Friday, March 29, 2013

First blog ever

This is my first post ever on my first blog - not something I imagined I would be doing at all. The reason is simple, even if the process is not. I wrote a book, a book I am quite proud of. I sent this book off to agents, and was thrilled when I got a request for the full manuscript.
Some weeks later I was disappointed to have my first serious rejection - by serious rejection I mean this particular agent really liked my writing, and she liked the book enough to send me a long, personal, apologetic rejection email. She wasn't sure if the subject would sell.
Oh well, I decided to write a new book with different subject matter (more on that in another post). But my first book would not go out of my thoughts, and so in this age of ebooks I decided that that I would self publish. Easy right? For sure it is relatively easy to self publish a book and watch it disappear into literary oblivion. To self publish and make a success of it (hopefully) there is a lot more to it.
There seems little point in publishing if I do not give it the very best shot I can, so I am following all the recommended steps - and these steps do in fact make sense to me. But soooo frustrating!!
Here is a list of what I have had to do, seems pretty easy:

1) Design a kick ass cover and make sure it has the right format for the main ebook publishers.
2) Find as many online reviewers as possible, and request a review of the book - the reasoning is to get the book noticed.
3) Do the research to make sure the keywords selected when publishing the book are the right ones to bring it up in a search by a potential reader.
4) Write an author blog - social media is a great marketing tool - no mention made of how scary it is to put a blog out into the ether and hope someone reads it...
5) Be sure to have the book edited and formatted into the correct style for the main ebook publishers. I can choose to do it personally or pay someone else to do it. Tricky choice really as I am sufficiently anal that if I pay someone I will most likely check their work.
6) Remember to embed a link to the author blog and a review option and a few other things that I forget right now but luckily have written down somewhere.

Of this, I have done numbers 1, 2, 3 and now I am doing 4. Was it easy? Not at all, this is the most frustrating part of the entire process. Writing a book is the easy part - the rest has had me almost tearing my hair out and more than once I have had to close the laptop and walk away when what I really wanted to do was throw the damn thing at a wall! Yes this last sentence was a long one and hopefully had you slightly breathless when you got to the end - that is how I have felt many times during this process.
Now I have no idea how long a blog post is supposed to be, but each stage of the process is a long story, so I'm going to stop here today, and write a stage per day. Hopefully by the time I get to describing step 6, I will have the book published and it is not sinking without trace. Also, fingers crossed, I will not be the only person reading this :)

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