Thinking of Your Book As A Gift

Camp NaNoWriMo 2014 has officially launched! Whether you’re writing a new novel, tackling a screenplay, or finishing an existing piece of work, Camp is a writing free-for-all. Want to make sure you publish your own work before starting to write anew? Karima Cammell and Clint Marsh, authors of self-publishing workbook, Publishing a Children’s Book , share why you should think of your book as a gift:

Chances are that when you set upon your NaNoWriMo journey, you were dreaming of holding an actual book in your hands—not just scrolling through an epic word processor file. Take solace in the new reality that there is nothing standing in the way of you publishing your book! You can actually do it yourself: all the tools and skills those traditional publishers use are also available to us as self-publishers. 

For a growing number of readers and authors, the stigma surrounding self-publishing is gone. It has either been obliterated by runaway success stories on Kickstarter, or playfully turned on its head by upstart independents such as Cory Doctorow. Even best-selling giants have embraced self-publishing for some of their projects.

After years of working with other publishers and by ourselves, we have come to see self-publishing as part of “the gift economy,” an exchanges done for the worth inherent in the process itself, not in how much money it might generate. Lewis Hyde explores this philosophy eloquently in his book, The Gift.

Shifting to this way of thinking eases the pressure to compromise your vision. And in a roundabout way, thinking of your book as a gift for an intended audience (your child, for example, or single fathers, or people who like space operas and zombies) helps answer many of the editorial and marketing questions asked by successful publishers. It can also help you sidestep many of the snares self-publishers face.

By creating your book with a specific person or group in mind, you help focus its target market, and this in turn helps you make decisions about how to sell it. You might be making your book with only one person in mind, in the same way you would conceive of a birthday present. And if your book is a gift for the whole world? Start thinking like Santa and you’re on your way.

Sometimes when you’ve got a special gift to give someone, you can’t help but tell others about it. How would you describe your gift—your story—to a third party? If you can boil it down to one or two compelling sentences, then you’ve just written your book’s elevator pitch, a summary you can rattle off whenever anyone asks, “What’s your book about?”

A little side-note on talking about your own work: This is often very difficult for self-publishers to do. It’s easy to defeat yourself when you feel too close to your work. Either you’re so fixated on its flaws that you point them out to potential readers (turning them off in the process), or you become too protective, guaranteeing no rejection—and no sales—by not telling a soul about it. Instead of engaging in this type of self-sabotage, try to live by the advice a good friend gave us recently: Authors should never say an unkind word about their own work. It’s your gift to give, and why would you give a flawed gift, or talk it down? And in terms of promotion, if you can’t stand behind your creation 100 percent, how can you expect anyone else to?

With the right knowledge and enough follow-through, you can give your gift to the world. You can also distribute it through any of the channels used by major publishers—bookshops, specialty stores, print-on-demand, and direct download among them. 

But in the end, what matters most is showing yourself that you’re capable of creating a gift that can be shared, no matter the size of the readership. And who knows? You might even grow and have fun along the way. Isn’t that why we’re doing all this in the first place? 

Award-winning authors Karima Cammell and Clint Marsh are Dromedary Press, the publishing arm of Castle in the Air, a shop and resource for artists and writers in Berkeley, California. Their guide, Publishing a Children’s Book, will take you from start to finish, covering topics including initial concept, writing, illustrations, layout, ISBNs, barcodes, copyright, marketing, funding, printing, and distribution. Learn more about their work at www.dromedarypress.com .

Photo by Flickr user planetttelex.