Guide to Self Publishing: Where to Start?
You have an idea for a book, or you’ve already completed a whole manuscript. What’s next? Where to start the self-publishing process? This is a question I have been asked so many times, I decided to start a new series here, called A Guide to Self-publishing. This, the first post is all about where to start.
Make Your Book Attractive
Yes, I know. You have spent months, even years writing your manuscript and now it’s ready, all you want to do is to get it out there for people to buy and read.
It’s very tempting to log onto Amazon and following their very easy guides, get your manuscript into print and onto a Kindle. You can even use their cover design feature, and software to convert your Word file to an eBook and printable text.
You can of course do that straight away if all you want is to see your book in an online store, or in print.
If, however, you’d like your book to be enjoyed by thousands (or tens – even hundreds – of thousands) of readers, you must make sure that your book is as visible as it possibly can be.
For this to happen, you need to make the text, cover, and metadata as attractive to your readers as you possibly can. For this, you need to do a bit of research.
Millions of Kindle eBooks on the Amazon Store
It’s been estimated that some 7,500 Kindle eBooks are published on the Amazon platform every single day. That means that hundreds of authors and publishers all over the world press ‘publish’ each hour of the day.
This can be a depressing fact to a new author, but I am not trying to dissuade you from publishing your book. Far from it.
At the other end of the scale, there are also many, many self-published authors who’ve made and continue to make a good living from their writing. There are some self-published authors who have sold millions of copies of their books and can call themselves millionaires.
It is possible to make money from self-publishing. You just need a little patience.
Before you press ‘publish’, you need to get to know your readers, and then give them what they want. It sounds simple, but there are many factors to consider.
What Kind of Book?
In order for you to become a successful self-published author, and to get your book to be seen by lots of readers on Amazon, and other online retailers’ stores, you need to know your audience.
That means that you need to decide who your book is aimed at.
Start with the simplest of questions. Is it fiction or non-fiction?
With the latter, it’s often easier to determine who your audience is.
A book about healthy living will target very different readers from one about, say, military history, or financial planning. If you are in business yourself, and an expert in your field, you will most probably already have a target audience in mind. You may even have a mailing list, or a large following on LinkedIn, for example. In this case, it’s fairly easy to find out who your audience, or ideal reader, is.
Trying to find your target audience for a fiction book can be trickier.
Genre
The first step in this process is to find the book’s genre. (Go here to find out more about genre).
There are a few main genres, such as Romance, Thrillers, Literary Fiction, and Fantasy, but there are also a huge amount of smaller categories.
A book’s genre can also be called its category. Categories and genres are there to help readers find a book, which they’d like to read. In brick-and-mortar shops, books are often displayed on shelves under various categories. It’s exactly the same in online stores such as Amazon.
To find out more about book categories, I would highly recommend K-Lytics. It’s a site that publishes regular research into various book categories (and subcategories) on Amazon. It includes recent research with information on what kind of book covers, titles, and keywords feature in that particular genre, as well as where the hot sub-category nitches in the category lie. It’s a paid service, but one that I personally could not do without.
You also need to determine if your book is for adults or children. (There are rules on what you can include in your book if it’s aimed at minors)
Who Is Your Ideal Reader?
Once you have decided what your book is about, now you need to think of the kind of person who would be reading a book like yours. Are they male or female, what is their age, education, interests, hobbies?
This process can be helped by thinking of just one person. For example, when you were writing your book, who did you think would read it? Many authors, me included, while writing, direct their words to one person. It’s a little as if you were writing a long letter, or telling a story to your friends.
If you haven’t done this, it’s not too late to think about who your book is for. The person could be your sister, father, aunt, or someone you hardly know or even have imagined. This person, if real, may never read your book. You’re just using them as a cardboard cutout, if you like, to help you understand your ideal reader.
Now set down all of this person’s characteristics. The most important of these is their reading habits. What genre do they most enjoy? Do they read Kindle books, audio, or traditional paperbacks? Or all of the above?
If you already have a mailing list of readers, you can ask them about their reading habits. If not, go to sites like GoodReads, Facebook groups, or Twitter to find out what people similar to your ideal reader like to read.
A little bit of research before you publish your book will pay huge dividends later on.
You can use this information about your ideal reader to guide you with all your metadata for the book. Don’t know what metadata is? Read on.
Get Your Metadata Right
Metadata is the information about your book you give to platforms such as Amazon when you publish the title. It includes:
Language
Title (including subtitle)
Author Name
Series and Edition detail
Book’s categories (Genre)
Target audience (Adult or child)
Description
Keywords (Amazon gives you 7 keywords)
Price
ISBN (Optional)
Metadata is what determines how visible your book will be on platforms like Amazon and in bookshops or libraries.
The data follows the book where ever it’s published and sold, so it’s highly important that all the information is the same. Especially if you publish your book on more platforms than just Amazon.
All of the metadata is important, but the two most significant ones are Categories and Keywords. Both are your main marketing tools and the best way to ensure that your book attracts a wide audience made up of the right kind of readers. I will talk in more detail about these two in further posts.
Your ideal reader will inform your metadata. For example, if you have determined your genre, you will know how books in that category are priced, but it will also affect how you present your book. The editing of your text, the interior layout and most importantly, the cover, will all need to fall in line with the preferences of your ideal reader.
Readers DO Judge a Book by Its Cover
New writers and most readers think that a cover needs to be unique and literal, ie. it needs to represent what’s inside the book. To a certain extent, this is true. You do want your book to stand out, but, surprisingly, you also want your book to look the same as others.
Research into successful book covers has shown that the most important factor in a cover is that it adheres to the conventions of the genre.
If a book cover veers away from what most books in a genre look like, readers will not pick it up. Romance readers, for example, will not pick up a book that has an image of a man running away towards a dark alleyway. They will immediately recognise it as a thriller, and move on.
There are exceptions, of course. But these exceptions, where the cover is very different from the rest of the titles in that genre usually has a huge marketing budget behind it.
For example, when The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett came out in 2020, the cover looked completely different from the other books in Women’s Fiction. But because it was heavily supported by a marketing budget, and the book’s subject matter was on-trend, the novel became a best-seller. And now, many books have copied the colourful style of the cover.
Sometimes publishers use a totally new cover design on books by authors who are very well-known. Just look at the cover for Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch. Readers all over the world were waiting for a book by this famously non-prolific bestselling author of The Secret History, so the cover needed to be special. What it didn’t need to do, was to tell the readers what kind of book it was, because her fans already knew Donna Tartt’s style.
For us ‘normal’ authors (which is the vast majority of writers) the situation is slightly different.
The cover of your book needs to reassure a reader that they are getting the kind of book that they are looking for, or usually read. They need to have the same but different. This statement is not putting down readers by any means, it is just a fact of the human condition. We are not designed to take risks, especially with our reading matter.
You, as a new author, will not have the kind of fan base that Donna Tartt has, or a large marketing budget like Brit Bennett, so you need your book cover to do all the talking for your title.
Again, a little research will inform you of the kind of cover your book should have. Go on Amazon, and/or to your local bookstore and look at books in your genre. Show the ones that you think are similar to your own book to your cover designer. (And do employ a professional cover designer.)
Don’t get too stuck on what images should be on the cover. Very few readers will examine the book cover in detail before buying. Especially with eBooks, we’re talking of a purchase of just a few dollars, which is often made quickly and on the spur of a moment. Naturally, it’s slightly different with paperback titles in brick-and-mortar bookstores. These readers like to browse and linger over books. But even then, it’s the feeling the cover ignites in a potential buyer that usually matters.
Next Time
I hope the above has given you something to think about. I hope I’ve encouraged you to do your research into your ideal readers, your book’s genre and categories and the other metadata that your book will be associated with before you press ‘publish’. Next time, I’m going to be talking about the type of files you need and software that is out there to help you to get your book looking as good as it can.