Are you one of the authors who doubt that there's really a secret to success in your self-publishing journey? Check this out, let me help you find answers to your question, "Why don't they teach this about self-publishing?"
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around. Because the third point is a secret as to the one attribute you're going to need which most people don't tell you when it comes to self-publishing. The topic we're discussing today is why don't they teach this about self-publishing.
When you're getting started with self-publishing and you've got your very first book. Perhaps you haven't even finished re-writing it but you take a course on self-publishing. You begin to understand that maybe this thing is a little more complicated than you thought.
There's something that in most courses is a secret that these instructors and these fake gurus in many cases aren't telling you about self-publishing. That's what I want to explore a little bit in today's topic. Grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist.
To make sure that you're not missing any of the secrets to getting your book published and selling. Start a fire now, when I was in the military for nine years I was doing survival training in the rocky mountains of Colorado.
That involves a lot of things anywhere from trapping animals to building shelters. But in this case, it was building a fire how exactly do we go about building a fire. Well, step number one is we're going to take a course on building a fire.
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Somebody's going to show us what is necessary to get a fire going for survival well the instructors make it look so easy. They simply take this and they take that and they split this piece of wood. They combine it this way and they light it then they have a fire.
The thing is they're showing videos of how to do this process and we're seeing slides of how to do this process. There's not so much one-on-one hands-on training something along the lines of coaching. Something that we would be looking at here to help with this process.
Suddenly, I find myself out in the rocky mountains no longer sitting in a classroom auditorium learning about survival. But actually out in the rocky mountains we've built our structure I'm getting a little bit tired. We're hungry we have a rabbit we're going to eat but we need a fire.
This shouldn't be a problem because after all, I've seen the instructor show me on the videos how to go about doing this. The problem is that they give you a wet log that they've soaked in the river. They give you a knife that you have with you.
You have one matchstick that you're expected to get the fire started with. Now, this seems a bit daunting and it is but we've seen on the videos how to do this. To do a split wood fire and the thing is it's a lot harder than it looks.
But by practicing and going through more than one matchstick over some time. We're able to get it set up properly so that the fire gets started. Even here in the mountains of Norway I still use those very skill sets that I developed.
In the air force, in the United States, in Colorado on the rocky mountains, they're trying to get the fire started. The thing is that as I practice more and more the skill set becomes second nature. It almost becomes so easy which can be dangerous.
Because when I'm teaching some of these skills that I teach here you may get the impression that it doesn't require any effort. That would be a huge mistake we do it the easy way. But the easy way still involves a little bit of effort.
Failures Can Lead To Success
Let me get into it why don't they teach this about self-publishing? and maybe you're starting to figure out what exactly we're talking about. The answer is it's only through hands-on trial and error that you will make progress.
That means you're going to fail at some aspects of self-publishing. As you're getting started you're going to have poor editing. You're going to have a terrible cover, your title is going to be awful.
Nobody's going to be looking for it and this is something that many writers do. If you have the expectation you're going to get it right the first time then you're completely mistaken. It's going to take a lot of work, a lot of back and forth checking with other people.
Some of the coaching students I have will have me go through their books, their covers, and things like that. To find what they need to change to improve upon it. This is one of the most common questions that I have.
But it's a great question because it understands and recognizes the fact that it takes time and mistakes to figure out what's going to work for you and your books. Number two, you can try to hire out the tasks right.
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You can try to hire them out but you may hit a barrier as one of my coaching clients was experiencing when it came to formatting. I also had the identical experience where this book formatting thing is very confusing and frustrating.
I will just hire a freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork who's going to be able to break it down. Be able to put the thing into the correct format and then we just upload it. Now, by the way, I would not recommend you to give your password away to anyone including me.
Sometimes some of my coaching clients have asked me can't just do the upload of the book. I do not do get into other people's accounts that's a very dangerous strategy. I would not recommend that but at least in terms of getting the files themselves then you can do the upload of the files.
Now that seems all wonderful except you suddenly discover two or three big problems with this particular thing. Which was that these freelancers sometimes the colors will be off that was my problem.
I like to look at it in dark mode and suddenly I couldn't even read the text because they had hardcoded the text to be black or blue. In this case I couldn't see the contrast any longer. Number two, the table of contents didn't work.
Number three, the look through the book suddenly was off. Number four, I changed my mind on some of the content. I want to reorganize it a little bit I want to fix some of the spelling mistakes I found but how am I supposed to do this? I have to pay for this person to do all of those changes.
That's one of the reasons I use the Jutoh tool which you can find below in the description of all of my YouTube videos of my affiliate link to do the formatting because it makes it a lot easier to do this. Now, one of my reaching recent coaching clients, I took the book and put it through the Jutoh tool.
But it still requires and I do understand there's an awful lot of menus and things like that. But if we use a little bit of time it can be figured out. You know in terms of going through those steps in order to get your book formatted.
Having The Courage To Succeed
I've taken a lot of the work out of it by creating my master template for Jutoh. That makes it possible to quickly pull your manuscript right into the tool then we can reorganize the order of things. We can change the chapter headings we can modify the fonts.
We have all sorts of stuff, we click one button, we have our paperback one but we have a hardback one button. We have our Kindle version or the version we're going to be using when we put it onto Smashwords or Draft2Digital.
This particular method here of doing it is by far the most effective. I'm saying that there are some skills you can simply not hire out. Some of the fake gurus will tell you "look you can just hire other people to do everything" write the book, format the book, all of it and that'll be just fine.
But I'm telling you this is a terrible idea you need to sort of invest a little bit of time. Now, I understand nothing is easy when we get started but as we're slowly moving into it. If we have the time to stay focused we can learn the steps.
Especially we can go back and forth a bit that's what I do with coaching clients all the time. Back and forth until we figure out what works best for you in terms of the process. You want to format the book yourself you do not want to give this to somebody else.
You want to be able to make small changes hit a button and you have your new version out of your book. This is completely doable for anyone but I do understand. It takes some time to learn and if you're not technically you know "I don't understand all this technology".
Then that's what coaching is for so this ability to get in there was hands-on help when it comes to that. That's one of the reasons I offer Self-Publishing Coaching below in the description of all of my YouTube videos. You can also just ask me in the comments, I do that for free all day long.
Number three and this is our secret answer of the day the top attribute you need for self-publishing is not being a great writer. But having grit and just learning and practicing grit is by more it is. By all measures the most important skill set you're going to need and all of these courses you take.
They don't tell you this but that is it you're sticking to this one thing. I am going to succeed at self-publishing, I am going to get these books done. I understand I'm going to make mistakes and it's going to be challenging during some portions of the self-publishing process.
As you find in the checklist in the description there whereas you're going through it some of these steps are trickier. But I'm going to ask "Chris how to go about fixing these issues? and what's the fastest way to reach my goal?". No matter which step you're in, just ask me in the comments.
This is so easy, it's free and I will respond to 100 of all comments in the comments section. We will work through your book here, so that's just a heads up. Some people may not have fully understood that but that's something that I offer to everyone.
In addition, moving on to the final thing here it is that what is the most important thing you have learned? I want to know what you've learned that you haven't learned from some of these fake gurus. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.