While white picket fences and a family car might be the American Dream, the Writerly Dream is just making enough of...
FAQs For Writers: How To Find & Apply For Grants
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What To Do Before You Start Writing
The piece of advice given out most often to budding writers is “Just write!”. This is important advice; writing is...
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6 Myths About the Australian Publishing Industry
To the average writer, the publishing industry may as well be fairyland. It’s easy to imagine that publishers are faceless gatekeepers...
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How to Spot Vanity Presses and Publishing Scams
Almost every writer wants to see their work in print. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer that doesn’t want the...
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Self-Publishing a Print Book
Self-publishing a print book is a challenge, but it can be very rewarding. A print version of your book allows...
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The 4 Ps and Cs of Marketing a Self-Published Book
One of the first things taught in any marketing course are the four Ps: product, place, price and promotion. The four Cs are the updated version, and the two theories work together to create the 'Marketing Mix', that is the important factors that should be taken into account when starting a small business, or preparing to sell a product. Each of the four principles bleed into each other, and while it is useful sketch ideas under each heading, don't be afraid to make linkages between them.
Any author self-publishing their work needs to get into this mindset, and plan their own answer to each of these principles. It is a useful exercise to help you understand the author/reader relationship, and it also gives depth of knowledge to a process that could be arbitrary for a first-time self-publishing author with no experience.
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Successful Self-Publishing: Getting Started
To be successfully self-published, a manuscript needs an action plan. The author needs to understand the facets of the industry, and be confident in the manuscript's quality, the route they will take to ensure the product is professional, and how the work will be marketed and distributed, and they need to know how they will get to get to that stage.
These are some of the things that anyone considering self-publishing should be thinking about.
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The Dangers of Self-Publishing: What Do Publishers Do Anyway?
Since the rise of the digital era, people have been calling for the death of the publishing industry as we know it. We've all heard someone claim that publishers are obsolete, they don't do anything for writers anyway, and that writers are guaranteed to make way more money from self-publishing. But they're wrong.
True self-publishing—successful self-publishing—needs to be treated like a business, or it will fail in 99.99% percent of cases. The author needs to educate themselves in and do all of the things that a publisher would, or their work will not sell.