microsoft Word, and then uploaded
it to InDesign, which offered more flexibility in design, layout and photo
manipulation. Because I had not used InDesign before, I spent quite a bit of
time watching Youtube videos from Joel Friedlander and Sean Foushee,
among others, until I got the hang of it (I still have a long way to go). I
also discovered Vellum. It is a miracle application.
Once the book was completely finished in InDesign and ready to upload as a
print-ready PDF file, I needed to create a different version for the e-book.
Chapter by chapter, I rebuilt the book (minus the photos) using Vellum. It only
took a couple of hours. Vellum then automatically stripped out all the InDesign
formatting and created files that work with all the e-book distributors who use
different formats. Just to see if it would really work, in one weekend,
I
created an entire book using Vellum (Odd Words, 1920-1922: An Enhanced
Compilation of Early Columns by Odd McIntyre) and had it available for
Kindle on Amazon. I had around 400 (free) downloads the first couple of days. I
can’t recommend Vellum enough.
You do want to have a launch event of some kind. Mine will
be in Odd’s hometown of Gallipolis, Ohio on Saturday, April 22, 2017 at 4:30
p.m. at the Ariel Opera House. That evening, The Ohio Valley Symphony will
perform Meredith Willson’s O.O. McIntyre Suite. If you are in Ohio, come check it out. It
should be a lot of fun.
As I mentioned before, all this takes a lot of time, but you
don’t have to spend a lot of money. The key is to focus on the things you do
well or want to learn, but have a little money planned for the things that are
not in your wheelhouse. With a modest investment, you can hire professionals to
do the things you don’t want or need to jump into.
While the differences between self-publishing and using a
traditional publisher are many, one thing remains the same. You need a
well-written book that looks like a book that’s well written.
I’ll post a few months from now about what I’ve learned from
the actual publishing and launch of my book, but I hope those of you with a
story or two crawling around in your head feel inspired to get started on your
own book.
