Three Important Points On Publishing a Book I Have Learned

I know that I need to make some changes to my next book, and I believe that my editor agrees with me on that front.  I’ve learned a lot of things by even publishing a book where the sales are still going steady and I am able to head into one of the best times, marketing-wise, to sell my book.

The key to publishing a good book is editing, and it would take a lot of words to cover how important that is.  There are many great books about editing out there, so choose a few that will serve your needs.

However if editing is done well and you’ve moved on to the next step, I will say that point one is the most important:  marketing or promotion of that book.  There is a fine line between overly promoting it and not doing enough at all.  The necessity of promotion hit home for me when I mentioned I had published a book and friends gave me blank stares.  That hilighted for me the concept of under-promotion; I had assumed that they already knew that I have a published non-fiction book.  If their reactions were different, such as rolling their eyes or saying, “We know, you’ve told us!” then that is over promotion to too few people.

Point Two: The inside and outside of a book are vital.  I believe now that I should spend as much time on the inside of my book as I do on the outside.  What is on the back of the book draws people in, and while it works, I have learned that people need to also see a nice clean book.  (Yes, go back to editing) 

This means following the conventions of publishing, such as justified pages, title pages and copyright pages.  I learned that the best format is to make it look like any other book, and make sure you tell your ideas to your publisher.

Point Three:  It’s great if you publish one book, but it is important to keep the momentum going with more books over the course of many years.  Of course, you will need to go back to marketing and writing, but you should also consider how to make some money on the side when you are busy writing another book.  This means that you can write online, however you want to publish.

These points are important, and this is a means to continue to make money with your writing, and to be able to continue to live a life with your writing.