This post started as just a placeholder for some of my marketing bits and pieces, but then the urge to write something about it struck again.
When you set out on your journey to write the book you’ve always had in you – it all seems so simple – just pick up a pen and tell your story. What you don’t realise at this stage is all the other stuff you are going to have to learn if you want it to look reasonably professional – and heaven preserve us – all the marketing work to put it – out there.
You find yourself scrabbling around the internet to learn about structural editing, copy editing, formatting – all the while wondering where this or that is on the Word document menus – and then you realise that all the answers are different for the various versions of the program.
Eventually, you complete something which looks like a finished manuscript, but there is still much to do. If you haven’t got money to burn, you’ve already got this far on a DIY approach, and this has now become a personal challenge not to let anything else stand in your way to publication.
Now it’s cover design, and that means photoshop. If you thought some aspects of Word are obscure, then try just having a go at photoshop. You either give up inside the first hour or spend days trawling through YouTube videos before you get remotely near a cover that you like.
By now, you’ve watched all the experts on YouTube informing you that you should give up now, as nobody will ever buy a self-published novel unless you pay hundreds of pounds on editors, proofreaders, beta readers and anything else you can think of. All these self-help gurus are doing to you at this point is stating that either you’ll speculate to accumulate – leaving you a mountain of debt on the project to recoup first – or, publish your novel, without using their help but don’t expect to sell any. I made the decision that if I didn’t invest much then, I wouldn’t have to recoup much, thereby the chances of making a profit would be much higher. The self-help experts who want your money, work on turning your own dreams against you, by inferring that you are doomed to fail without investment. Having said all that, there is plenty of help and advice out there from fellow authors and self-publishers.
What happens when you give up the part of your inner writer that wants to make millions is that you become free. The pressure is off, and you become absorbed in the act of creating – and finishing – something. To somebody who becomes over-enthusiastic, about anything – this makes me very happy, and endows me with a can-do attitude. Just as well, seeing as I started writing the New Reform Quartet in 2014, finished the last book in 2018 and now it’s halfway through 2020, and I’ve only just released the third book in the series, With Two Eyes. It’s all of the above that has added all that extra time to the project.
I wrote an earlier blog on producing my own audiobooks previously, called ‘Why Audiobooks?’ What I didn’t mention, was the cost to me if I had handed my books over to a narrator/producer to do it for me.
To choose a narrator via Audible, it would cost £100 per hour for a novice narrator, £200+ for an experienced one. Maybe, that doesn’t sound a lot, but all four of my novels, would end up being around 45 hours in length – I’m sorry, but I haven’t got a spare £4500 – £9000 to spend.
So, I did it myself. It was a business decision, to a certain extent, like those management tasks they would play on the Apprentice show. Do you gamble to make sales higher than your costs – or do you keep your costs minimal, thereby almost guaranteeing a profit? As it happens, my most profitable areas have been my audiobooks – not enough to give up the day job – so – I didn’t give up the day job!
Here are my audiobook samples that I have promoted on Facebook audiobook pages and on my Amazon author pages. Fortunately, I already knew how to put YouTube videos together!
There are several themes and threads through the four books, one of them is the use of all the song titles which were performed by some of our very fine local musicians from the Hereford & Worcester areas, as chapter headings.
This idea came from my love of Frank Zappa’s music. He had his Conceptual Continuity Clues through all of his 70+ LPs, where each would have a lyric or musical motif from a previous album. Therefore, I wanted all the works from the video project from the 142 Sessions to be included in these books.
On a previous blog, ‘Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas From?’ I went into exhaustive detail on the birth of the 142 obsession.
The other route left to me was to try and get an agent, to save me from all this work. I did try it. I wrote to eight agents, I didn’t receive a reply from three of them, but the other five all sent me encouraging responses, but ultimately, they were rejections, nonetheless.
There are lots of excellent reasons to write a book. When you’re creating something, it keeps your mind firing with positivity. When you complete a book, it gives a fabulous feeling of job satisfaction, because it’s hard writing all of those words and completing the editing, cover design and marketing your work. There is a sense of legacy as well, in this day and age, your words and your voice – in the case of audiobooks – are something that your grandchildren (as long as they are over eighteen) can access, long after you’ve started your story in the next world.
Jim Lowe Writing 
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