The Road to Self Publishing- The Cover

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Ah, the cover. Easily one of the most important things if you actually want to sell your book. Covers are one of those things that are far more complex than it seems on the surface, so I’m going to break this up into several sections.

  • Why the cover is important
  • Should you hire?
  • Types of covers you’ll need
  • Tools of the trade
  • Cover Designers

If you’re not ready for all that, you can check out the other Road to Self Publishing posts.

Ready? Let’s get started. Continue reading “The Road to Self Publishing- The Cover”

The Road to Self Publishing- The Afterdraft

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As always, if this is the first Road to Self Publishing post you’ve read, check out the master post here. It’ll take you through the whole series.

So, you’ve written and re-written your book several times now. You’ve gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. It’s as close to perfect as you can make it. The works over, right? No. Like every other blogger who’s gone through the self-publishing gauntlet, I’ve discovered that there is so much to do after I’ve hit my final draft. The things I have left, in no particular order are:

  • Have my final draft beta-read
  • Have at least one copy edit done
  • Get my cover up to par (more on that in a later post)
  • Choose publishing packages/vendors
  • Figure out how to market this thing

Continue reading “The Road to Self Publishing- The Afterdraft”

The Road to Self Publishing- What’s a Revision Anyway?

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I haven’t done one of these in awhile, (WordPress says two years? Yikes.) but it’s time for the next installment of The Road to Self Publishing, the series where I pretend to know what I’m talking about while going on my own journey to being a (hopefully selling) self-published author. If you haven’t read the previous entry, First Draft Done, Now What?, you can find it here, or you can find the master post here. As I said before, the master post will contain links to all other Road to Self Publishing posts, so if you’re not reading this one close to the post date, I’d check out that one.

Continue reading “The Road to Self Publishing- What’s a Revision Anyway?”

The Road to Self Publishing- First Draft Done, Now What?

article1Well, that’s an incredibly lengthy title. Welcome to the first post in The Road to Self Publishing series. As the title suggests, this post will concentrate on what happens after you’re done with the first draft of your work; the revision process. I realize that this isn’t strictly related to self-publishing, but it is still part of the same process that eventually leads to a published work. Plus, I want to help dispel the idea that self-published books are less good, that they don’t have the amount of work put into them that traditionally published books have. So, I’m going to show you every step of the process, not just the publishing steps. Continue reading “The Road to Self Publishing- First Draft Done, Now What?”

The Road to Self Publishing

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Welcome to The Road to Self Publishing! This isn’t really the first official post for it, that should come in a week or two. This is more of a meta-post to, sort of, explain what The Road to Self Publishing is and isn’t.

The main thing this series is going to be covering is my experience (good or bad) with attempting to self-publish my NaNoWriMo novel The Forgotten. These will be posted more-or-less alongside my actual experiences. This means it will not only be a very long series, but it will be inconsistent as well. There may be multiple posts very close to each other one month and then multiple months without a post as I go through the process. There will, of course be other posts interspersed with The Road to Self Publishing posts, the blog won’t become all about them.

The second thing it will be about is comparing options available to writers looking to self-publish. There are so many ways to do things at pretty much every step of the process, figuring out what options work best for you can be overwhelming. Hopefully, this series can help tame that by giving an in-depth comparison of the many options I find during my experience and research.

The combination of these two things means posts in this series will probably be a little longer than you might be used to from me. I personally think this is a good thing as I will endeavor to give you as much about my experience and the choices someone might face when self-publishing as possible.

Every post in this series will be tagged with The Road to Self Publishing and titled with it as well. In addition, this post will be continually updated with each post added to the list below. This post will serve as a permanent explanation of the series as well as a convenient way to access any single post in order. I’ll link to this post at the end of each new post. I will add posts below as I begin working on them, and links will be added once they’re posted.

The Road to Self Publishing

First Draft Done, Now What?– Explains techniques for going from first draft to second draft. Gives the basics for creating readable ebooks and PDFs for revision.

What’s a Revision Anyway?– Talks about the process of revisions from prep to the actual writing.

The Afterdraft– Talks about what needs to be done after you’ve hit your “final” draft and can’t make it any better on your own. Mostly about beta-reading.

The Hardest Writing– Discusses one of the hardest bits of writing for most authors; the back of the book blurb. Not too many tips/tricks, mostly discussion. Feel free to post in the comments even if it’s been awhile since it was published.