What else should I know?
I have learned a great many things in my pursuit to become more than a writer. More than I thought I would possibly need to know to actually segue into the world of an author… like publishing.
This all started as a gamble to see if I could write a book. Then it swelled into the wonder if I could write another, and then another. Once I had the first three in various stages of completeness, I wondered what was next.
What would it take to get published?
I read everything I could and checked with multiple publishers, but the genre my books were in was not the one they were looking to fill. The other shoe dropped when I found out that my stories were considered too short for the science fiction genre. I thought about padding the stories out, but it would absolutely kill the flow.
Each of my stories were between the mid fifty thousand words to over sixty thousand words, but the genre I was working in regularly requested between eighty thousand to one hundred thousand words. These two things pretty much curdled the publishing plan.
But what about Self-Publishing?
And so began my great search for information into what was needed to make that happen and as you already know, I have hit on that mission in previous posts. I’m finalizing some steps before I hit the next bigger ones and then it hit me, what is the hardest part about being a new author?
Being known. You’ve written a book, but who knows who you are and why would they buy your book? A cover and a byline will give you some traffic, but that’s it. I started this whole blog to work on that (plus its good writing practice in a different format). How is that going? Only time will tell.
So what’s another hold back from someone buying a book from an unknown author? Expense. I have thought long and hard on this one and you have no idea how many algorithms I’ve read for pricing it out. I’ve looked into the KDP Select and how that works.
How can I make stories intriguing without a lot of cost to someone? Then it hit me, the initial idea had been for a TV show and each full length book represented a season. So why not break each season down into three episodes?
The shorter length fit the lower cost algorithms for buyers and I can release them relatively quickly which should give me the time to complete the fourth one and get a final rewrite on the third one.
So, I’ve got my plan, my calendar and I’ve got all my ducks lined up in a row. I will be knocking them down one by one sooner than later.
How bright can the future be? Let’s find out!
Jon Gray Lang.com 