How to Self-publish and Market a Book

A comprehensive guide to an integrated approach to self-publishing and marketing a book

Hank Quense

Reviews for Creating Stories:

Joylene Butler: Author  of Matowak Women Who Cries:

This book is a true treasure and needs to be in the library of every writer worldwide. 

Indie Reader: 

CREATING STORIES is a useful resource for new writers who have a terrific story idea but aren't sure how to go about turning that into a functional, readable, enjoyable novel

Mark Henderson: British author of Cruel and Unusual Punnishments

Hank doesn't purport to tell reader how to produce creative ideas, but offers guidance on how to turn those ideas into readable fiction.  

I recommend Creating Stories unreservedly to fiction writers everywhere.

© 2019 Hank Quense

All Rights Reserved

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN: 978-1733342407

Published in the United States of America.

Published by Strange Worlds Publishing

Acknowledgements

This book owes a debt of gratitude to a plucky street team who took my typo-filled early drafts and told me what I had wrong and what I had to explain better.

Here is a list of these writers and authors:

Elaine Durbach

Mark Lance

Jordan Lewis

Anna Faversham

Barbara Mealer

Aaron Rath

John Tissandier

Dale Lehman

A.J. Watson

The manuscript was edited by Bonnie Smiler. Gary Tenuta made the cover.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: Getting Started

Chapter 2: 6 Months Before Launch

Chapter 3: 5 Months Before Launch

Chapter 4: 4 Months Before Launch

Chapter 5: 3 Months Before Launch

Chapter 6: 2 Months Before Launch

Chapter 7: Launch

Chapter 8: Post-launch

Chapter 9: Your Book Company

Chapter 10: Additional Resources

About the Author

Foreword

Back to the Table of Contents

Successfully self-publishing a book provides an author with a great feeling. The premise behind this book is that you have decided to self-publish a book. The project can result in an ebook only, a print book only or both ebook and print. It may not be apparent to you at this point, but ebooks and print books have different publishing procedures. This book will explain all these differences and guide you through the preparation and launch of the different editions. A piece of advice: take a deep breath and follow the step-by-step process. Many tasks are easy to accomplish and some will take time and effort. I will guide you every step of the way and separate the more challenging tasks into smaller chunks to ensure you can do it with ease. There are times when you’ll be doing very little work: instead you’ll be waiting for beta readers to comment on the book or for an editor to mark up your manuscript. These two tasks can easily consume two to three months, hence the need for a realistic project interval. This interval spreads out the work load and limits the number of tasks that have to be done all at once. This will ease any stress you may be feeling. If you were to sell your book to a publisher, they would take care of all (or almost all) of the publishing tasks detailed in this book, but you will still be to some degree responsible for part of the marketing. Even if you have a publisher, reading through the publishing tasks in this book will give you a much better understanding of the publishing process. This will enable you to talk more meaningfully to the publisher and that is to your advantage.

Self-publishing a book for the first time isn’t for the faint of heart: it’s a daunting project that takes time and money. Just because you wrote a book (of which you should be proud) doesn’t mean you know anything about self-publishing that book. Authoring a book and publishing that book are two completely different endeavors.

As you start your journey toward self-publishing your book, you will undoubtedly explore the internet searching for information. That’s where the trouble and confusion can start. The internet has tons of information on self-publishing. Some of this information may be accurate and some of it may be inaccurate. Some of it is wrong and some of it may lead you into the clutches of scammers and others out to make money without giving value for your money.

The best way to go about your maiden self-publishing project is to have a mentor — someone who has navigated the self-publishing swamp and survived the journey — and that is what I offer with this book. My book provides you with a wealth of information about self-publishing (indeed it lays out a plan for you to follow). I have self-published over twenty-five books, both fiction and non-fiction. Along the way, I’ve made mistakes and I’ve fallen for scams. This of course means I have a lot of experience and expertise, all of which I share.

This book recommends starting the project six months before the launch date. While this may seem strange, it provides time to complete all the tasks without going into overload. There are tasks to be completed at monthly intervals — six, five, four, three, launch and post-launch.

If you wish to shorten the project time to five months, I suggest you combine months six and five tasks which are found in Chapters 2 and 3. If you have only four months, combine months six and five as before and combine the tasks found in months four and three found in Chapters 4 and 5.

I don’t recommend make it shorter than five months because of your dependency on others to finish tasks such as editing.

Before you begin your journey into publishing and marketing, let me give you a few words of advice and encouragement: You can do this!

Chapter One: Getting Started

Back to the Table of Contents

Overview

Most books on publishing deal with publishing by itself. Most books on marketing deal with marketing as a stand-alone project. I think this is the wrong approach. Self-publishing and book marketing have to be considered as an integrated project. That is what this book does; it treats publishing and marketing together as a unified project.

Successfully self-publishing a book gives one a fantastic ego boost. It’s almost as good as writing the book! The thing is, self-publishing your book the professional way involves time and money (unless you elect to do it the lazy way). Technology and changes in the publishing industry have made self-publishing a book the lazy way easy to do. Indeed, it’s perhaps too easy This book covers in depth the professional way.

So what is the lazy way?

In the lazy way, you finish a new draft of the manuscript on Sunday. On Monday, you buy an inexpensive generic cover, or make one yourself. On Tuesday, you upload the manuscript file and the cover file. On Wednesday, you celebrate because you are now a published author.

Let me make three comments about self-publishing the lazy way. First, the book is a piece of crap: no one will buy it or read it. Second, books that are published the lazy way are the reason self-publishing has such a bad reputation and third, authors who self-publish this way have no concept of what self-publishing means.

What self-publishing means is that you, the author, do ALL the work a publisher would have done if you sold the book to a publisher. This means, among other tasks, making sure you have:

Obtained or created a unique cover

Enlisted the services of a professional editor

Ensured the ebook edition conforms to the Epub3 standard

Developed and maintained a consistent layout

Finished other related tasks

Completing all these tasks takes time, effort and money.

Self-publishing a book the professional way means producing a quality book package to hold your quality content. The term ‘quality book package’ will be the theme of the publishing portion of this book.

The bulk of the work in this project will occur later on in the project. The interval from two months before launch until the magic date will be especially busy.

If you’re ready to self-publish your book the right way, let’s get started.

Remember: You can do this!

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

What type of book?

Comparison list: ebook and print book

Book titles

Book publishing

Epub3 Standard

Book marketing

Budgeting

Publishing budget

Marketing budget

What’s next?

What Type of Book?

One of the early decisions a self-publishing author has to make concerns what type of book will be published. Ebook? Print book? Both?

Ebook formats: Ebooks come in different flavors to satisfy different e- reader devices. The primary ones today are described below.

PDF format: This file type has been around for a long time. It stands for Portable Document Format and is used to read documents on a computer monitor. Tablets and phones can now view this format file type. PDF produces a file that is almost identical to the original file that created it. The advantage of the PDF file (over a Word file, for instance) is the PDF file can’t be changed while the word processor file can be altered. Modern software does allow the PDF file to be marked up (with corrections or annotations), but the original text can’t be changed.

EPub format: This is the world-wide standard for ebooks. Formatting a document to be published in this format can be an exasperating experience because of the stringent standards that have been developed. Most word processors assume whatever you type into the computer will be printed, hence their default settings support printing the document. Many of these default settings violate Epub3 standards, hence the need to spend time on formatting the ebook manuscript. More on this issue later on.

Mobi format: This is the format used by Amazon for its Kindle ebooks. It doesn’t have the strict requirements of the Epub format.

Other formats: There are other ebook formats, such as HTML to mention one; however, most self-publishing authors will rarely, if ever, need to use them.

Print book formats: Print books come in paperback and hardcover styles. The latter are more expensive to produce and hence will demand a higher price. Print books also come in a variety of sizes that you’ll have to specify in order to have your cover match the book size. My novels all are 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches. Other possible sizes are: 6x9 and 8.5x11. There are dozens of sizes available in both US and metric measurements.

Audio books: Once your ebook or print book is completed, you have the option of having an audio book edition issued. Audio books are