5 things I wished I knew about Self Publishing | S3 E42
So we’ve covered what the differences are between traditional and self publishing and we covered why self publishing is worth it. So this week I want to speak from my experience of the 5 things I wished I knew when I self published. When I decided to self publish, I didn’t know much about the process. I had some experience with the publishing industry from my time working at Oxmoor House Publishing with the Southern Living cookbook division. I understood the marketing, the formatting and design pieces. I understood about copyrights and trademarks to a degree but I’m the type of person that is very diligent with my research before I ever do anything.
I knew that self-publishing is a big deal and all the ownership would fall to me so I wanted to make sure I did all the steps correctly but I was starting from scratch and having to figure it all out on my own. Google became my best friend and I also made sure to sign up for some of my favorite authors book launch teams so I could learn the ins and outs of how to launch a book and market it well. I also wanted to make sure I fully owned my work and that it was protected so I did tedious research to better understand how to copyright my book to protect my work and how to make sure there weren’t any trademarks I would be violating with my book title. That’s mainly why I created the self publish from start to finish course is so others don’t have to go on a goose hunt to learn all of what I had to learn but to help them from start to finish so you can launch your book much easier than what I went through in learning it all the hard way. I’ve also helped others through this same process since when I published my book people started reaching out wanting to know how I did it. It can be a tedious process so having a course or coach to walk you through each step is very helpful. But there are also a few things that I wished I knew or did more of after publishing my book.
The first thing that I wished I had done differently was that I wished I had done a better job of continuing to market my book. I did a great job the first few months but then tapered off because I was self conscious that it would be annoying to keep talking about it. I felt shy and didn’t want to bother people with my work so I only marketed it a few times a year. I wished I had done more and been more confident in selling my work because I’ve come to learn that it only felt like a lot to me but that other people don’t typically think that. I also realized that people wanted to learn more and hear about the book so I could’ve done a better job at marketing it more often and being confident in my work.
The second thing that I wished I would’ve done differently is when purchasing my ISBN number, I only purchased one. I was determined that after self publishing I would magically get a publishing deal at the writers conference I was headed to that summer and wouldn’t need to self publish again. In my mind, I ranked Traditionally publishing as higher than self publishing but that’s not the case at all. I later learned that many big authors who have had success with traditional publishing and have book deals also utilize self publishing as a way to make additional money. They have books both traditionally published and self published because they make more royalties off of their self published books, but the traditionally published books give them a shot at best seller lists. So looking back knowing that I wanted to publish more books, I should have bought a bundle of ISBN numbers at a discount to save money in the long run. Because now that I better understand all of this, I will need to buy ISBN numbers in bulk for the additional books I’m working on to add to my blog as a store front so if I had bought them back then I would have ultimately saved money. So if you think you might want to publish more than one book, journal, etc. I would purchase the 10 ISBN number bundle because it saves you money.
The third thing I wished I had done a better job of building community and not focusing so much on numbers and growth in order to advance to a traditional publishing deal.
The fourth thing I wished I knew more about advertising on Amazon. This was something that was new to me and I didn’t take advantage of but I’ve seen others do this and been successful with it. I haven’t researched the pricing to see what spend you would have to do for it to be worth it but it’s something to look into. Pinterest is another area I wished I had learned more about and took advantage of at the time as well.
Finally, the first thing I wished I had known is how important it is to have a blog to continue supporting your audience. I had a blog when I launched my book and I did really well for a while with building a blog community but then I got too in my head about growing numbers and an audience for a traditional publishing deal that I ended up getting overwhelmed with my content strategy and shifting to instagram only for a while since it seemed like blogging was dying out but I now regret that choice.
I get asked questions about publishing and specifically self publishing so often so I thought this month’s podcast series would be a great way to answer many of those questions and I even decided to create a whole course on self publishing from start to finish. The course will be coming out at the end of June and with this course I will be walking you through the entire self publishing process from beginning to end with a lot of resources to help you be successful with publishing. I give you all the resources that I wished I had during my first time self publishing and it’s all in one place so you don’t have to scour the internet googling all the different questions that I did when I went through this process. It’s a one stop shop to get your book published and the time frame is up to you for how long the publishing process will take you. I walk you through budgeting, marketing and all the details in between. I’ve walked several authors through this process individually before and decided that it would be a great resource to create a course so that I can help even more people make their publishing dream a reality.
If you want to learn more you can check out the course page and hop on the waiting list at selfpublishcourse.com.
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