BONUS CHAPTER

The Publishing Community and Useful Resources for you to use.

 

When I started writing seriously it was 1995. I had always dreamt of one day becoming a writer.

In 1995 there was no Social Media. PCs and Laptops were still a novelty, and getting Internet Access was something everyone wanted for Christmas, including adults.

In those days the only way to become a published writer was by writing a great book, finding a Literary Agent who loved your writing, and then keeping your fingers crossed that the agent would find a publisher who loved your book as much as they did.

A lot of love was involved.

The reality was that the odds were heavily stacked against you.

Today, that’s all changed.

I would say that the big reason that this has happened is because the Internet has enabled new technology to become more accessible to everyone and has been able to connect whole communities of people together, all who share similar interests or skills.

Better technology is begetting greater, newer technology.

Thanks to this new technology the world of publishing has been revolutionised.

The Indie Revolution has come a long way since 2007 when Amazon launched its new services for authors and readers. Since then, so many authors have taken advantage of the opportunities for self-publishing now available, that whole communities have evolved around individual components of the digital publishing revolution.

Writers no longer need to sit in a dirty, damp garret to churn out a novel alone and with a constant, bad cough.

Instead, they can sit in their favourite coffee shop, take advantage of free Wi-Fi, and talk to other authors all round the world, drawing succour and support from them whenever its needed.

The Indie Revolution has also spawned many new millionaires who have cracked the secret codes of the self-publishing world which has evolved in recent years. Many of these Indie Masters have now put together websites and commercial training courses which seek to teach new would-be Indies how to feel the Indie Force, and turn us all into Indie Jedi Masters.

When I started out, they weren’t available.

When you start out, they will be.

The authors of these courses are not doing this for free. Occasionally they do offer portions of their courses, or samples of their resources, for free, so even if you do not sign up to them initially, it’s really worthwhile subscribing to their email lists and monitoring what offers they give you.

I would like to suggest three of these to you, not because I endorse them, but because of all the courses and resources available, I monitor them to see if I can ever find anything of interest within their offers.

Due to the fact I have been in this game for so long, I already know a lot of this information already, but some of the tools which they produce can not only be very useful, but the information they provide can short-cut years of self-learning. In that respect, it may be worthwhile paying the price of some of the courses they may offer, simply because you can learn so much quicker and save months trying to learn by yourself.

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TOOLS TO HELP AUTHORS WRITE BOOKS AND THEN ADVERTISE THEM

 

The first of these is AUTHORLABS. The founder CJ McDaniel has spent the past few years building up a suite of tools that offer significant value to a new author starting out. You can also get a free 14-day trial of the AUTHORLAB environment where all these tools are made available to authors.

 

To view what’s available, find the free trial or sign up to the subscription list, type the link below into your browser:

 

https://www.adazing.com/tools-we-use/

 

Take the time to investigate these tools. As a new author you will find them very useful!

You might be interested to know that I designed the front cover of this book with their software! 

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TOOLS TO HELP AUTHORS GROW THEIR OWN EMAIL CONTACT LIST

 

Nick Stephenson is the owner of a course that teaches people how to create and grow a contact list of readers.

 

For more information please visit

https://www.yourfirst10kreaders.com/

When you sign up to Nick’s email list, he will regularly send you emails with supportive ideas on how to grow your business as an Indie Author. The central idea which he proposes and can help you with, is in instructing you how to build your own independent email subscription list.

Building your own email list so that you can contact readers who have read your book and enjoyed your work, is INCREDIBLY important for authors.

To put this in perspective, I have had over 2 MILLION people download my books from Amazon. The Amazon system has their email addresses and can contact them with special offers.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if when you write a second or third novel that you could send an email to readers who enjoyed your first book and tell them about your new book?

Imagine if I had the email addresses of all the 2 million people who had downloaded my books! When I launched a new book, I could email them and even if only 5% of those who opened up my email then bought my book, it would instantly go to the top of the book charts!

Sadly, I never thought about this as a new author. I only started paying attention to this in earnest last year.

Nick Stephenson has a course that will help you grown your email subscription list to 10,000 readers.

After a year, I now have 11,000 readers. It’s not quite 2 million, but it’s a start.

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MARK DAWSON and the ‘Self Publishing Formula’

For me, most of my writing career has been a very lonely experience. Not quite sitting in a dark Parisian attic, with water dripping off the ceiling and only able to work from the light of a small, smelly candle, but it has been lonely!

It was only very recently that I started getting encouragement from anyone in the literary world (my agent!), I only knew one other author, and until then I only continued to write because of the fan mail I received and my inner motivation and my dream of one day becoming ‘successful’.

Today that’s all different.

First, thanks to Amazon it’s easy to contact other authors – you just go to their Author Page, find their contact details and mostly just email or tweet them!

Second, Social Media has lots of author and reader groups which you can join.

Third, for a price, often not huge, you can join author communities run by other authors who having had significant success from self-publishing, are now keen to share (and market!) their success with others.

Probably the most significant of these is a community established by Mark Dawson, himself a successful author and now an entrepreneur who is helping drive the Self-Publishing revolution and providing many useful resources to help authors succeed.

To find out what’s available, please visit:

 

https://selfpublishingformula.com/

I would suggest you subscribe to the emails and listen to or read the text of the weekly podcasts.

Mark does a brilliant job of bringing in the experiences of other authors into the community and helping share them with everyone else.

There is certainly a lot to learn without every purchasing any of the varied courses that he offers, and you can watch the weekly podcasts on video for free!

In particular, you may wish to consider the SELF PUBLISHING 101 Course. It teaches you a lot about how to self-publish on Amazon, including showing you all the details of how to put your books on Amazon and earn revenue from them!

Once your book is published, you may start to consider advertising, and Mark Dawson’s course excels at explaining everything you may need to know about advertising on Amazon, Social Media or BookBub, which is one of the largest email advertising platforms available.

Books on Writing

 There are hundreds of books out there which teach people how to write. I suppose that this book has just added to their number! Whereas this book has focussed on several practical aspects of writing and majored on how to generate internal motivation that helps you achieve your dream, other books focus on different themes which you may also find of interest.

Books which have helped me in my writer’s journey include:

The Writer’s Handbook

• Writer’s and Artists’ Yearbook
• Grammar for Grown-Ups by Craig Shrives
• From Pitch to Publication by Carol Blake
• Solutions for Novelists: Secrets of a Master Editor by Sol Stein

 

I whole heartedly endorse these books and suggest you get them soon!

 

If you have any comments, please contact the author at :-

iancpirvine@hotmail.co.uk

To get my free ebooks, please visit:

http://www.free-ebook.co.uk

To keep up to date with other news, events and ebook releases, please visit the website at: www.iancpirvine.com