Friday, May 31, 2013

Road Map for Authors

You've finished writing and editing your book, and are ready to publish your work—congratulations! To successfully publish your novel, you'll need a road map or business plan. Here is a preliminary outline of steps authors should take to get their work published.

In addition to formatting your work for either for submissions or as an e-book (for either traditional or digital publication), here are your most important deliverables:

1) Author Twitter account with regular posts;

2) Author/book(s) Facebook Page;

3) Author/books(s) website/blog with regular posts, About Author, contact info, and published under your own domain name [ex: http://www.janemdoeauthor.com];

4) Author Google+ page tied to author Gmail (join relevant writing, publishing, and genre communities for purposes of additional resources and wider audience for promotion);

5) Author Goodreads account for outreach to likely audience by genre/category.

These will be essential to developing your brand ahead of or concurrently with publication. If you have a large enough following on an existing Twitter account already, you may be able to persuade them to follow your author account. Loyal followers may provide substantive assistance with promotion of your work—especially helpful for a self-published work.

If you choose to go traditional publishing route through submissions, publishers will be happy to see these deliverables in place and in use. They will otherwise have to prompt you to do this.

(I should note that I'm not doing a Facebook page, though some publishers like to see this. I find that Facebook does not offer a solid return on investment of time. This is a personal decision, however; your experience may vary greatly from mine.)

For business purposes if you are writing under a pseudonym, you may want to take out a DBA under your pen name as business name. Your accountant also suggested an LLC. You must do at least the DBA to play it safe for tax purposes if you are going to take write-offs for anything related to research/writing/publishing/marketing-promotion. Caveat: You should check with your own financial/tax consultant as I am not a tax professional.

Here are some additional resources about digital publishing, with emphasis on self-publication:

All e-book publishing

Rather general overview, commentary on standardization (or lack thereof in self-pub/ebooks). It's the problem of standardization that trips up newbie self-publishing authors.


Self-publishing e-books

Best all-around article from CNET; may not be super-current (ex: BN has recently announced a new self-pub platform [April 2013]).

Testimonial by self-pubbed author on process, experience.

This guy offers some advice on layouts, but watch out: his business is selling templates for formatting ebooks. Pricey, but time is money; if you need speed, his templates may be fastest to publication.

Another resource on formatting, see comments for another one.

Overview: intersection of publisher Carina Press and NetGalley -- how they work to help get word out on a book through review process. Instructive for authors of both traditional publishing and self-publishing.

David Gaughran, self-published author and expert on self-publishing e-books
See both of his books, Let's Get Digital and Let's Get Visible; be sure to follow his blog at the link above.
_________


Though provided here to help authors get started with publication, this list of deliverables and resources may not be complete and may be updated periodically. Hope these resources help you get started with publishing your book!

No comments:

Post a Comment