~ Guest post by Heather Kelly and Kristen Wixted Hold onto your hats, folks, this will be a long post. But our goal is to give you a blueprint for following your dreams of holding your book in your hands! It’s Heather Kelly and Kristen Wixted here, publishers and editors at Writers’ Loft Press and Pocket Moon Press. Not only do we indie-publish our own stuff, but we publish anthologies and mentor other writers to publish their own work. Check out our previously published anthologies: Firsts, An Assortment of Animals, Friends & Anemones, and Heather’s workbook to help you get the writing done, Jumpstart Your Writing in 30 Days. Today we’re going to take you on a journey to publication using Tom Franklin’s brand new steampunk Middle-Grade adventure story, The Pterrible Pteranodon, as a guide. THE MECHANICS: Tom started with a very clean draft that had been critiqued and edited. Pro Tip: Throw your manuscript into Pro-Writing Aid for a final polish! We recommend hiring freelance editors and copy editors at places like ALLi—the Alliance of Indie Publishers, Reedsy, or other indie-friendly forums. Next, Tom hired Robert Thibeault to create a genre-specific cover. Tom did his research by checking out his genre bucket at Amazon. Make sure to check out your genre-bucket best-sellers at Amazon before you choose a type of cover. For example, here are the best sellers of middle-grade steampunk at Amazon: Robert Thibeault designed an amazing and genre-specific cover: Hopefully, you can see how it would not only fit alongside the books in its genre but also stand out. It looks great as a thumbnail. Very important in this digital age! Pro Tip: Choose a type of cover that sells well in the genre. What you love as a book cover might not be what your reader loves. Sometimes as authors, we have to put our personal preferences aside! Here’s a closer look at Tom’s cover, so you can see the details: You can see here how an artist and book designer make a cover—it wraps around. Isn’t that cool? REACHING YOUR READERS: While Tom was waiting for his cover art masterpiece, he put up a freebie so people would sign up for his mailing list. Having an email list—direct contact with fans—is the most important piece of the publishing puzzle. Without this, every time you publish a new book, you start from scratch looking for fans. Tom gave away the first few chapters of his book and audio files of his book to entice people onto his list. Check it out here. Go ahead and sign up—Tom is going to KICKSTART this book, and you get to walk through the steps with him! (See the countdown page here!) Don’t just hide your freebie and the sign-up to your list on your personal website—plug it into one of the sharing sites that go directly to fans. Right now, two of the biggest sites are BookFunnel and StoryOrigin. Using sites like these, Tom doubled the number of fans he had on his list! Pro Tip: Story Origin is still in beta, so it’s currently FREE to use! Nothing beats free! Once you have fans, interact with them on a weekly or regular basis. Use email companies like MailChimp or mailerlite to do this professionally. Pro Tip: Make sure to consider who your fans are and give them what they are looking for! Remember that the people who sign up for your list are readers of your genre (or parents of the readers) and not just other writers or your friends. Formatting/Book Design: Use a program like Vellum (only for Macs) to format the inside of your book, or use the free program at Reedsy. Reedsy is a great one-stop-shop for finding indie-publishing support in general. PRODUCTION: While growing his email list, Tom finished all the production pieces. Here’s a list you can use:
Upload all the pieces (formatted correctly) along with the final cover artwork to Ingram Spark. Pro Tip: if you pay to be a member at ALLi you get a code for free uploads and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP has free uploads. Upload your ebook to KDP and choose to either have your book in Kindle Unlimited or use a distributor to go wide (like Draft2Digital) Pro Tip: Sites like Ingram Spark and KDP are often wonky, so make sure to save all your keywords and descriptions and bios elsewhere and paste them in. We have had some tense moments in the past! Pro Tip: You can purchase keywords that work in your genre at K-lytics, KPD Spy, or Publisher Rocket, to attract the right online buyers. Oftentimes as authors, it’s hard for us to think about what search words readers use! These keywords help people find your book when they search for it. If this seems like it’s a costly process, it can be. We generally budget $1,000 for a novel. (For an original cover like Tom’s from an artist, it’s much more!) But you can publish on a shoestring budget, by buying your cover premade (there are so many sites to use--just search for ‘premade book cover’) or by bartering. If you know someone who is a cover designer, and you are a great editor, trade those skills! Pro Tip: It’s okay to publish with the budget you have and then upgrade things as you go! FIND YOUR "WHY?" One of the most important questions to ask, before you start this process, is, “Why?” Why are you indie-publishing? If you want to see your book in your local bookstores:
If you want to make the most money you can:
Whatever you do, don’t go it alone. Some of the best resources for authors starting out on the Indie-pub path are Joanna Penn’s podcasts, the Facebook Group 20 Books to 50K, and joining an indie pubbing group. We have a virtual one at the Writers’ Loft if you’d like to join (email [email protected] to get on the email list). It’s run by Dave Pasquantonio who is also a freelance editor and knows a ton about book promotion. We promise, once you get going, things get easier, because you keep running into the same people, the same sites, and most of the people you run into are very supportive! So that’s another part of the job—be supportive of your fellow writers. Pro Tip: Don’t shortchange your readers—oftentimes the beautiful things that we love about books are simple enough for indie-publishers to achieve. See the gears that Tom added to each page number, the way his cover artist put the Pocket Moon Press logo into a gear, and how Tom invites his reader to read on into the next adventure! Phew, we covered a lot, right? Thanks to 24 Carrot Writing!
Feel free to leave us questions in the comments! Just out of curiosity, did we make you open up a billion tabs? We might just give a prize for the person who fesses up to opening a ton of tabs! Heather generally has at least 25,000 tabs open on her screen on any given day. (Let us know in the comments and we’ll pick someone at random.) Did you sign up for Tom’s email list so you can follow his further adventures in Kickstarting? We can’t wait for that process. (That’s another blog post)!
4 Comments
Desirae
3/16/2021 10:22:47 am
I always have a bunch of tabs open when researching indie publishing, so it's good to hear this is a common thing. As we learn tips, formats, organization, and the ongoing process of self-publishing correctly I enjoy finding sites and people that help other indie authors out. Thank you for this. I was about to check out Joanna Penn due to Meg LaTorre recommending her as well, so this is a further push to check out Joanna Penn's podcast and YouTube.
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3/16/2021 01:02:08 pm
You'll love Joanna Penn! I listen to her podcasts while out on walks or runs. (And her books are excellent resources.) She's really a one-stop shop to understand best practices of indie publishing. Thanks so much for commenting, Desirae!
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Desirae
3/16/2021 08:10:03 pm
No problem. Thank you for the post :)
Charlotte Hebert
3/18/2021 09:07:50 pm
Thanks so much Heather and Kristen! This is very very helpful and very appreciated! 😊
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