Self-Promotion & Self-Publishing for Beginners

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What Would You Do? Change of name / POV

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Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
A revealing article penned by indie author Alastair Crombie describes how he attempted self-marketing as an unknown writer.

Book Marketing from a Standing Start as an Indie Author - Alliance of Independent Authors: Self-Publishing Advice Center

He concludes:

"Unfortunately, I’ve not found any other methods that work reliably for newbies. I’m not sure there are any. The cold truth of the matter is that instant success belongs in the fiction we write and not in the facts we live."

"And the final lesson I learnt: living with disappointment. I know most authors recognize the feeling."

This year, I've been navigating the self-promotion trail, which is something I wish I'd began six years ago, before writing my first Cornish Detective novel. If you're new to writing, I earnestly recommend beginning a blog (with a newsletter) and posting regularly on social media. The trick is to get your name known and also to collect email addresses of subscribers who may, one day, buy your book.

Remember, whether you self-publish online or you publish traditionally through a book company, you'll be expected to have an author platform, so best start now!

When I returned to creative writing in 2013, I knew it would take at least five years to get anywhere and so it has proved. It helps that I'm stoical (and bloody-minded :mad:). I had some experience of publishing and being a writer from selling short stories and magazine articles in the 1970s and 1980s, realising that you were only as good as your last published piece—and that it needed lots of luck to get that into print.

I'm glad that one of the first writing guides I read was How Not To Write A Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author by David Armstrong. Originally published in 2002, what he says about surviving as a non-bestselling author is even truer today. The hardships and ignominy are worse. There are affordable copies available on Amazon and eBay and Kindle:

How Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author - Kindle edition by David Armstrong. Reference Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Armstrong confirms that it's a long, hard slog to get anywhere as a writer. Wannabee authors might well be put off starting.

At present, I'm wrestling with the hydra of converting my books to other formats, those most commonly used by e-reading devices, which are PDF, MOBI and EPUB. This is to make the manuscript flowable, able to automatically fit different-sized screens. Previously, I've self-published on Amazon and via Smashwords, which rather spoilt me, for they have meatgrinder software which does the conversion for you.

I should have used Smashwords again, even though I've unpublished my 45 titles on their site, to promote them via Draft2Digital. Instead, out of some daft sense of behaving honourably :rolleyes:, I attempted to do the job by using Calibre checking what the converted story looked like with Adobe Digital Editions. The main problem has been that the formatting I've used sometimes gets removed by Calibre, resulting in unwanted spacing between sentences and paragraphs. Trying to establish my own house style, I'd used Celtic symbols as section breaks, like this:

celtic-knot-2-7768_small.jpg

Calibre didn't like that at all, substituting a capital 'O' for the key I'd pressed to insert the Celtic Knot. The Smashwords meatgrinder did the same thing. This meant I had to remove them all, which took several hours...as did adding them last week. Note to self: stop being a clever dick!

giphy.gif


After cleaning the manuscript of extraneous design flourishes, I put it through the Smashwords meatgrinder again, which gave me a clean-looking story, complete with an attached book cover. There are still problems with the MOBI conversion done by Smashwords, which is the format used by Amazon for their Kindles.

Smashwords and Amazon don't play well together, each insisting that any manuscript submitted doesn't mention their rival. I'd listed my 45 previously published titles at the end of the book, linking them to Amazon, which gave Smashwords an epileptic fit! Removing them improved the MOBI reformatting results, but Amazon's own meatgrinder will probably do a better job.

Of course, if I had the money, I could pay someone to run a campaign promoting me and my books and to convert my books to other formats, placing advertising strategically, but I don't, so I'm doing everything myself. Paying for services is no guarantee of success. I've read some horror stories of people investing their life savings to promote themselves as writers, selling very few books and facing penury.

I'm 80% towards completing what I planned with blogging, having an author website, designing book covers, reformatting my five crime novels and posting on social media. I'm going to put in a couple of weeks of 12-hour days, to ready things for launching the first two stories in mid-July.

Although it's taken thousands of hours of work to get to this point, I'm truly not expecting anything much to happen. I'm not a celebrity who's chosen to write a book (or have it written for them), so I've no free promotion that way.

I'm just a nobody trying to be a somebody.

What might help raise my profile, is to do interviews with the local press and radio stations, which I'm loath to do, but needs must when the devil drives. :angry-face-with-horns: Cornwall Libraries have a policy of buying books by Cornish authors and those set in the county, so I'll make some sales that way (including eBooks) as well as introduce local readers to my name.

What problems have you faced in self-promoting and self-publishing?

What worked for you?

And, what was a waste of time and money?

If anyone needs advice on what I've written about in this post, please contact me (before my brain melts).

I might have made the mistakes, so you don't have to.

38261766_410408479363227_2596957095127416832_n.jpg

Jungho Lee Official Website
 
A revealing article penned by indie author Alastair Crombie describes how he attempted self-marketing as an unknown writer.

Book Marketing from a Standing Start as an Indie Author - Alliance of Independent Authors: Self-Publishing Advice Center

He concludes:

"Unfortunately, I’ve not found any other methods that work reliably for newbies. I’m not sure there are any. The cold truth of the matter is that instant success belongs in the fiction we write and not in the facts we live."

"And the final lesson I learnt: living with disappointment. I know most authors recognize the feeling."

This year, I've been navigating the self-promotion trail, which is something I wish I'd began six years ago, before writing my first Cornish Detective novel. If you're new to writing, I earnestly recommend beginning a blog (with a newsletter) and posting regularly on social media. The trick is to get your name known and also to collect email addresses of subscribers who may, one day, buy your book.

Remember, whether you self-publish online or you publish traditionally through a book company, you'll be expected to have an author platform, so best start now!

When I returned to creative writing in 2013, I knew it would take at least five years to get anywhere and so it has proved. It helps that I'm stoical (and bloody-minded :mad:). I had some experience of publishing and being a writer from selling short stories and magazine articles in the 1970s and 1980s, realising that you were only as good as your last published piece—and that it needed lots of luck to get that into print.

I'm glad that one of the first writing guides I read was How Not To Write A Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author by David Armstrong. Originally published in 2002, what he says about surviving as a non-bestselling author is even truer today. The hardships and ignominy are worse. There are affordable copies available on Amazon and eBay and Kindle:

How Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author - Kindle edition by David Armstrong. Reference Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Armstrong confirms that it's a long, hard slog to get anywhere as a writer. Wannabee authors might well be put off starting.

At present, I'm wrestling with the hydra of converting my books to other formats, those most commonly used by e-reading devices, which are PDF, MOBI and EPUB. This is to make the manuscript flowable, able to automatically fit different-sized screens. Previously, I've self-published on Amazon and via Smashwords, which rather spoilt me, for they have meatgrinder software which does the conversion for you.

I should have used Smashwords again, even though I've unpublished my 45 titles on their site, to promote them via Draft2Digital. Instead, out of some daft sense of behaving honourably :rolleyes:, I attempted to do the job by using Calibre checking what the converted story looked like with Adobe Digital Editions. The main problem has been that the formatting I've used sometimes gets removed by Calibre, resulting in unwanted spacing between sentences and paragraphs. Trying to establish my own house style, I'd used Celtic symbols as section breaks, like this:

celtic-knot-2-7768_small.jpg

Calibre didn't like that at all, substituting a capital 'O' for the key I'd pressed to insert the Celtic Knot. The Smashwords meatgrinder did the same thing. This meant I had to remove them all, which took several hours...as did adding them last week. Note to self: stop being a clever dick!

giphy.gif


After cleaning the manuscript of extraneous design flourishes, I put it through the Smashwords meatgrinder again, which gave me a clean-looking story, complete with an attached book cover. There are still problems with the MOBI conversion done by Smashwords, which is the format used by Amazon for their Kindles.

Smashwords and Amazon don't play well together, each insisting that any manuscript submitted doesn't mention their rival. I'd listed my 45 previously published titles at the end of the book, linking them to Amazon, which gave Smashwords an epileptic fit! Removing them improved the MOBI reformatting results, but Amazon's own meatgrinder will probably do a better job.

Of course, if I had the money, I could pay someone to run a campaign promoting me and my books and to convert my books to other formats, placing advertising strategically, but I don't, so I'm doing everything myself. Paying for services is no guarantee of success. I've read some horror stories of people investing their life savings to promote themselves as writers, selling very few books and facing penury.

I'm 80% towards completing what I planned with blogging, having an author website, designing book covers, reformatting my five crime novels and posting on social media. I'm going to put in a couple of weeks of 12-hour days, to ready things for launching the first two stories in mid-July.

Although it's taken thousands of hours of work to get to this point, I'm truly not expecting anything much to happen. I'm not a celebrity who's chosen to write a book (or have it written for them), so I've no free promotion that way.

I'm just a nobody trying to be a somebody.

What might help raise my profile, is to do interviews with the local press and radio stations, which I'm loath to do, but needs must when the devil drives. :angry-face-with-horns: Cornwall Libraries have a policy of buying books by Cornish authors and those set in the county, so I'll make some sales that way (including eBooks) as well as introduce local readers to my name.

What problems have you faced in self-promoting and self-publishing?

What worked for you?

And, what was a waste of time and money?

If anyone needs advice on what I've written about in this post, please contact me (before my brain melts).

I might have made the mistakes, so you don't have to.

38261766_410408479363227_2596957095127416832_n.jpg

Jungho Lee Official Website
Paul -- if you want to chat re doing author interviews (what to avoid, etc) send me a PM. I am a long-time journalist from all sorts of publications, starting with the locals. Never worked on the red tops but I am familiar with their bad habits.
 
Paul -- if you want to chat re doing author interviews (what to avoid, etc) send me a PM. I am a long-time journalist from all sorts of publications, starting with the locals. Never worked on the red tops but I am familiar with their bad habits.

Thank you for your kind offer, @ E G Logan, which I may well take you up on. Every time that I think I'm doing well in my self-promotion plans and designing and running my blog, website and social media posts, I immediately think of a dozen things I haven't tackled yet. My unreadiness was confirmed this morning in the latest newsletter from the brilliant Book Designer, which lists the top ten FAQs about book publicity and promotion:

Top 10 FAQs About Book Publicity and Promotion - The Book Designer

I find myself at a strange moral impasse over how to sell my Cornish Detective series and the 45 titles I already have online. Originally, I used Smashwords to self-publish, also uploading to Amazon's ordinary KDP publishing programme. Earlier this year, I delisted them and transferred to Draft2Digital, who are more modern in operation and appearance. They redistributed my eBooks to Amazon and many other vendors.

I've always been wary of committing to Amazon's Select and Unlimited options, writing about my doubts in several threads in The Back Room. Although I've recently praised the virtues of staying wide, I've had so much frustration attempting to produce decently formatted manuscripts of my crime novels using Smashwords meatgrinder and Calibre's book conversion software, that last night, I decided to test how Amazon's meatgrinder handled my manuscripts. The process was smooth and the result looked perfect—damn it!

Feeling rather like a rat jumping ship for a safer vessel, I delisted all of my books on D2D. They're already delisted on Smashwords. This put me in the perfect position to commit to Amazon's Select or Unlimited options, which demand exclusive representation. Still unsure about committing to them, I nonetheless uploaded all five crime novels, leaving them as Drafts.

Whatever my qualms are about hooking up with a corporation that is facing anti-trust enquiries for their dominance and controlling ways, I'm more likely to make money from my books with them. As the old saying goes, 'If you want to catch fish, you have to go to where the fish are'...and Amazon are rumoured to sell 83-87% of all eBooks!

It may be a wise business move for me to make, but why do I feel so dirty? :confused:
 

True. Talking of Wall Street, I saw it when it was released in 1987 at a newly-built cinema in Andover, Hampshire. I was walking home after working since 5.00 a.m. as a milkman, running five miles on my round to deliver 450 pints. Knackered and wanting some escapism, I entered the afternoon performance, finding I was the only person watching! This felt a bit greedy, but I settled back to enjoy a few cans of beer. Partway through, an usherette appeared, waving a torch around trying to find me, before saying "I know you're in here somewhere, would you like me to bring out some ice creams and snacks to buy?" Politely, I refused. I always think of that afternoon whenever Wall Street is shown on television.
 
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What Would You Do? Change of name / POV

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