Award-winning author,
Meredith Bond, kicks off a four-week Book Blather series featuring indie
authors. Meredith is an award-winning
author of a series of traditionally published Regency romances and
indie-published historical paranormal romances. Known for her characters “who
slip readily into one’s heart”, Meredith’s romance novels include her new
Medieval Fantasy series, the Children of Avalon,
her Regency-set paranormal romances in the Storm series
and traditional Regencies (without magic) in The Merry Men Quartet.
Meredith teaches writing and publishing at her local community college and
blogs on the two subjects every Saturday at www.meredithbond.com.
Welcome to Book Blather,
Meredith.
How does one
fall head-first into self-publishing? Well, actually, it wasn’t easy. It was
kind of like falling uphill. It takes skill.
I teach
writing at my local community college. I have for many years.
After
hearing a member of the Washington Romance Writers (my home RWA chapter) speak
about self-publishing, I was certain that that would a fantastic way to publish
a textbook to go with my writing classes. Little did I know just what I was
getting into!
My friend
who gave the talk told me afterward that her husband had formatted her books
into mobi and epub files to publish and the he could probably format my textbook
for me. So I sent it to him.
And then I
waited.
And waited.
And after a
month I got back to him asking if he’d had a chance to format my book for me.
He hedged and hawed and said that he hadn’t had a chance. Things were busy at
work, he told me.
So I decided
to see if I couldn’t do this myself. I had once studied computer programming
(when I was a freshman in college eons ago when beginning programmers were
still taught binary—we were past the punch-card era, but not by much).
I did some
research on the internet and found Guido
Henkel who has a fantastic series of blogs detailing exactly how to format
a book into HTML, and from there convert it to an epub and mobi file using
Calibre. It didn’t look too hard, so I did it. Referring many times to a
general on-line tutorial for HTML because, of course, a textbook has more than
straight text like there is in a novel. There were pictures, bullet points,
numbered lists and all manner of more complicated formatting.
But I did
it! It looked great! So I published it.
I was then
asked to teach a class on “how to get published”. I thought it would be perfect
to include how to format a novel and self-publish it. So, as a test, I
formatted a book that had been sitting in my drawer for a while after receiving
a fantastic rejection notice from Kensington where my Regency romances had been
published (essentially I was told that the book was great, but that they
wouldn’t publish it because it had a paranormal element to the Regency romance
and they didn’t publish books like that—this was in 2011). So I formatted the book
(Magic
in the Storm) and published it, carefully documenting the entire
process as I went so that I could teach others how to do this.
It was so
much easier than the textbook! But I realized—after it was available at three
retailers—that I had no marketing strategy for the book. There had been no beta
readers. There were no reviews. Nothing! I had a book published and had done
nothing to get the word out. I scrambled to send it out—I think I sent it to
about 30 websites and bloggers begging for reviews. I gave away many, many
copies. I got about 5 reviews. Slowly, over the years, through many sales and
much promotion, this book has a few more reviews now and it’s still one of my
favorite, but I know better now. Now I know all the planning and advance work
that should be done before a book is released into the world.
I also
realized that formatting is kind of fun and really easy for me, so I now offer
my formatting services to other
indie-authors, as well as my advice on how not
to publish a book.
I currently
have ten books and an anthology published and am working on more, but now when
I publish, I do so deliberately. I try not to fall into publishing a book, but
step carefully. If I fall on my face now, at least I know that I’ve tried not
to be quite so clumsy.
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Check out Meredith's latest book here: http://amzn.com/B00NI4YCIQ
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