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Launching Your Book Online

16 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. Last week I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’m presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I’ve managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years. You can catch up here. 

So in Step 1 you assembled your online infrastructure—blog, Twitter, Facebook fan page—and in Step 2, hopefully found a little corner of the internet that likes you and wants to hear more of what you’ve got to say. You have built an online platform. Hooray!

Now we’re going to share news of our upcoming book with the people who visit that online platform, but we’re going to very careful to (i) not piss anyone off, (ii) not to come across like a shameless self-promoter and (iii) keep up our end of the bargain at all times, regardless of what happens with our book. It’s time to launch our book online.

This.

What’s Our Aim Here?

Yesterday we talked about starting a blog, Twitter page, etc. under the heading “Find Your First Readers.” The idea is this: to assemble a group of supporters who, when our book comes out, will be among the first to buy it. Hopefully this group will then spread the word by reviewing our book online, telling their friends, etc. They’re going to help us give our book a good start in printed (or coded) life.

We’re not talking about hundreds or thousands of people. (Although that would be nice—chance would be a fine thing.) We merely want to ensure that when we release our book, people we are not related to and have never met in real life will be waiting to buy it, and buy it because they like our writing and/or are interested in the book’s subject matter—and like our writing and/or are interested in the subject matter because we got them liking our writing (through posts, tweets, etc.) and gave them reasons to be interested (through book-related content, which we’ll get to in a sec). 

For example when I first released Mousetrapped, I sold about 100 paperback copies in the first month. (My focus wasn’t yet on e-books.) At my real-life book launch which was not attended by a single person I wasn’t related to or friends with, I sold 38 copies of my book. So who bought the other 62?

  • People who’d been reading my blog for the past few months and liked my writing style
  • People who’d been reading my blog for the past few months and thought Mousetrapped sounded interesting
  • People who’d been reading my blog for the past few months and wanted to see how my book had turned out, perhaps because they were considering self-publishing too and wanted to gauge the quality of the finished product
  • As above, but with Twitter
  • As above, but with Facebook
  • Followers of blogs whose owners had been kind enough to host me for a guest post or giveaway
  • Followers of book blogs whose owners had been kind enough to review my book.

Now let’s address three very important points before we go any further. The first one is that you have to give your blog value. A blog that exists just to advertise books is an empty shell, and not a blog at all but a mere advertisement masquerading as something else, like those stupid “advertorials” you see in magazines these days. (Do they really think we’re that stupid? Please.) It won’t succeed in either being a blog or selling books, because it doesn’t have any value of its own. So give your blog value. As I’ve said already, only do this if you want to do this, and I don’t mean self-publishing, marketing and promoting your own books. I mean the individual things, i.e. being a blogger, being a tweeter, etc. Again, create the blog you want to read. Do you want to read a blog that merely says “buy a book” over and over again with just a slight variation each time?

The next point is that you must always keep up your end of the bargain. I would estimate that something like 80-90% of people who read this blog have never and will never buy a book of mine—and that’s okay. It’s okay because I don’t just blog to sell books. I blog because I enjoy it, and I want self-publishers to have the information I wish I’d had when I first self-published. So whenever I’m using this blog to spread the word about one of my books, especially in the lead up to its release, I always ask myself, Is there enough here for the people who aren’t interested? Have I delivered the kind of posts that my loyal blog readers are expecting? Or have I turned this blog into nothing more than an annoying advertisement this month? 

In the Terminator movies, the problems start when a computer program called Skynet becomes self-aware and decides to terminate humanity. In one version of the story’s timeline, Skynet “wakes up” and starts its killing spree on April 21, 2011. Last April 21, some clever clogs started a Twitter account for Skynet, its first tweet being something like “Hello world.” It was a brilliant idea, and the tweets were pretty funny. But on April 22—and after collecting thousands of followers—instead of shutting down the account or keeping it going (perhaps as the apocalypse got into full swing…), the person behind it started advertising his friend’s album. Cue 140-character outrage—and it was justified, in my opinion. Because the tweeter hadn’t kept up his end of the deal. We’d signed up for Skynet, not the hard sell.

The third point is that this is NOT to be confused with scamming people into buying your book. As in, collecting as many pliable disciplines as possible, chaining them to a newsletter and then instructing them all to buy your book at exactly 10:01 on Monday morning in a concerted effort to—artificially—push your book into the bestseller lists. That’s called Being a Moron.

Not this.

Stranger, Meet My (Not Yet Released) Book

I think your aims when you’re preparing to release a book should be:

  • To inform the world at large that it exists
  • To get the people who know about it interested in it (i.e. find potential readers)
  • To get potential readers caring enough to say, “I’m looking forward to reading that”
  • and to do all this BEFORE the book comes out.

Let’s work backwards. Why should you do this before the book comes out? Because if you don’t, you’ve wasted so many opportunities. Someone once told me that on average, a person has to hear about something three times before they buy it. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the amount of times I’ve said to myself I must buy that book greatly outnumbers the amount of books I’ve bought. That’s partly because I can’t afford it (I actually daydream about no-budget shopping sprees in Waterstones…) and partly because I forget. I need reminding a few times before it snags.

Time and time again I’ve seen Twitter friends release books and tell me about it for the first time on the day of its release. There’s only so many times you can do the “my book is out now!” tweet before you get embarrassed and we get annoyed, so let’s say you tell me twice about your book being for sale. But what if, instead, you’d been slipping me delicious details about your book for the past eight weeks? What if you’d blogged about why you’d decided to self-publish it? (That would’ve been one time.) What if you’d put two potential covers up and asked me and your other Facebook fans which did I prefer? (That would’ve been two.) What if you’d make a fun little book trailer and shared it on YouTube? (That would’ve been three.) What if you’d had a Twitter competition that tied in with the book? (That would’ve been four, at least.) What if you’d got a book blogger to review it, and then tweeted a link to the review? (Now we’re up to five.) And then you’d told me that your book was out now, twice. Now I’d have heard about your book seven times, and I’d either be buying it for sure or blocking you. If you’re a blogger or tweeter I like—and presumably you are, because I’m following you—it’s definitely going to be the first one.

As for getting people interested and caring about your book, you do that through the content you chose to publish, post or tweet about it. Here’s some of the things I did to give some you ideas (hopefully!):

  • Shared my personal story of why I decided to self-publish it
  • Blogged about all aspects of self-publishing, including my mistakes
  • Shared things like the cover design (the stages of it), synopsis, photos of proof copies, etc.
  • Made two book trailers (you can see them here)
  • Posting pictures from my time in Florida on my Facebook page
  • Had a PDF preview that readers could download for free
  • Tagged my “shameless self-promotion” tweets on Twitter with #mousetrappedmonday and confined them to 3-5 tweets of a Monday afternoon
  • Wrote guest posts on other blogs
  • Gave copies to book bloggers and other review sites and then linked to the reviews.

Doing this online—and hopefully getting retweeted, recommended, followed, etc.—will cover the “exists” bit.

Tip: I find it really helpful to think back to the last book I heard about and then went out and bought, and examine why I did that. 

Go For Launch

Another mistake I frequently see self-publishers making is failing to have a release date. You should have one. I know that as self-publishers it’s hard to judge exactly when your book will be available and it’s even harder to get your Kindle edition to coincide with your paperback and your Barnes and Noble listing to match them both, but don’t worry about all that. We don’t have to pick a day and then, come hell or high water, ensure that all our listings go live on that exact date. For self-publishers, your release date can be any day when (i) you decide that you’re ready to launch and (ii) at least your Kindle and paperback, if you’re doing one, are available to buy.

Then turn your online spaces into party central for the week around it. Have a virtual launch party. Go on a blog tour. Give away some books. Have a contest or competition for a juicy prize. Perhaps even give your book away for free for a couple of days, or 24 hours, just to get things going. But for the love of fudge, do something. Don’t invite me to the saddest book launch in the history of the world, i.e. a single post or tweet that gives me a quick run-through every rejection you’ve ever suffered, and then says, “So I self-published it. It’s on Amazon now. $2.99. Here’s a link. Excuse me while I log off, have a nap and expect there to have been hundred of sales by the time I wake up later.” If you wrote the thing and you’re not excited about it, why the hell should I be?

Another tip: look at that list of aims again. Now think of a tweet that says “My book is out now! Just $2.99 on Amazon! Buy it! Please RT please RT please RT” and ask yourself how does that get people interested?

So you’ve written your book, decided to self-publish it, self-published it, built an online platform and got people you’re not related to excited about your book to the point when they’ve exchanged their hard earned cash for a copy of it. The hard part is over. Tomorrow: what to do next to try and keep your book from disappearing into the Most Books Abyss…

Oh, sorry—I meant the easy part is over. Oops.

While we’re on the subject…

I feel like my regular blog readers know me really well, and always know where I’m coming from. But this blog has been getting a lot of attention from new sources in the last couple of weeks, and so a lot of people are stopping by here for the first time. Some, it seems, are getting the impression that I’m only interested in making money, and that I couldn’t care less about writing as a craft or an endeavor all of its own. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m different to a lot of self-publishers (and self-published bloggers) in that I’m still pursuing traditional publication. If a publisher approached me tomorrow and offered me a €5,000 advance, I’d take it, even though I could make four times that releasing the same book myself, because getting published is my dream, and I’d love the opportunity to see how the experts do all this. But this is “How To Sell Self-Published Books Month”, so the focus is on selling. And I need to make money from self-publishing because I do it full-time, and the income it generates allows me to not have a day job but instead devote myself fully to writing the book that I hope will, one day, help me achieve my dream of traditional publication. If you don’t want to make money from writing, I can only assume you don’t love doing it as much as I do, because making money from it is the only way that you can do it all the time, unless you win the lottery. And even if you are published by someone else, you still don’t get to “just write” all the time. You have to participate in the promotion, and so you should. It’s your book, after all. Helping the people who invested in it get their investment back is the very least you could do. When you self-publish, you’ve made the investment, and so you need to get out there and sell your book for the same reason.

To receive each new post by e-mail look for the subscribe box in the sidebar or footer, or follow me on Twitter for a reminder with a link. Or just come back here if it’s not too pink for you. Teaser alert: I’ll have another FREE book for you tomorrow…

Where to Find Your First Readers

15 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. Last week I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog with 12,000 views and counting), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’ll be presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years.

You can catch up on the introduction here but today we’re going to talk about Step 2: Find first readers (presuming that Step 1—signing up for preferably a Word Press blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page—is something you can manage yourself and have already done)…

Now, not every self-publisher needs an online presence to sell books. I can name two or three who merely uploaded their book to Amazon and—ta-daa!—bestseller status and a five-digit royalty cheque was theirs without so much as a single tweet, blog post or Facebook status update. (“How nice for them,” she says, through gritted teeth.) But of all the self-publishers I know and know of who have managed to get their books selling and kept them that way, the vast majority have a home—or five—online. Since we’ve already acknowledged that we’re not going to be the next Amanda Hocking, we’re going to do what seems to be an effective strategy for most self-publishers, and leave waiting for the Magical Self-Publishing Fairies to sprinkle our book with pixie dust for another day.

Wait a Sec—Do You Want to Do This?

Not every self-publisher needs an online presence to sell books, but every self-publisher with an online presence should actually want an online presence, and should genuinely enjoy doing all the things that comes with having a blog, tweeting, etc. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Pretend for a second that you know someone who makes a living giving motivational speeches. He self-publishes a book, and it goes straight to the top of the bestseller list. You ask him how he did it, and he puts it all down to the speeches. He says he mentions the book during them and sells copies afterwards, and that the people who buy them there write reviews and tell their friends, and he’s sure that’s what’s driving his sales. You’re about to self-publish a book of your own and, hey, these motivational speeches worked for him, so you decide that you’re going to do it too. Except that you hate public speaking. The thought of standing up in front of a room full of people makes you break out in a cold, clammy sweat. But you can overcome it. Is has to be done, right? Because giving speeches helps sell books. So you decide to grin and bear it. But there’s another problem: you don’t know what to say. You fear you might have nothing to say. And the only motivation you feel is the urge not to do anything except sleep and watch TV. But speeches sell books, and you have books to sell. So you get up in front of a room of several hundred people, sweat profusely, mumble and ultimately go down like a lead balloon. So yes, speeches sell books—but will yours if you don’t actually want to do them?

Don’t do this just because someone said you should. My advice is for writers who want to be bloggers and just need a little advice on what to do once they’ve become one.

Create the Blog You Want to Read

We all know that piece of writing advice write the book you want to read. Well, I say create the blog you want to read. When I first started blogging back in autumn 2009, I had no idea what I was doing—but I knew why I was doing it, and that was just because someone had said I should. I’d just decided to self-publish in a few months’ time, and I figured I’d need a blog in order to do it well. But I didn’t know what to blog about, and my blog was on Blogger.com, dull and—nooooooooo!—featured mismatched, blinking widgets. I know: for SHAME. But after researching self-publishing online, I realized there was a gaping hole in the blogging world, and it was shaped like a self-publisher who didn’t use words like gatekeepers, didn’t keep voodoo dolls named after agents and editors and didn’t believe that one person with no knowledge of the publishing world could do better than an office building full of people with degrees in it.

(That would be me, if it wasn’t clear!)

What I’m saying is: keep it simple. There are so many people out there selling workshops and seminars and training manuals and audio tapes and books about how to blog, when to blog, what to blog, etc. (I just googled “how to blog” and got approximately 6,190,000,000 results) but don’t worry about all that. Instead just imagine the blog you’d love to read every morning with a hot cup of coffee, and then create that blog. Simples.

But What About My Book?

It was easy for me to start talking about my book on my blog, since the whole point of my blog was to chronicle my adventures in self-publishing. But then I know other self-publishers who have tried to do the same thing, and it didn’t work for them. So why did it work for me? I think it’s because I gave the blog reader something that they could use to help themselves, which in my case was straightforward, occasionally (!) helpful advice or information that sometimes generated a giggle. I think most people are on the internet to find one or more of the following things: information, connection and entertainment. When you create content, be it a blog post, a tweet or a book trailer, ask yourself: does it tick at least one of those boxes? People love to describe blogs as online journals, but they’re really not about you. They’re about us, and what we want to read. Just like your book, your blog has to have appeal. It has to give people a reason to want to read to it.

Also, almost everything you put online is something you have written. Every paragraph of text is an advertisement for your work, regardless of what it’s about. Maybe your unique voice or perspective is selling point enough.

We’ll be talking in more detail about content next week in What Selling Books and Fight Club Have in Common.

Get Somebody (Anybody?) To Read It

A blog is not like a shop window. No one will ever just happen to walk past, look in and say to themselves, “Oh, I must pop in there!” You have to send people to it. The best way to start to do this is to make blogging friends.

Being a blogger is about being part of a online community and, like life, the amount of effort you put into it dictates the amount you’ll get back out. If I was just starting out now, here are the steps I’d take to find, charm and chat with blogging friends:

  1. Find other blogs. There are billions of them. Well, millions anyway. You’ve found this blog, so we know you can do it. Blogs are a great source of more blogs. Look for recommendations in the blogger’s “blog roll” (um, don’t look for mine because I’m updating it at the moment; it’s coming soon), links in the comments and posts or browse the blogs of the people who leave comments. Then read them.
  2. Comment on other blogs. If you read something interesting, tell the blogger you thought so. If the blogger asks for your opinion, leave it. If you’ve been lurking around a blog for months and months, reading every word but never so much as squeaking out a “hi”, say hello. (Yeah, I’m talking to YOU!)
  3. Repeat as required. You find this easier to do if you collect all your favorite blogs in one place. I use Google Reader.

Drive Traffic With Twitter

I signed up for Twitter because it was the only thing that would download in the square foot of reception at the very top of the stairs that I could put my right hand into if I stood on tippytoes in the little holiday cottage where I wrote one of my books. In other words, by chance. But being on Twitter is the single best thing I’ve ever done for my writing career, and that’s something I’ll be elaborating on next week. I think it’s very, very important—but again, only if you actually want to be on there.

Twitter helps your blog because people like to click interesting links they see on Twitter and follow them to see where they go. I wouldn’t bombard people with links to your blog; I think a ratio of 1 blog post to 3 links about it is about right. I love using Buffer for tweeting links to my current and past blog posts and spreading them out over the day and through different time zones.

For a great primer in using Twitter in a way that’s both effective and enjoyable, I highly recommend Nicola Morgan’s book Tweet Right: The Sensible Person’s Guide to Twitter. 

Find Fans on Facebook

I think every author should have a Facebook page that strangers can come and “like”—and NOT a personal profile page that they’ve commandeered for that purpose. At this stage, all you need to do is:

  1. Sign up for a public Facebook page
  2. Convince 25 of your friends and family to “like” it so you can get a customized URL, e.g. www.facebook.com/mousetrappedbook
  3. Throw a few photos, links, etc. up there so when someone does “like” it, there’s something for them to see.

We’ll come back to our Facebook page later when we launch our book.

What About Everything Else?

So that’s it. Blogging, Twitter and Facebook is all we’re going to worry about for now. Yes, there’s loads of other sites you can eagerly sign up for as well (Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Vimeo, etc. etc. etc. ETC!) but don’t take on too much too soon, or you’ll get blogging burn out before you’ve even customized your header. And I believe that these three are the most important ones anyway.

Tomorrow, we’re going to launch our book online. Oooh, how exciting!

To receive each new post by e-mail look for the subscribe box in the sidebar or footer, or follow me on Twitter for a reminder with a link. Or just come back here if it’s not too pink for you…

My Not So Scientific Theory of How to Sell Self-Pubbed Books

14 May

May is How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated. Last week I poured a bucket of ice-cold water over your dreams in Read This First (which, thanks to Freshly Pressed, is the most popular post ever on this blog with 11,792 views and counting), and then explained why I think you should go guns blazing for the launch of each book instead of waiting until you’ve a few to sell in One at a Time. This week I’ll be presenting my Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books, which is based on how I think I managed to sell my own books over the last couple of years. 

So: how do we sell self-published books? Well, isn’t that the million dollar question—especially when there’s a lucky few in the world who have actually made a million dollars off their e-book sales. We’re not aiming quite that high. Instead, our goal is to sell enough books per month to earn back what we spent publishing them, make a profit besides and get (and maintain) a warm, fuzzy feeling of accomplishment and pride. For me personally, that’s finding royalty cheques in the mail that equal $1,000 or more per month. At an average price of $2.99 per book, that’s a goal of approximately 478 sales every thirty days. And I think this—as in, My Not So Scientific Theory of How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books—will help you shift those copies easily, especially if you have more than one book. It worked for me.

The thing to remember is that Amazon sells books through its magical algorithms. Each sale increases the chance of there being another sale. The more popular you get, the even more popular you get. And if get popular enough, you don’t have to do anything at all, because between recommendations and pride of place atop search results, Amazon will be selling your book for you. Which is our aim. But in order for that to happen, we have to get the Amazon wheel turning in the first place. We have to get our book selling initially, and do it without Amazon’s help.

On the other side, we must also try to bring anyone who meets our book before they meet us to come check out our online platform after they reach “The End”, so that they can potentially be one of our first readers the next book round.

What I’m talking about here is what to do in the six months before you release your book and during the first six months afterwards. How to build an online platform. How to get people excited about your book and anticipating it. How to launch it online. How to give your book the equivalent of a hearty breakfast filled with fiber and slow-release energy, setting it up for a great day.

Or something.

Let’s take a second to talk about that “it worked for me.” The thing is, I didn’t do any of this on purpose. I didn’t really know what I was doing but looking back, this is what happened, and it’s what I’ve done—or tried to do—with each new title since. So of course I can’t—and won’t—guarantee that doing this sells books. But I did it, and I sold books.

I’d also like to point out that this is 99% common sense. You could probably figure it out on your own. But hey, I need something to blog about this week and you need something to read while you’re avoiding doing the thing you should be doing. So: everyone’s a winner.

So what exactly am I on about? There’s five steps as far as I can tell, and each day this week I’ll be elaborating on one of the steps (except the first one, which is self-explanatory). They are:

Step 1: Build an Online Home

Start a blog. Set up a Facebook page. Sign up for Twitter. Use Mailchimp to make a mailing list and a sign-up form so people can join it. See if you like using Goodreads.

I don’t think that needs a blog post of an explanation, does it?

Step 2: Find First Readers

Tomorrow I’ll be blogging about building an online platform, or making friends online. (Genuinely making friends, I may add. If you are one of these people who says “I follow back!” in your Twitter bio, for example, you’ve missed the “genuinely” bit.) By sharing quality content we’ll hopefully draw people to our blog, and by entertaining or intriguing them when they get there, we’ll get them interested in our voice, our perspective or maybe even our sense of humor. With any luck, they’ll like our style and want to read more of what we wrote. As luck would have it, we’ll have written something, and by blogging about The Something’s path to publication, we might even get our readers, followers, etc. contemplating buying The Something when it comes out. But most importantly, if they don’t want to buy The Something—or even if they never want to hear of The Something ever again—we’ll continue to generate the type of content that brought them to us in the first place, thus maintaining our online platform.

Does this make sense? Well, at least it looks pretty…

Step 3: Launch Online

On Wednesday we’ll launch our book online, at least three months after we started talking about it on there. We’ll do everything we can think of to spread the word that our book is now available and that it’s worth a read, including things like competitions and giveaways, organizing a blog tour, getting reviews from book bloggers and other readers, writing guest posts for other blogs and making cute and/or funny things for the magical interweb, such as book trailers.

Step 4: Get Amazon Going

By Thursday we’ll have built an online platform and convinced a bunch of people to stop by it regularly, and some of those people will have bought our book just because they like us. Some other people will never buy our book because they’ve no interest in it, but they’ll still help us spread the word through retweets, guest posts, etc. Our first round of sales will have released the handbrake over at Amazon, but now we need to put some gas in the tank so we can start the engine. (Can I just say that I know there’s a chance that my analogies are making no sense today, but in fairness I am writing this with one eye on The Voice.) So today we’ll discuss making the most of Amazon—which, from what I see, most authors don’t bother or don’t know to do—and the importance of sending our potential readers there as opposed to anywhere else.

Step 5: Everything Else

On Friday we’ll run through all the things we can do now that we’ve done everything else. Things like KDP Select, releasing new “bonus” material, making the most of getting reviews, offering free extras or other downloads and even paying to advertise on sites like Facebook and Goodreads. We’ll also discuss what not to do, what’s a complete waste of your time and why you must never forget about the people who will never buy your book.

See you in the morning…

(Bring coffee!)

To receive each new post by e-mail look for the subscribe box in the sidebar or footer, or follow me on Twitter for a reminder with a link. Or just come back here if it’s not too pink for you…

Freshly Pressed (or Perhaps Ground…?)

11 May

*looks around nervously* Is it safe to come back?

Wow. What a week that was, eh? If you haven’t been around these parts in the last few days, on Tuesday I had the honor of being Freshly Pressed, i.e. being highlighted on the WordPress.com homepage.

Cue more than 12,000 hits in one day, and more comments, like and subscribes than even a highly caffeinated gal can keep up with. At one point my average hits per hour rate was more than my average hits per month for the entire first year of this blog. What’s utterly hilarious about this is that the post in question—How To Sell Self-Published Books: Read This First—wasn’t even really part of this month’s how-to-sell-self-published-books theme. It was the introduction to it. But clearly it struck a nerve. The whole experience was amazing, and who wouldn’t want to see this below something they wrote?

A lot of people have been asking how I got Freshly Pressed. I don’t have a clue. I can only tell you that Read This First was already a popular post, having been picked up Joel on The Book Designer on Sunday (a great blog for self-pubs, by the way) and subsequently linked to on Twitter a lot. On Monday Reddit sent a few thousand people its way. (Before Tuesday, Monday was this blog’s busiest day ever with 3,393 visits, most of them Reddit referrals. Before that, my busiest day was around 2,500.) So maybe its popularity got it noticed by WP or something…? Honestly though, I don’t know. All I know is this: getting Freshly Pressed was great. If you’re reading this now because of it, hello! Welcome. Do stick around. And always bring coffee. If you’ve already been with me for a while, I sincerely hope you didn’t subscribe to comments when I first posted Read This First—if you did, may I apologize for your inundated inbox…

Anyways, let’s get back to business. Over five days next week I’m going to be presenting my Not at All Scientific Theory on How Self-Publishers Can Use Social Media to Get Amazon to Sell Their Books—on my To Do list for the weekend: (i) read This is How It Ends by Kathleen McMahon, (ii) watch the Spanish Grand Prix, (iii) think up a snappier name for that theory thingy—but in the meantime, new followers might want to catch up on some past popular posts:

(By the way, my novel, Results Not Typical, is not available to download at the moment. That’s because I’m doing some tweaking to it—changing “mum” to “mom”, for a start—in preparation for setting it to free next week.)

Have a good weekend!

How To Sell Self-Published Books: One at a Time

7 May

I’ve christened May “How to Sell Self-Published Books Month” here on Catherine, Caffeinated. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I figured that after last month’s shocking lack of blogging, this would be a good way to make up for it. It’s going to be a mix of new long posts, new short posts, replays and interesting links, all served with an Americano with an extra shot in it. You can catch up here. Get all future posts delivered direct to your inbox by subscribing (look in the sidebar or footer for the sign-up box) or, you know, you could just come back…

There’s a school of thought that says don’t do anything to promote your book until you have several books to promote. (They’re talking about e-books, but since that’s what most of us self-publishers are focused on these days, we’re going to talk about them too.) The idea is that if you manage to find a reader and convince them to buy one of your books, there’s another two or three or more for them to buy immediately afterwards, thus converting the effort of promoting one book into the sale of several.

Seems like a good idea, right?

It’s not. At least I don’t think it is. In fact, I completely disagree with it. I believe you need to release your books one at a time with space in between, and market, promote and sell them that way too. Here’s why.

As I said in Read This First, you generally have to do three things to sell me a copy of your book:

  1. Tell me about it
  2. Pique my interest
  3. Give me a reason (i.e. make me care enough) to buy it.

Let me give you a real-life example of how this 1-2-3 process led me to buy a self-published e-book. One day I was reading a blog post about how some self-publishers had been adding things like “For Fans of Dan Brown” to their e-book titles, and how Amazon had now moved to crack down on their clever (and a bit cheeky!) use of their system. The post mentioned two UK self-publishers, Louise Voss and Mark Edwards, who had done this to great effect with their e-book, Catch Your Death. So that’s how I found out the book existed—through a blog post. My interest was piqued when I read that the thriller was partly set at the Cold Research Unit in Salisbury, because anything that involves viruses is a winner for me. (In another life I wanted to be a virologist.) So I went to look it up on Amazon, where a combination of what I already knew, the synopsis and the pair’s writing credentials gave me reason enough to buy it. And so, because Mark and Louise had a good book that was the kind of thing I liked to read (it was well reviewed and they’ve since signed a huge deal with Harper Collins in the UK), and they’d designed a convincing Amazon listing (something I’ll blog more about later this month), the only real work they had to do was inform me of their book’s existence, and it’s this that marketing multiple books simultaneously—or waiting until you have multiple books to market—cripples.

You want to create as many worthwhile opportunities as possible to inform new readers that your book exists, without boring the arses off the readers who are already along for the ride, i.e. your blog readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans newsletter recipients, etc. The way to do this is to squeeze every last bit of Interesting Juice out of each book, and then give everyone a chance to recover before you go at it again with your next title.

Take Mousetrapped, the title that started it all for me. Although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time—I was just procrastinating online, I thought—I started building anticipation about that book approximately three months before I released it. Here’s some of the things I did:

  • I blogged about my decision to self-publish it
  • I blogged about the logistics of self-publishing it
  • I shared my cover design process and other milestones such as the finished blurb
  • I made two book trailers (see the Videos page)
  • I offered copies to book bloggers
  • I was interviewed by book bloggers and other sites
  • I wrote guest posts for other blogs
  • I had “#MousetrappedMondays” on Twitter where I made a thing of containing my self-promotion to 3-5 tweets every Monday in the lead up to its release, and then I released the book on the final #MousetrappedMonday, March 29 2010
  • I posted photos of my first proof copy, my first box of books, my bookstore launch, etc.
  • I set up a Facebook page, asked friends to like it, posted updates about the book on the wall
  • I gave away copies on my blog
  • I tweeted links to all of the above.

And in these ways, I told people that Mousetrapped existed, and I managed to get some of those people to buy it when it came out, to recommend it to friends and family and to mention it on their own online homes. And here is the key: when Backpacked came out more than a year later*, I was able to do all those things again and more besides. Why? Because I now had a completely different title that generated new material for me to blog about, etc. and because enough time had passed for (i) the people who had been around since the beginning to forgive all my Mousetrapped talk and (ii) a whole new audience to turn to face my way, i.e. new Twitter followers, new friends of my Facebook fans, new blog readers of my blog friends, etc. Enough time had passed for me to reach loads of new people using the same methods as I had before—and to do it without pissing people off.

What if I had released all of my books at the same time? I would only ever have reached that first, small group. My original readers. The ones who came on board at the beginning. Now maybe they would’ve been loyal enough to buy all of my books, but what then? I can’t continue to churn out post after tweet after post about the same old stuff, so I can’t blog about my books. No one likes “My book is on Amazon. Buy it!” tweets, so that’s out too. And what are all my lovely fans going to do after they’ve read all my books? What now?

I saw how disastrous this could be myself back in September-October 2011, when I did something silly. I released Backpacked, my second travel memoir, on September 1st, and Results Not Typical, my first novel, on October 1st.  The people who read my blog (hello YOU!) and follow my Twitter feed aren’t doing it because they love hearing about books they might have no interest in buying, so I was slow to spend two solid months yapping on about both titles. So I neglected Backpacked, and focused on the novel instead. I organized an extensive blog tour and a giveaway—and blogged about it, of course—but it was diluted and rushed, and my attention was split between the two titles. I should’ve spread them out a lot more and done a proper job on both of them, but I didn’t have the patience to keep two ready-to-go books behind the curtain any longer.

I know the temptation to get the next book out there right now is overwhelming, especially if it’s already written and ready to go. If someone sends you an e-mail saying “Just read Your First Book—loved it!!! When is the next one out? Can’t wait to read it!” there’s a reptilian part of your brain that considers going to KDP right that minute to upload the book, just so you don’t lose that sale. Because that’s The Big Fear, isn’t it? That that reader will have forgotten all about you by the time your next book comes out. Well, guess what? I have to wait a year between books for all of my favorite writers—because that’s the speed at which the publishing world works— and I manage it just fine. I never forget about them. Instead, I wait anxiously for their new books to come out. The waiting makes the reading sweeter. I’ve spent 364 days of every year waiting for a new Michael Connelly novel for almost half my life, and somehow I manage. I also buy every single one of his books. And if I do forget? Amazon reminds me in my recommendations whenever I visit the site. Sometimes they even e-mail me too.

You have to look at this in the long-term. Yes, the person who e-mailed you might not buy your next book because by the time it comes out six months from now, they’ll have forgotten about it. But the people who will find out about you for the first time when you put a full launch effort into your next title is a far greater number. And do you know how they say that the people who lose weight slowly and steadily have a much greater chance at keeping it off than those who lose a lot quickly on a drastic diet? Well, I think the same goes for books. (Bear with me…) Organic growth is always better. You promote this first book well, you focus entirely on the one title, and hopefully you carry a lot of the readers you gain with you onto the next book. You repeat the process in a few month’s time, and now you’re carrying forward the readers from the first and second books, and they all read both of them. And so on and on. I think those readers, thanks to the longer relationship they’ll have with you, will be a lot more likely to stick around in the long term that someone you managed to sell three 99c books to and then never interacted with again.

One of the people I follow on Twitter released three different books in rapid succession (I’d say, all within the same month) a while back. They were all quite different titles, and he’d never released anything before. He didn’t blog really, so Twitter was his main online home. At the time of the release, there was a lot of Twitter talk about it, but that soon dropped off like the edge of a cliff once the third book had been released. Since then? Nothing. Nada. Not a word. There’s nothing new to report, and he’s nice enough not to use his tweets for advertisements, so now he’s stuck. And so are his sales. If he’d spread out those releases, he might be heading into the summer now with a brand new book to promote—and so, new things to tweet about (like how he came to have his cover design, what a headache e-book formatting is, what he’s doing different this time around, etc.)—and I’d be willing to bet that he’d definitely get more sales. He has more Twitter followers now than he did when he released those books, and I—and all his other followers—are likely to have more people around us too, and so if I re-tweeted one of his book links, his audience would be much larger now than it was then. So, he should have waited. He should have spread out the release dates of his books.

I really hope this all makes sense, because I haven’t had much coffee today and regular readers will know how much I need my coffee. I fear I’ve spent two thousand words over-explaining a really simple concept. But in case I’ve spent two thousand words making no sense at all, what I’m basically trying to say is this:

  1. Each title release creates a wealth of material you can use to promote your book
  2. Putting this material online is one of the ways people find out that your book exists
  3. Informing people that your book exists is the first step in getting them to buy it
  4. You can’t constantly use your online platform to promote your book, and it’s not much fun to do that anyways
  5. Different people are following you and your followers than will be in six months or a year’s time
  6. The only way to maximize (i) how much material you get out of each book and (ii) the new people who see that material is to spread out your books
  7. What you sacrifice in I-just-finished-the-first-I’ll-buy-the-next-one sales, you’ll more than make up for with new, more loyal readers in the long term.

*I don’t recommend you leave a year+ between titles. That was just my own laziness!

L-R: the ridiculously comfortable beds at the St. Regis San Francisco, which I loved; the plank of wood with a thin foam mattress on top, as-thick-as-toast squishy pillow (covered in my own T-shirt, as it didn’t come with a pillowcase), sleeping bag and prone-to-falling mosquito net that I slept in at our hostel in San Pedro, Guatemala. Which I did NOT. 

I’m testing KDP again with Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America. It’s the story of me (loves Starbucks, boutique hotels and inactivity) going backpacking in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama (climbing active volcanos, sleeping on planks of wood, cockroaches, etc.) and it’s FREE between now and Wednesday for Kindle. So please, feel FREE (see what I did there?) to download it for yourself, or let your anti-backpacking friends with e-reading devices know that they are also FREE to download it for FREE from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. For FREE. (FREE!)

How To Sell Self-Published Books: Read This First

5 May

I’ve christened May the How To Sell Self-Published Books Month here on Catherine, Caffeinated, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of marketing and promoting your book, we need to have a little tough love session first.

At my most recent workshop I started off by saying to the participants that my aim for the day was to send them home with everything I wished I’d known before I started self-publishing, or in other words everything I had to learn on the job because when I started self-publishing, I didn’t have a clue. And yet clueless and all that I was, I was operating with a huge advantage: realism. Because I’d spent a good decade of my young life poring over every How To Format a Manuscript for Submission To Within an Inch of Its Life Because, Yeah, That’s What’s Going to Be the Deciding Factor (Not!) and 500 Pages About Submitting to Agents Even Though You Haven’t Written a Word type books, I knew way more than I’d ever need to about the way the traditional publishing world works, and so I knew that as a self-publisher, I wouldn’t be sitting at the top table. I mightn’t even be in the same room. But that was fine by me. I still recognized what an amazing opportunity digital self-publishing provided, and I was excited about getting to avail of it. And because I knew the score, I could manage my expectations. (Truth be told, I didn’t have any.) Ultimately when success came, it was a welcome bonus. So before we get into the practicalities of selling your self-published book, let’s have cold blast of reality, shall we?

1. By Default, No One Cares About Your Book

Just because you wrote a book does not mean people are going to want to read it. Sounds suspiciously like common sense, but as I’ve said before, common sense isn’t as common as you might think.

Think of all the books you hear about on a daily basis. Think of all the books you see when you walk into a bookstore, or through the book isles of supermarkets. Think of all the books that pop into your line of vision while you’re on Amazon. Do you buy them all? Are you even interested in them all? Or are you like me—and, I’d suspect, most book-buyers—buying and ultimately reading just the very cream of the crop, the top 0.5% or less of the books we know about, just the ones that get us interested in them and wanting to read them, i.e. just the ones we care about?

At least once a day I receive an e-mail from an author I don’t know saying “I’ve wrote a book. Will you review it?” If this author knew that every Friday Oprah’s Book Club sends me an e-mail recommending several books—books that, this being Oprah’s Book Club, are hugely publicized, high advance, this-is-gonna-be-big traditionally published books—and that, on average, I make a note of maybe two of them and ultimately buy maybe one of them for every five or six e-mails I get, do you think they’d do anything differently?

It is very hard to get people to care enough about your book that they go and buy it. It’s the hardest part. And before you can even do that, you have to get them interested in it, and before that you have to let them know that it exists. But embracing this will help you achieve this, because you’ll know what lengths to go to in order to make it happen. I blogged a little bit more about this in How (Not?) To Get Your Book Reviewed.

2. Your Book is a Product—and It Had Better Work

We’ve seen time and time again that the self-publishers who enjoy consistent success are those who treat self-publishing like a business they’ve started up. They act like entrepreneurs, and make like their book is their first product—which it is. Your book is a product. While you were writing it you could be all writer-like, hanging out in hipster cafés with your soy milk lattes and your well-creased Moleskine, but now that the book is going to be out in the world, for sale with a price-tag on it, the romance must drop away and the book must meet standards and be a viable product. When it comes to books, we’re talking about a professional polish and it having appeal. I talked about appeal in Why It Doesn’t Matter Whether or Not Your Book is Good, so let’s focus on the professional polish bit here.

Self-publishers against enlisting the services of a professional editor and/or proofreader seem to be against it because it’s expensive and/or because they don’t understand what editing means. The “I can’t afford it” thing drives me completely cuckoo because if you can’t afford to spend some money on your product, you shouldn’t be self-publishing it. If you’re not prepared to invest, why should I be expected to buy? And buy a sub-standard product at that. Which brings me onto my next point: not understanding what editing is.

Generally we can divide editing into three stages: structural (think re-writing), copyediting (think language) and proofreading (think errors). (If there’s any editors hanging around these parts, feel free to correct me on that, or elaborate.) I can understand why self-publishers would skip the structural bit, because it’s the most expensive and going back to the business analogy, you wouldn’t buy Egyptian cotton tablecloths for a fast food joint, because you’d never make the money back off a $1.99 burger. But you would have tables, right? And chairs for sitting around them? Of course you would, because that’s what’s expected. That’s a minimum standard. When we go into restaurants, we expect there to be somewhere to sit. And when we buy a book, we expect it to be error-free. (Or at least almost error-free. I’m still searching for a way to make perfection happen right out of the blocks.) We expect the language to be correct. We expect clarity and consistency. And that’s what a copyedit and a proofread does: it brings your book up to the minimum industry standard.

Every time I mention this, I get comments and e-mails saying things like, “But if a reader likes the story, they’ll overlook misspellings, etc.” I’m just going to say this once, okay? ONLY IF THE READER IS YOUR MUM. Take an hour to read a few Amazon Customer Reviews and then see if you still feel the same way.

3. Social Media is About Connection

I am evidence that social media does sell books, but only if you don’t use it to sell books. This is something I’ll be blogging loads more about this month, but for now I’ll just say this: you can’t use Twitter, Facebook, etc. to blatantly sell your book, because no one will buy it. Being subjected to the hard sell is not why anyone is using those platforms. We’re there for one or more of the following reasons: connection, entertainment and valuable information. Where does you saying “My book is on Amazon now: just $4.99!” or “My book is out now. Buy it!” fit into those? Obviously it doesn’t. (And no, it’s not valuable information!) I have a little giggle to myself every time I meet someone with a business who mutters, “I really have to get on Facebook” or “We really should start tweeting” as if social media is California during the Gold Rush and all you’ve to do is show up and start digging and—hey presto!—you’re a millionaire. News flash: starting a Facebook page does not equal sales.

Worse than the shameless self-promoter is the person who has no interest in blogging, tweeting or using Facebook but reluctantly comes to the table to flog their wares anyway. If you don’t genuinely enjoy connecting and sharing with other people online, what are you doing there?

A presence online takes time to build, and it isn’t suitable for people who don’t really want to be there or who don’t have an instinct for how it all works. So if you’re planning to self-publish a book and your marketing plan is to tweet a link to its Amazon listing once an hour 24/7/365, you’ve failed before you’ve even begun.

4. You Can’t Sell New Concepts with Old Ways

In my experience if your book is only for sale online, you should only be promoting it online. Time and time again I see self-publishers with money to burn hiring publicists who draft press releases for them and then send them round to all the usual suspects—newspapers, radio shows, magazines, etc. This is totally pointless, especially in the beginning, unless your book has a specific local interest or something. If you want to spend money, you’d be far better off doing it on a Goodreads ad or a Kindle Nation sponsorship, i.e. a place where readers gather online. You need to let go of any existing ideas you may have about selling books (especially if you’ve been traditionally published in the past) and haul them—and yourself—into this brave new digital world.

In February 2011 a series of events meant that in the space of a week or so, I was featured in The Sunday Times and appeared on several national radio shows, including the second most listened to show in the country with an average of 400,000 listeners. As far as I could tell, it led to no bump in sales. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that when I read about a book in a newspaper, chances are I’ll later walk into a bookstore, see the book on the shelf and think, Oh, yeah. That’s that book I read about. I must get that. But when you read about a self-published/only for sale online book in the newspaper, there’s no chance encounter later to remind you of it. And since apparently you have to be reminded of something three times before you’ll take action and buy it, it never translates into sales.

John Locke famously spent a fortune on “real world” advertising all to no avail, but became the first self-published author to sell a million Kindle books when he started focusing online instead. Traditional methods for selling books just don’t work when those books aren’t being sold traditionally.

(Note: I’m not saying say no to print and radio interviews. Say yes! They’re great fun and will make you feel like a proper published author. And your relatives might even believe you now when you say you’re selling loads of books online. Just don’t pursue them as a means to advertising a book, because they’re not effective when the book isn’t widely available in stores.)

5. You Are Not The Next Amanda Hocking

In all probability you’re not, anyway. And I’m not talking about becoming the first household name success story of this modern e-book self-publishing era—I’m talking about having to do little other than upload your e-books to achieve stellar sales. As in, chances are you’re going to have to do a lot more than that to shift any copies at all.

Let me explain. As in all walks of life, some people get really lucky at this self-publishing e-books thing. They upload their e-book and sell thousands of copies the first week, without ever having blogged or advertised. They massively outsell self-publishers who have been at it for years, and they do it almost instantly. So we should copy them, right? We should find out what they’re doing and do it ourselves. Wouldn’t that make sense?

No, it wouldn’t. Because they’re the outliers. They’re the extremes. You’d be better off focusing on the people in the middle, the ones who never meet the bleak abyss of failure or the dizzying heights of success, but instead consistently sell and can tell you what they did to achieve it. As I’ve always said, it’s better to hear from me, a moderate seller who can say I did x, y and z to sell my books and you can do it too, then a mega-seller who isn’t quite sure how they managed to sell a hundred thousand books.

Think of it this way: You meet a newly published author who is now sitting atop the bestseller lists with a debut novel that scored her a top agent and a six-figure deal. A movie adaptation is in the works. She’s rich, successful and she has achieved a lifelong dream. How did you do it? you want to know. She says that she was interviewing for a position as her agent’s assistant when they got talking about a recent news story, and she said “I bet the girlfriend did it. Wouldn’t it make a great story if she did?” The agent instantly got dollar signs in his eyes, told her to forget about being a PA and instead go home and write a one-page synopsis, which she did, and seven days later she had her six-figure deal. Now, knowing this, what would you do about your own published writer dreams? Would you continue to polish your novel, write a synopsis, craft a query letter and politely submit to suitable agents and editors, or would you start scanning the jobs listing for admin openings at literary agencies and publishing houses?

(I sincerely hope it would be the former!)

Your model for success shouldn’t be an extreme, because chances are you’re not going to be one. Millions of authors have self-published but only a relative handful had found success comes easily. Instead, get ready to work really hard.

And read all my upcoming posts, of course…!

L-R: the gorgeous spa-style bathroom of the St. Regis San Francisco, which I loved, and the dirty deathtrap of a “shower” in our room at the [cough, cough] “Hotel” San Francisco in San Pedro, Guatemala. Which I did NOT.

I’m testing KDP again with Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America. It’s the story of me (loves Starbucks, boutique hotels and inactivity) going backpacking in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama (climbing active volcanos, sleeping on planks of wood, cockroaches, etc.) and it’s FREE between now and Wednesday 9th May for Kindle. So please, feel FREE (see what I did there?) to download it for yourself, or let your anti-backpacking friends with e-reading devices know that they are also FREE to download it for FREE from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. For FREE.

(FREE!)

See you on Monday!

[UPDATE May 5th: Woo-hoo: Freshly Pressed! Not quite sure how it happened but thanks Word Press—and hello to everyone who came here because of it. *waves* Do say hello below.]

May is How To Sell Self-Publish Books Month on Catherine, Caffeinated. Find out more about here, or read all related posts by paying a visit to the category page. Get every new post direct to you inbox by subscribing to this blog (see the sidebar or footer for the sign-up box).

Edit Where Edit’s Due: A Guest Post by Stephanie of Saltwater Publishing

3 Apr

Today we have a guest post by Stephanie Boner of Dublin-based Saltwater Publishing, about one of the most crucial aspects of publishing a book, be it traditional or self-publishing: editing. Here, she’ll explain the differences between things like copyediting and proofreading, what happens to a book when it’s being prepared for publication at a publishing house and allays a fear that I often hear self-publishers express—no, an editor isn’t going to correct or change your book, but work with you to make it a better version of itself. So, without further ado, here’s Stephanie: 

No matter what changes the advances in technology and printing may bring to the publishing industry, it is the quality of a book’s writing that will always be paramount. A well-written book does not just leap from the mind of the author onto the page; it needs to be sculpted, honed and nurtured.

With the rise in popularity of self-publishing, the role of the traditional publisher is viewed as being increasingly unnecessary. While this in itself may not be such a bad thing, one does not want to throw one’s baby out with the bath water. In other words, while the growing culture of self-publishing has allowed the author new autonomy and control, the necessity of having a good editor is as important today as it ever was.

Of course, the editor does not claim to be more skilled a writer than the author; the most accomplished writers in the world need editors, after all. An editor, however, provides an author with two things. Firstly, as all writers know, writing, especially fiction, is an all-consuming activity. The old hackneyed cliché of the novel being the writer’s baby is an effective one, in that, like a parent, it is difficult to criticise or assess something with which you are so emotionally intimate. An editor approaches a manuscript with fresh eyes, without preconceptions and with the all-important benefit of distance. With their experience and skills, they use this distance to analyse a piece of writing in a way that is simply not possible for the loving parent. They know what works and what doesn’t. They offer ways out of the labyrinth when the writer is facing a dead end. This kind of analysis is not a luxury. It is the essential bridge between the ideas of the author and the demands and expectations of a reader.

Secondly, professional editors are essentially giant nerds. The glee they get from spotting a hyphen that should be an en-dash, or from being asked to explain what an Oxford comma is, might seem a tad pathetic, but they have the necessary skills for assuring the baby doesn’t leave the house with food on his face. So while an author may miss a comma or two, worrying about the nuances and subtleties of plot development and character, the editor can be relied on to wield her trusty red pen and set the world to rights.

When a book is published through the traditional channels, the manuscript is put through a number of processes before it is deemed worthy of the printer’s ink and every self-published work is worthy of exactly the same rigorous process. In the current market, where the number of self-published books is exploding and all traditional publishing houses are turning towards digital publishing, an author must do everything they can to take on the competition.

This process varies dramatically from publishing house to publishing house but generally speaking, once the contract has been signed, the manuscript is designated an editor. This editor reads and assesses the work and gives it a structural edit. This is done either in consultation or in conjunction with the author. There is usually a list of suggestions sent back to the author, advising him to move around some sections, to develop a character, to deal with issues of consistency and so on. Very significant changes may be suggested at this stage or it may be that author and editor are, from the outset, very much on the same page, so to speak.

Once the overall structure and form has been agreed on, the manuscript is copy-edited. This is a much narrower process, focusing on the detail of each line and paragraph of text. At this stage, the editor looks at issues such as tone, syntax, and continuity. They consider the consistency of the speech patterns of the characters, the logic of the sequence of events, anachronisms, repetition and the like. Once this is complete, the author is handed back their new and improved baby to ensure that they are happy with its development and if not, revisions are made.

Finally, in most cases, a new editor comes on board to proofread the copy. This takes place after the text has been formatted for print or eBook. It is a finicky and fastidious exercise, where one is consumed with such geeky issues as word breaks, leading and kerning. Of course, all spelling and grammar is checked again to ensure it is just so. Before the manuscript is sent off to press or uploaded into the ether of the internet, it is given one final going over before we say our tearful farewells and the baby takes its first steps into the big, bad world.

For writers who intend to self-publish, their work is put at an immediate disadvantage if it is not subject to the same process and brought to trade standard. While everyone knows someone who’s good at spotting spelling mistakes and who is willing to throw their eye over something for you in exchange for a pint, it is not quite the same thing. Allowing a manuscript to be assessed and polished by experienced and professional editors, using the tried and tested processes that have stood the test of time in the publishing industry, truly makes the work shine.

Essentially, an editor would not be doing the job they do if they didn’t love books. This love translates into a desire to see books fulfill their potential and therefore editor and author share a common goal. To produce the best book possible, it is imperative that the author and editor enjoy a positive and open relationship. Another hackneyed cliché we hear bandied about is that of the editor taking a sharp scalpel to a manuscript. But in reality this is not at all what we do. We tend to take a much less ruthless and more collaborative approach to a book. It is, after all, the author’s baby.

Established in 2010 by Publishing Directors Stephanie Boner and Maeve Convery, Saltwater is an independent publishing and editorial services company based in Dublin. Along with our trade publications, we specialise in editing and proofreading for authors who intend to self-publish. Feel free to contact us at info@saltwater.ie or at (01) 2449488.

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