Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Self-publishing Unboxed: The Three-year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction, #1
    Self-publishing Unboxed: The Three-year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction, #1
    Self-publishing Unboxed: The Three-year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction, #1
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    Self-publishing Unboxed: The Three-year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction, #1

    By Patty Jansen

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Revised June 2019.

    You intend to self-publish or have published a book or two. You're not selling very well and wonder why not. You feel you should be doing something, but the thought of "marketing" gives you nightmares. 

    You don't want to become one of these people shouting "Buy My Book!" on Twitter. 

    But you would still love to start selling some books, and pay some or even all of your bills with your writing income. 

    The good news is that this is ever more possible when self-publishing, if you set yourself up right. 

    This is where the three-year plan comes in. 

    The Three Year, No-Bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction has been a popular forum and blog post on the subject of career and audience building vs chasing sales and rankings of individual books. 

    People have long asked me if I'm going to turn the post into a book. The post itself is about 1500 words long, but it covers only an overview of the strategy and is intended for people who are already familiar with many of the tactics discussed. There is much I could add and explain in more detail. 

    Enter the books! 

    Self-publishing Unboxed is a 101 guide to self-publishing and selling your self-published books, and it will show you: 

    --The basics of self-publishing 
    --How to optimise your book's listings 
    --How to decide which services to use (and how to pick scams!) 
    --How to decide what you need to spend your time on besides writing 
    --Easy and cheap ways to promote 
    --And much more 

    It is ideal for people who are at the beginning of their publishing career, as well as those who have dabbled a bit, but are ready to take it seriously. 

    Take control of your writing career and get your copy now.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCapricornica Publications
    Release dateOct 8, 2017
    ISBN9781386336617
    Self-publishing Unboxed: The Three-year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction, #1
    Author

    Patty Jansen

    Patty lives in Sydney, Australia, and writes both Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has published over 15 novels and has sold short stories to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact.Patty was trained as a agricultural scientist, and if you look behind her stories, you will find bits of science sprinkled throughout.Want to keep up-to-date with Patty's fiction? Join the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/qqlAbPatty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at: http://pattyjansen.com/

    Read more from Patty Jansen

    Related to Self-publishing Unboxed

    Titles in the series (4)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    E-Commerce For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How To Self-publish A Book

      Jun 12, 2020

      How To Self-publish A Book
      2 min read

    • Article

      Bookish

      Sep 10, 2019

      “Learning how to shape your ideas into well-crafted pieces of writing is essentially learning how to think critically and creatively at the same time,” Tara Mokhtari writes in the introduction of The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing, now i

      1 min read

    • Article

      Deciding to Self-Publish

      Dec 21, 2021

      Whether you’ve been querying for a while or are still considering how to get your book into the world, self-publishing might have crossed your mind. The great thing about self-publishing is that technically, it’s open to anyone and provides opportuni

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Third Eye

      Oct 12, 2022

      The Third Eye
      12 min read

    • Article

      Eye On The Prize

      Mar 26, 2022

      Eye On The Prize
      4 min read

    • Article

      Going Indie in 2021

      Aug 14, 2021

      Going Indie in 2021
      15 min read

    • Article

      How to Crowdfund Your Book

      Oct 18, 2021

      It can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to produce a high-quality, self-published book that competes with its traditionally published counterparts. While some authors may be independently wealthy, most of us don’t have those funds lying around t

      4 min read

    • Article

      The First Five Pages

      Jan 7, 2021

      The First Five Pages
      5 min read

    • Article

      How to Write a Dynamite Last Chapter

      Oct 10, 2022

      When I was a newer writer, I bought a drink for a famous old novelist at the hotel bar after a long conference day. When he’d consumed half of it, I asked him for advice on crafting good, satisfying final chapters. He snapped, “Your ending depends on

      9 min read

    • Article

      Romance Writing Academy

      Dec 18, 2021

      Romance Writing Academy
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Art Of The Comp Title

      Jun 14, 2023

      The Art Of The Comp Title
      6 min read

    • Article

      Do It Yourself

      Nov 4, 2021

      Self-publishing can be a rewarding and exciting way of getting your story into the hands of readers but for children’s books it has its own challenges. Three authors share their experiences and advice. I had been writing traditionally published books

      6 min read

    • Article

      3 Reasons Why Authors Resist Book Marketing, and 3 Ways to Overcome That Resistance

      Dec 11, 2023

      Every author wants to do right by their book. They want to give their book the best chance to be seen and sold. Desire and action, however, are two very different prospects. When it comes to book marketing, authors shy away. Why? Three reasons: 1. It

      5 min read

    • Article

      Words Always Come First

      Aug 8, 2022

      Ursula Vernon is a unique hybrid author who writes science fiction and fantasy with equal ease for both young people and adults. Her stories, regardless of audience, tend to be quirky, wonderfully engaging, and hilariously, organically funny. Even he

      7 min read

    • Article

      11 Writing-Career Crossroads

      Jun 13, 2022

      11 Writing-Career Crossroads
      9 min read

    • Article

      Firing Up Fiction

      May 21, 2019

      Firing Up Fiction
      5 min read

    • Article

      How To Get PUBLISHED

      Jul 22, 2019

      How To Get PUBLISHED
      4 min read

    • Article

      Your Rights Revert

      Oct 11, 2017

      STEPHANIE DICKINSON is an Iowa native who lives in New York City. She is the author of three books published by Spuyten Duyvil, including the novel Half Girl (2008), the novella Lust Series (2011), and Love Highway (2014), a true-crime book based on

      8 min read

    • Article

      Your Rights Revert

      Oct 11, 2017

      STEPHANIE DICKINSON is an Iowa native who lives in New York City. She is the author of three books published by Spuyten Duyvil, including the novel Half Girl (2008), the novella Lust Series (2011), and Love Highway (2014), a true-crime book based on

      8 min read

    • Article

      So You Want to Be a Novelist

      Sep 26, 2019

      Do yourself a favor and read these 10 pieces of advice first. The post So You Want to Be a Novelist appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      PublishingMyths

      Dec 13, 2023

      Twenty years ago I went to grad school for writing and I heard people say that getting a book deal for a story collection was nearly impossible. As I met more nonfiction writers, I learned they, too, had been fed this line about essay collections. No

      3 min read

    • Article

      The End Or The Beginning?

      Nov 4, 2021

      The End Or The Beginning?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Funny You Should Ask

      Feb 15, 2021

      What is going to be the next big trend in fiction? Signed, Pencil Poised I am so glad you asked. I have been absolutely dying to tell someone. The next big trend is going to be … Amish steampunk crossover YA told in second person. Right? I know! How

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Importance of Genre

      Feb 13, 2023

      I’ve always had somewhat of a genre problem, and I don’t think I’m alone. Not every book fits tidily into one category. Many novels have elements of various genres. I wanted my book to be unique, and for this reason, I rejected the “know your genre”

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Self-publishing Unboxed

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Self-publishing Unboxed - Patty Jansen

      One

      This Is A Book About Making Money From Your Writing

      GASP, I KNOW. How dare I talk about money?

      Writers are supposed to be precious and exclusive creatures who need no food and clothing and have no kids who need education and no rent that needs paying. They live off thin air. They have no lives because they can’t afford lives, begging from friends, couch-surfing, slaving away in exploitative, backbreaking jobs, all the while banging away at their typewriters in the attic at night.

      Because, art.

      Every now and then, you will come across much-hyped articles in lauded, old-fashioned newspapers, or even websites (but writers can’t afford the Internet, remember?) that perpetuate the myth of a poor suffering writer by trotting out just one of these writers.

      They signed a book deal, got a $3000 advance. The book never earned out, and the publisher didn’t want the second book. They wrote another book that sold even less and now earn a pittance from their writing and supplement their writing income from speaking gigs and teaching writing classes. Because, obviously, the world needs more starving writers who can’t sell their books.

      I know, right?

      Of course, on the other side we find the other myth, that of the writer selling their soul to the devil called commerce, writing vast quantities of pulp books, churning them out, even contracting other people to write for them, because they write books that readers gobble up like cheap candy. This soulless writing (or so the literati say) thrives on churn; one book is like every other. But, hey, at least these writers can afford to pay for their own attic.

      Stereotypes. Who doesn’t love them? As soon as you say you’re a writer, people will mentally put you in either of those two boxes.

      This book is not about either of those extremes, although both definitely exist. It is also not about the soulless grind of finding an agent and selling your book to publishers who pay next to nothing, make you sign restrictive contracts, give you a poor cover and publish the book two years after they acquired it, barely market it and then hog your rights until the end of time.

      It’s about writing what you love, writing it well, positioning it well in today’s market, and building a sustainable long term income through taking control of your own publication and your own audience.

      It’s a book about making a viable, sustainable income through self-publishing.

      A lot of writers are doing this already. They are not writers you will find mentioned in articles in The Guardian, because they don’t have spectacular multi-million bestseller success. They are not the Amanda Hockings and Hugh Howeys and Andy Weirs of the world, although all of those saw fame from self-published books. But many of the writers I’m talking about never have any books in any top 100 anywhere.

      They are writers who have been empowered by the ability to upload their own books to retailers and cut out the necessity of a middleman, a.k.a a publisher. They have done this by putting out quality books that enough readers wanted to read that they, the authors, could lead the lives they have always dreamed of.

      Self-publishing has changed the lives of many. It has enabled carers to look after their sick partners, parents to be there for their kids, retirees to travel around the world or simply live comfortably. It’s allowed people to leave toxic marriages, leave bad jobs, provide for disabled family members, pay off mortgages, or even obtain mortgages.

      It involves nothing except yourself, your sense of savvy and your computer.

      It’s self-publishing, but self-publishing with a plan.

      But first . . .

      Two

      Self-Publishing Unboxed

      FIRST WE NEED to put a few myths to sleep that still circulate about self-publishing, myths that have proven very hard to kill.

      The myth that all self-published books are crap

      There is certainly a lot of crap out there. Self-published authors are not helping by putting out poorly written books with zero editing. And by poorly written, I don’t mean books that don’t conform to some literati’s self-imposed high standard of crafted prose, I mean books with such poor and twisted sentences that they are barely readable. Books with so many demonstrable grammar and spelling errors that a primary school kid with a decent grasp of language could do better. Unedited books by people who obviously don’t write a lot in English, or books that have been hauled through Google Translate. Books with extremely badly made pixelated covers. Books with formatting that renders them unreadable.

      I mean books that fail the absolute minimum standards of publication.

      And the fact that this myth exists is because there are still far too many people out there putting out books just like that. So maybe self-published books are crap is not a myth, but it’s definitely a myth when you want to apply it to all self-published books.

      The thing is, there are also a lot of books that look great, contain fewer editing oopsies than books from big publishers, and have awesome covers. Books that look indistinguishable from trade-published books. Books that have been through a thorough editing process, have a professional cover, and have been formatted by a professional.

      If you’re still doubtful that such books exist, go to the Science Fiction > Space Opera category on Amazon US, and look at the publishers of the bestselling books. If it says Amazon Digital Editions or the book is in Kindle Unlimited, then it’s self-published. On non-Amazon retailers, it will often say Smashwords Edition, or the publisher may be listed as Draft2Digital. At the time of writing, trade publishers appear to have withdrawn from publishing Space Opera. Self-published writers OWN this category on all platforms.

      These quality books are the books we’re talking about. These are the books we want to emulate.

      The myth that self-published books sell a hundred copies at best

      Here is a chart for you. It’s boiled down from a chart made by a writing friend of mine, data geek Phoenix Sullivan, who was a consultant for the now-defunct Author Earnings reporting site.

      The basis for the Author Earnings reports is an extended version of this table:

      Number of copies sold to obtain a certain ranking on Amazon

      Now, using the parameters I gave earlier to determine which books are self-published, have a look at the top 100 books in your favourite genre and find some self-published books. See how many copies these books sell per day. This is just section—namely Amazon US—of ONE retailer. There are other Amazon stores and there are other retailers.

      Case closed.

      Of course we cannot all sell this many copies, but there are good sales to be made without ever hitting the top 100 in any genre. In fact, there is a good living to be made from selling 1 copy a day of each of your twelve books on multiple retailers.

      But if anyone tells you, Self-published books don’t sell, tell them that well-edited, well-produced self-published books not only sell, they allow the writers to quit their day jobs. And show them the current Amazon bestseller lists for each genre and then that table.

      Obviously, putting out a well-produced book and marketing it well is the holy grail. This book is about that. But first . . .

      Three

      Put On Your Snark And Distrust

      WHEN YOU HAVE decided to self-publish, your wallet becomes a battleground.

      Sharks start circling the moment you utter the word self-publishing. Self-publishing means that you’ll need to contract out some tasks, notably those you can’t do yourself. These are tasks like editing, because it’s extremely hard to spot your own errors, and cover design, because you don’t have an artistic bone in your body. Don’t get me wrong, these are good expenses. But there are also many potential pitfalls, money-wasters and outright scams.

      The big sharks

      Start by googling self-publishing for example. What comes up? A whole page of vanity presses!

      These companies (I prefer to use the word scammers) prey on the insecurity of hopeful writers. Those people want to self-publish, but have no idea how. Mostly, they have a long list of rejections from traditional publishers (and, sadly, often with reason), have been worn out by the grind and have decided to do it themselves. They start by doing the one thing that would normally give you some pretty decent answers: googling.

      Nope! The vanity presses have hijacked the google search results. Not only that, but these results will keep following you around the Internet for the next few months in the Google Ads boxes. Just waiting for you to say: I looked at all the advice, but all this talk about formatting and finding an editor and marketing is too hard, why don’t I pay someone $10,000 and be done with it all. Why wouldn’t you? Because you’re retired, and you have $10,000, and you understand and accept that everything costs money. It’s rather a bit more than you expected to pay, but hey, you get to see your book published, and look! They offer publicity packages as well!

      All of this would be fine, if all these publishers did was provide you with the services, and did a decent job. But no—the services I’ve seen rendered by them are second-rate, overpriced and sometimes unnecessary or ineffective. I’ve even seen press releases and book launches included in the pricing models!

      For those who think a book launch party is vital, understand that the book launch is usually put on by a big publisher. The customers of Big Publishing are bookshops, and bookshop managers like coming to these after-work shindigs so that they can socialise. It has little to do with selling books to

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1