5 Fantastic Resources for Self-Publishers & Indie Authors

Earlier this week, I was listening to a writing podcast. The topic was self-publishing and the guest speaker was asked for the number one tool they would recommend for writers who were considering self-publishing. They recommended Google—which is definitely a gateway to some fabulous resources, but I felt like I would want something more specific if I were looking for help or if I were going to provide guidance to a just-starting-out-me. 

Granted, I am not as far in my self-publishing career as many authors, but I have spent the last two years reading about self-publishing and these are dozens of resources I would have recommended to myself if I’d known they’d existed. (Although I also think finding your own way to resources and connecting with online mentors is in and of itself part of the journey).

Nonetheless, here are five resources I would recommend for new authors who are considering self-publishing that will save you valuable time and help get you on your way!

The Creative Penn website and podcast

A fellow #monthlywritingchallenge participant was the first to recommend Joanna Penn to me. Joanna runs a website and podcast called The Creative Penn and her site is filled with tips for indie authors on everything from writing the first draft, to finding editors and cover designers, to getting started with an author website and to marketing your book. In addition to her blog posts and podcasts, she also writes a lot of non-fiction books for authors, but one of her resources—the Author 2.0 Blueprint is free and it has a lot of very helpful information.  

She's also compiled some helpful pages. For example, this page has a list of potential cover designers. This one has a list of potential editors. And lastly, this page contains the tools and resources she uses as an indie author. Have a look and you will see what I mean about useful, practical resources. 

The Self Publishing Formula Podcast

This is a fairly new but already amazing podcast. It features two writers—one who is a best-selling indie author and another who is in the process of writing his first novel. Together, they interview other successful writers and entrepreneurs about their writing and publishing journeys. One of my favourite episodes that would definitely be helpful to new authors is this one: Five Must Do Actions for New Authors. This interview with Marie Force is also fantastic and super inspiring. 

The Business Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s website is one that I have recommended before but I want to do so again. There are so many great posts in her Business Rusch series, as well as the Freelancer’s Survival Guide and Business Musings. Kristine is a hybrid author, meaning she publishes independently and with traditional publishers. She has been in the business of publishing for forty years and has a lot of perspective to offer. 

The Alliance of Independent Authors

I have just started subscribing to the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) mailing list. There are so many great resources on their website but the one I would like to recommend in particular, is the Indie Author Fringe Festival that ALLi held at the London Book Fair two weeks ago. It was an amazing event and there were a ton of presentations, all of which can be viewed on their website. The presentations cover a range of important topics like cover design, the future of publishing, editing, and more. Watching even a handful of these presentations can bring new or undecided authors up to speed quite quickly on current publishing trends (which is definitely helpful in a constantly shifting environment). 

Last week, I wrote about my own takeaways from the festival. 

The Monthly Twitter Writing Challenge

Finally, I have to recommend the monthly twitter writing challenge. Whether you decide to self-publish or pursue the traditional route, there is no escaping the fact that you need a finished, well-polished book. The only way to get that gleaming gem is to keep writing until you finish a first draft and then work on it until it’s as error free as it possible can be (without scrubbing the soul out of it!). Then do that again. And again. And again. 

Over the years I’ve found that to write a lot and to write consistently, you need to establish a writing schedule and a supportive environment (online or otherwise) that works for you. The monthly twitter writing challenge is my favourite writing community. It works for me because I like to have a very basic word count goal per day (500 words) when I’m writing something new and I also need the encouragement to roll up my sleeves and start editing when the time comes. And because I am 100% an introvert, it’s super hard for me to join physical communities. Participating in the writing challenge gives me a way to be accountable and to be inspired by others at the same time. There are so many writers willing to share their experiences with you—both the ups and the downs. It might seem silly, but their daily support and tweets have always made me feel less alone. 

So there you have it—those are five of my recommendations for authors who are considering self-publishing or looking for helpful information. At the very, very least, these five resources provide you with some support and some information to consider as you try to make up your mind about what you want to do.

What about you? What resources do you wish you'd known about when you were just starting out? 

Happy writing!

S.

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6 Lessons Learned from the Indie Author Fringe Festival

I just finished watching another great presentation from the 2016 Indie Author Fringe Festival that took place at the London Book Fair last week. Basically, #IAF16 was twenty-four hours of incredible interviews, presentations, blogs and podcasts. You can find them all here. There was so much fantastic information that it was a challenge to keep track of all the things I wanted to work on by the time the event was over, however—I have picked out a few follow-ups I think are achievable within the next year. So without further ado, here are my 6 takeaways from #IAF16, organized into short, medium and long-term goals. 

Short Term Goals (1-2 months)

LESSON # 1: Update my social media descriptions. I’ll be the first to admit that when I first joined Facebook and Twitter, I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted to represent myself to the social media world. I have a ton of interests and all of them seemed important or central to my online identity. I care a great deal about humans all over the world having fresh water. I want the education system to represent diversity well, particularly where it concerns Indigenous Peoples. And I love learning to speak the Cayuga language. But what I find myself tweeting, or reading and thinking about the most is my passion for writing and the incredible joy that I get from every aspect of the self-publishing process. There’s a better way to succinctly communicate that via my social media bios, and I’m going to take some time to figure out how.

LESSON # 2: Learn to use bit.ly to make my links shorter. One thing I've learned is that the little things can go a long way to tidy up or better organize the information I’m sharing or want to share with the world. I always wondered how people managed to make their links shorter—especially given the character limits on various platforms. Fortunately, this presentation by Jane Friedman helped shed some light on how easy it is to make links more accessible. There's several other nuggets of wisdom in her presentation, but this is a small one I was super happy to hear about. 

Medium Term Goals (3-6 months)

LESSON # 3: Record an audio book. At present, I have three books out. One is a short novel, one is a collection of stories and the third is a novelette. I would love to turn these into audio books. Over the next 3-6 months, I will be working on bringing this material to life in the audio format. This presentation by Joanna Penn was incredibly helpful in determining how and where to get started.

LESSON # 4: Practice making stronger and catchier images/covers. So, a confession. It was only in the last month that I discovered the wonder that is Canva (this despite the fact that I’ve read about it in so many self-publishing blogs) and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. I love how easy to use it is and moving forward, I plan to use it a lot to help me craft images for my blogs and design cool infographs or just make more interesting images. And while for the most part, I plan to hire out all of my cover designs, I still love making the attempt to design covers on my own (even though I’ve made pretty much every rookie mistake that the three wonderful cover design presentations covered!). One of my favourite presentations was this one by Derek Murphy. I took a ton of notes and look forward to trying to make better images based on what I learned here. And I have to admit—this is probably not the best use of my time as an author but as I’m super fortunate to have all of this really amazing software (InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere, etc), it would be a real shame to not put it to some good use—if not for my own author brand, then definitely for my publishing company’s. 

Long Term Goals (6 months - 1 year)

LESSON #5: WRITE MORE BOOKS. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last two years of serious writing, it’s that making time to write every day—even 500 words a day—can really add up. The number one piece of advice I heard consistently in each panel and presentation—was to keep writing and producing great stories. Not necessarily social media posts, or newsletters, or blogs, or sales descriptions—but work hard to finish that first novel, then the second, then the third. This year I plan to write three new books, a non-fiction book, plus write a novelette and a few short stories. So far, I’m doing well in meeting that goal. I’ve written the first draft to a book called The Wall of Bones, and I’m working on another book called The Fortunes of Ithaca right now. I’ve also written two short stories. Since creation is the funnest part of being a writer, it’s easy to make time for it. That doesn’t mean the ideas are always there or that I still don’t get lost—I definitely do. But making time to write every day has certainly paved the way for me to write more stories than I’d ever have dreamed possible as little as three years ago.

LESSON #6: Continue Organizing My Writing Business. In March of this year (right at the start of my March break vacation), I hired a facilitator to help me work through a strategic planning session for my author business because I wanted to get organized around the activities I was going to undertake on behalf of my books, as well as those I was going to undertake for my publishing company (since they are slightly different and have slightly different audiences). 

This exercise was incredibly helpful. It helped me to set some specific targets for what I hoped to achieve over the next year such as establishing an email list, setting up my finances in a responsible way, taking care of my intellectual properties, and understanding my distribution networks in a way that didn’t interfere with the creative/creation aspects of writing. It also helped me to see that you don’t have to do everything all at once. That it’s okay (and honestly better) if you tackle one thing at a time. For instance, I spent the last week getting more familiar with Canva. The week before that, I spent setting up a separate business account for author related expenses, and the week before that I spent learning about how to create ebooks in Scrivener, etc., etc. Tackling these new tasks or technologies in bite-sized pieces has made it a lot easier to incorporate them into my work in a meaningful and effective way. 

So that’s it—those were among my biggest takeaways from the Indie Author Fringe Festival. I am super excited that the Alliance of Independent Authors has made the presentations available for everyone to view. The presentations are an incredible resource and even though I knew you could watch the videos at any time, I still woke up and tried to attend most of the events on the day of because I’ve never been to a writer’s conference before and I thought it would be fun to pretend I was (which it absolutely was). So I want to say a big thank you to the Alliance of Independent Authors for creating a space for these topics to be shared with those of us who can't travel to these book fairs in person. I learned a lot and I appreciate it so very much! I hope you all have a chance to check them out as well!

Happy writing everyone!

S.

How My Research Needs Have Grown Since Becoming An Indie Author

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of non-fiction reading. This is because I'm trying to learn how to better share my books, make them look nice, and adapt them into other formats (ebooks and audio books). There are a lot of amazing tools and resources that enable you to do all of these things within several different budgets. 

But one thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is that the type of non-fiction reading I’m doing has changed significantly since I first started out trying to write seriously. Like many writers I know (on Twitter for example), I read a TON of blogs posts and books about writing. I still do. Only now, the books I’m reading are very much about the business side of being an author. I can definitely see how once I made the decision to move in one direction (indie publishing) over another (traditional publishing), the kinds of resources I needed to help me do so shifted dramatically. I stopped reading certain kinds of blogs and started to seek out others that had the information I needed. 

The more I understood about how the publishing industry operated (as much as anyone can understand the way the publishing industry operates give the amount of change it’s currently undergoing), the more inspired I felt. For example, one of the first books I wrote that will be published this June, is a young adult fantasy called The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. This book is just over 57,000 words long. I love this story, but when I was thinking about going the traditional publishing route, I worried about the length of it. In my mind, after nine or ten rounds of edits and working with a developmental editor as well as a proofreader, it was done. It felt done. It felt like the perfect length. But I was worried an agent or publisher wouldn’t see it that way. That they would want something more around the 70,000 word range, as this article suggests. And of course, like most writers I know—I’ve read Stephen King’s On Writing, which is a fabulous book but talks about him writing 180,000 word books which was very intimidating, but only because it was outside of my comfort zone of length (and also we write in very different genres).

Then I read this article by Dean Wesley Smith and it opened my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t the only writer struggling to fit into word length categories. It also helped me understand where some of these debates about word length were coming from. Check it out—trust me, you will find it illuminating (or at the very least—interesting).

What is the takeaway from this? For me, the takeaway is to keep writing, to keep reading and to keep working to become a better storyteller. After all, these are the things can help you generate and build trust in the stories you write, that result in a lot less second guessing and help you produce more work. And no matter which sources you are getting or seeking guidance from, these are the messages that seem to be consistently presented, which is comforting—at least to me.  

And in case you’re interested, here’s a little infographic of the subtle shifts in the podcasts and books I've been reading over the last year, once I decided to become an indie author. (All of these resources are still valuable of course, I just find myself using one set more than the other).  

What about you? How have your needs changed over your writing journey? Are there any resources and tools you find yourself using more than you used to?

Til next time—happy writing everyone!

S

5 Things That Have Helped Me Become A More Productive Writer

Like many of you, I work a full-time job and manage a variety of other important commitments in addition to trying to write books and learn about publishing. Vacations come far and few between and so over time (a very long time) I've come across different things that help me to be more productive on a day-to-day basis. I was on vacation this past week and managed to get quite a lot done, which made me reflect on what's helped me get to this point. Maybe some of this will be helpful to you, too!

1. Figure out when you're at your creative best

At the top of my productivity goals is making sure I'm getting words on the page every day. That hasn't always been easy for me. For many years, I struggled to find the time to write. And not just the time to write - but time when I was at my creative best. 

For me, this turned out to be first thing in the morning. I've known for a while now that if I wait until the end of the day, I'm too exhausted to write and worse, my creative energy might not get used at all - since my job can sometimes be very administrative in nature. 

Certainly, your time might be different than mine. For example, I know some people who write better at night or who write even earlier than I do (such as those in the #5amwritersclub). The important thing is getting to know yourself and when/how/where things flow best. Try out different times and see what works for you. 

2. I Started Using A Smartphone

This is a small thing but worth mentioning because it really did change things for me. For nearly five years I carried a Blackberry as my work phone. Then I carried a separate pay-as-you-go phone for personal texts. At the time my work-life balance was probably 80 percent work and 20 percent life. Not a very good balance. When I finally moved on from that job, I changed phones. I chose a Samsung Galaxy because I liked that it was a larger device than the iPhone. It was great because I started using a lot more apps that I hadn't with my previous devices. Before the Galaxy, I hadn't been using Twitter very much (which is crazy because Twitter is now my favourite and number one place to go learn and interact with other writers). Once I had it, I also started using Instagram and Pinterest a little bit more. When the iPhone 6 came out with a slightly bigger screen I made the switch and have been so happy ever since. With the switch to the iPhone I started to use more of the productivity and image apps. My favourite productivity app is Evernote. I use it for so many things but primarily lists (character names, place names, book ideas, unique phrases) and scheduling reminders (writing/publishing goals and booking cover art designers/editors). My favourite image app is Enlight. 

Finally, I love having everything in one place. I can listen to music (I like brainstorming to music by Two Steps From Hell) or noises (I've recently started listening to thunderstorms while writing) while I work. 

Now certainly, not every writer needs a smartphone but I can definitely say I get a lot out of mine.  

3. I Started Reading More

Reading is at the top of most writer's "how to write lists" for a reason. It helps with everything. Ideas. Understanding what's possible. Being exposed to words. Being inspired by other people's creativity. Taking a break from the grind of writing and recharging your batteries   

I typically get through upwards of 25 books a year, not including the reading I do for school. It used to be 50 by I dialled things back a bit after I had my daughter and am in the process of dialling them back up again. 

I also read a lot of nonfiction books about publishing. I don't usually count those as part of my fiction 25 but they are definitely valuable reads. 

4. I Switched to Scrivener

Like I mentioned in this post, I've had Scrivener for a number of years but didn't use it right away because it crashed a lot when I first tried it and the idea of losing writing terrified me. 

A few weeks ago, I downloaded it again and watched a webinar with Joanna Penn and the Scrivener coach. Since then, my writing productivity has sky rocketed in a few different ways. 

For example, I was able to quickly outline all of the scenes I could already picture happening thanks to Scrivener's drag and drop function. Scenes that need more development, I can still make a record of and put under the Ideas tab. I've also been able to use the 'Research' tab to pull my research for into one place so that I could write and access it without having to close the Scrivener window and open my browser. This feature alone helped kickstart a nonfiction project I'd been struggling to outline for the last six months. 

Finally, while it didn't improve my productivity as a writer but certainly improved my productivity as an indie publisher - I learned how to use the compile function to make ebooks. 

Oh. And did I mention how great it is to have everything in one place? Amazing. 

5. The Monthly Twitter Writing Challenge

I haven't shouted out the monthly writing challenge in quite a while though I've talked about it in plenty of posts. The challenge is one of my favourite online communities and one I found it at exactly the right time. Two years ago I had finally managed to start writing upwards of 300 words every day for a few months. Then I had a baby in May 2014. I was a bit worried I would lose my writing momentum and was looking for a way to keep myself motivated. Then I stumbled on the challenge.  It had simple rules: write a minimum of 500 words a day or edit for 1 hour. Tweet your word counts with the monthly hashtag and enter the count in a Googledocs spreadsheet. Super simple and super effective. 

Since May 2014 I've logged over 300,000 words in the forms of novels, novellas and short stories. I've edited for over 100 hours and have 9 stories that will be published in the next 6-12 months. It typically takes me about 15-30 minutes to get 500-1,000 words. For example, I started a new project a little over a week ago and I'm already at 16,000 words. At the very least, by participating every day I log a minimum of 3500 words a week (this last week I logged 6,984 words) and can typically have a rough draft of a book done in 4 months (depending on what kind of book it is). 

Takeaways?

Writing is the thing that fuels everything else that I do. It's the thing that makes me the happiest and like Hugh Howey often writes, it's something I would gladly pay to do. Being productive only increases that happiness and actually finishing, formatting and putting together books has become my all time favourite thing to do. 

I'm super grateful for all of the things, big and small, that have helped me get to this point and I'm always on the look out for more. More tips. More tricks. Anything that will help me grow as a writer and/or manage my time that little bit better. What about you? Do you set goals for your writing? What's helping you achieve them?

Til next time, happy writing! 

S. 

I Formatted An Ebook With Scrivener

Yesterday was an incredible day. I wrote 1154 words for a new story, I watched a Scrivener webinar (which is an amazing piece of writing software I've just started using more), I researched for a non-fiction book I'm working on, AND—I formatted my very own ebook! 

This is a big deal for me. You see, a few months ago when I was getting ready to publish The Vampire Skeleton and my short story collection I decided I would like to try and format my own ebooks. I did some research and learned there was a free program called Calibre that could help you, which I promptly downloaded and tried to use. I didn't have much luck. Nor did I have much luck formatting ebooks using InDesign. And so, because I was in my first trimester, working full-time and doing my doctorate, I figured it might be best to find an ebook formatter and work with them. And so that's what I did.  

However, I've been writing a lot more the last two years and as a result I have three other books ready for publishing (their covers are being designed in March and May) and a host of smaller stories (around 6,000-10,000 words apiece) finished as well. And since I really liked some of those shorter stories, I decided to polish them up and hired an editor to help. 

Once they were edited, I realized I had to decide what I was going to do for cover art and formatting, which we all know is both important and potentially costly. But over the past few weeks I've been binge listening to The Creative Penn podcasts, as well as reading Joanna Penn's books. She uses Scrivener a lot and after hearing/reading about it on and off throughout her material, I decided to give it another try. (I bought it three years ago but didn't use it much as it was always crashing on me). I reloaded it on my writing laptop (I write on an 11-inch MacBook Air so I have the App Store version) and away I went. My timing was good, because she was just about to do a webinar with The Scrivener Coach, Joseph Michael. I was working last week so I only got the chance to watch the replay yesterday and I have to say, it was so awesome! I learned so much in that webinar, not the least of which was some basics about compiling an ebook. After watching the webinar I kept fiddling around with the settings for my ebook. 

A few hours later (and quite a few tests runs) I had produced both .mobi and .epub files that I can use for Kindle, Kobo and iBooks—the three platforms I'm using to distribute my ebooks. One of the best parts of the whole process was that I could easily fix things for myself when there was something off in the formatting (missing italics, for example). It was amazing—I'm still excited about it. I love that you can take time to fine-tune and make the file look really great. The whole process is incredibly empowering. 

All of this means I will be soon releasing an ebook of a novelette (10,000) words called, The Fall of Ithaca. I'm so looking forward to it! And I'm definitely looking forward to working more with Scrivener. I expect I'll have some hiccups as I learn, but so far, I'm so grateful I gave it another try and also very grateful there are so many resources available at Joseph Michael’s website to help me hone my skills. Exciting times! 

What about you? Do you have any favourite Scrivener tricks? 

Til next time, happy writing everyone! 

S