12 Days: My Self Publishing Journey (Part 3 of 12)
Editors
Today my editor blasted me for how I wrote the first chapter in book 2, “The PureLights & The PureLight Order“. When I say, “blasted”, I mean that she tore me apart, beat every inch of me, and then, to top it all off, threw me to the pigs–to be eaten…alive!
Okay, it wasn’t that bad.
All she did, metaphorically, was tackle me, then pick me up, and body slam my sensitive “writing” soul. Then she dusted me off, telling me that the rest of my book “is great!” She applauded me on it. She even told me that she thinks my book is going to “take off”. However, the most important part of my book–chapter 1–is supposed to grab the reader. It apparently didn’t.
Fast forward five minute – My shoulders were drooped forward, my lips in a frown, and my mind screamed, “I need to write better!”
Fast forward another five minutes – My smile is back, my hope is up and we’re fixing the first chapter. In fact, we made it much, much better.
More about editors
I’ve had two editors edit my books. They both were and are very talented. One of the editors, the one I’m using for my second book, is an extremely talented artist and thinks that I need to change the book cover to my first book, so…
We changed my book cover
We added some things, changed the background, and if you scroll down a centimeter, you’ll see it.
The old cover is below.
So, you be the judge. The second book cover you see is my “baby” and was with me since the beginning (of my book publishing career), so I have a lot of love toward it. However, it didn’t sell. I’m hoping the second one is a little more appealing.
What else am I doing?
I’m glad you asked.
When I read the book, “Self-Printed”, by Catherine Ryan Howard, she wrote about the professionalism of self published authors compared to traditionally published authors. She advised self-published authors to be as professional as can be. She gave an example of what a mistake from a self-published author looks like.
When you go to amazon and click on the book cover, it pops up a sample of one to two chapters for the potential customer to read. In that sample, you’ll see the cover image, the table of contents, copyright, etc..–just like most books. However, many self-published authors make the error of skipping the table of contents, copyright, etc., and go ahead with chapter 1. The self-published author making this mistake thinks that if he/she started the sample on chapter 1, then the reader won’t have to wade through all that muck (table of contents, acknowledgments, copyright, etc.–how many times can I write “etc.” in this paragraph?). All that putting chapter 1 at the beginning of the sample does is scream, “SELF-PUBLISHED AND UNPROFESSIONAL!!!”
On the road to my free promotion
I did one more thing that I hope will help with my free promotion for book 1, “The PureLights of Ohm Totem“. Besides making my book free for 5 days, and all the other things you read about in my previous posts, I just went to Kindle Nation Daily and paid $29.99 for their Kindle Free Book Highlighter. They have a lot services that I wanted to use, but I chose the least expensive, ’cause I’m not a millionaire author as of yet.
Here is what Kindle Nation Daily says about their Kindle Free Book Highlighter program: “Your free book listing will be included in a post (like this one) listing up to 15 free books that will appear on the Kindle Nation website with a link (like this one) for the 131,000 fans of our Facebook page. The post and the Facebook update will go up on our website between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern time, almost always before 1:30 pm EST. If you are having trouble finding your post, please check our Facebook page after 2 pm EST.”
My excerpt
What’s an excerpt? An excerpt is a small “teaser” of your next book to entice the reader to go ahead and buy the next book in the series. That’s what I just added to my first book. I put an excerpt of chapter 1 from book 2, “The PureLights and The PureLight Order,” into the last pages of book 1.
Wow, it’s late. I gotta go…
See you tomorrow!
