Writing a book is hard

A year ago, when NaNoWriMo still existed, I decided to take the plunge and decided to write a book. From scratch. This wasn’t to be one of the many stories I told my family over the last several decades. It was to be brand new. I only had a title, but it was a great title, and I felt it was enough to work from.

I dove in with absolute passion, and finished my first 50,000 words in two weeks. I hit some mental blocks and life got in the way, but I didn’t give up. Finally I finished, just to discover it needed a lot of work and had country sized holes in the story, so I went back to work. Finally, I finished it but found more issues with the hook and the introductory characters. I fixed that rebuild the characters from the start and got it in good shape. During all this fixing, the book became twice as long as I have heard it is recommended to be for a first book, so one book became two. Add a epilogue to book 1 and another prologue to book two, rewrite a few more things, and finally the books were done.

Publishing a book is harder

So, after writing my book(s), I thought “Awesome. I’m done. Now, how do I publish this thing?” Turns out that publishing a book is harder than writing a book, and at least when doing it for the first time, can take longer than the writing. There are lots of companies that will do all this for you and save you a ton of time and effort and frustration.

However, I have my own media company already, and so learning the ins and outs of book publishing made sense to me. It couldn’t be all that hard, right?

Turns out, it is a lot of work. Book covers, formatting, copyrights, ISBN numbers, figuring out optimal publishing routes. Is it better to do an exclusive with KDP or to go wide? Which will give a better market reach? How do I get the best return? After tons of research, tutorials, buying software and learning how to use them, I finally started setting up accounts. Now there are more hoops to jump through to get my author accounts approved on the various systems.

Of course, like I said before, there are lots of companies that will do all this for you and save you a ton of time and effort and frustration. They will handle nearly everything for you. Except promotion.

Promoting a book is hardest

Well, some will do some to promote your book, but this is where the big publishing houses earn their bread and butter. They have existing marketing channels. They have experts who know all the best keywords, events, newsletters, mailing lists, and so on that allows them to get your book in front of tons of eyes. They also take a huge chunk of the revenues, control a great deal of your writing process, and they are invitation only.

There are plenty of small places that handle all the publishing, but do very little of the promotion. It will still save you time an money, and might help you make more. Maybe.

Needless to say, with my notorious overconfidence and bigger than life ideals, I, of course, decided to torture myself, which means I decided to do all of this myself. My book is technically published at this point, but at the moment, I am still working on my keyword and relevant competing product lists for my Amazon Ads promotions and waiting for yet another round of approvals with BookBub and GoodReads.

I hope to have it all going soon, but some of this is out of my control. So for now, I do what I can, and wait on others for the rest.