5 Business Lessons Nobody Taught Me (But I Sure Wish They Had)

Usually, though, that challenge is ignorance and fear: not knowing what to do.

While this is far from a definitive walk-through, I wanted to share an overview. If you’re comfortable with computers and fairly determined, you can do this without any help. Of course, if you get stuck on a specific step or have a question, don’t hesitate to ask. I want you to be able to do this.

You can do this on any computer of any kind with nothing special except Microsoft Word or another word processor which can emulate it (Open Office, for example.)

If your book’s formatting is simple, formatting for Kindle is easy.

1. Remove headers and footers.
2. From MS Word, save as “Filtered HTML” (Oops; I do not know how other word processing tools address this so I’ll have to check.)
3. Upload to Kindle.

That’s it. If your book has fancy sidebars, paragraphs indented with spaces instead of true indents, or other formatting complexities or downright errors, you’ll struggle with those. If you think your book has complex or incorrect formatting, submit it to Smashwords first. Read their style guide. Clean up your formatting. Submit it. Fix any errors you get from their automatic check tool, Autovetter, then submit to their Premium catalog.

The Premium catalog is checked by real humans who’ll give you clear descriptions of what’s wrong and exactly how to fix it.

Once it’s in Smashwords’ Premium catalog, (they only accept Word for uploads) take the Word doc and submit to Kindle.

So far, everything we’re talking about is free.

For CreateSpace, meaning paperback, you need to understand interior design of a book, or you need to be severely obsessive about copying another book you love perfectly: margins, page size, gutter, font, paragraph spacing, indentation, headers, footers, publisher’s page: it’s a huge task.

I’ve done it for all my own books, but it’s so tedious that when I have a paying client, I outsource the paperback layout to a specialist. She’s way inexpensive and incredibly good. Here’s her contact info:

Except the only difference was, their “hero” wasn’t traditionally heroic. Otherwise, the description was nothing more than an abbreviated version of the same story humans have been telling themselves for millennia.

Being “different” by

1. calling yourself different
2. pretending that how the human mind works doesn’t apply to you and/or
3. being ignorant of how language works (Campbell’s “hero” has nothing to do with heroism)

is loopy, wonky, misguided, and just plain wrong.

Nothing is completely new. This is not bad, but it is true. Working within guidelines does not constrain creativity. The acceptance of the 12-tone musical scale in the late 1500s gave rise to the greatest explosion of musical creativity in human history.

When a new band bills themselves as “like nothing you’ve ever heard before” I expect either irritating noise, or something so derivative they’d have been more accurate to say “Justin Timberlake, but there’s 4 of us.”

When a new author claims to eschew the monomyth in their novel, I expect the same.

You should start marketing your book the day you’re sure you’re going to write it. Your website is a major part of your marketing.

Consider how movies are marketed. A year in advance, sometimes more, teasers start to come out. A website goes up with trivia, bits and pieces.

As the date approaches, the teasers turn into trailers, longer more detailed snippets to suck you in and build excitement, buzz.

Just before the launch is when the big blitz happens, but it only matters because real fans have been talking about it since the announcement a year ago.

You’re also right in calling it an author website. Create fans of you, not fans of your book. Sure, let them know all about the book, but if they love the book, you’ll have to re-sell them on the next book, and the next, and the next. If they love you, all you have to do is announce the next book, not sell it.

Your site should talk about you. About the book. About what you’re writing, and why. It should have a realistic timeline. Don’t lie to your fans. They’ll abandon you.

Your site should show potential fans why on earth they should care about you, someone they’ve never heard of, and your book, which doesn’t even exist yet.

If your site looks like just another wannabe writer slapping together one more [insert hot genre here] kind of book, who cares?

But if you have a compelling story about you, about your need to write, about how you’ve already got a powerful outline for a mashup of The Fall of Troy and The Great Gatsby and you can back up your promises, folks will care. The right folks will care.

Assume, from Day 1, that you’ll have fans and non-fans. As we learn in Charlie the Unicorn, shun the non-believers. A thousand true fans is worth more than a million vaguely interested folks. Write for your fans, both in your book and on your website. And if it cheeses off your non-fans and they go away, that’s more Vienna sausages and Ritz crackers for the rest of us at your launch party.

In between are various levels of self-publishing, defined to some extent by the balance of responsibility and risk shared by the publisher and the author. Understanding those differences is vital to your success. When I was asked the question in the title the first part of the answer was getting our definitions straight.

First, read Dave Bricker’s stupendous article on the difference between self-publishing and vanity publishing.

Done? Good. Let’s talk about self-publishing, and ignore vanity publishing entirely.

A “self-publishing company” is going to be something like a book shepherd: someone who guides you through the process of doing it yourself. (This is what I do, including all the steps below.)

They might help you get the book written, with mentoring/coaching, guidance and developmental and general nudginess. You might work with them because you need this, and they’re good at it.

They might offer other kinds of editing, proofreading, etc. You might work with them because you really need help with sentence structure, spelling, etc. This is not uncommon among authors. Honest it’s not.

They might offer cover design. Unless you’re an artist, you want help.

They might offer marketing advice. If you’d like to spread your message, you might want help. (If you’re writing a book to make money, may I recommend real estate? The market will be booming again, beginning in late 2014; just enough time to get your license and get established enough to ride the gravy train.)

They might do your marketing for you. (I don’t. I only work with authors who are breathing fire at the chance to tell others about their work.) You might work with them because you don’t like selling and will accept a significantly reduced profit margin.

Here’s what I’d look for: someone with an established track record of producing quality work. The books produced have quality covers, are well edited, and generally look professional.

Of course, I just look in a mirror for most of it, then use CreateSpace for my print on demand needs (though Lightning Source is also excellent, just more expensive. LuLu also excellent, but even more expensive than Lightning Source.)

If you think a book shepherd might be helpful, let’s talk.

If you’re totally completely helplessly lost about this “ebook” thing, I’ll try to answer the question “Where do I start?” as long as we agree that it’s akin to asking “I’d like to learn to play music; where do I start?” Far too vague to have a real answer, but enough to start hacking through the underbrush to some better questions.

Not necessarily in any kind of order:

1. Write well. This is not as easy as anyone thinks, if anyone thinks it’s easy. But you can do it if you work at it.
2. Get a good editor to look at it, even just to give feedback. Better to spend the money to have them edit it, but at least get feedback from professional eyes.
3. Have a good cover. Digital covers are way different from print, because it needs to be eye-catching at a small size. Learn a bit about designing covers for the web. As with #2, if you take the risk of DIY here, get someone who knows what they’re doing to at least give you some feedback.
4. For digital, you’ll want to publish on Kindle and Smashwords. Follow Smashwords’ guide and get into their Premium catalog, and you’ll be everywhere else. Except Kindle. They only publish big sellers to Kindle, so do that yourself. Not difficult if your formatting is simple. Get fancy and it can be a bear.
5. Consider print via CreateSpace. Once you’ve gotten this far, why shut out folks who don’t buy digital? (like me)
6. Plan to market it yourself, as others have already said. Nobody else is going to sell your book. Have a blog and website where folks can read a bit about it. At the very least, don’t be completely invisible because, y’know, that makes you hard to find.
7. Know who you’re writing for, and why you’re writing. If your plan is to make money, find another way. If you want to share what you know or believe, the message that spreads, wins.

He warns against the danger of tweaking the answers (or the meaning of the questions) to suit our beliefs. If it looks like I’ve done that here, call me on it.

I want Someday Box to be the place you come to gain the belief that you, yes you, can write a book. If I’m not being honest with myself, that’s not honest with you.

Here they are:

Writers hate wasting words. Each syllable is like a miniature birth. Despite the validity of Quiller-Couch’s advice, we hate to murder our darlings.

No chef wants to waste food. Ah, but cooking always involves waste: egg shells, apple cores, melon rinds, coffee grounds.

Construction produces waste: sawdust, cut off ends, scraps of this and that.

Art is messy. Some of the bits get thrown away because they’re trash. At the other end of the spectrum is the finely honed highly polished work of art.

Not every meal is five star cuisine. Not every construction project is the Taj Mahal. Sometimes you’re banging together some bookcases. Sometimes you’re making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

In my daily writing practice I’ve produced some stream of consciousness nonsense which rightly will never see the light of day. But I’ve produced some short stories which, though not brilliant, don’t deserve a shallow grave in the yard.

Now that I’ve realized that some practice makes eggshells and some practice makes a PBJ, I feel I can safely ignore the eggshells and just as safely share a PBJ with those I trust.

That would be you.

I’ll be posting some of those stories at my personal blog. They’re not gourmet dining, but if you have a few minutes for a PBJ of the mind, pop by and give them a read.