Self-Publishing

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of interviews, and this is continuing part two of Interviews with Dale L. Roberts, a self-publishing expert and all-around guru and interesting guy to talk to as well. We started off getting some background and talking about basically getting started on self-publishing your first book. This episode we're going to pick right up there, talk about your audience, and really get into the first baby steps essentially, or the setup steps for self-publishing, for creating a book. Then we'll get deeper into that in future episodes, but this time we're really going to focus on the what do I do to get started to publish my first book. With that, let's get back to our conversation with Dale. Yeah, when you get to that level of marketing too, I think anybody that's played around with it even a little bit realizes that your money gets much more wisely spent when you're talking to people that at some point were thinking about buying your product or would consider it versus spending money to go notify people that have no interest whatsoever in whatever your product is and just wasting their time and your money trying to let them know that, hey, there's this great book out there that you're never going to want to read anyway. So it's much better to get that niche. Yeah, it's well put. It's going to seem defeating at first to a lot of people that may be new to this type of business as an online entrepreneur. You're going to be like, but I want to cater to everyone because that means I'll make more money. But honestly, when you try to please everyone, you're going to please no one in the process. So just know who you are working with, whether you're trying to get into writing or publishing, or you try to start up your own podcast or any type of online business, get good on who you're speaking to. Because here's the thing is you're going to see your payouts, your finances reflect exactly the audience that you're catering to, that you are helping serve and being of service to. I found that the longer I've been in this, the more that I tried to contribute towards this business, the more it pays me in the long term. Yeah, that's it very much goes back to a conversation I regularly have because I've got just I don't have near as many books. I've got three out with very different target audiences. One is more of a family autobiography or biographical type book. And then I've got a couple that are technology. And there's a lot of times that people in a conversation, hey, I've written a book or two, a couple of books. Let's say, oh, well, you know, what are they about? And depending on who I'm talking to, as I'll mention one or two of them and then say, and the others are things you'd never be interested in. Just sort of like gloss over them because it's there's just no purpose in it. It's one of those things that just doesn't apply to them. Yeah, by the way, for four books, by the way, that's that's stellar. That's really awesome. I think a lot of times when I get to talking with people, they hear how many books I've published over the years and they're like, oh, my gosh, I feel like I'm being lazy. No, no, not by any stretch. I think you've heard about this before, Rob, and maybe some of your listeners can appreciate this. The 80 20 rule. There is going to be 20 percent of the stuff that you put out that bring in 80 percent of the results that you're looking for and vice versa. Eighty percent of the stuff is only going to bring you in 20 percent of the results. And though I have a huge catalog of books, only about 20 percent of them perform the best and actually drive some type of results for my business. So I'm very realistic in looking at that. So kudos to you on four publications. That's really good. That's that's awesome. We actually talk about the 80 20 rule regularly. So that's it's awesome that that applies to show once again, it applies in yet another another instance and another industry. Yeah, absolutely. And the more times that you're at bat, the more times that you can either, a, make a connection with that ball and hit it or B, you swing and you miss. And though I could sit here and like boast like I've got 51 publications, the fact of the matter is like I probably have a batting average, you know, that's not all that great. You know, you look over something like baseball and I think a lot of greats like Hall of Fame legends have like a what a 300 batting average. Like it's nothing huge. You would think, oh, man, this person's Hall of Fame. They probably like hit like nine out of 10 balls. Not necessarily. But, you know, that's the thing is just get step up to the plate, swing away and you'll never know if you're going to be successful at something unless you actually do it. Exactly. You got to get out there and give it a try. So that leads us into another good question, particularly as you go back to that idea of being a loose fire hose just spraying all over the place. Yeah. So for somebody coming in, what would be some recommendations you have or sort of some first steps to do self publishing to maybe try to avoid that that fire hose effect? We you and I covered this extensively already with just dialing in your audience. Get good on who it is that your audience is. Study the nation which you plan to publish in or write in because success leaves bread crumbs for others to follow in their footsteps. So if you're, for instance, getting into I don't know, let me throw out here. Where Bear Shapeshifter Romance is one of my favorite ones. I usually pull up. Let's say that you're into writing where Bear Shapeshifter Romance books. Study those, read them, join newsletters, find out what that author is doing that makes them successful. Do a little bit of recon because it's going to make your life a little bit easier when you put pen to paper or hit that first keystroke to your manuscript. Now, the most important thing of all, don't worry about anything else until you actually written it. Sit down and just put pen to paper and let flow of thought go. Just just keep running on and just do it until you're done. I could sit here and talk exhaustively about the whole process. Outline the book, do your research, cite your sources, you know, get some beta readers. But all that means nothing if you don't have something that you can at least measure how well you're doing because, you know, no one's going to sell a single book from inside their head. They've got to get it out of their head and onto a manuscript. So that's the most important step. I can't tell you how many times people reach out to me and they're wanting to pay for me to consult. And I say to them, OK, what have you written so far? Oh, nothing. I had this idea, though. I've been I've been thinking about it for like the last like 10 years. Great. That's awesome. Start writing it. That's the most important thing. Get that out of the way. Write the book first and everything else will fall into place. Now, as far as getting that first step into actual self publishing, there's many steps you've got to do in between, because as soon as you get that first draft done and first thing I'm to say this, you heard me already say this, my first book was my worst book. Your first draft will always be your worst draft. Be OK with that. There's a lot of people that they get stymied and held up by this inner editor in their head. They start to write a sentence. Oh, that sounds like garbage. Let me do that one over. Or they write an entire page. Oh, I'm going to start this over. Just put your inner editor, you know, your inner editors furlough. Put it put them off to the side. He's no longer needed right now. What you got to focus on is just getting it done. As soon as you have it done. Great. Now we've got to go through and edit this puppy. Now, I'm not telling you just go through and you Microsoft Word to clean up any of your spelling and grammar. That's great. That's awesome. But you're actually going to need to reach out to professional that can edit your manuscript and bring out the best in you, because otherwise it's kind of like, for instance, you could be showroom ready and look like a brand new Honda Fit, one of my favorite cars, or you could look like some beat up, broke down, you know, Pinto that's got rust spots all over it. And though you might be proud of that car and I got you for point A to point B, not too many people are going to stop and admire your Pinto. So you got to get an editor so that way they can refine your voice and get it to where you're communicating in a way that your reader wants. And actually, this is just what they need to read your entire manuscript, as opposed to getting the first page in and going, oh, my gosh, this is horrible. I don't know why it's horrible. There's a couple typos. But beyond that, I just, and then they're ready to kind of piece out. But you're going to edit that and you're going to probably go through a few rounds of this with a professional editor and then your manuscripts done for now, because then you got to go through formatting and then you got to find different distribution avenues that make the most sense for you. Commonplace, I always send people to Kindle Direct Publishing because Amazon runs it and they have pretty much and I'm sorry, I got to be anecdotal on this one. Sixty percent. You'll have to just Google that one. Sixty percent of online global publication profits. They are. They are the big dog here. But in the event that you hate Amazon, there's so many other avenues between Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play Books. There's so many options out there. And getting that distribution Avenue is going to make the difference in you. For instance, writing a book that just you and a couple of family and friends know about, or the entire world knowing about it. So that leads well into the next question I had is. So across all of these platforms and just full disclosure kind of thing is that's, I was originally a create space person and then converted over to KDP when they converted that over. Do you miss it as much as I do? I actually enjoy it. Yeah, I did enjoy it quite a bit. There's some stuff that there's some nice things that KDP has added along the way. Or they've changed things, but there was just something very comfortable, I guess, about the create space process. It made the whole thing just feel very good for me. I wasn't sure how much of that was just me finally scratching an inch to write and how much of it was just it laid it out very well. It made it very simple. I understood what was asked was being asked for. It seemed to cross the T's and dot the I's that I needed to. So I really enjoyed the platform and everything advances and moves on and things like that. And there is a lot of support I see that Amazon gives to the, obviously to the Kindle platform and all the stuff that they've got and the marketing programs and all that stuff they've got built into it. But it was a, that was a great tool. I'm really glad that I was able to take advantage of it while it existed. Yeah. Yeah. It was a beautiful user interface. I echo a lot of your sentiment and I think there were some of the things when they had merged create space with Kindle Direct Publishing, we lost some of those really cool features. Like if you want to order an author proof, you didn't have a watermark on it. You could, it was like a legit book, but now if you order a proof copy, they send this giant watermark on it, not for resale, even though you're spending the same amount of money as if you were to buy a wholesale copy. Yeah. I kept, I mean, that was, that was nice because there are a couple that I could, you know, the basically my initial proofs, they were sort of a, you know, there's a nice little thing. I'm not going to sell it, but you know, you can give it out to people and it doesn't have a big mark on it or something like that. So they got it. They can see sort of a, a little bit of the evolution of the, uh, the formatting and publishing process where I'm, cause I had specifically had to adjust some stuff because it was like just on the border initially that it was a, instead of a flat back, it was more like a, it was like the rounded back, it was, it wasn't a huge number of pages, but I wanted to have enough that I had an actual spine and so I made some adjustments to it, things like that. And it, it made the whole book look different, you know, going, basically went from the idea of a sort of an ebook looking thing, you know, that kind of, or more of a pamphlet kind of look that to a full book, which is always, you know, it's kind of stuff that's neat to see the history of those kinds of things. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I'm sorry. I got totally off track because we started talking about CreateSpace. What was the question? I was just about to repeat it because I had to remind myself, uh, what's with the, you mentioned several of the platforms out there. Yeah. What is, I guess, too, it's sort of a part A and a part B is where do you, what do you see the best platform and maybe two parts of that one? Cause it sounds like, you know, you sort of mentioned KDP. Well, you mentioned KDP is huge. So if you want, yeah, size, it sounds like that's sort of the place you need to go. But maybe if there's one, that's a better experience. And then the, uh, the part B to that was, I don't know what I was going to have for my part B. Uh, let's see. Oh, it is it. Does it make sense maybe to have to use more than, or is it something where you would focus on one platform, do it all and, and sort of go with that one? Or is there a value in maybe essentially using a couple of platforms? This I'm glad you asked this. This is really good that we kind of broke into this. So if you happen to be new to the business itself publishing, I want to tell you that it's, it's a whole new world. You're going to come in and learn a lot of different language that you wouldn't otherwise know. Um, being an insider, I've been doing this for quite a few years. I'm just immersed in this. So I sometimes rattle off some stuff and people are like, what the heck are you talking about? The path of least resistance for any newbie author is going to be Amazon's Kindle direct publishing it's free to publish, but you, in order to publish on there, you do what's called a revenue share model, essentially Amazon's going to collect a certain percentage of every sale and you get the other percentage of that sale, uh, otherwise known as a royalty. So that, that revenue share is kind of a nice model. They've, they've got pretty good competitive rates versus the other ones. But Amazon KDP is going to be the path of least resistance for many reasons. The fact that there's more podcasts, YouTube channels, blog posts, and websites that you can find any number of information about how to break onto that KDP platform. Heck, even KDP has their own course called jumpstart that people can get a hundred percent free and they can learn how to do eBooks and print books. It's pretty cool. But let's just say, for instance, though, you're like, I don't just want to be on Amazon's platform. I want to be elsewhere. I 99% of the time will tell people if you're a newbie author, stay with KDP for at least a few months. So you can get used to the process of how this works of uploading, getting the keywords, selecting categories, promoting it and such like that. That way you get your feet wet. I I'm not the type of person that's going to go, okay, we're going to go to an Olympic pool and even though you don't know how to swim, I'm going to get you to jump off that high rise over there. Yeah, don't sweat it. You'll be fine. I believe that you should go into the shallow end of the pool and work your way out slowly. So that way you're aren't overwhelmed. And that's our little cliffhanger is we're going to dive into next episode, talking about really getting into those multiple platforms, talk about what they provide and how to progress from just getting it written, which we've focused on this episode and getting to that first, that first steps of publishing. And then how do you progress from there? So we're going to continue this conversation with him as always. I hope you're as an entertained listening as I was listening and discussing things with him, if you have any questions, you can always shoot an email to info at developer nor.com or you can check the show notes. This one in particular, I would take a look at because we're going to have some extra links for some of those publishing sites that are come up this episode and next episode that we'll be talking about. So you can browse those. I think all of them, I'll double check at some point here, but they all have, I think, free sign in so you can get started for nothing, zero cost, which in itself may be a nice little experience is just go take a little bit of time, sign up for one or two of these and see what it looks like. Get an idea for what kinds of things, what kinds of content they're going to ask for and sort of guide you through, not to mention some of those wizards that they're going to have available to help you in the process, the publishing process and even the sort of the whole process, the writing, the editing, proofs, all of that stuff, very useful information to have just so you have a little bit of grasp of what the publishing process is like. That being said, we'll let you get back to publishing, whatever it is you do on a daily basis and as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress, so let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go, Developer Noir podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better, but if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernoir.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.