Publishing a Book is Annoying

Hi all,

As you may have noticed, I have been MIA for the past several weeks. My book The Silver Ninja: A Bitter Winter is just a few steps away from going live. And it’s because of these few steps that the link to pre-order the book is still not available! So, as I wait for some files to come in, let me explain to you why publishing a book can sometimes be annoying.

There are A LOT of steps involved in publishing a book. If you’re under the impression that all author’s do is upload a PDF to Createspace, Barnes and Noble, or Kindle, you would be dead wrong. The additional steps aren’t difficult, but they are tedious.

1.) Missing book blurb / Author Bio.

Writing a marketing blurb and author bio is one of the toughest things a self-published author has to do. The rough draft for the marketing blurb was written almost two years ago. It wasn’t until recently that the finalized blurb was completed. And the reason it took so long is because . . .

A blurb and a bio generate sales. If you don’t grab the reader as they’re reading the back of your book or your author bio, then you’ve lost a sale. It has to be professional and it has to look like it was published by Random House or Penguin books. Doesn’t matter that it’s not, it just needs to look well put together.

I’ll post the blurb here, but if you want to see the author bio, go here: https://www.thesilverninja.com/books/silver-ninja-bitter-winter/

“She stretched out her hand and touched SIRCA’s waist which felt as it looked, smooth and solid. When she removed her hand, a trail of stringy mucus-like fibers dangled from her palm like glue—How is this a suit?”

On a cold winter night in New York City, former NYPD officer Cindy Ames snuck into a top-secret lab and stole a dangerous technology. With this device, she physically transformed herself into an unstoppable superhuman.

Tortured by guilt over her partner’s murder, Cindy swore to use her new weapon to bring justice to the killer who ruined her life. But when the deaths of innocent people plague Manhattan, all evidence points to her. Has Cindy’s quest for revenge gone too far?

The truth she discovers about herself may be more than she bargained for.

Super powers can save a city but break a hero.

The Silver Ninja: A Bitter Winter is book 1 of 5 of The Silver Ninja series.

 

2.) I can’t assign the correct pricing information because I don’t know how much the book will cost (yet).

Here’s another small thing that’s causing me a minor headache. I purchased 10 ISBN’s through Boker and needed to assign two of them to my book. One for the paperback, the other for an e-book. One of the requirements for assigning your ISBN is to tell Bowker how much you’re selling the book for.

Well, I don’t know that information because I haven’t uploaded my book to the printing platform yet. Createspace has a nifty feature which estimates how much your book will cost, but this is only an estimate and not what your actual number will be. A book that is 100 pages long will be significantly cheaper to print than a book that is 500 pages long.

Though the goal is to be around the $9.99, $10.99 range, I won’t know what the final price will be until the printer is ready to print. Unfortunately, I’m still missing a key piece of artwork and one more little detail.

3.) I need a logo for my Imprint publishing “company.”

I created an Imprint Publishing company in order to avoid the stigma of being a self-published author. Even though the work I’ve put into the book is of professional quality, when book stores and libraries see “CREATESPACE” they immediately assume the book is an amateur product and will not stock their shelves with it. Barnes and Noble also has a policy not to stock their shelves with Print On Demand (POD) titles, so you’re really screwed if you don’t take this extra step.

Creating an imprint allows you to bypass the POD policy. It doesn’t need to have an office or a building or staff, it just needs to be registered somewhere. But if you’re going to go through the trouble of registering an imprint, well you’re also going to need to buy the web domain. Why?

Well if your imprint company gets bigger and your library grows larger, you’re going to need a website. And if your imprint becomes really popular, someone out there will purchase the domain under your nose and sell it back to you for over 3,000 dollars. Do yourself a favor and buy the hosting before someone else does.

Okay, so now Silver Pencil Books is registered to me. There’s only one thing left to do in order to make it legit, it needs a logo. The website can come later but the logo is important. Since I figured this would be a quick and easy job, I decided to hire a freelancer from Fiverr.

You can leave the logo off, but that little detail will immediately paint you as an amateur author. Look at the spine of a book, any book, and you will see a tiny little logo signifying what publisher (or imprint) published it. Since I want to be viewed as a legitimate author and I had to get the logo done.

4.) I need to get a Library of Congress number.

So, this was news to me. A few days before publishing this blog I noticed that books published by big publishers had an LOC number. I had no idea how they got this number and so I googled it and lo and behold, if you are in the United States, you should definitely get a Library of Congress number. That means your book will exist in the LOC database which means you will be viewed as an honest to God, professional author.

Unfortunately, there is a processing time, so I will have to wait for that number to come in before I can upload the book for printing. The good news is, once I have the number, this book will be ready to sail.

As I’ve mentioned before, none of these issues are particularly challenging. They are minor obstacles which delay the release of a self-published book—I haven’t even gone over the process of acquiring a virtual P.O. box and having an appointment with a notary.

This is why authors are told to never state the specific release day for their books. You never know what sort of nonsense may pop up to delay the release.

Be patient, take the time to make sure you have all of your t’s crossed and I’s dotted before publishing. Once the book goes on sale, it will be out there for the whole world to see.

The Silver Ninja: A Bitter Winter is aiming for a May of 2018 release. Wish me luck!

Wilmar Luna

Wilmar Luna

Couldn't be a superhero in real life so he decided to write his own. When he's not creating empowered female characters he can be found watching films, reading books, and playing lots of video games. Buy his books here: https://www.thesilverninja.com/purchase/