Well, I'm moving on at a good pace with
my book, the first of the trilogy. Today I came across an e-book from
a website by an author who has laid out a road-map for anyone
interested in self-publishing. Her name is J.F. Penn and she has
already self-published two books that have done exceedingly well. She
has a multi-function site (website/blog) where she offers a very
informative e-booklet called the AUTHOR 2.0 BLUEPRINT. You can find
her here at THE CREATIVE PENN.
Well, I spent the day reading her
e-booklet, and it's so chocked with information that it's going to
take me even longer to go through all of the beneficial links. What
was really insightful, and what I had somewhat learned from reading
the blog from an e-publishing site, BOOKBABY.COM, is that a good
marketing tool for your book is Facebook Pages. Facebook Pages are
nothing like Facebook because its purpose is not to keep you
connected to the everyday life of everyone of your family and
friends, instead it introduces you and your work to anyone interested in
finding more about you. It's a professional connection that your
readers can use as a conduit straight to you.
I put it together in a few minutes and
tried to use another site called PAGEMODO.COM to design it. Pagemodo
is supposed to be a simple way to make high quality Facebook Pages
for a price, but it didn't work. I spent half the day trying to log
into it without making ANOTHER Facebook Page, but couldn't get it to
do anything but market to me. So, I gave up on it and decided to go
it alone. I have to say, I did a simple approach using one of the
apps in the Windows 7 operating system called PAINT. A very easy
program that allow you to manipulate, on a limited basis, your
photographs. I took one of my photos that I like, put my name and
sub-title on it and then cropped it to fit the headers on both my
Blog-site and my Facebook Page. When done, I was quite pleased with
myself. You can see the fruit of my work above on this blog-site.
Nothing really involved, but it does look better than the generic
header and wallpaper that you get with the BLOGGER application.
Then I went into the third book of my
trilogy. I've pushed myself over this weekend...well maybe not pushed
but flew through the writing to practically the last chapter. The
book was coming together like lightning, so I stayed behind the
keyboard to get it done. I seem to amaze myself by just letting the
characters do their thing and not really worry about the direction of
the story or where I want it to go. It's like it's on autopilot. Or
maybe being piloted by the characters and not being forced or pushed
about by me to fit a conclusion that might not be organic. I really
don't know how this works but it does.
Further today, I drew more from the
AUTHOR 2.0 BLUEPRINT, which was an entire self-publishing road-map.
So, what I did was take a flowchart template from VISIO and made the
road-map into an easy to follow diagram that I can chart for myself.
This will work fine for me to decide what actions to take next so
that I don't waste time working on things that don't fit in with the
plan to self-publish by Christmas. That's my deadline, Christmas.
Finally, today I did it. I went to
BOOKBABY.COM and paid for the Premium Package. Yeah, I did it, and
the tons of benefits that come with it. Overall, this is the book
distributor that I've decided to go with, so since this is the case,
why not take the plunge and get the money part of this out of the
way. Also I wanted to work on my book cover, which they do for an
extra charge, and the website for the book, which BOOKBABY.COM gives
you free for 60 days. Here's the thing: I was ready to work on these
tools and found that I can't get to them without first uploading my
book to the distributor. This messed me up because I wanted to get
these things out of the way before the book came into being so that
when I was done with it, it would come into the world with all these
support tools already in place.
But it looks like you have to do the
book first, which makes no sense to me. So I still have to wait for
JP to finish editing, and for me to finish revising, and then JP to
do a proofread of it before going to the distributor. Which means
it's going to be a long time before I can get all these things out
(Book cover/web site). I sent BOOKBABY.COM an email asking about
this oversight, but we'll see what reply I'll get from them on
Monday. Probably a stupid one...”Oh, the 'program' is not designed
to do that”, “Oh, I can't do that,” or “Oh, we never thought
of that.” All of the above means that they'll not allow me to get
these things out of the way first.
So I'm seriously on my way now. If you
think I'm doing good so far, and since I haven't gotten hung up in
any scams or problems, I've left you links to follow in my footsteps.
I hope they are as beneficial to you as they were to me.
Well, everything worked for me except
PAGEMODO.COM. If you get this to work leave me a comment. Help me out too.
Gregory Delaurentis
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