mistakes self-publishers make

Quick Link: 5 Horrible Mistakes Self Published Authors Make in 2016

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Are you guilty of any of these five mistakes brought to us by on the BooksGoSocial site? Number 5 is mine, I definitely need to work on that one.  I would add one. Daily, I see authors not spending enough time on covers and good book descriptions. You spent so much time writing your story, it hurts to see people not spending the same time and effort on the items that will get them readers! Got any tips to help the rest of us? Or is there a pet peeve you see other self publishing authors do? Let us know!

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5 Horrible Mistakes Self Published Authors Make in 2016

by Laurence O’Bryan

Off Target Shows To Miscalculate SkillSelf publishing is a golden opportunity. For the first time in history authors can reach readers without going through the traditional publishing system. Ebook sales growth over the next few years will provide real opportunities for writers who get it right. One analyst is predicting 93% ebook sales growth between now and 2020.

But many self published authors are making horrible, beginner-type-mistakes, which will cripple their book sales. Here’s my take on these mistakes:

1. Not getting outside help. Writers can’t generally be editors, cover designers and marketing experts, as well as being writers. Not if they want to do these jobs well. And asking a relative or close friend to do these jobs for you is probably worse than doing it yourself. Your judgement typically goes out the window when someone close to you does something for you. If you won’t spend money on getting experts your sales will be poor. I know there are occasional exceptions to this, but they only prove the rule.
2. Having unrealistic expectations. Most books, up to ten years ago, sold hundreds of copies. Only 1 in 300 traditionally published books, which got good editing, covers and marketing support, became bestsellers in the past. Publishing became a giant game of throw-it-up and see-what-sticks. With printed books it became ever growing and almost criminally wasteful, when you consider the dirty secret that most of the books you see in book stores are destined to be pulped. Now that game is in decline. If you do get editing, covers and marketing right, you might expect reasonable sales, but publishing is always a gamble, so never risk more than you can afford to lose. Great books don’t always sell well. And Print on Demand is way better than ordering books to store in a front room and then a back room – forever.
Read the full post on BooksGoSocial

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5 Self-publishing Truths Few Authors Talk About

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This post by Dylan Hearn originally appeared on his Suffolk Scribblings site on 1/5/15.

One of the hardest thing to watch on social media is an author, usually a debut author, getting excited about their upcoming book launch and knowing they are about to get hit around the head with a hard dose of reality.

They’ve done the right things, built up a twitter or Facebook following, blogged about the book, sent copies out for review, told all their friends about the upcoming launch, pulled together a promo video and graphic, maybe taken out some adverts. The first few days after launch are filled with excited tweets, mentions of early positive reviews and chart rankings. Then, after a few days, maybe a few weeks, the positive tweets stop and an air of desperation sets in as the reality of life as an indie author hits home.

Part of the problem is that the authors most vocal on social media are those that have already seen self-publishing success. They got in early, made names for themselves through talent, hard-work and persistence, and are happy to spread the gospel of the new self-publishing utopia. They are telling the truth, from their perspective, but for the vast majority of authors the picture is very different. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find success with your debut novel, just that it’s rare – and with changes in the market, becoming ever more so.

In order to provide some balance, below are 5 truths I, and many other self-published authors, have experienced. This hasn’t put me off from a writing career, and shouldn’t put you off either, but at least you will be going in with your eyes open.

 

1 You need talent to succeed but it’s no guarantee

 

Read the full post on Suffolk Scribblings.

 

I Buy Your Book, You Owe Me A Good Read

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This post by Ally Machate originally appeared on Shelf Pleasure on 2/17/13.

It’s so easy to download an inexpensive ebook that I’ve become much more willing to try self-published titles than when I had to pay $14, $15, or even upwards of $20 for the print version. Digital technology has broadened the possibilities for people to express themselves and for us, as readers, to find more books to enjoy. The downside, however, is that this new marketplace has created a troublesome reality for all book lovers: Almost anybody who wants to publish a book can. And frankly, too many of these books aren’t ready for public consumption.

I sat down one Saturday with my Kindle and my coffee, envisioning a lovely relaxing morning read. But here’s how it went: I started and stopped four books in about an hour. With a couple, I only read a few pages, but the other two I gave more of a chance. I knew the author of one and I’d read something good about the other in a blog roundup.

And yet, with all four of these books, the authors had not polished their skills, nor had they sufficiently polished their manuscripts. I’m not just talking about misplaced punctuation or bad spelling, either. I’m talking about basic plot holes; two-dimensional, clichéd characters and situations; unnatural and awkward dialogue; and unbelievable, contrived scenarios that didn’t arise naturally out of the events of the story.

 

Read the full post on Shelf Pleasure.

 

Ten Reasons Why The Gatekeepers Of Self-Publishing Have Become… You

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This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 9/30/14.

One of the biggest driving forces behind authors who self-publish has been the declaration that writing has become stifled by “the gatekeepers of the publishing world.” Many writers now go straight to self-publishing. Be self-published? Sounds great! Let’s do it! We can all help each other, right? Right? Guys?

The online self-publishing clique has become incredibly judgemental of its own kind. These didacts are scaring the heck out of those wanting a nice gentle, creative, inclusive experience. Simply, self-published authors have become dictators of their own industry. Here’s why.

1. Online Herdism
Thou shalt not pay for any kind of professional promotion. Thou shalt not pay for book formatting. Thou shalt only use your peers with no knowledge of editing a book to – um, edit your book. If you pay for services, you are dumb. Yeah! Just look at the herd go off on paid book reviews without even understanding the different types of paid review or how to use them! Come on, people. Any book needs promotion. After all, you just spent years of your life writing the damn thing. Give it a life. Building a professional book and marketing it with assistance is nothing to be ashamed about, and this truly has to stop being a “thing.” Forum comments start with “I COMPETELY AGREE WITH YOU!!!!” Or “I HATE paid reviews!” or “NONSENSE!!!!” (I noticed it’s always capital letters, many punctuation marks and absolutes, just to be THE MOST AGREEING PERSON!!!!) I always look up the naysayers’ books on these forums, and 9/10 have sold no books whatsoever. But they are “being true to the spirit of indie publishing.” Pffff…

 

2. Everyone Is A Self-Publishing Expert – And Get It All Wrong

 

Click here to read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

 

"I'll Do It Myself!"

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This post by Kate Siegel Bandos originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 6/26/14.

Those of us who were raised with classic nursery rhymes and stories know it was The Little Red Hen who said, “I’ll do it myself…and she did.” (http://www.storybus.org/stories_and_activities/the_little_red_hen/story)

Also, anyone who has been around a two-year-old may hear “I’ll do it myself!” multiple times a day.

However, when an author continually says to me, “I’ll do this myself…I’ll do that myself,” I now try to gently explain to them how this might be detrimental to them and their book.

The reality in publishing is that there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week for one person to do it all themselves.

Do you fix your own car? Do you cut your own hair? Do you make all your clothes? Do you grow ALL your own food? Few of us are a “jack of all trades.”

So when you are deciding to write, design, publish, promote, and market your book, and handle everything yourself, think again. Be aware of your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.

 

Click here to read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

Evaluating Your Editor

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This post originally appeared on Popular Soda on 10/3/13.

All editors are not created equal.

It is virtually impossible to find professional-level editing for bargain-basement prices. This handy checklist will help you determine if you’re looking at an experienced editor or a green freelancer. You may not have the funds, desire, or need to hire a top-notch editor, but this checklist will help you avoid untrained and unqualified individuals.

These guidelines are for editors who work on a sentence-by-sentence basis. They may call themselves line editors, copy-editors, or even proofreaders.

 

Experience

Look for experience specific to editing. Degrees in English and published books are nice, but they do not constitute copy-editing training.

Writing and editing are related skills, but not interchangeable, kind of like being good at running and being good at soccer. If you are a fast runner, that will help you in playing soccer. However, you can’t simply run around the field and expect to spontaneously learn the rules of the game. Editing is the same.

Check to make sure that your potential editor has training or formal experience in editing and he’s not just running around the field. An English degree is not enough. Look for education directly related to editing as well as in-the-field experience, such as editing for a book publisher or newspaper.

 

Rates

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Popular Soda.

 

Penguin's Author Solutions Still A Poor Self-Publishing Choice

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This post by Orna Ross originally appeared on the ALLi blog on 5/9/14.

Yes, it’s that time of  year again, when the Watchdog desk here at ALLi Towers (otherwise known as Jim Giammatteo and Mick Rooney) scan the self-publishing scene and analyse the good, the bad and the definitely-to-be-avoided.

Authors still have to make their self-publishing choices in an unregulated environment where the same service can cost $500 against $15,000, for pretty much the same thing, depending on where you shop; where services that are absolutely useless are sold at inflated prices; and where one large operation with many imprints dominates the information stream, including Google Ads/search.

Prior to launching our guide to services at Book Expo America at the end of May, we wanted to alert you to that company, the world’s largest self-publishing service, Author Solutions (ASI), acquired by Penguin-Random House in 2012, and trading under a number of brand names including Trafford, XLibris and iUniverse.

The Watchdog Warning issued last year about this company is still in place.

Our hope that Penguin would clean up ASI’s practices, notorious in self-publishing circles for over-promising and under-delivering has not, as yet, materialised — and ASI imprints score a very poor rating in our guide again this year.

 

Click here to read the full post on the ALLi blog.

 

Why Indie Authors Need A Team

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This post by Bruce McCabe originally appeared as a guest post on The Creative Penn blog on 4/16/14.

People often ask me about how to be a successful indie author, or what’s the best way of marketing. I seem to be replying in the same vein every time these days – it’s all about collaboration and about personal relationships.

I have a team of people I work with in my business. I have editors, a cover designer, an interior book designer, a graphic artist, a transcriber, a book-keeper, outsourced contractors for specific projects, a creative mentor, a community of twitter & blog friends and many more. Without these, I would not be able to do what I do. This is also why I self-identify as an indie author, NOT as self-published, as I am far from doing it all myself these days.

Today, author Bruce McCabe reiterates the importance of concentrating on people. His indie-published debut novel, ‘Skinjob,’ has just been acquired in a two-book deal with Random House.

I’ve been privileged to [have] spent most of the last twenty years hanging out with people vastly smarter than myself – inventors, mavericks, scientists and innovators. Here’s a lesson from these wonderful people that I’ve found helpful on the writing journey:

 

It’s always about the who.

By which they mean the most important success factor in Silicon Valley is not the earth-shattering idea, nor the technology, nor money, nor access to resources, nor a myriad of other things, it is the composition of that core group of people, often very small, who truly believe in a goal and are emotionally dedicated to bringing it to fruition. Good teams care. They roll up their sleeves and get things done, take bad ideas and remake them into something worthwhile, find resources where there are none. When good teams fail they pick up the pieces and start over. Good teams, eventually, break through.

The corollary being: put most of your time into getting the who right and the rest falls into place.

 

People are your best investment.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

Is Your Amazon 'Look Inside' Preview All In Italics?

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This post by Kimberly Hitchens originally appeared on Booknook.biz on 1/18/14.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I received a panicked email from a long-time editing acquaintance of mine. Her award-winning book needed some updates, so, being über-competent in making her own ebooks, she made the changes and uploaded the book. She checked back a few hours later, and it was one of those, “good news, bad news” moments. The good news? The LITB (Look Inside The Book) had updated, almost immediately. The bad news?

Holy Typography, Batman! Her entire Look Inside The Book was in italics.

What happened? She asked me if I could very quickly fix the book, because she had recently received a prestigious award, and sales were brisk. She had had such a shock about the “all italics” that she’d taken the book off sale.

Now, I would love to say that I’m a genius, but the truth was the same thing had recently happened to another client of mine, who had not updated her book, a mobi file that she got from us. So: what the heck had happened?

Both author-publishers had created their own nightmares, through sheer inadvertence. Both had read recent blog posts or “how-to” information on how to use HTML in their book descriptions in order to draw more attention to their books. They used header tags, bold, italic; all the things that any diligent publisher would do. But they had made one mistake.

 

Click here to read the full post on Booknook.biz.

 

More Open For Indies? What I’d Like 2014 to Bring

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This post, by Dan Holloway, originally appeared on his blog on 12/27/13.

Happy festivities. In this season of round-ups and forward-looks, when Janus stalks the blogosphere, writers everywhere are musing and reflecting. And whilst I am happy to grinch along with the best of them, it seems churlish not to join in the speculation.

But first the important bit. Here is a present. Click the image below to download an exclusive pdf of SKIN BOOK, beautifully illustrated with 8 pictures from Veronika von Volkova’s stunning Grime Angels series.

SKIN BOOK pic-page0001

It’s been a fascinating year for self-publishers. At the start of the year I had just begun work on the Alliance of Independent Authors’ Open Up to Indies guidebook. At time of writing, that guidebook’s release is imminent. But the backdrop against which it will see the light of day has changed – if not beyond all recognition then at least significantly. This autumn, Crimefest announced that it will be welcoming self-published authors next year. The Author Lounge at this year’s London Book Fair included self-publishing luminaries like Mel Sherratt. The Folio Prize, launched as the serious literary alternative to Booker, opened its doors to self-publishers, self-publishing conferences started talking about writing as well as marketing. And the Guardian has been running a self-publishing showcase giving blog time to indies for several months now. We’ve even seen a major serious writing award for the originally self-published A Naked Singularity.

The door feels ajar.

Whether or not it is, now that’s another matter. For me personally, it’s been a year of as much frustration as liberation. I still feel like the amusing pet as often as I feel like the welcome family member. It is getting easier to write about self-publishing. But as a literary writer and poet it remains as hard as ever to get the things I self-publish actually written about. I get to talk about self-publishing more than ever. But about my self-published writing as little as ever. There is still much work to be done to get people talking about self-published books rather than about self-publishing: the phenomenon.

These are the things I’d like to see for self-publishing in 2014.

 

1. Slow writing and the death of the algorithm

The best marketing for your book is other books. Write more. Be prolific. The tipping point to success comes when you’ve written x number of books. More books breed more discoverability. These have become more than mantras of self-publishing, givens that every writer has to take on board.

And these truisms are poison. Roz Morris wrote a brilliant post earlier this year about the slow novel, about the fact that some genres such as literary fiction spill their words more slowly than others. And yes, I absolutely accept that some genres are more sales friendly than others. But sales are not the be all and end all, and should not be the guide for whether or not a book receives coverage or acclaim.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Dan Holloway’s blog.