If you finished National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) with a complete 50K word draft, congratulations! Last year, only 18% of people who started NaNoWrimo finished, so getting this far is a huge accomplishment. And for those of you who decide to self-publish your work instead of seeking traditional publication, you can find the experience of selling your own work and reaching readers directly incredibly rewarding. But there’s one important thing to remember: your NaNoWriMo book is most likely not ready for the masses today.
Unless you have some serious superpowers, a book that’s just come out of a month-long speed draft won’t be strong enough for readers to enjoy or to garner positive reviews. While it might be tempting to throw your book onto retailer sites and see what happens, taking your time and publishing a polished novel will make a world of difference for your sales and overall self-publishing experience.
Here are 10 steps you should be sure to take before uploading your book anywhere:
Step #1: Revise your book
In fact, be prepared to revise your book several times. You can start revising right away, but some authors find it helpful to set the first draft aside for 4-6 weeks before diving back in. Revising is imperative to your book’s success. A published book that hasn’t been revised may suffer issues like plot holes, poor character development, typos, and grammatical errors — and your reviewers will be quick to point out these flaws.
Before you do line edits, look at the big picture — things like character development, plot, and pacing. Don’t worry about sentence structure or punctuation when you may need to completely rewrite or toss entire scenes. Fixing typos and grammar mistakes should be part of your final revision.
Step #2: Get critique partners
Find critique partners you trust to read your manuscript. You can either send early drafts to ensure your story is on the right course or wait until you have a more polished version ready. Either way, specify the kind of feedback you want from each reader — for example, for an early revision, ask for big-picture feedback. For later drafts, ask for feedback on specific characters or plot points. Don’t have your readers waste time pointing out typos on early revisions.
If you don’t have a wide circle of author friends available to offer help yet, here are a few ways to find critique partners:
Find local writing groups. Join societies for your genre (like SCBWI or RWA), or take a local writing workshop to connect with fellow authors and form your own group.
Join forums like Absolute Write or KBoards. Each of them have loads of members willing to network and exchange beta reads.
Reach out to authors on Twitter. Once you forge relationships with fellow authors on Twitter, sometimes all it takes is a tweet that you’re looking for help.
Ideally you’ll find someone who reads a lot of books in your genre. Critique partners don’t necessarily need to be writers themselves — not all writers are good at or comfortable with providing critical feedback to other authors. But the best way to vet new critique partner is to share the first few chapters of your book and see what kind of feedback they offer before providing them with the full manuscript. This will help you know if they are good fit for you and the kind of book you wrote.
Don’t be afraid to get critique partners. It’s much better to get the feedback now than in the form of negative public reviews online later! Aim to fix as many issues with your story as you can before making it available to readers.
Step #3: Repeat steps #1 and #2
Again, expect to revise your book several times. Once you’re happy with the big-picture items, focus on line edits. Here are some great resources for learning how to micro-edit your own book:
Self-Editing Basics: 10 Simple Ways to Edit Your Own Book
43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers ($8.99)
By doing line edits yourself, you’ll reduce the amount of back-and-forth with the professional editor you hire later. Once you finish revising, send the manuscript to several beta readers and ask them to point out any weird sentences, typos, or grammatical issues they come across. You’ll be surprised how your beta readers will each catch different typos!
Step #4: Hire an editor
Hiring a professional editor can help you make structural edits or line edits. Depending on what you still need help with, you can hire a developmental editor to be more confident that your story structure is in good shape, or you can hire a copy editor to help correct and refine sentence structure and grammar. Remember: the better shape your book is in, the better your reviews, the higher chance readers will recommend your book to their friends, and the more copies you’ll sell.
You can probably get personal recommendations for editors from your author friends, critique partners, or writing group. If you can’t find a reputable editor accepting new clients this way, C.S. Lakin provides great advice on finding the right copy editor for your book on her BookBub Partners guest post here.
Step #5: Understand your target audience
When publishing and marketing a book, targeting too broad of an audience is a common mistake many authors make. It’s incredibly difficult to make a single title stand out when virtually any book is now available to anyone. So rather than trying to make your book appeal to every potential reader out there, focus your efforts on a smaller group of readers who have demonstrated interest in the type of book you’re trying to sell. This will ensure your production and marketing budgets are better spent and your audience is more likely to purchase your books.
Before you dive into the packaging and marketing steps, learn as much as you can about your target audience’s demographics, preferences, and behaviors. Also discover what kinds of books they’re searching for, and cater your title, cover design, and marketing copy — retailer descriptions, synopsis on your website, blog posts, interviews, tweets, etc. — to these search queries to be sure they find your book and choose it as their next read. You can learn more about how to identify your target audience here.
Step #6: Choose a great title
Your book title — along with your cover — is the first thing a potential reader sees, and can be the deciding factor when making a purchase. Your title is a great opportunity to indicate genre, plot, atmosphere, or characters. Readers like to know what they’re getting into quickly, and your title works in conjunction with your cover to convince them that they’ll love this book.
When brainstorming a title, keep your target audience and what genre you’re marketing your book toward in mind. Each genre has its own title conventions, and studying the other titles in your genre, especially those that have been selling well, will help you learn how to target your audience. See what the most popular title trends in your genre are here.
Step #7: Hire a cover designer
Your book’s cover provides a reader with a first impression of your work, and despite all advice to the contrary, people will judge your book by its cover. Our testing has shown that a cover alone can account for a 30% difference in clicks on a BookBub listing, and other sources have reported similar results. Different genres often call for different packaging, and you should become familiar with the effective tropes in yours. See what kinds of covers sell more books in your genre here.
Since cover design is such a huge factor in a book’s success, it’s worth the cost to hire a seasoned professional to create the cover. While you might have an ambitious do-it-yourself approach, a polished cover from a professional designer can make a book much more appealing to readers scrolling through a list of books.
Before you commit to a cover designer, you should know what questions to ask him or her first to make sure you’re hiring someone who’s the right fit for you and your genre. See a list of questions you should ask when hiring a book cover designer here.
Step #8: Format your book correctly
While readers will make their first impression of your book from the title and cover, you should also get the inner formatting right. Skimping on the formatting will make your book seem unprofessional, and you don’t want to distract readers from your story by lacking proper indentation, using strange fonts, or including extra line breaks. In fact, formatting is something readers shouldn’t even notice.
Some ebook distributors (see step #9) offer services to help with the formatting and file conversions of your book. But if you’d rather do the formatting yourself, here are some resources to help you get it right:
Book Design Templates for Microsoft Word
How to Avoid the Self-Published Look
Self-Publishing: Typesetting and Formatting Your Book
Once you’re happy with the formatting, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo allow authors to directly upload their books, but you may need to convert your book to the right file type. In general, Amazon’s output is a MOBI file, and the other retailers’ output is an ePub file, but many will let you upload other file types and do the conversion for you.
Amazon KDP formats
Nook Press formats
iBooks formats
Google Play allows ePub or PDF files only
Kobo formats
Step #9: Choose retailers and/or distributors
If you’re self-publishing your books, formatting the finished versions and distributing them to retailers can be a complicated process. To make this complex process simpler, several services are available to help authors distribute their books. Distribution tools, while not required for self-publishing, can help you reach more readers and save time. Here are some specific things distribution tools can help with:
Ereader-friendly formatting. If you only have your manuscript in a Word doc and don’t know anything about how to format your book for ereaders, these publishing tools can help you format your book nicely and convert the files.
Centralized metadata management. Control your book’s metadata (price, description, categorization) at multiple retailers at once.
Easy addition and modification on worldwide retailers. Update your price across all regions and currencies at once.
Reporting tools. Keep track of book sales across retailers in one place (or two places, if you work with Amazon directly and use the distributor for everything else).
Learn more about the most popular distribution tools and get a side-by-side comparison of Smashwords, BookBaby, Draft2Digital, Amazon KDP, CreateSpace, and IngramSpark here.
Step #10: Create a marketing plan
It would take much more than a single blog post to cover how to market a book, but we have tons of resources for you to peruse over at The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing. It’s important to develop a plan before publishing your work. Maybe you’ll want to email the first few chapters as a teaser to your mailing list, or link to your new release in the back matter of your backlist books, or coordinate a price promotion on an older title to promote this new release. If you already rushed to publish your book, you’ll be left scrambling to complete all the pre-launch marketing tactics you would have wanted to try.
Yes, self-publishing is generally faster than waiting to secure a traditional publishing deal and ultimately see your book published a year or two later, but that doesn’t mean you should rush to publication. Take your time and get these important steps right, and you’ll see greater sales numbers follow.
Want to share this post? Here are ready-made tweets:
Click to tweet: Self-Publishing Your #NaNoWriMo Book? Don’t Miss These Steps! http://bit.ly/1LLdbJp by @DianaUrban at @BookBubPartners #writetip #pubtip
Click to tweet: #Authors: Planning to self-publish your #NaNoWriMo book? You should bookmark this article on next steps – http://bit.ly/1LLdbJp #selfpub