From First Draft to Bestseller: Self-Publish and Market a Book that Readers Will Love

1. Promo Video: Hi. Welcome to from first drafted bestseller. In this course, you'll learn a step by step guide for how to create, publish and market, a beautiful, high quality electronic and print version of your book that readers are going to want to buy. I'm Jonathan Poma, an award winning, best selling author of three independently published novels that have out sold authors such as Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Crichton on Amazon's Kindle store. I've also written 11 screenplays that have won over 150 awards and honors at various international stream rating competitions, and I recently Option one of those screenplays toe one of the producers of the American Pie and Final Destination films. And since 2000 and five, I've worked at over 15 public schools in the United States and to language schools in Mexico, and I currently have a California secondary teaching credential and teach at a secondary school here in San Diego, where I've been for about the last 10 years. I designed this course before beginning Authors were overwhelmed what to do after they type that their first draft of their novel and want to learn how to turn that manuscript into a book that readers are gonna wanted by this course will awful also benefits of veteran authors, both independently and traditionally published, like strategies on how to market their book. And even if you haven't yet written your book and your just curious about what's to come check out from first drafted bestseller, we're going to cover how to edit format your book, how to Get reviews, how to get your book into stores, both brick and mortar and outline how to get your book in the library's um, How to Grow your mailing list and how to sell your book using strategies that many independent authors have used to make enough money to quit their jobs and to write full time. So feel free to check out the course description, and I hope to see you in class. 2. Course Introduction: hi and thank you for enrolling in from first drafted bestseller and thank you for investing in your writing career. This course is a step by step guide to creating publishing and marketing prints and electronic versions of your book that readers are going to love. I designed this course is a Siris of screen casts and talking head videos, just like you're seeing right now, but mostly screen casts that you can follow along with on your computer. And so the active task for each lesson will just be the specific topic that I'm discussing in that lesson, and you can follow along and complete that task as you're watching the video. I structured this course into a series of topics, broke it down into an introduction section on how to create the book on that include such videos and lessons as how to edit and formats how to get a cover design made for your book . I then broke it down into a publishing section, and that would be how to turn your book into an electronic and print format of your book and then get that up on online retailers and to get printed versions of your book so that you can mail them to reviewers. And then there's also a section on marketing, and this section is going to contain information on how to grow your mailing list, how to create book bub and Amazon ads essential. This is gonna help you to target your audience, build that audience from zero, and to get his many readers to fall in love with your writing as possible. All right. Oh, and then also there is a section on screenwriting. So I I threw this in because I knew that there's a lot of writers who are interested in taking that jump from novel to potentially turning that that story into a screenplay. So I'm going to give you the very basics on how to do that. And I hope that that that is something that's going to be very useful for you also, what this course is not. It's not a get rich quick scheme. All right, so this is this course is is designed to, as like a long term strategy that will be, you'll see the best results when you apply these these strategies over the long term, and it's it's even better when you apply them over a series of books. So if you just have one book, don't worry. These these strategies should still be effective for you. However, this the strategies are best when you are publishing a number of books and you're repeating the same strategies. Also, this course is not designed to teach you how to write a potentially bestselling book. It's just gonna teach you how to take that manuscript and to turn it into a potential best seller and let me define what I mean by bestseller here. I'm not talking about like the New York Times bestselling list. I'm talking about lists like the Amazon best selling shirts or, you know, maybe the best selling lists on iBooks for Apple. So while these three strategies may may, you know, is a very small chance they could get you on The New York Times best sellers list. That's not necessarily what I mean by bestseller here in this case. Okay. And also I'd like to start from a place of empowerment by saying something which might seem , you know, contradictory to empowerment, but and that would be no one owes you anything. Okay, and and I know I know as well as anybody else. How much work goes into creating a book writing a book, publishing a book. However, you know you might put hundreds or even thousands of hours into creating and publishing your book. And then once you get it up for sale on Amazon, you know you might get 12 sales. And you know, all 12 of those are the family and friends. And so just so you know, nobody owes you anything. And again, I know that might sound like a negative way to start this this course, but I think it's an empowering way to start this course, because this way we're getting away from outside influences, and we're taking the responsibility ourselves for how successful our books and our career as writers are going to be. And the way that we can do this is by first of all, creating the most high quality books that we possibly can. And Second Weekend, using technology today target our our readers hungry readers with laser like accuracy. And this is something that we can do, regardless of whether or not we're getting supports from certain members of our community of family or friends or whatever we can reach out, and we can find our own readers. Okay, so again that the power is is in your hands, you can with as much effort as you put in. I do believe that you can get that much. Are those the results? Will will follow. Also, you may need some technology for this course and any any of the forms of technology, the products or whatever that I recommends. I am not being paid by any any of those companies or buy those products or whatever these air just products that have worked for me. And I want to share this with you so that maybe it will work for you as well. All right, Also where I could I created strategies for writers of all budgets. So some of these strategies I include are there are some free options as well. So I know that that there are a lot of writers on a budget out there and I tried to Teoh accommodate those that budget as well. And by the end of this course, you should feel confident in creating, publishing and marketing your book. You should you should have a ton of strategies for how to build your mailing list, How to get your book in this book stores if you'd like to How toe You know how to get great reviews. So by the end of this course, you should. You know, I know that you're probably very overwhelmed right now with all the information, but you should feel much more confidence in how to create publish in markets your book. And if you want any more in depth information, I even included more. Resource is in this course so that if you're if you want more information on maybe how to market books, you know, I I included other strategies or other influencers in the self publishing community or whatever that that you could follow or books or whatever that you could read that will help you to get more information on those topics. But the information that I give you in this course this will get you set up. This will. This will alleviate a lot of the stress and anxiety that you may be feeling right now, which I believe me. I felt the same amount of stress and anxiety. What I got started and effect where this course came from is is over years of off research . So I have been researching how toe publish markets books, how to create books, had a great book blurbs. I've read a number of books I've attended meet up groups here in San Diego where I live. I was part of a group called Entrepreneurs, where we saw we had New York Times. Bestselling authors come in and give lectures on how to market books and how to advance yourself a za ah writer as an entrepreneur. And so I have gathered all this information and just just from doing it myself. And I am allow me to give this information to you, allow me to help you and ease that anxiety that you may have, and I am available for questions. But just please keep in mind the fact that I work is a teacher full time, and I write full time. And so if you do have questions, I would ask that you try to result those issues with whatever maybe company that you're having the issue with. Say, for example, you're having issues uploading your book on Amazon Tiu, Sell your book on Amazon Kindle direct publishing. I would ask that you contact Kindle direct publishing first, and then if you're still having proper questions or problems, or if you even want to know best practices and how to address some of your concerns with these people, feel Frida toe. Ask a question. This is not saying. You know you can't ask questions. Please ask questions that you have. I would just ask you first to try to resolve those issues with, like, maybe vellum or Amazon or iBooks or wherever. Okay, um, and also I live in an apartment here, and so I did the best I possibly could to get rid of any extra sounds. But as you've probably heard a couple times, there are planes that go by. I'm right here in the flight path in San Diego. Also, I've got some lovely neighbors who are generally pretty quiet, but every once in a while you hear some banging on the walls. You might hear somebody shouting, So I did my best to mask all the sounds. But you know, there's only so much that I could do. So if if for at any points you you hear some, you know, annoying backgrounds sound just no vets. It should end pretty soon. You know any of the videos? If there's anything like that that there was an issue throughout the entire video. I just got rid of all that, uh, footage, and I shot a new video. So if you're hearing anything that's annoying, it should ends pretty pretty quickly. And also again, thank you very much for enrolling. I hope you find this course useful again. I I Why I created this course to is that I have a lot of friends who are interested in writing. And I can't tell you how many people have asked me questions about how do I, you know, how do I publish a book hideaway for matter? What is formatting? What is an eye? ESPN. Do I need an ESPN? What is all this? This this insanity. I'm so completely overwhelmed with it. So I designed this this course originally because I wanted to help out friends and then, you know, just as being a member of a lot of different communities in writing communities, there's a lot of people have similar questions. So I wanted to give you a comprehensive course, a premium course on a budget for a writer's budget that will help to ease any anxiety that you have. I try to make this as as complete, of course, as I possibly could to take your book from first draft to potential best seller. So again, I wish you is much success as you could possibly experience. I hope you have more success than I have. And you know, again, if you have any questions for me, let me know. And I I am excited that we're taking this journey together. All right, thank you very much. 3. About the Instructor: I had. Welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm John Le Poma, your instructor, and in this video I want to give you a little bit more information about me. So I am an award winning, best selling author of three independently published novels that have out sold authors such as Chuck, Paula, Nick, Michael Crichton and Pollak Willow on Amazon's Kindle store. I have also written 11 screenplays that have won over 150 honors at various international screenwriting competitions. And one of the producers of the American Pie in Final Destination films recently options one of my screenplays. And so I hope that soon enough, you should be able to see the film in a theater near you. All right, so I also write songs and poems. And since 2000 and five, I have taught in over 15 public schools in the United States and to language schools in Mexico, and I currently teach at a public secondary school here in San Diego, where I've starting my 10th year. And so I just want to give you a little bit off information to about my books and my successes as a writer grab these here. All right, So the first book that I had published is this one. It's called Developing Minds in American Ghost Story, and this one I did not publish. This one was published by an independent press in Florida. Cult laughing Fire Press I ends. This one came out in September of 2015 and it did fairly well. The first few months on the sales started to dip down, and but during those first few months it did sell over 2000 copies. In it Out sold authors like Michael Crichton and Kurt von Agate on the Kindle store. It was a number one Amazon bestseller and won a couple of awards. But then sales started to dip, and so after about, I don't know, about eight months or so, it sells kind of flat lined. And which is why I was surprised when last year I heard from my publisher are just a few months ago, I heard from my publisher that last year 2017 I sold over 120 copies of this book. Now the only thing that I had done different from 16 4017 is that I started a mailing list in 2017 and so I wasn't running ads or actively trying to promote this book. I wasn't doing any sales or anything like that. I just set up my mailing list, which I'm gonna show you how to do. And that allowed me to, I believe, sell 120 copies without really doing anything. So that's developing minds. And since then, I have been running ads for this book, and it's been selling really well on Amazon. Okay, so this is the second book that I published, and I published this one myself, using my publishing press, which I created Cult L'm Andro Arts. And this was actually the first book I ever wrote. And but I I thought because you see the size of this one, this was actually even even longer than that. And so this I did not feel, was in any shape of the time to go searching for a publisher. That's why published developing minds first. All right, I edited the heck out of this thing. And this this this one was a marathon of editing and writing. But this this is my first love. This is the first book I ever wrote, and it's always gonna be very special to me. This one was also a number one Amazon bestseller. Not sold polonco Well Oh, it was number one in, uh, Emma's three Amazon UK store In the metaphysical in visionary category. In a number of different categories as well in the UK are Canada and Australia. And this one I learned a lot about publishing because I had to do the whole thing myself. All right, so a lot of this that the strategies that tips that Sure I'm gonna give you in this course I gained those from creating this book and publishing this book. You see this one? That one second place in a competition called the Florida Authors and Florida Authors and Publishers Association Presidents Awards. It won the literary and contemporary literature category and then this one. This is my third book, and I wrote this once. The little guy here I wrote this one while I was waiting for the edits to come back for understanding. The Alec ran Now this one waas recommended by Burns and Noble. It made the Barnes and Noble press presents list for February in March of 2018. And this one was also recommended by Kirkus Reviews, as was developing minds. And so, you know, I feel this this book, it took all of my creative power. I feel to make it as short as it is. I feel like this is this is probably the best thing I have ever written, all right, And, um, but this I was able to publish this and write this so quickly because I had already had the experience with the other two books. So I wrote this one in the summer of 2017 and I got it out in February of 2018 and I understand that that's probably a long process for a lot of writers. Some writers write a book in a couple of weeks, and they get it out in a couple of weeks for me. I follow a little bit more of a traditional path off writing with the process that I do. It takes a little bit longer to get my books out and so just be clear here. Here, too. I writes in the literary fiction genre, which in the independently published World is Pretty much like the market is like a tiny little sliver. The biggest markets for self published books are like romance and SciFi fantasy mysteries, those those make up most of the market. So if you're writing in any of those genres and you're applying the strategies from this course, you are likely going to sell way more books than I'd ever have, all right, and you probably will continue to sell more books that I have. And so but I write in a genre that is almost non existent for independently published writers, and so I have had to work really hard to get the sales that I have. Since December, I've sold about 120 books on average per month, and so that that is going from like zero, you know, and we're going up right now. And I love the strategies that I have passed on to you in these lectures, these air strategies that I have gotten from other authors who are writing in genres like romance and SciFi, and they're selling enough books each month that they've been able to quit their jobs and write full time. All right, So, um, and the strategies that I'm giving you hear these air strategies that that will work for any genre, by the way, are and also for nonfiction as well. Okay, so I'm hoping and expecting for students of this course to out pass me in there. They're ah, they're sales and feel free to in in the the court, the question area on the course. Feel free to list your successes. I'd be interested in seeing them and also be interested. I'm sure your co um uh, code classmates would be interested in checking those out as well. All right, so that's just a little bit about me. You know, if you have any questions, too, about me, feel free to toe, ask them. Or you could check out my website or or whatever. Uh, and again, I'm glad that we're on this journey together to success as self publishers ads. And again, I'm looking forward to hearing more from 4. What is Self-Publishing?: All right. Welcome back to from first draft of bestseller. I'm John Le Poma. And today we're gonna be discussing self publishing. So what is self publishing? It is publishing your own work independently of another publisher. You are not submitting the book to agents. You're not submitting it to publishers. You are putting your writing. It's and you're putting it together yourself. You're creating publishing and marketing your own book. Now, that doesn't mean that you're doing everything entirely yourself. You know, you can still work with an editor of four matter cover designer. It just means that you are the person who isn't in control of the whole process. You get to pick which cover designer you want to work with. You get to pick which cover design you want to go with. You get to pick which four matter you would like to use so you can do everything literally , everything yourself. Or is you can work with people that you hire, but you are the boss. You are in control as a self publisher, and you can publish print or e books or both. So print books are obviously, you know, like hardcover books or or soft cover books. E books are books that you could read on electronic readers like kindles or nooks, and you can do both of those or you can just do either or now technology today makes it much easier to self publish. It's essentially made the process possible and are self publishing has been around for years, so this is nothing new. It's just, you know, people were self publishing the time of Dickins, so this is nothing new. It's just now because of advances in technology. It's cheap, and it's easy for authors to write a book, and they can get it in front of a worldwide audience and market to a worldwide audience without ever, ever having to leave their house. All right, so here is some of the advantages of self publishing. You have more freedom to write. What you want now, traditionally are traditionally what would happen if you're going to publish with like a Big Five publisher, you are going to have to querying agents. And chances are that agent, there's not gonna be any agents that pick up your book. And even if they do, they may tell you. All right, so you know I loved your book, but you're gonna have to change this this in this in this because, you know, according to the market, no, no publisher is going to then by the book and publish it. Unless you make these changes and then let's say maybe a miracle happens, and then the publisher buys the book and then they tell you Oh, well, you know, we're gonna have to make these these changes as well. You know, when you're when you're self publishing, you can write whatever you want to write. You don't have to worry about markets. You don't have to worry about pleasing anyone other than your readers. Also, this is good for niche writers. Are writers who write niche markets may be very small markets where they just want to reach 102 100,000 people. You know, you're not gonna be able to find a publisher in New York, you know, penguins not gonna pick up your booked just to sell. Sell it to 500 people, you know. So here you are in in control of your your book, and you're in control of how you want to create that book so you don't have to worry about any third parties telling you what to do and limiting you. You also make a higher royalty. Now let's say you traditionally publish your book with the company like Penguin. So penguin, they're going to take a huge chunk of of the sales for for each book sale because they have to pay their employees. They have to pay for the heating and the lighting. They have to pay the the editor. They have to pay their marketing team. You know so and then if they have to pay your agents or you pay your agent from your royalty rather. But by the end of after all these people get their cut, you're only getting a very small cut of each book sold. So you have to sell a lot of books in order to make money. As a self published author, you're keeping everything after the online vendors or the vendors have taken their cut. So, you know, like Amazon might take some might take 30% of each of your E books sold. You keep that other 70%. You don't have to share that with anyone else. So if you're selling a lot of books. As a self published author, you can make a lot more money, and also because you keep the entire royalty. You can sell your books for cheaper than that, the Big Five publishers and you can even make more money because for two reasons, because you're keeping, ah, higher percentage of your royalty and also because you may get more readers because you're charging less money for your books. And again, you can change whatever you want about the book whenever you want. Let's say you want to make some updates two months after you've published the book. Well, you know it. If you're self published off there, you can do whatever you want as it traditionally published off their the publisher is in control of all of that, so you'd have to ask them as a self published off. There. You choose that cover design, the formatting, etcetera. So you're again. You're in control of every aspect of this process. If you don't like the cover design, you could find another cover designer as a traditionally published off their most likely the publishing house, Penguin and HarperCollins. They're going to do this stuff for you, and you're either gonna like it or you're not gonna like it, but they're not gonna care, and you choose how to market it. So because advances in technology today, you can choose which audiences you'd like to target to market your book. Now this, you know, there could be advantage of that. But the thing is, if you're self publishing your book that you're at a disadvantage in the fact that's the traditional published publishing houses, they have got marketing teams, and they do help their authors to sell books to market their books. So as a self published author, you are on your own with this. But due to advances in technology today, there are ways that you can target your audience with laser like precision, and you can overcome some of the hurdles of not having a professional team helping you to market your books. All right, so some disadvantages of self publishing again, you have less money for marketing likely. All right. So likely you have less money for marketing than like HarperCollins. And that could potentially lead to fewer sales. You're probably not going to win a National Book Award or any big prestigious awards, which could lead to more sales. Generally, those those awards are reserved for books that are published out of the Big Five houses in New York. Your book from Glee will not be reviewed in The New York Times. You probably won't be getting a movie deal, and Barnes Noble probably won't sell your books and again because anyone could do it. You are competing with millions of other authors, literally millions of other authors, and so you're gonna have to find ways of standing out in an absolutely overcrowded market. Let's discuss technology. E books like kindles have made the process cheap and easy for self published authors to reach their their readers. All right, so if you just want to publish e books, you can definitely do that. And if you're writing quickly, you know you could write a book in in a month and get it up on Amazon. Get it up on KDP Select and get it out into the hands of your readers. You know you don't have toe. You don't have toe worry about setting the book up for Prince. You don't have to worry about doing print runs. You know you don't have Teoh worry about you know, any of that stuff you can just your writing on your own schedule. You could just get the book up on Amazon or kobo or wherever, and just get it out into your readers. Hands also print on demands. Technology has made this whole process ridiculously easy, so previous to print on demand technology. What you would have to do as an author if you wanted to sell books, is you would have to. You'd have to print books yourself, so maybe you had print 500 copies or 1000 copies. You'd have to store those copies somewhere, and then you would have to fulfill all of the orders yourself. So say a bookstore wanted order 10 books. You would have to, you know, package those books and mail those books yourself. Now with print on demand technology. When somebody orders your book from a website like Amazon, what the print on technology or P o. D. Companies like in drum spark or create space. What they do is they print one copy of the book to fulfill that order, and then they ship the book to that person who purchased the book. So this is This has made it so easy for self published authors to create high quality, beautiful print books to get to their readers. All authors have to do is to create the files, the cover file and the interior file, upload them to create space or in groups. Spark and readers can then buy copies of the books and get them shipped automatically. So it has made this process so easy. With one downside to this is the fact that the books are a little bit more expensive when their print on demand, as opposed to like If you bought books in bulk from a printer. You know, if you bought, like, 1000 books and you warehouse to those books, it will be cheaper. Likely then, buying 1000 print on demand books. But print on demand is what has allowed so many authors, self published authors to succeed. Today, our online vendors like Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Google play and Nook these air all websites where readers can buy e books and on Amazon bacon and nook, or I'm sorry and and Barnes and Noble at least they can buy print copies. Not a nook, though on, and this is This is where readers can buy copies and they can download copies to their E readers. And they can get start started reading the books almost instantly, you know. So let's say you only want to write an e book. You can write that e book very quickly, get it edited and then add it to a site like Amazon ends within a few days of getting it up on Amazon, your readers can start buying that book and getting it on their their kindles almost instantly, you know. So the having having these stores available for self published authors has made it extremely easy for for authors to make money to get their books out into the world. And, you know, if you put your book on Amazon once that book is approved, it is, you know, it's It's on an international websites where people all over the world can then buy your book. So essentially, with a few clicks of a mouse, you can get your book out in front of the entire world. So it's It's so easy now to sell your books. Thing is, you know, with with all these people doing it, it's there's you know it's an overcrowded market. It's a saturated market. So you're gonna have to find ways off getting people in in Canada, in the UK, in India, or wherever to notice your book and then want to buy it. And you conform at your books yourself. Do that advances in technology. So I'm gonna show you how to do that. In the the formatting section, I will show you a step by step guide on how to use a program called Vellum, which formats books for four prints and for e book and for the readers. And you can create your own cover design adds bookmarks on that. There's so much you can do with advances in technology today that it makes all of this stuff very easy, and you can target ads to specific customers with laser like accuracy rather than you know in the past, if you wanted to advertise a book, you might have taken ad in like The New York Times and the pay tens of thousands of dollars to do that. And here, anybody who is reading that that newspaper can see your ad, and most of those people probably would not be readers of your book, but today you can target ads to specific customers. You could target Facebook ads to people of specific age ranges in specific countries with specific interests. You know, it's it's incredible how, how accurately you can target people today. So this is This is great for is a great way for independent authors or self published authors to reach their audiences. And you couldn't work with people from all over the world without ever having to lead your house for me. I my four matter, lives in Tasmania. My editor lived in New York. Another editor lived in New Zealand's, uh, my cover designer. She is from Taiwan, but she was living in Colombia when she designs my book, you know, and I found all of these people online. I've interacted with all of them online. It's just incredible to be able to work with people from all over the world without ever having to leave your apartment. You know my my publisher in Florida, who published my book Developing Minds. I've never even met him, and we've been interacting for years, you know. So this is an on a lot of off writers, especially are are shy people who don't necessarily want to interact with people face to face. But this technology has made it so easy for you to work with people throughout the entire world without ever having to to leave your house. And so one thing about technology, those that it's constantly changing and it will change by the time you've probably finished this course from the time that I'm making this course to the time that you actually are watching this course, things are going to have changed. Right now. I'm currently hearing that create space, which is one of the P o. D publishers is is slowly, might slowly phase out, and KDP or kindle direct publishing may take over. You know, they may have a print service that takes over four create space, you know, so and that all of this stuff is constantly changing. There was, ah, an aggregator called pronoun, which was run by MacMillan and that shut down in January. And I mean, I'm gonna explain what aggregators are in a future lecture, but companies are constantly starting up and then closing down. Forms of technology are constantly changing vellum, which I previously mentioned they did not have print capabilities. Previous two, I believe Summer of 2000 and 17. If I remember, Get if I'm remembering that correctly, so technology is going to change, so you have to be. You have to be fluid yet. Do you have to change with technology instead of fighting it? You know, say, for example, you published your books on pro down. You're finding out that it's it's closing down. I mean, sure, you can feel bad about that, you know? But just remember that the reason why you are able to self published today with such with such success and so efficiently is because of technology. So you need to embrace technology flow with technology. Any time some other form of technology shuts down, likely something new is going to grow in its place. Whenever one opportunity ends, there's another opportunity just around the corner. So try not to think of this in such a black and white manner. Just you gotta flow. You know, you gotta change with the times. Self publishing, at least in its current state, is very new, all right, and things are changing all the time. Self publishing. Five years ago, this was completely different to self publishing today. The way it looked in 2013 versus the way it looks in 2018 are completely different. So, you know, you just got to be on top of things and and be very flexible. All right, so next we're going to discuss editing. So, you know, we've given you a little bit of information about what self publishing is. I've given you information about my own process with how I self published books. Now we're going to get into actually how to edit and format books, how to get reviews and all that. So please stick around and I hope to see you next with this lecture on editing. 5. Isn't Marketing a Book Considered "Selling Out?": hi and welcome back to from first drafted bestseller. I'm John lymphoma. And in this lecture, I'm going to be discussing selling out. So is marketing your book selling out? And the answer to that question is yes and no eso this is going to be something different for every single person. All right, so if you feel that, you know, marketing your book is selling out. I would imagine that you don't think that way, because if you did, you probably wouldn't have purchased this course. Or maybe you did just for the create and publish material and if so, cool, you know. But I would imagine most people who have purchased this course field that marketing your book is not necessarily selling out. Or maybe you feel maybe you feel that it it you know, there's a fine line between selling out ends and good marketing. And so that's for me. I feel like, you know, I'm walking that line here for me. I feel that, you know, as long as in my marketing efforts, I am staying true to myself as a writer. I'm staying true, you know, to my books and respecting my books. Um, and all I'm doing here is trying to find breeders for my books targeting readers, and I'm not being really sales the about it or annoying about it. And I feel that there are readers out there who will love my books and who, just based on reviews that I've already gotten who do love my books. And so I just I just feel like I am. You know, I'm playing like a matchmaker between my books and readers who might love my books. And so I'm just setting them up on a date. And I feel that if I do that in a responsible and ethical manner, that that's not necessarily selling out now, somebody else mites might disagree with me. But for me, when I write a book, I am you know, I will not compromise with what I write. I personally do not right to market. I know a lot of people do, and a lot of people who are making the most money. Those are people that are probably writing to market. I don't to do that. I don't have anything negative to say about those people, but for me, I write the stories that begin within me, no matter how weird, strange, whatever depraved those stories might be. I have those stories inside of me and I need to get them out now. As long as I feel that isn't that as a writer and off there, I am giving those words safe passage into the world. And then with my marketing, all I'm doing is, you know, trying to find people who might be interested in those books. I personally don't feel like that's selling up, you know, and so everybody's gonna have it difference opinion on this matter. But I would not just come into this thinking. Well, marketing is selling out. I know a lot of people who think that and those people one of them has currently got a book . That's ranks I thinking in the 10 or 11 million's on Amazon's bestseller rankings. Now I'm not trying to judge that person. I'm just saying that I've seen how that person wrote a book. He's really passionate about his book. He got it up for sale on Amazon. It didn't do anything. I think he just assumed that people were going to read it and love it. It was gonna go viral you know, And that's just not the case. Very, very rarely is that the case. You know, there are always the exception to the rule. Somebody might write a book that put it up on Amazon, do no marketing, and they're a multimillionaire overnight, you know, it's possible it's not probable. And so I think that if I think that you can't just put the book up there and then complain that nobody is reading it, I think that you need to find ways of introducing your book to people, to readers without doing that in sales and annoying ways. And so what? I'm gonna show you strategies on how to do that in this course, all right. And if you have any stretches to feel free to share those in the course comments section, you know, this is not this is not a lecture. This is I like for this to be a community here. We're giving and sharing information, right? So I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter. Um, and it is something that I have dealt with. You know, at first I was very resolute against, you know, any kind of marketing, but I have come around to that and seeing how marketing has helped for me to get my books into the reader's hands. Breeders who love my books, you know, So I don't know what? I don't have all the answers. Maybe you have a whole the answers, so let me know. All right, go. 6. How to Get Your Book Professionally Edited, and Why this is Critical : All right. Welcome back to from first drafted bestseller again. I'm Jonathan lymphoma. And today we're gonna talk about editing. That's a very fun topic. I'm sure a lot of you excited here. Okay, So before we get started, I just want to give a list of recommended books that will help with the editing process. Now, some of these books are books on how to just write better. You know, when you're writing is at its best, you're going to have fewer mistakes or fewer corrections in your book. So here are some books that that I believe are excellent to help writers write better words and thus make it easier to edit. So here we go. Uh, self editing for fiction writers by Dave King and Ready Brown. Obviously this one is is tailored more toward editing. I used this one before editing my first book Developing Minds in American Ghost Story, and I highly recommend it. The next one. That that really helps with editing as well is the Elements of Style by William Strunk on E . B. White. This is a classic book. You've probably already heard of this one. It's really small. I recommend getting into that. Another great book is Make Your Words Work by Gary Provost Fantastic Writer Ends I learned a ton from this book, something with keys to great Writing by Stephen Wilbur's It's another fantastic one on writing. Well, was the first book I read that about writing that the one by William Zinsser and I highly recommend that one as well. And on writing by Stephen King, this one's half memoir, half book on writing and that when again, fantastic book, I recommend all of these and again. I think that's the better you writes. The better your first draft will be in, the less you'll have to worry about editing. Okay, so now we're gonna talk about how to find an editor. So, you know, again, I very highly recommend working with a professional. I wouldn't just pass this off to a friend or your wife or your husband or your mother. Make sure that you're getting an unbiased person, a professional, to take a look at your writing before it gets out into the world. And so the first place where you could find an editor is a website called Risi and reads He's a fantastic website you can use this for for a number of different things. I found editors there found my cover designer for my last book. There you could find people to help you market your book publicists and all that. So here we go. So the way to use reads E to see up here. You know, just go to read z dot com. It's r e d s y dot com. Then you'll have to tow log in, creating a new account to user name and password. When you look in, you'll come to this screen here and see how we have got Ah, whole list of different topics that's that are covered here. So if you're looking for an editor, essentially what this is is it's a curated list of professionals who you can search for on this site. So see how this editing tab here is clicked. You can go here to see which one you're looking for. Maybe if you're just looking for a proof read, click that and then sees some of them quickly. Jonah, Here's some of them are specialists in certain areas, so maybe we've got crime and mystery, and we're looking for somebody who at its in in UK English. So see how this this narrowest your selections down right away makes it really easy. And then all you have to do is go through the different editors. You see a little bit of, ah of information about them. Here you see their their user rating, their response rate where they are located in the UK or where they're located. In general, if you click on this little section here, you can get more information about them. You can see which books they have edited. You can see their resume, you can read their bio, and then you could see what services they offer. See what areas they specialize in, what languages they specialize in again. They're certifications or their their resume, and you could check out some of their other work. So if you really wanted Teoh, get a better idea, you know, maybe could check one of these and then it pulled up there. There, Amazon page, see how it says, Look inside here. You can click on that, and then if you want to just sort of scan through the book, you can get a sample of something that's that this editor has worked on. Okay, uh, and then you can get reviews here as well. So looks like she did a top notch job here. Okay, so let's say you want a higher clear rush, Brooke, As an editor, all you have to do is click Select. See how it says that says four more professionals, to quote, you can select up to five professionals. Let's just let's just go through here, will save the ones. Uh, these five. Let's say maybe we gotta come back later on. You can star somebody you know and ends. Come back to them later on. Okay, so now again, we've selected that we once we want proof reading in Crime and mystery and UK English. So then we go to continue ends. This is where you're going to submit your editing brief. So you're going to submit this information to these five editors now, they can either choose to accept your job or they can reject it off the rejected. They usually give you a reason why. Sometimes it's because of scheduling or, you know, the other reasons. So it's good to give detailed information. You can select your book, See my my books already programmed already have information for these books, or you could enter a new title. If you're new to the website and then you can give a date for when you like your ad, it's to be returns. I would recommend giving them a realistic timeline. Don't just say you know what? Today it's February 18th 2018. Don't say they want it back by tomorrow. You know, that's clearly not going to happen. Oh, sorry. This is when when they should return the quote spy. Okay, so I generally give them a week, you know, it gives them some time to review the brief and then see if it would be a good fit. And then I gave my editors over a month again because I wanted to. I didn't want to rush the job. And so like like I said, if in my other lecture about my process and if you didn't listen to that my processes I submits the book to an editor after I have edited it myself twice. And then when that editor gives the book back to me, I go through it again. I submitted to a second editor, and so I try to give myself enough time with this process so that I am not just typing up my book. And I come up with a publication date that's one month away, you know? And meanwhile, I've got the book. It's not gonna be edited by then. So just mind your deadlines. If again, if you're gonna be working with a professional editor there, you have to give them enough time to complete tasks. And you really want to give them. You don't want to rush them through it, right? You're paying these people to to care about your project, So give them every opportunity they can. Teoh do the best with your work and so Okay, so give the word counts. Genre, Introduce yourself. Give the book details. So this this here I would recommend putting this in because you give more of information to the editor and then they can see whether it would be a good fit for them or not. And this I would highly recommend you doing submit up to 3000 words for them Teoh sample for as a sample. So they can they can edit it and you can see what they're editing job would look like I very highly recommend this, that the quality has has ranged a little bits. And some of the editors that I've worked with are that I submitted briefs to. And so some of the people who are quoting the most money aren't necessarily the best. So I would submit a brief and then see who would be the best fit for you. So once you filled out all the information, you're gonna submit a brief that you would go to your requests. Okay? Yeah. I want to leave the page here. So I I submitted a brief here for design. So these were the people that I had queried over Ah, the cover design for my my novel this summer of Crowd. And I ended up going with sin you chew and so what these these people will do. And so this this would say, editor there editing for you. If if you're looking for editor, these people will review your brief and they'll send you quotes. And so you can click and view. The quote could see how much money they would potentially charge you for that job. And you can see the sample at its they did to your manuscript. And then if you accept the job, you have to pay Theo editor of the fee or the designer, their fee or the publicist their fee. And then you also have to pay reads e a fee. So that is something to keep in mind if you're going to be using this. But it it's fantastic. I've used risi now to find I found the editor for my last book this summer of Crowed on Greasy And I found the designer here and Cindy Chu she was fantastic and I would hire her again for another job. Okay, so that's read. See, I'm gonna come back to Risi when we're discussing design. Because again, I found my cover designer here on Reid's e. Alright, So back to this. Okay, so another site is book baby and I have not used book baby. This is a website, though, that I've heard other people have used and have headlight. So this one, it's similar to read Z and that you can find editing services, designed services, all different types of services here to say we're looking for an editor. You can find out Earth Select, which editing you would like and shows how it works here. So choose the book editing Steps service you need. Upload your word documents and retrieve your professionally edited manuscript in 8 to 10 days. So this again is another service that you can use. It's called Book Baby, and I have had other people recommend it, or you could join groups to get referrals again. I mentioned Facebook groups in one of my earlier lectures. I would very highly recommend getting on the Internets ends and meeting other people or just getting into the community. Going to writers events, go to book signing events, you know, just good a library events, meet other authors and see who they would refer you to. I works with an editor on my last two books, and I am going to use him again. And then I I found him through a Facebook group referral. Okay, so one thing you're going to be hearing to a lot about our beta readers. So there there are professional editors, people that you pay money to toe. Go through your strip of your I keep wanting to say script to go through your manuscript, your book, and to edit it, however you would you're hiring them for so, like, if you're hiring them for ah ah, copy, edit or a proof read. You know, beta readers are people that you don't necessarily higher. They're people who volunteer to to read your book and give you information about it. So these are people who read your story and give you feedback, you know? So they're not editors? Um, I wouldn't send them a final trapped, too, by the way. So this way they they have. You're not giving them a draft. They're gonna have toe to find tons of errors with, But they're people that are gonna help you with character and plot development plot holes. They'll give you their opinion of this story. We'll tell you. Hey, this ending was terrible. Why would you end it so abruptly? And generally, writers will submit their books to 456 However, many beta readers, the beta readers, will read the story that give their feedback, and the author will choose to accept that feedback, or they will did not choose to accept it, but always make sure you're being respectful with these people. They're they're using their time to help you. All right? So even if they give you some ridiculous suggestion, just say thank you. Smile and and move on again. These things, people will test out the story that give you feedback that lets you know if there are typos , you know? But they're not people. You can't expect them to scour through your story as an editor would. You know, as somebody you're paying, you're paying a professional to scour your book into find errors. You know, that's one thing. But if you have some having somebody just volunteering their time to help you out, I don't think that you could really expect them to, um, to do something like that. Okay, so now where do I find beta readers? You can find them in writers groups. So again, facebooko are people that you meet, um, out in the community. So Facebook there there are good reads groups dedicated to this and Google searches. So I just typed in beta readers. And there I had people a number of, um uh, beta readers show up in the search, so use this used These resource is to find your beta readers. And also, if you're if you creating a mailing list. As your mailing list gets bigger, you can ask people in your mailing list to to see if they would potentially beyond, like your Beta Rieder team. All right, so tips for editing remember, always be respectful, even though these people may give you suggestions that you absolutely hate that you think are terrible. Smile and say thank you. Consider making changes again. You may get your work back, and you know, somebody might have crossed out some part that you absolutely love. Remember that this is an impartial third party that is reviewing your work. And really, you should consider what they have to say because they're looking at your your work with a pair of fresh eyes. And if they're telling you something is just not working and you keep hearing the same thing from beta readers or other editors, they're telling you, Hey, this thing is not really working out. Even if you love it, you know there's to quote Kill your Darlings. I would recommend considering to change that thing, and there's just a little bit of information to that I've heard along the way about writers groups or, like beta readers you know if if everybody is telling you that something is wrong, it likely is. But when they start giving you suggestions on how to change that thing, they're always wrong. You know, it's up to you, the writer, to come up with the changes or two to determine whether you to change something. And then if so, you need to make the changes that you need to know because nobody's knows this story better than you do. So you're the one that really needs to come up with those those changes if they're necessary And also look for a good fit. Make sure that this this editor is editor of the beta readers there. People who enjoy your genre who are competent, who like you, you know, like if you guys are a good fit, that will help the process. Okay, so the next lecture we're gonna talk about formatting another really fun topic. So thanks. And we'll see again 7. How to Format your Book for eReaders and Print: right? And welcome back to from first draft of best seller I'm John lymphoma. And today we're going to be talking about formatting eso. What is formatting? Formatting is preparing your book for print or E readers. Okay, so you can format your book for print or you perform at your book for E readers or both. It's the formatting print and e books. So one way you can format your book is by using what are called book designed templates. Now what? These are R. C. So you can it's gonna click one of these here, click pulp here. Basically, what you do with these templates is that you can just copy and paste your manuscript. So few rights in I don't know, uh, Microsoft Word or or Schreiner or whatever. You can copy and paste your manuscript into one of these templates, and it will do the formatting for you. And by formatting, I mean, look here, see how this book has got standard merchants. All right, it's all justified here, meaning that everything lines up on this right. Merge in and on the left, see how we've got the check to to appear that in the title and the author name up here. Now, these are things that you can't just uploaded Microsoft Word file on Ingram Spark and expect the prince copy to come out looking like this, you need to format it first. The same thing with E readers. You need to format your book so it can be read on E readers. And there are various formats for difference E readers, so you might have to format it differently for nook vs Kindle. Okay. Kindles require a Mobi file a dot m o b I. And most of the others require an e pub. Just an e p u b. Right. So this is one option for formatting. You can download one of these templates which are quite affordable, so I'll show you think the pricing is at the bottom here? Yes. So a single license here to use this for both your prints and e book. So this will take care of both of those is on sale right now for $29. Okay. It's usually 59. Once you pay for this, they will send you some files. And if you want to open up the file in word, say, for example, so you won't open the word file for your book size. You would just open that file and then you copy and paste your information onto that template. That's a little more complicated than that, but they give you step by step videos for how to do that. So this is one way of formatting your book, and I did mention something about size there. So Prince books have different sizes, so five by age, this is a standard size. It's five inches by eight inches. Obviously, six by nine is is bigger than five by eight. And therefore, if you have a book that six by nine, it's going to be able to hold more words per page. So if you've written a very lengthy book, you might want to consider using a bigger size. And if you've written a smaller one, you might want to consider a smaller size too. Okay, so, again, this is one option that you can do, an