Last weekend I finally launched my second urban fantasy novel, Denai Bound. After a year between publishing that and my first novel Denai Touch, I realised that I’ve learnt a lot about self-publishing over the past year. When I launched my first book I didn’t really know what I was doing and made a lot of mistakes. After that, I was determined to learn all I could about self-publishing and book marketing,
Here are some of the things I learnt:
- I learnt how to be a better writer. I definitely feel my writing has improved a lot since my first novel. I’ve done a lot of different writing since then including non-fiction and freelance work. It even inspired me to start writing my first non-fiction book.
- Self-publishing has to be treated like a business. Publishing books is a business and has to be treated as such. You have to be thoroughly organised and prepared with planning, distributing and marketing.
- Being a pantser makes it longer to get anything published. I used to write everything on the fly and I realised that plotting is the only way to lessen the time it takes to write a complete novel.
- There’s no easy way to write or market a book. This process depends entirely on the author. What works for one person might not work someone else. Every author is different.
- Knowledge and experience makes the process easier. Knowing how to format, distribute and plan things before a launch definitely makes the process a lot easier and smoother.
- I finally started building my author platform. When I first started out I didn’t even know an author platform was, but over time, I finally started to build mine.
What lessons did you learn with your first books?
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Karen
Great Advice. My dream is to one day self publish – will definately be following you. Keep it up.
Petra
These are some amazing lessons and I experienced much of the same. I think one of my lessons is that recognizing, not everyone will read what I write and that’s okay!
Tiffany Shand
Yes, that’s very true. I should have added that too!
Tiffany Shand
Thanks. Good luck with your publishing!
Chrsitina Queen
Great lessons! Defiantly something I could learn from!
Leila Rexford
I am looking into writing a novella, but one thing I need to work on is organization. These tips are actually very helpful. And I have no idea what an author platform is. You learn something new everyday!
Patinka
I think experience and knowledge are the key!
Tiffany Shand
Very true!
Tiffany Shand
Good luck with your novella. An author platform is essentially the base you use to connect with your readers. Like having a website but having a platform is so much more than that. It can include a lot of different things such as social media, newsletters, etc. I am writing a book about it at the moment which goes into more detail. One thing I have learnt is that it’s important to build a platform before you publish a book.
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