First, you have to have a completed story. Not a fully edited one, but a complete one. You can’t publish without that. What else do you need? Well, there’s a list. But I can also tell you what you don’t need: a lot of money. Yes, you can spend a lot of money on publishing, and if you make this into a job, you will eventually. You don’t need to do that at the beginning. All you need is time and patience. You also need a finished story, three is even better.
Now what? Well, editing is good. If you can’t afford to hire one at the outset, there are various ways to manage it. Barter with another writer, swapping your skills with theirs. Read the story out loud to yourself or someone else. Read the story backwards, from end to start. Do all of the above. Put the story aside for a while, days, weeks, or months, and work on the rest of the list:
Cover
Part 1 of a series that will walk you through the whole process
Blurb
Dorothy Grant, who is the expert among us, on blurbing
The fabulous MCA Hogarth on crafting a selling blurb
Formatting:
John van Stry’s videos
Tools for formatting
Frontmatter
A comprehensive list of the stuff in a book that isn’t story
Author Bio
A short and sweet, quirky, grabs the reader’s attention and makes them want to find more of your stuff. Probably 99% of readers don’t read this, so you can omit if you like.
Also by…
If you don’t have other stories out to promote here, or even if you do, I like to promote other books by friends that are in the same genre as this story the reader just enjoyed.
Print Cover (for novella or longer work)
Setting up KDP
Keywords and Categories
Pricing
Look at other stories in your subgenre, at their length, and the prices, to get an idea of where to set yours. Rule of thumb is that short stories are 0.99 to perhaps 1.99, novellas are 2.99 up to 3.99, and novels begin at 4.99 but word of caution on novels – don’t use tradpub pricing. As a new author, you want the barrier to readers to be low,, so they will take a chance on you. If you are publishing three stories in quick succession, make the first one lowest. Also, seriously consider KU for the first three months at minimum, to give those whale readers a way to sample your wares.
After Publication, then what?
Marketing, a bad word that doesn’t have to be. There are as many ways to market as there are writers. I’ve written about it. Dorothy Grant has written on it. Looking at the dates on those posts, we need to revisit the topic.
Remember up at the top where I said three stories were better than one? If you start publishing, then publish another in a week, then another… that kind of momentum really bumps up your visibility. It’s a good way to get started, and it can be done in various ways: a story in an anthology, paired with an indie release is one. Breaking an overly-long novel into three parts is another (overly-long is anything over 120K words roughly speaking), and don’t worry about cliffhangers at the breaks, because with rapid releases and pre-orders your readers can be confident you will deliver.
So dear readers, what more would you like to see in this list? I’m sure I’m missing something here!
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Begin at the beginning”
Very nice summation!
We do a lot of events and I’m continually horrified by new writers coming up to us and either expecting us to do everything because they have such a fabulous idea
OR
telling us about the thousands they spent on book doulas and wondering why it didn’t pay off.
Once you have a backlist, maintain a separate document with amazon links to each book, add new book to it once live, copy it into the file for each book and update.
Yep! I am loving Vellum’s new feature where you can just one-click copy over all your front and back matter from a previous project. Sooo easy!
Pricing is important. There are a lot of books out there that are probably at least as good as yours, so readers can afford to be very picky. Personally, I’ll give any $.99 ebook a shot if it sounds interesting, and I’m very reluctant to go above $4.99 for an ebook unless I’m already familiar with the author or series.
Ensure that a collection is cheaper than its components.
$4.99 seems to have become a pretty hard cap for most indie book readers. Above that and it needs to be by a very, very well loved author, or very long, preferably both. (But not too long.)
Semi-off-topic question:
If I want to update an existing book on Amazon, do I just upload the revised manuscript? Will that cause my rating / review count to start over? Are there things I haven’t asked that I need to know?
I’m asking because I would like to do typo corrections for my first 2 books in anticipation of possible audiobook editions.
Yes, just upload the new manuscript. While you are in there, check your categories and keywords to be sure they are still good. It will not reset your reviews.
when does a book that you fix become something different? Like the above commenter I’d like to fix some typos and remove some other words. I’m just trying to figure out if there’s a line I shouldn’t cross.
I recently re-did the covers on my Noir series. I edited the manuscripts while I cleaned up their formatting. After nearly ten years, I caught a lot of light edits that needed to be cleaned up, but I didn’t make any major changes. I don’t think that’s too much.
Thanks
Thank you very much, Cedar.
Also, incredible post.
Just FYI regarding categories on Amazon. On Thursday I did the blurb and set categories and keywords, and uploaded the cover. Then I rested (OK, no, I did a lot of Day Job stuff until Saturday evening). On Saturday, when I went back, two categories had been changed by Amazon. When I reset them, I discovered that “Paranormal/Urban Fantasy” returned as an option, but in a slightly different place under the broad “Fantasy” category.
Hint: If you can, pick category and put in your keywords, then let things sit for a day or two. You can correct category changes, but also might find that Amazon suggests/makes available options that are better fits
Interesting! Thank you.