7 Steps to Successfully Publishing a Book


Taken from 'I Published 14 Books in 13 Months. This is how I did it.'


Successfully publishing a book is a seven step process. 
1. Brainstorming
2. Writing
3.  Editing
4. Designing a cover
5. Laying out the book
6. Publishing the book
7. Promoting the book

Step 1: Brainstorming.

This is where you come up with the concept of your story. It all starts with an idea, or the spark of an idea and the first thing you are going to want to do is write all your ideas down - on paper or on a device - just get the ideas out of your head so you can make room for more ideas. Once you start getting the ideas flowing it helps to make a chart of the conflict, action and important moments in the book and in the characters lives. Write all your ideas down, you can discard the bad ones later, once you’ve started writing the book.

Step 2: Writing.

What genre are you writing? Horror, Comedy, a Kids Book? 
Who is your audience? Kids, Young Adults, Adults only?
Are you writing a short story? What length?
Are you writing a book? How many pages?
Which POV will you be writing from? 1st Person, 3rd Person?
Is your story Character or Plot driven?
Fiction or Non-Fiction?
These are a few of the question you need to ask yourself before you start piecing the story together. You don’t need to have all the answers before you start writing, the answers often come out during the writing process. Remember: you don’t work on a story, you work with a story.
Start writing and don’t worry whether or not what you’re writing is ‘gold’, it probably isn’t. The first draft is better known as the Vomit Pass because all you’re doing is getting all the ideas out as quick as they come. Wait until the editing step to worry about the fine details.

Step 3: Editing.

For most writers this is the hardest part because it’s the step where you question yourself the most and where your ego takes the biggest beating. It’s important to take a break between writing and editing, to give yourself a fresh perspective on your work. Best thing you can ever do, is have other people edit your work. Writers groups are good for this, if you can find other writers who’s opinions you trust and respect. Find a friend or a family member to read and edit your work. A lot of times you won’t hear what your hoping - that it’s a work of pure genius! - but they’ll point out errors that you can’t see with your own eyes, because as a writer you often see what you want to, not what is really on the page. 
Don’t be your own editor. Edit your own work but having a second and third set of eyes checking out your story is the best thing for your work. And don’t wait until it’s done to have people edit your work, get people on board earlier in the process because they can help you make changes you might never have thought of yourself.
Once you’re done the editing process, it’s time to create a cover.

Step 4. Designing a Cover

If you have a lot of money, you can just pay an artist to do this. I designed 13 of the covers, Jason Todd did the other one, aka the best one, for A Maggot Conspiracy.
I’m no artist, I have no visual artistic skills and I’m a terrible photographer, so how did I come up with my book covers?
Thanks to my sister, Pam, I found all the images I used on a royalty-free pictures website called www.pixabay.com. They don’t have a ton of images to choose from, so I had to get creative. Finding the right images is the longest part of the process and I’d often do multiple versions of each cover and just keep going until I found one that I liked and that worked for the project.
I designed the covers in Pages, a free word doc program that comes with a Mac, but you could do the same thing in Microsoft Word or Photoshop, neither of which I have.
I’d import the image I downloaded from pixabay, move it around until the image fit the page the way I liked it, then I’d add the text: book title and name.
That’s really all it takes to make the cover. Finding the right image and deciding on the fonts is the hardest part.

Step 5: Laying out the book.

The most important part of this step is having the right program to lay the book out with. For that, I used Vellum, which is a program you can download for free and use for free, until you are ready to generate your book, at which point they stick out their hand and say: show me the money!
You can download it here: www.vellum.pub
With Vellum you have two choices: Ebook only, which costs $260 Canadian, or the Print and Ebook Version, which costs $360. 
I chose Ebook because that was all I was planning on putting out and because it was all I could afford.
Vellum is simple to use and the end result is a professional-looking book that can be read on any device. You can generate versions for all type of readers, including iPads and iPhones.
You load your cover into the program, add the title of your book, then start adding in the parts you need: dedication, chapters, about the author etc. Vellum formats the table of contents for you and you can preview your work in real time. It’s a very handy and user-friendly program. Trust me, if I can figure it out, so can you.

Step 6: Publishing the Book.

This part can get very frustrating, especially if you have no patience with computers, like me.
When I first started I was publishing on amazon.com and smashwords.com and uploading the book to both sites was exhausting. After a bit I noticed that everyone was viewing and purchasing the books only on amazon, so I stopped using smashwords. People just need to download the kindle app and they can read my books on any device they want, it’s that simple.
The site I use to publish the books is: kdp.com. All you have to do is start an account and you can have your book up and available online within 24 hours.
You upload a .jpg of your cover and the kindle version of your book and add the details into your account. You decide how much to charge for your book and then you push ‘publish’.
And you are now a published author.

Step 7: Promoting the book.

This is the secret to selling your book. A secret I have yet to master, sorry. 
I use my blog, my facebook page and instagram account to spread the word about my latest book and send out a mass email to a master list that I continue to build upon. I always hope that for each book the list is bigger than the last one.
I tell everyone I meet about my books and spread the word about my projects as much as I can.
In the next few months I will learn more about promoting my books, at which time I will come back to this part and write down what I’ve learned.

In some ways, I think that publishing 14 books in 13 months makes it look easy to do, and in essence, it is, but first, you have to have a story to tell. Until you have that, you have nothing.

Write down your thoughts and ideas and before you know it, you have a story. And you can be a paid and published author too.

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