Not so long ago publishing a book intended for a limited audience of family members and friends was an expensive proposition. Today, technological changes in the world of printing and the evolution of the publishing industry have given authors an opportunity to dramatically reduce the cost of publishing books like family histories and memoirs. Here are four ways to save money when publishing your book.
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As authors grow close to finishing the writing of their book they are also often anxious to get it into print as soon as they can. The impulse is easily understandable, however rushing to publication can not only result in a book of lesser quality than the author hoped for, it may actually result in higher costs, and cause the process to take longer than it needed to. Successful self-publishing is not a process of doing multiple things simultaneously; it is a process of following a simple plan one step at a time.
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Most authors in today’s marketplace don’t know how to write books that will sell, nor do they know how to effectively promote. Profitable Authors Institute was created to change that. We are profitable authors. We want to show you how to be one, too (without wasting time spinning your wheels and still not selling books.)
12 industry professionals, including Stories To Tell founder Nancy Barnes, offer forty-eight video courses online in three tracks:
- Writing
- Publishing
- Book Promotion
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An author phoned us recently with good news. We had worked with him last year to self-publish his book. Now, he was very excited to tell us, a New York publishing house (not one of the big 5, but a New York publisher, nevertheless) had offered him a contract to purchase the rights to his book and publish it. He wanted to know if it was a good deal.
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Who should publish your book? Every author faces the same choice. Increasingly the choice is between “assisted self-publishing” and becoming an “indie” who truly self-publishes.
Before you sign up for an all-inclusive package with a heavily advertised giant like Author House, Xlibris, or Outskirts Press it’s important to understand that when you choose one of them you will pay an inflated price for every book they print for you.
Let's see how it works.
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Frustrated by the lack of opportunity to display and sell her children’s books, Patti Brassard Jefferson, an award-winning independent author and illustrator, decided to change the rules of the game.
This summer she opened P.J. Boox, described by Publishers Weekly as the “first bookstore dedicated to self-published authors.”
P.J. Boox only sells books published by independent and self-published authors.
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Looking at your Facebook page can be like staring at a blank canvas. What content do you post so you gain an audience and they stay interested? What do you share first?
Here are 12 great post ideas for your page.
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This is the first in a series of posts by Stories To Tell editor and book designer Sarah Hoggatt, an experienced self-published author herself, on how authors can best use social media to promote their books.
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There are many important choices when choosing a printer for your self-published book. Author Sarah Hoggatt discusses the choices she made in publishing the third book of her trilogy.
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As an author, your success all depends on connecting with your audience. You’ll need to let them know you have a book of interest to them, get it into their hands, (whether it’s a purchase or a free gift), and then hope they read and “connect” with your words, in their minds and hearts. Let’s face it – not everyone out there cares to read your book. These “connections” only happen with the right audience.
There are three types of audience. The audience you target will affect many of the choices you make as you publish.
One the one end of the spectrum, we have large-scale commercial publishing. On the opposite end, some authors write for a very small audience, just family and friends. And then there is an ever-growing segment of the writer’s market, niche publishing. Let’s look at how these audiences place authors on different paths.
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As great an experience as publishing is, I learn a lot every time I go to print, lessons I put into practice with subsequent books. I thought these lessons would be for myself alone until a high school student approached me asking if I would mentor her for her senior project. She reminded me a bit of myself at that age except even brighter and more put together. So I took what I learned and shared those lessons with her. It was a gift to pass them on to such a gifted artist in her own right and her book came out beautifully. Here is some of what I told her in relation to the physical printing of books:
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You’ve been working on some writing and are considering the possibility of self-publishing down the road, but it looks like a large, unmanageable jungle. You’re not sure where to even start and thus ask a question I often hear, “How did you start publishing?”
Sarah Hoggatt of Stories To tell explores her path into print.
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It’s the question so many people ask. As writers, I’m sure you know what it is. It’s the question that brings both great delight and great discomfort. It’s the question that makes us smile with pride yet also makes us suddenly shy. It’s the coaxing out of information we tend to clutch tightly to our chests. The one we are secretly longing to be asked.
“So how’s the book going?”
There it is. What do we say? Do we tell them what we’re writing about, what stage the book is in, what we want it to become? I’ve been asked this question recently by my editors, by the baristas at my favorite coffee shop, and by a friend while I was visiting her house. I actually love to be asked this question as it keeps me accountable to keep writing and it gives me opportunity to share about a topic I love.
Here at “Stories to Tell,” we know many of you are going through the same process of writing, editing, and publishing your book so we thought it would be fun and informative if we created a blog series around the process of me putting my book together.
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Your book is almost ready to publish. You have lots of questions. Print? eBook? Both? How can I make sure that I get the widest possible distribution and easiest order fulfillment services? What publisher is best for my needs?
In the next few posts we will look at some of the options you might consider. If your book is intended for a limited distribution to family and friends like many family histories or memoirs you’ll want what is often called private printing. (We’ll explore private printing in an upcoming post.) If you have commercial aspirations for your book you have many more issues to consider. We’ll begin by looking at some of the most popular options you may want to explore. Today we’ll explore Ingram Spark.
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Your book is almost done. You are completing the final revisions of the manuscript. If you are self-publishing for the first time, you probably have a lot of questions about the next steps in the process.
Here are some that you'll want to look at right now.
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Is your book legally protected from copyright infringement? Would you be able to prove your rights to your work in a court of law? Though anything you create in written or viewable form is automatically copyrighted according to United States law, such a claim will not stand up in court. To prove you own the work, you need a certificate from the Copyright office at the Library of Congress.
It’s a pretty easy process to obtain a copyright certificate. You fill out an application online, pay the fee (between $35 for online registration and $85 for paper registration), then send two copies of the work to the Copyright office at the Library of Congress. It takes several months to process the application after which they send you a copyright certificate. Keep this certificate on file in case of any future legal issues.
Here’s how you do it.
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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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One of the questions we are frequently asked is, “What is a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) and how do I get one?” A LCCN is distributed for free by the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and corresponds to a created record in their system that libraries across the country can look at if they want information on how to catalog your book.
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You’re in a bookstore or at an event looking at a book and it’s so poorly designed that it’s distracting to you and you choose not to buy it. I’ve had this happen so many times that I want to write the authors and tell them about our book design services before they print their books again. Whether a book is designed by a mainstream publisher or is self-published, the design needs to look clean and professional.
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Why does it take so long to get a book into print?
That’s a question a lot of first time authors ask. There are plenty of good reasons that the process takes so long, but a humorous look at how a book gets edited, designed, published, publicized, distributed and marketed is much more fun. Enjoy the video published by the Digital Marketing Team at Macmillan titled From the Typewriter to the Bookstore: A Publishing Story.
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