You don’t have to go it alone

Have you ever run a triathlon? How about a triathlon where the third leg of the race never ends?

You can do it, but sometimes you might need a little help

Writing your book probably seemed like a marathon, so it might be daunting to learn that self-publishing your book will involve working through three stages, each of them calling for new skills.

1. Converting your book from manuscript to a quality ebook

Chances are you wrote your book in Word, but whatever you wrote it in, you need to get it into another format to sell it to your readers.

Readers care about formatting and they will mention mistakes in their reviews. You don’t want to lose a four-star review because you didn’t understand what it would take to turn a manuscript into an ebook you could be proud to sell.

2. Uploading your ebook to online bookstores like Amazon

There’s seemingly no shortage of ebookstores — Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, Smashwords.

You need to  know:

1. Which ones require you to be exclusive
2. Which ones sell the most books
3. The pros and cons of going direct or going through a third-party  like Book Baby
4. How you’ll get paid

3. Marketing your books

This is the final leg of the self-publishing triathlon, and it never ends. If you want readers to find your book, you have to keep advertising that it’s there.

To keep up your marketing effort, you need to have a clear plan when it comes to:

1. How to make your book stand out in the bookstore
2. How to build your author platform
3. How to use social media like Twitter and Facebook
4. The pros and cons of having a website, including running a blog

If only you could ask someone who’d done it successfully…

There’s lots of help out there, including the help and support sections of each of the online retailers.
But what do you do if:

• You can’t understand the advice
• The advice is conflicting
• It all seems too hard and like you’ll never get there

Call me for answers and a plan of action you can follow for success

Steven Lewis, author, journalist, speaker and consultant

I’ve been publishing online since 1994 and with online bookshops like Amazon, Audible, Smashwords, and the iBookstore since 2010.

My background is in journalism, PR and online marketing. Those are all skills I use every time I run courses for authors, either through Taleist directly, online, or with various authors’ groups.

I also co-wrote the Taleist Self-Publishing Survey, the first and only comprehensive survey of self-publishing authors. The survey reported, among other things, on what made authors successful.

If you’re looking for a knowledgeable friend to unravel the complexities and give you straight answers in plain English, I have consulted to hundreds of authors.

You could save yourself hours of needless effort and hundreds of lost readers.

Consulting rate

My rate is $199/hour for a consultation by Skype or telephone. The minimum time is 30 minutes and calls are billed in 15-minute increments.