Surviving Self-Publishing

BECOMING LADY BETH has been out in the wild for over three months. The publishing process is extra tough when you’re a one-man band. By choosing the self-publishing path you are electing yourself publisher and author and marketer. It’s a tough trot if you’re not comfortable with pushing your work. How does a writer cope with wearing both the author and publisher hat? Here are some gentle tips:

1. My biggest piece of advice is to treat your novel as if it were a friend’s. This allows you a little distance from what some can see as the distasteful marketing side. Most writers are uncomfortable with pushing their own writing or telling others about their work. So you need to distance yourself from the process, even if that distance is simply a tiny shift in your mindset. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of writers out there who are so mentally averse to the concept of self-publishing that they bash any author who dares publicise themselves. But you need to ignore those who hold such double standards. Why should your book be overlooked because it’s you who’s advertising it and not a publishing house? Keep faith in your work, shed the shy author mantle and don the crown of publisher.

2. Step away from the amazon rank checker thingy. Seriously. When I self-published my first novel, DAWN SOLSTICE, I’m pretty sure I gave myself repetitive hand strain from hitting the refresh button. Honestly, there is nothing your beady little eyes can do that will make that magic number decrease. So, step away from the refresh button, your fingers will thank you for it.

3. Try not to hate anyone who says they’ll buy your book and then they don’t. Don’t let the air out of their tyres, send them dog turd in the post or glitter bomb them with your next Christmas card. I’ve tried all of the above* and guess what? They still won’t buy your book. (*kidding…kind of).

4. If your novel does make a decent ranking. Do take a screenshot. This will help ease the sting when some idiot gives your novel a one star rating because the distributor delivered your novel a day late. Unfortunately we have to share are world with such people. Deal with it and move on.

5. Anyone who reads your book and reviews it should be left to their opinion, good or bad. It does not matter how much their review makes you want to stick needles in your eyes. Even a sucky review deserves its place. They bought your book, they are entitled to review it as they see fit. Welcome to the world of free speech folks.

6. Don’t be beaten down by the process or doubt your book just because your sales don’t sky-rocket and propel you to instant author fame-dom. Celebrate your successful publication, the completion of your novel and the fact that it’s available to readers (other than your Mammy). Sure we’d all love immediate, drop-into-your-lap six figure advances and overnight success but you have a better chance of catching sight of a unicorn that’s simultaneously riding a unicycle whilst reading the eighth Harry Potter book. But, at the same time, don’t let this reality stop you from aiming high and all that.

7. Get working on your next novel. Too soon? Never. If you are a writer, this is what you do. End of.

Olivia Bright is author of BECOMING LADY BETH

Find her on Twitter: @LivKiernan

 

Creating an Active Table of Contents for your E-Book

Creating an Active Table of Contents for novel, Becoming Lady Beth

This post will take you through the steps necessary to create a clickable table of contents in your word document, so that readers can navigate easily to the point in your e-book that they want to read.

Once you have laid out what the ‘front matter’ of your book will contain then you can create your Table of Contents. I chose to place mine after the copyright page. You then need to create a page with all of your chapter headings, whether they have names or whether they are simply numbered, like below:

 Next go through your document and beginning with the first heading/title highlight first…

 

…then select the chapter title and click ‘Heading 1’. Do this for all headings/chapter titles you want included in your table of contents.

 

 

Return to the Table of Contents page in your document and select the first title. Then click ‘Insert’ ➝ ‘Hyperlink’

 

 

 

Make sure that ‘Document’ is highlighted in the grey box that appears.

 

 

Then click ‘Locate’.

 

 

 

Select ‘Headings’

 

Choose the corresponding heading from the list that appears.

 

 

 

Do this for all of your headings and once finished you will find that your Table of Contents is now active and when you click on the heading you will be taken to that point in your document. The complete Table of Contents will look like this on Kindle Previewer:

If you have found this post helpful please share, like and comment!

Becoming Lady Beth will be published and available for purchase on Tuesday the 16th of December but is ready to pre-order now! Click here to be taken to it on Amazon.

 

Using Amazon’s Kids’ Book Creator to publish your Picture Book

In September, I received an email from Amazon informing me of a new service available to authors and illustrators who might be thinking of publishing their picture books but did not want to go through the hair-pulling torture of formatting images and text so that it would be suitable for all electronic devices. Amazon’s new and free programme, ‘Kids’ Book Creator’, claimed to be easy to use and would therefore preserve users’ barnets—something that I’m hugely in favour of.

I have had a rhyming picture book lounging on my computer for many years, so I thought I’d give it a shot. My illustrator sister, Ann Kiernan, had already created some beautiful images for my story and I hated the thought that they would never see the light of day, so I scanned them into my laptop and got going on creating my first picture book.

My rhyming story, Pip Learns To Fly, is available from Amazon now and I am awaiting proofs from CreateSpace. They should arrive next week.

On Amazon:

Click the image to be taken to Pip Learns to Fly on Amazon!

On CreateSpace:

Almost ready on CreateSpace.

The Kids’ Book Creator was that easy to use, I found myself making up problems to complicate matters. I have compiled three short ‘how to’ videos for any authors or illustrators that would consider this kind of thing but are a too nervous to try it out or believe it to be too difficult or time consuming.

There might be sections of the videos that are too basic for some authors/illustrators but I thought I would put them up anyway as they were part of my learning curve and I thought there likely to be folk out there who will benefit from them.

The first tutorial shows how to resize your illustrations and add text in preparation for publication, so skip ahead to the third video if you don’t need this.

The next ‘how to’ video explains how to compile your pages into a single PDF file. This could make uploading your picture book to CreateSpace easier.

The final ‘how to’ video shows how easy it is to upload your pages onto Amazon’s Kids’ Book Creator:

Below is also an email I received from Amazon about my formatting, as I was a little worried about the amount of white space around my pages on the Kindle Previewer. I thought I’d paste it here for those who have similar concerns.

Hello from Amazon Kindle Publishing,

Thanks for writing to us. We have analyzed the screenshot and found that it is working as expected and images are actually center aligned. The issue you are facing will be reproducible only in Kindle Previewer. Since Kindle Previewer is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool of kindle devices, particular device screen resolutions maybe higher than your desktop resolution. Due to which, a scroll bar appears on the screen. Please scroll down to see remaining space beneath the image. We assure you that this will not be an issue in actual devices.

Please get back to us, if you still have any concerns.

And that’s it! I found the experience liberating and headache free and now have a picture book for sale on Amazon. Do comment if you know of better options out there or if you have any questions on the process, I’ll try to answer them.

Happy publishing!

Olivia Bright is author of soon to be released, Becoming Lady Beth (published on 16th of December, 2014). You can preorder your copy here: BECOMING LADY BETH