Self-publishing
has always had a stigma attached. Why
is this? Mostly because we were taught in school that anything published has
been thoroughly checked and edited by “those who knew more than we did,
specialists of some kind.” That may have been true of our textbooks, which were
written and edited by specialists in their fields.
As
we became adults and, at least some of us, became teachers, writers and
editors, we tried our hand at publishing and found out how hard it was to
attract the eyes of a publisher, let alone land a publishing contract. Some of
us continued to butt our heads against that publishing wall until we were, at
least, moderately successful. Some gave up, thinking it wasn’t worth the
effort. The third segment saw the modern availability of publishing technology
as a way to go around the traditional publishing roadblock. It afforded low
cost publishing (CreateSpace and many others), free way to get public attention
(Amazon—you and several million other authors) and you kept all the profit and
didn’t have a garage full of inventory and shipping to handle. A sweet deal,
right?
Not so fast. You are a specialist in the
subject you are writing about, right? You researched the topic extensively
beyond your bookshelf and the local public library, right? (No offense to
public libraries here.) You had someone besides your best friend or your
grandmother edit your work, right? You have a marketing and business plan,
which goes beyond Amazon, right? You have a brand, right? A what?
Let’s
look at these issues in the order they are listed:
1)
You
are a specialist in the subject about which you are writing. You don’t have
to have an advanced degree in the topic about which you are writing unless you
a claiming your work to be the final word on the topic. Be sure you acknowledge
somewhere your limitations.
2)
You
researched the topic extensively beyond your bookshelf and the local public
library. There is nothing wrong with using the resources you have on
hand—just don’t stop there. Your local librarian will give you suggestions as
to where to get more information on your topic. Beware of the internet. Use it
with caution. Much information is there, unfiltered and unchecked—anybody can
put anything there, whether or not it is valid.
3)
You
had someone besides your best friend or your grandmother edit your work. Your
best friend and your grandmother are fine people and they have your best
interest at heart. However, they are probably not editors and, even if they
are, they are biased to see your work as better than it actually is. Choose
someone, better to ask two or three people, who are experienced writers,
editors or English teachers to read your work critically. You should welcome
criticism—it means you are on the way to having a quality piece of work.
4)
You
have a marketing and business plan, which goes beyond Amazon. Amazon is
great at what it does. It makes works available to anyone who can get near a
computer and has a few bucks to buy a book. But that’s as far as it goes. How
will anyone know your book is there, except your family and friends who have
heard you talk about it every chance you get? They won’t. You are competing
with at least a hundred million other titles, admittedly not all on your topic,
but that won’t make your book any easier to find.
Your marketing
plan will provide a roadmap for you to follow to get attention for your book
and should include some or all of the following:
a) Your
website,
b) Your
blog,
c) Your
other social media sites (Facebook, twitter, Tumblr, Instagram)
d) More
traditional materials, such as bookmarks, business cards, postcards, flyers,
e) Radio
and TV spots,
f) Other
signings and speaking engagements.
5)
What is
this brand of which you speak? Your brand is your personae as a writer,
specifically as the writer of your particular book on your particular topic.
You must make yourself known by what you have written. Everything in the list
immediately above works together to brand you. Acknowledge it, work with it,
use it.
Does this sound
like more than you are capable of doing? It may be. It is a lot of work. Even
the large publishers require more promotional work from their authors than they
used to. It’s a fact of life.
Now, what about
the stigma? It isn’t as bad as it once was. Does that mean self-published works
are better than they were at one time? Yes and no. Yes, some experienced
authors are going the self-publishing route. What they learned from being
associated with higher quality editing and their natural maturity as writers
has paid off, for them as writers and us as readers.
Yet, in large
part, one often can spot a self-published book within the first page or two.
Layout is strange, sometimes disjointed with lots of white where there should
be print; typos, spelling and grammatical errors appear with distracting
regularity. (CreateSpace does not edit the work). Yes, you do see typos in
works published by the large publishers but nowhere near as many.
There you have
it, my take on self-publishing. You self-publish at your own risk. If you are
hoping for the next best seller, better get a large publisher.
Published In: Outdoors Unlimited August/September 2016
