Hurry up and wait...

I've spent the past couple of weeks beating the drum about THE TRIP, trying to get myself into review queues, guest blog spots, and book spotlights. One of the things I've found is once the book is published, there's the long slog to get the word out that it's available. I'm self published, so I don't have the benefit of a marketing department (not the money to hire a publicist at this point).

The first of these should be hitting in the next week. I have to admit when I open my email and see a reply to an inquiry that someone wants to read my book, I get excited.

I got even more excited today. I had a reviewer hit my web site, download my sample chapters, READ THEM and then say she was "intrigued" by my sample. Please send the full novel, I'll get you online in March. And she has a few teen relatives who love the zombie genre and are looking for new books to read.

Woot!

Seriously, anyone who's ever tried publishing a story or novel, or heck, even looked for a job knows how much effort it takes to find something. Lots of emails go out, few (if any) come back. You've got to find these little nuggets of success when you can and keep you going for the long haul in-between.

Not following anybody's lead

I had lunch with a couple of old friends last week and the topic of THE TRIP, of course, came up...

What also came up was the fact that a former classmate of ours published his own novel, through a traditional publisher. Of course, the question of how much this guy's being published factored into my decision to launch when I did.

The short answer is it had nothing at all to do with when I launched.

Let me explain a little further.

I decided to self-publish THE TRIP in 2010. Self publishing is a LOT of work. I'm the editor. The quality department. I've got to be the one to pull together everything from the marketing plan to the cover art. In short, it's all on me. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but it's not easy and it's a lot of work.

I had a couple of things get in the way of publishing, and finally set to wrapping things up in the fall of 2012. I was able to launch right about Christmas, after years of hard work. Coincidentally my former classmate announced his book being published around Thanksgiving.

The only way anyone is going to get a self-published book out quickly is by half-assing it. I hate to say it, but in project management there are trade offs between cost, time and quality. You can choose to focus on one attribute, and it will always be at the expense of the other two.

If you fix the timeframe and make it aggressive, it's going to be expensive and it's not going to be very good. Period.

I chose to go the other way - I focused on the quality of the book, and didn't worry about the time. This also helped me keep the cost down (I spent less than $1000 bringing my book to market - but that's a topic for another post).

My advice if you choose to go this route is take the same approach. Focus on the quality of the work - self-published books get a bad rap because so many people read a few books and think there's nothing to writing one. (Much like people seem to think about screenplays, which is also a topic for another post) Many self-published books are akin to swallowing glass, but I do believe the market will always make room for quality products.

Nobody said it would be easy

I just wrote a press release for my novel. My first of (hopefully) many to come.

Most of the time I'm a kind of quiet guy. At my day job I tend to keep my head down and work without a whole lot of fanfare. In many ways, that anonymity gives me quite a bit of freedom (mainly leaving work on time, and leaving work at work when I head out for the day)

What I found writing the press release - which is, really, a marketing piece - is I actually have to toot my own horn here. I need to write a piece about my work that makes my work sound like the best thing since the wheel. It's a guilty pleasure in a way. (I must be getting old...my vices are shifting)

While I was in grad school I took a class in writing press releases. It was pretty easy for me - here's some information on a fake client, make them sound intelligent and make their product sound great. Easy. When it's your work and you're the client, and the product you're marketing is real...well, I won't lie to you. I have to admit, the game changes.

I've got a colleague reviewing the release and hope to actually release it next week. I'll keep you posted on what happens next. If things go well, it could hopefully help me move some books. If things don't go well, the world will yawn at me. Hopefully the truth is somewhere in the middle.

That's no accident - it's the result of a LOT of hard work

Last week my wife told me a friend of ours decided to look my novel up on Google. The cool thing was the official web site for THE TRIP was the first result to come up. My wife thought this was cool, but I already knew it was going to happen. I planted some seeds in Google when I set the page up, and those efforts are now bearing fruit.

Don't get me wrong - it's really cool to know someone else can find my site through a Google search. (It's one thing with me finding it myself, but it's a totally different feeling to see someone else succeeding at it)

So how did I do this? By day I'm a web developer. I know HTML, some jQuery, but I knew absolutely nothing about SEO (search-engine optimization). I bought a really good book on the topic - SEO Made Simple by Michael Fleishner - and put his advice into action. Voila! A couple weeks after deploying my novel's site, I can find it in Google.

I need to stress here I kind of had a leg up - my personal site (accessible off THE TRIP's site) was out and available for a couple years. Rather than starting over with a new domain, I decided to make my novel's URL a subsite under my personal web site. Why spend more money on another domain that I'd need to maintain when I can do whatever I want under my own banner?

So if you want to do this on your own, could you? Absolutely. You can learn HTML from a good book (I highly recommend Laura Lemay's book on HTML). It'll take a little work, but you can probably put together a basic site within a week or so. This custom built site - if you take Fleishner's advice - will be much better for your SEO rankings than an off-the-shelf site will be. ("Canned" sites tend to limit how much you can customize, and IMHO they tend to look a lot alike)

In a nutshell, landing on the top of a Google search result page isn't an accident. It's the result of a lot of work and - most importantly - time to reach that spot. You can't put a page together Sunday and expect to be at the top of Google by Wednesday.

Now that the novel's done...here comes the hard part

As you know, I've decided to self-publish a novel. On the upside, I've been able to decide exactly how the story unfolds, the word count, and even the cover art. With a traditional publisher, this probably wouldn't have been the case.

So here comes the difficult part. I'm on my own marketing this. I have no marketing department to help me - I've got to do this on my own. My work will rise or fall largely due to the work that *I* put into it. If you're considering this route on your own, you need to understand this going in.

This is at the same time scary as hell and liberating. I fret over whether I'll make my investment back, though I've luckily spent a fraction of what I see other self-published authors spend (I got pretty far without spending any money - but that's for another post). But on the other hand...nobody's calling the shots but me.

Tonight on the advice of a friend, I stopped by a local independent bookstore to drop off a comp so they could decide whether to sell my book or not. The meeting seemed to go well (I mentioned I was self-published and they didn't wave me off out of hand). I'm interested to see where this goes - there's the possibility of a book signing and getting my book onto the shelves. THAT'S exciting!

And I've sent a number of copies out for reviews...the reviews I'm seeing on Amazon.com and GoodReads have thus far been positive. Whether this trend continues (and what the people working for the blogs and newspapers think), time will tell.

It's ALIVE!

After a year of writing, a year of redrafting, and a couple of years trying to market it, I've gone and self-published a novel.

What the hell was I thinking?

Seriously - this is a lot of work. I'm responsible for everything from the cover design to the marketing plan. It's a lot of work, sure, but at the same time...this is kind of fun.

I'll bring you along for the ride here - the ups, the downs...the wonderful journey known as self-publishing.