Having already sent Living with Saci to four agents I’ve been finding myself becoming more and more receptive to the temptations of the world of self-publishing.
I guess I sent my first few chapters to traditional agents because I sought professional approval for my work but the more I learn about the traditional publishing industry and the self-publishing industry, the less convinced I am that traditional publishing is the correct route.
One of the sources of persuasion has been coming from the podcasts of the Self-Publishing Formula. I am only up to episode 9 but I have already picked up lots of useful tips.
The first thing I have learnt is that a self-publishing author needs an inventory of books, preferably a number of titles in a series. The reason for this is to enable the self-publisher to offer the first title for free in order to generate interest in the rest of the series.
Obviously, I have only just finished the rough draft of my second novel, the first is still riddled with grammatical errors, I haven’t started the third yet and none of them forms part of a series. However, there is still a lot of preparation I can do before my first three novels are ready to be published.
My first step has been to set up an account with mail chimp to create an email list of people who are interested in finding out when my novels are going to be published. I’ve added a link to the subscription form for this mailing list into my Facebook page and also sent a link out via Twitter. I’ve already been trying to build a following via Facebook and Twitter so I’m not starting completely from scratch and obviously, I have this blog as well which is designed to promote my work by blogging about the tortuous process.
I also changed the theme of the blog do that I could include Facebook and Twitter widgets on the menu.
Once the books are finished, they need to be thoroughly proofread (by someone else) to iron out all those silly grammatical mistakes I mentioned earlier and a book cover professionally designed and, to be honest, that’s about as much as I’ve learnt so far.
My plan at the moment is to write the third novel, iron out the mistakes in the first novel and re-write the second novel before I can even think about publishing anything. In the meantime, I’ll keep blogging and tweeting in the hope of increasing my following but will I continue sending my work to traditional agents? On that I haven’t yet decided, I’ll wait and see how the second novel turns out after the re-write and decide then.
Still, I’ve now got a big list of things I can do other than write. Hooray!
M J Dees 
Reblogged this on Our Man in Sao Paulo.
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