Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

[Tylluan Penry]

As I'm often asked about writing, publishing and self publishing I thought I would start a thread for it. A good site to get anyone who is thinking of self publishing started is Derek Murphy's Creative Indie. (http://www.creativindiecovers.com/more-about-me/) It's well worth signing up for his newsletters, there's a lot of good stuff there which is free.

But other than that, ask away and I'll do my best to answer.

[habbalah]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

I have some experience with epress publishing, so I'd be happy to throw my hat into the ring for that.

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

That's great!

[B. de Corbin]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

I know that if you are self publishing, you are also committed to self promotion.

What have you found to be the most effective way to promote your writing?

[DavidMcCann]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

May I offer some advice on book design?

Make sure your work looks professional: the conventions do have a reason. If you can, look at a style guide like that of the Chicago University Press, or Oxford UP (Hart's Rules). If you can't, at least compare your work to published books. I recently bought a self-designed book by an academic that consisted largely of interviews. They were set with wider margins, which is standard, but in italic. Modern italic fonts are designed for setting words or phrases, not whole paragraphs, and legibility is not a major design requirement. Since we aren't used to reading whole paragraphs in italic anyway, that was very hard on the eyes. Then, since she had misused italic, she didn't use it where italic is supposed to be used — emphasis or boot titles — but used underlining, which looks like some pre-computer typescript.

Another problem with that book was that there was no index. A 300 page book with no index is useless: I ended up making one myself. Another book I'm currently reading has an index obviously made by the author, who has equally obviously never read a book on how to do it. You do not need to enter every proper name — only index a person if the passage would be useful to someone seeking information about that person. A remark like "as Freud said" doesn't count. Over-indexing of names leads to subjects being left out: finding "lunar mansions" in a 700 page work when it's not in the index is no joke!

[anunitu]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

I admire you peeps,I would never even consider trying to do any type of "Book" and I guess "E-Book" because my style is so very on the fly.

[Tylluan Penry]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

Good one. When I started there wasn't a lot of choice... it was mostly down to the publisher and what they felt like and my very first publisher (I was only 19) was brilliant. When I published Seeking the Green in 2008 I had already been blogging for a while. Then moved onto Facebook. YouTube. And my own website, though I still have a soft spot for blogging.

Really it's about finding ways to connect with the people who are likely to be interested in buying your books... so depending on the type of books you're writing this will direct the way you try to connect with your readers.

Be very careful of firms who offer to 'promote' your book in return for a hefty payment. Generally they promise much but do very little.

Promotion takes as much - sometimes more - effort than the writing and many writers really hate it. But if you want to sell your books (and if you have a publisher they will probably want some evidence that you are at least trying!) then you have to find a way to get to your customers and audiences.

- - - Updated - - -

May I offer some advice on book design?

Make sure your work looks professional: the conventions do have a reason. If you can, look at a style guide like that of the Chicago University Press, or Oxford UP (Hart's Rules). If you can't, at least compare your work to published books. I recently bought a self-designed book by an academic that consisted largely of interviews. They were set with wider margins, which is standard, but in italic. Modern italic fonts are designed for setting words or phrases, not whole paragraphs, and legibility is not a major design requirement. Since we aren't used to reading whole paragraphs in italic anyway, that was very hard on the eyes. Then, since she had misused italic, she didn't use it where italic is supposed to be used — emphasis or boot titles — but used underlining, which looks like some pre-computer typescript.

Another problem with that book was that there was no index. A 300 page book with no index is useless: I ended up making one myself. Another book I'm currently reading has an index obviously made by the author, who has equally obviously never read a book on how to do it. You do not need to enter every proper name — only index a person if the passage would be useful to someone seeking information about that person. A remark like "as Freud said" doesn't count. Over-indexing of names leads to subjects being left out: finding "lunar mansions" in a 700 page work when it's not in the index is no joke!

Italics!!! (or should that be Italics!!! ) The mind positively boggles.

[habbalah]

Re: Writing, Publishing and Self PUblishing

I know that if you are self publishing, you are also committed to self promotion.

What have you found to be the most effective way to promote your writing?

Even being published through a press, I have to do most of my own self-promotion if I want to sell any decent number.

Twitter has been my #1 source for promoting. I have over 1,000 followers now (which really isn't a lot, when some have millions) that potentially see my tweets about books I have for sale. Retweets, which puts my post on someone else's stream, also helps.

My Twitter is set up to cross-post to Tumblr, and it carries over the hashtags as well. I don't honestly know how effective Tumblr is for this, because I barely look at it, but I figure it must help.

I also occasionally have giveaways. People love free stuff, and even if they don't even enter, they see my name and check out my work. I also have had a few interviews on other authors' blogs to push my work out there.

There are services that will post, tweet, etc whatever you want, but they're very expensive. And as Mrs. P said, a lot of them are a scam.