Launching a book is serious business. If you’ve ever launched a course or product, you know this. A book is no different. I asked some of my friends in the creative entrepreneur and writing communities what they wish they’d known before launching their first book. 

Editing has been, for my entire career, my bread and butter. However, I received so many requests to enter the writing process earlier over the last few years that I added coaching to my services in addition to editing. When you hire a copy editor, your manuscript is written. You can still make big changes to its structure, but that’s often easier to do before or during writing. Or what if you want someone to help you flesh out the contents before you start writing? Or what if you need help defining your goals for writing a book to make sure that your writing supports said goal (or goals)? Or what if you need help knowing how to approach beta readers and obtain reviews? Maybe you need help with all of that, or maybe just one or two or those things. Enter a book writing coach.

Resource Roundup: Book Publishing Posts

Let’s be honest. There’s a reason you create content: To get your message out there so you’re visible and relevant. Of course that’s why. After all, you need people to notice you if your business is going to be a success.

But no one will to pay attention to your content if that’s the approach you take with it. It’s time to grab a new agenda and make your content about your audience. Not you and your products and services.

No matter who you’re marketing to, online business owners have very little time. So if you want them to consume your content, you need to make it worth their while.

This month I’m reviewing Happy Pretty Messy: Cultivating Beauty and Bravery When Life Gets Tough by Natalie Wise. This is a fabulous read for anyone, but especially entrepreneurs!

When it comes to writing, people generally fall into one of two camps. There are the people who love writing and do it whenever and wherever they can, and then there are the people who hide under their beds to avoid ever writing anything again. (Ok, I lied. There’s a third, small camp that doesn’t care one way or the other about writing...but they don’t matter here.)

If you’re in the second camp, it’s possible that you’re suffering from a writing mindset block.

Years ago, authors wrote a manuscript, photocopied it, sent it off to whichever book publisher they hoped would publish it, and waited. Those days are long gone. Most book publishers today, save for a few small and some niche houses, don’t work directly with the author until they’ve decided to publish a book. Rather, authors work through literary agents.

Today authors query a literary agency with their manuscript idea rather than a publishing house. The agent then queries (pitches) publishing houses on behalf of an author. When a publisher is interested, the agent negotiates the best deal possible for the author. A publishing house signs a book and handles the production (editorial and design), printing, and distribution tasks that self-publishing authors are responsible for. Authors typically work with publicity departments to coordinate marketing efforts, as authors assume some responsibility for marketing and promoting their books in today’s book publishing climate.

This month I’m reviewing Book Launch Blueprint: The Step-by-Step Guide to a Bestselling Launch by Tim Grahl. Grab a copy if you haven’t already checked out this book. Wonderful read!

ISBN is book publishing-speak for International Standard Book Number. It’s a 13-digit number that’s used to identify and track (for sales inventory purposes) every book that is published for retail sale. Many self-publishing authors don’t pay attention to it, but that can be a mistake. This post explains what you need to know about ISBNs and how they affect you as an author.

What is it about that harmless little apostrophe that trips up so many people? People ask me often about issues regarding plurals and possessives (and especially the dreaded combo of a plural possessive!). The basic definitions are simple enough, right?

Plural signifies more than one.
Possessive signifies ownership and belonging.

Yet this is one of those often-confused aspects of English, so this week we’re going old school — as in, elementary (middle?) school English class for a quick grammar lesson. Ready?

You won’t know what the market looks like for a book like yours without conducting a book marketing analysis. This is an important step of the publishing process whether you’re planning to publish traditionally or you’re planning to self-publish. (In fact, if you’re publishing traditionally, I can almost guarantee that this will be a required part of your submissions package.)

Sometimes book titles themselves are catchy and clever but don’t actually tell you what a book is about. Enter your subtitle. The subtitle can expand on the title. Don’t get me wrong: You WANT a catchy title so that it’s memorable, but you also want to be clear to readers what they’re getting in your book.

"Sometimes book titles themselves are catchy and clever but don't actually tell you what a book is about. Enter your subtitle." (Tweet)

Case in point: I recently received an email from a former editorial colleague, from my days working for publishers directly. She congratulated me on the publication of my book, Write.Publish.Market. and said that she had purchased 20 copies to gift to her editing clients. While I certainly appreciated her support (and those sales!), my book isn’t going to help her clients, who publish in academic journals. If my colleague had read my subtitle, she would have known: From Idea to Published Book: The Creative Entrepreneur’s Blueprint. My book is for book writers, not journal article writers, and it’s for creative entrepreneurs, not academics.

Every year is the year I’m going to declutter and minimize the “stuff” I have hanging around in my house. And every year…it doesn’t happen.

As a business owner, I’m in the same boat. I want to reduce the number of services I offer so I can simply focus on what I love (but I love it all). I want to stop being so busy and start getting more done (but there’s so much to do). Sigh.

I’ve read all the books and pretended to do all the homework, but yet nothing changes. So when I heard about the book Essentialism, I knew I needed to check it out. And you know what? I just think I might have gotten some key takeaways that can help me get to a more essentialist mindset.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know the ways a book can help your business. To offer a quick recap, think credibility/authority, visibility, growth, and money. (You can read a full post about this HERE) A book will bring you credibility in your particular subject area, so think about what that area is. What are you known for? What do want to be known for? Then think about who your audience is (remember: It’s not everybody!) and how you’ll get in front of them. Word-of-mouth will be a huge asset with regard to book sales, but you need a bigger-picture plan, too.

After hearing again and again that every business needs a blog, you finally took the plunge and added one to your website. You published some posts, and waited to be flooded with awesome new leads.

But nothing happened.

What went wrong? A blog isn’t “Field of Dreams.” Just because you built it, doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will come.

Do you have questions about writing? Lots of creative entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and bloggers do. Here are some that I’m asked regularly enough that I thought, “Hey, that would make a good roundup blog post, Jodi.”

I hear statements like these all the time from bloggers and creative entrepreneurs. Or they say they want to write a book but that “now isn’t the right time.” That might be true for a small number of people, but for others: nope. These are all just excuses. The truth is, you only REALLY need two things to start your book today: a plan and accountability.

Chances are, when you’re writing a blog post or article, you save your notes in a Google doc or maybe even in Evernote. A book is much more complicated project to organize, due to the volume of material. Whereas you might save an article or two to read before writing a blog post, you might have 50 or 100 bookmarked for book research. A Word or Google doc can become unwieldy and overwhelm you when you realize just how much information there is to keep track of, let alone in an organized manner: articles to read, websites to look at, hashtags to search on Twitter, people to interview. Enter Trello.

When writing roadblocks come up, you feel like the loneliest writer on the planet. I promise, though, that this happens to all writers — professional, first-time, whatever. The important thing is to have a plan to work around these creative blocks and get back to writing. So much writing advice tells you, “Sit your butt in the chair and get the words written. If your goal is to write 1,000 words, then sit there until you write 1,000 words. Period.” That sounds great in theory, but that’s not always realistic. Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not suggesting that, at the first sign of not knowing what word to write next, you throw in the towel for the day. (Sorry!)