Publishing

Quick Links: Self-Publishing Success Stories: How I Do It – with Joseph Alexander

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It is always nice to see how other people are managing their success and maybe getting a tip or two for your own success. At the Alliance of Independent Authors, guest author Joseph Alexander shares his thoughts on how he has been successful as an indie author.

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Self-Publishing Success Stories: How I Do It – with Joseph Alexander

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This week in our series celebrating super-successful indie authors, we talk to guitarist Joseph Alexander who has established the terrific Fundamental Changes series of non-fiction books about playing guitar, though a non-stop, single-minded focus on his goals, collaboration with other musicians and an enviable email list of over 25,000. Read on to find out how he does it, and to be inspired for your own self-publishing career, whatever genre you write in. He also shares great advice for those who run small indie imprints publishing other authors’ work.

What is the secret of your success?

I wish I knew! I guess it’s constant output. I’ve written 30 books about playing guitar myself and published about 15 more by some other very talented musicians. For the last four years I’ve been working about fourteen hours a day and making sure that everything I write is to the highest possible standard. I try to go above and beyond every guitar guide out there. I add as much value as I can and cram in a huge amount of freebies, such as audio downloads and videos. These downloads help me to grow my email list.

To be honest, having a 25,000+ email list helps tremendously as all out email marketing is automated now.

This results in a constant trickle of sales across all titles and helps to keep my books at the top of the best sellers lists.

What was the single best thing you ever did?

Can I pick three things?

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Quick Link: 7 Essentials for Your Book Launch

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Today’s offering is about that most wonderful of things, getting ready to launch your book!  Hooray for you! But before you break open the champagne, check out the post by Keely Brooke Keith at Helping Writers Become Authors to make sure you have the basics down!

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7 Essentials for Your Book Launch

by Keely Brooke Keith

Congratulations, it’s a book! You accomplished something rare and impressive just by completing your masterpiece, not to mention surviving blood-boiling revisions and the agony of the publishing process. Now, the book launch date has been set and—surprise!—you have more work to do!

Orchestrating a book launch sounds daunting, but people need your book. Take a long slow breath and relax into the creative process of promoting your release. While there is no one-size-fits-all promotion plan, there are certain essential tasks that both traditionally published authors and independent authors should do to ensure a fulfilling book launch.

How to Prepare for Your Book Launch in 7 Steps

Following, are a few basics to get you started.

Book Launch Step #1: Ready Your Website

Your author website is the online version of your professional office or storefront. It could also be your catalog, your bulletin board, or your yearbook. It should not be a cobweb-covered single page you set up years ago and haven’t touched since.

Unless you’re an avid blogger, the author website won’t be how readers discover you. Instead, it’s where they will come to learn more about you. Your web address should be the simplest form of your author name as possible and should be the link you share more than any other.

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Quick Link: This is Why Authors Shouldn’t Do it All

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There are people out there who say you can self-publish an ebook for free. And it is true you can. But if you want anyone to actually read your book you have to compete against a lot of other titles, and they will have taken the time to hire professionals. It doesn’t matter how good your story is, or how important your information is. No one will read it if it isn’t professionally done. Just because you can make a cover in MS Paint doesn’t mean you should. Please don’t.  During my day job, I see a lot of books and I can tell instantly which ones did their own cover, and they don’t sell. Margery Walshaw posting at Bad Redhead Media has a great post on all the different experts you will need and why it is a good idea to use them. 

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This is Why Authors Shouldn’t Do it All by guest @evatopialit

By Margery Walshaw

What’s better? To be a jack of all trades or to specialize in a particular skill? Naturally, there are arguments for either choice depending upon the circumstance. Let’s say you’re an athlete and have suffered torn cartilage in your knee; you’ll want to consult with an orthopedic surgeon. After all, they’re experts at what they do. So why is it as authors, we don’t seek out experts? Why do so many of us try to do it all?

Assuming that the writing is in place, let’s examine all of the jobs or tasks that are required to bring a book to market.

Publishing Requires Juggling  

  • Editing/Proofreading
  • Cover Art
  • Digital and Paperback Formatting
  • ISBN Registration
  • Synopsis Writing
  • Keyword and Category Research
  • Distribution / File Uploading
  • Marketing and Public Relations
  • Social Media

Phew…what a list! Considering that today’s reader has an abundance of choices available to them, it makes sense to give your audience what they crave….more books! Many authors have learned that one of the secrets to building a loyal fanbase is to release their books in rapid succession. Some debate the pros and cons of doing this with a series versus a standalone novel.

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Quick Link: Covers Can Make or Break a Book

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Yea yea yea. I know, covers are important and you have been told that many times here and other places. But Darren Beyer, at Indies Unlimited, isn’t just telling you. He is showing you with a real world example of what a great cover vs. a good cover can do. Ever hear of a little fantasy title called Game of Thrones?

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Covers Can Make or Break a Book

Guest Post by Darren Beyer

We are all visual learners. I understand the value strong visuals bring to the game. That’s why, when I launched my first novel, I decided to seek out the best cover artist, the perfect person to take my words and put them into a stunning depiction of a scene from my story. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but everyone judges a book by its cover — and that’s just human nature.

A Case Study in Cover Design

I recently began the cover process for my second book with artist Stephen Youll. I relish working with people who are at the top in their fields — Stephen fits that bill. What really got me was his story.  A number of years ago, a major publishing house came to him to take a crack at a cover for a book they were trying to bring to market. The first launch had failed, and they thought the cover had something to do with it.

The publisher knew they had a great book on their hands and gave Stephen a specific direction to follow. At the time of the launch, romance novels were among the most popular, and the publisher believed that putting a romance flare on the cover of this book would help it sell. The art shown to the right is what it went to market with — and the book met with the same lackluster response as it did in its first launch. What went wrong?

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Quick Links – Should You Pay for a Publicist?

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posting at Jane Friedman, shares her experiences and costs of hiring a publicist.  As an indie author, you should be willing to spend a little money on a great cover and a great editor, but is it worth it to spend more money on a publicist? What have your experiences been?

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Should You Pay for a Publicist?

by Jane Friedman
You’ve written a great book and—if you’ve self-published—probably shelled out for the services of a good editor and cover designer. The last thing you want is to pay for a publicist. But in a sea of authors, how will potential readers know about your book?As a traditional-turned-hybrid author publishing with She Writes Press, I foot the bill for all the publishing costs but reap a much higher percentage of royalties for both print and ebook sales for my debut memoir, Accidental Soldier: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice in the Israel Defense Forces. My book is distributed like a traditional one, in all the retail channels; distribution is a major challenge facing self-pubbed authors, and traditional distribution is an advantage of my particular press.

I invested in a publicist to break into mainstream media, which led me to identify a number of online and print women’s media sites that would be perfect for my coming-of-age memoir and mother-daughter story. Of course I could have tried approaching these editors on my own, but that would have been time-consuming, and I didn’t have the established and nurtured contacts. Accidental Soldier has been featured with The Reading Room, Brit + Co, Writer’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, SheKnows.com, Working Mother magazine, Teen Vogue, and Seventeen—and that’s just a few. I would have never gotten that far on my own.

However, good publicists are not cheap. They command higher payment than a quality editor because they spend more hours over a longer time period working for you and your book.

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Quick Link: What is Hybrid Publishing? Here Are 4 Things All Writers Should Know

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Have you heard of hybrid publishing? I didn’t until I read the article by Brooke Warner at The Writer’s Dig.   It is a great opportunity for authors who are on the fence between indie and traditional publishing. If that sounds like you, go check it out and let us know what you think.

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What is Hybrid Publishing? Here Are 4 Things All Writers Should Know

Hybrid publishing is an emerging area that occupies the middle ground between traditional and self-publishing and therefore includes many different publishing models— basically anything that is not self-publishing or traditional publishing. “Hybrid publishing” is not a term all publishers or authors in this space use; other terms that describe this type of publishing include “author-assisted publishing,” “independent publishing,” “partnership publishing,” “copublishing,” and “entrepreneurial publishing.” But right now, because it’s a catchall, “hybrid publishing” is the umbrella term I’ll use throughout this book to refer to this middle ground.

This guest post is Brooke Warner. Warner is publisher of She Writes Press, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Green-Light Your Book, What’s Your Book?, and How to Sell Your Memoir, and the co-author of Breaking Ground on Your Memoir. Brooke’s expertise is in traditional and new publishing, and she is an equal advocate for publishing with a traditional house and self-publishing. She sits on the board of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), the Bay Area Book Festival, and the National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW). She blogs actively on Huffington Post Books and SheWrites.com. She lives and works in Berkeley, California.

The hybrid publishing space is somewhat controversial, in part because it’s new and in part because there’s no universal agreement about what it is. Because hybrid models almost always involve the author paying for some or all services (and always in return for higher royalty rates), some assert that hybrid publishing is the same as vanity publishing. For people who like to think in black-and-white terms, the hybrid publishing space upends their sense of order. Without hybrid, there are’ just traditional publishing and self-publishing. Black and white. You get paid to publish or you pay to get published. The hybrid publishing space is not for black-and-white thinkers. There are a number of models, and in my experience what sets them apart from vanity presses is that they’re run like publishing companies. Many of them have a submissions process, control their own cover design and editorial process, and have publishers calling the shots and curating the lists. There are also traditional publishers that are cutting hybrid deals, in which authors pay for some services in exchange for higher royalties.

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Quick Links: Why Do Some Writers Choose to Go ‘Indie’?

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At Writer Unboxed, indie author explores the different reason people choose to go indie. Head on over and check it out and see if anything resonates with you. Are you an indie author? Why did you choose to do so?

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Why Do Some Writers Choose to Go ‘Indie’?

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After October’s inaugural, myth-busting post “What Does it Mean to Be an ‘Indie’?”, the comments section exploded with proud indie authors stepping forward and sharing their experiences. At first, I was surprised by the number of comments that rolled in—I knew I wasn’t the only indie hanging around these parts, but I had no idea there were so many kindred spirits out there. As I read their comments and stories, I spent some time visiting their links, where I discovered beautiful author websites, exquisite book covers, and an incredible range of work—from nonfiction to thriller to gay romance and everything in between. It was the ultimate demonstration of what it means to be an indie author. And it made me curious about what inspires some writers to choose this path.

For me, independent publishing felt like a natural next step in my career. I’d spent a decade working in marketing, advertising, and sales and was looking for something more entrepreneurial. When my first novel, Empty Arms, was complete, the indie movement was just beginning to pick up steam, and the idea of starting my own publishing company seemed like an exciting opportunity to merge my passion for writing with my professional experience. While the favorable royalty splits and payment terms were appealing and the disadvantages seemed like a fun challenge to tackle, what I wanted most as a writer and business owner was autonomy. I decided not to seek representation or pursue a traditional book deal, in favor of independence.

But what about other indie authors? How did they end up on this path? I decided to find out. I reached out to a handful of indie authors and asked them how their publishing journeys came to be. Not surprisingly, they were happy to share their stories. Here’s what I learned:

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Quick Link: Reading Reviews: It’s Complicated

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Hey all you published authors out there, how do you handle reviews? Today’s post comes from at Kill Zone and deals with the issues of book reviews, while adding a humorous twist. You could also share your best tips on how to deal with reviews with the rest of us below.

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Reading Reviews: It’s Complicated

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There are as many approaches to dealing with reviews as there are writers, ranging from the diehards who don’t read their reviews, ever, to the snowflakes among us who turn into sad, quivering puddles at the sight of the dreaded single star. (As a former snowflake, I resemble that remark.)

Book reviews fall into several categories:

–Good (Loved it!!!! Five Stars!!!)

–Bad (“Horrible!! wish I hadn’t read it.”)

–Meh (or what I like to call damned by faint praise)

–Irrelevant Content

–All About the Reviewer

–Actionable

The Good Review

Everyone loves a good review (except your enemies). It feeds the ego of the little kid inside of us who trudged home from school clutching a hand-loomed potholder, desperate to hear that it was the BEST POTHOLDER IN THE WORLD! We’re adults now, of course. We are mature professionals who understand that a job well done is still just a job, and while we humbly tell ourselves that there are probablydefinitelycertainly things we could have done better, somebody thinks it’s the BEST POTHOLDER BOOK IN THE WORLD!

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Quick Link: 5 Ways Independent Authors Can Advocate for Themselves

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We all know there is a bias against self-publishing. While there are now more indie authors than ever, there is still a struggle to legitimize the choice of doing it yourself.  Brooke Warner has some great thoughts on how indie authors can help themselves as well as the rest of us.

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5 Ways Independent Authors Can Advocate for Themselves

by Brooke Warner

Earlier this month I moderated a panel at the Bay Area Book Festival called “The Future of Book Publishing.” We had an esteemed group of panelists from all areas of the industry, with Jack Jensen, publisher of Chronicle Books as the traditional figurehead, and Mark Coker of Smashwords representing the self-publishing contingent.

A question surfaced from the audience: Do some people avoid self-publishing because they don’t qualify for awards?

Jensen was the first to respond, telling the earnest woman that anyone can submit to contests — just submit. I almost felt bad to have to inform him of his industry’s bias — that no, you can’t just submit, and that countless awards programs bar self-published authors (and any author, in fact, who’s invested in their own work) from entering.

Jensen was shocked, and I was shocked that he was shocked. And yet gratified too. Even someone with such illustrious credentials who’s been in this industry nearly four decades thinks policies like these are bullshit.

A couple days later I was being interviewed for a podcast. The host started talking to me about the topic of bias in the industry, which seems to follow me everywhere I go (because I’m vocal about the aforementioned bullshit factor). She said she suggests self-published authors have their own imprints and submit wherever they want to and say that they’re published on a “small press” (their own) and no one will be any the wiser.

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Quick Link: Publishing: Kindle Scout Case Study

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Do you Kindle Scout? I do, as a reader I love it. I love being able to help authors generate buzz for their titles and finding new works to read. If your book is selected by Amazon, you get a contract and I get a free book.

Even if your book doesn’t get published by Amazon, you can still self-publish. The readers who voted for you are notified so they can buy the story. I have, especially if the price is right. would know how great Kindle Scout is for authors. Check out her Kindle Scout experienc at Self Publishing Advice Center

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Publishing: Kindle Scout Case Study

kindlescoutBy Katherine Hayton on July 14, 2016

New Zealand novelist Katherine Hayton shares her inspiring success story about her fourth novel’s success in a Kindle Scout campaign, leading to a publishing contract with Amazon’s own imprint, Kindle Press.

Back in January, I ran a Kindle Scout campaign for my fourth full-length novel, The Three Deaths of Magdalene Lynton, and was accepted for publication by Kindle Press on the 8th February. After the effort of the campaign, I was excited to be selected, and so far my experience with Kindle Press has shown me they can sell a lot more of my books than I could manage on my own. I’m in my second month (release date 29th March) and I think I’ll have earned out my advance by the end of this month, or early next month, so it seems on track with their expectation of 25k over five years.

Regular Promotions by Kindle

Because they’re an Amazon imprint, they have access to place their published books on the advertising slots available to Amazon, and their aim is to place each book in some kind of promotion every ninety days or so. These range from month long $1.99 promotions in genre selections to individual book titles featured on the $0.99 Kindle Daily Deals. From talking with other authors in Kindle Press, there are mixed results among the books they’ve selected. Some authors have taken a year or more to earn out their advance of $1,500, while others have earned over $12,000 in their first year.

Degree of Author Control

An author with Kindle Press retains a lot more control than they would with a larger press, so I had final say over all edits, title, cover, and book description. Anything else (eg categories) can be suggested but not necessarily taken on board. The pricing is determined by word count and seems unshakable apart from a book’s inclusion in discounted pricing promotions. If there’s anything about the book that Kindle Press thinks will harm the chances of promotion slots, they’ll discuss it directly with the author so they have the chance to either change it or stick to their own vision.

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Quick Link: 3 Things Your Traditional Publisher Is Unlikely to Do

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You know we love authors of all kinds here at Publetariat. Anyone who writes a story is my kind of hero, but we do lean towards the self-publishing author just a little more. At Jane Friedman, Jane shares three reasons why sometimes being indie is the right choice.

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3 Things Your Traditional Publisher Is Unlikely to Do

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Portrait of fastidious businesswoman in Santa cap holding giftbox

Years ago, when I still worked for a traditional publisher, I wrote a blog post about the No. 1 disappointment of all published authors: the lack of marketing support from their publisher. This was back when social media was still a fringe pastime, limited mostly to MySpace. So if your publisher wasn’t investing in marketing or publicity, you probably had few available tools to market and publicize your work outside your community—unless you had funds to hire a publicist or a national platform of some kind.

Today, some form of online marketing by both author and publisher is essential for all titles, and while traditional forms of marketing and publicity are still key—everyone wants a mix of online and offline exposure to maximize word of mouth—publishers’ launch efforts may be focused primarily or entirely on online channels. It tends to be more efficient, targeted, and cost effective.

Yet authors still have very traditional ideas of what their publisher ought to do to demonstrate support for their book, even though where and how books get sold has changed dramatically in the last decade. Here are three things that you may want or expect your publisher to do—but are very unlikely to happen.

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Quick Link: 5 Musts for Self-Publishing Great Books

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A timely post now that NaNoWriMo is almost done! Once you have completed writing your story there are some essentials you need to do to make it worth publishing. Laurisa White Reyes from Janice Hardy’s Fiction University lists them out for you. 

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5 Musts for Self-Publishing Great Books

By Laurisa White Reyes, @lwreyes

Quality Puzzle Showing Excellent Services And Products
I will give you a hint…

Part of the Indie Authors Series

When I was fourteen years old, I described my life’s dream on a page in my journal. I wanted, more than anything, to be an author. Not just any author. I wanted to be a New York Times Best-selling author. I fantasized about autographing books and winning the Newbery Award. In bookstores, I scanned the shelves, hunting for the very spot where my books would one day be. Once I actually started writing novels about a dozen years ago, I fully believed this dream was within reach, that any writer who worked hard enough could achieve it.

Naïve as I was, this dream kept me motivated through fourteen complete manuscripts and hundreds of rejection letters. Along the way, I did get three books published with small presses. I thought my dream was coming true. But I soon discovered that publication is no guarantee of success, and that too often, getting published with a small press (as well-meaning and author-friendly as many of them are) can be worse for an author’s career than having never published at all.

That’s where I found myself in 2015, with three published titles, a career in the publishing industry, and an impressive list of awards and recognitions under my belt. Yet I felt no closer to my dream than I had been as a teenager. By that time, I had spent two decades working on one particular book that meant a great deal to me.

In 1993, I worked as an office assistant at an AIDS clinic in Pasadena, California. I witnessed a lot of tragedy there, people suffering from a disease for which, at the time, there was no effective treatment. My experiences stuck with me and eventually resulted in a children’s novel about a girl whose father is dying of AIDS. Though I received numerous positive responses from literary agents, the manuscript accumulated close to thirty rejections. One agent told me that though The Storytellers was good, “kids today aren’t interested in reading about AIDS in the 90s.” In other words, it simply wasn’t marketable.

I was discouraged. I was disillusioned. Maybe the publishing industry was somehow rigged against people like me. I had a decision to make: Give up on the book or self-publish.

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Quick Links: How Indie Authors Should Price a Book for Optimal Success

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How do you decide the right price for your book? Too little and you risk not making any money and also possibly turning some audience away. Too much and you definitely risk turning people away. Over at Digital Book World, shares her tips on book pricing.

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How Indie Authors Should Price a Book for Optimal Success

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Best Price GuaranteedSometimes the simplest thing you can do to give your book a boost is play around with the pricing.

It’s one thing to have a book, but it’s quite another to have one that actually sells. You have probably heard this from other indie authors, or even experienced it yourself. Your book gets added to Amazon, full of pomp and circumstance, and then, nothing.

It’s disheartening to see your hard work just sit there. But here’s the good news: this might be an easy fix.

How you price your book is something we don’t often think of as a trigger for book promotion or how to sell more books, but it is. First, let’s look at two important factors. Your book’s perceived value vs. the going market rate.

Look at other books. First and foremost, see what others are charging in your market. You may be surprised by what you find. It’s never a good idea to price your book outside of what the market can bear, even if you toiled over the book, worked endlessly, lost sleep, etc.

My book is worth more! Yes, I know. Your book is worth a heck of a lot more. In fact, if you add up all the hours you spent working on it, you probably couldn’t charge enough for it. Here’s the thing, though: you can’t focus on your worth or your book’s worth—you have to focus on what the market will bear.

Consider the ebook. In general, I find that most traditional publishers don’t know how to price an ebook. I’ll see ebooks priced at $9.99 and up, which is a deterrent for most readers. As you build your marketing plan, keep in mind that ebooks should not be priced equal to their print counterparts. Even pricing them within a dollar or two of a $14.95 book is too high.

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Quick Link: Query Letters Part 1: The Pitch

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First of all, congratulations to the Chicago Cubs!  Sorry Indian fans, but wow what a game! I am sure you all heard my family yelling as we watched!

But now to talk about a different type of pitch, your query letter. This is really important and can make or break your chances of even getting an agent or editor to look at your work. At Writer UnBoxed,  talks about how you can write a great query letter.

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Query Letters Part 1: The Pitch

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Last time I did my best to convince you that the query letter is a skill worth mastering. The heart of the query, your pitch, is useful not just for querying agents but also for the back of your book, pitching to editors, plotting, problem-solving, and even brainstorming. Naturally, the next big question is, “Okay, how do I write one?”

Unfortunately, there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Every query pitch is unique, as is every writer’s path to getting out a good one. Unless you have an extremely lucky knack for them, the answer will almost certainly involve lots of study, work, practice, repetition, practice, critique, and did I mention practice?

Nonetheless, there are certain nearly-universal guidelines you can use to get started. Today I’m going to give you my version of these in hopes that they help you with your own pitch writing, but keep in mind that reading and writing many pitches really is the best way to ingrain the pattern into your brain. Aside from going to bookstores and libraries to read the backs of lots of books (what works to make you want to keep reading? why? what doesn’t? why?), there are many wonderful resources for writers such as Query Shark, Agent Query Connect, and Writer’s Digest where you can read real query letters and commentary on them.

And here’s one more important thing to keep in mind with your query: a pitch is not a summary. The goal of a summary is to encapsulate everything that happens in your book. The goal of a pitch is to make someone want to read more of your book. This means intentionally picking and choosing which information to include and which to leave out. Intrigue is a great way to pique interest.

What Goes In Your Pitch

Quick Link: Why I Self-Publish My Literary Fiction

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Author Jane Davis decided to switch to self-publishing because it gave her more freedom, and control over her own manuscript.  Over at Reedsy, you can find the reasons behind her choice. 

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Why I Self-Publish My Literary Fiction

You Can Do It Sign Shows Encouragement And InspirationJuly 7, 2016

Self-published books are still largely associated with genre novels, while authors tend to turn to traditional publishers for literary fiction. We were curious to hear from someone who has been challenging labels and going against industry wisdom to carve her own niche in the publishing world. Indie author Jane Davis used to be bullied into changing her work just to fit into an easily marketable category. She decided to take matters into her own hands and self-publish her daring, award-winning fiction. 

Eimear McBride used the platform provided by her various competition wins to urge publishers to back challenging fiction. McBride had spent 9 years submitting the manuscript for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing before it was taken up by Galley Press, a small publisher which puts story before profit. For many writers, 9 years would be too long.

Traditional Publishing houses ‘play it safe’

So much of what we read from traditional publishing houses feels safe or sanitised. In 2014 I collaborated with hybrid author Joni Rodgers on a multi-author box-set. She shared my frustrations: ‘As a voracious reader, I was overwhelmed with the over-editing and lack of creative risk that had come over so much of the fiction I was being fed by the marketing machine.’

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