Since losing my online job in February, Don and I have had endless discussions about new ways to earn income. One of the things we wanted to do for some time was to self-publish a variety of things we've written over the years (including Don's collection of country humor stories).
But oddly, I also have a number of (clean) romance novels that remain unpublished. One in particular, titled "Rachel's Folly," remains my favorite unpublished manuscript. It's too long (74,000 words) for Harlequin's Love Inspired line, and too outside-the-box for Harlequin's Heartwarming line. So, with my agent's blessing, I'm going to go "indie" on this one and publish it myself.
Don started watching YouTube videos detailing how to self-publish books using Amazon, and it just spiraled out of control in terms of complexity. Between our daily workload and projects we're tackling, he just didn't have the bandwidth to learn something so completely unfamiliar to both of us.
So we connected with a woman named Jessie Denning, who used to be the managing editor at Backwoods Home Magazine before splitting off to start her own business. She quoted us a reasonable price for formatting and uploading the manuscript to Amazon. Don and I will try our hands at designing the cover art.
The mechanics of getting the book into print (especially since most of the heavy lifting will be done by Jessie) is the easy part. The difficult part is marketing. And that's where I'd like to pick the brains of you, dear readers.
Keeping in mind my limited experience with social media, what are your recommendations for how best to market an indie book? I'm all ears!
A good cover design is CRUCIAL. Yesterday someone I know was pushing me her self published book and the cover was so bad--it just screamed self published and I know it's going to be atrocious. (Besides, it's a children's book and everyone thinks they can write children's books and they can't.) See how much a professional might charge for a cover on Upwork or Fiverr or something.
ReplyDeleteDead readers? See your second to last paragraph.. LOL..
ReplyDeleteI for one can't wait for the publication of your newest book. So I'd say your current readers here are a good start. Will we be able to review on Amazon?
I'd also suggest a road trip to your favorite book stores to see if they'll feature you on a "Meet the Author' event.
Best wishes on this new venture. I am always in awe at the teamwork you and your family have.
Cheers, SJ now in California
Whoops! Typo fixed, thank you!
Delete- Patrice
There are some self-published books I have purchased after they put slides of scenes I could read though on TikTok to give a flavor of what the book was. Look up Kate Alyne- she has a TikTok and YouTube channel giving advice for using social media to promote self-published works. She gets very specific.
ReplyDeleteFYI I got that info from my husband who is using Kate’s free resources for a con-fiction thing he is doing, but I see from looking closer that her name is actually Kate Hall and she strongly promotes her paid courses. Sorry to not be fully transparent about that!
DeleteHave your loyal readers market it for free. We can share it on social media.
ReplyDeleteAn acquaintance of mine published a book about earning college credit while homeschooling using Amazon and ran into trouble. People were basically stealing the content and then uploading it as their own to sell. Amazon would not do anything to help. She ended up republishing it another way.
ReplyDeleteI have more thoughts--will spill them tomorrow. But as someone who worked in (real not self) publishing for decades, these ideas (other than mine) are all a bit....B. Sorry. If you guys don't know how to market a book, just say so. Re blog readers: I'm a faithful blog reader and my interest in any romance novel is nil, and nil minus 500 if it's "clean" and Amish. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I think Social Media is your best marketing. I know you hate it, but that's where the people are these days.
ReplyDelete