Where to Self Publish

A quick short article on my experiences so far. I will be adding to this in the future.

How to get what you have written out into the world. This is by far the most difficult thing to do successfully for an author. There are just so many decisions to make, and any one of them can mean the diffgerence between success and failure.

Where does the book fit, is it a general fiction book, or more specific genre? These questions need careful thought and it’s actually quite hard for you to do it yourself. Most authors have an exceedingly overrated opinion of their masterpiece, it’s a good idea to get other people’s opinion.

But, let’s take it that what you’ve produced is going to set the world alight, what do you need to think about next:

• As mentioned, what is my market – chicklit, childrens, detective
• Do I need an agent, or should I go straight to the publishing houses
• Which publishing houses should I send my query letter to

It’s very complicated, and the biggest problem is often that you don’t know the right questions to ask, let alone the answers. One way to avoid a lot of this is to self publish. Now don’t get the idea that this is the easy way, it’s not. It means that not only are you the author, but you have to be a proofreader, designer, marketing expert, and many other things. But one thing it does do is that it puts you in total control.

There are a plethora of companies that offer Print, or Publish On Demand (POD) and some are good, and some are bad. Finding the right one for you can be a minefield. A couple of sites that proved invaluable to me were Preditors & Editors, and Writer Beware. Both of these sites attempt to sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of writing with regards to publishers and agents, the latter also point out the numerous scams out there that target desperate authors.

Eventually, after many days, and weeks of research I plumped for a company called Lulu. One of the main reasons for this was that they are one of the few that:

1. Allow you complete control over your book
2. Allow you to only pay for what is sold – one book at a time
3. Allows UK authors
4. Has a great community of fellow authors to ask for help

How Many Words?

How Many Words on a Page
This is going to depend on:

• What the font size is
• What the font is
• What the page size is

Font sizes range from a miniscule 6pt to a rather large 14pt, and on. The sizes at either end of this scale are usually reserved for specialist books, academia uses a smaller than average size, whilst books for the partially sighted use the largest. An exception to this, is books for children. Early age books again use a larger than normal font size.

Font size in itself is a rather confusing subject, because that generally depends on the actual font. For instance a Times New Roman font size of 10, is a lot larger than a Bookman font size of 10. A note on fonts. If you are planning an ebook, then by all means use the Times New Roam, and Aerial fonts, but nothing screams “Self Published” louder than seeing these fonts on paper. As a rule, if you pick a font with ‘Book’ in it’s name, you should be safe. Chapter headings are another thing altogether, these can be whatever font you want, although I’d personally steer clear of anything too distracting. Whilst you want something eye-catching, you don’t want something that takes the reader away from your story.

How Many Pages, or Words in a Book
Again, this is a subjective question, as it depends on the above being answered. Looking at it from the converse, then we can probably work out what font size to use.

For normal paperback books, the 70,000 word mark is the normal, anything less would have to be priced accordingly. For instance my book has 139 pages and is priced at £6.98 retail. This is a problem with POD, as it tend to be more expensive than traditional publishing, and therefore it is easy to price yourself out of the market.

OK, so let’s take an 80,000 word novel, with 320 pages. That would work out at 250 words per page. This is probably on the low side, most novels these days have around 350 words on the page. When I say most novels, I’m talking about the usual sized ones that fill the bookshelves in your local Waterstones.

So to summarise. An average novel has about 70 to 80,000 words, it also has about 350 words per page, on average. So it should be about 220 pages long.

Options from POD

• 1 free copy of my book
• 1 choice of book format
• 2 customizable covers
• Complete ownership of rights
• Ability to set my own Retail Price
• A marketing toolkit
• A free webpage
• Local radio contact list

As you can see, it’s not a great deal to be honest, but then it is the cheapets option I could find. This company did offer another 4 packages that went from $399, $699, $999, and $1099. The final one is probably the most expensive I have seen, but it did offer a lot more of a service:

• 5 free copies of my book
• 2 choices of book format
• 25 customizable covers
• The option of full colour printing
• Complete ownership of rights
• Ability to set my own Retail Price
• A marketing toolkit
• A free webpage
• Local radio contact list
• Some author discounts
• A personal representative
• Manuscript evaluation
• Ability to set my own Royalty
• Price embedded barcode
• Assigned ISBN
• Their own bookstore listing, with a discount
• Worldwide distribution
• Marketing coach
• Listing in Book-in-Print

Wow, that looks like so much more, of course it’s a lot more expensive. Well, let’s look at it in a little more detail.

5 Free Copies
This is nice, but don’t forget you can buy them at author cost anyway. So it’s not as good as it might sound.

Colour Printing
This is probably the most expensive option when considering printing. But only if it’s worthwhile. Unless your book has lots of pictures, or illustrations, then this isn’t worth it.

Free Webpage
You can get one of these almost anywhere these days, in fact this whole website only cost me £10 for the year, and that included the domain name. So that’s not such a great offer.

Local Radio Contact List
Again, this wouldn’t be too hard to find yourself, so this isn’t worth a lot.

Author Discounts
As these are discounts off their own products, it’s not exactly the sort of thing to set your heart racing.

A Personal Representative
This might be worthwhile, this person is supposed to be able to give you advice regarding publishing your work.

Manuscript Evaluation
Now this is worthwhile, as you are going to need this one way or another. But saying that, there are plenty of small to medium
sized companies that offer this service at a reasonale rate.

Ability to Set Royalty
This one is a bit pointless. If you set a retail price, then your royalty will be calculated automatically.

Price Embedded Barcode
This is a nice to have, and it does add a professional look to your book. Saying that it isn’t really necessary.

Assigned ISBN
This is the big one, although most POD companies offer this as standard. You can do this yourself if you want.

Their Own Bookstore Listing
Another pointless one. I imagine they are very few buyers of books that visit their bookstore.

Worldwide Distribution & Listing in Books-in-Print
The first would include the second, again this is something that you could do yourself. But it might be a service that’s worthwhile paying for.

Marketing Coach
This could be a very useful service, but only if it’s tailored to your book. If it’s a general set of advice then you can probably pick up what to do on plenty of Internet sources, including this one

So, let’s summarise. From the above list, the only things that are really worthwhile, or indeed actually mean anything, are: ISBN, Distribution, and possibly the Marketing Coach. And for that they are asking you to pay an extra $900. I don’t think so.

Putting a PayPal Button on your Website

This is very easy to do, and a lot of people put a simple “Buy it Now” button on their sites. Yet surprisingly, quite a few people don’t know how to manage multiple prices. On my book page on my site, I have a drop dwon PayPal button that allows customers to price the right price for my book, dependant upon where they live. In other words, I have different prices that include the postage and packing for the UK, Europe, and the USA. I even have a box that allows a text message to be entered, I use this for dedications to be entered in my book.

So how is it done? Well, it’s quite easy. Here are 13 steps to get your own options button:

1. Click on “Merchant Services”
2. Under the “Website Payments Standard”, click on “Buy Now Buttons”
3. Click on “Create your button now”
4. Drop down box should say “Products”
5. Choose “No; create a “Buy Now” button”
6. Type in the item name e.g. title of book
7. Click on “add dropdown menu with price/option”
8. In first box, type in the name e.g. Price incl. delivery
9. Type your options in the “Option x” boxes. e.g. Pickup Only – No Delivery, or Delivery in UK etc.
10. Type in the price for each option. This is the book retail price plus the p&p costs
11. If you only want 2 options, then delete the words in the “Option 3″ box
12. If you want more options, then click on the “add option 4″ link
13. Click on “Done”

On the right hand side of the “customise button” area, should be a “buyer’s view”. You can see what the button will look like on your website.

Good luck, and happy selling. Feel free to ask questions if you run into trouble.

Phil

Marketing Plan

Marketing is probably the most important thing for you to do, apart from actually writing something that is. You can write a hundred books, and even get them placed on Amazon, and other online stores, but unless you actually tell people they are there, you’re not going to get many visitors.

You need to be thinking about this a good few months before your book even hits the shelves. I use the What, how, and where plan for my marketing:

What are my objectives?
How am I going to achieve these?
Where am I going to market?

This may, or may not work for you, but feel free to adapt it. The first thing to do is write a marketing plan and I’ll go through mine with you here:

Objectives
It’s no good simply stating sell lots of books, you need to break this down into smaller objectives. Mine are:

• Attract high numbers to website
• Convert visitors into buyers
• Place book into high street bookstores
• Create public awareness

If I can achieve these four simple objectives, then as long as my book is good enough, I should be able to sell quite a few. Next up is deciding what my target audience is. Who am I going to sell these books to? For my book (Kopek the Destroyer), it’s:

• Dog lovers
• Animal lovers
• Humourous story lovers

My next section is the first part of how, and where. This includes tools etc. that I’m going to use:
Benefits/Encouragement

• Free Bookmark
• Free Pen
• Free T-Shirt
• Signed copies

These are things that I will use to encourage people to buy my book directly from my website. I can use these as give-aways, or in competitions.

Now the important bit, what tools am I going to use:

• Website
• Google AdWords
• Word of mouth
• Libraries
• Postcards
• Flyer’s
• Awareness material
• Competitions
• Press
• Radio
• Work Colleagues

All of the above are things that I can use to either create awareness, or drive people to my website. I should mention a company I use frequently here, and that is VistaPrint. They often give away merchandising products on a regular basis. One of the most useful I get from here is postcards. There is almost a weekly giveaway of 100 postcards for free from this company. You can simply choose one of the standard designs, or for a small charge (about £3.00) you can design your own bespoke one. Here’s an example of my postcard FRONT / BACK.

I have managed to spend about £100 over the last month or so, by using VistaPrint’s offers. They generally send out an email every week with some offer on it, either 250 free business cards, or 100 free postcards. I have so far collected:

• 5 bespoke t-shirts
• 12 pens
• 500 postcards
• 1,000 business cards
• 75 brochures
• 3 notepads
• 100 return address labels

If I were to go to a normal shop, this would have cost me close to £600, at least. The t-shirts and pens I can use as give-aways, or in competitions. Either of these will help to create awareness for both the book and the website.

Method
This is how you are going to use the above tools and information to achieve your objectives.

Public Awareness

• Using marketing material in competitions, or give-aways – t-shirts etc. should create more awareness
• Placing material, such as bookmarks and postcards, in public areas
• Pubs
• Libraries
• Shops – postcards
• Give away free business card magnets

Targets

• Pubs – list the pubs that you go in on a regular basis. You can drop material into others, but they won’t be as effective as your regular haunts.
• Radio Stations – list the individual radio stations that you are going to contact.
• Newspapers/Magazines – Which magazines are good matches to your book.
• Hairdressers
• Cafes
• Dentists waiting rooms
• Doctors waiting rooms

The final four points are places where people have to sit and wait, and most will generally pick up something to read, even if it’s a flyer.