Hello friends! I recently wrote and published a Kindle book (which
made it to the #amazonbestseller list in the first week) called ‘The Work-At-Home Military Wife – A quickstart guide to creating a pack-and-carry career and work-from-home lifestyle on the move’. It took me a few months, from
start to finish, and it’s been one roller coaster of a learning experience.
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| How to write, launch and promo that first Kindle book |
I’d love to write and publish more books, both non-fiction
and fiction, and the lessons learnt here will help me in the months to come. If
you’re self-publishing your first book, I hope my journey will help you too.
Writing a book: I started writing this book in December 2018,
when my parents were visiting me, and I could grab a few extra hours to write
every day as they were helping out with my homeschooled son. When it comes to
writing a book, there are so many tiny steps, and Hassan Osman's ebook helped me
break down the process into bite sized pieces. Here are the steps I followed:
1.
Write down the ideas for your book, and choose
one that you want to take up for the current project.
2.
Break it down into a list of topics and create a
table of contents.
3.
Add in the extras like Acknowledgements, notes,
copyright information and anything else that you want in your book apart from
the chapters.
4.
Set some deadlines for yourself, like maybe 1000
words each day or 45 minutes at your desk writing your book. While a lot of
authors suggest writing tonnes of words each day, I fit things according to my
schedule. This is the best thing about Hassan’s book; he asks you to spend only
30 minutes per day, if that’s all you have, to get your book done.
5.
Spend at least 5 days a week on your book, so
that you don’t lose the rhythm and flow.
6.
Finish the book. This can be the tedious part
because by the time you’re at the end of it, you might feel a tad bored or may
want to take a break from it.
Editing and proofreading: Once the book is over, you move on
to cleaning up your copy.
1.Ideally, I should have shelved the manuscript for a couple
of weeks before bringing it out for a self-edit; but because this was my first
book and I was eager to publish it, I began doing the first round of edits
immediately. Once this was over, I printed out the entire manuscript and edited
it all over again with my red pen. Then, I went back to the soft copy and
incorporated the changes there, before putting it through Grammarly and
ProWriting Aid.
2. Once all the changes were made at my end, I sent it to my
editor for a round of proof reading and editing.
3. When the manuscript came back to me, I converted it into
a pdf and downloaded it on my Kindle to check for typos that we could have
missed.
4. And lastly, I made a few more changes in the language
that I felt would make the text more relevant.
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| Grab my book at 50% discount this week at Amazon. |
Designing the book cover: Every book on self-publishing puts
a lot of emphasis on getting an attractive book cover. Since I was on a tight
budget, I searched high and low for book cover designers on Fiverr.com, but
finally chose the cover designed by Smokey Bandit. A fun thing to do is ask
your prospective readers to choose a favorite cover out of the few options that
you present.
Formatting the book for Kindle: I’m a complete Dodo when it
comes to technical things, and I requested my husband to help me format the
book. He used Calibre, a free software as well as some know-how from Derek
Murphy’s ecourse to format this book.
Get a KDP account: This is an important part of the process,
if you’re planning to publish via Kindle. You can also explore Draft2Digital or
Smashwords if you want to publish your book on various platforms.
Publish the book: With a prayer, publish that book.
Celebrate this milestone! But hey, before this, do some research on the seven
keywords, book description and the categories that you need to place it in on
Amazon. I used KDP Rocket for this.
Promote your book: Now begins the next part of the process
– sending out word about your book. This can be as elaborate and expensive or as
simple and pocket-friendly as you want it to be. Most of the books I read about
self-publishing encourage authors to spend a good amount of money on hiring
promotional gigs and advertising. I, on the other hand, was ready to do a promo
on my own, on zero budget; but, finally decided to fork out a few dollars
(total of $20) to get some extra help. There are a few good promo gigs on
Fiverr as well as a great article on Kindlepreneur about where you can get some
help.
Here’s how I created a buzz about my book:
Chose 3 Free days for it (if you’re part of the Kindle
Unlimited program, you’re offered 5 Free promo days every three months).
Built a book launch team via my Facebook groups and sent
them the book link the day the book was free and requested them to download it.
I also sent out the book link via my blog mailing list, and
requested my husband and parents to circulate it within their friend circle.
I posted on several Facebook Groups for Free Kindle books,
and in the groups that I am part of.
I also hired a pocket-friendly Fiverr gig and a VA gig to
help promote the Free book on one of those days.
All of this resulted in quite a bit of buzz, and
interestingly, I also made it to both Amazon.com and Amazon.in’s bestseller
list.
Once the free offer was over, I put up a solid discount of
66% on my book price for a whole week, and let my people know via my mailing
lists.
The only flip side about having offering it free for a few
days is that some people will only want it for free and are astonished when you
begin charging a price – even a heavily discounted one! I guess, the thought
must be that if it can be free for a few days, does it even merit being a paid
offering!
When the first 10 days of promotional offers are over, I can
go on offering a discount, just in order to create more buzz about my new book,
or let it revert to the original price. (Currently my book is at 50% discount for
#womendsday.)
Another way to continue creating awareness about your book
is to contact book bloggers and ask them if they’d be interested in blogging
about your book. Guest posting on blogs that share the same message as your
book can also be another way to spread the word.
However, what I’ve realized is that book promotion can also
be very time consuming, and how much time you want to spend on it, is entirely
your decision.
But whatever you choose to do, begin that second book
instead of waiting to make a lot of money on the first one. The more books you
write, the more buzz there will be around your author name. Also, writing is
what we do best and the more of it we do, the better it is for our soul J.
By the way, if you're interested, get my book here.
How do you write, publish and market your books?
#selfpublishing #indiepublishing #writebooks #indieauthor
#kindle #kindlepublishing #3kdprocket #amazonbestseller
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