Wow, I haven’t made an entry since Christmas, but with good reason. The book I mentioned way back years ago, I finally got it published since my last entry. There’s a lot to catch up on so here we go.
My book is a hybrid. By that I mean it’s a reference book for those who are looking at careers. The book takes a look at basically 100 careers but from the inside. In other words primarily the many jobs I’ve worked at describing the details involved and pointing out the things not to do which now are funny. Anyone that has seen the movie Galaxy Quest would understand my saying these are my “Historical documents.” I didn’t find any publishers that fit my niche so I self-published.
At Thanksgiving I finally got my book to the point of where I felt I needed it to be professional edited. There are many places to turn to have your manuscript edited but the two I considered were Freelancer and Fiverr. This is strongly recommended for those looking at self-publishing because you need a fresh pair of eyes (professional ones) to see things you missed.
After I found the right person they worked through Christmas to get my manuscript back just before the new year. The editor reviewed things with me, made some tweaks and changes and “viola” I thought it was ready for publishing. Actually you need to be considering what your cover is going to look like. If it’s an eBook that’s all you need but if the book is to be printed you also need back cover work and the spine to consider.
We’ll come back to the cover in a bit. I thought I was ready but alas the manuscript needs to be typeset to make it look right. Again like editors there are a lot of typesetters, I went with Reedsy and I had to make changes like maybe 20 times for one reason or another. When it was done it looked great.
Being that my book doesn’t fit in a niche and because I had an idea of what I was looking for fortunately my sister, the artist in the family put the cover together. This was another adventure, they will want it to be so many pixels and you need high resolution to get it published. If you’re strictly doing an eBook you don’t have to worry as much about the cover alignment, or the pages and whether they’ll bleed, so you don’t want to get too close to the edge with the cover or your print. It took me until last week to actually be published.
When you are finally published then you need to focus on marketing, actually marketing should be considered before you’re published. Anyway, some Indie publishers may include some marketing but it may be minimal so prepare to market your book. The book is Career Menu With Ingredients: Secrets from the job man.
More in depth look coming…
persuasion2015 