Award-winning author Andrew Diamond has done a huge favor for all new and would-be indie authors by creating a jewel (yes, weak pun intended) of a new website, A Practical Guide to Self-Publishing. Andrew is a software developer and the author of seven outstanding indie novels. Learn more about him here.
One of the most common comments I hear from people when they learn I write novels is, “It’s always been my dream to do that.” My response is always the same, “Go for it. You can do it!” I’m a big believer in following your dreams—not just dreaming about them. Time will pass you by in a hurry. A common response to my encouragement is, “I wouldn’t have any idea how to start.”
I know other people who have gone beyond dreaming and already written a novel—then let it sit in a drawer gathering dust. Maybe they tried to land a literary agent, but gave up that pursuit for the much easier challenge of searching for needles in haystacks. (One writer puts the odds of landing an agent for your book at 1 in 6,000, and that’s not including the additional odds that the agent will actually be able to land you a book deal.) When I mention self-publishing to these folks, their lament is the same. “I wouldn’t have any idea how to start.”
That or they think of self-publishing in pejorative terms. To many people unfamiliar with modern book publishing, self-publishing (often called “indie publishing”) evokes images of the “vanity presses” of yore, presses that would publish any book submitted to them if the author was willing to pay for it. Most of these books ended up stacked in garages gathering mold. With the advent of platforms such as Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing, which offers both Kindle and hard copy publishing services via the world’s largest bookseller), self-publishing has advanced light years from those days. As Tucker Max of Scribe writes, self-publishing is the obvious choice for 97% of authors in 2022. Amazon published 1.4 million self-published titles in 2018 alone, an annual figure that has likely increased since then.
Author Andrew Diamond
Which brings me back to Andrew’s new website. If you do some web-searching, it won’t take long to come across hundreds of excellent blog posts covering aspects of self-publishing. The beauty of Andrew’s new site is that he puts everything together in one place. It’s based on the lessons he has learned from his experiences publishing seven novels. A Practical Guide to Self-Publishing is an A to Z one-stop shop to guide authors through the entire self-publishing process.
The site is new and more content will be added, but you can get a good idea of its comprehensiveness by taking a look at the site menu:
Production
Production
Editing
Design
Publishing and Distribution
PDF-X
E-book Conversion
ISBNs
Printing
Audio Books
Marketing
Marketing
Basic Marketing Copy
Your Book Page
Author Websites
Paid Promotional Sites
Review Sites
Distributing Free Copies
Advertising
Bookstores
Direct Book Distribution
Resources
Images
Editorial Reviews
Reader Reviews
Promo Sites
Publicity and Marketing
Contests and Awards
Social Sites for Readers and Writers
Author Forums
Finding Traditional Agents and Publishers
Resources for Prisoners
Checklists
Case Study
Many people mistakenly think that the publishing a book is the hardest part, when, although it does involve a large amount of work, it is actually the easiest. Most indie authors, including me, would probably agree that marketing is the hardest and least-fun part of being an indie or even a traditional author. A new author recently contacted me about one of my books and lamented that he made the serious error of thinking, “If I can just get it published, they [readers] will come.” If only that were true.
With more than a million new self-published titles each year, on top of the titles published by traditional publishers, it’s impossible to stand out in the crowd without making serious marketing efforts. A few years ago, Andrew was generous enough to share with me his Marketing Plan for his award-winning Gate 76. Reading it was like being given a key to the inside world of modern indie book marketing strategies. Now he’s offering it for free, along with loads of other resources, on this ad-free website!
If you’re a new or would-be indie author, bookmark Diamond’s gem (couldn’t resist) and visit it regularly. Even experienced indie authors can learn a lot from A Practical Guide to Self-Publishing.