The following is a guest post from author Carol Buchanan. If you’d like to be a guest poster, we’d love to have you! Just shoot us an e-mail or give a shout to @duolit. Now, on to Carol’s post — enjoy!
Good writing. Hard work.
In four words you have what I’ve learned about successful self-publishing since my first self-published novel came out in July 2008. There’s no secret, no magic. Success as a self-publisher comes from good writing and hard work. You make a pact with your readers to write the best you can, tell the story as best you can, and work as hard as you can to get the word out to as many potential readers as you can.
Notice the repetition in that last sentence? You can.
Given good writing and hard work, you can succeed.
When you self-publish, you define success. Do you want to write a huge bestseller like The Shack and have your book picked up by everyone in the world, with amazing royalties and publishing contracts? That is a dream; it’s not a definition of success. If that’s your idea of success, you’ll be sorely disappointed if it doesn’t happen. Anything less you might consider failure.
So decide on something reasonable as a goal, that stretches you and makes you work. A good goal lets you consider yourself a success when you’ve met that goal. I wanted to write a good, truthful story about the Vigilantes of Montana (1863-1864). The readership I knew would be a small niche comprising Montanans and those interested in Montana’s colorful history. What happened was a pleasant surprise. God’s Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana won the 2009 Spur award for Best First Novel, and readers have loved it. The novel has sold around a thousand copies and is still selling.
Goals differ with every writer. For example, you might want to leave your descendants the story of your life and times in a format you can be proud of, that can be handed down the generations.
So, then. To succeed as a self-published writer, measure success against the goal you’ve set, coupled with the date you expect to reach that goal.
Suppose your goal is to sell 10,000 copies. That’s an enormous number for a self-publisher. Although we hear of writers who reach that number quickly, they are very few and far between. If you have special expertise in a hot topic, like the study of food chemistry in combating cancer, and you can write that in a way people enjoy reading it, you might have a big winner. Or, perhaps your target market is large and easy to find. You have a new wrinkle on zombie or sci/fi stories. It’s perfectly okay to revise the goal or the time span as you go. After all, life happens. Perhaps a baby comes, and what is more important than that?
Whatever your goal, decide what you have to do to reach it. For example, to sell more copies, you have to inform more people that it exists. You can do that on the ground, by visiting appropriate outlets – bookstores, hospital gift shops, or feed stores, depending on your book. Plan to make perhaps 3 – 5 calls each day. In a 5-day week, that’s 15 – 25 calls. Introduce yourself and have a sell sheet ready that will tell owners or managers everything they need to know to make a purchase decision. Your friends and family and other connections will help you, too.
To promote the book online, take advantage of the free social network marketing sites. Not all of them will be a comfortable fit for you, and you won’t have time to get into all the possibilities. Try them out and then concentrate on the ones that work for you. In 2+ years, I’ve found Twitter to suit me best, with Facebook second and LinkedIn third. I’m still learning to use them all to the best advantage, though.
Limit your efforts to the most you can handle, and pace yourself, because self-publishing is a marathon, not a sprint.
You can do it. Yes, you can.
Award-winning novelist Carol Buchanan is a native Montanan fascinated with Montana history. Her debut novel, God’s Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, won the 2009 Spur for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America, and a short story, “Fear of Horses,” won the 2008 LAURA award from Women Writing the West. Married 34 years, she turned to fiction when she and her husband, Richard, returned to live in NW Montana. Her second novel, Gold Under Ice, came out this summer from Missouri Breaks Press. She teaches “Successful Self-Publishing” at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell, MT.
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