This post was originally a guest post on Ashni Clayton’s blog “Speaking Across the Centuries”
Here is a link to the original post on her website:
Speaking Across the Centuries
THE SWORD IN THE STONE:
PERILOUS JOURNEYS INTO THE WORLD OF PUBLISHING
Part Two: INDIE PUBLISHING
In Part One we talked about completing a novel, and what an amazing process that is. We used the analogy of pulling the sword from the stone, the stone representing the obstacles to writing; the sword the completed novel. Part One went on to look at the path of Traditional Publishing and what that means for an author. Here in Part Two, we will talk about being an Indie Author.
Again, this little post is not meant as a “How-to-Indie-Publish” manifesto. That task would far exceed the limits of this blog post. Rather, think of this as a sketch. Choosing to be an Indie Author does not mean treading a dragon-free path. The dragons are just different. Which brings us here. Sandwiched between Traditional Publishing and Vanity Publishing, Indie Authors have become a force in the book marketplace. Although the data is endlessly disputed and revised, revenue from purely Indie books make up somewhere around 40% of total books sales. That, my lovely writer friends, is a great deal of money. And, as any good fantasy book will tell us, dragons love to hoard treasure.
Most authors who choose to self-publish begin with the greatest dragon of them all: Amazon. So let us start there. First, just how big is this dragon anyway? The answer is that it is big; really, really big. According to Data-Guru Drew at K-Lytics, Amazon has more print books on hand than the Library of Congress. When we look at eBooks, the numbers get really staggering. There are somewhere in the range of five-million eBook titles on Amazon, with another 50,000-70,000 coming online every month. Now here comes the important bit: The top 50,000 books make up over 80% of the revenue on Amazon. That means the other four-million-nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand (yes, I wrote that out on purpose!) books on Amazon, those below the top 50,000, earn less than 20% of the total revenue. The moral of these depressing statistics is that yes, Amazon will publish your book and, yes, your most precious novel will be adrift in a sea of other books.
Forget the numbers,” you all shout. “We are brave authors on a quest! Forward!” Very well, onward we go. Before your manuscript can become an eBook, or Print-On-Demand Paperback, it has to be compiled. Compiling is the process of converting your manuscript into an accepted file format for uploading. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is the side-kick dragon to the Amazon mega-dragon. KDP has a special type of file, a (dot)Mobi file. I write in Scrivener, a fantastic writing tool, which compiles directly to Mobi. Compiling a manuscript can be incredibly frustrating. Regardless of what tools you use, here is my first hard advice: Get Help!
One of the most amazing things about the path of the Indie Writer is the vast amount of help that is out there for the asking. Indie Writers love to write, and they love to write about the pitfalls, tribulations, and dragons of the writing and publishing process. Let’s say you are struggling (and you will) with compiling your manuscript into an eBook. The fonts are weird, or the spacing is all wrong, or the chapter headings are seriously wonky. This is your fifth try and you are ready to give it up and teach macramé to parrots. This is where you get help. Actually, it would have been better to get help before you (I) started. Yeah, I’m talking about myself now. Trust me, get help. Read first, learn, and only then compile.
Think of this as a stop at the armory, gathering our tools and weapons before we go further. There are folks who dedicate a great deal of time and effort toward helping Indie Authors, a fantastic army of bloggers who offer support and guidance. There are also folks who prey on the Indies and who, for a price, offer to save you from the horrors. Learn to tell the difference between the two. Here are some of the good guys: Joanna Penn is one of the shining stars along the path. Her Author 2.0 Blueprint is a must-read for Indies, and it’s free! Her website has been a huge resource for me. Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula is an amazing online course. There is free content and paid content. The point is that you are not alone. Someone, somewhere, has gone through the exact publishing issue you are experiencing, and they wrote a blog post about it. Again: Get Help!
We’ve checked the resources and we have done our homework, so let’s get to it. There is a good deal of work that must be done before we take on the actual KDP publishing process. We have to compile our manuscript to an upload file. We have to create a great book cover, or have someone create it. We are going to need a Book Blurb, some of the hardest writing you will ever do. Writing a fantastic book blurb is brutal. In the links section, I have listed two books that were invaluable to me. Libbie Hawker and Dean Wesley Smith saved my butt on the book blurb front. We need to research KDP Categories and Keywords. This is how we choose where our novel fits in the great matrix of Amazon. Prepare carefully, do the steps, and eventually you will come to the brink. You will press the ‘Publish’ button. If you have done all the steps correctly, guess what? Your novel is now an eBook.
In Part One of this blog, I mentioned savoring the moment. Now would be a good time to do just that. Look at your newly published eBook, all shiny and bright on the Amazon page. Family and friends will buy your book, which is really cool. You will see sales on your very own KDP page. Now take a deep breath, and get ready for end of the parade. Once the Family-and-Friend pool has run dry, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
This is paragraph nine, the evil little paragraph where I share a phrase you may grow to hate. That phrase is “Platform Building,” and it is one you will hear over and over. You will hear about it over and over because it is important. To emphasize, building a platform is vitally important. Remember when we were talking about the vast number of books on Amazon? Your novel is now one of those numbers, and most likely not near the top. In fact, hard truth time, if your novel is not in the Top 100 of a given Amazon Category, no one is going to see it. At all. Amazon is not going to market your book. Not even a little tiny bit. There are only two ways a potential reader is going to discover your book. One, they are specifically searching for it by title, like my Aunt Gloria (who really likes my novels) or, two, you have managed to get the idea of your novel onto the potential reader’s computer screen. Building a Platform, or Author Platform, is a series of steps, all of which you can do. I know this because I have done them. If I can do it, you can do it. Trust me when I say I kicked and screamed at some of the steps, but I did them.
Here is the down and dirty on Platform building. Keep in mind, each of these items could take up an entire blog post. The planks of your platform include ways readers can find you. You’re going to need a Facebook page dedicated to your new novel, and to future projects. This is not the FB page where you post cute kitten picture. A FB page is free, and you can build one in an hour. Don’t forget to set up your shop. On Amazon, you will have to build an Author Page. It’s easy and important. Browse the author pages of writers you admire. You’ll get the idea. Ditto for Goodreads. Make sure your new novel is on Goodreads. Go through every single option that Goodreads or Amazon offers and check every single one. Yes, you want to have a biography, a library, an Author Page, and a blog. Yes, yes, yes. This is all free stuff, so enjoy it and make it work for you. Each of these steps gets your novel and your name in front of potential readers.
The next thing that every serious author needs is a decent website. I sweated blood, inventing an entire new language of profanity in the process, but I eventually built a really nice website. Or so my Aunt Gloria says. Learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and why you need it to push your website to the top of the Google search page. After you have a beautiful new website, you will need to read up on building a mailing list. Why do we want a mailing list? So we can connect with potential readers, readers whom we can point in the general direction of our shiny new novel. Here is one more hard truth, and a dirty little secret. Hard Truth: Getting potential readers to see your book, amongst the mass of other books, is the hardest thing about Indie Publishing. Dirty Little Secret: Even Traditionally Published Authors have to do this.
The thing is, the dirty little secret isn’t so secret. One of the items that literary agents will look for in a query is whether or not the requesting author has a website, a following, you guessed it: A Platform. They want to know that you are willing to pick up a big part of the marketing. In other words, you are going to hustle your novel one way or another. If you’re an Indie Author, you get to keep a higher percentage of the sales. The trouble is, there must be sales to get a percentage. Hence the mantra: “We are all in sales.”
This is the place where you breathe in, breathe out, and relax. Your novel does not have an expiration date. It is a wonderful creation of your imagination and hard work. Platform building does not happen overnight, just as you did not write your novel overnight. Work through the items, starting with the low-hanging fruit. Building an Author Page on Goodreads or Amazon is fairly painless. Both sites have a lot of self-help articles. At the tougher end of the spectrum are the tasks of building a website and then building a subscription mailing list for your website. It is prudent to have all of the planks in your platform built and in place before you publish your novel. Having said that, I acknowledge that the pull to publish is strong. My first novel went live while I was still in the middle of the platform building process and I survived.
You have written a book, done the hard work, and published your book. Knuckling down, you have built a fantastic Author Platform. This is so great! Give yourself a pat on the back. Now it is time to put the platform to work. We are ready to take the leap to advertising, and it is a big leap. This is where we step far outside the Friends-and-Family pool, reaching out to the readers who have never heard of our novel.
There are many ways to advertise your novel. Again, let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. First, learn about writing ad copy. This is harder than it sounds. For Goodreads or Amazon, an author has about 150 characters with which to sell their novel; not words, characters. Resources for learning the art of ad copy include the books listed below, and Mark Dawson’s website. There are many more. Try your hand at ad copy before you set yourself to launching an ad.
Goodreads and Amazon are good places to try your first ads. The ad billings are based on link clicks, and the click costs are relatively low. It is critically important to research audiences and ad keywords. This is how you get your great thriller novel in front of folks who like thrillers, rather than wasting time on readers who only enjoy romance novels. It is important to know that you are going to make mistakes. You will probably waste a little money, but it is all part of the learning curve. The learning curve is much gentler on Amazon and Goodreads. Gentler than what, you will ask. Gentler than the complex monster that is the Facebook Ads Manager.
There are books devoted to Facebook ads, blog sites for FB ads, and courses on how to craft a successful FB ad. There are companies that will promise, for a fee, to build you the perfect Facebook ad. Why? Because FB ads are serious business, complicated, and, if done improperly, can ruin an advertising budget. Mark Dawson is one of the gurus of Facebook ads. I would recommend checking out his online videos for advice on crafting and executing your first ad. Some of his most important advice is start small, limit your budget, and track the results. As you hone your ad copy, and find your best audience and keywords, you will start to see results. Things will go wrong, or you won’t get the results you expect. That is all part of the learning process.
Welcome to the path of being a published writer. If you’ve made the Traditional Publishing cut, my hat is off to you. Good Job! If you are now an Indie Author, welcome to the fold. It can be fun, rewarding, and frustrating, but you will learn an amazing amount of new things. Remember to keep writing! One of the most important planks in the Author Platform is to publish more books. I can tell you from personal experience that it is easy to let publishing and marketing interfere with your writing. First and foremost, we are writers. As Indie Authors, we may have to wear different hats. We can be marketers, crafters of ad copy, or promoters, but at our core, we are writers. Keep the writer hat firmly on your head. It looks really good on you.
A Link for Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn:
https://www.thecreativepenn.com/resources/
A Link for Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula:
https://selfpublishingformula.com/
A Link for K-Lytics (Alex the Data-Geek!)
Gotta Read It by Libbie Hawker
How to Write Fiction Sales Copy by Dean Wesley Smith
Remember, you are not alone. The community of Indie Authors is pretty amazing. I cannot begin to thank all of the people who have helped me, either directly, or by providing information and insight on their blogs. As a way of paying back the rather large debt that I owe to the Indie Author community, I would like to make this small offer: If you are a first time author, or are struggling with one of the many facets of Indie Publishing, feel free to drop me a line. You can contact me through my website, which is listed at the end of this blog. If I can help you in any way, or steer you towards someone who can, I would be happy to do so. Thanks for reading!
An ex-resident of Seattle, Marco Etheridge lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. He is the author of two novels: The Best Dark Rain: A Post-Apocalyptic Struggle for Life and Love and Blood Rust Chains. When he isn’t creating great fiction or being a good Hausmann, he explores the world with his lovely wife. If the sun is shining too brightly, or the birds are too chipper, Marco studies German grammar to create a suitably dark mood for creativity. For more information about his novels, check out his website at:
