Navigating the World of E-Book Publishing

--> Navigating The World Of E-Book Publishing was released fourteen days ago and it has been on several Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk Top 100 Bestselling Lists since. This is a short e-book with some of the basic beginning steps on the road to e-publishing your manuscript by Deena Rae Schoenfeldt. This is not a roadmap to getting a best seller nor it is a technical manual or writing guide, rather it addresses things that most aspiring authors don't take into consideration before starting their publishing journey. Filled with tips, tricks, and helpful advice, this book a must read if you have aspirations of joining the indie publishing ranks, have already published your own book or have a full back-list of titles already on the bookstore shelves.

Book Description

With a no-nonsense, conversational style, Deena Rae of E-BookBuilders gives advice to aspiring authors about indie publishing. Filled with information about social media, pricing, formatting styles, covers, reviews and platforms (to a name a few) there is a wealth of information for the novice author. Even experienced authors and publishers will find this book helpful and informative.
With sections such as 'Authors - Quit Doing This!', 'In Praise of Audio(books)', 'Twitter Primer for Authors', and 'Should You Use Amazon's Author Central', Deena Rae gives detailed information that anyone in the industry of publishing should know and consider.
Whether you are just starting on your publishing journey, considering entering the literary world or have 30 books for sale, there is something for everyone in this book.

If you would like to add the book to your Goodread's shelf - just click the button!

What Other's Are Saying

This book is a must read for Indie Authors. Deena lays out the ins and outs of ebook publishing that many other people fail to hit on. From the novice writer to the seasoned pro, there are hidden nuggets of gold for everyone in this book. The author shares her viewpoint, having worked in the industry on several sides, as if you were talking to a friend. With helpful hints, do's and don'ts, this is the best "get your feet wet" book I've come across. -Janet W., Amazon Customer

...I got down to reading and oh my word. Almost a year into self publishing the hard way, learning everything on my own, I thought I knew it all, but no. Deena Rae's book is filled with little known information, tidbits of advice, obviously picked up from years of working in the trade. Not only was there much information to be soaked in, but my brain was pleasantly sponging every little thing up because the book is written in a fun and engaging way. I read it in one sitting, and as my kindle can attest, any other tech book is rarely read beyond 40%. -Lisa G., Goodreads Reader

...This book will answer so many questions that come up during the process, which had me baffled and almost ready to throw in the towel. The author also gives excellent information on how to promote your book. She does all this with a personal touch. You will not be buried in tech speak where even a dictionary would fail miserably....I highly recommend this book to anyone that is considering self-publishing their work, or is interested in seeing how it is all done. -Amazon Customer

I had the feeling of believing and trusting Deena knowledge, straight shooting style and passion for what she does while reading her book. She produced an ebook that was easy to read and kept me scrolling through without stopping.-Mauri B., Amazon Customer

Like many authors I wish had had read books like this before I published my first book. However it is never too late to learn. It is good to read about the things I seem to have got right, the things I could improve on and to learn a few tricks from scratch. The book is very well laid out with descriptive chapter titles so that it will be easy to dip back into which I certainly will. -Wendy U., Goodreads Reader

Who Is Deena Rae?

E-BookBuilders is the online alias of Deena Rae. She was born and raised in Texas - home of bluebonnets, boots, beef and big hair - into a family that was in the printing and publishing industries. Her father was a computer programmer for major newspapers when the equipment took up whole rooms and mother has been a publisher for almost 30 years - trying, unsuccessfully, to bring her into the family business. She is a second-generation genetically perfected super-nerd.

She was happily living her life, having three third-generation genetically perfected super-nerds herself, but then through a series of events (unfortunate and fortunate), she officially joined The Book Connection - her mother's publishing and packaging company - as the Digital Director, to create the e-publishing division in 2011. Her computer skills, willingness to help authors, love of literature, no-nonsense attitude and quick wit has helped shepherd many authors through the maze of digital publishing.

Through her work with E-BookBuilders, Deena Rae has been able to meet authors and writers from all over the world and in every genre imaginable. She has a biting wit, obscure sense of humor, awareness of the absurd, and a love of literature all which led to the creation of Bluebonnets, Bagpipes and Books, the #NSFW publishing discussion podcast she produces and hosts with Janet Wrenn and Peter Burnett. Her no-nonsense attitude makes for some hilarious discussions and plenty of "Oh my God, did she really just say that?" moments. Sometimes it is as if there is no filter between her brain and her mouth. But if she likes you she tries to be nice - sometimes. Deena also has the safe-for-everyone author interview show, B3's Bookworm. You can find her most hours of everyday attached to her computer either researching, tweeting on her 6 accounts, posting on her different Facebook timelines and pages, coding e-books for her fabulous friends/clients or with her nose buried in her Kindle reading.

If you are serious about publishing your own work, or just kicking the idea around, head over to Amazon and download the ebook Navigating the World of E-Book Publishing, available exclusively on Amazon. I am also available on many social media platforms and you can track me down that way if you have a question about e-publishing.

A Writer’s Need For Validation

Every writer needs validation. If I’m wrong, and there’s one somewhere who doesn’t, we’ve never heard of him and he’s never shown his work to anyone. 

I’m not criticising this need. I am a writer, after all, and therefore I, too, need validation. I’m not ashamed to admit it. Writing is a solitary business, and it’s a hard and lonely business to bleed one’s soul all over the page in a room on one’s own. Social media has remedied this to some degree, giving writers the comfort and support of a network of like-minded souls who ‘get it’, but it’s not a complete salve. 

Writing is, at its heart, an act of creation. In that sense it is akin to pregnancy and birth. 

I was once remonstrated for saying my pregnancy was so hellish it seriously made me reconsider wanting more children. Apparently this meant I somehow didn’t appreciate my daughter. I replied no, the only thing worse than having gone through my pregnancy to get a baby would have been going through it to get nothing.

Similarly, how soul-destroying is it to go through the painful process of writing fiction and have nothing at the end of it?

Sure, you always have the completed work, but that’s not enough, is it? We don’t just want to stick it in a drawer and let it gather dust. We want people to know we wrote it, we want them to read it, and most of all, we want them to like it.

Writers who seek traditional publishing want their validation in the form of approval by a publisher – someone thought my work was good enough to invest their money in and take a chance on it! You can’t deny the ego stroke in that. 

Why do these writers need someone else to say their work is good enough? Why can’t they just look at it and know it’s good? I’m one of these writers, and I would hazard a guess it’s because we have all, at some point, looked upon a work of ours that we once thought was fantastic and wanted to burn it so no one else would ever read our shame. ‘Good’ is subjective. We can only assess if a work is good as against our current standard. What was our best work ‘at the time’, will in the future, when we improve, become merely ‘OK’ or even ‘bad’. We crave someone else’s approval because we can’t trust our own judgement. 

There's a quote that says something to the effect of the stupid have boundless self-confidence, while the intelligent or talented are riddled with self-doubt. I suspect that’s because the intelligent or talented know enough to recognise their own shortcomings, and so question themselves constantly. This probably circles back to the four stages of learning, and I suspect it’s why a good writer (of any publishing stripe) so desperately needs validation. 

I’ve heard it said in self-publishing circles that self-published authors don’t need validation; but they do. It doesn’t arrive in the same form as for traditionally published authors, but self-published authors still crave it and need it. Validation in the self-publishing industry comes in the form of book sales, five star reviews, and industry recognition. For the lucky few, it might come in the form of invitations to speak at conferences, or even an offer of a publishing contract. Make no mistake, a publishing contract is the ultimate validation for a self-published author, even if they don’t accept. The author is then in the position to say ‘I’m good enough that you wanted me, but I made it this far on my own, and I don’t need you.’

We’re all the same, at our heart, no matter which way we choose to publish. We have fragile egos, and we spend so much of ourselves in our work we often no longer have the defences necessary to protect ourselves from a cold, harsh reality. We fear rejection, and no publishing path is free of rejection, it’s only the form of rejection that changes. 

We need each other, for support, for encouragement, to keep us going and motivated until we get the validation we need.

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The Four Stages of Learning and What This Means In the Era of Self-Publishing

I am all for self-publishing. It gives writers a viable alternative when publishers say things like ‘We’d like to publish your work but...’

But it’s too risky.

But it’s too hard to market/we don’t know how to market it.

But it’s not fashionable right now. 

There are a lot of buts, but... the one thing they have in common is all these type of answers imply (or expressly state) the quality of the work is good, and there are other commercial considerations in play. We all know publishers have acted as gatekeepers in the past, and sometimes they were gate-keeping excellent work for business reasons, and self-publishing neatly solves this problem. 

BUT.

 

If the publisher no longer acts as gatekeeper, for any issue, including quality control, it falls to the writer to act as their own gatekeeper for their own poor quality work – self-regulation is required.

Now I know what you’re likely to say next – but publishers do publish badly written books. There are a couple that spring to mind at the current time, and I bet you’re thinking their names right now.

Twilight.

50 Shades of Grey.

Both hugely popular books that, from a technical standpoint, aren’t all that brilliantly written. And yet they were published.

But there is just as much a business reason behind publishing these books as there is behind the excellently written books that weren’t published. Because a publisher is, first and foremost, a business. A commercial enterprise. We as writers, as artists, like to conveniently forget this fact when it suits us. But they are. And if you’re a self-publisher, you are now a business.

Usually what makes money is good books, and a good book is a well-written book with a good story. Excellent writing won’t make up for a bad story. But publishers also know that sometimes a really good story will make up for mediocre writing - although not really bad writing. And if you think either of those books is really badly written, go check out the first draft of a first book by someone who has just picked up a pen to write fiction for the first time, then come back and we’ll talk. I still remember my first book. It made Twilight look like a Pulitzer Prize winner.

So in the traditional model we get mostly well-written books and some mediocre books which, for reasons that are hard to finger, really set fire to the imagination of readers and go viral.

In the self-publishing model, each writer gets to decide what he or she will publish.

The problem with this is the Four Stages of Learning.

The Four Stages of Learning is a model for learning suggesting individuals are initially unaware of how little they know, or unconscious of their incompetence – in more colloquial terms ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ which I’ve always considered to be a fairly inarguable piece of wisdom.  

Unconscious Incompetence
The first stage is when a person doesn’t understand how to do something, and doesn’t even know they should be doing it. If I go back to my very early days of writing, this includes just about everything. I had an idea about plot and characterisation, but I didn’t even know what POV stood for, never mind what they were, how they differed, or how to use them.

Sometimes this stage is characterised by the person denying the usefulness of a skill if it is pointed out to them. Again, an excellent example is POV. May new writers head-hop, and use defences like ‘But I want to know what everyone in the scene think’ or ‘But Stephen King does it’.

Well, I wish I could do what Stephen King does, but I can’t. Most of us can’t. Most of us never will.

At this level of ignorance, the person doesn’t even know enough about the skill (POV) to know why it’s important, or how to intelligently break the rules (like King does) or why intelligently breaking the rules is even different to just breaking through them like a bull at a gate.

Conscious Incompetence
The second stage begins when the person begins to realise there is something they need to know – and don’t. There is some self-awareness that the person’s work isn’t particularly great, and a writer is more likely to learn from their mistakes.

Conscious Competence
At the third stage, the person has learned how to do something, but the process is laborious and requires concentration. The skill may need to be enacted in conscious steps.

Unconscious Competence
At the fourth and final stage, the person is so good at the skill it has become ‘second nature’ and can be performed easily, or even while carrying out other tasks. The person may even be able to teach it to others.

So, what has this got to do with self-publishing? I believe it affects the quality of what is self-published.

Not many writers in the fourth stage will be self-publishing, except for business reasons. Most of these writers can (and will) be traditionally published – and in fact the process of getting traditionally published is a learning process in itself, equipping the writer with a thick skin. Not many writers in the second stage will self-publish either, because they are painfully aware of their own shortcomings and don’t wish to expose them to the light of public scrutiny.

Some writers from the third category may self-publish, some may be working to improve further (into stage four) before they publish under any model, and some will still be pursuing traditional publishing.

Which leaves us with the first stage. People who don’t know what they don’t know. I’m betting a lot of people in this group are self-publishing, and what they are publishing is bad.

I’m not criticising their ignorance. I remember how great I thought my first book was. And my second. And my third. And hey, even my fourth. I didn’t have the lure of self-publishing to tempt me, for which I am grateful, because I look back at that work now and I cringe. I cringe, and no one but me can see it. How much more would I cringe if it had been made public?

But I wonder, how many self-published writers will look back at the first book they published and regret it? I know one or two who have pulled books from the market for exactly this reason.

So if you're thinking about self-publishing, maybe stop a moment, consider which stage you think you're at, and ask yourself seriously if this work is something you'd be embarrassed to admit to in the future.

If you missed it, check out the latest in my Mythical Creature series - the truth about the vampire myth.

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