Today Commander Chris Hadfield returns to earth from the International Space Station. His stay there has been, I think, NASA’s biggest public relations win since Apollo 11 landed on the moon. He has just been amazing: tweeting images, recording videos and just generally reminding people, in a fun and inspiring way, that there’s not only a Space Station up there but people in it. The bad news for us—the good news for him, I’m sure—is that he returns to earth today. I’m sure his enthusiasm for manned space exploration and his PR skills will be put to good use here as well, but in the meantime, he has created this truly amazing, wonderful, awe-inspiring, delightful, funny and utterly perfect goodbye gift.

I may be heightening expectations here so I’ll just shut up, but please watch it. You won’t regret it.

Thank you, Commander.

Safe journey home.

Do you like answering questions? Do you love a good survey? Do you delight in being asked for your opinion? Then step right up! Because I have just the thing for you….

As you’ll already know, I don’t just blog and write about self-publishing: I talk to people about it as well.

These speaking engagements are usually either a full day’s course, which is just me taking the participants through self-publishing from A to Z, or smaller, introductory style things, where I might aim to give an overview of the process in an hour and a half or two. I always aim to achieve at least what I consider to be the most important thing: to give the soon-to-be self-published author a roadmap, to give them the whole picture so they know the repercussions of, say, not choosing a cover design that works in thumbnail size and black or white, or why the actual self-publishing bit isn’t at the start of the process, but just after the middle of it. That’s what I wish I had back when I started self-publishing. Because although the logistics of self-publishing, like formatting an e-book, are easy to find laid out step-by-step online—including on this blog—it’s harder to find someone who will say ‘Well, first you must think of this…’ and ‘We do this now because we’ll need that later…’ and ‘For the love of fudge, don’t use tabs!’ Even before we get to that, it’s much easier to take things in when someone is telling you them. Scrolling through the internet is nowhere near as much fun.

But I’ve only ever done these talks here in Ireland, or in London. So if you live anywhere else and your self-publishing budget doesn’t consist of blocks of gold bullion, it’s not really possible for you to attend. Then when I was in Orlando in February and I met up with the lovely Duolit girls, they told me about Udemy, a service that allows you to upload and sell video courses online, which the buyers of can then access whenever they want.

I’m thinking of doing this, and I want to gauge whether or not you think it’s a good idea, whether or not you’d be interested and how much you think is a fair price to pay for it.

Warning: I may ignore every single thing I learn from this post, and do what I was planning regardless. We’ll see.

So, please read the information below and then answer the questions. You can also tell me what you think in the comments below. Thank you in advance!

The Plan

Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Online Course to Self-Publishing will consist of three parts. Each one will stand alone, or you can get all three for the full experience. They’ll be based on the full-day self-publishing course I do in person, and will break down into three parts:

• Preparing to Self-Publish
• Self-Publish an E-book and POD Paperback
• Launch and Sell Your Self-Published Book Online

Each of these will consist of a ‘main’ video (i.e. me talking to you) and supporting course materials in PDF (i.e. instructions for to print out and refer to if need be). The PDF materials will include Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing. The videos will include on-screen, real time, step-by-step, click-this-button-and-then-click-that-one type instructions.

Before anyone says it: I’m not going to make an e-book only video. Producing a POD paperback is just an add on to the e-book process, really, and so it doesn’t warrant a video of its own. Everything ties in, so they go in one video.

There will also be a free to view preview video to give you an idea of what the course content is like.

The Pricing

Each video will be around 1.5 hours long and cost $49.

That’s about £29 or €36, per video.

To compare, my full-day course price ranges from $160 to $255. (The prices are set by the organizers, not by me.) That’s a range of £102 to £164, or  €125 to €200.

So one day with me telling you in person: anywhere from $160 to $255.

Four and a half hours of me telling you via the magic of video: $150-ish. Plus you get lots of extra materials, you can go through it as many times as you like, and you don’t have to leave your house.

You’ll also be able to buy all three videos in one for $125.

The Credentials

Please take into account that I’m experienced at this—both talking about self-publishing and doing it myself. I’ve done events for:

• Faber Academy (London)
• Publishing Ireland
• The Inkwell Group (Dublin)
• Chipping Norton Literary Festival (UK)
• Waterford Writers’ Weekend (Ireland)
• Mountains to Sea Festival (Co. Dublin, Ireland)
• Irish PEN
• LitNet NI (Belfast)
• National Union of Journalists (Ireland)
• Women in Journalism (UK)

and this summer, I’ll be doing a Guardian Masterclass in London too.

And here are some things people have said about Self-Printed:

• “The BEST book on self-publishing … Seriously, GET THIS NOW!” –David Wright, co-author of the bestselling YESTERDAY’S GONE series
• “The best thing about Catherine is that she not only lives the dream, but offers you a stepladder up to join her. The advice she gives is utterly practical and the whole [book] is suffused with humour. I am a fan.” –Alison Baverstock, author of IS THERE A BOOK IN YOU? & senior lecturer on the Publishing MA at Kingston University (UK)
• “An exceptional breath of realism, real knowledge and hard experience–don’t dream of self-publishing your book without it.” –Nicola Morgan, award-winning author of 90 books–including the Carnegie-nominated WASTED and WRITE TO BE PUBLISHED– and the blog Help! I Need a Publisher!

And please do add your comments below…

‘From last summer, when I officially decided to self-publish my first novel, Benevolent, until now, I have gone through many stages of publishing. You could label these stages logically, like “editing,” “cover creation,” or “launching.” You could also label them emotionally.

The current stage is depressed.

Yeah, yeah; publishing your first book and launching it is exciting. For about a second. Because what happens next, when you self-publish, is almost always going to be a resounding silence. The dreaded yellow light. The I-just-spent-months-getting-bloggers-to-host-me-and-herding-people-to-my-reading-and-even-the-newpaper-featured-me-and-everyone-said-they-love-the-book chasm of what next?. It’s not easy. It makes me want to curl up with tater tots and red wine and all six seasons of Ugly Betty. (Okay, so I do succumb, some.) Who knows what’s calling to you? I’m betting it’s not Irish jigs and flowing bubbly, not anymore.

So, really, what next?

In my ideal world, I would spend the next seventy years during the work day sipping tea in my study (I don’t actually have one of those, yet), spending about half of each day promoting my last book and the other half writing the next one. Well, ideally I would be kicking back and just writing away in Tahiti and not giving a fig about promotion, but let’s at least shoot for attainable dreams, okay? And this can happen, as long as some people buy each book along the way. Several thousand, really. And then I have to keep publishing.

Well, I’m willing to keep up my end of the writing-publishing (and even marketing) bargain, as long as a whole lotta someone elses hold up their end of the buying-reading.

The issue is first and foremost one of perspiration. Then one of endurance. (Sounds sporty, doesn’t it?) If you haven’t put your blood, sweat, and tears into your book creating, editing and promoting, you need to move back a step and do that. But now that I have, I am back into the endurance phase. Actually, I never left it and I may never leave the endurance phase, which is why it is called endurance. Every day carries with it the choice to keep working at selling one book and writing another. Let’s face it: on the day of my reading I was too busy celebrating to work. So all emotional phases of writing are wrought with pitfalls.

It is completely normal for a book to lag in sales until it catches one big (or many smaller) wave(s) of interest, somewhere, somehow. In the meantime, you have to keep the book afloat, keep the dream alive. Plenty of days are going to feel like the desert of no- or even negative-feedback. Elongate your perspective and keep on moving, even on the most hopeless of days. If you give up now, it’s true: you’ll never make it. The only way to get to what you want is to thunk one foot down in front of the tentative other, day after day after day.

And here’s what you do next: You continue to be present on the internet, looking for people to try your book or to promote you. You talk about your book, to strangers or to bookstore audiences or to newspaper editors. You do more giveaways, more Tweets, keep blogging. You enter contests, beg for reviews. And you write. That’s what’s at the heart of all this, and that’s what has got me back in the game. I sat down yesterday (trying to ignore the three-star rating that had just blemished my GoodReads reputation), and started in on chapter two of the book I have been waiting to write, all this time. And I loved it! I do love it. That’s why I chose writing as a career. And I’m sure there are a bazillion more times when editing, publishing and marketing are going to feel blah. Thank goodness, then, that I will still have writing.

But love is a tricky word. In my world, love isn’t always a tickly, wonderful feeling. Love is equate-able with commitment. Sure, sometimes you feel warm and fuzzy toward your mom, but most the time you’re just being loyal when you accept her invitation to coffee. That’s love. So you sometimes have writer’s block? You still love writing. You are a writer. Any hey, we’re right back where we were a few paragraphs ago: endurance. Cuz even in-love people get depressed.

Choose each day to be a writer, and you’re already there.’

About Devon:

Devon is a writer in the Durham, North Carolina area. She is originally from metro Detroit, Michigan. She is a mommy, a wife, a hobby yogi, photographer, painter, and foodie. She has been writing seriously since her very earliest brushes with literature, and has published articles, poems, and photography in literary journals and magazines. She was an assistant editor and freelance editor for 10 years, during which she wrote copy for and contributed to various research materials. She has been blogging since 2008, first with The Green Notebook and then with The Starving Artist. She has started living her dream with the independent release of her first novel, Benevolent.

About Benevolent:

Gaby LeFevre is a suburban, Midwestern firecracker, growing up in the 80s and 90s and looking to save the world one homeless person, centenarian, and orphan at a time. With her crew of twin sister, Annie, smitten Mikhail, frenemy Mel, she’s a pamphlet-wielding humanitarian, tackling a broken world full of heroes and heroines, villains and magical seeds, and saturated with variations of the Northwyth legends.

Beginning with a roadkill-burying nine-year-old and a gas-leak explosion, Benevolent follows Gaby from her formative years; through her awakening (during a soup kitchen stampede); through high school drama; a college career filled with an epic term paper, a building fire, and a protest-gone-bad; to Israel, a land full of romance and mysticism. It all ends back in metro-Detroit with a cataclysmic clash to resolve all good intentions. Accidents abound in Gaby’s life. As does love. And, thankfully, as does mercy.

Meanwhile, Benevolent is woven with tales of The Queen, The Angel, Jaden the Great, and The Sage. Are they figments of John’s and Mercedes’ imaginative stories? Or are they something more? You’ll want to find out for yourself.

Find out more on www.devontrevarrowflaherty.com and www.benevolentthenovel.com.

Thanks Devon!

We all know I love publishers. I still hope, should I ever finish The Novel, to be published by one of them. Say silly things like legacy or gatekeepers, or use something as serious and tragic as the Irish potato famine—or rape or Stockholm Syndrome, for that matter—to describe the relationship between the author and the business that has risked its money to get that author’s book to market, and you go straight onto my Naughty List.

(Well, there isn’t actually a Naughty List. Who has the time? I will roll my eyes at you though.)

I don’t believe for a second, for instance, what is pretty much an accepted ‘fact’ by the majority of the self-publishing community: that traditional publishers don’t publicize and/or care about the books they publish. I’ve seen for myself that this is simply not true. The bad publishers might not, but it’s up to you not to sign contracts with them. (Or at least not sign contracts with them twice, or tarnish all publishers with the same brush just because of one experience.) Even if I took away what I’ve seen firsthand, there would still be the evidence of logic: publishing is a business, and any business that isn’t run by morons wants to recoup their investment, i.e. any advance paid, printing and staff costs. They market and publicize and support their product as much as they can because it’s in their interests for it to sell.

Here’s a nice relaxing photo for you this Monday morning. You’re welcome!

Anyway, I tell you this because I want to make it clear that despite my self-publishing background, I ain’t a publisher-basher. But there is one area where some of them do need a stern talking to, and that’s their attitude towards using social media to promote their books. The Big Ones are all over it (that’s probably why they’re The Big Ones) but others aren’t even making an effort, which is crazy as they’re the ones who stand to benefit the most on the internet’s level playing field.

This is something they have in common with a lot of self-publishers, as luck would have it, so let’s talk about this attitude and the reasons behind it here today.

Do any of these statements sound at all familiar?

• ‘But does Twitter really sell books? So-and-so has 10,000 followers and he only sold 500 books…’
• ‘Ugh. I can’t be bothered with Facebook and all that silly stuff.’
• ‘Why waste your time on that when books have sold fine without all this rubbish until now?’
• ‘There’s no evidence social media does anything except suck away time.’
• ‘I have NEVER bought a book because someone on Goodreads recommended it to me. NEVAAAH!’
• ‘Is this over yet? Call me when Twitter is gone.’
• (From the writer) ‘But I want just to WRITE!’

I talked about this recently in a post called The Author Platform: Are You Being Cautious… Or Just Lazy? But I think beyond caution and laziness, there’s yet another reason why you might be turning your nose up at the idea of using social media to sell books: you might have it all wrong. The phrases using social media to sell books and promoting your books on social networks offer no real, tangible, practical clues as to how one might do such a thing, and once you start throwing around buzzwords like discoverability, the process becomes even murkier still.

So I think it’s time we demystified this whole selling-books-with-social-media thing. Because maybe if we took your average Social Media Skeptic and explained to them, in practical, tangible terms, what it actually means, they’d feel differently.

Using social media to promote your book is not anything magic or mystical. It’s not a hit-or-miss fuzzy cloud from which success only rarely emerges. It’s just the simple act of:

1. Finding readers who liked a book like yours
2. Telling them about your one.

As the meerkats would say, simples!

And here’s another one… (Because who wants pictures of Twitter logos? BORING!)

But Wait… Does It REALLY Sell Books?

Yes, it does. It sold mine, it sells the books of my self-published friends, and it’s worked wonders for countless traditionally published titles. But most of the time, we can’t prove it. No one listens to self-publishers because for some reason self-published success is still treated like a total fluke. Even when the author says ‘Well, I did this and then I did this and then sales really picked up when I started doing this’, no one listens. They just think wasn’t he lucky?! And publishing houses use lots of different methods to sell books, so they can’t really say for sure why a certain book was a bestseller, only that, as a whole, the campaign worked. The other problem is that it doesn’t sell all the books, and the skeptics latch on to each Twitter-flavored failure and hold it up as high as they can. If it fails, it means they don’t have to worry about it.

But tell me what, besides Oprah or the New York Times, can be guaranteed to sell thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions copies of a book? Two books get great media coverage, meet you inside the door of every major bookstore and collect glowing reviews. One ends up selling a million copies, and the other disappears without a trace. Why? Because that’s just how it goes! That’s how publicity pans out. Sometimes it works, and we don’t know exactly why, and sometimes it doesn’t, and we can’t say for sure what went wrong.

The beauty of social media is that, should it fail, the only thing you’ve spent, for the most part, is time.

The other benefit is that what you have done has been targeted to readers who like books like yours. Spend money on a radio ad, for example, and you don’t know who’ll hear it. But get your crime novel reviewed or mentioned on a crime book blog, or reviewed by an influential crime novel-loving Goodreads user, and you know that promotion hit home. People always want to know time-saving tricks for using social media, but social media itself is a time-saving trick, because it cuts you a path to your target market.

Much like Salon’s recent spate of anti-self-publishing articles*, we should also look at these so-called failures a little closer. When someone says ‘I used Twitter and it didn’t work’, is that really evidence that Twitter doesn’t sell books? Were they using it right? Like I said last Friday, it’s like having a treadmill in your garage, failing to lose 30 pounds and then concluding that treadmills don’t lead to weight loss. Did you use the treadmill? Did you eat right? Did you avoid those knock-off Choc Ices from Aldi? I congratulate you if you did, because they’re delicious…

We may have wandered slightly off topic here.

Anyway, social media can sell books. I know it can, because that’s how I sold mine—and how countless self-published friends sold theirs (a lot more of them than me), including a few who’ve sold more than 100,000—and because that’s how I now find out about a lot of the new books I buy and authors I decide to try. (Ooh, look: I’m a poet and I… am unaware.) Even if you don’t buy that, you can’t deny that the readers are out there, online. Twelve million of them on Goodreads. A thriving book-loving community on Twitter. And then there’s the fans and subscribers of countless book blogs, author websites, etc. They are there. You can’t deny that. And if you’re a reader, you’ll know that a good book recommendation is the best thing after a good book. We want to hear about the new books. We want to add to our To Read pile. And if you don’t bother telling me about your book, one of your competitors will get in there and tell me about theirs instead.

I want to go to there. 

Engagement, Not Advertising

But it’s not advertising, and so saying ‘oh, so-and-so has 10,000 followers and he only sold 1,000 books, therefore social media doesn’t sell books’ means you don’t get any Pretend Choc Ices.

This is really, at the end of the day, about good content. Create good content, post that content, drive eyeballs to that content, convince me with your cover and your blurb and your advance praise and your writer’s credentials to hit the ‘Buy’ button and—ta-daa!—you’ve sold me a book. And by good content we mean something that stands alone as entertainment or useful information, even if you took away the advertising-a-book-bit.

Examples of this would be:

• My self-publishing blog posts
• Matt Haig’s posts for Book Trust
• Dead Good Books by Random House (who owe me at least enough to cover two months’ credit card bills, at this stage)
• The book trailer for You Had Me At Hello

While we’re on the subject of book trailers, STOP WITH THE MOVIE-STYLE ONES, for the love of fudge. Even if they work, they sell just one book—to me, the person watching it. But make it funny, make it entertaining or make it not really about the book at all, and not only will I buy the book, but I’ll pass the book trailer on.

For example, boring with a capital B:

Yawn.

But wait, LET ME STICK THIS UP ON FACEBOOK AT ONCE!

I read a great line about content during the week (from a graph on Pinterest, of all places): valuable content earns you permission to sell. Write it on a prominent Post-It, people.

Or read this great post on The Creative Penn which talks about this being not social media marketing but content marketing, with social media is just the delivery system.

The Numbers You Can’t Deny

Even if you don’t believe that social media can be used to sell books, here is a number you can’t deny: 12,000,000. That’s how many users Goodreads has. That’s a website where only people who love to read books and share the books they’ve read love to go. Twelve million. And that’s before we even think about the readers on Twitter, or Facebook, or blogs.

And remember: Goodreads, at its core, is about personal recommendations. We follow someone whose taste we trust, we see that she liked a certain book, we think we’ll like it too. Five years ago I would’ve finished a book I loved and told a couple of friends about it. Now, I can share it on Goodreads, tweet about it, blog about it, stick it up on Facebook… Word-of-mouth is still what makes a bestseller. What’s changed is that word-of-mouth now involves a lot more people, and because there’s a lot more people, it can benefit a lot more books.

We don’t know where Twitter and Facebook and all that malarkey will be in five or ten years’ time, but I think it’s safe to say that social reading is here to stay. So at the very least, you should be turning your head towards that.

The readers are out there. They want to know what to read next. And you’re publishing books. You two need to get it on.

I’m one of these readers. That’s why I can say this with a degree of confidence. Nearly all the new books I read (new releases but also authors I haven’t read before) now find their way into my consciousness via Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads or a blog post. Just this past week it happened with Just What Kind of Mother Are You? and My Criminal World, and I’m counting down the days until I can get my hands on a copy of The Silent Wife (which the internet just seems to refuse to shut up about, and tortuously it’s not out until July).

All you have to do is find us, tell us about your book through good content, a book which we should be predisposed to liking because it’s similar to other books we have publicly expressed a love for in the past, and finally aim to convince us, through the book itself (cover, blurb, etc.) to buy it.

No voodoo involved.

(Seriously: 2,015 words. And I wonder why The Novel isn’t finished!)

*Salon are really having a laugh lately. First of all we had I’m a Self-Publishing Failure, and the internet whispers tell me that the guy didn’t have an e-book for sale, and then we had The future  is no fun—self-publishing is the worst, which was about a newly self-published author trying to promote his book through the same channels that had promoted the books he’d previously got traditionally published, like newspapers, TV, etc. which is just stoopid. Trad books=trad media. Self-published books=online media, i.e. the place where nearly all the self-published books are sold. I mean, REALLY. 

What do you think? If you’re not using social media to promote your books, why not? And does selling books this way work on you? How do you find out about the books you read? 

I know Sunday Coffee Reads has been a bit patchy of late, but so has my presence at my desk. May, however, is a beautiful month clear of any events or speaking commitments, and my To Do list is really getting beaten into submission. So hopefully Sunday Coffee Reads will be making more regular appearances this month.

This week’s coffee shot was brought to you by Le Cocodile on the promenade in Nice, France. Bliss!

Onto this week’s tweets…

7 extremely unhelpful tips for writers huff.to/15S9mlW

— HuffPost Books (@HuffPostBooks) April 26, 2013

Three writers file federal class action-seeking lawsuit claiming Author Solutions cheated them out of royalties. courthousenews.com/2013/04/30/571…

— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) May 1, 2013

Lovely guest blogs on writers and stationery on @thewomensroom @jennycolgan bit.ly/104CcaM and @jillmansell bit.ly/104Ce2y

— Waffle (@BelgianWaffling) May 2, 2013

Hmmm RT @neilmorrison: Interesting……. Facebook deserted by millions of users in biggest markets gu.com/p/3fezj/tw via @guardian

— Suzanne Collier (@SuzanneCollier) April 28, 2013

“‘Legacy’ #publishing, as if having a past as strong as @faberbooks…is some kind of albatross.” @philipdsjones ow.ly/kyYbr

— Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) April 30, 2013

And this one will really only make sense to my Irish readers, but it’s so good I had to include it:

Have you guys seen @derekf03 Vincent Browne song? It’s BRILLIANT! Big grin this morning bit.ly/102NOfl

— Vanessa O’Loughlin (@inkwellHQ) May 1, 2013

Until next week…

Come back Monday for my thoughts on the horrifying disconnect between what ‘social media’ actually is and what some publishers/some self-publishers think it is, and more about disused and dusty treadmills… (It’ll all make sense, trust me!)

Yes, even my Power Point presentations are pink. 

Social Media is Just Like a Treadmill Really!

Blaming social media for not coming through is like blaming an unused treadmill, said Catherine Ryan Howard, author, marketeer and social media guru extraordinaire last Friday as she explained the inevitable question of whether or not social media actually helps sell more books. ’This is a question I get asked a lot’, she said, ‘and the answer is that it absolutely does!’ ’Having twitter, not using it right and then blaming it for not boosting your sales is like having a treadmill, not using it and blaming it for not losing any weight!’

Social Media for Publishers kicked off last Friday with a motley crew encompassing every sector from digital projects to marketing and editorial as social media guru Catherine Ryan Howard took us through the do’s and don’ts of how to sell your books through social media.

From the inescapable growth of Facebook and Goodreads to newer kid on the block Pinterest (which is by the way the fastest growing social network ever), Catherine offered a practical and no-holes barred approach to making your books more ‘discovereable’- a word which Catherine herself admits a certain hatred of!

Among the key points to take away from the session were simple and time-effective ways to use social media tools- and the right tools!, setting the right tone for your message, and, most importantly, accepting the fact that social media, in whatever tool it comes under is here to stay!

‘The seminar was very helpful and informative. Catherine’s lively and engaging presentation was excellent; she helped to dispel a lot of misconceptions about social media and provided very useful examples of how different elements/formats of social media are particularly applicable to publishing and, if utilised appropriately, can have a positive impact to create engagement with the book buyers we want to appeal to.’ –Helena King, Assistant Editor, Royal Irish Academy

‘The seminar was extremely relevant- Catherine was articulate and very engaging!’ – Kitty Lyddon, Manager, Assistant Editor at The Lilliput Press

Missed this one? Never mind, we have more seminars coming up in the series over the next couple of weeks. Keep an eye out for our next sessions on Fiction Editing with Rachel Pierce on 10 and 17 May. For more information, go to the Publishing Ireland website or email stephanie@publishingireland.com.

____________

Thanks Stephanie! While we’re on the subject of me telling people things, if you have attended one of my talks or workshops, didn’t find it completely awful/a total snoozefest and would consider writing a little endorsement like the quotes above, please write a few lines and send it to me via the Contact page. It’s for a secret summer project of mine… (Oooh, mysterious!)

On another related note, I will be talking self-publishing at the Guardian’s Getting Your Book Published Masterclass in London on June 15-16. Details here. 

You can also follow Stephanie on Twitter here, and Publishing Ireland on Twitter here. To get new posts in your inbox look for the subscribe button over here —> and probably up a bit. 

Have a good weekend! 

‘Since you are reading Catherine’s blog, you’ve no doubt accepted by now that you’re a writer. But just in case you haven’t or if you’ve been having doubts of late, here are 11 signs that you truly are meant to be writing – and always have been!

1. You bust out long emails without even flinching, and even your signature is like a paragraph long. Sometimes you start an email with the words “In a bit of a rush, so just a quick reply,” and still manage to bang out enough text for a Kindle Singles essay.

2. You’re the person who buys 10 postcards on holiday and actually delights in writing them. Oh, and each one has a different story on it, because writing the same thing to all 10 of your friends would feel like cheating.

3. You’ve dreamed of sitting in front of a typewriter/ computer and pouring your heart out on to it ever since you can remember. Whether your first inspiration was Clark Kent working at the fast-paced Daily Planet, or Carrie Bradshaw staring longingly out of her window in her knickers and a pair of sparkly earrings, you’ve wanted to do that forever.

4. You work your thoughts out better with a pen and paper than discussing the situation through verbally. If you’re trying to make a decision, make sense of something, or plan ahead for the weekend, it’s that trusty notebook and pen that you make a grab for first.

5. Staying home on a Friday night with a glass of wine and a good book sounds pretty much like you died and went to heaven.

6. You read the back of cereal packets and think about what you would write in place of the current copy (and think to yourself how you’d do a much better job at it).

7. You’re able to articulate and get your point across far better with written words than over the phone. Whenever you’re given a customer service number, your first question is, “is there an email address I can use?”

8. You’ve actually Googled “Can I expense coffee/ tea?” before.

Laura’s newest venture, The Write Life magazine.

9. You read everything you can get your hands on, including the free leaflets from the supermarket or the book of coupons from the drug store.

10. You can’t walk past a stationery shop without popping in, “just to have a look.”

11. While you couldn’t give a hoot about playing Monopoly or Settlers of Catan, put a box of Scrabble or Scattegories in front of you and you suddenly get very competitive. That dinner party just got way more interesting.

How many did you nod your head along to? Many of us have wondered at one point or another what we need to do or achieve before we can legitimately call ourselves “a writer.” If that sounds remotely like you, stop that. If you truly love writing you probably know it and you always have, and that’s the only permission you need. Okay?’

Thanks, Laura! My number is 8, and it’ll be 9 in a minute after I Google “Can I expense coffee?”. My favorite part of Sex and the City was when Carrie sat at her little desk to write, but alas, my reality of this involves sweatpants, a tiny box room and a view of suburbia. Oh, well. 

Laura Pepper Wu is a writer and the editor for The Write Life Magazine: a lifestyle magazine for those of us who write. Check it out at TheWriteLifeMagazine.com. Laura is also the founder of Ladies Who Critique and 30 Day Books. Outside of her many writing-related ventures, she spends her time walking her spoiled dog in rainy Seattle, checking out local coffee shops, and learning (quite hopelessly) how to sing jazz. Connect with Laura on Twitter @laurapepwu.

Me: Please explain to us what exactly are your Book Design Templates, and how self-published authors can use them. 

Joel: They are Microsoft Word template files specifically designed for authors who want to do their own book formatting. A template file is simply a pre-formatted layout used to make new documents with the same design. There are 9 different designs, and each is available in standard book sizes as well as in ebook versions.

The templates allow you to quickly create a book interior because all the basic work has been done for you. The templates are sized properly and contain all the Word style definitions needed to format the text in your book. Not only that, they come with the fonts you need as well as an extensive Formatting Guide that walks you through the process of getting your text into the template.

M: You know there are self-publishers reading this now who can’t imagine why they’d need to use one of these templates. Here’s your chance to convince them… 

J: Well, let me tell you Catherine, that there are a lot of authors who need something like this. The reason I say that is because I see a lot of self-published books, and most of them contain formatting errors. And I don’t mean errors like forgetting to put in your chapter title, I mean errors in book construction.

Now there’s no reason an author can’t do the same thing herself. What the template accomplishes for you is to make sure your file is set up properly, that it looks good, that you’re using appropriate fonts, and that your book will conform to industry standards. So we’ve taken care of most of the work for you, and at a very reasonable price. I think that’s pretty cool.

M: Your website, TheBookDesigner.com, is a treasure trove of advice for the self-publishing author (that I recommend to other self-publishers all the time). What do you think is the ONE thing self-publishers need to know about producing a professional-looking print book? 

J: If you want to create a package that gives your book the best chance of success, there are things you can do. First, for your cover, I strongly recommend hiring a professional cover designer, and this expense will be well worthwhile.

For those authors who plan to produce their own book interiors, you’ll need to learn about how books are put together, where each part is supposed to be in relation to other parts of the book, how we separate sections and number pages, and all the minutia of book construction.

Your other choices are to hire a book designer to format your interior, or you might want to take a look at our book templates, which take care of most of this stuff for you.

M: Once upon a time I didn’t understand why self-publishers would start Chapter 1 on page 1 when, presumably, there were traditionally published books on their shelves at home that they could pick up and refer to for guidance at any time. But since then I’ve made mistakes in my own paperbacks (such as not realizing that using MS Word’s sections feature, I can ensure that my blank pages are actually blank) so I can see how it happens. Why do you think it’s so difficult for self-publishers to get their print interiors right, especially considering that there are also—hopefully—avid readers? 

J: Yes, it’s curious, isn’t it? I think I know why this happens, too. Almost all of us have grown up with books, and we were introduced to them even before we could read, when Mum or Dad would read us to sleep.

Consequently, we pretty much take books for granted. They seem like such dead simple parts of ordinary life, we can’t imagine that there’s anything complicated about them at all.

It’s only when you try to create a real book yourself that it slowly dawns on you that the apparently simple object actually has lots of parts, many details that need to be decided, and a whole raft of centuries-old conventions that need to be followed if you don’t want to create uneasiness in your readers.

M: Anyone who has ever tried to format their manuscript for upload to Smashwords or KDP knows that MS Word is indeed the devil. But why is it so difficult to make a good looking paperback interior with it? What are the biggest hurdles? 

J: That’s pretty funny, Catherine. Of course, Microsoft Word is a brilliant program when it’s applied to its intended uses, mostly in an office environment. It makes it easy to create memos, reports, flyers, and many other common documents.

But it was never designed as a typesetting program, or intended for book layout. I can’t tell you how many self-published books I’ve seen with really horrible errors, like running heads on the title page, blank pages with page numbers, text that floats around the page, and formatting inconsistencies throughout.

Our templates were designed to get authors over those hurdles without them having to become Word ninjas. The template makes it easy.

M: The reaction to the Book Design Templates, from what I’ve seen, has been amazing. Has this surprised you? And what’s next for The Book Designer? 

J: Right away it was obvious that we had hit on something people really wanted. Instead of struggling with Word for hour after frustrating hour, and not even getting the result you want after all that work, authors saw right away that the template would free them from the drudgery and mistakes. I love that.

What’s on the horizon? We’ll keep expanding the template line, since we’re getting regular requests for sizes and styles we haven’t had a chance to develop yet.

And I’ll break some news here too. My next business will go in the opposite direction. I’m working right now on setting up a business to provide done-for-you professional-level book interiors based on the outstanding typography produced by Adobe InDesign and employing my own award-winning book designs.

I can’t say any more about that yet, but I’m pretty excited about it. This way, no matter how an author wants to get their book done—by themselves using the software they already own and know how to use, or with professional typesetting—I’ll be able to help them get into print.

For over 25 years I’ve been an advocate for self-publishing, and I love helping authors get their books done and into the hands of readers. That’s my mission, whether it’s on my blog, with these templates, or any of the other ways I try to help authors realize their publishing dreams.

* * * * *

Thanks so much Joel! And if you’re interested in these templates, I have great news: Joel is offering Catherine, Caffeinated readers a whopping 46% off until April 30 on http://www.bookdesigntemplates.com! Just enter the coupon code template46 at checkout.

If you don’t want to go the template route, there’s also the very helpful Book Construction Blueprint, a fantastic resource for anyone creating their own books, and it’s available for free on the template site. You can find that here.

Joel Friedlander (@JFBookman) is an award-winning book designer, a blogger, and the author of A Self-Publisher’s Companion: Expert Advice for Authors Who Want to Publish. He’s been launching the careers of self-publishers since 1994 and writes TheBookDesigner.com, a popular blog on book design, book marketing and the future of the book. Joel is also the founder of the online training course, The Self-Publishing Roadmap.

May contain cucumber sandwiches. 

With big names splashed all over the program, military-level organization (in a good way!) and five-star accommodation for authors, it’s hard to believe that this was only the second year of ChipLitFest. I was delighted to be invited to do a ‘ChipLit Chunk’ — a two-hour workshop on self-publishing followed by half an hour of coffee and cake with my participants afterwards — and since my big regret at Waterford Writers’ Weekend was not having enough time to attend anyone else’s sessions, I made sure to grab some ChipLitFest tickets as well.

The main house at Heythrop Park.

ChipLitFest are famous for looking after their authors, which is how I ended up at the stunning Crowne Plaza hotel at Heythrop Park. On 400-hundred-and-something acres, it was like waking up on the grounds of the palace of Versailles in the morning—especially since on Saturday it was all clear blue skies and warm sun. I checked in at the (well-stocked!) authors’ Green Room, collecting my ‘Author’ badge to wear for the day. And there was a even little thank you card from Clare Mackintosh, the founder of ChipLitFest, who invited me. Such a lovely touch!

No, thank YOU!

My event, The Art of Self-Publishing,took place in one of the most adorable bookshops I’ve ever been in: Jaffe & Neale. In my daydreams about one day opening my own bookshop/cafe, it’s the interior of Jaffe & Neale’s that I’d hope to recreate: plenty of books yet plenty of space, and coffee tables not collected in a far corner but actually dotted around the bookshop. I couldn’t help myself; I picked up Stranded by Emily Barr and We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver while I waited for the previous event to finish. (It being one of my all time favourite novels, I already have a copy of Kevin, but all my books are piled in boxes in a storage unit at the moment and I fancied a re-read.) Then the lovely staff took my coffee and cake order for later—coffee, cake and sunshine? Can’t all book festivals be like this?—and then it was time to start.

Jaffe & Neale bookshop & cafe, Chipping Norton.

The event went really well, mainly because I had such a lovely group, and afterwards I ran around the corner to the theatre because I had tickets for Lionel Shriver’s talk about new book, Big Brother. Shriver has long been a favourite writer of mine so it was thrilling to see her in the flesh, but honestly: there’s clues in her books, but I didn’t appreciate just how clever and fascinating she is. The hour flew by. I would’ve happily sat there and listened to her for another two after that.

Thanks, @cathryanhoward, for a great talk on self-publishing. Sun, tasty cake and good advice – the #ChipLitFest this year is brilliant!

— Monika Hocks (@MonikaHocks) April 21, 2013

I also had tickets to Peter James, in conversation with the lovely and hilarious Jane Wenham-Jones. James has amazing access to seemingly all branches of the criminal world and the authorities who strive to put a stop to them, and his anecdotes were worth the ticket price alone. Another truly fascinating hour. I snapped up Wannabe a Writer? by Jane (again, another copy, since I have it already—this one was so she could sign it for me) and Perfect People by Peter James, who signed it and wished me luck with my writing.

A souvenir and great reading for the journey home…

Heading back to Heythrop Park I had a bag weighed down with books and a heart full of love for all those who write them.

Thank you to Clare Mackintosh for a wonderful weekend!

Bit of housekeeping: due to a recent surge in spam, I’ve reverted to the comment moderation setting that means first time commenters must be approved, and thereafter will have their comment published immediately. So sorry if this is a bit annoying but waiting to see your comment appear is better than me having to delete tens of spam comments per post—trust me! 

Why? Because the London Book Fair is on, and I just can’t stand to hear about it.

Not because I don’t like the London Book Fair. On the contrary, I’d love to go. A hall filled with publishers, agents and authors chattering excitedly about books, meeting up with Twitter friends in real life, perhaps even being one of those crazy people who sidle up to agents in the bathrooms and casually slip USB sticks with their manuscript on it into a pocket or a bag… What’s not to like?

The fair itself is not the problem.

I am.

Once upon a time I had never even heard of the LBF, but since I entered the publishing world (through a back gate that Amazon took a crowbar to on my behalf, i.e. self-publishing e-books) four of them have gone by. Four of them! And each one is a reminder that I haven’t got published yet. I realize that I’ve achieved lots of other things, and that’s great, but they don’t add up to getting published. If anything, they make me feel worse, because I look around at all the people I know—and there seems to be lots of them—who are signing with top agents and getting amazing deals and just generally having fantastic publishing-themed things happen to them, and I wonder what the hell I’m doing wrong, because finishing a novel is the only thing on their writing CV while mine, between self-publishing and media appearances and speaking engagements and working with publishers, is running to two pages—

And then the penny drops.

They’ve finished a novel.

I have finished writing one novel in my entire life, and that was back in 2010. It actually coincided with the first LBF I paid any attention to.

I don’t generally talk about my non-self-publishing endeavors on this blog, so here’s a recap: since 2010 there’s been stops and starts, feasts and famines, and two entirely different genres. But due mostly to the fact that self-publishing—and talking about self-publishing—has really taken off for me, I haven’t finished a novel. And because my plan is to use this novel to get an agent, I’m stuck. Stuck and succeeding, at the same time. Amazing things are happening to me because of self-publishing, but my ultimate goal, that of getting a novel published, is getting nowhere.

And every time a LBF comes around it’s a reminder that I’ve somehow let another year go by without finding a way to balance the two. It’s just like New Year’s Eve: a reminder that you haven’t done all the things you said you’d do this year. Only this one is especially for writers, and everyone else at this New Year’s Eve party seems to have just signed a six-figure deal, despite the fact that it wasn’t even on their list of goals this day last year. Hell, they didn’t even make goals last year! This just happened! It all came as a complete surprise!

LBFs past serve as markers in my book deal pursuits. In April 2011, I’d decided to to ditch the new novel I’d started following the ‘we don’t love this but can we see something else?’ feedback that first novel had got, and focus on self-publishing for a few months instead, releasing Self-Printed and Backpacked only a summer apart. In April 2012, I was working on a chapter-by-chapter outline for yet another novel following a meeting with an editor who liked the sound of the idea but wanted to see it worked out, but I was only a few months away from ditching that too in favor of writing something completely different, the thing I (I’d just realized) really wanted to write. And today, April 2013, I’m a third of the way into that Something Completely Different, but busier than ever. I just sent 30,000 words of Travelled: Episode 1 to my copyeditor, I’m doing freelance social media work for a major publisher and ’tis the season of speaking engagements—I’m off to ChipLitFest in the morning and still need to finish my presentation.

I’m not complaining. Not at all. What I’m doing is berating myself for not getting a handle on this. I actually have loads of time. I have oodles of it: I don’t do anything else except this. And all those people I know who’ve signed deals? Almost all of them have full-time jobs. In terms of how much time self-publishing, etc. takes, I work maybe 4 full days a week. That leaves the equivalent of 3 just for writing. So why haven’t I finished? It might be fear, or it might just be plain laziness. It might be all those Scandinavian crime drama box sets. All I know for sure is that I haven’t finished writing a novel I really want to write and am really excited about yet.

I have a drastic plan on the horizon though. And the entire month of May is as yet mercifully free of events. And I’ve watched all three seasons of The Killing, two of Borgen and the only existing one of The Bridge, so I’m out of those for now.

I saw a quote on Pinterest last week: do something today your future self would be proud of. I’ve written it on a Post-It and stuck it to my Mac, and when I read future self I think of me a year from now, and how I’ll feel if I still haven’t finished the novel.

Because I just cannot face another LBF.

What do you think? Are there any milestones that send you hiding under the duvet? Or do you think events like the LBF make good goals to work towards, e.g. by the next LBF, I’ll have finished my novel? Let me know in the comments below…

*I know it’ll be gone soon—I’m moving to Feedly in baby steps.