The 10 Biggest Mistakes Writers Make in Publishing Their First Book
Over 90% of self-published books sell less than 100 copies because of the mistakes writers make. Here are the things to do to avoid the biggest mistakes.
After you read each tip, write down your thoughts about how to apply that tip in your own writing, publishing, and promotion.
1) Make sure it’s well written without typos, and a professional editor can help. Reviewers can be very picky and can give you a bad review because of writing mistakes.
2) Have a really good cover, because that’s the first thing prospective readers see, and a good cover helps to showcase your book and show it’s going to be good. A poorly designed cover screams self-publishing by an amateur, so you want to avoid that.
3) Plan to actively promote and market your book so it doesn’t get lost in the millions of books that have been published. That includes doing a prelaunch, launch, and post-launch campaign.
4) In doing your prelaunch, launch, and post-launch campaign, use advertising, book promotion sites, YouTube videos, social media postings, press releases, and other methods to drum up sales for our book.
5) Get at least 5 reviews and testimonials. To do so, set a low introductory price on Kindle — .99 or $1.99, and appeal to friends, associates, members of referral and networking groups, and social media contacts to buy it there or offer to reimburse those who buy a paperback.
6) Don’t limit your sales to Amazon. So don’t give Amazon the rights to extended distribution or sign-up for KDP select if you plan to reach beyond Amazon.
7) To get bookstore and library sales, get your ISBNs for paperback, hardcover, and ebooks through Myidentifiers.com, which is a part of Bowker. Then, using those ISBNs, publish your books through IngramSpark.
8) To get additional e-book sales, set up your accounts for digital versions of your book through the online book aggregators, such as Smashwords or Draft2Digital, which will distribute your ebook to about 10 other retailers of online book.
9) Don’t try to do everything yourself, so you can spend more time writing, speaking about your book, or doing programs based on it. Instead, get help with marketing and promotion by working with a social media expert, publicist, web site designer, virtual assistant, and others to create a support team.
10) Look for ways to tie what you are writing about to something in the news, which will help you get publicity for your book.