People decide to self publish for various reasons. It may be that numerous publishers have rejected a book for not being commercially viable enough, or that the meagre royalties offered by a publishing house don’t sound appealing. Whatever the reason, self-publishing has never been easier to do. With e-book services such as Smashwords, publish on demand services such as Lulu, and retailers like Amazon, nearly anybody can format and release a book for sale.

Just because you no longer need a publisher, doesn’t mean you should necessarily do everything that a publisher would have done yourself. Whether it’s a non-fiction book on banking and getting the best savings rates, or a thriller, mystery or romance novel, publishers don’t just take a manuscript and slap it between the covers of a book before they release it. All processes happen before a book is released, and in self-publishing, these processes can’t and shouldn’t all be done on your own.

Quality Matters

One of the most valuable processes a traditional publisher does to a manuscript before it is released is editing. Editors don’t just check for errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation, although they do this too, but also they check to ensure the story flows well, that the characters are convincing and that there are no holes in the story.

Releasing a book to the world which is full of such errors is a sure fire way of receiving one-star reviews and having all your hard work go to waste. Nobody wants to read a bad book, but without an editor, it can be nearly impossible for a writer to identify all the possible mistakes in his or her own work. Hiring an editor is the best solution for anybody considering self-publishing, but this isn’t cheap, and not everybody can afford to have their manuscript professionally edited, but there are other ways of ensuring the book is as good as it can be.

Get Honest Opinions

Beta readers can help identify mistakes in both syntax and plot. Getting as many people as possible to read you manuscript, will help with the proofreading and also help to spot holes in the story, poor characterisation and other weaknesses. While you will have proofread and checked the manuscript you intend to self-publish dozens of times just to make sure it’s perfect, you won’t find everything yourself as you are far too close to the work. You may not have noticed that your main character has left the house in red shoes, only to get her blue trainers wet in a puddle a page later, but a fresh pair of eyes might. However, these people need to be unbiased.

Simply giving your manuscript to all your friends and family is not going to get you honest opinions. Most people close to you would be worried about upsetting you if they didn’t like something about your manuscript, so it’s far better to find people you don’t know as beta readers. Using critique groups and writer’s resources such as Baen’s Bar or Writers Digest is a great way to find people that will give honest opinions and help identify errors, plot holes, bad pacing or unrealistic characters.

Judging a Book by its Cover

While we’ve all heard the old saying, ‘Never judge a book by its cover,’ the truth is that people do. Good covers sell books, bad covers don’t. This is true for both hard copy books in bookshops and those bought on the internet. A good cover should represent what is within the pages of the book, but also be visually appealing. Unless you know what you are doing, creating your own cover could damage any future sales so you need to find somebody that can help.

Not everybody has a degree in graphic design or fine art, and not everybody can create his or her own book cover. Again, if you can afford it, hire a professional artist, ideally somebody that specialises in book covers. If not, try to find somebody that has some background in art. It’s important you explain exactly what type of book it is otherwise the cover may clash with the work. If possible, get several covers created and get different people to give their opinions of them and choose the most popular one.

Editing and cover design are just as important for a self-published book as one that is published in the traditional way, so before you submit all your hard work to the world, don’t try to do it all yourself. Get outside help, as it will give your work the best possible chance of being successful and prevent all that hard work from going to waste.

Whilst it might be appealing to imagine that you’ve written such a wonderful book all you need to do now is list it on Amazon, kick back on your recliner sofa and wait to become a bestseller, it sadly doesn’t work that way for anyone.

Even the most well-established authors still have to put the time and effort into promoting their books so that readers know it’s out there for them to buy and read, so if you’re just starting out in your writing career, you’ve certainly got some work to do.

When you make the decision to go down the self-publishing route, you should know that this means you must also become your own publicist. Of course, if you’ve got the funds to hire an expert, that’s great. But the majority of aspiring self-publishers won’t have that kind of money and will have to do some DIY platform building.

Getting Started

You’re probably already familiar with the basics of platform building on the internet. Most of us have a Facebook account, maybe a Twitter account, etc.

If you use Facebook, you can create an author’s page so that people who aren’t on your friends list can ‘like’ you and follow your updates. This is a good idea if you don’t want to add just anyone to your friends list. Many writers like to keep their personal online presence separate from their author’s presence. To create a page, sign into your Facebook account and follow this link.

Many writers also have a website or a blog which they use to promote their work.

Joining writing communities such as Critique Circle and Authonomy is a wise idea too.

Basically, any way in which you can create a stronger web presence is a good thing.

Yet there’s an important element to platform building which is often overlooked.

You Reap What You Sow

A lot of new authors make the mistake of thinking that all they need to do is get the word out about themselves and their work as much as possible. But there’s more to building a platform than endless self-promotion. A big part of the process is making friends and connections with other writers, not just so you can tell them about your work, but so you can help to support them with theirs too.

Its common sense – if all you’re focussing on is getting your name out there and expecting everyone to come to you and buy your book, and every other author is doing the same thing too, not much is going to happen.

It’s easy to talk about yourself all the time. Lots of people are doing that. But it’s important to get involved with what other authors are doing. Read writer’s blogs, leave comments, join forums and read other self-published books. Talk to other writers on Twitter and Facebook. Post links to writing you’ve enjoyed.  The more involved you become in the online writing community, the stronger the platform you’ll be able to build. If you can make friends with other authors, they will be more likely to help you promote your book. Many authors write book reviews or post blog entries from guest bloggers, so build relationships with people you can share those processes with.

Be Authentic

It does take time, and you need to approach online networking with authenticity, because it will be obvious if you’re just commenting on someone’s blog to earn back-scratching points from them.

Connect with authors whose writing you’re interested in, rather than simply targeting anyone and everyone. If you spread your net too wide, you’ll end up having to trawl through a lot of stuff that isn’t helpful, let alone enjoyable.

Authenticity is also important in a wider sense. Your online presence needs to reflect who you are. If you’re trying too hard to be something you’re not, people will see through that. It also creates more work for you if you’re having to ‘keep up appearances’.

Have Fun with it

Although it requires some work, try to relax and enjoy the process. Remember that you’re making new friends, not just promotion buddies. Writing is often a lonely profession, so it’s nice to talk to other like-minded souls. Connecting and communicating with other writers is also bound to help improve your writing anyway.

Overall, the best advice for any author trying to build an online platform is: Be yourself, and be sociable; just as you would need to be in real life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Available: Out now

Description

Wheel of Destiny is a novel of intrigue, adventure and explicit sexuality. An English teacher flees the threat of death across the world in the company of his provocative pupil. When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls’ grammar school in England and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfather’s wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest that ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters’ latent sexuality. While the novel takes the form of a thriller, it is also a love story. The plot pivots round the war-diary of a man whose bomber was shot down in action in Egypt in 1941. The man had invested money in partnership with his wartime friend in an opal mine in a place designated by the letters ‘C.P.’ in ‘S.A.’. His granddaughter’s search for the mine affects her own as well as her former teacher’s destiny.

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Bryan Cromwell

Available: Out now

Description

The first part of this book deals with disease, health, and diet mainly in Knightswood prior to, during, and immediately following World War II. The second part is concerned mainly with the education of primary school children in the same area and during the same period, although there are several ventures beyond Knightswood and into Glasgow generally.

This is not intended to be an academic treatise but is more in the form of a collection of experiences from a number of men and women who spent their formative years in Glasgow’s largest between-the-wars housing development. The accounts are equally applicable to all of Glasgow Corporation’s pioneering garden suburbs. In addition to anecdotes there is a great deal of easily verifiable “official” information; for example, details of Glasgow’s highly successful mass chest X-ray campaign in the 1950s and a fair amount of factual material concerning the Scottish education system operating in the early to mid 20th century.

Perhaps this modest book, although concentrating on health and education, will go some way to giving Glasgow’s largest garden suburb the attention it deserves. After all, this “land of hope and glory” has nurtured many people who came to the forefront of public attention and in a variety of occupations, having survived the diseases of childhood prevalent in the period covered and benefitted from a ‘guid Scottish education’.

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Available: Out now

Description

Ivor’s Ramblings is a feast of poetry covering many subjects including fantasy, trips within one’s mind, spirituality and life’s experiences with an ever present message of having fun, enjoying life and making the most of the hand life dealt you to travel the pathways of life.

It is coloured by his being brought up in a large military family, his teenage years living on the island of Penang in Malaysia and the trials and successes he has encountered throughout his lifetime.

Avenues of the mind, depression, laughter, death, disability, religion and spirituality are all unfolded here in a most surprisingly entertaining fashion.

The clear message of having fun whilst rising from the ashes of depression, redundancy and personal loss have never before been presented in such a personal and open manner that makes one feel that just reading his work could guide you towards one’s own personal fulfilment.

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