I've Finally Decided to Focus on Self-Publishing- Where Do I Go From Here?

If it was me, I'd start with the legal aspects (author protections, and so forth) of various elements....

1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621532674/?tag=absowrit-20

2. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988302195/?tag=absowrit-20

I'm sure there are loads more. Maybe your local, public library has these titles (or similar titles) for free as ebooks or hard copies.

Absolutewrite is where you want to begin. If you haven't already, have someone read what you want to offer for sale. If the craft is not there, maybe no one will buy it (regardless of how many Web site followers you get). Put your work out there (Share Your Work forum) and see what people say. If it's good, start the Web site. If it needs work, I'd focus on craft before spending money on Web sites (or time gaining followers).

Some questions to ask yourself before getting into Web Sites....

Do you know your demographic?
How will you attract your demographic and retain them?
What are your short- and long-term goals, and do you have a contingency plan if your goal/desire doesn't work?

Think of it as a job. Am I getting compensated enough for the time I put into the venture?

Possible scenario....

Let's say you write 30 books in 10 years. If you had a job at $50K per year, that's $500K earned in 10 years.

At $10 per book, you need to sell 50,000 books to make $500K (gross income).

Net Income (profit) = Revenue (gross income) - Expenses (e.g. taxes, cover art, editors, and so on).

You should decide if your goal is make writing an avocation or a vocation. Minimize your expenses (e.g. Web Site expenditures). First, maximize your product line. See if there is a market for it. Get it critiqued by peers. If it needs work, fix it.

Self-publishing is A LOT of work. You need to learn A LOT of new things, not just writing craft.

It's a tough environment. My post is not meant to dissuade you, but to offer information of some things you need to think about before jumping into the deep end. Read other self-publisher stories of their experiences (good and bad). See if it is something you want to tackle.

Best of luck to you. My advice for building an audience is avoid traditional sources, like newspapers and magazines...they are very expensive. Facebook ads can be done for $30 and will reach thousands of people.

DanielSTJ said:

Thanks Enlightened- a lot! You've provided some good resources and I think you're right. I need to focus on craft first. Nevertheless, I'll keep reading and take due diligence with my endeavours.

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No problem. Maybe give screenwriting a try. You may find it more appealing and it is more immediate (success or failure). You'll need to make a steep investment at first with Final Draft screenwriting software. There are other options, but this is a robust program.

what genre do you write?

You can check out the Writers Sanctum forum. https://writersanctum.com/index.php.

There are people on there who are serious self publishers, some who actually make good money. It is heavily focused on marketing and somewhat on the mechanics of publishing. I have found them very friendly to newbies.

I’ve learned a lot in my first year of self publishing. There are so many aspects of it that it can help to research each step as you go. Feel free to message me if you have specific questions.

A big part of building an audience is figuring out who your audience is, then figuring out where they are, and then going to them. I'm writing Sci-Fi Fantasy, and as I've been poking around, what I've realized is they are on Reddit. They're on lots of places, but a big chunk of them are on Reddit, so I've gone there, even though I'm not that enamored with the way the whole upvoting threads and comments works in terms of critical thinking and honest and unpopular opinions works.

So who is your audience? Where are they?

Getting a website cracking is a good start, but you might want to just try building your own free website first, using wordpress or wix.

If you do, whenever you do, spend money, keep the receipts, keep track of it, write it off vs your income when you start generating it.

DanielSTJ said:

Hello world!

I want to self-publish. It seems like the best option for me. The question that I have is: how do I get started? I understand it can take years to build an audience and start making money and I don't mind that- I'm still young and have time. Now, I wanted to start with setting up a website (it's only $200 per year-- affordable in my book considering my goals) to try and get some of my work out there and establish a presence before I consider releasing any material on Amazon (which would be my preferred landscape.) My idea is to build the audience that way. Does this make sense? What are all the steps I have to take? I'm going to work hard at saving my money and investing it into, what I consider, is my business now. Any links, references, advice, etc will be greatly appreciated!

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Honestly, I don't think establishing yourself on your website is the best first step. When I was getting into writing I started a blog and blogged regularly and attracted a certain number of followers but they weren't readers necessarily and so when it came time to publish they didn't purchase what I published. Which means to have a website that supports your writing you'd need to focus it towards your potential readers and without books that brought them to you that's much harder to do.

If you want to do this for money: focus your efforts on getting three novels in your genre ready to go. Make sure they're competitive in terms of covers and writing. And then release them either simultaneously or close together. Right now being exclusive to Amazon and enrolling in Kindle Unlimited is probably the best way to start for a new author. That could change by the time you're ready to go. Price competitively for your genre. (Look at what sells at the length you're writing and price around there.) Learn how to promote your books. With 3 in a series you can do 99 cent and free runs on the first book to drive readers to the series or you can do a trickle campaign on the books while they're at full-price with pay-per-click ads like AMS (Amazon Ads).

I'd recommend a simple website, email address, and mailing list where people can follow to find out about the next novel once they've read the ones you already published. (A Wordpress site with a custom domain should cost about $99. You can go fancier than that, but ask yourself what you really need.) Social media is really up to you and what you can do well. Some people sell because they're appealing on social media. Some waste time they should be writing forcing themselves to try to be appealing on social media.

And understand that while self-publishing seems like it's easier to do than trade publishing because you can simply decide to do it and act, realize that at this stage of the market that's probably not actually true. The authors making money with self-publishing who start now are going to be the ones that can not only successfully write a book that appeals to readers but also package it well and figure out how to market it well. A few years ago you could've probably gotten by with being strong in one of those three areas and adequate in the other two, but I don't believe that's true anymore. Pay attention to when someone broke through when listening to advice. And pay attention to what they write. Different genres behave differently.

Good luck!

$200 a year sounds quite expensive. My website costs around $25 a year with a .com url, and hosting.
Directing people to your site takes a lot of time and energy that could probably be better spent on writing. No one's going to be looking you up for a long time, so you will have to work hard at, not only directing people there, but providing enough content to keep them coming back, which is going to take years.
My advice would be to work on a series, and get your work on Amazon kindle unlimited. At the back of your book, provide a link to your newsletter. you can offer incentives like free bonus stories set in the same universe. All you need on your website for now is the signup form. For that you can create a free mailerlite account which will last until you have around a thousand subscribers, then you can upgrade.
Before you launch, use sites like bookfunnel to get reviews. (There's a long waiting list) Once you have reviews, you can then try for a bookbub promotion, or some other similar site, and go from there.
The advice I hear, over and over again, is aim to get a book out every couple of months, and, unless you already have an audience, limit the time you spend on everything else.

Dan Rhys said:

Best of luck to you. My advice for building an audience is avoid traditional sources, like newspapers and magazines...they are very expensive. Facebook ads can be done for $30 and will reach thousands of people.

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Is that a productive reach, though? I see ads for things on fb all the time but I just skim past them, whereas a review in a lit mag is often how I choose books and quite often more than one book by the author.

If you haven't already, immerse yourself in the indie community as much as possible. You need to join groups and forums for indies and you will learn A LOT. You also need to network with as many authors as possible especially those who write what you write.

Start off by joining some FB groups like Indie Author Support, Wide for the Win, and many, many more that focus on the industry and helping out self-published authors.

Go to Kboards and check out the Writers Cafe and read as much of the old posts as you can. You will learn everything you need to know about self-publishing. You can also join the new forum WritersSanctum.

I seriously urge you to research as much as possible and become a part of the self-publishing community and you'll get all the help you need. That's what I love most about self-publishing, so many willing to help you. I used to be trade published by the way.

Good luck and definitely take my advice and join forums and groups geared toward self-publishing.

mccardey said:

Is that a productive reach, though? I see ads for things on fb all the time but I just skim past them, whereas a review in a lit mag is often how I choose books and quite often more than one book by the author.

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You are not necessarily anyone's target audience, so don't too do much-assuming everyone's reading habits/tastes are like yours. Many extremely mediocre writers make a living, and a very good living, just churning out bad books. And I don't just mean self-publishing. And there's definitely quite a number of people on the write 4-6 (bad) books a year plan, and some of them are making a decent living.

BPhillipYork said:

You are not necessarily anyone's target audience, so don't too do much-assuming everyone's reading habits/tastes are like yours. Many extremely mediocre writers make a living, and a very good living, just churning out bad books. And I don't just mean self-publishing. And there's definitely quite a number of people on the write 4-6 (bad) books a year plan, and some of them are making a decent living.

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I think you might have misread mccardey's post. The doubtful advice was about using FB adverts as a way of selling books. Whether writers are 'extremely mediocre', mediocrely mediocre, or good, and whether the books are self-published or trade-published -- these factors are unrelated to the usefulness of Facebook advertising.

BPhillipYork said:

You are not necessarily anyone's target audience, so don't too do much-assuming everyone's reading habits/tastes are like yours. Many extremely mediocre writers make a living, and a very good living, just churning out bad books. And I don't just mean self-publishing. And there's definitely quite a number of people on the write 4-6 (bad) books a year plan, and some of them are making a decent living.

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Excuse me?

I was asking whether $30 worth of facebook ads

Dan Rhys said:

avoid traditional sources, like newspapers and magazines...they are very expensive. Facebook ads can be done for $30 and will reach thousands of people.

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was likely to result in sales. It sounds a bit scatter-gun to me.

I didn't say anything about good books or bad books. That's neither here not there.

Helix said:

I think you might have misread mccardey's post. The doubtful advice was about using FB adverts as a way of selling books. Whether writers are 'extremely mediocre', mediocrely mediocre, or good, and whether the books are self-published or trade-published -- these factors are unrelated to the usefulness of Facebook advertising.

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I am on the fence about social media advertising. On the one hand, no, I don't think you get a whole lot of buyers from push ads (although I'll admit I loathe ads on social media no matter what they're for, so I'm biased). On the other hand, what helps is catching the right person's eye, and sometimes (although not often) that happens via social media.

Facebook ads are easy to run, and if you can afford them they certainly won't hurt you. OTOH you can tweet for free, although if you don't have followers you need to play with tags to get views. Both methods are low friction, and if they don't give you sufficient return, you haven't wasted much time.

BPhillipYork said:

Many extremely mediocre writers make a living, and a very good living, just churning out bad books. And I don't just mean self-publishing.

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Also - RYFW is a thing here. And it doesn't just mean respect trade published writers.

Helix said:

I think you might have misread mccardey's post. The doubtful advice was about using FB adverts as a way of selling books. Whether writers are 'extremely mediocre', mediocrely mediocre, or good, and whether the books are self-published or trade-published -- these factors are unrelated to the usefulness of Facebook advertising.

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I don't think that's true. I think people who want different kinds of writing are best targeted with different kinds of ads, on different platforms. I don't think the kind of people who read reviews in lit mags are looking for the same kind of writing as the kind of people who are likely to click on facebook ads for books.

BPhillipYork said:

I don't think that's true. I think people who want different kinds of writing are best targeted with different kinds of ads, on different platforms. I don't think the kind of people who read reviews in lit mags are looking for the same kind of writing as the kind of people who are likely to click on facebook ads for books.

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So what are you implying about the relationship between writing skill and FB adverts?

BPhillipYork said:

You are not necessarily anyone's target audience, so don't too do much-assuming everyone's reading habits/tastes are like yours. Many extremely mediocre writers make a living, and a very good living, just churning out bad books. And I don't just mean self-publishing. And there's definitely quite a number of people on the write 4-6 (bad) books a year plan, and some of them are making a decent living.

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BPhilip, you're new here, so perhaps you haven't realised that at AW we have one rule, and we're really serious about it. It goes like this:

Respect your fellow writer.

When you signed up to join AW you'll have been directed to read the Newbie Guide, which explains our one rule. I want you to go back and read it again, right now, before you post again. And then I want you to ensure that you follow our rule in all future posts. Thank you.

Though looking at what others do is not bad advice in a general way, being a bit sceptical of anything that seems too good to be true will help you. It turned out a number of those who were putting out books very often were hiring ghostwriters, but pretending they simply wrote really fast. There are also a whole bunch of shady schemes for faking reviews, pushing books up the charts, getting more page reads, and so on. These things can get people banned from Amazon eventually, but before that, the authors look very successful.

Which means I'd suggest not only looking at those who sell the most. Look at all examples, from outright failure to doing reasonable well. It gives a better idea of what really happens when people try certain things.

DanielSTJ said:

Hello world!

I want to self-publish. It seems like the best option for me. The question that I have is: how do I get started? I understand it can take years to build an audience and start making money and I don't mind that- I'm still young and have time. Now, I wanted to start with setting up a website (it's only $200 per year-- affordable in my book considering my goals) to try and get some of my work out there and establish a presence before I consider releasing any material on Amazon (which would be my preferred landscape.) My idea is to build the audience that way. Does this make sense? What are all the steps I have to take? I'm going to work hard at saving my money and investing it into, what I consider, is my business now. Any links, references, advice, etc will be greatly appreciated!

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There is a lot here!

-Website: I don't know much about websites. Mr Hippo made mine and wrote a post on how to make an affordable author website here. There are lots of options out there...I think depending on what you're looking for, $200/year could be cheap or it could be expensive. Things like what plug-ins you want would affect the cost.

-As for establishing a presence, I'm in the process of learning that myself. I think I've recommended this to you in your other thread, so I'm sorry for repeating myself, but I highly recommend Joanna Penn's books. She talks about how we ALL start at zero (unless you're some celebrity!) and we've all got to build a platform somehow, and she lists all the things she tried and is very honest about what worked and what didn't work for her. It'll be different for everyone...for example, her social media platform of choice is Twitter. After poking around a bit, I have a personal preference for Instagram, so I'll be focusing my efforts there from now on. But it's worth picking up her book.

-Kboards I think has a wealth of information, as well as Facebook groups. I still have yet to find the time to go on Kboards (I'm just way too attached to AW ), but it is definitely on my Must-Do list. I was lucky enough to be invited to a couple of Facebook groups for hybrid authors (authors who pursue both trade and self publishing), and I've just been soaking up a LOT of information. One of the pieces of info, which seems really vital, is how with SP, as opposed to TP, you should really look up which niche genres have a high demand and low supply. One of the ways you could look this up is through Klytics (did I spell that right...). They do an analysis of niche genres and tell you which ones you should be aiming for. It seems to me that to do well in SP, you need to write with an eye on the market. I think that's well-suited for me because 1. I write fast, and 2. I get very influenced by trends anyway, so writing to market isn't going to be such a big shift for me. But do consider how your strengths and weaknesses as a writer would play into SPing and try to work with that.

Hope this helps!

I've been building social media for two years under my author name. I have around 6,000 Twitter followers and several hundred for my blog.

My book became available for preorder a few months ago and, as far as I can tell, my social media following has resulted in about 20 sales. From what I gather, my experience is far from unusual. I mean, how many books have I bought based on seeing an author tweet, post on Facebook, or blog? I can think of exactly one. And I'm connected to thousands of authors through social media.

I would concentrate far less on social media and promotion and far more on writing in volume. By all accounts, the best way to be successful at self-publishing is to be prolifc - in books, not tweets.