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First time Publishing tips

Self-publishing is challenging first time out.

Creating a book that is edited and designed to standard, and that reaches enough readers to make a profit, requires your attention, time and money. It also requires a willingness to trust the process and learn by doing.

Understand the seven processes of publishing

There are seven stages of the publishing process: editorial, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion and rights licensing. These divide across three stages: making a book; selling a book; and selectively licensing the rights in that book. Read more.

Set a clear intention for your book

If your objective is to create a book for friends and family, you will approach it in a completely different way than if you aim to be a full-time author-publisher. If you're commercially motivated, you'll make different choices than those for whom creative or literary intentions are top priority.

Go digital

All writers love bookstores but they shouldn't be your concern at first. It's extremely difficult to get good placement in physical bookstores and unless you have an exceptional arrangement you'll more than likely lose money and a great deal of time. The reason self-publishing is flourishing today is due to online bookstores selling digital products. Learn what you need to know to sell the easy way (e-books) before moving on to the more challenging (p-books and a-books).

Go creative

Creative self-publishing is when indie authors approach their publishing tasks with the same creative mindset that we bring to our writing. Creative self-publishing encompasses not just what we do, but how we do it, across the seven stages of the publishing process.

Consider as many out-of-the-box, creative campaigns as you can dream up and are willing to follow through. These may not cost money but they do take time, so you need to be organised if you are also to find time to write. Read more: Read more.

Think about your reader and your writing

Connect to readers with your deepest motives for writing the book in the first place.

  1. Do I write chiefly to inform, inspire, or entertain? Good writing embraces all three, but which is your chief motivation?
  2. Whom do I most hope to interest, inspire, or entertain? Who is the core cohort of readers for this book? Which gender? What age? Nationality? Income? Interests? Don't just think about the answers to these questions, write them out.
  3. What other books do these readers enjoy? What are the meeting points between those books and yours? If you were to overhear one of your readers saying, “I love [your]  books because they…..”, how would you like them to complete that sentence?
  4. Where are my readers found online? As most of your sales will be ebooks or print on demand (POD), and many of your readers will not be in your home territory, you must learn how to reach out to your readers online. There’s also no point in you being on Facebook if they are largely on LinkedIn or GoodReads or Pinterest. 

If you follow take the trouble to go where your readers are and reach out to them regularly, through social media or some other way, they will spontaneously want to share with you, learn from you, hear from you, grow with you. You will organically develop that author desirable; a strong author platform.

Know that niche books do best

Nonfiction books can succeed with relative ease if they are intelligently aimed at their target audience with a well-defined topic, good hook, and attractive writing style. Even with these vital  qualities, fiction is much tougher unless you write genre fiction. This is why romance, erotica, crime, and fantasy do so well for author-publishers. These are also the genres that do best for trade publishing. 

Literary books and serious non-fiction like biography or history struggle (just as they do in trade fiction) unless the author has a following from another medium, e.g. teaching, journalism, TV. These days social media can also be used effectively to build a following online.

Make a marketing plan

Download this Marketing Plan from the Quick and Easy downloads in the member zone. 

Set a regular time daily and weekly for reaching readers

Devote a few hours every week to thinking about readers and promotion. Give it a name like Marketing Monday or something similar and be consistent. Take the time to review what has worked (and do more of that) and what hasn't (drop it). Keep moving, trying new experiments and explorations, sticking with what works.

Consider a blog or podcast tour

Many authors do virtual book tours – reviews, interviews, posts at a number of blogs or podcasts. The higher the following those blogs or podcasts have, the more successful such a tour will be.

Prepare a good pitch and consider your options around social media, local press and radio, and special sales outlets. Go creative, make the tour compelling and fun for the participants.

Research any paid marketing

Do not pay for any marketing until you have done the work of establishing who your reader is and where they are online. Paid Facebook ads campaigns can be successful but only with clarity, focus, and trial and error. The same applies to Google AdWords and Keywords. Note: placing ads in subject-related blogs and publications works better for most books than ads on review sites or book blogs.

When you are ready, BookBub is an example of a service which consistently comes up among our members as the paid marketing worth investing in. Check here for a comparison of eight ebook promotion sites

AskALLi

Remember that you're not alone on your self-publishing journey. Our #AskALLi campaign commits to answering any self-publishing question you might have and ALLi offers resources specifically for new publishers.

We host a monthly Members' Self-Publishing Q&A, One of the benefits of your ALLi membership is that you can submit any question you like to our advisors Orna Ross and Michael la Ronn. At ALLi, there's no such thing as a stupid question!

You can also post questions to other members on our Facebook forum, where the team, ambassadors and advisors are on hand to offer their tried and tested advice. 

Visit our calendar to view our full live video and podcast schedule.

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