Have no idea what you have to undergo when you self-publish your book? Here is self-publishing – an introduction to help you get started.
Rejected Due To Age Discrimination
Pedro was very close to completely giving up on this whole publishing idea until he asked me the one question that is most commonly asked to me. That's one of the reasons why in today's topic, we are going to discuss Self-Publishing – An Introduction.
The thing is that Pedro lives in Peru. He's 75 years old and he's written a book. The book that he wrote was a children's book that he'd been wanting to get out for a very long time.
His writing is in Spanish and he was excited about the whole idea of actually getting his book traditionally published. The problem is the main publishing houses that he approached in Peru and other places; they just were not responding to his requests.
So, he wrote his children's book and he had it illustrated. Everything was looking fantastic. He wanted his grandkids to be able to sit on his lap and he could read the book to them.
That was the ultimate goal. And if he didn't get the book out, he would not even see how exactly he was going to be able to make this possible. The other thing was that he wasn't even sure how many more years he had.
So, this was incredibly important to get this going at this specific time. He first started and he contacted a traditional publisher. He waited a while and wrote back to them.
He waited a while and he finally managed to get a hold of them and they ended up rejecting him. One of the problems he found was he felt based upon the way that they were rejecting him was actually because of his age.
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He was thinking that maybe if he were younger, they would do it. I can tell you, sometimes, people will judge you for this reason. Which is also a great reason to go the self-publishing route.
You don't have to put up with this age discrimination. And other things that other people out there will do. I have quite a few clients on this front who are over the age of 70. Sometimes, they'll call themselves old.
But I have clients as old as 80 to 83 years old. It's unbelievable, the age of people. Because you suddenly have time, you have that energy and you want to get these books on the market.
There's no reason age should be an issue when it comes to this. But he realized that some of the gatekeepers at the traditional companies or publishing houses simply were not willing to give him a chance.
Because they figured, “If we're going to build you up as an author, we want to make sure you have many more years of writing books.” As opposed to “He had a great book, his book was fantastic.” But for some reason, they were not willing to do it.
So, the second thing was that he was watching all of the different videos that he found on YouTube. And other places where self-publishers were talking about the process of what it takes to do self-publishing.
Many of these fake gurus, simply told them all this stuff and that stuff. They just made it so complicated. Then, ultimately wanted to charge them like 10,000 or something to get his book onto the market.
Using The Just-In-Time Concept
It was absolutely way outside of the price range or the time that he wanted to do. And after all, maybe it was just too complicated. He reached this point where he was almost ready to completely give up.
Until he went on to Quora where I normally will answer questions that are sent to me. His key question was, what is the best way to handle this situation? I told him because this is a question that comes up, should I do self-publishing or should I go for traditional publishing?
I told him that self-publishing is by far the best option for him and almost anyone who's looking to first get started. You're an author, you've written a book and it's of at least quality, right?
Something that the average reader would give maybe four or five stars. Or even perfect if the quality level is high enough. So, we're ready to put this thing onto the market but we need to know how to.
This is by far the best way to go. This is the whole point with self-publishing – an introduction, it's that all you need is a book. As a writer, you've written a book or a manuscript and you're going to do some editing.
You're going to need a cover for it. We can hire somebody to do that. I like to use 99Designs for them to do the cover. Then you can do the formatting, I like to use Jutoh for that specific thing.
So, we have our book in the right format. We have a cover for the thing and we're going to need a description of the categories. Just some small metadata that goes with a particular book.
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At this point, we're ready to do it. We have everything necessary to go and start learning the process. And that's the biggest one, it's that you can learn the process.
You don't have to learn all of these things at once. Just do one thing at a time as we're slowly working through the process. The other thing is that there is no gatekeeper so you simply don't have to deal with this age discrimination.
You don’t have to deal with other things that you would sometimes find when you're trying to go the traditional route. If that makes any sense. And without the gatekeepers, you can start immediately on Amazon.
Then, we can optimize the sales page. We can start running ads against it. This is the normal flow but we don't learn anything until we're actually at that point.
So, we're not using what's called “just-in-case learning” but “just-in-time”. So, we're not learning just in case later on down the line, we're going to need to do these things. But just in time, which is when we're ready to do the next step, then we learn that step.
So, for example, if you haven't put your book on the market yet, you don't need to learn how to run the ads on your books. Because after all, the book's not even on the market. So, if you haven't finished the editing phase, well there's no point in starting to learn how to do the formatting phase.
We focus on one thing, one step at a time. And as you move through it, you begin to realize this whole self-publishing thing isn't that difficult after all. By the time you've got your book on the market and we're running ads against it, we're ready to start the content marketing phase of the entire thing.
Making Progress Using The Right Tool
The best part of self-publishing is that I have never met a single person who self-published that regretted it. Not a single person, every single one of them said this was a great or maybe one of the best decisions they've ever made.
Whereas I have met people who go on the traditional publishing route and have regretted that. Or the hybrid publishing, they lost control over their own book’s rights. Or they had the rights but were under somebody else's dashboard.
They were getting lower rates on it. They weren't getting any marketing help from these companies without paying another thousand dollars for what they were going to do. But they were just posting it out on social media.
It didn't make their books sell at any level. They weren't teaching them the skills necessary to do this. Whereas on the self-publishing side, you're learning the skills as you go and becoming better at these particular things.
Pedro finally ended up booking a session with me. We were able to go through this and I gave him a copy of my free self-publishing checklist. So, he could start working through those phases.
You also can check that out so that you are not going to get overwhelmed. You can see the flow of this self-publishing process. And will be able to work through those specific steps.
The final thing was that Pedro had grabbed the checklist and started working through it. He realized this wasn't so difficult. It was easy to do the entire self-publishing thing.
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So, he finished getting his manuscript formatted in Jutoh. After he had done the editing and made sure everything looked correct. In addition, he ordered the cover and that's exactly where he's at right now.
You're not getting everything done in a day. When you get good and fast at this, you can do the entire process. If you have the cover and you've got the book, even the formatting and the posting can be done within an hour or two from many books.
It's amazing how fast you can do it if you're using Jutoh which is the right formatting tool. And once you gain the skills of how to deal with these covers, there's just a couple of these skill sets and when we get them in place, you're able to do multiple books.
No problem at all if you go the self-publishing route. For him, he feels fantastic, he's seeing that the progress is being made in his book on the market. Yet no, it's not in the market but he knows the cover is going to be coming in, he'll get it connected and work through on the 1-On-1 Program.
We're able to make progress on this as we're pulling it right through this entire sequence without the age discrimination. That's one of the things I find when I'm working with most of my clients. I have people who are quite young sometimes, as young as 18 years old.
People will be coming in and discussing things. And sometimes people in their 80’s, I've never had anybody 90 or 100 years old. But for me, the important thing is that you're able to get your book on the market if you have something that you want to contribute.
You want the world to see and you want to get it out there. Sometimes you just need a little motivation and one thing that can do that is success stories. That's the reason why you're going to want to check out Success Stories: The Power Of Self-Publishing.