Tag Archives: publishing

Brain Clutter

Work is still crazy with learning things AND finalizing budgeting for 2022. That work adds to publication activities. Then I add other hobby activities like Sounders games and D&D. I have to admit that I’m no longer at the top of my game. As a result, I have not been doing much writing in the last couple of weeks. I’m trying to prevent this draft from being filled with holes. 

Right now, book 2 is out with my alpha readers, and I have been working on the concept revision of book 3. I mentioned this before, but my drafts usually go in this order: concept, revised, alpha, revised alpha, beta, final draft, edited final. The Hidden Series has four books planned, and I have a pretty good start on all of them, but each stage takes time.

  • Book 1 (Hidden Memory): Edited final set for publication
  • Book 2 (Hidden Sanctuary): Alpha version is with alpha readers
  • Book 3: The concept is complete, and I’m working on the revision
  • Book 4: The concept is complete

I have rough publication timeframes on the “My Books” page for each of the four books, and I plan to post Hidden Sanctuary for preorder in the next couple of weeks. That is so I can include the link at the end of the first book. I need to work on the book description for that to happen. 

Mad Mage Campaign

The brain clutter impacted my D&D game this week. The game still went fine, and everyone had fun, but I forgot so much of the monster abilities and negative stat items for the players that they walked through combat like it was a day at the beach. Now I have a “reminders” section on my notepad to help me keep all of these moving parts in mind. 

My players strolling through level 2 in Halaster’s dungeon.

I’m trying to warn my players that combat will be more difficult going forward. That they should be careful when deciding their course of action. Words are not internalized like experience, though. They will plow into another combat with half health and zero ability resources left, and someone’s character will die. Or my warnings will drive them to rest all the time, and I will have to attack them to break them of that overcorrection. Fun times for me either way!

Bookbub

Next week I will share some of what I have learned about Bookbub from some of the Facebook groups I’m part of and hopefully an acceptance letter for their “New Release” feature (super difficult, so cross your fingers, but don’t hold your breath on my account). If I release book 2 for preorder, there will also be more changes to the website! 

Those are all the remotely coherent sentences and complete thoughts I can string together for today, so have a great weekend, everyone!

Author Pages and Reviews

After seven days, I have eleven pre-orders! I know not all of them are friends and family, but they are all because of friends and family who also shared and posted about my book available for pre-order. Thank you to everyone for the support. It has been amazing. 

Now, some of you might be raising an eyebrow and saying, “Really? Eleven? That’s all?”

As you all know, I am currently a complete unknown as a writer. No one is searching for me just yet. People need to see my book first and then think it sounds interesting enough to buy. That is where advertising comes in, but I have decided to wait a little longer. More research is required to spend any money I put toward advertising as wisely as possible. 

Author Pages

Now that I have a book live, I have set up some of my author pages. Check out the links to follow me or see my pages: 

  • Amazon: It was easy to set up at author.amazon.com once I had a book available to claim. For all my pages, I’m using the same photo and bio. I also linked my blog feed to it. I had to look up the RSS feed URL, but Amazon took a standard one with no problem. 
  • Goodreads: My book did not show in any searches, even with the ISBN and pre-order release. I had to set up the book before I could claim it to get an author page. The blog feed was NOT working for me at first on Goodreads. It did not like the standard RSS or ATOM feed URLs. I used Google’s Feedburner to resolve the issue, so the feed is now live.  
  • Bookbub (not a link yet): I have to be honest, I’m not familiar with Bookbub at all, and my author page is still pending review. They said it could take a couple of weeks. From what I have read, this is primarily for audio and ebooks. I have also heard there are some great promo options. I will have to wait to share more once I’m approved.
  • Are there any I’m missing? If you have something you use or refer to all the time for books, please comment to let me know!

Reviews

As a reader, I had no idea how critical good reviews are for newer authors. You generally understand the concept because you look at the star rating and the number of reviews when shopping. As a shopper, you fail to internalize that people who like something are less likely to write about it. An author I follow does a bonus scene on her website when she reaches 100 reviews on a new release as an incentive to review. It is a good idea, but I’m not there yet with the content I have available. 

I’m going to release ARCs to early readers in exchange for honest reviews in mid-November. I’m targeting about 2-3 weeks ahead so that people are finishing it up just before or after the book is released. Amazon does not allow reviews on ebooks ahead of the release date, which is why I’m cutting it closer. I believe that is different for paperbacks. It is also different for Goodreads. One of my beta readers liked the book enough to write a full review and post it! 

Everything is off to a great start, and I hope it continues that way. I think my ultimate goal is to get a total of fifty reviews on Hidden Memory by the time the fourth and final in the series comes out. That gives me a couple of years to drum up more reviews with each release. While daunting, I think it is an achievable goal. I guess we will see how that starts in December! For now, I’m off to research advertising!

Available for Preorder!

My book officially drops onto e-readers in just over ten weeks and is available for preorder now! I hit the submit button on Amazon this morning and was so nervous that something would go wrong. They say it can take up to 72 hours before it is live for preorder, so I was bracing for a long wait. I can’t even tell you how much I have been grinning since getting the notification that it went through just fine, but you can probably imagine. 

Before I delve into some publication sharing, I want to say thank you to everyone who helped me get this far. The interest and support of family and friends helped me push past the fear and imposter syndrome and make it to this stage. The professional support for artists, editors, and readers is crucial to realizing a vision. I tried to name all of the direct contributors in the back of the book, and I know I missed some of you. Please consider this for you as well as the additional thanks I’m sure to write when the book is published and available. 

Hitting Submit

I know there are some fellow authors following me or looking in on these, so I also want to share some of the steps I have been taking recently to get to this point. While I am not going to say the Amazon publishing tools are perfect, I have found them all relatively easy to work with. A lot of these steps I set up and started playing around with a few months ago just in case I had any issues understanding what was happening. 

First, I set up a KDP account separate from my personal Amazon account. I’m not sure exactly what might happen if I mixed them, but I made sure they were separate just in case. One that was set up, I went to my “Bookshelf” and started setting up Hidden Memory in the tool as a draft. I wanted to see how it looked and what options there were. I’m still not sure about the categories I selected, but I can adjust those by contacting Amazon later, so those are not a deal-breaker for moving forward. (They could be critical to sales, so do not discount the importance of categories.)

I also decided to use the Kindle Create tool to turn my Word doc into an ebook format. There are pros and cons to this. I will probably use it again, but I will keep in mind the limitations. 

Pros: 

  • Following the instructions, it read and formatted the file well.
  • It includes tools for frontmatter and backmatter (see this blog post for great links) which were simple and useful.
  • It allows nice preview of the document in multiple formats. 

Cons: 

  • The KPF files are not able to be used on other tools. This is impactful because I plan on using BookFunnel for ARCs (post probably next week on this). 
    • The frontmatter/backmatter does not translate.

I shifted to Calibre for BookFunnel to create a mobi. KDP no longer accepts mobi files, so it is something to keep in mind.

Once my book was published, I was able to create my Amazon author page, and I also submitted for a Goodreads author page. The latter is still pending, so TBD on how that works. My next steps are a Bookbub author page, a BookFunnel account, and gathering ARC readers to submit early reviews. I plan on getting to some paid advertising next month or closer to the release date to generate some additional interest, but I have no idea what that looks like yet. There is always something more to learn and do.

I hope you are having a great weekend. Go Sounders! Go Mariners! 

Coming Soon!

First, I have been told I should be more specific on the newsletter sign-up in relation to my blog. I have decided NOT to copy over the audience list from my blog subscribers to my newsletter. As such, if you are a subscriber here, you will need to actively sign up for my newsletter to receive it. You can do so below or on the homepage of my website.

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New Page

Now for the big news! I have released a new page on my website cleverly titled “My Books.” This has information on what is coming soon and my tentative release schedule for the rest of the series. It will evolve, with the pre-order link added in about a month when it goes live on Amazon and other changes as books are released. I am by no means a graphic or website designer, but I am pretty happy with how things are looking so far.

Check out my new page here: https://tiffanyshearn.com/my-books/

I’m at that nervous-excited stage of publication. Things are becoming more real every day, and there is so much left to do to release on time. Fortunately, the book is effectively complete. I am working on polishing front- and back-matter, but the story itself is wrapped. While it might not be perfect, all the advice I see is that at some point you have to stop polishing and release it.

I went to Fiverr to look for copy editors, and I was pleasantly surprised by how helpful everyone I spoke with about this was. Whether I went with them or not, all provided advice on the entire process of selecting editors, which was very helpful for this first-time author. They were all great communicators and answered all of my, probably repetitious for them, questions. Based on my needs, I ended up working with Maxine Meyers she had some great reviews, and I am happy with the results.

The next few weeks are going to be looking into various author pages on sites like Amazon, Goodreads, Bookbub, etc., so hopefully, the existing publication info tides you over for a bit until I have that learning to share. It will probably be random life bits for a week or two.

Three months to go! I should start a countdown!

Publication and Social Media

Before I jump into sharing the social media aspect of my publication journey, a little announcement on the book’s status: The beta reads came back with only some minor adjustments. I took care of those, and the manuscript is now off with the copy editor! I’m on schedule, and maybe even a little ahead, to have it in the hands of ARC readers with plenty of time for them to read and review for the launch. If you are interested in hearing more about ARC readers, stay with me until the end of the year. I will have a post about them as well when I get to that stage.

Today I talk about communication and brand building. When I first began this blog, I mentioned how it is because of the strong recommendation for authors to have one. Blogs are a way for an audience to know an author through more than their book writing. They also connect to the author’s website and can provide a solid base of communication. That was my goal with this blog. I started it well in advance of my launch, intending to publish weekly, so I had an online presence should a reader come looking for me. 

Now I’m a little more than three months out from my intended launch date, and I expect the preorder link to be available sometime in October. The last couple of weeks have been all about communication planning. How do I cast a wide net? How do I capture my audience? How do I offer versatility to my audience’s preferences? What do I respond to? How do I respond when it is going to be just me doing this for quite some time?

First, I looked at building what I am calling “passive contacts.” These are the follows on various social media platforms where people may or may not see my posts in their feeds. I took a look at websites for some of the authors I read to see what platforms they used. Based on that information for guidance, I decided on adding Instagram and Twitter to my existing Facebook presence. This is how I am describing my presence on these platforms: 

  • Website: This is my website, including my blog. You can sign up to receive blog notifications either with a WordPress account or simply with email. Blog posts are short, weekly musings about what is going on in my life, ranging from family, to writing, to D&D games. Few of these posts, if any, will be included in the newsletters.
  • Twitter: My posts will primarily be sharing blog posts, so you can follow the blog through this source instead of the website if you prefer. There will also be some soccer or family tweets in there as well.
  • Facebook: My Facebook page will primarily include brief progress posts and some blog sharing. There will also be some Facebook exclusive events with giveaway raffles. 
  • Instagram: This will primarily be pictures of me, my cats, Seattle Sounders games, and book cover images as they come out. 

“What is this ‘newsletter’ to which you refer in the descriptions?” you ask? Well, that is the part I am calling “active contacts” and starting to build out now. I now have a MailChimp account and will be sending out newsletters! This is one of the best ways to keep an audience because you are directly telling them about a new release or work-in-progress rather than relying on a news feed in an app. I am still working another job, and I need time to actually write the books, so I’m only planning quarterly newsletters with a few extras if there are special events. 

I don’t know how this is going to work exactly just yet, as I only made the newsletter sign-up live on my site last night. At the moment of writing this, I am my only audience member. New audience members SHOULD get an automatic welcome email. I’m crossing my fingers that I set up the automation correctly. There is going to be some learning along the way, so I hope my early subscribers find errors humorous and enjoy the process with me. 

If you are curious about any of this and want to follow me on any of these platforms, I have included links to them all above in this post, and they are the icons at the bottom of my website pages as well. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you are back next week as well for an exciting reveal of the new page I am adding to my website!