Well today I did my first interview with a local newspaper to help promote my book, and it has to be said that I am really not good at them!! haha
I think I babbled on so much the poor girls ears must have bled afterwards!
Anyway it was still great to talk about it, I'm really chuffed and grateful that they would want to help me out by writing about me and my book. So just in case you read this thanks a lot Amie Morrell of the Crawley News/Observer.
Not only did I want to do it to promote myself and my work, but I really want other people out there to know that things like this are possible. Even when they seem very daunting.
When I was submitting my book to agents and publishers and waiting to receive a reply from them, that were ALL rejection letters, I found myself being glad of my thick skin. I geared myself up to get a lot of rejections just the way that I have geared myself for any bad reviews that I get. After all you can't please all the people all the time, so we have to do what we can and cross our fingers. That, however, is only if people actually get to see our work. I am still a fan of the legacy Publishing and would love to see my books in print. If I don't get an agent I may self publish in print eventually anyway, who knows? The thing is over the course of the last two years I have
learnt many things, the biggest one so far being "you don't have to wait for someone else to tell you your good enough"! Submitting my work to one person in one company is obviously not as wide spread as publishing with companies like Amazon and being able to reach a wider audience straight away. The feeling of control that it gives you over your work is amazing as well. In my search for what to do next I have met, spoken to and worked alongside people that have become great connections and great sources of information. Although it is a lot of hard work doing everything yourself, it is worth it. After all if you cant work your hardest for your own future career then what can you work for. I don't want to sound like I'm against legacy publishing or that I am annoyed, bitter or hateful of Agents and Publishing houses. I will even now continue to submit my work to them. What I want is for people to know that it isn't the only way anymore. You don't have to wait around for one person to say yes and you don't have to get approval from anyone but your audience. You can trust yourself to do right by your work.
The network of other writers, ebook designers, cover artists, reviewers and readers is huge. There is a massive community online for e books as well as the legacy published books, so get out there and get involved. Even if it takes a while to find your feet, when you do it's great.
I wouldn't have even known about the path I chose if I hadn't had luck and a lot of Internet surfing. To start with, when I started to write Brunswick, I bought The Writers and Artists Yearbook. It had so much information in there, which included ebooks and self publishing.
Then one day I was searching self publishing online and a story in The Guardian came up about a woman named Amanda Hocking. She simply wanted to raise money to attend a concert for The Muppet's and ended up a best selling author. I read how she did it and where she published her books, she also mentioned that she herself got a lot of her information from another writer J A Konrath. Well after I read her story and J A Konrath's blog I decided to take my career in to my own hands. The great thing is they make it clear that it isn't a get rich quick scheme or fast process. It takes a lot of hard work, self promoting and hope that people will give good reviews and share them. However, it is still possible and more important for me was to get my work and my name out there.
After making this decision I had a lot of work to do. I proof read and edited as much as I could and even re-wrote the beginning of the book as I wasn't totally happy with it. When it was all ready, I set up this blog and a twitter account to start networking. I read Amanda hocking and JA Konraths books (well not all of them YET, there are quite a few) and met another author and book designer called Tim Taylor. Tim helped me to get everything ready for my book to be formatted, he was a true gem and I was very lucky to find him. He built my book so that it was all ready for Amazon and gave me lots of other information too. After all I was a total ebook virgin and knew exactly nothing about formatting, other that what I'd read other people had done.
And now we are here, I'm blogging and Tweeting and still learning what comes after this bit. Slowly but surely my name is getting out there and people are reading my work. I was very happy to see that someone bought my book in the US as well!! OK so its only 1 book, but hey that's 1 book more than what I had last year and to me that's a pretty big deal!!
So I hope that you enjoyed this post and that its helped you as well. I have put some links at the bottom for the people I have mentioned in this post. Read what I read and you'll see how great it is. More importantly you'll see how POSSIBLE it is!
Happy Blogging
Ann
http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/12/amanda-hocking-self-publishing
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
http://www.timctaylor.com/
http://victorinewrites.blogspot.com/2011/12/ive-publishednow-what.html
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