A friend asked me the other day where he could go to make his family history look good before he handed it around. He was number ten so far this year, and I’m sure it will hit a dozen before Christmas.
People do tend to ask this sort of question when they find out you’ve published a book, even if it’s a romantic comedy novel and he or she is writing a memoir. It blows me away every time someone asks. I think it’s downright thrilling that Uncle Fred and Aunt Irma can publish a book if they want to, too.
Once upon a time, publishing a book meant fighting your way through the gatekeepers at publishing houses, begging them to read a word or two. That was about as easy as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in flip-flops. These days, most publishers won’t look even peek at the first page unless an agent puts it in front of them.
People have always had the choice of vanity publishing. That meant stockpiling your pennies for years, then renting a tractor-trailer truck to take them to a printer. Then, still choking on the cost per copy unless you ordered hundreds or thousands, you cleaned out the garage to make room for them until you could sell them. If you ever did.
Now we have ebooks, and we even have print on demand. And we have a go-to author like Paul Lima to tell us in clear, concise prose how to do both. And promote them so well you might even sell a copy or two.
Paul has penned a dozen books or so on writing books. I enthusiastically recommend every one of them to friends with memoirs on their minds, or any other books for that matter. A great place to start is Produce, Price and Promote Your Self-Published Fiction or Non-fiction Book and e-Book.
It’s now in its third edition, thankfully. The technology and processes involved in self-publishing change daily.
Paul has been a freelance writer and teacher of the trade for decades, and it shows in his thorough, straightforward coverage of just about everything you could ever need to know. In fact, the book covers far more ground than many people will need, but it doesn’t hurt to scan it all. After all, Uncle Pete may tell you that your book is the best he’s read all year and ask, “Why don’t you write about … ?”
Paul has a gift for organizing his thoughts so completely that he can make you think it’s easy to produce, price, and promote your own book, or even to just produce it.
Fair warning. It’s not easy. If it were, my first attempt at publishing Sit, Stay, Love, wouldn’t have looked like I borrowed a cat to wander across the keyboard while my formatting software had a field day with the manuscript. Thankfully, readers can download a new version with the click of a mouse.
Paul also reveals tidbits you didn’t know you wanted to know. Case in point: “social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web!” Who wouldn’t be happy to hear that?
“Produce, Price” doesn’t stop there. It covers more ground than a kid trying to get out of doing the dishes.
The producing part? Paul introduces you to players ranging from Lightning Source, Ingram Spark, and Lulu to Draft2Digital, Kobo, and of course giant Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. The guide to promotional possibilities is comprehensive but not so detailed you’ll run screaming into the night.
Wait, scratch that. It’s not possible, even for so accomplished and calming a simplifier as Paul Lima, to touch on that subject without sending you on a mad dash into the moonlight, vocal cords at full volume.
There’s one thing he doesn’t suggest that you might want to consider. Adopt a sibling. My sister, bless her bookish heart, recently boasted about her sisterly relationship with a published author at a recent retiree breakfast get-together. I didn’t even have to pay her to mention my book. Money might have to change hands, however, before she twists the arms of her book club members to buy my book for discussion at their next meeting.
No, Paul didn’t suggest that either. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if he has a Mount Everest-sized mountain of better suggestions in his fourth edition of Produce, Price and Promote Your Self-Published Fiction or Non-fiction Book and e-Book.