Francine Craft

Nature At Her Best

If you hope to succeed with self-publishing as with anything else, you’ve got to get your act together. First, relax and use your noodle.  As I’ve pointed out here, study the field thoroughly, take the time to familiarize yourself with the good guys and the bad guys.  Make use of your Better Business Bureau; they’ll point out the rotten ones.  Go to your library, google, check out Amazon, but somehow get the so-called bibles of self-publishing.  There are few, but they’ll save you a lot of trouble.

An excellent place to start is with Wheatmark.com.  That excellent  publishing company offers you a free series of pamphlets for downloading.  Reading them, you’ll find out if self-publishing is for you.  Better to find out early than late.  And too, they have an excellent book for free downloading called Marketecture.  That one book transformed my life, and I’ve been a published writer — by good publishers — for 20 years.  It is well written, clear, concise and to my mind, one of the best I’ve read.

Too much information and your mind is going to sleep.  Please mull this over and come back for more which I’ll share with you often.  I just wish I’d had someone to offer me more tips in a blog, but little was available when I became hooked years ago.  Now you’ve got me and I’ve dug deep and found much.  I’m willing to share because I want your ideas and your experiences. So, stay tuned!

Happy self-publishing!

You and Blogging

I hope you like or can learn to like blogging, because it will prove to be one of the best things you can do to market your book.  One writer said, “Well, it just seems to be the wandering of my mind.”  But oh, it’s so much more.  It’s a great way to communicate, to share your thoughts with the readers you want.  Some people are putting excerpts of their books on their websites and on other venues like Blogger.com.

Another excellent blog to study is this one:  Wheatmark.com.  You get so much information on self-publishing here.  Authors who’ve successfully published with them tell you how they did it, what worked and what didn’t work.  I don’t think blogs get much more useful than this.

So, put on your blogging hat and get started.  You don’t have to publish your blogs until you’re comfortable with them, but you don’t need to take forever to get comfortable.  People know you make mistakes and most are forgiving.  Try it.  You’ll like it.  I promise.

Flowing Water

It will be useful to you to study the ever widening field of self-publishing.  There is now a fairly wide range of publishers out there that will help you with your book.  Google the subject, then google the ones that seem a most likely fit.  I believe you  will find that Wheatmark.com . offers more than most.  I found them reasonable, but if you need real economy, there are others you’ll readily find on Google.

I’d like you to check in with Wheatmark and order their big brochure entitled “Marketecture.”  It gave me so much more assurance about what I wanted from my book in terms of audience, expenses, energy I would need to expend.   The brochure suggested that I actually begin thinking about and planning marketing before writing the book.  Think about it and you’ll find it makes great sense.

Tomorrow I have another suggestion with this company that will prove to be one of the backbones of your marketing.  Hey, you’ve written a book and that’s wonderful.  Now get out there and let the world know how good it is.

Beautiful Nature

Sooner or later you’re going to ask me how much longer I’ll be testing.  You’ll be glad you waited when I begin to tell you things you always wanted to know about self-publishing.  It’s such a fascinating thing to do.

Creative control is the name of the game.  If you get a good company, they strive to satisfy you as to what you want your book to be, within reason.  And getting the cover together just thrilled me.  It’s a romantic voodoo mystery and so I wanted a gun.  No gun meeting my specifications could be found.  Okay, bullet holes.  The artist came up with the messiest bullet holes you could imagine.  I said no.  Too thuggish.  Gross.  So they redid and now you get the idea of romance, voodoo, mystery.

I wrote the back cover material which was duly checked.  The company I chose – Wheatmark – has excellent editors.  My copy made the grade.  And oh, the thrill of having my own Library of Congress Card Number.  They do turn down books.  ISBN, listing with RR Bowker, all kinds of things you can also do for yourself.

There are so many companies to help you self-publish.  You’ve got to check it out.  I mulled it over for nearly thirty years while I sold to established publishers.   This is for me.  Try it.  You just might like it.

Glorious Nature

My dear friends, please be patient.  I’m trying to do a couple of dozen things at one time and it’s getting to me.  I think you’ll find my coming articles on self-publishing well worth waiting for.

Best,

Francine