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Editor's Notes

• #2: Publishing has always been labor intensive. A few hundred years ago it was a real life-shortener, don’t you think? \n
• #3: Zoom forward into the end of the 20th century. We’re using desktop publishing software. How beautiful. Still, very labor intensive. Chiropractors have a good business in their tech clients.\n
• #4: Enter Amazon. I published an ebook online in 1998, but it was Amazon’s Kindle and their simple process for publishing directly into a distributor who paid royalties, that changed everything. \n
• #5: The publishing industry and its old systems are transformed, or broken, or gone. We’re learning to talk about it in new ways. Naturally this is confusing.\n
• #6: Emboldened by new tools, I researched how to market books myself and published “Open Here” into print-on-demand in 2003. \n
• #7: The research and careful production paid off. In 2004, Sourcebooks picked up the book and released it with some changes as “Little Shifts.” So, self-publishing got me published. The book sold thousands of copies but royalties were slim. This is a common story.\n
• #8: The opportunity today is in digital books, or ebooks. I like to call them products, because “book” is a little grandiose for most of my offerings. The starting place for people learning this industry is digital publishing. \nStart with digital publishing, learn about it, get your mind into that world, and the pieces start to fall into place. You can do so much, so quickly, in digital publishing. So cheaply. You can test your market. You can start a conversation around your work. You can gather readers on an email list, work with the weird review system, share and collaborate. \n\nPrint means none of that. It's cumbersome and expensive and slow. So it needs to be the last thing you do. If you want print, make it your icing on the cake. \n
• #9: 1. Include yourself in the community, so you get a feel for the culture and the robust resources available in many forms. For example, we serve the community at BABS, teach at Bel-Tib community center. Meetup.com is a great resource for finding free groups to learn with at any level. This is a kind of preparation that makes what comes next more fun, more interesting, and more productive.\n\n2. Fall in love with your content. Decide what kind of content you will enjoy writing enough to keep talking about it long after it's written, which is what you'll be doing to roll it out to your readers.\n\n3. Research your options for editors. Decide how you'll approach the editor relationship, what costs will be reasonable for you, and what is available on your timeline. Step 1 will help you with this, as you put the word out and get feedback from many local resources. \n\n4. Open the door to your future readers. If you have the resources and capacity, start learning about the author platform and create one point of contact such as a blog or Twitter account. Don't go overboard at first, it's exhausting.\n\n
• #10: Ultimately you’ll want your product available on all the distribution vehicles. Kindle is the one that is going to get you seen and drive sales initially. Nook is good to include, but it has only a tiny percentage of sales. Other vehicles include Sony, Kobo, and aggregators like Smashwords. Start with Kindle. Learn the many aspects of sales support via Amazon. Then grow beyond it.\n
• #11: You’ll upload your product to kdp.amazon.com, which is an account you create using your Amazon customer name and password. It is a simple two page process. Be sure to avoid clicking the KDP Select option. You can participate in that program when you know more about your marketing schedule. \n
• #12: This is what the sign-in page looks like on kdp.amazon.com.\n
• #13: Once you’ve signed in, you’ll be read to click on “Add new title.” Notice that Amazon wants you to sign into the KDP Select program. That’s fine, after you know what you’re doing. It locks up your book for 90 days to be exclusive on Amazon. Avoid that for now.\n
• #14: The first of two pages of metadata you’ll enter regarding your new book. Again, you have an opportunity to enroll in KDP Select. Easy does it. Learn about this first. On this page, you’ll post a description of your book. It’s an important area with generous space. Make good use of it. You’ll decide on categories, which can be difficult, but you can change them later if you want to. Once you upload the content you get a chance to view it in a “preview” Kindle page. Then you save it and proceed to page two.\n
• #15: The top of page two. Each area is mostly self-explanatory.\n
• #16: Now you’ll decide on pricing. The lowest price is 99 cents. I think that price point has lost its advantage, except for special marketing campaigns. You can change your price point any time you need to. Pricing is a big ongoing discussion among ebook authors. Once you’ve filled out this page, you are ready to hit “publish!”\n
• #17: The Barnes and Noble publishing site for their Nook device is called PubIt! It works in a very similar way to Amazon’s. \n
• #18: Now. Let’s just take a moment to look at a typewritten page of Henry Miller's manuscript, Tropic of Capricorn. \nThese long tomes were typed again and again, by the author, before arriving at the press to be published. Imagine. Pulling that page out of the machine. Again. Retyping the whole page. Again. Hundreds of pages of backbreaking manual typing. It’s amazing anything ever got published.\n\nToday? We cut and paste. We can dictate our manuscripts and they magically appear on the screen. (Dragon Dictation is actually working pretty well now.) Writers have enormous luxury in the production arena. So, what are we writers doing with allllllll that extra time?\n
• #19: In addition to his outrageously prolific writing life, Miller produced over 2,000 watercolors.\n
• #20: He still found time to goof around. So I wonder. What are we doing with our time as writers who want to publish and develop a readership?\n\n
• #21: We build an author platform. We communicate with our readers. And we write more. And we write better. And we help each other be discovered. \n
• #22: What is an author platform?\nThe point of contact on the internet where you can interact with your readers, help make your books more discoverable, and develop a following that you can actually contact.\n\n
• #23: The tools:\nA blog, or sometimes a website without a blog, but a blog has many simple tools that make everything else easier. \nA social networking tool where you can meet your readers and fellow authors who help you with discovery. Twitter is becoming the site of choice for many authors, because it is very streamlined and can be partially automated, which helps enormously. I sell all my books through Twitter almost exclusively.\nA little thing called an opt-in on your blog where people sign up for your emails, or newsletters. This sounds a lot bigger than it is. You can write a friendly, short letter to your subscribers once a month to keep a basic level of interaction going. What's actually big about this is its importance. It's the holy grail. Your own list you can contact yourself who wants to hear from you and wants to know what you're doing. The right kind of email list can make any publisher sit up and take notice of what you're doing. But by then, you may not need anything a publisher has to offer. You've done it yourself. \nThat’s what we’re doing as independent publishers. Join us. Visit Suzanna at epubclubs.com, on Twitter as Brainmaker, and at her SF Bay Area user group, Bay Area Bloggers Society.\n