Why would an author who is self-publishing want to write a book proposal?
Aren’t book proposals the tools authors use when seeking an agent or an acquisitions editor at a traditional publishing house to guide their book into print? Self-publishing eliminates those gatekeepers.
Before we dismiss the need for a self-publishing author to write a book proposal, let’s take a moment to think about what a proposal is and why a self-publishing author might benefit from writing one.
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You have just completed the manuscript for your book. You are ready to publish and , after reviewing your options, you have decided that you will publish in e-book version only. After all e-books are the wave of the future, especially among younger readers who have grown up online.
Before you go ahead you should check out the Washington Post’s recent report that “wired millennials still prefer the printed word.”
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Ancestry has found a new home for My Canvas. There has been a good deal of celebrating in the genealogy community. At Stories To Tell we are always happy to see more opportunities for people to share their family history. But this is a good time to ask whether My Canvas, the best known place to publish a family history, is really the best way to create a family history book.
There are two reasons My Canvas seems an attractive option to people who want to publish a family history, but don’t know much about how book publishing works:
Ancestry's credibility, and My Canvas's Ease of Use.
Before choosing My Canvas as your publisher, you might want to ask some additional questions.
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If you’re a self-publishing author, you have some important choices to make. In this blog series, we are discussing the pros and cons to help you with the most important decisions you’ll need to know about:
How authors can market their books online without technical skills?
In any group of self-publishing authors, this is always the big question. Here are five great ideas we have talked about in the past and links to our posts that explored the marketing tools in detail.
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“Many self-publishers publish too early,” says Leslie Ramsey of Compulsion Reads, a website that seeks to “…quality standard for the indie book market” by shining a “…spotlight on good self-published books and protect readers from those that are not yet ready for the marketplace.”
In a recent post on Writer Unboxed titled Ten Things I Have Learned from Evaluating Self-Published Books for a Year she explained:
One of the hardest decisions for an author to make is to decide when their book is “ready” to publish. I think a lot of newer authors lack the experience and patience to give their book that last needed scrub before putting it out on the market.
That’s too bad because it means that their books are of a lesser quality than they deserve to be. Taking the time to devote some attention to detail when you think it’s finished can take it to the next level.
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