Self-Publishing my Book - Comments welcome...
Discussion
Hi all,
Cayman 987.2 driving forum newb here and want to say massive congrats on getting close to finishing your self-published book.
Talking of a writing journey, I took early retirement in late 2021, started writing my first book in November 2021, and finished the first draft of 65,000 words after 3 months in February 2022. It took another 6 months of exhausting proofreading, editing, checking, re-checking, and more editing to get the quality result I wanted. I finally self-published on Kindle Direct Publishing and numerous other outlets in August 2022.
As far as “I wish I’d known this,” I had no idea the professional proofreading and editing stage would take twice as long as the actual writing of the book! In many ways, writing was the easy part. My top tip would be to use a writing aid; I use ‘Grammarly Premium,’ and while not perfect, it does a decent job of polishing up your prose before you put it in the hands of your professional proofreader/ editor.
Best of luck to all petrolhead writers.
Cayman 987.2 driving forum newb here and want to say massive congrats on getting close to finishing your self-published book.
Talking of a writing journey, I took early retirement in late 2021, started writing my first book in November 2021, and finished the first draft of 65,000 words after 3 months in February 2022. It took another 6 months of exhausting proofreading, editing, checking, re-checking, and more editing to get the quality result I wanted. I finally self-published on Kindle Direct Publishing and numerous other outlets in August 2022.
As far as “I wish I’d known this,” I had no idea the professional proofreading and editing stage would take twice as long as the actual writing of the book! In many ways, writing was the easy part. My top tip would be to use a writing aid; I use ‘Grammarly Premium,’ and while not perfect, it does a decent job of polishing up your prose before you put it in the hands of your professional proofreader/ editor.
Best of luck to all petrolhead writers.
Moderator edit: no advertising
I have never tried grammarly premium as ,ultimately, it means you would be reliant an algorithm somebody has created which reflects their idea of best practice. I'm not sure how it'd have coped with James Joyce, Martin Amis or Conrad ... And , ironically enough , 'grammarly' ain't even a word in my Chambers.
Anyway , did you find it intrusive, did it inhibit your style ? I must admit even the stuff on Word gets me cussing - I'll use an Oxford comma when I want - rarely - rather than for each noun , term , and thing . Oops
Anyway , did you find it intrusive, did it inhibit your style ? I must admit even the stuff on Word gets me cussing - I'll use an Oxford comma when I want - rarely - rather than for each noun , term , and thing . Oops
Edited by coppice on Thursday 22 September 18:37
^ Thanks both, I haven't used grammarly and doubt I will. Having said that, if/when there is a hefty print run (fingers crossed, you never know) I will get a professional on board. I know someone who will do it.
With regard to editing I got a couple of copies printed, partly for me to read in a proper manner and make notes directly into, but also because I just wanted a feel of things. The major thing to note was my small font size, slightly tight line spacing which is now fixed, and that also it didn't feel like a book as the paper was too white. Not a problem of course.
Anyway, I've made all of my notes and it's taking me about 30 mins per chapter to rewrite/correct. 34 chapters so I'll spend a couple of weeks on it.
After that's done I'll be getting perhaps a dozen copies printed, to be much more 'book like' based on the above notes. They'll be given to a select few people to give me honest feedback, and they are bound to spot some silly mistakes.
Plodding along though, reckon by the start of November I'll be in a position to order my first proper print run (just 100 books or so) and do a bit of promotion to see if I can sell some :-)
With regard to editing I got a couple of copies printed, partly for me to read in a proper manner and make notes directly into, but also because I just wanted a feel of things. The major thing to note was my small font size, slightly tight line spacing which is now fixed, and that also it didn't feel like a book as the paper was too white. Not a problem of course.
Anyway, I've made all of my notes and it's taking me about 30 mins per chapter to rewrite/correct. 34 chapters so I'll spend a couple of weeks on it.
After that's done I'll be getting perhaps a dozen copies printed, to be much more 'book like' based on the above notes. They'll be given to a select few people to give me honest feedback, and they are bound to spot some silly mistakes.
Plodding along though, reckon by the start of November I'll be in a position to order my first proper print run (just 100 books or so) and do a bit of promotion to see if I can sell some :-)
Doesn’t matter how long you spend on editing, and how good your editor is, whenever humans are involved something will slip through! You just gotta do what you can to limit them 
Don’t worry - reviewers will take great delight in giving you one star for a perceived error…
I even had someone DM me to point out I’d made a mistake and called a room on a ship where a scene takes place ‘the wardroom’ instead of ‘the war room’…. Hmmmmmm.
Best of luck…
Don’t worry - reviewers will take great delight in giving you one star for a perceived error…
I even had someone DM me to point out I’d made a mistake and called a room on a ship where a scene takes place ‘the wardroom’ instead of ‘the war room’…. Hmmmmmm.
Best of luck…
Wickedbad said:
Doesn’t matter how long you spend on editing, and how good your editor is, whenever humans are involved something will slip through! You just gotta do what you can to limit them
Don’t worry - reviewers will take great delight in giving you one star for a perceived error…
I even had someone DM me to point out I’d made a mistake and called a room on a ship where a scene takes place ‘the wardroom’ instead of ‘the war room’…. Hmmmmmm.
Best of luck…
Ah well this I can relate to. One of my other jobs is putting together a magazine for some clients in London. It gets read time and time again, and professionally proof read, but only after a £7k print run do the final little mistakes get spotted :-)Don’t worry - reviewers will take great delight in giving you one star for a perceived error…
I even had someone DM me to point out I’d made a mistake and called a room on a ship where a scene takes place ‘the wardroom’ instead of ‘the war room’…. Hmmmmmm.
Best of luck…
MrWarrior68 said:
Hi all,
Cayman 987.2 driving forum newb here and want to say massive congrats on getting close to finishing your self-published book.
Talking of a writing journey, I took early retirement in late 2021, started writing my first book in November 2021, and finished the first draft of 65,000 words after 3 months in February 2022. It took another 6 months of exhausting proofreading, editing, checking, re-checking, and more editing to get the quality result I wanted. I finally self-published on Kindle Direct Publishing and numerous other outlets in August 2022.
As far as “I wish I’d known this,” I had no idea the professional proofreading and editing stage would take twice as long as the actual writing of the book! In many ways, writing was the easy part. My top tip would be to use a writing aid; I use ‘Grammarly Premium,’ and while not perfect, it does a decent job of polishing up your prose before you put it in the hands of your professional proofreader/ editor.
Best of luck to all petrolhead writers.
I had a similar journey to you - the proofreading and editing was hard. I think I got through about 15 draft iteration sof the book - all in paperback, as I found it easier to read than the electronic manuscript. Amazon typically turned it around in a week.Cayman 987.2 driving forum newb here and want to say massive congrats on getting close to finishing your self-published book.
Talking of a writing journey, I took early retirement in late 2021, started writing my first book in November 2021, and finished the first draft of 65,000 words after 3 months in February 2022. It took another 6 months of exhausting proofreading, editing, checking, re-checking, and more editing to get the quality result I wanted. I finally self-published on Kindle Direct Publishing and numerous other outlets in August 2022.
As far as “I wish I’d known this,” I had no idea the professional proofreading and editing stage would take twice as long as the actual writing of the book! In many ways, writing was the easy part. My top tip would be to use a writing aid; I use ‘Grammarly Premium,’ and while not perfect, it does a decent job of polishing up your prose before you put it in the hands of your professional proofreader/ editor.
Best of luck to all petrolhead writers.
Moderator edit: no advertising
I wish I had used Grammarly, and also wish I had an appreciation of the difference between colour and black and white printing costs (at least on Amazon).
Thought I’d throw a few things in here. Sorry it’s a long post.
My wife has a number of books self published on Amazon, she does the writing, I do the techy stuff and the promotion. As far as ‘self published’ books go, they have been very successful. What you need to bear in mind is that probably 90% of SP books will sell half a dozen copies and sink without trace. Emma’s (her pseudonym) is heading towards 7000 book sales and over million and half page reads now.
The books are fiction, mainly romantic and aimed at the female market. Most of them have a French theme.
A few things we have learnt;
Editing is vital, but get the right editor. We chose a semi professional person from online recommendation and she did the first three books. At the time we thought we had done the right thing, but looking back now, the books are not particularly good grammatically and there are a fair number of mistakes still. But and this is a big but, they are still selling and selling well for SP books. The next three books were edited by a friend Emma met at a writing group, he’s an ex English Lit lecturer and a fellow author, he is far better and far cheaper (free actually).
Cover design is vital, our first attempt was pretty rubbish, but the rest have been very good and certainly increase sales. We are lucky in that my daughter is a professional print designer and very talented in that department.
Traditional publishing is practically impossible to get into, we sent the info off to a dozen or so houses and the only responses came back from those that were obviously vanity ones. They were very happy to publish, but wanted about 2k upfront. They guaranteed x number copies, but it became pretty clear it would take a very long time (if ever) to clear back the up front costs. It seems in reality the only authors that get a trad contract now are those that know someone in the Industry or are an established ‘ celeb’ themselves.
We chose to use Amazon KDP and stayed exclusive with them on Amazon select. This means the books are free for those who sign up to select, we get paid by the page read. The sale price is chosen by us and when sold we get a decent royalty. More than traditional publishing. We can do paperbacks, but these are done by print on demand, they work out expensive For the reader to buy (about £10) and we only make roughly the same margin as would a £3.49 ebook. We sell a Tiny fraction of the number of ebooks.
To gain sales you have to work at it. If you just put the book out, and do nothing, no matter how good it is, it will fail. Sadly it doesn’t really matter if it’s a brilliantly edited book or in some cases even that well written. Some of the ones we see selling very well are pretty poor, that includes traditional and vanity published books as well SD ones. You need to market it well, the easiest is probably Amazon’s own ads system, basically you pay them and they will push the book up the system so more people see it and then buy it. But it’s expensive, in reality a stand alone book will not be profitable, it will cost as much to promote it as you will get back in royalties, probably more. It only works if you have a series of books which is good enough that the reader continues. We get about 50 to 60% follow on reads, from a series which is started at 99p and With follow on books risI got to £3:49. We set the current spending level on advertising at approx £150.00 a month. A good month will see about £300.00 profit.
Pick your market... Emma’s books are marketed almost entirely in the UK, we found they didn’t really appeal to the American market, probably because they consider £1000 a month as a minimum advertising budget.... and we don’t! Australia and Canada were better, but we only break even with them when we advertise. ( so I’ve stopped)
Find a category, Amazon is all about sales ranking, the higher the sales the higher the ranking, get a higher ranking and you get more sales, it’s a virtuous circle! If you can find a category where you consistently rank highly it will in turn drag you up in the overall sales rank. There are well over two million books on UK Amazon.
The vast majority of SP books will be ranking below the million or so. With the right category you can be showing In the top ten In your category and somewhere in the teens of thousands overall. The knack is finding that category as they seem to like to make it difficult for you. The actual books for sale, in some categories rarely seem to correspond with what you would expect them to be. If you are really good at it you can with some effort hit the best selling rank in the category, this allows you to use the ‘best seller’ orange tag, which certainly get you more sales. ( not managed it yet, our ceiling seemed to be about #5, when on promotions)
Talking of promotions, with Amazon select you are allowed to promote books for a certain number of days each quarter. The one that works for us best is the free give away. Basically you set a period of time to give the book away for free, seems counterintuitive, but I’m reality if it’s a series, you should get follow on sales and a ‘tail’ of sales once it’s finished. This still works in the UK, less so in the US. it appears the Americans certainly like a freebie, they downloaded hundreds of copies in a five day period, but then hardly bought any follow on books. The UK by contrast downloaded a fraction of that number, but then followed on at a very high percentage.
It’s all good fun and hopefully going forward will be become a small pension!
My wife has a number of books self published on Amazon, she does the writing, I do the techy stuff and the promotion. As far as ‘self published’ books go, they have been very successful. What you need to bear in mind is that probably 90% of SP books will sell half a dozen copies and sink without trace. Emma’s (her pseudonym) is heading towards 7000 book sales and over million and half page reads now.
The books are fiction, mainly romantic and aimed at the female market. Most of them have a French theme.
A few things we have learnt;
Editing is vital, but get the right editor. We chose a semi professional person from online recommendation and she did the first three books. At the time we thought we had done the right thing, but looking back now, the books are not particularly good grammatically and there are a fair number of mistakes still. But and this is a big but, they are still selling and selling well for SP books. The next three books were edited by a friend Emma met at a writing group, he’s an ex English Lit lecturer and a fellow author, he is far better and far cheaper (free actually).
Cover design is vital, our first attempt was pretty rubbish, but the rest have been very good and certainly increase sales. We are lucky in that my daughter is a professional print designer and very talented in that department.
Traditional publishing is practically impossible to get into, we sent the info off to a dozen or so houses and the only responses came back from those that were obviously vanity ones. They were very happy to publish, but wanted about 2k upfront. They guaranteed x number copies, but it became pretty clear it would take a very long time (if ever) to clear back the up front costs. It seems in reality the only authors that get a trad contract now are those that know someone in the Industry or are an established ‘ celeb’ themselves.
We chose to use Amazon KDP and stayed exclusive with them on Amazon select. This means the books are free for those who sign up to select, we get paid by the page read. The sale price is chosen by us and when sold we get a decent royalty. More than traditional publishing. We can do paperbacks, but these are done by print on demand, they work out expensive For the reader to buy (about £10) and we only make roughly the same margin as would a £3.49 ebook. We sell a Tiny fraction of the number of ebooks.
To gain sales you have to work at it. If you just put the book out, and do nothing, no matter how good it is, it will fail. Sadly it doesn’t really matter if it’s a brilliantly edited book or in some cases even that well written. Some of the ones we see selling very well are pretty poor, that includes traditional and vanity published books as well SD ones. You need to market it well, the easiest is probably Amazon’s own ads system, basically you pay them and they will push the book up the system so more people see it and then buy it. But it’s expensive, in reality a stand alone book will not be profitable, it will cost as much to promote it as you will get back in royalties, probably more. It only works if you have a series of books which is good enough that the reader continues. We get about 50 to 60% follow on reads, from a series which is started at 99p and With follow on books risI got to £3:49. We set the current spending level on advertising at approx £150.00 a month. A good month will see about £300.00 profit.
Pick your market... Emma’s books are marketed almost entirely in the UK, we found they didn’t really appeal to the American market, probably because they consider £1000 a month as a minimum advertising budget.... and we don’t! Australia and Canada were better, but we only break even with them when we advertise. ( so I’ve stopped)
Find a category, Amazon is all about sales ranking, the higher the sales the higher the ranking, get a higher ranking and you get more sales, it’s a virtuous circle! If you can find a category where you consistently rank highly it will in turn drag you up in the overall sales rank. There are well over two million books on UK Amazon.
The vast majority of SP books will be ranking below the million or so. With the right category you can be showing In the top ten In your category and somewhere in the teens of thousands overall. The knack is finding that category as they seem to like to make it difficult for you. The actual books for sale, in some categories rarely seem to correspond with what you would expect them to be. If you are really good at it you can with some effort hit the best selling rank in the category, this allows you to use the ‘best seller’ orange tag, which certainly get you more sales. ( not managed it yet, our ceiling seemed to be about #5, when on promotions)
Talking of promotions, with Amazon select you are allowed to promote books for a certain number of days each quarter. The one that works for us best is the free give away. Basically you set a period of time to give the book away for free, seems counterintuitive, but I’m reality if it’s a series, you should get follow on sales and a ‘tail’ of sales once it’s finished. This still works in the UK, less so in the US. it appears the Americans certainly like a freebie, they downloaded hundreds of copies in a five day period, but then hardly bought any follow on books. The UK by contrast downloaded a fraction of that number, but then followed on at a very high percentage.
It’s all good fun and hopefully going forward will be become a small pension!
Thank you for the above, much appreciated.
I'm editing away, quite a slow process but I'm on schedule. To be honest I was pretty happy with what I wrote first time around. A few mistakes, some bits that didn't quite work, but hey, it's not Wuthering Heights.
I will certainly be considering Amazon, but I am very keen on trying to "go it alone" initially and I do have a plan for this.
Cheers all :-)
I'm editing away, quite a slow process but I'm on schedule. To be honest I was pretty happy with what I wrote first time around. A few mistakes, some bits that didn't quite work, but hey, it's not Wuthering Heights.
I will certainly be considering Amazon, but I am very keen on trying to "go it alone" initially and I do have a plan for this.
Cheers all :-)
Re: editing.
I write SEO copy and am often used to correct website content by a content manager. I've written all my life, almost exclusively non-fiction, and I've edited a 72pp, A4, full colour magazine.
I'm with those who suggest copy editing takes three or four times longer than writing. Unless:
I've found that what's best for me - for me, I'm merely suggesting you try this method - is to read the copy, that's from 100 words to 100,000, out loud. I find hundreds of mistakes when I do. If I go through a whole page of Word without an error, I stop doing it for a while because I realise I'm getting tired.
Then, and this is the real killer, I read through it again, this time recording it, in my case onto a dictaphone but I suppose most will now do it onto a phone, and then play it back. After a while, you won't even bother to ask yourself 'How on earth did I miss that?' As I said, it's a killer, and mostly of confidence.
It's not only bad grammar and poor sentence construction that's exposed, but how boring some parts are as well.
Copy editing is gutting and, at the end of it all, there will be mistakes you've missed that only appear once it's published, so you will feel as if you've been gutted. I was told by an editor that he never read one of his magazines once published. I know how he felt.
As general advice: work out why you want to write a book and have it published. Work to those goals. If you are doing it for money, get someone to beat you up until you see sense.
I write SEO copy and am often used to correct website content by a content manager. I've written all my life, almost exclusively non-fiction, and I've edited a 72pp, A4, full colour magazine.
I'm with those who suggest copy editing takes three or four times longer than writing. Unless:
I've found that what's best for me - for me, I'm merely suggesting you try this method - is to read the copy, that's from 100 words to 100,000, out loud. I find hundreds of mistakes when I do. If I go through a whole page of Word without an error, I stop doing it for a while because I realise I'm getting tired.
Then, and this is the real killer, I read through it again, this time recording it, in my case onto a dictaphone but I suppose most will now do it onto a phone, and then play it back. After a while, you won't even bother to ask yourself 'How on earth did I miss that?' As I said, it's a killer, and mostly of confidence.
It's not only bad grammar and poor sentence construction that's exposed, but how boring some parts are as well.
Copy editing is gutting and, at the end of it all, there will be mistakes you've missed that only appear once it's published, so you will feel as if you've been gutted. I was told by an editor that he never read one of his magazines once published. I know how he felt.
As general advice: work out why you want to write a book and have it published. Work to those goals. If you are doing it for money, get someone to beat you up until you see sense.
Thanks for the above.
I wanted to write a book because I thought could, and I liked the idea of being able to say "I wrote a book".
I imagined I would sit in the pub with my laptop, and just write whilst enjoying a beer or two, and that's what I did.
Having written just an introduction and a couple of short chapters, those I showed it to had very positive reactions, which was probably the spark for me saying to myself "They liked 5,000 words, now write another 60,000".
With regard to grammar, mistakes and other errors, well I want to get it right, but such things are not, in my opinion, going to be a major factor on whether, from a sales perspective, it is successful. (I accept I could be wildly wrong on this).
The book is about a fictional golf club, fictional characters, and the fictional things that go on there. It is based on years of experience working and playing at various golf clubs. I know what golf clubs are like and I hope that a golfer reading it will always be thinking "Yeah, that goes on here" or "we've got a bloke just like that".
It's very silly, it's very sweary (no c-words though), it is what it is and it's very "me".
Will it sell? Honestly I doubt it, maybe a few copies but I gave it a go and I very much enjoyed writing it.
I wanted to write a book because I thought could, and I liked the idea of being able to say "I wrote a book".
I imagined I would sit in the pub with my laptop, and just write whilst enjoying a beer or two, and that's what I did.
Having written just an introduction and a couple of short chapters, those I showed it to had very positive reactions, which was probably the spark for me saying to myself "They liked 5,000 words, now write another 60,000".
With regard to grammar, mistakes and other errors, well I want to get it right, but such things are not, in my opinion, going to be a major factor on whether, from a sales perspective, it is successful. (I accept I could be wildly wrong on this).
The book is about a fictional golf club, fictional characters, and the fictional things that go on there. It is based on years of experience working and playing at various golf clubs. I know what golf clubs are like and I hope that a golfer reading it will always be thinking "Yeah, that goes on here" or "we've got a bloke just like that".
It's very silly, it's very sweary (no c-words though), it is what it is and it's very "me".
Will it sell? Honestly I doubt it, maybe a few copies but I gave it a go and I very much enjoyed writing it.
Derek is so right about reading one's work out loud .Once you have written something, re- read it and edited it a few times it is so easy to lose the ability to spot errors . For my first two books I wrote them in longhand, but then transferred the text to tape for my moonlighting secretary to type up . I had become so used to dictating all my work stuff that talking to a dictaphone had become second nature .The best compliments I've had were from the people who said that "I can hear you speaking" .
Rhythm , or 'metre ' is such an important attribute of good prose. For a brilliant example of how to do it , Bob Dylan's "Chronicles" reads like His Bobness is talking to you, and you alone .
Rhythm , or 'metre ' is such an important attribute of good prose. For a brilliant example of how to do it , Bob Dylan's "Chronicles" reads like His Bobness is talking to you, and you alone .
Alex Z said:
A friend has self published plenty of books, and wrote one about how to do that.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0749BPCBY/
This is very good and well worth buying if you are considering trying to get a book out. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0749BPCBY/
Might be slightly out of date though as things have evolved a bit since it was published.
velocemitch said:
Traditional publishing is practically impossible to get into, we sent the info off to a dozen or so houses and the only responses came back from those that were obviously vanity ones… It seems in reality the only authors that get a trad contract now are those that know someone in the Industry or are an established ‘ celeb’ themselves.
I got my agent a couple of years ago and have a traditional publishing deal and trust me, I’m no celeb and knew no one in the industry, coming from a working class background. That could be down to genre I write in though - lots of crime writers have zero contacts when they start and there are always similar new writers getting deals.I do agree in general though, it can be frustrating seeing huge deals handed out to celebs or industry insiders.
It might just be the terminology but to land a trad publishing contract you generally don’t send your MS to a publisher, you’d get yourself taken on by an agent first, who’s job it is to then sell your MS to the publisher.
Have you tried this route? I ask because I know Amazon publishing do a fair bit of romance, and it’s a pretty decent segment of the industry. I’m not sure if they accept direct submissions or only agented authors. I know a few authors who are writing it at the moment.
Best of luck to her, sounds like she’s doing fantastic anyway! Did you see some of the stats that came out of the Penguin antitrust case? From memory something like 95% of books they put out last year sold less than 5000 copies, so she’s already doing better than most traditionally published authors!
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