Fiction Scribe

Author Peter Bowerman, Mr. Well Fed Writer, is joining us for three days here on Fiction Scribe. He’ll be talking about his writing, his book, and self-publishing today.

Even those authors who manage to gain entry to The Publishing Kingdom quickly discover that the emperor truly has no clothes: paltry royalties, up to two years to publication, the loss of creative control and relinquished book rights. And the most unpleasant realization of all? Even after all those concessions, authors are still expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the book promotion burden themselves! All to earn – in most cases – far less than a buck a book.

Self-publishing offers the opportunity to take the reins of your own book journey. You keep control of the process, the timetable, the rights, and most of the money. Given that have to do most of the marketing yourself even in a conventional publishing scenario, why not reap most of the rewards? Yes, you have to foot the bill for your publishing efforts, but if done right, whatever you invest can quite realistically come back many times over.

Me? I began as an unknown author with one book, NO big publisher, NO publicist, NO big marketing budget and NO publishing experience whatsoever. I was in the black in 90 days, and subsequently turned that book into a full-time living for five-plus years (more like seven-plus now with two more books under my belt).

Of course, I often hear, “I don’t know anything about marketing and book promotion.� Well, I firmly assert that commercial success as a self-publishing author is far more about a process than an aptitude – far more about a lot of things you have to do than some way you have to be. None of those things are particularly difficult – they just have to get done.

Because I realize most people don’t come from a marketing background, I devoted an entire chapter of TWFSP to developing a “marketing mindset� – minus the angst and stress. NOT book promotion – that’s most of the book – but rather grasping the fundamentals of sales and marketing to better understand book promotion. Chapter title? “Learning to Love S&M… (Sales & Marketing).� It just feels like the other sometimes…

Of course, my focus isn’t simply self-publishing. It’s profitable self-publishing. Self-publishing by itself, as a process, is obviously feasible. People do it all the time. And in most cases, they do it like clumsy, sloppy clueless amateurs. And as a result, they go nowhere, reach virtually no one, and make no money. Which is why “self-publishing� gets a bad rap – and in the overwhelming percentage of cases, that rap is well deserved.

But your self-publishing story doesn’t have to end that way. Success isn’t easy or cheap, but it’s do-able. I’ve done it and countless others have done it as well. It all starts with a plan, and that’s the whole point of TWFSP – a detailed blueprint authors can follow to write their own self-publishing success story.