Let's Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should: Let's Get Publishing, #1

LET’S GET DIGITAL—Learn how to publish your work like a pro and start building your audience with the most comprehensive and up-to-date self-publishing guide on the market today. Packed with practical, actionable advice, Let’s Get Digital delivers the very latest best practices on publishing your work and finding readers.

• Boost your writing career with marketing strategies that are proven to sell more books.

• Get expert tips on platform building, newsletters, and social media.

• Discover which approaches are best for selling fiction vs. non-fiction.

• Implement powerful ways to make your ebooks more discoverable.

• Increase your visibility by optimizing keywords and categories.

• Weigh the pros and cons of Kindle Unlimited, and find out exactly how to tweak your promotional plans depending on whether you stay exclusive to Amazon or opt for wider distribution.

And that's just for starters…

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Introduction to the 4th Edition

If I were to map out the typical writing career for you, most of my time would be spent sketching giant letters saying HERE BE WOLVES.

It’s a form of madness, really. We spend all our time sitting in a room, making up imaginary friends and forcing them into conflict with each other like some kind of demented Punch and Judy show. We tell lies for a living. We live inside our own heads. We spend days, weeks, months—sometimes years—on one single project, before finding out if we stuffed it up.

And if we do manage to navigate the eldritch-filled labyrinth that is our own sub-conscious, and publish our book that is around an inch thick, as the ancient ones decree, what’s our reward? One-star reviews from people who really seem to enjoy using capital letters. Royalty checks that barely cover the cost of your liver transplant. And having to listen to Simon Salesmachine drone on and on and on about how he just tries to focus on writing great books.

Go choke on a chicken wing, Simon.

Writing is hard. But here’s the thing: you’ve already done the hardest part. You’ve beaten the odds already by actually finishing a book because 99% of people never get beyond the first few pages. Which makes you special. Whoop-de-doo!

You might now be stuck at the stage where you’re trying to publish the bloody thing, and that’s where I can help.

Here’s your first bit of assistance: it’s easier than you think. In simple terms, the modern-day author has three broad tasks: writing, publishing, and marketing. New writers get hung up on the middle one, but the truth is it’s the easiest part of the process, by far—and it’s not even close! Writing is hard. Okay, anyone can type up four hundred pages of nonsense. But writing a story, a good story, one that really resonates widely with readers, that’s the hardest challenge of all. And marketing? We might need to order more wine.

Publishing, though, is relatively straightforward, especially once you have made the rather smart decision to take control of your own future and become your own publisher. It took me eighteen months of pointlessly querying literary agents before I realized there was a better way—and I haven’t looked back since. I’ve even gotten to send a couple of rejection letters of my own to literary agents, which is something I hope all querying authors get to experience once in their lives. (Although, in hindsight, my ten-pager could have done with some trimming.)

Being successful as a self-publisher requires a few things. A good book always helps. Publishing to a professional level gives you the best possible chance of enticing readers. And then having some kind of marketing plan to get your book under their noses is kind of essential too, as you might imagine.

The good book part is down to you; I can help with all the rest.

Over the years, a certain kind of mystique attached itself to the publishing process—no doubt cultivated by agents and editors. Really, though, it’s just a case of following a few rote steps, some simple instructions. Especially when it comes to ebooks—the world of print is a little fiddlier, I will grant. Okay, the first time will be challenging, but this book will explain every step along the way, and show you the very latest best practices when it comes to finding an editor, getting your cover designed, building your ebook, publishing it on all the various retailers, and seeking your first reviews.

However, this book is about so much more than simply publishing your book—because if no one reads it, what’s the point?

Marketing advice is woven throughout this book—and I don’t just mean that it will train you to think in a commercial way when briefing your cover designer. We’ll tackle the topic directly right from the start by kicking off with a chapter entitled Starting From Zero. I am a firm believer in that Seth Godin saying that the best marketing is baked into a product, and books are no different. This mindset will inform all the advice I share on each of the steps you must take when publishing your book.

But we’ll also tackle marketing head-on too. There’s a whole section in this brand-new edition about the kind of platform you need to build before you launch, the reader-capturing apparatus that should be in place before you hit Publish. And then there’s a whole approach mapped out for you—safely dodging all those wolves, one hopes—so you know exactly what you need to do to find your first readers after your book launches.

And there’s more. I’ve assembled an incredible bunch of bonus resources, which are exclusive to readers of this book. You can access those on a private page on my website—DavidGaughran.com/DigitalResources—so you might want to bookmark that now. But don’t worry too much; I will repeat that link throughout.

Some advice on how to read this book: I was tempted to say, left-to-right is traditional but go wild if you like, but I’m not that childish. My advice is to read this through once, then follow each step as you go through the self-publishing process yourself. The book is organized extremely logically, if I do say so myself, and everything is lined up for you to complete each task in the correct order. Every chapter ends with a series of Action Steps that handily summarize what you need to do, or set in motion, before you move on to the next chapter. This also makes it very easy for you to dip in and out of each section later on, when referring back to whatever you might need. Each part is quite self-contained.

There’s a lot to get through, but I don’t blame you if you have some lingering doubts about your ability to do this. That’s probably because you suck.

Only kidding! I think you’re great.

More seriously, a lot of this stuff might be difficult to process. Publishing was already a counter-intuitive affair before Amazon and the internet and ebooks and self-publishing turned the world upside down. It’s really hard for newer people because pretty much everything they have learned about the book business from the likes of Hollywood is, well, totally untrue. Except for the movie Limitless—we really do spend most of our time wishing we had some kind of drug that would enable us to write 10,000 words in an afternoon without breaking sweat.

But I’ve got your back. This book covers everything you need to know about publishing like a pro and adopting the right business mindset to be successful. I’ll help you shed those misconceptions like a snake wriggling free of its crumbling, dying skin. Wait. That doesn’t sound very attractive. Let’s have another stab: I’ll help you divest yourself of those notions like a stockbroker frantically dumping shares on the eve of a global financial meltdown that will condemn an entire generation to apocalyptic penury. That’s better!

Really though, I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture here at all. It’s probably too late, anyway. If you have come this far already, there’s no hope of turning you around. You’re beyond redemption. You’re committed to this path now, so you might as well do it right.

And sure, writing is a tough business, and it’s important that you know that—be wary of anyone painting a picture exclusively filled with lollipops and rainbows. But being a writer is also the best job in the world. There’s nothing like starting the day by getting an email from a stranger telling you that they loved your book, floating towards your writing desk and opening up your computer and filling it with worlds that you have created out of thin air. Heartbreak, betrayal, joy, ecstasy, despair—we take readers on an emotional journey and help them experience the most profound emotions of all. And we do that with words. We. Are. Magicians.

Then we get paid for all that! Sometimes we get paid a lot. Which is the best feeling ever, naturally, especially if you have ever had a crappy job where you just felt like a cog in a giant machine—or got treated like dirt and spent your days pining for the relative anonymity of just being a cog in a giant machine, for that matter.

Self-publishing, on the other hand, feels so… liberating. Being at the helm of your own little business, crafting stories, choosing their covers, selecting editors, designing launch plans, and emailing newsletters to your readers is just so empowering. Yes, they are all new things you will have to learn—or pay to outsource—but I’ll bet anything that after you work your way through this book you’ll agree with me that it’s all manageable. And it’s so totally worth it to see your book out there in the wild, chatting up readers. Total strangers reading your book!

Yegads.

1: Starting From Zero

Your authorial fantasies probably involved sipping gimlets and exchanging bon mots with your editor. Or tanning yourself on a beach in Costa Rica when, suddenly, your agent calls after frantically spending all day trying to reach you with news of a major movie deal. Those daydreams probably didn’t involve setting up mailing lists, searching for cover designers, figuring out Facebook Ads, or simply wondering how to share your story with the world in a way that didn’t make you look like an amateur. It’s so frustrating starting out. I know, because I remember what it was like to start from zero.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid, like most of you, I’m sure. Sophomore scribbles aside, I started writing seriously—as in when I started writing my first real book, one I was going to try to publish—back in 2009. Well, that’s not quite true. That was my second book, but we never speak of the first.

Anyway! I’ve been self-publishing since 2011—after trying (and spectacularly failing) to get an agent, a process that involved emailing every single agent on the planet. Self-publishing was most definitely a Plan B for me, but one that has worked out quite well. I started selling books right away, and I’ve been making my living this way since some time towards the end of 2012.

In other words, it took about eighteen months to establish myself to the point where I didn’t need a second job anymore, which in turn is quite a workmanlike way of saying it took eighteen months for self-publishing to make my dreams come true. A full-time author! Even my most outrageous fantasies didn’t involve becoming successful that quickly. Maybe I need better fantasies…

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve been doing this for a little while, and I’ve done okay out of it. And there are thousands of self-publishers out there who have done even better than me, so I’m hardly some kind of unicorn. But unlike most of them, I write both fiction and non-fiction, and publishing multiple, updated editions of this here book over the years has kept me in touch with the issues that newer authors face, especially in the marketplace today—one that’s much more mature and competitive than when I got going.

Not all of that change has been negative, as is sometimes portrayed. Yes, there is a lot more competition now, but that’s balanced by the market multiplying in sheer size. It’s also true that things are harder today in the sense that standards (and perhaps expectations) have risen, but the flipside is that it’s easier today in terms of the tools you have at your disposal. And while we are rounding out the picture with some much needed perspective, let’s not forget that we are living through an era of unprecedented opportunity for authors—something that can be disguised by the bumps in the road we personally travel, as the market goes through one spasm or another that we all have to deal with.

A few constants