Double Whoopee! Just 10 Days!

Last week I announced that Prayer Wasn’t Enough, my convent memoir, will be available from Amazon on Wednesday, March 21. That date was seventeen days away last Sunday. Today, it’s just ten! O ye jigs and julips! I’m both excited and a wee bit apprehensive.

Excited to share with readers a time in my life when I was so immature—both emotionally and spiritually—that I made perfection my goal. The failure to achieve it became my Waterloo.

Apprehensive because reaching an audience interested in this coming-of-age memoir is no easy task. Why? Because I’m self-publishing it. So no big New York publisher will be pushing the book via ads and reps in the field.

Today I’d like to share with you some things I’ve learned about self-publishing. Some of you will publish in the future, and you may choose this same route. If I can make self-publishing easier for you, I want to do so.  

Let’s begin: A number of companies now do print-on-demand publishing. That is, you simply submit your manuscript, and when someone wants to read it, the company prints it.

The most well-known of these sites is CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon. The company provides a range of services, all of which are listed quite clearly on its website. Because I am technologically so inept, I asked my oldest niece to use the site to publish Prayer Wasn’t Enough.

Because we wanted to keep the project within my financial means, my niece decided not to use all the options offered by CreateSpace—from formatting to the application of an ISBN. What she then needed from me was the following:

·      the line-edited and copy-edited manuscript

·      a book cover—front and back

·      any advance praise—from first readers and published writers—that I had for the memoir

·      the credits for anything I quoted within the book

·      the dedication

·      the epigraph

·      the table of contents

·      the list of other books I’ve had published

·      a brief bio

·      the acknowledgments

·      my social media outlets

·      a self-photograph

My niece and I both read three books that proved helpful in understanding the self-publishing tasks. She became responsible for the actual publication of the memoir; I took on the responsibility of promoting it. The three books that helped us understand our roles were the following:

1.     CreateSpace & Kindle Self-Publishing Masterclass (latest edition) by Rick Smith.

2.     How to Publish Your Book by Jane Friedman, who also has a fine website about all this.

3.     How to Market a Book (third edition) by Joanna Penn.

Of course, many other fine books on writing and self-publishing are available. These just happen to be the three we used. In addition, my niece goggled many subjects necessary to self-publishing. For example: the cost of an ISBN for the copyright page for both a paper and an ebook; the cost of barcodes; how to copyright the memoir; how to get a Library of Congress listing for the ISBN page; how to lay out the book in the right order of contents.

All this seemed formidable to me. That’s why I asked my niece to partner with me on this. She is technologically savvy, has a younger brain than I, and has mastered the vocabulary of technology.

Once the paper book is formatted on CreateSpace—the company we used—the book is then ready to be uploaded on Kindle, which is another subsidiary of Amazon. Thus, the paper book becomes an ebook available on Amazon.

I can see that I need another posting to finish explaining all this. Would you like me to continue next week? Or is there something else about all this you’d like me to share?

Peace.