Making Self-Publishing Success By Khurshid Alam

Making Self-Publishing Success

By Khurshid Alam

Self-publishing is without doubt a most readily available means of getting published today and brings a great hope to the aspiring writers. If you are an amateur writer and want to get a break through faster, self-publishing fulfils your dream.

But self-publishing writers should behave more like entrepreneurs than backroom boys. You must have a good plan to promote your book in all manners, much like your publisher.

Get Your Manuscript Edited

Your manuscript is not the holy tenet. So prune it as much as possible to make the information accurate, complete and reliable. Do thorough researches on the topic that you deal, tighten your plot and refine your characters, have the most befitting climax, and above all organize your content.

Get your manuscript edited by professional editors before you go for publishing. Write a few lines in the foreword that your book has been well-edited to establish credibility.

Enhance Credibility

Self-publishing writers own high responsibility to their work as they are basically the sole owners of their titles. There are many factors that the writers should attend; possible spelling and grammatical errors including typos, wrong information, and plagiarism threats. Ensure that you have the rights to use the pictures, images, names of characters and places, and other details. Add a note of disclaimer.

Reach to Audience

The first thing in your plan should be to target your audience. Do research on your target readers, understand their requirement, the craft of writing they may love, understand the mediums they are more attracted to or use, and the platforms where they are available.

For example, if you’ve written a romance fiction, the language should be mature, direct and refined. Create a page on social networking sites and create a group of writers and readers, share excerpts from your book and invite comments from them, encourage them to ask you questions and answer them.

Attend to Packaging

Ensure that book covers, layout, print quality are relevant to the concept that your book deals with and are of the best quality. You might have heard the idiom, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. But post Internet, the concept has changed. The cover is a window to the core of the concept in your book. To put it straight I would give you an example. You want to read memoirs. Type this keyword on the Google search you will see hundreds of titles on the genre. How would you judge which book you would buy? Most probably, the smartly crafted title and finest cover designs will attract you.

Get Your Book Reviewed

Get blurb written on your titles. Get your book reviewed by some writers. Share blurbs and review on social networking sites and manage them get published with literary journal, magazine or newspaper. They help in boosting promotion.

Promote Your Book

Getting a book published is not the end of the story but it is the beginning. Take out time and spend money on promoting your book. In an age where hundreds of titles come out each month, it is important that your book gets the due flash in the limelight. There are various means available for promoting your book. Get a flyer designed, post ads on literary journals, buy ads of Facebook, Google Adwords, and other ads programs.

Participate in Lit Awards

There are many small to big literary prizes run by various literary organizations. Participate in them. Though most of them charge a reading fee, do not keep away. Participating in such literary prizes does not simply mean mere involvement; you get wider penetration and may get feedback that would definitely benefit you in your later venture.

Khurshid Alam is Lead – Technical Writing with an IT company based in Pune, India. Besides, he writes poetry, stories, flash fiction, essays, criticism, screenplay and on life and culture.

Get Your Book Reviewed by Contemporary Literary Review India — journal that brings articulate writings for articulate readers. CLRI prides itself to have a good number of review writers. We have different review writers for books of different genres. Our reviews are gaining recognition among the publishers, journals and academia for fair and high quality reviews.