Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness

So, self butt-kicking held, mostly, at bay, I had to get down doing things about a book I’ve worked on for over fifteen years going into print shortly such as figuring out this newly discovered service so I can use it. After my frantic emails and quick reconnaissance on line, I found out I get one person to take care of the physical publishing parts: i.e. get me my included free copies, the so called “book stubs”— a card with a code used for downloading a single free e-book version, help with author discounts for purchasing more books and like matters, and then I’ll also get someone who takes care of the promotional side. This involved more acronyms I can’t remember, nor ever bothered learned: I keep the emails and recognize names.

There were some miscellaneous items included in the publishing package that I needed to follow up on to make sure I haven’t left anything else I’d paid for laying on the table.

This included the documents given to Rising Star recipients, which I’d only looked at briefly when I got them that I had now to get down to working on. There was a book signing kit with PDFs for a flyer, a postcard, poster, a notice of a signing, and a dense, thorough example of a marketing plan. It was for a non-fiction book, but most of it is relevant to fiction. Such as a detailed target audience break down, a list of needs and things to ask when planning book signings, media appearances and the like. Of all of these, the audience breakdown is probably the most important as it requires a writer to be specific and to dig deep to know what to do next.

With that, I started. At first, I vomited every possible audience I could in a list that went three pages, including some specific subsets, such as people who like the bands Front 242 and the Sisters of Mercy. Deciding if these groups are a local or national audience.

From there I picked three primary audiences and dove deeply into them: mining their age, income, education, location, employment, hobbies, current events, life issues, magazines read, etc. as best as I could imagine.

Then it explores the book’s competition: ask for specific books it competes with and how it is different and how it is better. That done comes positioning A Perfect Blindness, figuring out why a particular group will buy my book.

Much thinking and research goes into figuring all this out, which I really should have had done months ago vs. teaching myself the intricate details of the many tools and abilities of Canva, WordPress and Gimp, which while some of these things are useful, much of what I learned has lain fallow, and has been forgotten, so I’ll have to reread, re-watch everything all over again. Gaining unapplied knowledge is as bad as frittering away the hours that make up a dull day when one tries to get things done.

Owing to the need to recover from my flat-footed launch, and to keep working on a 6-month re-launch, I’ll only be posting once or twice a week for the next several months, depending on what happens, starting next week.

Know someone who might like this? Post it or Forward this email to let them in on it.

To ask a question or follow along with the self-publishing adventure, join the “Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness” here.