Stop the Madness! Let's Put an End to Self-Published Author Overwhelm

When I read blogs about book promotion and the promises of most marketing "gurus" my head literally feels heavy. And I'm not the only one. I spend hours on the phone talking new authors off the proverbial ledge because they feel as if they are "falling behind." Over the phone I can often hear them growing more fatigued by the minute--even before taking much action--because they've enrolled themselves in uber complicated schemes or because they interpret the word "marketing" to mean "get busy" or "act like a nuisance/irritant/jackass." The tears (yes, tears) come at the thought of too much to do.

This way sounds like no fun. Fortunately I'm not sure such fears are ever realized in quite the way authors worry about them. But it's easy to understand why it would stop a well-meaning person in his or her tracks. No one wants to be hawking a book like a used car salesman, especially when love has gone into it. No one wants to feel the paralysis that comes from confusion.

Being an author can be FUN. Publishing your book should be a delicious moment when you celebrate finally putting your love and inspiration into the hands of the people you created it for. Really, efforts made on the launch day are merely the opening volley in a multi-round exchange between you and your readers. It should enrich your life to give from the heart and provide the answer to someone's question, the solution to a problem, the insight that's been lacking, the entertainment, and so forth. That's the real dream behind it all that motivates, isn't it?

Self-published authors always have a mission--often a noble one: In my experience this is to heal, awaken, support, teach, and transform your readers in some manner or through some method. It's good to tap into this deeper purpose. Once your book is on sale, your mission is already being fulfilled--partly. That's exciting! But remember, the mission stands outside the book. You cannot fail--with or without selling books--as long as you continue to deliver (in every way you can dream of) the value that the book contains. The message matters more than the delivery mechanism. It helps to be committed to both your ideas and your audience.

I'm going to speak a good bit about this perspective in the upcoming Book Marketing Training for Self-Published Authors, which begins on February 2nd and runs through March 5th. In addition, I'll be putting you right into action, specific action, if you take the course. In five weeks, you can get a lot done. If you do the work piece by piece, it's entirely manageable. The idea is to create a system that you can operate routinely.

The beauty of continuous marketing, or more specifically, of engagement marketing, is that persistence is key. In the old days, with traditional mainstream publishing, books were dumped on store shelves on the same date everywhere. In the relatively new paradigm of print-on-demand publishing the "drop date" is less relevant: Since there is less physical inventory, what you're aiming to do is spread word through as many avenues as possible. The more highly targeted these inroads are, the easier it is for the people who want what you offer to find you online. Your print sales are supplementary.

The idea alone of forming relationships with carefully targeted readers should feed the flames of your human spirit, rather than put out your light or drag down your energy. Seriously, why else are you writing other than to be read by them? (If not, perhaps you are publishing for the wrong reasons . . . cynical or self-important reasons . . . reasons that don't inspire and uplift you?) If you don't feel grateful enough that someone "out there" cares to read your words or genuinely motivated to connect, the process is more difficult. Not impossible, just harder.

My 5-week Book Marketing Training for Self-Published Authors begins with a session on positioning. From there we shall build our efforts in parallel layers that radiate outwards like the circles on a tree stump or the sticky latticework of a spider's web, looking at optimizing your website and social network presence. None of what I'm going to suggest you do is hard to implement; it just requires clarity of thought and purpose.

At the point when your book is newly available or publishing imminently you really need to develop a grounded action plan, one your energy can sustain, to broadcast your message for months to come and keep open the lines of communication with your readers (and colleagues, mind you, that's important, too). You will get better and better at it the more you participate. There is definitely a learning curve to being in any relationship, and author-reader relationships are no different.

The very things that make you special are going to be the strongest playing cards you could place on the table. It's your trump suit that you need to follow to win in this little game.

COURSE CONTENTS

 

5 Sessions of Live Instruction

(one-hour webinars with slides, Thursdays at 3 PM Eastern,

recorded for replay):

• Target Audience Research/Timetable (February 2)
• Author Website Optimization (February 9)
• Social Media Optimization (February 16)
• Publicity: Radio/TV/Blog Tours (February 23)
• Speaking & Events (March 1)

5 Sessions of Live Q&A

(one-hour open calls/web simulcasts, Mondays at 3 PM Eastern, recorded for replay):

Each instructional segment is followed with an open question and answer session where you can get specific insights into the module we're on. Q&A Calls will take place at on February 6, February 13, February 20, February 27, and March 5.

Half hour private coaching with Stephanie Gunning:

When you sign up, you'll be booked for a private, confidential laser strategy session to hone your key concept and marketing, so you can gain clarity on your unique hook. These will be booked for the first two weeks of the course on a first-come, first served basis.

You'll also get weekly PDF handouts.

Price $697

Register here

Visit the Course Website

Loving the Look of Your Book: Working Well with Designers

There's a job in the copyediting departments of mainstream publishers called "Production Editor" that doesn't exist in the new paradigm of the self-publishing realm. To the detriment of self-publishers, what they don't know leads them to believe that the tasks handled by production editors are not necessary. Many hope and pray and anticipate that the freelance designers they hire to do their covers and interiors will intuit an appropriate design (because they are competent in their specialization). I have found that this is wishful thinking.

So what is it that production editors do which self-publishing writers could emulate that's going to get you the excellent results you want from your interior design?

Some of this is pure timing. When does the designer begin designing? If you want a cover that you can post on your website to announce an impending book launch and stir up some excitement, this can be prepared many months in advance. It isn't necessary to complete your manuscript to get a cover. All you need to know is the correct title, subtitle, and author, and have a sense of what type of imagery appeals to the targeted book audience. That last bit matters as much as the title/subtitle combo.

Back in the day, we were taught that a book cover is a poster. Online a cover is more like a postage stamp. A key question is: Does your cover work when viewed small as well as large? (Have a look at your art samples in the realm of 25% of the size of your 5x8 cover before finalizing.)

Try explaining your marketing strategy to your cover artist and involving them in finding the right symbolic representation of your subject matter. A cover can be like a pictorial dreamscape or floating words. It has to follow sound design principles, and evoke an emotional response in potential buyers.

The interior design is another matter. It cannot be successfully completed prior to the manuscript being completed. When you deliver a manuscript to an interior designer it should be fairly stripped down--not busy with added elements--which gives the designer fewer embedded problems to solve.

A key step in production that most self-publishers skip is pulling out some pages from the manuscript for the designer to prepare a sample design. These must contain each of the basic elements of design that will be present in the final book from bulleted and numbered lists, to chapter headings, running heads, running feet, subheadings at every level of hierarchy (A, B, C), boxes, borders, call-out quotes, captions, figures, regular prose, italics, bold faces, and anything else you might dream of. You need not see whole chapters in your samples, but you do need to see each element proposed to imagine them all together.

When you skip this step, believe me, something is likely to go wrong. Designers are not mind readers and they are certainly not as fully invested in your project as you are as an author. A designer could either nail it squarely on the head or could miss the mark and spend hours going down a wrong path.

Save yourself money if you're paying by the hour. Save the designer time spent on false starts. And give yourself the chance to consider a few alternatives if you aren't certain of what you're asking for.

Great things to communicate in your instructions to a designer of either a cover or an interior are color schemes, tone and mood (sophisticated, playful, modern, old-fashioned, witty, authoritative, youthful, etc.), shapes (round, wavy, boxy), subject matter (romance, history, science, spirituality), and also preexisting books that you would like to emulate in some way, meaning you responded well to them and think there is something appealing about them in the abstract that could be echoed in your book design.

Ask what the designer would prefer to know from you; get a sense of best practices for their work process that would help them help you to get the result you want.

Once you have approved your sample pages, then the next step is implementation. This should only be done from the final manuscript after word choices are complete.

Remember to proofread not only the words but the design once it has been set into type. Mistakes can and do occur. And sometimes designers (especially those not originating professionally from within the ranks of the traditional book world) make poor decisions. For instance, I once saw a designer deliver a "final" (not really) version of a page layout where a bold heading was the last line on a page. To my eye, this clearly should have been caught and corrected. A heading should never be separated from the text in the section that it leads into. It looks terrible otherwise. She was a lazy or ignorant designer.

Many authors try to implement designs themselves prior to copyediting. Then when the notes come back--red lines and line length changes--the design falls apart and the author is frustrated. It's sweetly naive to do it this way unless you intend to follow through all the way to the finish line. Who are you trying to impress? Yourself! The editor doesn't give a hoot about design at the stage of word play.

Where an editor can help you with design issues is in setting up the format and visualizing how long sections of text can be (paragraphs included) without making navigation hard for the reader. They can make sure the hierarchy of your contents is properly structured so that the design won't fall apart.

I was surfing the web yesterday evening for wonderful design sources to send you to look at, and the following ones caught my eye. Visit the AIGA Design Archives, Best Book Covers 2010. This site really is expressing high artistry. Also have a glance at The Book Cover Archive, for the purpose of appreciation.

Read the Wikibook on Basic Book Design to get a breakdown on terms that are used and some of the issues that professional designers think about.

A fun article that impressed me was "books with no label on the cover" on The Book Design Review Blog. It just proves that some images are so iconographic that we can "grasp" the whole thing without needing a title.

Inksie Blog: Ten Principles of Good Design is about universal design principles, not just for books. This is for connoisseurs really.

Stress Free Book Marketing Training for Self-Published Authors

A new course is being offered February 2-March 5, 2012. Early Bird Special: Take $100 Off If You Sign Up by Friday, January 13

The phone rings and it's an author checking in with me for advice. "I did everything you said I should do on Twitter, Stephanie. I followed 2000 people until the system cut me off. But only some of those people followed me back. I hate Twitter."

(That's not exactly what I said to do--what I said would have been a little more detailed.)

I ask her, "And have your posts been well-received? Are you being retweeted or mentioned? Are people visiting your website and subscribing for your newsletter?"

She says, "Actually... I never post."

"Well," I said, "there's your trouble. It's not Twitter, Facebook, or [fill in the blank]; it's you."

Like many self-published authors, this woman didn't have a plan of action to promote her book and she naively dreamed that setting up an account on a social network was enough. Thus, she had transformed herself into a NON-messenger.

Was she a troglodyte? Hmmm... I don't think so.

Perhaps she was a "positive thinker." LOL

In fact, I believe the whole thing stressed her out. She was worried about how she was going to manage all the "moving parts" of social media, because it was unfamiliar to her. It seemed STRESSFUL. 

In my view, having an organized PLAN removes stress. Learn More

Fortunately IT IS possible to spread word of a book to prospective readers online, because that's where MOST self-published books are marketed by neccessity. Typically, self-published authors don't sell tons of books in stores. The stores aren't very interested.

Online sales are a different story. Each book interests its own audience and they can be reached here. On the social networks, an author has the ability to analyze and find the right people who will like/need/buy it. It's a tool that can be leveraged.

The point is: You have to be smart about your strategies to engender sales. You have to market your book if you want to sell your book. YES, really!

Your mailing list doesn't have to be massive when you start for you to get results. It doesn't hurt, but ultimately it's not the decisive factor. Understanding your reader is.

Furthermore, believe me or not, but this part of being an author is FUN.

Starting on Thursday, February 2, join me for a five-week course:

Book Marketing Training for Self-Published Authors.

You'll develop a marketing plan for your book and learn to:

• Targeting/Position Yourself as an Author
• Optimize Your Book Website
• Optimze Your Social Media
• Set Up Radio/TV/Blog Tours
• Plan Live Events and Public Speaking

Visit the Course Page Now and If You Sign Up by Friday January 13th Get a BIG Discount.

My goal is for you to walk away with a hands-on strategy, and clear action steps that fall along a timetable, which you are enthusiastic about following through on.