Yet, we all know that a small percentage of traditionally published authors make vast fortunes. They become household names. Famous, wealthy and loved by many adoring fans. They travel the world speaking at book fairs, and regularly give TV interviews.
Indie Authors on the other hand are largely unknown.
Almost no one knows who I am, but according to the figures, my books sales are higher than many traditionally published authors.
Yet, no one knows who I am.
I think that for me, were I offered a contract, I’d probably take it so that I could see my books in the bookshops. I’m still vain that way. It’s part of my personal dream.
In the meantime, I continue to pursue my dream, but by doing everything myself.
I do my own editing, formatting, publishing on Amazon, and my own marketing, of which I admit I do very little indeed.
The answer to the third question above really depends upon how impatient you are, and what your long-term book publishing aims are.
It’s worth considering that if you get a Trad-book contract, it may be two to three years before your book ends up in print and in circulation; this compares with six to twelve months if you sign up with a Digital Publisher who focusses on the ebook market.
Yet, if you decide to publish it yourself, on Amazon KP or any of the other routes available (i.e. directly with Apple or Kobo or Barnes & Noble or Google Play, or via distributors such as Smashwords, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark or PublishDrive etc.) once you have a number of key assets available at your fingertips, you can publish your book to the world in a matter of minutes, not days, weeks, months or years!
Assets that you may need to gather together to help you self-publish an ebook for example, may include:
A book cover designed for use on an ebook platform or the front cover of a printed book.
A catchy blurb to describe your book
Keywords which you have chosen to help position your book within the relevant categories on your ebook retailer
A digital file containing your book in a format acceptable to the ebook retailer
A decision on the genres/categories where your book will appear, i.e. Romance, Crime, Science Fiction
An understanding of how the ebook platform will sell your book and which royalty scheme you will be entitled to, which may guide you as to the price you wish to sell your book for
An ISBN number (not all ebook platforms will require this: some platforms will offer to provide you one for free, or will offer an alternative e.g. Amazon will allocate you an ASIN which is their equivalent).
In a previous chapter we have talked about the ebook cover. If you decide to Self-Publish, a high-quality ebook cover is absolutely necessary.
Also, a catchy blurb that immediately hooks a reader and motivates them to download your ebook from an ebook product page is also something you need to spend time on.
A small piece of good news for you, is that directions to where you can find guidance on these topics can be found in the Bonus Chapter of this book!
If you know any authors, you may wish to have a discussion with them about the pros and cons of either Trad or Indie Publishing.
You can also go online and simply type in ‘Indie Publishing versus Traditional Publishing’ and read whatever comes back: you’ll be swamped for choice.
Okay, that’s probably enough for now on this topic. I just wanted to highlight that when you get to this stage, you will be faced with this choice. Many people have already written a lot on this topic, and it’s not the focus of this book, which is to motivate you in your book writing journey so that you write a book and then ultimately do end up with this choice.
It’s actually a privileged choice to be presented with. Few people are. Enjoy it when it comes!
Chapter 22
Doing research for your books
I never wrote the first book I wanted to write.
I started it.
Then I spent weeks locked in a library in Scotland trying to dig up as much historical detail as I possibly could about my intended topic.
I wanted to write a historical thriller.
I still hope to write it one day.
A number of weeks into my project, I realised that I was drowning in the research I needed to do. I also realised that when I began to weigh up how much research I was going to have to do on an almost ongoing basis, versus my motivation to write the book and the practicality of writing it, that I should probably abandon the project and write something very different that didn’t need so much research.
That was in 1992.
Now it’s 2019.
As far as research is concerned, everything has changed.
Now I do a lot of research. Yet, instead of spending hours going back and forward to the library, climbing ladders and lifting heavy tomes of knowledge off the top shelves, before blowing off the dust and the cobwebs, these days I simply type in a question into my browser of choice, and within seconds, voilà, everything I’ve ever needed to know about something is listed there, before my eyes, and only one click away.
It’s got to the point that you can start a chapter knowing that half-way through you will need to research everything there is to know about a topic, no matter how obscure, and when you come to the point you need it, you ask the internet to tell you what you need, and it’s provided. Another term I could coin for the internet is ‘knowledge-on-demand’!
This doesn’t mean that I don’t do my research. I just wanted to emphasise how simple it is now. The Internet has made all our writers’ lives so much simpler.
A particularly special place to learn knowledge is YouTube.
If you’ve ever wondered how to do ‘X’, ‘Y’ or ‘Z’, it’s practically guaranteed that you can go to YouTube and find an expert somewhere who has made a video on your particular topic of choice.
As a writer, don’t underestimate the resources which you now have, quite literally, at your fingertips.
Only one click away.
It’s a resource you should and must use.
So, now don’t be worried about doing research. You should even prepare yourself for the possibility that you might enjoy it!
When I wrote this chapter and looked at YouTube, I even managed to find this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtrhWDD9-pU
(It’s a little old, and I’d even forgotten I’d made it!)
Chapter 23
How many pages should I write each day?
It depends how motivated you are to write, and how much you are enjoying your time spent alone writing your novel and moving closer to your dream of having written a book. It also depends on whether or not you have a job, or a family to bring up.
I do not want to ever hear that one of you has been sitting at your computer for days on end, and has forgotten to feed your family, who are now starving to death and considering eating each other! If it’s your responsibility to feed and look after them, do that first. Before you write!
Personally, I try to write one or two chapters a day. That equates to between two thousand or four thousand words a day. Beyond that I need time out to go for my walk, or to swim, and to think about the chapters ahead and how I will write them.
As my children grow up, I am spending less and less time actually writing, and more time learning the role of a taxi-driver.
One day, we will have driver-less cars, and I will be allowed to return to my desk and finish my books. Until then, I personally am limited on the number of words I can churn out each day.
I’ve heard that other authors are able to sit and write all day long. They are highly motivated, love to write, and their creativity never seems to dry up.
I do not however, advocate just sitting at your computer and writing for writing’s sake. If you run out of meaningful things to say, or you are waiting for SC to give you the next part of the story, then get up, leave your office, and go and do something else.
Only come back and sit down when you can
feel the words filling up the end of your fingers and getting ready to burst out.
The last word on this, is that books don’t write themselves. So, establishing some form of discipline whereby you do sit down at your computer every day and try to write, is a good practice to engage in.
You will find that SC is a highly tameable creature. If he/she knows you will be sitting down to write between, for example, 8 and 10 p.m. every night, then that’s when you will feel the inspiration begin to well up from within.
It will become the tap you turn on when you sit down to write, and which you turn off when you’ve reached your daily target, or when your fingers begin to hurt.
On that last point, make sure you have a comfortable chair, your desk is the right height, and your computer screen is level with your head. Ensuring you have the right posture when writing is essential, especially if you think this is an activity you may continue to engage in when your first book is done.
In this book I have tried to help make sure that ‘Writer’s Block’ never becomes a problem for you, however, if you develop a sore neck, or tendonitis in your fingers or arms because of excessive writing whilst sitting with a bad posture, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with that!
May I suggest you google “Posture and Seating for Writing?” You might even find a video on it on YouTube!
If you want to become a writer with a long-term career, please, look after yourself!
Before we round off this chapter, may I give you a very useful tip that could save you hours or potentially even years of work?
I just wanted to emphasise that when you write a book, which could take days, months, or even years of effort, it is extremely wise to ‘save’ your work continuously as you write. After every few pages, SAVE YOUR DOCUMENT!
Not only in one place, but in several!
When I write, I routinely create two documents: ‘Main Document’, and a backup document ‘Main Document Back-up’.
I then also REGULARLY save my work to an external hard-drive or a flash stick.
Nowadays, you also have the option to save your work to or in ‘the cloud’, in some way. To investigate these options, why not type in ‘How do I save to cloud for free?’ into your browser, then explore the options that come up?
Lastly, I also back up my work onto an external flash-stick or hard-drive and bury it in a box in my garden. Why? Because if my house is burnt down or broken into, and all my storage media are destroyed or stolen, then I can dig up my own treasure from the garden and not worry about losing anything.
You may think that I am being paranoid.
No, I am not.
One day my computer just stopped working. I couldn’t reboot that computer. I lost everything.
Last month, Microsoft decided to update my wife’s computer with a software patch that essentially erased access to every file stored on that computer. She lost everything, or so she had thought…Cleverly, I had backed everything up to an external drive the month before, so she effectively lost very little.
What really worries me however, is a cyber ransomware attack, where somehow you accidentally download some malware onto your computer, and a hacker takes over your computer files and encrypts them so you can’t read them. They then send you an email demanding payment in ‘bitcoins’ to their private account, threatening never to give you access to your computer files again unless you pay up!
All the above bad scenarios can be avoided if you have made backups.
Lastly, I would suggest you go that extra mile and regularly send or give a copy of your data to your sister/brother or a friend who lives hundreds of miles from you.
Why?
Because if your house floods, and the garden is under water, and someone breaks into your house and steals your external hard-drive or your computer, all you have to do is buy a new computer and get the files back from your friend/relative, who will not have been affected by your local natural disaster.
If you still think I’m being paranoid, consider this: imagine you have been writing for twenty years. Everything you have written is on your computer and/or media hidden in your house. One day your house blows up in a gas explosion and you lose everything. If you have backed everything up, then you can easily get everything back.
Twenty years of writing is a lot of work. Take precautions. Write safely. Be careful!
By the way, I would suggest you also do this for all your photographs! Personally, I think my digital photographs of my family, relatives and friends are my most treasured possessions, with my books firmly in second place.
It’s just advice. Take it or leave it. But please don’t regret not taking it!
Chapter 24
Celebrate! The End is Nigh!
The purpose of this book has been to provide a practical, inspirational guide on how to approach writing a new book. The book focuses on generating internal motivation and using the power of your Subconscious Creative Self to achieve your dream of writing a novel.
Without stepping on the toes of many other authors who may have written extensively on how you should or shouldn’t write a book or which provide guidance or advice on how to develop characters and storylines, I hope that I have managed to take you through the basics of how to approach the task.
I don’t claim to be a good writer, but I have written quite a few books, and I know how that aspect of things is done, and this book is about the process and not the result.
Luckily, if you read the reviews associated with my books on Amazon, it would seem that many readers, particularly those in the UK, seem to enjoy my work and my writing style.
Others don’t, and that’s okay: when I go to a bookshop, there are thousands of books on the shelves, and most of them I would never consider reading. I have specific interests and my own list of favourite authors.
I am fortunate however, in that I have had quite a lot of success as an author, and I believe a lot of that does in fact come down to the process I’ve outlined in this book.
Although I’ve been writing for many years now, I hope that I am still only at the beginning of my journey.
I can almost guarantee that some of you who are reading this book today will go on to become very successful writers. Some of you will earn A LOT of money. Others will receive tremendous praise and respect for your work. And some of you will come to be loved by millions! That won’t happen to everyone. But that’s not what’s important here. What is important is that if you follow the Irvine Method outlined in these chapters, then most of you will come to fulfil the dream you have dreamt of all your lives.
You will become a writer. An author.
You will be able to put a copy of your very own book upon your own bookshelf for all your friends and relatives to see.
And for you to look at yourself with pride.
And who knows, one day, in a hundred, or perhaps even a thousand years’ time, someone will pick up a copy of your book in an ‘interstellar rocket-boot sale’ [What were cars?] or borrow your book from a library, or buy it from an antique shop, and they will read it!
Through your book, you will live on!
In closing, first may I congratulate you for getting to this part of this book. You’ve read all about how to go and make your dream come true, and to write that book which is inside of you and just bursting to get out. Now you know what to do! So…
GO WRITE YOUR BOOK!
NOW!
[Cue the drum roll, here comes those two incredible words…]
The End!
P.S.
For all of you who decide to go down the Self-Publishing route, one of the most important things you can do, is to build your very own contact list of readers whom you can, in future, email and inform about your next book when it is published.
(I think you will love the next bit...)
So, for anyone who wants to find out HOW to build an email list, or who would also like to learn about other resources that you could highly benefit from when writing your book
and when its finished (How to get an agent? How to publish it? How to market it? Sell it? Create Front Covers? Build an email list etc.), then…
Please Subscribe to my email list and I will immediately send you a Bonus Chapter to this book, which will guide you to additional, vital and very useful publishing resources that I recommend you consider! The Bonus Chapter will include information on where to find:
Tools to help authors write books and then advertise them
Tools to help authors grow their own email contact list
Information on the ‘Self Publishing Formula’ Writing Community and Resources
Useful Books on Writing
CLICK HERE AND I’LL SEND YOU THE BONUS CHAPTER!
(or type in http://eepurl.com/gJxT5X to your browser)
(See what I did there? Not only am I teaching you a new, important trick, but I am also practicing what I preach!)
P.P.S.
If you sign up to my email list, I promise not to hassle you with lots of spam emails. I will only contact you with news of new books which I have written, or when I add additional information to this book in future which I feel you could benefit from or be interested in. You will be able to unsubscribe at any time if I annoy you or bore you to tears.
OTHER BOOKS BY ME THAT I THINK YOU SHOULD BUY!
(See what I’m doing there too? I’m teaching you how to sell and promote your own work! But seriously, you may want to consider getting Haunted From Within or The Messiah Conspiracy which I have referenced in this book. Fortunately for you, you will never be able to buy that Top-Drawer Novel that I told you about earlier!)
Get Writing! How ANYONE can write a Novel! Page 9
