Self-Publish a Best Selling Book

1. Introduction: Hey everybody, I'm Peggy Dean and I am the author of The Ultimate Brush Lettering Guide and Botanical Line Drawing. In this class, I'm going to talk about my process on how I went in to writing these books and then getting themselves published, how they became best sellers so quickly and how today they've now been re-released with traditional publishing. This class is really great for anybody who's looking for information on how to get your project out there into the hands of passionate creatives or even just people that loved to read any book idea that you have. We're going to cover ,the ins and outs on how to format that and get your files uploaded to reach a broad audience via Amazon Prime, which is pretty much the biggest retailer there is. We'll talk about distribution, we'll talk about file formatting, we'll talk about ideas, we'll talk about brainstorming, networking, how to reach out to publishers eventually, if that's where you want to go, how to create bestsellers quickly, how to create number 1 New Releases. These are things that I have personal experience with and I'm so excited to share with you because if you have a dream, you can make it happen and it really can't happen overnight. 2. How to Choose a Unique Topic: The first thing that I'll say is yes, there's absolutely room for everybody, and everyone has something unique and clever, and witty, and informational to say. Where you want to be careful in your planning stages, is to make sure that you understand your topics, needs, markets, and who you are going to cater to, and within that community, what already exists, so the big important thing from the very beginning is to do plenty of research to find out what's already on the market, what are things that might be competition to you? What are some existing books on the shelves already that might be considered competitors? My suggestion to you is to grab those books and take them home, and sticky note every single page that you might have a thought about, because the idea here is that, you want to create a book that sets apart from anybody else's. You want something of value. You want something that's going to explain things in a way that isn't already explained in the mass production of books. You want content that doesn't duplicate or repeats, or feel like you're reading something that you already know or you've already heard of or isn't unique. Basically, you want a topic that's going to be very unique to your audience, that they will walk away from having enjoyed their experience with your book. You want to think about your topic, you want to think about your niche market, you want to think about, is that topic overly saturated? If it is, how can you differentiate your book from the ones that are already in existence? What will set it apart? This is where you can find topics, find paragraphs, find lessons, whatever your book may be covering, you can see exactly how it was broken down and why and how you are going to put value in the way that you're going to write it. 3. How to Structure Your Content: Once you decide on the perfect topic for your book, think about how you want to structure it. What type of content are you going to put inside of your book? How is it going to be laid out? This is something that can happen organically as you write. It can also happen in a table of contents that's preliminary. If you're like me, I'm one of those people that table of contents comes at the very end. My brain will go all over the place and I have a really hard time following an outline and staying within guidelines even if I set them myself. The creative mind I think, especially people that are writers, some people can do it, but sometimes it just has to flow organically as you go. Think about how you want to plan this out. Think about what you want to put into your book, if it's going to have artwork in it or pictures, illustrations, anything like that. If it's just going to be words, how you want to set that up with text. There are some really clever books out there that have used typeface to their advantage, which can make things a lot more interesting to read. However, it might not cater to the mass market, in which case, you might want to consider depending on what type of book you're putting out there. These are things to think about when it's time to build your layout and build the interior content. I recommend starting off with some bullet points. I ended up buying a notebook that I use to plan out my book, my very first book. I'm laughing inside me because it's not a pretty notebook is a hot mess. My notes are all over the place, they are disorganized. But what it's doing is getting your thoughts on paper. Everybody has a way of note taking, whether it is the lack of OA or away. Getting these bullet points out of your mind on paper will help you to continue to return to them. Then you can create a topic with subtopics and so on and continue building off of that. If you're creating a fictitious character, let's talk about name options. Let's talk about what type of individual they are. Let's talk about what they might wear, what they look like in your minds, what their voice might sound like, whether it's relevant to the text or not, or you're going to included or not included. But you're painting a picture in your mind on how you are going to portray these people. If you're doing a lesson based book like the ultimate brush lettering guide or botanical line-drawing. Think about the way that you want to break things up. Brush lettering has got, it builds on itself as it goes and it talks about fundamentals and moves them to the next, but then they have subtopics. Whereas the tunnel, the line drawing doesn't have a lot going on. It's got four sections and you jump right in. These are things to think about when you're structuring your books. Again, my best recommendation is to get your note taking ready and have this available to you at any time. Because the brainstorming part of things, will jump start the planning process. If you have your notebook handy, then you can jot that down. I say notebook versus doing notes in your phone because it's something that's tactile. There is something about writing notes on a piece of paper and the way that you can build off of them, it's almost like you can create mind maps. You know, you have a topic and you just draw a line and then you can draw a line off of that and draw a line off of that and just have subtopics or where that might take you. These are ways to get your thoughts on paper. Think about structure and think about content and then once you have that ready to go, you can start writing. 4. Staying True to Your Style: We live in a modern world, which means people want to hear your voice. When you read, even before the modern world, you can sit down and start reading a book, and some of the best authors, you can hear their voice and the way that they think and articulate things in simple text. when you're writing, you want to put yourself into it and you want to put your personality into it. If you're writing a fiction novel, you're going to want personality in these characters. This is probably something I don't need to tell you if you are a writer already, but something to think about, especially if it's your first time embarking on a book writing excursion. But I mean, anything that you are narrating or explaining, let's say in my instance, when I did a how-to book, you want to have personality in it and you want to be relatable. You want people to feel like they're sitting next to you and going on the journey with you rather than reading a boring narrative. 5. Why KDP? (formerly Createspace): If you are on the computer and have googled 'self-publishing,' then you will know that there are a plethora of options when it comes to self-publishing hosts, if you will, companies that will print your book on your behalf. There's pluses and minuses to all of them, in this class we are going to focus on CreateSpace, and the reason why is because that is the company that I have used and have personal experience with navigating, and can confidently say that I know most of the ins and outs behind this service. Could be because I'm really bad at following directions and it took me a lot of trial and error to figure out very simple things. What I will say is that if you ever need to make a call into their service line, then you will discover very quickly that all of them are very competent, very friendly, and very helpful. I was very impressed every single time, which is not what you would expect when you call into a customer service hot-line. Especially if you plug in your number and they're the ones that call you. You don't expect that, but yeah, they're fantastic. It's a great company, I love it. They are Amazon's sister company, so it's the self-publishing platform within Amazon's umbrella, and they make it very simple and easy to use. The biggest selling point for me when looking into this was the accessibility factor, and knowing that I did not have to have any inventory at all, but rather my books would be printed on demand as soon as they were ordered, but they were still available for Prime today shipping, which you can't really go wrong with that, especially in this day and age when we have zero patience. So that really helped with distribution, but it also helped with the convenience factor of getting into people's hands sooner than later. 6. Full Walkthrough: Format Interior Pages for KDP: I use Kindle Direct Publishing. You might know of it as KDP. If you've looked into self-publishing, there are a lot of options. I've always used this platform. It used to be called Createspace back in the day, but it was converted. Don't really know what happened, but it's KDP. So when you set up an account in here, this is what it's gonna look like. You're going to have immediately the option to create a new book. And that's what, that's what you would press. And then I'll show you what the behind the scenes looks like. And then after that, I just wanted to show you to give you an idea of what the dashboard, essentially your bookshelf or it's called your bookshelf. Right here. When you click it, you get to this page. And this is what you're gonna see. These are my self-published books. You can order author copies in here, you can promote, you can create hardcover, you can do Ebook versions. So you can see I have Kindle Ebook and paperback. I'm going to walk through the setup with you. I'm working on my travel adventure Line Drawing and that's about to go public. I'm very excited. This is what you're going to see when you, when you see create, you're going to have language, book title, subtitle, series, edition number. I don't nothing. They're just my author name, no contributors. My description. I own the rights. It's not adult only. Primary marketplace, amazon.com, you'll see there's just different regions in here categories. So this is where your book is categorized and then some keywords. So that's page one, that is your entire paper back details. Paperback content. This is where you will upload everything. So I have my ISBN. You'll see that KDP has the option for ISBN. Use my own. The reason why is because there are some restrictions using Katie peas. I don't remember exactly what they are, but basically I want expanded distribution if and when. So that means my book would be able to end up in, I don't know the exact specifics, but as an example, in libraries or in a bookstore or something like that. And I know that some things like that can be restricted. Then as a, as an aside real quick, you're gonna get ISBN from this website, docker.com. And I'll open that in a new tab so I can show you what that looks like. You're gonna, you're gonna see this and you're gonna see author solutions, identify our services. Isbn, United States. I think that also is just this. Yeah. So order ISBN. And then it's going to change the website to my identifiers.com. So that's actually that ends up being the website you have an account with. And what I ended up doing was just bulk ordering. So I can show you what this looks like. Once inside, I can go to what is it? Well, again, I go to think just my imprint. Oh yeah, here we go. So my identifiers. So you can see I have all of these ISBN is, and this is for self-published books. And when you bulk Upload them, you will, or excuse me, bulk purchase them. You'll have some that are still available. So that's where you're going to assign the title. And I will tell you this right now, this needs to perfectly mirror the information that you put in KDP, your imprint. What I do know is with free KDP ISBN is that it'll say, I think it says like self-published or not self-published, but independent published or something like that. That's the imprint. I just want it to be my brand, my company name. And because I set up on BellKor initially, see I can't edit this. So if it doesn't completely mirror it perfectly, there can be some issues with processing. I from what I had known, there wasn't any sort of core connection between these two. But I actually had some issues with this current book I'm working on and they said that was the reason why. So that's why you see that I have an ISBN that I'm not saying and then known that I am. But anyhow, it just needs to match it basically. Then if you want your own barcode, you can buy a barcode. And then it'll, what happens when you have a barcode available is that you'll see instead of where it says by barcode here, you'll see it says generates barcode and then you can generate a barcode, save it, and then you can include that in the cover that you create in Procreate. Just the barcode, so that's handy. Now, coming back over here, I've used my own ISBN here, my inference the same, my publication date. I'm using just black and white Interior with whitepaper. This doesn't matter as far as how you set things up. This is my trim size and then I'm using bleed. And that's so that I don't have intentional white padding because I've already set it up the way that I want to. So I'm using bleed, I will say that they're very picky. So even if something is setup correctly with bleed that every book that you submit is it goes through a manual process. So that can be frustrating when it comes to trying to. When you look at the preview and you're like, No, this is right. It's frustrating. So anyway, sometimes you just have to press Submit again and then it'll go through. This is where you upload the manuscript. This is where you upload that PDF that we just looked at. It's really simple. You can also upload these types of files, but they do want a PDF file just makes things easy. So I uploaded that here and I actually need to replace it. So I'm going to use the new version. Open that up. This takes a minute. So not too long, but it does take a minute and then you're going to want to preview it and that also takes a minute to generate. So instead of making you wait for it, Let's skip this part. Once that's uploaded, I, I'm gonna show you cover in a separate video because I want to focus on Interior. But once this is uploaded, you will see a book preview. You do have to open this in order to save and continue, which I appreciate because you just never know. I do recommend when you launch this, actually looking through every single page to make sure that everything looks in order. You're going to also see the trim and bleed lines in the preview. So you can see if anything's going to cut off. For example, right here, I want everything to be within the red that I want printed. Anything outside of that could be cut off. Anything outside of this trim line will definitely be cut off. But I see that I've placed the spine correctly, etcetera will, we'll look at this again in the Cover video. But now I can go through and see everything is as it should be. And you can see where I've offset each one of these. And so that's going to make sure that nothing gets lost inside of the fold of the book. And I'm going through this, making sure everything looks good. I check. I usually go through like three sets. So I go through once and make sure that everything, all the bleed looks good. The reason I do this in thirds is in threes. Because if I'm focused on all the things at once, I will inevitably miss something. This is just something I've learned about myself. I have three rounds. The first is making sure everything is inside the bleed as it should be. It's pretty straightforward, but I look at these lines here, you're able to zoom in. Are you able to? I just do it with my laptop, but you can also do it with your iPad. You can zoom in. But to really see the edges overall, these are all going to be formatted very, very similarly. But I still want to check like somewhat like for example, this line is getting close, but it's still okay. Then I'll look at things like this to make sure that everything looks good. Now, one thing I'm noticing here is that this should not have shown up on this one. I'm gonna have to re-upload without having the title on this essentially Chapter page. No big deal. But I'm glad that I'm checking. So that's kinda what I look for it. Now. The second round when I look through this is I want to make sure. Okay, So see, there's an issue here too. So I need to fix the chapter Pages. And I might go through and make notes of page numbers. But because I have these setup is files in Procreate. I'm just going to find it because I know I don't have them in order. Then the second thing that I'll do, I'll start over from the beginning and I'll go through and I'll just look at page numbers. I want to make sure that all the page numbers are correct, especially when I do this manually, rather than putting it into something like InDesign or Affinity Publisher. If I'm putting these in manually, I want to make sure that they are on the right spot. And then also correct, even if I looked at that through my PDF, I still wanna do it in the actual preview or because this is how it's going to print, this is what the product will be. Then see there's an issue here too. So there's a few things I need to fix. And I usually I'm not getting you. I will go through process like three times because I keep seeing things I need to fix. But the the third one I'll go through is spelling. So I'll go through and I'll make sure that I don't have typos or I don't have spelling issues or something like that. I miss them. I mean, we are blind to our own projects because we're in them. So I often like to have an extra pair of eyes just look through this, but I still make this a dedicated review. So that'd being said, I'm going to exit preview or and then re-upload. I've gone ahead and I've Looked through this, I've fixed the issues. I've uploaded the newer version and now I'm going to and I've launched the previous, I've said approve and now I'm going to save and continue. And the rest of this setup is distribution and pricing. So we're gonna go in and I'm going to say all territories, Amazon, then I can look at all of this. So if you put in one price, it will change. Let me show you. It'll change everything and recalculate everything according to the conversions. So that's nice. You don't have to deal with any of that. And then I can request a proof before I press Publish. I like to do this because I like to see it in physical form. And then I can know, okay, well, this didn't turn out how I wanted it to in Publishing. I say order samples, this is a time to do it. I'm going to save this as a draft for now, and otherwise, you'll just press Publish. What happens when you press Publish is you'll have about it. It can vary. It's up to 72 h is usually someone will manually review your book and they'll do exactly what you did with the print preview or, and sometimes they'll disagree with you that it was ready to go and they'll tell you what needs to be fixed because that's what they do and they know this is going to interfere with cutting off or this needs to be fixed. They'll just let you know. Otherwise, you'll get an e-mail that says your book is live and that is that's the gist of it. And then you can order author copies. And I'll show you it works very simply. I'll just say, let's see, order author copies, order quantity, selected marketplace, amazon.com. I'll say. You'll see your cost right here. So the printing cost is pretty low a, you will have to pay shipping even though it's through Amazon. So you have to factor that in. When you say Submit Order, it's not ordering it. See, it says you'll be directed to your Amazon cart. And indeed I am. So then I would proceed to checkout and finish that order. So that's how that works and it's pretty straightforward. You're shipping will be longer. It's not Prime. However, when it is on Amazon because it will be live on Amazon. I'll show you it will be prime. Let's see, where is it? Where does it say? It says it's somewhere there. B prime. So other people will get it when they order it very quickly. So that is what you need to know. A finished product now. And the cover looks great, the spine lined up great. The back looks great. And the inside I was loud. The inside also looks great. And the the border or the margins, I it looks like I set that up exactly how I wanted it to go. The preview worked out wonderfully and I'm happy with this result. I'm very happy with it. So this is, that's the full process. 7. Full Walkthrough: Upload Cover for KDP: So if you haven't watched the first round where we set up the interior of the book. That is in the other videos. I'm not going to go through that again just for the sake of saving redundant, saving you from ridden dependency if I can talk. So basically all I need to do is go to paperback and content and upload my cover. So I'm gonna show you how I will do this. I'm going to download a KDP template and that will, it'll put through my, I can do a calculator essentially, and it's going to give me a template that's specific to my book. So I can say paperback, I'm using black and white, I'm using white paper. I always get this confused left to right or right to left. I can always flip it if it's wrong. Inches, I know that this is my trends size and my page count. This one's important. So I numbered my Pages 3, 2175, but I know that there's first pages in there, so I'll just say 179. It'll be one or two pages off, I'm sure. But just for the sake of this this picture that comes up is not the true template. The True template is under Download template right here. But you'll also see very, very specific margins. If you are using a design software, this would come in very handy. So I'm going to download the template. I'll show you what that looks like. I'm opening this up. You can see shrink this down. This is what it looks like. So they give you a PDF version and a PNG version and we're going to insert the, I did do it backwards. That's okay. Flip it and we'll use this as a guide. Once you have finished there, you can upload the cover file. And so you can do all of this from your iPad to I just prefer to send it to my computer and do it that way. But I will grab the PDF and then I will open it and it will generate, and then it will show this little thumbnail here. And then you'll check the box. If you're including your barcode, which I am, then I will launch preview or again because it's going to want me to do that. Otherwise, it'll prompt me to do it so you can't move on. So it's going to save it, process it, and then I can see the bleed lines again here in the live preview or if I'm happy with that and I've already reviewed everything else I can say Approve. And then it will close. It will approve and I will be ready completely. We've gone through everything else that we need to go through. So we'll do this together. This was the perfect time to film this because this is happening right now. So I'm going to say Publish. And then I get to go through the waiting periods. So I'm gonna show you what I am shown. Show you what I'm shown. As soon as this goes through. Paperback submitted, it prompts me to do an e-book. I'm going to just not right now. Note, if it passes our review up to 72 h to be to purchase on Amazon. I haven't really noticed. I don't I don't know that I've ever noticed that there's like to notifications like one that the review and I can't remember either way. I know that it's around 72 h is what I'm I've been familiar with. I've seen it happen as soon as like 30-something hours. So otherwise you're gonna get an e-mail saying update this. So that's it. That's all you have to do. And now you wait, and then it says interview right now. So it's not easy. So you can do this with coloring books, you can do it with tutorial books, you can do it with regular books, anything that you want. The world is your oyster. So create some Art and make a book. Finished product now, and the cover looks great. The spine lined up great. The back looks great. And the inside, that was loud. The inside also looks great. And the the border or the margins, I it looks like I set that up exactly how I wanted it to go. So the preview worked out wonderfully and I'm happy with this result and very happy with it. So this is, that's the full process. 8. Create a Successful Marketing Strategy: Let's talk about how you can make your book an instant success. There are things that you will need to have ready to go as soon as your book becomes live and available for people to purchase. There's nothing worse than launching your book and having it sit there and it's not purchased, it's not reviewed. You just put in all of this hard work but nothing is happening from it. The best, best, best number 1 thing that's going to help you in your book success, is to have reviews from the very beginning. What I recommend doing for this, there are a few ways that you can do this. I would gather about 20 or so people, who you will send your book to free of charge for them to skim through, to read thoroughly however they want to go about doing it, till they get a really good idea of what your book is all about in exchange for a candid review. You always want to specify that you're looking for an honest review, but to get these books to people, the trick is you don't have anything to show them except for your PDF file. It's totally fine to get that to friends and family, but why wouldn't you want to give somebody the book, the tactile book in their hands so they can really experience the full product for themselves. It'll be tricky because when your files are approved, you will only be allowed a couple of copies to order as samples. So if you want to get this out to 20 people, that'll be hard to do with only two and you don't want to circulate that around. The best thing to do is to approve the files when you're ready to, but don't select any of the distribution areas. Well, you gave us the option to distribute to Amazon, to create space, to libraries, to bookstores, have those all toggled off because when you press approve, it's creating it and making it available, but it's not distributed anywhere. But it exists. That means that because it's been approved, even though it's available, it's not distributed. Because it's available, you are able to order as many copies as you want. Then order some copies and get them out to people who are willing to review it for you, and get this prepped. Get them ready to go, let them know when the launch date is, when you plan on making this public on Amazon because as soon as launch date hits, you can let them know, "Hey, it's launch day. This is really exciting. Thank you so much again. Your review is much appreciated." If you could get that up right, meow. Because the minute that you start getting reviews coming in, all of a sudden, your book gets pushed up to the top and it's suddenly a number 1 new release because people are already paying so much attention to it. This is crucial for the life of your book in the beginning, as far as marketing goes. Having people on your side, having people to support you from the very beginning, will get it into the eyes of other people. Another thing that you can do, is reach out to book review bloggers, people with bigger names in the industry, offer them a copy. A lot of these people love to review books. It's worth it because it will get in front of a larger audience and it's a curated audience. So whoever you end up reaching out to, they have a curated audience that's specific, following them for that reason, and then suddenly your book is the focus film. Boom. 9. Self -vs- Traditional Publishing: The difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing can vary in pros and cons on each side, such as distribution and also on the amount of royalties that you're going to make, which means the amount that you'll make on each book sale. Let's say you go through this entire process and you've built up an amazing book that you actually decide that you want to take to a traditional publisher, that is when it's a good idea to research and pick your favorite publishers and reach out to them, because it never hurts to go big. What you'll want to do is create a presentation for them. Let them know why you've chosen them, let them know who you are, let them know what you're doing outside of your book, what you've accomplished if that is applicable, let them know why you've chosen their publisher, how it fits with your vision, and then you'll want to attach a brief 30,40 pages is great. It gives them something to go over to really give them an idea of what they're going to experience in your content that you've created. You'll want to give them time to review these. These publishers don't accept unsolicited projects or they might, and it just might take a while. A lot of times when you research these options and find out how to submit your files, it'll explain exactly what their process is, how long it might take them. What I would recommend doing is when you see those dates, if you see this might take six weeks. You might follow up at week five and just let them know you wanted to loop back in that you're excited to hear their response. Let's say you go the self-publishing route and then you get a bunch of publishers coming out you wanting to re-release your book under their name. That's an opportunity for you to research that publisher, you might not have heard of them. Don't decline something because you haven't, because a lot of these publishers are imprints of other large ones and they might be really great to work with. The nice thing about these boutique imprints is that you're getting a lot more catered experiences with a great team who's really devoted to you, who is also supported by a bigger publishing house. You can also look up forums on authors who were very candid and transparent about their experiences, about the publishers that they work with. You might find that you shouldn't work with one that reached out to you it could save you from getting stuck in a situation that you might not want to be stuck in, so these are also things to way. There's also the option of, if you have a successful self-published book, think about what is going to determine whether you should go the traditional publishing route or not. In my instance, it was a very personal decision. It was a branding decision as a whole. I wanted better quality and I want a distribution in bookstores. Overall, the big picture looks a lot more polished if that makes sense. So these are things to think about if you do decide to go that route, this is something I get asked a lot, so I wanted to explain my thought process there. So and at the end of the day though, you should please feel empowered because you have all of the control over your experience, over your journey. If you put the effort in, then you will be able to get this beautiful idea that you came up with in a tactile item and into people's hands to share an experience with you, which is a really magical thing. 10. Ready, Set, YOUR TURN: Alright guys, that is a good jump-start into how to self publish. I'm really hoping that that was helpful to get you motivated to get started on your big project because I promise you, it feels so good the minute that you have a book that you created in your hands, it's amazing. I wish you the best in this journey, and if you do end up going this route, please share in the project tab, I want to see it. Even if you're working on it, let's see your step by step and things that you've encountered because there are many different ways and avenues that you can approach this subject matter. I can't wait to hear your thoughts, I can't wait to see your progress, and I will see you next time.