Praise in the Midwest Book Review

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

Last week I received a note that A Path to Publishing had been reviewed in the Midwest Book Review. The editor Jim Cox shared the following conclusion:

“Of special note are the chapters focused on Preparing Your Proposal; Publishing Options; Working with an Editor; and Marketing Your Work. Thoroughly ‘user friendly’ and superbly presented, ‘A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book’ is a very strongly recommended read for any and all aspiring writers seeking to turn their manuscripts into profitably published books.”

You can read the rest of his review under his introductory note at the latest edition of the Midwest Book Review online.

How to Know if Your Book Idea Works: Is It Unique?

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

I’m guessing you can count on one hand the books you’re read more than once. We typically read for information or in order to be entertained by a particular story, and then we return the book or stick it on a shelf. If we really enjoy it we’ll recommend it to our friends.

If you read a book explaining the significance of the beaver trade in colonial America or telling the story of a young woman who finds out that she’s really the princess of a small country, I’m guessing you wouldn’t be tempted by another book that explains the animal-centered commerce of colonial America or how a country found it’s unsuspecting princess in a mall department store.

In other words, if you’re just rehashing what’s already out there, chances are you’ll have a hard time finding readers. That isn’t to say you need to have a completely fresh and unique idea that no one has ever done before. There are fresh angles to explore in topics that are already addressed in books and new spins we can add to old stories.

However, you need to watch out for the “been there, read that,” response from readers. It would be terrible to invest a year or two of your life into a book project that fails to sell because it’s been done.

I know that the spirits of aspiring authors are crushed every time a new vampire book is released, but even if there are plenty of repeats out there, publishers and the general public are looking for unique books with something new to say. For every vampire spin-off, there are plenty of innovative and unique books released each year. For example, I encourage you to read something by Susanna Clark, Jasper Fforde, or Neil Gaiman for examples of authors breaking new ground by tinkering with older forms.

Can you add a new angle to a topic that has been covered extensively? Can you draw in your readers without tossing in a character with a gun (such as secret agent Michael Scarn?)?

If someone has already nailed your book topic, I encourage you to buy that book, read it, and consider what else needs to be addressed in your own book. In fact, reading your competition is essential by way of not only selling your book, but making sure you write with an awareness of your genre and field.

If you claim to present a ground-breaking, fresh, new, riveting book that only rehashing what five others have already done, then you’ve just spent a lot of time working on the project that’s going no where fast.

Perhaps you could begin by asking yourself this question: What can I write that no one else can?

How to Know if Your Book Idea Works: Is It Better Than Good?

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

I have had a lot of book ideas. Only one has been published by a relatively large commercial publisher.

The rest hang out on my hard drive. The most promising are listed on a white board next to my desk waiting for something to click. A few made it to the desks of editors as book proposals, and some of them were even greeted as good book ideas with excellent writing.

Alas, no contract, no book.

It’s quite hard to evaluate the merit of a book idea, but one thing that helps me weed them out before I bug my agent or an editor is the “better than good” standard. In other words, my book idea needs to be really exceptional if I’m going to invest the time and energy required for a book. I usually ask myself questions like these:

Am I passionate about it?

Does thinking about it keep me up at night?

Can I NOT write this book?

Those are tough questions that have killed about ten projects that were all the rage with me for a few months. When they fizzled and failed to re-fizzle themselves, I knew that I made the right call.

At this point I’m testing about two or three ideas for future books, seeking feedback from trusted friends, and experimenting with them. Once I have a better idea of what their main concepts will be, I’ll start asking the hard questions.

If I can’t answer with an unequivocal, “Yes!” then I know I won’t be able to invest the time and energy required to form the proposal, pitch the book, write it, edit it, and then market it until I drop.

This incredible expenditure of energy in publishing makes it all the more critical that authors are passionate about their book ideas. If not, then they have a long year ahead of them!

The next post in this series: In my next post I’ll talk about the ways I make sure my book ideas are unique. However, you’ll unfortunately need to wait until July 19th for that one! We’ll be away on vacation for a week, so hang in there. I promise to keep sharing the goods when I return.

How to Know if Your Book Idea Works

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

I have had publishing hopefuls ask me whether their book ideas were good, and I have to admit it’s a tough question to answer. There are many factors to consider when setting out to publish a book.

It’s most important in my experience to summarize the book succinctly, to have a solid title in mind, and to know exactly what you need to say in order to evaluate its merit. The details of each chapter may be fuzzy, but at least the main idea, controlling metaphors, and outline should be pretty clear before evaluating whether or not a book could work.

Some sample chapters will help you sort through how substantive your ideas are and if you can carry on for an entire book. Many good book ideas work better as magazine articles.

There are several factors you’ll need to consider when evaluating whether your book idea works. I’ll give you a hint right now, it won’t be enough for the idea to be good. I’ve seen my own good ideas and the good ideas of others fail the editor test.

They need to be better than good, and that’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.

When Can You Call Yourself a “Writer”?

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

In speaking with many publishing hopefuls, bloggers, and other folks who dabble in writing, I often hear them question whether they can truly call themselves “a writer.”

They all write words on a page or on a computer.

Some have quite a few readers on their web sites.

And yet, they hesitate in calling themselves “writers.”

Why?

Because they haven’t published in magazines or they haven’t published books. They just think of themselves as word tinkers.

I used to think the same of myself before I published a book. At the time my only writing credit was an online magazine and a defunct humor magazine. Then someone said in an E-mail, “You’re a writer. Now you just need someone to pay you for it and some fame.”

It was a jarring comment. I’d built my identity as a writer around external sources of validation, namely money and popularity.

Here’s the thing, having published in several magazines, several books, and online over the past five years, I can just about guarantee you’ll never think you have enough money or popularity to call yourself a writer because there will always be someone with more money and more readers.

While there are good writers and writers who have a long way to go before they’re good, perhaps the matter of calling yourself a “writer” rests more with the individual. Do you personally believe you can call yourself a writer based on the work you do?

Forget money.

Forget fame.

Do you write seriously? Do you care about the words you put on the page? Is your writing an important part of who you are?

If you can answer yes to questions such as these, then you probably are a writer. Very few writers go on to make a lot of money or to become household names, so just focus on loving what you do, put your best into it, and savor every time a reader shares positive feedback about your work no matter how you publish it.

Writing is about crafting words for readers. Set goals for yourself, but never confuse legitimate writing with the side benefits of money and popularity.

What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Solving the Distribution Problem

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

One of the greatest obstacles that self-published authors will face is finding people to actually buy their books.

Think about it. No one will visit a book store and stumble upon your book. No one will find it on a publisher’s web site. No one will read about it in a catalogue. No one will want to stock in a book store because it’s self-published.

Oh, of course you can sell it online, but how will readers find it?

That is the trick. Can you assemble a realistic marketing plan that will sufficiently take into account all of the setbacks that self-publishing brings, while still connecting with readers on a scale that will ensure you sell enough copies to at least break even?

Ah, distribution is a huge problem for self-published authors. Heck, when self-publishing A Path to Publishing, I still didn’t quite grasp the amount of work ahead of me or the sheer quantity of potentials readers I needed to connect with in my niche.

Where should you start if you’re self-publishing?

For starters, check out my free online marketing guide. That gives both traditional and new ways to market your work.

However, the most important principle in selling books is to make a real connection with a potential reader and to communicate clearly why he or she may want to buy your book. Someone else may be able to do that for you by way of an endorsement or a review, but kicking it all off depends on you and you alone.

I began this series saying that “self” is the key word when it comes to “self-publishing”. If you have any hopes of selling your book, make sure you have more than Plan A and B for distributing your book. You’ll probably need to have plans that range from A to Z.

Your job is to find the communities, blogs, forums, Twitter users, Facebook users, groups, societies, and any other group of potential readers in your content niche. That is the publishing sales game in a nutshell, and it’s a tough one on your own!

Win a Free E-book Version of A Path to Publishing

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

Marketing expert and blogger Paul Steinbrueck is giving away three copies of A Path to Publishing. Check out his review and his special offer to readers. He has opened up the comments to reader questions about publishing and will include them when he interviews me this week.

If you drop by his blog, be sure to stick around and to have a look at some of the great posts he has been sharing on marketing, writing, and blogging.

Lessons in Self-Publishing: Format It Correctly or Else…

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

While no one will dispute the importance of writing a great book and making sure you connect with readers, the design of a book can be just as important, if not more so to a certain degree. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” aside potential readers WILL judge your book by its cover and its formatting.

In fact, if your font, lay out, and spacing look sloppy or are unreadable, they won’t take you or your book seriously. There are simple things you can do to correctly format a self-published book, ensuring that readers will be drawn in and take it seriously once you’ve successfully marketed it to them:

Keep Your Lay Out Simple

Don’t make your book’s lay out too flashy if you don’t know what you’re doing. Instead, use the templates that are available at sites such as www.lulu.com. Your primary job is to write a great book, and therefore a book template will save you a lot of time and pay off in the long run.

Research Your Design Options

Beyond the options offered by book templates, many of your most important design decisions (cover design, font choice, font size, and line spacing) can be figured out by researching your options and reading what others have found to be true in online forums. Some test-printings on your home printer will also give you a good idea of how your fonts will show up for readers.

Compare your design choices to the books you enjoy most, what experts recommend, and what others have found in their own publishing experiences. Readability is a major concern for self-publishing authors and deserves a lot of consideration.

Invest Where It Counts

There are some things that you cannot do well on your own no matter how hard you try. One of these things, for most of us at least, is designing a great book cover. Of course most self-publishing services provide a cover creator as part of their packages, but if money isn’t too much of an issue, I think it’s well worth paying a professional or even novice designer to at least create a cover.

Even designing a simple cover requires choosing the appropriate font to match your material and then choosing the size, spacing, color, and location that works best. This can be quite difficult to do.

A catchy, professional cover will not necessarily sell more books, but it will be an important part of the whole package. You don’t want an unappealing cover to give customers a reason to ignore your book!

What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Seek Opinions

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

In conjunction with the release of my self-published book A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book, I’m offering this series of posts on what you need to know about self-publishing.

When working on a self-published book you may have put together a passable first draft, and even managed to spruce up a pretty decent second draft. However, chances are your argument or story will have some significant holes in it, to say nothing of some sections that readers will find confusing.

While working on my third draft of A Path to Publishing I couldn’t think of any significant changes to make, so I sent it off to several friends and colleagues to read it. Sure enough, one reader found the same glaring flaw in two of the book’s chapters.

She very gently suggested that those two sections needed significant revision. She was absolutely right. I had a few doubts at first about those sections, but I had decided they worked fine. Thankfully she pointed out some other reasons why needed to be not only rewritten but largely deleted.

And that brings us to the challenge of editing your own book. You always need perspectives other than your own to make sure your book flows and makes sense. No matter how talented you may be as a writer or an editor, you can’t catch all of your own mistakes.

Depending on your relationship with your friends and family, you may ask them for help. However, remember that a good editor will not worry about hurting your feelings. A good editor needs to feel comfortable pointing out all of your book’s flaws. Will your friends and family be able to do that?

My friends through social media and blogging have been a tremendous help in reading drafts of my books, while several key friends and family members have helped at times as well. However, I think it’s important to choose your readers carefully and to give them deadlines that can be flexible if need be.

In addition, keep in mind that these friends may publish their own books some day. Guess who they’re going to e-mail before anyone else for help…

What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Get Known First

Posted on by Ed Cyzewski

In conjunction with the release of my self-published book A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book, I’m offering this series of posts on what you need to know about self-publishing.

When you’re self-publishing all of the work falls on you, the author. No matter how much published authors complain about the lack of marketing support provided by their publishers, which can be spotty at times, the worst publicist will do more than upload a file to a web site, which is all you’re doing when self-publishing.

The Basic Ways Publishers Market

Publishers have established lists of contacts who receive their catalogues, e-mail newsletters, and browse their web sites. They represent authors at book stores and can send releases out to major press services—something that can be quite costly to do on your own.

The staff at publishers generally have social media accounts and blogs, and they may even generate some buzz for your book through these tools. At the very least these publishing professionals will tell potential readers about your book. You’ll at least have a few warm bodies with a measure of interest in selling your book.

Any way you slice it, the least that a publisher provides still puts their authors way ahead of the self-published ones.

What Self-Published Authors Need to Do

While it’s important to seek out some reputable endorsers and reviewers who have a large group of readers, I don’t think self-published authors realize the number of readers they need to pull off a self-published book that sells more than 25-50 copies. Simply put, self-published authors need a massive number of connections with potential readers.

The “potential reader” part of this is crucial. Authors may have lots of “connections” through social media, their blogs, or more traditional means, but many of these connections may not view their books as something they’ll want to purchase.

I’ve done quite a bit of networking, but I have been reading Crush It! by social media expert and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and he’s been blowing my mind. I usually drop by some blogs to leave comments and contribute to writing forums, but he advocates a scale of networking that few would ever consider.

I sure didn’t!

I could try to describe it to you, but to be honest, I’d be doing you a disservice because I can’t do his methods justice. Crush It! is available at a pretty low price as a Video Book, which I highly recommend, though it’s also available in print. You may not do everything Vaynerchuk suggests, but I think he’ll give self-published authors the reality check they need about how involved the marketing process will be for their books.

An author who is new to the publishing process will underestimate the amount of work necessary for marketing. Count on it. As a published author I still underestimate the amount of work I need to do. Before you invest heavily into a book, begin marketing yourself and making connections today. It’s a worthwhile investment you won’t regret.   

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