Tag Archives: self-publishing

Becoming a book publisher

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Becoming a book publisher.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Becoming a book publisher.

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

Seeing my first book in print.

Once I had completed my manuscript and printed out a couple of copies for friends to read, I thought the road to launching that book into the world would get easier. There were a whole lot of challenges to navigate. Had I known how much was involved, I might not have begun this journey of writing books.

Some of those challenges turned out to be logistical, and some had to do with technology. Technology is one of those creatures I love to hate. Without all this modern technology, self-publishing would have been impossible or out of my price range. But technology also involves a learning curve that, to my old, tired eyes, looks like scaling a vertical wall.

Let me walk you through some of the decisions I had to make and the technologies they had to study. I won’t presume to say master, but I did make them all work, sometimes, at least partially, the way they were supposed to.

Do things yourself or hire people?

You can do, by yourself, all of the tasks needed to turn your manuscript into a finished book and make it available for readers to purchase. You can also contract these tasks out to others. Which do you have more of time or money? I can’t say I had a whole lot of either.

If you’re like me and love learning, you probably want to do as much as possible yourself. I also didn’t have a lot of money to commit to hiring people to do things.

A title for my publishing company.

Picking a name for my publishing company turned out to be one of the easiest choices I had to make. Since I was electing to self-publish, I could pick pretty much any name I wanted as long as it wasn’t already in use and I didn’t include someone else’s name.

I came up with the name “Portal Publishing” with the idea in mind that I wanted my books to transport readers to somewhere they hadn’t been before.

Titles for my books.

As I began each book, a title would occur to me. So that is the title on the file where all my notes and early drafts reside. My first book was a nonfiction book. If I ever publish a second edition, it will get a new title.

With my second book, I shifted to writing novels, and my experience with titles in the fiction area has been quite different. That book started out with one title, but when I got it complete, the original title didn’t quite fit, and I hastily retitled it just before I pushed the self-publish button.

When I say my first book, my second book, and so on, I’m talking about the ones I ended up publishing. I would estimate there are another 6 to 10 books that either didn’t get completed or, once I finished them, I didn’t feel they were good enough to publish. Someday, maybe, I’ll take those unfinished and unpublished drafts and run them through the process of revising and editing and see if there’s something there worth publishing.

While the titles worked for me while I was writing and publishing the books, they’re probably not the best titles for selling the books. One lesson I learned from this was that I should have taken more time and picked titles that reflected their genre and that would attract readers.

Creating covers.

For my nonfiction book Bumps On The Road Of Life, I used the cover creator program in KDP for the paperback edition. When it came time to upload the reformatted book for the kindle edition, I couldn’t figure out how to reuse the cover that was on the paperback. So, I launched into learning to use Canva to create my own covers. It worked exceptionally well, and I could make it work quickly enough to use it for several more of my covers.

Mastering the mechanical part of creating a cover was quite challenging. However, that process has gotten easier to use the more I’ve done it. And, of course, all the technology has improved over the years between my first book, published in 2017, and now.

There’s a vast difference between creating a cover and creating a good one. I’m firmly convinced all my books would sell better with professional covers. Having covers that match the genre of your book is a necessity if you want your book to sell well.

Formatting manuscripts twice.

Formatting a book for publication is another specialized skill. I quickly learned that it needed to be formatted differently for e-book readers, which needs to flow, than the way it should be formatted for paperbacks. This means that every book I published had to be reformatted multiple times.

Another formatting wrinkle here. Each edition needs to have the front and back matter updated, and any links in the books must be revised. If you want to publish wide, meaning with more than one publisher, you’ll have to revise that back matter and create separate editions for each publishing company.

Writing blurbs.

There’s an art to writing good blurbs. Unfortunately, it takes time to master blurb writing. I’ve taken several classes on writing blurbs and other advertising copy, but if you want to do this well, you’ll need more training than an hour or two of webinars.

Writing back copy.

Just like blurbs, learning to write back copy is another skill to master. While these two and other instances of writing advertising copy are related, they’re not identical.

Uploading manuscripts.

Uploading manuscripts to various publishers was also a time-consuming activity. In addition, different publishers have different platforms. Had I continued to publish wide, I could easily have justified paying someone else to format and maintain my books on the various platforms.

Two reasons why I discontinued my effort to publish wide.

There’s a huge learning curve with each platform your books are available on. For someone like me who has a full-time job and some other things in my life that require my attention, I needed to spend more time focused on my writing and less on the mechanics of getting my book in front of potential buyers.

I also discovered that a significant portion of my book sales came from books I had listed exclusively on KDP. So it just made sense to me to have all my books available in kindle unlimited.

Getting people to buy the book.

It’s a great feeling to have written and published a book. I still remember the first time I sold a copy. I also remember when a student in one of my classes brought in a paperback copy of one of my books and wanted it autographed. Reaching that point is a baby step on the journey to being an author with a following.

I know I’ve covered a lot of topics in this brief series of posts. If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Having just had my 75th birthday, I’m conscious that there will never be enough time to do everything I want to do. But I’m certainly not done with my writing journey. Thank you for sharing this adventure called life with me.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Turning a manuscript into a book

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Turning a manuscript into a published book

Publishing
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Turning a manuscript into a book.

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

What are you going to do with that manuscript?

My writing a book began because I had something I wanted to say. I didn’t want to be one of those people who spent my whole life saying I was going to write a book and never did. As an aside here, I think of myself as an “indoor mountain climber.” I am always looking for a new challenge to master.

My top three-character strengths are:

  1. Love of learning
  2. Creativity
  3. Curiosity.

The idea of building on your character strengths comes from the field of positive psychology. As a therapist, just treating people to get them over their depression never seems like enough. I wanted to find out what it took to have a happy, joyful, and contented life. For more of all that thinking, take a look at my mental health blog counselorsoapbox.com

So, given my top character strengths, it came naturally that I would not only want to write the book, but I would want to learn and understand the process of going from an idea to a finished product. I was hoping that some people would actually read the book.

Am I writing a nonfiction book or a novel?

I struggled with that choice for quite some time. Ultimately, I decided to do both. I took a number of the blog posts I had written about overcoming life’s problems, added some more material, did some editing, and the result was a nonfiction mental health book. Someday I’ll get back to working on nonfiction books, but that hasn’t happened yet.

I printed copies of my first nonfiction book using the printer attached to my computer, hole-punched them, and put them in binders. Then I asked a few friends to look at the book. I got some useful feedback and made some revisions. Eventually, I published that book. My biggest regrets are that I didn’t get more beta readers and do more revisions before I decided to publish. On the other hand, had I kept revising, I might never have published anything.

Next came my first novel.

While I was waiting for feedback on my nonfiction book, I started work on a novel. There are several stories behind that decision, but I’ll leave those for another post.

While finishing up the nonfiction book, I kept working on my novel. As a result, I got better at taking a book writing project from start to finish. Like most beginners in any field, I could see what I was accomplishing, but I still didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I gave copies of my first novel to a second set of friends for feedback.

Again, the feedback was helpful, and encouragement from friends felt good, but at that point, I couldn’t identify areas that needed improvement. What I did identify were all those steps that come after finally saying the book is done but before it could be available for people to purchase.

This all happened when things in the self-publishing field were changing rapidly.

My first two books were published just as CreateSpace was being folded into KDP. I quickly discovered that just because the book looked good when viewed on my computer in Microsoft Word, it didn’t look the way it should when viewed on a kindle or printed out into a paperback.

There were certainly features of the process that I struggled to learn. However, by the time I returned to using them for my subsequent books, many of those steps had changed.

Both books got their debut.

Eventually, my first two books became available as kindle editions and paperbacks. I briefly tried “going wide.” but ultimately, I decided that the right thing for me was to be exclusive with Amazon and have my books available on Kindle unlimited. While the sales aren’t huge, some months, the revenue from Kindle Unlimited reads exceeds the revenue from sales of books.

The next step in my journey was learning how to publish my books.

I’ll tell you more about that in an upcoming blog post.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Decisions writers make once their book is written.

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Moving from Writer to Author.
Courtesy of Pixabay.com

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

Decisions you must make once you finish your manuscript.

You have finished your manuscript, which is probably a first draft, and now you must make a lot of decisions. Frankly, some of these you could have made before you wrote a book, but unless you are well along your journey to becoming a writer, publisher, and entrepreneur, you probably won’t do that. I know I didn’t. I will walk you through the decisions I had to make and some of the lessons I learned.

Why did I write this book?

Unless you’re doing write-to-market or someone else presented you with an idea, you probably got an idea and went to work on writing your book. Now you must ask yourself why you wrote this particular book and what you will do with it now that you have it.

If you wrote it because you felt you had something you needed to say, you probably want to get the maximum number of people to read it. If you are hoping to make money, maybe even make a living by writing, you need to look at what will be most profitable.

If you go on to write a second book, you will probably have a much clearer idea of the intended readers. The more refined your idea, the better your chances that this book will accomplish what you set out to do.

What do you intend to do with this book?

Not having a clear idea of your objectives results in people writing books that end up in drawers, never to see the light of day again. Writing a book about yourself or your problems can be very therapeutic. A lot of self-help books start that way. Most of them aren’t things that should be shared with anyone else. Writing an epic novel can be a lot of fun. Many books began with the author putting their daydreams down on paper. But now what?

If you decide to share this with others, you move from being a writer to taking on the many other responsibilities of getting your book ready for others to read.

Are you going to run off half-dozen copies of your memoir and hand them out to family and friends? Or will you try to get your book in front of a wider audience?

All these decisions I’m going to give you aren’t always made in this order, but eventually, you’ll have to think about these things. I know I did.

Should you Self-publish or submit to a traditional publisher?

Will you go looking for an agent or publisher? Or are you going to self-publish? If you hadn’t thought those things through before you started writing, you had better do it now.

Both have their advantages. If you find an agent or a publisher, they can do much of the work for you. They can also prevent you from making a lot of serious mistakes.

Submitting your book to a publisher or agent includes a high risk that you will get rejected. Even if you get it accepted, unless you sell a lot of books, you won’t see much money. But you will have the publisher helping you through the process of getting your book out there.

One warning here. Paying a publisher to get your book printed usually results in spending a lot of money and ending up with a garage full of books. Real legitimate publishers will pay for the expenses if they expect to sell some books, and they reject it if they don’t. People who charge you to print your book plan to make their money off you, and whether you ever do anything with the books is not their problem. I suppose there are some exceptions to this, but bad experiences are so common I cannot encourage that route.

I decided to do the self-publish route.

I finished my first nonfiction book shortly before I turned seventy. I wanted to say that I had achieved my goal of writing a book and seeing it published. I wasn’t sure I would have it in me to write more books. Looking back, I wish I had done things a little differently, but I’ll share those challenges with you.

If you decide to go the self-publish route, even with the help of one of the major platforms, you will be wearing one, two, or maybe even a dozen hats in addition to being a writer. Each function you will have to perform has a learning curve. I found some of those curves as steep as climbing a shared granite wall. But I’m still climbing.

So, are you ready to become a published author?

If you reach this point, you have finished your manuscript, decided you wanted to get it out in the world, and probably have decided to self-publish your book. You’re now ready to move from the art of being a writer to the business of being a published author.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel