Spiderwize's Self Publishing Blog

Just a quick post today to let you know that we have re-launched our manuscript editing service. The main differences is that we now first edit 5,000 words of the manuscript and send this back to the author to review, this used to be 2,000 words. This helps the author to see exactly what our editing service provides – if the author decides after seeing the 5,000 words editing sample that they don’t want to proceed then the author is free to not proceed and at no charge.

Also instead of charging a fixed editing fee the editing service is now charged at 1.2p a word (£0.012).

For more details about our editing service please view our editing page or contact us.

The other day I was talking about the fact that writing matters, regardless of financial success, or whether you are published by a big firm or prefer to go the self publishing route instead.  Today I thought I’d continue this little theme, since frankly, I’m just getting warmed up.

Another reason why writing matters is that it is an absolute fact that your writing can live longer than you do.  Think about it – even if you never become a bestseller, whatever writing you do can still last a long time, providing both entertainment and an insight into your own self for generations of your family to come.  If you do manage even a modicum of success, your work has the chance of being discovered and celebrated, and of affecting people for potentially hundreds of years after you yourself have departed this mortal coil.

Affecting people is actually yet another important reason why writing matters.  Writing can touch people you’ll never meet, in places you’ll never go.  Even something as simple as a blog with a very limited readership can still reach out and touch someone, affect their lives for the better.  Even fan fiction, often a form of writing sneered at by many can produce some often beautiful, haunting, touching pieces of prose that can genuinely affect and move another human being, perhaps in another country, or many years after it was actually written.  That’s power.  That’s writing.

p.s. Writing can change lives.

We’ve probably all been there, the point when you begin to wonder why you ever started this writing lark in the first place.  You can’t get taken seriously by your friends or family, you enter endless short story competitions which never win a thing and you spend an eternity writing a novel that fails to interest publishers, and you’d go down the self publishing route but for all the people telling you it won’t work and doesn’t count anyway.

The fact is, what you are writing matters, for a variety of reasons.  For one, even if you aren’t getting paid at the present time, at the end of the day no one becomes a writer for the cash anyway.  It’s a nice thing if you can get it, to be sure, but writing is not just a career, and it certainly isn’t just a “hobby”.  Writing is a calling.  It sounds terribly pretentious, I know, but how many of us, when we first picked up a pen, did so because we envisaged great riches or just to pass the time until something more interesting happened?  Very few, I’d wager.  We write because we don’t have any other choice.  It’s more than what we do, it’s what we are.  So published or not, paid or not, the fact that writing is such an intrinsic part of our identity as an individual human being is what makes it matter.

p.s. Writers are writers, regardless of success.

Many writers, be they in the self publishing field or otherwise, can find writing fiction a great challenge.  Not that I’m suggesting non-fiction is a walk in the park, but to be out on your own and trying to create a story that will grip people is certainly no mean feat.  The thing to remember is that it is not just the story but also the characters that are important in keeping the reader interested.

After all, a TV show lasts about an hour while even the longest “Harry Potter” movie lasts 2 ½ hours at the most – a book, on the other hand, takes up to ten hours for the average reader to get through.  Ten hours is a very long time, so those characters – whether they’re good, evil or somewhere in between – had definitely better be seriously interesting in order to justify your reader’s investment.

Another tip is simply to write like you.  This simply means to develop your own style of writing and not to try to emulate someone else’s.  If you have a sense of humour (and if you don’t, you have bigger problems than trying to self-publish a book, let’s face it) that humour should bleed through into your characters and your work.  If there is a big idea in your work, make sure it’s an idea that you are taken with.  This isn’t just for your readers’ sake – it’s for your own.  Trying to write a novel about something you don’t care about in a style that isn’t your own is practically guaranteeing failure before you’ve even started.

p.s. In writing, as in life – be yourself.

This self publishing game is okay, some of you – especially newcomers to the field – may be thinking, but can I actually earn any money at it?  After all, unless it’s a real personal project where the author only wants a few copies to show his family and friends and for his own personal pleasure, the great majority of writers would like to see something for their efforts – something such as decent money, mainly.

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule for how much you can earn as a self published author.  Book authors do not get a salary – how much they earn depends on how many of their books they can sell and what royalties they then receive from those sales.  Some self published authors have been successful enough to earn something like 100,000 US dollars inside of six months.  Others would be lucky if they earned that much in a lifetime.  Some self published authors, of course, can end up selling not so much as one copy of their book, so you can probably guess how much they’re earning.

The truth is that the success of a book is something like 20 per cent writing, 80 per cent marketing, so to be a success as a self published writer, being a good writer simply isn’t enough – you need to be a good, if not great, marketer as well.

p.s. Quality writing and canny marketing skills are the only ways to make good profit as a self published author.