You’ve written a book, and it’s the best thing ever! So, now you want people to read it. How do you get it to them? In our current publishing world, there’s three major options. You can contact a traditional big publisher, who – if everything goes well – will buy the rights to your book, edit it, put a cover on it, market it and send you money when it sells. You can contact a smaller independent (indie) press, who have the flexibility to take chances on unusual work, and who are more likely to involve you in the details of publishing – but who don’t have the same marketing reach as the big publishers, and won’t sell quite as many as the big traditionals. Avoid anyone who asks you for money to publish (known as ‘vanity press’) with the promise of royalties in the future – it’s very likely that you’ll pay a lot and not get nearly as much back. A publisher should always cover things like editing and cover art for you, even if that means your royalty share is smaller. Or you can self-publish. This means you’re the one responsible for everything – editing, cover art, formatting, releasing, marketing, selling – so you’re putting the book out under your name, and you keep the profits from it. You can sub some of the work out (eg. hire a proofreader, purchase cover-art) but it’s down to you to sell your book to the world. And the great thing is that there are plenty of ways to do that! In this article, we’re going to briefly cover some alternative methods of getting your writing out there to your readers. While we tend to think of self-publishing as being a hard copy or ebook version of a book, that’s… read more →
In this article, we’re going to briefly cover the printing options for self-publishing – that is, if you want a hard copy of your book. Step 1: The Finished Text This means the book needs to be edited and proofread, with all the chapter headings in the right place, a preface and acknowledgements (if you want them) and any copyright disclaimers done. Make the text as perfect as you can. However, you don’t need to make sure the layout is perfect – if fact, it’s easier if it’s not! Make the margins all standard, and the font standard. This makes the next stage a lot easier. At this point, you can either turn the text into a print book or an ebook (or both!) Step 2: Typesetting This is the point that the text is put into a printable format. The important thing here is that typesetting is not word processing; it’s closer to artwork than it is to writing. The text positioning needs to be exact, and word processors (such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice) tend to skip the little details that make the text look nice on a printed page. There are several different pieces of software that can be used for this; one popular one is Adobe InDesign, but there are various free systems available as well. You can actually now use Word, but it’s a very different process to writing, and you usually need to use a template. Alternatively, there are a number of professionals out there who offer a typesetting service to self-publishers, often with additional services such as cover creation or proofreading as well. If you’re not too sure you want to get into the details of the typesetting process, it’s worth paying for this stage. Step 3: Thinking About The End Result There… read more →
In this article, we’re going to briefly cover the ebook creation options for self-publishing – that is, if you want an ebook copy distributed through any of the major stores. There are a couple of steps to think about before you can start with the creation process: Step 1: The Finished Text This means the book needs to be edited and proofread, with all the chapter headings in the right place, a preface and acknowledgements (if you want them) and any copyright disclaimers done. Make the text as perfect as you can. However, you don’t need to make sure the layout is perfect – if fact, it’s easier if it’s not! Make the margins all standard, and the font standard. This makes the next stage a lot easier. At this point, you can either turn the text into a print book or an ebook (or both!) Step 2: Formatting This is the point that you put the text into an ebook conversion software, and turn it into something that an e-reader can decipher. The text needs to be able to change size, font, color and layout, but still have breaks before chapters; the reader needs to be able to find the chapter headings on their navigation, and skip forward or backwards; and the book needs a cover and metadata attached to it in the file. While you can do this creation process yourself via software such as Calibre, Jutoh or Scriviner, this can be very time-consuming and you have to get the details right, as well as ensure you have all the formats needed (for example, Kindle uses a .mobi format, while most other ereaders need an .epub). Most self-published authors prefer to use an online platform such as CreateSpace or Lulu. We’ve provided some suggestions below, along with a… read more →
What is Self-Publishing? You’ve written a book, and it’s the best thing ever! So, now you want people to read it. How do you get it to them? In our current publishing world, there’s three major options. You can contact a traditional big publisher, who – if everything goes well – will buy the rights to your book, edit it, put a cover on it, market it and send you money when it sells. You can contact a smaller independent (indie) press, who have the flexibility to take chances on unusual work, and who are more likely to involve you in the details of publishing – but who don’t have the same marketing reach as the big publishers, and won’t sell quite as many as the big traditionals. Avoid anyone who asks you for money to publish (known as ‘vanity press’) with the promise of royalties in the future – it’s very likely that you’ll pay a lot and not get nearly as much back. A publisher should always cover things like editing and cover art for you, even if that means your royalty share is smaller. Or you can self-publish. This means you’re the one responsible for everything – editing, cover art, formatting, releasing, marketing, selling – so you’re putting the book out under your name, and you keep the profits from it. You can sub some of the work out (eg. hire a proofreader, purchase cover-art) but it’s down to you to sell your book to the world. And the great thing is that there are plenty of ways to do that! Over the next couple of articles, we’re going to look at options for printing, ebook and online self-publishing. But first…. Things to think about if you’re considering self-publishing Have you written the best book that you… read more →
I’ll start with a disclaimer and some credentials; I’m involved in the submissions and editing process for Grimbold Books, my publisher. It’s a small indie press, which in many ways is wonderful – anyone involved get to do a bit of everything! But it’s really made me realise that when I first started submitting writing to publishers, I had absolutely no idea of the process that goes on once your writing has hit the submissions inbox. Surely they just…read it? And then publish it? Well, yes…sort of. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. So, before you do any of this, go and read 5 Questions to Ask Before Submitting a Short Story. It applies to novels, too! Stage 1: Submission Read the subs guidelines! I know they’re annoying and it’s a pain to have to format (I submit too, so I have a lot of sympathy for the never-ending task of re-formatting things) but it really does make reading easier. And on the same note, please send the amount asked. If the guidelines wants 10,000 words, a little under or over is fine…but don’t send your entire manuscript. Having a synopsis is nice; it gives us some idea of how the story unfolds. We often won’t have time to read the entire thing, so the first 30 pages and a synopsis is excellent. Tell us something about you; you don’t have to seem quirky, but just some insight into who you are is nice. However, your work will speak for itself, so if (like me) you’re fairly self-conscious when it comes to showing off, you won’t miss out by not giving a huge bio. And lastly (again) – read the guidelines! You want to make the publisher’s job as easy as possible – and that means sending what… read more →
Have you ever toyed around with the idea of submitting your short story to a publication, but felt too overwhelmed or uncertain to actually send in your manuscript? Creating a strategy for myself based on the five questions below helped me prepare one of my short stories (which I’ll lovingly refer to by the alias of Fantasy Story #1) and ready myself for the submission process. First, I had to ask myself: I. Have I made my story the best it can be? The rest of this post continues under the assumption that you have already gone through the steps to thoroughly edit your short story. Whether you’ve hired a freelance editor, consulted with your beta readers, or participated in your critique group, make sure that you’ve got at least one other pair of eyes to look over your story. Even if the thought of having your work critiqued isn’t exactly fun, you’ll be thankful later on for the chance to improve your story before you start sending it out. When I was preparing Fantasy Story #1, I submitted my draft to a writer’s critique group that I had joined a few months prior after doing some self-editing to my manuscript. I received valuable feedback from around 6 other members of the group, which I then reconciled and used to improve my draft. Specifically, my critique group caught a plot hole that I was able to fix in my second round of editing. II. Have I created a solid organizational system? Before moving onto the next step and looking for markets to submit your work, I would recommend creating a system for recording details of the stories that you plan to submit and information on the publications you are interested in. I’ve experimented with a some submissions tracking software, but… read more →
Over the past few years, there has been a real surge in how the internet and technological advances have affected the world of writing. The publishing industry is constantly changing and the way we purchase and read books isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. If you are a writer, it’s important that you keep up to date on these developments and use them to your advantage. As we all know, writing itself can be totally time consuming, but add in the need for online promotion and website maintenance and you’d be surprised if you had time to do anything else! The internet has unleashed so many tools for us as writers, but at the same time, it can often feel as if we are the tiniest little fish in a gigantic ocean of other tiny fish, all fighting to be noticed! How can we get others to pay attention to us? We don’t have the powers of the big publishers who could get our book to the front display in Waterstones. It’s all on us to get as much promotion as possible! I personally find it liberating, but at the same time, totally intimidating! I love the new ‘do-it-yourself’ aspect of self publishing. I have complete control and I enjoy the challenge. At the moment, I’m yet to fully dive into that world again, as I am still working on streamlining my book into something I am totally proud of, but I look forward to it. I think that if you are a self-published writer, then rather than allowing the process to overwhelm you, you should step up to the mark, research all the different ways of promoting yourself, really get creative and see what you can come up with. There are a lot of writing forums out… read more →