Watch Me Self-Publish #6

Mugshots

So I had new business cards and promotional mugs made…just a few mugs – one for Morgan and some for me as a reward for all the hard work.

In between various debilitating days dealing with the day-job, health issues and the onset of winter, I finally managed to make changes to the file and upload to CreateSpace. Now I’m waiting for the proof copy to be sent through and then I can do a “Hard Copy Launch”

Interestingly, CreateSpace is possibly a better way to go for self-publishing: there is a template provided to help you paginate and make sure you remember to include everything AND the CreateSpace version automatically uploads to Kindle if you tick the box. You still have to do the KDP steps and tax declaration.

My focus now is on two things:

K2 – the next Kindle Run – As usual I have a stack of stories waiting to be finished. I’m thinking of applying to the Odyssey Writing Workshop to do their workshop on endings…

And

Marketing. I’ve sold ten copies of Halibut so far. I’m not devastated by this but I am curious about how you get to be noticed in such a busy world. this year I’m going to be teaching KindleRunners – a workshop on how to self-publish – at Cyber_Shed and the more I work on lesson plans, the more I think that Marketing is where 90% of the work is for self-publishers. So I am challenging myself to do a few things during July:

1. Offer the book (hard copy) to my local book store plus a poster of me (local artist blah blah)

2. Offer the book to Blue Mountains Library (Cymbeline and I are running a workshop there, so they know me…a bit)

3. Ask people in the Artists’ Transformation 1% Group to write and post a review

4. Enter the book into at least one Award – there are a million of the things: The Wattys, List of Awards at Book Designer, another list at the Alliance of Independent Authors  aaand so on.

That’s plenty to do and in the meantime I’m writing Alien Stories (Oh come on, at least I’ve moved on from Zombies) – so I’ll be posting some of those.

🙂