Book Launch Talk - on writing

I am talking Book Launch in this article.

I have a book launch planned for twenty-three days time, as my husband determined that writing a book is something to be celebrated, and I agree with him.  It is a great achievement.  I can't promise smashing champagne bottles off the side of the ship, but my Time Travelling Pirate adventure is about to set sail.

My point here is:  If you want to do something, go out and do it.  Just get it done.  For the select few, they will have personal trainers to motivate them, dieticians to help them eat, snazzy agents to help them book venues and sell their product to the press and general masses but many of us don't.  If you play guitar and you have a song to sing, then go on and sing it.  Book a ticket to some random town and play there, build a small fan base, record your own album.  Then, you have an album.  And you have achieved a dream.  Don't wait for success to come knocking at your door, just put yourself out there and then you are part of it, you are creating, you are magic.  Hurray you are awesome!

I, along with many other people, just have myself to invest in, to believe in.  I am not a businessman but I like to call some of my previous ventures 'bad investments'.  Its nice comforting terminology, it puts my failures in a box labelled, "you live, you learn, you keep trying" rather than  a box covered in bleeding thorns labelled, "you completely failed there what a total idiot you are".  It helps me keep going, after all, once you quit, that't it.  I am now investing in myself and I don't intend to let myself down.

There's enough information on the web to show you how to do almost anything you set your mind to, youtube videos, blogs, websites, you name it I probably won't have heard of it.  So, I had a dream to write books and be an author since I was at Primary School, when I first started out trying to human being.  Thankfully the world has turned a few times since then, technology has advanced in miraculous ways to allow the advancement of the self-publisher.  I'm still going to plug my wares to Agents, but its difficult to tell where the Agent ends and the money-making business begins.  Must I attend one of their £1500+ writing courses to prove to them I can string coherent sentences together before they will pick up my manuscript from the slush pile?  I will steadily make my way through the Writers and Artists Yearbook till I figure that part out.

But, in the meantime, this wonderful world has allowed me the chance to get my words out there, to other people, if they care to read them.  Success has a formula, so I keep telling myself, you just have to know the mathematics, apply them and hey presto, you will do it too.  I tend not to like maths much so alternatively I ask The Universe, that always helps too.  I have read other people's guides to self-publishing, as well as the articles claiming: "I sold 150,000 copies of my book in X amount of time" well done self-published author.  I offer you a huge clap of my hands.  But how do they do it?  That secretive little section seems to remain hidden from many of the success stories - how they actually executed their success.  They will put it down to "I used Twitter and Facebook and ..." and what?  How many hours a day did they Tweet?  What did they say in their Tweets?  Did they pay to advertise on Facebook?  What is the Secret Formula to Taking Over the World?

It took me a year to write my book.  I'm damn proud of it.  I will try my best to give my blog-reader an honest account of what I have done to reach where I am now.  Please remember to laugh, I do not invite negative comments by posting, go chew on your thumbnails somewhere else, all I invite are a thumbs up and a lemonade maybe.

Book Writing

I estimated on a good day I can write 3000 words a day.  If the average novel is 90,000 words, thanks Google for that random how-long-is-a-piece-of-string puzzler, then I could write a book in 30 days.  Life however, knows, I don't get a chance to work like that.  I snatch snippets of time where I can, I carry notebooks around with me and type up words onto my laptop later.  I persevered for many months until my jigsaw of segmented word documents made up a coherent story that I threaded together, stitched with love.

Book Editing

Takes a really long time.  Yes it does.  There is no denying it.  I thought I'd typed up my book really well, I knew each line inside out, each movement of character, each display of emotion.  Reluctantly I handed my precious words over to my sister and two close friends and asked them to pick holes in my work.  Find each and every single hole you can, let me know about them, and I must fix them.  They returned armed with numerous glitches.  I found my Google Chromebook sighing every time I tried to trawl through my 90,000 word document.  It didn't want to keep working on editing, neither did I.  This bit of authorism takes a tremendous amount of patience and will power.

Uploading to Kindle

On New Years Eve 2015, in the morning I decided it would be a nice end to the year if my book was out there in the world.  I uploaded my book to Amazon Kindle, and was notified it could take over 24 hours before it became live, Gah.  But there it was, £2.99, the author gets 70% of each sale.

Createspace

Six months into the year I remembered the email Amazon sent advising if I wanted, I could produce a paperback book via print on demand.  I revisited the book, which proved a more difficult exercise.  I printed out my very first paperback edition of my book, wowsers, I am a published author on paper now!  I can sign books, I can put my book on my shelf next to my favourite authors - make a bit of room along there guys thank you.  Then I actually read my book, from cover to cover for the first time ever, and found more editing glitches, more typos, repeat "The"s, and sentences that went from first person to third person, no, no, no, not more editing!

Head spinning, further editing over with, while I could easily upload the word document I had created, it looked nothing like an officially proper paperback book should.  I inserted page breaks in the chapter headings, tried to make them look a bit more fancy, inserted a copyright page that I copy-pasted from the internet and tweaked a little, inserted page numbers.  Only to find that my Google Chromebook's GoogleDocs doesn't have a 6"x 9" setting for a page size.  This was imperative to getting the layout accurate for my book, and it didn't exist on my Google Docs.  I did nothing but praise my wee laptop the whole time, with its auto-save feature and ease of use.  Now it hit a huge stumbling block.  Hence why I spent rather too much money on draft copies of my paperback.  I Googled and used Createspace Help pages to try to find a method of making my document the right size so Createspace would load it up properly without making its own adjustments to it.  Nothing worked.  I was at the point of exasperated tears with the final copy of the book which seemed okay on the screen arrived with print so minute I could barely read it, and margins too close to the spine of the book.  My laptop won't allow me to download the full version of Word.  Not meant to be.  No, I will not give up now!  Not when it is so close!

Then, one of my unbelievably kind friends advised me they use In-Design, publishing software, and would look over my first book for me.  It took them a day to create a perfect looking book.  One day.  I struggled for hour upon hour and reached the same brick wall.  Here it was.  That easy when you know how, right?

Without them, the book launch celebration wouldn't be possible.  Here's to friends who light the way!

The Book Launch - Choosing a Venue

Supportive husband, perhaps relieved that he can finally stop hearing snippets of the characters lives, questions about spelling, suggests we celebrate the fact we have finished my first book.  I say we, as this was a team effort.  I wrote words, I was encouraged by a ream of people around me, I was helped by friends and family, and then, somewhere out there, the book will be bought by other people.

We looked at a village hall near where we live, but realised we would have to provide catering, do all the setting up and tidying up, and it was quite far out for people to reach and I would have to pay for the venue as well.  But it is a lovely venue and I like supporting the local village.

One of the cafe's in my home town allows you to book a space for free in their venue so long as you use their catering services, set in town, on a bus route, ample parking.  This venue won - why? Because when I tried to find a number for the village hall I couldn't, when I rang there was no answer, then when I projected my crazy author mind into the future, I saw the launch playing out at the cafe, and I trust those little guiding signs.  

The Book Launch - Promotion

I used Google Drawings to create invitations, which I'm pretty pleased with.  I copied the wording from other people's invites on a Google Search.

I created a Facebook event - and watch whether you want to make it a public or private event as once it's set up you cant change it, you'll have to create a new event and re-invite all the people.

I have emailed a few folks, text a few folks, and, wrote a News Release.  You can Google how to do this too, though I have a notion how to do these from my uni days.  You send the press a Word Document with details about the event, you can send a JPEG of the book cover, and a JPEG of your smiley self.  

And the kind people at my local press - The Hawick News and The Jed Eye have put a wee article in their publications for me.  Thank you local papers.

My family are advising I should try national papers as well as inviting a few authors and reviewers, which I will endeavour to do.  These things all take time, and I'm learning as I go, listening to suggestions when they come. You can but try! 

I listened when the articles suggest you don't just have a wee talk and book signing, give the event a draw, something to entertain, and I agree.  Why not make these things fun? My suggestion that everyone dress up as pirates was declined by family, its still meant to be a professional event. So, I have hired two actors who will attend the event dressed as pirates and act out a scene from the book.  I would like there to be a piratey cake, though I haven't organised this yet either, it depends how my budget goes!

The Book Launch - Costs

Anticipated costs for this event all come out of my purse so I'll be lucky to break even.  I don't think of this as a negative, its just a fact that if I want to have a book launch I have to pay for it and it may or may not pay for itself.  Costs include:  catering nibbles and refreshments, printed invites or posters, buying print-on-demand copies of my book in advance to sell (and how many do you buy?  I've bought thirty, which has a bonus effect of knocking my book higher up the Amazon sales charts!),  actors, and any extras like table decorations or one of those nice giant postery things of my book cover thats a backdrop to when the author signs books.

Ooo I get to do book signings now!  I have a book, written by my own hand, that I can sign.  It doesn't get any better than that!  Dreams can come true.  Never give up!

Wish me luck!