Welcome to the ninth installment of Year One – you can access the previous entries right here!

Marketing that is.

As a creative, marketing is the part most of us hate more than anything in the world.

We want to just create. We don’t want to have to push our products on people, we want them to come to it.

The problem is, there is so much product out there, unless you are someone like Stephen King or have a million friends, just announcing a new product is not going to make people buy it or be interested.

Tapping the friends and family route only goes so far.

Here’s where I want to make it very clear – I am not marketing expert, I wouldn’t even say I’m very good at it.

For creative properties, you could make it a full-time job to simply market your products. You could hire someone to help, you could hire a whole staff, it still might not get you where you want to be.

If you want to be successful and do it on your own, marketing will take up more of your time than actually creating.

It’s hard. Period. I know it sounds whiny, but it’s true.

Over the last year plus of marketing Shady Place and The Couch, I’ve run ads, done promos, held contests, run giveaways, attended events, basically anything I could think of.

As far as I can tell, unless you have a ton of money to throw at marketing, there is no easy way to get your work in front of people.

There is, however, an inexpensive long game.

We all love the overnight success story, but the fact is, most of those overnight successes were not overnight. Just because someone hits it big or becomes very popular in what seems like an out of the blue fashion, many toiled away for years before ever getting a second glance.

A big thing I’ve learned about marketing in my relatively short journey is that your products market each other.

You can create loss leaders (giving something away or deeply discounting it) to promote the next thing. People like free stuff, so if you have a book series, give them a big chunk of or the whole first book for free, then when they like it they’ll buy the second one, and third one, and so on.

You’re swimming upstream against a lot of other content and noise.

Making great stuff isn’t enough. You have to tell people about it, but be steady; get on all the social media outlets, get a website, get a newsletter, put your product everywhere you can feasibly do so, get a good cover, make the content good, put it out there.

These may sound like no duh type concepts, but there are creators who make things and then just expect people to come to them when their product is nowhere to be found, “But I announced it on Facebook…” Neat, how’d that work out for you? Oh, you got 15 likes? Slow claps all around.

I don’t have the answers, I’ve read and been told it takes years of consistently being there for people to even begin to notice you. I can see a year in that people are starting to take notice, not a lot, but they like what I’m doing and I’m going to keep doing it.

I’ve stopped throwing money at book promos and social media ads.

Instead? I tell people what I’m doing. I post pictures of the shows I attend. I post pictures of new artwork. I (hopefully) give people a reason to like me and what I do. This article? My blog? My website? The newsletter I send out weekly? Those are all part of marketing.

My reach isn’t that great, yet, but as I said above, it’s a long game. Growing an audience organically and marketing directly to those people who already like you may take time, but that’s ok, this is a commitment to a long career, not one-time thing.

I rambled a bit in this entry, but I think the point gets across. Marketing is in everything you do when you’re a creative. You can throw money at it, but unless you find a magic formula to make the return outweigh the cost, it’s not going to be worth it. Build a portfolio of great work, share it with the world, make connections, strong connections, give some things away, and be prepared for the long haul.

Next time I’m going to try to wrap up all this Year One rambling into a conclusion.

Welcome to the eighth installment of Year One – you can access the previous entries right here!

That’s what I was saying to the manager at Barnes and Noble when he told me they’d love to have me do an in-store signing, but not with my book being only available to them via Createspace.

Come back when your books are returnable kid.

I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of the statement. There was more to it than that, of course…but that’s what I heard.

How do you pick where to publish your book? Hire a printer and just have them at your house or office? Setup with a print on demand outfit like Createspace, LuLu, or Ingram Spark? The copy shop down the street (please don’t do this, pretty pretty please)?

After I did a lot of research on just how to get my book out there, I settled on Createspace, because, well, it was easy!

You upload your book, fix the mistakes, hit publish and bam! There it is on Amazon, Kindle, and if you selected the expanded distribution all the other online retailers and even in major retailers like Barnes and Noble if someone chooses to order it!

It was awesome. I found my book on every different store I could think for order.

I also went into the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program so anyone with Kindle Unlimited could read Shady Place as part of their subscription and I got paid a page rate. (this is a 90-day commitment to only sell your ebook on Kindle)

Like I said. It was AWESOME! My book was everywhere.

Re-wind back to the beginning. I went in to Barnes and Noble and asked for a manager, asked if I could do a signing, and was flat out rejected.

As it turns out, stores like Barnes and Noble don’t like Amazon – crazy right? Well not really, since Amazon is their sworn enemy. Furthermore, Createspace is print on demand and does not allow retailers to return unsold copies. Strike two.

I got the proverbial pat on the butt and sent on my way, but with the caveat, if you can make it so your books are returnable, we can talk…

This opened a whole new educational opportunity – that’s right opportunity, because every setback is an opportunity. My research led me to Ingram Spark, who I was familiar with, but decided not to use previously because it’s more complicated (see Year One: Part Seven for more on this).

When you create a book through Createspace you are given the option to provide your own ISBN (that number above the barcode on books) or use one of theirs. If you chose to use their ISBN, Createspace shows as the publisher of your work, if you provide your own, you can dictate the name of the publisher. Ingram Spark requires you to provide your own.

A book must have an ISBN and a barcode to be sold in stores.

My back to the drawing board moment meant figuring out how to get an ISBN and what to do with it. Also, what to do with my already published book on Createspace.

In retrospect, I made a mistake taking the easy route. I should have done more research before publishing through Createspace.

What should I have done?

When I decided I did indeed want the ability to have a book signing at Barnes and Noble, I had to take a step back and basically start over.

I purchased a 10 pack of ISBNs from Bowker.com (you need a separate ISBN for each edition, hardcover, softcover, ebook, second editions, etc.). I bought 10 because I intended and still intend to have more titles and it’s much much cheaper. (This is a UPC for comics and still an ISBN for collected trade paperbacks/graphic novels)

Next, I assigned Shady Place soft cover and ebook separate IBSNs.

My Shady Place version on Createspace was considered published by them, so I actually pulled it from the site and created a new version with my ISBN and W.i.N. Pictures as the publisher. This time, I did not include expanded distribution. So, through Createspace, Shady Place was available as a print on demand through Amazon only. (on a side note, I was able to get Amazon to migrate my already existing reviews to the new version)

Then, with the same ISBN, I created a version for Ingram Spark (also print on demand) for the distribution to other retail channels. Keep in mind, this method means if a store orders copies and doesn’t sell them, you are on the hook for those copies financially; you can have the returned copies mailed to you or destroyed, but they become your responsibility.

From there, I uploaded to KDP directly with a new ISBN and also used this for Smashwords (another digital book distributor) and Apple iBooks.

Once it became available through the Ingram Spark distribution channels, I returned to Barnes and Noble and they welcomed me with open arms! Voila! Easy, ha, yeah, so easy:)…

Make a decision before you hit publish or you’re in for double work if you want to make changes.

Bonus: The Audio Book

I like to run before I crawl. So of course, when I put Shady Place, my first novel, into the world, I wanted it available every which way possible. In steps the audio book.

I knew Audible was the biggest audio book distributor, and once again, part of the Amazon family.

To get your book on Audible, you need to use a service called ACX. This service allows you to either upload your completed audio book or even hire, through their site at no additional cost a narrator to produce your audio book.

This process was really cool. I sent Shady Place out for producers to read for through ACX and got over 30 auditions within two days, people vying for the opportunity to read my book. It was fun going through and narrowing down, then selecting Nik Magill to narrate the book, a decision I’m so glad I made. He did a fantastic job.

ACX gives you several options when publishing. You can go exclusive for seven years (!) at 50/50 split of 40% royalties with your narrator or 40% royalties while paying your narrator separately. Or you can sign a non-exclusive deal (still seven years) at 25% and provide your own audio or pay your narrator out of pocket.

When you get there it’s a really worthwhile experience for a creator. Honestly, it was superfluous for a first book, but it will be there for another six years at least.

I went on longer than usual on this one, but hopefully it’s useful information to someone out there. Stay tuned for what should be the final installment next week when I give my feeble take on marketing.

Welcome to the seventh installment of Year One – you can access the previous entries right here!

Writing a book isn’t the only creative part of the process.  Once the manuscript is complete, there are two other important aspects to consider before the book can be considered complete: Book Design and Cover Design.

Cover Design touches on what the header alluded to. What is someone going to see when they pick up your book? This was something I knew had to be perfect before I ever got close to creating a cover.

Yes, a book should stand on its merits and it shouldn’t matter what the outside looks like (just like human beings), but let’s be honest, if the cover looks like crap you’re not evening picking it up. I know I’m not. If we lived in a vacuum, maybe we could get past a bad cover, but we don’t – before we ever decide to read the description on the back, we need the cover to draw our eye in, not repel it.

A good cover will bring a potential reader to the table, the description will convince them to eat, and a well written book will help them keep it down and bring them back for seconds (see the previous installment where I beg writers to get an editor).

Make sure the cover fits the genre and the book delivers on the description. Add in some quotes if you got em.

Make the cover sell the book.

I’m lucky enough to have a great friend (Jason Fragale) who was able to help me make what I consider to be an awesome cover for Shady Place. If I didn’t have him, I would have paid someone else to do my cover in a heartbeat.

Do not skimp here. There are sites that sell premade covers by genre, utilize them or a site like Fiverr where you can hire individuals to work with you to create a great cover.

Book design is how the inside of your book actually looks. Pretty simple right? You typed it up, formatted as you went, and hit save with every change and draft. Done. What’s the big deal?

Every publishing platform has a different format requirement for how you submit your manuscript. I’m not exaggerating when I say I spent dozens of hours on formatting alone with Shady Place. A lot of this was trial and error from someone who had no clue what they were doing. Should I have paid someone and just had them provide me all the deliverables for the different formats for one price? In retrospect, yes, but I feel like even if I don’t do it myself in the future, I should at least know how.

Ingram Spark, Createspace, Smash Words, KDP – these are all publishing platforms you’ll hear more about in a later installment – these are your primary formatting Gods. They tell you how your work needs to appear to fit their platform. If you do it wrong, it either won’t look right, or in the case of Ingram Spark they reject it and charge you each time you resubmit.

There are templates available for each of these, but who knew you had to pay such close attention?

Beyond just preparing for the publishing platform there are other things to consider when designing the interior of the book: Font, font size (I have been thanked numerous times for using a larger font on Shady Place), copyright page, title page, where you’re going to number the pages, will you have headers on each page – so many things you don’t even realize when your only intention was to write a book and shove it out into the world.

Pick up a book and flip through it. There may be somethings you like and some you don’t. I flipped through dozens of books and noted just what I wanted Shady Place to look like, but still had to change certain aspects to fit certain formats.

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems.

Books should stand alone on the quality of the content, but cover and book design go a long way to getting readers to even give you a shot.

If the book looks unprofessional, readers are going to assume the content is unprofessional. Make the investment in time or money and get these steps right.