Wow, Have I Learned A Lot About Publishing

… and yet, I know nothing.

I haven’t even learned all the ways there are not to publish a book, but I now have at least a general idea of what I’m doing.  I can tell you this much, publishers and agents really do earn their pay.  There is a lot to know, and a lot to know to avoid.

For one thing, you can’t launch your book without both TikTok and Instagram.  It’s harder to get traction on Instagram, but at least it’s mostly free of scammers trying to sell you author’s services.  Apparently this is a thing on TikTok.  You’ll get a pile of followers quickly, and that really does help, regardless.  However, some non-zero percentage of these people are folks trying to sell you book trailer or fake reviews for your book, neither of which helps you, and both of which will drain your bank account with little to show for it.

The clue, by the way, that you’re talking to a scammer is the number after their name.  If they have under a hundred followers, they are very probably not a fellow author. I hadn’t known this when I started out, and got buttonholed by one female author who got me talking about my book, then offered to sell me fake reviews. I told her to shove off.  A week later, she contacts me again, under the same login-name but with a different number at the end. What I think is happening is that this author, who looks legit when you look her up online, is actually being spoofed by an illicit organization that uses her name and likeness, and by accident they’ll contact the same potential clients, thereby giving up the game because the second one doesn’t know what the first one talked about with you and repeats the same lame sales pitch.

I also found out that there are a bunch of book review services that are used by bookstores and libraries, but that nearly all of them want to review the book three months prior to press time.  If you’re self-publishing, you don’t have three months.  The time between a final draft and publication might be as little as one week.

In the world of publishing, things move at glacial speeds. For a major publisher, a three month delay is nothing. For a small press or an independent author, though, that’s a fiscal quarter. Nobody can sit around on a book that long, it’s financial suicide.  For the next book I’ll add that into the marketing and distribution plan, but that obviously isn’t happening for Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere.

The most cost effective way of getting reviews for your book is through either Goodreads, or through Booksprout. Booksprout lets you substitute cash for the social elbow grease you have to apply to make Goodreads work for you, but it seems to me that Goodreads is probably the better long term plan. It has a social environment Booksprout doesn’t appear to have. and it’s vastly vastly cheaper. Either way, building a mailing list is essential, even a small one will perform better and do you more good than no mailing list at all.  I think failure to do this is why so many indie books fail.

I’ve also encountered something interesting.  Apparently an average review of 3.5 stars out of 5 is considered decent. I’m having a hard time with this idea.  My review ratio is more like 4.75 stars out of 5.  My writing style has been compared to those of Neil Gaiman (I know, I know, but remember him as a writer, not a human being with questionable personal values), T. Kingfisher, Terry Pratchett, Lewis Carrol, J.R.R. Tolkien, and L. Frank Baum. Once I step outside my protective bubble of my personal advance review list, I might do more poorly, but people don’t tend to make those specific kinds of remarks unless they mean them. When you say things on the internet, they tend to stick around.

Anyway, the point being that that fellow I found with a 3.5 stars out of 5 review average seems to be selling very well. I’m hopeful that this speaks well of my own potential.

Of course I’m scared to death that it’s all a data mirage, and that I’ve been basing my research on people who were either lying or didn’t have a clue themselves, or both.  There’ll be no way to know until release day.

And now we wait.

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