My journey into the publishing world

How I started writing

Three summers ago, I was working a couple hours a week in a cheese factory and, as I’m the kind of person who neither has a lot of friends nor is good at socializing, I was wondering what I could do to pass the time. Let’s just say that I was waiting for a book in the Bloodlines series to come out and I didn’t feel like starting a new series, which would have taken me away from the amazing world author Richelle Mead has created for us readers. I was outside, sunbathing and looking at a chair when the idea struck me. I took out a pen and a sheet of paper and started… drawing. I drew all summer, from a chair to my sister and her new husband, a present for their wedding day. That day on patio, I discovered a passion.

The next summer, drawing wasn’t enough to keep me busy. There was a part of me begging for a change but I didn’t know what else to do. Taking a dance or a martial arts class was out of question since I had no money. I had just finished reading Beautiful Creatures series and was about to start Divergent when this girl from my imagination started talking to me. Now, don’t call the asylum. I’m still trying to convince my parents that it’s perfectly normal for my characters to speak to me on a daily basis. It is normal. I swear!

Anyway, this girl named Cassandra (now known as Amya) explained to me that she’d been in a coma for a few months and she needed me to figure out what had happened to her. So I just started writing. And I kept writing and developing this idea and this new world for two months. Until I had myself a first draft. Just like the summer before, I discovered a passion because I had nothing else to do. Unlike with drawing, however, I could feel from the beginning that this passion, this obsession of mine, meant much more. The world I had created was carved in my mind and heart. It followed me everywhere. And then new ideas came along with new characters telling me what to write and arguing with each other. After all, writers are only the medium by which characters tell their story.

And that’s when I knew that this path I had walked into was a one way street. And there was no going back.

Why indie-publishing?

After that summer when I wrote my first draft, I spent two semesters barely touching the story. I had contacted agents and they didn’t like the first few pages enough to want to read the entire manuscript. Honestly, thinking back on it, I understand why. It was the first time I’d ever written anything other than a diary or poems—still part of a diary I kept when I was in high school—or an assignment for a class. Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet in two months. At least, I don’t think so. And if he did, well, he is Shakespeare after all. For my part, I knew I had a lot to improve. I finished my degree in English literature and applied to a creative writing summer program at the University of Oxford. Receiving my acceptance letter was one of the happiest moments of my entire life. I’d always dreamt of going to England, and visiting the school where scenes from Harry Potter were filmed was all the more exciting. But mostly, I was going to spend three weeks focusing entirely on writing and honing new skills. (That’s not entirely true since I met incredible people along the way and ended up procrastinating and spending time socializing. But it was all worth it.)

Not only did I come back to Canada with enough inspiration and will to write my manuscript completely anew, but I also became much more confident about the words I wrote down on my keyboard. I know I’m not the best writer in the world. I don’t write beautiful metaphors and I dislike descriptions, but there is one thing I am absolutely certain: the stories my characters are begging me to share are worth reading. As for the rest, I have a life-long plan to become the best writer I can ever be.

I got carried away here.

Okay, so I finished writing my story for the second time, I had a few people read it and I hired a good copy-editor (KLA Down Editorial Services). I wrote what I thought was a decent query letter and sent it to approximately 40 agents. I was convinced that this time, someone would ask for the whole manuscript.

I waited for two months—or more, I can’t really remember. Until I came across an article on self-publishing—or indie-publishing to be exact. They explained the pros and cons of publishing your book on your own or with a small/indie publishing house. I did a lot of research on indie-authors’ blogs and many websites explaining the difference between the many options an author has. I even asked Reyna Pryde, author of Bound by Sacrifice and Unique: A New Breed, about her process of self-publishing. It is after several articles and real-life stories that I realized how fun it would be to have control over everything regarding my first novel. From front to back cover, marketing, rights, and much more! And that’s when I took the decision to indie-publish. It wasn’t easy, as I’d always pictured myself working with one of the “Big Fives”, but I was convinced that it was the right choice.

And today, only a few days after my first novel was released, I know for sure that it was.

Process of indie-publishing

I can’t stress enough how incredibly proud I feel when I look at the final product, when I hold this new born book in my hands. Except for copy-editing—because I suck at editing, especially editing something I’ve been writing for months—I created everything from scratch. It’s like my baby has 98% of my genes! And it’s an incredible feeling.

There are, however, two cons to indie-publishing.

For one, I invested so much time into marketing and reading about indie-publishing to make sure I wasn’t doing the wrong thing that I stopped writing the sequel to AMANI: Remember for a good two-three months.

And I still don’t know if all those efforts/hours will be worth something someday. Only time will tell.

Marketing and getting your book out there is hard when you’re up against the “Big Fives” and every other publishing house. I have no money to invest in a publicist. I wish I had, believe me, because at least they know what they’re doing. I still don’t.

My only hope is that at some point, someone in the business will read my book and get the word out. Otherwise, all my investments will have been for nothing.

So, I might say that indie-publishing leads to a lot of uncertainty.

But hey! If I wanted a 9am-to-5pm kind of job with a sealed check every other week, I’d have chosen another path, wouldn’t I?

Now, I’m going to talk about my process of indie-publishing. Doesn’t mean it’s the right one and it always depends on your budget.

I had read in an article that Amazon offered the best royalties. Using KDP Select, you can earn up to 70% of your sells on Kindle, which is a LOT compared to what you could earn with a publishing house. Plus, your e-book becomes free to all subscribers. At the end, you get a percentage of a big pool of money generated by KDP Select. All you need to promise is that you will make your e-book available on Amazon only for 90 days. Paperback and Harcover aren’t an issue. If you do that, KDP Select rewards you by giving you a chance with two kinds of promotional programs. After your book has been enrolled in KDP Select for 30 days, you are allowed to create a Kindle Countdown Deal, in which you design a discount for up to 7 days, or use the Free Book Promotion, in which you set your e-book for free for a few days only. Those two options help your sells up and hopefully, lead to more reviews.

If you want to sell a paperback version of your novel, I highly recommend Createspace with Amazon.

If, however, you want to make your book available to libraries, schools, and bookstores, you can also go to Blurb.com. It is a free website that allows you to reach more people because bookstores cannot order from Amazon. Although your royalties on Amazon are much higher. On Blurb, you will set your price and chose whether or not you allow people to return your books if they can’t sell it. You have a lot of control on Blurb, but once your book is approved, you cannot upload another version, like on Amazon, so make sure you’re done editing before your upload your PDF.

IngramSpark is another website that makes your book available with other distributors, but this one isn’t free. It costs about $60 US to create your novel in paperback. I didn’t try hardcover yet, simply because I read in an article that paperbacks sell more. And I can’t upload an e-copy yet because I enrolled in KDP Select, but if you want all three versions of your book available to the world, I’m pretty sure the price will be at least $100 US. Again, don’t try to change anything once you’ve paid the fees because they’ll charge you twice, even if you just wanted to change the “one sale” date. Learn from my mistakes.

Now that I used all three websites, not really knowing which would sell best, I noticed that sometimes, Amazon uses the Blurb price, because Blurb sends your book on Amazon, and sometimes they show the price I chose on Createspace. I still don’t know if that is an issue, but I guess if you want to spare some time, you can always choose to publish with Blurb only and maybe IngramSparks if you want to invest a little. But if you do that, you won’t have access to Amazon’s promotions and high royalties.

Difficult choice, isn’t it?

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

The title says it all. If you choose to indie-publish and you can’t afford a publicist, you have to do everything yourself.

That’s where all my time went. Into reading about marking and reading about marketing… AND trying to market my book.

Oh, man. That process is the most difficult and discouraging.

To save you some reading, here’s what I leant.

0) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

1) For a first book, you must set your price low. For an e-copy, the lower the better. Even for paperbacks and hardcovers. Paperbacks published with publishing houses are on average $10 US. If, like me, your novel has 370 pages, it’s impossible to set the price that low. I think the lowest I could go was $13.99. That was just the price for printing it. So I chose $14.99 in order to gain a little from my sells. The girl’s got to live after all. If you set your price too high, your book won’t sell. Unless you’re already well known and your fans would buy anything from you. If that’s the case. Good for you!

2) Give lots of e-copies in exchange for reviews. Again, the more the better. Reviews are the key to getting your book out there. Bad ones as well as good ones. Let’s face it, if your book only has 5* reviews, something’s wrong. You can’t please everyone 100%. Readers will look at your reviews before they buy your book, and all 5* means you either paid people to give you that much or you and your family wrote them yourselves.

I can already hear you say: “What if someone gives that PDF version I sent them to other people?”

I’ve been afraid of that for a while, but one of my tutor at Oxford told me that at some point, if you want to move forward, you need to trust some people. How are we sure we trust the right ones? Well, we aren’t, but that applies to life in general, doesn’t it?

3) I also suggest to try and get in contact with radio stations and TV programs, but since I have no experience at all in that subject and since all my efforts haven’t been successful so far in that department, I’m going to let you figure things out on your own. Good luck!

4) GOODREADS! Create your author page on Goodreads, get into reading groups, and mostly, create a Giveaway! Just so you know, you can’t giveaway e-books, only paperbacks or hardcovers, so don’t get too excited on the number of books you sign up. I personally gave away 5 paperback copies of AMANI: Remember. Two in the UK and three in the US. Might cost a whole lot of money to ship them, but I believe it’s worth it.

5) Enter book contests. Now, most of them cost money. And a whole bunch of those cost a LOT of money, so don’t get fooled. Take some time to read about the panel judges and check the list of last year’s winners.

6) Plan a VBT (Virtual Book Tour). Book tours are expensive. Even established publishing houses stalled on investing so much on book signings and public speaking events for authors who are just beginners in the industry. If you don’t already have a big readership, I don’t believe, again according to many articles I read on the Web, that a traditional book tour will be lucrative. VBT, however, are free and, if you choose the blogs you visit carefully, it might even set you on the map! All you need to do is google the kind of book your write and contact the blogs who seem to have the biggest readerships. I just started doing that, and so far, those big blogs are off limits, as they are affiliated with publishing houses and thus, never accept indie-authors. Some simply don’t have time to interview authors. I’ll update with a list once I actually receive positive responses! Don’t forget to choose the number of days you want to be on a book tour and update it on your website, Facebook, and Twitter once you have your full schedule!

7) Promotions on Facebook, Goodreads, and everywhere you can! I didn’t say it before, but if you don’t already have a FB page and a Twitter account, get on it now! The key here is to be active and post things interesting to your readers. If you write YA novels, your Facebook page should represent a teen’s interests. If you write mysteries, you must be mysterious in a way that will pull the readers in and make them want to read your books. It’s as simple as that. And yet quite challenging.

Now, you can “Boost” your Facebook posts or create an ad on Goodreads. With both, you decide of the amount of money you want to invest and how many days the ad will last. You can also boost your FB author page! In my case, that generated about 100 more likes than anything else I’ve tried so far. Choosing your audience is the best feature about this marketing tool. It makes you choose the location, the interests, the age, and the gender of the people being targeted by your ad. If you use it correctly, you can reach new readers and thus expand your book’s success.

8 ) All in all, your goal is to build a brand for yourself as a writer and for your books. Everything from having a catchy phrase to pulling in new readers using Youtube videos or writing a Blog will help. And you can also create a compelling press release to send everywhere!

9) Most of all, you need to have FUN and ENJOY this process. If you’re tired and discouraged, re-read your positive reviews and remind yourself why you’re doing it. Or write on a new project. Indie-publishing is hard and if you’re not ready to put a lot of efforts into it, you’re most likely going to regret it.

I’m not a pro of the industry (yet) but I wrote this article to help people like me and save you some time. I don’t even want to count the hours I spent on reading articles and taking notes. If I were to get paid for them, I’d already be rich.

I hope this helps a few people and I’ll update if I think of something else!

Thanks for reading! :)