How To Publish A Collection: Shorts, Poems, Essays

1. What is a collection, and why do I care?: Hi, I'm Hannah, I'm a writer and a teaching or YouTube or, and I published two collections of short stories and flash Fiction. The first one was in 2018, it's called little birds, and the second one is dropping this October, it's called starlight. I'm going to use my experience with both of those to talk about how to write and produce and publish your own collection, whether it's a short stories or flash fiction, poems, essays, et cetera, little birds is a mix of micro flash and short contemporary fiction. It has been on multiple bestsellers lists with a 4.8 out of five stars. Starlight is a collection of Flash and short fiction. This one's multi genre, from contemporary to fantasy to sci-fi horror. It's already talked a few best sellers list, and I'm very excited and grateful about it. So we've got two collections, different genres. I did different things to publish each. So I'll go into detail about what I did differently and we'll see which one worked at her, both her self-published. So this class is coming from the perspective of self-publishing, which is most likely the root of that you'll take to publish a collection, but I'll touch on that more in less than five. I love collections to read answer, right? So in this class I'm going to break down how you can create and publish your own. But first, why might someone published a collection? It's fun. It's relatively easy compared to a novel. You can work on it for a much longer amount of time without as much focus with a novel, for example, usually at the stake, whether it until it's done with shorts, poems or essays, finish one, and then kind of forget about it. You can let a collection set for weeks or months or years Xin comeback and write more without it mattering so much that you may have lost touch with it. So it's a good side project while you're working on something bigger, which is what I'm doing now with a fantasy novel and shorts. In this class, I'm going to walk you through the steps of drafting, editing, designing, and publishing a collection. I'm going to use my own as examples to help give you context and also share some of my personal experiences with it. I'm going to be presenting information under the assumption that you are starting with a blank page with no idea what you're doing. That likely isn't the case. If you clicked on this class, you might be a few steps in, but I do encourage you to watch every video to make sure that you don't miss out on any information whenever you are ready, click over to the next video and we'll get started on drafting. 2. Drafting: Brutal. To number two. In this lesson, we're gonna talk about three topics in drafting, form, themes and prompts before you draft your collection. What do you collecting? There are multiple types of short form writing like shorts, essays, poems, et cetera. Check out my class on writing flash fiction. If you'd like to learn more about that. Little birds is micro flashing shorts. It has 12 stories and runs around 10 thousand words. Starlight is mostly short stories, so they run a little bit longer. It has 12 stories in around 18 thousand words. The form you choose is going to affect a couple different things. If you choose a shorter type like micro or poetry, you're obviously going to need more visas to fill up above. You might also use different formatting for different kinds of collections. For example, with poetry, you have a lot more freedom with how you stylize the page. It could be a very tiny poem on a huge blank page. You can incorporate visual art. You can get way more stylistic with something smaller. Here's an example from little birds at this flash fiction is small enough that we were able to incorporate artwork like this. You couldn't do that with a story that was over page long without breaking it up. Once you know what your form is going to be, you'll know roughly how many pieces you will need to fill the size collection that you'd like to publish and you'll have an idea of what formatting might look like. So how long should your collection B? This is a question I get a lot and there's not really Australia answer for it. It depends on what you want and if you have a publisher on what they want, but if we're assuming your self publishing is completely up to you, there isn't the number for how many pieces are pages or words you should have, but you should run the entire thing pass multiple beta readers. If you, readers feel like it drags on, maybe it's too long or your content just isn't as strong as it could be, yes. If they thought it was too brief to be worth the time or it didn't impact them in any way. Maybe you need to develop it more Bovary tribology. When you're drafting, you should think about themes for your collection. A theme is like the main idea of a collection. Some examples of themes are fear, loneliness, the color green, marriage, parenthood, loss, war, freedom, learning, mystery, revenge as genre might be considered a theme. Maybe all of your pieces are, it's speculative science fiction. That could be your connective tissue and give it some coherency if it's a personal essay collection, all of them are from your perspective. If I wrote an essay collection, the theme might be life from the perspective of a self-employed person or an author or someone from Louisiana. Essay collections can often be beamed just by being written by the same person. So theme can be a pretty loose term. I use it to mean some kind of commonality over the whole collection that makes it work as a unit. Why should you have a theme? I'm a big fan of themes within collections because it's easier to design, easier to market. And if you're in the early stages of development, whenever you decide on the beam, it's easier to write. Themes helped to tie technically unrelated things into a nice little package. When I wanted to publish little birds, I already had quite a few stories written. So I went through what I had picked out, what I've found to be cohesive and then wrote two additional pieces, went ON cane sprouts to specificly published in little barons. And the theme kind of became about human experience, the struggles and emotional turmoil that come from existing. With my second collection, starlight. I knew the theme before I started writing. It's dark and creepy. So I had a few stories that played with those elements that didn't fit into little birds. And those stories became my starting place for starlight while I was drafting my fantasy novel. If I had an idea for a story that fit that theme, I quickly drafted OUT what I knew about it and put it in my starlight folder to worry about later. I also came up with ideas on purpose, not forcing a story out because that rarely works. But I was listening to creepy story podcasts and reading Edgar Allan Poe and like other authors who thrive in that kind of dark literary sphere. And that kept me in the mindsets are right for my beam. In the case of little birds, that theme became clear when I looked at what I already had for starlight, I knew from the beginning and having that purpose and intention going into it made that process a lot quicker. So I would definitely recommend that you nail down some kind of theme. And I think the earlier you establish that being the easier it'll be pieces that come to you naturally are great, but it is possible to fabricate an idea on purpose, I recommend making a list of prompts that support your theme and doing writing spreads using starlight as an example, I pulled prompts like re-imagining classic monsters like ghosts and vampires and skin walkers, and seeing if I could put any kind of new twist on it. Some prompts were based on like things that scared me as a kid, like the vent and my ceiling. I would listen to true crime interviews and pull quotes from victims and use that as a prom. If you're writing a collection of personal essays, brainstorm a bunch of stuff that happened to you. I've been really into reading personal essay collections lately. So I have an ongoing list, stories from my life that I've organized into beams. I have a folder of poetry. I'm not even that into writing poems, but I have them organized just in case. I also already have a folder for the next short story collection. And those are sub categorized in the beam. So I basically have the first draft of several different collections by exerting very little effort is just writing down the ideas as they come to you. Writing is hard to force. So utilize the inspiration as you get it. Don't let it slip away. You will forget about it. Just drafted out and save it for later for your homework for this course. I obviously don't expect you to draft out a whole collection right now, but I do want you to brainstorm some themes, some more examples of themes to maybe help you out. Our regions. Maybe right about your hometown growing up in the South Island lie emotions. Maybe it deals with grief or with overcoming a certain obstacle or what Finding Freedom people. Maybe your theme is a certain kind of person. Mothers, foster kids, the terminally ill monsters genre, fantasy adventure, contemporary historical horror comedy, whatever. And once again, may I suggest to the color green? That's it, that's the beam. If you already have a theme, generate a list of ideas or writing prompts that go with that theme. Take a little time to brainstorm and save that list for later. When you're ready, click over to the next lesson and we're gonna talk about how to edit a collection. 3. Editing: In this lesson, we're going to cover two types of editing, Self editing and professional editing. We'll also touch on how to hire a professional editor. Editing your individual stories kind of falls under the drafting category, but we'll talk about it separately. If you're familiar with publishing, you know that you need beta readers and you need editors with a collection. I use beta readers and editors for each story individually. And then again as a whole, editing individually everyone self-edit process is going to be unique to that writer. My process for editing short stories is similar to a lot of people's process for editing novels, self-edit, beta rounds, professional edit, ie, add a step between beta rounds and that's workshops. Here's a sort of step-by-step from drafting to completion for my short stories. Step one is the first draft. I dump every thought I have about IT into a roughly linear order. The second draft, cleaning it up, adding things, deleting things. This might happen immediately after the first draft or it might happen several months later, then the self-edit, This is where I get the story as good as I can on my own. I usually do several rounds of these. Most people call them revisions or a draft, 1234, etcetera workshop. I usually do a few workshops with my stories. I start with letting one or two people read it, getting their feedback, making changes based on their thoughts. Then I do at least one more workshop with a different group of people. And I do the same thing over again. Then I'll debate around, I'll send stories to anywhere from three to 20 people with a list of questions for them to answer about it. If you want to know more about beta readers, I have a few videos on the subject is good. You do back home slash handling getter. And between each bait around, I'll make edits. I'll do anywhere from one to four beta rounds depending on the feedback. I had one story that I sent to over 20 beta readers. No one had notes, there were no misinterpretations, so that one was really easy. I only did one but then I had another that I really had to work for and I did, I think six rounds with that one, every story is going to require a different amount of effort. After beta rounds, I dropped them in the finished folder. After I've written all of them, I'll choose which ones I want to publish and an order that I think is nice and then I send it out to more beta rounds. I'm going to ask those readers and questions about the coherency, the order, the pacing, if any stories like stuck out in a bad way, stuff like that. After beta rounds for the full collection, there's another self-edit. Then I sent it to my professional editor. That professional editor round is going to be for developmental And Lynette's developmental means big problems like story issues, character arcs, line at its's for edits of the prose like syntax and wording. And then way later after the interior formatting and everything is done, I'm going to send it back to that editor for a round of copy edits. So copy editor to make sure that nothing got shifted around, no typos were produced during formatting, which happens often. And just to catch anything that may have slipped through the cracks of the first few times. For some reason, there's a lot of debate about whether or not indie writers should hire professional editors before they publish something. I think you should, even for short pieces, at least a copy editor, it just gives you a much better product. Like I said, I hire an editor for multiple rounds, developmental line and copy edit. Sometimes I'll do an additional copy edit round is to be saying I also read over the manuscript several more times myself. Are all of those rounds of professional edit necessary? That's up to you. This is just how I do it. I will say that the professional edit is last, the cleaner. You can get it on your own and with like volunteer beta readers, the more time and money you're gonna save on the professional edit. So how do you find a good editor? I lucked out and met mine in college. If one doesn't conveniently fall into your lap, you can do a few things. Number one, recommendations from other writers. You can check the inside cover of books you thought were well edited and sometimes the editors information will be listed there, read reviews and testimonials, preferably ones that aren't on the editors website. That's a little harder to do good law. Just Google around and see what people are saying about him and make sure you request a sample edit before hiring. If someone isn't willing to provide you a sample at it, it's probably not a good situation to get into the price of a professional edit can vary a lot. Typically they'll charge between 1 $0.03 per word, depending on the type of edit. Just shop around and compare prices to make sure you're getting a good deal whenever you're ready, click over to the next lesson because we're going to talk about my favorite part, designing your collection. 4. Designing: There are a few things to consider for the design of your collection. We're gonna cover the order of your pieces, the layout, so the interior formatting of your book covers and you might have multiple covers, e-books, paperbacks, hard backs and audio books are all going to be a little different. And the last one is super optional. But artwork, I have images in both my collections. So I'll talk about that in case you're interested in doing the same. The order in which you arrange your pieces is very important. A few things you might consider are starting strong, pick a first piece of that is strong on its own and also represents the rest of the collection. And little birds I opened with a story called Dear Emma. It's a flash fiction, so it's easier to pull people in rather than starting out with something super long. It's kind of melancholy. So it sets that expectation for what the rest of the book will be like. But it's not my heaviest saddest story that might scare people off in starlight. I start with a story called slice. It's also a flash fiction, so it's a little bit easier for the reader to just tumble into the rest. It's relatively easy to understand, so you don't have to dig super deep to analyze it. And it's weird enough that it sets the expectation for the collection. Spooky, strange but not so horrific that it'll scare people away. So we have a little blood, a little weirdness, and that sets the tone for the rest of the collection, but it's not the grocer just won. The second thing to consider is ending strong. That tone that your last piece ends on is what's going to reverberate in your readers head as they come away from the collection. The last story and little birds is one of the strongest and the collection it's set in South Louisiana where I grew up. So I think the narrative voice is a lot more genuine and stronger in that lend. It also ends on a kind of bitter, sweet note. So it's not a total downer like some of the other stories might be if they were at the end. The last piece in starlight is definitely top five strong stories in the collection. It's one of the most emotional ones and the ending of that one is the most hopeful and uplifting. Even if it's the dark collection, you don't want your reader to finish and be like, well that was a bummer. So the note to end on is going to echo with the recency effect, the feeling that you leave your reader width when they close the book is what they're going to remember the Majlis, both of these stories are also the longest pieces and I feel like the story builds up to them. And then since it's such a chunky piece, the reader can come away feeling more satisfied. I love flash fiction, but I feel like if I ended a collection with a piece of flash, it's just not enough to sink your teeth and do. So you might feel a little dissatisfied at the end of the book. So that's why the longer pieces or at the end. And the third thing you should consider with order is varying the pieces of metal. If you have sad pieces and uplifting pieces layer, then if you have short and long pieces, layer them. Since my stories have a wide range of lengths, i tried to break up the longer ones with the little flash fiction. I also look out for repetitive themes. For example, in starlight, I have multiple stories that deal with broken relationships between parents and children. So I made sure to spread those out as much as I could. And then little birds, I had multiple stories with roadkill imagery. So I needed those to be spaced out. So try to spot if there's any repetitiveness in beams or content or length and just mix it up. I try to put them in the order where it's kind of a roller coaster. It's up and down. You feel good and then you don't, then you feel good and then you down. So start strong to get your reader interested in finishing the book. Strong to leave a good taste in their mouth and very up the middle, so it's not Repetitive. Now we're going to talk about designing the interior of your book. It is possible to design it yourself, especially if you have experience or if he took some classes for it. But I opted to outsource for little birds because I didn't have the experience. Actually did try to do it myself at first. And after like a week of fighting with Microsoft Word, I realized it was not a productive use of my time. The money I could've been making, working on things other than doing a bad job, designing my book interior was worth more than what I spent getting it professionally done. And the people who designed my cover for a little birds had a really good bundle deal for both of them. So I just opted for that. What starlight I did design the interior myself for a few reasons. Number one, the people who did little birds are now out of business. Number two, I have a lot more experienced with graphic design now than I did two years ago. And three, I was willing to invest in the design software. It now that I know publishing is a lucrative endeavor for me. So this is something you could potentially do yourself, but it's going to depend on you and your skill set and the time and money you are willing to invest. I designed starlight with InDesign and I learned how to use it wouldn't addEdge Richards skill share classes on the subject which I highly recommend if you're going to use InDesign. I think she also has one on how to format using Microsoft Word. If you're meeting, looking for something more affordable, if you want to hire an interior designer, go through the same process that we did for hiring a professional editor, recommendations, reviews, look at our portfolio and communicate with them a little bit to see if it's someone you'd be able to work with. So what's it going to cost? If you're doing it yourself? You might use software like Microsoft where Adobe InDesign vellum, I've heard of some people using Scribner and really liking it. So that can vary from $0 to a couple of $100 depending on your preference. I'm using Adobe InDesign, which is about $20 a month. If you're hiring a designer, the price is going to depend on a few things like their experience level, the kinds of things you're wanting to do, the length of your book, but it can range from 200 to $1500. So definitely plan ahead. The higher the designer for a little birds, I wanna say it was about 700 for the covers and interior formatting for both the e-book and the paperback, but that wasn't insanely good deal. That is no longer available if you're traditionally publishing and collection, which is very hard to do and we'll cover later the design costs should be covered by a publisher congrats also the editor, also the book cover, your set, but if your traditional publishing, you probably would do Washington's glass. It took me maybe a month working on it on and off, proving between designs and figuring out the software to get my ebook and paperback interiors format. There was a learning curve, but in the future I'll be much quicker at it. So if you're designing it yourself and haven't done it before, counts on investing some time to learn the software covers. You might be able to learn how to design the interior of your book yourself. Covers are not where you want to cut costs. Your book cover is your biggest marketing tool. If you're investing money anywhere, it should be on your cover. If you're shopping for a cover designer. Same Ceph we mentioned for every other outsource, check references, reviews, look at their portfolio, have some correspondence to make sure that they're prompt and communicate. The cover design can run anywhere from $300 to $2 thousand. It depends on what you want and who you pick shop around for someone who's willing to work with you in your budget. The cost for my e-book, paperback, and audio cover design for starlight Is about the price I paid to have the covers for everything and the interior is done for little birds. So even though I'm doing the And for myself this time I ended up paying about the same amount while you're writing your collection, you should definitely be thinking about what you want for the cover. This was the mockup sketch I did for the little birds cover. And that's pretty much exactly what I got. So the more you know about what you want, the quicker the process might be. But make sure that you do your research and your genre to see what other people are doing with their covers, with the best practices are know the trend. And if you hire a competent designer, they should be able to point you in the right direction as to what you should and shouldn't be doing with your coverage because they have that industry experience. Even though my first designer gave me nearly exactly what I wanted for little birds, that may have not been the best thing. This is a mock-up, I said the designers for starlight, and this is what I got. They did give me the cover I wanted, but they also designed one that was a little trendy or I was so set on having a cover that matched little birds because that was an idea I had a long time ago that I couldn't really see the bigger picture of which cover would sell better. They just know the market trends better than I do. So Yes, they cost a good bit more than my original design, but they also have more experience and I think I ended up with a better product. And again, if you're traditionally publishing, costs are covered. Congrats. Artwork is probably the most optional thing, but in something like a collection, I think it's nice to kind of break up pieces with some visual artwork. So that's what I did for both of my collections. I hired my friend Roslyn stilling to do the artwork and both little birds and Starlight. So I would send her the pieces as I wrote them and then we kind of talk about it and then she just come up with a piece and send it to me and I'd send or any edits that I had. If you want to find an artist there everywhere, I recommend hiring an artist that you have the budget for it just because it's a little cool collaboration. There's always an artist somewhere looking for where one thing you could consider when picking an artist is if that artist has a platform while that might cost a little bit more. When you're promoting yourselves, you'll be promoting each other. So it's just a little freebie. The price here is going to vary widely based on their experience, their popularity, your timeline, their schedule, the medium, how many edits you're gonna want. A newer artist might charge as little as $10 a piece, while someone who's more established my charge a couple 100. It's a wide range with a lot of variables, all things considered producing your book will probably cost somewhere between a $150 to a few thousand dollars. It completely depends on you and your preferences and there are definitely ways to finagle something cheaper if you need to, if this is your first publication and you don't have a sizable readership yet. I definitely recommend doing as best you can as cheaply as possible. Don't sync all of your money if you don't know, they offer you. If you look at the paperbacks of little birds and starlight, you can tell which one I was confident enough to invest in. I'm proud of little birds. I think it's a great book for what I was able to put into it, but it's a budget production. If this is your debut collection, I absolutely recommend keeping costs as low as possible just until you find your audience and you get a feel for how it will perform. And then maybe you can invest a little more in the next one if it flops. Uh, well, you tried something new. If publishing collections is something you wanna do regularly for a living, but maybe it's something you will invest in. In the next lesson, we're gonna talk about how to get published. 5. Publishing and Promoting: When it comes to publishing your book, we're going to talk about self-publishing, traditional publishing, which is best for you. And then we're gonna talk about some specifics about how to actually sell books. I was a long sentence. So do you want a traditionally published or self-publishing your collection? There are several angles people usually consider when they're making and costs and payments, marketing, creative freedom and likelihood. Most traditional publishers offer an advanced, so that's a set price that they give you to publish your book if and when the book sells enough copies for your royalty payments to have surpassed that advance, then you start to receive royalty payments. Most books never reached that point, and those royalty payments will be significantly lower than the royalty payments you'd get for a self-published book. However, with a self-published book, you obviously don't get that guaranteed advance. So there's no guarantee that you'll make any money at all for costs, you'll be investing any money that is required for the production of your book if you self-publish, if you traditionally published, most, if not all costs will be covered by the publisher. A lot of people seem to think that if you get traditionally published, they'll mark it for you. They won't. You'll have to market your collection regardless. It doesn't pay for a publisher to invest in a debut or unknown author. So if you're leaning traditional because you'd think that they're going to promote you. That's probably not a good reason. Creative freedom. If you go with the publisher, they will likely make many of the creative decisions regarding your collection. Are you okay giving up that freedom for some people that might ruin the entire experience and there's no point for others, they might be like, great, I don't wanna make choices which I get. It depends on the writer, but that's definitely something to consider. And likelihood, will you be able to find someone who wants to publish your collection? Probably not, especially if you're a debut author. No one is going to want to publish a collection of shorts, maybe poetry, but it's still very, very unlikely for you to get a publisher Interested in your collection. You either need to know a guy or have a lot of money to pay someone else. Which kind of ruins the point, doesn't it? If you have the money for that and it's a vanity project, cool, have fun. If you wanna make this your career. For you to get a publisher Interested in your collection, you'd need some or all of three things. Number one, strong writing and unique content. Amateur stuff is not going to cut it. Boring stuff is not going to cut it. This is a nearly impossible genre to publish in a strong, marketable, probably topical theme and most importantly, a platform. If you have a big enough audience, publishers will know that your book is going to sell and the likely want to invest in you. It's why YouTubers who can barely read good book deals if those three things, or at least the last one, apply to you and you want to try traditional publishing. Good luck, I hope that goes well. I personally chose to self-published for several reasons. Number one, better royalties. Number two, I wanted to create a decision-making. I wanted absolute freedom to produce and promoted however I wanted, I didn't want to worry about a specific brand I'm curating into keeps someone else happy. I wanted. All up to me. I don't like answering to other people. For example, when lockdown started after coded 19, I put the e-book for little birds available for free. I couldn't have done that if I were traditionally published because that wouldn't be my decision. I like making all the creative and business choices number for it for a little birds. Specifically, I'd already published in most of the short stories in anthologies and journals. So that would have really complicated finding a publisher for the collection because they'd already been published. And number five, I just didn't wanna deal with the super long and involved process of querying and finding an agent and getting published when I thought I could do it and sell it myself and I could. So self-publishing was the correct route for me. Does that mean it's for everyone? Absolutely not. Everyone has different goals and expectations, so that's a decision you can make on your own. We've decided which publishing route we wanna take. Now, if you've chosen traditional, This is the end of the line for my advice, good luck. If you've chosen self-publishing, there are tons of options for getting your book from your computer to paper or e-readers. Some of them are popular options are Ingram spark, ADP, iBooks, hobo, Barnes and Noble press. But you can find so many options for self-publishing for little birds. I used KP for my e-book and paperback because I was investing as little as possible until I knew if my collections would sell. And KDC was achieved as option being for because they do print order. So a customer buys a book, let's say it's $10, it $3 for materials and production. They keep $3 for their service and I get $4. If those aren't exact numbers, but you get it. You don't drop money upfront because they keep a portion of your sale for starlight. I'm using KP for the e-book and Ingram spark for the paperback because Ingram spark lets you do a pre-sale for the paper bag. Kp doesn't. So I'm paying for Ingram spark for the benefit of offering paperback pre-orders to my readers. And it's not expensive, it's around $40, shop around and do your research because there are tons of options for self-publishing and whichever one you choose should give you like a full walkthrough of how to upload and publish your book. And there's an instructional youtube video on absolutely anything you'd want to learn how to do. So don't be afraid to figure stuff out with self publishers do. Marketing. A book is a complicated and unique process for every writer. I'm not gonna get super ensue. And I'll give you an overview of some of the main things you'll probably want to consider. You should start marketing before your book is f for pre-sale marketing can just be talking about your book Releasing lines are excerpts, doing a cover reveal, doing readings, having meetups. Ideally, you want to have a pre-sale period between 26 months. This is when your book is available for people to pre-order, but they won't actually receive it for awhile. That's your Primo hyper marketing time. If you have no idea how to create marketing materials, there are a ton of free, cheap resources. You can use social media. It's free, it's accessible, it's easy to learn, build a platform, post content, gather readership. This class is not about how to build a readership, but gentle heresies classes. I highly recommend checking out her skills or classes on building an author platform and releasing really good marketing information in both of those classes, canva is a free alternative to Photoshop. They can help even completely inexperienced designers make some really nice marketing materials. I just recently upgraded to the premium account because I use it so much in one of the extra features, but I used it for like a good year without it's just a great full resource for designing marketing materials. Giveaways are always a great way to get people interested in whatever you have going on. You can do pre-sale giveaways to boost sales before the release. That can help a ton with visibility. I haven't ongoing giveaway for Starlight where everyone who pre-orders and enters gets a bundle of three short stories that I cut from starlight. And they also get entered to win a bunch of other prizes. There's not really a benefit for them to pre-order your book because they're not gonna see it for months. So offering that instant gratification can really help boost your sales, are per views can really help with your bugs visibility as well. An arc as an advanced reader copy. So you send copies of your book to strategic people to get them to review it before your book is released for everyone else, because readers are much more likely to buy a book that has reviews. So having those in place beforehand is really helpful street teams, if you're able to get a group of people who want to volunteer to hide your book up that can really help. You just have to organize them and point them in the right direction. If you're just starting out and have no platform, maybe your street team is a group chat with five siblings, but having a group of people to help promote your book, extend your reach so much further than you could do it on your own. I'm working with a team for starlight right now. I have about 20 people and having 20 people to generate ideas and make posts and put together a static boards and stuff like that is insanely helpful. And they do it for free just because they like the book. Getting a street team together for Starlight was a lot easier than it was for little birds because I've already established a platform and I already have a book out. Basically everything gets easier with your second try. That's all I had to say about publishing and marketing right now, but definitely keep marketing and mind. The more books you sell, the more you can invest into your next one, also, the more money you get. Money. Thanks. 6. Wrap-Up: So that's how I draft, edit, design, publish and promote my collections. I hope it was helpful. Pick your form and your theme right in at the book. Make it look nice. Choose your publishing route and go for it. Most of these topics are covered from different angles on my YouTube channel. So go check that out at youtube.com slash channel the getter. Leave your themes and writing prompt, brainstorming homework in the project section and feel free to take a look at everyone else's. Maybe you'll see some writing prompts that apply to you and you can snatch them. We all share here. I'm handily Kenner, thank you for watching. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, patron and YouTube under handily kit, or you can find my collection, a little birds in e-book, paperback and audio book, and you can pre-order starlight until October 11th. Then you can just buy it debris to follow me on skill share to get alerted for future classes and I'll see you next time.