I
can remember how excited I was like it were yesterday when my first book titled
What Happened to Little League Baseball in the Inner City? was
published. About fifty of my closest friends and family attended the
book signing, and my wife catered the food. Even the bishop of my church at the
time also came to the book signing and even allowed me to sell some copies at
the church afterward. It was an extravaganza to remember for many years to
come, and I made a lot of money at the signing as well as selling my book to
some of my coworkers. I was indeed well on my way to being a bestselling
author, or so I thought. Boy, I was naïve to say the least.
The
momentum that I generated was short-lived, and reality set in for me very
quickly. I didn’t become an overnight sensation like I had originally planned
because I was old news before my Amazon page showed up in the Google search
engine results. Basically, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, if that makes any
sense. However, I did learn five basic truths about self-publishing that I wish
I knew before I got started.
Stay Away from
Vanity Publishers.
Vanity
publishers suck. They take all the money and leave the heavy lifting to the
author. I won’t drop any names because I’m not in the business of trashing a
company’s reputation, but I used a vanity publisher back in the day and lost
hundreds of dollars without making any semblance of a profit. They give authors
the illusion that they will promote their books, but the fact of the matter is self-published
authors have the sole responsibility of managing their own book promotion. One
rule of thumb for new writers is to never pay a publishing company to publish a
book―a real publisher will give an author a cash advance if they feel that a
book has the potential to be profitable.
Avoid Using
Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
Authors
are guaranteed to lose their shirts trying to pay for traffic for a website or blog if they
lack experience in internet marketing. Books have a low profit margin―especially
if the books are fiction―and it’s virtually impossible for fiction authors to
make a profit via pay-per-click advertising companies like Google AdWords or Microsoft
Advertising, for example. Unknown authors will have a hard time selling their
own books from a website or blog, and prior to Amazon’s advertising platform
for authors, authors as a whole weren’t making a lot of money using pay-per-click
advertising. Conversely, Amazon Advertising had dramatically changed the game for authors
like me and allowed us to make a profit exhibiting our books because customers
automatically come to the Amazon marketplace with the intent to buy.
Create a Blog.
I
kick myself for not creating my blog sooner. I only spent eleven months in the Google
sandbox before I started receiving organic traffic on a daily basis, and if I had
created my blog fifteen years ago, I’d have one of the most popular sites on
the Internet with well over a thousand posts under my belt. Chronicling my
writing experiences back then would’ve helped catapult me to the next level in
the self-publishing game much sooner.
Hire a Team of Freelancers.
Vanity
publishers bank on new authors’ ignorance and capitalize by charging outrageous
prices when it comes to book cover design, proofreading, editing, and formatting
of books. An author must do his or her due diligence and seek out freelancers
on the Web who provide these services for a fraction of the cost that these vanity
publishing companies charge. Fiverr is a great place to start, and I only wish
that they were around when I first started writing.
Limit Time on
Social Media.
I
spent entirely too much time trying to market my books on sites like Facebook
and Twitter in the past, and this took away from the time that I could’ve spent
writing. I’m an introvert by nature and don’t enjoy wasting my time soliciting
people to follow me or buy my books, so I removed myself from social media altogether
and focused solely on writing books and posts on my blog.
There’s
no one-size-fits-all type of self-publishing handbook that anyone can follow
and achieve success because everyone’s situation is different. My job is to
help new authors avoid some of the pitfalls that plagued me starting out, and I
sincerely hope that this article will help make things a little easier when it
comes to authors striking out on their own and trying to make things happen in
the self-publishing world.
Related Posts:
I've Been Blogging for Eleven and a Half Months and Learned This
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The Three Most Difficult Facets of Writing for Me
The Self-Publishing Game Is Rigged for Authors to Fail
How My Spiritual Journey Affected How I Write