I wrote a book!

I decided to write a book. It was quite an experience and I thought I would share some of what I went through with you, in case you ever consider writing a book yourself. In this particular case, I’m going to describe the option of self-publishing, where you do the writing, take care of the editing, and self-publish on the platforms of your choosing.

First you have to write the book. I really took my time on this step, finally coming up with about 130 letter sized pages over the course of a couple of years. The reason it took so long is because I wanted to interview friends for inspiration for the examples I would use, and because I kept going over the material and tweaking it. By the time I thought I was done, I expected that the manuscript was as polished as it could be. I was very naïve.

I wanted a great title. It didn’t take me long to come up with one. I asked a lot of people for their opinion and the feedback was extremely good, which bolstered my confidence. Time will tell if the title choice will help with sales.

You must get your material edited by a professional. Instead of hiring a full-blown editor, I chose a slightly less expensive option and hired a proofer. To keep it simple, a proofer is basically an editor in training. I was charged a very reasonable rate, $0.50 per 1000 words. My proofer went through my transcript with a fine-toothed comb and found a lot of things that needed tidying up. Sentences that were unclear or ambiguous. Grammar mistakes. Material that wasn’t clearly getting my intended message across. This is why getting edited is so important. The words make sense to you, but they may not make sense to the reader. I got feedback not only on a word by word, and sentence by sentence basis, but I also got a report detailing where the material was weak, or ambiguous, or needed references, or made use of the same words too repeatedly. For example, there were a lot of instances of the word ‘actually’, or ‘really’. I didn’t notice it myself until it was pointed out to me. Then I could see just how much I was using those words. I used the feedback to tighten up the writing even more, and then once I was happy, I used my spouse as a sounding board by reading the book to her. She had very useful feedback to offer as well, and even gave me a few more stories to use as anecdotes to support the material I had written.

Once I was happy with the manuscript, I had to decide how to publish. There are so many choices, but the biggest decision I had to make was whether I was going to enter into an exclusive relationship with one publisher or insist on the freedom to publish anywhere I wanted to. I wasn’t going to worry about hard copy publishing for now and just stick to e-book to get started. I chose to start with Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) service and chose a royalty plan that would still allow me to publish on other platforms. I made that choice partly because I had read that Kindle may have a good slice of the e-book market in North America, but other platforms had better reach in other parts of the world, such as Kobo.

For cover art, I knew a lot of creative people who could photograph, and I hired someone I was very familiar with to both shoot the candidate pictures and find willing models to pose. It’s good to have friends in the arts community, that is for sure. I came up with the idea for the photo’s theme based on something I saw online. I signed a contract that gave me the freedom to do anything I wanted with the resulting pictures. I had a couple dozen shots to pick from and one of them was selected for the book’s official cover. I did not get too serious with the cover art design, the title, etc. and that is one small regret. The cover art is passable, it’s fun to look at, but it’s definitely not high quality. But hey, it’s my first book and it’s a journey. 

I really struggled with using a pen name or not. I would have liked to use my real name for recognition, but the book’s subject matter was just too confidential to make me comfortable. So, I went with a pen name, which was a fun exercise just inventing one. I shopped it around and the people I trusted liked it, so the decision was made. When you go to self-publish and set up your account, you have to be careful because the platform assumes that the author name and publisher name are the same, which is not the case when using a pen name. 

Next comes the formatting of the transcript. I chose to use KDP’s built-in formatting tool, which wasn’t perfect, but it was easy. Once the formatting is done, you get to see a preview of what the material will look like in an e-reader. Once I was happy, I uploaded the cover art, typed up a description and submitted the book for publishing. The book was online in the Kindle store within 24 hours. I was pumped.

The task isn’t finished though. My past research indicated that for a self-published e-book to sell, you have to get the word out. You need a launch team. I hoped that if I shared the news with enough of my closest friends within a few hours of the book’s launch, it would help get the word out if they shared with their friends, and so on, and so on. Some of them were nice enough to even buy the book. But there wasn’t enough sharing of the news to make much of an impact. The book started out in the top 20 for its category, but quickly dropped off the rankings radar within days because of lack of buzz. I knew that the only ace I had left up my sleeve was to push my friends who had bought the book to make sure to rate  and review it as soon as possible, which over time, does help with the ranking. It hasn’t made an impact yet, but it’s only been on the market for a few months. The entire launch event was also somewhat dulled by the fact that I wasn’t using my real name. My advice is to form a large launch party group and use everyone you know. Be aggressive about getting the word out in the first 48 hours. I’m talking shark aggressive, not poodle aggressive. 

Within a few days I had friends asking if my book was available in hard copy. I wasn’t sure if I was going to bother, but now that the request had come up a few times, I decided to look into both self-publishing as an e-book on another platform and getting a hard copy book ready for sale. My second e-book platform of choice was Kobo. That satisfied the needs of my Kobo subscribing friends. For the hard copy, I went again with Amazon. Now I had to reformat my material and cover art to suit a standard sized soft cover book. I ordered a few author copies just to see how it would come out. Luckily, as the author they let you order author copies at cost. Again, the results were passable, but not the best design quality. The hard copies are made in the US and take about 2 weeks to be made and shipped.

Next, I had been reading that if you want to improve your reach, it helps to have an audiobook version. If you think there are a lot of options for getting an e-book to print, there are even more options surrounding putting an audiobook online. Again, there are a multitude of platforms available, but Amazon’s ACX platform is by far the widest reaching, including your title in Apple's and Audible’s library. In this case I decided to go exclusive with ACX to maximize the royalty returns.

One reason why it may be worth your time putting an audiobook out is that there is far less competition for readers, or in this case, listeners. So you have a better chance at finding your audience. But now you have your work cut out for you because you need to get all of that written material narrated.

There are many directions you can go here. ACX makes it possible for you to just provide the written transcript and audition and select a narrator to do the voice recording. Then you have to engineer the audio so that it meets ACX’s audio standards. Or you can hire that part out too. In fact, if you have a good voice, you can just join ACX to offer your services as a narrator. Or a sound engineer. As the author of a book, if you hire out any of those things, you lose a cut of the royalties. Since I had experience with audio editing and felt that my voice was good enough to narrate my own material, I made the decision to do everything myself. Now the work gets serious.

I’ve had serious quality issues when it comes to recording live audio, especially from webcams. Thankfully, I own a professional digital recorder made by Zoom with a high-quality microphone. I chose to record early in the morning at my desk in our basement. It’s quiet, and with the door closed you can’t hear the furnace. I had to remember to turn the fireplace off too, because the drone of the fan isn’t something you want to hear on the recording. I mounted the digital recorder on a small tripod so that the microphone is level with my face and placed it about 15-18 inches away from my mouth. I discovered the hard way that early-morning voice isn’t always the best but having a nice hot cup of coffee nearby can help. Once I hit ‘record’, I just started reading. I paused when I needed a breath, and when I made a mistake, or my voice got rough, or I just didn’t like how the last paragraph sounded, I stopped, and made an audible ‘boop’ sound to make it easy to find the mistakes during post production. At the end of each chapter, I ended the recording and that got saved as a separate file.

I tried as much as possible to animate my voice while reading, but you always think it could have turned out better. You always want another take. I didn’t want this to become a long drawn out process like the written book was, so I got firm about letting go and accepting the recordings as is, knowing that I could add pauses where they were needed, shorten pauses where they were too long, and surgically cut out mistakes. My goal was to get every chapter recorded in a reasonable amount of time. I managed to do it over the course of 2 weekends.

I knew from my research that the ACX audio standards were quite specific in terms of audio RMS and peak levels, noise floor and so on, but thankfully some experienced audiobook engineers wrote procedures on how to use Audacity (a free audio editing program) to engineer the recordings like a pro. The editing was indeed the hardest part, because you have to listen with laser focus, watching for mistakes, pauses, cadence, mouth noises, breathing noises, background noises, table thumps, etc. But after about the twelfth chapter, I got into a groove. You can even get a plug-in for Audacity that will analyze the final edits looking for all the ACX audio level prerequisites. You won’t know for sure if the audio does meet the ACX standard until you submit it online but being able to pass a preliminary check helps build confidence that you’re on the right track.

Then you need to reformat your cover art to meet the audiobook standard. The picture must be perfectly square and have a decently high resolution. The next step is to choose a sample of your audiobook to use as the retail sample, so that potential buyers have something to listen to before they decide to purchase the audiobook.

After that, you upload all the audio files and then the quality control process begins. I waited a bout a week before they sent me a message back saying that my spacing needed fixing. For every chapter, there must be no talking for the first 0.5 to 1.0 second of the file and 1-5 seconds at the tail end. So I made those tweaks and uploaded the new versions of the files. Fortunately, that was all it took. My audiobook went live on 13 April 2021.

I ended up liking my audiobook cover so much, I completely redesigned my e-book and paperback covers to match. Much better, since the templates KDP provides are kind of limited and not very customizable.

I'm on my second book now. This time, I'll be using my real name because the subject matter is less controversial. I'd say my writing is about half done.